Chapter Text
Dean had never been a fan of cleaning, but even he knew sometimes a deep clean was needed. Take this cursed attic for example. It wasn’t unusual for an attic to be covered in dust and cobwebs, but finding dead rats in the corners or behind boxes was just disgusting. Why was he up in the attic anyway? Oh, yeah. Daddy dearest had apparently put a ghost warding medallion in one of those boxes according to Bobby and considering the fact that they encountered ghosts quite a lot – it had been becoming quite the problem – it would come in handy. And while they were at it, they could see what other stuff he had hidden away in the attic.
The house had been one of their father’s old places that never got sold. All his stuff was still inside, the house musty and covered in dust from years of unuse. When they had found out about the place, the brothers had no intention of going there, until Bobby told them that father had a lot of hunter stuff stored in the place. Reluctantly, they had made their way over to look at everything and hopefully find something useful.
“Dean!”
He looked to the other side of the attic where Sam was sitting in front of some boxes with a paper in his hands.
“Yeah.”
“Come look at this.”
Dean rolled his eyes, but moved towards him anyway.
“Didn’t know you turned into a cliche all of a sudden, Sammy.”
Sam shot him a glare, but it held no heat. He just held the paper up to him. Getting no rebuttal, not even a ‘don’t call me Sammy’, made Dean take the situation seriously. With a slight frown he took the paper from Sam. He had expected a lot of things. A report on some kind of cold case. A deed to some unknown property. Maybe a talisman to fight off some kind of monster. Heck, even a treasure map would have been fine. But this… this took him completely off guard.
Daniel John Winchester. Born 1977 to John and Mary Winchester.
A birth certificate. A fucking birth certificate! They had a brother, an older brother. He was three years older than Dean, meaning he would be thirty. They had a thirty year old brother.
“What the fuck?”
“Here, apparently they had put him up for adoption when he was two.”
Sam handed him another paper, that said which orphanage Daniel had been taken to.
“I have an older brother?”
“Great, now I have two older brothers.”
“What do we do with this?”
“I don’t know. I mean, should we even go and disrupt this guy's life?”
“Right, he is probably some normal office worker in Seattle.”
“Why Seattle?”
“Why would I know why he would want to work in Seattle.”
“That’s not– haah. Maybe it would be best to leave this alone.”
Dean looked at Sam weirdly.
“Leave it alone? He is a Winchester! When have you ever known a Winchester that could stay out of trouble? What if he encounters something because of his heritage and he has no clue how to fight it?”
He could see Sam’s resolve wavering.
“Come on, Sammy! What if he comes across a werewolf, vampire, mermaid?”
“I don’t know, Dean.”
“Sam, think about it. We already have angels on our ass, who is to say they will leave Daniel alone? He would have no idea what the fuck is even happening!”
That seemed to do the trick. Sam looked back at the papers and dusted off his pants as he stood up.
“Sunflower Orphanage in Illinois, here we come.”
“That’s the spirit!”
— — —
Finding Daniel was a Herculean task. The trip to Illinois was long and boring. When they finally made it to the orphanage Daniel had been left at, they found that it had been closed down twenty years ago. So it took some time to even find someone that worked there. After that, much to their dismay, to find any information on Daniel, they had to search through decades of old paper files. They hadn’t even been organised by year!
“Found it!”
Sam stopped sifting through papers and walked up to Dean who was holding an old yellow folder.
“Daniel John Winchester, adopted by… tut tut tut… Madeline Fenton and Jack Fenton. Last known residence Amity Park, Illinois.”
At least it wasn’t that far away from the orphanage, it was still in the same state. While driving, Sam was looking up the Fenton’s on his laptop.
“Wow, Dean, these people are something else.”
“How so?”
“Madeline and Jack Fenton are supposed Ecto-scientists and ghost hunters.”
“Ecto- what now?”
“Ecto-scientists. They believe that ghosts are entities made out of something called ectoplasm. They make and sell weapons and defence systems to deal with ghosts.”
“Really now? How did we not know about them sooner?”
“Well, if I see this right, even in their own community of ghost hunters, they are seen as weird and frankly many say they are fake and making stuff up.”
“Great, fake ghost hunters. Anything else?”
“They also have a daughter, Jasmine Fenton, she is a psychiatrist at a youth institution in New York. Huh, went to Harvard and everything.”
“Anything on Daniel?”
“He was in an article at some point. Says he found out the purple-back gorilla at a zoo was a female instead of a male. That’s amazing, he basically saved the purple-back gorilla population. He-”
“Yeah, yeah very fascinating. Does it say anything about his whereabouts at present?”
“Um, no. He barely graduated high school, never went to college. Nothing else.”
“Damn.”
When they got to Amity Park the place looked normal at first glance, nothing out of the ordinary, and yet both Dean and Sam felt uncomfortable. Like an invisible weight was pressing on their shoulders. Everywhere they went, people would look at them as if it was strange for them to be there. Like they didn’t belong. It was very unsettling. They arrived at the address Sam had found on the website and really, it was a building you couldn’t miss. A giant sign with ‘Fenton works’ was on the front and it had an ufo-like structure balancing on the roof. How was that even legal?
Dean parked his impala in the driveway and they walked up to the door.