Coffeehouse ft. Alternate Universe, for themegalosaurus
Title: Coffeehouse ft. Alternate Universe
Recipient: themegalosaurus
Rating: PG 13
Word Count: 6800 words
Warnings: horror, some violence, language
A/N: I took your cinematic/literary genre prompt and ran with it, recipient. The result is slightly meta, slightly crazy, and hopefully enjoyable to you.
Summary: Sam and Dean do some world-hopping to find the strange alternate world the Nephilim created. But they’re at the mercy of something they would never have predicted: their own pasts.
1.
The crow in the bubble-storm speaks in tongues.
Sam-laptop-armed, language-savvy-shakes his hair out of his eyes and spins away from Dean to record it better, phone-screen lighting up with green waves like crooked teeth.
This is not good.
They work better when there is not more than an amniotic cord of distance between them. As it is, they are pulled too far away across the field, stretched taut. Dean feels danger come lapping at his feet, close fingers around his neck. Funny he is always first to notice-maybe it is an older sibling thing.
He says, “Sam!” like a conjuring.
It summons no brother. Sam is entranced by the talking crow, and the fairytale landscape that ripples violet and magenta, and doesn’t notice reality fragmenting until it is too late.
Snap, like a whip.
Across time. Across space.
Dean yells, “Fucking glad and thank you!”
Give me zombies, he thinks, or give me Nazis. Don’t give him turquoise coconuts and rainbow unicorns. Shit isn’t even realistic. Sam seems to have liked the leprechauns though, which figures. The only thing Dean has liked about Fairy Tale Land has been how it is absolutely apparent that Sam is the princess in the tale: he has a braid, and cannot say a word for fear of breaking some curse, and all the birds flock to him in droves.
It is kind of hilarious.
It’s a soft world.
One without teeth.
It isn’t where they’d left Mary.
2.
“I hope you’re not running out of food.”
Dean has, already. He’s down to the last can of soup he had found in this house, and there had never been more than a few gallons of water in dirty buckets. His stomach hurts. The only liquid left in the cupboards are bottles of bleach. Bottles and bottles. Hundreds of liters of bleach.
Why the hell did a police station need so much bleach?
Sam hums something from the other side of the door. It takes a while but then it comes to Dean: Guns ‘N Roses.
“I have food,” he says. “If you let me in, I’ll give it to you.”
Dean clenches his teeth. He’s sitting with his back to the door, cutting out shapes from a magazine. Everything he cut is artless and misshapen, and curls at the edges like wilted flowers.
Dean tries, “What food do you have?”
Sam laughs. “Hell-food. Skin and flesh and blood.”
“Yeah? Screw that,” says Dean. “I was thinking more Biggersons, less demon buffet. Tell me when you find a cheeseburger.”
“If you let me in, I’ll find you a cheeseburger. I’ll find you anything you want,” says Sam, his voice soft. “Hey, Dean? It’s cold on my side, man. You have all the heat.”
“I’ll trade you heat for food,” grumbles Dean, his arms full of paper breasts, paper smiles, paper Kardashian-style makeup on paper girls. Why can’t he eat paper? “You thankless son of a bitch.”
“Deal!” says Sam, brightly. “Let me in, and we can trade. We can share like we always have! Think about it!”
Dean turns towards the door, puts his eye to the peephole. The room on the other side is lit bright, white as a lab under industrial light, bloody all over. Walls dripping with gore. The silver table at the center heaped with something furry, and four pairs of shears sticking out from it. It is surreal. What the fuck is that thing? It’s huge. A wolf? He hadn’t noticed any wolves the first time they were here in this police station.
A hazel eye obscures the room.
A low cry escapes Dean. He falls back, startled.
“Don’t peek! It’s not very pretty here,” Sam says from the other side. His voice drops to a murmur then, as if he’s sharing a sweet secret, “I don’t like it here. Please let me in.”
Dean laughs, shaky. “After I saw that? Fat chance.”
“I’ll do anything,” whispers Sam. “You only have to ask. Please let me in, Dean. Please.”
“Shut up.”
“You really are going to choose Amara over everyone,” says Sam. “It’s only a matter of time.”
“That was last season,” Dean says, rolling his eyes. “Get with the program, Sam. We’re trying to find Mom, and then figure out what to do with Satan’s baby.”
“It’s cold here, Dean. It’s cold, and everything s-smells like blood, and it-it’s l-like the Cage, okay? It’s like I’m-”
“Shut up!” says Dean again, and throws the magazine, scissors and all, across the room. “For the last time, you bastard. You’re not my brother.”
Dean’s right: it really isn’t Sam. In one universe out of a thousand others, they never met Chuck in front of a police station in Hope Springs, Idaho. God didn’t save Sam, the amulet never glowed, and the fog and the Darkness took out everything.
Everyone.
Now it’s like being stuck in a B-movie apocalypse.
Here is a morning in this universe:
Dean wakes up, spine stiff, the knee that has been bothering him these days on hunts all seized up with pain. His neck aches from drooping onto his chest, and the panels of the door has left grooves carved into his cramped back. He stumbles up with a groan, tries to bend into a stretch. It hurts all over.
The radio in the kitchen plays some sucky pop song. Percussive beats and sex stitched into every lyric, personal vendettas and Insta-queen kitty fights all mixed up with shit about edgy hipsters. Dean misses real music-or whatever he’s snob enough to term real music. These things are relative, Sam told him once, at the tail end of an argument about why Vince Vincente is the fucking worst. You can’t tell someone what to like, Dean.
“Hey, Sammy,” he yells. “Do you like Taylor Swift? I won’t judge.”
He washes his face with stale water. Counts the bottles of bleach. Checks his gun.
(Oh, hey, it’s the Colt! Will kill anything. Here’s a caveat: provided you want it to.)
Dean looks out of the window. Still the same road where they once-in another reality-met God. Now empty except for an abandoned police cruiser.
“I don’t think this world had its angel apocalypse, either,” he says. Looks to the ceiling. Thinks at the real Sam: “By the power of Chuck. Zap me out anytime now.”
Here is another morning:
Dean wakes up, curled on the ground outside the door. Head pounding with the dregs of dangerous dreams, fumbling frantically for the Colt. It’s still at his hip, pressed painfully against bone.
The radio in the kitchen plays rock. Dean sings along to Styx, and then to Kaleo, which he likes, grudgingly.
“Hey, Sam?” he shouts. “What’s that other band, with the banjo and the witchcraft feel?”
He splashes water on his face. Takes a piss.
Here a bleach, there a bleach, everywhere a bleach-bleach.
He yawns.
Police cruiser’s still out there. Crows still watching. Someone’s swinging from the tree, pale legs keeping time like a bloated pendulum.
“This is not getting any more interesting,” he complains to no one.
Three times of anything is a charm, a spell, a piece of witchcraft.
Here’s yet another morning:
Dean wakes up-
Someone’s standing over him. A flash of a cleaver, a sharp smile. The metal finds the door where his shoulder had been not more than a second ago. Stars clash behind his eyes when he jumps up, blood-rush dizzied from sleep and zero-to-escape-velocity motion.
Dean staggers away, drags the man by his throat. He’s a heavy fucker; all muscle and corded veins, eyes dark and skin covered in writhing black veins. His mouth is a mad, drooling mess of blood and teeth. Dean knocks the cleaver out of the other man’s hand. He fights dirty, kicking and punching, ramming his knee against the other man’s groin, grabbing a fistful of his short hair.
I’ll kill you, Dean says. He’s delighted by the man’s heft, his hard punch. He’s delighted by the blood in his maw, the loose tooth. He’s delighted by the pink when he spits.
Means Dean’s alive. Means there’s still a world out there.
I’ll kill you, bastard.
But Dean won’t.
Instead, Dean kicks the door behind him open, and pushes the man in, makes an ugly choking noise when he almost falls in himself. The air is thick and rotten and ice-cold. The man gurgles, suffocating from his own shirt-collar because of Dean’s grip. Dean kicks at the small of his back, sends him sprawling-
3.
Dean slams his hand on the cheap Formica of the coffeehouse table.
“I don’t know about you, Sam, but I’m getting serious fucking whiplash.”
Sam looks at him blearily. “Where were you this time?”
“Hope Springs, Idaho,” says Dean. He’s unable to take his eyes off Sam. Whole, non-murderous Sam, who is categorically ignoring Dean’s awesome breakfast to pick at an egg-white omelet. “You were some sort of Darkness-capital D-enhanced monster. Chuck never showed. It was crap. Some kind of grindhouse gore-splatter horror movie. You?”
Sam groans and reaches for his fourth cup of coffee. “Random case, 2011.”
“You look like crap.”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
Dean racks his brain. “Lucifer? Back when, with the Leviathans?”
Sam nods. He closes his eyes, puts his head on the table and turns so that a curtain of hair falls over his face. The backs of his lids look purple and bruised, and his face is gaunt.
“I didn’t notice back then,” Sam says, quietly, “Maybe because I was dealing with so much shit of my own, with Bobby and the police after us and everything-you drank a lot back then.”
“Wasn’t a stellar year for either of us,” Dean says. He can’t help the pang in his chest when he says, “Or Cas.”
They’ve tried not to talk about Cas. Sam-for once in his life-doesn’t want to talk, and that’s fine by Dean. He doesn’t know what they’ll say to each other anyway. He doesn’t know what they can say.
Everything had happened so fast.
There had been too many elements. Dean can manage when it’s just him and Sam, but it never was anymore, was it?
Jack. Kelly. Lucifer. Crowley. Mary. Cas.
Sometimes it’s like a ticker tape of panic runs in Dean’s head, screaming their names over and over again. BREAKING NEWS. Only it broke months ago, and everything is still terrible, and nothing is new except the sharpness of his cold terror which renews itself with greater potency on the daily.
Sam keeps up a bright, optimistic front. But then that’s always the best sign that Sam’s crashing and falling on a slow, spectacularly awful arc, which will inevitably cause more damage than Dean’s refusal to confront things.
Sam says, ignoring the Cas name-drop, “Oh! And Dick Roman diversified into coffee shops, so it took me a while to find this place. It was under his chain.”
“Soylent Green is in my coffee?”
Sam, still flopped on the table, waves a hand in dismissal. “I think the coffeehouse becomes like it is in the world of whosoever gets here first. Because it’s the base.”
“Why’s the coffeehouse the base?”
Sam shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s a thing, apparently, in fanfiction.”
Dean doesn’t understand how this magic works. It’s brilliant and insane in equal measures-like most of Sam’s more ambitious plans are. All that really matters is that Sam walked into the war room of the bunker one morning and announced that he might have a way to get them into that strange otherworld in which they’d left Mom.
“It’s crazy,” he’d said. “A hundred things could-will-go wrong.”
“I don’t care,” Dean had said. “Lay it on me.”
“You-you remember the musical? Marie, and those kids…”
“The Supernatural musical?”
“Yes-and you remember Becky Rosen, and that weird Supernatural convention?”
“Of course I remember-”
Sam made an impatient face. “And you remember Hell House?”
“…What?”
Sam dropped a Chuck Shurley book on the table. “Hell House. Mordechai, the Ghostfacers-well, they weren’t the Ghostfacers yet back then-”
Dean pushed the book towards Sam, frowning at it. “We burned it down. What’s your point?”
“Tulpa.”
Dean sighed, rubbing at his temples. “You’re brilliantly enlightening on two pots of coffee and no sleep.”
Sam shook his head and perched on the table. “Listen. What do we want more than anything right now?”
“Get to the alternate world where Mom is,” said Dean. “Duh. But we’ve been through every bit of lore imaginable, and the man-baby nephilim in the dungeon is not talking-”
“Yes, precisely, so I was thinking, there is no existing mythology to help us with this. So we have to create mythology-make ourselves a sort of lore that will help us be transported to the otherworld.”
“How do we do that?”
“I think we need a Tulpa.”
Dean gaped. “You want us to, what, meditate a route into bizarro-apocalypse-world?”
“Not us.” Sam opened his laptop and set it on the table. “See, the problem with us creating a Tulpa is that it will not be powerful enough to get us there. There’s only the two of us. But lucky for us, the two of us are not always the only ones invested in what we do.”
Dean looked at the book and groaned as the puzzle piece slotted into place. “You want to use the Chuck Shurley series fans to get us there.”
Sam made a face. “Well, not use…”
“If you throw a convention and dress up as the Impala, Sam, I swear I will disown you.”
“You’re the one with the fetishes. Look, I’m not even saying we actually get anyone else involved,” Sam pushed his laptop closer to Dean. “I, uh, I know a guy who writes computer programs-”
“I don’t like this plan already.”
Sam gave an impatient huff. “Oh, do you have a plan B? Or even another plan A? What exactly is our plan, here, Dean?”
Dean opened his mouth. Then he shut it. He has had no plans since they lost Cas and Mom, except for a vague desire to drive them off the edge of the Grand Canyon, which-Sam would probably not consider that very healthy.
For all parties concerned.
“Okay, so what does your computer program do?”
“Recycle multiple alternate realities, via literature gleaned from-ugh, sources-”
“Any sentence with the word gleaned in it, Sam-”
“With a common base, and then duplicate the program enough times on the Dark Web for it to populate-”
Dean can’t help but imagine self-replicating versions of himself and Sam bouncing from inbox to inbox. “Turn us into bots? Really? Can bots meditate a Tibetan thought-form into being?”
“Well, no, but this is hybrid magic-sort of a digital Tulpa, you know? Techno-logic our way out through this shit. I mean, media and the internet are supposed to be modern day Gods, and we’re going to reap the benefits to go up against-well, older celestial entities-Lucifer, and the Nephilim…I mean-”
“Dude. If you’re going to plagiarize a goddamn TV show, we’ve at least gotta try to be on Wednesday’s side. Not with the modern Gods-”
Sam raised an eyebrow. “So are you in or not?”
“What? Of course I’m in,” Dean shut down the laptop. “Do we have any other plan?”
….and so here they are.
Back up the nostalgia-machine, get to the present, sip on the Soylent coffee.
INT: generic coffeehouse that changes subtly based on one of their worlds.
EXT: weird alternate reality that might or might not lead to their mom, Mad Max Bobby, and the Devil.
Truth is, Dean never actually expected the plan to work. He’d thought of it as one of their more fanciful ideas, and walked into it expecting it to crash around them and for Sam to go back to the bunker and meditate until he came up with a new bizarre plan. That is, Dean had truly, sincerely, hoped it would work-all of Sam’s fraying, struggling optimism is hard enough to be witness to without having to deal with the fallout of it when he gets burnt out. But Sam’s computer guy had come through. And now here they are: bots, circulating a wide spectrum of alternate universes.
Sam asks, “You-uh. You still wanna walk out the door? We could stop looking, we could think of another plan-”
Truth is, Dean still thinks it won’t work, but it’s better than sitting in the bunker and thinking of how he’d failed to keep this family together-again.
Truth is, it’s not much better than running away from everything.
Dean shakes his head. “Did you get to bizarro-Bobby and Mom yet? We gotta keep trying.”
Sam looks concerned. “I just-after the last world you were in-”
“What the fuck is this coffee? Why’s this coffee rainbow-colored? Is this Dick Roman’s doing? Sam, I swear, your worlds suck.”
“It’s a unicorn frappe,” says Sam, with a small laugh. “Must be popular in this world.”
“Whatever,” says Dean, standing up and taking the bright coffee with him, “I’m drinking it in the next world. Let’s go.”
4.
There are worlds Sam would rather not think of.
Worlds where Dean is not his brother, for example. Or worlds where he doesn’t exist, and the Winchesters are a family so normal that they sometimes have dinner table conversations around the Kardashians. Although he’s together with Dean when they go to that one, and Dean says it’s a horror-show. There are some worlds in which there is no Sam Winchester and no explanation for it, and Dean’s brother is some random dude they both don’t recognize.
“Dude, in one world I was in without you, I was a dragon,” says Dean. “And I’m not sure, but I think Cas… Cas was a mouse. Seemed to be at the same level of being flummoxed by everything…”
“What does that have to do with this?”
Dean meets his eyes and doesn’t look away. “I’m just saying, Sammy. These realities aren’t…they aren’t real. You can’t let them get to you.”
Sam laughs it off, but it is not that simple.
In those worlds-where they are not hunters, Sam or sans Sam-these people he knows as his family have history. They have history built out of sharing everyday minutiae over the years: inside jokes, and a library of remember that one times, and vacation albums. They have history, and Sam craves history. That’s what they’ve been missing with Mary. That’s why they keep missing Mary.
He can’t stop thinking about it.
Sam also inevitably ends up in a world, of course, where he did not manage to stop the apocalypse. He stumbles through that one to a camp where he meets a dead-eyed Dean who looks at him and grabs for the gun in his holster. When Sam gets ripped out of that world and deposited in their coffeehouse, Dean’s sitting at their usual table devouring pie.
“Sorry if I pulled you out too quick,” he says when Sam drops into the seat opposite him. “My world sucked.”
“Yeah?”
“I-uh. It was right after the whole Mark of Cain debacle, you know, when I was…”
Dean gestures to his face. Sam gets it. When I was a demon.
“-the hammer thing, Sam-”
Sam rolls his eyes. “Shut up. What happened to don’t let it get to you?”
Dean shrugs and changes the subject. “Where did you go?”
“Camp Chitaqua.”
Dean swallows. “Oh.”
“How do you-”
Dean shakes his head. “Angels. Are you-? It isn’t real, Sam, whatever it was that you saw…”
“Yeah, honestly? Nothing happened. I mean, something might have happened, but you pulled me out. So I guess-I guess we’re good.”
Sam is shaky. There are some realities that are really far out that he doesn’t mind. It’s the ones closest to their lives that fucks him over. One mistake, one wrong ray of light, one bad choice…and these would have been the realities they ended up in. It gives a whole new meaning to walking on eggshells. Knowing this, having seen this, how could they make choices? What if they chose wrong the next time?
Dean is quiet for a long time. Then he asks, in a rush, “Sam, what are we doing?”
“Only thing we can do,” says Sam, although if he closes his eyes he can still see that other Dean, hardened and with ice in his eyes, looking at him like he’ll never see Sam behind this face again, “We owe it to her, man. We owe it to Mom. We can’t leave her there with the Devil.”
Dean sighs. “You want some pie?”
“Why does this coffeehouse always have pie?”
“Hey, it’s my coffeehouse today, Mr. Unicorn Frappe,” says Dean. “You could have cake.”
The windows of the coffeehouse are wet with rain. The insides steam, slightly, every edge of every bright booth and pastel-colored counter glistening with a sleek retro sheen. The silver coffee machines on the counter spit and steam and deposit bright swirls of color on the steel. It looks unreal. Sam walks up to the counter. The waitress is the most generic stock-image insert he could have imagined: blonde, white uniform, diamond-bright smile.
“Good luck finding your family, sweetie,” she tells him when she hands over his coffee. “And your brother’s right, you know. You could have cake. Probably the only place in the world you can have it and eat it too.”
5.
The first thing that Sam ever blows away is a person.
Dean stands behind him with his arms against Sam’s arms, his hands cupping Sam’s hands, his fingers steadying Sam’s fingers. Sam fights against instinct to close his eyes. He’s still small enough that he has to look up to see his brother’s face, and if he does, he thinks he might see nothing. That’s scary enough to keep him gazing forward. The idea that Dean might-he just might-not smile, nor look reassuring, nor say Sammy the way he has, always. That he might be something else.
“Don’t flinch.”
Sam feels pressure on his shoulders from how stiff he’s keeping them. He’s barely breathing. Their Dad’s getting the car and they’re standing in bloodied snow and Dean’s teaching him how to shoot a gun for Christmas. When they pull the trigger, he still stumbles back. Their shoulders ram together. For a single second, Sam wants to scream his lungs out until there’s no voice left in him. The second passes. Sam’s roiling insides starts to settle. Dean grunts, but then he takes the gun away and just pulls Sam closer against him.
The dead man’s head explodes in a wreath of pale-white lilies.
“This is not real.”
He gasps to life in the Impala’s seat, scrambling to find his bearings, his normal space even more cramped with a blanket, and muggy air, and Funkytown on speakers. His head pounds away in rhythm. His vision does funny things. The interstate fractals out, and neon signs pass by in Doppler blurs. They’re over a river. Now, they’re on blacktop again. Now, there’s a sign that says something about Las Vegas. They’re in the desert. There’s a steady stream of sand blowing onto the road, and cacti like helpless robbers with their hands held up for cops. He’s giddy and he can’t feel his teeth, and all of the sky he can see looks like swirls of cream mixed in with blood.
Sam keeps looking at the driver’s seat and finding nothing.
“You okay?” Dean asks.
Sam keeps looking at the driver’s seat and finding Dean staring at him in concern.
“Does it hurt?”
Does what hurt? Sam can’t feel his feet either. He thinks of himself as a balloon, and then a ball of light, which makes him think of yoga. Which seems too harmless and generic a thing to think about, really, so he skips track and thinks of angels instead. Specifically how, post Gadreel, sometimes he woke up feeling like parts of him had migrated away from the rest of him.
Dean says something.
“…what?”
“I said, have you lost him?”
“Lost…lost who?”
“The mark!” says Dean, impatiently. “Sammy. Come on.”
“Fuck. What?”
“Is he still in town? We can’t have driven all this way for nothing-”
There are photographs and maps and surveillance-cam images on his lap. Some have spilled to the floor. Sam scoops them up and stares. Is this guy someone they’re watching for a case? Is he a shapeshifter, maybe, or a demon? He can’t find anything external to pin on the guy.
“Dude,” Dean chuckles, “You’re the one who picked him.”
This is weird.
And it only gets weirder.
Sam pieces together bits of this reality: he and Dean are on the road, like normal. He and Dean had a Dad who taught them to hunt, like normal. But Dean’s grin is sharper and his taste in music louder, and every time he looks at Sam it’s like a pleased smile creeps up the edge of his lips.
So-maybe, to paraphrase a dick angel in the Shurley book, they’re codependent to a larger degree.
It gets dark. They drop their stuff off at a motel, and then track their way to a house.
“Dean-”
“Sshh, he’s got a dog,” says Dean. “Come on. Back gate.”
There are giant flowers growing in the guy’s yard. Sam looks at them and feels like the scent of them explodes in his mind, somewhere, and his fists clench.
Stupid flowers.
And then they’re breaking a window, and Dean’s climbing in, and Sam follows. Then they’re standing over a sleeping man, and he looks normal as heck-just a stupid son of a bitch with a garden full of monstrously large flowers-and Dean offers him a gun.
“You wanna?”
“-what?”
“Why’re you being so weird?”
“I’m not-I just. You do it.”
Dean shrugs.
He aims, and shoots, and the guy’s head explodes like a chrysanthemum in wild bloom.
Sam stumbles back, shocked.
“There you go,” says Dean, happily. “That’s special number 50.”
Sam wants to be horrified. He wants to be disgusted, and he wants to run out of this place, and he wants to get back to the coffeehouse so they can start over in a new world, but instead the pattern of the dead man’s blood against his sheets reminds him of Hell.
Hell, where everything felt infinitely more real.
Hell, post whose splatterpunk beauty Earth just looks like a pale shadow.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Dean asks.
Alistair’s star pupil: his eyes gleam dark in the shadow-light touching the room.
“Yeah,” says Sam. “Yeah, it is.”
“Sammy,” says Dean, his grin like a shark. “You pick the next one.”
6.
Sam loses track of the number of worlds where they have a random sister. Or the ones where either he or Dean is something inhuman (although most usually a werewolf). Or the ones where everything is as it is, only people survived who didn’t in their real worlds: like Jess, for example, or Dad, or Kevin and Charlie.
Worlds where Sam is a lawyer, and Dean is surprised when they talk over the phone: like that long ago world the djinn had sent Dean into. Worlds where Sam is in an asylum, and everything that has happened has happened in his brain. Worlds where Dean is in that asylum. Worlds where Sam and Dean are but memories fraying in the minds of hunters, or betrayers whose names are never spoken aloud.
Worlds where Anna blasted Sam to smithereens, where Dean said yes to Michael, where Sam didn’t make it to Stanford.
Worlds where Cas is not on their side, where Cas really does become God, where Cas is a figment of their imagination.
Where Cas is alive, alive, alive.
Some of those worlds are better than the one they live in. Some are infinitely worse.
All feel real.
Sam loses a week to the world where Hell and horror has turned them killers.
“I kept waiting for you to pull me out,” Dean says. “Dude, I was stuck in jail! Henriksen never got possessed, never believed us, and I don’t know how long I had been in there but I could feel my brain circling the drain, you know? I busted myself out to find the coffeehouse. Where the hell were you?”
Sammy, you pick the next one.
Sam shakes his head.
Everything is green in this version of the coffeehouse to some degree. The window sashes are green. They hang, flimsy and ephemeral, and the light that comes through them is green as dead skin, green as verdigris. The booths are green. The waitress, when she smiles, is tinted radioactive green by the light.
Dean’s eyes are the greenest thing there is.
Sam’s head feels spongy and thick, shocks of shallow pain when he moves it.
“Can you hear me? Hullo? Sam.”
The naked bulb in the socket above the rusted coffee machines is brown and black with dust and cigarette smoke. Sam’s mouth is dry; his throat feels like sand-paper. He’s blinking and trying to focus but it’s like he’s been shaken too hard and now things won’t settle.
Dean reaches out and shakes his shoulder. “Sam, I swear. Don’t go Emily Rose on me.”
“Huh,” says Sam. Fuck articulation and the bloody mess it rolled in on.
“You okay? You back with me?”
Where had I gone?
His pulse flutters. There’s blood, crusted on his nails.
(Blood is the road to everything. Blood opens doors, or closes them.)
“What did you just say?”
The world narrows into crystal focus. “What?”
Dean’s gaze is sharp. “You just said something about blood.”
Sam brushes a hand over a scar that no longer exists. Just out of habit. He thinks it will slip past Dean’s notice, but the next moment Dean’s grabbing hold of his wrist and flipping his palm open on the table.
“Sammy?”
“Yes.”
“Are you having trouble telling things apart? What’s real and what’s not?”
“N-no, of course not. Just-that was a strange world.”
Dean’s not convinced. “Strange how?”
Sam shakes his head. It was a world, he thinks, where they both let go of something central to them. Some inherent kernel of rightness that pushed them through all this senseless grief and violence that followed them around like phantoms waiting to strike. Some bruised, tarnished piece of their souls that hadn’t yet been killed by multiple deaths, multiple apocalypses, and all the times they’d each lost all of their family.
“Sam?” asks Dean, again. “Strange how?”
“We were us,” says Sam, slowly. “We were just us, Dean, if we’d stopped fighting ourselves.”
7.
In the next world there is only one difference from their reality: their plan to trap only Lucifer in the otherworld worked. They have Mary. They have Cas. They also have Jack, the Nephilim child who is not a child-but they were going to have that anyway.
Sam spirals to a stop when he realizes.
This is it. This is the perfect one.
Why haven’t they been looking for this? Why have they been looking for apocalypse-land when, out of the infinite possibilities of the infinite strange lands they’ve been to, there could be this? This world-where everything is as it should have been. No Lucifer. And Crowley gone, yes, but not in vain.
Why can’t this world be it?
Of course-he knows he can’t stay. Dean’s out there in some bizarre place, probably looking for the coffeehouse at this very moment. But what if he could find this world again, get Dean here with him, and just stay?
“Because it’s not real,” says Dean, the next time they meet. “Sam, this is our world. Well-not the coffeehouse bit,” he waves a hand around to encompass the weed-choked walls, the torn-up booths, the graffiti on the wall that’s grossly anatomically perfect: this one is from Dean’s world, and it’s beyond repair, “I’d say this is pretty goddamn surreal. But you know, you know what’s real. And we can’t go making house in a reality that’s not ours.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Because if it’s not crap,” says Sam, sighing, “How can it be our lives?”
Dean shakes his head. “And now you’re quoting the Devil.”
But Sam can’t let go of how perfect that world had been. How perfectly right.
What was that theory? If you cloned yourself so perfectly, down to your memories, down to every last similarity, then which one was real and which one was not?
How do you say you are real, when the facsimile is so perfectly you? What even gives you the right?
8.
Sam’s pretty sure that he and Dean have wearied the word ‘love’, abused it to explain too many transgressions. And he’s not done with it yet. He knows it with a certainty that sits heavy that he will do what it takes for Dean, to Dean: despite all his protestations against the same that comes from having a heart too fond of logic.
Practical, diplomatic Sam-until he flips his shit.
Always with a timer on.
And this is what pares his soul every time they find a reality where he screwed up. Where Sam didn’t do enough, waited just long enough, fucked up because he doesn’t make decisions the way Dean makes them. How can he? All his decisions have dug bigger holes than Dean’s ever has.
That becomes a weight. That leaves very less space to hold anything else. And there are times when he has wanted to tell Dean: see, here, look at the pattern of how things go when you leave your life in my hands. I don’t trust them. You shouldn’t trust them.
Every time there is a witness, distraught and terrified, Sam scrambles to find something in him that can still relate. It’s how he knows to help. How he can understand them: because if he doesn’t feel, if he cannot empathise, then his involvement turns mechanical. And no case can be routine, because every case starts with a death. With a person, dying.
He cannot let himself get used to death, however long he’s been in the job.
And he cannot forget people.
In this world they’re on the road, and he runs into someone familiar in every gas station restroom.
She’s got a head wound, bleeding copiously into the lining of her hoodie. He double-takes every time, even though he should get used to the symptoms by now: in addition to the normal cold spots and chills accompanying ghosts, his hands also bleed into the sink when he washes them. He doesn’t want to confront it, but the stigmata symbolism only reminds him of one person in recent history.
“You’re one person I got to save,” he tells the pinkish water disappearing down the drain. “You cannot be dead.”
“Oh, but I am,” she says. “Those British guys did a bang up job with cleaning up your loose ends. At least, that’s what the guy said.”
“No. You’re at a ranch. Where you’re supposed to be. This is an unreal world.”
“I don’t know,” says Magda. “I feel pretty dead.”
And it’s strange, thinks Sam, leaving the ghost behind as he walks out. He’s been in other worlds where people who shouldn’t be dead were: ones with zombies where mostly everyone was dead, other mostly normal ones where there was no Jody, or no Claire, or a couple of worlds-always like a slap to the face-without Dean.
But this is the one that slams the awareness of their actual reality into him.
That world they’ve left behind.
There is no blinding light, no snapping magic. The true form of epiphany is a small, beleaguered knot somewhere in his chest, the awareness of which never goes away.
“You pulled out of that one pretty quick,” says Dean, walking into the coffeehouse.
“I’m glad that one wasn’t real,” says Sam, wishing phones worked in here, wishing internet worked; there was about a dozen people he suddenly wanted to track, and there was a strange terror in his heart for all the lives out in the real world that they had left to their own.
9.
There is a world from which Dean comes back first, bringing with him a bombed-out, bloody coffeehouse.
When Sam follows him in, taking in the horrific décor, Dean opens his arms like, take in the splendor of what I’ve found.
“Thought that was almost it,” says Dean. “But nope. Just another apocalypse. Guess what caused it.”
“What?”
“Jack the Nephilim.”
Sam gapes. “But…that’s the future, isn’t it? I mean, how can you be in the future? The stories are cycled on what happened already.”
“Unless the tulpa is finally working and creating new stories, closer to what’s going on right now. You know, speculation. What’s on our minds,” says Dean. “Although I could have done without a demonstration of what creepy Devil baby is capable of.”
Sam, whose most recent world had been some strange World War 2 situation, slumps into their charred booth.
“We might be getting closer then.”
“Meditate on that world,” says Dean, and does a terrible impression on what he probably thinks pranayama looks like. “Grey, full of bizarre giant angel blades, complete with surly Bobby wearing Mad Max gear-”
“That wasn’t Mad Max gear.”
“Well, it wasn’t a Vegas showgirl costume.”
“It wasn’t exactly a Ghostbuster outfit either.”
“Nor a hula skirt,” says Dean, and suddenly grins. “Imagine Bobby in a hula skirt.”
Sam protests. “Dude.”
“Or Sailor Moon.”
“How do you know Sailor Moon?” Sam asks, and immediately regrets it. “Wait, no, don’t answer that.”
They’re quiet for a while. Sam looks out through the windows and sees mist, amorphous. He looks back at Dean and finds his brother thoughtful, staring at initials carved on the table. Sam remembers their initials on the bunker table, and suddenly misses it.
Dean catches his gaze and gives a small, taut smile.
“You know,” he says. “Maybe we’ll never find that actual, exact world. Maybe this is a lost cause. I mean, what if we find an angel-apocalypse world, and everything was exactly as we want it to be, except for Bobby in a Ghostbuster suit?”
“I know.”
“And if we pull Mom out of that one, then is she the real one? You get what I’m saying?”
“I know.”
“Maybe we’ve got to-and it hurts to say this, Sam, but maybe we’ve got to move on, you know. The real world is out there, and it sucks-believe me-but some of these are worse. And we’ll never know. We’ll never know if we’re saving the real Mom out here.”
“Out there are people who need us. We’ve got a Nephilim to handle-”
“Exactly. And I’ve still got you, and you’ve got me-which is better than some of these Bizarro-worlds. And we’ve got to-I don’t know,” Dean looks conflicted. “I hate it. I hate that we can’t save everyone. I hate that for even once we don’t get to keep what we have. But maybe that’s just how it is. It’s how it’s always been. And we’ve caught some breaks…”
Sam thinks, unbidden, of Castiel slamming an angel knife into a reaper ready to take their souls. For some odd reason, the thought makes him laugh.
Dean says, “We’ll keep looking. We’ll find a way. But not like this. Not by running away from everything else.”
Sam thinks of that theory again. The two clones, who share every memory, share every thought, is a perfect replica of each other. But a human being is not an isolated system. Skin is age and cell and pigment, but it is also history: what you touched, and what touched you.
And what they’ve touched is out there.
That unfortunate, misbegotten world that’s still theirs.
Sam nods. “You’re right.”
Dean grins. “Of course I am. Although,” he adds, wistfully. “I did wish we’d get to that other world at least once. You know? The one where you were Polish. That was a sweet gig.”
“Please,” says Sam, with a shudder. “Any world where I’m forced in front of a camera? Terrible idea.”