Who? Dean and John Winchester What? Walking, looking for Mary, angst. Where? Around Lawrence When? Backdated: the night before deperilization of Mary occurs Rating? Probably not ridiculous.
Dean wasn’t entirely sure what had gotten into his father. Not that he literally thought John had something in him, possessing him, not this time - but it just... it was weird, being asked something instead of ordered. Of course, it could have been the kind of question he wasn’t supposed to say no to, it was hard to tell in a text-based form, but it didn’t matter, because he’d kind of wanted the company, the familiar comfort of John’s presence. Especially right now, especially when they’d been decimated again, Mom taken from them and it was different but it was the same, too.
He’d let Sam take lead on this whole thing - partly because he knew better than to try to shove his way to the forefront (Sam needed to have something to focus on, something to organize and mull over for ages, something that wasn’t just she’s gone); partly it was because he didn’t know what else he could do. He felt helpless, small and fragile and young -
- and he kept catching whiffs of smoke (burnt flesh; that’s not just smoke, that’s-) or sulfur, and he wasn’t entirely sure if it was just his imagination or not, whether it was a clue or a diversion or something completely unrelated, but he hadn’t been able to find the source to any of it, but it made him uneasy, set him on edge, made him remember a time when everything smelled like smoke, tasted like smoke, and everything felt terrifying and wrong.
The air outside wasn’t much better, thick and dry and hot, and he coughed, choked on the imaginary burnt smell for a second before it disappeared and left him reeling, waiting for it to come back and hoping it was all in his head, and he looked around, eyes searching out his father, fingers pressing tight against the bricks of the building, something to anchor him and ground him and keep him from drifting away, getting lost where panic met memory and drowning there in the smoke.