An End Has a Start (Dean/Carmen, Sam/Jess R) 5/10
Title: An End Has a Start - Part 5
Rating: R
Pairings: Dean/Carmen, Sam/Jess
Word Count: 5,557 (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 - Part 3 - Part 4
The police had ruled it as a tragic accident according to the newspaper article that made it below the fold on the front page. They listed Michaela Johnson’s cause of death as an internal explosion in her car battery, which Dean had known definitely wasn’t the cause from looking at the photo of the damage to her vehicle that ran alongside the article - if the battery had exploded, the front end of the car would’ve been blown apart instead of just the damage it sustained from hitting a lamppost when the driver was killed. The article said that Michaela Johnson was a graduate student at KU and recommended anyone who knew her to feel free to go and talk to the campus’s mental health services.
Dean went to the library at the University of Kansas with a Thermos that he was sure was intended for soup but filled with coffee instead. He also brought a notebook with him, cutting out and pasting into it the articles on Sabrina Belmont’s and Michaela Johnson’s deaths. Not being a university student meant he couldn’t check anything out, but he hadn’t planned to, and he liked that should the research take too long, he was able to order food and have it delivered right to the library.
He called up Lawrence Journal-World, hoping that he wouldn’t have to go farther back than 1858. Dean also worked under the assumption that the deaths stayed regional based on the fact that these recent deaths were following the same pattern as those from forty two years ago. He also worked on the assumption that nothing happened between 1964 and 2006, reducing the amount of years he needed to look through by a third. With one hundred years of newspapers to go through, Dean was glad that he only needed to look in Decembers and Januarys.
He went back to 1964, starting with the elderly man that died in Atchison. Dean noticed that the article he had found before and was rereading now was a follow up written two weeks after the fact. He almost spit out the coffee he was drinking when he found the original article stating that Arthur Bea had died on December 21, 1964 - the exact date of Sabrina Belmont’s death albeit forty two years removed.
“Well that narrows it down,” Dean said to himself, writing down the specific dates he was searching for - December 21st and 28th then January 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th. He had scans of those pages printed to add to the notebook.
Dean got to work, usually stopping when a story’s title involved “freak accident” or “dead.” He also only stuck to one specific date, hoping the pattern stayed and that the years when these deaths happened kept the body count the same. Dean wasn’t going to look through six newspapers for each timeframe when he only had to look at one.
World War II ended and came back before Dean got what he thought was a match. On December 28, 1941 a little boy in Lawrence had died in what the town had called a power surge, which Dean might have believed was caused by an actual power surge if it wasn’t for the fact that the rest of the paper didn’t at all mention a power surge occurring in the area. He printed the scan and looked through the surrounding dates, finding what had confirmed his suspicions - similar deaths in Atchison the week before then afterwards in Holton, Leavenworth, Topeka, and finally in Oskaloosa.
He printed them all, putting them all in the notebook in reverse chronological order. Dean had, rather morbidly, he thought, left the first four pages blank to be added later, but he hoped that wouldn’t be the case. He knew he was probably getting obsessive about the case, but Dean couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that he would be able to stop it before more people died.
Grabbing the printed scans, Dean paused, catching a bit of an interview with someone in Leavenworth who had been neighbors with the deceased. “Funny thing, ain’t it?” a former United States Military Prison worker had commented to the paper. “We had an inmate die the same way back in 1926 - I’ll never forget the smell of ‘im. We’d thought it was a suicide.”
Dean had to force himself not to run to the microfiche viewing station. The quote had saved him hours of reading through fifteen years’ worth of newspapers. He was hoping that if there’d been a more recent death in a similar manner in Leavenworth the prison worker would have mentioned it instead of the one in 1926. He pulled up the dates in December 1925 and January 1926, reading them carefully in case other cases were mentioned, but this time he wasn’t so lucky. He jumped back a year, starting over the process of reading through the specific dates for each year again.
The work was slow, and Dean was glad he brought all of the coffee. It had been four hours already, and he was starting to wish he’d talked to Sam about the deaths already - his brother liked tediously dull reading much more than Dean ever had. He didn’t want Sam to think he’d lost it by harboring an interest in these deaths, though, so he needed to gather more evidence before bringing his brother into it. If finding the same pattern of deaths in two completely different years about forty and eighty years ago didn’t convince Sam that something strange was going on and that it looked like the pattern had started up again, Dean wasn’t sure what would.
After another hour and a half he thought he found something in 1913 but it turned out to be an actual lightning strike and the person didn’t die, which Dean thought was pretty badass, but not what he was looking for. Luckily he wasn’t that far from finding the next occurrences in 1910 and 1911. Dean had no idea how far back he was going to go, but he figured if he could find one more instance, it would be more than enough proof.
Six hours since he got to the library, Dean found the fifth instance that he was looking for. In December 1902 through January 1903, six people were killed by electrical incidences in their homes, which was especially strange since household electricity wasn’t even commonplace yet.
Printing off the last of the articles, Dean shoved them in the notebook at the appropriate pages, wondering, now, what exactly it was he was going to tell Sam. He wasn’t even certain himself what was going on - over sixty years of deaths in the exact same pattern and now it seemed to be starting again. But what was it? Dean’s head started to ache, a pain that felt like it was in the very center of his brain.
He rubbed at his eyes which were also feeling strained from looking at the bright screen in the darkened room. Dean decided that going home first, eating something, and popping a couple Advil was the way to go. The next victim in Holton wasn’t going to die for another five days - he had plenty of time.
+
He was in a house and Sam was there. Sam and a guy in a trucker hat with a beard and some cute blonde chick tied to a chair. Cute, but for some reason Dean knew that he hated her.
“An exorcism?” she asked scornfully. “Are you serious?”
Dean became aware of the fact that Sam was holding a book and reading from it, and based on the times he’d gone to church as a kid, Dean guessed it was Latin. “Oh we’re going for it, baby,” he was saying, feeling some sort of justice from the idea. “Head spinning, projectile vomiting - the whole nine yards.”
She started jerking around in the chair, groaning in pain. Dean heard Sam stop reading, like he was waiting for something. “I’m going to kill you,” she spat. “I’m going to rip the bones from your body.”
“No,” Dean replied emphatically, “you’re going to burn in hell unless you tell us where our dad is.” He waited for a beat, but she - Meg, his mind supplied from somewhere - was stubbornly refusing. “Well, at least you’ll get a nice tan.”
He nodded at Sam, who continued to read. Meg was shaking violently, screaming in pain. Sam stopped again, letting her speak, which she did through clenched teeth. “He begged for his life with tears in his eyes. He begged to see his sons one last time. That’s when I slit his throat.”
Sam looked over at Dean, nervous, afraid that she might be telling the truth. Dean got down, crouching in front of Meg, his face just inches from her own. “For your sake, I hope you’re lying. Because if it’s true, I swear to God, I will march into Hell myself, and I will slaughter each and every one of you evil sons of bitches.”
He backed away, and Sam started reading from the book again. “Perditionis venenum propinare. Vade, satana, inventor et magister omnis fallaciae, hostis humanae salutis.” The pages of a book on the table behind them started turning on their own, as if blown by a wind, but Dean couldn’t feel any air moving. “Humiliare sub potenti manu dei, contremisce et effuge, invocato a nobis sancto et terribili nomine, quem inferi tremunt.”
Meg kept on screaming in agony, shaking like she was having a seizure.
“Where is he?”
“You just won’t take ‘dead’ for an answer, will you?” she growled.
“Where is he?!” Dean repeated, barely keeping himself from shoving her backwards, from potentially pushing her out of the devil’s trap.
“Dead!”
“No, he’s not!” Dean yelled, knocking all the books off the table, listening to them crash to the floor, although it wasn’t nearly as satisfying as hitting her would’ve been. “He’s not dead; he can’t be.” Dean shot a look at Sam. “What are you looking at? Keep reading.”
The more Sam read, the more Meg screamed, louder and louder. Her chair began to move around inside the trap, like it was possessed too, and the lights were flickering. Suddenly her chair stopped. “He will be,” she said, hissing. Sam stopped reading instantly. “He’s not dead, but he will be after what we do to him.”
Dean’s jaw clenched and unclenched. “How do we know you’re telling the truth?”
“You don’t,” she replied. Dean glanced at Sam, silently telling him to continue reading, but before he could even get a word out Meg interrupted. “A building, okay?! In Jefferson City. I don’t know the address.”
“And the demon?” Sam spoke up. “The one we’re looking for - where is it?”
“I don’t know, I swear!” Meg said, clearly exhausted and desperate. Tears were streaming down her face and her breath was heavy. “That’s everything. That’s all I know.”
Dean studied her for a moment, the demon that had almost gotten all three of them killed back in Chicago. He looked to Sam. “Finish it.”
+
New Year’s Eve for the most part was made up of watching the Chiefs (who beat Jacksonville 35-30, clinching their spot as a wild card for the post-season), dinner with the family, and a party at their apartment that was mostly Carmen’s friends (who were perfectly nice but the last party they had Dean had a glass coffee table that one of them had managed to fall on and getting a replacement plus a cleaner to get all the blood out of the carpet had been expensive) plus Sam and Jess (who had actually cooked said family dinner). Dean hadn’t even thought to invite his friends because of all the mental preparations he’d been making trying to figure out how he was going to pull Sam aside and show him the articles. He also knew that as bad as Carmen’s friends could get, his were worse, and hosting parties meant you were forced to be responsible for the cleanup.
A good deal of cheap vodka later, it didn’t seem like that difficult of a task. Dean followed his brother into the kitchen first chance he got, grabbing the notebook from where he’d placed it nearby on the coffee table. “So…” he began, dragging out the vowel for way longer than he needed to. Ah, what the hell, Dean thought, he might as well just go for it. “Remember that girl that died a couple days ago?”
“Uh, yeah, Dean - we were right there when it happened, and Mom had to go to the hospital. It’s not something I’m just going to be able to forget.” Sam froze, realizing he just said that to his amnesiac brother. “Sorry - I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Eh, whatever,” Dean shrugged, thinking it would’ve been a bigger deal if he were sober and didn’t have a matter that he considered life or death on his hands. “Like water off a goose’s back.”
“A duck’s back,” Sam corrected, buzzed enough to wonder why it was specifically a duck and not a goose or a swan or even a penguin for that matter. He heard something break in the other room, quickly followed by a high-pitched apology that would’ve sounded sincere if it weren’t for all the giggling. Sam opened the refrigerator, perusing the different beers that had been brought to the party. “What about her?”
Dean’s attention snapped back to Sam and away from trying to figure out what he’d need to replace later. “Who?”
“The girl that died.”
“Oh… right… You see, she didn’t just die - someone killed her.” Sam stared at Dean, waiting for him to tell the punch line in whatever twisted joke he was trying to tell, but it didn’t come. The hollow pop of Sam uncapping a bottle broke the silence. “Look I have proof.” Dean slid the notebook down the counter, pulling out his flask as Sam looked through it, grabbing a tumbler and some ice.
“It says her car battery exploded,” Sam said, not even passed the most recent article yet. “It was an accident.”
“If I know anything, Sam, it’s how the inside of a car works, and I can tell you just by looking at the picture of the damage that isn’t what happened.” Dean fidgeted nervously. “Just keep going.”
Sam turned the page, seeing the article from last week, that the causes of death were apparently the same - burns and trauma typical of electrocution. He doubted they were connected, a coincidence much more likely, but Sam decided to humor Dean at least for a little while longer. He flipped the page and noticed that the articles were no longer newspaper cutouts but prints and he’d jumped back in time about forty years. There were six deaths, one a week for two months, and they’d all apparently died from a single, massive electric event. He kept going, and the articles kept coming - sixty years back, eighty years back, ninety years back, and nearly one hundred years back. Sam didn’t know what to make of it. There was a pattern, definitely - all the towns matched up as well as the days of the month and the order - but the years were random, and Sam could not believe in a serial killer that had been active since 1902. “This is fucked up.”
“You’re telling me,” Dean chuckled, taking a sip of his drink and scowling at how it tasted like you’d imagine paint stripper to.
“It’s also impossible.”
“What? You don’t think there’s some really old dude on a murder spree?”
“No, Dean, I don’t.”
“Well I don’t think that either.”
Sam took a long pull from the beer, eyeing his brother over the bottle until he swallowed. “So who do you think is doing it?”
Dean hesitated. He knew it couldn’t be the same person and the whole thing just gave him an eerie feeling, but he didn’t know who he thought was responsible. “Maybe it’s like a cult. The leader dies and his successors follow or something.”
“Or maybe,” Sam’s tone was mocking, and he was admittedly more drunk than he thought it was because he’d seemed to have lost control of his mouth at some point in the evening, “it’s a ghost, because those things are real, right, Dean? It’s a ghost and you’re seeing dead people, and if you give it what it wants, it will stop killing people and go on to Heaven or whatever.”
“I don’t remember any of that shit,” Dean said defensively, moving closer to Sam, trying to stare him down, which was difficult since Sam was taller and Dean’s eyes kept refusing to focus. “You remember - you were there!”
“I remember that my brother’s clearly gone insane and is now looking for things that aren’t there to try and help him sleep at night.”
Dean hadn’t planned on punching his brother - it just sort of happened. One moment he was standing there, strangely calm, and then the next his arm was swinging, too late to stop, and connected with Sam’s face.
Sam stared at him almost sorrowfully. “You can hit me all you want,” he said. “It won’t change anything.”
“I’m not trying to change anything,” Dean practically spat, all of a sudden having a headache.
On top of being pissed off Sam was now confused. He hadn’t said anything about Dean trying to change something. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“Whatever.” Sam left the kitchen - not midnight yet or not, he didn’t care. He wasn’t going to stick around for this. He found Jess, gently grabbing her arm to pull her away from the circle formed around one of Carmen’s friends who was telling a story involving a patient who’d gone in on Thanksgiving because he thought it’d be a good idea to put a turkey baster up his ass and went to the hospital when the grease had started to cause a burning sensation. “We gotta go.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Dean’s just being Dean,” he used as an explanation.
Dean had made himself wait a few minutes to calm down before walking out of the kitchen, catching sight of Sam and Jess about to slip out the door and a quizzical look from Carmen at the same time. Carmen got to him before Dean could get to the door, putting a hand on his shoulder and asking what was going on. He considered telling her about the deaths, about the notebook, about how he tried to get Sam’s help and ended up punching his brother in the face, but Dean decided against it. For some reason he felt like only Sam would be able to help him out on this one.
“I’ll be right back,” he told Carmen, going out into the hallway to try and get Sam to believe him, but they weren’t there. Not wanting to risk them driving off before he could get to the parking lot, Dean went outside and opened the kitchen window, which looked out over the lot. He saw Sam and Jess walk out of rear entrance and stuck his head out the window. “Holton on January 4th!” he yelled.
Sam looked in the direction his brother’s voice was coming from, pissed off yet starting to cave due to Dean’s persistence. “I hope you’re wrong,” he yelled back before getting in the car, his face sore, but Sam knew he deserved it. Getting punched by Dean had quickly sobered him, and he even admitted to Jess that he was being an ass when she wanted to know specifics on what had happened.
For what it was worth, Dean hoped that he was wrong, too. Just because he knew someone was going to die didn’t mean he knew who, and while Holton wasn’t a large town, Dean couldn’t exactly drive up there and go door-to-door hoping he’d be able to figure out who was next. One of the things he had wanted Sam’s help with was to try and find a connection between all of the victims, assuming there was one and the killer wasn’t just going by location and not particularly caring about who died specifically.
He pulled his head back in the window, shutting out the cold air behind him. Carmen was behind him, arms crossed, and looking far too serious for the amount of champagne she had been drinking. “What happened?”
“Sam called me insane, so I hit him,” it sounded childish, even to Dean. “Can it just be 2007 already? This year hasn’t been making an effort to leave me with warm and fuzzy feelings.”
“Do you want me to start sending people home?”
“And get stuck with all that champagne? No thanks - they can stay. You should get back out there before Elena breaks something else. I’ll be out in a little bit.”
“Okay,” Carmen said, relaxing her stance and taking one of Dean’s hands in her own, tracing the back of it with her thumb. “And no one thinks you’re crazy.”
I do, Dean thought, as he watched her walk out of the kitchen. He took his flask out of his back pocket, going over to the sink and draining its contents. Dean knew it was partly the alcohol’s fault that he was feeling so emotionally drawn tight. It was shitty vodka, anyway, so he didn’t feel bad wasting it.
They watched the countdown as the coverage alternated between New Orleans and Chicago, having a split screen on both cities for the final sixty seconds and then jumping to different cities all around the world afterwards. He kissed Carmen as they played Auld Lang Syne on the television, hearing the rest of the unopened champagne getting popped open behind them.
+
The holidays were always good for business - there never seemed to be a short supply of drunken morons smashing their cars into telephone poles or other peoples’ cars, especially heightened by the fact that the roads tended to get icy this time of year.
It was January 5th, and Dean was trying his best not to think about it. He’d avoided the newspapers and television all day, even turning off the shop radio, working in silence until Dean got around to hooking up an MP3 player to the speaker system. Something about singing along with James Hetfield as he worked made Dean feel better.
Out of the corner of his eye, Dean saw Mike waving at him, trying to get Dean’s attention, through the soundproof glass that shielded the office from the sounds of the garage. He put the drill down, grabbing a towel to try and wipe the car grease off of his arms, but it only smeared it around, the towel itself filthy. Dean saw that Mike was on the phone when he got into the office, arguing with whoever was on the other end of the line about something, and Mike used his free hand to point Dean outside. His gaze followed the direction Mike was pointing him in, freezing in place when he saw Sam just outside, leaning against the Impala.
They hadn’t spoken to each other since New Year’s Eve, which didn’t particularly bother either of them since they were used to not being in each other’s lives much. Dean didn’t think that Sam was making a point to avoid him, either - just because Sam was taking the quarter off didn’t mean that Jess was as well, and Dean was sure that she had to return to Stanford soon, and Dean wasn’t going to begrudge his brother for wanting to spend time with his fiancé.
He found himself slowly moving outside, noticing that Sam held a newspaper in his slightly shaking hands, looking pale. Sam’s eyes snapped to Dean’s the second he heard the door opening, his expression distressed. “Thomas Kane, sixteen years old, was found dead in the bathtub by his mother last night when she got home from work. Police ruled it as a suicide, but there were no plugged in devices in the tub with him.” Sam stared at his brother, blatantly freaked out. “How in the hell did you know this would happen?”
“You saw the notebook, Sam. There’s a pattern.” Dean clenched his jaw, trying to keep his temper in check and yelling at Sam on how they could’ve prevented this if only Sam had believed him. “I read about the first one two weeks ago, thought it was strange. They mentioned similar deaths in ’64 and ’65, so I looked those up. Then when Mom was in the hospital, and I heard about that girl, it was like the same thing. It’s happened five times before, Sam, maybe more. I don’t know who or what is causing it - I just know I have this feeling in my gut that I need your help.”
“Is this going to be like that thing with the… with the djinn?”
“If I could remember anything about that night I’d answer that for you.”
Sam stared at his brother for a moment. “I don’t know how you think I can help.”
“You’re better at the thinking stuff than I am. Let’s say it’s like… a cult or something, all right? It’s not like this happens every year, and the police don’t seem to have a clue that something’s even up. Three more people are going to die this month before it ends, and there’s no way to know when it might happen again after that. If whoever is responsible is going to get caught it’s gotta be now.” Dean stopped, catching his breath. He’d gotten faster and faster with each word that came out of his mouth. “I mean, what would you be going to law school for if not to protect the innocent?”
Taking in a deep breath, Sam wondered if he was going to end up regretting this. He had images in his head of telling the police, becoming suspects when they had known where and when someone was going to die, if not guilty themselves then at least as accessories. Sam was certain he wouldn’t be in law school much longer once he had a rap sheet. “Okay,” he said, surprising Dean as much as he was surprising himself.
“Okay?”
“Okay,” Sam affirmed, shrugging half-heartedly. “I drove Jess to the airport this morning. I’m not going back to school until spring quarter, and I’m not working, so what else am I going to do with my time?” He watched Dean pull his keys out of the back pocket of his jeans and climb into the Impala’s driver’s seat. “Um… where are you going?”
“I thought we’re going to do this.”
“We are, but aren’t you supposed to be working?”
Dean shrugged. “Mike’s here, so I can take off.” He looked at his brother who was still standing next to the car. “Are you going to get in or just stand there so I have to run you over on my way out?”
Sam went around the front of the car, climbing into the passenger seat of the car he hadn’t sat in since that long drive back to Lawrence from Joliet. He’d made a point to avoid it and the sense of dread and anxiety he now associated it with. It had been Sam’s car they’d taken when they went Christmas shopping since, as much as Dean hated other people driving him around, he didn’t want to deal with crazy ass drivers when he still had the painkillers in his system. Sam swore he could still smell lingering traces of Dean’s blood, which had been soaked into his clothes and probably freaked out the people at the gas station he had stopped at halfway home for coffee and a sandwich.
“The notebook’s in the glove compartment,” Dean said, breaking Sam out of his thoughts. “You can stick the new one on the third page.”
“What’s this?” Sam asked, picking up a business card that had fallen out of the glove compartment when he pulled out the notebook. “Missouri Moseley - Psychic. Is this for real?”
“How would I know? I haven’t gone to get a reading or whatever psychics call what they do these days. Charlie gave me the card, said something about Missouri being to help me in ways Charlie couldn’t or something.”
“Maybe she’s a prostitute,” Sam said wryly as he put the card back where it had come from.
“Yeah… right… Like I’ve ever needed to pay for sex.”
“Where are we going, anyway?”
“Library. If we’re going to figure out who’s next, we gotta find a connection between the people that have already died. They always have connections, right?”
“I didn’t know you knew what a library was.”
“Hey I had to do a hell of a lot of reading to get that damn notebook together. I was staring at microfiche for six hours straight.” Dean glanced over at Sam quickly, seeing his thumbs flying across the keyboard of his Treo. “What are you doing?”
“There’s a searchable database that has like every crime in recorded American history logged into it. I’m going to borrow a login and password from a friend and then finding information about these people won’t take nearly as long.”
“I knew there was a reason I thought you’d be helpful.”
Sam’s friend got back to him by the time he and Dean had parked and were walking into the library. They secreted themselves in the corner of a computer room that was mostly empty, Dean holding the notebook in front of him somewhat protectively as Sam entered the name of yesterday’s victim.
Dean was surprised at how much information Sam could pull up so quickly. They had police reports, crime scene photographs, autopsy reports, statements from family and friends, and a biography that didn’t give much more than the basics. The kid did well in school, stayed out of trouble, and was remarkably unremarkable.
They went on to the girl from the week before, again, she seemed normal. Statements from her friends said that she was meeting them at Free State for her birthday. “Huh,” Dean said, looking at Sam whose brows were furrowed, like he was trying to find what Dean found so interesting before it was pointed out to him. “Michaela died on her birthday.”
Sam looked at the date, like perhaps he didn’t believe his brother, but it was right there on the screen - date of birth and date of death were the same just twenty six years apart. Flipping back to Thomas’s file again, Sam saw that he had also died on his birthday.
Dean started reading off the other names he had gathered along with the dates and towns they’d died in so the searches would be faster, looking to see if that simple fact was the connection. All of them panned out.
“So it’s a cult that targets people in these specific towns and if someone has a birthday on one of their dates, they kill them,” Sam said, keeping with the word “cult” because he liked how if left open the possibility that the killer could still be human. “Maybe it’s ritualistic? Like the years are unevenly spaced because the, um, requirements are so specific?”
“Dude that’s just fucking creepy.” Dean looked at the deaths from forty two years ago. “So why not earlier? With these deaths the youngest was eleven. Couldn’t they have killed the baby the year after?”
“Now who’s being creepy?” Sam asked, disturbed by the whole concept of it. “So the next one is going to be on the 11th in Leavenworth - we should look up who in that town has a birthday coming up.”
“Then what? Call the police?”
“Well what else are we supposed to do? We can’t take care of this ourselves, Dean. If we leave an anonymous tip, catching someone in the attempt would be enough without needing us to testify or risk looking like suspects ourselves.”
Dean shifted uncomfortably, wishing that he had more answers. He couldn’t help but remember the dreams he’d been having since he woke up in the hospital, ones so vivid that he couldn’t help but think they were real, ones that corresponded so closely to what Dean himself said on tape during his hypnosis sessions with Charlie. He doubted that the police would be able to help them, but he didn’t know how to tell that to Sam.
Or maybe Dean really was going insane. Maybe it really was some sort of cult, or a coincidence, or a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil. Maybe he really was looking for something that wasn’t there to make himself feel better about losing his memory, about all the strange shit he said during the hypnosis sessions and dreams about fires and Sam shooting him and exorcising blonde girls.
“Just do what you think is best,” Dean said, leaning back in the chair as Sam continued to search through the residents of Leavenworth, and wondering if he wanted no one to turn up so no one else would die, or if he wanted a name to pop up because it would mean that he wasn’t making a mountain out of a molehill.
Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10
Rating: R
Pairings: Dean/Carmen, Sam/Jess
Word Count: 5,557 (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 - Part 3 - Part 4
The police had ruled it as a tragic accident according to the newspaper article that made it below the fold on the front page. They listed Michaela Johnson’s cause of death as an internal explosion in her car battery, which Dean had known definitely wasn’t the cause from looking at the photo of the damage to her vehicle that ran alongside the article - if the battery had exploded, the front end of the car would’ve been blown apart instead of just the damage it sustained from hitting a lamppost when the driver was killed. The article said that Michaela Johnson was a graduate student at KU and recommended anyone who knew her to feel free to go and talk to the campus’s mental health services.
Dean went to the library at the University of Kansas with a Thermos that he was sure was intended for soup but filled with coffee instead. He also brought a notebook with him, cutting out and pasting into it the articles on Sabrina Belmont’s and Michaela Johnson’s deaths. Not being a university student meant he couldn’t check anything out, but he hadn’t planned to, and he liked that should the research take too long, he was able to order food and have it delivered right to the library.
He called up Lawrence Journal-World, hoping that he wouldn’t have to go farther back than 1858. Dean also worked under the assumption that the deaths stayed regional based on the fact that these recent deaths were following the same pattern as those from forty two years ago. He also worked on the assumption that nothing happened between 1964 and 2006, reducing the amount of years he needed to look through by a third. With one hundred years of newspapers to go through, Dean was glad that he only needed to look in Decembers and Januarys.
He went back to 1964, starting with the elderly man that died in Atchison. Dean noticed that the article he had found before and was rereading now was a follow up written two weeks after the fact. He almost spit out the coffee he was drinking when he found the original article stating that Arthur Bea had died on December 21, 1964 - the exact date of Sabrina Belmont’s death albeit forty two years removed.
“Well that narrows it down,” Dean said to himself, writing down the specific dates he was searching for - December 21st and 28th then January 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th. He had scans of those pages printed to add to the notebook.
Dean got to work, usually stopping when a story’s title involved “freak accident” or “dead.” He also only stuck to one specific date, hoping the pattern stayed and that the years when these deaths happened kept the body count the same. Dean wasn’t going to look through six newspapers for each timeframe when he only had to look at one.
World War II ended and came back before Dean got what he thought was a match. On December 28, 1941 a little boy in Lawrence had died in what the town had called a power surge, which Dean might have believed was caused by an actual power surge if it wasn’t for the fact that the rest of the paper didn’t at all mention a power surge occurring in the area. He printed the scan and looked through the surrounding dates, finding what had confirmed his suspicions - similar deaths in Atchison the week before then afterwards in Holton, Leavenworth, Topeka, and finally in Oskaloosa.
He printed them all, putting them all in the notebook in reverse chronological order. Dean had, rather morbidly, he thought, left the first four pages blank to be added later, but he hoped that wouldn’t be the case. He knew he was probably getting obsessive about the case, but Dean couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that he would be able to stop it before more people died.
Grabbing the printed scans, Dean paused, catching a bit of an interview with someone in Leavenworth who had been neighbors with the deceased. “Funny thing, ain’t it?” a former United States Military Prison worker had commented to the paper. “We had an inmate die the same way back in 1926 - I’ll never forget the smell of ‘im. We’d thought it was a suicide.”
Dean had to force himself not to run to the microfiche viewing station. The quote had saved him hours of reading through fifteen years’ worth of newspapers. He was hoping that if there’d been a more recent death in a similar manner in Leavenworth the prison worker would have mentioned it instead of the one in 1926. He pulled up the dates in December 1925 and January 1926, reading them carefully in case other cases were mentioned, but this time he wasn’t so lucky. He jumped back a year, starting over the process of reading through the specific dates for each year again.
The work was slow, and Dean was glad he brought all of the coffee. It had been four hours already, and he was starting to wish he’d talked to Sam about the deaths already - his brother liked tediously dull reading much more than Dean ever had. He didn’t want Sam to think he’d lost it by harboring an interest in these deaths, though, so he needed to gather more evidence before bringing his brother into it. If finding the same pattern of deaths in two completely different years about forty and eighty years ago didn’t convince Sam that something strange was going on and that it looked like the pattern had started up again, Dean wasn’t sure what would.
After another hour and a half he thought he found something in 1913 but it turned out to be an actual lightning strike and the person didn’t die, which Dean thought was pretty badass, but not what he was looking for. Luckily he wasn’t that far from finding the next occurrences in 1910 and 1911. Dean had no idea how far back he was going to go, but he figured if he could find one more instance, it would be more than enough proof.
Six hours since he got to the library, Dean found the fifth instance that he was looking for. In December 1902 through January 1903, six people were killed by electrical incidences in their homes, which was especially strange since household electricity wasn’t even commonplace yet.
Printing off the last of the articles, Dean shoved them in the notebook at the appropriate pages, wondering, now, what exactly it was he was going to tell Sam. He wasn’t even certain himself what was going on - over sixty years of deaths in the exact same pattern and now it seemed to be starting again. But what was it? Dean’s head started to ache, a pain that felt like it was in the very center of his brain.
He rubbed at his eyes which were also feeling strained from looking at the bright screen in the darkened room. Dean decided that going home first, eating something, and popping a couple Advil was the way to go. The next victim in Holton wasn’t going to die for another five days - he had plenty of time.
+
He was in a house and Sam was there. Sam and a guy in a trucker hat with a beard and some cute blonde chick tied to a chair. Cute, but for some reason Dean knew that he hated her.
“An exorcism?” she asked scornfully. “Are you serious?”
Dean became aware of the fact that Sam was holding a book and reading from it, and based on the times he’d gone to church as a kid, Dean guessed it was Latin. “Oh we’re going for it, baby,” he was saying, feeling some sort of justice from the idea. “Head spinning, projectile vomiting - the whole nine yards.”
She started jerking around in the chair, groaning in pain. Dean heard Sam stop reading, like he was waiting for something. “I’m going to kill you,” she spat. “I’m going to rip the bones from your body.”
“No,” Dean replied emphatically, “you’re going to burn in hell unless you tell us where our dad is.” He waited for a beat, but she - Meg, his mind supplied from somewhere - was stubbornly refusing. “Well, at least you’ll get a nice tan.”
He nodded at Sam, who continued to read. Meg was shaking violently, screaming in pain. Sam stopped again, letting her speak, which she did through clenched teeth. “He begged for his life with tears in his eyes. He begged to see his sons one last time. That’s when I slit his throat.”
Sam looked over at Dean, nervous, afraid that she might be telling the truth. Dean got down, crouching in front of Meg, his face just inches from her own. “For your sake, I hope you’re lying. Because if it’s true, I swear to God, I will march into Hell myself, and I will slaughter each and every one of you evil sons of bitches.”
He backed away, and Sam started reading from the book again. “Perditionis venenum propinare. Vade, satana, inventor et magister omnis fallaciae, hostis humanae salutis.” The pages of a book on the table behind them started turning on their own, as if blown by a wind, but Dean couldn’t feel any air moving. “Humiliare sub potenti manu dei, contremisce et effuge, invocato a nobis sancto et terribili nomine, quem inferi tremunt.”
Meg kept on screaming in agony, shaking like she was having a seizure.
“Where is he?”
“You just won’t take ‘dead’ for an answer, will you?” she growled.
“Where is he?!” Dean repeated, barely keeping himself from shoving her backwards, from potentially pushing her out of the devil’s trap.
“Dead!”
“No, he’s not!” Dean yelled, knocking all the books off the table, listening to them crash to the floor, although it wasn’t nearly as satisfying as hitting her would’ve been. “He’s not dead; he can’t be.” Dean shot a look at Sam. “What are you looking at? Keep reading.”
The more Sam read, the more Meg screamed, louder and louder. Her chair began to move around inside the trap, like it was possessed too, and the lights were flickering. Suddenly her chair stopped. “He will be,” she said, hissing. Sam stopped reading instantly. “He’s not dead, but he will be after what we do to him.”
Dean’s jaw clenched and unclenched. “How do we know you’re telling the truth?”
“You don’t,” she replied. Dean glanced at Sam, silently telling him to continue reading, but before he could even get a word out Meg interrupted. “A building, okay?! In Jefferson City. I don’t know the address.”
“And the demon?” Sam spoke up. “The one we’re looking for - where is it?”
“I don’t know, I swear!” Meg said, clearly exhausted and desperate. Tears were streaming down her face and her breath was heavy. “That’s everything. That’s all I know.”
Dean studied her for a moment, the demon that had almost gotten all three of them killed back in Chicago. He looked to Sam. “Finish it.”
+
New Year’s Eve for the most part was made up of watching the Chiefs (who beat Jacksonville 35-30, clinching their spot as a wild card for the post-season), dinner with the family, and a party at their apartment that was mostly Carmen’s friends (who were perfectly nice but the last party they had Dean had a glass coffee table that one of them had managed to fall on and getting a replacement plus a cleaner to get all the blood out of the carpet had been expensive) plus Sam and Jess (who had actually cooked said family dinner). Dean hadn’t even thought to invite his friends because of all the mental preparations he’d been making trying to figure out how he was going to pull Sam aside and show him the articles. He also knew that as bad as Carmen’s friends could get, his were worse, and hosting parties meant you were forced to be responsible for the cleanup.
A good deal of cheap vodka later, it didn’t seem like that difficult of a task. Dean followed his brother into the kitchen first chance he got, grabbing the notebook from where he’d placed it nearby on the coffee table. “So…” he began, dragging out the vowel for way longer than he needed to. Ah, what the hell, Dean thought, he might as well just go for it. “Remember that girl that died a couple days ago?”
“Uh, yeah, Dean - we were right there when it happened, and Mom had to go to the hospital. It’s not something I’m just going to be able to forget.” Sam froze, realizing he just said that to his amnesiac brother. “Sorry - I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Eh, whatever,” Dean shrugged, thinking it would’ve been a bigger deal if he were sober and didn’t have a matter that he considered life or death on his hands. “Like water off a goose’s back.”
“A duck’s back,” Sam corrected, buzzed enough to wonder why it was specifically a duck and not a goose or a swan or even a penguin for that matter. He heard something break in the other room, quickly followed by a high-pitched apology that would’ve sounded sincere if it weren’t for all the giggling. Sam opened the refrigerator, perusing the different beers that had been brought to the party. “What about her?”
Dean’s attention snapped back to Sam and away from trying to figure out what he’d need to replace later. “Who?”
“The girl that died.”
“Oh… right… You see, she didn’t just die - someone killed her.” Sam stared at Dean, waiting for him to tell the punch line in whatever twisted joke he was trying to tell, but it didn’t come. The hollow pop of Sam uncapping a bottle broke the silence. “Look I have proof.” Dean slid the notebook down the counter, pulling out his flask as Sam looked through it, grabbing a tumbler and some ice.
“It says her car battery exploded,” Sam said, not even passed the most recent article yet. “It was an accident.”
“If I know anything, Sam, it’s how the inside of a car works, and I can tell you just by looking at the picture of the damage that isn’t what happened.” Dean fidgeted nervously. “Just keep going.”
Sam turned the page, seeing the article from last week, that the causes of death were apparently the same - burns and trauma typical of electrocution. He doubted they were connected, a coincidence much more likely, but Sam decided to humor Dean at least for a little while longer. He flipped the page and noticed that the articles were no longer newspaper cutouts but prints and he’d jumped back in time about forty years. There were six deaths, one a week for two months, and they’d all apparently died from a single, massive electric event. He kept going, and the articles kept coming - sixty years back, eighty years back, ninety years back, and nearly one hundred years back. Sam didn’t know what to make of it. There was a pattern, definitely - all the towns matched up as well as the days of the month and the order - but the years were random, and Sam could not believe in a serial killer that had been active since 1902. “This is fucked up.”
“You’re telling me,” Dean chuckled, taking a sip of his drink and scowling at how it tasted like you’d imagine paint stripper to.
“It’s also impossible.”
“What? You don’t think there’s some really old dude on a murder spree?”
“No, Dean, I don’t.”
“Well I don’t think that either.”
Sam took a long pull from the beer, eyeing his brother over the bottle until he swallowed. “So who do you think is doing it?”
Dean hesitated. He knew it couldn’t be the same person and the whole thing just gave him an eerie feeling, but he didn’t know who he thought was responsible. “Maybe it’s like a cult. The leader dies and his successors follow or something.”
“Or maybe,” Sam’s tone was mocking, and he was admittedly more drunk than he thought it was because he’d seemed to have lost control of his mouth at some point in the evening, “it’s a ghost, because those things are real, right, Dean? It’s a ghost and you’re seeing dead people, and if you give it what it wants, it will stop killing people and go on to Heaven or whatever.”
“I don’t remember any of that shit,” Dean said defensively, moving closer to Sam, trying to stare him down, which was difficult since Sam was taller and Dean’s eyes kept refusing to focus. “You remember - you were there!”
“I remember that my brother’s clearly gone insane and is now looking for things that aren’t there to try and help him sleep at night.”
Dean hadn’t planned on punching his brother - it just sort of happened. One moment he was standing there, strangely calm, and then the next his arm was swinging, too late to stop, and connected with Sam’s face.
Sam stared at him almost sorrowfully. “You can hit me all you want,” he said. “It won’t change anything.”
“I’m not trying to change anything,” Dean practically spat, all of a sudden having a headache.
On top of being pissed off Sam was now confused. He hadn’t said anything about Dean trying to change something. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“Whatever.” Sam left the kitchen - not midnight yet or not, he didn’t care. He wasn’t going to stick around for this. He found Jess, gently grabbing her arm to pull her away from the circle formed around one of Carmen’s friends who was telling a story involving a patient who’d gone in on Thanksgiving because he thought it’d be a good idea to put a turkey baster up his ass and went to the hospital when the grease had started to cause a burning sensation. “We gotta go.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Dean’s just being Dean,” he used as an explanation.
Dean had made himself wait a few minutes to calm down before walking out of the kitchen, catching sight of Sam and Jess about to slip out the door and a quizzical look from Carmen at the same time. Carmen got to him before Dean could get to the door, putting a hand on his shoulder and asking what was going on. He considered telling her about the deaths, about the notebook, about how he tried to get Sam’s help and ended up punching his brother in the face, but Dean decided against it. For some reason he felt like only Sam would be able to help him out on this one.
“I’ll be right back,” he told Carmen, going out into the hallway to try and get Sam to believe him, but they weren’t there. Not wanting to risk them driving off before he could get to the parking lot, Dean went outside and opened the kitchen window, which looked out over the lot. He saw Sam and Jess walk out of rear entrance and stuck his head out the window. “Holton on January 4th!” he yelled.
Sam looked in the direction his brother’s voice was coming from, pissed off yet starting to cave due to Dean’s persistence. “I hope you’re wrong,” he yelled back before getting in the car, his face sore, but Sam knew he deserved it. Getting punched by Dean had quickly sobered him, and he even admitted to Jess that he was being an ass when she wanted to know specifics on what had happened.
For what it was worth, Dean hoped that he was wrong, too. Just because he knew someone was going to die didn’t mean he knew who, and while Holton wasn’t a large town, Dean couldn’t exactly drive up there and go door-to-door hoping he’d be able to figure out who was next. One of the things he had wanted Sam’s help with was to try and find a connection between all of the victims, assuming there was one and the killer wasn’t just going by location and not particularly caring about who died specifically.
He pulled his head back in the window, shutting out the cold air behind him. Carmen was behind him, arms crossed, and looking far too serious for the amount of champagne she had been drinking. “What happened?”
“Sam called me insane, so I hit him,” it sounded childish, even to Dean. “Can it just be 2007 already? This year hasn’t been making an effort to leave me with warm and fuzzy feelings.”
“Do you want me to start sending people home?”
“And get stuck with all that champagne? No thanks - they can stay. You should get back out there before Elena breaks something else. I’ll be out in a little bit.”
“Okay,” Carmen said, relaxing her stance and taking one of Dean’s hands in her own, tracing the back of it with her thumb. “And no one thinks you’re crazy.”
I do, Dean thought, as he watched her walk out of the kitchen. He took his flask out of his back pocket, going over to the sink and draining its contents. Dean knew it was partly the alcohol’s fault that he was feeling so emotionally drawn tight. It was shitty vodka, anyway, so he didn’t feel bad wasting it.
They watched the countdown as the coverage alternated between New Orleans and Chicago, having a split screen on both cities for the final sixty seconds and then jumping to different cities all around the world afterwards. He kissed Carmen as they played Auld Lang Syne on the television, hearing the rest of the unopened champagne getting popped open behind them.
+
The holidays were always good for business - there never seemed to be a short supply of drunken morons smashing their cars into telephone poles or other peoples’ cars, especially heightened by the fact that the roads tended to get icy this time of year.
It was January 5th, and Dean was trying his best not to think about it. He’d avoided the newspapers and television all day, even turning off the shop radio, working in silence until Dean got around to hooking up an MP3 player to the speaker system. Something about singing along with James Hetfield as he worked made Dean feel better.
Out of the corner of his eye, Dean saw Mike waving at him, trying to get Dean’s attention, through the soundproof glass that shielded the office from the sounds of the garage. He put the drill down, grabbing a towel to try and wipe the car grease off of his arms, but it only smeared it around, the towel itself filthy. Dean saw that Mike was on the phone when he got into the office, arguing with whoever was on the other end of the line about something, and Mike used his free hand to point Dean outside. His gaze followed the direction Mike was pointing him in, freezing in place when he saw Sam just outside, leaning against the Impala.
They hadn’t spoken to each other since New Year’s Eve, which didn’t particularly bother either of them since they were used to not being in each other’s lives much. Dean didn’t think that Sam was making a point to avoid him, either - just because Sam was taking the quarter off didn’t mean that Jess was as well, and Dean was sure that she had to return to Stanford soon, and Dean wasn’t going to begrudge his brother for wanting to spend time with his fiancé.
He found himself slowly moving outside, noticing that Sam held a newspaper in his slightly shaking hands, looking pale. Sam’s eyes snapped to Dean’s the second he heard the door opening, his expression distressed. “Thomas Kane, sixteen years old, was found dead in the bathtub by his mother last night when she got home from work. Police ruled it as a suicide, but there were no plugged in devices in the tub with him.” Sam stared at his brother, blatantly freaked out. “How in the hell did you know this would happen?”
“You saw the notebook, Sam. There’s a pattern.” Dean clenched his jaw, trying to keep his temper in check and yelling at Sam on how they could’ve prevented this if only Sam had believed him. “I read about the first one two weeks ago, thought it was strange. They mentioned similar deaths in ’64 and ’65, so I looked those up. Then when Mom was in the hospital, and I heard about that girl, it was like the same thing. It’s happened five times before, Sam, maybe more. I don’t know who or what is causing it - I just know I have this feeling in my gut that I need your help.”
“Is this going to be like that thing with the… with the djinn?”
“If I could remember anything about that night I’d answer that for you.”
Sam stared at his brother for a moment. “I don’t know how you think I can help.”
“You’re better at the thinking stuff than I am. Let’s say it’s like… a cult or something, all right? It’s not like this happens every year, and the police don’t seem to have a clue that something’s even up. Three more people are going to die this month before it ends, and there’s no way to know when it might happen again after that. If whoever is responsible is going to get caught it’s gotta be now.” Dean stopped, catching his breath. He’d gotten faster and faster with each word that came out of his mouth. “I mean, what would you be going to law school for if not to protect the innocent?”
Taking in a deep breath, Sam wondered if he was going to end up regretting this. He had images in his head of telling the police, becoming suspects when they had known where and when someone was going to die, if not guilty themselves then at least as accessories. Sam was certain he wouldn’t be in law school much longer once he had a rap sheet. “Okay,” he said, surprising Dean as much as he was surprising himself.
“Okay?”
“Okay,” Sam affirmed, shrugging half-heartedly. “I drove Jess to the airport this morning. I’m not going back to school until spring quarter, and I’m not working, so what else am I going to do with my time?” He watched Dean pull his keys out of the back pocket of his jeans and climb into the Impala’s driver’s seat. “Um… where are you going?”
“I thought we’re going to do this.”
“We are, but aren’t you supposed to be working?”
Dean shrugged. “Mike’s here, so I can take off.” He looked at his brother who was still standing next to the car. “Are you going to get in or just stand there so I have to run you over on my way out?”
Sam went around the front of the car, climbing into the passenger seat of the car he hadn’t sat in since that long drive back to Lawrence from Joliet. He’d made a point to avoid it and the sense of dread and anxiety he now associated it with. It had been Sam’s car they’d taken when they went Christmas shopping since, as much as Dean hated other people driving him around, he didn’t want to deal with crazy ass drivers when he still had the painkillers in his system. Sam swore he could still smell lingering traces of Dean’s blood, which had been soaked into his clothes and probably freaked out the people at the gas station he had stopped at halfway home for coffee and a sandwich.
“The notebook’s in the glove compartment,” Dean said, breaking Sam out of his thoughts. “You can stick the new one on the third page.”
“What’s this?” Sam asked, picking up a business card that had fallen out of the glove compartment when he pulled out the notebook. “Missouri Moseley - Psychic. Is this for real?”
“How would I know? I haven’t gone to get a reading or whatever psychics call what they do these days. Charlie gave me the card, said something about Missouri being to help me in ways Charlie couldn’t or something.”
“Maybe she’s a prostitute,” Sam said wryly as he put the card back where it had come from.
“Yeah… right… Like I’ve ever needed to pay for sex.”
“Where are we going, anyway?”
“Library. If we’re going to figure out who’s next, we gotta find a connection between the people that have already died. They always have connections, right?”
“I didn’t know you knew what a library was.”
“Hey I had to do a hell of a lot of reading to get that damn notebook together. I was staring at microfiche for six hours straight.” Dean glanced over at Sam quickly, seeing his thumbs flying across the keyboard of his Treo. “What are you doing?”
“There’s a searchable database that has like every crime in recorded American history logged into it. I’m going to borrow a login and password from a friend and then finding information about these people won’t take nearly as long.”
“I knew there was a reason I thought you’d be helpful.”
Sam’s friend got back to him by the time he and Dean had parked and were walking into the library. They secreted themselves in the corner of a computer room that was mostly empty, Dean holding the notebook in front of him somewhat protectively as Sam entered the name of yesterday’s victim.
Dean was surprised at how much information Sam could pull up so quickly. They had police reports, crime scene photographs, autopsy reports, statements from family and friends, and a biography that didn’t give much more than the basics. The kid did well in school, stayed out of trouble, and was remarkably unremarkable.
They went on to the girl from the week before, again, she seemed normal. Statements from her friends said that she was meeting them at Free State for her birthday. “Huh,” Dean said, looking at Sam whose brows were furrowed, like he was trying to find what Dean found so interesting before it was pointed out to him. “Michaela died on her birthday.”
Sam looked at the date, like perhaps he didn’t believe his brother, but it was right there on the screen - date of birth and date of death were the same just twenty six years apart. Flipping back to Thomas’s file again, Sam saw that he had also died on his birthday.
Dean started reading off the other names he had gathered along with the dates and towns they’d died in so the searches would be faster, looking to see if that simple fact was the connection. All of them panned out.
“So it’s a cult that targets people in these specific towns and if someone has a birthday on one of their dates, they kill them,” Sam said, keeping with the word “cult” because he liked how if left open the possibility that the killer could still be human. “Maybe it’s ritualistic? Like the years are unevenly spaced because the, um, requirements are so specific?”
“Dude that’s just fucking creepy.” Dean looked at the deaths from forty two years ago. “So why not earlier? With these deaths the youngest was eleven. Couldn’t they have killed the baby the year after?”
“Now who’s being creepy?” Sam asked, disturbed by the whole concept of it. “So the next one is going to be on the 11th in Leavenworth - we should look up who in that town has a birthday coming up.”
“Then what? Call the police?”
“Well what else are we supposed to do? We can’t take care of this ourselves, Dean. If we leave an anonymous tip, catching someone in the attempt would be enough without needing us to testify or risk looking like suspects ourselves.”
Dean shifted uncomfortably, wishing that he had more answers. He couldn’t help but remember the dreams he’d been having since he woke up in the hospital, ones so vivid that he couldn’t help but think they were real, ones that corresponded so closely to what Dean himself said on tape during his hypnosis sessions with Charlie. He doubted that the police would be able to help them, but he didn’t know how to tell that to Sam.
Or maybe Dean really was going insane. Maybe it really was some sort of cult, or a coincidence, or a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil. Maybe he really was looking for something that wasn’t there to make himself feel better about losing his memory, about all the strange shit he said during the hypnosis sessions and dreams about fires and Sam shooting him and exorcising blonde girls.
“Just do what you think is best,” Dean said, leaning back in the chair as Sam continued to search through the residents of Leavenworth, and wondering if he wanted no one to turn up so no one else would die, or if he wanted a name to pop up because it would mean that he wasn’t making a mountain out of a molehill.
Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10