When Dean comes to and a bird is calling from somewhere in the distance, he thinks for a moment that it's the beep of hospital equipment, and he opens his eyes expecting to see the white of hospital walls, feel the dull thump of drugs running through his veins. He comes to expecting to be alone.
But instead, he sees Sam's huge head, his brother's little eyes opened about as wide as they can go, mouth moving frantically in what Dean recognizes as his own name.
"Dean! Dean!"
Dean blinks, realizes that he's lying on the damp, muddy ground in his only good suit.
"The fuck?" he asks, leveraging himself to his elbows, not sure what happened. Then he sees a girl's face, anxious and curious, framed by long, wavy hair, and he remembers.
Claire. The carpenters. The cabin, that looks so much like that other cabin.
He closes his eyes against a wave of dizziness that threatens to engulf him, takes a deep breath. For a moment, before he'd lost consciousness, he'd been right back where he was eight months ago, so real, wood dust in his nose and no solid ground beneath his feet, the instant of realization when he knew that there was nothing to grab onto. Pain.
"Hey," Sam is saying, is pressing a hand to Dean's chest. "Breathe, man, breathe!"
Dean shakes his head, sucks in a noisy breath, and reality fades slowly back into his vision.
And now he's just really fucking embarrassed. Really fucking embarrassed, because he just fainted like a little girl, and he still can't look at that cabin.
"Dean?" Sam says.
"I'm fine," Dean rasps, clears his throat. "Got dizzy for a second."
"Dude, you fell out of the golf cart."
"Yeah," Dean says, wincing as he tries to sit up. "Fuckin' meds. Doctors warned me about this."
"You think this is an effect of the vicodin?" Sam asks. "How many did you take today, man?"
"Doubled the dose," Dean says, which is not true, for once.
"That could do it," Claire chimes in. "You shouldn't trust pharmaceuticals unless you make them yourself."
"Amen," Dean groans. Glances at Sam, whose carefully slicked-back hair is giving way to its natural shagginess, knees of his suit covered in mud and grass stains, and then takes inventory of himself, dirty and laying on the ground like he's trying to become one with the earth, hyperventilating and blabbing about pain meds. They are maybe some of the worst FBI agents ever.
"Help me up," he directs, and Sam pulls him to his feet, helps him lean up against the golf cart. His whole right side is throbbing from where he fell. Funny, he could use a vicodin right now, but that would be pretty damn suspicious considering the excuse he made a moment ago.
"I just," he says, feeling around in his jacket pockets, "I just need to smoke a cigarette and then I'll be all right."
"Except for the cancer," Claire says, and Dean shoots her a withering glare as Sam grins.
He turns away to light his smoke because he doesn't want either of them to see how badly his hands are shaking. It takes a couple tries but finally he gets it lit and can turn back, already a little calmer.
"You sure you're all right?" Sam asks, puts a big hand on Dean's elbow and squeezes in what he apparently thinks is a gesture of comfort.
"I'm fine," Dean says, shaking him off. "Yeah. Just. Yeah, I've gotta lay off the vicodin."
"You know, there are more natural pain meds available," Claire says.
"Like opium?" Dean snorts, then remembers that federal agents really aren't supposed to talk about drugs. Claire seems to have remembered it too, because she flushes for a moment and looks terrified before turning away.
It's started drizzling again, and the air feels like it's gotten a couple degrees colder in the past half hour, and Dean suppresses a shiver. He's got to get a grip.
Slowly, trying to play it off like he's just stretching his neck, he turns his head towards the cabin.
He can feel his heartrate climb, but he doesn't even come close to passing out this time, and the vivid, intense flashback he'd experienced is only a flicker of memory in his mind, the sound of cracking wood, darkness.
The cabin doesn't really look anything like that other cabin back in South Dakota; it's in better shape, for one thing, with a shiny new porch and a roof that, for the most part, looks like it might keep out the rain.
And it's not even like Dean remembers much, except for that sickening feeling of the floor dropping out from underneath his feet, the throbbing, relentless pain that characterized the next month and a half or so. The red lights of the ambulance, and maybe his father gripping his hand, though he can't be sure about the last part.
He'd told Sam a couple days ago that he'd had running dreams for a while – but he'd left out the part about how they had always, without fail, turned into falling dreams. For months he'd fall in a terrifying plunge every time he closed his eyes, night after night, and he'd wake up gasping for air, soaked in sweat, leg screaming like it had snapped all over again.
In the hospital – and this is also something he's never going to tell Sam, never going to tell anyone – he'd gone through some mandatory group counseling, learning to live with a disability, that kind of crap. Compared to the others in the group he was pretty well off; there was a woman who'd lost her eyesight in a chemical spill, a older man who'd gotten his arm completely mangled by a snowmobile, and a guy named Steve around his age who'd fallen off a cliff while rock climbing and had to have his leg amputated.
Dean had gotten to be pretty good friends with Steve, for the month they were in the hospital together – it was a circumstantial friendship, to be sure, born out of the fact that they were both twenty-five and bored out of their skulls, and the majority of their conversations centered around women and drinking stories and how much it sucked not to be able to walk. And the fact that they both had dreams where they re-lived their falls, over and over.
"I can barely look out of a third-floor window anymore," Steve had confessed in counseling one day. "I used to live for climbing. Now what the fuck am I supposed to live for?"
Dean had never liked heights, and after he fell he found that he was almost paralyzed by them. He remembers being wheeled up to the eighth floor for physical therapy, how the doors had slid open on a huge picture window that overlooked the town, how he thought for one second that he was going to pass out – but he hadn't.
Seeing this cabin was like that, but a thousand times worse. Cause, yeah. He had passed out this time. Which is. Completely mortifying.
He takes a drag of his cigarette, realizes suddenly that neither Claire nor Sam have said anything at all for the past three minutes, have just been standing there silently, watching him smoke.
"Okay!" he says, his voice so falsely cheerful that even he is disgusted. "Let's get this investigation on the road!" He finishes his cigarette and moves to toss it on the ground, but Claire stops him with a hand to his arm.
"Please don't throw that on the earth," she says. "Put it in your pocket."
He complies, turns to Sam.
"You sure you're all right?" he asks Dean.
"Totally."
Sam eyes him, sighs, nods. "We shouldn't be more than a half hour," Sam says to Claire. "If you don't want to come down and pick us up, that's fine. We can probably manage the walk; the ground didn't look too bad."
"Oh, I'll just stay," she says, and Dean gives Sam the most eloquent non-verbal I-freakin-told-you-so he's got.
"Fine," Sam sighs, ignores Dean's wiggling eyebrows. "Let's go."
Dean manages about three steps before he realizes that he probably isn't going to be able to do this.
"Hey, Agent Thomson," he says. "Maybe today's not the best day to go in there."
Sam and Claire both look at him like he's insane. "What are you talking about?" Sam asks.
"I mean," Dean waves his hand a little. "It's raining."
"So?"
"It could be dangerous."
"Martinez, it's broad daylight," Sam says. "If it's… critters… you're worried about, we're prepared."
"Right," Dean says, and Sam turns around. Dean takes another step towards the cabin, stops. It feels like a steel band is tightening around his lungs, and his vision's going blurry at the edges again. He grips his crutches, closes his eyes, wills himself to stay upright.
"Hey," he hears Claire say. "Agent Thomson. Something's wrong."
Then Sam's hands are on Dean's shoulders, shaking him. "Dean! Dean, jesus!"
"Agent Thomson," Claire says in a tone of reproach, and there's a smacking noise, a yelp from Sam, and his hands are replaced by Claire's, slim and cool, patting Dean's cheek.
"Agent Martinez," she says gently. "Dean. You're really freaking out."
"Yeah," he admits, eyes still closed.
"Just breathe through it, all right? It's like a bad trip."
"Yeah," Dean breathes, because she's right, it does feel like a bad trip, and when he thinks about it like that, it's easier to manage.
When he opens his eyes, Sam is looking at him with renewed understanding and something akin to horror.
"Oh, Dean," he says. "Is it…" he gestures to the cabin, gestures to Dean's crutches. "Are you…?"
"Little bit," Dean says, closes his eyes again. "Yeah."
"Well, okay," Sam says. "Okay. You just stay out here. Okay? I'll check things out, and you… why don't you just go sit down?"
"No!" Dean says, feels panic grip his heart again. "Don't—Sam, it's not safe." God, he knows he sounds like an idiot, and this fear he feels, it's completely unreasonable and irrational and he knows that; but knowing doesn't make it go away.
"Dude," Sam says. "One of us has got to go in there and check things out. People have been walking around in that cabin for the past week, and no one got – well, okay, people got hurt, but not because of that."
"Just don't," Dean says. "You need backup."
"I'll only be ten minutes," Sam says. "Do you want people to keep dying?"
How the fuck is Dean supposed to argue with that? "Dude," he says. "Please. Be careful."
"Of course I'll be careful."
Dean can't watch Sam go in, lets Claire lead him back to the golf cart and push him gently down till he's sitting on the hood.
He shakes out another cigarette from his pack, wishes he could go for the flask of whiskey he's got in his jacket pocket next to the holy water, but he's given Claire enough clues that he's not really an agent.
"You all right?" she asks.
"Fucked if I know," he mutters around the filter, flicking his lighter with a hiss and a crackle.
"What are you so frightened of?" she asks. "Are you worried it's haunted?"
He nearly chokes on his cigarette, stares at her with wide eyes.
She pats him absently on the back, keeps talking. "Because if you're worried it's haunted, you've got nothing to fear. I did a smudging ceremony before I started any work on it."
"You did?"
"Of course. I told you, my father was an asshole. There was a lot of bad energy in that place."
Dean is silent, considering. Interesting that the smudging didn't work. It's not the most foolproof way to put down a vengeful spirit, but it's definitely been proven effective more than once, if performed before the spirit has a chance to harm anyone.
"Where's your father buried?" Dean asks, because he and Sam have been figuring this for a classic case of vengeful spirit. Nasty old man gets killed in his cabin, hangs around the place to be a nasty old ghost.
"Oh, he's not buried."
"What?"
"We cremated him."
Bones burned? That puts kind of a damper on the theory, then. Dean casts a speculative look back at the cabin.
If it's not Jane's father, then what is it?
Suddenly a loud crack sounds from the house, followed by a bang, and all the windows of the cabin start to rattle.
Dean's heart leaps up into his mouth and then takes a swan dive towards his stomach.
"Sam!" he shouts, already pushing himself to his feet and grappling with his crutches. He starts forward as there's another crack and then a bang and then he can physically see the windows of the cabin start to rattle.
The door swings open before he's taken three steps, and his brother hurtles himself down the porch, face a mask of pain, one arm clamped around his chest and blood streaming down into his eyes.
"We've got to get out of here!" Sam gasps. "Now!"