TITLE: Deadly Game: Chapter 2
AUTHOR: L. C. Brotherton
DISCLAIMER: No copyright infringements intended. I just like to bring some of these characters out to visit my playground and promise to put them back when we've finished our game.
RATING: PG-13 or T for sexual situations, crude language, and violence.
SPOILERS: Anything between Season One and Season Two's episode "The Usual Suspects" is fair game.
REVIEWS/FEEDBACK: Yes, please!
. . . S U P E R N A T U R A L. . .
Blue Earth, Montana
June, 1984
10:30 PM
Six-year-old Dean Winchester froze in the doorway, stunned beyond belief at what he saw in Pastor Jim Murphy's kitchen.
For days, he'd looked forward to being in Jim's home, a place that consistently meant safety and familiarity over the last year. And now, after they'd driven for hours in the rain just to get here, the unthinkable had happened: Pastor Jim wasn't alone in his kitchen, and it was far worse than Dean ever could have imagined.
A little girl with curling, brown pigtails sat at the kitchen table with Pastor Jim, crayons and coloring books scattered about. She had a plateful of animal crackers in front of her to go with the hot cocoa she was drinking. For a panicked moment, Dean felt his heart stutter when he thought that she was drinking out of his very favorite GI Joe mug, the one with Duke on it. It took a second for his thudding heart to slow down as he realized that the mug had Duke's friend, Scarlet, on it-so it wasn't his mug, after all.
Stunned, and slowing trying to recover from his shock over the intruder's presence, he dropped his denim backpack on the floor, and his father nearly stumbled over him at the threshold.
"Dean, get a move on, boy—you're not a doorstop!" John growled in weary annoyance, shifting the weight of his sleeping two-year-old son as he carried him close to his shoulder, using his knee to nudge his oldest son into the room.
Seated at the kitchen table, Pastor Jim stopped coloring and smiled in welcome at his guests. "It's good to see you," the cleric and some-time hunter warmly offered in greeting. "I was beginning to worry that something might have happened. You're a couple of hours late. Caleb had to go help take care of—well, something. He'll be back when he can."
"Storm slowed us down," John offered. "Bridge is washed out at Wild Horse Creek and we had to take the back way."
While John and Pastor Jim continued to talk about unimportant things like bridges washing away in flash floods, their words were sucked off the planet and into the newly ripped chasm in the fabric of reality. Dean hastily considered what this new development might mean. It had to be a joke of some kind, and he was determined to get to the bottom of it, because it wasn't very funny.
The little girl met Dean's eyes solemnly, and she wiped off a foamy hot cocoa mustache with the back of her hand. Unexpectedly, she grinned at him, and he could see that she was missing two of her front teeth.
"What's the matter with you? " John demanded, lightly smacking Dean in the back of the head with a few fingers. "She's not gonna bite you, Sport. I'm gonna put Sam in the back bedroom," he announced, moving around the statue that used to be his oldest son.
Pastor Jim smiled and rose, the wooden chair making a hideous squeak on the hardwood floor. "I'll get some coffee ready," he said, affectionately ruffling Dean's hair as he moved past the boy.
"Dean, make yourself at home and I'll get you some hot cocoa," Pastor Jim said, pulling a pair of mugs from the cabinet, one of which was Dean's GI Joe mug. "I'd like to introduce you to Miss Arianna Lambert."
"Arianna, this is Dean Winchester, a very good friend of mine," he continued, pouring up hot cocoa in Dean's GI Joe mug. "I have a feeling that two of you are going to become very good friends, too."
Dean hoped that Pastor Jim wasn't betting on the very good friendship between him and Miss Arianna Lambert. She cocked her head and appraised Dean quietly with big green eyes, then nodded. She slid some coloring books toward him and held out a handful of crayons. "Wanna color with me?"
"Dean's quite the artist, Ari," Jim commented, putting Dean's mug on the table and pulling out a chair. "Maybe in the morning, he might show you some of the drawings he made when he last visited," he continued, gently guiding Dean toward the chair next to the little girl. Dean wasn't overly pleased with the idea that this intruding girl was still going to be around in the morning, but it would give him more time to figure out exactly how she fit into the picture.
"I like Batman," Dean said, leafing through the book on top of the pile, smiling as she slid the plate of animal crackers between them so he could have some, too.
"I like him, too, but Superman is nicer," she confided, dunking a lion-shaped cracker into her mug.
"Yeah, but Batman is smarter and he has that cool utility belt," Dean countered, picking up a purple crayon to start working on the Joker's suit.
A few minutes later when John came back downstairs, he gratefully accepted the mug of steaming coffee offered to him and smiled with satisfaction to see that the two children were chatting quietly between themselves, comparing the various strengths of Batman and Superman. Pastor Jim gestured toward the living room, and he followed.
"I think they're getting along nicely," Pastor Jim commented.
"I was afraid Dean was going to pull the stone statue impersonation again," John said; worry creased his brow in remembrance.
In the year immediately following his mother's fiery death, stone cold silence had been the way the boy dealt with the world. John had taken his traumatized son to several physicians and counselors, all of whom greatly pitied the silence the motherless boy had retreated into, and assured the worried father that when the time was right Dean would begin speaking again. Happily, one morning he'd awoken to find Dean chattering to baby Sammy as though there hadn't been a year that John Winchester prayed for even a syllable from his boy.
During this past year, whenever he'd been jerked out of his comfort zone or under great stress, Dean had shown signs of reverting to that silent state. More often than not, John himself was typically the cause of those transition points in Dean's life, and he was afraid he'd done it yet again by not forewarning his son that a creature of the female variety would be spending time at the Murphy farm.
Abruptly, John was shocked to hear Dean laughing at something the little girl had shared with him. It had been a while since his son had laughed, and he cherished the sound.
"Ari's quite the charmer; she can coax a smile and a quick conversation out of asphalt when she wants to do it," Jim chuckled. "Actually, she's much like her father in that regard. I think you'll like Caleb and I'm very pleased that you accepted his offer to share with you some of his expertise."
Absently, John studied the steam coming off his coffee. Knowledge was power. Power was necessary to win a war. In his "other life," as he often thought of it, before coming home to Mary, he'd been a Marine and knew about war. But that was a different lifetime and a different kind of war. Currently, John had little knowledge and no power; thus he had precious little hope of winning many battles-let alone a war-against the supernatural forces that had claimed the life of his wife and forever changed his life and that of his sons. So, if an experienced and successful warrior openly offered the necessary training that John needed to turn the tables and learn how to win this kind of war, he'd gladly accept and dedicate himself toward the collection of skills that would turn him into the kind of hunter he needed to be.