An End Has a Start (Dean/Carmen, Sam/Jess R) 2/10
Title: An End Has a Start - Part 2
Rating: R
Pairings: Dean/Carmen, Sam/Jess
Word Count: 4,596 (50,221 overall)
Warnings: Wishverse fic, spoilers for S1 & S2 through 2x20
Summary: After Dean wakes up in the hospital with amnesia after an apparent attempted suicide, the answers he seeks just brings more questions before turning his world completely upside down.
Part 1
One Week Later
+
“Welcome home.” Carmen held the door to their apartment open, waiting patiently for Dean to make his way up the last of the stairs. Walking wasn’t the issue so much as holding himself up - staying bedridden for so long had made him weak, and Dean hadn’t really thought about how much the top half of his body weighed until he tried to hold it up with his recuperating abdomen.
“I never thought I’d be so glad to walk through this door.” Dean paused in the doorway then turned, leaning into Carmen and pressing her against the frame. “Let’s see if I remember where the bedroom is.” He kissed Carmen, taking in the feel of her, the smell of her, and the taste of her. Dean put a hand on her waist, tracing his fingers against her lower back as he directed her into the apartment, letting the door slam shut behind them. They made it to the sofa, Carmen kneeling on the cushions, lowering herself onto them. Dean stooped to follow but grunted in pain. He released Carmen, hand shooting to cover his stomach. “Ow.”
Carmen shook her head, managing to look amused yet concerned at the same time. “Yeah, I don’t think this is going to happen, tiger.”
“I feel fine as long as I don’t move,” Dean said, leering suggestively. “I’m willing to be flexible.”
“I think flexible is the last thing you can be right now.”
Dean fell into the couch, resting his arms along the top of the back, wondering if his prescription meds would react with beer or if the Do Not Take with Alcohol warning only applied to liquor. He looked at Carmen, who seemed to be trying to gauge his behavior, so he smiled at her cheekily. “Do we have any food?” Of all people Dean wanted to believe that he was perfectly fine, he had to have Carmen believe that he wasn’t clinically depressed.
“I can make dinner if you’re hungry. I’ll cater to your every whim tonight, but only tonight, so don’t get too used to lying around and getting served.” She stood in front of him, bending forward to place her hands on Dean’s thighs and kiss him. “I love you.”
“Mmm… You’re too good for me.”
“That hasn’t escaped my notice,” she laughed, straightening and making her way into the kitchen.
Dean kicked off his shoes, putting his feet up on the coffee table and turning on the television. He found a football game that was almost over where the Chiefs were, no big surprise, losing. A news item started scrolling across the screen about a young man found murdered in Lafayette, Indiana and that the police were looking for anyone with information. He heard a knock at the door that he knew Carmen wouldn’t be able to hear in the kitchen, so Dean forced himself to stand up, feeling like he had aged about forty years since he got home. The person on the other side of the door was the last person Dean had expected to see, although part of him should have suspected.
“Hey,” Sam said, standing there awkwardly, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his jeans. “I meant to come see you at the hospital, but I only just got in today.”
“Did you want to come inside?” Dean asked, thinking how Charlie’s challenge was easier said than done. He didn’t even know how to start forming a relationship with his brother - they were completely different people.
“I can’t stay too long, just wanted to see how you were doing.” Dean figured Sam was going to leave; he was still standing outside and Dean was inside, the screen door between them. He was about to give some excuse to get back inside when Sam ran a hand through his hair, breaking the silence. “Look… Um… If you want to, some point, you know… talk about what I can tell you, I’ll do my best, but even I’m not sure what happened, so I don’t know how helpful I can be.”
“Sure. Uh, thanks.”
Sam gave a brief, tightlipped smile before going back to where his car was waiting in the parking lot. Dean shut the door, watching Sam pull away through the narrow glass pane window at about eyelevel. He was starting to have doubts about whether or not he really wanted to hear Sam’s perspective on what had happened, why they had driven out to Joliet, and what had caused the accident. What if he really had tried to kill himself? Dean couldn’t think of why he might want to die, but it was possible that something happened in those missing days, he supposed, and it seemed to Dean that something bad enough to make him want to die was something not worth putting in an effort to try and remember. The part that made the least sense to Dean, though, was why he had bothered going all the way to Joliet with Sam if he had just planned on killing himself. The only solution he could figure was that something had to have happened that night, in the warehouse, and Sam knew.
Dinner was a leftover roast that Dean knew his mother had probably brought over for Carmen while Dean was in the hospital. They were the type of couple that lived off of takeout, neither really ever having the time or energy to cook. Dean could make a damned good breakfast, though, which he attributed to his brief stint as a short order cook. Carmen could do amazing things with a barbecue, but there’s had managed to develop a leak in the gas line that they hadn’t had the time yet to fix. At first Dean had tried to do it himself, thinking it couldn’t be that much different from the gas line in a car, but after burning off all the hairs on the back of his arms after igniting the grill when he thought it was fixed, Dean decided that it was best if he didn’t even bother trying.
At this point, though, Dean was just excited about a hot meal that hadn’t come from a box and wasn’t served with a side of green Jell-O. He hated the stuff and never understood why hospitals bothered serving it.
Carmen was trying her best to act like it was just any other day. She talked about work, some of the stranger cases that had come into the hospital during the course of the last two weeks. Dean usually enjoyed these stories, but now he found himself thinking of the different nurses and interns and doctors that had checked on him at Silver Cross and then Lawrence Memorial and had told their families about him over dinner.
There was an awkward lull when Carmen noticed that he wasn’t paying attention. “Are you in any pain? You’re being awfully quiet.”
Dean shrugged, eyeing a green bean on the end of his fork as if he couldn’t remember if he liked them or not. “I think I’ve had enough with hospitals for a little while.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry! I didn’t even think of that!” Dean shrugged again like it was no big deal. Carmen eyed him thoughtfully. “I talked to Jess the other day. I guess Sam’s taking off the winter quarter so he can be here. It was actually Jess’s idea. We both think spending time together would be really good for the two of you.”
Not thinking to tell Carmen that Sam had just been there, Dean instead wondered if it was possible that his psychiatrist was somehow talking to Carmen in spite of that whole doctor-patient confidentiality thing. Everyone seemed to think it was a good idea that they suddenly become friends. He hadn’t said anything to anyone about his sessions with Charlie, but Dean was curious about Jess and Carmen’s reasons for trying to get the two of them to get along. “Do you think that whatever happened was because of me and Sam?”
“I know you don’t remember, but after we went out to dinner for your mother’s birthday, you suggested that we all go out together. You seemed so surprised and… and disappointed when Sam shut you down.”
“I don’t remember that at all.”
“That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.” Carmen placed her fork and knife down, crossing her arms on top of the table. “Something happened that night, babe, something that you can’t remember and Sam doesn’t want to talk about. You guys need to figure out what happened, which requires spending time together. If you don’t, keep in mind that now I can withhold sex and painkillers.”
Dean managed to bite his tongue before he could blurt out that he would rather be dead than live at that moment without either of those. It wasn’t funny now that it might hold a shadow of truth.
+
He was back in the hospital. He wasn’t stuck in the bed, though, and physically Dean felt perfectly fine. He was walking around, up and down a long, empty hallway until he found a flight of stairs. All the rooms along the way had been empty as well, so Dean went down to the first floor.
“Hello?”
He stopped at the bottom step, listening for movement or a response. All he heard was the echo of his own voice bouncing off the walls. He picked a corridor and kept walking, looking into each and every room.
“Hello?” he called out again. “Anybody?”
Dean continued through the hospital, trying to find another human being, and starting to wonder if he was having some dream where the rest of the world had been wiped out by an evil monkey virus while he was sleeping.
+
The doorbell rang, distracting Sam from his spot at the dining room table with a bowl of cereal and his law books. Glancing briefly out the window, the familiar black Chevy Impala was all he needed to catch sight of to know who was standing on the other side of the door. He didn’t think he was ready to have the conversation that he needed to have with his brother, and Sam hoped that wasn’t why Dean was there. He let himself in when the door was opened; Sam was surprised that Dean even bothered ringing the doorbell when Sam was positive Dean still had a key.
“Is Mom home?”
Sam watched Dean, stunned. “You drove here?”
“No, I flew,” Dean rolled his eyes, catching sight Sam’s breakfast and deciding to help himself.
“Aren’t you on medication that says Do Not Operate Heavy Machinery on the label? Or are you figuring that if you break it you can fix it like the last car accident you got in.”
Dean was used to Sam’s bickering, but it wasn’t usually so sudden. “What the hell crawled up your ass and died?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe my brother who doesn’t seem to have any regard for his own life and is causing our mom to worry more than she needs to.” Sam clenched and unclenched his jaw. “Jess thinks I’m out here to help you, but I’m really here for Mom.”
“Good to know. I’m so glad we got this conversation out of the way and can now move on with our lives.” Dean went into the kitchen, fixing himself a cup of coffee. How was he supposed to work with this? He was barely even in the house and Sam was already on his case.
Sam, on the other hand, was trying to figure out if it was such a good idea that he was trying even harder to alienate Dean. The discussion they needed to have would be awkward if it happened today or if it happened in two months.
He didn’t know what to tell Dean, though. They had gone to Joliet in search of a mythical being, a djinn, like “I Dream of Jeannie” could have been based in reality. Dean had been deathly serious when he told Sam that there were things out there that they couldn’t even imagine. Sam had gone, feeling like it was his responsibility to try and keep Dean out of trouble, but when they went in the warehouse, he had seen something.
There was a girl strung up on ropes, hanging like meat in a butcher shop. They tried to help her, to get her out of there, but then they heard someone else coming. Dean had been holding the silver knife like he’d been born with a weapon in his hand, moved like a soldier evading an enemy during war. They hid under the stairs, and Sam had seen what looked like a man covered in tattoos. He went to the girl, and when he touched her, she moaned, spoke to someone she wasn’t seeing, and there was a flash of blue flame dancing where their skin had met.
Then, all of a sudden, the tattooed man and the girl were gone. Things had all spiraled from there, leading to Dean stabbing himself. Dean, his brother, took a knife from the good silver that they had probably used during Thanksgiving dinner every year, and pushed it into his own stomach.
Sam could barely deal with it. He didn’t know how he expected Dean to. He didn’t know how to get Dean to believe that version of events being the truth when Sam still couldn’t wrap his mind around it after seeing it with his own two eyes.
There was a creak of floorboards and Dean and Sam turned around to see their mother sipping from a mug and looking surprised to see the two of them standing near each other somewhat defensively, mostly guiltily. “Are you boys fighting already?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Dean replied with a shit-eating grin, putting down the bowl of cereal he had knowingly taken from Sam. Mary gave him a look that seemed to say don’t-be-such-a-smartass as he leaned over to kiss her cheek, letting his mother hold him like she’d wanted to when Dean was in the hospital. “Were you going to make pancakes?”
“I think the day you lose your appetite is the day I start to worry about you.” Mary ran her fingers through Dean’s hair, happy to see him out of the hospital. She couldn’t help but wonder where time had gone, when her boys had become such handsome men. “You need a haircut.”
The phone interrupted Dean’s response, pulling Mom into the other side of the house to answer, leaving him alone in the dining room with Sam. Dean leaned against the dining room table, figuring it would be best to just put everything on the line. “Look,” he began, searching for the words, “because of the uncertainty of what happened, because they think the amnesia could be caused by trauma or whatever, so…” Dean chewed his lower lip, not knowing if Sam knew about his psychiatry sessions or not. “In the hospital they had me talking to a shrink everyday and now I’m expected to keep up with the sessions every week. My doctor seems to think that it’s a problem that we don’t get along, and I’m supposed to try and change that.”
Sam didn’t know what to say. He was certain that was the most Dean had ever said to him in a long time, definitely the most personal thing Dean had ever told him, even though it did involve Sam directly. He immediately felt like an asshole for yelling at Dean, although he was sure that in some karmic level, Dean deserved it.
“Anyway, I’d appreciate it if you don’t go off on me every time you feel like it. This is going to be difficult enough as it is. I can’t remember entire days of my life, which in itself is indescribably hard to deal with. Then I’m supposed to try and be friends with you, you who was there and might have seen me do something that I can’t even conceive of doing, and then you start giving me shit right off the bat. So please just back off for a bit, man. I just got out of the hospital yesterday, give me a break.” Dean noticed Sam’s hurt puppy expression but didn’t feel any regret for causing it. He’d always been annoyed by it growing up since Sam had known he could use it to get anything out of their parents. “Oh, and don’t expect me to believe that you’re just here for Mom, because you showed up at my apartment yesterday, and I know Mom didn’t ask you to come check on me since she would’ve come over herself.”
Sam wasn’t given enough time to apologize, to respond in anyway as Mary came back into the dining room, sitting at the table near where Sam and Dean were standing. “How much time are they letting you have before expecting you back at work?” she asked, sipping at her coffee.
“Only a couple days,” Dean replied, sitting next to his mom and watching Sam follow suit on the other side of her. “I think I would go insane doing some more sitting around and doing nothing. I’ll really start feeling better when I can get my hands busy again.”
+
Charlie was seated in her favorite chair in the office, legs crossed with the legal pad in her lap and recorder on the table as she watched Dean walk around the room. “So how is being back at home been going for you?”
He hated lying down, doing nothing, since getting back. As a result, Dean was pacing around Charlie’s office instead of sitting or lying on the brown leather sofa. He was standing beside her desk, playing with one of those perpetual motion gadgets. “I don’t know… Kind of boring, I suppose.” Dean pulled back two of the silver balls, watching them hit the two in the center and then the two on the other end go up into the air then back again. The motion of it was entrancing.
“Are you working again yet?” She noticed Dean looked much better if nothing else. There always seemed to be a stark difference between people thriving in the real world and just surviving in the hospital.
“I was thinking about going in tomorrow. Moving around still hurts, so I won’t be there for too long. Don’t want to end up back in the emergency room because I popped my stitches and my liver or whatever is hanging out.” He was holding the three on the end now, watching as they ricocheted off the other three, making a scissoring motion. Dean knew that Charlie was analyzing his every move and wondered what she thought him playing with her desk gadget meant.
“What about your family - how have they been handling what happened?” She was curious as to what details he had been filled in on so far and which he hadn’t. Charlie was also curious as to whether or not Dean’s amnesia was specific to the exact dates or if there were other things that he was slowly realizing that he couldn’t remember.
“Can I get a different question, Alex?” Dean didn’t like to think about the stress he had caused his family, the stress he was still causing them since no one knew if they should think Dean was crazy or not. He felt like every word, every movement was under constant scrutiny, not just by Carmen and his mother, but even by himself. “They…” he hesitated. “Mom’s been walking on eggshells around me, and Carmen seems to have taken me on as a project to fix.”
“And what about Sam?”
“Sam’s treating me like I’m the same selfish asshole out to ruin his life like I always was.” Dean turned away from the door, leaning against the desk. “We haven’t talked about that night yet. Carmen has told me a little about the other days… I completely missed my mom’s birthday. Well… not really. I was there but I don’t remember.”
Charlie studied over her written summaries of the last sessions, knowing that the ultimate purpose of these visits were to determine if Dean were suicidal or not. From what she had seen, her professional opinion was that he wasn’t, but revealing the cause of the accident in Joliet could flip her opinion completely around. She liked to think that there was trust established between them by this point, and now that Dean was out of the hospital, she thought it was time to move on to the next step. “I was thinking of trying something different today. Have you ever been hypnotized before?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Hypnosis can help unlock those missing days. You have to be completely willing to participate, though, or it won’t work. You won’t know what you’re saying in the state, but I’ll record them just as I’ve been recording all of our other sessions. Hearing the events described in your own voice might help trigger your memory.”
Dean stared intently at the floor. “I don’t know if I want to know yet. That night, anyway. I don’t want to remember Joliet just yet. The rest of it I’d like to know about, though. I want to know where we brought Mom for dinner on her birthday. I want to know if she was happy.”
“Why wouldn’t she have been?” Charlie asked. She had her own idea on why Dean might think she wouldn’t have been, but she wanted to confirm it. Being Dean’s psychiatrist meant she didn’t often get a complete family picture, and she’d had cases before where one family member was suspected of being depressed or suicidal when she’d actually been spending her time with the wrong individual. Charlie wasn’t going to rule out that it was Mary or Sam with emotional health problems as of late. A sudden death in the family frequently caused such things.
“Dad wasn’t there,” Dean replied, hoping his tone demonstrated to Charlie that he thought she was an idiot for not being able to figure that out on her own after all their sessions together.
“Well that is why I’m suggesting the hypnosis now. It doesn’t always work, especially the first time. We can practice getting you into the trance, get you to talk about things you don’t remember, and then we can start on the trickier memories.”
Dean was willing to give it a shot despite how freaked out the idea made him. His freshman year of high school they had brought in a hypnotist as a fun diversion, and he’d been one of the students in the group brought onto the stage. The hypnotist had, according to several of his friends after the fact, given them all a piece of paper that he’d told them to guard with their lives and hide it somewhere that they thought no one would ever find it. Dean had jumped down the stage and dropped the paper down Tracy Clemens’s shirt. She was a senior and had the biggest tits Dean had ever seen. They never had a hypnotist ever again at the school after that. He’d also gotten in trouble, the principal assuming he’d done it on purpose even though he was the one who had hired the hypnotist to begin with.
He knew Charlie wasn’t going to ask him to stuff a piece of paper down in some girl’s bra, but he was nervous about what kind of questions she might get him to answer. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what other secrets his subconscious might reveal. “I suppose we could try,” he said anyway. He’d agreed to behave, so he was going to behave.
“Okay - Dean, I’m going to need you to sit on the sofa there. But don’t lie down; I can’t have you falling asleep on me. Make sure you’re comfortable, and once you are, close your eyes. I want you to take ten deep breaths, counting after each time you exhale.”
Dean sat in the middle of the sofa, his feet touching the floor and his arms at his sides. There was still a twinge of pain when he bent to sit down, but the effort of bending his stomach muscles didn’t exhaust him like it had at first when he was trying to sit up in the bed at the hospital, which he took as a good sign. He inhaled deeply and then exhaled as long as possible, listening to Charlie as he counted each breath.
“Every time you exhale, imagine that all your tension is leaving you. It’s leaving your head; it’s leaving your neck, and your shoulders. The tension is leaving your arms, your fingers, your legs, and your feet. You are completely, utterly relaxed. All your worries, all your thoughts, have been locked in a box where they can’t bother you.” Charlie waited for Dean to reach the tenth breath before continuing. “There is a staircase between where you are and where you want to be. There are ten steps, and with each step, you become even more relaxed than you were with the previous one.” She counted him down each step, noticing the dreamlike expression on Dean’s face. He was either doing better than Charlie had expected or was really good at faking it. Charlie then established that when she clapped her hands, Dean would immediately come out of hypnosis, just in case the session started to go badly.
Charlie took a deep breath of her own, working out the direction she wanted to start in. “What is your name?” she began, deciding that would be simple enough.
“Dean Winchester.” His voice was robotic as those being hypnotized often seemed to be. It still managed to unnerve Charlie every time.
“When were you born?”
“January 24, 1979.”
“And where are you from, Dean?”
“Lawrence, Kansas.”
Now that she’d gotten some introductory questions out of the way, Charlie decided to take a route of more emotional depth while leaving the questions open enough that Dean was deciding the topic instead of being asked bluntly about a specific instance in his life. “Why don’t you tell me about a sad memory?”
Dean frowned, reminding Charlie vaguely of a petulant child. “My dad died.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” He responded by shaking his head vigorously, drawing his legs up to his chest and hugging them tightly. “How about you tell me a happy memory, then?”
He was smiling now, relaxing his hold on his shins. “Sammy got engaged.”
It was Charlie’s turn to frown as she flipped through every note she had written about her sessions with Dean, every bit of family information she had gathered from the doctors or Dean himself. She couldn’t find anything about Sam and his girlfriend getting engaged. “When did this happen, Dean?”
“I don’t know - I wasn’t there. They told us at dinner, though, on Mom’s birthday. I was still surprised to see them together.”
Charlie was surprised at how easily and accidentally Dean had been able to bring up information from one of the days he’d forgotten. She decided to press on, to see what else she could get him to say. “Were they having relationship issues?”
“I guess you could put it that way,” Dean replied. “Sounds kind of like downplaying the entire incident, though.”
“Why, Dean?” Charlie pushed. “What happened?”
“Jess was dead,” Dean said with such gravity that Charlie didn’t know how to respond besides with a clap of her hands, snapping him out of the trance.
Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10
Rating: R
Pairings: Dean/Carmen, Sam/Jess
Word Count: 4,596 (50,221 overall)
Warnings: Wishverse fic, spoilers for S1 & S2 through 2x20
Summary: After Dean wakes up in the hospital with amnesia after an apparent attempted suicide, the answers he seeks just brings more questions before turning his world completely upside down.
Part 1
One Week Later
+
“Welcome home.” Carmen held the door to their apartment open, waiting patiently for Dean to make his way up the last of the stairs. Walking wasn’t the issue so much as holding himself up - staying bedridden for so long had made him weak, and Dean hadn’t really thought about how much the top half of his body weighed until he tried to hold it up with his recuperating abdomen.
“I never thought I’d be so glad to walk through this door.” Dean paused in the doorway then turned, leaning into Carmen and pressing her against the frame. “Let’s see if I remember where the bedroom is.” He kissed Carmen, taking in the feel of her, the smell of her, and the taste of her. Dean put a hand on her waist, tracing his fingers against her lower back as he directed her into the apartment, letting the door slam shut behind them. They made it to the sofa, Carmen kneeling on the cushions, lowering herself onto them. Dean stooped to follow but grunted in pain. He released Carmen, hand shooting to cover his stomach. “Ow.”
Carmen shook her head, managing to look amused yet concerned at the same time. “Yeah, I don’t think this is going to happen, tiger.”
“I feel fine as long as I don’t move,” Dean said, leering suggestively. “I’m willing to be flexible.”
“I think flexible is the last thing you can be right now.”
Dean fell into the couch, resting his arms along the top of the back, wondering if his prescription meds would react with beer or if the Do Not Take with Alcohol warning only applied to liquor. He looked at Carmen, who seemed to be trying to gauge his behavior, so he smiled at her cheekily. “Do we have any food?” Of all people Dean wanted to believe that he was perfectly fine, he had to have Carmen believe that he wasn’t clinically depressed.
“I can make dinner if you’re hungry. I’ll cater to your every whim tonight, but only tonight, so don’t get too used to lying around and getting served.” She stood in front of him, bending forward to place her hands on Dean’s thighs and kiss him. “I love you.”
“Mmm… You’re too good for me.”
“That hasn’t escaped my notice,” she laughed, straightening and making her way into the kitchen.
Dean kicked off his shoes, putting his feet up on the coffee table and turning on the television. He found a football game that was almost over where the Chiefs were, no big surprise, losing. A news item started scrolling across the screen about a young man found murdered in Lafayette, Indiana and that the police were looking for anyone with information. He heard a knock at the door that he knew Carmen wouldn’t be able to hear in the kitchen, so Dean forced himself to stand up, feeling like he had aged about forty years since he got home. The person on the other side of the door was the last person Dean had expected to see, although part of him should have suspected.
“Hey,” Sam said, standing there awkwardly, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his jeans. “I meant to come see you at the hospital, but I only just got in today.”
“Did you want to come inside?” Dean asked, thinking how Charlie’s challenge was easier said than done. He didn’t even know how to start forming a relationship with his brother - they were completely different people.
“I can’t stay too long, just wanted to see how you were doing.” Dean figured Sam was going to leave; he was still standing outside and Dean was inside, the screen door between them. He was about to give some excuse to get back inside when Sam ran a hand through his hair, breaking the silence. “Look… Um… If you want to, some point, you know… talk about what I can tell you, I’ll do my best, but even I’m not sure what happened, so I don’t know how helpful I can be.”
“Sure. Uh, thanks.”
Sam gave a brief, tightlipped smile before going back to where his car was waiting in the parking lot. Dean shut the door, watching Sam pull away through the narrow glass pane window at about eyelevel. He was starting to have doubts about whether or not he really wanted to hear Sam’s perspective on what had happened, why they had driven out to Joliet, and what had caused the accident. What if he really had tried to kill himself? Dean couldn’t think of why he might want to die, but it was possible that something happened in those missing days, he supposed, and it seemed to Dean that something bad enough to make him want to die was something not worth putting in an effort to try and remember. The part that made the least sense to Dean, though, was why he had bothered going all the way to Joliet with Sam if he had just planned on killing himself. The only solution he could figure was that something had to have happened that night, in the warehouse, and Sam knew.
Dinner was a leftover roast that Dean knew his mother had probably brought over for Carmen while Dean was in the hospital. They were the type of couple that lived off of takeout, neither really ever having the time or energy to cook. Dean could make a damned good breakfast, though, which he attributed to his brief stint as a short order cook. Carmen could do amazing things with a barbecue, but there’s had managed to develop a leak in the gas line that they hadn’t had the time yet to fix. At first Dean had tried to do it himself, thinking it couldn’t be that much different from the gas line in a car, but after burning off all the hairs on the back of his arms after igniting the grill when he thought it was fixed, Dean decided that it was best if he didn’t even bother trying.
At this point, though, Dean was just excited about a hot meal that hadn’t come from a box and wasn’t served with a side of green Jell-O. He hated the stuff and never understood why hospitals bothered serving it.
Carmen was trying her best to act like it was just any other day. She talked about work, some of the stranger cases that had come into the hospital during the course of the last two weeks. Dean usually enjoyed these stories, but now he found himself thinking of the different nurses and interns and doctors that had checked on him at Silver Cross and then Lawrence Memorial and had told their families about him over dinner.
There was an awkward lull when Carmen noticed that he wasn’t paying attention. “Are you in any pain? You’re being awfully quiet.”
Dean shrugged, eyeing a green bean on the end of his fork as if he couldn’t remember if he liked them or not. “I think I’ve had enough with hospitals for a little while.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry! I didn’t even think of that!” Dean shrugged again like it was no big deal. Carmen eyed him thoughtfully. “I talked to Jess the other day. I guess Sam’s taking off the winter quarter so he can be here. It was actually Jess’s idea. We both think spending time together would be really good for the two of you.”
Not thinking to tell Carmen that Sam had just been there, Dean instead wondered if it was possible that his psychiatrist was somehow talking to Carmen in spite of that whole doctor-patient confidentiality thing. Everyone seemed to think it was a good idea that they suddenly become friends. He hadn’t said anything to anyone about his sessions with Charlie, but Dean was curious about Jess and Carmen’s reasons for trying to get the two of them to get along. “Do you think that whatever happened was because of me and Sam?”
“I know you don’t remember, but after we went out to dinner for your mother’s birthday, you suggested that we all go out together. You seemed so surprised and… and disappointed when Sam shut you down.”
“I don’t remember that at all.”
“That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.” Carmen placed her fork and knife down, crossing her arms on top of the table. “Something happened that night, babe, something that you can’t remember and Sam doesn’t want to talk about. You guys need to figure out what happened, which requires spending time together. If you don’t, keep in mind that now I can withhold sex and painkillers.”
Dean managed to bite his tongue before he could blurt out that he would rather be dead than live at that moment without either of those. It wasn’t funny now that it might hold a shadow of truth.
+
He was back in the hospital. He wasn’t stuck in the bed, though, and physically Dean felt perfectly fine. He was walking around, up and down a long, empty hallway until he found a flight of stairs. All the rooms along the way had been empty as well, so Dean went down to the first floor.
“Hello?”
He stopped at the bottom step, listening for movement or a response. All he heard was the echo of his own voice bouncing off the walls. He picked a corridor and kept walking, looking into each and every room.
“Hello?” he called out again. “Anybody?”
Dean continued through the hospital, trying to find another human being, and starting to wonder if he was having some dream where the rest of the world had been wiped out by an evil monkey virus while he was sleeping.
+
The doorbell rang, distracting Sam from his spot at the dining room table with a bowl of cereal and his law books. Glancing briefly out the window, the familiar black Chevy Impala was all he needed to catch sight of to know who was standing on the other side of the door. He didn’t think he was ready to have the conversation that he needed to have with his brother, and Sam hoped that wasn’t why Dean was there. He let himself in when the door was opened; Sam was surprised that Dean even bothered ringing the doorbell when Sam was positive Dean still had a key.
“Is Mom home?”
Sam watched Dean, stunned. “You drove here?”
“No, I flew,” Dean rolled his eyes, catching sight Sam’s breakfast and deciding to help himself.
“Aren’t you on medication that says Do Not Operate Heavy Machinery on the label? Or are you figuring that if you break it you can fix it like the last car accident you got in.”
Dean was used to Sam’s bickering, but it wasn’t usually so sudden. “What the hell crawled up your ass and died?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe my brother who doesn’t seem to have any regard for his own life and is causing our mom to worry more than she needs to.” Sam clenched and unclenched his jaw. “Jess thinks I’m out here to help you, but I’m really here for Mom.”
“Good to know. I’m so glad we got this conversation out of the way and can now move on with our lives.” Dean went into the kitchen, fixing himself a cup of coffee. How was he supposed to work with this? He was barely even in the house and Sam was already on his case.
Sam, on the other hand, was trying to figure out if it was such a good idea that he was trying even harder to alienate Dean. The discussion they needed to have would be awkward if it happened today or if it happened in two months.
He didn’t know what to tell Dean, though. They had gone to Joliet in search of a mythical being, a djinn, like “I Dream of Jeannie” could have been based in reality. Dean had been deathly serious when he told Sam that there were things out there that they couldn’t even imagine. Sam had gone, feeling like it was his responsibility to try and keep Dean out of trouble, but when they went in the warehouse, he had seen something.
There was a girl strung up on ropes, hanging like meat in a butcher shop. They tried to help her, to get her out of there, but then they heard someone else coming. Dean had been holding the silver knife like he’d been born with a weapon in his hand, moved like a soldier evading an enemy during war. They hid under the stairs, and Sam had seen what looked like a man covered in tattoos. He went to the girl, and when he touched her, she moaned, spoke to someone she wasn’t seeing, and there was a flash of blue flame dancing where their skin had met.
Then, all of a sudden, the tattooed man and the girl were gone. Things had all spiraled from there, leading to Dean stabbing himself. Dean, his brother, took a knife from the good silver that they had probably used during Thanksgiving dinner every year, and pushed it into his own stomach.
Sam could barely deal with it. He didn’t know how he expected Dean to. He didn’t know how to get Dean to believe that version of events being the truth when Sam still couldn’t wrap his mind around it after seeing it with his own two eyes.
There was a creak of floorboards and Dean and Sam turned around to see their mother sipping from a mug and looking surprised to see the two of them standing near each other somewhat defensively, mostly guiltily. “Are you boys fighting already?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Dean replied with a shit-eating grin, putting down the bowl of cereal he had knowingly taken from Sam. Mary gave him a look that seemed to say don’t-be-such-a-smartass as he leaned over to kiss her cheek, letting his mother hold him like she’d wanted to when Dean was in the hospital. “Were you going to make pancakes?”
“I think the day you lose your appetite is the day I start to worry about you.” Mary ran her fingers through Dean’s hair, happy to see him out of the hospital. She couldn’t help but wonder where time had gone, when her boys had become such handsome men. “You need a haircut.”
The phone interrupted Dean’s response, pulling Mom into the other side of the house to answer, leaving him alone in the dining room with Sam. Dean leaned against the dining room table, figuring it would be best to just put everything on the line. “Look,” he began, searching for the words, “because of the uncertainty of what happened, because they think the amnesia could be caused by trauma or whatever, so…” Dean chewed his lower lip, not knowing if Sam knew about his psychiatry sessions or not. “In the hospital they had me talking to a shrink everyday and now I’m expected to keep up with the sessions every week. My doctor seems to think that it’s a problem that we don’t get along, and I’m supposed to try and change that.”
Sam didn’t know what to say. He was certain that was the most Dean had ever said to him in a long time, definitely the most personal thing Dean had ever told him, even though it did involve Sam directly. He immediately felt like an asshole for yelling at Dean, although he was sure that in some karmic level, Dean deserved it.
“Anyway, I’d appreciate it if you don’t go off on me every time you feel like it. This is going to be difficult enough as it is. I can’t remember entire days of my life, which in itself is indescribably hard to deal with. Then I’m supposed to try and be friends with you, you who was there and might have seen me do something that I can’t even conceive of doing, and then you start giving me shit right off the bat. So please just back off for a bit, man. I just got out of the hospital yesterday, give me a break.” Dean noticed Sam’s hurt puppy expression but didn’t feel any regret for causing it. He’d always been annoyed by it growing up since Sam had known he could use it to get anything out of their parents. “Oh, and don’t expect me to believe that you’re just here for Mom, because you showed up at my apartment yesterday, and I know Mom didn’t ask you to come check on me since she would’ve come over herself.”
Sam wasn’t given enough time to apologize, to respond in anyway as Mary came back into the dining room, sitting at the table near where Sam and Dean were standing. “How much time are they letting you have before expecting you back at work?” she asked, sipping at her coffee.
“Only a couple days,” Dean replied, sitting next to his mom and watching Sam follow suit on the other side of her. “I think I would go insane doing some more sitting around and doing nothing. I’ll really start feeling better when I can get my hands busy again.”
+
Charlie was seated in her favorite chair in the office, legs crossed with the legal pad in her lap and recorder on the table as she watched Dean walk around the room. “So how is being back at home been going for you?”
He hated lying down, doing nothing, since getting back. As a result, Dean was pacing around Charlie’s office instead of sitting or lying on the brown leather sofa. He was standing beside her desk, playing with one of those perpetual motion gadgets. “I don’t know… Kind of boring, I suppose.” Dean pulled back two of the silver balls, watching them hit the two in the center and then the two on the other end go up into the air then back again. The motion of it was entrancing.
“Are you working again yet?” She noticed Dean looked much better if nothing else. There always seemed to be a stark difference between people thriving in the real world and just surviving in the hospital.
“I was thinking about going in tomorrow. Moving around still hurts, so I won’t be there for too long. Don’t want to end up back in the emergency room because I popped my stitches and my liver or whatever is hanging out.” He was holding the three on the end now, watching as they ricocheted off the other three, making a scissoring motion. Dean knew that Charlie was analyzing his every move and wondered what she thought him playing with her desk gadget meant.
“What about your family - how have they been handling what happened?” She was curious as to what details he had been filled in on so far and which he hadn’t. Charlie was also curious as to whether or not Dean’s amnesia was specific to the exact dates or if there were other things that he was slowly realizing that he couldn’t remember.
“Can I get a different question, Alex?” Dean didn’t like to think about the stress he had caused his family, the stress he was still causing them since no one knew if they should think Dean was crazy or not. He felt like every word, every movement was under constant scrutiny, not just by Carmen and his mother, but even by himself. “They…” he hesitated. “Mom’s been walking on eggshells around me, and Carmen seems to have taken me on as a project to fix.”
“And what about Sam?”
“Sam’s treating me like I’m the same selfish asshole out to ruin his life like I always was.” Dean turned away from the door, leaning against the desk. “We haven’t talked about that night yet. Carmen has told me a little about the other days… I completely missed my mom’s birthday. Well… not really. I was there but I don’t remember.”
Charlie studied over her written summaries of the last sessions, knowing that the ultimate purpose of these visits were to determine if Dean were suicidal or not. From what she had seen, her professional opinion was that he wasn’t, but revealing the cause of the accident in Joliet could flip her opinion completely around. She liked to think that there was trust established between them by this point, and now that Dean was out of the hospital, she thought it was time to move on to the next step. “I was thinking of trying something different today. Have you ever been hypnotized before?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Hypnosis can help unlock those missing days. You have to be completely willing to participate, though, or it won’t work. You won’t know what you’re saying in the state, but I’ll record them just as I’ve been recording all of our other sessions. Hearing the events described in your own voice might help trigger your memory.”
Dean stared intently at the floor. “I don’t know if I want to know yet. That night, anyway. I don’t want to remember Joliet just yet. The rest of it I’d like to know about, though. I want to know where we brought Mom for dinner on her birthday. I want to know if she was happy.”
“Why wouldn’t she have been?” Charlie asked. She had her own idea on why Dean might think she wouldn’t have been, but she wanted to confirm it. Being Dean’s psychiatrist meant she didn’t often get a complete family picture, and she’d had cases before where one family member was suspected of being depressed or suicidal when she’d actually been spending her time with the wrong individual. Charlie wasn’t going to rule out that it was Mary or Sam with emotional health problems as of late. A sudden death in the family frequently caused such things.
“Dad wasn’t there,” Dean replied, hoping his tone demonstrated to Charlie that he thought she was an idiot for not being able to figure that out on her own after all their sessions together.
“Well that is why I’m suggesting the hypnosis now. It doesn’t always work, especially the first time. We can practice getting you into the trance, get you to talk about things you don’t remember, and then we can start on the trickier memories.”
Dean was willing to give it a shot despite how freaked out the idea made him. His freshman year of high school they had brought in a hypnotist as a fun diversion, and he’d been one of the students in the group brought onto the stage. The hypnotist had, according to several of his friends after the fact, given them all a piece of paper that he’d told them to guard with their lives and hide it somewhere that they thought no one would ever find it. Dean had jumped down the stage and dropped the paper down Tracy Clemens’s shirt. She was a senior and had the biggest tits Dean had ever seen. They never had a hypnotist ever again at the school after that. He’d also gotten in trouble, the principal assuming he’d done it on purpose even though he was the one who had hired the hypnotist to begin with.
He knew Charlie wasn’t going to ask him to stuff a piece of paper down in some girl’s bra, but he was nervous about what kind of questions she might get him to answer. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what other secrets his subconscious might reveal. “I suppose we could try,” he said anyway. He’d agreed to behave, so he was going to behave.
“Okay - Dean, I’m going to need you to sit on the sofa there. But don’t lie down; I can’t have you falling asleep on me. Make sure you’re comfortable, and once you are, close your eyes. I want you to take ten deep breaths, counting after each time you exhale.”
Dean sat in the middle of the sofa, his feet touching the floor and his arms at his sides. There was still a twinge of pain when he bent to sit down, but the effort of bending his stomach muscles didn’t exhaust him like it had at first when he was trying to sit up in the bed at the hospital, which he took as a good sign. He inhaled deeply and then exhaled as long as possible, listening to Charlie as he counted each breath.
“Every time you exhale, imagine that all your tension is leaving you. It’s leaving your head; it’s leaving your neck, and your shoulders. The tension is leaving your arms, your fingers, your legs, and your feet. You are completely, utterly relaxed. All your worries, all your thoughts, have been locked in a box where they can’t bother you.” Charlie waited for Dean to reach the tenth breath before continuing. “There is a staircase between where you are and where you want to be. There are ten steps, and with each step, you become even more relaxed than you were with the previous one.” She counted him down each step, noticing the dreamlike expression on Dean’s face. He was either doing better than Charlie had expected or was really good at faking it. Charlie then established that when she clapped her hands, Dean would immediately come out of hypnosis, just in case the session started to go badly.
Charlie took a deep breath of her own, working out the direction she wanted to start in. “What is your name?” she began, deciding that would be simple enough.
“Dean Winchester.” His voice was robotic as those being hypnotized often seemed to be. It still managed to unnerve Charlie every time.
“When were you born?”
“January 24, 1979.”
“And where are you from, Dean?”
“Lawrence, Kansas.”
Now that she’d gotten some introductory questions out of the way, Charlie decided to take a route of more emotional depth while leaving the questions open enough that Dean was deciding the topic instead of being asked bluntly about a specific instance in his life. “Why don’t you tell me about a sad memory?”
Dean frowned, reminding Charlie vaguely of a petulant child. “My dad died.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” He responded by shaking his head vigorously, drawing his legs up to his chest and hugging them tightly. “How about you tell me a happy memory, then?”
He was smiling now, relaxing his hold on his shins. “Sammy got engaged.”
It was Charlie’s turn to frown as she flipped through every note she had written about her sessions with Dean, every bit of family information she had gathered from the doctors or Dean himself. She couldn’t find anything about Sam and his girlfriend getting engaged. “When did this happen, Dean?”
“I don’t know - I wasn’t there. They told us at dinner, though, on Mom’s birthday. I was still surprised to see them together.”
Charlie was surprised at how easily and accidentally Dean had been able to bring up information from one of the days he’d forgotten. She decided to press on, to see what else she could get him to say. “Were they having relationship issues?”
“I guess you could put it that way,” Dean replied. “Sounds kind of like downplaying the entire incident, though.”
“Why, Dean?” Charlie pushed. “What happened?”
“Jess was dead,” Dean said with such gravity that Charlie didn’t know how to respond besides with a clap of her hands, snapping him out of the trance.
Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10