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Dean watched as his father’s face hardened, eyes flickering as he read the note again, and again, and one more time. They then grew still, staring at the paper.
An inhumane growl, muffled by clenched teeth, erupted from John’s chest. He scrunched up the paper and threw it across the motel, hitting the far wall with ineffective force. The beer bottles on the adjacent table were next - they shattered across the tiles kitchenette floor, what little poison retained within them dribbling from jagged spikes of glass.
Then the storm fled the room with the whirl of a leather jacket and a muttered promise to be back by sunrise, and the room grew still.
For a moment, the boy was at a loss as to what to do. At the mere age of fourteen, left without orders or, for some reason his father had yet to reveal, a younger brother, he wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself.
The crumpled ball of paper sat in the far corner of the room like a dark omen, yanking at the threads of childish curiosity in the corners of his mind. He rocked back on his heels, pulling at the hem of his shirt because goddamn did he want to know what that note said, and why it had upset his father so much.
However, his father hadn’t given him the note to read, and by scrunching up he hadn’t exactly invited the notion of Dean being filled in on the situation, so he backed off. He hopped onto his bed, settling back against the headboard and flicked on the TV at the opposing wall, hoping to distract himself until Dad got back, probably with his brother.
He lasted a solid minute, which was admittedly a new record for the elder Winchester.
With the lack of the Impala’s hood in front of their room, he deemed himself safe from his father coming back and catching him going through his personal stuff. He switched off the TV and, for no conscious reason, crept across the tufted carpet to where the ball radiated from the corner, whispering the need to be opened into the corners of Dean’s mind. His heartbeat echoed like oncoming footsteps as he picked up the ball, careful not to rip it as he peeled it out of its cocoon, smoothing it out against the wall.
His heart stopped beating altogether at the words scrawled in messy, smudged handwriting across the coffee stained paper.
John.
We have the boy.
Have the $50,000 by the end of the week at Shank’s or he stops breathing.
A signature, too scrawly to make out, was etched in the corner, half smudged by the spilled coffee, but Dean didn’t care to figure out what it said.
Someone had his baby brother.
Someone, some self-righteous, cold-hearted bastard had his baby brother and was holding him like a lamb for slaughter.
The sharp stab of anger that ripped through his gut was barely noticed beyond the seething thoughts about all the crap he was going to do to that prick if he so much as lay a finger-
The front door opened, and the jolt of Dean’s heart numbed his fingers. The paper sway, discarded, to the floor.
Dean watched as the storm blew back in in a whirlwind of leather and whiskey and insistent cursing, grabbing the satchel that was re-stuffed with the journal, the wallet of fake IDs. It was talking, the gravel of his voice falling on deaf ears as Dean just watched.
“We gotta go, kid. We gotta leave.”
The spare shirt was picked up, stuffed into a backpack. The switchblade and the flashlight on the nightstand, the half-empty six-pack, all evidence of their existence washed down with the scrub of a washcloth before the storm even took a moment to pause and stare at its silent son.
“You listening to me, boy?”
Dean’s limbs were as stiff as his mind as he struggled to catch up. Leave? But Sammy was in danger. Shouldn’t they be gearing up to go after him?
“Dean.”
Its eyes were cold flashes of stale whiskey. Dean swallowed, finding his voice having been sucked into its vortex, swallowed by its winds. They flickered, surprised at the lack of its son’s obedience that normally came automatically, instinctual.
Until they saw the crumpled paper, open, on the floor, and then they seemed to understand.
Cold hands gripped shaking shoulders. “Dean, we have to go.”
“But…” Dean could hardly believe the storm was even his father at all. “But we can’t...we can’t leave Sammy, Dad we-”
“Dean.” Harsh gravel, stabbing Dean’s heart, trying to push it over the edge of disobedience and fall back into the soldier he was raised to be. “Sammy...Sammy isn’t here anymore, okay? There’s nothing we can do for him.”
Dean’s head was shaking even as the cold hands were leading him, forcefully, out the front door and into the Impala, but no more words crawled from the thousands of things enclosing his chest that he just wanted to let out in one frustrated scream. They were swallowed, shoved down by the gut instinct of a soldier. He was given an order.
So he stared out the misted window, raced the teardrops, and tried not to think about how the silence echoed. The car was devoid of excited chatter of just-read books or new fascinations that simply had to be shared, and the void it left carved a hole in Dean’s chest, puncturing his lungs and sucking out his energy until he couldn’t breathe anymore.
The storm was drinking as it drove, emptying the six-pack and letting it leak out of its eyes as salt, leaving angry lines down its face. Its jaw was clenched and its hand shook beneath the weight of the can, fingers trembling with the exertion of crushing another and chucking it into the empty, empty, empty space behind them.
Empty space. Sammy liked space.
Shut up, stop thinking, just stop fucking thinking.
Absently, he scrubbed the dampness from his cheeks with his shirt sleeve, clenching it in his palm like Sammy used to. His other hand reached up, rolling his necklace Sammy got him between his thumb and forefinger. Keeping his emotions down was becoming harder, verging on impossible. The fear of the storm was the only weight shoving them down at the moment, and even that weight was beginning to lighten at the sight of Sammy’s book stack in the back seat, one hardcover still open next to them.
When a can was shoved under his nose, the scent of beer assaulting the air around him, he found himself startled into distraction.
“Drink. It makes it easier.”
Dean swallowed, staring into the sloshing contents in the bottom of the tin cylinder. “Dad...why don’t we just go after Sammy?”
The expected whack to the back of the head never came. Those dead eyes, rimmed with the hints of humanity, stared dead again. Its grip on the wheel tightened. “Sammy’s gone.”
“But the note said-”
“Who gives a rat’s ass what the note said!” The can was crushed and chucked, splashing the remnants of its contents across the painfully empty space where a complaining younger brother should be.
At this point, Dean couldn’t be bothered to stop the flow down his cheeks and dripping off his chin. The tone the storm held was holding on to the mere strings of authority, cracked with fear and irritation and a hint of desperation for said authority not to be questioned. And it terrified the living hell out of Dean to see the storm, an impenetrable force, crumble between his fingers.
So he stared back out of the window. He clenched his sleeve against his palm to stop him digging his fingernails in and counted the teardrops carving through the mist.
And he tried not to think. He tried his hardest not to think of a single thought.
His thoughts became teardrops - slow, single, carving through the mist of his mind in consecutive breaches of his dam until the next one crashed through and he followed this new drop until all the drops dissolved and he was left blank, empty, numb.
So when the warm embrace of sleep beckoned from the corners of his mind, he didn’t care enough to fight it off.