An End Has a Start (Dean/Carmen, Sam/Jess R) 8/10
Title: An End Has a Start - Part 8
Rating: R
Pairings: Dean/Carmen, Sam/Jess
Word Count: 3,887 (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 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7
Dean could feel Sam staring at him as they drove on the highway in silence, so Dean steered the Impala across the road, skidding to a stop on the shoulder on the other side of the road. Dean climbed out of the car, getting out to sit on the hood, and Sam followed. “Dean… What is it?”
“I’m sorry. For the way I’ve been acting.” Sam sat beside him on the hood of the car, listening patiently. “And for Dad. He was your dad, too, and it’s my fault he’s gone.”
“What are you talking about?” Sam pressed.
Dean looked at his brother sadly. “I know you’ve been thinking it, and, well, so have I. It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. Back at the hospital I made a full recovery. It was a miracle.” He couldn’t help but spit out that last word bitterly. “Then five minutes later Dad’s dead and the Colt’s gone.”
“Dean-”
“You can’t tell me there’s no connection,” he interrupted, not wanting to hear whatever trite condolance he was sure that Sam was about to utter. “I don’t know how the demon was involved. I don’t know exactly how the whole thing went down. But Dad’s dead because of me, and that much I do know.”
“We don’t know that,” Sam argued, his misplaced optimism something Dean both loved and hated his brother for. “Not for sure.”
Dean could feel his eyes welling up, but he was just so tired that he couldn’t hold them back anymore. So tired of pretending when the both of them knew that everything was just so fucked up. “Sam… You and Dad, you’re the most important people in my life. And now…” He drew in a shaky breath. “I never should have come back, Sam - it wasn’t natural, and now look what’s come of it.” He looked at his brother. “I was dead, and I should have stayed dead.” Dean looked back away, across the mountainview that he had pulled over at. “You wanted to know how I was feeling? Well, that’s it,” he said quietly. “So tell me - what could you possibly say to make that all right?”
+
Researching boys that were killed in Kansas sometime in the nineteenth century was, in Dean’s opinion, a huge pain in the ass, although a necessary one. He was trying to identify the ghost boy while Sam was looking into who would be the next target. January 25th had an ominous sound to it, especially since if they didn’t manage to destroy the spirit, an individual in Oskaloosa would be killed. Dean understood that even if they didn’t manage to stop the last one they could still look for where the kid had been buried and salt and burn the body, effectively stopping anything that would have otherwise come in the future, but Dean wanted the satisfaction of saving at least one person when it had been nearly a month since he had discovered the pattern.
Oskaloosa was a small town - less than one square mile for all nearly twelve hundred residents but still referred to as a city - so it didn’t take Sam very long to get results. Only one individual had a January 25th birthday.
“Jaime Struthers,” Sam announced, not even looking up from his computer. “She’s a third grade teacher at Oskaloosa Elementary. She’s been engaged for two years now to her boyfriend who has three months left in Iraq.”
They were at Dean’s apartment, Sam stealing wireless from the coffee house across the street with his own laptop as Dean learned the perks of having a library card - he could access the microfiche through the internet with the proper access codes instead of having to actually go to the library and sit in a dark room for hours on end.
Dean propped himself up against the desk on his elbow, leaning his head into his hands. “He’ll get the last phone call he ever imagined getting if we don’t find out where the dead kid was buried.”
“Assuming he was buried and the grave was marked.” Sam was feeling pessimistic about the whole situation. They didn’t even know where to begin. It wasn’t that he was already thinking of Jaime Struthers as another victim, but he wasn’t going to get his hopes up and worried that Dean might not be doing the same.
“I don’t get why there’s six different towns here - Missouri made it sound like spirits have a very specific, limited range. This one can go from one city to another that’s sixty miles away.” Dean cracked his knuckles before returning to scrolling through pictures of documents so old that they were now locked away from light and moisture so they wouldn’t fall apart.
“I think it’s specific to this case,” Sam said. He’d done some thinking on the subject, and this was the best explanation he had been able to come up with. “This ghost uses electricity to kill people. From what Missouri said, how spirits can be picked up by electronic devises and by listening to electromagnetic frequencies, I think they are, basically, in themselves electric. So I’d imagine that it wouldn’t be difficult for them to travel through power lines. I think there’s a reason he’s using those towns, though, and the dates. It’s something significant and if I could just figure it out then maybe we could find and stop him.”
“Well,” Dean smirked, impressed but not willing to admit it, “you have way too much free time on your hands, Sam.”
Sam went to the state website, trying to find out if there was anything that connected the towns themselves. It was possible that the child had just moved around a lot while he was still alive, but that didn’t seem significant enough to keep the spirit connected to those locations, especially when he couldn’t have been killed in all six of them. Sam wanted to know what kept the spirit going back to those towns, in that order. It definitely wasn’t random - according to Missouri, the supernatural had too many unwritten laws that were dutifully obeyed for anything to be random. Now it was their job to figure out what that connection was and quickly, the countdown to the twenty fifth ever constant in Dean and Sam’s minds.
“This is going to take forever.” Dean was about ready to throw the computer at the wall. “How about you just look through Atchison, Lawrence, and Holton? And I’ll take the other three. You said this thing looked like it was wearing nineteenth century clothing. How do we even know the kid’s death will be documented somewhere?”
“I guess we don’t,” Sam admitted. “But these people, to be vengeful spirits, are that way as a result of a violent death. News traveled back then, too. A child’s death, especially since it was likely murder, would have been documented.”
“But why would it be online?”
Truthfully, Sam knew there wasn’t a guarantee that they would find anything. “I don’t know that it would be, but if the documents were ever found, they would have been digitized, saved as records, since the original copies won’t last nearly as long.”
Dean’s mouth twisted into an annoyed scowl. “So in order to find and identify this ghost, we’re going off the hope that some historian got a stiffy over finding the original documents and thought they were worthy of saving.”
“Pretty much.”
“Well… Now that we’ve got that cleared up, I’m going to make more coffee.” Dean got up from the computer, entering the kitchen to start another pot of coffee brewing. He rubbed wearily at his temples, looking for one of the bottles of ibuprofen he had started leaving in various locations around the apartment - Dean even stashed one in the glove compartment of the Impala.
The chronic headaches he’d been having since getting out of the hospital were starting to get irritating. They weren’t that strong, but they were a constant, dull pain in the middle of his brain. It was almost at the point where he thought he should call the hospital, but they would have noticed before if there’d been some sort of brain damage, right? Dean wondered if it was possibly a side effect of the amnesia. It seemed like everytime he started to work on this case there was a flare up of pain.
Coffee supply fully replenished, Dean brought it back into the other room, pouring himself more in the mug he’d already had set out and handing the pot over to Sam. They got back to work, looking up stories on boys who had been murdered in the 1800s in the specific towns, hoping that each sepia-toned photograph would be a match to the face they saw the other night, but the longer they looked, the less likely it felt that they would be able to match an identity and discover where the body was buried in time to save Jaime Struthers. Dean didn’t want to have to bear her death on his shoulders on top of those of Thomas Kane, Sally McIntire, and Donald Cooper. He also couldn’t forget about Sabrina Belmont and Michaela Johnson despite knowing that there was no way he knew at that point what had been going on. Difficulty sleeping had kept Dean awake the last couple days, images of Donald Cooper getting killed running on repeat whenever Dean closed his eyes. He didn’t know it, but Sam had the same images flashing through his mind along with the sense of panic, fear, the smell of burning flesh and hair.
Eyes starting to go blurry from staring at the computer, Sam pinched the bridge of his nose, moving his gaze to a map of Kansas that he had next to him on the table. He needed something new to focus on, let his eyes adjust to a different distance to relieve the strain. Sam grabbed a Sharpie, drawing thick, black stars over the names of the cities they were looking into. He hesitated, marking Holton with a slow deliberateness. Sam drew the rest of the stars, pulling back as he noticed the pattern. “Dean?”
His brother looked up from his own computer. “Did you find something?”
“Check this out.” Sam waited until Dean was paying attention, then he took the Sharpie, connecting the dots between Atchison, Lawrence, Holton, Leavenworth, and Topeka. When connected, each city made the point of a star that took up most of the northeastern corner of Kansas with Oskaloosa in the middle. Sam pointed at the last town with the tip of the marker. “I think I know where the grave is.”
+
Dean and Sam were in the back of an airplane, talking to a pretty flight attendant. “Two plane crashes in two months - that doesn’t strike you as strange?”
“Look,” Sam said, taking a less aggressive approach than Dean. “There was something wrong with 2485. Maybe you sensed it, maybe you didn’t, but there’s something wrong with this flight too.”
“Amanda,” Dean urged, actually feeling a little afraid - he fucking hated flying, “you have to believe us.”
Amanda looked at them, part like she thought they were crazy and part like everything suddenly made sense. Dean found himself on the receiving end of that expression a lot. “On 2485 there was this man… He had these eyes…”
“Yes!” Sam encourage. “That’s exactly what we’re talking about.”
“I don’t understand what you’re asking me to do.”
“We need you to bring the co-pilot back here. We don’t have time to explain - just need to talk to him, okay?” They needed her to do it. Neither of them could just go in the cockpit without freaking out everyone on the plane. Dean didn’t need to deal with an air marshal on top of a demon that liked making planes crash.
“But how am I supposed to go into the cockpit and get the co-pilot?”
Sam put a hand on her shoulder, trying to motivate her. “Do whatever it takes. Tell him something’s broken back here - whatever will get him out of the cockpit.”
“You do realize that I could lose my job if-”
“You could lose a lot more than that if you don’t help us out,” Dean interrupted, feeling impatient, trying to get a read on Sam’s watch but not being able to see.
Amanda nodded slowly. “Okay.” She left the curtained off area, Dean and Sam watching as she walked casually to the front of the plane, knocking on the door. They watched the co-pilot come out, talking to her by the door, Amanda pointing towards the back of the plane. Sam took out their father’s journal and Dean pulled the holy water out of his pocket as Amanda and the co-pilot walked towards the back of the plane.
Once he got through the curtains, Dean punched the co-pilot, throwing him to the floor and covering his mouth with duct tape.
“What are you doing?” Amanda asked, alarmed. “You said you were just going to talk to him!”
“We are,” Dean assured forcefully, holding down the co-pilot who was thrashing violently as Sam doused him in holy water, his skin sizzling and burning his clothing.
“Oh my God.” Amanda was clearly starting to panic. “What’s wrong with him?”
Sam looked at her, trying his best to be reassuring. “We need you to calm down. Go on the other side of the curtain. Don’t let anybody in, okay? Can you do that?” She was staring at the co-pilot, not seeming to hear anything Sam was saying. “Amanda?”
“Okay,” she said, voice higher than usual. “Okay.”
Dean watched her step outside, turning back to his brother when she closed the curtain behind her. “Hurry up, Sam, I don’t know how much longer I can hold him.”
Sam began to read the Latin from Dad’s journal, the co-pilot struggling against Dean’s hold. Panic seemed to give him a surge of strength, the demon knocking the holy water from Sam and throwing both of them against the wall. Sam kept his hold on the journal, still reading as the co-pilot ripped the tape off of his mouth and twisted a fist in Sam’s shirt, wrenching the journal from Sam’s hands. Dean watched the demon speak to Sam, unable to hear what the demon was saying since slamming his head against the wall made his ears ring, but his brother looked shocked.
Dean hurried over, trying to hold the co-pilot back down, but Sam wasn’t reading anymore. “Sam!” Dean yelled, and Sam seemed to snap out of it, picking up the journal and continuing to read.
Sam stopped, putting the journal down and helping Dean keep the demon pinned to the floor. “I got him!” he yelled over the co-pilots screams, the demon thrashing, resulting in the journal getting kicked down the aisle in the middle of the plane. The co-pilot opened his mouth, the demon pouring out and entering an air vent above their heads, leaving the co-pilot unconscious on the floor. “Where’d it go?”
“It’s in the plane. Hurry up, we’ve got to finish it.”
Sam stands, leaving the curtained off area to retrieve the journal, but suddenly the plane lurched, Dean’s stomach doing flip flops as he realized they were falling. He got thrown to a wall, screaming, and he could hear the other passengers start to scream as well. Dean wasn’t much of a prayer, but he hoped to God that Sam had got to the journal and was about to finish reading before the plane hit the ground. Dean tried to move but found that he couldn’t, the force holding him in place.
There was a flash of white light and then the plane started to right itself.
+
He shot awake, throwing aside the covers and jumping out of bed in a cold sweat. Dean kept cycling the numbers through his head - United Britannia flight 2485, 2485, 2485 - like a mantra until he got to the computer in the other room, booting it up and waiting for the login screen.
Dean heard the mattress creak in the other room, turning to see Carmen walk out of the bedroom, looking rumpled. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, babe, I’m fine. Just remembered I needed to, ah, pay my cell phone bill, that’s all.”
She crossed her arms, the air cooler than the bed had been, looking confused. “It couldn’t wait until morning?”
“I didn’t mean to wake you.” He flashed a charming grin at her, hoping Carmen would drop it. “You know how I forget these things. Just go back to bed - I’ll be there soon.”
“Okay,” Carmen conceded, rubbing the warmth back into her arms. “If my feet feel cold, though, it’s your fault.”
“I take full responsibility.”
Carmen smiled at him sleepily before going back to bed. Turning back to the computer, Dean typed in his password and hit enter, waiting for the screen to load and internet to connect. He pulled up a search engine, typing in “United Britannia 2485,” the cursor hovering over the search button. Dean rubbed his eyes tiredly, hesitating. Sam had mentioned the flight in his dream, and they had been on - had saved - another one, both of which the flight attendant Amanda had worked on.
He hit search, looking at the first link that popped up, a news story from last month. It discussed that it had been a year since the original plane crash that killed everyone except for seven people. It went on to talk about how those seven survivors all died after the crash, the last one Amanda Walker, a flight attendant on 2485, who two months later went back to work on flight 424, which also crashed, and everyone died.
Dean froze. Flight 424 was the one in the dream - he vaguely remembered hearing about the crash after it had happened, remembered how United Britannia Airlines soon went bankrupt from claims filed by family members of those who had died. Dean hadn’t paid much attention, though, since it had happened right after Dad’s death. He hadn’t known about the connection with Amanda Walker between both flights, definitely didn’t know about a demon possessing people to make sure everyone involved with 2485 died.
The bottom of the page had a photograph of Amanda, Dean’s brain flashing to her on the airplane, and then, afterwards, on the ground - Amanda talking to paramedics, looking over at him and Sam and mouthing “thank you” in their direction. Dean sat staring at the computer, completely stunned, mind reeling as he was overcome with a sudden, intense headache that made his muscles twitch as he tried to keep himself from falling out of the chair, rubbing at his temples and willing the pain to go away.
Light danced across the back of his eyelids, glimpses of people, places, things he didn’t know, couldn’t even comprehend. He saw Dad, hard, gruff, and angry; Sam, barely eight years old and learning how to use a gun; himself from his own perspective, burning corpses, beheading vampires, shooting at all matter of monsters that he couldn’t even begin to name but somehow knew what they were called automatically. He pulled Sam out of a burning house, Jess on the ceiling engulfed in flames with her stomach split open, face frozen in fear and shock.
The thoughts - no, he corrected himself, memories - went through years and years before they took him to a place he knew but a place he hadn’t been able to remember, those days that brought him and Sam to the warehouse in Joliet. Dean remembered the flood of relief, of joy, when Mom answered the door, so alive and so beautiful; how happy he was to see Jess alive, to see Sam still in school, to know that Dad had died peacefully, naturally, that he’d worked on cars, played softball, and got to live happily with Mom, with all of them, as a family. Then Dean remembered seeing the girl in the street, at the restaurant, the story on the news about the one year anniversary after the crash of United Britannia flight 2485 and how he’d looked up all the people they’d saved over the years to find all of them dead. He remembered going to Mom’s house, needing silver, getting caught by Sam who thought he was about to get into trouble, so he came along with him on the drive out to a warehouse in Joliet where Dean had encountered the djinn, where Dean needed to know how this all had really happened.
With a sudden lurch of pain that brought Dean curling forward on himself, clutching at his stomach as he fell to the floor, he remembered the warehouse. He saw the djinn, saw what it did to people, how it fed them their desires as it fed off of their blood. It wasn’t real, Dean realized, none of it was real. Sam had begged, had pleaded, for Dean to snap out of it, and then Mom and Carmen and Jess were there, too, but he didn’t listen, didn’t believe. Dean took the knife, plunged it into his stomach, and then he was back, bleeding and confused, but normal again.
He was vaguely aware of being rolled onto his back, of Carmen calling his name, the sound of the chair crashing to the ground having brought her back out of the bedroom to see what had happened. Dean felt her hands on his face, her voice becoming clearer, sounding less and less like he was underwater, as the onslaught of memories faded.
“I’m okay,” Dean gasped, sitting upright so quickly that it left his head spinning. “I’m okay,” he repeated.
“What the hell happened?” Carmen asked, sounding pissed off but looking scared. Dean didn’t blame her - it was the second time he’d woken her up in the last ten minutes and it was only three in the morning. He was pissed off as well - instead of answering the questions he’d had, getting his memory back had only given him more.
“I remember,” Dean said, watching Carmen’s eyes widen in surprise. “I remember everything.”
“Dean… How?” Her eyes kept glancing down to his stomach, Dean following her gaze to see what she was looking at.
There was blood on his shirt, a red gash drying into the fabric that covered his stomach. Dean looked at his hands to see blood on them, as well, from when he fell and clutched his abdomen in pain. Dean wrapped his fingers around the bottom hem of the shirt, trying to force his hands to stop shaking but failing. When Dean pulled the shirt up, his eyes shot to Carmen’s, alarmed and bewildered. There had been blood on his shirt, but all that was under it was the knife wound, a pink, fading scar that hadn’t torn open at all.
“What the hell is going on, Dean?”
He looked at Carmen evenly, realizing that it was time to tell her what was happening, why he hadn’t been around as much as he could be, what he knew, what he still didn’t know, and what he had learned so far. Dean figured he owed her at least that much.
Part 9 - Part 10
Rating: R
Pairings: Dean/Carmen, Sam/Jess
Word Count: 3,887 (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 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7
Dean could feel Sam staring at him as they drove on the highway in silence, so Dean steered the Impala across the road, skidding to a stop on the shoulder on the other side of the road. Dean climbed out of the car, getting out to sit on the hood, and Sam followed. “Dean… What is it?”
“I’m sorry. For the way I’ve been acting.” Sam sat beside him on the hood of the car, listening patiently. “And for Dad. He was your dad, too, and it’s my fault he’s gone.”
“What are you talking about?” Sam pressed.
Dean looked at his brother sadly. “I know you’ve been thinking it, and, well, so have I. It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. Back at the hospital I made a full recovery. It was a miracle.” He couldn’t help but spit out that last word bitterly. “Then five minutes later Dad’s dead and the Colt’s gone.”
“Dean-”
“You can’t tell me there’s no connection,” he interrupted, not wanting to hear whatever trite condolance he was sure that Sam was about to utter. “I don’t know how the demon was involved. I don’t know exactly how the whole thing went down. But Dad’s dead because of me, and that much I do know.”
“We don’t know that,” Sam argued, his misplaced optimism something Dean both loved and hated his brother for. “Not for sure.”
Dean could feel his eyes welling up, but he was just so tired that he couldn’t hold them back anymore. So tired of pretending when the both of them knew that everything was just so fucked up. “Sam… You and Dad, you’re the most important people in my life. And now…” He drew in a shaky breath. “I never should have come back, Sam - it wasn’t natural, and now look what’s come of it.” He looked at his brother. “I was dead, and I should have stayed dead.” Dean looked back away, across the mountainview that he had pulled over at. “You wanted to know how I was feeling? Well, that’s it,” he said quietly. “So tell me - what could you possibly say to make that all right?”
+
Researching boys that were killed in Kansas sometime in the nineteenth century was, in Dean’s opinion, a huge pain in the ass, although a necessary one. He was trying to identify the ghost boy while Sam was looking into who would be the next target. January 25th had an ominous sound to it, especially since if they didn’t manage to destroy the spirit, an individual in Oskaloosa would be killed. Dean understood that even if they didn’t manage to stop the last one they could still look for where the kid had been buried and salt and burn the body, effectively stopping anything that would have otherwise come in the future, but Dean wanted the satisfaction of saving at least one person when it had been nearly a month since he had discovered the pattern.
Oskaloosa was a small town - less than one square mile for all nearly twelve hundred residents but still referred to as a city - so it didn’t take Sam very long to get results. Only one individual had a January 25th birthday.
“Jaime Struthers,” Sam announced, not even looking up from his computer. “She’s a third grade teacher at Oskaloosa Elementary. She’s been engaged for two years now to her boyfriend who has three months left in Iraq.”
They were at Dean’s apartment, Sam stealing wireless from the coffee house across the street with his own laptop as Dean learned the perks of having a library card - he could access the microfiche through the internet with the proper access codes instead of having to actually go to the library and sit in a dark room for hours on end.
Dean propped himself up against the desk on his elbow, leaning his head into his hands. “He’ll get the last phone call he ever imagined getting if we don’t find out where the dead kid was buried.”
“Assuming he was buried and the grave was marked.” Sam was feeling pessimistic about the whole situation. They didn’t even know where to begin. It wasn’t that he was already thinking of Jaime Struthers as another victim, but he wasn’t going to get his hopes up and worried that Dean might not be doing the same.
“I don’t get why there’s six different towns here - Missouri made it sound like spirits have a very specific, limited range. This one can go from one city to another that’s sixty miles away.” Dean cracked his knuckles before returning to scrolling through pictures of documents so old that they were now locked away from light and moisture so they wouldn’t fall apart.
“I think it’s specific to this case,” Sam said. He’d done some thinking on the subject, and this was the best explanation he had been able to come up with. “This ghost uses electricity to kill people. From what Missouri said, how spirits can be picked up by electronic devises and by listening to electromagnetic frequencies, I think they are, basically, in themselves electric. So I’d imagine that it wouldn’t be difficult for them to travel through power lines. I think there’s a reason he’s using those towns, though, and the dates. It’s something significant and if I could just figure it out then maybe we could find and stop him.”
“Well,” Dean smirked, impressed but not willing to admit it, “you have way too much free time on your hands, Sam.”
Sam went to the state website, trying to find out if there was anything that connected the towns themselves. It was possible that the child had just moved around a lot while he was still alive, but that didn’t seem significant enough to keep the spirit connected to those locations, especially when he couldn’t have been killed in all six of them. Sam wanted to know what kept the spirit going back to those towns, in that order. It definitely wasn’t random - according to Missouri, the supernatural had too many unwritten laws that were dutifully obeyed for anything to be random. Now it was their job to figure out what that connection was and quickly, the countdown to the twenty fifth ever constant in Dean and Sam’s minds.
“This is going to take forever.” Dean was about ready to throw the computer at the wall. “How about you just look through Atchison, Lawrence, and Holton? And I’ll take the other three. You said this thing looked like it was wearing nineteenth century clothing. How do we even know the kid’s death will be documented somewhere?”
“I guess we don’t,” Sam admitted. “But these people, to be vengeful spirits, are that way as a result of a violent death. News traveled back then, too. A child’s death, especially since it was likely murder, would have been documented.”
“But why would it be online?”
Truthfully, Sam knew there wasn’t a guarantee that they would find anything. “I don’t know that it would be, but if the documents were ever found, they would have been digitized, saved as records, since the original copies won’t last nearly as long.”
Dean’s mouth twisted into an annoyed scowl. “So in order to find and identify this ghost, we’re going off the hope that some historian got a stiffy over finding the original documents and thought they were worthy of saving.”
“Pretty much.”
“Well… Now that we’ve got that cleared up, I’m going to make more coffee.” Dean got up from the computer, entering the kitchen to start another pot of coffee brewing. He rubbed wearily at his temples, looking for one of the bottles of ibuprofen he had started leaving in various locations around the apartment - Dean even stashed one in the glove compartment of the Impala.
The chronic headaches he’d been having since getting out of the hospital were starting to get irritating. They weren’t that strong, but they were a constant, dull pain in the middle of his brain. It was almost at the point where he thought he should call the hospital, but they would have noticed before if there’d been some sort of brain damage, right? Dean wondered if it was possibly a side effect of the amnesia. It seemed like everytime he started to work on this case there was a flare up of pain.
Coffee supply fully replenished, Dean brought it back into the other room, pouring himself more in the mug he’d already had set out and handing the pot over to Sam. They got back to work, looking up stories on boys who had been murdered in the 1800s in the specific towns, hoping that each sepia-toned photograph would be a match to the face they saw the other night, but the longer they looked, the less likely it felt that they would be able to match an identity and discover where the body was buried in time to save Jaime Struthers. Dean didn’t want to have to bear her death on his shoulders on top of those of Thomas Kane, Sally McIntire, and Donald Cooper. He also couldn’t forget about Sabrina Belmont and Michaela Johnson despite knowing that there was no way he knew at that point what had been going on. Difficulty sleeping had kept Dean awake the last couple days, images of Donald Cooper getting killed running on repeat whenever Dean closed his eyes. He didn’t know it, but Sam had the same images flashing through his mind along with the sense of panic, fear, the smell of burning flesh and hair.
Eyes starting to go blurry from staring at the computer, Sam pinched the bridge of his nose, moving his gaze to a map of Kansas that he had next to him on the table. He needed something new to focus on, let his eyes adjust to a different distance to relieve the strain. Sam grabbed a Sharpie, drawing thick, black stars over the names of the cities they were looking into. He hesitated, marking Holton with a slow deliberateness. Sam drew the rest of the stars, pulling back as he noticed the pattern. “Dean?”
His brother looked up from his own computer. “Did you find something?”
“Check this out.” Sam waited until Dean was paying attention, then he took the Sharpie, connecting the dots between Atchison, Lawrence, Holton, Leavenworth, and Topeka. When connected, each city made the point of a star that took up most of the northeastern corner of Kansas with Oskaloosa in the middle. Sam pointed at the last town with the tip of the marker. “I think I know where the grave is.”
+
Dean and Sam were in the back of an airplane, talking to a pretty flight attendant. “Two plane crashes in two months - that doesn’t strike you as strange?”
“Look,” Sam said, taking a less aggressive approach than Dean. “There was something wrong with 2485. Maybe you sensed it, maybe you didn’t, but there’s something wrong with this flight too.”
“Amanda,” Dean urged, actually feeling a little afraid - he fucking hated flying, “you have to believe us.”
Amanda looked at them, part like she thought they were crazy and part like everything suddenly made sense. Dean found himself on the receiving end of that expression a lot. “On 2485 there was this man… He had these eyes…”
“Yes!” Sam encourage. “That’s exactly what we’re talking about.”
“I don’t understand what you’re asking me to do.”
“We need you to bring the co-pilot back here. We don’t have time to explain - just need to talk to him, okay?” They needed her to do it. Neither of them could just go in the cockpit without freaking out everyone on the plane. Dean didn’t need to deal with an air marshal on top of a demon that liked making planes crash.
“But how am I supposed to go into the cockpit and get the co-pilot?”
Sam put a hand on her shoulder, trying to motivate her. “Do whatever it takes. Tell him something’s broken back here - whatever will get him out of the cockpit.”
“You do realize that I could lose my job if-”
“You could lose a lot more than that if you don’t help us out,” Dean interrupted, feeling impatient, trying to get a read on Sam’s watch but not being able to see.
Amanda nodded slowly. “Okay.” She left the curtained off area, Dean and Sam watching as she walked casually to the front of the plane, knocking on the door. They watched the co-pilot come out, talking to her by the door, Amanda pointing towards the back of the plane. Sam took out their father’s journal and Dean pulled the holy water out of his pocket as Amanda and the co-pilot walked towards the back of the plane.
Once he got through the curtains, Dean punched the co-pilot, throwing him to the floor and covering his mouth with duct tape.
“What are you doing?” Amanda asked, alarmed. “You said you were just going to talk to him!”
“We are,” Dean assured forcefully, holding down the co-pilot who was thrashing violently as Sam doused him in holy water, his skin sizzling and burning his clothing.
“Oh my God.” Amanda was clearly starting to panic. “What’s wrong with him?”
Sam looked at her, trying his best to be reassuring. “We need you to calm down. Go on the other side of the curtain. Don’t let anybody in, okay? Can you do that?” She was staring at the co-pilot, not seeming to hear anything Sam was saying. “Amanda?”
“Okay,” she said, voice higher than usual. “Okay.”
Dean watched her step outside, turning back to his brother when she closed the curtain behind her. “Hurry up, Sam, I don’t know how much longer I can hold him.”
Sam began to read the Latin from Dad’s journal, the co-pilot struggling against Dean’s hold. Panic seemed to give him a surge of strength, the demon knocking the holy water from Sam and throwing both of them against the wall. Sam kept his hold on the journal, still reading as the co-pilot ripped the tape off of his mouth and twisted a fist in Sam’s shirt, wrenching the journal from Sam’s hands. Dean watched the demon speak to Sam, unable to hear what the demon was saying since slamming his head against the wall made his ears ring, but his brother looked shocked.
Dean hurried over, trying to hold the co-pilot back down, but Sam wasn’t reading anymore. “Sam!” Dean yelled, and Sam seemed to snap out of it, picking up the journal and continuing to read.
Sam stopped, putting the journal down and helping Dean keep the demon pinned to the floor. “I got him!” he yelled over the co-pilots screams, the demon thrashing, resulting in the journal getting kicked down the aisle in the middle of the plane. The co-pilot opened his mouth, the demon pouring out and entering an air vent above their heads, leaving the co-pilot unconscious on the floor. “Where’d it go?”
“It’s in the plane. Hurry up, we’ve got to finish it.”
Sam stands, leaving the curtained off area to retrieve the journal, but suddenly the plane lurched, Dean’s stomach doing flip flops as he realized they were falling. He got thrown to a wall, screaming, and he could hear the other passengers start to scream as well. Dean wasn’t much of a prayer, but he hoped to God that Sam had got to the journal and was about to finish reading before the plane hit the ground. Dean tried to move but found that he couldn’t, the force holding him in place.
There was a flash of white light and then the plane started to right itself.
+
He shot awake, throwing aside the covers and jumping out of bed in a cold sweat. Dean kept cycling the numbers through his head - United Britannia flight 2485, 2485, 2485 - like a mantra until he got to the computer in the other room, booting it up and waiting for the login screen.
Dean heard the mattress creak in the other room, turning to see Carmen walk out of the bedroom, looking rumpled. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, babe, I’m fine. Just remembered I needed to, ah, pay my cell phone bill, that’s all.”
She crossed her arms, the air cooler than the bed had been, looking confused. “It couldn’t wait until morning?”
“I didn’t mean to wake you.” He flashed a charming grin at her, hoping Carmen would drop it. “You know how I forget these things. Just go back to bed - I’ll be there soon.”
“Okay,” Carmen conceded, rubbing the warmth back into her arms. “If my feet feel cold, though, it’s your fault.”
“I take full responsibility.”
Carmen smiled at him sleepily before going back to bed. Turning back to the computer, Dean typed in his password and hit enter, waiting for the screen to load and internet to connect. He pulled up a search engine, typing in “United Britannia 2485,” the cursor hovering over the search button. Dean rubbed his eyes tiredly, hesitating. Sam had mentioned the flight in his dream, and they had been on - had saved - another one, both of which the flight attendant Amanda had worked on.
He hit search, looking at the first link that popped up, a news story from last month. It discussed that it had been a year since the original plane crash that killed everyone except for seven people. It went on to talk about how those seven survivors all died after the crash, the last one Amanda Walker, a flight attendant on 2485, who two months later went back to work on flight 424, which also crashed, and everyone died.
Dean froze. Flight 424 was the one in the dream - he vaguely remembered hearing about the crash after it had happened, remembered how United Britannia Airlines soon went bankrupt from claims filed by family members of those who had died. Dean hadn’t paid much attention, though, since it had happened right after Dad’s death. He hadn’t known about the connection with Amanda Walker between both flights, definitely didn’t know about a demon possessing people to make sure everyone involved with 2485 died.
The bottom of the page had a photograph of Amanda, Dean’s brain flashing to her on the airplane, and then, afterwards, on the ground - Amanda talking to paramedics, looking over at him and Sam and mouthing “thank you” in their direction. Dean sat staring at the computer, completely stunned, mind reeling as he was overcome with a sudden, intense headache that made his muscles twitch as he tried to keep himself from falling out of the chair, rubbing at his temples and willing the pain to go away.
Light danced across the back of his eyelids, glimpses of people, places, things he didn’t know, couldn’t even comprehend. He saw Dad, hard, gruff, and angry; Sam, barely eight years old and learning how to use a gun; himself from his own perspective, burning corpses, beheading vampires, shooting at all matter of monsters that he couldn’t even begin to name but somehow knew what they were called automatically. He pulled Sam out of a burning house, Jess on the ceiling engulfed in flames with her stomach split open, face frozen in fear and shock.
The thoughts - no, he corrected himself, memories - went through years and years before they took him to a place he knew but a place he hadn’t been able to remember, those days that brought him and Sam to the warehouse in Joliet. Dean remembered the flood of relief, of joy, when Mom answered the door, so alive and so beautiful; how happy he was to see Jess alive, to see Sam still in school, to know that Dad had died peacefully, naturally, that he’d worked on cars, played softball, and got to live happily with Mom, with all of them, as a family. Then Dean remembered seeing the girl in the street, at the restaurant, the story on the news about the one year anniversary after the crash of United Britannia flight 2485 and how he’d looked up all the people they’d saved over the years to find all of them dead. He remembered going to Mom’s house, needing silver, getting caught by Sam who thought he was about to get into trouble, so he came along with him on the drive out to a warehouse in Joliet where Dean had encountered the djinn, where Dean needed to know how this all had really happened.
With a sudden lurch of pain that brought Dean curling forward on himself, clutching at his stomach as he fell to the floor, he remembered the warehouse. He saw the djinn, saw what it did to people, how it fed them their desires as it fed off of their blood. It wasn’t real, Dean realized, none of it was real. Sam had begged, had pleaded, for Dean to snap out of it, and then Mom and Carmen and Jess were there, too, but he didn’t listen, didn’t believe. Dean took the knife, plunged it into his stomach, and then he was back, bleeding and confused, but normal again.
He was vaguely aware of being rolled onto his back, of Carmen calling his name, the sound of the chair crashing to the ground having brought her back out of the bedroom to see what had happened. Dean felt her hands on his face, her voice becoming clearer, sounding less and less like he was underwater, as the onslaught of memories faded.
“I’m okay,” Dean gasped, sitting upright so quickly that it left his head spinning. “I’m okay,” he repeated.
“What the hell happened?” Carmen asked, sounding pissed off but looking scared. Dean didn’t blame her - it was the second time he’d woken her up in the last ten minutes and it was only three in the morning. He was pissed off as well - instead of answering the questions he’d had, getting his memory back had only given him more.
“I remember,” Dean said, watching Carmen’s eyes widen in surprise. “I remember everything.”
“Dean… How?” Her eyes kept glancing down to his stomach, Dean following her gaze to see what she was looking at.
There was blood on his shirt, a red gash drying into the fabric that covered his stomach. Dean looked at his hands to see blood on them, as well, from when he fell and clutched his abdomen in pain. Dean wrapped his fingers around the bottom hem of the shirt, trying to force his hands to stop shaking but failing. When Dean pulled the shirt up, his eyes shot to Carmen’s, alarmed and bewildered. There had been blood on his shirt, but all that was under it was the knife wound, a pink, fading scar that hadn’t torn open at all.
“What the hell is going on, Dean?”
He looked at Carmen evenly, realizing that it was time to tell her what was happening, why he hadn’t been around as much as he could be, what he knew, what he still didn’t know, and what he had learned so far. Dean figured he owed her at least that much.
Part 9 - Part 10