Chapter Text
Sam frowned, brown eyes glittering with confusion. “Aren’t you worried, man?” He asked, voice desperate and exasperated. “Aren’t you worried I could turn into Max or something?”
That I could turn into a monster? God, I could kill you. I could actually kill you, Dean.
Dean bit his lip. He continued packing his duffle, trying to busy his hands. His brother’s thoughts boomed in his ears, distorted and angry and an awful neon yellow color, and he tried not to flinch. “Nope,” He said. “No way. You know why?”
How could you not… A pale pink. “No. Why?”
Dean nearly smiled. “Cause you got one advantage Max didn’t have.”
Dad? His amusement fell into the pit of his stomach at the deep purple. Dad. That was the first person Sam thought of. What the fuck was he, chopped liver? “Dad? Because Dad’s not here, Dean.”
“No. Me.” Bitch. He kept his voice light. “As long as I’m around, nothin bad is going to happen to you.”
Sam’s frown deepened. “How do you know?”
He wanted to tell him. He did. Honestly. His baby brother deserved to know his abilities. But the words of Dad echoed like an anthem in his head.
“What you can do is an asset, Dean. Tell no one.”
So, instead, Dean tapped the side of his head. “Instinct, dude. Impeccable instinct.”
That made Sam crack, a smirk coming over his features. “Yeah, sure. Dude.”
When Dean was 10 years old, he had the worst sensory overload of his life. He was at the table of a dingy fast-food restaurant, seated next to little Sammy, across from Dad, and surrounded by people, customers and waiters and cooks alike. He was just taking a bite into his sad burger and fries, teasing Sammy about his small Caesar salad, when it hit. Like a fucking bullet train.
The colors. The thoughts. And the pain.
So much pain.
A bleeding red. Next hunt, poltergeist in Montana.
A bursting gold. But I like salad, Dean.
A burning mauve. Can’t wait for tonight--
A blue. I’m so tired--
A brown. My order is wrong--
Yellow. I don’t--
Silver. Please--
Orange.
A technicolor rainbow, searing his skull. And thoughts, pounding, piercing, penetrating his young senses.
He screamed.
His dad had to haul him out of the restaurant, past shocked patrons and concerned staff, and lock him in the backseat of the Impala before he calmed down. He sent Sammy on a mission to pay the bill by himself, a feat sure to be achieved after the promise of a lollipop.
In the car, bawling his eyes out and in the most pain he’d ever felt, Dean told everything to his dad. Right then and there, his dad diagnosed him.
Empath. He was an empath. One whose powers conceded with synesthesia of colors.
Fucking nuts, huh?
Crocodile tears poured down his cheeks that night. He was some kind of freak. An impossible creature of being--almost like the monsters his dad hunted. “I-I’m sorry!”
A calloused thumb brushed over his face roughly. “Why cry?” John Winchester had a menacing glint in his eye, the look that Dean was scared of. “What you can do is an asset, Dean.”
Dean swallowed. “W-what,” he hiccupped pathetically. “What about Sammy?”
“This is not about Sammy.” His dad was harsh and final. “This is about you. Tell no one about this. We’ll have the upper hand.”
“F-for what?”
“Let’s play some poker, son.”
Green. It’s always the green that gets the other guys. Everything went green--particularly a light green--when someone bluffed. There was no way this stranger he was playing with--Stanley something or other--had anything better than a three of a kind, and here he was with a full house.
Dean chuckled as he cast some of his chips into the center of the table. “Raise you thirty.”
Stanley shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Shit. A swirling bronze turned into a sick khaki. I’ll fake him out . Slowly, he shoved all of his stacks into the jackpot. “All in.”
Khaki. Khaki was also always what gets these guys. Hope, after all, is telling.
Dean was counting up his tenth wad of cash when he met Sam, who was leaned up against Baby’s hood, in the bar’s parking lot. “Merry Christmas, Sammy.”
His brother shook his head in disbelief. “How do you do it? You never lose.” A loose, cool gray.
Dean shrugged. “Natural talent.”
Over the years, he learned to reign in the extent of his empathic reading. It was exhausting, having to self-contain a sudden and strong aspect of himself, but he couldn’t afford having debilitating episodes of overload every day. Besides, being tired never disrupted his work. As long as he got six hours of sleep, he was good.
Anyways, with this self-control, his actual abilities dialed down from 100% to 50%. He could only sense the colors of a person if he focused on them. Rarely did he ever hear their thoughts.
It was easy listening to Sam’s mind, him being the constant person in Dean’s life. However, out of his brother’s privacy and humility, he didn’t pry. Only when Sam had a strong thought did he peer into his colors.
It wasn’t because he was nosy. It was because he was protective.
His abilities are also why he acts oblivious most of the time about feelings and social interaction that isn’t flirting.
“What you can do is an asset. Tell no one.”
So he does. He doesn’t tell anyone--verbally or through his personality or body language. He trained himself to appear as the least likely suspect if some declared that there was someone on Earth who was an empath.
It was better that way.
But it left him super emotionally constipated.
Ironic, huh?
It took a good fifteen hours before they rolled into Adren, Montana. Windows rolled down, Dean drove with one hand, the other hanging outside the car, while Sam dozed in the passenger seat. Originally, they were going to head down to Los Angeles, but they found an interesting headline in the local news.
Sightings of mutants , paired with small video clips of shadows crawling across walls, floors, yadda yadda. The usual.
Dean would normally brush a thing like this off. The kids were joking around. Technology was improving, and videos could be easily tampered with. Even practical effects would get the same result, making it seem like the kids could control the elements.
Then again, Sam had one of his premonition nightmares about one of those kids. He couldn’t tell Dean exactly what it was that made this “case” so important, but Dean learned to trust his instinct after what happened with the Millers. (And he got a whole bunch of blinding white, which generally wasn’t good.)
Dean rode in peace with heavy metal playing softly on the Impala’s speakers. He checked in on Sam once and a while, seeing a floating haze of turquoise fade to amber, before returning to his attention to the road, satisfied.
That’s when it caught his attention.
More specifically, a burst of brilliant lilac in his rearview mirror.
Concerned, he spared a quick glance over his shoulder to the rolling street behind the car. It laid empty of any indication of human life, yet… He wouldn’t see color if there wasn’t a person in the street just a second ago.
An uneasy feeling settled in his stomach. It might’ve been nothing. He was running on three hours of sleep after all. But… For the rest of the drive, he kept half an eye on his rearview.
Eves Warren clung to the top of the Impala, belly flush against the roof. The wind speeding by brought tears to his eyes, but he swallowed down his pain. This was his one way out of his small town, and he’ll be damned if he let this opportunity slide. (After all, being raised in a fucking cult full of gifted entities did nothing for his dwindling mental stability.)
A shudder rolled through Eves’ body, and he saw his body flicker out of the range of visibility. His skin split into red, green, and blue before exploding into cosmic rays. He wavered between the planes of reality of two seconds before abruptly crashing back down into the third dimension, dizzy and out of breath. Despite feeling the hot metal of the car and the whoosh of the air, his hands kept flickering between invisible and split red-green-blue and their normal dark tan.
Sometimes he hated his gift. More like a fucking curse.
Eves clenched his teeth. It was going to be a long drive to God-knows-where.
As long as the two occupants of the Impala never caught him, he would be fine.