Part One: You Only Feel It When It’s Lost
“Hey, Sam?”
“Hmmm?” Sam looks up from the map he’s been studying, which strikes Dean as weird in itself. When did Sam start using maps again? Whatever happened to the GPS on his phone?
“This is gonna sound weird,” Dean goes on. “But where are we?”
Sam blinks, looks up at the road in front of them, then frowns back at the map he’s holding.
“About five miles out of Cortland,” Sam says.
“Nebraska?”
“Yeah, that’s right.” Sam puts the map down, frowns deeper, as if he’s just now realized something.
“And we’re headed where, exactly?”
“Back to Lebanon?” Sam’s hesitation makes Dean’s blood run cold. Something is definitely off.
Dean clears his throat. “Okay.” He tightens his hands on the steering wheel, taking comfort in the familiar purr of his baby’s engine. “What were we doing in Cortland, again?”
Sam squints, as if that might help jog his memory. “No idea,” he admits finally.
Dean takes a deep breath and slows down as they pull up to Mae’s Diner on their side of the road. A gas station with an attached convenience store sits directly across the road. A Travel Lodge sits next to the diner, two cars and a truck in the parking lot.
“Well, my stomach tells me it’s time to eat,” Dean announces unnecessarily. “Maybe we can figure it out over lunch.”
In the diner, there’s one other customer, a trucker in a baseball cap who sits all the way down the counter, nursing a cup of coffee and a piece of pie, reading a newspaper.
“Take your pick,” the waitress says, gesturing toward the row of empty booths. “We’re not exactly overbooked today.”
Dean and Sam slide into opposite sides of the booth nearest the door, opening the menus lying on the table.
“What’s good here?” Dean asks the waitress as she brings them tall, cold glasses of water.
“Best bacon cheeseburger west of the Mississippi,” the waitress, whose name tag reads Gladys, says as she pulls out a pad and pencil.
“We’ll see about that.” Dean flashes his best smile, and Gladys loosens up, just a bit.
“Fries with that?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Dean nods at Sam. “He’ll have the Cobb salad.”
Sam frowns but says nothing. He waits for Gladys to gather their menus and leave them alone, then lets out an exasperated sigh.
“Okay, so what do you remember? About yesterday in Cortland, I mean.”
Dean shakes his head. “I don’t even remember this morning in Cortland,” he admits. “It’s like I just woke up in the car, driving.”
“Okay,” Sam nods. “So we don’t even know for sure that we were ever in Cortland.”
Dean shrugs. “I guess we could drive back there, see if anything looks familiar. Try to figure out what we were doing there in the first place.”
“But what if we were just driving through, coming from somewhere else, like say, Lincoln? Do you think we maybe worked a case in Lincoln?”
“I don’t know!” Dean throws up his hands. “But I can tell you this. We get back to the bunker, we do some research, see if there was a case anywhere near Lincoln, then we go from there.”
Sam nods, seemingly satisfied.
Gladys arrives with their food, and for a few moments they’re both preoccupied with eating. Sam stares out the window, watching as a family pulls up in an old Dodge station wagon. Dean eats his burger, which is pretty good, if not the best in the West. He watches Sam watching the family as they enter the diner and take a booth a couple of tables back from theirs.
The two little boys look about five and nine years old, Dean decides. Pretty blond mother, tough-looking father with a crewcut.
Now that they’re seated in their booth, Dean can’t see them, but he catches Sam glancing at them. Thinks he knows why.
“That coulda been us,” he comments blandly. “In another universe, I mean.”
Sam blushes and ducks his head, caught out. His dimples pop as he looks down at his salad, moving the lettuce around the plate like he’s looking for something better.
“I guess,” Sam acknowledges. “But you said it yourself last week: you wouldn’t go back and change a thing, ‘cuz then we wouldn’t be us. We’d be those happy little boys all grown up, well-adjusted, getting together once or twice a year for Thanksgiving or Christmas.”
Dean shrugs. “No Yellow-Eyes, no demon-blood, no Hell trauma.”
“No having each other’s back through the worst of times,” Sam says. “No forging a bond from shared experience, shared history. Not to mention all the people we saved.”
“All the people we lost,” Dean says. “All the people who died because of us.”
Sam puts his fork down, wipes his mouth with his napkin. “Are you saying you would go back and change things, if you had the chance?”
“No, Sam, that’s not what I’m saying.” Dean brushes his hands off, gestures to Gladys to bring the check. “I’m just saying, who we are? All the things that happened to us to make us who we are? That’s some messed up crap, man.”
Sam shakes his head with a grim smile. “There’ve been good things, too, Dean. It’s not all grief and horror.”
Dean pulls two twenties from his wallet, leaves them on top of the check as he scoots out of the booth.
“True,” he agrees as he leads the way out of the diner. “Sometimes, things are just weird. Like this day, for example. And yesterday, which neither of us can remember.”
“Right.” Sam stops at the car, hand on the handle of the passenger door. “What’s the last thing you remember? Before waking up in the car, I mean.”
Dean thinks for a minute. “Breakfast yesterday,” he says. “You were mad because I gave you real bacon instead of the turkey stuff.”
“Right.” Sam nods. “And you burned your hands on the toast, even though I warned you it was hot.”
Dean nods. “Then we went into the library like we always do to look for a job.”
San bites his lip. “I don’t remember finding anything.”
“Me, neither.” Dean pulls open the driver’s door and is relieved when Sam gets in. “We’ll figure this out, just like we always do.”
But the drive back to the bunker is weird, too. Towns Dean remembers having one filling station and a convenience store have grown, with houses and a couple of motels, even a town hall he’s never seen before, although they all seem oddly deserted and empty.
Towns that used to be huge have diminished to one or two houses, a diner, and a filling station.
When they get to Lebanon, it’s a ghost town. No friendly main street with little shops, no cozy tree-lined neighborhoods. No school. There’s just one convenience store. The grocery store and liquor store where the Winchesters used to shop are gone, no sign they’ve ever been there. An old, crumbling motel sits on the crossroads into town from the bunker, along with an overgrown park where a chapel and a stone monument sit, weather-beaten and uncared for.
The road to the bunker off the main road is pocked and unpaved. Dean finally leaves the car, climbs out to walk the last mile on foot, just to save Baby’s struts.
Sam plods silently beside him, apparently already having made up his mind about what they’ll find when they get to the site of the bunker.
There’s nothing there. No sign there ever was anything there. Just fields in every direction, flat, unforgiving, and long untended.
“Crap.”
Dean pulls the bunker key from his pocket, turns it over a couple of times, looks up at the empty field.
“What do you think?” Sam asks finally.
“I think we need to drive back to Cortland,” Dean says. “Then Lincoln, if we can’t find anything to explain this.”
Sam nods, heads back to the car, and Dean’s proud of himself for tamping down on his panic attack. Little brother needs him to be confident and in charge. He can be that. For Sam.
“We need a public library,” Sam suggests tentatively as Dean falls into step beside him.
“Don’t you have your laptop?”
Sam’s shoulders sag. “Something tells me there’s no wifi out here,” he says.
“Cell service?”
Sam pulls his old-fashioned flip phone from his pocket, flips it open while Dean’s heartbeat increases. His palms sweat.
“Your other cell phone?” Dean asks after Sam’s done a sweep of the area to no avail.
Sam snaps the device closed, slides it back into his pocket.
“What other cell phone?”
“Your goddamn smartphone, Sam,” Dean growls. He’s got a very bad feeling about this. “The one you use to get us around because you don’t need maps anymore. The one that tells you all the things, just like your laptop.”
Dean searches his own pockets as he grumbles, but his smartphone seems to be missing. Maybe he left it in the car?
“You mean my Blackberry?” Sam asks, genuinely perplexed. “Don’t you remember? It stopped working a couple of years ago. Sony doesn’t make them anymore.”
Dean wonders if he’s losing his mind, but the bigger question is why he and Sam don’t seem to have the same memories of this particular thing. What else might they not have shared memories about?
It’s too overwhelming to think about, so Dean doesn’t. There must be another explanation.
“So all we have for cell service is our Star Trek communicators,” Dean says finally, just to have something to say to prevent himself from admitting that he remembers this completely differently.
Sam huffs out a laugh. “Well, yeah. You haven’t called them that in a while, but basically, yeah.”
“Same as what we had back in 2005 when we first started hunting for Dad.” Dean’s fishing and he knows it. He needs to confirm that Sam’s other memories line up with his.
“Yeah, I guess.” Sam squints, thinking back. It’s been a few years, after all. “They’re a step up from those old clunky satellite phones, though, remember those?”
Dean does, but that’s not the point. Sam doesn’t contradict his memory of searching for their father, all those years ago. That’s what matters.
When they get back to the car, Dean searches the glove box, the cassette box under the seat, then the trunk. As he rifles through his duffle, Sam gets back out of the car and stands waiting, a troubled frown on his brow.
Dean finally admits defeat. He doesn’t find anything unfamiliar or out of place, which is good, he decides. His clothes, their weapons, everything is just as they should be. He even finds Sam’s laptop, not the new one he remembers, but an older model with a DVD player that Dean hasn’t seen in years.
“This thing still work?” he asks, holding it up uncertainly.
“When it’s plugged in and connected to wifi,” Sam assents. “Just as good as a desktop.”
Dean nods, slips it back into Sam’s messenger bag.
“Dean?” Sam’s voice is hesitant, concerned. “Is something wrong?”
Dean slams the trunk, takes a breath. “Get in the car,” he orders. “Let’s find us a library.”
When they’re back on the main road, headed back the way they came, Sam asks again.
Dean sighs. “Other than the bunker being gone, you mean? Other than you and me having some different memories? I don’t know, Sammy, you tell me.”
“You think something really weird happened on our drive here from Cortland?” Sam asks. “Something like, I don’t know. Maybe we drove through a portal into an alternate universe?”
Dean frowns. He glances at Sam, then back at the road, doing his best to hide his mounting panic.
“Well, if that were true, then we should’ve seen a rift, right? I mean, do you remember driving through a rift?” At least he can still speak in coherent sentences.
“We don’t remember anything since yesterday morning in the bunker,” Sam reminds him. “I guess we could've driven through a rift and just forgotten about it.”
“Right. Right.”
But that doesn’t account for the fact that he and Sam have different memories. Did they come from different universes? Is the man sitting next to him even his brother?
“Dean, this is weird, no doubt about it,” Sam says, misreading Dean’s panic entirely. “But I’m sure there’s a way to fix it. We can probably drive right through the rift we came through to get here, go back home to our universe the way we got here in the first place.”
“Our universe. Right.”
Besides the cell phone thing, what are the other differences between their memories?
“Of course, it might not be a rift thing at all,” Sam muses. “We know archangels who can create different realities. If we hadn’t killed Zachariah -- twice -- I might suspect this had something to do with him.”
“Zachariah. Right.”
“Or Gabriel,” Sam goes on, “except he’s dead, too. Or Michael.”
Cold air slices down Dean’s spine at the thought of the archangel who so recently possessed him and is still locked up in his mind.
Except when Dean probes gently at the place where he’s got Michael locked up, he senses nothing.
“Sam,” Dean says tentatively, almost afraid to express the thought out loud. He’s lived too long with the effort to keep Michael contained, after finally understanding exactly how it felt to be possessed by an archangel. Yet another experience he and Sam shared, or so he thought until now.
“Yeah? What?”
“I -- I think Michael’s gone,” Dean says, almost whispering, afraid to say it too loud.
“What? How?” Dean can feel Sam staring at him, but he keeps his eyes on the road.
“I don’t know, man. Maybe whatever happened, driving into another universe or whatever, he’s just gone.”
Sam sucks in a long breath of relief. “Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but what if driving back through the rift reverses that and I get him back?”
Sam nods. “Okay. I think we need to figure this out.”
“You think?” Dean can hear the hysteria in his own voice, feels his hands shaking on the wheel.
“Yeah, yeah, I think we need to figure out what else has changed before we decide what to do next.”
“Well, for one thing, we’ve got different memories,” Dean blurts out. “You and me come from different universes, Sam!”
He can feel rather than see Sam’s shock.
“How do you know?”
Sam’s voice is small, frightened-little-brother hesitant, and Dean almost drives off the road. He clutches the steering wheel like a lifeline, manages to keep the wheels where they belong.
“The cell phone thing,” Dean explains. “In my world, we’ve got smartphones, made by Apple and Samsung, I don’t know who else. They’ve got screens so you can watch movies on them and everything. They’re like little hand-held computers.”
“Apple went out of business twenty years ago,” Sam says softly. “I’ve never even heard of that other one. Sang-sun?”
“Never mind,” Dean growls. “Doesn’t matter. The point is, we didn’t just drive through a rift from another universe. You and me are from different universes.”
“How can that be?” Sam breathes, clearly as disturbed by the prospect as Dean. “We remember most things the same way, right? The things that matter? Cell phones excepted, everything else lines up, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know! Maybe. Maybe not.”
“We’re Sam and Dean Winchester,” Sam says, obviously ready to recite their entire shared history. “Our mother died when I was six months old, our father raised us to be hunters. I left for Stanford when I was 18, you came to get me when Dad went missing on a hunting trip when I was 22. We’ve been through hell and back, literally, since that day. But no matter how awful our lives, no matter how many people we’ve lost, we’ve always been there for each other. That hasn’t changed.”
Dean clenches his jaw and doesn’t answer, so Sam goes on.
“Right? Through you selling your soul and spending forty years in Hell to me drinking demon blood and being possessed by Lucifer and jumping into the cage, through all the crazy things that have happened since, the one thing that’s always been true, the one thing that really matters, is each other. Right?”
Sam sounds so desperate, so terrified that Dean might confess to remembering differently, that Dean can’t help himself. Little brother needs reassurance, and Dean can’t help giving it to him.
“Right, Sam, that’s how it happened,” he agrees. “Just like you said.”
“Okay,” Sam says, huffing out a breath that sounds like relief. “So we remember the important things the same way.”
Dean flinches. He doesn’t want to say out loud the thing he’s thinking, but then Sam says it anyway.
“You think we’re not brothers,” he says. “You think we’ve switched places with alternate versions of ourselves. That’s the real reason we have to fix this.”
Dean chews on his bottom lip. He can hear the hurt in Sam’s voice. It’s almost too much to take.
“Sam, we’re gonna figure this out, okay? No reason to jump the gun here. I’m sure it’s just a matter of reversing whatever happened, then everything goes back to normal.”
Sam shuts up then, gets quiet and brooding, seems to shrink down in the seat like he’s determined to make himself small again, like he does when he’s feeling like he’s letting Dean down.
Again.
Just by existing. Just by being an alternate version of himself.
“Hey, this isn’t your fault, you get me?” Dean says finally, unable to stand Sam’s unhappiness a moment longer. “You didn’t do this.”
“I’m not your brother,” Sam whispers, voice hitching like he’s about to cry.
“Don’t say that,” Dean protests. He puts a hand on Sam’s knee and squeezes gently, just to reassure him, just to ground him. “As far as I can tell, in all the ways that matter, you’re still my pain-in-the-ass little brother, Sammy. A little universe hopping ain’t gonna change that.”
Sam sucks in a shuddery breath, puts his hand over Dean’s, squeezes. Leaves it there.
Okay. That’s not usually how they do, but okay.
Dean glances at Sam, but he’s looking out the side window, keeping his hand over Dean’s on his knee, holding it there.
Definitely not how they do.
But Sam needed the reassurance, so Dean leaves his hand there another moment before giving Sam’s knee another squeeze and pulling his hand free.
Sam’s head whips around, giving him that puppy-dog look of hurt surprise that Dean doesn’t need to see to know it’s there.
“Just need to make a turn,” he mumbles by way of excuse, as if he should need an excuse to remove his hand from his brother’s leg.
As he makes the left onto the state route, heading back north to Nebraska, the way they came, Dean catches the little worried frown on Sam’s face, like he’s trying to figure something out.
“There’s a public library in Belleville,” Sam announces. “Just about twenty minutes up the road. Or at least there used to be.”
“Sounds like a good place to start,” Dean agrees, just for something to say.
The library is getting ready to close, but they’re allowed a quick search of the web. Apparently, Google doesn’t exist in this universe, but Sam seems to know what to do anyway.
“No sign of supernatural activity anywhere,” Sam notes after five minutes of clicking and surfing, flipping through pages that look mostly like the front pages of online newspapers. “No signs or omens, no freak electrical storms or cattle mutilations, no unexplained deaths. No dark web full of hunter bulletin boards and chat rooms. It’s just -- dead.”
“What do you mean, ‘dead’?”
Dean does his best to look over Sam’s shoulder without touching him, feeling oddly self-conscious after their near-hand-holding in the car, but finds himself leaning close the way he always does anyway. Sam’s body heat is comforting. Familiar. Dean could almost press his cheek against Sam’s hair, but he doesn’t. That would be too much, he decides, then can’t for the life of him figure out why he thought about it in the first place.
“I mean, like there’s nothing,” Sam says. “No hauntings, no missing persons that might be our kind of thing, no weird flickering lights or ‘animal attacks.’ It’s like there’s nothing supernatural happening anywhere.”
“Well that’s just impossible, isn’t it?” Dean half-laughs. “I mean, just because you can’t find any evidence of freaky activity, doesn’t mean there isn’t any at all, right?”
Sam leans back, huffing out a frustrated breath, and now Dean’s chest is pressed right up against Sam’s back, his cheek against Sam’s temple. Sam wiggles a little, like he’s leaning into the contact, and Dean freezes. This is weird, isn’t it? Do they always do this?
“I don’t know, man,” Sam says. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, usually there’s something, right? An unexplained death or a pattern of weird killings or -- something.”
Dean gathers his best big-brother-in-control confidence like a shroud, pulling it close around them so Sam feels it, too.
“Alright, maybe it’s time to check in with some other hunters,” Dean says. “You wanna try calling Jody? Or Donna? Or -- or Mom?”
“Right. Good idea.”
Sam pulls out his phone and there’s a librarian standing in front of them almost instantly.
“No cell phone use in the library,” she says sternly. “You need to take that outside. We’re closing now, anyway.”
Sam pockets his phone and signs out of whatever search engine he’s using so that the screen goes blank.
Dean stands back, having jerked away from his brother the moment the librarian showed up, trying not to think about how good it felt to be pressed so close to Sam in the first place.
Outside on the front steps, Sam pulls out his cell phone and starts scrolling through his contacts. He makes little unhappy noises as he dials one, then another number, listens to the “this number is no longer in service” alert which follows each one.
Dean’s heart sinks as each number fails to go through to a trusted friend who is no longer on the other end of the line.
After the sixth attempt, Dean puts his hand over Sam’s, stopping his scrolling.
“That’s enough,” he growls. “We get it.”
“They can’t all be just -- gone, Dean,” Sam protests. “The numbers must’ve changed.”
“Or there aren’t any hunters in this universe, just like there aren’t any monsters,” Dean answers, deliberately keeping his voice calm and steady, for Sam’s sake, or so he tells himself.
Sam looks at him helplessly. “Jody,” he whispers, voice choked. “Mom.” There’s a sheen of moisture over his beautiful hazel eyes.
When did Dean start thinking Sam’s eyes were beautiful? What the hell?
“Okay, okay, let’s get back to the car, head on up the road to Cortland, maybe get some answers there.”
Dean’s got one hand on Sam’s arm, the other on his back, guiding him toward the car, and he wonders again how they got like this. When did they start being so physical with each other? Has it always been like this but Dean’s only noticing it now?
Why is he noticing it now?
Sam’s muscles twitch under Dean’s hands, but he lets himself be guided back to the car, lets Dean open the passenger door, put his hand on Sam’s head as he bends him over to sit, protecting his head like he always does because Sam’s such a Sasquatch and he hits his head too often on door jambs as it is.
Except he can’t remember a single other time he’s done it.
During the hour’s drive to Cortland, Sam tries a few more numbers, getting more frustrated with each ensuing failure until Dean finally reaches over and takes the phone away.
“Sam. That’s enough.”
Five miles out of Cortland, Dean pulls the car over and they get out, search the area around the road as thoroughly as they can for any sign of something that might help explain what happened to them that morning.
Nothing but fields in every direction, empty and quiet, with only a couple of other cars on the road. The setting sun casts long shadows and a breeze lifts the dust off the shoulder of the road, but there’s nothing to indicate that anything weird or supernatural happened there.
They get back in the car, creep along the shoulder for a half-mile in each direction before giving up.
Cortland itself is an empty town with a population of around 500, a feed store, a seed store, and a convenience store. Not even a diner.
“Well, I’m starving,” Dean announces as they pull out of town on the highway north toward Lincoln. “I say we stop for dinner next place we see.”
Sam says nothing, hunched and sulking in his seat. He doesn’t argue when Dean pulls over at a bar and grille on the outskirts of Lincoln, gets out and follows Dean into the bar, a silent hulk of unhappiness at Dean’s back.
“Seat yourself,” the bartender calls out. The room is about half-full, a few single men sitting at the bar, a group of men around the pool table in the back, a couple of working girls at a table nursing tall, icy drinks. “Sweet Child of Mine” blares from the jukebox.
“Could be worse,” Dean notes as he leads Sam to a table near the door. “At least this universe has Guns & Roses.”
“Did you see all those cemeteries as we drove here from Cortland?” Sam asks as he takes a menu from the stand on the table. “More dead people per square mile than live ones.”
“Huh.”
Dean thinks for a minute about all the mostly empty towns they’ve driven through today, wonders vaguely if Sam’s onto something.
“This is the most people in one place we’ve seen all day,” Sam adds.
Dean frowns. “You think it means anything? Other than there’s just not much population density in south-eastern Nebraska.”
Sam shakes his head. “I don’t know. It’s something. Maybe. Maybe nothing.”
The bartender comes over to take their order. Dean orders two tequila shots, two beers, a bacon cheeseburger with fries, and a salad with grilled chicken for Sam.
Sam makes a face as the woman heads back to the bar to fill their drink order.
“Salads are probably pretty terrible here,” he notes as he takes a sip of his water.
“You can have half my cheeseburger,” Dean offers generously, just to watch Sam roll his eyes.
“No, thanks.” He stares grumpily at his water glass for a minute, then looks up at Dean. “You should try calling Castiel.”
The thought hadn’t occurred to him, to be honest. Dean had been too worried about Sam possibly not being completely and totally Sam to think about anything else.
“Yeah, alright,” he agrees. “After we eat. And find a motel. I’m exhausted.”
Sam reaches into his messenger bag and pulls out his laptop. “You think there’s wifi in here?”
“What difference does it make?” Dean grumbles. “We’ve already established there’s nothing unusual going on in this universe.”
“Right, but we still don’t know how we got here,” Sam says. “Do you think it might have been a side-effect of the pearl magic? That only happened last week, and this was our first trip out of Lebanon since then. Maybe its magic only affected the area right around the bunker, so the further out we traveled, the more the timeline changed.”
“But we broke the magic when you crushed the pearl,” Dean reminds him.
“Right, but what if the changes it caused didn’t all revert to normal right away? Like a delayed response.”
“So you’re saying the further away from the pearl’s epicenter, the more the world changed, so when we shattered it, some of those changes stayed.” Dean frowns uncertainly. “Doesn’t explain the total lack of supernatural activity anywhere, though. Or the fact that the whole fuckin’ bunker just up and disappeared, along with the hillside it was built into like it never existed in the first place.”
“Right,” Sam nods. “I don’t know. It’s probably not that, then.”
Dean watches Sam type quickly and competently on his laptop. He watches the screen light play across his face. Sam’s always been handsome, but for some reason, he’s even better looking than usual in the bar’s dim light.
Their drinks arrive and Dean downs both tequila shots, signals the bartender for more.
It’s gonna be one of those nights.
As he sips his beer, Dean watches Sam’s face, the way the light from the laptop screen reflects off his eyes, making him look younger. He looks for any sign that something has changed, that this Sam isn’t really his Sam, but he just doesn’t see it.
Other than allowing himself to really admire Sam’s handsomeness, which is something he’s always been pretty good at ignoring, Sam looks the same as always. Dean tells himself it’s just because he’s missed Sam, after what went down with Michael. He doesn’t take him so much for granted anymore.
At least Sam shaved that damn beard, that painful reminder that Dean’s possession and disappearance had caused Sam a lot of grief and anguish in the first place. The horror of being possessed is dwarfed by Dean’s fear that he might have hurt Sam or caused him pain in any way.
Anyway, the possession thing is just one more thing he has in common with his brother now. One more way he can empathize with what Sam went through with Lucifer.
Except, what Sam went through with Lucifer was so, so much worse. Dean knows that, too, even if he’s never given it much thought.
“Dean.”
Sam’s fixing him with an accusing stare, and when Dean lifts his eyebrows, Sam looks down at the empty glasses on the table. Seems Dean has managed to finish off both beers and four shots of tequila. Huh.
“Are you trying to get drunk?”
Dean frowns, shrugs, thinks for a minute. “Maybe.”
Sam rolls his eyes. “Try eating something first,” he instructs, and just like magic (except definitely not), the food arrives.
Sam closes his laptop and slides it back into his messenger bag.
“Anything?” Dean asks as he takes a bite of his burger.
Sam purses his lips, shakes his head sharply. He pokes at his salad, which has been drowned in some kind of orange gloop that probably calls itself dressing. He takes a bite, scowls.
“Hey, I bet we have all the same memories,” Dean suggests, desperate to find a way to cheer up this sad man who is and isn’t his brother. “I’ll bet the weird thing with technology is the only difference.”
Sam shrugs. “Maybe.”
“I bet we don’t find any other difference,” Dean says. “I’ll bet you twenty bucks.”
Sam lifts his eyes. There’s a light in them that Dean recognizes. Sam can’t resist a challenge. He’s competitive. They both are.
“Okay, you’re on,” he says, taking another bite of his soupy salad. “You go first.”
The bartender brings more beer and tequila as Dean thinks up a memory they probably both share. A happy one.
“Okay. When we were kids, you came home from school and found me and Rosie Whittacker making out in your room,” Dean says. “And what happened?”
Sam’s jaw works, but it’s not because he can’t remember. “I threw my shoe at you,” he says.
Dean chuckles. “Yeah, you did.” He rubs his forehead. “Left a bruise.”
“You were in my room, dude,” Sam protests. “I hardly ever got a room of my own, and you were in it! Doing that!”
“That’s right,” Dean smirks as he takes another bite of his burger. “Your turn.”
“Okay,” Sam says. “My high school graduation.”
Dean’s eyebrows go up. His chest fills with pride.
“You won all the awards,” he says, grinning. “Watching you get up over and over to get each one was incredible. Best part of the whole thing!”
“Dad wasn’t there,” Sam mutters darkly.
“So I clapped and cheered enough for both of us,” Dean says.
Sam ducks his head, but Dean can see his grin, his dimples popping.
“Yeah, you did.”
Sam stabs his salad, managing to shake loose some lettuce. Dean watches as he eats, chewing slowly and carefully, the way he usually does. Kid eats slower than molasses. Always did.
“Your turn,” Sam says when he’s finally swallowed.
“Okay,” Dean thinks for a minute. “That night I came to get you at school? The first thing you said when I told you Dad hadn’t been home in a few days.”
Sam barely hesitates. “I said, ‘So he’s working overtime on a Miller time shift.’ That’s too easy, Dean. It’s in those damn books that Chuck wrote about us.”
“Okay, hot shot, how about the first thing I said to you when I came back from Hell?”
Sam’s face screws up, not like he can’t remember, more like the memory is giving him some feels.
“‘Hey, Sammy,’” he says finally, his voice a little choked. “You said, ‘hey, Sammy.’ You always say that when you come back. Then you said, ‘I look fantastic, don’t I?’”
Dean shrugs. “Well, I did, for being dead for four months.” He chuckles as he finishes his burger, brushes his hands off. “Okay, your turn.”
Sam licks his lips, and Dean can’t help watching before he refocuses his gaze on Sam’s eyes.
“The first time we kissed,” Sam says, voice even, determined. “Where and when was it?”
Dean frowns, takes a second to respond. “You mean when we were kids?” he asks. “When you were a slobbery toddler always putting your sticky fingers in my hair? When were you not kissing me back then? You were an affectionate little kid.”
Sam frowns, clearly frustrated. “No, Dean. As adults. When and where was the first time, after we grew up? Come on, man, don’t tell me you don’t remember.”
Dean’s flummoxed. Is this a trick question? Is this something he >should remember? Clearly, it’s a memory that means a lot to Sam but somehow doesn’t mean much to Dean because he can’t remember what in the hell Sam’s talking about.
“On the lips,” Dean prods. “The first time we lip-locked. You and me. Nobody else.”
Sam stares. “Oh my god, you don’t remember.”
“Was I drunk?” Dean needs more hints, feels sure the memory’s in there somewhere. It has to be.
“We’d been drinking earlier in the evening, yeah,” Sam says, already deflating with disappointment. “Maybe you were still buzzed, but that’s not why it happened.”
Dean throws up his hands. “Okay, I give up. You win. I got no memory of whatever it is you’re talking about. None. Nada. Although I gotta say, if we kissed on the lips one time ten years ago and I don’t remember it, it couldn’t have been that memorable.”
Sam’s face does that thing that Dean used to think of as “Sam’s crowded face” because there are so many conflicting expressions crossing it one after the other.
“It wasn’t just one time,” Sam says, needlessly clarifying something that in Dean’s opinion really doesn’t clarify anything at all. “I said it was the first time.”
Now it’s Dean’s turn to be confused. Kissing Sam on the lips one time long ago was bad enough, but apparently, it’s happened more than once. And Dean doesn’t remember any of those times?
Dean tries not to let his disappointment show as he looks down at his now-empty beer glass, then up at the bartender to signal for another. He dares a quick glance up at Sam, reads the realization dawning on his familiar features, and almost lies to him, just to make it better.
“I don’t remember that, Sam. That’s not something we do, in my reality.”
He feels the air sucking out of the room, knows without looking up that Sam’s shocked. And unhappy. Somehow, Dean has let him down. Hard.
The bartender brings his beer and Dean gulps it. Definitely time for some liquid courage. More liquid courage.
He can sense Sam watching him, feels a flush of embarrassment heat up his chest and cheeks, rising all the way up to his ears.
This Sam does that with his Dean, his brain provides, completely unhelpfully. That’s just sick.
Except it’s not and Dean knows it. Dean thinks about Sam in that way all the time, not that he’d ever admit it.
Damn it.
Dean slams the empty glass down and reaches for his wallet.
“Let’s get out of here.”
He pulls out some bills, leaves them on the table as he gets up, doesn’t even look back to be sure Sam’s following.
When they get out to the parking lot, Dean’s grateful for the cold air. He’s too drunk to drive. Really shouldn’t put his baby -- and Sam -- at risk. As he fumbles the keys out of his pocket, they fall to the pavement. Sam stoops to pick them up, and Dean lets him.
“Guess I shouldn’t drive,” he says needlessly, keeping his eyes on Sam’s shoes, on the pavement, on the car. Anywhere but Sam’s sharp, hazel eyes.
The Shake Down Motel is right across the street, and Dean lets Sam lead them there, carrying his duffel and messenger bag. He offers to carry Dean’s duffel, too, but Dean shakes him off.
“I got it!”
“If you like, I can get us separate rooms,” Sam offers softly.
“No, Sam, a room with two beds is fine, just like always,” Dean snaps. “I’m not worried you’re gonna molest me in my sleep, for fuck’s sake.”
Sam’s silence is almost worse than the sad sigh Dean had expected. It isn’t his intention to make Sam more miserable. Really, it isn’t.
He’s just a little bit in shock, is all.
Finding out this other version of his brother has been hot for him all his adult life, and has in fact been acting on those feelings, is just weird.
It makes Dean wonder if there was something he was missing, all those years with his Sam. Could it be that Dean’s little brother felt the same way?
No, it could not. As Dean thinks back quickly, there is just no way that he’s been misreading Sam for all those years. No way.
Is there?
After they check in and get into their room, Dean flops down face-first on the bed nearest the door. He really is tired. And wasted. He’s half-aware of Sam moving around the room, going into the bathroom, running a shower. The sound of the water running soothes Dean to sleep, and he’s not even aware of Sam coming back into the room, laying a blanket over him from the other bed, and turning the lights off.
He doesn’t dream.
PART TWO
“Hmmm?” Sam looks up from the map he’s been studying, which strikes Dean as weird in itself. When did Sam start using maps again? Whatever happened to the GPS on his phone?
“This is gonna sound weird,” Dean goes on. “But where are we?”
Sam blinks, looks up at the road in front of them, then frowns back at the map he’s holding.
“About five miles out of Cortland,” Sam says.
“Nebraska?”
“Yeah, that’s right.” Sam puts the map down, frowns deeper, as if he’s just now realized something.
“And we’re headed where, exactly?”
“Back to Lebanon?” Sam’s hesitation makes Dean’s blood run cold. Something is definitely off.
Dean clears his throat. “Okay.” He tightens his hands on the steering wheel, taking comfort in the familiar purr of his baby’s engine. “What were we doing in Cortland, again?”
Sam squints, as if that might help jog his memory. “No idea,” he admits finally.
Dean takes a deep breath and slows down as they pull up to Mae’s Diner on their side of the road. A gas station with an attached convenience store sits directly across the road. A Travel Lodge sits next to the diner, two cars and a truck in the parking lot.
“Well, my stomach tells me it’s time to eat,” Dean announces unnecessarily. “Maybe we can figure it out over lunch.”
In the diner, there’s one other customer, a trucker in a baseball cap who sits all the way down the counter, nursing a cup of coffee and a piece of pie, reading a newspaper.
“Take your pick,” the waitress says, gesturing toward the row of empty booths. “We’re not exactly overbooked today.”
Dean and Sam slide into opposite sides of the booth nearest the door, opening the menus lying on the table.
“What’s good here?” Dean asks the waitress as she brings them tall, cold glasses of water.
“Best bacon cheeseburger west of the Mississippi,” the waitress, whose name tag reads Gladys, says as she pulls out a pad and pencil.
“We’ll see about that.” Dean flashes his best smile, and Gladys loosens up, just a bit.
“Fries with that?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Dean nods at Sam. “He’ll have the Cobb salad.”
Sam frowns but says nothing. He waits for Gladys to gather their menus and leave them alone, then lets out an exasperated sigh.
“Okay, so what do you remember? About yesterday in Cortland, I mean.”
Dean shakes his head. “I don’t even remember this morning in Cortland,” he admits. “It’s like I just woke up in the car, driving.”
“Okay,” Sam nods. “So we don’t even know for sure that we were ever in Cortland.”
Dean shrugs. “I guess we could drive back there, see if anything looks familiar. Try to figure out what we were doing there in the first place.”
“But what if we were just driving through, coming from somewhere else, like say, Lincoln? Do you think we maybe worked a case in Lincoln?”
“I don’t know!” Dean throws up his hands. “But I can tell you this. We get back to the bunker, we do some research, see if there was a case anywhere near Lincoln, then we go from there.”
Sam nods, seemingly satisfied.
Gladys arrives with their food, and for a few moments they’re both preoccupied with eating. Sam stares out the window, watching as a family pulls up in an old Dodge station wagon. Dean eats his burger, which is pretty good, if not the best in the West. He watches Sam watching the family as they enter the diner and take a booth a couple of tables back from theirs.
The two little boys look about five and nine years old, Dean decides. Pretty blond mother, tough-looking father with a crewcut.
Now that they’re seated in their booth, Dean can’t see them, but he catches Sam glancing at them. Thinks he knows why.
“That coulda been us,” he comments blandly. “In another universe, I mean.”
Sam blushes and ducks his head, caught out. His dimples pop as he looks down at his salad, moving the lettuce around the plate like he’s looking for something better.
“I guess,” Sam acknowledges. “But you said it yourself last week: you wouldn’t go back and change a thing, ‘cuz then we wouldn’t be us. We’d be those happy little boys all grown up, well-adjusted, getting together once or twice a year for Thanksgiving or Christmas.”
Dean shrugs. “No Yellow-Eyes, no demon-blood, no Hell trauma.”
“No having each other’s back through the worst of times,” Sam says. “No forging a bond from shared experience, shared history. Not to mention all the people we saved.”
“All the people we lost,” Dean says. “All the people who died because of us.”
Sam puts his fork down, wipes his mouth with his napkin. “Are you saying you would go back and change things, if you had the chance?”
“No, Sam, that’s not what I’m saying.” Dean brushes his hands off, gestures to Gladys to bring the check. “I’m just saying, who we are? All the things that happened to us to make us who we are? That’s some messed up crap, man.”
Sam shakes his head with a grim smile. “There’ve been good things, too, Dean. It’s not all grief and horror.”
Dean pulls two twenties from his wallet, leaves them on top of the check as he scoots out of the booth.
“True,” he agrees as he leads the way out of the diner. “Sometimes, things are just weird. Like this day, for example. And yesterday, which neither of us can remember.”
“Right.” Sam stops at the car, hand on the handle of the passenger door. “What’s the last thing you remember? Before waking up in the car, I mean.”
Dean thinks for a minute. “Breakfast yesterday,” he says. “You were mad because I gave you real bacon instead of the turkey stuff.”
“Right.” Sam nods. “And you burned your hands on the toast, even though I warned you it was hot.”
Dean nods. “Then we went into the library like we always do to look for a job.”
San bites his lip. “I don’t remember finding anything.”
“Me, neither.” Dean pulls open the driver’s door and is relieved when Sam gets in. “We’ll figure this out, just like we always do.”
But the drive back to the bunker is weird, too. Towns Dean remembers having one filling station and a convenience store have grown, with houses and a couple of motels, even a town hall he’s never seen before, although they all seem oddly deserted and empty.
Towns that used to be huge have diminished to one or two houses, a diner, and a filling station.
When they get to Lebanon, it’s a ghost town. No friendly main street with little shops, no cozy tree-lined neighborhoods. No school. There’s just one convenience store. The grocery store and liquor store where the Winchesters used to shop are gone, no sign they’ve ever been there. An old, crumbling motel sits on the crossroads into town from the bunker, along with an overgrown park where a chapel and a stone monument sit, weather-beaten and uncared for.
The road to the bunker off the main road is pocked and unpaved. Dean finally leaves the car, climbs out to walk the last mile on foot, just to save Baby’s struts.
Sam plods silently beside him, apparently already having made up his mind about what they’ll find when they get to the site of the bunker.
There’s nothing there. No sign there ever was anything there. Just fields in every direction, flat, unforgiving, and long untended.
“Crap.”
Dean pulls the bunker key from his pocket, turns it over a couple of times, looks up at the empty field.
“What do you think?” Sam asks finally.
“I think we need to drive back to Cortland,” Dean says. “Then Lincoln, if we can’t find anything to explain this.”
Sam nods, heads back to the car, and Dean’s proud of himself for tamping down on his panic attack. Little brother needs him to be confident and in charge. He can be that. For Sam.
“We need a public library,” Sam suggests tentatively as Dean falls into step beside him.
“Don’t you have your laptop?”
Sam’s shoulders sag. “Something tells me there’s no wifi out here,” he says.
“Cell service?”
Sam pulls his old-fashioned flip phone from his pocket, flips it open while Dean’s heartbeat increases. His palms sweat.
“Your other cell phone?” Dean asks after Sam’s done a sweep of the area to no avail.
Sam snaps the device closed, slides it back into his pocket.
“What other cell phone?”
“Your goddamn smartphone, Sam,” Dean growls. He’s got a very bad feeling about this. “The one you use to get us around because you don’t need maps anymore. The one that tells you all the things, just like your laptop.”
Dean searches his own pockets as he grumbles, but his smartphone seems to be missing. Maybe he left it in the car?
“You mean my Blackberry?” Sam asks, genuinely perplexed. “Don’t you remember? It stopped working a couple of years ago. Sony doesn’t make them anymore.”
Dean wonders if he’s losing his mind, but the bigger question is why he and Sam don’t seem to have the same memories of this particular thing. What else might they not have shared memories about?
It’s too overwhelming to think about, so Dean doesn’t. There must be another explanation.
“So all we have for cell service is our Star Trek communicators,” Dean says finally, just to have something to say to prevent himself from admitting that he remembers this completely differently.
Sam huffs out a laugh. “Well, yeah. You haven’t called them that in a while, but basically, yeah.”
“Same as what we had back in 2005 when we first started hunting for Dad.” Dean’s fishing and he knows it. He needs to confirm that Sam’s other memories line up with his.
“Yeah, I guess.” Sam squints, thinking back. It’s been a few years, after all. “They’re a step up from those old clunky satellite phones, though, remember those?”
Dean does, but that’s not the point. Sam doesn’t contradict his memory of searching for their father, all those years ago. That’s what matters.
When they get back to the car, Dean searches the glove box, the cassette box under the seat, then the trunk. As he rifles through his duffle, Sam gets back out of the car and stands waiting, a troubled frown on his brow.
Dean finally admits defeat. He doesn’t find anything unfamiliar or out of place, which is good, he decides. His clothes, their weapons, everything is just as they should be. He even finds Sam’s laptop, not the new one he remembers, but an older model with a DVD player that Dean hasn’t seen in years.
“This thing still work?” he asks, holding it up uncertainly.
“When it’s plugged in and connected to wifi,” Sam assents. “Just as good as a desktop.”
Dean nods, slips it back into Sam’s messenger bag.
“Dean?” Sam’s voice is hesitant, concerned. “Is something wrong?”
Dean slams the trunk, takes a breath. “Get in the car,” he orders. “Let’s find us a library.”
When they’re back on the main road, headed back the way they came, Sam asks again.
Dean sighs. “Other than the bunker being gone, you mean? Other than you and me having some different memories? I don’t know, Sammy, you tell me.”
“You think something really weird happened on our drive here from Cortland?” Sam asks. “Something like, I don’t know. Maybe we drove through a portal into an alternate universe?”
Dean frowns. He glances at Sam, then back at the road, doing his best to hide his mounting panic.
“Well, if that were true, then we should’ve seen a rift, right? I mean, do you remember driving through a rift?” At least he can still speak in coherent sentences.
“We don’t remember anything since yesterday morning in the bunker,” Sam reminds him. “I guess we could've driven through a rift and just forgotten about it.”
“Right. Right.”
But that doesn’t account for the fact that he and Sam have different memories. Did they come from different universes? Is the man sitting next to him even his brother?
“Dean, this is weird, no doubt about it,” Sam says, misreading Dean’s panic entirely. “But I’m sure there’s a way to fix it. We can probably drive right through the rift we came through to get here, go back home to our universe the way we got here in the first place.”
“Our universe. Right.”
Besides the cell phone thing, what are the other differences between their memories?
“Of course, it might not be a rift thing at all,” Sam muses. “We know archangels who can create different realities. If we hadn’t killed Zachariah -- twice -- I might suspect this had something to do with him.”
“Zachariah. Right.”
“Or Gabriel,” Sam goes on, “except he’s dead, too. Or Michael.”
Cold air slices down Dean’s spine at the thought of the archangel who so recently possessed him and is still locked up in his mind.
Except when Dean probes gently at the place where he’s got Michael locked up, he senses nothing.
“Sam,” Dean says tentatively, almost afraid to express the thought out loud. He’s lived too long with the effort to keep Michael contained, after finally understanding exactly how it felt to be possessed by an archangel. Yet another experience he and Sam shared, or so he thought until now.
“Yeah? What?”
“I -- I think Michael’s gone,” Dean says, almost whispering, afraid to say it too loud.
“What? How?” Dean can feel Sam staring at him, but he keeps his eyes on the road.
“I don’t know, man. Maybe whatever happened, driving into another universe or whatever, he’s just gone.”
Sam sucks in a long breath of relief. “Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but what if driving back through the rift reverses that and I get him back?”
Sam nods. “Okay. I think we need to figure this out.”
“You think?” Dean can hear the hysteria in his own voice, feels his hands shaking on the wheel.
“Yeah, yeah, I think we need to figure out what else has changed before we decide what to do next.”
“Well, for one thing, we’ve got different memories,” Dean blurts out. “You and me come from different universes, Sam!”
He can feel rather than see Sam’s shock.
“How do you know?”
Sam’s voice is small, frightened-little-brother hesitant, and Dean almost drives off the road. He clutches the steering wheel like a lifeline, manages to keep the wheels where they belong.
“The cell phone thing,” Dean explains. “In my world, we’ve got smartphones, made by Apple and Samsung, I don’t know who else. They’ve got screens so you can watch movies on them and everything. They’re like little hand-held computers.”
“Apple went out of business twenty years ago,” Sam says softly. “I’ve never even heard of that other one. Sang-sun?”
“Never mind,” Dean growls. “Doesn’t matter. The point is, we didn’t just drive through a rift from another universe. You and me are from different universes.”
“How can that be?” Sam breathes, clearly as disturbed by the prospect as Dean. “We remember most things the same way, right? The things that matter? Cell phones excepted, everything else lines up, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know! Maybe. Maybe not.”
“We’re Sam and Dean Winchester,” Sam says, obviously ready to recite their entire shared history. “Our mother died when I was six months old, our father raised us to be hunters. I left for Stanford when I was 18, you came to get me when Dad went missing on a hunting trip when I was 22. We’ve been through hell and back, literally, since that day. But no matter how awful our lives, no matter how many people we’ve lost, we’ve always been there for each other. That hasn’t changed.”
Dean clenches his jaw and doesn’t answer, so Sam goes on.
“Right? Through you selling your soul and spending forty years in Hell to me drinking demon blood and being possessed by Lucifer and jumping into the cage, through all the crazy things that have happened since, the one thing that’s always been true, the one thing that really matters, is each other. Right?”
Sam sounds so desperate, so terrified that Dean might confess to remembering differently, that Dean can’t help himself. Little brother needs reassurance, and Dean can’t help giving it to him.
“Right, Sam, that’s how it happened,” he agrees. “Just like you said.”
“Okay,” Sam says, huffing out a breath that sounds like relief. “So we remember the important things the same way.”
Dean flinches. He doesn’t want to say out loud the thing he’s thinking, but then Sam says it anyway.
“You think we’re not brothers,” he says. “You think we’ve switched places with alternate versions of ourselves. That’s the real reason we have to fix this.”
Dean chews on his bottom lip. He can hear the hurt in Sam’s voice. It’s almost too much to take.
“Sam, we’re gonna figure this out, okay? No reason to jump the gun here. I’m sure it’s just a matter of reversing whatever happened, then everything goes back to normal.”
Sam shuts up then, gets quiet and brooding, seems to shrink down in the seat like he’s determined to make himself small again, like he does when he’s feeling like he’s letting Dean down.
Again.
Just by existing. Just by being an alternate version of himself.
“Hey, this isn’t your fault, you get me?” Dean says finally, unable to stand Sam’s unhappiness a moment longer. “You didn’t do this.”
“I’m not your brother,” Sam whispers, voice hitching like he’s about to cry.
“Don’t say that,” Dean protests. He puts a hand on Sam’s knee and squeezes gently, just to reassure him, just to ground him. “As far as I can tell, in all the ways that matter, you’re still my pain-in-the-ass little brother, Sammy. A little universe hopping ain’t gonna change that.”
Sam sucks in a shuddery breath, puts his hand over Dean’s, squeezes. Leaves it there.
Okay. That’s not usually how they do, but okay.
Dean glances at Sam, but he’s looking out the side window, keeping his hand over Dean’s on his knee, holding it there.
Definitely not how they do.
But Sam needed the reassurance, so Dean leaves his hand there another moment before giving Sam’s knee another squeeze and pulling his hand free.
Sam’s head whips around, giving him that puppy-dog look of hurt surprise that Dean doesn’t need to see to know it’s there.
“Just need to make a turn,” he mumbles by way of excuse, as if he should need an excuse to remove his hand from his brother’s leg.
As he makes the left onto the state route, heading back north to Nebraska, the way they came, Dean catches the little worried frown on Sam’s face, like he’s trying to figure something out.
“There’s a public library in Belleville,” Sam announces. “Just about twenty minutes up the road. Or at least there used to be.”
“Sounds like a good place to start,” Dean agrees, just for something to say.
The library is getting ready to close, but they’re allowed a quick search of the web. Apparently, Google doesn’t exist in this universe, but Sam seems to know what to do anyway.
“No sign of supernatural activity anywhere,” Sam notes after five minutes of clicking and surfing, flipping through pages that look mostly like the front pages of online newspapers. “No signs or omens, no freak electrical storms or cattle mutilations, no unexplained deaths. No dark web full of hunter bulletin boards and chat rooms. It’s just -- dead.”
“What do you mean, ‘dead’?”
Dean does his best to look over Sam’s shoulder without touching him, feeling oddly self-conscious after their near-hand-holding in the car, but finds himself leaning close the way he always does anyway. Sam’s body heat is comforting. Familiar. Dean could almost press his cheek against Sam’s hair, but he doesn’t. That would be too much, he decides, then can’t for the life of him figure out why he thought about it in the first place.
“I mean, like there’s nothing,” Sam says. “No hauntings, no missing persons that might be our kind of thing, no weird flickering lights or ‘animal attacks.’ It’s like there’s nothing supernatural happening anywhere.”
“Well that’s just impossible, isn’t it?” Dean half-laughs. “I mean, just because you can’t find any evidence of freaky activity, doesn’t mean there isn’t any at all, right?”
Sam leans back, huffing out a frustrated breath, and now Dean’s chest is pressed right up against Sam’s back, his cheek against Sam’s temple. Sam wiggles a little, like he’s leaning into the contact, and Dean freezes. This is weird, isn’t it? Do they always do this?
“I don’t know, man,” Sam says. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, usually there’s something, right? An unexplained death or a pattern of weird killings or -- something.”
Dean gathers his best big-brother-in-control confidence like a shroud, pulling it close around them so Sam feels it, too.
“Alright, maybe it’s time to check in with some other hunters,” Dean says. “You wanna try calling Jody? Or Donna? Or -- or Mom?”
“Right. Good idea.”
Sam pulls out his phone and there’s a librarian standing in front of them almost instantly.
“No cell phone use in the library,” she says sternly. “You need to take that outside. We’re closing now, anyway.”
Sam pockets his phone and signs out of whatever search engine he’s using so that the screen goes blank.
Dean stands back, having jerked away from his brother the moment the librarian showed up, trying not to think about how good it felt to be pressed so close to Sam in the first place.
Outside on the front steps, Sam pulls out his cell phone and starts scrolling through his contacts. He makes little unhappy noises as he dials one, then another number, listens to the “this number is no longer in service” alert which follows each one.
Dean’s heart sinks as each number fails to go through to a trusted friend who is no longer on the other end of the line.
After the sixth attempt, Dean puts his hand over Sam’s, stopping his scrolling.
“That’s enough,” he growls. “We get it.”
“They can’t all be just -- gone, Dean,” Sam protests. “The numbers must’ve changed.”
“Or there aren’t any hunters in this universe, just like there aren’t any monsters,” Dean answers, deliberately keeping his voice calm and steady, for Sam’s sake, or so he tells himself.
Sam looks at him helplessly. “Jody,” he whispers, voice choked. “Mom.” There’s a sheen of moisture over his beautiful hazel eyes.
When did Dean start thinking Sam’s eyes were beautiful? What the hell?
“Okay, okay, let’s get back to the car, head on up the road to Cortland, maybe get some answers there.”
Dean’s got one hand on Sam’s arm, the other on his back, guiding him toward the car, and he wonders again how they got like this. When did they start being so physical with each other? Has it always been like this but Dean’s only noticing it now?
Why is he noticing it now?
Sam’s muscles twitch under Dean’s hands, but he lets himself be guided back to the car, lets Dean open the passenger door, put his hand on Sam’s head as he bends him over to sit, protecting his head like he always does because Sam’s such a Sasquatch and he hits his head too often on door jambs as it is.
Except he can’t remember a single other time he’s done it.
During the hour’s drive to Cortland, Sam tries a few more numbers, getting more frustrated with each ensuing failure until Dean finally reaches over and takes the phone away.
“Sam. That’s enough.”
Five miles out of Cortland, Dean pulls the car over and they get out, search the area around the road as thoroughly as they can for any sign of something that might help explain what happened to them that morning.
Nothing but fields in every direction, empty and quiet, with only a couple of other cars on the road. The setting sun casts long shadows and a breeze lifts the dust off the shoulder of the road, but there’s nothing to indicate that anything weird or supernatural happened there.
They get back in the car, creep along the shoulder for a half-mile in each direction before giving up.
Cortland itself is an empty town with a population of around 500, a feed store, a seed store, and a convenience store. Not even a diner.
“Well, I’m starving,” Dean announces as they pull out of town on the highway north toward Lincoln. “I say we stop for dinner next place we see.”
Sam says nothing, hunched and sulking in his seat. He doesn’t argue when Dean pulls over at a bar and grille on the outskirts of Lincoln, gets out and follows Dean into the bar, a silent hulk of unhappiness at Dean’s back.
“Seat yourself,” the bartender calls out. The room is about half-full, a few single men sitting at the bar, a group of men around the pool table in the back, a couple of working girls at a table nursing tall, icy drinks. “Sweet Child of Mine” blares from the jukebox.
“Could be worse,” Dean notes as he leads Sam to a table near the door. “At least this universe has Guns & Roses.”
“Did you see all those cemeteries as we drove here from Cortland?” Sam asks as he takes a menu from the stand on the table. “More dead people per square mile than live ones.”
“Huh.”
Dean thinks for a minute about all the mostly empty towns they’ve driven through today, wonders vaguely if Sam’s onto something.
“This is the most people in one place we’ve seen all day,” Sam adds.
Dean frowns. “You think it means anything? Other than there’s just not much population density in south-eastern Nebraska.”
Sam shakes his head. “I don’t know. It’s something. Maybe. Maybe nothing.”
The bartender comes over to take their order. Dean orders two tequila shots, two beers, a bacon cheeseburger with fries, and a salad with grilled chicken for Sam.
Sam makes a face as the woman heads back to the bar to fill their drink order.
“Salads are probably pretty terrible here,” he notes as he takes a sip of his water.
“You can have half my cheeseburger,” Dean offers generously, just to watch Sam roll his eyes.
“No, thanks.” He stares grumpily at his water glass for a minute, then looks up at Dean. “You should try calling Castiel.”
The thought hadn’t occurred to him, to be honest. Dean had been too worried about Sam possibly not being completely and totally Sam to think about anything else.
“Yeah, alright,” he agrees. “After we eat. And find a motel. I’m exhausted.”
Sam reaches into his messenger bag and pulls out his laptop. “You think there’s wifi in here?”
“What difference does it make?” Dean grumbles. “We’ve already established there’s nothing unusual going on in this universe.”
“Right, but we still don’t know how we got here,” Sam says. “Do you think it might have been a side-effect of the pearl magic? That only happened last week, and this was our first trip out of Lebanon since then. Maybe its magic only affected the area right around the bunker, so the further out we traveled, the more the timeline changed.”
“But we broke the magic when you crushed the pearl,” Dean reminds him.
“Right, but what if the changes it caused didn’t all revert to normal right away? Like a delayed response.”
“So you’re saying the further away from the pearl’s epicenter, the more the world changed, so when we shattered it, some of those changes stayed.” Dean frowns uncertainly. “Doesn’t explain the total lack of supernatural activity anywhere, though. Or the fact that the whole fuckin’ bunker just up and disappeared, along with the hillside it was built into like it never existed in the first place.”
“Right,” Sam nods. “I don’t know. It’s probably not that, then.”
Dean watches Sam type quickly and competently on his laptop. He watches the screen light play across his face. Sam’s always been handsome, but for some reason, he’s even better looking than usual in the bar’s dim light.
Their drinks arrive and Dean downs both tequila shots, signals the bartender for more.
It’s gonna be one of those nights.
As he sips his beer, Dean watches Sam’s face, the way the light from the laptop screen reflects off his eyes, making him look younger. He looks for any sign that something has changed, that this Sam isn’t really his Sam, but he just doesn’t see it.
Other than allowing himself to really admire Sam’s handsomeness, which is something he’s always been pretty good at ignoring, Sam looks the same as always. Dean tells himself it’s just because he’s missed Sam, after what went down with Michael. He doesn’t take him so much for granted anymore.
At least Sam shaved that damn beard, that painful reminder that Dean’s possession and disappearance had caused Sam a lot of grief and anguish in the first place. The horror of being possessed is dwarfed by Dean’s fear that he might have hurt Sam or caused him pain in any way.
Anyway, the possession thing is just one more thing he has in common with his brother now. One more way he can empathize with what Sam went through with Lucifer.
Except, what Sam went through with Lucifer was so, so much worse. Dean knows that, too, even if he’s never given it much thought.
“Dean.”
Sam’s fixing him with an accusing stare, and when Dean lifts his eyebrows, Sam looks down at the empty glasses on the table. Seems Dean has managed to finish off both beers and four shots of tequila. Huh.
“Are you trying to get drunk?”
Dean frowns, shrugs, thinks for a minute. “Maybe.”
Sam rolls his eyes. “Try eating something first,” he instructs, and just like magic (except definitely not), the food arrives.
Sam closes his laptop and slides it back into his messenger bag.
“Anything?” Dean asks as he takes a bite of his burger.
Sam purses his lips, shakes his head sharply. He pokes at his salad, which has been drowned in some kind of orange gloop that probably calls itself dressing. He takes a bite, scowls.
“Hey, I bet we have all the same memories,” Dean suggests, desperate to find a way to cheer up this sad man who is and isn’t his brother. “I’ll bet the weird thing with technology is the only difference.”
Sam shrugs. “Maybe.”
“I bet we don’t find any other difference,” Dean says. “I’ll bet you twenty bucks.”
Sam lifts his eyes. There’s a light in them that Dean recognizes. Sam can’t resist a challenge. He’s competitive. They both are.
“Okay, you’re on,” he says, taking another bite of his soupy salad. “You go first.”
The bartender brings more beer and tequila as Dean thinks up a memory they probably both share. A happy one.
“Okay. When we were kids, you came home from school and found me and Rosie Whittacker making out in your room,” Dean says. “And what happened?”
Sam’s jaw works, but it’s not because he can’t remember. “I threw my shoe at you,” he says.
Dean chuckles. “Yeah, you did.” He rubs his forehead. “Left a bruise.”
“You were in my room, dude,” Sam protests. “I hardly ever got a room of my own, and you were in it! Doing that!”
“That’s right,” Dean smirks as he takes another bite of his burger. “Your turn.”
“Okay,” Sam says. “My high school graduation.”
Dean’s eyebrows go up. His chest fills with pride.
“You won all the awards,” he says, grinning. “Watching you get up over and over to get each one was incredible. Best part of the whole thing!”
“Dad wasn’t there,” Sam mutters darkly.
“So I clapped and cheered enough for both of us,” Dean says.
Sam ducks his head, but Dean can see his grin, his dimples popping.
“Yeah, you did.”
Sam stabs his salad, managing to shake loose some lettuce. Dean watches as he eats, chewing slowly and carefully, the way he usually does. Kid eats slower than molasses. Always did.
“Your turn,” Sam says when he’s finally swallowed.
“Okay,” Dean thinks for a minute. “That night I came to get you at school? The first thing you said when I told you Dad hadn’t been home in a few days.”
Sam barely hesitates. “I said, ‘So he’s working overtime on a Miller time shift.’ That’s too easy, Dean. It’s in those damn books that Chuck wrote about us.”
“Okay, hot shot, how about the first thing I said to you when I came back from Hell?”
Sam’s face screws up, not like he can’t remember, more like the memory is giving him some feels.
“‘Hey, Sammy,’” he says finally, his voice a little choked. “You said, ‘hey, Sammy.’ You always say that when you come back. Then you said, ‘I look fantastic, don’t I?’”
Dean shrugs. “Well, I did, for being dead for four months.” He chuckles as he finishes his burger, brushes his hands off. “Okay, your turn.”
Sam licks his lips, and Dean can’t help watching before he refocuses his gaze on Sam’s eyes.
“The first time we kissed,” Sam says, voice even, determined. “Where and when was it?”
Dean frowns, takes a second to respond. “You mean when we were kids?” he asks. “When you were a slobbery toddler always putting your sticky fingers in my hair? When were you not kissing me back then? You were an affectionate little kid.”
Sam frowns, clearly frustrated. “No, Dean. As adults. When and where was the first time, after we grew up? Come on, man, don’t tell me you don’t remember.”
Dean’s flummoxed. Is this a trick question? Is this something he >should remember? Clearly, it’s a memory that means a lot to Sam but somehow doesn’t mean much to Dean because he can’t remember what in the hell Sam’s talking about.
“On the lips,” Dean prods. “The first time we lip-locked. You and me. Nobody else.”
Sam stares. “Oh my god, you don’t remember.”
“Was I drunk?” Dean needs more hints, feels sure the memory’s in there somewhere. It has to be.
“We’d been drinking earlier in the evening, yeah,” Sam says, already deflating with disappointment. “Maybe you were still buzzed, but that’s not why it happened.”
Dean throws up his hands. “Okay, I give up. You win. I got no memory of whatever it is you’re talking about. None. Nada. Although I gotta say, if we kissed on the lips one time ten years ago and I don’t remember it, it couldn’t have been that memorable.”
Sam’s face does that thing that Dean used to think of as “Sam’s crowded face” because there are so many conflicting expressions crossing it one after the other.
“It wasn’t just one time,” Sam says, needlessly clarifying something that in Dean’s opinion really doesn’t clarify anything at all. “I said it was the first time.”
Now it’s Dean’s turn to be confused. Kissing Sam on the lips one time long ago was bad enough, but apparently, it’s happened more than once. And Dean doesn’t remember any of those times?
Dean tries not to let his disappointment show as he looks down at his now-empty beer glass, then up at the bartender to signal for another. He dares a quick glance up at Sam, reads the realization dawning on his familiar features, and almost lies to him, just to make it better.
“I don’t remember that, Sam. That’s not something we do, in my reality.”
He feels the air sucking out of the room, knows without looking up that Sam’s shocked. And unhappy. Somehow, Dean has let him down. Hard.
The bartender brings his beer and Dean gulps it. Definitely time for some liquid courage. More liquid courage.
He can sense Sam watching him, feels a flush of embarrassment heat up his chest and cheeks, rising all the way up to his ears.
This Sam does that with his Dean, his brain provides, completely unhelpfully. That’s just sick.
Except it’s not and Dean knows it. Dean thinks about Sam in that way all the time, not that he’d ever admit it.
Damn it.
Dean slams the empty glass down and reaches for his wallet.
“Let’s get out of here.”
He pulls out some bills, leaves them on the table as he gets up, doesn’t even look back to be sure Sam’s following.
When they get out to the parking lot, Dean’s grateful for the cold air. He’s too drunk to drive. Really shouldn’t put his baby -- and Sam -- at risk. As he fumbles the keys out of his pocket, they fall to the pavement. Sam stoops to pick them up, and Dean lets him.
“Guess I shouldn’t drive,” he says needlessly, keeping his eyes on Sam’s shoes, on the pavement, on the car. Anywhere but Sam’s sharp, hazel eyes.
The Shake Down Motel is right across the street, and Dean lets Sam lead them there, carrying his duffel and messenger bag. He offers to carry Dean’s duffel, too, but Dean shakes him off.
“I got it!”
“If you like, I can get us separate rooms,” Sam offers softly.
“No, Sam, a room with two beds is fine, just like always,” Dean snaps. “I’m not worried you’re gonna molest me in my sleep, for fuck’s sake.”
Sam’s silence is almost worse than the sad sigh Dean had expected. It isn’t his intention to make Sam more miserable. Really, it isn’t.
He’s just a little bit in shock, is all.
Finding out this other version of his brother has been hot for him all his adult life, and has in fact been acting on those feelings, is just weird.
It makes Dean wonder if there was something he was missing, all those years with his Sam. Could it be that Dean’s little brother felt the same way?
No, it could not. As Dean thinks back quickly, there is just no way that he’s been misreading Sam for all those years. No way.
Is there?
After they check in and get into their room, Dean flops down face-first on the bed nearest the door. He really is tired. And wasted. He’s half-aware of Sam moving around the room, going into the bathroom, running a shower. The sound of the water running soothes Dean to sleep, and he’s not even aware of Sam coming back into the room, laying a blanket over him from the other bed, and turning the lights off.
He doesn’t dream.
PART TWO