![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Title: Feather Weight
Rating/Warning: Mature (language)
Wordcount: 5,080
Spoilers: None
Fandom: SPN
By:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kellifer_fic
Category: Gen - wing!fic
Notes: Follows Forgetting To Fall, Learning To Fly and The Air In Between.
The kids of Sanctuary love him.
Dean sits on the fence-line, watching Danny and Clara from the Thompson farm down the road climbing Sam like a jungle gym. Sam takes it with the patience of a saint, laughing through the grimace of pain when Danny tugs on one wing just a little too enthusiastically.
“Leave him alone now!” Annabelle calls and Dean turns to her with a smile. Annabelle Thompson delivers groceries to them in exchange for Dean keeping her ancient Buick on the road. Most of the townsfolk now know about Sam but the risk of random strangers passing through and seeing him is too great for them to get complacent.
Hell Hound, in puppy enthusiasm, knocks Clara over and she starts to cry. Annabelle makes a small sound of dismay and dashes to her daughter, already scooped aloft by Sam, tears forgotten as he holds the small girl over his head.
Dean sits with the sun on his face and children’s laughter in his ears and he feels happy.
His eyes snap open because Dean Winchester knows that just isn’t right.
000
The first ripples in his contentment start the next day when he’s standing by an old Ford that just won’t turn over no matter what he tries and a girl named Faye keeps looking at him, something like worry on her face. There is a small boy clinging to her legs, one arm in a blue plaster cast and Dean doesn’t know why but…
Somehow that little boy’s broken arm would be about him and Sam.
“I just… you should be more careful,” she blurts and Dean just blinks at her. He figures that she was so busy forming whatever it was she was going to say in her brain that it came out sounding like she was in the middle of a conversation. Faye colours and looks down, biting her lip.
“Excuse me?”
“He should think about the kids,” Faye says, eyes darting everywhere but right at Dean. Her hand flutters for a moment and then comes to rest on top of the boy’s head, ruffling distractedly through his hair.
“I’m sorry… did my brother drop your kid or something?” Dean asks. He catches sight of Freddy, his boss, leaning out of his office.
“Faye, goddamit!” Freddy snaps and Dean shifts his gaze between them.
“My nephew tried to fly,” Faye hisses and Dean steps back because he’s suddenly struck by the fact that this woman he barely knows is furious at him. “Lord knows we’ve all tried to be accommodating but-“
“Faye!” Freddy snaps again, this time coming all the way out his office. “When I was six I jumped off my Daddy’s roof with a towel tied around my neck. There was no one to blame but me.”
“Oh please,” Faye snaps, eyes now firmly fixed on Dean. “His brother-“
“Hey!” Dean blurts, taking the step forward he’d previously retreated. He’s not sure how he’s going to follow up his indignation but he also can’t just stand around and let someone disparage Sam when he’s not even present to defend himself. “Are you seriously trying to blame Sam for your kid jumping off your roof?”
“He was trying to fly,” Faye repeats, rolling her eyes like she can’t believe Dean is dense enough not to put two and two together and come up with the result she has. “It’s pretty obvious.”
“Get outta my shop you harridan,” Freddy snorts, waving a hand in Faye’s direction. The woman gives an insulted huff and storms out, tugging her nephew in her wake. When she’s gone, Freddy turns to Dean and shrugs. “Don’t mind her; Faye’s always been a bitch.”
Dean can’t help the laugh that escapes, even though he’s feeling a little stung from the encounter. He can’t believe he’d been priding himself and Sam on not getting complacent, because he realises that they’d started to. While the majority of the people in the small town of Sanctuary accept and in some way embrace the Winchesters, there’s always people willing to whisper in corners and shake their fingers at what’s different.
“Sam jumped off Jim’s barn,” Dean says, not really sure why he’s telling Freddy. “Well, he actually fell off but the wings came in damn handy.”
It’ Freddy’s turn to laugh and with a clap on the shoulder, Dean can almost forget what just happened.
Almost.
000
A week later, Dean truly has forgotten what happened, right up until Sam comes into the living room with an envelope clenched in his fist.
“What?” Dean asks around his fruit loops. It’s a Wednesday and the garage is shut. Freddy is of the opinion that the whole point of having his own business is making his own hours and a four day week is part and parcel of that.
“Nothin’” Sam tries, stuffing the envelope in his back pocket and making a bee-line for his bedroom. Dean sets aside his cereal and beats him to the doorway. Sam crosses his arms and huffs, feathers metaphorically and physically ruffled and Dean merely stands his ground. Sam finally relents, scowling as he digs the envelope back out of his pocket and hands it over.
It’s opened, Sam always sliding his thumb under the stuck-down flap. Dean hates the way he does it, expecting Sam to get a paper cut every time. Dean is a rip-off-the-end kind of guy. He fishes a single sheaf of paper out of the envelope and unfolds it. A hand-written line curls across the middle of the page and makes Dean see red.
Go back where you came from, freak!
“Where-?”
“In the post box,” Sam says and he looks miserable. Dean’s ready to kill anyone who dared put a look like that on his brother’s face. He’s trembling with fury but he can’t seem to stop it, calm down. “I hadn’t checked the mail in a few days so I’m not sure when.”
“I know who,” Dean snarls.
“What?”
“Never mind,” Dean tries to dismiss but now it’s Sam’s turn to plant himself firmly in Dean’s way.
“Dean!”
“I didn’t want to… just some woman thought… aw hell,” Dean sighs, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. “Some woman from town blames you for her kid getting hurt.”
“What?” Sam splutters, blinking owlishly. “How?”
“He tried to fly,” Dean says and watches Sam deflate, wings drooping with the rest of his body.
“Oh.”
“Oh?Sam, that kid of hers jumping off a roof has nothing to do with you!” Dean claps hands down on Sam’s shoulders and gives him a firm shake until Sam’s eyes come up to meet his own. “You hear me?”
“Yeah,” Sam says reluctantly but Dean knows that this isn’t the end of it.
000
That night, Dean peels his eyes open to see Sam standing in his bedroom doorway. Sam’s got the bottom of his t-shirt in his hands, stretching the fabric out as he wrings it. Dean has a strong flash-memory of Sam as an eight-year old the first time their Dad had put them in separate rooms and how Sam hadn’t really understood the concept. Instead every night he’d followed Dean stubbornly and insinuated himself in Dean’s bed.
Dean hadn’t really objected too strenuously because when you knew the dark things that went bump in the night were real, you slept easier with your kid brother tucked under your arm.
“What’s up, kiddo?” Dean asks, sitting up and knuckling his eyes, trying to push the sleep-fog away.
“I think something’s wrong,” Sam says in a voice so small that Dean has to look to make sure Sam hasn’t magically regressed to that eight-year old.
“Sammy?” Dean swings his feet out of bed and plants them on the floor, wincing because it’s nearly winter and the bare boards become a misery on unprotected feet. Dean forebears though because he absolutely refuses to wear the bed socks that Sam bought him with much glee.
By way of answer, Sam holds his hands up and they’re covered in something sticky with feathers between his fingers. Adrenalin dumps through Dean’s body, getting him up and moving and he’s over to Sam in a few steps, feeling feathers underfoot when he gets close. Sam steps back a little and Dean leans out of his room, seeing the trail of feathers that leads from Sam’s room to his.
“What-?” Dean starts, gripping Sam’s arms and swinging him around. Sam goes, pliant like a doll and in the half-light Dean can see that Sam was right, something is definitely wrong.
000
They end up in the bathroom, Sam lying on the tiles with a towel under his head and breathing hard. Dean is watching Sam’s wings rot and fall away and feels powerless to do anything to stop it. Sam has already thrown up once, but Dean’s pretty sure it’s the smell rather than anything else that’s done it. Dean himself feels like gagging but swallows it down.
Dean feels paralysed, kneeling by Sam’s head and sending up prayers to whoever will listen. He’d gone and gotten the phone but then stopped, not knowing who he was going to call. He’d hit the speed dial at random but he couldn’t remember who he’d called, didn’t remember until there was a banging on the front door and the sound of Freddy calling, “Dean?”
There is the sound of cracking wood and then Melinda, Freddy’s wife and the kind of woman Dean can only hope he will end up with some day, is in the doorway. He looks up at her and he’s not sure what’s in his face but it gets her moving, bustling into the bathroom, pushing up the sleeves on her pullover as she goes.
Freddy appears behind her and then he’s saying something, crouching down beside him but Dean can’t really focus on what he’s saying. He watches mutely as Melinda grabs some of their bath towels and start soaking them under the shower. Sam’s hand comes up and bumps against Dean’s knee and Dean reaches blindly for it.
“I don’t know what to do,” he says in such a hollow, far-away voice that he’s not even sure he’s spoken. He feels Freddy’s hands under his armpits and then he’s being hauled up and away. Dean tries to protest but his legs are rubbery from kneeling for so long and Melinda is moving with purpose and a grim mouth.
“C’mon son, lets let her work, eh?” Freddy says into his ear, steering a still wobbly Dean out the door.
Dean looks down at his hands and they are coated in feathers. He remembers a little boy with a bloody knife, surrounded by piles of feathers saying, “Please, Dean, please.”
Freddy barely has him out the front door before Dean is curled over, throwing up into the dust of the yard.
000
Sam is lying on his stomach, head pillowed by Dean’s thigh and his hands tucked under his chest. Melinda sits opposite, now dressed in one of Dean’s t-shirts which comes down to the knees of the small woman. She has one of Sam’s feathers in her fingers and is turning it over and over. Freddy hovers behind her, pacing.
“You’ll have to change the dressings every few hours or whenever they look like they’re soaking through,” Melinda is saying. Dean is trying to listen but it’s hard when his hand keeps straying to Sam’s back, running over his shoulder blades.
His bare shoulder blades.
Clean white bandaging is taped down over the space and Dean picks at one of the edges with his fingers until Melinda leans forward and slaps his hand away. “Hon, do you know what happened?” she asks gently.
“No idea,” Dean says. He’s grateful for what Melinda has done but he just wants her and Freddy to leave. He doesn’t want to answer any questions.
Not right now.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she says and Dean looks at her, wondering where she would have seen anything like Sam before, let alone his miraculous malting act when he remembers she’s a vet. He wonders if some deep-rooted part of his mind made the connection when he dialled his phone on auto-pilot, knowing that a doctor probably wouldn’t be able to do anything but a vet… someone who treated birds just might. “Has this ever happened before?”
“Oh yeah,” Dean laughs, not liking the high-pitched and sharp edged sound of it. “He loses his wings every year like a winter coat. New ones grow back all nice and shiny.”
“Dean,” Freddy snaps and Dean grimaces, knowing he shouldn’t be an asshole to the woman who just spent half a night tending to his brother but if he doesn’t lash out everything he’s feeling will turn inward and Dean’s not sure he can survive that.
“Just… I need to be alone with him. He’s gonna have to…” Above everything else, Dean wants Sam not to have to deal with the people that have just seen him at his most vulnerable. He knows he’s telegraphing some of his own pride onto Sam but he figures where there’s Winchester, there’s the stubborn need to hide pain.
“Sure,” Melinda says, standing. Freddy gives her a glance that Dean knows means, Are you sure? because she nods almost imperceptibly at him. “But you call if you need anything. I mean anything.” When Dean nods she leans down and kisses his temple and Dean is oddly touched.
“You take all the time you need,” Freddy says as they head out the door and Dean nods again, understanding exactly what Freddy means. Dean leans his head back against the head board of Sam’s bed and lets his hand come to rest on the space on Sam’s back that is now empty.
000
Dean is man enough to admit that he panics just the tiniest bit when he wakes up and Sam is gone. The sounds of someone puttering around the kitchen make his heart slow down some but Dean doesn’t calm completely until he’s standing in the kitchen doorway and watching Sam at the counter, buttering toast.
“There’s coffee,” Sam offers, gesturing at the pot with his butter knife over his shoulder but Dean stays where he is because he’s not buying Sam’s everything’s okay dance and he’s just waiting for the break.
Sam slows and finally stops what he’s doing, putting the knife aside and lowering his hands to the counter. Dean watches the skin around Sam’s knuckles grow white as his grip tightens. “I lived without them for seven years, right? No big deal.”
“Sam.”
“We can get back on the road. That’s what you want right?”
“Sam.”
“They were a pain in the ass anyway, I was always knocking shit over and I couldn’t fit in the car properly and we were stuck here-“
“Sammy!”
Sam turns around and slides, butt coming to rest on the floor. He drops his head onto his drawn up knees and Dean crosses to him and hunkers down so he can ruffle his hands through Sam’s hair.
“We’ll figure this out,” Dean promises. “I’ll figure this out.”
000
Faye Delancey lives in a small yellow house on the outer edge of town. As Dean makes his way up her front walk, he spots a cheery gnome fishing in a pond full of fat gold fish. One of her neighbours is drawn from the house next door with the sound of a gnome hitting the front wall at high velocity breaks the morning still.
“What are you doing?” the frazzled woman calls across the fence line.
“You wouldn’t happen to know where Miss Delancey is would you?” Dean asks, shoving hands into his pockets and trying to look as harmless as possible but he knows it’s probably a little too late for that.
The woman still looks like she’s a heartbeat away from dashing back into her house and calling the police but she pauses on her threshold, caught by Dean’s normal tone and politeness warring with her worry. It’s a fascinating battle Dean watches her wage with herself before she finally bites her lip and then says, “Faye, her sister and the little boy took off last night. Looks like they packed everything they owned in their station wagon and peeled out of here like the devil were chasing them himself.”
“You’re joking,” Dean says, feeling his heart sink.
The woman comes down her front steps, shading her eyes so she can see Dean better. “You’re the brother of that nice winged boy aren’t you? You work at the garage?”
“Yes Ma’am,” Dean confirms, his own auto-polite kicking in.
“He’s such a sweet boy,” the woman says, all her wariness forgotten. “Got my Mr Bingles off the roof only last week.”
“Mr Bingles?”
The woman nods, pointing at a rather hefty-looking cat sunning itself on her porch and looking like it would have trouble climbing a step let alone a house.
“You didn’t happen to catch where the Delanceys were headed did you?”
“No,” the woman says, looking apologetic. “I was just so glad to be shut of them to be honest, I didn’t much care to know where.”
“You were?”
“Oh yes,” the woman says, nodding fervently. “Always weird smells coming from the house. Faye tried to tell me that she and that sister of hers were just trying out recipes from the Mediterranean but I didn’t come down in the last shower. I know the dark arts when I smells ‘em.”
Dean blinks, looking at the woman in a faded house dress and fuzzy slippers, with a too-fat cat and more roses in her front garden than he thinks he’s ever seen and shakes his head. Dean’s not sure quite how they managed it, but he and Sam seem to have found the one town where they fit right in.
He’s tempted to tell Bobby to move right over. He can imagine popping next door and asking for a cup of holy water because someone has gone and gotten themselves possessed wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow.
“Something happened to Sam,” Dean says and watches the woman’s face flood with dismay. “I need to find Faye so anything you can tell me, even if you don’t think it’s important, would help.” Dean tries his most winning smile but he knows the woman was caught as soon as he’d mentioned Sam. She looks thoughtful and then brightens, snapping her fingers.
“They’d gone away last year for a couple of months and had their mail forwarded to another sister in Idaho I think. Derek at the post office should be able to tell you where.”
Dean thanks the woman profusely and heads back to the Impala.
Three sisters, Dean thinks. Just perfect.
000
“Delancey sounds familiar,” Bobby says. Dean is driving, cell phone cradled between his cheek and shoulder and is deciding whether he should be more of less worried that Bobby has heard of the people that have apparently cursed Sam. “I can ask around. I mean hell, Dean. Who’d you manage to piss off now?”
“It wasn’t even Sam’s fault,” Dean complains. “Their stupid kid jumped off a roof trying to fly and they’re-“
“Did he die?”
“What? No, just broke his arm, like millions of kids across America.”
“You’re lucky then.”
“Why?”
“I won’t be sure until I check but there’s Crones I’ve heard of, three sisters who retain their youth by sacrificing a boy every eleven years. One of them has to bear the kid because he has to be of their blood.”
“Jesus, Bobby!” Dean exclaims. “Why hasn’t anyone ever taken them out?”
“There’s no pattern to where they live and they don’t for the most part stay together so it’s less obvious. The boy’s death is the first clue to where they’ve been hiding and by then they’re long gone.”
“I have a line on where they can be now.”
“Dean, I wouldn’t. These women are unlike anything you’d ever dealt with before. I think you should just cut your losses.”
“How can you say that? They hurt Sam,” Dean spits. He’s wondering how long he can be angry at so many people before he burns himself out.
“Your Daddy once made a deal to have this very thing happen to Sam, have the wings removed. Sam asked for it. Maybe you should just let it be.”
“Bobby-”
“Dean, I mean it. There ain’t no good reason those women left Sam alive. Count your blessings and be done.”
000
“I’m going to ask you this once,” Dean says and Sam looks up from his book. He’s stretched out on the couch with pillows propped behind his back and Hell Hound across his lap. Sam was scratching the dog’s ears absently but he stops when Dean speaks.
“Okay,” Sam says, looking wary.
“You wanted a life once, wanted normal. You can have that now.”
“Dean-”
“Let me just… let me get this out okay?” Sam closes his mouth and nods grimly. “You must have been pretty convincing to make Dad trust someone like Casen to remove your wings the first time and I know you don’t remember now.” When Sam opens his mouth, Dean holds up a hand. “I know you don’t remember what it was like to have them the first time or want to be rid of them but the fact remains that you did.”
“I know that.”
“I just… you could go back to college, have the white picket fence and the two point three kids like you wanted.”
“Our fence is white.”
“Sam, dammit! Bobby says we should let this go and I’m just giving you the chance to do that.”
Sam pushes at Hell Hound until he grudgingly moves and Sam is freed to stand. He puts a hand on Dean’s shoulder and squeezes. “They took this from me. You were right, you were always right. The way I was… it was the way I was meant to be. I couldn’t see that before but finding this place, these people who accept me… us. That can’t be an accident.”
“You think there’s a larger purpose at work?” Dean asks, raising an eyebrow.
“I’m saying that they took something that was mine and I want it back,” Sam says, eyes hard.
“Alright then,” Dean says, nodding. “Good enough.”
000
Their dad’s journal is a little slim on information about Crones, but Missouri is more helpful when they call her. She points them in the direction of a woman called Madelyn Lane who she describes as walking a fine line but trustworthy, especially with a good word from her.
Dean watches, when they’re leaving, Sam hesitate by the Impala before slipping into the passenger side. They drop Hell Hound off with Annabelle and head out. Dean tries not to let it get to him, the prospect of the open road with Sam by his side making their grim task a little easier to bear.
Sam for the most part is quiet, answering questions that Dean resorts to peppering him with to break the silence but not offering much more than that by way of conversation. When they stop for gas, Dean buys them burgers from an adjoining diner and ducks around the back of the place while they’re cooking to call Bobby.
“I’d like your help but I know how you feel about us doing this,” Dean says and Bobby merely snorts and agrees to meet them at Madelyn’s house on the way. Madelyn herself seems pleasant enough and pleased as punch that they are going after the Crones.
“’Bout time,” she says as she wrinkles her nose delicately. “People like that give the rest of us a bad name.”
Madelyn gives them some protective charms and a few defensive incantations that she coaches Dean through before wishing them luck. Bobby turns up and seeing his truck in front of them as they hit the road again makes Dean long for their father. When Dean had been handed the Impala’s keys on his eighteenth birthday and John had bought the black truck, they’d often convoyed between jobs. He’d always had Sam in the passenger seat because the one and only time Sam had ridden up front with their father there’d been a screaming match about which motel to turn off at before they’d been driving more than half an hour.
When they cross into Idaho, Dean is starting to think that everything will be fine, that’ll it’ll just be another job that they’ll see done and dusted pretty quickly when one of Sam’s hands lands on his forearm and squeezes.
“Sam, what-?” Dean starts but when he looks sideways he sees Sam’s head thump back and his eyes roll up. Thankfully, it’s nearly midnight and the roads are pretty empty so Dean doesn’t take out anyone when he yanks the wheel of the Impala hard to the right and bumps off the road.
Dean’s out of the car and around to Sam’s side as fast as he can, opening the door and dragging Sam out. Sam’s booted feet drum on the dirt and his back bows painfully.
“We felt you coming for miles,” a voice calls out from the darkness and Dean, who has laid a forearm across Sam’s chest to try and keep him still, squints into the shadows of the picnic area he’s pulled up into and sees a woman emerge.
He barely recognises her. Last time he saw her, she had frizzy hair and a washed-out complexion but Dean knows that was probably their way of blending in. Faye Delancey is currently all sleek lines and knowing smile, her dark hair a rich fall across her shoulders. Two more women emerge out of the dark by her sides, similar enough in looks to have Dean know that these are the sisters.
“Grace here,” Faye says, touching the woman on her left on the arm, “Had heard of your father, and knew that you’d likely follow us if you were anything like him. We built a caveat into your brother’s curse. Closer he comes to us the worse he’ll get. He so much as touches one of us and he’ll die.” Faye looks positively gleeful at the prospect, holding her hands out and waggling her fingers.
Sam has gone limp, but Dean keeps a hand over his heart, making sure it’s still thumping under his fingers. There are three of them and he knows all the parlour tricks Madelyn taught him won’t keep at least one of them going for Sam. He can’t risk it and even though it makes Dean sick, he knows he’s going to push Sam back into the car and head in the opposite direction as fast as he can.
“I wouldn’t do that.” Dean turns at the sound of another woman’s voice and sees Madelyn with Bobby just behind her. She has something in her hand, a glass ball with a swirl of blue in the middle that she holds out and away from herself.
“No!” The third and yet unnamed sister shrieks, backing up a few steps. Both Faye and Grace latch onto her and drag her back forward.
“Where did you come from?” Dean asks, genuinely surprised. Madelyn passes close to them and Dean feels the hairs in his arms and neck stand up in her wake. Bobby crouches down by Dean, getting a shoulder under Sam’s arm and Dean automatically moves to put himself under the other.
“We don’t want to see this,” Bobby says, hauling Sam upright. “Every time the Crones killed a child of theirs, the spirit was left behind. Madelyn’s family has been collecting them in a spirit trap for a long time.”
Dean hears all three women scream when there is the sound of breaking glass and the temperature drops. Dean sees ice form on the Impala’s windshield as they get Sam loaded inside and he only prays that she will turn over. When Sam is settled and Bobby has taken off at a run for his own truck, Dean stabs the keys in the ignition. The Impala hitches but then turns over and Dean peels out, not looking behind him.
Sam blinks his eyes open when they pull into an all-night diner down the road from the rest stop and puts a hand to his face. “My back itches,” he says with a frown.
000
It had been a long time since Dean had seen Sam grow in a pair of wings and Sam had been a lot smaller when it had happened the first time. Dean had only gotten away with calling Sam a cherub three times before he was tackled to the floor, Hell Hound bouncing around them and barking with excitement.
Add to that the itching from the new feathers and Annabelle’s kids joining in on the teasing with the inspired name baby bird and Sam was irritable and generally unpleasant to be around for about three weeks until he was back to full wing span again.
“Holy crap,” Dean says one day. They are sitting on the farm’s border fence eating strawberries that grow wild at the edge of Annabelle’s property from the vine.
“What?” Sam asks, looking concerned because Dean is staring at his back.
“You have a grey feather.”
“I what?”
“You have a grey one. Want me to pull it out?”
“No!” Sam snaps, slapping one of Dean’s sticky hands away from himself. “I’ll get twenty more!”
“That’s hair,” Dean says, giving up the rest of the fruit he’d had held in his shirt so he can concentrate both hands on plucking the feather he’s spotted.
They pitch off the fence in a tangle of limbs, both brothers having the other in a pretty good headlock. “I’ll have to start calling you old man cherub,” Dean gasps between laughing and wheezing and he feels himself scooped up and smacked flat by one of Sam’s wings. “Unfair! I call shenanigans!” he yelps when the rest of Sam lands on his back and strawberries are rubbed into his hair.
It’s pretty lame that all Sam can think to call him is berry-head but they both laugh until they’re nearly crying and the sun goes down on them lying flat, Dean with one of Sam’s wings under his shoulder and the smell of bruised berries hanging heavy in their nostrils.
“This is who I’m meant to be,” Sam says out of nowhere.
“Yeah,” Dean agrees. “It is.”
Rating/Warning: Mature (language)
Wordcount: 5,080
Spoilers: None
Fandom: SPN
By:
kellifer_ficCategory: Gen - wing!fic
Notes: Follows Forgetting To Fall, Learning To Fly and The Air In Between.
The kids of Sanctuary love him.
Dean sits on the fence-line, watching Danny and Clara from the Thompson farm down the road climbing Sam like a jungle gym. Sam takes it with the patience of a saint, laughing through the grimace of pain when Danny tugs on one wing just a little too enthusiastically.
“Leave him alone now!” Annabelle calls and Dean turns to her with a smile. Annabelle Thompson delivers groceries to them in exchange for Dean keeping her ancient Buick on the road. Most of the townsfolk now know about Sam but the risk of random strangers passing through and seeing him is too great for them to get complacent.
Hell Hound, in puppy enthusiasm, knocks Clara over and she starts to cry. Annabelle makes a small sound of dismay and dashes to her daughter, already scooped aloft by Sam, tears forgotten as he holds the small girl over his head.
Dean sits with the sun on his face and children’s laughter in his ears and he feels happy.
His eyes snap open because Dean Winchester knows that just isn’t right.
The first ripples in his contentment start the next day when he’s standing by an old Ford that just won’t turn over no matter what he tries and a girl named Faye keeps looking at him, something like worry on her face. There is a small boy clinging to her legs, one arm in a blue plaster cast and Dean doesn’t know why but…
Somehow that little boy’s broken arm would be about him and Sam.
“I just… you should be more careful,” she blurts and Dean just blinks at her. He figures that she was so busy forming whatever it was she was going to say in her brain that it came out sounding like she was in the middle of a conversation. Faye colours and looks down, biting her lip.
“Excuse me?”
“He should think about the kids,” Faye says, eyes darting everywhere but right at Dean. Her hand flutters for a moment and then comes to rest on top of the boy’s head, ruffling distractedly through his hair.
“I’m sorry… did my brother drop your kid or something?” Dean asks. He catches sight of Freddy, his boss, leaning out of his office.
“Faye, goddamit!” Freddy snaps and Dean shifts his gaze between them.
“My nephew tried to fly,” Faye hisses and Dean steps back because he’s suddenly struck by the fact that this woman he barely knows is furious at him. “Lord knows we’ve all tried to be accommodating but-“
“Faye!” Freddy snaps again, this time coming all the way out his office. “When I was six I jumped off my Daddy’s roof with a towel tied around my neck. There was no one to blame but me.”
“Oh please,” Faye snaps, eyes now firmly fixed on Dean. “His brother-“
“Hey!” Dean blurts, taking the step forward he’d previously retreated. He’s not sure how he’s going to follow up his indignation but he also can’t just stand around and let someone disparage Sam when he’s not even present to defend himself. “Are you seriously trying to blame Sam for your kid jumping off your roof?”
“He was trying to fly,” Faye repeats, rolling her eyes like she can’t believe Dean is dense enough not to put two and two together and come up with the result she has. “It’s pretty obvious.”
“Get outta my shop you harridan,” Freddy snorts, waving a hand in Faye’s direction. The woman gives an insulted huff and storms out, tugging her nephew in her wake. When she’s gone, Freddy turns to Dean and shrugs. “Don’t mind her; Faye’s always been a bitch.”
Dean can’t help the laugh that escapes, even though he’s feeling a little stung from the encounter. He can’t believe he’d been priding himself and Sam on not getting complacent, because he realises that they’d started to. While the majority of the people in the small town of Sanctuary accept and in some way embrace the Winchesters, there’s always people willing to whisper in corners and shake their fingers at what’s different.
“Sam jumped off Jim’s barn,” Dean says, not really sure why he’s telling Freddy. “Well, he actually fell off but the wings came in damn handy.”
It’ Freddy’s turn to laugh and with a clap on the shoulder, Dean can almost forget what just happened.
Almost.
A week later, Dean truly has forgotten what happened, right up until Sam comes into the living room with an envelope clenched in his fist.
“What?” Dean asks around his fruit loops. It’s a Wednesday and the garage is shut. Freddy is of the opinion that the whole point of having his own business is making his own hours and a four day week is part and parcel of that.
“Nothin’” Sam tries, stuffing the envelope in his back pocket and making a bee-line for his bedroom. Dean sets aside his cereal and beats him to the doorway. Sam crosses his arms and huffs, feathers metaphorically and physically ruffled and Dean merely stands his ground. Sam finally relents, scowling as he digs the envelope back out of his pocket and hands it over.
It’s opened, Sam always sliding his thumb under the stuck-down flap. Dean hates the way he does it, expecting Sam to get a paper cut every time. Dean is a rip-off-the-end kind of guy. He fishes a single sheaf of paper out of the envelope and unfolds it. A hand-written line curls across the middle of the page and makes Dean see red.
Go back where you came from, freak!
“Where-?”
“In the post box,” Sam says and he looks miserable. Dean’s ready to kill anyone who dared put a look like that on his brother’s face. He’s trembling with fury but he can’t seem to stop it, calm down. “I hadn’t checked the mail in a few days so I’m not sure when.”
“I know who,” Dean snarls.
“What?”
“Never mind,” Dean tries to dismiss but now it’s Sam’s turn to plant himself firmly in Dean’s way.
“Dean!”
“I didn’t want to… just some woman thought… aw hell,” Dean sighs, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. “Some woman from town blames you for her kid getting hurt.”
“What?” Sam splutters, blinking owlishly. “How?”
“He tried to fly,” Dean says and watches Sam deflate, wings drooping with the rest of his body.
“Oh.”
“Oh?Sam, that kid of hers jumping off a roof has nothing to do with you!” Dean claps hands down on Sam’s shoulders and gives him a firm shake until Sam’s eyes come up to meet his own. “You hear me?”
“Yeah,” Sam says reluctantly but Dean knows that this isn’t the end of it.
That night, Dean peels his eyes open to see Sam standing in his bedroom doorway. Sam’s got the bottom of his t-shirt in his hands, stretching the fabric out as he wrings it. Dean has a strong flash-memory of Sam as an eight-year old the first time their Dad had put them in separate rooms and how Sam hadn’t really understood the concept. Instead every night he’d followed Dean stubbornly and insinuated himself in Dean’s bed.
Dean hadn’t really objected too strenuously because when you knew the dark things that went bump in the night were real, you slept easier with your kid brother tucked under your arm.
“What’s up, kiddo?” Dean asks, sitting up and knuckling his eyes, trying to push the sleep-fog away.
“I think something’s wrong,” Sam says in a voice so small that Dean has to look to make sure Sam hasn’t magically regressed to that eight-year old.
“Sammy?” Dean swings his feet out of bed and plants them on the floor, wincing because it’s nearly winter and the bare boards become a misery on unprotected feet. Dean forebears though because he absolutely refuses to wear the bed socks that Sam bought him with much glee.
By way of answer, Sam holds his hands up and they’re covered in something sticky with feathers between his fingers. Adrenalin dumps through Dean’s body, getting him up and moving and he’s over to Sam in a few steps, feeling feathers underfoot when he gets close. Sam steps back a little and Dean leans out of his room, seeing the trail of feathers that leads from Sam’s room to his.
“What-?” Dean starts, gripping Sam’s arms and swinging him around. Sam goes, pliant like a doll and in the half-light Dean can see that Sam was right, something is definitely wrong.
They end up in the bathroom, Sam lying on the tiles with a towel under his head and breathing hard. Dean is watching Sam’s wings rot and fall away and feels powerless to do anything to stop it. Sam has already thrown up once, but Dean’s pretty sure it’s the smell rather than anything else that’s done it. Dean himself feels like gagging but swallows it down.
Dean feels paralysed, kneeling by Sam’s head and sending up prayers to whoever will listen. He’d gone and gotten the phone but then stopped, not knowing who he was going to call. He’d hit the speed dial at random but he couldn’t remember who he’d called, didn’t remember until there was a banging on the front door and the sound of Freddy calling, “Dean?”
There is the sound of cracking wood and then Melinda, Freddy’s wife and the kind of woman Dean can only hope he will end up with some day, is in the doorway. He looks up at her and he’s not sure what’s in his face but it gets her moving, bustling into the bathroom, pushing up the sleeves on her pullover as she goes.
Freddy appears behind her and then he’s saying something, crouching down beside him but Dean can’t really focus on what he’s saying. He watches mutely as Melinda grabs some of their bath towels and start soaking them under the shower. Sam’s hand comes up and bumps against Dean’s knee and Dean reaches blindly for it.
“I don’t know what to do,” he says in such a hollow, far-away voice that he’s not even sure he’s spoken. He feels Freddy’s hands under his armpits and then he’s being hauled up and away. Dean tries to protest but his legs are rubbery from kneeling for so long and Melinda is moving with purpose and a grim mouth.
“C’mon son, lets let her work, eh?” Freddy says into his ear, steering a still wobbly Dean out the door.
Dean looks down at his hands and they are coated in feathers. He remembers a little boy with a bloody knife, surrounded by piles of feathers saying, “Please, Dean, please.”
Freddy barely has him out the front door before Dean is curled over, throwing up into the dust of the yard.
Sam is lying on his stomach, head pillowed by Dean’s thigh and his hands tucked under his chest. Melinda sits opposite, now dressed in one of Dean’s t-shirts which comes down to the knees of the small woman. She has one of Sam’s feathers in her fingers and is turning it over and over. Freddy hovers behind her, pacing.
“You’ll have to change the dressings every few hours or whenever they look like they’re soaking through,” Melinda is saying. Dean is trying to listen but it’s hard when his hand keeps straying to Sam’s back, running over his shoulder blades.
His bare shoulder blades.
Clean white bandaging is taped down over the space and Dean picks at one of the edges with his fingers until Melinda leans forward and slaps his hand away. “Hon, do you know what happened?” she asks gently.
“No idea,” Dean says. He’s grateful for what Melinda has done but he just wants her and Freddy to leave. He doesn’t want to answer any questions.
Not right now.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she says and Dean looks at her, wondering where she would have seen anything like Sam before, let alone his miraculous malting act when he remembers she’s a vet. He wonders if some deep-rooted part of his mind made the connection when he dialled his phone on auto-pilot, knowing that a doctor probably wouldn’t be able to do anything but a vet… someone who treated birds just might. “Has this ever happened before?”
“Oh yeah,” Dean laughs, not liking the high-pitched and sharp edged sound of it. “He loses his wings every year like a winter coat. New ones grow back all nice and shiny.”
“Dean,” Freddy snaps and Dean grimaces, knowing he shouldn’t be an asshole to the woman who just spent half a night tending to his brother but if he doesn’t lash out everything he’s feeling will turn inward and Dean’s not sure he can survive that.
“Just… I need to be alone with him. He’s gonna have to…” Above everything else, Dean wants Sam not to have to deal with the people that have just seen him at his most vulnerable. He knows he’s telegraphing some of his own pride onto Sam but he figures where there’s Winchester, there’s the stubborn need to hide pain.
“Sure,” Melinda says, standing. Freddy gives her a glance that Dean knows means, Are you sure? because she nods almost imperceptibly at him. “But you call if you need anything. I mean anything.” When Dean nods she leans down and kisses his temple and Dean is oddly touched.
“You take all the time you need,” Freddy says as they head out the door and Dean nods again, understanding exactly what Freddy means. Dean leans his head back against the head board of Sam’s bed and lets his hand come to rest on the space on Sam’s back that is now empty.
Dean is man enough to admit that he panics just the tiniest bit when he wakes up and Sam is gone. The sounds of someone puttering around the kitchen make his heart slow down some but Dean doesn’t calm completely until he’s standing in the kitchen doorway and watching Sam at the counter, buttering toast.
“There’s coffee,” Sam offers, gesturing at the pot with his butter knife over his shoulder but Dean stays where he is because he’s not buying Sam’s everything’s okay dance and he’s just waiting for the break.
Sam slows and finally stops what he’s doing, putting the knife aside and lowering his hands to the counter. Dean watches the skin around Sam’s knuckles grow white as his grip tightens. “I lived without them for seven years, right? No big deal.”
“Sam.”
“We can get back on the road. That’s what you want right?”
“Sam.”
“They were a pain in the ass anyway, I was always knocking shit over and I couldn’t fit in the car properly and we were stuck here-“
“Sammy!”
Sam turns around and slides, butt coming to rest on the floor. He drops his head onto his drawn up knees and Dean crosses to him and hunkers down so he can ruffle his hands through Sam’s hair.
“We’ll figure this out,” Dean promises. “I’ll figure this out.”
Faye Delancey lives in a small yellow house on the outer edge of town. As Dean makes his way up her front walk, he spots a cheery gnome fishing in a pond full of fat gold fish. One of her neighbours is drawn from the house next door with the sound of a gnome hitting the front wall at high velocity breaks the morning still.
“What are you doing?” the frazzled woman calls across the fence line.
“You wouldn’t happen to know where Miss Delancey is would you?” Dean asks, shoving hands into his pockets and trying to look as harmless as possible but he knows it’s probably a little too late for that.
The woman still looks like she’s a heartbeat away from dashing back into her house and calling the police but she pauses on her threshold, caught by Dean’s normal tone and politeness warring with her worry. It’s a fascinating battle Dean watches her wage with herself before she finally bites her lip and then says, “Faye, her sister and the little boy took off last night. Looks like they packed everything they owned in their station wagon and peeled out of here like the devil were chasing them himself.”
“You’re joking,” Dean says, feeling his heart sink.
The woman comes down her front steps, shading her eyes so she can see Dean better. “You’re the brother of that nice winged boy aren’t you? You work at the garage?”
“Yes Ma’am,” Dean confirms, his own auto-polite kicking in.
“He’s such a sweet boy,” the woman says, all her wariness forgotten. “Got my Mr Bingles off the roof only last week.”
“Mr Bingles?”
The woman nods, pointing at a rather hefty-looking cat sunning itself on her porch and looking like it would have trouble climbing a step let alone a house.
“You didn’t happen to catch where the Delanceys were headed did you?”
“No,” the woman says, looking apologetic. “I was just so glad to be shut of them to be honest, I didn’t much care to know where.”
“You were?”
“Oh yes,” the woman says, nodding fervently. “Always weird smells coming from the house. Faye tried to tell me that she and that sister of hers were just trying out recipes from the Mediterranean but I didn’t come down in the last shower. I know the dark arts when I smells ‘em.”
Dean blinks, looking at the woman in a faded house dress and fuzzy slippers, with a too-fat cat and more roses in her front garden than he thinks he’s ever seen and shakes his head. Dean’s not sure quite how they managed it, but he and Sam seem to have found the one town where they fit right in.
He’s tempted to tell Bobby to move right over. He can imagine popping next door and asking for a cup of holy water because someone has gone and gotten themselves possessed wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow.
“Something happened to Sam,” Dean says and watches the woman’s face flood with dismay. “I need to find Faye so anything you can tell me, even if you don’t think it’s important, would help.” Dean tries his most winning smile but he knows the woman was caught as soon as he’d mentioned Sam. She looks thoughtful and then brightens, snapping her fingers.
“They’d gone away last year for a couple of months and had their mail forwarded to another sister in Idaho I think. Derek at the post office should be able to tell you where.”
Dean thanks the woman profusely and heads back to the Impala.
Three sisters, Dean thinks. Just perfect.
“Delancey sounds familiar,” Bobby says. Dean is driving, cell phone cradled between his cheek and shoulder and is deciding whether he should be more of less worried that Bobby has heard of the people that have apparently cursed Sam. “I can ask around. I mean hell, Dean. Who’d you manage to piss off now?”
“It wasn’t even Sam’s fault,” Dean complains. “Their stupid kid jumped off a roof trying to fly and they’re-“
“Did he die?”
“What? No, just broke his arm, like millions of kids across America.”
“You’re lucky then.”
“Why?”
“I won’t be sure until I check but there’s Crones I’ve heard of, three sisters who retain their youth by sacrificing a boy every eleven years. One of them has to bear the kid because he has to be of their blood.”
“Jesus, Bobby!” Dean exclaims. “Why hasn’t anyone ever taken them out?”
“There’s no pattern to where they live and they don’t for the most part stay together so it’s less obvious. The boy’s death is the first clue to where they’ve been hiding and by then they’re long gone.”
“I have a line on where they can be now.”
“Dean, I wouldn’t. These women are unlike anything you’d ever dealt with before. I think you should just cut your losses.”
“How can you say that? They hurt Sam,” Dean spits. He’s wondering how long he can be angry at so many people before he burns himself out.
“Your Daddy once made a deal to have this very thing happen to Sam, have the wings removed. Sam asked for it. Maybe you should just let it be.”
“Bobby-”
“Dean, I mean it. There ain’t no good reason those women left Sam alive. Count your blessings and be done.”
“I’m going to ask you this once,” Dean says and Sam looks up from his book. He’s stretched out on the couch with pillows propped behind his back and Hell Hound across his lap. Sam was scratching the dog’s ears absently but he stops when Dean speaks.
“Okay,” Sam says, looking wary.
“You wanted a life once, wanted normal. You can have that now.”
“Dean-”
“Let me just… let me get this out okay?” Sam closes his mouth and nods grimly. “You must have been pretty convincing to make Dad trust someone like Casen to remove your wings the first time and I know you don’t remember now.” When Sam opens his mouth, Dean holds up a hand. “I know you don’t remember what it was like to have them the first time or want to be rid of them but the fact remains that you did.”
“I know that.”
“I just… you could go back to college, have the white picket fence and the two point three kids like you wanted.”
“Our fence is white.”
“Sam, dammit! Bobby says we should let this go and I’m just giving you the chance to do that.”
Sam pushes at Hell Hound until he grudgingly moves and Sam is freed to stand. He puts a hand on Dean’s shoulder and squeezes. “They took this from me. You were right, you were always right. The way I was… it was the way I was meant to be. I couldn’t see that before but finding this place, these people who accept me… us. That can’t be an accident.”
“You think there’s a larger purpose at work?” Dean asks, raising an eyebrow.
“I’m saying that they took something that was mine and I want it back,” Sam says, eyes hard.
“Alright then,” Dean says, nodding. “Good enough.”
Their dad’s journal is a little slim on information about Crones, but Missouri is more helpful when they call her. She points them in the direction of a woman called Madelyn Lane who she describes as walking a fine line but trustworthy, especially with a good word from her.
Dean watches, when they’re leaving, Sam hesitate by the Impala before slipping into the passenger side. They drop Hell Hound off with Annabelle and head out. Dean tries not to let it get to him, the prospect of the open road with Sam by his side making their grim task a little easier to bear.
Sam for the most part is quiet, answering questions that Dean resorts to peppering him with to break the silence but not offering much more than that by way of conversation. When they stop for gas, Dean buys them burgers from an adjoining diner and ducks around the back of the place while they’re cooking to call Bobby.
“I’d like your help but I know how you feel about us doing this,” Dean says and Bobby merely snorts and agrees to meet them at Madelyn’s house on the way. Madelyn herself seems pleasant enough and pleased as punch that they are going after the Crones.
“’Bout time,” she says as she wrinkles her nose delicately. “People like that give the rest of us a bad name.”
Madelyn gives them some protective charms and a few defensive incantations that she coaches Dean through before wishing them luck. Bobby turns up and seeing his truck in front of them as they hit the road again makes Dean long for their father. When Dean had been handed the Impala’s keys on his eighteenth birthday and John had bought the black truck, they’d often convoyed between jobs. He’d always had Sam in the passenger seat because the one and only time Sam had ridden up front with their father there’d been a screaming match about which motel to turn off at before they’d been driving more than half an hour.
When they cross into Idaho, Dean is starting to think that everything will be fine, that’ll it’ll just be another job that they’ll see done and dusted pretty quickly when one of Sam’s hands lands on his forearm and squeezes.
“Sam, what-?” Dean starts but when he looks sideways he sees Sam’s head thump back and his eyes roll up. Thankfully, it’s nearly midnight and the roads are pretty empty so Dean doesn’t take out anyone when he yanks the wheel of the Impala hard to the right and bumps off the road.
Dean’s out of the car and around to Sam’s side as fast as he can, opening the door and dragging Sam out. Sam’s booted feet drum on the dirt and his back bows painfully.
“We felt you coming for miles,” a voice calls out from the darkness and Dean, who has laid a forearm across Sam’s chest to try and keep him still, squints into the shadows of the picnic area he’s pulled up into and sees a woman emerge.
He barely recognises her. Last time he saw her, she had frizzy hair and a washed-out complexion but Dean knows that was probably their way of blending in. Faye Delancey is currently all sleek lines and knowing smile, her dark hair a rich fall across her shoulders. Two more women emerge out of the dark by her sides, similar enough in looks to have Dean know that these are the sisters.
“Grace here,” Faye says, touching the woman on her left on the arm, “Had heard of your father, and knew that you’d likely follow us if you were anything like him. We built a caveat into your brother’s curse. Closer he comes to us the worse he’ll get. He so much as touches one of us and he’ll die.” Faye looks positively gleeful at the prospect, holding her hands out and waggling her fingers.
Sam has gone limp, but Dean keeps a hand over his heart, making sure it’s still thumping under his fingers. There are three of them and he knows all the parlour tricks Madelyn taught him won’t keep at least one of them going for Sam. He can’t risk it and even though it makes Dean sick, he knows he’s going to push Sam back into the car and head in the opposite direction as fast as he can.
“I wouldn’t do that.” Dean turns at the sound of another woman’s voice and sees Madelyn with Bobby just behind her. She has something in her hand, a glass ball with a swirl of blue in the middle that she holds out and away from herself.
“No!” The third and yet unnamed sister shrieks, backing up a few steps. Both Faye and Grace latch onto her and drag her back forward.
“Where did you come from?” Dean asks, genuinely surprised. Madelyn passes close to them and Dean feels the hairs in his arms and neck stand up in her wake. Bobby crouches down by Dean, getting a shoulder under Sam’s arm and Dean automatically moves to put himself under the other.
“We don’t want to see this,” Bobby says, hauling Sam upright. “Every time the Crones killed a child of theirs, the spirit was left behind. Madelyn’s family has been collecting them in a spirit trap for a long time.”
Dean hears all three women scream when there is the sound of breaking glass and the temperature drops. Dean sees ice form on the Impala’s windshield as they get Sam loaded inside and he only prays that she will turn over. When Sam is settled and Bobby has taken off at a run for his own truck, Dean stabs the keys in the ignition. The Impala hitches but then turns over and Dean peels out, not looking behind him.
Sam blinks his eyes open when they pull into an all-night diner down the road from the rest stop and puts a hand to his face. “My back itches,” he says with a frown.
It had been a long time since Dean had seen Sam grow in a pair of wings and Sam had been a lot smaller when it had happened the first time. Dean had only gotten away with calling Sam a cherub three times before he was tackled to the floor, Hell Hound bouncing around them and barking with excitement.
Add to that the itching from the new feathers and Annabelle’s kids joining in on the teasing with the inspired name baby bird and Sam was irritable and generally unpleasant to be around for about three weeks until he was back to full wing span again.
“Holy crap,” Dean says one day. They are sitting on the farm’s border fence eating strawberries that grow wild at the edge of Annabelle’s property from the vine.
“What?” Sam asks, looking concerned because Dean is staring at his back.
“You have a grey feather.”
“I what?”
“You have a grey one. Want me to pull it out?”
“No!” Sam snaps, slapping one of Dean’s sticky hands away from himself. “I’ll get twenty more!”
“That’s hair,” Dean says, giving up the rest of the fruit he’d had held in his shirt so he can concentrate both hands on plucking the feather he’s spotted.
They pitch off the fence in a tangle of limbs, both brothers having the other in a pretty good headlock. “I’ll have to start calling you old man cherub,” Dean gasps between laughing and wheezing and he feels himself scooped up and smacked flat by one of Sam’s wings. “Unfair! I call shenanigans!” he yelps when the rest of Sam lands on his back and strawberries are rubbed into his hair.
It’s pretty lame that all Sam can think to call him is berry-head but they both laugh until they’re nearly crying and the sun goes down on them lying flat, Dean with one of Sam’s wings under his shoulder and the smell of bruised berries hanging heavy in their nostrils.
“This is who I’m meant to be,” Sam says out of nowhere.
“Yeah,” Dean agrees. “It is.”
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And I haven't forgotten about the kidfic either!
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Yay for kid!fic... some day dammit!!
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“Unfair! I call shenanigans!”
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Lovely work.
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um. Sorry? commentfic. *embarrassed expression*
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They should have killed him - the winged freak who almost cost them everything - but it was too delicious. They had heard rumors, had had a share of the horror-and-joy-filled memories he'd given up to reach for something he could never be; the symmetry pleased them, to cost him this again. To leave him yearning for the sky and what, this time, he did not choose to give away.
They knew the price they were paying and it was worth it, worth it to see the look on his fool brother's face, worth every wrenching blood soaked bewildered child's cry every time they taunted the pitiful mortal hunters that tried to challenge them. To laugh and share a moment of shared blistering joy before they went their separate ways.
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A long, long time. Oh, her family had hunted other demons; they fought with other hunters. But they never forgot that it was the Crones that were their responsibility. They would drop anything, leave any one else behind, just to close in on their trail. Each generation came closer and closer, passing the knowledge down, breeding as deliberately (though for different reasons) as the Crones.
And then the Winchester boys came to her, reeking of determination and righteousness and bleeding fury enough to mask one extra shadow...
Madelyn smiled.
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Re: um. Sorry? commentfic. *embarrassed expression*
Just marvellous!
Re: um. Sorry? commentfic. *embarrassed expression*
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Oh good lord I HATE these types of people! I have to deal with them everyday, and I don't have the comfort of knowing they're actually evil Crones.
I know I've said this before, but I never get tired of this verse. Sam playing with the kids was too adorable for words, and Sam's wings rotting off his body was such a horrible image. But in that good horrible way. =)
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Beautiful.
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You have them spot on and I'm completely enthralled. I do hope there will be more of this. I love it very much. Hands down the best wing!fic I've ever read. Adding these to my memories for sure.
Um, I'll stop rambling now.
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Favorite lines:
It’s opened, Sam always sliding his thumb under the stuck-down flap. Dean hates the way he does it, expecting Sam to get a paper cut every time.
I like his little detail, maybe because I myself am always paranoid about getting paper cuts while opening envelopes. *g*
“Where-?”
“In the post box,” Sam says and he looks miserable.
Oh, Sam.
Dean hadn’t really objected too strenuously because when you knew the dark things that went bump in the night were real, you slept easier with your kid brother tucked under your arm.
Aww. *pets Dean*
“I think something’s wrong,” Sam says in a voice so small that Dean has to look to make sure Sam hasn’t magically regressed to that eight-year old.
This whole scene with Sam being hurt, losing his wings, makes me ache.
“Dean, I mean it. There ain’t no good reason those women left Sam alive. Count your blessings and be done.”
I love Bobby’s no-nonsense approach here.
“I just… you could go back to college, have the white picket fence and the two point three kids like you wanted.”
“Our fence is white.”
I adore Sam’s response.
“I’m saying that they took something that was mine and I want it back,” Sam says, eyes hard.
Love, love, love this. His determination is very yummy.
“This is who I’m meant to be,” Sam says out of nowhere.
“Yeah,” Dean agrees. “It is.”
Aww, lovely ending.
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When I saw you'd written another one I was so excited, and may I just say it was wonderful =)
Thankyou
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I love the quiet, subtle ways you expand upon this, creating a whole world around Sam and his wings. I love their town. I love Faye's next door neighbor. I love the idea of little kids trying to be Sam. And of course Sam and Dean are just... wonderful.
You make me so happy with this. :) And in general. But especially with this. :D
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Love this fic, it's brilliant. Must go back and read more.
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I think that's why I decided to make it Dean's story... the way he copes...q
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The scene with Sam's wings rotting away made me whimper a little...
I've gotta say, I 've read my share of Wing!fics, and yours has got to be the most plausable and smooth flowing plot-wise out there.
Congrats!
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Yay for wings.
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I like the town you set up here (and was happy to see there was more!), and that, while it provides a safe space for the brothers, there are still risks, and Sam mostly keeps to the farm, and there are awful neighbors and all the rest. Sam's wings rotting off was horrifying and very visceral, and Dean's shock and Melinda's competency were wonderful.
Thank you so much for sharing these, and I'm delighted to hear there might be more! This is one of the most fleshed-out and interesting wingfic stories I've ever seen done, and I'll definitely be looking out for any further sequels.
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:0)
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I also really like the way Sam has changed so much and his gradual shift in relationship with his place in the world.