AN: Thank you for the kind reviews! I appreciate it so much, and hope you enjoy the remaining chapters. I thought I would include an author's note, since not so long ago we had "Something Wicked," which gave us a Little!Dean in canon. "Under a Haystack" was mostly complete before that ep aired, oddly enough. I finished the last three chapters afterward, but in any case, the Wee!Dean in this story is not in any way based on the canon little guy, except what we'd learned of the guys' upbringing prior to SW. It isn't truly an issue in the sense that UaH regressed Dean to aconsiderably younger age than the ep denoted (somewhere around nine or ten); however, I felt it was worth pointing out, in case of comparison.
Thank you again! EB
Under a Haystack
By EB
©2006
8. Cry baby bunting, Daddy's gone a-hunting
He curses when he opens the trunk, because Dean's things are missing. Kid-Dean's things, a change of clothes and he's gone through the secret compartment and one of the Colts and both of the throwing knives are missing. Dean hasn't been abducted. Dean is GONE, Dean hit the road, vaya con huevos, hasta la byebye, and Sam's still shaking but now it's with anger, frustration, a million shades of crap all adding up to I will kick your skinny seven-year-old ASS when I find you, Dean, don't you DO this to me.
And the thing is, Dean can DO it. Any other kid and Sam would probably find him, but Dean knows good and goddamn well how to go to ground, one of the first things Dad taught them, remember? When you can't run and you can't fight, hide. Hide well.
Sam checks the ammo on the second Colt and jams it into the back of his jeans, pulls his shirt over it so it won't show, and slams the trunk. They're in fucking Nowhere, Oklahoma, not even a wide spot in the road so much as an excuse to build a half-dozen gas stations and two fast-food places just off the interstate, and if he calls the cops it'll be state troopers, and what kind of shitstorm will THAT be?
And beneath it all, gazing around wishing he'd let Dean buy those new night-vision goggles he'd wanted back in Syracuse, he's thinking, Why, Dean? Why'd you do this? Was it THAT bad? What?
There aren't any good hiding places around the buildings. But he checks the insides, goes into the lavatories, even checks the ceilings. No one he asks can remember seeing a little kid by himself. Plenty with parents, none on their own.
Why doesn't he remember Dean being such an amazing pain in the ass as a kid?
And maybe Dean left on his own, just put on his boogie shoes, beat feet, vamoosed the hell out of Dodge, but how about now? Now he's out someplace, can't be far because seriously, how far can a seven-year-old kid GET, anyway, but this place is hairy with traffic, tons of vehicles in and out all day and all night. Trucks, station wagons, sedans, motorcycles, Christ, in and out and back on the interstate in no time flat, and any of those could have stuck a little blond kid in the back seat and who'd know? It's dark, it's busy, no one looks anyway.
He dodges a meandering Lexus and sprints across the access road. The grass next to the culvert is deep, unmowed, and he sees the outline of a frog leaping out of his way, sproing. His feet sink into invisible muck, and his shoes make a slurping sound when he tugs them free with each step.
There is no one in the culvert, no one skulking around the overpass. No bums around here, no homeless.
Sam cups his hands on either side of his mouth and screams, "Dean! God damn it!"
The overpass whispers back, "ammit, ammit," and Sam wipes tears from his cheeks and turns back.
There will be no tracking Dean in the dark, in this place. All Sam can hope is that he's gone to ground, although where that would be, Sam hasn't got a clue. Obviously; he'd be there if he did. He drives anyway, loops from access road south to through street to access road north and around again until it all looks exactly the same to him, headlights and taillights and the few watery parking-lot sodiums and the rest of it black, endless stretches of blank empty space where daylight would show roads and fences and fields.
At four he parks the Impala in the deserted McDonald's parking lot and shuts his eyes. But when light burrows its fingers over the horizon, pink and gold and innocent, he hasn't slept. The thrumming anxiety in his chest has become dull, permeating fear. He remembers the feel of it, from months before, endless driving and no music and the awareness of Dean next to him, dozing and dying in the passenger seat. This fear is like that fear, relentless and almost monotonous. Tinged with the expectation of loss
A few weeks, maybe a month, we can't work miracles
like waiting for surgery to remove a limb.
He blinks in the pale light, and takes out his cell phone.
The Ottawa County sheriff's office is located in a smallish three-story building, and it smells strongly of burned coffee and onions, or maybe body odor. It isn't a good smell, whatever it is. Sam swallows nausea and pushes his Styrofoam cup away. Surprised this shit hasn't eaten through, like the acid in Alien. Pictures it boiling away at the table, the floor underneath, and landing on some bald guy downstairs. Sam can almost hear the startled scream.
"You doin' all right, son?"
The voice shocks him, and he jerks his head up, glaring before he recognizes the deputy who'd answered his semi-hysterical call, what, six hours ago? He can't tell what time it is. Time to find Dean. That's all that counts.
"No," Sam says hoarsely. "Anything?"
The deputy is named Ortega, and he has a face accustomed to smiling, but there is no smile on his tanned cheeks right now. He looks tired, and frustrated. The chair creaks when he sits down. "Got a whole lot of folks looking for him," he says after a pause. It is, Sam thinks, the closest he can make himself come to saying, "We don't got diddly-shit." "Dogs should be here in another hour or so."
They will use dogs to try to track Dean. And manpower, because Sam's an unknown, but his driver's license still gives his real identity and unlike Dean he isn't officially dead yet, and he's checked out, and Dean's his younger brother and there's no reason for these nice people to think things might be skewed, that this seven-year-old whose disappearance has mobilized an entire county's worth of deputies and troopers and local law enforcement, not to mention more than a few good-hearted townspeople from Miami and Ottawa, Oklahoma, is anything but a possible runaway, or kidnapping victim.
Everyone's so nice. And Sam knows, knows it like he knows his own face, they will never find Dean. They aren't prepared. They don't know. They are the normal people Sam so desperately wanted, once upon a time, to emulate. Normal is finding out your parents died and you have custody of your younger sibling, not waking up one morning to become an instant father. Not having your older brother OLDER brother wake up your much, much younger brother, victim of a werewolf's curse, unbreakable goddamn fucking curse.
"Sam?" Deputy Ortega looks genuinely concerned, dark eyes narrowed. "You got any family I could call for you? Anyone around here you know? Ought not to be alone right now."
Sam shakes his head. "There's no one."
"Because if you want –"
"I need to go."
He wobbles when he stands, too long sitting uselessly around when he should have been out there all along, never trust the authorities, Dad had practically beaten that literally into them from as far back as Sam can remember, they mean well but they're useless, the kinds of things we hunt will never make it on the state's most-wanted list, boys, and he shakes off Ortega's steadying hand.
"Thanks," Sam says absently, and walks away. There are people staring at him, hushed people, eyes filled with the same pity and worry and thank-god-it's-him-and-not-me, people thinking about how they'll hug their kids extra-tight tonight and lock the doors and watch the news for anything about that poor missing seven-year-old.
He hates all of them.
He rents a room at the first motel he sees, and lays out his gear on the nearer of the two beds. There is no reason to believe Dean has fallen into supernatural hands, or paws, or whatever, but Sam cannot go hunting without the basics. And those sorts of things find them, find Winchesters, and sometimes he wonders if he ever did his family's cracked genealogy he would discover that demons and witches and werewolves and goblins have been haunting them for centuries, millennia. Wonders if Dean's curse is only the pallid reflection of a larger, older curse, one placed on all of them from time immemorial. May you live in interesting times, some shit like that. They sure as hell do.
So he packs guns and adult-Dean's razor-sharp knife, no throwing weapon this but made for cutting, slicing, paring away. The basics: things for flesh and blood, and not. Extra ammo. Holy water, and flares, and firestarters, and salt and a Zippo lighter. EMF, and binoculars. Flashlight and GPS and a heavy blister pack of batteries.
The bag is weightless while he strides back to the Impala. He's wasted precious time, following the normal course. Winchesters aren't normal. He feels it like a cold blade in his gut, that awareness: the worst anyone can imagine is nothing. Nothing, compared to what he knows, what he has seen since childhood. Dean has run away, and instead of coming back as Sam knows he would have done by now, he's stayed gone, and that means something has him. And Sam is going to get him back. Period.
Eight hours later, in the middle of a dark barren field less than two miles from the interstate overpass, he sees a bobbing light where there should be none.
"Dean," Sam whispers, and settles his pack on his back and takes off.
The light jerks, flirts and puffs out, and when Sam slows it flickers to life again, just as far away.
He doesn't know what it is, or might be. He's broken his cardinal rule: research before ass-kicking. It could be anything: will o' the wisp, ghost lights, could be a goddamn UFO. This part of Oklahoma is as dark and unknown, and he gives chase but the light vanishes, and this time it takes a while for it to return. As far-off as ever.
High and thin, like a vanishing train whistle, the sound of a child's far-off scream.
Sam gives a grunt like he's been gut-punched and lumbers forward again.
The field is endless. He will never catch the light. He stops, panting audibly, and closes his eyes tight. His brain feels like a rubber ball, tethered by the slimmest strand to his body. It is natural, as instinctive as breathing, as dangerous as putting a plastic bag over his head while he jerks off, and the meat part of him cries out in terror while his mind drifts upward, bobbing like the light, zooming along the stunted tips of dry grass and weeds. It is so much easier this way, so much harder, but Dean screams again, a sound pregnant with terror and exhaustion, and Sam keeps going. Ducking his mind to follow, until the light is so near, and it notices him, it sees him, and for an unbreathing unthinking moment they stare at each other, and when Sam bobs the light does, too, and when he backs away it follows him.
Yes, yes, you fucker, come to me, bring him BACK TO ME, and when Sam pries his eyes open again his eyelashes are matted together and he feels the ice-cold minuscule prick of pain as a few are pulled loose, and the light is directly in front of his face.
A few feet away, outlined in pale bluish light, is Dean. The tee shirt is torn, and his shoes are missing. He lies motionless, and a woman bends over him and touches his cheek, smeared with dark, and then glares at Sam. "You can't have him," she says. "He's mine."
Sam blinks blood from his eyes and rasps, "No, he's not."
He can see tears on the woman's luminous cheeks, like little trails of dry-ice vapor. The air is crisply cold. "They took her from me," she says, kneeling at Dean's side. "And they wouldn't give her back. But I can have him. He's my son. My beautiful, precious boy."
Sam digs his hand in his pocket. The balloon feeling is gone, as if it had never been. He says, "No, he's John Winchester's son, and my brother, and you take your fucking hands OFF HIM," and flings a handful of salt into her face.
The light looms, flares to icy-hot intensity, until Sam feels as if his bones must glow, the mutant x-ray from hell, kinda literally. His ears are ringing, and above that tinny noise he hears the ghost shrieking, wailing her grief, her rage. Eyes burning, he gropes for Dean, feels cold flesh beneath his hands and scrabbles to pick him up. Dean hangs limply in his arms, eyes closed and lashes making sharp feathery shadows on his cheeks in the actinic light.
He shakes his head at the light, warningly, and it ebbs, back to the soft ethereal glow. The woman's weeping is fading, following the light as it retreats, back to its eternal bobbing, searching.
Sam draws a deep breath, and feels for Dean's pulse. So cold, so lifeless in his arms, but his heart beats, steady and so very slow. With a hoarse sob Sam presses his lips to Dean's chilly dirt-smeared forehead, and turns away.
Dean sleeps, if it is sleep, beyond dawn and all the next day. His pallor is striking and frightening, as if he had been put into suspended animation, cryosleep or something, but Sam knows he heard a scream, two of them, before the apparition was lured back to him, carrying Dean with it. He doesn't know what has put Dean into this Sleeping-Beauty stupor, and he cares how only to the extent that he can figure out how to break it.
Catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror, he sees blood dried on his cheeks, his upper lip. Around his EARS, and he hastily wets a washcloth and scrubs it away.
A warm bath does nothing much for Dean, nor does bundling him under all the blankets. Finally Sam curls up on the bed, cradling Dean's naked blue-white body to him, and shivers with the bone-deep cold. It's hot outside, baking sheets of heat, but waves of deep cold radiate off Dean's body, and Sam thinks, Hypothermia, use body heat, it's not as shocking to the system, a slow warm-up.
At sunset, forty-eight hours after he disappeared, Dean wakes up, jerking soundlessly in Sam's arms, flailing.
"It's okay," Sam croaks urgently, holding on, enduring a bonk on the chin from Dean's bucking head. "You're okay, Dean. It's me, Sam. Sammy. Look at me. Come on."
Dean shivers convulsively over and over, eyes wide and petrified. It seems to penetrate, though, and he burrows against Sam, hands clutching his shoulders.
Sam sighs and sees Dean's bright hair move with his breath.
After a bath – very hot this time – and wearing two shirts and two pairs of socks, Dean stops shaking quite so hard. But he is eternally silent, aware but not responding in words, and the sharp ache of rebuke in Sam's chest falters and fades in the fact of his ongoing worry. Wherever Dean has been, wherever the revenant took him, it was too long, and Sam can't even make his brain consider what would have happened if he left the hunt to law enforcement. They will still be out there, no doubt, looking vigilantly in all the wrong places, and his guilt is brief and weary. He'll call soon. Let Ortega off the hook. For now, his concern is the boy swaddled in nearly every item of clothing he owns, quiet and unmoving on the bed.
"Hey." Sam squats and places his hands on Dean's knees. "Let's go get something to eat, huh? You hungry?"
Dean's eyes are filled with distant, wondering uncertainty. He starts to nod, then halts, brow furrowing as if Sam's wanting him to solve a quick quadratic equation, and Sam swallows the immediate surge of fear
will he be all right will he come back did part of him get lost back there how did I find him what did I DO
and says, "Soup. Or chili. Want some chili?"
Dean nods for real this time, and holds out his arms to be carried.
They find a little restaurant about two blocks from the motel, and Sam calls Ortega while they're waiting for their bowls of chili. Dean says nothing while Sam explains that yes, he found him, no, he hadn't gone far, just hid real well, and they have to get moving, their aunt is expecting them in Dallas.
"CPS gonna need to make a report," Ortega says reluctantly. "Any time this sort of thing happens."
"Who do I need to talk to?" Sam asks, knowing he never will.
After a few minutes it's done, and Dean stares at his chili like it's some inscrutable puzzle before picking up his spoon. His hands shake too badly to eat at first, but he keeps on trying, and the color is slowly leaching back into his cheeks, his eyes losing the haunted emptiness of earlier.
They have pie for dessert, and it may be the combination of spice and sugar that make Dean seem better. But after the plates are gone Sam reaches out and takes Dean's grubby hands in his.
"I'm sorry," he says shakily. "I'm sorry, buddy."
"You came and got me, didn't you?" Dean's voice is a pale whisper, but his eyes are wide and earnest, gazing into Sam's. "You found me."
"Yeah," Sam says. "I did. I always will, Dean. Always."
Dean gives a grave nod, and casts a brief flicker of a smile at the waitress when she brings the check.