Part Three: You Only Feel It When It’s Lost
Nobody in Sioux Falls has ever heard of Jody Mills. Jody’s home, where Sam and Dean have spent Christmas and Thanksgiving and multiple visits several times over the years, is lived in by a family who have been there since 2003.
They wait until the morning after they arrive in Sioux Falls to actually knock on the door, staring into the suspicious, unfamiliar face of the middle-aged woman who opens it with hope, followed by deep disappointment.
Afterward, Sam stands next to the car, staring at the house, hands shoved in the pockets of his worn canvas jacket, and the sadness in his eyes makes Dean want to hug him.
“It’s like that time Dick Roman exploded and you disappeared,” Sam says when Dean finally puts a hand on his shoulder. “Everybody’s gone. Everybody. I’m all alone.”
“You’re not alone, Sam,” Dean reminds him as gently as he can. “You’ve got me.”
But of course, it’s not the same, and Dean knows it. It’s weird that he’s not missing his Sam as much as this Sam is obviously missing his Dean, is all.
“Yeah,” is all Sam says, voice shaking as he swipes the back of his hand across his eyes, pulls away so he can get back into the car.
They drive back to the police station, just to check with the day staff to confirm that, in fact, nobody has ever heard of the woman who was sheriff here, in an alternate reality. The woman who lost her husband and son to a zombie attack, years ago. The woman whose son Sam shot to death because she couldn’t do it herself.
The woman whose house still stands, but has had another family living in it since long before the zombie attack thing.
“Okay, what’s next?” Dean asks as they leave the public library, where a thorough investigation of the local newspaper archives has confirmed that no zombie attack ever happened in this reality in the first place.
Maybe the strangest revelation of all, when Sam does a search of their names and the aliases they used in Lebanon, is that nothing comes up. Not even the Supernatural books by Carver Edlund. Even their fictional selves don’t exist in this universe.
Dean’s not sure how he feels about that. The Winchester Gospels just gone. Non-existent.
The old site of Singer Salvage has been a used car lot since 2001. No monsters buried there. No fire.
“I’m gonna try doing some magic,” Sam says, and before Dean can protest, he pulls out a list of ingredients for a spell.
Dean really feels like he should protest. It’s a knee-jerk thing, keeping Sam’s magic abilities under control. Dean’s been doing it so long, thinks of it as protecting Sam as much as controlling him so it’s okay, that he starts to say something before Sam puts a hand up to stop him.
“I’m doing it, so just stop with the speeches,” Sam growls. “It’s probably not gonna work anyway.”
Against Dean’s better judgment, Sam does spells in the motel room that night. Over the next week, he does a spell in a graveyard at midnight on a full moon. He even tries summoning a demon at a crossroads.
Nothing happens. Not even a spark. Magic doesn’t exist in this universe. Dean could have told him that.
Sam’s disappointment and frustration are so obvious it makes Dean feel guilty, despite his relief.
“Hey, you’re the best magic-maker, wizard, whatever,” Dean says, sounding lame even to himself. “I’m sure it’s not you. It’s just this magic-dead universe.”
Sam shakes his head. “It’s just so weird, you know? All my life, I’ve had this thing in me, this power. And now it’s just -- gone. I don’t know if I’m even me anymore. I mean, who am I without it?”
“It’s not you, Sam,” Dean repeats. “It’s just this dead damn universe.”
“I just wish I could understand how this happened,” Sam says.
They’re in the car, in the dark, driving back to the motel after their failed attempt to summon a crossroads demon, which Dean protested on principle but allowed to happen because Sam was so dead set on it.
And for some reason Dean can’t begin to understand, he wants this Sam to be happy.
“We may never know,” Dean suggests gently. “We may never figure out how this happened, Sam, have you thought of that?”
Sam’s jaw sets. “No.”
“Hey, remember the first time we summoned a crossroads demon?” Dean says, desperate to change the subject, to turn Sam’s morbid stubbornness into something familiar to them both.
“The time you made your demon deal, you mean?”
Dean can feel Sam glancing at him, daring him to contradict him.
“No, before that,” Dean says. “That case down in Mississippi.”
“Yeah,” Sam says. “We should check on that guy.”
Dean nods. “Evan, wasn’t that his name?”
“Right,” Sam nods grimly. “The night you almost sold your soul to bring Dad back.”
Dean frowns. Gives his head a little shake. Sam’s not wrong.
“The point I was trying to make, Sam, is that we saved that guy. We saved people, a lot of people. We did that. Getting sucked into a universe where nobody remembers anything we ever did doesn’t change that.”
“Evan Hudson, Greenwood, Mississippi,” Sam says.
When they get back to the motel, Sam pulls out a notebook, the one he’s been jotting down notes in over the past week.
“What’s this?” Dean asks as he flips on the TV and shrugs a shoulder at the notebook.
“It’s what we need to do next,” Sam says, handing it to him.
It’s a list of people they saved, places they hunted, monsters they killed, going back to Constance Welch, the Woman in White, in Jericho, California.
“You want us to drive to all these places?”
Sam shrugs. “Unless you’ve suddenly overcome your fear of flying.”
Dean hasn’t, so he says nothing, just studies the list, trying to recall anything about any of these places and the hunts attached to them.
As usual, Sam’s incredible memory has retrieved an amazing amount of information.
Sam’s got a plan. And now that they’ve spent more than a week in the area where the rift or shift or whatever happened, visiting Cortland at least every other day to see if anything has changed (it hasn’t), Dean can’t come up with a good reason to stick around.
“We check these places out, see if the people we interviewed are still there, see if anybody remembers us, if anything seems familiar.”
They’ve got nothing to lose, so Dean agrees.
“A little road trip down memory lane,” he calls it, grinning almost cheerfully.
Sam scowls and says nothing.
//**//**//
During their first week on the road, they learn about the pandemic that took out half the world’s population. They read about the plague and its years of ravaging the population of the entire world, which apparently happened between 2005 and 2010. The world is about half as populated as it was before, and people still live in some fear but mostly complete denial about the possibility of a recurrence.
Explains all the cemeteries everywhere. All the once-thriving cities and towns that now look more like ghost towns.
“Most people were cremated,” Sam explains after he’s done his research. “When they ran out of cemetery space, after the first year, everybody was cremated.”
“Sorry we missed it,” Dean says, taking a sip of his coffee.
“We might still catch it,” Sam says. “Variants come around every year. We should probably get vaccinated.”
Huh. Maybe that explains the lack of smartphones and the general slowdown in the economy. It definitely helps explain all the empty houses, abandoned housing developments. Deserted buildings.
As he lies in bed that night, Dean wonders about Sam and his Dean’s relationship. Did they hug a lot? Kiss each other good morning and good night? How many times a week did they have sex?
He’ll make himself crazy and he knows it. It’s not like this Sam will ever let him know how soft his lips are, or how those big hands with their long, slender fingers feel on his naked hips. No matter how much Dean thinks about it, he’ll never know what it would be like to do all the things he can’t stop thinking about, now that he knows that Sam and his Dean did those things.
The stupid thing is, Dean finds himself kicking himself for not lying to Sam at the beginning. He should have let Sam think he was his brother. He’s a good liar. He could’ve made up the answer to the “first kiss” question, gone with it, let Sam touch him and hold his hand. Sam would’ve let him slide his hands through his pretty, pretty hair and now Dean never will because he couldn’t keep his stupid mouth shut.
Yeah, like living a lie would’ve been so great. Like Dean and his Sam haven’t figured out how wrong that can be. Like Dean doesn’t know better.
He jerks off quietly, muffling his voice in his pillow when he gasps out Sam’s name.
He really needs to get laid.
//**//**//
Black Water Ridge, Colorado is a bust. First, it doesn’t exist. Grand Junction, the closest town, is a flat, desert town on the Colorado River which doesn’t look a thing like the forested backpacking landscape the Winchesters remember when they hunted their first wendigo. They don’t find Haley Collins, her brother Tommy, or the Forest Ranger they spoke to fifteen years ago. There’s not even a local legend of people disappearing every twenty-three years, as there was when they last visited. And, obviously, no wendigo nor any sign that there ever was one.
They waste two days exploring anything with the word Ridge in its title on the map, but the landscape looks more like the Grand Canyon than the Pacific Northwest. Not forested the way they remember. No caves or old mines.
At the end of the second day, over dinner at Rita’s Diner on the outskirts of Grand Junction, Sam crosses Black Water Ridge/Wendigo off their list and sets his jaw grimly.
“Where to next?” Dean asks, feigning a good cheer he definitely doesn’t feel.
“Lake Manitoc, Wisconsin doesn’t exist either, as far as I can tell,” Sam says. “And before you ask, no, I don’t remember the exact coordinates.”
“Hey, I don’t expect you to,” Dean assures him, popping a pickle into his mouth. “So, we skip it? Or head to Wisconsin to see if we can find anything similar to that haunted lake?”
Sam shakes his head. “Wisconsin is huge. I doubt we could find it even if we visited every lake in the state.”
“Okay,” Dean nods. “What’s after Lake Manitoc?”
“Pennsylvania,” Sam says. “The plane crash demon.”
Dean takes a sip of his beer. “Hated that one.”
Sam smiles, which is such a relief it makes Dean’s chest flush warm.
“I know you did.”
Dean decides at that moment that this weird road trip is completely worth it because it reminds Sam of all the ways their memories of events coincide. They have a shared history. Even if none of the places on Sam’s list exist, even if none of the people they saved are alive in this universe, at least Sam and Dean remember events in the same way. They remember the places, the monsters, the people they helped. They remember the ones they lost.
Dean looks up from his plate, finds Sam gazing at him with something like fondness in his eyes.
“Eat your food,” he orders before Sam can see him blush.
//**//**//
The setting of the plane crash demon case exists in this reality, which is a win. On the other hand, their dad’s old friend Jerry, the air traffic controller whose poltergeist Dean and John vanquished all those years ago, doesn’t exist and apparently never did. The airline itself never existed either, not to mention all those people the Winchesters interviewed, or the passengers on the flight that didn’t crash, thanks to them. The nice flight attendant whose name Dean still remembers but little else is also a Never-Existed here.
“She was a cool chick,” Dean says, taking a moment to absorb Amanda’s loss. “Really steady under pressure.”
Sam purses his lips, nods curtly. He’s already looking up the next case.
Air travel itself has changed, probably as a result of the pandemic. People don’t travel as much as they used to. Combined with the restrictions imposed during the plague years, most airlines have gone out of business or merged. The airport looks like a ghost town, the number of flights in and out severely reduced from what it was when Sam and Dean were here in 2005.
“People started traveling again after the first year restrictions were lifted,” Sam says, reading the old news reports on his laptop screen. “Then infection spread and deaths picked up again. People stopped traveling. Hunkered down with their remaining loved ones. Statistically, every single person we meet in this universe has lost someone close to them.”
Dean looks up at the waitress who fills his coffee cup, wondering who she lost.
Somehow, it makes Dean’s losses seem less significant. Especially when Sam’s sitting right across the table from him. Maybe not his Sam, exactly, but close enough. Better than these poor people in this weird, sad, empty world.
Dean’s eyes meet Sam’s across the table, feeling grateful. Sam seems to read his expression, gives his head a little shake and gets back to his reading.
Dean’s lucky, all right.
PART FOUR
They wait until the morning after they arrive in Sioux Falls to actually knock on the door, staring into the suspicious, unfamiliar face of the middle-aged woman who opens it with hope, followed by deep disappointment.
Afterward, Sam stands next to the car, staring at the house, hands shoved in the pockets of his worn canvas jacket, and the sadness in his eyes makes Dean want to hug him.
“It’s like that time Dick Roman exploded and you disappeared,” Sam says when Dean finally puts a hand on his shoulder. “Everybody’s gone. Everybody. I’m all alone.”
“You’re not alone, Sam,” Dean reminds him as gently as he can. “You’ve got me.”
But of course, it’s not the same, and Dean knows it. It’s weird that he’s not missing his Sam as much as this Sam is obviously missing his Dean, is all.
“Yeah,” is all Sam says, voice shaking as he swipes the back of his hand across his eyes, pulls away so he can get back into the car.
They drive back to the police station, just to check with the day staff to confirm that, in fact, nobody has ever heard of the woman who was sheriff here, in an alternate reality. The woman who lost her husband and son to a zombie attack, years ago. The woman whose son Sam shot to death because she couldn’t do it herself.
The woman whose house still stands, but has had another family living in it since long before the zombie attack thing.
“Okay, what’s next?” Dean asks as they leave the public library, where a thorough investigation of the local newspaper archives has confirmed that no zombie attack ever happened in this reality in the first place.
Maybe the strangest revelation of all, when Sam does a search of their names and the aliases they used in Lebanon, is that nothing comes up. Not even the Supernatural books by Carver Edlund. Even their fictional selves don’t exist in this universe.
Dean’s not sure how he feels about that. The Winchester Gospels just gone. Non-existent.
The old site of Singer Salvage has been a used car lot since 2001. No monsters buried there. No fire.
“I’m gonna try doing some magic,” Sam says, and before Dean can protest, he pulls out a list of ingredients for a spell.
Dean really feels like he should protest. It’s a knee-jerk thing, keeping Sam’s magic abilities under control. Dean’s been doing it so long, thinks of it as protecting Sam as much as controlling him so it’s okay, that he starts to say something before Sam puts a hand up to stop him.
“I’m doing it, so just stop with the speeches,” Sam growls. “It’s probably not gonna work anyway.”
Against Dean’s better judgment, Sam does spells in the motel room that night. Over the next week, he does a spell in a graveyard at midnight on a full moon. He even tries summoning a demon at a crossroads.
Nothing happens. Not even a spark. Magic doesn’t exist in this universe. Dean could have told him that.
Sam’s disappointment and frustration are so obvious it makes Dean feel guilty, despite his relief.
“Hey, you’re the best magic-maker, wizard, whatever,” Dean says, sounding lame even to himself. “I’m sure it’s not you. It’s just this magic-dead universe.”
Sam shakes his head. “It’s just so weird, you know? All my life, I’ve had this thing in me, this power. And now it’s just -- gone. I don’t know if I’m even me anymore. I mean, who am I without it?”
“It’s not you, Sam,” Dean repeats. “It’s just this dead damn universe.”
“I just wish I could understand how this happened,” Sam says.
They’re in the car, in the dark, driving back to the motel after their failed attempt to summon a crossroads demon, which Dean protested on principle but allowed to happen because Sam was so dead set on it.
And for some reason Dean can’t begin to understand, he wants this Sam to be happy.
“We may never know,” Dean suggests gently. “We may never figure out how this happened, Sam, have you thought of that?”
Sam’s jaw sets. “No.”
“Hey, remember the first time we summoned a crossroads demon?” Dean says, desperate to change the subject, to turn Sam’s morbid stubbornness into something familiar to them both.
“The time you made your demon deal, you mean?”
Dean can feel Sam glancing at him, daring him to contradict him.
“No, before that,” Dean says. “That case down in Mississippi.”
“Yeah,” Sam says. “We should check on that guy.”
Dean nods. “Evan, wasn’t that his name?”
“Right,” Sam nods grimly. “The night you almost sold your soul to bring Dad back.”
Dean frowns. Gives his head a little shake. Sam’s not wrong.
“The point I was trying to make, Sam, is that we saved that guy. We saved people, a lot of people. We did that. Getting sucked into a universe where nobody remembers anything we ever did doesn’t change that.”
“Evan Hudson, Greenwood, Mississippi,” Sam says.
When they get back to the motel, Sam pulls out a notebook, the one he’s been jotting down notes in over the past week.
“What’s this?” Dean asks as he flips on the TV and shrugs a shoulder at the notebook.
“It’s what we need to do next,” Sam says, handing it to him.
It’s a list of people they saved, places they hunted, monsters they killed, going back to Constance Welch, the Woman in White, in Jericho, California.
“You want us to drive to all these places?”
Sam shrugs. “Unless you’ve suddenly overcome your fear of flying.”
Dean hasn’t, so he says nothing, just studies the list, trying to recall anything about any of these places and the hunts attached to them.
As usual, Sam’s incredible memory has retrieved an amazing amount of information.
Sam’s got a plan. And now that they’ve spent more than a week in the area where the rift or shift or whatever happened, visiting Cortland at least every other day to see if anything has changed (it hasn’t), Dean can’t come up with a good reason to stick around.
“We check these places out, see if the people we interviewed are still there, see if anybody remembers us, if anything seems familiar.”
They’ve got nothing to lose, so Dean agrees.
“A little road trip down memory lane,” he calls it, grinning almost cheerfully.
Sam scowls and says nothing.
//**//**//
During their first week on the road, they learn about the pandemic that took out half the world’s population. They read about the plague and its years of ravaging the population of the entire world, which apparently happened between 2005 and 2010. The world is about half as populated as it was before, and people still live in some fear but mostly complete denial about the possibility of a recurrence.
Explains all the cemeteries everywhere. All the once-thriving cities and towns that now look more like ghost towns.
“Most people were cremated,” Sam explains after he’s done his research. “When they ran out of cemetery space, after the first year, everybody was cremated.”
“Sorry we missed it,” Dean says, taking a sip of his coffee.
“We might still catch it,” Sam says. “Variants come around every year. We should probably get vaccinated.”
Huh. Maybe that explains the lack of smartphones and the general slowdown in the economy. It definitely helps explain all the empty houses, abandoned housing developments. Deserted buildings.
As he lies in bed that night, Dean wonders about Sam and his Dean’s relationship. Did they hug a lot? Kiss each other good morning and good night? How many times a week did they have sex?
He’ll make himself crazy and he knows it. It’s not like this Sam will ever let him know how soft his lips are, or how those big hands with their long, slender fingers feel on his naked hips. No matter how much Dean thinks about it, he’ll never know what it would be like to do all the things he can’t stop thinking about, now that he knows that Sam and his Dean did those things.
The stupid thing is, Dean finds himself kicking himself for not lying to Sam at the beginning. He should have let Sam think he was his brother. He’s a good liar. He could’ve made up the answer to the “first kiss” question, gone with it, let Sam touch him and hold his hand. Sam would’ve let him slide his hands through his pretty, pretty hair and now Dean never will because he couldn’t keep his stupid mouth shut.
Yeah, like living a lie would’ve been so great. Like Dean and his Sam haven’t figured out how wrong that can be. Like Dean doesn’t know better.
He jerks off quietly, muffling his voice in his pillow when he gasps out Sam’s name.
He really needs to get laid.
//**//**//
Black Water Ridge, Colorado is a bust. First, it doesn’t exist. Grand Junction, the closest town, is a flat, desert town on the Colorado River which doesn’t look a thing like the forested backpacking landscape the Winchesters remember when they hunted their first wendigo. They don’t find Haley Collins, her brother Tommy, or the Forest Ranger they spoke to fifteen years ago. There’s not even a local legend of people disappearing every twenty-three years, as there was when they last visited. And, obviously, no wendigo nor any sign that there ever was one.
They waste two days exploring anything with the word Ridge in its title on the map, but the landscape looks more like the Grand Canyon than the Pacific Northwest. Not forested the way they remember. No caves or old mines.
At the end of the second day, over dinner at Rita’s Diner on the outskirts of Grand Junction, Sam crosses Black Water Ridge/Wendigo off their list and sets his jaw grimly.
“Where to next?” Dean asks, feigning a good cheer he definitely doesn’t feel.
“Lake Manitoc, Wisconsin doesn’t exist either, as far as I can tell,” Sam says. “And before you ask, no, I don’t remember the exact coordinates.”
“Hey, I don’t expect you to,” Dean assures him, popping a pickle into his mouth. “So, we skip it? Or head to Wisconsin to see if we can find anything similar to that haunted lake?”
Sam shakes his head. “Wisconsin is huge. I doubt we could find it even if we visited every lake in the state.”
“Okay,” Dean nods. “What’s after Lake Manitoc?”
“Pennsylvania,” Sam says. “The plane crash demon.”
Dean takes a sip of his beer. “Hated that one.”
Sam smiles, which is such a relief it makes Dean’s chest flush warm.
“I know you did.”
Dean decides at that moment that this weird road trip is completely worth it because it reminds Sam of all the ways their memories of events coincide. They have a shared history. Even if none of the places on Sam’s list exist, even if none of the people they saved are alive in this universe, at least Sam and Dean remember events in the same way. They remember the places, the monsters, the people they helped. They remember the ones they lost.
Dean looks up from his plate, finds Sam gazing at him with something like fondness in his eyes.
“Eat your food,” he orders before Sam can see him blush.
//**//**//
The setting of the plane crash demon case exists in this reality, which is a win. On the other hand, their dad’s old friend Jerry, the air traffic controller whose poltergeist Dean and John vanquished all those years ago, doesn’t exist and apparently never did. The airline itself never existed either, not to mention all those people the Winchesters interviewed, or the passengers on the flight that didn’t crash, thanks to them. The nice flight attendant whose name Dean still remembers but little else is also a Never-Existed here.
“She was a cool chick,” Dean says, taking a moment to absorb Amanda’s loss. “Really steady under pressure.”
Sam purses his lips, nods curtly. He’s already looking up the next case.
Air travel itself has changed, probably as a result of the pandemic. People don’t travel as much as they used to. Combined with the restrictions imposed during the plague years, most airlines have gone out of business or merged. The airport looks like a ghost town, the number of flights in and out severely reduced from what it was when Sam and Dean were here in 2005.
“People started traveling again after the first year restrictions were lifted,” Sam says, reading the old news reports on his laptop screen. “Then infection spread and deaths picked up again. People stopped traveling. Hunkered down with their remaining loved ones. Statistically, every single person we meet in this universe has lost someone close to them.”
Dean looks up at the waitress who fills his coffee cup, wondering who she lost.
Somehow, it makes Dean’s losses seem less significant. Especially when Sam’s sitting right across the table from him. Maybe not his Sam, exactly, but close enough. Better than these poor people in this weird, sad, empty world.
Dean’s eyes meet Sam’s across the table, feeling grateful. Sam seems to read his expression, gives his head a little shake and gets back to his reading.
Dean’s lucky, all right.
PART FOUR