Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural.
Warnings: Minor violence? Slight language, maybe. Use of Alcohol.
The next morning they were up early and laid a map of the city out on the kitchenette's table. Treating it like a normal hunt, Sam carefully marked locations with a tiny red 'X' while Dean read off the 'last seen at…' from each missing child's article. At the final one, Sam set the marker aside and looked for a pattern. Anything that could give them a hint to help the missing children in a hope that it wouldn't be too late.
"So, Sammy," Dean said, "connect the dots. What're we looking at?"
"It's 'Sam'."
"Sure," Dean said. "Seriously though, finding anything?"
Sam pointed at a couple locations where the little marks were grouped. "These look like hot spots, but they're what you would expect for kidnappings. Places where kids typically hang out. School, probably grabbed on their way home. The local arcade. The mall. The park. None of them were grabbed from their beds in the middle of the night, so I'm guessing they aren't targeting specific children. Just taking what they can get, you know?"
"Maybe," Dean said. "But that might not be entirely true. I mean, taking a kid from their home is pretty risky. These guys might not have the stealth for that."
"And taking a kid in public places is pretty risky, too. You would think that someone would've noticed kids being taken if it's from a public place, especially if the kid is panicking." Sam looked at the X's staring back at him, like they were trying to get him to see something obvious right in front of him. He sighed. "I don't know, man."
"Might be worth taking a look at the places you have all marked up. If they scope out kids, they could be at any of the spots at any time," Dean suggested. He grabbed the keys to the Impala. "Looks like we have a long day ahead of us."
Sam folded the map and followed Dean out of the motel room, glad to get some fresh air before he contracted freaking asbestosis. Their dad got so caught up in the dangers that the supernatural world posed that he sometimes forgot the normal hazards.
The car was mostly quiet, but like Dean, there was something about this hunt that he couldn't quite shake from his thoughts.
"Hey, Dean?"
"What?"
"The kids have never been found, like not even a body. What do you think happened to them?" Sam asked.
Dean shot a sideways glance at him. "Why do you want to know?"
Sam shrugged. "Just curious, you know? How can someone disappear so completely without it being supernatural?"
"People are crazy, Sammy," Dean said. "If they want something bad enough, they'll find a way to get it."
Sam let that end their conversation since it was clear that Dean wasn't about to stop deflecting his question. Maybe he didn't want the images of his beliefs in Sam's head. Maybe he didn't want to think of the possibilities himself. It's so much easier to write people off as crazy than it is to look at what they've done for that title and why.
"Sam?"
"What?"
"Stay close to me while we're snooping around these places," Dean said. "Just in case."
Sam used a lot of his willpower to resist the urge to roll his eyes. "Sure, Dean," he said. While he heard how insincere it sounded, they both knew he wouldn't be running off on his own. Not unless he wanted to be stranded.
But he saw Dean's white knuckle grip on the steering wheel and realized that while Dean knew he wouldn't run off on his own, that didn't mean that outside forces wouldn't interfere and remove him against his will.
"I'm kind of out of their age range," Sam added. As if pointing out minor details ever made Dean worry less. The one time that Sam implied that he was worse than a mother bear, Dean looked almost proud like it was a compliment.
"I know that," Dean said. "But it doesn't matter what your age is, just what age you look. And let's face it, Sammy, you don't look fifteen."
Sam was well aware of that. He'd grown somewhat in the past year, but Dean still towered over him.
That growth spurt Dean promised him was coming could get here any time now. He was sick of hearing that it was normal to still be a runt at his age. That some people don't reach their full height until their early twenties.
Bullshit.
"Do you actually think they're going to come after me?" Sam asked. He meant to sound sarcastic, but when the question left his mouth, genuine curiosity accompanied it.
Dean took a little longer to answer than Sam was comfortable with. "I don't know," he admitted. "But if they make that mistake, I'll be teaching them a lesson that they'll remember until they die. You don't got anything to worry about."
Sam didn't point out that Dean was the one worrying. Whoever was kidnapping children was taking them when they were in public places, and likely alone there. He figured they wouldn't go through the effort of tracking him down, and if he was in public, Dean was usually in the area as well.
Dean parked on the street by the park. Sam watched the kids play with unbridled joy and no worries, a feeling he never experienced. Parents watched from the sidelines and enjoyed their own conversations amidst the shouts and laughter. Moments like this made him feel even more like an outsider than normal, standing away from it all and knowing that he couldn't join in. Could never join in.
He didn't realize he spaced out again until Dean waved his hand in front of his face. He blinked himself back into the present and met Dean's worried stare.
"You back with me, Sammy?"
"It's 'Sam'."
"So, that's a 'yes'," Dean said. "You having mini seizures or something? This new checking-out thing of yours, it's like there's no one home."
Dean's laugh at the end was probably meant to be a way to lighten his words, but its shakiness told Sam that this was a legitimate concern of Dean's. 'Sam is starting to space out, his brain must be breaking.'
And Sam wasn't the least bit surprised that Dean came to that conclusion because it was Dean and if the source of pain—any variation—wasn't something he could see, it meant a broken brain.
"I'm not having seizures, Dean. It' called 'getting lost in thought'," Sam said. Then, with a smirk, he added, "But I guess you'd have to have a thought first before you could get lost in it."
Dean hit him upside the head and walked away, only this time Sam followed him. And Dean made sure of that by glancing over his shoulder every few seconds like he was about to disappear from right under his nose.
But this wasn't a supernatural threat they were after this time. It wasn't something that really could snatch Sam away without warning. Humans bled, and Sam grew up learning how to hurt things that bleed (and some things that didn't bleed, but did burn). They'd have to drag him kicking and screaming, and people kidnapping so many children who are never seen again wouldn't want their cover blown by one kid drawing too much attention to them.
Dean might've been worried, but Sam figured that logically the odds of him being chosen and taken were fairly low.
As they moved farther into the park, his skin crawled in the same way it did when a spirit was a little too close for comfort, but when he looked around, nothing in the park seemed out of the ordinary. He tried to shake that feeling that he was being watched—and no matter how many times he checked his surroundings, he never found a reason to feel that way—but hunting taught him to trust his gut instincts.
He decided that he would tell Dean only if the feeling persisted once they left the park. There was no use in adding to his worry, and he'd really like to avoid being handcuffed to Dean, by Dean, 'for his own safety'.
After a sweep of the park, and absolutely nothing to show for it, they left. While they couldn't find any hint as to what happened to the kids, the park was big and who knew how many people went through it on any given day and unknowingly walked through things that could have been useful evidence. So, Dean drove them to the arcade next. Sam was still next to him, which was a win. But the missing children were still, well, missing. So that part was a loss.
Dean parked the car. Sam on the way over once again suggested that maybe they should leave this to the police. What were they going to find that the police missed?
Dean gave him the choice to help with the hunt, or be dropped off back at the motel to wait while Dean worked the hunt. Sam reluctantly said he'd help, but Dean wondered how much not wanting to be at the filthy motel room outweighed genuinely wanting to help children.
But hey, beggars and choosers.
The arcade was the kind of place Dean would have gladly frequented as a child. A place filled with bright, colorful lights, the pew-pew of virtual lasers, laughter, and greasy food that should never sensibly be served to children. Perfection.
But as a hunter, it was a nightmare. Loud, a haze of lung-killing smoke, crowded, and cramped.
They swept the place in the same way they did the park. Look for anything out of the ordinary, but so many people passed through the arcade that it posed the same problem as the park. Anything useful had to be found almost immediately after the kidnapping, or it'd get lost in a flood of people passing through.
More than one child disappeared from the arcade, so there had to be someone who lurked around and watched for their opportunity.
If you were a psychopathic child-snatcher, where would you scope out your prey?
God if it didn't make him sick to just think that.
He led Sam over to the dining area of the arcade (right next to the bumper cars that he might try out before they left) and sat at one of the tables.
"Would you say that we have a pretty good view of the place from here?" Dean asked.
Sam took a minute to look around from his chair before he shrugged. "I don't know. I guess it's okay, but there are a lot of machines in the way."
"Maybe," Dean admitted, but then he looked and saw what might be the information he needed. "But we have a perfect view of the exit, don't we?"
Sam looked over and nodded. "Yeah. You don't think?"
"That's exactly what I think. Find a kid and follow 'em out of the building. Less witnesses and still plenty of clueless people passing through to muck up any evidence left behind."
Dean felt electricity jolt through the back of his neck, and he searched the area. Someone was watching him. He could feel it and knew it as certainly as he knew that a silver bullet to the heart killed a werewolf.
Sam didn't seem to notice anything, which led Dean to believe that maybe it's nothing. Simply the result of being around a lot of people, a breakthrough (even small), and the general paranoia that was always present when there was the slightest chance that something posed a threat to his family.
He herded Sam back to the Impala and headed to take a break for some dinner, there wasn't much else they could learn from the arcade beyond a possible place where the kidnappers sat while looking for their next victim. It'd been too long since a child was taken. If they wanted something useful, they'd have to be on the scene within a day. Before it's lost to the oblivious crowds.
"Did it feel like you were being watched at the arcade?" Dean asked.
Sam stared out of the window, and Dean thought he'd have to repeat his question by the time Sam finally said, "No. Not at the arcade. Did you?"
"I thought I did, but it could've been nothing," Dean said. "It was probably nothing."
Dean looked over at Sam, who had the expression that he was thinking about whether or not he wanted to speak up about something. A look Dean hated when it was followed by silence, as it increasingly was these days.
"Spill it, Sam," Dean said. "I can hear those gears in your head grinding away."
Sam sighed, but complied. "I felt like that at the park."
"And you didn't tell me because?"
"Like you, I didn't think it was anything. Paranoia, maybe."
Dean tensed and relaxed his grip on the steering wheel like it was a stress relief ball. "New rule, Sam. Or, well, old rule that I never thought I'd have to spell out for you. If something even remotely feels off or weird, you tell me. I don't care how insignificant you think it might be. I want to know," Dean said. "Understood?"
"I was going to tell you if I kept feeling it, but I didn't," Sam said. "And since you felt the same thing at the arcade, I brought it up. I really didn't think it was a big deal, Dean."
"Not a big deal," Dean echoed. His voice raised. "Not a big deal? What, if you get your freaking arm cut off are you going to tell me it's just a scratch?"
"What? No," Sam said. "How are you comparing me not telling you that I thought I was being paranoid with me losing my arm?"
"Because how long does it take for the situations we're used to to escalate from paranoia to missing limbs, Sam?" Dean demanded.
"Well, now you know. It doesn't matter anymore," Sam said. The argumentative heat left his words. Dean knew he hated the tension growing between him and their dad, but arguing with John didn't hurt like it did with Dean. Sam told him that once after an apology for a stupid argument between them that went too far.
"No, we aren't just dropping this," Dean said. Of course they weren't. Dean refused to drop any conversation when he thought it pertained to Sam's well-being. Even if he sounded angry—and he was—it was mostly out of concern. "Like I said before, I get that something happened in the last town, and I don't know what exactly it is, but it's eating at you. You don't wanna tell me? Fine. Mope all you want. Be sad. Angst and watch raindrops slide down windows. That's all fine.
"But the second you feel threatened or watched, you tell me and let me do my job. Because that's not fine. I don't want to have to handcuff you to me, but I will if it means keeping you safe."
Sam didn't respond to that, but there wasn't much left to say. They both knew where they stood on the topic and no change was in sight.
Dean pulled into the motel parking lot after a quick stop for dinner, and Sam prepared himself for another night alone in the motel room. At least he got the TV working so it wouldn't be so silent, but he wished that whatever garbage was showing on cheap cable tonight could numb his brain like it could Dean's.
But he wasn't Dean. And he wasn't John. He sympathized with things that they called monsters because he wasn't sure that's all there was to the world. As much as he wished he could believe that their world was black and white, he witnessed that it wasn't.
So Sam settled on one bed with his back against the headboard, doing his best to ignore the way the air in the motel room felt oddly sticky. Grimy.
Dean said his goodbye with a mumbled apology and promised to only be gone a few hours. Long enough to check out the mall and the school, the last two places on the list. Then Sam was alone again.
Like at the arcade and the park, Dean couldn't find anything helpful. The only thing he did notice was that at both places he felt a presence watching him. While glad that Sam wasn't there for the sickos to stalk, he didn't feel great about being separated from Sam when something was obviously going on in this town, supernatural or not.
But he made sure that they weren't followed to the motel. He knew that Sam had his choice of hidden weapons around the motel room to protect himself against any sort of threat.
He tried to tell himself that there was nothing to worry about. He was just being paranoid. And he would never admit it, but he was starting to wonder if he should've listened to his dad about leaving the entire situation alone. He had yet to understand how John could turn his back to kids going missing. Wouldn't he do anything he could to find Dean or Sam if they went missing, regardless of whether or not the reason behind it was supernatural?
He drove through the town's darkened streets and wondered what time of day the kids were taken. Why? How did they vanish so completely that it was like they were only figments of others' imaginations?
He needed a drink more tonight than he had a few nights ago, and Sam could wait a little longer. As long as he felt that he was being watched, and Sam apparently hadn't felt that since the park, that was fine. They can watch him all they wanted as long as Sam was out of their sight. So he managed to find a bar with a pretty, young bartender of the female sex and set out to settle his nerves.
Sam knew the spending-the-night-alone drill. He had known it since he was nine and all he had was Sully to keep him company while Dean left more often to join their dad on hunts. He took the silver knife Dean kept under his pillow and put it under his own pillow. He made sure the door was locked. He followed the instructions that still echoed in his mind from every single time they were given to him when Dean knew he'd be gone for a couple of days at a time.
Sam fell into a fitful sleep, but he couldn't remember the last time his sleep was peaceful. Waking up in the middle of the night became an expected occurrence, so it was no surprise when he found himself tired but unable to return to sleep.
He heard a sort of scratching sound from the door. If Dean had enough to drink that he couldn't get the key in the door the first try, he should definitely not have driven back.
But Sam would have heard the Impala pull in and park in front of the room. He would have heard the door open and close. He would have heard Dean's drunken, off-key singing continuing the song he just cut off as he got out of the car. He would have heard…
The lock being opened, but not picked.
He slipped his hand under his pillow and gripped the knife's hilt. That was enough to bring him some comfort, like Dean was with him even when he wasn't. Like he could channel a bit of Dean's fighting spirit through one of the few material possessions his brother treasured. He allowed himself a deep breath before he controlled his breathing to be nice and slow, pretending to be asleep despite the flood of adrenaline beginning to pump through his veins. The element of surprise was really the only element he had at the moment.
He heard voices from the other side of the door, like they were arguing in hushed tones. Which meant that there was more than one person outside of his motel room and trying to break in.
Why did Dean have to choose that night to stay out until the sun freaking rose?
The door opened slowly, but they couldn't prevent it from creaking. All the oil and WD-40 in the town couldn't accomplish that. It made them stop for a second, listen to see if they woke Sam up with the sound.
Then they were moving closer and closer to him, and more questions ran through his mind with each step they took. Why him? Where was Dean? Didn't Dean say he was sure they weren't followed back? What were his odds when he was outnumbered by (assumingly) full-grown adults? Could he at least take one down before they got him?
He sure as hell was going to try.
He waited for his perfect moment, and found it when one of the intruders leaned over him so close that he could feel breath on the back of his neck. It took every ounce of the discipline instilled in him by his dad to keep pretending he was deep, deep asleep.
It was when he felt the tip of the needle against his skin that he opened his eyes and drove the knife up and into the man hovering over him.
The cry of pain and vague outline of a man shriveled up on the ground in the darkness told Sam that these men weren't used to their victims fighting back.
But they could adapt and a heavy hit from a fist at his head had him dazed. A flashlight being turned on and pointed at him blinded him. He kicked and flailed, tried to get off of the bed and grab the knife still lodged in the man on the ground, but there were too many of them.
When they held him down through his resistance and managed to stick the needle in his neck, pushing the syringe's plunger, the only solace he could find was in two things.
One: they would be hurting for a few days to come due to his struggle. The stabbed man might even bleed out on the motel's floor, but Sam's not sure where he managed to hit with the knife.
Two: Dean would come after him.
So the world around him faded with the feeling of being lifted and grunts as one of them tried to get the stabbed man out of the room as well.
The last thing he heard was a distant voice, frantic and pain-filled, exclaim, "Little bastard stabbed me!"
Sam would've smirked if he could control any part of his body in that moment against the weight of unconsciousness pulling him away.
It would be his luck that the first peaceful bout of his sleep came at the hands of forced drugs and kidnappers.
Dean was sober enough to know that he shouldn't drive, but drunk enough to do it anyway. His night ended on a high note, and he might've stayed out until sunrise with an eager-to-please woman if the drinks could've shaken his earlier feelings of being watched. If they could've shaken the knowledge that Sam felt the same paranoia (and then neglected to tell him).
Getting back to the motel didn't take long normally, but he still had enough sense to avoid speeding because the last thing he needed was for a speeding ticket to become a DUI.
He managed to pull into the parking lot in front of their room in one piece. The urge remained to continuously look over his shoulder, like something was there and watching him, but nothing ever showed its face.
He made his way to the door, only to find it already ajar. Dean's alcohol-addled brain (even if the buzz was quickly fading as adrenaline took over) couldn't decide between throwing open the door and charging in, or using stealth to figure out the situation and use surprise if need be.
He threw the door open and turned on the light. The sight left him much more sober than he had been a minute ago. He wasn't sure at exactly which point he stopped breathing.
He took careful steps to the beds. The sheets of Sam's bed were in disarray and stained with blood. Another bloodstain was on the ground next to Dean's bed, a pool. Whoever was there was there for a while and bleeding out. His own silver knife laid next to that stain, and he hoped that Sam's hands spilled the blood. Not that the hands of strangers had spilled the blood of his brother.
In a last ditch cling to hope, Dean glanced at the bathroom. Empty and dark and open.
He fisted his hands into his hair, close to pulling chunks straight out of his scalp, and looked from one bit of evidence to the next. The blood. The bed. The knife. The emptiness. It all led him to the same heart-stopping, blood-freezing conclusion.
Sam was gone. Taken after a struggle that hadn't been enough to save him.
He messed up again and left Sam alone, and Sam paid the price for it. After Fort Douglas, he swore to himself that Sam would never be hurt again because of his misjudgments. He would never leave his brother so vulnerable when he knew the dangers they faced. Somewhere along the line, he must have forgotten about that promise because he was here and Sam was gone. They both felt watched during the day, and Dean still thought that going to check out the rest of the hot spots they found by himself and then heading to the bar for a few drinks would be okay. That leaving Sam alone when children were being kidnapped would be okay. But he had been so sure that they hadn't been followed. So sure that Sam would be safer in the motel room and out of sight.
The universe just loved proving him wrong.
His senses kicked back in and he pulled his boxy cell phone from his pocket with a hand consumed by small tremors, swallowed past the lump in his throat, and dialed his father's number.
As much as it hurt to admit his failure, he needed his dad's help to ensure that Sam made it through alive because each second of pain and fear that Sam felt would be Dean's fault.
He prayed that his call wouldn't go to voicemail, that this would be one of the rare times that John was in a position and had the reception to answer. So when he heard static and a gruff greeting, he was torn between elation and terror. The blame for this was completely his, and maybe he should have listened and left the case alone. But that wasn't an option anymore because the assholes responsible made it personal.
He had to force the words out and couldn't keep his voice steady when he said, "Dad, we have a problem. Sam's gone."
Author's Note: Here's where the fun begins! Sam's not the kind to go down without a fight, and Dean and John aren't the kind to let something take him without a fight.
Thank you to everyone who has reviewed, followed, and favorited. I'm glad that it sounds like so many of you are excited to see where this goes. There are some reviews that I wish I could reply to (or even just be able to read) on the first chapter, but is doing that thing again where the review count goes up, but the new reviews aren't displayed.
Leave a review and let me know what you think so far and what you wish to see in the future!