Apologies for the delay in updates. Unlike my one shots, this little monster demands serious attention from my angst!brain, and said angst!brain needs time to warm itself up. Beyond that, my internet time is somewhat limited by the stupid locations my work takes me. Archaeology is not glamorous, people, and I have jet to meet a young Harrison Ford look-alike. Still, I am now back in the UK for a month or two, so updates should be more regular. A huge thank you to everyone who is reading this story, and a double thank you to those that take the time to let me know what you think. I have always felt that writing is a two way street, an author can never improve on what is not corrected, and a reader won't get that mini!Dean angst they want unless they sweet-talk the girl with the pen!
So on with the show. Chapter three, in which very few questions are answered, Sam breaks more laws than I can keep track off, Dean pushes every maternal button going, and Sam finally meets himself. Phew. The ending is not what I'd call a cliffhanger, but some of you might just want to kill me. Consider yourself warned.
Once, when he was shut up in a motel room with a broken leg and bad attitude, Dean watched the entire Nightmare on Elm Street series on cable, and sniggered at every single one of them.
He bitched through Children of the Corn, slated Pet Cemetery, and did a damn good job of repressing all memories of The Exorcist. He was an unabashed critic who had never once found a believable supernatural horror film, but if you asked him to sit down and watch The Wicker Man, he'd run a mile.
"It's Christopher Lee, dude. He's…freaky." Personally, Sam though that Dean could say whatever he liked on the subject. The truth of the matter was that Dean found people far scarier than monsters. Not the chainsaw wielding type, they elicited nothing but derision, but that deeply buried evil that ran through ordinary men seriously freaked Dean out.
Someone had once called his brother a sociopath. Dean had shrugged and knocked out the guy's two front teeth. Dean simply did not relate well to the living.
Sam was starting to understand why.
The police arrived in the pediatrics ward an hour or so after Dean woke from his medication. Sam had taken up sentry duty with his face to the door and the window at his side in lieu of the protection salt would provide them all. Caution had been thrown aside when the little boy reached out wordlessly for his daddy, and John had climbed awkwardly onto the spaceship covered bed sheets. Father and son were the picture of love against the gaudy bedspread. It forced Sam to beat back a small smile whenever he caught the two of them in the corner of his eye.
When the first officer stepped over the threshold of the private room, John's arms tightened around Dean's small shoulders and the little boy almost crawled under his father's arm. It had been John's reaction more than anything that sent the hairs on the back of Sam's neck stand at attention. He shifted his feet to get a more sturdy position should he need to be on his feet, but let his body loll easily in the plastic armchair.
"Officer Winters." The gruff set to the elder Winchester's voice cemented the worry that had been forming in Sam's mind. It was a warning. John was wary, he did not like the policeman, and Sam had grown up trusting his father's instincts.
Winters removed his cap to reveal military short white blond hair. His eyes were a ferocious grey and his shoulders were broad. He jumped straight to the point. "Mister Winchester, I am going to have to ask you to come with us to the station."
Sam got in before John could. "On what grounds?"
Cold eyes looked him up and down, weighing, assessing. Sam rose to his feet and let his extra five inches do the talking.
"And you are?" Arrogance, obnoxiously confident. Dean would so have fucked with him.
"I am a family friend." He said firmly, sending a mental prayer to the higher powers that his father would keep his tongue in check and go with the flow. He was still waiting for the other shoe to drop in John' mind and land a bullet between Sam's eyes.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw John watching him with a guarded expression. Dean's eyes were also fixed upon his older, taller, and scarier little brother, curious where John's were wary.
Winters had unconsciously backed up a step, but gained his equilibrium swiftly. "Then you are well aware of how bad this looks. Wife dies in a house fire, and his son is put in hospital three weeks later. It looks suspicious."
Sam heard Dean whimper slightly and turn to find John standing squarely behind him, thunder in his eyes and fists clenched. Sam's Winchester Brawl-o-metre predicted a fight in five, four…
"Do you have any evidence to back up your ridiculous and inappropriate speculation?"
Winters waved a hand in Dean's direction. "Mister…?"
"Clapton." Clapton? God, he had been in Dean's company for too long.
"Clapton, right. You going to tell me the kid fell down the stairs?" The man obviously did not like people hurting children. Very commendable, but he was barking up a tree that was likely to combust at a moments notice.
Sam thrust his own injured arms under the officer's face. "I suppose you think mister Winchester is responsible for these?"
"It was a goddamned wild dog." John snapped, reminding Sam who had written the rulebook on lying to the police. "They've had their tetanus shots and everything." He added mockingly. With his usual sense of timing, Dean chose that moment to pull a face of disgust and shudder dramatically.
Four years old and already committing a felony. Sam could have hugged him.
"Be that as it may," Winters nodded his head absently and Robocops one through three filed into the small room. Sam weighed them up. Small space, dumb cops. He could take them. "The judge is in possession of new evidence regarding the fire at your residence on November the second. You can either come to the station willingly, or I will be forced to further traumatize your son by arresting his daddy."
Sam had seen enough people die of asphyxiation to know exactly what color Winters' face would turn when Sam strangled him with his own shoelaces. It would not be pretty. He would make sure Dean had his eyes closed…
"You don't expect me to leave Dean here alone, do you?" John snapped incredulously. He backed up to his son's bedside and placed a soothing hand on the boy's shoulder. Dean had been fighting unsuccessfully with his various medical dressings in an attempt to reach his father. Sam knew form experience that if he'd have been given any more time, he'd have pulled the IV free, self-injury be damned.
Sam watched with a heavy heart as his father tried in vain to soothe the little boy. He honestly could have killed Winters right then. What kind of jackass acted that way in the presence of a hurt child? Mary had been taken away from him, now John. It made Sam wonder just how much of these events his Dean remembered.
"I'm sure mister Clapton, being such a good family friend will keep an eye on the boy until social services arrive."
The SS. Feared in the Winchester household as its namesake was feared across Europe. Still, the current score was Winchesters 3, SS 0, and Sam intended to keep it that way.
There was a mixture of anger and fear in John's eyes when he looked up at Sam, realizing he had shot himself in the foot by not contradicting Sam's claim earlier in their conversation. Sam tried to put everything he felt for his family into his gaze, hoping to convey a promise that John Winchester could accept, if not believe.
"Daddy?"
"Easy Sport. I need you to be a good boy and stay here until I get back, okay?"
Dean nodded reluctantly. John sighed, pressed a kiss to the boy's forehead and rested his cheek against the golden hair. "Good boy. Daddy will be back to take you home very soon. Then we'll take Sammy to the park and feed the ducks."
"I miss Sammy."
Sammy misses you, too big brother, Sam thought sadly.
John made no reply, simply kissed him again and stood to stand before Winters.
"If anything happens to him, it will be on your head, understand me?" There was such quiet, deadly malice in the words that even an insensitive asshole such as Winters could not fail to take heed of them. Sam knew that a part of the threat was directed at him.
"Please, Mister Winchester, he's in a hospital. Where on earth could he be safer?"
Neither Winchester dignified him with a response.
The nurse, a woman that Sam's Dean would have hit on in a heartbeat, had stopped by on her rounds, adding a little mixture to Dean's IV to help the boy sleep. As much as Sam hated the idea of anyone drugging his brother, he was grateful to some extent. Removing the needle embedded in Dean's wrist was a task of Titanic proportions, even when the boy was asleep. Dean's wrist was tiny, and so fragile Sam was terrified of hurting him. It took more courage to slide the IV out than it did to take down that damn ghoul. Dean muttered something dreamily and showed no signs of waking when Sam wrapped his own jacket around him like a duvet.
The boy was a warm, sleepy, breathing teddy bear in Sam's arms. Carefully navigating the quiet hallways of the hospital, Sam contemplated the ironies of fate that had him essentially kidnapping his brother from a freaking pediatrics ward.
"Dude, you would so be laughing at me right now." Sam muttered into the warm blond head resting under his chin. Dean muttered and moaned, wrapped one small hand into the folds of Sam's shirt. "You're just too darn cute, you know that, don't you?" Sam continued. He snorted. "Of course you know that. No wonder you're such an arrogant bas-person."
He was not going to cuss in front of his four-year-old big brother. He was not going to be the bad influence in this relationship.
The security in the hospital sucked ass. Sam had only to dodge one nurse and three milling janitors before he was through the door and into the cold night air. Small shivers vibrated in his arms. It was second nature to hold Dean tighter.
There, under the dim overhead glow of a streetlamp, the Impala loomed like the Holy Grail, still in need of a good clean. Sam broke into his brother's car, with a fair amount of wicked glee, carefully lowered Dean into the passenger seat and strapped him in.
"Okay big brother. Let's go find me."
Turning onto the main road, the whole situation struck Sam as absurd. He'd abducted his brother, stolen his father's car, and planned to kidnap his infant self. Any minute and Ashton Kutcher was going to jump out from behind a tree with his camera crew and adult Dean was going to bitch at him for letting the car get so dirty.
He made it all the way into Lawrence without a single Punk'd moment and began to worry.
Time traveling, if that was what he had done, was bad. Like black-hole-world-end kind of bad. It was always bad. Even in fiction- especially in fiction. Hindsight was twenty-twenty- but there was a reason people walked around without their glasses. Sam may not know exact details of events that were happening, but he knew enough to seriously fuck things up. Enough to know that if he grabbed his junior self and hightailed it to Canada, he and Dean would never grow up knowing how to kill a man before they hit puberty.
The thought hit him like a ton of bricks, so tempting that he nearly drove off the road.
He could…
Dean slowly stirring in the seat besides him forced Sam to shove the temptation to the back of his mind. As if someone flicked a switch, Dean bolted upright and scrambled in the seat, not happy to find himself in a car when his daddy told him to stay put.
"Hey, hey, easy Dean. It's okay." Sam pulled them over in order to turn his full attention on the toddler. Acting as he would around a skittish horse, Sam slowly reached out a hand, palm open and up. His heart broke as his brother trembled and leant away from his touch, and just as he moved to pull his hand back, a sharp pain erupted in one of his fingers.
With a yelp, he yanked his hand back to his chest, more out of instinct than anything else. Dean whimpered at the sudden noise and clawed at the door handle.
Holding his finger to the dashboard light, bloody. Kid had bitten him hard. For a moment, Sam recognized John Winchester's hard-ass stubbornness in the watery green eyes of his brother, but it quickly faded.
He might have simply ordered Den to sit still and keep quiet. Would probably have worked in a few years, but he didn't know this Dean. He didn't know what made him tick, or how he thought.
But he could.
He could with this Dean. It would be easy. Children were open to things like that. Susceptible. Vulnerable. Sam wasn't sure of what he was about to do was a violation or a blessing, but he quickly, gently, caught Dean's small face in once hand, whispering soft soothing noises as he went.
"It's alright. It's alright." He promised repeatedly, and slipped silently into the little boy's mind.
Ever since the incident with their second favorite demon, Sam's powers had been doing the hokey pokey. When he touched some people, it was as if he could take a walk in their minds. Some, like Dean, had brick walls constructed that Sam couldn't, wouldn't, break through. Not this Dean, though. As easily as walking down the street, Sam made a beeline for the boy's happier memories. He couldn't force Dean to relive them, but he could tap into the emotions that surrounded them and use them as a comfort blanket.
"There we go, that's better. Shush, it's okay. You're safe." He muttered, along with other senseless words and promises of security and love. Mary Winchester sparked a fire of idolizing adoration in her eldest son, and Dean settled happily under the warmth of his mother's hugs. It was a lie, but one Sam would gladly tell Dean every day if he had to.
"Good. Good boy. You alright now?"
Slowly, Dean nodded.
Sam smiled. "Not going to bite me again, are you?"
A small, shy shake of the head. "Sorry." The word was barely audible, and it saddened Sam that the boy's first word to him had been an apology.
"Don't worry about it. My fault." He said gruffly.
The last time he had been in Lawrence had been with an older, snarkier Dean, who had shown Sam where Mike and Kate Gunther lived, and housed their small family after the fire. It was dark still, and the house was silent. Leaving Dean in the car with the strict instructions to stay put, Sam climbed through the bathroom window. He'd already broken so many laws, of state and time, that a little breaking and entering was the least of his worries.
Locating the room where baby Sammy slept was relatively simple, and Sammy, unlike Dean, didn't seem at all fazed by the strange person plucking him from his cot in the dead of night. The baby cooed happily, and Sam felt so fucking weird, climbing out into the garden with a mini-Sam tucked under one arm. Besides, if Dean's tiny body had him freaked out, he did not want to deal with the repercussions of dropping himself mid fence jump.
It was almost a surprise to find Dean sitting exactly where Sam had left him. The moment he saw Sammy, the boy held out his arms with his patented leave Sammy the fuck alone, right now look that was far cuter than any version Sam had ever seen before. He gently placed his younger self in Dean's arms and was taken aback by the relief that shone out from the small face.
Even so young, Dean's whole world revolved around his little brother. It was humbling, and Sam said nothing as he climbed back into the Impala and pulled onto the main road.
That old Robert Frost poem sprang to mind as he pulled to a stop at a red light and two roads loomed ahead.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Down one road lay the interstate, freedom, and a life devoid of darkness. He spared a glance at the two small lives huddled together besides him. He could change everything. He could give himself the life he had always wanted. He could give Dean the life he had always deserved.
Down the second lay the path to the quiet street Missouri Mosley inhabited. She would help him. She would show John the truth, and his small family would be thrown down the path of death and destruction, of a never-ending war that knew no pity and took no prisoners.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference.
With a sigh, Sam flicked on the blinker and made his choice.
TBC
Now taking bets as to which road our Sam takes.