A/N - Thanks to everyone who waited so long for me to continue this, and I'm sorry about my horrible laziness. *sheepish grin* Also, since I'm sure there'll be some confusion, THIS IS NOT THE ORIGINAL CHAPTER TWO. During the long time it took for me to update, I reworked some of the aspects of the story, including changing the timeline a bit. Unfortunately, this kinda had to come before the SG-1 stuff. Sorry. :/


-24 Hours Earlier-

Dark.

Darkness and night and the oppressive stench of blood. Half-decomposed. Rotting. It surrounded him, and he felt it thick in his nose and mouth, like a monster hell-bent on choking out every single thing in the room that could be considered anything less than pure evil.

Screams pierced the heavy air. Horrible, gut-wrenching, familiar screams. One. And another. And another still. Three in quick succession, and they didn't stop.

Wouldn't ever stop.

The screams came from a body that lay close by, close enough to touch if he could move. A body as dead as the blood that pooled around it.

Dead by his own hand.

Dead. Lifeless. Eyes wide, but staring at nothing.

And still the screams refused to stop: some of his name, some unintelligible and almost inhuman-

-No, that wasn't right, they were all of his name now. And not pained and tortured either. Insistent. Faded. Slowly yet irresistibly overtaken by a comfortably familiar rumble...

"Sam!"

A sharp whack to his left shoulder finally startled the younger Winchester awake, and after a rather lengthier than usual moment of complete confusion, he realised that he was in the Impala with his brother. Safe. No screams, no blood. Everything was right and normal and just as it should be.

Except it wasn't, not really. Thinking back on the events of the past few weeks, Sam remembered that nothing was really right at all.

Instinctively, he glanced over at his brother, though not before having the presence of mind to feign an attitude of annoyance at the rude awakening. After all, that was the sort of attitude that Dean would expect. It felt easy and normal and right when nothing else was, and would bother him far less than any show of concern on Sam's part. "What?"

Dean grinned over at him, appropriately and reassuringly oblivious. "That must've been some dream you were having there. It took me a whole three miles to get you awake enough to realize I existed, let alone move. And even then you were doing that thing with your shoulders - you know, like you used to do when you were little and didn't want to get up?" He shook his head and chuckled. "Man, you were cute."

Sam glared. Now annoyed in earnest, he was beginning to feel a little more like himself, and a little less like the helpless, haunted thing he had been in his nightmare.

And it was a nightmare. It had to be a nightmare, and not just because he wanted it to be. Two years of the horrible, painful things had taught him what visions felt like, and this wasn't it. He had known from the beginning, really - and also not until he had woken up, yet another sign that it was perfectly normal manifestation of his freakishly messed up subconscious - but it felt too wrong to be a vision. Like it was too vivid, yet also too impossible.

No, not impossible, that was the wrong word.

Unreal.

Because the possibility that such a scenario might actually occur was far too real for Sam to care to imagine.

He pushed the thought from his mind. Regardless of word choice, the fact still remained that the horrifically vivid thing that he had just experienced was simply a dream. A bloody, terrifying, gut-wrenching dream, granted - one of the worst he had experienced since he was a kid - but nothing more. He had taken enough Psych classes back at Stanford to know that nightmares were simply the unconscious mind's response to fear. They weren't prophecies, warnings, or portents of things to come.

If you were careful, the things in nightmares never had to happen.

He shook his head, and tried to focus on the being-annoyed-at-Dean. Rather unsurprisingly, this was far less difficult than he might have imagined. "Yeah, well," he countered, "three miles isn't actually that long a time when you're pushing 90." He yawned and tried to arrange his long limbs into something a little closer to a sitting position.

Dean's only response was to step a little harder on the accelerator, coaxing the Impala faster and faster down the empty highway. As Sam watched, the mountains and low, scattered bushes of eastern Utah rushed past at an ever-increasing pace, eventually melting into a single dark blur and blending into the night. Ever so briefly, a feeling flashed over him that he remembered from when he was a kid - like the world was flying by and the only constants were the car and the people inside it. Usually he hated that feeling. He hated the fact that he couldn't make it stop, that he was always stuck inside the little bubble of his life and separated against his will from everything normal and interesting.

Ever so rarely, though - usually in little moments like these - that feeling was the only thing that actually provided any comfort. In those moments it didn't matter that evil rushed through their lives on an almost daily basis, leaving behind a whirlwind of carnage and chaos that they only hoped they could clean up in their lifetime. It didn't matter that situations and plans changed at a frightening rate or that they always seemed to be one step behind the next evil scheme, because no matter what happened, this would never change.

Him and Dean. In the Impala. Watching the world rush madly by, and letting it.

A small smile played at his lips. Or at least the closest thing to a smile that anyone had seen on him in since he woke up alive in that shack outside of Cold Oak.

He could almost feel Dean smirking, and quickly changed his expression back to one of general annoyance, though he was now unable to keep the teasing tone out of his voice. "Besides, I was never the one who was hard to wake up, Mr. Slept-through-Dad-killing-a- werewolf."

"Hey! I had the flu, and I hadn't slept in two days."

"Yeah, whatever."

"Besides, I'm not the one who just slept through his phone ringing. Twice."

This got Sam's attention, and he dug quickly through his pockets, pulling out the offending device. Sure enough, there were two missed calls, both within a couple minutes of each other.

"Bobby." His mind raced, wondering what could have caused the older hunter to call at this time of night, especially considering they had parted ways in Lincoln barely a day earlier. With a sort of childish hope, he couldn't keep himself from thinking that maybe this had been the call. The one where Bobby would have all the answers and fix everything. "Why didn't you wake me up? This could've been important!"

Dean glanced at him again, his face betraying his concern. "Dude, chill. And I tried, remember? Why don't you just call him back, if you're that worried about it?"

Sam had already pressed the redial button. A few seconds later, the other end of the line was picked up, and he let go of the breath he hadn't even realized he'd been holding. "Hey, Bobby, you got something?"

"As a matter of fact, I do." The voice on the other end was scratchier than usual, a result of the poor cell signal in the Middle of Nowhere, Utah. "Been getting a hell of a lot of reports of omens out near Colorado Springs. Unless I'm wrong, something big and nasty is headed there, and fast."

"Oh." Sam took a deep breath and tried to keep the disappointment out of his voice. It had been a stupid thing to hope for, anyway. "So this is about a job." Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Dean look at him again, then quickly refocused his attention on the call.

"'Course it's about a job." There was a pause as Bobby worked out what exactly Sam had been hoping to hear. "Look, Sam, I'm good, but even I ain't that good. I promise we're gonna find a way to help your brother, but this is going down now, and we gotta deal with it."

Sam nodded, chastised. "Yeah, Bobby, I know. So what are the details?"

"Why don't you go ahead and put it on speaker? I don't wanna have to explain this more than once to you two idjits."

Sam complied, and the rest of the call was spent discussing the gory details of what he was sure was going to be the next major crisis that the Winchester Brothers were willfully pitching themselves into headlong. He jotted down the most important facts, but for the most part, it was more of the usual: crop failures, storms that didn't seem to be entirely natural, and a couple of grisly, unexplained deaths. Just another day at the office.

He stopped paying attention about half way through and did a few calculations in his head. By his estimation they were nearly 500 miles away from Colorado Springs, so they'd have to hurry if they wanted to make it there by morning.

Suppressing a sigh, Sam resigned himself to yet another long night of driving. As Dean and Bobby droned on about omens, demons, and monsters with a taste for human flesh, he turned his head back to the window, watching the rest of the world fly past at an ever-hurrying pace.


A/N - Again, sorry about the confusion! As always, comments and reviews would be lovely.