AN: For Kathy. Preseries.

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Most grown ups thought kids were stupid, or at least that they didn't pay attention. Dean wasn't stupid, and he did pay attention. He paid a lot of attention to the world around him, and heard and understood a lot more than most adults realized.

Dad and Uncle Bobby, unfortunately, were not among the grown-ups who underestimated Dean. They'd sent the boys upstairs in Uncle Bobby's house with strict orders to stay there, and were now talking too quietly for Dean to hear from his perch at the top of the stairs, no matter how hard he tried.

It wasn't fair. He had just turned 9 now, and he already knew all about monsters and Hunting. They didn't have to protect him. And if they were hoping to spare him worry, well, they shouldn't have acted so concerned. Dean could easily read the lines of stress around their eyes. And, of course, there was the way they'd driven here. Dad only drove like that when they really needed to get somewhere. Or away from somewhere.

Dean could only catch the occasional word, not near enough to figure out what they were talking about. He was concentrating so hard that he didn't register that the sound of Sam jumping on his bed had stopped until a warm weight plopped down next to him.

"Cha doin', De?" Sammy asked in a 4-year-old's version of a whisper.

Dean held his breath for a minute, then tilted his head back toward the bedroom. Luckily, Sammy understood and headed back without a word. He might be a dorky little kid, but he could be a pretty smart dorky little kid.

Once they were safely back in the bedroom, Sam started jumping again. He loved the relative freedom that they had at Uncle Bobby's. He was able to make noise without worrying about neighbors complaining, and Bobby was lousy at saying no to the kid.

"I just wanna know what Dad an' Uncle Bobby are talkin' about," Dean admitted, not seeing any harm in it. "But they're talking too soft."

"Oh." Sammy leaped from his bed to Dean's, then back, wearing a grin that was almost too big for his face. "Wanna listen from the kitchen?"

"Yeah, but they won't – whoa!" Dean barely reacted in time to catch Sammy as the younger boy unexpectedly leaped into his arms. Sammy giggled and squirmed away. He ducked under Dean's hands and for once evaded his older brother to run out to the top of the stairs. Dean said one of the words he wasn't supposed to use in public.

"Dad! Unca Bobby! I'm HUNGWY!" Sammy bellowed. "Can I have a gwilled cheese? Pleeeeease?" he stood on his tiptoes so he could put his chin on the top of the banister and smile down at the men below.

"Can you wait?" asked Bobby, falling like a house of cards, making Dean snicker quietly. "I can make one in, I don't know, half an hour."

"Okay." Sam's whole body deflated. "I'll wait." He slid down to sit with his legs dangling between bars of the railing.

"You need to go back into the bedroom, Sammy," said Dad, who was better at resisting the Cute Face of Getting Things than most people. A little.

"Yes, siw." Sammy laid on his back and started sliding along the floor that way, pushing with his feet to propel himself. "How long's half an hour?" He sounded very sad. Even Dean might have believed it, except for the little grin Sam sent toward his brother, unseen by the men.

There was a long moment of silence, with only the hiss of Sam's sliding. Then Dad sighed heavily. "Dean," he called. "Can you make Sam a grilled cheese?"

Dean's mouth dropped open. He grinned down at his brother, whose head was now almost at Dean's feet. "Yeah, sure, Dad," he called. He was going to make Sammy the best grilled cheese ever.

By the time Dean had made two sandwiches (hey, no reason he couldn't eat too), he knew that Dad was worried about a water wraith he'd had a run-in with. Apparently, she could appear in any water and mesmer- mes-something anybody she touched.

"De?" Sammy distracted Dean from his listening. "Doncha like your sammich?"

Dean grinned at his brother and took a huge bite of his own grilled cheese. "Did Sammy eat his sammich?" he asked, like he always did, since he loved the way the younger boy said the word.

Sam smiled and patted his stomach happily. But he didn't look particularly happy. Dean swallowed his bite and was about to ask Sam what was wrong when a rumble of thunder answered the unspoken question. Sam was not a fan of storms. "It'll be okay, Bud," Dean told him confidently. He moved his arm so Sam could climb onto his lap, and his brother quickly scrambled up. "Remember what the noise really is?"

Sammy giggled, though he still looked a little nervous. "Angels bowling," he parroted what Dean always told him to help reduce his fear.

"That's right!" Dean wrapped one arm around Sam as lightning lit the sky through the window, followed quickly by a loud peal of thunder. "Ooh! That was a good one!" Sam shivered and snuggled even closer, but smiled, trusting his brother.

It wasn't long until Dean began to get a little nervous about the storm himself. Rain was coming down in sheets and every boom of thunder seemed to be right overhead. The house shook from the dual assaults. And then Dad said that the boys needed to go into the main floor bathroom...and didn't answer when Dean asked him what was wrong.

Sammy burrowed into Dean like he wanted to crawl right under his skin but didn't whine or complain as they huddled on the bathroom floor. He already knew that when Dad looked serious, they needed to be quiet, and part of Dean hated that Sam knew that.

They stayed there until the storm passed – it felt like forever. The power went out and stayed out, as it often did with storms, and it was very dark in the little, windowless room.Then they waited for Dad or Uncle Bobby to come back. And waited. And waited. They waited so long that they both had to actually pee. Even then, nobody came back, and the sick feeling in Dean's gut that had started to dissipate with the storm began to grow again. He softly told Sam all the stories he could remember and made up a few more and put all the towels down in the tub so they had somewhere more comfortable to sit. And finally, had to admit that it was time that he take a look around and see if he could figure out what was going on. "Sammy, you stay here and turtle," Dean whispered to his brother as seriously as he could, knowing Sam would understand. "I mean it. Don't make a sound. It's important."

"D'ya think it's a dwill?" asked Sam in a small voice. Sometimes, Dad would order them to hide and stay silent (or "turtle") as a drill, then call them to come out and either congratulate or scold them depending on how well they'd done.

"Maybe," Dean admitted, not quite able to lie to Sam when the kid's eyes were looking at him all big and liquid like that. "I'm going to figure it out. Your job is to –"

"Hide." Sammy smiled, just a little, always proud when he knew the answer. "And stay quiet."

Dean ruffled Sam's hair like Uncle Bobby sometimes did to him. Then he pulled the shower curtain closed so that Sam would be out of sight even if somebody happened to glance into the little room. He triple-checked the gun that hadn't left his hand, even when he'd peed, since they'd been put into their sanctuary. Then he drew a breath and stepped out of the room, closing the door carefully behind himself.

Nothing looked out of place that he could see. He could see the sunset out the window, and rivulets of water snaking across the salvage yard, but no more rain was falling. The water still pouring out of the gutters was loud to Dean's ears.Over it,he could hear a rhythmic sound from the kitchen, almost like a screendoor flapping in the wind. Dean peeked through the doorway. Uncle Bobby was standing at the refrigerator, opening and closing the door over and over again. There was no urgency to his actions, and his knife was setting on the kitchen table. Dean couldn't see his face, and he knew there were things that could look like other people, so he called out softly, "Uncle Bobby?"

The man – if it was him – didn't turn. Dean crept into the room and silently took the knife off the table, sliding it out of sight under some papers on the counter. Dean moved cautiously around until he could see his adoptive uncle's face, staying out of reach. He might be friendly and welcoming to Sam and Dean, but Bobby was no pushover. Once, someone had stepped out of an alley trying to mug them, and the guy had found himself on the ground with his wrist broken and Bobby's knee on his back before he'd finished making his demands.

"Uncle Bobby?" Dean tried once more. The man's face was oddly blank. He blinked and looked at Dean, still opening and closing the fridge door. "Whatcha doin'?"

Bobby looked at the fridge and his hand on the door, finally stilling. "Can't fit in," he said, his voice high and child-like.

"You...can't fit in the fridge?" Dean asked slowly, like he talked to Sammy when his brother was over-tired and not really firing on all cylinders.

"Right." Bobby's mouth turned down almost comically far. "Can't. Too big." He sniffed and Dean had the terrible feeling that Uncle Bobby (and he was almost sure it actually was Uncle Bobby) was about to start crying.

"Yeah, I'm too big, too," Dean admitted, his brain jumping. His 'uncle' was acting like a little kid. Maybe Dean could distract him the same way he would with Sam. "But we could, uh, make a fort in the living room that we could both fit into. How's that sound?"

Bobby's face lit up and he jumped up and down a few times. Dean took the opportunity to tuck his gun away. "Can we, can we?" Bobby asked with a grin. Worried (okay, freaked out, actually) or not, Dean couldn't help but smile back at the incongruous sight.

"Sure. You get a bunch of blankets and pillows and meet me in the living room, okay?" Dean asked in an encouraging voice. "You know where all that stuff is, right?"

"Uh-huh!" Bobby ran off and Dean brushed a hand over the top of his own head. As Bobby – normal Bobby – might say, what the hell? What could make Bobby act like this? Was it dangerous? Would he be like this forever?

Okay, Dean couldn't really focus on all of that until he found his dad and made sure that the house was safe. The first part of that was easy. As Dean stepped back out of the kitchen, he saw something that he'd never forget. John Winchester, former marine, Hunter, and all-around badass, was sliding down the steps on his butt and laughing like it was the funniest thing that had ever happened.

And Bobby was sliding right behind him. "Yahooooooo!" Bobby cheered. He'd thrown an armful of blankets and pillows over the banister and was wearing a pillowcase over his head. Because of this, he couldn't see and he crashed into Dad hard enough that they both rolled that last few steps and ended up in a heap on the floor. It was so loud that Dean was pretty impressed that Sammy didn't come out of his hiding place.

"Are you, uh, okay?" he asked, sure he had a stupid, shocked expression on his face. Even in his memories of Dad before the fire, he'd never been this...childish.

Bobby shoved Dad off him and did a deliberate bellyflop onto the pile of linens. "Yuppers! I wanna do it again!"

Dean thought if Bobby did it again, he just might break the banister of the stairs...or himself.

"Owie!" Dad sat up and pouted and looked so much like Sammy that Dean just stared. "I landed on this and it hurt me!" Dad held up his Colt Anaconda with his fist around the barrel, and that more than anything else that had happened so far convinced Dean that this wasn't some joke.

"Treat your weapons with respect," Dad said all the time. "They can save your life or take it. Never forget that."

Now he was holding his favorite handgun like it was an ice cream cone and saying things like 'owie' and it was making Dean freak out a little bit. Or a lot. "Why don't you let me take it, then?" Dean asked, his voice wavering a little. "Then it can't h-hurt you again."

"Okie dokie," agreed the man who'd taught Dean that being weaponless was akin to being naked. Dad handed over the gun willingly. And his boot knife. And belt knife. And the smaller gun he kept in an ankle holster.

Meanwhile, Bobby was crawling around with a blanket wrapped around his head and pretending to be a lion. Dean ignored that for a while. He checked out the rest of the rooms on the main floor, then took a quick look in the rooms upstairs too. There was nothing obvious out of place, nothing that could remotely explain why the only adults in the house were acting like toddlers.

"Hey, Dad, why don't you help Bobby make a fort out of all these blankets and things?" Dean asked when Dad expressed a desire to go outside. Luckily, both men were fully on board with that plan.

Dean bit his lip and contemplated his next move. He'd have to figure out a way to call Pastor Jim, he supposed, though how with the power out he had no idea. And he had to let poor Sammy out of the bathroom and tell him something. That decided, Dean opened the bathroom door, pleased that Sam was still out of sight in the tub. "Sammy, it's okay to come out now," he said, smiling when a tousled little head peeked around the edge of the shower curtain. "Dad and Uncle Bobby are, um, acting a little weird, but everything seems okay otherwise."

"Okay!" Sam grinned at Dean, pleased to get out of his dark little prison. "Maybe they just need a nap." Dean bit his lip to keep from smiling at that. Whenever Sam acted up too much, Dad would say maybe he just needs a nap.

"Maybe," Dean allowed. "Don't be scared if they're bein' goofy, okay?"

"Okay." Sam was affable as usual, ignoring Dean's hand to scramble out of the tub on his own. He smiled in delight to see that his dad and 'uncle' were having a pillow fight of sorts with the cushions off the couch and ran to join them.

Looking for clues, Dean tried to read the book that had been left open on Bobby's desk to try and figure out what the men had been Hunting, but it was way over his head. He wasn't sure all of it was even in English. He studied the picture covering the entire right page, however. It was the top half of a woman (naked!) rising out of the water. Her hair was long and disappeared in the water behind her and she would have been kind of pretty except that her mouth was full of shark-like teethand her hair kind of looked like snakes. Was an aqua irae, as the caption read, responsible for the state of Dad and Uncle Bobby?

Dean had to stop his reading three times to tell the men to be more careful because in their enthusiasm, they were knocking Sam over with every hit from a pillow, and Dean was concerned they'd hurt the kid. "Hey, guys, if you build a big enough fort, I'll make popcorn for everyone," he cajoled. The suggestion was met with a great deal of enthusiasm, to Dean's relief. As the three began to enthusiastically plan how exactly their fort would be made (amusingly, Sam seemed to be in charge), Dean noticed that the door to the basement was slightly ajar.

In his search of the house, Dean had completely forgotten about the basement. It was a mistake Dad would never have made, and Dean was a little embarrassed about it. It didn't matter that he was nine years old; he was the most responsible person there right now, and the rest of them needed Dean to be at the top of his game. But for some reason, he really, really didn't want to see what was in the basement. Just the thought of it made the little hairs on the back of Dean's neck stand up.

"Hurry up, Bobby! I want popcorn!" trilled Dad behind Dean, galvanizing the boy to action finally. He couldn't rely on the adults right now.

"No, no. You havta lean the cushion like this or it tips over," Sam instructed, his little voice a strange soundtrack for the fear Dean was feeling as he used the barrel of his gun to push the basement door open inch by agonizing inch.

Dean felt like he could hardly breathe from the suffocating weight of fear. What was wrong with him? Swallowing it all down, Dean slipped inside the door, gun held at the ready.

Long rays of sun reached through the small, high windows of the basement, making it light enough for Dean to see fairly well. There was standing water covering the floor of the back half of the big room Dean was in. Next to the edge of the water, nearly touching it, was a machete. And lying on the bottom step was Bobby's shotgun. Whatever had happened to Dad and Uncle Bobby had happened here.

Dean took one more step down, deciding that was as far as he was going to go. The men had been armed and had ended up...well, whatever they were right now. He wasn't stupid enough to think that one 9-year-old would be able to defeat something two Hunter hadn't been able to.

As Dean had the thought, the surface of the water swirled with colors, ranging from turquoise to black and back again. Then a figure rose from it, or maybe the water turned into the figure – he couldn't tell which. It formed the top half of a woman, and though she didn't really look like the drawing in the book, Dean thought of it immediately. No, she looked mostly like a regular lady, except she was bluish and her skin kept changing colors the way the water had a minute earlier. Where's her bottom half? he wondered, since the water wasn't more than a few inches deep. But that wasn't the important question, was it?

"What did you do to my dad and uncle?" Dean demanded, pointing the gun right at her face, though he was pretty sure a bullet wouldn't actually hurt her.

The woman laughed. The sound was warm and light, but it made Dean feel cold inside. She held out a hand toward the stairs. "Come closer and I will show you, child."

"I don't think so, creepy...water lady." Dean really needed to work on his insults, but in his defense, he was pretty far out of his element. "You need to fix them."

"They are happy," she said in that sweet, sweet voice. "I can make you happy, too." She smiled and Dean felt a tug behind his belly button, like something was pulling him down the steps. "And your brother, too."

The allusion to Sam made Dean furious. "Whatever you're doing, stop it!" he yelled. "You fix them or I'll...I'll kill you. You make me want to puke. And you are never getting Sammy!"

He barely noticed her expression morph into surprise before he was back up and slamming the door. Dean breathed hard for a few minutes, trying to figure out what to do.

"Dean, Dean, Dean, can we have popcorn now?" begged Bobby cheerfully, and Dean felt tears well in his eyes.

They did have popcorn, and all of the Oreos from Bobby's not-as-secret-as-he-thought stash. Then since it was dark and Dad seemed a little freaked out by it, Dean did shadow puppets by flashlight the way he did for Sam when the kid got scared at night.

Finally, in just one more odd memory to add to this entire bank of them, Dad and Bobby fell asleep on the couch with Bobby leaning against the taller man's side.

Eventually, Dean found himself staring off into space just praying for the electricity to come back on. Otherwise, he'd have to drive them somewhere, and he wasn't confident about his ability to do that at all. And there was the worry about keeping the three others safe. And his fear that maybe this couldn't be undone at all. It all made Dean feel sick again, the worry and junk food conspiring to make his stomach roil.

"'Sa matter, De?" asked Sammy, sliding onto Dean's lap. For one fraught second, Dean thought he'd been actually crying (and boys his age did not cry), but his face was dry. Apparently, his little brother had just seen something in his expression.

"I'm…"

"Is it cuz of the dark?" asked Sam doubtfully. Dean always told him that he wasn't afraid of the dark. (It was kind of true; Dean was only afraid of what he knew liked to hunt in the dark.)

"No, not really," Dean prevaricated.

"Somethin' in the basement?" Sam guessed. Dammit. If Dean told him, 'no' Sam would certainly look in the basement on his own to make sure. He was like that.

"Kinda, yeah." What could he say that would satisfy Sam yet keep him away from the basement? A sudden bit of inspiration hit. "There's water on the floor, and there's a really ugly fish in it."

Sam's nose wrinkled in disgust. They'd been at Bobby's once when a neighbor had brought over some fresh-caught salmon as a gift. Sam had refused to go into the kitchen until after the fish were processed, packaged, and put away, and he'd admitted later to Dean that he found them really creepy. "The fish's eyes are scawy, De," he'd explained after actually having a nightmare about them.

"I don't like that there's a fish in the basement, De," he said now, predictably.

"Me neither, squirt." Dean sighed. "But I don't want to go close to it and I don't know what to do about it." It was as truthful as he could be. He didn't want his little brother to know about real monsters, not when even seeing dead fish could give him nightmares.

Sam leaned against Dean quietly for a few minutes, and Dean half thought that he'd fall asleep.

"Scottie spilled salt in the fish tank, and her fish all died," Sam said, punctuating the words with a yawn.

Dean had no idea who Scottie was, or even if she was real or just a character on TV, but Sam's words electrified him. Salt. A lot of supernatural creatures didn't like salt. What if it was just as simple as that and salt could hurt or even kill the aqua idea, or whatever she was?

"Sammy, I need to go to Uncle Bobby's garage a sec," Dean said, gently dislodging his lap ornament. Before his brother could offer to come along, Dean added, "Think you can keep an eye on Dad and Uncle Bobby for me? Since they're actin' so weird?"

Sammy gave Dean a brilliant smile, always happy to be trusted with a task. "Okay, De!"

Dean ran to the garage and back like the hounds of hell itself were on his heels andnotbecause he was scared that the creepy naked half lady would appear out of one of the puddles. Really. It was just because he was worried that Dad and/or Bobby would wake up and get into some trouble that Sammy couldn't talk them out of.

The two men were still fast asleep, Bobby almost on Dad's lap, when Dean got back with a block of the kind of salt that Bobby would put out for deer in the winter. Dean would have laughed at the sight if he hadn't been so worried about getting them back to normal.

"Are you gonna kill the ugly fish?" asked Sam, looking at Dean in a way that made the older boy feel about ten feet tall.

"I'm gonna try, Sammy," he said, feeling unaccountably more confident about his half-baked plan. "You stay here, okay?"

Sam nodded, and Dean went back to the basement door. He really didn't want to go through it again, but for his brother, who looked at him like he was Batman and Superman and Chuck Norris all rolled into one, he would. Dean counted to three, then popped through the door and went down the first couple steps.

The weird lady-monster-thing appeared, but before she could say a word, Dean heaved the salt brick into the water, where it burst.

The effect was immediate. The water – and the monster – began to roll and boil. Shrieking, the creature shrank down like the Wicked Witch of the West when Dorothy threw a bucket of water at her. It was cool and gross and left behind nothing but a brackish water with a little sticky blue residue floating on top. Dean stared at it, unable to quite believe that the salt had worked so well and so dramatically.

"De?" said a little voice, followed by Sam's face peeking around the door in a show of bravery that impressed Dean. "Is the fish dead?"

Dean laughed, a little more high-pitched than normal. "Yeah, Sammy. The fish is dead."

Behind Sam, Bobby's voice said, "What the hell?" followed by a few words that Dean wasn't supposed to know.

Then Dad bellowed. "Get off me, Singer!" and all was right with Dean's world again.

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AN: I don't know what John Winchester's preferred handgun was, but Mr. Internet says that a Colt Anaconda is shown in his arsenal in season 3, episode 7, Fresh Blood.

The term aqua irea is Latin for water wraith, unless Google translate lied to me. Their appearance and powers and weaknesses I just made up.