Hello. I'm Panda. Thanks for clicking on my story and I hope you enjoy. If you have any questions please comment. I appreciate any feedback too. This is purely a boredom project I did over the summer and thought people might like to read it while we console ourselves with SPN ending *cries into oblivion*

Anyway, here's my version of a story you already know. Hope you like :)

love Panda x

In the shadow of a large tree in the Winchester's front yard, stood two figures. It was 11.50pm, and the quiet, suburban street was submerged in darkness, save for the street lamps overhead, which flickered and buzzed erratically. The light directly above the tree popped loudly, punctuating the silence. The figures paid no attention to the light's dramatic display, they were solely focussed on the window of a bedroom to the right of the house. They had stood there and watched while all signs of life in the house dimmed, and darkened, signalling that the occupants were sleeping soundly. The taller of the two, a man in his 50's, smiled wickedly.

"It's time."

The short blonde woman next to him faltered, shifting from one foot to the other, her mouth a thin line.

"But are you sure? Are you sure you want this one? Wouldn't you prefer someone… anyone else?" she voiced, with caution.

"No. This boy is the one."

"But…" she hesitated, "the kid is defective. I heard them talking about doctors appointments, and special schools, and a whole bunch of other stuff. We can find you a strong one, a better one."

"I said no!" the man said firmly, silencing the blonde immediately. "Mary Winchester made a deal, and I'm here to collect. The boy will be mine."

The man entered the house in the blink of an eye, leaving the woman on the street alone.

"Well don't say I didn't warn you," she muttered to herself through clenched teeth. In a blink of the opposite street lamp, she was gone.

Fifteen minutes later, the same front lawn was awash with an orange glare from the flames licking out of the window to the right, as two figures and a tiny bundle wrapped in blankets tumbled out of the front door, falling on the grass in the panic. Sirens wailed, closer by the second, drowning out the screams coming from the blanket bundle.

"Dean! Are you ok? Is Sammy ok? Oh god, Mary!" John frantically ran hands over his two boys, checking for signs of injury or damage. Tears streamed down his soot-stained face, leaving trails of clean skin.

"Help me! My wife!" he screamed, as neighbours began stepping out of their front doors, and peeking behind curtains, scared awake by the awful noises of the Winchester house going up in flames.

A fire truck and two police cars screamed to a halt by the curb, with people leaping out before the vehicles had come to a complete stop. The police ran to help the little family huddled on the lawn, while the firefighters got to work extinguishing the fire.

"My wife is in there," John pleaded, while he got up and made a break to re-enter the house. Hands held him back, while a sobbing four year old screamed for his daddy.

"Sir, the firefighters are working on it. Please, I need you to stay here and tell me what happened." A young male officer pleaded with John, not sure what to make of any of this.

"Daddy!" Dean's cries broke through to John in his grief, and he scooped up both boys, holding onto them for dear life.

"It's ok Dean, it's ok. I'm here."

The next hour dragged on for what felt like a lifetime, but finally the flames were gone, leaving a gaping, smoking shell that once was a family home. The three Winchester boys sat in the back of an ambulance, in shock, not speaking. At some point, an officer and a firefighter had come over and broken the news to John, that his wife was dead, but he already knew. He'd seen her, bleeding, and burning. There was no way she could have escaped that, whatever THAT was. Had he really seen what he saw? How could that possibly be real?

He looked down at his two sons, little baby Sammy with his dimples and pure innocence who was sleeping through all the commotion, and Dean, who looked older beyond his four years in that moment. John wondered how much the kid had seen and heard, and what he was going to say to explain where Mommy had gone. Did he even know where Mary had gone?

A paramedic emerged from the back of the van. "Sir, we're going to take you to the hospital now to get checked over, ok? Your kids could use a once over," she said, softly.

"Yeah, yeah ok." John gently nudged Dean. "Come on kiddo, climb up."

"I can't believe your baby is sleeping now. You've got a tough little cookie there," paramedic lady commented with a kind smile.

"Lil Sammy… he was born deaf. He… he'll sleep through anything." It was true too, John had seen Sam sleep through storms, Dean's temper tantrums, broken pots, everything. Now he was sleeping through this, impossible as it may seem. His innocent little Sammy, who would now never know his Mom.

It was in that moment that a steely composure set upon John, and he made one thing clear in his mind; he was going to find answers, and he was going to get revenge for what had happened to his beautiful wife.

No matter what the cost.

Chapter 1

Sam Winchester stood with his back pressed against a brick wall, peeking ever so carefully round the corner into the alleyway, a knife clenched in his right hand. On the opposite side of the alley, his brother Dean was poised in the same position with a handgun, waiting. He could see their target with his hyper-keen peripheral vision. He'd been trained within an inch of his life to rely upon his sight when on a job, as it was the only thing standing between him and death.

Sam shot his brother a glance that said, 'you ready?' and Dean nodded once, holding up three fingers. He counted down 3, 2, 1, then both brothers sprung into action. Their target was a large, skinny man, who had a woman pinned to the wall, leering over her in demented glee.

"Hey! Didn't your mother teach you not to play with your food?" Dean quipped.

The figure spun round with inhuman speed, snarling. Dean fired one, then two shots into the guy's chest, but it had no effect. He looked at Sam, and threw a brief series of signs at him, instructing him it was his turn. The younger Winchester leapt forward, brandishing his weapon at the creature. He made contact with its shoulder, and it howled in pain and shock. In one blurry action, it stepped forward and swiped at Sam, flinging him into the wall much harder than any human should have been able to. All of the air left Sam's lungs in a whoosh, and he crumpled to the floor, winded.

"Sammy!" Dean yelled out in reflex, followed by a string of expletives. He pulled a long machete from his thigh strap, and angled it towards the vampire in front of him. "Come on then, you fugly son of a bitch, lets finish this."

The vampire laughed arrogantly, then leapt at Dean. But the young hunter was ready for this, and dodged out of the way. In a moment of opportunity, he brought the machete down in one clean swing aimed at the vamp's neck, cutting through it like a weak sapling. The creature's body went in one direction, while the head rolled in another, right towards where Sam was just picking himself up off the floor.

"Ugh!" he exclaimed as the head bumped into his foot, then glanced up at Dean with a furrowed brow.

'Oh Sammy, don't be so delicate. It's just a severed vampire head,' Dean signed with a grin.

Sam rolled his eyes and shook his head. He didn't know how Dean could get so much enjoyment from this horrific job. He brushed off his jeans where he'd fallen in the dirt, and rubbed at his shoulder which had taken the brunt of the blow into the wall.

'You ok?' Dean asked, holding up one hand.

Sam nodded his closed fist in a 'yes' and pocketed his knife, looking down at the mess they had made.

The woman who was intended to be the vampire's meal was still cowering against the wall, in shocked silence. Sam walked up to her, while Dean set to work getting rid of the body. A small purse lay on the floor nearby, so Sam picked it up and went to hand it to the woman, but she flinched away in fear.

"Ish ok," Sam said cautiously, hands held up to show her he meant no harm. "Ish 'afe now."

She took the bag cautiously from him, looking like she wasn't 100% convinced. He shot her one of his patented soft smiles of reassurance, and she softened a little.

"What was that?" she asked, breathlessly.

"Uh…" Sam wasn't sure how to word it, especially not in his second language.

"Vampire," Dean appeared suddenly at Sam's side, stating with an obvious tone. "Or some dude jacked up on 'roids. Whichever one you prefer. Hey, Sammy, let's go," he smacked Sam on the arm and jerked his head backwards.

Sam shot Dean a look that said 'Really? That's how you're going to leave it?' He was really great at conveying a guilt trip in a single glance.

"Ok sweetheart, look. He was a bad, bad man. And we got rid of him, now he can't hurt you, or anyone else ever again. Cool?"

"But… you killed him!" she shrieked in a high pitched tone that made Dean wince.

Sam stepped forward and placed a calming hand on her shoulder. "No, he washnt huemn. Nuthn to worr aboud."

"Huh?!" she shook her head, confusion overtaking the fear now.

The younger brother stalled, not sure if she was confused about the nature of what he was telling her, or if she didn't understand his accent. To Dean and John, Sam's speech was clear as day, but to others, it was sometimes hard to grasp.

"I'm shorry. You ok. Go 'ome an' resh." Sam backed away, "We' 'eave."

The woman took off at a run, entirely unconvinced that the brothers weren't about to chop her head off too.

"You're friggin' welcome!" Dean yelled after her with a huff. Thankless job at times, this shit, he thought, grumpily.

'What did you do with the body?' Sam asked the hunter to his right.

'In the trunk,' Dean signed back, fluidly.

Sam made a face. 'BBQ in the woods then?' He hated the disposal part of the job. The smell would stick to everything for days after.

Dean nodded his fist. "Yup. Yummy!" He said out loud, causing his sibling to retch slightly.

'You did good, kid,' Dean signed meaningfully.

'I barely grazed the thing, then got thrown into a wall. Yeah, great work there!' Sam signed rapidly with eyebrows cocked and a small huff of sarcasm escaping his lips. 'And I'm 19. Not a kid.'

'I meant after, dude. I know you hate talking to the victims, but you really reassured her.'

'I don't like talking to people because I CAN'T talk to people,' Sam replied, his index fingers smacking together with force to emphasise the "can't".

"Sammy," Dean signed with an exasperated look. "You CAN talk. Hell, you speak English better than I do!"

Sam snorted in laughter. "Well if you read a book instead of porn magazines, you'd do better."

"Ha ha," Dean said aloud, cocking his head with sarcasm. "Seriously, dude. You sound good now. When you were 5 though…" then he made a horrified face and shook his head. "You sounded like a fog horn."

"Fuck you, jerk! That's so offensive!" Sam held up a middle finger in his brothers face.

"Ah I'm kidding, you whiny bitch. Get your ass back to the car. And clean your pants, you sat in crap back there!"

Being profoundly deaf since birth, Sam had never heard his own voice, or anyone's for that matter, so he struggled to form the words himself, and could occasionally get self conscious about it. Not because he was ashamed of being deaf, he just hated the looks it would draw, and got fed up when people lacked patience with him. John had been dragging his sons all over the country on the trail of the demon that killed their Mom ever since Sam was a year old, but he had made sure to get his youngest son as much help with communication as he could. They all learned ASL while on the road together, using books and videos while travelling, and attending classes in each town they stopped at. Sam took to it so easily, he was soon fluent and Dean wasn't far behind. John struggled more, being that he was older, but he got it in the end.

They saw one doctor after another, followed by a new audiologist each month. He tried out various hearing aids over the years, but they were a hinderance rather than a help, and he usually wound up ditching them in the previous motel. John got tired of spending more, and more money on new hearing aids that the kid clearly didn't want, so he gave up trying. There was a rather long-winded, and fraught discussion about cochlear implants one evening, after Sam met a kid who had them. But after a lot of questions and research, he decided it wasn't for him. It wasn't going to magically fix him, so what was the point. And he wasn't keen on the thought of someone cutting into his skull either.

When Sam was 4, they stayed in the same town for a whole year and a half, so John managed to get him signed up for speech therapy. It was only afterwards when Sam was old enough to know right from wrong, that he told them of the horrific method of making kids sit on their hands so they couldn't sign, and therefore had to learn to voice. Because of this, Sam had learned how to speak well enough to be understood if the other person cared enough to listen well. Dean always thought his little brother's voice sounded too nasal, like he had a permanent cold. Also, he never could quite say his S's right though, which was definitely one of life's cruel jokes, considering is name.

At times when it was just the three of them on the road, they could go days without speaking a single word, only signing to one another, and it was then that Sam fell out of practice and his speech became more lazy. Once John recognised this, he pressed his youngest to voice more, stating emphatically that it was a useful skill. Sam would complain, and sometimes even cry that it was too hard, but he was convinced to preserve with it, and it did become easier. John also made him learn lip reading, calling it a "necessary skill" for both life and hunting. It was a hard skill to learn, and even now he only ever caught half of what was said, and had to guess what the other half was. It was tiring too, playing a guess game every day, so he was thankful whenever his brother or school interpreters were around.

Schooling was tough for both of the boys because of the constant moving, but Dean mostly didn't care. He was learning all he needed to know from his dad, about weapons, and fighting demons. Sam on the other hand loved school and learning from books about the civil war, and Shakespeare, and anything else he could drink in through written word. Books were easy, and there was a simplicity to them. He always knew exactly what was going on, and there was no language barrier. Sure, he struggled to keep up at times when in a school setting, but John always managed to find an interpreter in each town for him, and anything he missed in class, he would catch up on at home. Hours, upon hours of homework, while Dean and John cleaned guns, or sparred in the car park. He hated moving from one school to the next though, and wished that they could stay in one town longer than a few months.

Now Sam was 19 and was secretly wishing he could go to college just like many of his peers. His latest teachers had been extremely surprised when he said he wasn't planning on matriculating as they recognised how smart he was. Gallaudet was mentioned a lot, as it was a prestigious Deaf college, but so was Brown and even Stanford. Secretly, Sam applied for all of these colleges, along with scholarships for each, and now the offers had begun to pour in. He couldn't believe it when he was actually accepted to Stanford, and Gallaudet, even though Brown rejected him. Both acceptances came with a full ride too, so now all he had to do was choose. And… break the news to his dad and brother. He was dreading that, and couldn't predict how it would go. They had all relied solely on each other for his whole life, and had a system going. School, training, hunting, making money, it was all a well oiled machine. Now he was about to ask to dismantle that machine.

"Your dad will be so proud," one teacher had gushed.

"You don't know John Winchester," Sam thought. His father was a loose canon, his brother possibly even worse. But enrolment was looming, so it was now or never. He'd intended to tell them both that evening, but then John had barrelled in talking about a vamp nest the next town over. So here they were.

"Dad just texted. We have to meet him. Coordinates," Dean relayed once they got into the car. John never texted Sam, just Dean, his second in command.

"Ok," Sam signed with a flick of his wrist. "I'm starving. Dinner after?"

"Sure. No green leaf shit though," Dean replied, starting up the Mustang they'd borrowed. "A man needs his meat!" He said aloud with a smirk, Sam just rolled his eyes in response.

Twenty minutes later they were pulling into an old warehouse district, that looked like it hadn't been used for at least several years. John was stood leaning against his beloved Chevy Impala by a set of chained gates. He flagged the boys down, and Dean pulled up alongside.

"Boys," he greeted them with a nod. "You get that bloodsucker in town?" he signed, using the headlights to illuminate his words.

"Yes, Sir,"both Sam and Dean replied together, voicing while signing, just how John liked things.

"Good. There's just the nest left now. It's here, four buildings over. If we hit them fast, they'll never know we're coming."

"Dad, wouldn't it be better to wait for daylight?" Sam piped up silently, scared his voice would be too loud and alert the vamps.

"No Sammy, no time to wait. We do this now. Clean. Fast. No fuck ups."John signed plainly, no flourishes or facial expressions. Sam relied on facial expressions along with the signs to get the full story, so sometimes it annoyed him when their dad was so blank-faced. But it wasn't a conversation he could ever bring up.

Both sons bobbed their fists. "Yes, Sir"

Each Winchester carried a machete, while John had the extra arsenal of some syringes of dead man's blood, and a canister of gas, which he offloaded onto Sam to carry. Dean picked the lock on the chained gate, and dropped the padlock to the floor. With a nod from John, they pressed forward towards the nest.

It only took them a few minutes to get to the building which housed the vampires. It looked just like any other abandoned warehouse would, you'd never know there was a pack of vicious killers inside.

"Voices off here, boys. Stealth," John signed.

He'd commented many times how knowing sign language had become such a handy tool for sneaking up on the enemy, or working as a team in the field. He used to be a marine, so was adept at using their hand signals when in stealth mode, but this as he said, was "next level". Sam rolled his eyes every time and made some sarcastic comment about what a blessing his deafness really was.

In single file formation, they crept into the warehouse in question. John had spent a good long while training Sam to creep, and not make sounds that he could not hear. He generally wore thinner soles shoes so he could feel the terrain better, and used his keen eyesight to predict what could make noise if he wasn't careful. He'd gotten so good at it that people outside of the family would joke that he needed to wear a bell.

The vampires had made their home in the basement, (of course, it was always the creepy basement) so the three of them descended some rotting wooden stairs down. Sam hesitated, knowing the potential for lots of noise here. Bringing up the rear, he placed a hand on the slightly moist banister, feeling for vibrations, and pausing when they got too strong. John saw his son pause, and beckoned him on.

"Forward. You're ok"

Dean reached the foot of the stairs first, and signalled he was going right, so John went left. Sam carried going straight on, but turned on a swivel the whole time, keeping both eyes on his family. Dean disappeared round a corner only to reappear a second later.

"Dead end," he signed with one hand.

Both boys turned and followed the direction their dad had gone, and discovered him not a second later, stood over a pile of sleeping vampires.

"I thought these pasty bitches were nocturnal," Dean signed rapidly, causing John to cock his head in confusion at some of the signs.

That brief opening was all that was needed when suddenly one of the vamps awoke and sprung up, hissing and snarling right in John's face.

"Dad!" Sam shouted, and before they knew it, all six vampires were circling the three of them, fangs bared, ready for dinner.

Machetes held high, the Winchester's readied themselves for the fight. The small female vamp who had woken first was the first to attack, leaping at John, fangs aimed at his neck. But the elder hunter was more than prepared for this, dodging the attack deftly, sinking a syringe of blood into the creature as it passed him. The thing that once was a young girl yelped, and soon fell to the floor, writhing in agony.

"HANNAH!" one of the male vamps cried out for his mate. That was the distraction Dean needed to gain the upper hand, swinging his machete down in one stroke, removing the head of the boy instantly.

Sam had better luck this time with his machete, burying it into the torso of the burly vampire dude heading towards him, then sliding it out again, and chopping off its head in a series of quick movements. Dean saw this and shot an impressed look at his brother, who shrugged and moved onto the next.

Once they'd taken two vamps a piece, with only one minor injury where one of the creatures had socked Dean in the nose, the trio piled up the bodies and soaked it with gasoline. Dean went and retrieved the body from his trunk, and together they watched as the heap of bodies and heads burned with ferocious heat.

"How about that burger now then?" Dean signed in the firelight, blood staining his shirt where his nose had bled for a moment.

"Weirdly I am still hungry," Sam replied, looking slightly disgusted at the same time.

"Yeah I could eat," John chimed in, throwing a wayward head into the pyre.

The three of them headed back to the cars, discussing on the way where they could go that would still be open this late into the night. They decided on a dive bar that served food all night long, and was only a few streets down from their motel, although Sam had desperately begged for somewhere that also did food that wasn't deep fried. He liked to watch what he ate more so than the other men, possibly because his frame was already so large and lanky. At 17 he had passed 6 foot, measuring an inch over that now, plus he was still growing. Dean teased him that he was too skinny and needed to get some fat on his bones, but Sam usually just swore at him and ignored it.

Two cheeseburgers, a chicken burger, two beers and a tap water later, the family were sat tossing idle conversation around the table, switching from stories of hunting mishaps, to sitting in silent reveries. John's eyes began to mist over with exhaustion, and Sam yawned loudly causing an old timer nearby to look up from his pitcher.

"Come on boys, you need some sleep,"John signed sloppily, slurring his words too, not from drink, but just pure tiredness.

Any hopes Sam had of raising the college topic tonight were dashed, but he made a silent promise to himself that he would rip that band aid off in the morning. Then if an argument did start, he could escape to school, which was actually a better plan anyway.

A hand rapped on the table in front of him, and he looked up to find Dean's green eyes bearing down on him.

"You coming then, geek boy?"

He certainly wasn't going to miss those nicknames.