October 5

The house was on fire. Sam was lying in a crib, the shadow of a mobile above him. The fire licked the walls around him. But he was frozen. He couldn't move. Latex paint and wallpaper bubbled and peeled, sheet rock melted and burst into brightness. A white dress in the flame and blonde hair. Jessica. She was bleeding.

He couldn't move. Dad's arms lifted him up. Was it Dad? That face was all wrong.


Sam awakened again. This time he'd done it quietly enough that Jess only stirred as she rolled over.

Sam stood up, clad only in his boxers and a tee shirt and wandered to the kitchen. He took a few slow breaths to calm the gallop of his heartbeat and ran his fingers through his hair. 'It's okay. It was a dream. Just a bad dream.'

He crouched down and dug under the sink, rummaging through tubs of cleaning supplies and some rubber gloves before his hand seized the handle of his little bare bones tool box. He pulled it out with the clatter of knocked over Windex and placed it on the counter.

He sighed and nudged the cupboard closed with his foot, armed himself with a screwdriver and pried off each smoke alarm to check it over before he put it back. Then he wandered to the individual electrical box in their apartment behind the door of the closet off their kitchen.

He cut the power and slowly, methodically began to turn them on and off to test the circuit breaker. He wasn't terribly adept at wiring or electricity but checking the circuit breaker and taking a peak behind each power switch for a ratty connective wire that might start a fire...that he could do.

The wiring in the apartment seemed fine. But he threw away the candle that Jess had in the living room. He'd tell her he'd accidentally knocked it over and broken it.


October 10

The leather chair Jess had brought from her parents made a creaking sound as Sam moved in it. He leaned his head back against the wall and sighed, then stood up and dropped the newspaper onto the cushion. He usually tried to avoid the paper, but old habits died hard and if he was able to get a hold of one, he couldn't resist the temptation to scan the headlines for anything strange.

Sometimes Sam went months without picking up the paper and then sometimes there was an old one available in a diner somewhere or the cafeteria and his old snooping skills kicked into high gear. Today he hadn't found anything unusual. He breathed a sigh of relief around the constriction in his chest and felt it loosen a little.

Most days he felt the most content he'd ever felt in his life. In fact, he hadn't known what contentment felt like before he met Jessica. However, lately there was a growing sense of unease that sometimes struck him. Some weird feeling of impending doom that he couldn't quite shake off. He had been slow to trust that this was his life. That this existence he had constructed was a real and viable thing. Something solid and something that he had autonomy over and was his.

If only he knew.

But sometimes it's better to not know. Some secrets are too dark.


October 15

Sam pulled Jessica close to him on the couch. A crack of thunder peeled through the air and the lights flickered and went out. The TV blinked off.

"Well, damn." She said beside him. "There goes the power. What is with the weather this week?" She flipped open her cell phone to illuminate the room and started to get off the couch. "I have that candle somewhere."

Sam shook his head. "Jess about that, I uh, knocked it off the table and broke it."

"Sam! That was one of my apple spice ones."

"I'm sorry. Hey," he tugged on her arm. "Come sit."

"We can't do anything in the dark."

"I can think of lots of things we can do in the dark," Sam said with mischief in his eye.


October 17

"The Primroses were over."

The thought echoed through Sam's mind as he sat in class. He blinked, trying to figure out where he'd even heard it before.

The lecture faded out and he had to pull his focus back to the professor. Sam had a way of directing his attention with laser precision if he needed to, but when he didn't have to, he could doodle in the margins of his notebooks while the teacher talked and still somehow walk out of class with a 4.0.

He knew his memory gave him an advantage over a lot of students. Sam could hear information once and regurgitate it later with near perfect recall when put on the spot. His brother didn't have that ability and he wondered if that's partly why Dean did so badly in school.

Sam could never quite untangle whether it was Dean's attitude that caused him to not pay attention in class or if at some point he'd not been able to keep up with the information being given and had stopped paying attention. It could go either way with his brother.

Taking notes on a laptop had put a dent in Sam's doodling habit. Instead he stretched out one of his long legs as much as he could in the cramped lecture hall and rolled his neck-and had random quotes run through his head.

The Primroses were over.

The fields are covered in blood.

He blinked.

Of course. The opening words to Watership Down. Although why the hell it had popped into his mind in the middle of a lecture, he had no clue. He hadn't read that book in years upon years.

A tale of two brothers leaving their home on the whim of the younger with his blood filled visions of ruin.

A tale of two brothers.

The fields are covered in blood. The Primroses were over.

Sam shook his head to clear it and snapped his laptop closed as class was dismissed.


October 18

The ceiling was burning. Blonde hair lit from within burning gold and then yellow and red. Shades of blue at the center. It licked and fanned and then swirled and headed toward Sam.

"The fields are covered in blood!" He was yelling it at Dean, who watched him with a knowing green eye.

"I believe you, Sammy." He said. "Dad said to stay here."

Dean's eye reflected the burning flames behind them. Red and oranges that swirled together into yellow. Yellow that took over the entirety of his iris.

He blinked and suddenly they were the hazel eyes of his father. John's face twisted into a frown of torment. "Shoot me, son! You have to shoot me!" His baritone cut through the sound of the crackle pop of flames eating the house and then an explosion.

And Sam awoke panting. He sat upright in the darkness of his room and tried to calm his breathing. His face scrunched up and he realized that he was crying. He wiped a forearm over his eyes and pushed the feeling of trapped panic back down. He swallowed hard and looked at Jessica lying beside him.

She stirred. "You okay?" She asked sleepily.

"Yeah." Sam laid back down and gathered her into his arms. She dropped her head into his chest and was back asleep before his tears dried.

Oh Sammy...I'm so sorry. Thanks for the reviews, guys. Stay tuned.