CHAPTER ONE
Inhale. Exhale. A slower rhythm than the rapid beat of his heart to calm himself as he pauses. The condensation from his breath is heavy in the frigid night air. It flows from his mouth with each rapid breath in swirling patterns. It's the only indication he isn't a ghost, stuck between one world and the next, in the cemetery. Though, with how cold night air has seeped into his bones, he feels as if he should be one of them.
He can't see them but he knows they're there. He knows they're there but they don't seem to know, or even care, about his existence. The feeling is claustrophobic, they surround him on all sides, even though he can't see them, he can feel them, hear them, even. Their voices talking and screaming so loud he can't hear his heart pounding in his chest as he could before. There are so many that even if he were to try and tune in on one conversation he'd fail, yet each of them sounds so cynical. Despite all this, and the fear building in his chest, he pushes on. He has to find him.
A pained scream, that makes his heart come to a screeching halt, somehow makes it over all the noise, makes all the noise stop. All at once, as if it had been an orchestra conductor demanding his players to cease their music, the voices become quiet. The silence is deafening and he feels terrifyingly alone. He almost wishes for the thousands of voices to come back, wishes for anything else but the suffocating silence.
"Sam!" Loud and horrifyingly desperate, the call of his name sounds magnified in the silence. He knows that voice, it matches the scream from before, he has to help him. Through the darkness, with no idea if he's even going the correct way, he runs. The sound of pure agony urging him ever onward. He has no thought other than to find its source.
He kicks at the tall grass as he goes, the long blades feeling like thin fingers reaching up from the ground to pull him down, like the earth beneath his feet knows he doesn't belong here.
His fight against it is futile as it has its way and soon he's sent tumbling down, feet caught, tangled up in the grass, and sent hurtling face-first into the dirt. He's narrowly missed hitting his head on a large stone, a headstone. A few more inches and he would have cracked his skull, then he really would have been one of them. Looking up, he can make out the inscription in the stone through the black of the night, John and Mary Winchester. They're names he thinks he knows but can't put faces to. No matter how hard he tries, he doesn't know them, even if they share a surname.
He begins to pick himself up, breathing ragged and he struggles to calm it, having an eerie feeling that if he doesn't quiet himself then he'll be caught. He doesn't know what danger lurks in the shadows, just that he's scared of it, just that needs to save his brother from it, "Dean!" he calls, desperately hoping for an answer, his fall leaving him disorientated, he needs to find direction again, a sound he can follow. He sits back on his knees listening, hoping to hear something, anything, in this silence even a single breath would do.
His only answer is the continued silence.
There's a new sensation, one he's yet to realize, a startling contrast to the cold night air that he's not sure how he's missed it. His hands are wet, and more disturbingly, sickeningly warm. His whole body feels like it's shaking as his gaze slowly drifts down to his hands. He wants to throw up when he's met with the sight.
His hands are coated in thick blood. Looking further down, he's horrified to find he's not only covered in blood but kneeling in a large pool of it as well. He follows the puddle, turning his head to discover the source. Surely enough, there it lies behind him.
It's now he makes the connection that the earth hadn't sought to capture him with the blades of grass, it only meant to slow him down, to stop him, to save him. It didn't want him to see this, it was the only thing here that was on his side. If only he had made this connection sooner.
He scrambles backward, trying to get away from the scene, the horrible mutilation of someone he loves dearly. There on the ground behind him, in the center of all the blood, lies his brother, the corpse of his brother. Chest ripped open like the skin had been as thin as paper to the assailant. With the sternum exposed, he can see figures carved deep into the bone in a language he can't read. He forces himself to look at him lying there, to bear that feeling of how he's failed his brother, how he was too late and it's all his fault. He forces himself to look him in the eye, only to find them horridly and shockingly black.
Sam inhales sharply and sits up quickly, making his head spin and vision blurry. He puts a hand to his temple to ward off the oncoming migraine, avoiding closing his eyes, almost scared that if he does he'll be back in that dream.
Dreaming, Sam hates dreaming. Ever since he was a kid he's had frequent dreams, horrible nightmares that leave him uneasy the next morning, often left feeling like he hadn't slept to begin with. On and off for as far back as he can remember he's had horrible dreams of death and losing people he loves, even the parents whose faces he doesn't even remember. Awful things that had seemed so real and sometimes felt like they had happened. No matter what sort of charm or prayer he attempted, nothing ever seemed to stop them. They were persistent as he was stubborn.
For a short time, they had stopped. His only relief had come when he moved away from home to go to college. For three blissful years, Sam had nights where he didn't dream at all and if he did he didn't remember it. All of that was gone far too soon. By his senior year, studying law at Stanford University, they started back up again. This time they consisted of people he didn't know. They were strangers but he still dreamt of their deaths even though he hadn't met a single one. He just considered himself lucky that so far of them had ever come true. If they had, he didn't want to know. Now it was back to dreaming about losing his family.
His wandering gaze brings him to the work that lay on his desk. Stacks of paperwork from a court case he had helped the state win, though, after the grueling process that took well over a month he didn't much feel like a winner. Being a state attorney had turned out to be his dream job but unfortunately, after roughly five years, he was worried he'd become burnt out. The paperwork was the absolute worst and the most boring at that. So boring that over the years he was prone to overworking himself and falling asleep at his desk, just like the night before.
With a heavy sigh, Sam begins to gather the work into neat stacks, hoping that by busying himself with cleaning up then he'll forget about the dream, even if he hadn't forgotten a single one since they started plaguing him. Ignorance was bliss in his case.
When a certain piece of paper doesn't give, he's quick to realize the melted down candle still burning away. How it hadn't burnt the whole apartment building down was beyond him. Maybe that luck held in its black colored wax had gone to preventing a fire. It's a shame really since he had originally lit it to prevent his nightmare of the evening. He blows out the small flickering flame with disdain for the thing. He doesn't know why he even bothers, nothing has ever helped the dreams.
He's pulled out of his resounding hatred of the wax charm by a harsh knocking on his front door. It almost matches the beat of the headache he hadn't been able to evade. Sam, reluctantly stands, legs wobbly from having been in a sitting position for so long. As he crosses the space between the wall his desk faces and the opposite side where the door is, it's almost like he dares his legs to give out on him. They don't and Sam considers it a small battle already won.
Just as soon as he places his hand on the knob to greet his visitor, the door swings open all it's own. In the doorway stands Jess, his long time girlfriend, and her keys swing loudly with the door. Sam is just as startled to see her there as she is that he met her at the door. He's had nightmares about her too.
"Why did you knock?" He asks her, he's used to her letting herself in, boundaries being seldom a concern between the two of them anymore, evident of this is how she walks in. As soon as he steps aside to allow her to enter, she removes her keys from the door and practically tosses them onto his kitchen counter once she's through the doorway. "I figured you were still asleep," she states, adjusting the tightness of her ponytail, a particular comfortableness in how she moves that's come from years of being together, "you hadn't answered my calls." Sam realizes he hadn't heard his phone go off at all. He's not even sure where his phone is at the moment. Even more worrisome, he's having a hard time remembering what he did as soon as he got home the night before.
Short lapses in his memory weren't uncommon but it's not like they happened often.
"Sam?" she has her hand placed gently on his shoulder, he realizes he hasn't answered her, the silence must have been longer than he realized, "Are you alright?" she's in front of him now, close enough he has to tip his head down just slightly to meet her gaze. She wasn't short, rather he was considerably tall, but her short distance from him made the difference more obvious, "You have another one of those dreams?" Her voice is gentle yet full of concern, like she's ready to drop everything to make sure he's okay.
Jess knew about the dreams, part of it at least. She had known since the first night they had spent together after graduating college when he woke up in the middle of the night after one of his nightmares. It wasn't the last time either, there had been instances when he had dreams about losing her that felt so real, just like the others, that left him shaking and unable to form words or do much of anything other than hold her and remind himself that they were both still okay.
Sam sighs softly, kisses her on the head, and tells her not to worry. "I'll be fine, I've already started to forget it," he lies to her with one of his best smiles that puts her at ease, allows it to be a lie to himself as well. He's a firm believer in your lies can be truths if you believe them, even better when half of it is the truth. He knows he'll eventually be fine, that much is true, over time the horrific imagery becomes an annoying nuisance of a memory. Sam also knows better than to withhold the fact that the dream happened at all from Jess, it's better to admit it and put her worry at ease than to deny it happened to begin with, she always seemed to find out anyways.
"I haven't forgotten about our date plans," He tells her proudly, attempting to steer their conversation to something lighter, more important, and, to him, more relevant. She's not going to let it go, he knows that much, she'll just bring up his troubles later, but for now, she goes with it, smiles, and tells him, "Then you need to hurry. Or lunch might become dinner," It's a joke he knows that much, but a look at the clock over his desk tells him that noon is fast approaching and he better get a move on.
Another kiss, this time on her cheek, and he tells her he'll be right back. Sam leaves her there in the main room as he makes the short journey to his bedroom just around the corner. The answer to what happened to his phone is answered when he opens the door and finds it sitting on the corner of his bed. He makes a mental note to grab it before he leaves.
Sam puts little thought into the clothes he pulls out of his dresser drawers. The only mindful moves he makes are to keep ziplock bags of various dried plants and an array of small colored candles hidden. Jess may not enter his room today but he doesn't take the chance that he won't forget to fix it when he gets home. He's not ready for her to find the only bits of magic he's kept around in his life since moving away from his family.
He tries not to think of the altar tools in his bottom drawer that he keeps underneath clothes he's outgrown. Sam hasn't used them since he discovered his older brother Dean had hidden them in his suitcase during the move. He did his best to keep his upbringing out of this new life he's made for himself. Although, he found it difficult to give it all up. It currently remains to be a considerably large factor in why he didn't move in with Jess after all these years. There was little he kept from her, having a confident air of honesty in their relationship, but the nature of his upbringing was one of those things he swore to himself he wouldn't share.
He makes quick work of getting dressed and he's able to return to her, freshly dressed and shoulder-length chestnut hair brushed, proudly having remembered to grab his phone on the way out of his room. "Ready?" he asks her, picking a light jacket off a hook by the door, watching as she gets down from her perch on one of his barstools and grabbing her keys off the counter as she goes. "I've been ready," she teases, "Where have you been?" He can't help but laugh and smile at her, taking her hand in his so they can walk out the door together.
Jess was far better than any candle. Around her all the bad things seemed to go away, they didn't matter to him when he was with her. Darkness, curses, nightmares, they all seemed unreal when they were together. That's all he really needed.