The 24th pair: Chapter 6

[adrenalineshots]

CHAPTER 6


When Dean opened his eyes next, he knew he was no longer in that dark and blood-filled basement. For one, the smell was too clean and antiseptic; and there was so much light in this new place that it burned Dean’s eyes and shot daggers of pain into his brain.

He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Dean was sure that he was dead, once again trapped inside his own coffin.

Trying to use hands that felt like they were encased in cement, Dean rolled over the flat surface where he lay, and immediately regretted it. The motion seemed to set off a cacophony of high-pitched noises, firing left and right and bouncing off the walls like rubber balls. His head felt like it was going to crack under the onslaught of sound.

His back was on fire, the same electric jolts that he had felt before, only this time they were twice as painful, thrice as long. Dean pulled away from the world around him like a hurt animal, curling on himself. The movement pulled at something in his back and the pain only grew worse.

The place where he was laying was too small for such aerobics; there was a brief feeling of weightlessness followed by an unforgiving landing on the floor. A sudden, intense flash of pain smashed through his lower body; it felt, at the same time, like a kick to his lower back and groin. It knocked the wind from his lungs and Dean wiggled on the hard floor with a pained wheeze; even the strength to scream had abandoned him.

The floor was cold as ice, and yet, it burned through Dean’s sensitive skin like fire. He wanted to roll away, to push away, but none of his limbs seemed to be in the mood to obey him.

Dean faintly registered his surroundings. The smell of blood and urine in the air; the discarded medical equipment that had joined him on the floor; the bodies lying around.

They were all strangers, unfamiliar faces that Dean couldn’t remember seeing in life. And they were all dead, trashed dolls abandoned on the floor.

Dean had no idea what had happened in that place. The only thing he could remember was that Ben was gone and that someone was coming for him; that someone wanted Dean dead as well. If he wanted to help Ben, if he wanted to set the boy free, Dean needed to escape the shadow that was pursuing him and find his son.

≪◇≫ 
Sam peered down the second corridor, hoping that, like the rest of the house, there was only one guard per floor. If Marcus had doubled security in the meantime and a second guard had seen his partner go down… all would be lost.

The corridor was blissfully empty.

Not bothering to go around the long way, through the stairs, Sam jumped the railing and let himself hang from the wooden structure. The room where he had heard Dean was directly below him; all Sam needed to do was swing and land on the floor directly beneath.

His sneakers landed with a soft thud and Sam immediately dropped to a crouch. He stilled and listened, waiting for any signs of a raised alarm; the only thing Sam could hear was the faint sound of heavy footfalls, a cadence of steps that screamed of simultaneous boredom and alertness, drawing nearer. One of the guards, making his rounds on the floor beneath Sam.

Downstairs, he imagined that Bobby was already talking to Marcus and that Balthazar was waiting for his cue.

Looking at the empty stairs at the end of the corridor, Sam couldn’t help but remember what had happened there before. In the few quiet times he’d had since, Sam had gone over and over his actions, thinking of how he could have stopped Brenda from being killed. Then and now, he’d always come to the same conclusion; he had kidnapped an innocent person and she had died.

Brenda’s death was, sadly, only one more in the list of dark marks on Sam’s soul. He wondered if there were any clean spots remaining.

Distracted by his guilt, Sam almost tripped over the body lying on the floor. Startled, Sam had his gun raised and aimed at the man’s neck even as his eyes registered the fact that it was one of Marcus’ guards and that he was already out. Dropping to his knee, Sam pressed two fingers to the man’s neck. Dead.

“What t’hell-“

A few feet away, in the doorway of that Sam knew to lead into Dean’s room, he saw yet another arm, limp against the floor.

“Dean…” Sam breathed in a panicked whisper. On his feet, he abandoned all thoughts of stealth, and raced headlong in to the room, his heart hammering against his chest in a desperate staccato that seemed to spell in Morse code ‘Dean’s in trouble’.

“Oh…Jesus,” Sam gagged and quickly buried his mouth and nose in the crook of his elbow as soon as he stepped inside. The smell of urine assaulted his senses; so strong it made his eyes water and he fought the urge to throw up.

Eyes scanning the room, his shoulders slumped; the room was empty. Not that it was exactly empty; there were bodies everywhere, but none of them was Dean.

Two men in lab coats, one sprawled over a table, and the other sitting against one of the machines, lay unconscious or dead; Sam had no way to tell which.

The room itself was the pure image of chaos, like a small nuke had exploded in there. The only things left in place were those either bolted to the floor or the walls. Papers lay scattered all over the floor, broken glass glinting from one of the corners, overturned chairs and equipment piled in heaps of rubble. Bottles of expensive Champagne, looking oddly out of place in that room, were scattered randomly, most of them empty, like a big party had been interrupted just minutes before. Closer to the metallic table that took center stage, Sam could see the torn ending of two IV lines and a urine bag, catheter discarded and open, leaking all over the floor.

That would account for the smell.

Stepping over the guard’s body at the door, Sam did a quick check of the men in white coats. They were dead, tall glasses discarded by their hands. Sam picked one up and sniffed it. It smelled of nothing but Champagne, but Sam doubted that was all that was in those bottles. The guard by the door, a balding man with the skinniest of faces, was beginning to stir.

The pulled off IVs, the medical equipment smashed in anger…none of that added up with the poisoned medical staff and the dead guard outside. If Sam didn’t know better, it seemed like someone was cleaning the house up, erasing all traces of what had happened there. God... what if Dean...

No. Dean was alive, Sam was sure of it. The target for the poisoned bottles seemed to be the scientists; and yet someone had killed that guard outside.

Sam only needed to find his brother in the -he looked at his watch again- next five minutes; in the middle of a house the size of two football fields and crawling with security people who would shoot him on sight and sneak him out past all the remaining guards.

Sam felt like smacking his head against the wall in frustration. Instead, he decided to smack the face of the guard, the one clutching his arm to his side, leaning against the door frame, desperately looking for his gun. The man’s head, like a soft ball, banged against the machine and dropped to his chest. “Where is he?” Sam spat through clenched teeth.

The man looked up, bleary-eyed, still struggling to decide what was up and down, eyes struggling to focus on his newest attacker.

Sam shook him for good measure. The motion made the man look even greener around the gills but Sam didn’t really care about that. This was a person who had stood by and done nothing while Dean was held prisoner for over a week, doing to him things that Sam could not and would not think about just yet… the well being of this ‘person’, -and Sam using the term loosely even in his mind- was the least of Sam’s concerns.

“Here the hell is my brother?” Sam insisted, giving the man another shake.

The man coughed, decorating Sam’s shirt with speckles of blood. His teeth were staining red when he pulled his lips back, drawing a pained breath. “Who?... I don… I don’t kno-“

“WHERE IS HE?” Sam yelled, resisting the urge to add more bruises to the man’s already broken face.

The man tried to curl up on himself, but Sam’s grip, hands’ full of his black shirt, didn’t allow him much room to wiggle.

“I… I… I didn’t see… I swear,” the man stuttered, looking around as if fearing that whomever had beaten him unconscious would come back to finish the job. “He a-attacked me… he wanted to know where the kid was... he’s fucking insane!”

Sam had to reign in his desire to end that man’s misery right there and then. Maybe he was talking about someone else; maybe Sam was wrong and it hadn’t been Dean who had done this.
Because, surely, this man couldn’t be calling his brother insane for beating the crap out of his captors after a week of being kept in that room, like some animal for study.

“Where did he go?”

Sam realized he was talking to himself. The man had slipped back into unconsciousness in between one rattle and the next.

Discarding the guard on the dirty floor like the piece of human trash that he was, Sam looked around, searching for someone else to answer his questions.

Sam looked at his watch again; he needed to hurry or they would miss their opening.

There was no way of knowing for how long Bobby and Balthazar could keep Marcus entertained and the guards’ attention on them rather than inside the house.

But this was one gargantuan house and Sam couldn’t even venture a guess as to where Dean might’ve gone after leaving that room. Logic told him that Dean would have tried to make a run for the door, that escape would have been his first thought.

But the scientist had mentioned a kid. Dean was looking for some kid and Sam knew that, no matter how bad the shape Dean was in, he would chose his own safety over leaving behind any kid in need of rescue.

The identity of the kid was a mystery in itself; as far as Sam was aware, the only kid in Dean’s life at the moment was Ben. But Dean had left Lisa and Ben behind; their memories wiped clean, both of them severed from his life in the most painful of ways. Had Marcus grabbed Ben as well as Dean, without them realizing it? Or was this some other poor child that this guy had abducted?

The monitors on one corner of the room that had been left somewhat unscathed called to Sam’s attention. If the men working there had been collecting some form of data on his brother - a thought that gave Sam shivers- maybe Sam could find in there at least a direction to start his search.

Sam pushed a dead scientist from the swiveling chair where he’d died in and sat himself. The three flat screen monitors were lined side by side, all three running the same variations of a forest-themed screensaver. Quickly pressing a random key on each of the digital keyboards that seemed to be a part of the table itself, Sam looked at the revealed images with a puzzled look.

Leaning in, he stared hard at the data, struggling to make any sense of the meaning behind the first two monitors. Sam could vaguely assume that the scribbles running top to bottom of the screen were some kind of programming code, but even that was a bit too much of knowledge acquired through watching movies like the ‘The Matrix’ rather than actual understanding. The last screen, however, was thankfully very simple to get.

It was a freeze frame image, a video stopped at random, showing a dark room. At first, Sam thought that it some kind of surveillance tape, a hidden camera tapping what happened inside that room. With a sick feeling growing inside his stomach, knowing for certain that he would not like what that recording would show him, Sam rewound and hit play. He quickly realized that what he was seeing was much more horrible than anything he could’ve imagined.

Sam couldn’t recognize the place, and the colors were off, like an over-exposed film, but he was sure that it wasn’t that room. In the almost complete darkness, the floor and the walls glinted, like wet paint, and there were broken pieces of statues and scattered folders everywhere.

The shooting angles were weird, like someone was holding the camera only inches away from the floor; it was clearly no surveillance camera that Sam had ever seen.

There was a voice speaking in the background. Sam knew it was his brother’s voice, even if the broken tone was one that he had seldom heard coming from Dean’s mouth. The ‘camera’ rotated randomly, like someone taking in his surroundings and with a heaviness setting in his stomach, Sam realized that the ‘camera’ was actually Dean’s perspective. Whatever this was, he was seeing it through Dean’s eyes.

Sam’s brain was filled with so much information that he couldn’t even begin to process what he was seeing. He gasped out loud, unable to help himself.

The glinting on the floor and walls was blood. It coated everything in red, like a slaughterhouse in a Tarantino movie.

There were bodies on the floor, or at least, parts of them. Sam couldn’t be sure, but one of the dead bodies looked like a teacher he and Dean had had in high school and the other looked like a woman who used to look after them when they were staying at Pastor Jim’s.

The worst was the broken body lying on Dean’s lap. Sam realized with a pang that he was seeing Ben. Only, it wasn’t Ben as he remembered seeing the kid the last time, baby fat still decorating his cheeks. That was an older Ben, maybe three or four years older.

From the amount of guts hanging on the outside rather than inside the kid, it was easy to see that that Ben was dead.

Sam looked around the room once again. A veil had been pulled from his eyes and he could now guess the purpose of some of those machines. Whatever the hell Marcus had been trying to pull out of Dean’s mind, he had been using something similar to the Djinn’s poison, creating a sort of virtual reality where Dean was stuck in a bloody room and where...

A bright light flooded the frame on the still running computer screen, making Sam close his eyes for a second. Even behind his closed lids he could see the mangled body of the kid Dean saw as a son. Wherever Dean had run to, Sam feared for his brother’s state of mind.

A single one word uttered on the screen made Sam look at it again. ‘Dean’ was spoken in that simultaneously patient and inpatient tone that Castiel used with them so many times.

The things that the Castiel in that dream-reality was saying to his brother were breaking Sam’s heart in this one.

“You failed, Dean… in everything that you’ve set yourself to do. You failed at stopping Lucifer, you failed at saving Sam… you failed as a son, as a brother, as a husband and as a father.”

What scared Sam the most was not the fact that Castiel was saying that to Dean in some made up world were everything seemed set to push his brother down; no, what scared Sam the most was the fact that Dean believed those words with all of his heart. Because, deep down, Sam knew that was exactly as Dean saw himself.

Sam forced himself to watch the tape until it reached the same freeze frame that he had initially discovered. The end was frizzed out, like someone had cut the recording too suddenly and choppy, distorted voices sounding in the background.

Running a hand through his messy hair, Sam looked around, begging the chaos to give him a clue. He got up, walking over cooling corpses until he reached the door. Outside, everything was still as empty and silent as before. Silent as a tomb, he realized with a chill. His eyes landed on a set of narrow stairs at the end of the corridor, disappearing up the tower.

There had been a set of stairs in the dream-reality as well; Sam remembered seeing those, leading up, away from that bloody room. For some reason that Sam couldn’t understand, the Dean in that world had made no effort to climb those stairs, just laying there, looking longingly at them.

Dean had been pushed from that make-believe world and thrown into to reality so suddenly that Sam wasn’t sure how aware he would’ve been of the change. In the dream world, he was demanding that Castiel gave Ben back to him. In here, now, Sam was almost certain that Dean was still looking for Ben.

Sam looked at the narrow stairway. He knew exactly where he would find his brother.

≪◇≫ 
It didn’t register on Dean’s brain that he was running up the stairs until he had to stop to catch his breath.

Startled by the realization, Dean looked down. His legs... his legs were working.

The realization brought such a tidal wave of emotion that it robbed Dean of all his strength and sent him almost crashing down the steps. With a hand supporting most of his weight against the wall, Dean reached out and tentatively touched his pajamas clad leg. Instead of rubber, he could feel strong muscle, tempered and healthy. It clenched and stretched at his command, following the movements of Dean’s foot without a moment’s hesitation.

He took a deep breath, feeling the air shaking inside his chest and shivering as it passed his throat. This was a dream; it could only be a dream. Or one of those vivid hallucinations that had been plaguing his life more and more of late.

The thing that was after him was trying to lure Dean into a sense of happiness, of security so that it could catch him unaware and rob him of his chance to save Ben.

Dean forced himself to give no importance to the fact that, after four years trapped in a wheelchair, he could finally use his legs again.

Trusting that this was all part of the same illusion, Dean climbed the rest of the steps, giving no thought to the fact that his muscles should be atrophied and not able to sustain his weight, much less take the effort of running up a set of stairs.

Dean stopped only when he reached the top, dizzy from the curling shape of the steps. He found himself standing outside, not in the same archive room where he and the others had arrived, but on a balcony facing a group of trees and a green field that ran as far as the eye could see. It looked like a country house, big as no one built them anymore, with two towers on each end of the structure. The one he’d just came out of glinted blue against the clear sky.

Grabbing on to the ledge, Dean pulled in a deep breath; it felt like it was the first time his lungs worked in a very long time. There was a faint promise of rain in the air and Dean felt as light and alive as he hadn’t in far too long. As far as hallucinations went, this one was surpassing itself.

The gust of fresh air caressed his skin and prickled his hair. Confused, Dean ran a hand over his head and down across his jaw. His hair had been short just minutes ago and he was pretty sure that he had shaved that morning. He had no idea from where the slightly shaggy hair and the week long beard had suddenly come from.

Relegating those findings as of lesser importance, Dean looked around. On the opposite side of the green field, there was a brown and grey chasm.

Trying to situate himself, Dean walked the length of the roof and leaned over the short balcony on the other side, taking in the view. The whirling feeling of how high he stood and what he saw down there almost sent him over the edge.

There were bodies down there. Pieces of bodies, at least.

It was impossible to know how many or even if they used to be men or women. Dean could only see grey rocks stained in red and the birds, feeding.

Bile rose in his throat and Dean turned to the side, letting mostly spit and a white goo out. What was that place?

It was clear that he wasn’t at the Vatican. From what Dean remembered from pictures, the small country inside the city of Rome was neither at the edge of a cliff, nor was it known for its pits of dead people.

Dean could think of only one place that fit that bill. He remembered all too well the holes of flesh and blood down there, in the Pit. It was the place where he disposed of the ‘leftovers’ once he was done torturing each soul on the rack; it was the place where he always ‘woke up’ after each session with Alastair.

Hell.

Maybe he had truly died and had been thrown back into Hell. Maybe that was what that thing wearing Sam’s face had come to do; drag him back to join his brother. Maybe it really was Sam...

“Dean!”

Dean spun around, startled. The voice was so familiar, so longed for, so sorely missed. But Dean would not let that fool him. He had finally caught up to him.

The smile in Sam’s face was jarring, like it was really Dean’s brother standing there in the sun, happy to see him.

Dean didn’t gave him a chance to open his mouth and defile Sam’s memory even further by using his voice.

He simply attacked.

≪◇≫ 
Sam could hardly believe his luck when he reached the top of the stairs and found himself staring at his brother. “Dean!”

The man who looked back and stared at Sam was not a version of Dean that Sam remembered ever seeing. Physically, it was still his brother, even if a little ragged around the edges and with hair longer than Sam had ever seen on Dean’s usually cropped style. But the look in his eyes...

After Dean’s return from Hell, Sam had caught glimpses of that look on occasion and it had always scared the crap out of him. The dozens of mornings when he had woken to Dean’s bitten gasps, the nights he would passed out from too much drinking and when lucidity and dreamland mingled in the blink of an eye, Sam had seen the same emotions in Dean’s eyes.

Lost.

Feral.

Cornered.

It was that experience that had Sam bracing his feet. He patted the air in front of him, trying to stop the inevitable. “Wait… Dean.”

It did him no good; Dean lunged at him.

“Dean! Stop!” Sam shouted as Dean swung. “It’s me!” he finished, ducking beneath a well-aimed blow.

It was useless.

There was a gun in Dean’s hand, probably taken from one of the guards he’d attacked, but Dean seemed to have forgotten what a gun was for, something that Sam was very grateful for.
Dean’s fighting moves were as familiar to Sam as his own. A lifetime of sparring against each other made them better fighters than most, but it also meant that they could predict each other’s move in an almost precognitive way.

But this wasn’t Dean fighting as he had his whole life. This was a trapped animal snarling and swinging, lashing out, hands curled into claws, swiping the air and occasionally skin. Mouth drawn up into an aggressive sneer, Dean moved fast and hard, relentless in his pursuit. It was clear, his aim was to maim and kill and nothing less.

“Dean, come on,” Sam persisted, feeling the bruises pile up every time Dean managed to land another blow. He grabbed on to Dean’s forearms and pinned him against the doorway, forcing the struggling man to look him in the eyes. The gun fell to the floor with a clatter of metal, and Sam kicked it away. “Dean, it’s me. It’s Sam.”

Dean’s blood shot eyes focused on him for the first time and Sam sighed in relief, thinking that whatever crazy state of mind had possessed his brother, Dean would surely regain his senses once he saw Sam.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Fingers curled towards his face as Dean tried to scratch out Sam’s eyes. “Sam is dead, Sam’s in Hell... stop using his face!” he growled and shoved, knocking Sam backward. “You won’t stop me... I won’t let you stop me!”

Sam stumbled back, blinking his eyes in surprise. Dean was still trapped inside the nightmare, completely oblivious to the reality around him. Sam hadn’t managed to watch that far back, but it seemed like Marcus had managed to convince Dean that Sam had never returned from the Pit and now that he was awake, Sam could only imagine how freaked out his brother was at seeing him there, alive and kicking.

“It was a all dream, Dean,” Sam tried to explain. Maybe pure logic and reason would get through. “I’m alive; Ben is alive... none of it was real.”

He could see that Dean was growing tired already. One week strapped to a bed had taken its toll on Dean’s body and Sam could only hope that his strength ran out before one of them got hurt.

“Think, Dean... we’ve been hunting for almost a year since I got back from Hell. You know that I can’t be dead.”

Dean paused at that, his hands grabbing at his head instead of Sam’s neck, where he was trying to take a hold. “You’re lying... I was with Lisa and Ben... I wasn’t hunting anymore.”

Sam nodded. “That’s right... and then I came to get you and we started hunting again,” Sam pushed on, taking advantage of Dean’s moment of lucidity. “Remember the hunt where we-“

Sam stopped himself, realizing that the hunt he was remembering had happened before he went to Hell. He had no memory of what he and Dean had done together since they’d begun working together again. How could he help Dean remember if he couldn’t recall any of it himself? “Remember us fighting those dragons with the broken sword?” Sam finished, hopefully. It was the first hunt he could remember after waking up in Bobby’s panic room, the one where he had started atoning for all the hurt he had caused by saving Dean’s life.

Dean frowned at the question. Brow scrunched, thinking hard, clearly searching whatever fragmented memories he still had. “Dragons don’t exist...” he said, at last and brought his knee up into Sam’s stomach. “Try harder.”

Sam had no other choice but throw a punch, just to push Dean away from him. Even though he tried to pull it, Dean’s reflexes were slower than usual and Sam’s fist hit him squarely on the jaw. Blood flew from where Dean bit into his lip.

“Remember killing the Phoenix? The high noon gun fight in the Old West?” Sam tried again. His brother’s love for the Old West had to count for something.

Dean ran at him like a raging bull charging a red flag. The force of the hit stole Sam’s breath away and drove them both to the floor. “That was a dream... stop trying to poke my head, you son of a bitch!” Dean yelled, furiously, grasping desperately to what he perceived as reality.

Sam raised his arms, trying to protect his face as best he could. It was all he could do until he managed to roll them over and pin Dean to the floor under his weight. “Dean, you gotta listen to me... we don’t have time for this,” Sam pointed out. Any minute now the rest of the guards would wise up to the fact that Dean was missing and they would be royally screwed. “It was real, I AM real... they were keeping you in a dreamscape all this time. Like the Djinn did when he caught you!”

Dean fought against his hold like a wild cat and Sam was soon forced to let him go before his brother hurt himself with how much force he was putting against the restraining arms. Scrambling away, Dean wiped the sweat from his eyes and blinked at Sam.

He was exhausted, Sam could see that now. Chest heaving with each breath, skin glistening with sweat, blood dripping from his nose and mouth.

“I remember the Djinn,” Dean said. He seemed to be talking to himself rather than at Sam. “I remember... the yellow eyed demon working with them... I remember them attacking Lisa and Ben,” Dean went on, eyes scrunching shut, forcing himself to sort through his memories. “You weren’t there... you weren’t there. I was all alone and I couldn’t protect them.”

Sam moved closer, hoping that the fight had finally drained Dean. He barely had time to dodge a kick aimed at his groin, unable to stop it from connecting with his knee. Joint ringing in pain, Sam watched as Dean climb back up, using the wall for support, charging again even before he was completely vertical.

“Dean, please, snap out of it!”

Sam raised his hand to stop the blow, but the flying fist still hit him right in the ear. Head ringing and his balance shot to hell, Sam veered closer to the edge of the balcony.

“I remember being attacked in an alley and bitten while you watched,” Dean said throwing another wild punch. “I remember being afraid and alone, in a place filled with bright-lit creatures and knowing that you wouldn’t come for me... why do I remember these things if you are really Sam? My brother would have my back!”

Sam had no answer for that. If he were to be honest with himself, he couldn’t even tell if those were things that had happened while Dean was inside Marcus’ dream or real events that had happened while Sam had no soul. Sam prayed that it was the first rather than the latter.

Dean was pushing him towards the edge with each word of hatred that was coming from his mouth and Sam had no other choice but to attack instead of defend or he knew Dean would stop only when he’d pushed Sam over the edge.

It was like watching a car wreck in slow motion. Sam blocked Dean’s fist with his elbow, turned them around and threw a right hook that sent his brother stumbling backwards, straight into the Sam’s foot. There was a moment of panic in Dean’s eyes as their feet tangled and he realized that he was tipping over the balcony’s ledge.

Sam reached out with his hand, horror covering his face. His fingers barely brushed Dean’s skin before grasping empty air. Anguish rose in Sam’s throat and erupted in a pained “NO!”

This couldn’t be happening; Sam only wanted to subdue Dean, stop him for long enough to make him listen to reason. It seemed, like everyone other good deed that Sam had tried to do in his life, this one too would end bloody.

Heart hammering against his ribcage, Sam took a breath and reluctantly neared the edge of the roof; the last thing he wanted to do was look down at the mangled body of his brother, but he needed to be sure. He needed to see with his own eyes.

Wind blew his hair back as Sam leaned over, eyes blurry with tears he wasn’t aware of shedding making the whole landscape amorphous and undefined.

In a small rim of sharp rocks, Sam could see a body. Bodies, he emended in his head. More than he could count.

Bile rose inside his mouth as he recognized a couple of uniforms like the one Brenda had been wearing, the one Sam himself had put on before she’d been killed. There were more people, bodies too mangled for Sam to identify, his heart skipping beats until he realized that, whoever they were, they were wearing much more clothing that Dean had been. With a sick feeling, Sam realized that he was looking at what was left of Marcus’ staff.

Wrapped up in grief and blinding hope, Sam almost missed the bloody fingernails gripping the ledge of the wall. “Dean!” Sam yelled, relief swirling inside his chest and leaving him dizzy.

Dean looked up, the small gesture almost enough to dislodge his precarious hold. Sam leaned forward as far as he could go without joining his brother. Below, framing Dean’s grimacing face, all Sam could see was grey, like a thunderous sea made of sharp edges and unforgiving stone. “Take my hand!”

The stubborn look in Dean’s red face was the last thing that Sam expected right then, the last thing he wanted to see. It would be the last thing he would see of Dean if he didn’t grab a hold of Sam’s hand. “Dean, come on... please!”

“You’re not Sam,” Dean insisted, looking back down as if he was trying to gauge the distance of his fall. “Sam is dead... everyone’s dead.”

Blood froze inside Sam’s veins. Dean’s disheartened words... his broken tone of someone who had nothing left to lose... Dean was getting ready to let go!
“Don’t you dare do that, you fuck! Don’t you dare!” Sam let out in anger. Then, on a desperate attempt, Sam reached inside his picket and grabbed his cell phone. “Lisa’s alive... I can prove it to you. Just grab my hand and I’ll prove it to you!”

Dean looked up in doubt. Sam could see it in his eyes that he wanted to believe, that he was desperate to believe, but too afraid to try. Too hurt to hope.

With barely a glimpse at the display screen, Sam dialed Lisa’s number, praying that she hadn’t changed it. The ring tone seemed to last forever, even as Dean’s fingers began to slip, sweaty tips unable to hold his weight much longer.

“Hello? Who is this?”

Just a few words, and Dean’s eyes blinked clear, like he was only now waking up. He looked up at Sam as if he was seeing him now for the first time. “Lisa? That’s really Lisa?”

If it weren’t for the precarious position Dean was in, Sam would’ve smacked him upside the head. For the past several minutes Sam had been trying his best to get Dean back, desperately pulling at every string he could think of to snap his brother back to reality; all it had taken were a few words from a woman who no longer even remember Dean for him to come back.

It hurt like hell, even if Sam figured that he had it coming. After all, he had spent more than a year being a stranger to his own brother. however, all that mattered now was getting Dean to safety.

When Dean’s fingers tentatively reach up and wrap themselves around Sam’s wrist he almost yelped in triumph, settling for throwing his brother a bright smile. For the first time since Balthazar had dropped him on the roof of that house, Sam felt like Dean was back, safe with him.

It took less than a second for that feeling to melt away. The instant Dean’s right hand closed around Sam’s wrist, he noticed the crooked form of two of Dean’s fingers. Broken and out of shape.

Unprepared for the sharp pain that traveled down his arm when he put most of his weigh on those fingers, Dean yelped and let go.

Sam’s whole world shrink down to the feeling of Dean’ sweaty skin under his fingers, slipping away under Dean’s weight. Sam felt his feet sliding forward, dragged towards the cliff, gravity conspiring for him to join Dean in his fall. Sam panicked and over compensated.

Dean’ scream of pain was seconds behind the dry sound of his shoulder slipping out of its socket, even as Sam jerked him over the top of the ledge and into safety. He didn’t move from where Sam had dropped him, white-hot pain blurring the whole world.

Sam looked down in alarm, realizing what had happened. “I’m sorry... sorry, sorry,” he said over and over, reaching for Dean’s other shoulder and pulling his brother towards him.

Dean lay panting, leaning against Sam’s chest, his limp arm trapped between the two of them. Their hearts beat wildly, racing horses competing for first position.

“Now I know you’re real,” Dean gasped after awhile, pain lacing every breath, words puffing against Sam’s neck. “Only my gigantor lil’brother could ev... ever break my arm trying to rescue me.”

Sam laughed, carefully hugging his brother closer. “If I’d known that,” he said, breathing in the sweat and sour smell of Dean being alive and well. “I would’ve done it sooner.”

Dean rested his forehead on Sam’s shoulder. Sam knew he had to be exhausted and in pain, but he couldn’t let him rest. Not yet. “Come on, we need to get out of here,” he said, taking a quick peek at his watch. They were already running late.

≪◇≫ 
Bobby wasn’t where he was supposed to be.

Sam wasn’t saying as much, but Dean could tell from the deep frown on his face that something was not right.

His brother’s expressions, at least, Dean could still read right. Everything else around him was strange and unfamiliar and had it not been for the pain in his shoulder, Dean would have pinched himself to make sure that he wasn’t, in fact, still dreaming.

Bobby, like Sam, like Lisa, like everyone in his life, was supposed to be dead. Some part of Dean didn’t find it the least bit odd that the older man wasn’t at the rendezvous point like Sam seemed to believe he should have been.

Dean had trusted Sam on the rooftop, had believed that it was truly Lisa’s voice that he had heard on the cell phone. Had believed that everything Dean could remember from the past four years had been nothing but a dream. But what if Sam was wrong? What if this was the real dream?

A place where everyone was still alive, a place where Dean could walk, a place where there was still something they could do to stop the world from ending. It really seemed too good to be true.

“It’s real,” Sam’s voice broke into his thoughts, startling Dean. Was he being that obvious?

“Yes,” Sam replied. “You are also thinking out loud. Quit worrying, we’ll be out of here soon.”

Dean cradled his dislocated arm closer to his stomach and followed Sam, who kept looking at the watch. “What’s with the sudden time obsession, Doc Brown?” Dean asked.

Sam’s smile was genuine and shy. It convinced Dean that he truly was his brother more than all the words Sam has spoken so far.

“Waiting for our cue,” Sam said mysteriously. “Maybe he’s running late too...” he mumbled to himself.

Before Dean had a chance to ask what the hell Sam was talking about, there was a loud boom, quickly followed by shaking walls and the sound of all the windows breaking.

“Our cue?” Dean ventured, hoping that was true. He really didn’t feel up to fighting an enemy that could make the walls tremble like that.

“Our cue,” Sam smirked and grabbed Dean’s elbow. “Let’s go,” he said and pulled him along, as if Dean had somehow forgotten the complex meaning of the verb ‘go’.

Bobby was waiting for them as they descended the stairs to a pantry of some sort, heartfelt grin splashed across his graying beard as he counted heads and saw that there were two Winchesters coming down.

“Took you long enough,” Sam complained with a smile.

“I was delayed,” Bobby explained. “Our friend Balthazar has no decent concept of ‘in the vicinity’. How’re you holdin’ up, kid?” he asked, directing his attention from Sam to Dean.

“Happy to see you alive,” Dean let out.

“Yeah,” Bobby nodded, apparently not one bit surprised with the fact that Dean thought him dead. “I figured that rat Marcus would turn on me as soon as I handed over the Nail. He had the balls to order Balthazar to kill me as soon as his greasy paws were over the thing; our friendly angel took the chance to zap me out of there.”

Sam’ smile widen. “Finally, a plan that goes right.”

“Well,” Bobby voiced, giving Dean an appraising look. “We’re not out of here yet.”

Dean fought the urge to hide his swollen arm and naked chest. He knew that these people were his closest family, but a part of his brain kept on insisting that they should all be dead. A part of his brain saw them as nothing but strangers.

“Have you guys crossed paths with any guards yet? Or anyone at all?” Bobby went on, diverting his gaze to more important things.

“Can’t speak for the guards, but everyone else is dead,” Sam informed grimly. “I think Marcus arranged to kill them all. With Champagne.”

Bobby palled at the mention of Marcus’ ‘weapon’ of choice. “Son of bitch... I think he tried to do the same to me,” he said, wiping the sweat off his face. “Either way, something’s not smelling right... even with half of them dead, this is all a little bit too easy. Balthazar wouldn’t keep him busy this long...”

“Where’s Balthazar now?” Sam asked, making his way to the door, exchanging his tranq-gun for his Taurus. Any guard remaining at the gates would be alert to the presence of intruders and a tranquilizer wouldn’t do them much good against real bullets. “You good to use this?” he asked, handing Dean his Colt.

Dean nodded, tucking his broken arm in the hem of his pajamas pants to keep it from hanging loose. It wasn’t much in terms of support, and it made the elastic band of the things hang precariously low, but he felt a little more like himself with the gun in his hand. His aim with his left wasn’t as good as his right, but Dean could make do just fine with that hand.

“Hell if I know,” Bobby told him, grabbing his own gun. “Last I saw him, Marcus was convinced that he had himself a private little angel bitch... I imagine Balthazar will tire of that pretty fast. Besides, I got the impression that Balthazar was afraid that we might get company pretty soon. Feathery company.”

“Raphael? Castiel?” Sam ventured, trying to guess which of those angels would make Balthazar more nervous at this point.

“Does it really make a difference?” Bobby asked with a shrug. “I say we just get the hell out of Dodge and let Marcus deal with whichever pissed off angel drops by.”

“That name... Marcus,” Dean started, tasting the word on his lips. If he closed his eyes, he could see a brown haired guy with dead eyes, looming over him, raising a leg to kick him. Had that been real? “He’s the one doing all of this?”

Sam’s hand froze on the door handle. The look he and Bobby gave Dean made the older Winchester wonder if he had somehow grown a second head. At this point, it wouldn’t have surprised him.

“Yeah... you met him?”

Dean nodded slowly, unsure if that was the right answer. He remembered that Marcus guy questioning him about Castiel, wanting to know everything about angels. He remembered Ben asking the same questions, always pushing, always wanting to know more about them. For one second, the two of them merged inside his head and Dean shivered.

In his mind, Dean could see himself with Ben, watching late night horror movies, sitting side by side on the couch until they fell asleep, both tired of laughing so hard at how badly movie people got monsters.

He could see Ben, leaning over the edge of the Impala’s engine, learning how to tune in a cylinder until the car was purring.

He could feel Ben’s shoulder, pressed against his own, as they went over protection sigils and angel lore.

It was impossible to tell which of those memories were his and Ben’s and which were made up with a fake Ben, in fake life where all that mattered was that some unscrupulous man got want he wanted.

And Ben, the real Ben, wouldn’t know which memories were real either, because his memories of Dean were all gone. Dean had made sure of that. He could remember that much.

The feeling of pointless invasion and violation filled Dean with such sadness and anger that he wavered on his feet.

“Dean?” Sam stepped in closer to his brother, one hand coming up to touch Dean’s uninjured shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

Dean never got a chance to answer. Sunlight sneaked in through the open door, inviting them to freedom. Everything else could wait until they were out of there.

However, escape wasn’t meant to be as easy as they had hoped for. As soon as their eyes adjusted to the change in light, Bobby got his answer as to where all the guards had gone.

Surrounding them, spread over the front gate and sides of the house, were more than ten men, faces like stone and guns pointed at their heads, begging just one of them to make the wrong move to turn that walkway into a bloodbath.

Somewhere at a distance, there was an implosion of bright light. Like a star had fallen in the back yard. No one was paying enough attention to wonder what it might’ve been.

≪ ◇≫