ELEUTHEROMANIA - D. Winchester

01.

Dean Winchester was reading the newspaper in search of a new job. There was absolutely nothing to be found. Everything was almost a little too quiet, no curiosities calling for their attention. It was weird. His brother Sam, sitting on the opposite side of the table of the dinner they were seated in, was browsing through the internet with the same mission and frustration. He was awfully quiet, usually a sight that he hadn´t been successful either.

Annoyed, Dean closed the paper, putting it down on the table.

“Dude, not a decent lead in all of Nebraska. What do you get?” he sighed heavily.

He looked at his brother expectingly, whose eyes were still glued to the screen of his laptop.

“Well, I’ve been scanning Wyoming, Colorado, South Dakota. Here, a women in Iowa fell 10.000 feet from an airplane and survived.”

“Sounds more That’s incredible! than Twilight Zone.”, Dean pointed out, and his younger brother hummed in agreement.

He was just fishing for straws right now; Dean knew that. And it was frustrating. He needed something to do, something to hunt to distract him from the fact that their dad had sent them away after they had looked for him so long. But they could do a road trip if there wasn’t a hunt. Anything to get moving again.

“Hey, you know…”, he started, a particular young woman in mind.

“We could just keep heading east. New York? Upstate? You could stop by and see Sarah again, huh?” he said, eyeing his brother closely, a slight, knowing grin on his lips. “She’s a cool chick, man. Smoking.” He let out a whistle that made Sam huff. But his brother wasn’t done with teasing yet.

“You two seemed pretty friendly. What do you say?”

Sam chuckled, “Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe someday. But in the meantime we got a lot of work to do, Dean, and you know that.”

He looked up at Dean as he hinted at the yellow-eyed demon and their family issues, making Dean shake his head. Sam could really be a killjoy. Also, he was the only man Dean knew that was constantly cock blocking himself. He couldn’t understand that. Sam clearly had a thing for that chick. But Dean knew his brother and when it was best not to argue with him, and his lack of a sex life was his personal matter after all. It was not Dean’s problem if he wasn’t getting any.

“Yeah, you’re right,” he half-heartedly agreed with his younger brother.

“What else do you got?” Sam scrolled down a bit.

“Uh, Manning, Colorado. A local man by the name of Daniel Elkins was found mauled in his home.,” he read out loud an article he had come across. That name sounded familiar.

“Elkins? I know that name.”, Dean mumbled, more to himself than to his brother, trying desperately to piece together where he had heard about it.

“Doesn’t ring a bell.” Sam shrugged, continuing to type on his keyboard loudly while the bell was practically screaming at his brother, who just couldn´t place his finger on it. He knew there was something in the back of his head; he´d always been better with names than Sam. And the longer this particular one spooked through his mind, the closer he got to an answer.

“Sounds like the police don’t know what to think.”, he said, but oblivious to him, Dean wasn’t listening. His brain was still working on that mystery until it finally clicked, completely blending out his brother´s voice going on and on in the background.

Quickly, Dean reached for John’s diary, which he kept in the pocket of his beloved leather jacket.

Something told him it was the key to his search. Humming at his brother’s rambling while opening it, he flicked through the yellowed pages, taking in names and places with a frown on his face until he finally found what he had been looking for. A telephone number with the name Elkins written next to it.