A Hunter's Legacy - Part One

[mangacat201]

 

 

It seems pretty stupid to start this out with the words ‘dear diary’ considering the circumstances, which is why I’m just not going to do it. There will be no headline here, just words pouring out whenever they need to. They say a lot of hunters keep a journal of some sort, since in this line of work the memory is the first to go.

I haven’t seen much of the life yet, but I doubt they’re wrong. Growing up on the other side of things really puts everything into perspective. It is strange that of all the feelings I should probably have in a situation like this – fear, terror, anguish, longing for my home, and the safety it ensured – there is only one thing that occupies my mind. If I want to get back at them for it, for destroying the innocence of my childhood, and the knowledge that monsters aren’t real, I'd better grow up damn fast.

There isn’t much more time, they’re coming for me.

I will hunt.

 

 

A phone rang with annoying persistence, for the first time in what might have been months, and a hand lashed out from under a heap of blankets and knocked it down from the hardwood nightstand onto the floor with one flailing swipe. Unfortunately, it landed with a clang but didn’t stop ringing, which made it necessary for the hand to emerge again, alongside a head full of ruffled, light-brown hair and bleary green eyes that darted around to identify the cell as a blurry, dark blob on the floor. Long calloused fingers picked up the phone and flipped it open to take the call. Meanwhile the heap on the bed on the other side of the nightstand moved slowly, and the blankets fell away to reveal another mop of hair atop a disgruntled face.

When Dean answered the phone it was with a non-descript: “Yeeeeeeeeeeahh?”

He listened for a moment and then snorted out a light greeting: “Hey there, how are you?”

After a few more seconds of listening, he sat up in bed like a jack-knife – wide awake and talking urgently.

“What? Really? When did that…? Wait, slow down and tell me what happened… did you call the police? ... Yes, yes of course, I understand… uhuh… And you think it might… alright, you know what, we’re between jobs anyway, we’re going to drive down to your place right away… No, please, it’s the least… yes, I… yes it’s going to take a couple of days tops… alright, see you soon then.”

He snapped the phone shut and looked over at his brother, who had disentangled himself from his blankets as well. Dean’s face showed a grimace of urgent worry, and it made Sam rub his hand against his temple in dread of what kind of bad news his brother had just received to sent them barging out without so much as a moment’s notice.

“Who was that?”

Dean tapped the phone against his lips for a moment and then let his hand drop as he told Sam the news.

“Lisa Braeden, you remember her? The, the thing with the changelings a few years back?”

Sam nodded and continued to look at his brother with that little vertical line forming between his brows. “Something happened?”

“Ben’s missing, has been for some weeks, and the police have nothing. Lisa thinks they might be looking in all the wrong places.”

Sam took in the pinched look on his brother’s face, and the tense line of his shoulders, and he knew instantly how much this case would get to Dean. This one was even more personal for them than usual. Children being kidnapped by sick bastards happened all the time, but at least the police stood a small chance of catching them if the perpetrators were human. But  the supernatural abductees just vanished - literally into thin air - leaving nothing to go on, and no chance of ever finding those kids again. It would be much worse since they had actually managed to save Ben from the supernatural once already. What were the odds of doing it again and getting off as lightly as the first time around?

 

There had, of course, been people they couldn’t save and close friends too, but Dean would take it rough if they found this boy dead or worse, and Sam was worried about what his brother would do in the wake of such an event. While his brain had been running facts and theories, his body had already gone through the motions of packing and getting ready to leave this motel room behind in the next ten minutes. Dean slid the knife out from under his pillow and sheathed it carefully before packing it into the duffle bag that held all his essential possessions. He threw on a pair of jeans that looked vaguely respectable and a lot of layers to protect his skin from the cold that had instantly seeped into it as soon as he’d thrown of the bedding. The older man walked into the bathroom to wash up for a moment, and Sam put the rest of his items into the bag, closing the zip with an audible sound, then he addressed his brother.

“Dean,” His brother leaned around the doorjamb of the bathroom, his toothbrush and a lot of foam around his mouth and looked at him with raised eyebrows, “did she say anything more about the circumstances of the boy vanishing?”

Dean shook his head slowly and then plodded back into the bathroom to spit and rinse before he answered: “The police are on it, but since I told her we were coming I didn’t think wasting time trying to get into all that over the phone would do any good. We really need to drive fast though; I have a bad feeling about this one.”

Sam nodded and wondered how the boy had gotten himself in such a situation again. It wasn’t as if being kidnapped and exchanged for a fairy child wasn’t enough of a brush with the supernatural for one lifetime. Wordlessly, he followed Dean out to the car and got in.

 

Dean’s shoulders didn’t relax one bit on the entire way to Cicero, Indiana, and it didn’t help that they spend most of their time on dusty side-roads with no company, but the familiar rumble of the car, and Dean’s apocalypse-mix that he couldn’t let go of, for the sheer joy of the thing being over, and them being still alive and mostly whole. It wasn’t something they actually talked about or even really addressed in their thoughts. The patented Winchester-way of coping was up and running though another year with full efficiency and for once they were both perfectly okay with it. This thing about Ben had hit a bit too close to home for them to appreciate it as a perfect distraction, but it was a distraction nonetheless, and the more energy they needed to put into the investigation, the better anyway. Sam looked out of the window at the smoldering heat rising from the landscape around them, shimmering in the air, no disturbance beside the steady movement of the car. They had silently agreed to take turns at the wheel and rest as much as possible when it wasn’t their turn, and they'd only stopped for a scant four hours of shut-eye in a by-the-hour motel they'd passed, because time was of essence here. Instead of late in the evening, they arrived in Cicero mid-afternoon after one and a half days of hard driving. At least the exhaustion seeping into their bones kept them from appearing too tense as they rolled into the familiar suburban area to seek out Lisa’s nice little house. When the Impala rumbled into the street and stopped alongside the weed studded front lawn, the door of the house opened at once. The attractive young mother had obviously kept watch out for the sound of the car and anticipated their arrival. Dean cut off the motor and gripped the wheel a bit tighter for a moment, taking a deep breath before he opened the door and got out of the car. Sam listened to the ticking of the cooling engine for a couple of seconds before following his brother out and up the few steps that brought them to Lisa’s door. The young woman looked distraught, but her appearance was as groomed and impeccable as they’d come to expect from her. Her eyes, though, looked haunted, and deep shadows lurking under the careful make-up showed that there was only façade and nothing more to her well-kept appearance. She opened the door wider to admit them into the house but closed and locked it instantly after her. Lisa turned around to face them, back pressed against the door as if she had to keep it shut against an onslaught from something invisible, but she relaxed after a moment and showed them into the living room. They had sat in countless victims’ living rooms trying to piece information and stories together for their hunts, but there weren't many people or rooms they’d ever see again. And most of the time they were quite glad that was the case, since it meant those people would never face anything in their line of work again. Even of the people they actually knew, or who had been referred to them through their father’s contacts, few ever received them under their actual names, or in such a personal matter.

 

Sam and Dean sat down on the couch while Lisa seated herself in the single chair. She drew her legs up sideways to hug them between her clasped hands, but it was the only sign that she was seeking comfort, since the apparently detached indifference on her face matched the prim cleanliness of the room.. Dean observed her carefully and noted that the sleek dark-brown hair had given way to a stylish new cut with a slight bluish black tint, and a few new lines had moulded her features into a kind of entrancing maturity. He blinked against his treasured dream image for a moment and fought to concentrate on the case at hand instead of getting hung-up on might-have-beens that brought more pain than closure.

“I’m really glad that you came, and on such short notice too… can I get you anything?”

Both brothers declined with a silent shake of the head, too wired in anticipation of the whole story behind the boy’s disappearance to have it held up with hospitality. Sam leaned forward with his elbows on his knees to be able to catch Lisa’s eyes and encouraged her to talk about what had happened.

“We’re fine. Why don’t you just tell us what happened, and why you think this is something we can help with?”

She nodded and took a deep breath before speaking, eyes trained onto her clasped fingers.

“It was two months ago, almost exactly to the day now, and a few days after Ben’s eleventh birthday. I brought him to school in the morning and went to work afterwards, there was nothing amiss, but… when I came by in the afternoon to pick him up from school, they said he’d left already. I mean, I’ve let him walk home from school from time to time with friends when I had a late meeting and couldn’t make it, but it was always arranged in advance, and he’d stay at one of his friends’ places, until I could come by and pick him up from there. He wasn’t supposed to leave alone that day, and, after calling around at all of his friends’ houses, their parents only told me that they hadn’t seen him, and that all their children where all right and safely at home.”

A little wetness gathered in the corner of her eyes, and a small hitch in her breath announced upcoming tears, but the brothers waited patiently, until she had found her composure again, even though Sam had to grab Dean’s elbow from behind to quell the harsh words rising in his brother’s throat.

“I got frantic then and went back to his school to round up all the teachers, but nobody had seen Ben leaving, exactly, and they just kept telling me about how he had walked out of the classroom after the last period and… I called the police then and drove to and fro around the neighbourhood to see if he was fooling around, though he knows that he’s not supposed to just walk around on his own. The police sent a patrol car or two around for the afternoon, which of course wasn’t effective in the least. I didn’t want to believe that something had happened then, you know? It… it was easier to accept that he’d just taken the afternoon off and would come back soon.”

She looked out of the window down to the patio and the back garden where the party had taken place all those years ago.

“When he didn’t come home that night and didn’t turn up in the morning either, the police upped the search party, and when he'd been officially missing for 24 hours, they did a full scale search, with the neighbourhood involved. My phone got rigged in case there was a ransom demand – though what kind of ransom anybody would want with what I have here is beyond me – and… they did everything from flyers, the newspaper, to dogs, it was… it was crazy. But we heard nothing, nobody called about money or anything, and although they began searching in the woods around town, too, they didn’t even find his backpack or clothing or, or anything…”

Lisa covered her eyes with her hands for a moment and then raked them through her hair, tousling the strands with her frantic fingers. Sam let Dean get up this time, and the older man moved over to the distraught woman, picking up her hands and cradling them in his own while he crouched next to the armchair.

“It’s ok, go on.”

“Well, it’s just… they say the first forty-eight hours or so are crucial, and when they didn’t find him it was like… someone pulled the rug from under my feet you know? I mean, they were all very supportive, the whole neighbourhood was with me, volunteering and everything. But after a few weeks the efforts started to dwindle, and I was just… I wasn’t ready to let life go on. In those first couple of weeks I didn’t have time to think, but when it got quiet, I remembered. I mean, I hadn’t… children get taken by normal… you know, but he just vanished, like into thin air. I tried to call you several times, but you didn’t pick up, and I wasn’t going to try again, but then I actually got you, and… suddenly I was so sure. I don’t know.”

Sam nodded slowly turning the facts over in his head. He could see that Lisa was barely keeping it together, and even though she’d rather not have anything to do with the kinds of things they worked on, she was grasping at last straws. Nevertheless he had heard this kind of story often enough to trust her mother instinct and found it worth investigating.

“We had a… big thing going down that put us out of commission for some time. But I think there’s no harm done in trying to find something from our angle. What about the other children?”

The dark haired woman looked at Sam blankly.

“You know the other children that were involved in the… incident a couple of years ago? Did they disappear too?”

Lisa looked from one man to the other and frowned in confusion, until her eyes widened with realization.

“I… I don’t know. I didn’t even think to ask,” she balled her fists in helpless frustration, “I know a couple of them moved away after the… you know, but they’re mostly still here I think, I… I haven’t heard from other missing children in the paper or…, but I didn’t think about that.”

“It’s ok, really, Lisa, it’s not your job to think of these things, it’s ours. We’ll try and track down all the families and see if they’ve had anything unusual going on lately, alright? It’s not much to go on, but I’m sure the police already covered most of the investigative angles except for this one. And even if we find out that nothing happened to the other children, we’ll at least know that it’s not tied to them. But we’ll do anything we can to find out what's happened to Ben, and we’ll do whatever is necessary to bring him back, ok?”

Now the tears flowed freely from her eyes, and Dean squeezed her hands gently while she sobbed under her breath.

 

Sam and Dean reluctantly set up shop in Lisa’s living room. They’d have preferred to hole up in a motel first and operate from there, but the woman pleaded with them to stay in her guest room, most likely because she wanted to keep close tabs on anything they might find out. They told the worried mother to at least go to work and keep her appointments, so she might not find herself out of a job when all this was over. Since Dean was rather well known about the neighbourhood due to his spectacular appearance at the party a couple of years back, and the subsequent gossip that had travelled around in his wake, they decided it would be too suspicious if he went around the neighbourhood asking questions. So, they switched roles, and Sam did the legwork on the families that still lived in the vicinity, while Dean checked up on the children that had moved away. Most of them hadn’t strayed further than a couple of hours drive from Cicero, manageable in one day, which is why the brothers decided to check up personally on them even though the preliminary calls hadn’t raised any flags immediately. It took an additional day, but since the trail had long gone cold on the immediate search, and they didn’t have any other leads to check out yet, they thought it prudent to make sure the kids were all right and hadn’t been exchanged for something nasty again. When all the families turned out to be in possession of their own healthy, completely natural children, they decided to waive the one family that had actually moved out of state, and took care of that with only a phone call. None of the families involved in the original case had had a brush with something supernatural since, so they were sure that it didn’t have anything to do with the changeling infestation the town had suffered. They were loath to tell Lisa that their only solid lead hadn’t panned out, but Sam had worked up a few theories by then, all of which were really unpleasant to think about, since they contained a list of possible supernatural perpetrators that looked like the A-Z of nastiness. The hunters were very reluctant to share the list with Lisa and tried to rule most of the creatures out, before they compiled a short-list of the more likely suspects. Dean even decided to look into the human crime angle after a couple more days of fruitless research with no more hints coming up, but the police had done a good job there, even if they hadn’t been able to turn anything up. When they were down to trying to determine whether a Rakshasa might have set up shop in the area, or possibly a rawhead, Dean started pacing like a caged tiger, which in turn made Sam irritable and antsy. Given that both creatures were in the habit of eating children for breakfast, lunch and dinner, Lisa avoided both of the brothers purposefully, though she told them often enough how much she appreciated their efforts.

 

“This is getting us nowhere, Dean.”

Sam watched his brother whip around and advance on him with a predator-like glare.

“Don’t you think I know that? We’ve investigated every possible badass from here to Timbuktu. And other than ‘we can’t tell for sure’ there is nothing. I know we’re not getting anywhere fast, but it’s not like there’s something else we can do.”

Dean turned around and stared out of the window as if he could will the boy to stumble into the back yard just like that. Sometimes Sam wondered if his brother might just be capable of such a thing if he put enough of his stubborn head into it. While that would make a lot of their hunts a lot easier, he didn’t think he wanted to encourage Dean though. Things like this came with a price tag that was too high to pay once let alone twice. On the other hand, Dean’s stubbornness would be a big hurdle for what he was going to suggest next.

“You know that’s not true, Dean.”

The taller man caught his brother’s eye, working his way into his peripheral vision even though Dean was pretending not to look at him. Sam knew that the other man was well aware of what – or rather whom – he was referring to.

“We can’t, Sam.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t keep asking for favours for myself, Sam. He’s given so much already…”

“That’s bullshit. You know he’ll do it, no matter for whom you ask, especially since it’s just that… personal. And out there is a kid that could have been yours if you’d just… is that not a good-enough reason to ask? Seriously, Dean if we have any shot at finding Ben, it’s our duty to try it. It’s just a call and a question.”

Dean opened his mouth to retaliate something, but he stopped short at the sight of something behind Sam’s back. Sam turned around and saw Lisa standing in the doorway, half hidden by the wooden panels of the sliding door. She watched them with slightly wet, resigned eyes before speaking:

“I know you’ve put a lot of effort into this, but I think it’s all you can do. I’m… just tired. I know I can’t ever give up looking… looking out for… but I can’t keep you any longer, I’m sure there are cases that are a lot more promising, right? Mother’s lose their children every day, don’t they?”

Tears coursed down her cheeks, and that made Dean hasten over to her, enveloping her trembling frame in his strong arms.

“They might, but I’m not going just stand there and let it happen to you and Ben. Sam is right, I should have gotten over myself already.”

“Lisa, we have a friend, who’s… well, he has his ways to find people, ways that reach beyond what we can manage with our means. If we ask him we’ll need a bit of time to drive to Illinois, and something of Ben’s personal things, his favourite toy maybe, something he spent a lot of time with.”

She looked between them and frowned a bit.

“Are you talking about someone like those psychics that do readings for the police and find missing persons? Because that’s…” she caught herself, thinking for a moment, “never mind.”

Dean chuckled under his breath, and a small smile tugged his lips; the first in weeks maybe.

“No, we were thinking more along the lines of some heavenly assistance…”

The young woman looked at him with big eyes.

“Are you serious? How…”

“Trust me, THAT you really don’t want to know. Are you ready to take this chance?”

Lisa searched Dean’s face for a moment, and what she found there seemed to satisfy her.

“I… yes. You can have whatever you need. I’m… I can’t begin to thank you, you know that right?”

“You’ve told me about a dozen times, and my answer is the same, seriously now. We’ll be doing everything in our power to bring your son back safe as can be, all right? I’ll make that call and see what he says, but I’m sure he’ll be prepared to help, ok?”

When she nodded, Dean let go of her and flipped his cell open. He dialled and then walked out on the back porch, his greeting “Hey there Amelia, is your husband home…?” He drifted through the door, and it slammed shut behind him.

 

Lisa looked at Sam with tired eyes and turned away to walk into the kitchen. She beckoned him with a slight wave of her hand, and he followed her into the next room where she busied herself setting up coffee. When the coffee maker had begun gurgled along merrily, the woman turned around to face him again with a wary expression on her face.

“I can’t believe I’m asking myself whether it’s worth it. I mean, I’m a bad mother for it, right, to just… I don’t know, accept it? Give up? No, not give up, never that, but getting myself used to the thought that I might not ever see my son again.”

Sam looked out of the window where he could see his brother talking on the phone, then back at her.

“I don’t think you are. It’s been months, and nobody can run at full tilt forever, not even for a missing child. Hope is exhausting, you know? Even more so than resignation and guilt, I know, I’ve seen it often enough, clung to it like nothing else mattered. I know that losing someone you love, possibly never to see them again on this plane or even the next is the worst thing that can happen to anyone. And when it happens, it's like the whole world is ripped to shreds in front of your eyes, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But at some point, you just need to shut it out for a little while, not let it get to you, because you’re expected to function in real life just as if nothing had happened, and you realize the world goes on for everyone else, even though it feels like it shouldn’t. It’s a terrible thing, letting go of something you feel you can’t live without, but sometimes it’s needed, so you can get the right kind of distance that just might lead you back to it.”

She bowed her head so that her short hair obscured her face, hands perched on the counter behind her.

“You’ve been so strong, Lisa, you’ve done everything you could and kept your head in the game all along, so that Ben has a home to return to. Don’t ever think you’d be a bad mother for that, it’s the most difficult task of all, measuring hope against life.”

She wiped at her eyes with a finger, slightly smudging the mascara around her eyes, but didn’t cry again. After a moment, and a deep breath, she looked up at him.

“Thanks, Sam, I mean it, for this… you’re good at putting things in perspective you know? But it sounds an awful lot like you speak from experience.”

Sam huffed a small sigh and looked out of the window again at his brother’s turned back. As if he’d felt the eyes on him, Dean turned and met Sam’s gaze with a small frown for a moment, before he concentrated on his phone call again. The tall man met Lisa’s eyes again.

“I do.”

She looked from him to the window and back with a puzzled expression. Then her eyes widened slightly when she got the implication of what he had said.

“You… how, I mean…”

“It’s too complicated to explain, really, and we’re glad to have put it behind us.”

She took his cue at not wanting to talk about it and nodded slowly.

“I’m going to check in with my brother if you don’t mind, I expect we’ll be leaving soon if everything turns out well.”

He took a little wave of her hand as a dismissal and strode out to the back-door.

 

Dean waited patiently for the woman on the other end of the line to fetch her husband. It was still a bit strange for him to think of Cas like that, but after the apocalypse, the angel had decided to make amends with his host’s family. Dean wasn’t exactly sure how things stood with Jimmy’s soul, after his body had been blown up by an archangel and put together again, but apparently Cas did at least a good impression of a real if slightly holy tax accountant and family man. He hadn’t pried into what kind of relationship he had with his ‘wife’ or their daughter, and Dean wasn’t really all that keen to know either, but at least he had a social security number, and a purpose, since he’d been cut off from the heavenly host for his dealings with the Winchesters. From what Dean had gained from their sporadic phone calls, he sounded content if not happy to embrace human life with the innate curiosity that had gotten him into so much trouble in the first place. Dean hoped that his friend would be able to make a life for himself as well as possible under the circumstances, and he hated to disrupt it to ask such a favor. Nonetheless, he couldn’t deny that he’d also thought about it in the last couple of days, and that he’d been waiting for Sam to bring it up, so he could blame his brother for the idea.

“What can I do for you, Dean?”

The familiar voice startled him out of his thoughts abruptly and he filled the gap immediately with false cheer and a jibe.

“Hey, buddy o’ mine, what makes you think I want something? This could be a mere social call, you know?”

He practically heard the smile at the other end of the line.

“It could be, Dean, but your anxiety palpitates through the phone like it’s got its own voice. I still know some tricks, you know?”

Dean chuckled slightly to himself for being caught out trying to fool the angel, before he turned serious again.

“Listen, someone we know well is in trouble, her son is missing, and we've tried all the usual ways to find him. I’m grasping straws here, and you know I wouldn’t call you if I didn’t think there was no other way to find something.”

“Alright, where are you? I’m going to come by immediately.”

“No, no… that’s not… it’s not necessary. You know I don’t want you to come flying every time I call on you.”

“Dean…”

“No, look, we’re in Indiana, it’s like a three-hours-something drive. We’ll come over, alright? If we leave now we should be there just after nightfall.”

He heard the angel sigh on the other end of the line, but agree to his terms.

“Don’t forget to bring something of his, some personal affect, a most recent one if possible.”

Dean said good-bye and ended the call just as Sam stepped through the door.

“Are we going?”

“Yes, we’re driving down immediately, get your stuff together.”

Sam nodded and returned into the house to pack.

 

 

 Part Two

 

 

Comments

[angeblond.livejournal.com]

Ouch, so much mystery !

I hope that angel of their will ascend again. I like him the poor lad.

[mangacat201.livejournal.com]

*lol* yes, there's more mystery to come ehehehe, but I'm afraid our dear Cas is quite happy in a down-to-earth kinda way. (no angel wars in this one) But I'm very excited that you apparently decided to start reading this so... have FUN!
Cat