Chapter Text
Devils Lake, North Dakota
21 December 1999
The lightning storm that lit up the evening sky over Devils Lake was like nothing Sam had ever seen.
He sat outside in the cold to watch it, curled into the rickety swing on their tiny front porch with one of Dean’s flannel-and-canvas field jackets and their old down blanket wrapped around him, a mug of cocoa laced with whiskey cradled in his hands. The weather had been dodgy for a week, ever since Dean and Dad had left him in their rundown, ramshackle cabin here to go hunt an active coven one county to the west, but this storm, it was—Sam could feel the wrongness of it in his bones, and every crack of white across the sky tightened the cold knot of panic in his chest.
Let them be okay, he prayed, blindly, to the night, to the wind, to the wild; to Pastor Jim’s god, in His far-distant heaven; to his mother’s ghost. Please let them be okay.
Neither Dean nor his father picked up when he called (not the first time, not the second, not the thirdfourthfifth), and he curled into bed that night still afraid, still tucked up in Dean’s jacket with Jim’s medallion of St. Michael clutched in one hand. Be okay. Please be okay. He woke an hour later, shaking, from a dream of Dean’s body laid out in the cold chamber of a morgue, their father on the slab beside him.
The landline rang just before midnight. Sam tumbled out of bed and caught it on the second ring.
‘Dean?’ he said, high, tight, panicked.
Dean sounded beaten up and bone-tired, but he was alive and snarky and quoting The Wizard of Oz. ‘Ding-dong, Sammy-Sam,’ he said, and Sam slid down the wall to sit on the floor, shaky with relief, and too grateful that his family was safe to remember to mention the storm.
***
22 December 1999
Alone in the late afternoon quiet, hair still damp from the shower he’d taken after his after-school run, Sam listened to the 4:30 weather report with half an ear as he got dressed, pulling on worn jeans and an old tee and his brother’s soft, broken-in grey Henley that Dean thought he’d lost two months ago. Sam just—he liked to wear it, when Dean was gone, liked the comfort that it brought him.
—has just formed incredibly quickly, folks, and has already put three inches of snow on the ground this past hour; Dickinson is already seeing the first flakes coming down along the I-94 corridor, along with some lightning along the bow curve of this storm, and it shows no signs of slowing down. It’ll be in our neck of the woods a little after mid—
The TV crackled for a moment, all snow and loud static, before the picture snapped back into place. —on canned goods, now’s the time! Some seriously wild weather we’ve been having this week, so stay tuned for more updates throughout the evening. Back to you, Evie.
There was the sound of a car pulling up the dirt drive outside and, a moment later, a cheerful double honk. Sam tucked a knife into his left boot and shrugged into the warm parka Dean had found for him at a Salvation Army store a month ago, and then zipped it up to his throat and grabbed his keys and stepped out into the twilight and the rising wind, leaving the light and the TV on behind him. It would be comforting, later, not to come back to silence and the dark, if Dean and their dad weren't yet home.
The porch was bright with the headlights from Ximena’s Jeep, idling on the other side of the fallen pine that blocked the top of their drive, and the sun was dying in the west. James was waving a Santa hat at him out the passenger side window, reindeer antlers already blinking on his own dark blond head. A ribbon of warmth unfurled in Sam’s stomach at the other boy’s careless, teasing smile. He was tall and lean with green eyes and broad shoulders, and Sam wasn’t stupid, okay; he knew why he liked him. But James was also funny and kind and better at math than anyone Sam knew, and on Sam’s first day in their English class he’d solemnly passed him a note written entirely in Tolkien’s runes, and Sam just—it was never going to go anywhere, and he knew it; they’d be leaving inside a month, if that long. But he could still taste the kiss James had pressed against his mouth that afternoon in the parking lot, warm and soft and unapologetically wanting, and it was . . . it was just really nice, sometimes, to feel wanted, even if only for a little while.
'Get the lead out, Winchester!' Ximena's voice, merry and bright. 'The winter carnival awaits!'
The sky was grey overhead, tinged with just a little color from the fading sunset, and Sam jogged lightly down the steps toward his friends beneath it, his skin humming with the coming storm.