An End Has a Start (Dean/Carmen, Sam/Jess R) 3/10
Title: An End Has a Start - Part 3
Rating: R
Pairings: Dean/Carmen, Sam/Jess
Word Count: 5,086 (50,221 overall)
Warnings: Wishverse fic, spoilers for S1 & S2 through 2x20
Summary: After Dean wakes up in the hospital with amnesia after an apparent attempted suicide, the answers he seeks just brings more questions before turning his world completely upside down.
Part 1 - Part 2
Christmas shopping with Dean was a strange experience. Sam was certain the last time they had gone together he was ten, the year they had both gotten a pair of rollerblades. That was also the first year in a while that Mom and Dad didn’t hide all the presents to only put them out under the tree on Christmas morning. When Sam was four years old Dean had changed all of the tags on his presents so they read “Samantha,” making Sam hysterical from the idea that Santa had got him girls’ toys.
They were waiting in a line that they hoped was for the bank, but for all Sam knew, it could’ve been for the toy store next door that was proclaiming to have just received a shipment of the newest model of PlayStation.
“Congratulations, by the way,” Dean said, craning his neck to try and see around the other people in line. “Is this seriously the line for the bank?” he added quickly, almost like he didn’t want Sam to acknowledge what he had first said. Sam clearly caught it anyway, shooting his brother a confused look. “You know… you and Jess.”
The line moved forward a few feet. “Weren’t you there?”
“Apparently but it’s one of those days I don’t remember. My shrink tried some hypnosis to see if my subconscious still remembers or whatever and I thought it was bullshit, but if I mentioned you guys got engaged, and you really are engaged, then I guess it works.” Dean toed at the floor with his boot, wishing that it really hadn’t worked. It wasn’t that he didn’t want his brother to be engaged - he actually was happy for them about that. Jess was a nice girl, and Sam deserved to be happy. He hadn’t wanted it to work because he heard the tape after Charlie brought him out of it - he had heard his own voice say that Jess was dead. He had no idea why he would think that.
Sam wasn’t used to his brother trying to reach out to him - even less used to seeing Dean as vulnerable as he seemed since getting back from the hospital. He didn’t seem to be taking well how people were treating him like he was about to break. “So do you remember now?”
Dean shook his head. “I still don’t remember, but I guess I have to believe what’s said in these sessions since I’m the one saying it.” He watched some of the people bustling around the mall with their collection of shopping bags as they moved forward some more in the line. “What are you going to get for Mom?”
“That’s my secret,” Sam replied, stepping through the doorway of the bank. “I can’t have you stealing my idea.”
The line continued to move, each teller window having a person seated at it. Dean wondered if it was possible for a bank to run out of cash. He had no idea how much they kept in the vault and doubted it got stocked everyday. They only came to the bank because every ATM they had tried was saying that it was empty.
“Do you think she’d like a sound system for her car? Maybe a voice automated one that plays MP3s. I think I heard her complain once about how she couldn’t listen to her iPod while driving.”
“I still can’t believe she has an iPod.” The hardest thing for Sam about being off at school all the time was that staying completely updated on every little detail of his family’s lives was practically impossible. He had no idea how up on the time his mom was until she’d told him that she bought herself an iPod. Sam had professors at school that still didn’t know how to do a PowerPoint presentation and still insisted on using an overhead projector during lecture.
They were well inside the bank, now, within the roped off section that marked the line that weaved against itself in the middle of the room. Dean was focused on one of the bank tellers, trying to figure out where he knew her from, when he noticed something wrong with the customer she was assisting. He elbowed Sam lightly. “Man in the green jacket, fourth window from the left.”
Sam didn’t recognize the man and had no idea why Dean was pointing him out. “What about him?”
“He’s holding a gun.”
“How the hell can you tell?” Sam asked, wondering if his brother was trying to be funny to pass the time, but as he looked around the bank, Sam could see two police officers slowly approaching from outside, their hands hovering around their waists so the gun would be close but not to attract any unwanted attention that would alert the man to their presence.
The officers flanked the man on either side of the line of customers. Sam watched as they drew their guns and simultaneously yelled, “Everybody get down!”
The man in the green jacket spun around upon hearing this, drawing his gun out and grabbing the teller’s sweater, pulling her close as he held the gun to the side of her head. “No one move or she dies.” His voice was dangerously calm as he stood no more than ten feet from Dean and Sam.
Sam glanced outside, seeing more police officers approaching the entrance with guns drawn. The fact that they were inside a shopping mall made it difficult for them to surround the man; instead they had to count on trapping him and doing their best to make sure that no one got hurt. He looked at Dean who was on the floor beside him. “How come weird shit happens every time I go somewhere with you?”
The man in the green jacket released the teller, throwing her back against the wall behind the glass window. He approached where Dean and Sam were, waving vaguely at the people on the floor with his gun. With the angle from the door, the police officers didn’t have a clear shot unless they tried going through the glass of the storefront, but that risked getting more people hurt if the bullets ricocheted or the shards of glass went flying from the velocity. “Who’s talking?”
The gun passed by him, then Sam, and the next thing Dean knew, he wasn’t thinking anymore. He shot up from the floor, grabbing the gun with one hand and the man’s elbow with the other, hearing a gunshot go off and people screaming, children crying, but then the gun was in his hand and he was kicking the man in the stomach, bending him over on himself and sending him flying into the counter. He took the magazine out, sliding the gun across the tiled floor in the direction the police officers were approaching man from, hoping he looked calm as he walked over to where Sam was now standing. Dean hoped that he didn’t look as freaked out as he felt.
“Are you insane?” Sam asked incredulously. “You do realize you could have been shot, right? Why the hell would you think it was a good idea to try something like that?”
The truth was that Dean had no idea. “It felt like the thing to do,” he offered as an answer. The man held the gun at Sam and it was like something had clicked deep down inside of Dean - something that never wanted to see his little brother hurt even though growing up Dean had never been very protective of Sam.
Sam was dumbfounded, stuck somewhere between completely horrified and utterly amazed. It was like something out of a movie; he’d had no idea that his brother could move like that, but at the same time he was starting to wonder if maybe Dean really did have a death wish.
“Excuse me,” one of the police officers that had been inside approached as the other one led the man in the green jacket out of the bank in handcuffs. “We’d like a statement from you, sir, if you don’t mind.”
Dean told the officer how he’d noticed that the man had a gun before he drew it out of his jacket. The cop described Dean’s actions as “heroic yet idiotic,” and Sam listened to Dean apologize, saying that he’d “just reacted” and didn’t really think about it.
They cut their shopping short after that, neither of them wanting to end up on the evening news. Sam didn’t bother to disguise the fact of how leery he was. Dean couldn’t help but feel a little like Jason Bourne and was wondering if maybe he was a government agent for a couple days and they had intentionally altered his memory so he wouldn’t be able to recall the top secret mission they had sent him on.
“I hate this,” Dean said to himself as much as to Sam.
“Maybe you’re really Batman,” Sam suggested, and Dean couldn’t help but laugh.
+
He was falling asleep in bed when he heard the scream.
Dean climbed out of bed, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with the back of his hand. He could hear yelling and there was a strange light coming from Sammy’s room. He saw Daddy run out of there, Sammy all bundled up in his arms.
“Daddy?” Dean called, not quite sure what was going on.
He quickly found himself with his brother in his arms. “Take your brother outside as fast as you can and don’t look back,” Daddy was saying. The house was getting hot, Dean soon realizing there was a fire. He didn’t want to go outside without Mommy and Daddy. “Now, Dean, go!”
Dean had no choice but to listen, rushing outside into the front yard with Sam. He turned to look at the house, seeing the flames lick up the sides, wondering where Mommy and Daddy were. “It’s okay, Sammy,” he said, holding his brother tight.
+
When Dean woke up the next morning he flushed the rest of the painkillers down the toilet. He was getting sick of having what he’d started referring to as The Fire Dream. Last night, though, it was the most vivid version of it he’d had since they started. Before it was vague, more sensory, he’d been able to feel the heat from the fire and hear the screaming, the yelling, but that had been the first time he’d actually been a part of it. He was starting to wonder if maybe the house really had caught fire when he was growing up and he’d just been too young to remember. Dean made a mental note to ask his mother about it the next time he saw her.
He went into the bathroom, pulling the T-shirt he had slept in off over his head and gently peeled back the medical tape and gauze from his stomach. The stitches had been removed his last day in the hospital, but Dean had been told to keep the gauze on until for a few more days. The wound was completely closed up now, leaving an angry red scar in its wake. He touched it lightly, willing it to tell him how it came to be, but there was nothing.
Dean showered quickly, surprised that the apartment smelled of coffee when he left the bathroom. He knew that Carmen had a shift that started last night, which normally meant she wouldn’t be back until noon at the earliest. He pulled on a pair of jeans that were in a crumpled heap on the floor that smelled okay and grabbed a maroon button down that was hanging up in the closet.
“I didn’t think you’d be back until la-” he said as he walked into the kitchen, but stopped when he saw that it wasn’t Carmen. “You didn’t have to come over just to make me coffee.”
“I wanted to see how you were doing,” Mary replied, hovering around the sink. “You left some clothes at home. Just because I let you come over to do laundry doesn’t mean I’m going to do it for you or run a delivery service.”
“I would’ve gotten them eventually. I forgot to grab it when I dropped Sam off yesterday. Do you want anything to eat, Mom?” Dean pulled a carton of eggs out of the refrigerator, the rest of the bacon, and a frying pan that was hanging above the sink.
“Whatever you’re making for yourself will be fine.” Mary sat at the kitchen table, the day’s newspaper open in front of her even though she ignored it, instead watching her older son cook breakfast. He seemed to be holding himself up better, like the muscles in his stomach had gotten their strength back. She’d been trying hard to keep an eye on Dean’s demeanor - he’d always been so locked up around her, not wanting to bother her if something was wrong - but Mary had gotten reading Dean down to an art form. What kind of mother would she be if she hadn’t? After losing John she had gotten strength from her boys, so she couldn’t even imagine losing either one of them.
“Hey, Mom?” Dean asked, figuring now was as good a time as any. “Was there ever a fire in our house when Sam was a baby?”
“No… Why?”
He used the spatula to divvy up the scrambled eggs between two plates, adding two slices of bacon to each. “These dreams I’ve been having lately. They seemed so real.” Dean poured two cups of coffee and set everything down on the table, grabbing two clean forks from the dish drying rack before sitting across from his mother.
“Do you know that’s the second time you’ve asked me that?” Mary recalled for him the morning of her birthday when Dean had showed up at the house, seeming lost and a little confused. He had asked if there was a fire then, too, amongst other things. “And then you volunteered to mow the lawn.”
A week ago Dean would have found what Mary told him very unusual and highly unlikely. Now it hardly even surprised him. He remembered Sam’s Batman comment, knowing he wasn’t suicidal but wondering if maybe he had some sort of split personality dissociative whatever-it-was-called - a secret identity that was so secret that even he didn’t know about it.
Charlie would have told him, though, if she had suspected that to be the case, right? He would’ve been given some magic pills that made the voices go away. But the problem was that he didn’t have any voices. He had the opposite of voices. No one was trying to tell him what to do; he was trying to tell himself what he had done.
“How’s work been going?” Mary asked, suspecting she gave Dean more questions than answers.
Dean bit off the end of a strip of bacon, giving a half-hearted shrug. “A few housewives wanting to get their oil checked and tires rotated before driving to see family for Christmas. Some bodywork from parking lot accidents - people get angry around the holidays, it seems - then a couple of high school kids looking into custom detailing. I can’t use most of the equipment until I’m off the meds, though, so I’ve been doing a lot of inventory, restocking what’s missing, doing damage reports for insurance companies on the cars that get towed in.” His eye caught a small newspaper article on the bottom corner of the page. The title read “Woman Dead in Freak Accident.” Dean grabbed the sheet, turning it around so he could read it better.
ATCHISON, KANSAS. Sabrina Belmont, 43, was found dead Thursday morning in her home at 192 Harper Drive. Apparent cause was electrocution, but the degree to which her body was burned was too extensive for any household object. The medical examiner’s office is suggesting that the only voltage strong enough would be lightning, but the area had no reports of lightning activity the night of Belmont’s death.
Authorities refused to comment when asked if there were any connections between this case and the deaths back in 1964 to 1965. Six people died in the months of December and January in northeastern Kansas, also from massive electrocution that had seemed to be caused by sporadic storm cells that had been cropping up across the Midwestern United States during the time.
Belmont was a social worker for the state. She is survived by a husband and their teenaged daughter. A wake will be held on Sunday at Ashton and Grace Funeral Home on 17th Street.
“Anything interesting?” Mary asked, distracting Dean from the nagging sensation the article had left him with.
Dean made a mental note of what page it was on, slowly folding the newspaper back up and pushing it towards the middle of the table. “Just strange.”
“It was on the news this morning. Right before Christmas, too.” Mary studied her son, noticing how stiff his posture seemed all of a sudden. “Are you feeling all right? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
That idea didn’t feel wrong at all.
+
Sitting at the counter at the Crosstown Tavern, Dean waited for Sam. The Saturday before Christmas, the pub was practically empty. Dean nursed a beer, glancing at the door every time he thought he’d heard it open to see if it was his brother or not. He had decided this morning that he needed to know what happened in Joliet. Even if Dean didn’t remember for himself, he needed to hear from somebody, and Sam was the only one that knew. He just hoped that knowing would explain all of the weird shit that had been going on since he woke up in the hospital.
He hadn’t been able to get Sabrina Belmont’s death out of his head all day. Dean went to the library, looking into other coverage, looking for further information about what happened, but all the papers and television stations gave the same story. They all also referenced the similar incidences back in 1964 and 1965, so Dean had looked those up on the microfiche. The first death had been in Atchison followed by Lawrence, Holton, Leavenworth, Topeka, and finally Oskaloosa. They were spaced about a week apart starting a few days before Christmas. They all, just like Sabrina Belmont, had been killed by a single electric surge that caused heart failure.
Working in an auto body shop meant Dean knew some things about electricity. He knew how much voltage it took to run a car, how long it would take that amount running continuously through a body to kill a person. A single charge strong enough to kill someone instantly, boiling their blood the process, could only be caused by lightning.
It was dark when he left and had called Sam right away, telling him to meet him at Crosstown. He finished his first beer and was halfway through his second when his brother finally showed up, looking very out of place in his preppy college boy clothes in this particular dive of a pub. Dean couldn’t help but sneer as Sam sat at the stool beside him. “You look like you got lost on your way to a frat party.”
“I should’ve known you’d pick a dive.” Sam ordered a beer, receiving an odd, sideways glance from the bartender. He put his hands on the bar, pulling them back immediately. “There’s something sticky on the counter.”
“Yeah, this place sucks. But no one in here will pay any attention to us.” He paused when the bartender returned with a coaster and Sam’s beer, and then waited for the man to go back to the register at the other end of the bar. Their stools were near the door, and most of the other patrons - people stuck depressed and lonely for the holidays - were in booths in dark corners in the back near the unisex restroom and the jukebox that only had Beatles albums in it, despite the hole-in-the-wall, bottom-of-the-barrel atmosphere the bar exuded. “I need to know what happened.”
Sam nearly choked on his beer. He had been going over the events in his mind since he realized Dean would need to hear them from him eventually; he just hadn’t expected to have been asked so bluntly. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” Dean replied, downing the rest of the pint and motioning for another one. The bartender brought over two, the second of which Dean slid over to Sam. “You keep talking, and I’ll keep drinking. You can drink, too,” he added as an afterthought.
Finishing his first beer, Sam pulled his thoughts together. “You’re going to think I’m insane.”
“I’m the one with amnesia and the weekly psychiatric sessions.”
“Good point,” he smirked, looking at Dean. As strange as those days had been, Dean seeming like an entirely different person, it was nothing compared to the last week, seeing his brother trying to deal with the missing memories, the accident, and now making an attempt at being different. He didn’t want to say that they were friends, but Sam would admit that his brother was surprisingly tolerable.
Sam started off slow - talking about when he and Jess arrived in Lawrence, how Dean had greeted them with unusual enthusiasm. He then jumped to dinner, how Dean had stood up in the middle of it, walked around the table like he was looking at someone near the entrance to the restaurant, but no one had been there.
Dean listened carefully, not bothering to interrupt even for a witty comeback to something Sam had said. He listened to Sam describing when they got back home, his attempts to get them all to go back out like it was something they did normally. Sam jumped forward a few hours, how he had woken up because he had heard someone downstairs. They’d startled each other - Sam thinking Dean was someone trying to rob them; Dean not sure who Sam was but had attacked him, throwing Sam to the ground before he realized who he was. Dean had been going through Mom’s good silver, claiming it was to pay off a gambling debt.
Then, Sam continued, Dean had apologized. He had apologized for the fact that they didn’t get along, and that he couldn’t stay to fix things. Dean had said that people’s lives had depended on him doing what he needed to do. Sam hadn’t understood what the hell Dean was talking about, and Dean had just told him to forget about it. To tell Mom that he loved her, and then he said, “I’ll see you, Sammy,” before heading out to the car.
Something that Dean had said had triggered something in Sam. Whether it was the apology, the fact that it sounded like he was saying goodbye, or how Dean had called him Sammy, he did not know, but Sam found himself climbing into the passenger seat of the Impala, telling Dean that whatever stupid thing he was about to do, he shouldn’t have to do it alone. Because they were brothers.
The drive to Joliet was eight hours of Dean talking about spirits, demons, vampires, werewolves, and djinn. He said the stories about monsters under the bed were, for the most part, true. Dean told him that these things could be killed, destroyed, so they wouldn’t be able to hurt any more people. Dean told Sam how he kept seeing this girl, which was what happened in the restaurant, and that he thought the djinn in this warehouse in Joliet had something to do with it.
Sam paused, delaying as he drank half of what remained in the glass. “In the warehouse… I don’t even know how to describe what was there. There was this girl, tied up and hanging from only her wrists. There was a needle in her neck, collecting her blood. You said it was the same girl you’d been seeing. She talked about her dad like she was dreaming about talking to him. Someone was coming, so we hid under the stairs, and… It was like a man but not. There were these designs all over his body, and his eyes glowed. He… he drank her blood, and when she started to stir, like she was waking up, he touched her, his skin giving off a blue light, and then she returned to the dream.”
Dean watched Sam drain the beer, sensing that he was about to get to the part that Dean had been dreading. He thought over the things Sam had mentioned so far - the monsters, the girl in the warehouse, the part back at Mom’s house where Dean kicked Sam’s ass - and wasn’t sure what to make of it. It didn’t feel right, but he still didn’t remember, so Dean hadn’t expected it to. He didn’t think it made him insane, though. Sam had seen the thing that Dean had called a djinn. Some part of him knew things that he couldn’t remember, could do things he wasn’t consciously capable of doing. Dean had disarmed the man who had tried robbing the bank, like he’d had military hand-to-hand combat training, and now to hear that he had defended himself in the same manner when Sam had surprised him. What else could he do?
The bartender brought them more beer. Dean was glad he’d ditched the painkillers days ago. He couldn’t imagine this conversation completely sober - after that third pint he was starting to feel it. The Crosstown Tavern may have been a dive bar, but it could at least be said that they didn’t serve watered down piss.
Forcing himself to refocus, Dean listened as Sam started talking about when Dean seemed to have “lost it” - Sam’s words, not Dean’s. According to Sam, Dean had started to go on about how none of it was real, that the djinn must have gotten him like it had gotten that girl. The djinn and her also seemed to have just disappeared, which Sam found extremely odd and would’ve made a bigger deal of it at the time if it weren’t for the fact that he found himself with more pressing matters on his hands. Dean started talking to Carmen, to Mom, but neither of them had been there. He had then pulled the knife, turning the blade towards his own body, still clearly convinced that everything was a dream. Sam had begged, pleaded, and tried reasoning with his brother, but Dean wouldn’t have any of it. The next thing Sam knew, Dean was holding the knife in his stomach, eyes wide with shock as he slumped forward and tried to get a grasp on what was going on before he passed out.
Sam waved for more beers, the sticky counter clearly no longer a problem. He coughed into his hand, hoping Dean didn’t notice that his eyes were watering up, but he was all set to blame it on the smokiness of the bar if he did comment. Remembering those last moments when he thought his older brother was going to die right in front of him were emotionally taxing. He watched Dean, unsure of how his brother was going to react.
It was quite possibly the beer interacting with whatever amount of prescription medication lingered in his system, but Dean started to laugh. It was ridiculous, right? He looked over at Sam, who was staring at him incredulously at first, but then started laughing along with Dean.
“Vampires!?” Dean giggled, making a stabbing motion with his right hand. “Why would I be talking about that shit?” He looked at Sam with mock seriousness. “Do you think I know Buffy?”
“What I don’t get,” Sam laughed, taking another sip, “is that we saw that girl and the…” He hesitated to use the word, like calling it that would make that what it really was, but he was buzzed enough to not care. “The djinn, they like, disappeared. Like, poof! Goodbye!”
“Maybe he went to hide in his lamp. Oh!” Dean jumped up excitedly, nearly knocking the stool over. “Maybe he lives in a bottle.”
“So you get in touch with Buffy, and I’ll try to find Major Nelson.” Sam drank the rest of the glass he was working on, and had coughed, managing not to spit any of it across the bar, when Dean started singing the theme from I Dream of Jeannie.
Neither of them had particularly noticed that they were disturbing the silence that the bar’s usual patrons had come to expect, even sought. Sam straightened up when he noticed a man in a stained suit with his tie all disheveled approaching, looking extremely pissed off and reeking of scotch. “Think you assholes are lost.” He stumbled over the words. “This ain’t one of your KU bars.”
Sam tensed at the look Dean gave the man, hoping he could get his brother out the door before he got into any trouble. “Calm down there, buddy,” Dean said condescendingly. “Phew - were you drinking back there or bathing in it?”
Dean saw the man grab the pool cue from behind him before Sam could yell a warning. He raised the cue in the air, clearly aiming to slam it down on his brother’s head, but Dean grabbed it in both hands, using it to push the man back and yank it out of his hands at the same time. He fell, hitting the back of his head against the leg of the pool table.
“I think we better go,” Sam suggested, keeping a wary eye on the rest of the people in the bar and hoping the guy Dean just knocked out didn’t have any friends with him.
“Right,” Dean agreed, suddenly feeling more sober but knowing it was just the adrenaline. He slapped thirty dollars on the counter. “He’ll be feeling that one in the morning,” he told the bartender cheekily before following Sam outside.
“I don’t think I should drive home,” Sam said after he had somehow managed to trip over his own foot.
“Light weight,” Dean mumbled, putting his wallet back in his pocket. “Come on - I walked here, it’s not even a mile. You can crash on the couch.”
“For what it’s worth,” Sam began, “I don’t think you’re insane. Crazy, maybe, but not insane.”
“God you are so drunk,” was what Dean said instead of what he knew he was supposed to say.
Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10
Rating: R
Pairings: Dean/Carmen, Sam/Jess
Word Count: 5,086 (50,221 overall)
Warnings: Wishverse fic, spoilers for S1 & S2 through 2x20
Summary: After Dean wakes up in the hospital with amnesia after an apparent attempted suicide, the answers he seeks just brings more questions before turning his world completely upside down.
Part 1 - Part 2
Christmas shopping with Dean was a strange experience. Sam was certain the last time they had gone together he was ten, the year they had both gotten a pair of rollerblades. That was also the first year in a while that Mom and Dad didn’t hide all the presents to only put them out under the tree on Christmas morning. When Sam was four years old Dean had changed all of the tags on his presents so they read “Samantha,” making Sam hysterical from the idea that Santa had got him girls’ toys.
They were waiting in a line that they hoped was for the bank, but for all Sam knew, it could’ve been for the toy store next door that was proclaiming to have just received a shipment of the newest model of PlayStation.
“Congratulations, by the way,” Dean said, craning his neck to try and see around the other people in line. “Is this seriously the line for the bank?” he added quickly, almost like he didn’t want Sam to acknowledge what he had first said. Sam clearly caught it anyway, shooting his brother a confused look. “You know… you and Jess.”
The line moved forward a few feet. “Weren’t you there?”
“Apparently but it’s one of those days I don’t remember. My shrink tried some hypnosis to see if my subconscious still remembers or whatever and I thought it was bullshit, but if I mentioned you guys got engaged, and you really are engaged, then I guess it works.” Dean toed at the floor with his boot, wishing that it really hadn’t worked. It wasn’t that he didn’t want his brother to be engaged - he actually was happy for them about that. Jess was a nice girl, and Sam deserved to be happy. He hadn’t wanted it to work because he heard the tape after Charlie brought him out of it - he had heard his own voice say that Jess was dead. He had no idea why he would think that.
Sam wasn’t used to his brother trying to reach out to him - even less used to seeing Dean as vulnerable as he seemed since getting back from the hospital. He didn’t seem to be taking well how people were treating him like he was about to break. “So do you remember now?”
Dean shook his head. “I still don’t remember, but I guess I have to believe what’s said in these sessions since I’m the one saying it.” He watched some of the people bustling around the mall with their collection of shopping bags as they moved forward some more in the line. “What are you going to get for Mom?”
“That’s my secret,” Sam replied, stepping through the doorway of the bank. “I can’t have you stealing my idea.”
The line continued to move, each teller window having a person seated at it. Dean wondered if it was possible for a bank to run out of cash. He had no idea how much they kept in the vault and doubted it got stocked everyday. They only came to the bank because every ATM they had tried was saying that it was empty.
“Do you think she’d like a sound system for her car? Maybe a voice automated one that plays MP3s. I think I heard her complain once about how she couldn’t listen to her iPod while driving.”
“I still can’t believe she has an iPod.” The hardest thing for Sam about being off at school all the time was that staying completely updated on every little detail of his family’s lives was practically impossible. He had no idea how up on the time his mom was until she’d told him that she bought herself an iPod. Sam had professors at school that still didn’t know how to do a PowerPoint presentation and still insisted on using an overhead projector during lecture.
They were well inside the bank, now, within the roped off section that marked the line that weaved against itself in the middle of the room. Dean was focused on one of the bank tellers, trying to figure out where he knew her from, when he noticed something wrong with the customer she was assisting. He elbowed Sam lightly. “Man in the green jacket, fourth window from the left.”
Sam didn’t recognize the man and had no idea why Dean was pointing him out. “What about him?”
“He’s holding a gun.”
“How the hell can you tell?” Sam asked, wondering if his brother was trying to be funny to pass the time, but as he looked around the bank, Sam could see two police officers slowly approaching from outside, their hands hovering around their waists so the gun would be close but not to attract any unwanted attention that would alert the man to their presence.
The officers flanked the man on either side of the line of customers. Sam watched as they drew their guns and simultaneously yelled, “Everybody get down!”
The man in the green jacket spun around upon hearing this, drawing his gun out and grabbing the teller’s sweater, pulling her close as he held the gun to the side of her head. “No one move or she dies.” His voice was dangerously calm as he stood no more than ten feet from Dean and Sam.
Sam glanced outside, seeing more police officers approaching the entrance with guns drawn. The fact that they were inside a shopping mall made it difficult for them to surround the man; instead they had to count on trapping him and doing their best to make sure that no one got hurt. He looked at Dean who was on the floor beside him. “How come weird shit happens every time I go somewhere with you?”
The man in the green jacket released the teller, throwing her back against the wall behind the glass window. He approached where Dean and Sam were, waving vaguely at the people on the floor with his gun. With the angle from the door, the police officers didn’t have a clear shot unless they tried going through the glass of the storefront, but that risked getting more people hurt if the bullets ricocheted or the shards of glass went flying from the velocity. “Who’s talking?”
The gun passed by him, then Sam, and the next thing Dean knew, he wasn’t thinking anymore. He shot up from the floor, grabbing the gun with one hand and the man’s elbow with the other, hearing a gunshot go off and people screaming, children crying, but then the gun was in his hand and he was kicking the man in the stomach, bending him over on himself and sending him flying into the counter. He took the magazine out, sliding the gun across the tiled floor in the direction the police officers were approaching man from, hoping he looked calm as he walked over to where Sam was now standing. Dean hoped that he didn’t look as freaked out as he felt.
“Are you insane?” Sam asked incredulously. “You do realize you could have been shot, right? Why the hell would you think it was a good idea to try something like that?”
The truth was that Dean had no idea. “It felt like the thing to do,” he offered as an answer. The man held the gun at Sam and it was like something had clicked deep down inside of Dean - something that never wanted to see his little brother hurt even though growing up Dean had never been very protective of Sam.
Sam was dumbfounded, stuck somewhere between completely horrified and utterly amazed. It was like something out of a movie; he’d had no idea that his brother could move like that, but at the same time he was starting to wonder if maybe Dean really did have a death wish.
“Excuse me,” one of the police officers that had been inside approached as the other one led the man in the green jacket out of the bank in handcuffs. “We’d like a statement from you, sir, if you don’t mind.”
Dean told the officer how he’d noticed that the man had a gun before he drew it out of his jacket. The cop described Dean’s actions as “heroic yet idiotic,” and Sam listened to Dean apologize, saying that he’d “just reacted” and didn’t really think about it.
They cut their shopping short after that, neither of them wanting to end up on the evening news. Sam didn’t bother to disguise the fact of how leery he was. Dean couldn’t help but feel a little like Jason Bourne and was wondering if maybe he was a government agent for a couple days and they had intentionally altered his memory so he wouldn’t be able to recall the top secret mission they had sent him on.
“I hate this,” Dean said to himself as much as to Sam.
“Maybe you’re really Batman,” Sam suggested, and Dean couldn’t help but laugh.
+
He was falling asleep in bed when he heard the scream.
Dean climbed out of bed, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with the back of his hand. He could hear yelling and there was a strange light coming from Sammy’s room. He saw Daddy run out of there, Sammy all bundled up in his arms.
“Daddy?” Dean called, not quite sure what was going on.
He quickly found himself with his brother in his arms. “Take your brother outside as fast as you can and don’t look back,” Daddy was saying. The house was getting hot, Dean soon realizing there was a fire. He didn’t want to go outside without Mommy and Daddy. “Now, Dean, go!”
Dean had no choice but to listen, rushing outside into the front yard with Sam. He turned to look at the house, seeing the flames lick up the sides, wondering where Mommy and Daddy were. “It’s okay, Sammy,” he said, holding his brother tight.
+
When Dean woke up the next morning he flushed the rest of the painkillers down the toilet. He was getting sick of having what he’d started referring to as The Fire Dream. Last night, though, it was the most vivid version of it he’d had since they started. Before it was vague, more sensory, he’d been able to feel the heat from the fire and hear the screaming, the yelling, but that had been the first time he’d actually been a part of it. He was starting to wonder if maybe the house really had caught fire when he was growing up and he’d just been too young to remember. Dean made a mental note to ask his mother about it the next time he saw her.
He went into the bathroom, pulling the T-shirt he had slept in off over his head and gently peeled back the medical tape and gauze from his stomach. The stitches had been removed his last day in the hospital, but Dean had been told to keep the gauze on until for a few more days. The wound was completely closed up now, leaving an angry red scar in its wake. He touched it lightly, willing it to tell him how it came to be, but there was nothing.
Dean showered quickly, surprised that the apartment smelled of coffee when he left the bathroom. He knew that Carmen had a shift that started last night, which normally meant she wouldn’t be back until noon at the earliest. He pulled on a pair of jeans that were in a crumpled heap on the floor that smelled okay and grabbed a maroon button down that was hanging up in the closet.
“I didn’t think you’d be back until la-” he said as he walked into the kitchen, but stopped when he saw that it wasn’t Carmen. “You didn’t have to come over just to make me coffee.”
“I wanted to see how you were doing,” Mary replied, hovering around the sink. “You left some clothes at home. Just because I let you come over to do laundry doesn’t mean I’m going to do it for you or run a delivery service.”
“I would’ve gotten them eventually. I forgot to grab it when I dropped Sam off yesterday. Do you want anything to eat, Mom?” Dean pulled a carton of eggs out of the refrigerator, the rest of the bacon, and a frying pan that was hanging above the sink.
“Whatever you’re making for yourself will be fine.” Mary sat at the kitchen table, the day’s newspaper open in front of her even though she ignored it, instead watching her older son cook breakfast. He seemed to be holding himself up better, like the muscles in his stomach had gotten their strength back. She’d been trying hard to keep an eye on Dean’s demeanor - he’d always been so locked up around her, not wanting to bother her if something was wrong - but Mary had gotten reading Dean down to an art form. What kind of mother would she be if she hadn’t? After losing John she had gotten strength from her boys, so she couldn’t even imagine losing either one of them.
“Hey, Mom?” Dean asked, figuring now was as good a time as any. “Was there ever a fire in our house when Sam was a baby?”
“No… Why?”
He used the spatula to divvy up the scrambled eggs between two plates, adding two slices of bacon to each. “These dreams I’ve been having lately. They seemed so real.” Dean poured two cups of coffee and set everything down on the table, grabbing two clean forks from the dish drying rack before sitting across from his mother.
“Do you know that’s the second time you’ve asked me that?” Mary recalled for him the morning of her birthday when Dean had showed up at the house, seeming lost and a little confused. He had asked if there was a fire then, too, amongst other things. “And then you volunteered to mow the lawn.”
A week ago Dean would have found what Mary told him very unusual and highly unlikely. Now it hardly even surprised him. He remembered Sam’s Batman comment, knowing he wasn’t suicidal but wondering if maybe he had some sort of split personality dissociative whatever-it-was-called - a secret identity that was so secret that even he didn’t know about it.
Charlie would have told him, though, if she had suspected that to be the case, right? He would’ve been given some magic pills that made the voices go away. But the problem was that he didn’t have any voices. He had the opposite of voices. No one was trying to tell him what to do; he was trying to tell himself what he had done.
“How’s work been going?” Mary asked, suspecting she gave Dean more questions than answers.
Dean bit off the end of a strip of bacon, giving a half-hearted shrug. “A few housewives wanting to get their oil checked and tires rotated before driving to see family for Christmas. Some bodywork from parking lot accidents - people get angry around the holidays, it seems - then a couple of high school kids looking into custom detailing. I can’t use most of the equipment until I’m off the meds, though, so I’ve been doing a lot of inventory, restocking what’s missing, doing damage reports for insurance companies on the cars that get towed in.” His eye caught a small newspaper article on the bottom corner of the page. The title read “Woman Dead in Freak Accident.” Dean grabbed the sheet, turning it around so he could read it better.
ATCHISON, KANSAS. Sabrina Belmont, 43, was found dead Thursday morning in her home at 192 Harper Drive. Apparent cause was electrocution, but the degree to which her body was burned was too extensive for any household object. The medical examiner’s office is suggesting that the only voltage strong enough would be lightning, but the area had no reports of lightning activity the night of Belmont’s death.
Authorities refused to comment when asked if there were any connections between this case and the deaths back in 1964 to 1965. Six people died in the months of December and January in northeastern Kansas, also from massive electrocution that had seemed to be caused by sporadic storm cells that had been cropping up across the Midwestern United States during the time.
Belmont was a social worker for the state. She is survived by a husband and their teenaged daughter. A wake will be held on Sunday at Ashton and Grace Funeral Home on 17th Street.
“Anything interesting?” Mary asked, distracting Dean from the nagging sensation the article had left him with.
Dean made a mental note of what page it was on, slowly folding the newspaper back up and pushing it towards the middle of the table. “Just strange.”
“It was on the news this morning. Right before Christmas, too.” Mary studied her son, noticing how stiff his posture seemed all of a sudden. “Are you feeling all right? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
That idea didn’t feel wrong at all.
+
Sitting at the counter at the Crosstown Tavern, Dean waited for Sam. The Saturday before Christmas, the pub was practically empty. Dean nursed a beer, glancing at the door every time he thought he’d heard it open to see if it was his brother or not. He had decided this morning that he needed to know what happened in Joliet. Even if Dean didn’t remember for himself, he needed to hear from somebody, and Sam was the only one that knew. He just hoped that knowing would explain all of the weird shit that had been going on since he woke up in the hospital.
He hadn’t been able to get Sabrina Belmont’s death out of his head all day. Dean went to the library, looking into other coverage, looking for further information about what happened, but all the papers and television stations gave the same story. They all also referenced the similar incidences back in 1964 and 1965, so Dean had looked those up on the microfiche. The first death had been in Atchison followed by Lawrence, Holton, Leavenworth, Topeka, and finally Oskaloosa. They were spaced about a week apart starting a few days before Christmas. They all, just like Sabrina Belmont, had been killed by a single electric surge that caused heart failure.
Working in an auto body shop meant Dean knew some things about electricity. He knew how much voltage it took to run a car, how long it would take that amount running continuously through a body to kill a person. A single charge strong enough to kill someone instantly, boiling their blood the process, could only be caused by lightning.
It was dark when he left and had called Sam right away, telling him to meet him at Crosstown. He finished his first beer and was halfway through his second when his brother finally showed up, looking very out of place in his preppy college boy clothes in this particular dive of a pub. Dean couldn’t help but sneer as Sam sat at the stool beside him. “You look like you got lost on your way to a frat party.”
“I should’ve known you’d pick a dive.” Sam ordered a beer, receiving an odd, sideways glance from the bartender. He put his hands on the bar, pulling them back immediately. “There’s something sticky on the counter.”
“Yeah, this place sucks. But no one in here will pay any attention to us.” He paused when the bartender returned with a coaster and Sam’s beer, and then waited for the man to go back to the register at the other end of the bar. Their stools were near the door, and most of the other patrons - people stuck depressed and lonely for the holidays - were in booths in dark corners in the back near the unisex restroom and the jukebox that only had Beatles albums in it, despite the hole-in-the-wall, bottom-of-the-barrel atmosphere the bar exuded. “I need to know what happened.”
Sam nearly choked on his beer. He had been going over the events in his mind since he realized Dean would need to hear them from him eventually; he just hadn’t expected to have been asked so bluntly. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” Dean replied, downing the rest of the pint and motioning for another one. The bartender brought over two, the second of which Dean slid over to Sam. “You keep talking, and I’ll keep drinking. You can drink, too,” he added as an afterthought.
Finishing his first beer, Sam pulled his thoughts together. “You’re going to think I’m insane.”
“I’m the one with amnesia and the weekly psychiatric sessions.”
“Good point,” he smirked, looking at Dean. As strange as those days had been, Dean seeming like an entirely different person, it was nothing compared to the last week, seeing his brother trying to deal with the missing memories, the accident, and now making an attempt at being different. He didn’t want to say that they were friends, but Sam would admit that his brother was surprisingly tolerable.
Sam started off slow - talking about when he and Jess arrived in Lawrence, how Dean had greeted them with unusual enthusiasm. He then jumped to dinner, how Dean had stood up in the middle of it, walked around the table like he was looking at someone near the entrance to the restaurant, but no one had been there.
Dean listened carefully, not bothering to interrupt even for a witty comeback to something Sam had said. He listened to Sam describing when they got back home, his attempts to get them all to go back out like it was something they did normally. Sam jumped forward a few hours, how he had woken up because he had heard someone downstairs. They’d startled each other - Sam thinking Dean was someone trying to rob them; Dean not sure who Sam was but had attacked him, throwing Sam to the ground before he realized who he was. Dean had been going through Mom’s good silver, claiming it was to pay off a gambling debt.
Then, Sam continued, Dean had apologized. He had apologized for the fact that they didn’t get along, and that he couldn’t stay to fix things. Dean had said that people’s lives had depended on him doing what he needed to do. Sam hadn’t understood what the hell Dean was talking about, and Dean had just told him to forget about it. To tell Mom that he loved her, and then he said, “I’ll see you, Sammy,” before heading out to the car.
Something that Dean had said had triggered something in Sam. Whether it was the apology, the fact that it sounded like he was saying goodbye, or how Dean had called him Sammy, he did not know, but Sam found himself climbing into the passenger seat of the Impala, telling Dean that whatever stupid thing he was about to do, he shouldn’t have to do it alone. Because they were brothers.
The drive to Joliet was eight hours of Dean talking about spirits, demons, vampires, werewolves, and djinn. He said the stories about monsters under the bed were, for the most part, true. Dean told him that these things could be killed, destroyed, so they wouldn’t be able to hurt any more people. Dean told Sam how he kept seeing this girl, which was what happened in the restaurant, and that he thought the djinn in this warehouse in Joliet had something to do with it.
Sam paused, delaying as he drank half of what remained in the glass. “In the warehouse… I don’t even know how to describe what was there. There was this girl, tied up and hanging from only her wrists. There was a needle in her neck, collecting her blood. You said it was the same girl you’d been seeing. She talked about her dad like she was dreaming about talking to him. Someone was coming, so we hid under the stairs, and… It was like a man but not. There were these designs all over his body, and his eyes glowed. He… he drank her blood, and when she started to stir, like she was waking up, he touched her, his skin giving off a blue light, and then she returned to the dream.”
Dean watched Sam drain the beer, sensing that he was about to get to the part that Dean had been dreading. He thought over the things Sam had mentioned so far - the monsters, the girl in the warehouse, the part back at Mom’s house where Dean kicked Sam’s ass - and wasn’t sure what to make of it. It didn’t feel right, but he still didn’t remember, so Dean hadn’t expected it to. He didn’t think it made him insane, though. Sam had seen the thing that Dean had called a djinn. Some part of him knew things that he couldn’t remember, could do things he wasn’t consciously capable of doing. Dean had disarmed the man who had tried robbing the bank, like he’d had military hand-to-hand combat training, and now to hear that he had defended himself in the same manner when Sam had surprised him. What else could he do?
The bartender brought them more beer. Dean was glad he’d ditched the painkillers days ago. He couldn’t imagine this conversation completely sober - after that third pint he was starting to feel it. The Crosstown Tavern may have been a dive bar, but it could at least be said that they didn’t serve watered down piss.
Forcing himself to refocus, Dean listened as Sam started talking about when Dean seemed to have “lost it” - Sam’s words, not Dean’s. According to Sam, Dean had started to go on about how none of it was real, that the djinn must have gotten him like it had gotten that girl. The djinn and her also seemed to have just disappeared, which Sam found extremely odd and would’ve made a bigger deal of it at the time if it weren’t for the fact that he found himself with more pressing matters on his hands. Dean started talking to Carmen, to Mom, but neither of them had been there. He had then pulled the knife, turning the blade towards his own body, still clearly convinced that everything was a dream. Sam had begged, pleaded, and tried reasoning with his brother, but Dean wouldn’t have any of it. The next thing Sam knew, Dean was holding the knife in his stomach, eyes wide with shock as he slumped forward and tried to get a grasp on what was going on before he passed out.
Sam waved for more beers, the sticky counter clearly no longer a problem. He coughed into his hand, hoping Dean didn’t notice that his eyes were watering up, but he was all set to blame it on the smokiness of the bar if he did comment. Remembering those last moments when he thought his older brother was going to die right in front of him were emotionally taxing. He watched Dean, unsure of how his brother was going to react.
It was quite possibly the beer interacting with whatever amount of prescription medication lingered in his system, but Dean started to laugh. It was ridiculous, right? He looked over at Sam, who was staring at him incredulously at first, but then started laughing along with Dean.
“Vampires!?” Dean giggled, making a stabbing motion with his right hand. “Why would I be talking about that shit?” He looked at Sam with mock seriousness. “Do you think I know Buffy?”
“What I don’t get,” Sam laughed, taking another sip, “is that we saw that girl and the…” He hesitated to use the word, like calling it that would make that what it really was, but he was buzzed enough to not care. “The djinn, they like, disappeared. Like, poof! Goodbye!”
“Maybe he went to hide in his lamp. Oh!” Dean jumped up excitedly, nearly knocking the stool over. “Maybe he lives in a bottle.”
“So you get in touch with Buffy, and I’ll try to find Major Nelson.” Sam drank the rest of the glass he was working on, and had coughed, managing not to spit any of it across the bar, when Dean started singing the theme from I Dream of Jeannie.
Neither of them had particularly noticed that they were disturbing the silence that the bar’s usual patrons had come to expect, even sought. Sam straightened up when he noticed a man in a stained suit with his tie all disheveled approaching, looking extremely pissed off and reeking of scotch. “Think you assholes are lost.” He stumbled over the words. “This ain’t one of your KU bars.”
Sam tensed at the look Dean gave the man, hoping he could get his brother out the door before he got into any trouble. “Calm down there, buddy,” Dean said condescendingly. “Phew - were you drinking back there or bathing in it?”
Dean saw the man grab the pool cue from behind him before Sam could yell a warning. He raised the cue in the air, clearly aiming to slam it down on his brother’s head, but Dean grabbed it in both hands, using it to push the man back and yank it out of his hands at the same time. He fell, hitting the back of his head against the leg of the pool table.
“I think we better go,” Sam suggested, keeping a wary eye on the rest of the people in the bar and hoping the guy Dean just knocked out didn’t have any friends with him.
“Right,” Dean agreed, suddenly feeling more sober but knowing it was just the adrenaline. He slapped thirty dollars on the counter. “He’ll be feeling that one in the morning,” he told the bartender cheekily before following Sam outside.
“I don’t think I should drive home,” Sam said after he had somehow managed to trip over his own foot.
“Light weight,” Dean mumbled, putting his wallet back in his pocket. “Come on - I walked here, it’s not even a mile. You can crash on the couch.”
“For what it’s worth,” Sam began, “I don’t think you’re insane. Crazy, maybe, but not insane.”
“God you are so drunk,” was what Dean said instead of what he knew he was supposed to say.
Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10