Work Text:
When you have rescued a father from whatever terrible threat menaces him, then you feel, for a moment, that you are the father and he is not. For a moment. This is the only moment in your life you will feel this way.
A Manual for Sons, Donald Barthelme
He waited. Then came the sound. Then Dean saved his father.
He was six, maybe seven years old. Somewhere in a muddy forest in Colorado. John had told him to stay in the car, where the fingers of branches dragging across the roof echoed softly, and there, beneath those fingers, inside the trench of darkness, John, who was his father, had told him to wait with Sammy, who was asleep in the back seat. But then came the sound. And Dean got out of the car.
He held the shotgun out in front of him. He held it the way he'd seen John hold it so many times, as though it were something as ordinary as a baby bottle or a very small spoon. He aimed the barrel into the darkness. He followed the darkness. The line darkness cast through the forest, threading between the patches where the moonlight managed to brush the ferns. It was quiet, and then came the sound. And then Dean saved his father.
They got him good. So good that he couldn't tell what he was looking at. He only knew it was something no one should ever have to see. Because he couldn't understand what he was seeing, all he could make out were shadows that didn't look like shadows at all, solid as bodies, wrapped so tightly around his father that they looked like swaddling cloth. He knew his father was underneath them, not because he understood what he was seeing, but because the crown of John's black head kept jerking into view through the folds of the shadows, and because he was making little, sorrowful sounds, somewhere between groans and crying.
Dean fired into the air.
Only then did he realize he was about to save his father.
He thought he'd done well. The shadows slipped from his father's body and scattered in every direction, retreating beneath the ferns and bushes, into the forest's fingers. And when he knelt beside John, his father was unconscious, but he was breathing. He was wounded, and asleep. Not knowing what else to do, Dean crouched beside him and rested the shotgun across his knees. He watched his father's face, which was alive and covered in blood-stained sweat, turned toward the earth. The forest around them was quite and still like an animal in the few moments after you've shot it.
He thought he had been very brave while he was saving his father.
It was the only time in his life he would ever think that way.