Against the Current, for red_b_rackham
Title: Against the Current
Recipient: red_b_rackham
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~ 7600
Warnings: Spoilers for all aired episodes. Mentions of torture, self-harm and suicide.
Author’s Notes: Many thanks to my awesome beta - you know who you are!
Summary: Dean has plenty of memories. Just not his own.
-So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dean still remembers how to tie his shoes.
The unfamiliar handwriting blurred in front of Dean’s eyes.
… No aphasia…sounded a bit stilted and overly polite at the beginning…speech has reverted back to normal…
…heightened modesty… blushed (!) and practically ran away when he walked in on me in the shower room… dressed in his Fed suit, his tie a perfect Windsor knot…
…didn’t remember how to shoot a gun… practiced in the shooting range for two hours… back to being a crack shot…
…Car…no personal memories. No clue how to use a tablet or a smartphone... internet…
…nothing about hunting.
Dean blinked at the meager summary of his existence in Sam’s journal, jotted down in royal blue ink.
He read again what Sam had added at the bottom of the page, Dean still remembers how to tie his shoes. Like a consolation prize.
Sam-his brother.
Three days ago Dean had woken up in a windowless room whose walls were decorated with weapons. Murky green eyes greeted him in the cracked mirror on the dresser. Freckled skin. A tired mouth.
Before his brain had been able to answer the question Who am I?, the door of the room burst open and a floppy haired giant rushed at him, prompting question number two: Who are you?
Countless other questions followed.
Sam had answered each one with great patience and an unhappy twitch of his lips, even though each question led to further questions, no end in sight.
The past seventy-two hours had been long enough for Dean to accept the idea that there were monsters out there-werewolves, vampires, angels, demons, even God’s friggin’ sister-and that people like Sam were insane enough to hunt them day-in, day-out. But he still couldn’t believe that Dean Winchester, 37-year-old monster hunter extraordinaire, the guy who featured so prominently in all Sam’s tales, was supposed to be him.
For how could he, when all his amnesia-addled brain had retained were impersonal memories that might belong to any Joe out on the street? He knew how to tie his shoes, for God’s sake. (No, strike that, Chuck’s sake. Because apparently, God was real and he was a weird writer dude with a cat blog who liked to make pancakes for breakfast.) But basic survival info like how to kill a vampire-cut off their heads, according to Sam-nil.
With a frustrated sigh, Dean turned his attention to a barely readable scrawl in the margin.
Dean’s knowledge of technology seems to date to the early nineties, Sam had written next to the comment about smartphones and tablets.
Smartphones, tablets, the Internet-if Sam was to be believed, all that stuff had changed the world more in the past twenty years than in the five hundred years preceding them.
And Dean remembered none of it.
Maybe Sam was right. Maybe this was a vital clue to what had happened to him.
Okay, it seemed more than a little strange that part of his memories should have been preserved up to a certain date, when most of them were just gone entirely. But from what Sam had told him, strange was their middle name.
Dean’s pulse quickened in anticipation. Was this the answer he’d been waiting for?
“No, it’s not.”
Dean jumped. He hadn’t heard Sam enter the library.
“What’s-?” He closed the notebook and carefully pushed it halfway across the table.
Sam didn’t seem upset at Dean’s nosiness. Presumably because he didn’t have any capacities left for it, considering just how upset he still was that he’d lost the other Dean, the real Dean, his brother.
“You were thinking that’s the answer,” Sam explained patiently. “But it’s not. You knew how to use a gun ever since you were six.”
“Right.” Dean did his best not to let his disappointment show. He should have remembered that. After all, Sam had told him only yesterday about all the things Dean had taught him when he was a child; hell, when they’d both still been children. Which was wrong on so many levels. He did the best he could, Sam defended his father’s parenting. Just like he’d excused the deal his mother had made, never mind that she’d thereby ruined his life before it even started. Or like he’d wiped away the ugly story of how Dean had shoved an angel inside him against his will with a mild smile. Sam was some kind of saint, Dean was sure of it. What he was, though-the jury was still out on that one.
“What you said about me sounding more like the other-like myself,” he gestured towards the notebook, “do you think my memories are starting to come back?”
Sam bit his lip. “I hope so.”
Dean averted his eyes from the naked pain on Sam’s face. He didn’t need a fresh reminder that for Sam this situation equaled having to downgrade from a T-Bird to a Model T. Unless Dean magically managed to transform back into the T-Bird Dean, there was nothing he could do to make Sam feel any better.
“Maybe you could bounce some ideas off me?” he suggested timidly.
“Yeah. Except I don’t really have any at this point.” Sam shrugged helplessly. “Like I told you, I found you in the storage room. No injury, nothing, just passed out. You were supposed to do some research. But God knows what you might have gotten up to!” At Dean’s puzzled look, he added, “You’re not very fond of research.”
“But you are?”
“I guess.”
“That’s great,” Dean remarked, not sure what else to say. He watched Sam’s mouth tighten and wanted to bang his head against the table. Dammit, he got it wrong again! Probably the T-Bird would have made fun of Sam now, he certainly sounded douchey enough. He cleared his throat. “The contents of the box he-I went through couldn’t have caused this?”
“Not really. It was all stuff about curing monsters.”
“And the beaker that was broken-”
“Contained a spell which can turn any creature back into a model citizen.” Sam sighed. “Look, I went over everything three times already, but nothing in there can explain your amnesia.”
“What about the books on curses you browsed yesterday?”
“Nothing. Sorry.”
“It’s okay…Sam.” Sam’s mouth tightened again. Dean had no idea what he’d done wrong this time. He wondered how he was supposed to live through the rest of this day. He felt exhausted already.
Swaying slightly, he got to his feet. A shout of “Dean!” was the last thing he registered before darkness enveloped him.
***
Dean came to on the parquet flooring of the bathroom, propped up against Sam’s muscular torso.
As soon as he gave the first sign of life, Sam cupped his face in two huge hands. “Dean! Thank God! You okay? What happened?”
Dean tried to pull away and regain his bearings. Sam’s voice was too loud, his hands too forceful, his eyes too piercing, while Dean’s own limbs felt too large, too heavy, too alien. Like a film noir composition of flashy light, stark contrasts and endless mirrors, it was overwhelming him, confusing him, smudging the line between up and down, near and far, Sam and Dean.
Once his surroundings had settled into a more coherent shape and he could tell where Sam ended and he began, he mumbled, “I remember.”
Sam’s legs jerked against his lower back. “You remember? What?”
“Not much. Just-I stood in front of the mirror and reapplied my lipstick.” Sam stared at him. “I was tipsy, I couldn’t stop giggling. It was my first date with Patrick, and he was-”
“Patrick?” Sam interrupted him sharply. “Dean, you don’t date guys. And you don’t wear lipstick.”
Dean nodded. The discovery of his predecessor’s embarrassingly large collection of erotica had already told him as much. “And I guess I’ve never been a woman either?”
Sam gaped at him like he’d grown two heads. Poetic justice, considering Dean was still trying to wrap his head around all the weird facts Sam had bombarded him with in the past three days.
He suppressed a grin at Sam’s amazed silence and continued, “I look into the mirror and then I-well, she, she started to cough up blood. I don’t know why. It kept getting worse, and I couldn’t breathe, and I was going to die right there, right in that public bathroom, God, Sam, you can’t imagine-”
“Jody,” Sam said. There was a shrewd look in his eyes.
“What?” Already they were back to Sam being the one who made no sense.
“Jody. Our friend, Sherriff Jody Mills. Remember when I told you about the trials I undertook so we could close the Gates of Hell forever? Well, Crowley, he wanted to stop us.”
Crowley, Dean mentally supplied, the Al Capone of Hell who the other Dean had liked to hang out with. What a douche.
“He started killing off everyone we’d known, everyone we’d saved.” Sam swallowed hard. “He threatened to kill Jody if we didn’t surrender. He was Patrick.”
“So the vision I just had, of what happened in that restroom-”
“Hexbag.”
Effects of a hexbag, of course. Dean didn’t know what it meant that he accepted the explanation just as readily as the laws of gravity.
For a moment, neither of them spoke. Then Dean raised himself to his feet, leaning on Sam for support. “Why am I remembering this?”
There were no answers waiting for him in Sam’s tired face. “I don’t know.”
A new thought struck Dean. “Have I ever been through that?”
Sam’s eyebrows made contact with his hairline. “A near-death experience in a public bathroom?”
Dean didn’t know why the idea seemed so ridiculous to Sam. By all accounts, he’d watched Dean die in about a billion different ways. (Well, the other Dean. The T-Bird.) Death by taco was hardly any more glorious.
But that was beside the point. “No, the hexbag thing,” he clarified.
“Oh.” Sam’s eyebrows rushed back down towards the tip of his nose.
With longing, Dean watched the memories whirl past Sam’s fuzzed-over eyes.
“The first time we dealt with witches,” Sam answered eventually, “they cursed you. Ruby rescued you.”
Sam didn’t volunteer up any further information, and Dean felt too intimidated by the look on his face to inquire. Ruby was a sore topic, he already knew that from Sam’s crash course through their mutual history. Not that he could seriously imagine the man standing in front of him sucking someone else’s blood and springing Lucifer free from his Cage. Sam looked so soft, if worn, like a beloved teddy bear.
The other Dean, though-him he thought capable of anything. He just needed to lower his eyes a little, and what he saw were the rough, calloused hands of a serial killer.
***
The next three days passed uneventfully.
At first, Dean closely inspected his bedroom. Apart from the porn collection which had already caught his eye, he discovered little of interest. Booze, burgers, guns and boobs, that seemed all his predecessor had cared about.
Then he explored the rest of the bunker, which yielded no further information on Dean Winchester, but deepened his understanding of the hunting world in general. It still didn’t quite make sense to him that when a demon murdered your mother and girlfriend, you started chasing after vampires or pishtacos who’d never done you any harm. But it no longer surprised him that research in a dusty storage room had led to the loss of his memories. Each box he opened revealed some curious object or other. Dean was careful not to touch anything. Who knew, maybe that ancient crystal ball or that moldy piece of wood could summon Lauren Bacall. But why risk it, when chances were just as high that he’d be transformed into a frog. Or that his guts would spill out.
His growing curiosity led him to devour John Winchester’s journal from cover to cover. Like him, John had zero knowledge of the supernatural when he set out. Yet with each adventure he’d delved more deeply into that world, until he all but forgot about any other. Similarly, tracing John’s steps page after page, monster after monster, Dean succumbed to the siren call of the supernatural, so that when he reached the last entries, it amazed him how he could ever have believed in any other kind of world.
Meanwhile, Sam pored over lorebooks. When it became obvious that they would both starve to death if he left matters up to Sam, Dean took over kitchen duty. A strange giddiness bubbled up inside him when he paid for his groceries with a credit card reading James B. Dean, which only grew as he prepared dinner. By the time he’d finished the dishes afterwards, he noticed that for the first time since he’d woken up without his memories, he felt content.
***
A new vision assaulted him the next morning. Dean spent an half an hour throwing up in the bathroom before he could tell Sam what he’d seen-or rather relived in violent detail. This time, it had been a teenage girl who’d been turned into a vampire. Alex. He could still feel her confusion and sense of betrayal pumping through his veins.
“I let you get turned.” The distraught look in Sam’s eyes made Dean’s stomach lurch.
“You cured me,” Dean pointed out. “And her.” Then he retched again. “What’s happening to me?”
Sam sighed. “No idea. Supernatural morning sickness?”
“Oh God, is there such a thing?” Dean exclaimed, horrified. “Am I pregnant?”
Sam actually snickered. “Calm down, dude.”
“Calm down? You calm down when you’ve grown a uterus overnight.” Dean pressed his hands against his stomach. “Fuck, I can feel something moving in there.”
“Dean, you just puked out your guts.”
“You sure about that? What if there’s some spell-”
“The only thing you lost are your memories, right?” Sam interrupted him with a glance at Dean’s crotch. Dean hastily moved his hand down there to reassure himself that everything was still where it was supposed to be.
A sprinkling of doubt remained nonetheless. “First Jody, now Alex. I’m reliving memories of chicks. Chicks, Sam! And yesterday I cooked and cleaned the kitchen and-” he lowered his voice “-I liked it, Sam, I liked it a lot.”
Sam laughed. The snarky gleam in his eyes made him look about ten years old. “Not exactly breaking news.”
“Whatever you say, Doris Day.” Half affronted, half amused, Dean cuffed him on the side of his head, earning an elbow in the ribs for his trouble.
For a few glorious seconds, Dean felt like he belonged.
Dean could pinpoint the exact moment Sam recollected that to Dean this had been breaking news. If Dean hadn’t already emptied the contents of his stomach, he would have done so now at the sight of how Sam’s face crumpled like a used napkin.
“Sorry,” Dean said.
With a dismissive shake of his head, Sam turned away. “Let’s hit the books.”
***
The next weeks brought more of the same. More dead ends for Sam’s research, more flashbacks for Dean. It still puzzled him that he was reliving his most traumatic experiences through the memories of other people. According to Sam’s optimistic interpretation, this was a sure sign his memories were lurking around, ready to burst to the forefront of his mind at any given minute. Dean couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it. If he managed to fit more easily into the role of Sam’s brother with each passing day, it was probably just down to the fact that he’d gotten better at reading Sam’s reactions.
It was difficult to anticipate when the next vision would hit him. Sometimes he had two in one day, sometimes he had to wait for over a week.
Their content also varied. Experiencing how Jody nearly choked on her own blood seemed harmless in hindsight compared to being torn apart by hellhounds.
“Bela was a truly awful person,” the usually so kind Sam said without a hint of sympathy. Apparently she’d made a deal out of pure, selfish greed, asking a demon to slaughter her parents so she could inherit their millions. Dean couldn’t shake off the feeling that no one deserved to die like that.
He understood now, though, why Sam had gone off the rails after his brother went to hell. You couldn’t expect anyone to watch someone else being ripped apart by invisible beasts without losing their head.
The night after he’d relived Bela’s death, Dean carefully examined his body in a mirror. A flat chest and bulky forearms gazed back at him, so different from Bela’s supple limbs he’d inhabited in the vision. If he closed his eyes, he could still see invisible fangs sinking into his dainty ankle, vicious teeth burying themselves in his hipbone, twisting him this way and that, shaking, tearing-With a gasp he tore his eyes open again. The reflection in the mirror mocked him. No blood. No bites. It seemed unfathomable that such a violent death had left behind no marks-neither on his body, nor on his memories.
His searching eyes and probing fingers ran across other scars, each one a lock to which Dean lacked the key. Not a single patch of skin spoke to him directly.
He reached for one of the knives that hung on the wall and brought it down to his wrist. He gazed at the blood oozing out of the shallow cut and smiled.
I did this, he thought. This is all mine.
***
“So who was it this time-Daisy Simpson?” Sam asked with a strained smile after Dean’s latest flashback.
It struck Dean then that Sam grew more tense each time it happened. Like he was dreading that one day he would be the star of Dean’s visions. Or maybe he was disappointed because he never was.
“Not a chick this time.” Dean swallowed. He couldn’t lie to Sam. “Crowley.”
Bitterness flashed over Sam’s face.
“You cured me when I was a demon, right?” Dean asked in an almost apologetic voice. What he meant to say was, You matter to me. “Was it anything like that?”
All Sam had previously told him on the subject was: You were a demon. I got you back. Nothing had prepared him for the sensation of fire and ice rushing through his veins, the tears, the penitence, the plea for love.
Sam snorted. “You were something else altogether, believe me. You chased me through the bunker with a hammer.”
An emotion Dean couldn’t name colored Sam’s words. Not anger, resentment, fear or anything else Dean might have imagined. No, he realized eventually, it was wistfulness.
Dean didn’t dare ask Sam if he would trade him against his demon self, who still had access to all his memories but wanted to kill Sam because they no longer meant the same to him. He knew he wouldn’t like the answer.
At night he took up the knife again and carved fresh memories into his skin.
***
“I haven’t been entirely straight with you,” Sam remarked at breakfast one day. It fascinated Dean how Sam could munch his cereal and still look like a starving man. “I wasn’t always with you. When I went away to Stanford, I wanted a clean break. When you called me-it was just too much. As stupid as it sounds, I was homesick. And so scared that I’d beg you to come and take me away… I didn’t speak to you for over two years.”
Dean frowned. Sam wasn’t seeking absolution. Not from him. “Is this about the things I’ve been seeing?”
“I can see you looking at me sometimes. You must be wondering. God knows, I would too. We’re so close, and yet-”
“So what if the flashbacks I’m experiencing aren’t about you? It doesn’t mean anything. Or,” he continued when Sam opened his mouth to protest, “it doesn’t mean what you think it does. Come on, you really believe that your brother was closer to Bela or Crowley than you?”
“Not really, but…” Sam trailed off with a mournful wave of his spoon.
“I know I’m not the Einstein here, but I’m pretty sure it’s the other way round. For some reason my own memories are…blocked-” Sam had recently explained spam filters, firewalls and adblockers to him, after Dean had almost crashed his laptop with a research on cherry pie “-and all I have are the memories of other people who’ve experienced something similar at one point. But because of the lives we lead, your memories are so close to mine that the memoryblocker in my brain treats them like my own. Ta-da!”
Dean spread his hands like a magician who’d completed his latest trick and waited for the applause of the audience.
“It’s a theory,” said Sam and swallowed another spoonful of cereal. He chewed on it, neither as impressed nor as enthusiastic as Dean’s performance warranted in his own humble opinion, but at least Sam’s jaw no longer seemed quite so rigid with guilt.
***
A month after Dean had woken up without his memories Sam finally agreed to take him along on a hunt. Saving people, hunting things, Sam had explained their lives to him. As long as they couldn’t find a cure for Dean’s amnesia, why not get back to that? It seemed important.
Sam made him swear several times to stay back and watch. Which was kind of patronizing, but if being in the big brother role for once was the single thing about this whole mess that could make Sam happy, then Dean was willing to play along.
Of course, once the ghost in question turned out not to be just any ghost, but Billy the Kid, and salting and burning his bones didn’t stop him from choking Sam, Dean no longer gave a damn about the promises he’d made.
He dashed towards Billy’s gun which had been lost during his tussle with Sam. His heart was hammering furiously against his ribcage, less in fear than exhilaration. With steady fingers he poured salt onto the gun, drizzled it with gas and drew out his lighter, just like Sam had done after he dug up Billy’s grave.
“Hey,” he yelled to get Billy’s attention. The guy released Sam’s neck and spun around. Dean dropped his lighter onto the gun. “Here’s looking at you, Kid!”
With a furious cry the ghost leapt at him, but he didn’t manage to do any worse damage than scratch his dirty nails across Dean’s forearms before he was consumed by flames.
“Wow!” He glanced across at Sam. “That was amazing!” No wonder the Winchesters had chosen to become a band of supernatural Untouchables.
“How did you know?” Sam nodded towards the gun, rubbing his neck.
Dean shrugged. “Just a hunch.”
“Just a…You idiot. Never do that again!” Sam burst out, his voice rough.
“Ummm, okay,” Dean agreed somewhat hesitantly. In his opinion, a Thanks for saving my ass, dude would have been more appropriate. But what did he know? He’d only been a hunter for half-an-hour.
Going by the unhappy twitch of Sam’s mouth as he bent to pick up their tools, that wasn’t what Sam had wanted to hear. Dean hated himself for getting it wrong once again. Maybe he should have gone with a smirk and You’re welcome instead.
Sam was quiet on the ride home. This hunt was doubtless the closest thing to his life pre Dean’s memory loss that Sam had experienced so far, and it seemed like all it had done was make him more keenly aware of what he’d lost.
With growing bitterness Dean watched the silent workings of Sam’s rigid jawbones. He clenched his fists in his lap and bit down on his lip to keep the angry scream waiting on his tongue from escaping: You’re mourning your brother and I’m sitting right next to you! How is that fair?
“Hey, can I ask you something?” he asked later, much later, when they’d settled back into their research routine at the bunker. He was standing next to one of the bookshelves, checking and re-checking that he hadn’t missed a single volume of the section Sam had assigned him.
Across the table, Sam raised his head from his books with a tight smile. “Sure.”
Dean swallowed. He was glad that he was standing, forcing Sam to look up at him. It gave him the confidence to continue, “Why do you miss him so much?”
“Him?”
“Your brother,” Dean clarified. It annoyed him howSam still wouldn’t give up the pretense that they were one and the same, when each of his actions betrayed that he didn’t believe it himself, not even a little. He met Sam’s gaze head-on. “No offense, but he kinda sounds like a dick.”
Fury flashed up bright in Sam’s eyes. Involuntarily, Dean took a step backwards. This was a side of Sam he’d so far only encountered in Sam’s stories. Stories of a Sam who was angry enough to make monsters tremble and kill demons with the powers of his mind. Stories Dean had never quite believed, up till now.
In the blink of an eye the fire in Sam’s glare had been stamped out, replaced by ice, impersonal and impenetrable enough that Dean found himself longing for the rage which had scared him so badly just a moment ago.
“You wouldn’t understand.” Sam’s voice was carefully neutral, like he was speaking to a stranger. “You don’t know a thing about us.”
Pain exploded in Dean’s chest, like his heart had suddenly been shoved into a freezer the size of a safety pin.
There it was, the crushing truth: He didn’t belong.
Hours after Dean had excused himself to bed, Sam came to his room, announced by a waft of liquor. He hesitated in the doorway. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” He sounded honestly upset.
“It’s fine,” Dean told him and pressed his thumbnail into the fresh cut he’d made on his arm. His pillow muffled the words. He didn’t turn around.
***
Over the next couple of weeks, Dean discovered that hunting wasn’t always a glorious, light-flooded stage over which you could prance with more badassery and sass than Marlon Brando, Elliot Ness and Humphrey Bogart put together. Theoretically, he already knew as much from everything Sam had told him about their lives. But hearing that you couldn’t save everyone, that sometimes you messed up and came to let, was a completely different thing from actually experiencing it.
A little girl had died, because they hadn’t been able to figure out quickly enough what was going on.
Sam seemed somber but calm afterwards, like this tragic incident merely made him more determined to keep hunting monsters and saving people. Dean wondered if his former self would have been just as collected. He was utterly thrown by it.
He couldn’t think, he couldn’t sleep. The sole thing he was still up to was dropping by the liquor store on their way home.
Sam watched him with worry, which only made it worse. So Dean escaped to his room, a bottle of Jack clutched in his fist. Of course Sam being Sam, he poked his head through the door every ten minutes, a soft “You okay?” on his lips.
Eventually, Dean couldn’t stand it anymore. “I’m going out!” he announced, jumping to his feet.
“Okay, let me just get my jacket,” said Sam.
“No!” Dean shouted. “You’re not coming along!”
“Dean, I don’t think you should be driving-”
“I don’t care what you think!” All the misery of the past two months suddenly poured out of Dean. “Can’t you see you’re suffocating me? You’re there 24/7, I never see anyone else, anyone would think we’re married. It’s not normal! I want to have friends, a family, a house with actual windows, a real life!”
Ignoring Sam’s hurt face, he pushed past him.
When he entered the bar he felt like he could draw his first deep breath since discovering the little girl’s corpse. The relief lasted for about a second.
Then a blonde, practically naked woman reached for him with long, red nails. For a moment, Dean could only stare dumbly at her. She didn’t know him, hell, he barely knew himself; it seemed criminal. He extricated himself from her grasp, stumbling backwards. Perhaps he was already drunker than he’d thought.
On unsteady feet he elbowed his path through the crowd. When he arrived at the bar, the young man behind it grinned and winked at him. “Hey, Dean. Long time no see, man. The usual?”
Dean froze. This guy knew him. Well, not him, but the other Dean. He’d lived such a secluded life at the bunker it never occurred to him that he might run into someone who knew him. Someone who would notice something was amiss. Someone who’d stare at him with astonished, disdainful, or maybe sad eyes asking, What’s wrong with you?
Without a word he fled back to the sanctuary of his car.
He had no idea how long he sat there with his head resting against the wheel. Maybe he’d passed out at some point, he didn’t know.
All he knew was that when he straightened up again, his limbs felt stiff and cold, and his heart ached with loneliness. He missed Sam.
***
It was a miracle that he arrived back at the bunker without crashing the car. Sam had been right. He shouldn’t have been driving.
“Dean, thank God!” Sam greeted him in relief. He dragged Dean into one of the armchairs in the library, put a cuddly hoodie around his shoulders and fed him cheese on toast. Apparently Dean looked every bit as cold and miserable as he felt.
Warmed and nourished as much by Sam’s presence as by his attentions, Dean said eventually, “Listen, Sam, about earlier-”
He expected a shadow of his former hurt to pass over Sam’s face, but instead Sam’s mouth widened into a grin. “It’s okay. I finally figured it out, thanks to you!”
Dean blinked at him. “Figured out what?”
“What happened to you.”
“Seriously?” Dean could hardly believe it. “Dude, seriously?”
“Yes.” Sam was exuberant. He held up the broken beaker and the spellbook which had been contained in the storage box Dean, the other Dean, had collapsed next to.
“I thought that was the monster cure-all?”
“It is. But it works differently than I originally thought. It doesn’t change monsters back into their human form, it takes away their individual memories and replaces them by a collective memory of normal citizen life.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you see? You accidentally inhaled the spell powder. That’s why your memories are gone, but why you can still do things like talk-”
“Or tie my shoes?” Dean added with a sardonic huff. “Wow. But why did I have those weird flashbacks?”
“It’s only a theory so far, but-” here Sam paused for effect and allowed himself a smug smile “-I think it’s a good one: The Men of Letters never got round to testing this spell. There’s no saying how long lasting it is. And you’ve experienced so many traumatic things in your life that it would probably have taken a much bigger dose to keep that away permanently. And-” he went on when he perceived Dean’s questioning look “-because of the way the spell works, the memories of those events couldn’t come back to you as your individual memories, so instead you had flashbacks to similar memories which belonged to Alex or Jody.”
“Okay.” Dean nodded, even though he was still having trouble processing it at all. It was a lot of info to swallow at once. “But how did me bitching at you earlier make you realize all that?”
“It struck me then that it’s odd that you’d have such a strong conviction of what a normal life looks like. I mean, I wasn’t born into a normal life either, but I never realized that the way I grew up wasn’t normal until I started going to school and saw what a different world the other kids around me existed in. Yet here you were, waking up without any memories of the supernatural, yet so sure that a house should have windows…”
Sam drew a deep breath, then continued with fresh energy, “And once I started to think about it, all the other odd things made sense to me too. That you put on the suit the first day. That you never leave your room until you’re fully dressed. That you sounded so overly formal at first. That you didn’t know anything about the internet. That you quote Casablanca!”
“Yeah?” Dean didn’t know yet what Sam was getting at.
“It’s what would have been normal in the fifties, when the Men of Letters created the spell.”
Dean whistled. Sam’s explanation did make a lot of sense. Though-He tilted his head and frowned at Sam. “Wait a minute. The Men of Letters, they knew about the supernatural, right? So what, they were trying to create an army of mindless apes which they could control at whim because they were the only ones who had access to that kind of higher knowledge and power?”
Sam looked taken aback. “That’s one way to look at it.”
The answer didn’t satisfy Dean, but instead of starting a fundamental debate on morality in a supernatural world which he had no hope of winning, he focused on the more pressing issue. “So-how do we reverse it?”
Sam visibly deflated. “I’m working on it,” he said.
***
It had taken Sam over two months to figure out why Dean had lost his memories. Soon it became evident that reversing the spell would be a similarly cumbersome task.
In a way it was worse, Dean thought, knowing what was wrong without being able to fix it. Each new lead turned out to be a bust, each fresh boost of hope was viciously squashed.
Apparently, the spell the Men of Letters had designed was beyond anything any witch had ever practiced. Not even Rowena and the Book of the Damned could decipher it.
“This is old, old, intricate magic,” Rowena purred, with something like awe in her voice. Dean loathed her instantly.
“Promise me we’ll never use this spell on anyone else,” Dean said later as they drove back to the bunker, Sam silent and gray-faced beside him. The words came out flat, like a rusty bronze bell that had been dragged up from the bottom of the sea, caked in ten layers of mud and tang. “No one deserves to live like this.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sam flinch.
“We’ll fix this, Dean. We always do.” Sam’s voice was thin and lacking any conviction.
***
Anyone can make this bitch scream. The art is to make her whimper for days on end.
Alastair’s words, spoken in his latest flashback, haunted Dean. As did the burst of pride in his chest the first time Alastair petted his head and said, Well done, my child.
He hadn’t told Sam about that particular vision. He knew that in taking up a knife in hell, he’d broken the first seal. It was obvious to see the parallels. From what Sam had said about her, he was willing to bet that Alastair’s pupil in the flashback was Meg. But what he didn’t know and really, really didn’t want to find out, was if he’d felt just as pleased whenever Alastair praised his handiwork.
He stared at the scars on his forearm he’d created. Already, they were changing in his eyes, no longer his, but the work of the other Dean, the masterful torturer.
With shaking fingers, he took down the knife from the wall. He was going to scratch them out, all of them, and then he could finally overwrite them in his own true hand.
***
Dean’s first thought was, Wow, those curls would make Sam jealous.
Wait-curls?
He closed his eyes and opened them again with great deliberation. Once again an opulence of black curls met his gaze. As he let his eyes slowly travel south, Dean discovered that this impressive mane belonged to a hot, leather-clad woman who stood above him with a challenging frown.
Dean had no memory of sitting down on the floor in front of his bed, and certainly not of inviting a guest into his room. A lady guest! (Though, considering his condition, that didn’t necessarily mean anything.)
“Who are you?” Dean sprang to his feet and approached the stranger.
The woman grinned at him, shaking her dark curls. Each strand of hair radiated mystery and power. Dean felt like he’d walked right into a hairspray commercial. She pushed him back down as if he weighed no more than a feather.
Dean stared at her with growing suspicion. “What are you?”
He only hoped this wasn’t some weird transgender re-enactment of Samson and Delilah. He’d already spent more than enough time reliving the experiences of other chicks, thank you very much.
“Relax, I’m an old friend.” Mystery woman propped down beside him with a nonchalant shrug. Her face was a curious blend of brazenness and serenity. “For certain values of friend.”
Understanding dawned on Dean. “You’re Billie.”
She didn’t say anything, just stared at him with mild curiosity. Unnerved, Dean lowered his eyes to his forearm. The last thing he remembered was taking up the knife. Yet there was no blood.
A vague sense of foreboding seized him. Slowly, he shifted his gaze to the side.
Not two feet away lay another body. His body. And on that body, there was blood.
“I’m dead,” Dean realized.
Billie merely continued to look at him. Her silence was infinitely creepier than the sight of his own lifeless body.
“Go on then.” Dean spread his arms. “Do your job.”
“Oh I will, Dean Winchester. But not today.”
“Why not? Sam said you want us dead.”
“I want to make sure that when you’re dead you stay dead. Subtle difference, sport. No more bending the rules, pushing the universe out of joint.” She tapped her digit against his forehead. “And not just for you and Sam, but for everyone.”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Dean muttered, leaning out of reach. “Except I’m already dead, right?”
“Not quite. You will be, in about half an hour. If you don’t fight it.”
Dean raised his eyebrows. “You saying you want me to fight it?”
“No, I just want to tell you a bedtime story. Hello, Mr. Sandman.”
“Wow, you’re really gonna put me to sleep if you go on like that, lady,” Dean said, faking a yawn.
Instead of taking offense, Billie laughed. “And here I thought that curse turned you into a mild Sunday school boy.”
Dean turned to her with fresh urgency. “What do you know about the curse?”
“Everything,” she said with a smug grin. “Sam ever tell you about that time he got his soul back?” Before he could interrupt to ask what the hell that had to do with anything, she continued, “The old Death, he put up a wall in Sam’s mind to keep the bad memories of hell away. Lucky kid. They don’t sell these things at Walmart, you know.”
Here she fell silent, as if she expected him to put two and two together now. He frowned at her. “Are you-are you saying I have a wall like that in my head?”
“Bingo.”
Something like hope began to blossom in Dean’s chest. “And it’s old-school reaper magic?” That might explain why Rowena and the Book of the Damned hadn’t been of any help.
“Reaper magic? More like reaper murder. The old Death, he might have been able to build something like that and devour a pizza at the same time, but your average reaper? Not so much. Sam’s supposed to be the brainy one, right? Didn’t it strike him as strange that the Men of Letters never developed this into a large-scale project? Here’s a little hint-just for that pinch you accidentally snuffed a hundred reapers had to die.”
“Let me guess,” he could tell there this was going, “you’re pissed, because that upset the natural order and all that crap you’re so big about.” He plastered on what he hoped was a confident grin. “So breaking down that wall in my head would restore the balance, right?”
“The universe isn’t made up of math, kid. Just ‘cause A and B add up to C, doesn’t mean that when you take away B you’ll get A again. You of all people should understand that.”
“So what,” he ground out over his flare of disappointment, “you just came here to dangle a carrot in front of me?”
“No. I came to give you a little pro tip. Scratch. Not down there,” she added with a disdainful glance at the dead body’s blood covered wrist.” Her finger was back against his forehead. “Up here.”
For a moment everything disappeared from his sight-
-And he came back to himself.
“I’m back,” Dean whispered, full of wonder, as he looked down his body. No longer just a lifeless thing. His again.
And currently bleeding out.
In a frenzy, he ripped off his shirt and roughly bandaged his wounds. When he’d satisfied himself that he’d stopped the bleeding enough so he wasn’t going to pass out again before getting to the medical kit they kept in the bathroom, he slowly rose to his feet.
He came face to face with Billie. She was leaning casually against the doorframe, looking unbearably smug. Which was somewhat weird considering he’d just narrowly escaped her clutches for the second time-
Wait! The second time? How did Dean know there was a first time? Sam didn’t know anything about what had happened in the hospital. He couldn’t have told him about it.
Which meant-his memories were back!
Dean punched a fist into the air in triumph.
“My god, why are you still here?” Dean groaned, when Billie rolled her eyes at his antics. A suspicion took hold of him. He pointed his digit at her. “Be honest, you only helped me ‘cause you wouldn’t have gotten as much of a kick out of reaping me when I wasn’t myself. Sadistic bitch.”
She smirked. “You’re welcome. Bitch.”
***
If Sam had any doubts about the official version of events Dean told him (Billie was pissed at the spell and had made a trade with Dean, giving him his memories back in return for the promise that they’d destroy it), he kept them to himself.
A sense of relief settled over Dean as he watched the flames consume the spellbook in the little pyre they’d erected in one of the fields near the bunker.
“Dude, I can’t believe you didn’t immediately realize what was up when I quoted Casablanca!” Dean complained, knocking his can of beer against Sam’s.
“You always quote old movies!” Sam retorted.
“But not chick flicks.”
“Oh shut up,” Sam protested with a grin, “you know you love chick flicks.”
Dean smiled down at the flames in front of them. He’d never fully appreciated just how beautiful it was when you stood next to someone and knew you were both thinking of the same thing.
True, at the present his mind was like an apartment that had been ransacked by a gang of thieves, and while the police had manage to retrieve every stolen item, the task of putting everything back in its proper place still lay ahead of him. But at least those missing pieces were there again. Even if there were some Dean would have preferred to lose forever.
Ironic, less than twenty-four hours ago, he’d resented his present self, as though memories of grief and guilt were precious emeralds. Now he couldn’t help but be jealous of the guy he’d been without them-the guy who could close his eyes and not smell blood and betrayal.
Dean thought of how Zachariah had messed with their memories all those years ago. As a reminder. Like the marketing director he’d pretended to be, that angelic dickbag had wrapped the message in pompous phrases including blood and destiny. What it boiled down to, though, was simple enough: You’ve got nowhere to run. And Dean might have been able to stab the smug bastard into the face, but the truth behind those words, that he couldn’t erase.
No matter where he was, what he was, he would never be enough.
Still, he thought, glancing at Sam’s smiling silhouette to his left, as long as his brother was by his side, he could live with that.
Sam’s dimpled grin melted into soft concern. “You okay?”
Self-consciously, Dean tugged at his sleeves. He took a generous swig from his beer and gave his brother a full-toothed smile. “I’m great. Hell, I’m fan-freakin’-tastic.” As long as he had Sam and a six-pack a day, he could deal. On seeing that Sam didn’t look quite convinced, he waggled his eyebrows for good measure. “Cause the next time you wanna put me on research duty, you can forget it.”
He barely refrained from adding, “See what I did there?”
Sam groaned and buried his face in his hands, as unappreciative of Dean’s puns as ever. “I can’t believe I’ve missed this. I must be going insane.”
Dean chuckled into his beer. “Sorry to break it to you, little bro, but that ship sailed a long, long time ago.”
Sam shook his head, half exasperated, half fond. It was a gesture Dean hadn’t seen since before he’d lost his memories, a gesture no one apart from Dean had ever been able to coax out of him. As far as Dean was concerned, that was a skill far more worth remembering than how to tie your shoes.
And from the way Sam then bumped their shoulders together, he gathered that Sam agreed.
***fin***
Recipient: red_b_rackham
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~ 7600
Warnings: Spoilers for all aired episodes. Mentions of torture, self-harm and suicide.
Author’s Notes: Many thanks to my awesome beta - you know who you are!
Summary: Dean has plenty of memories. Just not his own.
-So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dean still remembers how to tie his shoes.
The unfamiliar handwriting blurred in front of Dean’s eyes.
… No aphasia…sounded a bit stilted and overly polite at the beginning…speech has reverted back to normal…
…heightened modesty… blushed (!) and practically ran away when he walked in on me in the shower room… dressed in his Fed suit, his tie a perfect Windsor knot…
…didn’t remember how to shoot a gun… practiced in the shooting range for two hours… back to being a crack shot…
…Car…no personal memories. No clue how to use a tablet or a smartphone... internet…
…nothing about hunting.
Dean blinked at the meager summary of his existence in Sam’s journal, jotted down in royal blue ink.
He read again what Sam had added at the bottom of the page, Dean still remembers how to tie his shoes. Like a consolation prize.
Sam-his brother.
Three days ago Dean had woken up in a windowless room whose walls were decorated with weapons. Murky green eyes greeted him in the cracked mirror on the dresser. Freckled skin. A tired mouth.
Before his brain had been able to answer the question Who am I?, the door of the room burst open and a floppy haired giant rushed at him, prompting question number two: Who are you?
Countless other questions followed.
Sam had answered each one with great patience and an unhappy twitch of his lips, even though each question led to further questions, no end in sight.
The past seventy-two hours had been long enough for Dean to accept the idea that there were monsters out there-werewolves, vampires, angels, demons, even God’s friggin’ sister-and that people like Sam were insane enough to hunt them day-in, day-out. But he still couldn’t believe that Dean Winchester, 37-year-old monster hunter extraordinaire, the guy who featured so prominently in all Sam’s tales, was supposed to be him.
For how could he, when all his amnesia-addled brain had retained were impersonal memories that might belong to any Joe out on the street? He knew how to tie his shoes, for God’s sake. (No, strike that, Chuck’s sake. Because apparently, God was real and he was a weird writer dude with a cat blog who liked to make pancakes for breakfast.) But basic survival info like how to kill a vampire-cut off their heads, according to Sam-nil.
With a frustrated sigh, Dean turned his attention to a barely readable scrawl in the margin.
Dean’s knowledge of technology seems to date to the early nineties, Sam had written next to the comment about smartphones and tablets.
Smartphones, tablets, the Internet-if Sam was to be believed, all that stuff had changed the world more in the past twenty years than in the five hundred years preceding them.
And Dean remembered none of it.
Maybe Sam was right. Maybe this was a vital clue to what had happened to him.
Okay, it seemed more than a little strange that part of his memories should have been preserved up to a certain date, when most of them were just gone entirely. But from what Sam had told him, strange was their middle name.
Dean’s pulse quickened in anticipation. Was this the answer he’d been waiting for?
“No, it’s not.”
Dean jumped. He hadn’t heard Sam enter the library.
“What’s-?” He closed the notebook and carefully pushed it halfway across the table.
Sam didn’t seem upset at Dean’s nosiness. Presumably because he didn’t have any capacities left for it, considering just how upset he still was that he’d lost the other Dean, the real Dean, his brother.
“You were thinking that’s the answer,” Sam explained patiently. “But it’s not. You knew how to use a gun ever since you were six.”
“Right.” Dean did his best not to let his disappointment show. He should have remembered that. After all, Sam had told him only yesterday about all the things Dean had taught him when he was a child; hell, when they’d both still been children. Which was wrong on so many levels. He did the best he could, Sam defended his father’s parenting. Just like he’d excused the deal his mother had made, never mind that she’d thereby ruined his life before it even started. Or like he’d wiped away the ugly story of how Dean had shoved an angel inside him against his will with a mild smile. Sam was some kind of saint, Dean was sure of it. What he was, though-the jury was still out on that one.
“What you said about me sounding more like the other-like myself,” he gestured towards the notebook, “do you think my memories are starting to come back?”
Sam bit his lip. “I hope so.”
Dean averted his eyes from the naked pain on Sam’s face. He didn’t need a fresh reminder that for Sam this situation equaled having to downgrade from a T-Bird to a Model T. Unless Dean magically managed to transform back into the T-Bird Dean, there was nothing he could do to make Sam feel any better.
“Maybe you could bounce some ideas off me?” he suggested timidly.
“Yeah. Except I don’t really have any at this point.” Sam shrugged helplessly. “Like I told you, I found you in the storage room. No injury, nothing, just passed out. You were supposed to do some research. But God knows what you might have gotten up to!” At Dean’s puzzled look, he added, “You’re not very fond of research.”
“But you are?”
“I guess.”
“That’s great,” Dean remarked, not sure what else to say. He watched Sam’s mouth tighten and wanted to bang his head against the table. Dammit, he got it wrong again! Probably the T-Bird would have made fun of Sam now, he certainly sounded douchey enough. He cleared his throat. “The contents of the box he-I went through couldn’t have caused this?”
“Not really. It was all stuff about curing monsters.”
“And the beaker that was broken-”
“Contained a spell which can turn any creature back into a model citizen.” Sam sighed. “Look, I went over everything three times already, but nothing in there can explain your amnesia.”
“What about the books on curses you browsed yesterday?”
“Nothing. Sorry.”
“It’s okay…Sam.” Sam’s mouth tightened again. Dean had no idea what he’d done wrong this time. He wondered how he was supposed to live through the rest of this day. He felt exhausted already.
Swaying slightly, he got to his feet. A shout of “Dean!” was the last thing he registered before darkness enveloped him.
***
Dean came to on the parquet flooring of the bathroom, propped up against Sam’s muscular torso.
As soon as he gave the first sign of life, Sam cupped his face in two huge hands. “Dean! Thank God! You okay? What happened?”
Dean tried to pull away and regain his bearings. Sam’s voice was too loud, his hands too forceful, his eyes too piercing, while Dean’s own limbs felt too large, too heavy, too alien. Like a film noir composition of flashy light, stark contrasts and endless mirrors, it was overwhelming him, confusing him, smudging the line between up and down, near and far, Sam and Dean.
Once his surroundings had settled into a more coherent shape and he could tell where Sam ended and he began, he mumbled, “I remember.”
Sam’s legs jerked against his lower back. “You remember? What?”
“Not much. Just-I stood in front of the mirror and reapplied my lipstick.” Sam stared at him. “I was tipsy, I couldn’t stop giggling. It was my first date with Patrick, and he was-”
“Patrick?” Sam interrupted him sharply. “Dean, you don’t date guys. And you don’t wear lipstick.”
Dean nodded. The discovery of his predecessor’s embarrassingly large collection of erotica had already told him as much. “And I guess I’ve never been a woman either?”
Sam gaped at him like he’d grown two heads. Poetic justice, considering Dean was still trying to wrap his head around all the weird facts Sam had bombarded him with in the past three days.
He suppressed a grin at Sam’s amazed silence and continued, “I look into the mirror and then I-well, she, she started to cough up blood. I don’t know why. It kept getting worse, and I couldn’t breathe, and I was going to die right there, right in that public bathroom, God, Sam, you can’t imagine-”
“Jody,” Sam said. There was a shrewd look in his eyes.
“What?” Already they were back to Sam being the one who made no sense.
“Jody. Our friend, Sherriff Jody Mills. Remember when I told you about the trials I undertook so we could close the Gates of Hell forever? Well, Crowley, he wanted to stop us.”
Crowley, Dean mentally supplied, the Al Capone of Hell who the other Dean had liked to hang out with. What a douche.
“He started killing off everyone we’d known, everyone we’d saved.” Sam swallowed hard. “He threatened to kill Jody if we didn’t surrender. He was Patrick.”
“So the vision I just had, of what happened in that restroom-”
“Hexbag.”
Effects of a hexbag, of course. Dean didn’t know what it meant that he accepted the explanation just as readily as the laws of gravity.
For a moment, neither of them spoke. Then Dean raised himself to his feet, leaning on Sam for support. “Why am I remembering this?”
There were no answers waiting for him in Sam’s tired face. “I don’t know.”
A new thought struck Dean. “Have I ever been through that?”
Sam’s eyebrows made contact with his hairline. “A near-death experience in a public bathroom?”
Dean didn’t know why the idea seemed so ridiculous to Sam. By all accounts, he’d watched Dean die in about a billion different ways. (Well, the other Dean. The T-Bird.) Death by taco was hardly any more glorious.
But that was beside the point. “No, the hexbag thing,” he clarified.
“Oh.” Sam’s eyebrows rushed back down towards the tip of his nose.
With longing, Dean watched the memories whirl past Sam’s fuzzed-over eyes.
“The first time we dealt with witches,” Sam answered eventually, “they cursed you. Ruby rescued you.”
Sam didn’t volunteer up any further information, and Dean felt too intimidated by the look on his face to inquire. Ruby was a sore topic, he already knew that from Sam’s crash course through their mutual history. Not that he could seriously imagine the man standing in front of him sucking someone else’s blood and springing Lucifer free from his Cage. Sam looked so soft, if worn, like a beloved teddy bear.
The other Dean, though-him he thought capable of anything. He just needed to lower his eyes a little, and what he saw were the rough, calloused hands of a serial killer.
***
The next three days passed uneventfully.
At first, Dean closely inspected his bedroom. Apart from the porn collection which had already caught his eye, he discovered little of interest. Booze, burgers, guns and boobs, that seemed all his predecessor had cared about.
Then he explored the rest of the bunker, which yielded no further information on Dean Winchester, but deepened his understanding of the hunting world in general. It still didn’t quite make sense to him that when a demon murdered your mother and girlfriend, you started chasing after vampires or pishtacos who’d never done you any harm. But it no longer surprised him that research in a dusty storage room had led to the loss of his memories. Each box he opened revealed some curious object or other. Dean was careful not to touch anything. Who knew, maybe that ancient crystal ball or that moldy piece of wood could summon Lauren Bacall. But why risk it, when chances were just as high that he’d be transformed into a frog. Or that his guts would spill out.
His growing curiosity led him to devour John Winchester’s journal from cover to cover. Like him, John had zero knowledge of the supernatural when he set out. Yet with each adventure he’d delved more deeply into that world, until he all but forgot about any other. Similarly, tracing John’s steps page after page, monster after monster, Dean succumbed to the siren call of the supernatural, so that when he reached the last entries, it amazed him how he could ever have believed in any other kind of world.
Meanwhile, Sam pored over lorebooks. When it became obvious that they would both starve to death if he left matters up to Sam, Dean took over kitchen duty. A strange giddiness bubbled up inside him when he paid for his groceries with a credit card reading James B. Dean, which only grew as he prepared dinner. By the time he’d finished the dishes afterwards, he noticed that for the first time since he’d woken up without his memories, he felt content.
***
A new vision assaulted him the next morning. Dean spent an half an hour throwing up in the bathroom before he could tell Sam what he’d seen-or rather relived in violent detail. This time, it had been a teenage girl who’d been turned into a vampire. Alex. He could still feel her confusion and sense of betrayal pumping through his veins.
“I let you get turned.” The distraught look in Sam’s eyes made Dean’s stomach lurch.
“You cured me,” Dean pointed out. “And her.” Then he retched again. “What’s happening to me?”
Sam sighed. “No idea. Supernatural morning sickness?”
“Oh God, is there such a thing?” Dean exclaimed, horrified. “Am I pregnant?”
Sam actually snickered. “Calm down, dude.”
“Calm down? You calm down when you’ve grown a uterus overnight.” Dean pressed his hands against his stomach. “Fuck, I can feel something moving in there.”
“Dean, you just puked out your guts.”
“You sure about that? What if there’s some spell-”
“The only thing you lost are your memories, right?” Sam interrupted him with a glance at Dean’s crotch. Dean hastily moved his hand down there to reassure himself that everything was still where it was supposed to be.
A sprinkling of doubt remained nonetheless. “First Jody, now Alex. I’m reliving memories of chicks. Chicks, Sam! And yesterday I cooked and cleaned the kitchen and-” he lowered his voice “-I liked it, Sam, I liked it a lot.”
Sam laughed. The snarky gleam in his eyes made him look about ten years old. “Not exactly breaking news.”
“Whatever you say, Doris Day.” Half affronted, half amused, Dean cuffed him on the side of his head, earning an elbow in the ribs for his trouble.
For a few glorious seconds, Dean felt like he belonged.
Dean could pinpoint the exact moment Sam recollected that to Dean this had been breaking news. If Dean hadn’t already emptied the contents of his stomach, he would have done so now at the sight of how Sam’s face crumpled like a used napkin.
“Sorry,” Dean said.
With a dismissive shake of his head, Sam turned away. “Let’s hit the books.”
***
The next weeks brought more of the same. More dead ends for Sam’s research, more flashbacks for Dean. It still puzzled him that he was reliving his most traumatic experiences through the memories of other people. According to Sam’s optimistic interpretation, this was a sure sign his memories were lurking around, ready to burst to the forefront of his mind at any given minute. Dean couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it. If he managed to fit more easily into the role of Sam’s brother with each passing day, it was probably just down to the fact that he’d gotten better at reading Sam’s reactions.
It was difficult to anticipate when the next vision would hit him. Sometimes he had two in one day, sometimes he had to wait for over a week.
Their content also varied. Experiencing how Jody nearly choked on her own blood seemed harmless in hindsight compared to being torn apart by hellhounds.
“Bela was a truly awful person,” the usually so kind Sam said without a hint of sympathy. Apparently she’d made a deal out of pure, selfish greed, asking a demon to slaughter her parents so she could inherit their millions. Dean couldn’t shake off the feeling that no one deserved to die like that.
He understood now, though, why Sam had gone off the rails after his brother went to hell. You couldn’t expect anyone to watch someone else being ripped apart by invisible beasts without losing their head.
The night after he’d relived Bela’s death, Dean carefully examined his body in a mirror. A flat chest and bulky forearms gazed back at him, so different from Bela’s supple limbs he’d inhabited in the vision. If he closed his eyes, he could still see invisible fangs sinking into his dainty ankle, vicious teeth burying themselves in his hipbone, twisting him this way and that, shaking, tearing-With a gasp he tore his eyes open again. The reflection in the mirror mocked him. No blood. No bites. It seemed unfathomable that such a violent death had left behind no marks-neither on his body, nor on his memories.
His searching eyes and probing fingers ran across other scars, each one a lock to which Dean lacked the key. Not a single patch of skin spoke to him directly.
He reached for one of the knives that hung on the wall and brought it down to his wrist. He gazed at the blood oozing out of the shallow cut and smiled.
I did this, he thought. This is all mine.
***
“So who was it this time-Daisy Simpson?” Sam asked with a strained smile after Dean’s latest flashback.
It struck Dean then that Sam grew more tense each time it happened. Like he was dreading that one day he would be the star of Dean’s visions. Or maybe he was disappointed because he never was.
“Not a chick this time.” Dean swallowed. He couldn’t lie to Sam. “Crowley.”
Bitterness flashed over Sam’s face.
“You cured me when I was a demon, right?” Dean asked in an almost apologetic voice. What he meant to say was, You matter to me. “Was it anything like that?”
All Sam had previously told him on the subject was: You were a demon. I got you back. Nothing had prepared him for the sensation of fire and ice rushing through his veins, the tears, the penitence, the plea for love.
Sam snorted. “You were something else altogether, believe me. You chased me through the bunker with a hammer.”
An emotion Dean couldn’t name colored Sam’s words. Not anger, resentment, fear or anything else Dean might have imagined. No, he realized eventually, it was wistfulness.
Dean didn’t dare ask Sam if he would trade him against his demon self, who still had access to all his memories but wanted to kill Sam because they no longer meant the same to him. He knew he wouldn’t like the answer.
At night he took up the knife again and carved fresh memories into his skin.
***
“I haven’t been entirely straight with you,” Sam remarked at breakfast one day. It fascinated Dean how Sam could munch his cereal and still look like a starving man. “I wasn’t always with you. When I went away to Stanford, I wanted a clean break. When you called me-it was just too much. As stupid as it sounds, I was homesick. And so scared that I’d beg you to come and take me away… I didn’t speak to you for over two years.”
Dean frowned. Sam wasn’t seeking absolution. Not from him. “Is this about the things I’ve been seeing?”
“I can see you looking at me sometimes. You must be wondering. God knows, I would too. We’re so close, and yet-”
“So what if the flashbacks I’m experiencing aren’t about you? It doesn’t mean anything. Or,” he continued when Sam opened his mouth to protest, “it doesn’t mean what you think it does. Come on, you really believe that your brother was closer to Bela or Crowley than you?”
“Not really, but…” Sam trailed off with a mournful wave of his spoon.
“I know I’m not the Einstein here, but I’m pretty sure it’s the other way round. For some reason my own memories are…blocked-” Sam had recently explained spam filters, firewalls and adblockers to him, after Dean had almost crashed his laptop with a research on cherry pie “-and all I have are the memories of other people who’ve experienced something similar at one point. But because of the lives we lead, your memories are so close to mine that the memoryblocker in my brain treats them like my own. Ta-da!”
Dean spread his hands like a magician who’d completed his latest trick and waited for the applause of the audience.
“It’s a theory,” said Sam and swallowed another spoonful of cereal. He chewed on it, neither as impressed nor as enthusiastic as Dean’s performance warranted in his own humble opinion, but at least Sam’s jaw no longer seemed quite so rigid with guilt.
***
A month after Dean had woken up without his memories Sam finally agreed to take him along on a hunt. Saving people, hunting things, Sam had explained their lives to him. As long as they couldn’t find a cure for Dean’s amnesia, why not get back to that? It seemed important.
Sam made him swear several times to stay back and watch. Which was kind of patronizing, but if being in the big brother role for once was the single thing about this whole mess that could make Sam happy, then Dean was willing to play along.
Of course, once the ghost in question turned out not to be just any ghost, but Billy the Kid, and salting and burning his bones didn’t stop him from choking Sam, Dean no longer gave a damn about the promises he’d made.
He dashed towards Billy’s gun which had been lost during his tussle with Sam. His heart was hammering furiously against his ribcage, less in fear than exhilaration. With steady fingers he poured salt onto the gun, drizzled it with gas and drew out his lighter, just like Sam had done after he dug up Billy’s grave.
“Hey,” he yelled to get Billy’s attention. The guy released Sam’s neck and spun around. Dean dropped his lighter onto the gun. “Here’s looking at you, Kid!”
With a furious cry the ghost leapt at him, but he didn’t manage to do any worse damage than scratch his dirty nails across Dean’s forearms before he was consumed by flames.
“Wow!” He glanced across at Sam. “That was amazing!” No wonder the Winchesters had chosen to become a band of supernatural Untouchables.
“How did you know?” Sam nodded towards the gun, rubbing his neck.
Dean shrugged. “Just a hunch.”
“Just a…You idiot. Never do that again!” Sam burst out, his voice rough.
“Ummm, okay,” Dean agreed somewhat hesitantly. In his opinion, a Thanks for saving my ass, dude would have been more appropriate. But what did he know? He’d only been a hunter for half-an-hour.
Going by the unhappy twitch of Sam’s mouth as he bent to pick up their tools, that wasn’t what Sam had wanted to hear. Dean hated himself for getting it wrong once again. Maybe he should have gone with a smirk and You’re welcome instead.
Sam was quiet on the ride home. This hunt was doubtless the closest thing to his life pre Dean’s memory loss that Sam had experienced so far, and it seemed like all it had done was make him more keenly aware of what he’d lost.
With growing bitterness Dean watched the silent workings of Sam’s rigid jawbones. He clenched his fists in his lap and bit down on his lip to keep the angry scream waiting on his tongue from escaping: You’re mourning your brother and I’m sitting right next to you! How is that fair?
“Hey, can I ask you something?” he asked later, much later, when they’d settled back into their research routine at the bunker. He was standing next to one of the bookshelves, checking and re-checking that he hadn’t missed a single volume of the section Sam had assigned him.
Across the table, Sam raised his head from his books with a tight smile. “Sure.”
Dean swallowed. He was glad that he was standing, forcing Sam to look up at him. It gave him the confidence to continue, “Why do you miss him so much?”
“Him?”
“Your brother,” Dean clarified. It annoyed him howSam still wouldn’t give up the pretense that they were one and the same, when each of his actions betrayed that he didn’t believe it himself, not even a little. He met Sam’s gaze head-on. “No offense, but he kinda sounds like a dick.”
Fury flashed up bright in Sam’s eyes. Involuntarily, Dean took a step backwards. This was a side of Sam he’d so far only encountered in Sam’s stories. Stories of a Sam who was angry enough to make monsters tremble and kill demons with the powers of his mind. Stories Dean had never quite believed, up till now.
In the blink of an eye the fire in Sam’s glare had been stamped out, replaced by ice, impersonal and impenetrable enough that Dean found himself longing for the rage which had scared him so badly just a moment ago.
“You wouldn’t understand.” Sam’s voice was carefully neutral, like he was speaking to a stranger. “You don’t know a thing about us.”
Pain exploded in Dean’s chest, like his heart had suddenly been shoved into a freezer the size of a safety pin.
There it was, the crushing truth: He didn’t belong.
Hours after Dean had excused himself to bed, Sam came to his room, announced by a waft of liquor. He hesitated in the doorway. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” He sounded honestly upset.
“It’s fine,” Dean told him and pressed his thumbnail into the fresh cut he’d made on his arm. His pillow muffled the words. He didn’t turn around.
***
Over the next couple of weeks, Dean discovered that hunting wasn’t always a glorious, light-flooded stage over which you could prance with more badassery and sass than Marlon Brando, Elliot Ness and Humphrey Bogart put together. Theoretically, he already knew as much from everything Sam had told him about their lives. But hearing that you couldn’t save everyone, that sometimes you messed up and came to let, was a completely different thing from actually experiencing it.
A little girl had died, because they hadn’t been able to figure out quickly enough what was going on.
Sam seemed somber but calm afterwards, like this tragic incident merely made him more determined to keep hunting monsters and saving people. Dean wondered if his former self would have been just as collected. He was utterly thrown by it.
He couldn’t think, he couldn’t sleep. The sole thing he was still up to was dropping by the liquor store on their way home.
Sam watched him with worry, which only made it worse. So Dean escaped to his room, a bottle of Jack clutched in his fist. Of course Sam being Sam, he poked his head through the door every ten minutes, a soft “You okay?” on his lips.
Eventually, Dean couldn’t stand it anymore. “I’m going out!” he announced, jumping to his feet.
“Okay, let me just get my jacket,” said Sam.
“No!” Dean shouted. “You’re not coming along!”
“Dean, I don’t think you should be driving-”
“I don’t care what you think!” All the misery of the past two months suddenly poured out of Dean. “Can’t you see you’re suffocating me? You’re there 24/7, I never see anyone else, anyone would think we’re married. It’s not normal! I want to have friends, a family, a house with actual windows, a real life!”
Ignoring Sam’s hurt face, he pushed past him.
When he entered the bar he felt like he could draw his first deep breath since discovering the little girl’s corpse. The relief lasted for about a second.
Then a blonde, practically naked woman reached for him with long, red nails. For a moment, Dean could only stare dumbly at her. She didn’t know him, hell, he barely knew himself; it seemed criminal. He extricated himself from her grasp, stumbling backwards. Perhaps he was already drunker than he’d thought.
On unsteady feet he elbowed his path through the crowd. When he arrived at the bar, the young man behind it grinned and winked at him. “Hey, Dean. Long time no see, man. The usual?”
Dean froze. This guy knew him. Well, not him, but the other Dean. He’d lived such a secluded life at the bunker it never occurred to him that he might run into someone who knew him. Someone who would notice something was amiss. Someone who’d stare at him with astonished, disdainful, or maybe sad eyes asking, What’s wrong with you?
Without a word he fled back to the sanctuary of his car.
He had no idea how long he sat there with his head resting against the wheel. Maybe he’d passed out at some point, he didn’t know.
All he knew was that when he straightened up again, his limbs felt stiff and cold, and his heart ached with loneliness. He missed Sam.
***
It was a miracle that he arrived back at the bunker without crashing the car. Sam had been right. He shouldn’t have been driving.
“Dean, thank God!” Sam greeted him in relief. He dragged Dean into one of the armchairs in the library, put a cuddly hoodie around his shoulders and fed him cheese on toast. Apparently Dean looked every bit as cold and miserable as he felt.
Warmed and nourished as much by Sam’s presence as by his attentions, Dean said eventually, “Listen, Sam, about earlier-”
He expected a shadow of his former hurt to pass over Sam’s face, but instead Sam’s mouth widened into a grin. “It’s okay. I finally figured it out, thanks to you!”
Dean blinked at him. “Figured out what?”
“What happened to you.”
“Seriously?” Dean could hardly believe it. “Dude, seriously?”
“Yes.” Sam was exuberant. He held up the broken beaker and the spellbook which had been contained in the storage box Dean, the other Dean, had collapsed next to.
“I thought that was the monster cure-all?”
“It is. But it works differently than I originally thought. It doesn’t change monsters back into their human form, it takes away their individual memories and replaces them by a collective memory of normal citizen life.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you see? You accidentally inhaled the spell powder. That’s why your memories are gone, but why you can still do things like talk-”
“Or tie my shoes?” Dean added with a sardonic huff. “Wow. But why did I have those weird flashbacks?”
“It’s only a theory so far, but-” here Sam paused for effect and allowed himself a smug smile “-I think it’s a good one: The Men of Letters never got round to testing this spell. There’s no saying how long lasting it is. And you’ve experienced so many traumatic things in your life that it would probably have taken a much bigger dose to keep that away permanently. And-” he went on when he perceived Dean’s questioning look “-because of the way the spell works, the memories of those events couldn’t come back to you as your individual memories, so instead you had flashbacks to similar memories which belonged to Alex or Jody.”
“Okay.” Dean nodded, even though he was still having trouble processing it at all. It was a lot of info to swallow at once. “But how did me bitching at you earlier make you realize all that?”
“It struck me then that it’s odd that you’d have such a strong conviction of what a normal life looks like. I mean, I wasn’t born into a normal life either, but I never realized that the way I grew up wasn’t normal until I started going to school and saw what a different world the other kids around me existed in. Yet here you were, waking up without any memories of the supernatural, yet so sure that a house should have windows…”
Sam drew a deep breath, then continued with fresh energy, “And once I started to think about it, all the other odd things made sense to me too. That you put on the suit the first day. That you never leave your room until you’re fully dressed. That you sounded so overly formal at first. That you didn’t know anything about the internet. That you quote Casablanca!”
“Yeah?” Dean didn’t know yet what Sam was getting at.
“It’s what would have been normal in the fifties, when the Men of Letters created the spell.”
Dean whistled. Sam’s explanation did make a lot of sense. Though-He tilted his head and frowned at Sam. “Wait a minute. The Men of Letters, they knew about the supernatural, right? So what, they were trying to create an army of mindless apes which they could control at whim because they were the only ones who had access to that kind of higher knowledge and power?”
Sam looked taken aback. “That’s one way to look at it.”
The answer didn’t satisfy Dean, but instead of starting a fundamental debate on morality in a supernatural world which he had no hope of winning, he focused on the more pressing issue. “So-how do we reverse it?”
Sam visibly deflated. “I’m working on it,” he said.
***
It had taken Sam over two months to figure out why Dean had lost his memories. Soon it became evident that reversing the spell would be a similarly cumbersome task.
In a way it was worse, Dean thought, knowing what was wrong without being able to fix it. Each new lead turned out to be a bust, each fresh boost of hope was viciously squashed.
Apparently, the spell the Men of Letters had designed was beyond anything any witch had ever practiced. Not even Rowena and the Book of the Damned could decipher it.
“This is old, old, intricate magic,” Rowena purred, with something like awe in her voice. Dean loathed her instantly.
“Promise me we’ll never use this spell on anyone else,” Dean said later as they drove back to the bunker, Sam silent and gray-faced beside him. The words came out flat, like a rusty bronze bell that had been dragged up from the bottom of the sea, caked in ten layers of mud and tang. “No one deserves to live like this.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sam flinch.
“We’ll fix this, Dean. We always do.” Sam’s voice was thin and lacking any conviction.
***
Anyone can make this bitch scream. The art is to make her whimper for days on end.
Alastair’s words, spoken in his latest flashback, haunted Dean. As did the burst of pride in his chest the first time Alastair petted his head and said, Well done, my child.
He hadn’t told Sam about that particular vision. He knew that in taking up a knife in hell, he’d broken the first seal. It was obvious to see the parallels. From what Sam had said about her, he was willing to bet that Alastair’s pupil in the flashback was Meg. But what he didn’t know and really, really didn’t want to find out, was if he’d felt just as pleased whenever Alastair praised his handiwork.
He stared at the scars on his forearm he’d created. Already, they were changing in his eyes, no longer his, but the work of the other Dean, the masterful torturer.
With shaking fingers, he took down the knife from the wall. He was going to scratch them out, all of them, and then he could finally overwrite them in his own true hand.
***
Dean’s first thought was, Wow, those curls would make Sam jealous.
Wait-curls?
He closed his eyes and opened them again with great deliberation. Once again an opulence of black curls met his gaze. As he let his eyes slowly travel south, Dean discovered that this impressive mane belonged to a hot, leather-clad woman who stood above him with a challenging frown.
Dean had no memory of sitting down on the floor in front of his bed, and certainly not of inviting a guest into his room. A lady guest! (Though, considering his condition, that didn’t necessarily mean anything.)
“Who are you?” Dean sprang to his feet and approached the stranger.
The woman grinned at him, shaking her dark curls. Each strand of hair radiated mystery and power. Dean felt like he’d walked right into a hairspray commercial. She pushed him back down as if he weighed no more than a feather.
Dean stared at her with growing suspicion. “What are you?”
He only hoped this wasn’t some weird transgender re-enactment of Samson and Delilah. He’d already spent more than enough time reliving the experiences of other chicks, thank you very much.
“Relax, I’m an old friend.” Mystery woman propped down beside him with a nonchalant shrug. Her face was a curious blend of brazenness and serenity. “For certain values of friend.”
Understanding dawned on Dean. “You’re Billie.”
She didn’t say anything, just stared at him with mild curiosity. Unnerved, Dean lowered his eyes to his forearm. The last thing he remembered was taking up the knife. Yet there was no blood.
A vague sense of foreboding seized him. Slowly, he shifted his gaze to the side.
Not two feet away lay another body. His body. And on that body, there was blood.
“I’m dead,” Dean realized.
Billie merely continued to look at him. Her silence was infinitely creepier than the sight of his own lifeless body.
“Go on then.” Dean spread his arms. “Do your job.”
“Oh I will, Dean Winchester. But not today.”
“Why not? Sam said you want us dead.”
“I want to make sure that when you’re dead you stay dead. Subtle difference, sport. No more bending the rules, pushing the universe out of joint.” She tapped her digit against his forehead. “And not just for you and Sam, but for everyone.”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Dean muttered, leaning out of reach. “Except I’m already dead, right?”
“Not quite. You will be, in about half an hour. If you don’t fight it.”
Dean raised his eyebrows. “You saying you want me to fight it?”
“No, I just want to tell you a bedtime story. Hello, Mr. Sandman.”
“Wow, you’re really gonna put me to sleep if you go on like that, lady,” Dean said, faking a yawn.
Instead of taking offense, Billie laughed. “And here I thought that curse turned you into a mild Sunday school boy.”
Dean turned to her with fresh urgency. “What do you know about the curse?”
“Everything,” she said with a smug grin. “Sam ever tell you about that time he got his soul back?” Before he could interrupt to ask what the hell that had to do with anything, she continued, “The old Death, he put up a wall in Sam’s mind to keep the bad memories of hell away. Lucky kid. They don’t sell these things at Walmart, you know.”
Here she fell silent, as if she expected him to put two and two together now. He frowned at her. “Are you-are you saying I have a wall like that in my head?”
“Bingo.”
Something like hope began to blossom in Dean’s chest. “And it’s old-school reaper magic?” That might explain why Rowena and the Book of the Damned hadn’t been of any help.
“Reaper magic? More like reaper murder. The old Death, he might have been able to build something like that and devour a pizza at the same time, but your average reaper? Not so much. Sam’s supposed to be the brainy one, right? Didn’t it strike him as strange that the Men of Letters never developed this into a large-scale project? Here’s a little hint-just for that pinch you accidentally snuffed a hundred reapers had to die.”
“Let me guess,” he could tell there this was going, “you’re pissed, because that upset the natural order and all that crap you’re so big about.” He plastered on what he hoped was a confident grin. “So breaking down that wall in my head would restore the balance, right?”
“The universe isn’t made up of math, kid. Just ‘cause A and B add up to C, doesn’t mean that when you take away B you’ll get A again. You of all people should understand that.”
“So what,” he ground out over his flare of disappointment, “you just came here to dangle a carrot in front of me?”
“No. I came to give you a little pro tip. Scratch. Not down there,” she added with a disdainful glance at the dead body’s blood covered wrist.” Her finger was back against his forehead. “Up here.”
For a moment everything disappeared from his sight-
-And he came back to himself.
“I’m back,” Dean whispered, full of wonder, as he looked down his body. No longer just a lifeless thing. His again.
And currently bleeding out.
In a frenzy, he ripped off his shirt and roughly bandaged his wounds. When he’d satisfied himself that he’d stopped the bleeding enough so he wasn’t going to pass out again before getting to the medical kit they kept in the bathroom, he slowly rose to his feet.
He came face to face with Billie. She was leaning casually against the doorframe, looking unbearably smug. Which was somewhat weird considering he’d just narrowly escaped her clutches for the second time-
Wait! The second time? How did Dean know there was a first time? Sam didn’t know anything about what had happened in the hospital. He couldn’t have told him about it.
Which meant-his memories were back!
Dean punched a fist into the air in triumph.
“My god, why are you still here?” Dean groaned, when Billie rolled her eyes at his antics. A suspicion took hold of him. He pointed his digit at her. “Be honest, you only helped me ‘cause you wouldn’t have gotten as much of a kick out of reaping me when I wasn’t myself. Sadistic bitch.”
She smirked. “You’re welcome. Bitch.”
***
If Sam had any doubts about the official version of events Dean told him (Billie was pissed at the spell and had made a trade with Dean, giving him his memories back in return for the promise that they’d destroy it), he kept them to himself.
A sense of relief settled over Dean as he watched the flames consume the spellbook in the little pyre they’d erected in one of the fields near the bunker.
“Dude, I can’t believe you didn’t immediately realize what was up when I quoted Casablanca!” Dean complained, knocking his can of beer against Sam’s.
“You always quote old movies!” Sam retorted.
“But not chick flicks.”
“Oh shut up,” Sam protested with a grin, “you know you love chick flicks.”
Dean smiled down at the flames in front of them. He’d never fully appreciated just how beautiful it was when you stood next to someone and knew you were both thinking of the same thing.
True, at the present his mind was like an apartment that had been ransacked by a gang of thieves, and while the police had manage to retrieve every stolen item, the task of putting everything back in its proper place still lay ahead of him. But at least those missing pieces were there again. Even if there were some Dean would have preferred to lose forever.
Ironic, less than twenty-four hours ago, he’d resented his present self, as though memories of grief and guilt were precious emeralds. Now he couldn’t help but be jealous of the guy he’d been without them-the guy who could close his eyes and not smell blood and betrayal.
Dean thought of how Zachariah had messed with their memories all those years ago. As a reminder. Like the marketing director he’d pretended to be, that angelic dickbag had wrapped the message in pompous phrases including blood and destiny. What it boiled down to, though, was simple enough: You’ve got nowhere to run. And Dean might have been able to stab the smug bastard into the face, but the truth behind those words, that he couldn’t erase.
No matter where he was, what he was, he would never be enough.
Still, he thought, glancing at Sam’s smiling silhouette to his left, as long as his brother was by his side, he could live with that.
Sam’s dimpled grin melted into soft concern. “You okay?”
Self-consciously, Dean tugged at his sleeves. He took a generous swig from his beer and gave his brother a full-toothed smile. “I’m great. Hell, I’m fan-freakin’-tastic.” As long as he had Sam and a six-pack a day, he could deal. On seeing that Sam didn’t look quite convinced, he waggled his eyebrows for good measure. “Cause the next time you wanna put me on research duty, you can forget it.”
He barely refrained from adding, “See what I did there?”
Sam groaned and buried his face in his hands, as unappreciative of Dean’s puns as ever. “I can’t believe I’ve missed this. I must be going insane.”
Dean chuckled into his beer. “Sorry to break it to you, little bro, but that ship sailed a long, long time ago.”
Sam shook his head, half exasperated, half fond. It was a gesture Dean hadn’t seen since before he’d lost his memories, a gesture no one apart from Dean had ever been able to coax out of him. As far as Dean was concerned, that was a skill far more worth remembering than how to tie your shoes.
And from the way Sam then bumped their shoulders together, he gathered that Sam agreed.
***fin***