whitmerule:

whitmerule:

WHY WOULD YOU SAY SUCH A THING TO ME

You do realise what this means, don’t you?

—

The cholera had broken out in its most fatal form, and people were dying like flies.

“Is it so very bad? Oh, is it?” Dean heard his mother say.

“Awfully,” the young man answered in a trembling voice. “Awfully, Mrs. Winchester. You ought to have gone to the hills two weeks ago.”

The Mem Sahib wrung her hands.

“Oh, I know I ought!” she cried. “I only stayed to go to that silly dinner party. What a fool I was!”

At that very moment such a loud sound of wailing broke out from the servants’ quarters that Dean clutched his sleeping brother to him, and his mother stood shivering from head to foot. The wailing grew wilder and wilder.

“What is it? What is it?” Mrs. Winchester gasped.

“Some one has died,” answered the boy officer. “You did not say it had broken out among your servants.”

“I did not know!” the Mem Sahib cried. “Come with me! Come with me!” and she turned and ran into the house.

—

And of course she dies; and John Winchester is overtaken by a obsession for defeating the disease (or possibly with a paranoid conviction that somebody had deliberately introduced it into their house to kill his wife), and goes chasing it across India. It does not last long: Dean is left with his Ayah, and John takes Sam with him – and it is not long before there is whispering and shaking of heads, and Dean understands only vaguely that his father has died, and he is to be sent to England.

“Where is my brother?” he asks, then he screams it, and kicks and stamps; but nobody knows where Sam is, or they will not tell him.

And so then we have Dean, who (in an isolated colonial community surrounded only by Indian servants) has never had any purpose in life but to be brought out and displayed as a clever young boy then sent back to the nursery or school room, and to look after his little brother, being packed onto a ship with a lot of other children who all seem to speak a language he does not understand; and they tease him, and he becomes sullen and alone, and learns to growl and snap back, and use his fists. And then he is even more alone, in a grand old manor in Yorkshire with nobody there but the servants; and on his bad days he turns the loneliness into sulkiness, and on the good ones he explores every nook and cranny of this strange new world, house and gardens and moors.

But the moment when the robin lands on the branch of a tree behind the mysterious wall and seems to sing its song to Dean—when it lands by the boot of the taciturn old gardener Joshua, and cocks its head, and looks at Dean as if it knows him and understands him—when it perches on the ring of an old key in the upturned soil—it is the first time since he lost Sam that Dean feels like he has a friend, like somebody trusts him.

And when Dean plucks up his courage to say, “Might I—might I have a bit of earth?”

Well, that’s the first time that Dean can remember having asked for anything for himself in his life.

—

And then, and then…

Keep reading

I won’t be doing the whole book, but there is this little speculation about how the whole Colin thing works (and, of course, where Sam is). And I may do a few snippets tonight covering that, if I have time. 🙂