sdatislife
in
damned
Night 48: M21-30 Hallway
Shinji was worried. He'd been waiting for a while - Kaworu still hadn't arrived. He didn't know why and as always his insecurities had begun to flare up. Maybe he'd changed his mind. Maybe he didn't really want to see Shinji. Maybe he'd simply been hallucinating the whole thing. Shinji glanced down the darkened hallway, flashlight dangling from his
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Ruby paused when Sam did, eyes flicking up and taking in his obvious discomfort. She didn’t say anything, just waited for it to pass. Sam wasn’t expecting any comforting from her (she would have questioned his sanity if he had, since she’d never exactly been caring and matronly before), and calling attention to it wasn’t going to do anything either. She just took the notebook and looked it over. His writing was scrawled all over the pages, a collection of disjointed notes and people spoken to. More interesting than the stuff about zombies was the newspaper itself. “No date,” she said out loud, surprised. What kind of newspaper didn’t put a date on their stuff? Even the ugliest hand-printed newsletter from the lowliest little trailer park in Nowheresville, USA included a full date in its masthead, not just a random day of the week. “There’s no way this is actually legit. If it were, there’d be a date.” It was just as simple as that.
“Do you think it could have been a plant? The place sticks fake newspapers in town to throw people off on where-and when-we could actually be? Seems awfully…elaborate, though.” But this was Landel’s, she had to remind herself, not anywhere that actually played by the rules, and the good doctor himself was currently rambling on about a war and a project of some sort. They were all about the elaborate, illogical solutions.
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"That's pretty much what I've spent the past ten days or something trying to decide," Sam replied. "Half the time, it feels like everything's just fake, you know? I mean, it'd explain everything, I just, I don't know if it's the right answer. It's almost too neat."
He'd bounced back and forth with this issue on and off constantly, including earlier today, and he'd come up with no solid leads, not even close. He'd told Dean he wanted to look into it, figure this out, but Dean had asked him how, and yeah, he didn't know. Somehow was starting to feel less and less like a good response.
Besides, if the dates were false, and the town was false, and the institute, where did it even stop? At the events that occurred within it or at the patients? What about the ones like Peter's brother who'd gone and come back and gone again? Sam had managed to turn off that part of his brain that kept nagging that Dean wasn't really here (and Christ, in that case, who knew if Ruby was real at that?) because he didn't think he could deal with the uncertainty of Dean's actual existence, but the question reared up from time to time.
And honestly, he was surprised no one had truly brought this up. Not to the full extent that it needed to be explored, that was, not even back before the nurses had started cracking down on that board everyone used as a public forum.
Then again, he was the only one here with a brother who had an expiration date. His focus was probably different from the others here.
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At any rate, Sam did have point. It was tempting to think that they were just stuck in the Matrix and that all of this was fake. It made sense. They were basically powerless here, both physically and psychologically. Their days were regimented, and so, to an extent, were their nights. Still, Sam was right. It was too neat. It made entirely too much sense for it to actually be true.
The demon laughed. "Whatever it is, it's not like we have Lawrence Fishburne here to help us out. So don't go all existential on me, okay? We'll figure it out." She got up, sat on the edge of the bed. Sam was pretty easy to read sometimes, and he was going into broody mode. He had a one-track mind, and that track usually pointed towards his brother. Especially here, not knowing that Dean had broken the first seal and gotten busted out of Hell. Plus, there was the whole problem with Dean's deal. She honestly didn't know how to deal with that, or if she even should. Dean's sudden arrival had thrown the grand plan a little out of whack, and it was tempting to claim ignorance and let things run their course (again). She missed how it had been, when it was just the two of them. "We're all here. I'm here, you're here, Dean's here. And we're real, okay?"
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Still, Ruby was right. When in doubt, default to what was gonna keep you sane. Relatively speaking.
Sam shifted over a bit without thinking when she sat down. He had to admit, it was...easier to be talking about this with Ruby instead of Dean. There was less tiptoeing, less keeping himself in check in case he tipped Dean off. Even with Stanford lurking between them when he'd first gone on the road with Dean, things had never been this tense.
He let out a quiet huff of laughter. "I'm comforted, I promise." Besides, real or not, both options came with their own set of problems. A damn large set, in fact. He shook his head. "Anyway, forget it. If something's going to turn up, it's not gonna be tonight."
It was clear there wasn't a whole lot he could do. Not only in terms of at this moment, but for the next little while. Maybe that was the point. Maybe he needed to quit thinking about it so much and just see what came up over the next couple of days. He could afford a couple of days, couldn't he? It wasn't like if he dug extra hard, he'd find something within forty-eight hours. He'd gone over all the information he had a million times. Until something new came his way, there was nothing left to think on. He didn't like to admit it, part of him thinking that he had to have missed something, that he'd find it if he just looked a little harder, but no. He'd hit a dead end and he knew it.
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She leaned back, resting on her elbows, and gave Sam a long look. “How are you feeling, by the way? You still look like crap, but your color’s starting to come back.” He looked slightly less like he wanted to crawl into a ditch and die than he had when she’d first come in. That was improvement, at least. Mixing sedatives with Sam’s already weakened powers obviously hadn’t worked very well. Was it the specific mix of sedatives, or was it just this place? There was no way to know, really.
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With Dean back, it somehow made him more conscious of it all, too, and he didn't know how he felt about that.
"I'm fine. Or, better," he said. "I've had worse, just...not in awhile. Wouldn't say no to an aspirin, though."
And the thing was, he'd barely done anything. A single burst of power shouldn't have knocked him down this bad. Maybe during the very first couple of times he'd started, but otherwise-
It was getting annoying. There wasn't much occasion for him to use his abilities here if at all, he knew that, but it was the principle of the matter. They were his. He could do something with them and he didn't like the feeling that he was losing his hold. It wasn't as if he had a lot going for him in the first place when it came to the whole you-have-demon-blood deal.
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