The Footman

0.1

po·li·o·my·e·li·tis

/ˌpōlēōˌmīəˈlīdəs/

an infectious viral disease that affects the central nervous system and can cause temporary or permanent paralysis.

Dean Winchester frowned. His arm was crooked against the ledge of the window in the compartment and his eyes barely seeing the landscape. His green eyes skimmed it only barely. The land was misty and pale, winter turning to spring. Dean's mind was wintry and misty, too, his thoughts jumbled together.

Dean clenched his jaw tightly and clasped both his hands around the small book he held in his hand, The Secret Garden. He turned his gaze away to the furnished seats in his room. The train was fast. Only 2 years before had the electric cable car ran. He ran his tongue along his teeth and clenched his fist. Yes, the damned train was fast but not fast enough! Kansas seemed so far away on the barren world.

He looked down at his dark suit and untied his tie. He hated them, the ties. The were like nooses around your neck, squeezes always to show that life is just a bunk away. Dean's father had taught him how to tie them when he was a boy. Before the sickness.

"Now Dean," John slid the dark fabric under the young boy's collar. "It's quiet simple, truly." With the older man's nimble fingers he flipped and knotted the tie. "You see, you cross the two like this, and know fold it over like that, and again. Ah see! There we've got it. Now you try, son." John untied it swiftly and handed it to Dean.

Dean took it with large mossy eyes and copied what his father had done. "Brilliant Dean! You did it on your first try!" Is what Dean wanted to hear, but no he did not. What he did hear was: "You folded wrong this way. Dean that what a simple mistake. Any tighter to that knot you've created and we'd have to cut you out of it."

John was kind and meant the best for his boys but they didn't see it. A dark cloud fogged over him and it was hard for him to show love. When Dean was a boy and Sam - his younger brother - was just a babe their sweet mother, Mary, had died, John closed up. He raised his boys but mostly focused on his work. John worked for the Government as a Kansas State Agent. He wasn't home often but when he was he raised his boys to be respectable men. They were taught how to shoot a tin can from far away, how to wear a suit, how to speak fluently in small talk. He wanted his boys in politics, government workers. The winchester Family had been government officials and workers for years, John didn't what it to end after Mary did. So when Dean went to college to study Botany John was very displeased. All the elder brother ever wanted was for his father to be proud of him. So Dean ditched university after 2 years and joined the military. He'd been fighting for 3 years but they pulled him out of the Border War for his father. His good for nothing father. His drunk father. His dying father. And Dean was going to stay as long as it took for his dad to get better, because he had to.