Sleep Behind the Wheel
Pairing: None [Supernatural]
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,812
Sam wakes up slowly, his head pounding, his mouth dry, and the light slanting through the windows burning his eyes. He slings a forearm over his face to block the sun and licks his lips, trying to work up some wetness in his mouth. Last night had been Halloween and apparently he had gotten carried away, despite his distaste for the holiday and everything that went with it. Reaching out with his free hand, he patted the bed, looking for Jess. The girl could hold her liquor and never had a hangover. When he comes up empty, Sam rolls over, squinting at the other half of the bed. The bedspread looks different. And ugly.
"Jess?" Sam calls out.
He starts to sit up, his body aching with every movement, and he feels heavier somehow, like he had magically gained weight overnight. Blinking down at himself, Sam frowns. Last he checked, he didn't have a six pack. Or a tattoo. Or so many scars. The headache only gets worse as he glances around, really taking everything in. This is not his apartment. It's a motel room like the ones he grew up in. The fake wood paneling, scarred dresser, rabbit-eared TV, and horribly 70s color combinations give it away.
"Dean?" Sam tries instead. "Dad?"
Maybe something had happened last night? His family coming to get him for something? No, but that didn't explain the changes in his own body. Sam stumbles into the bathroom to get a better look at himself. He looks older, harder, like he's spent a lot of time doing manual labor. Or hunting, his mind supplies. He hurries through his morning routine and then heads back into the main room.
There's a bag on the table, but when he opens it, all he finds is a box with fake IDs, his favorite gun, and a few changes of clothing. Digging through the outside pockets and checking the lining doesn't reveal anything more useful, so he dumps it all back on the table and collapses in the chair next to it.
"What the hell happened?" he asks the empty room.
Dean wakes up to find himself on a bus. An endless, flat landscape flashes by the windows, the sun burning his eyes. He doesn't remember getting on the bus. Doesn't remember anything except his name and a vague sense of missing something. There's something clenched in his hand and he opens his palm, examining it. It's a compass.
The compass is old and scratched, the indicators just barely readable, and judging by the angle of the sun, it's pointing the wrong way. He flips it over and frowns at the symbols on the back. They look familiar but he can't quite place them, like it's on the tip of his tongue, if only he could remember.
If only he could remember anything other than his name.
"Next stop, Lawrence. Lawrence, Kansas," the bus driver announces.
Dean doesn't know how he ended up on the bus or why, but when he pats his pockets, he finds a ticket with Lawrence as the destination. The origin is rubbed out and no amount of squinting or turning the paper makes it readable. He pulls out his wallet and digs through it, hoping for more clues, but all he finds are a bunch of credit cards and IDs in different names.
"Who the hell am I?" Dean mutters.
The only response he gets is a glare from the old lady across the aisle.
Sam takes the few bills he found in his pocket and walks to the motel office to get change and a newspaper. There's a payphone next to the pop machine outside and Sam plans to call every number he can think of until he gets some answers. He calls Jess, his Dad, Dean, Caleb, Bobby, any other hunter he can think up or remember the number for but they all reach the same dead end: I'm sorry but this number is out of service. That doesn't make any sense. How can all of them be out of service?
He rakes a hand through his hair and then walks back to his motel room. If their numbers are disconnected, likely no one lives where he would expect them to either, but Sam has to try something.
According to the paper, Sam is in King City, somewhere in Monterey County, so south of Stanford. It's also apparently 2011, a good six years after Sam's last memory. He wonders what happened in that blank space, but when he tries to concentrate and come up with something, all he sees is fire. Fire behind a blurry glass, like someone hasn't washed the windows in decades.
Shaking off the vision, Sam hurriedly packs his bag back up and exits the motel room. He really hopes he remembers how to steal a car.
At the bus station in Lawrence, Dean sits down in one of the plastic chairs and tries to get his bearings. Turns out he had checked baggage on the bus; one duffel bag full of old clothes and, bizarrely, a knife hidden at the bottom. The weight of it had felt right in his palm when he touched it, like he knew how to use it, but he had only that one sensory memory, nothing else to go on. His best guess is that he's a criminal of some sort; why else would he have so many fake identities? A con man? A grifter? But he can feel the strength of his hands, the lean muscles of his legs, the broadness of his shoulders, things that could only come from a life of hard work, not from any prison yard gym.
He tosses the compass back and forth between his hands as he thinks. It's the only thing he really can't make sense of at all. Why would he be carrying around a busted compass with weird writing on the back? Is it a family heirloom? He runs his thumbs over the marks but the only thing that comes to him is the scent of dusty old books. Was he a librarian?
Librarian, he thinks, library. Maybe he can figure out how to translate the symbols.
Stanford is a bust. Sam and Jess' apartment is now occupied by someone named Vijay Kumar. The records office can only tell him that he dropped out six years ago and left no forwarding address. None of the faces are familiar and Sam figures if that many years have passed, none of his friends go to school here anymore. The only thing the place is good for is stealing a laptop.
It's going to be a long drive, but Sam figures his next stop should be Bobby's. Even if the only phone number Sam can remember is disconnected, Sam highly doubts the man has moved. As a child Sam used to think that Bobby was bound to that salvage yard like some kind of curse since he hardly ever left its confines.
So Sam gets back in his stolen Ford Taurus and heads east. Bobby has to be there. Has to know what happened, where his father and brother have gone; where the last six years of his life have gone.
The library is a two mile walk east of the bus station, according to the woman at the ticket counter. Dean spends most of it looking around. The city seems almost familiar like maybe he had been there once, long ago. Not quite déjà vu, but something close, like a dream instead of something real.
Inside the library he heads for the foreign language section even though he's not sure exactly what he's looking for since it's not as though the language is in words. Maybe it's Egyptian? He wanders aimlessly between history and foreign language, idly picking up books and paging through them looking for similar symbols, but finding nothing.
Finally he gives up and goes to the counter. There's a pale, skinny guy dressed in all black who looks like death warmed over sitting behind it. He's slurping something out of a Styrofoam cup but somehow looks dignified even with his cheeks hollowed and a straw between his lips.
"Listen, I need some help," Dean starts.
"Do I really have to do everything around here?" the man sighs. He snatches the compass out of Dean's hand and flips it over. "Sumerian although I doubt you're going to find help translating that here."
"Right," Dean says slowly.
The man rolls his eyes. "True heart's desire. Or true heart's curse, depending on your interpretation." He tosses the compass back to Dean who catches it easily. "Knowing you, probably the latter."
"Knowing me?" Dean asks. "Do I know you?"
Dean smells fried food, grease, feels queasy as it hits him. He clutches the edge of the counter as his stomach heaves. There's something about this man. A feeling of fear hits him like a wave and he goes down, falling to his knees.
"Who are you?" Dean manages to choke out.
"That, I'm afraid, I can't tell you."
When Dean is finally able to lift his head, the other man is gone.
What had once been a ramshackle house is now a burnt-out ruin. Sam kicks a couple of pieces of charred wood, feeling completely lost. Dean is gone. His dad is gone. And now Bobby. Maybe he's the only one left. Maybe something catastrophic happened.
Sam can guess all he likes, but unless he can find someone in their little network of hunters, he's never going to know the truth.
So he decides to bunk down for the night, get some rest, see if he can track down someone else. Pastor Jim or one of the other hunters his dad knew.
Only when he settles into the room and turns on the TV, Dean is there, in the background of a news report on a freak hail storm in Lawrence, Kansas. He's older than Sam remembers, but that's him walking down the sidewalk.
Dean doesn't know why, but he thinks he should follow the direction of the broken compass. There has to be a reason why it's broken. A reason why it has those symbols. A reason why he just happened to run into someone who could translate them. And the translation is pretty telling.
The old Toyota Camry he buys used with John Bonham's credit card seems like a reliable way to get around, but he feels strange driving it. Like he's expecting something roomier, wider, older. But he shakes that feeling of wrongness off and heads west, using the compass to know when to turn, head south or keep going.
As he drives, the plains of Kansas fade into the grasslands of Oklahoma and northern Texas before turning into the rugged desert of New Mexico. He stops in Santa Rosa for the night at the Sun & Sand Motel, avoiding the nicer places he passes and the main drag of the city all together. He doesn't know why he does this either, just that it makes his skin itch thinking about picking somewhere nicer.
Once he's in the room, this one decorated like Las Vegas died inside, he gets this warm feeling in his chest, like it's safe, warm, home. He can almost reach some kind of memory. A little boy, a pendant, but as soon as it comes, it's gone, leaving behind a painful headache.
Sam is going on days of almost no sleep, but when he arrives in Kansas, he doesn't stop. He checks every alias he remembers Dean ever having before he hits the jackpot with John Bonham. There's a used car, a bunch of seedy motels, and a string of diners in the guy's name. It has to be Dean. Has to be.
No cell phone though. So Sam's stuck tracking his movement after the fact. None of it makes much sense. There are no strange occurrences where Dean's going, other than the hail storm, so he's not hunting. Maybe, Sam thinks, maybe he's lost his memory just like Sam has; maybe he's trying to get it back.
So Sam starts researching, looking into the past six years for anything remotely odd. Anything that could've been a hunt he and Dean were on, anything that matches up with the places Dean is traveling to. He's only guessing though, so he stays in Lawrence on the off chance Dean comes back. After all, it's the only real "home" they've ever had.
The next morning, Dean wakes up early, drinks the horrible coffee offered in the motel lounge, and then heads out again. Seems like the compass still wants him to go west, so that's what he does. Across the rest of New Mexico, the whole of Arizona, before dipping down into southern California. As soon as Dean crosses a bridge over a river in Jericho, the compass starts spinning like crazy. He slams on the brakes and gets out, looking down into the water.
He remembers this bridge, this river. Something about the color white. A woman. Water. Dead children. It doesn't make any sense and trying to pry further just makes Dean sick.
After puking over the side of the bridge, Dean slides back into the car. The compass sits on the dash, mocking him, and it clearly points north-east. With no memories, no reference points, the compass is the only thing he has, so he turns back, heads right back the way he came.
Sam's reading about a string of disappearances in Jericho, California - where Dean had just been-- when a flood of memories hits him like a freight train. They had gone there without their Dad. No, looking for their Dad. It was a woman in white. And when they came back to Stanford, Jess…
Fire. That's all Sam can see. Fire on the ceiling, fire all around.
"I knew you couldn't forget me," a voice says, smooth and deadly.
He remembers the face that goes with it. Remembers being flayed alive while those eyes danced and a smirk played on the thing's face.
"Lucifer," Sam whispers, but refuses to open his eyes.
There's laughter and then fire is gone. Sam remembers being in Hell. Remembers every case, every argument with Dean, their dad dying, his own psychic powers, Yellow Eyes, dying, Dean's deal, Ruby, the apocalypse, Ellen and Jo and Ash and all the others that died for his sins, and Castiel. The angel who…
But Sam can't remember. He knows Castiel brought Dean back from Hell, but he can't remember anything beyond that about the angel. Nothing at all.
The compass keeps leading Dean to small towns, to places that Dean continues to not remember. Colorado, Oklahoma. Back and forth across the country for no apparent reason that he can discern.
This time the compass leads Dean to Rockford, Illinois. It starts doing the crazy spinning outside a shuttered mental institution. Dean doesn't dare go inside. He gets this cold feeling just looking at the place. When he touches the fence, he feels like he's been punched in the gut. It cripples him, dropping him to his knees, fingers grasping the fence so hard his knuckles turn white. There's a name on the tip of his tongue, but he can't remember it. It hurts so much to even try and he screams in agony, howling into the night.
When he's finally able to breathe again, Dean looks down at the compass. West, again. He almost throws it away in frustration, but instead clutches it tight to his chest.
Salvation, Iowa. If Sam remembers correctly, Dean has to end up there at some point, so Sam packs up and drives north. With his memories came other things, Bobby's most recent spate of phone numbers, for one. He tries each of them as he drives until he finally hits the jackpot.
"Bobby?" Sam asks.
"Sam? You're alive?"
Bobby sounds shocked. Did the same thing happen to him that happened to Sam and Dean? Memories wiped?
"Yeah. I don't know what happened, but I'm alive."
They spend the next half hour hashing out what happened to the two of them. Bobby had woken up to find himself in jail, remembering everything. He catches Sam up on Castiel, on where they all stood last. The only thing they can't figure out is why Castiel wiped his memories and most likely Dean's, what purpose did that serve?
Dean is tired after his outburst in Rockford, but he doesn't stick around. The compass says to head west, so he gets right back in the car and heads west. It starts raining as soon as he's back on the highway, matching his own dark mood. The compass may be all he has but this is a lonely existence, drifting from place to place, waiting for something to happen. Anything to happen.
He gets his wish in the middle of nowhere, Iowa. The compass spins once and then just stops, pointing due south. Dean taps it, tries moving around in a circle to see if it will move again, but nothing. So he pulls into a parking space outside the only motel in this tiny town and rests his head on the steering wheel. Is this where he's from? Is this his true heart's desire?
Sam is about to head out to grab some dinner. He's been on the phone for what seems like days with Bobby trying to figure this out. Castiel had wiped their memories, but why? That's one thing neither he nor Bobby can seem to figure out. Sam wants to believe it was to protect them, but Bobby has snorted at that every time Sam tries to bring it up. It's true that Cas had been acting strange, but separating them like this? Especially so soon after Sam got his soul back?
He's nearly halfway across the parking lot when he feels it, this sense of someone staring at him. Turning around, he immediately recognizes the figure leaning against an old Toyota.
"Dean!"
Dean looks startled, not happy. His eyes are narrowed, taking in Sam like he doesn't recognize him.
"You don't remember?" Sam asks as he stops a few feet away.
"I don't-" Dean cuts himself off. "Who are you?"
"Sam. Your brother."
"I have a brother?" Dean looks puzzled. "Do I live here?"
"Yes, no." Sam points at his motel room door. "Just come with me and I'll explain."
Dean shies away. "How do I know you're telling the truth?"
And Sam doesn't know how to answer that. No way to bring something up that they would only both remember. There are no photos of the two of them together. Sam snaps his fingers and then yanks down the collar of his shirt, revealing his tattoo.
"You have one of these, too, right?" Sam asks.
"Yeah," Dean says, sounding surprised. He pulls down the neck of his shirt to show Sam the same tattoo. "I do."
Despite the matching tattoos, Dean is still wary of following this stranger into a motel room. Hell the matching tattoos themselves are worrying. Are they in a biker club? A gang? A cult? But he really has no choice in the matter, not since the compass stopped working. Maybe this is what the compass meant; to find his brother.
This motel is just like all the other ones Dean stayed in, but it feels much more like home with both him and Sam inside of it. That calms Dean down a bit. He sits in the chair Sam indicates and then looks around, taking in all the maps and notes tacked to the wall. His mind quickly picks up the pattern, recognizes all the places he's been and he shoots out of the chair, ripping down a photo of himself.
"What is this? Have you been… stalking me?" Dean asks.
"No!" Sam says quickly. "Trying to find you."
"Do you work for the police? How would you know how to do this? Are we criminals? We're criminals, aren't we? That explains the matching tattoos," Dean rambles as he paces back and forth. "And the knife. But not the compass. Don't think many criminals are fluent in Sumerian. But then again, what would I know? I have amnesia."
"Dean, Dean." Sam grabs his shoulders. "Stop. I can explain if you just let me."
Dean slumps down in the chair again. "Okay. Explain."
"Well, we're brothers and our mother died…"
As Sam goes on, his explanation seems to get more and more convoluted with every passing word. Angels and demons and monsters and hunting them. Something about the family business and their mom and a fire started by a demon. A magical gun. A battle between Michael and Lucifer and a third brother named Adam.
"You sound crazy. Are you sure that mental institute I stopped at wasn't someplace you stayed at for a while?" Dean finally breaks in.
"I know it sounds crazy," Sam sighs. "But it's true. All of it."
"Okay, so our whole family is crazy. Do we belong to a cult? Did I try to escape?" Dean asks and then quickly adds, "Because I'm not going back. I don't care if you're my brother."
"No!" Sam blows out a frustrated breath.
Suddenly Sam grabs Dean, pulling him up into a bear hug. Dean sucks in a deep breath out of surprise, taking in Sam's scent, and then suddenly, the world spins, turns upside down as he remembers. He remembers all of it so fast it's a head rush.
"Sammy," Dean gasps. "I remember." He pulls back a bit, still clutching Sam's shoulders. "I remember. And we have to stop Cas."
"Stop him?" Sam asks, brow furrowed.
"Death. He told me. The souls are important. Cas did something with them. Something bad," Dean explains.
They're too late. By the time they hunt Castiel down, he's already walking in the water supply. He tricked them, strung them along, tried to permanently separate them when tried to stop him, and yet Sam does feel remorse. Once again they're losing a friend; once again it's just the two of them standing at the edge of the end of civilization.
"What do we do now?" Sam asks as they watch the black ooze spread.
"Take care of it," Dean answers, meeting Sam's eyes with an intense look. "Together."
Sam smiles, just a slight tilt of his lips. Nothing has ever been able to keep them apart. Not death or alternative universes or magic spells woven by a power hungry angel or even their own stupidity. And together, they can accomplish anything.
"Together," Sam repeats, clapping his hand on Dean's shoulder.
Dean gives him a matching smile back and despite everything, Sam feels like everything's going to be just fine.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,812
Sam wakes up slowly, his head pounding, his mouth dry, and the light slanting through the windows burning his eyes. He slings a forearm over his face to block the sun and licks his lips, trying to work up some wetness in his mouth. Last night had been Halloween and apparently he had gotten carried away, despite his distaste for the holiday and everything that went with it. Reaching out with his free hand, he patted the bed, looking for Jess. The girl could hold her liquor and never had a hangover. When he comes up empty, Sam rolls over, squinting at the other half of the bed. The bedspread looks different. And ugly.
"Jess?" Sam calls out.
He starts to sit up, his body aching with every movement, and he feels heavier somehow, like he had magically gained weight overnight. Blinking down at himself, Sam frowns. Last he checked, he didn't have a six pack. Or a tattoo. Or so many scars. The headache only gets worse as he glances around, really taking everything in. This is not his apartment. It's a motel room like the ones he grew up in. The fake wood paneling, scarred dresser, rabbit-eared TV, and horribly 70s color combinations give it away.
"Dean?" Sam tries instead. "Dad?"
Maybe something had happened last night? His family coming to get him for something? No, but that didn't explain the changes in his own body. Sam stumbles into the bathroom to get a better look at himself. He looks older, harder, like he's spent a lot of time doing manual labor. Or hunting, his mind supplies. He hurries through his morning routine and then heads back into the main room.
There's a bag on the table, but when he opens it, all he finds is a box with fake IDs, his favorite gun, and a few changes of clothing. Digging through the outside pockets and checking the lining doesn't reveal anything more useful, so he dumps it all back on the table and collapses in the chair next to it.
"What the hell happened?" he asks the empty room.
Dean wakes up to find himself on a bus. An endless, flat landscape flashes by the windows, the sun burning his eyes. He doesn't remember getting on the bus. Doesn't remember anything except his name and a vague sense of missing something. There's something clenched in his hand and he opens his palm, examining it. It's a compass.
The compass is old and scratched, the indicators just barely readable, and judging by the angle of the sun, it's pointing the wrong way. He flips it over and frowns at the symbols on the back. They look familiar but he can't quite place them, like it's on the tip of his tongue, if only he could remember.
If only he could remember anything other than his name.
"Next stop, Lawrence. Lawrence, Kansas," the bus driver announces.
Dean doesn't know how he ended up on the bus or why, but when he pats his pockets, he finds a ticket with Lawrence as the destination. The origin is rubbed out and no amount of squinting or turning the paper makes it readable. He pulls out his wallet and digs through it, hoping for more clues, but all he finds are a bunch of credit cards and IDs in different names.
"Who the hell am I?" Dean mutters.
The only response he gets is a glare from the old lady across the aisle.
Sam takes the few bills he found in his pocket and walks to the motel office to get change and a newspaper. There's a payphone next to the pop machine outside and Sam plans to call every number he can think of until he gets some answers. He calls Jess, his Dad, Dean, Caleb, Bobby, any other hunter he can think up or remember the number for but they all reach the same dead end: I'm sorry but this number is out of service. That doesn't make any sense. How can all of them be out of service?
He rakes a hand through his hair and then walks back to his motel room. If their numbers are disconnected, likely no one lives where he would expect them to either, but Sam has to try something.
According to the paper, Sam is in King City, somewhere in Monterey County, so south of Stanford. It's also apparently 2011, a good six years after Sam's last memory. He wonders what happened in that blank space, but when he tries to concentrate and come up with something, all he sees is fire. Fire behind a blurry glass, like someone hasn't washed the windows in decades.
Shaking off the vision, Sam hurriedly packs his bag back up and exits the motel room. He really hopes he remembers how to steal a car.
At the bus station in Lawrence, Dean sits down in one of the plastic chairs and tries to get his bearings. Turns out he had checked baggage on the bus; one duffel bag full of old clothes and, bizarrely, a knife hidden at the bottom. The weight of it had felt right in his palm when he touched it, like he knew how to use it, but he had only that one sensory memory, nothing else to go on. His best guess is that he's a criminal of some sort; why else would he have so many fake identities? A con man? A grifter? But he can feel the strength of his hands, the lean muscles of his legs, the broadness of his shoulders, things that could only come from a life of hard work, not from any prison yard gym.
He tosses the compass back and forth between his hands as he thinks. It's the only thing he really can't make sense of at all. Why would he be carrying around a busted compass with weird writing on the back? Is it a family heirloom? He runs his thumbs over the marks but the only thing that comes to him is the scent of dusty old books. Was he a librarian?
Librarian, he thinks, library. Maybe he can figure out how to translate the symbols.
Stanford is a bust. Sam and Jess' apartment is now occupied by someone named Vijay Kumar. The records office can only tell him that he dropped out six years ago and left no forwarding address. None of the faces are familiar and Sam figures if that many years have passed, none of his friends go to school here anymore. The only thing the place is good for is stealing a laptop.
It's going to be a long drive, but Sam figures his next stop should be Bobby's. Even if the only phone number Sam can remember is disconnected, Sam highly doubts the man has moved. As a child Sam used to think that Bobby was bound to that salvage yard like some kind of curse since he hardly ever left its confines.
So Sam gets back in his stolen Ford Taurus and heads east. Bobby has to be there. Has to know what happened, where his father and brother have gone; where the last six years of his life have gone.
The library is a two mile walk east of the bus station, according to the woman at the ticket counter. Dean spends most of it looking around. The city seems almost familiar like maybe he had been there once, long ago. Not quite déjà vu, but something close, like a dream instead of something real.
Inside the library he heads for the foreign language section even though he's not sure exactly what he's looking for since it's not as though the language is in words. Maybe it's Egyptian? He wanders aimlessly between history and foreign language, idly picking up books and paging through them looking for similar symbols, but finding nothing.
Finally he gives up and goes to the counter. There's a pale, skinny guy dressed in all black who looks like death warmed over sitting behind it. He's slurping something out of a Styrofoam cup but somehow looks dignified even with his cheeks hollowed and a straw between his lips.
"Listen, I need some help," Dean starts.
"Do I really have to do everything around here?" the man sighs. He snatches the compass out of Dean's hand and flips it over. "Sumerian although I doubt you're going to find help translating that here."
"Right," Dean says slowly.
The man rolls his eyes. "True heart's desire. Or true heart's curse, depending on your interpretation." He tosses the compass back to Dean who catches it easily. "Knowing you, probably the latter."
"Knowing me?" Dean asks. "Do I know you?"
Dean smells fried food, grease, feels queasy as it hits him. He clutches the edge of the counter as his stomach heaves. There's something about this man. A feeling of fear hits him like a wave and he goes down, falling to his knees.
"Who are you?" Dean manages to choke out.
"That, I'm afraid, I can't tell you."
When Dean is finally able to lift his head, the other man is gone.
What had once been a ramshackle house is now a burnt-out ruin. Sam kicks a couple of pieces of charred wood, feeling completely lost. Dean is gone. His dad is gone. And now Bobby. Maybe he's the only one left. Maybe something catastrophic happened.
Sam can guess all he likes, but unless he can find someone in their little network of hunters, he's never going to know the truth.
So he decides to bunk down for the night, get some rest, see if he can track down someone else. Pastor Jim or one of the other hunters his dad knew.
Only when he settles into the room and turns on the TV, Dean is there, in the background of a news report on a freak hail storm in Lawrence, Kansas. He's older than Sam remembers, but that's him walking down the sidewalk.
Dean doesn't know why, but he thinks he should follow the direction of the broken compass. There has to be a reason why it's broken. A reason why it has those symbols. A reason why he just happened to run into someone who could translate them. And the translation is pretty telling.
The old Toyota Camry he buys used with John Bonham's credit card seems like a reliable way to get around, but he feels strange driving it. Like he's expecting something roomier, wider, older. But he shakes that feeling of wrongness off and heads west, using the compass to know when to turn, head south or keep going.
As he drives, the plains of Kansas fade into the grasslands of Oklahoma and northern Texas before turning into the rugged desert of New Mexico. He stops in Santa Rosa for the night at the Sun & Sand Motel, avoiding the nicer places he passes and the main drag of the city all together. He doesn't know why he does this either, just that it makes his skin itch thinking about picking somewhere nicer.
Once he's in the room, this one decorated like Las Vegas died inside, he gets this warm feeling in his chest, like it's safe, warm, home. He can almost reach some kind of memory. A little boy, a pendant, but as soon as it comes, it's gone, leaving behind a painful headache.
Sam is going on days of almost no sleep, but when he arrives in Kansas, he doesn't stop. He checks every alias he remembers Dean ever having before he hits the jackpot with John Bonham. There's a used car, a bunch of seedy motels, and a string of diners in the guy's name. It has to be Dean. Has to be.
No cell phone though. So Sam's stuck tracking his movement after the fact. None of it makes much sense. There are no strange occurrences where Dean's going, other than the hail storm, so he's not hunting. Maybe, Sam thinks, maybe he's lost his memory just like Sam has; maybe he's trying to get it back.
So Sam starts researching, looking into the past six years for anything remotely odd. Anything that could've been a hunt he and Dean were on, anything that matches up with the places Dean is traveling to. He's only guessing though, so he stays in Lawrence on the off chance Dean comes back. After all, it's the only real "home" they've ever had.
The next morning, Dean wakes up early, drinks the horrible coffee offered in the motel lounge, and then heads out again. Seems like the compass still wants him to go west, so that's what he does. Across the rest of New Mexico, the whole of Arizona, before dipping down into southern California. As soon as Dean crosses a bridge over a river in Jericho, the compass starts spinning like crazy. He slams on the brakes and gets out, looking down into the water.
He remembers this bridge, this river. Something about the color white. A woman. Water. Dead children. It doesn't make any sense and trying to pry further just makes Dean sick.
After puking over the side of the bridge, Dean slides back into the car. The compass sits on the dash, mocking him, and it clearly points north-east. With no memories, no reference points, the compass is the only thing he has, so he turns back, heads right back the way he came.
Sam's reading about a string of disappearances in Jericho, California - where Dean had just been-- when a flood of memories hits him like a freight train. They had gone there without their Dad. No, looking for their Dad. It was a woman in white. And when they came back to Stanford, Jess…
Fire. That's all Sam can see. Fire on the ceiling, fire all around.
"I knew you couldn't forget me," a voice says, smooth and deadly.
He remembers the face that goes with it. Remembers being flayed alive while those eyes danced and a smirk played on the thing's face.
"Lucifer," Sam whispers, but refuses to open his eyes.
There's laughter and then fire is gone. Sam remembers being in Hell. Remembers every case, every argument with Dean, their dad dying, his own psychic powers, Yellow Eyes, dying, Dean's deal, Ruby, the apocalypse, Ellen and Jo and Ash and all the others that died for his sins, and Castiel. The angel who…
But Sam can't remember. He knows Castiel brought Dean back from Hell, but he can't remember anything beyond that about the angel. Nothing at all.
The compass keeps leading Dean to small towns, to places that Dean continues to not remember. Colorado, Oklahoma. Back and forth across the country for no apparent reason that he can discern.
This time the compass leads Dean to Rockford, Illinois. It starts doing the crazy spinning outside a shuttered mental institution. Dean doesn't dare go inside. He gets this cold feeling just looking at the place. When he touches the fence, he feels like he's been punched in the gut. It cripples him, dropping him to his knees, fingers grasping the fence so hard his knuckles turn white. There's a name on the tip of his tongue, but he can't remember it. It hurts so much to even try and he screams in agony, howling into the night.
When he's finally able to breathe again, Dean looks down at the compass. West, again. He almost throws it away in frustration, but instead clutches it tight to his chest.
Salvation, Iowa. If Sam remembers correctly, Dean has to end up there at some point, so Sam packs up and drives north. With his memories came other things, Bobby's most recent spate of phone numbers, for one. He tries each of them as he drives until he finally hits the jackpot.
"Bobby?" Sam asks.
"Sam? You're alive?"
Bobby sounds shocked. Did the same thing happen to him that happened to Sam and Dean? Memories wiped?
"Yeah. I don't know what happened, but I'm alive."
They spend the next half hour hashing out what happened to the two of them. Bobby had woken up to find himself in jail, remembering everything. He catches Sam up on Castiel, on where they all stood last. The only thing they can't figure out is why Castiel wiped his memories and most likely Dean's, what purpose did that serve?
Dean is tired after his outburst in Rockford, but he doesn't stick around. The compass says to head west, so he gets right back in the car and heads west. It starts raining as soon as he's back on the highway, matching his own dark mood. The compass may be all he has but this is a lonely existence, drifting from place to place, waiting for something to happen. Anything to happen.
He gets his wish in the middle of nowhere, Iowa. The compass spins once and then just stops, pointing due south. Dean taps it, tries moving around in a circle to see if it will move again, but nothing. So he pulls into a parking space outside the only motel in this tiny town and rests his head on the steering wheel. Is this where he's from? Is this his true heart's desire?
Sam is about to head out to grab some dinner. He's been on the phone for what seems like days with Bobby trying to figure this out. Castiel had wiped their memories, but why? That's one thing neither he nor Bobby can seem to figure out. Sam wants to believe it was to protect them, but Bobby has snorted at that every time Sam tries to bring it up. It's true that Cas had been acting strange, but separating them like this? Especially so soon after Sam got his soul back?
He's nearly halfway across the parking lot when he feels it, this sense of someone staring at him. Turning around, he immediately recognizes the figure leaning against an old Toyota.
"Dean!"
Dean looks startled, not happy. His eyes are narrowed, taking in Sam like he doesn't recognize him.
"You don't remember?" Sam asks as he stops a few feet away.
"I don't-" Dean cuts himself off. "Who are you?"
"Sam. Your brother."
"I have a brother?" Dean looks puzzled. "Do I live here?"
"Yes, no." Sam points at his motel room door. "Just come with me and I'll explain."
Dean shies away. "How do I know you're telling the truth?"
And Sam doesn't know how to answer that. No way to bring something up that they would only both remember. There are no photos of the two of them together. Sam snaps his fingers and then yanks down the collar of his shirt, revealing his tattoo.
"You have one of these, too, right?" Sam asks.
"Yeah," Dean says, sounding surprised. He pulls down the neck of his shirt to show Sam the same tattoo. "I do."
Despite the matching tattoos, Dean is still wary of following this stranger into a motel room. Hell the matching tattoos themselves are worrying. Are they in a biker club? A gang? A cult? But he really has no choice in the matter, not since the compass stopped working. Maybe this is what the compass meant; to find his brother.
This motel is just like all the other ones Dean stayed in, but it feels much more like home with both him and Sam inside of it. That calms Dean down a bit. He sits in the chair Sam indicates and then looks around, taking in all the maps and notes tacked to the wall. His mind quickly picks up the pattern, recognizes all the places he's been and he shoots out of the chair, ripping down a photo of himself.
"What is this? Have you been… stalking me?" Dean asks.
"No!" Sam says quickly. "Trying to find you."
"Do you work for the police? How would you know how to do this? Are we criminals? We're criminals, aren't we? That explains the matching tattoos," Dean rambles as he paces back and forth. "And the knife. But not the compass. Don't think many criminals are fluent in Sumerian. But then again, what would I know? I have amnesia."
"Dean, Dean." Sam grabs his shoulders. "Stop. I can explain if you just let me."
Dean slumps down in the chair again. "Okay. Explain."
"Well, we're brothers and our mother died…"
As Sam goes on, his explanation seems to get more and more convoluted with every passing word. Angels and demons and monsters and hunting them. Something about the family business and their mom and a fire started by a demon. A magical gun. A battle between Michael and Lucifer and a third brother named Adam.
"You sound crazy. Are you sure that mental institute I stopped at wasn't someplace you stayed at for a while?" Dean finally breaks in.
"I know it sounds crazy," Sam sighs. "But it's true. All of it."
"Okay, so our whole family is crazy. Do we belong to a cult? Did I try to escape?" Dean asks and then quickly adds, "Because I'm not going back. I don't care if you're my brother."
"No!" Sam blows out a frustrated breath.
Suddenly Sam grabs Dean, pulling him up into a bear hug. Dean sucks in a deep breath out of surprise, taking in Sam's scent, and then suddenly, the world spins, turns upside down as he remembers. He remembers all of it so fast it's a head rush.
"Sammy," Dean gasps. "I remember." He pulls back a bit, still clutching Sam's shoulders. "I remember. And we have to stop Cas."
"Stop him?" Sam asks, brow furrowed.
"Death. He told me. The souls are important. Cas did something with them. Something bad," Dean explains.
They're too late. By the time they hunt Castiel down, he's already walking in the water supply. He tricked them, strung them along, tried to permanently separate them when tried to stop him, and yet Sam does feel remorse. Once again they're losing a friend; once again it's just the two of them standing at the edge of the end of civilization.
"What do we do now?" Sam asks as they watch the black ooze spread.
"Take care of it," Dean answers, meeting Sam's eyes with an intense look. "Together."
Sam smiles, just a slight tilt of his lips. Nothing has ever been able to keep them apart. Not death or alternative universes or magic spells woven by a power hungry angel or even their own stupidity. And together, they can accomplish anything.
"Together," Sam repeats, clapping his hand on Dean's shoulder.
Dean gives him a matching smile back and despite everything, Sam feels like everything's going to be just fine.