Chapter 7


"You're not making sense."

"Fuck, I know," he said, and his shoulders slumped down along with the exhale he let out. "I shouldn't have done this," he added, much more quietly.

"Done what?" I sat up and looked at him. "This? Us? That's what you're regretting now? After – after everything that we've been through?"

It wasn't him, I thought a bit wildly. It couldn't be. But it sure as heck sounded like him, sounded like some misguided guilt trip he'd taken himself on.

"It was a mistake," he said, straightening up and turning to look at me. "Mine. Sam needs me to be focussed – to watch his back."

"Yeah, I get that –"

He cut me off. "So, right now, most of the time, I'm not focussed on him, not focussed on the job," he said, the sharpness returning to his tone. "I'm thinking about things I have no business thinking about."

At that, I started to feel angry. Finally, I can hear you mutter. Yeah, well, surprise does that to you.

"I'm distracting you, Dean?" I asked him, wincing inwardly at the way my voice had risen to a new, higher pitch with the question. I looked around the room, wondering how I could have been so darned dumb as to think this was going to be a home.

"I'm not trying to hurt you –" he started to say, and swung away, his eyes closing.

"You're not? What a relief!" I snapped, ignoring the way he looked, focussed on what he was saying instead. Females. I tell ya. "Because I'd hate to think what I'd feel like if you were trying."

I got off the bed, snatching up my robe and pulling it on, wondering where the hell I could go for the rest of the night. It was inconsiderate to have a fight in the middle of the night, I thought, not looking at what he was saying, preferring to relegate the argument to one of relationship etiquette.

"I'll go, you can stay here," he said, not looking at me as he began to pull clean clothes from the bureau.

"Why would I want to stay here?" I said waspishly to him, and it was right then that I felt something wrong. I mean, wrong apart from what was going horrendously wrong in the room between us, that is. It was really weird, but I kind of stepped right away from everything for a split-second, as if I'd just taken a giant stride off the world.

How had we gone from being so close, physically and emotionally, a moment ago to this, I wondered in that weird clarity when I didn't feel like I existed anywhere. How had that happened?

I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that Dean had not been feeling any doubts whatsoever five minutes before – or an hour – or a day. He'd been aware that I was worried about him, about the trials and all that meant, about what the hellhound had done to him, all of that stuff, but we'd been past that, I thought. He'd never mentioned or even implied by look or anything that he was worried that he needed to protect his brother without distractions.

The out-of-the-world clarity vanished and I stood in our room, staring at him as he leaned on the end of the bed, his shoulders tense and the muscles visibly knotted up.

"Dean –"

"I can't," he said, lurching to one side as if he was feeling a pain in his head, his gaze on the floor. He reached out for the door handle and pulled the door open, his head bowed as he staggered through it.

"I can't risk losing Sam, Terry," he said as he drew the door close to him. "I don't love you, not the same way you love me, and I never will."

He stepped aside and pulled the door shut, like a kind of exclamation point to his words. My nanosecond of clarity memory vanished under those words and I sat down on the bed staring at the door for a few minutes as they sank in.

The feeling of wrongness persisted, however.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

They were gone in the morning, and I walked downstairs in a numb haze, not really sure that everything that had happened last night had really occurred. I mean, I'd been having nightmares, maybe I'd had one and in it Dean had said the thing I least wanted to hear and had left? It was possible. I didn't think that's what'd happened, but I did try to keep the thought that it was a possibility at the forefront of my mind.

Lauren took one look at my face and poured me a coffee, setting it down on the kitchen table in front of me and pushing me down into a chair.

"What happened?"

"I don't know," I said. "I think Dean dumped me last night."

"You think?" she asked doubtfully.

I sipped the hot black coffee and tried to sort out the memories into something resembling order.

"Everything was fine, then he suddenly started saying that he couldn't protect Sam, that he couldn't prioritise with me around," I remembered. "Then he said didn't love me, the same way I love him, and he never would."

I frowned at that, the contradiction in the conversation coming back to me. "Actually, he seemed to be saying that he wasn't thinking of Sam as much as he was thinking of our relationship at first, but then it changed around."

"That's…peculiar," Lauren ventured, frowning as well.

The comment did get a snort out of me. "Understatement," I told her. "What's more peculiar is that at first, I was attacking him as well…" I stopped, remembering that. I mean, you know me, I can hardly get two related words to come out when Dean's been on the attack over the time I've known him, yet last night a whole bunch of stuff came out that hadn't really sounded like me.

I rubbed the heel of my hand over my forehead, feeling a slight ache around the temple. "In any case, in the middle of it, I suddenly felt like I wasn't standing in the room any more, like I'd…ceased to exist or something."

"Okay…" Lauren said. "Then what?"

"Then I was wondering how we'd gotten from just having incredibly tender yet mind-blowing sex to yelling at each other and apparently breaking up," I said, a good deal more bluntly than I would've without the anxiety that was twisting up my insides. "He's never mentioned being worried about looking after Sam before. In fact, the last thing he said before that was that Bobby was insisting on going along with them to find the vampires."

She nodded at that. "Dean did look strange this morning," she said. "Distracted and angry about something."

It was when I seemed to be back in the room that he'd changed the course of his arguments, I realised. "When I snapped back into myself, or whatever it was that happened, I wasn't mad anymore."

I hadn't been, I remembered. I'd been calm, and that's when he'd left.

"Well?" I asked her, watching the expressions flit across her face as she thought through everything I'd said.

"I might be reaching again," she warned me, her eyes on mine. "But we've seen this happening already, haven't we?"

"We have?" I looked at her in surprise. Had I been missing monumental events?

She made an impatient gesture at my apparent forgetfulness. "Sam getting hooked by a demon's spell from Becky?" she said. "Crowley getting inexplicably stronger? And Dean and Sam retreading issues that they've already been through?"

"You think this is a part of the story re-write?" I asked, trying to ignore the flutter of hope in my stomach.

"How many times are there two separate problems working in tandem?"

I hoped that was a rhetorical question because it sure wasn't one I could answer at this minute, but I shook my head. "If all of this, everything that's going on, is a re-write, why now?"

"Actually, the question is why at all? Why target the Winchesters? Is it who they are or what they're doing or what they're going to do?" she asked, leaning back in her chair.

All very good questions, I thought, looking at her. None of which I could think of a single answer to.

Lauren stared blankly into space for a minute or two, then she said, in a very thoughtful tone, "The other thing, Terry, is that you weren't sucked into it."

I got what she meant and remembered the last time that'd happened. "You're right."

When Balthazar had changed the time lines, I'd been outside of that, able to remember the real time-line where we were supposed to be.

"Does that help?" I asked her nervously.

"It might help a lot," she said, sitting up straighter. "If Metatron is forcing Dean and Sam to follow his script, somehow, the fact that he can't force you to do the same might mean we can wreck his efforts."

"How?"

"I don't know, but I don't think he brought you here," she said, her eyes losing focus again.

Of course, that made me wonder who, or probably more pertinently, what, had.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

It was five days before they got back. Over that time, I had swung from one extreme end of the pendulum's arc to the other and back again more times than I could count. There's a deep vulnerability to loving someone that makes objective reasoning often ride off into the distance without looking back. I could see Lauren's point about the possibilities of this all being orchestrated by a being that was, like a kid pulling the wings off a fly or angling a magnifying glass onto an ant's nest, bored and destructively inclined. At the same time, I could also see that Dean might not want to be tied down, even emotionally, at this time. He might need to be able to focus on his brother and closing Hell.

I was standing in the library, my insides shaking and my palms sweating when the front door ker-lunkered and the three men shambled down the stairs, boots ringing on the iron treads. Sam pulled me aside as soon as he'd finished hugging Lauren, dragging me down to the apothecary with some lame excuse about a pulled muscle in his back. I'd felt Dean's gaze on me when they'd come in but every time I'd looked at him, he'd looked somewhere else, so I was guessing that the situation was still the same as when he'd left.

Sam pushed open the door at the end of the still room and we walked into the store-room behind it, sitting on crates amidst a cacophony of slightly dusty and weird smells.

"What happened between you and Dean?" he asked me, leaning forward intently.

"I don't know," I said, truthfully enough at that point, wiping my still-damp palms on my jeans. "Why?"

"Because he's been acting bizarre for the last five days," Sam said irritably, running both hands through his hair as he sat up, making it stick out in several directions.

"What happened on the island?" I asked him, curious about what he might term 'bizarre' when it came to his brother. It's a pretty broad definition, don't you think? "Did you clean out the nest?"

"Yeah," Sam said, nodding distractedly. "We got there just as a boat came back, waited until midday and went in." He looked down at the floor. "Dean was – he was all over the place, Terry. One minute, he was like a damned robot, planning on how we'd get over there, what we'd do, pulling up floor plans of the house on the island…the next, he'd get up and leave the room and drive off somewhere and he was shaking when he did it, even Bobby saw it."

"What about on the island?"

"That was worse," Sam said, shaking his head. "We started off fine. We each took a floor, got in okay and took down about six of them. Then Dean found a blood slave and he seemed to be having some kind of melt-down about one of the vampires, kept saying he couldn't understand it. The woman he'd found must have been turned sometime in the last twelve hours, because she attacked him and he just stood there, then one of the vampires killed her, and saved him. Then he wouldn't kill the vampire even with the damned thing begging him to."

I listened to him, hearing the disbelief in his voice at the same time as I was wondering if this was Dean fighting against what he was supposed to be doing. Saving vampires was something he usually had to be talked into. And he'd never, ever frozen on a job. Had never, in my knowledge, stood there and waited to be killed. Ever.

"Did you or Bobby hear his conversations with the vampire?"

"Some of it, we got to the basement in time to see the woman attack, but what he said, didn't make that much sense, and then we got just the mixed up crap he came out with when the vamp was finally dead," Sam said. "Bobby tried to get it straight but he wasn't very coherent when we got back to the mainland, just kept saying he didn't understand and asking us what he was doing. We couldn't figure out what he was talking about."

I couldn't make sense of that either, but it sounded more like an internal conflict. I sucked in a deep breath and looked down at my hands, loosely clasped together on my lap. "The night before you left, Dean – well he told me that he couldn't keep you safe because he wasn't prioritising things the right way, then he said that he – he said that he didn't love me and never would."

It surprised me how much that hurt to say out loud, even when I'd been over and over the conversation in my head endlessly in the last few days. Sam's silence finally made me look up.

"I don't believe that."

"Yeah, well, I'm having trouble with it too," I said, as casually as I could.

"There's no way, Terry – no way he feels like that." He looked at the store-room door and got to his feet. "This is – look, whatever's going on –"

"Sam, it might be bigger than this," I said, a bit unwillingly since I didn't have a shred of proof for our speculations. We'd been leap-frogging along based on the way he and Dean had been acting since Kevin had turned up, and it was all just…well, maybe wishful thinking on my part at least.

"What do you mean?" He stopped at the door and looked back at me.

"Talk to Lauren first, okay?" I thought she'd be more convincing about the background of the scribe than I could be. "Then talk to Dean."

His forehead wrinkled up questioningly and I waved my hand at the door. "Just talk to Lauren first."

"Alright."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Bobby beat Sam to the talk with Dean anyway, taking him down to the garage and apparently dragging the details of not only what had happened on Prentiss Island, but what had happened here before they'd left as well.

He came marching back up the stairs, his craggy face taut with tension and asked me if we could talk. It would've felt like a French farce if we'd been going in and out bedrooms, but everyone seemed happy enough to find store-rooms or in the case of Bobby, the library stacks at the top of the building. I didn't think I'd ever been up and down the stairs so many times in one day. Since I was also too nervous to eat, my stomach muscles felt like piano strings as I climbed the stairs. Or possibly Spaghetti-Os.

I walked to my window seat and sat down and he dragged a chair over and dropped into it, fixing me with an exasperated stare.

"I just talked to Dean," he said as I sat on the window seat and he dropped like a stone into the chair nearby. "What the hell is going on?"

I blinked at him, wondering why on earth he thought I'd know. "What did he say?"

"He said a whole truckful of nonsense at first," Bobby told me, pushing his cap back on his head as he scratched at one eyebrow. "That he was putting everyone in danger, that he had to look after Sam, that was his job, that he couldn't concentrate," he carried on, lifting his head to look at me. "That he didn't think he could stay here because it was too confusing."

That was a new one on me. "Too confusing?"

Bobby huffed out a lungful of air exasperatedly and shook his head. "Like I said, he wasn't making a lick of sense, but he seems to have gotten in his head that you betrayed him, told him you cared about him when you don't."

"What!?"

"Yeah, okay," he said, holding up his hands in a pacifying gesture. "I know, I told him that was bullshit but he wouldn't let it go."

"Why? How?" I stared at him disbelievingly. I mean, I'd understood how he'd gotten to not being able to protect Sam if he was also worried about me, about us, but this was off the scale.

"I don't know, he wasn't all that coherent about it," Bobby said sourly.

"What happened in the nest, Bobby?" I asked, trying to shove it aside and focus on how things had gotten from bad to really bad so quickly.

"It was assloads of weird," he said. "Dean was down in the basement and he found what he thought was a blood slave – you know what that is?"

I nodded. The concept had been played with a few times on the show, since the first season.

"Well he'd just freed her when one of the vamps we must'a missed came in. Told Dean that the woman was the love of his life or somethin' and begged him not to hurt her."

I frowned at that. Vampires weren't usually so emotionally involved.

"Anyway, it didn't matter 'cause it seemed like she'd been turned, but hadn't fed," Bobby said, heaving in a deep breath. "She attacked Dean as Sam and me were coming down to see what was takin' so long."

He hesitated a little, looking at the floor. "We were on the stairs, Dean was in the middle of the basement. The woman – the new vamp – flew at him and I saw him watch her coming. He didn't move, Terry," he said, looking up at me worriedly. "Didn't even lift his machete. If it hadn't been for the other vamp, he'd been dead right now."

The shiver that rocked me then started down in my toes and ran all the way up to the crown of my head, and I had a hard time getting rid of it.

"The other vamp hit her as she knocked Dean to the floor, and pulled her off. Grabbed Dean's machete and took her head," he continued. "Sam and me were down there too by that time, and it didn't even acknowledge us, just looked down at the woman it'd killed. Then it asked Dean to kill it."

"And he didn't," I said.

"Wouldn't even take the blade back," Bobby recalled, his voice incredulous. "Sam killed it, and Dean walked out, never even looked back."

"What did he say about that?" I could visualise it happening, but I couldn't imagine why.

"He said he froze up, but he was lyin'," Bobby said bitterly. "I don't know why. Then he said that he couldn't've done it. I asked him what he was talking about – he said he couldn't've killed you."

I blinked again. "If I was turned, you mean?" I asked, trying to make sense of it.

Bobby shrugged. "Damned if I know what he meant," he said gruffly. "He said you'd manipulated him and trapped him and he still couldn't do it."

Ever had a lot of ice-water on a hot day? Felt it just about freeze your insides? That's exactly how I felt at that moment. Snap-frozen from the inside-out. There was a part of me, the emotional part, I guess, that couldn't make sense of it. The more rational part was perversely glad to hear it. It meant that it wasn't Dean talking. He'd never had a reason to think I'd do that and I dragged in a deep breath, unfolding myself from the window seat and looking at Bobby.

"This might be a lot bigger than that," I said, wondering where to start with my explanations.

"Ya think?" Bobby said, ahead of me already. "Something's messing with him –"

"Him and Sam," I said, leaning my elbows on my knees. "They got through a lot of their problems and now they're recurring again, as if the past never happened."

He nodded. "Saw that too," he admitted. "Thought it was just them, you know, but now…question is, what can we do about it?"

I stared at him blankly. I had no clue. How could anyone convince Dean – or his brother – that their history was being re-written and they were being forced into doing and thinking and feeling things that weren't real?

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

What I kept thinking about was a movie I'd seen, back in my old life, called The Manchurian Candidate. It was about brainwashing and substituting memories and implanting commands to create an untraceable assassin. One of the things that had come out of the movie had been the human mind's inability to be forced to lie to itself. I think they were a bit naïve in that, 'cause I know – knew – lots of people who had no problems with self-delusion, myself included from time to time, but there was a marked difference between rationalising certain things for one's own benefit, and being forced to swallow something that the mind knows didn't really happen.

In any case, it did make me wonder if the end game wasn't something along those lines as well. If maybe, somewhere down the line, even if they were sure they weren't being manipulated, maybe Sam or maybe Dean would do something to create a situation that would make Metatron's efforts worthwhile.

It seemed nuts, right? An archangel, fooling around with people to force a situation onto the human population? Real fiction stuff. Maybe even worthy of a tv show. It didn't mean that wasn't happening, right here and right now. There is a reason that the old cliché, truth is stranger than fiction, is a cliché, after all.

Lauren and Bobby tried to talk to the brothers, singly and together over the next two days. I don't know where Dean was sleeping, in one of the other bedrooms, I guessed, since he hadn't come back to our room. His clothes had disappeared from the drawers and hangers one day, but he'd left his albums and photos and the weapons there. It made me wonder if God's scribe was doing such a good job of writing the brothers as he obviously thought he was.

In the end, it took all of us, walking them back through their memories and what I'd seen of what had happened to them over the past couple of years to even admit to the possibility that there were discrepancies – heh, big, great, gaping holes more likely – there that were inexplicable. Dean called Cas.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The silence in the library was heavy. Lauren, Bobby, Sam, Charlie and I sat around one of the library tables. The Trans were staying out of it, Kevin still reading the tablet and his mom still transcribing his notes. Dean was seated at the other, Cas standing in front of him, the angel's fingertips resting lightly against Dean's forehead.

After several minutes, Cas stepped back, breaking the contact and Dean blinked a few times, lifting a hand and wiping it over his face as he looked up at the angel.

"Well?"

"They're right," Cas said, his expression troubled. "A little under four weeks ago, I think. Your memories stop, then start again, but they look different. Truncated and hazy. Is that how you see them?"

Dean's gaze flicked toward the table where the rest of us were sitting uncomfortably then he nodded. "More like something I saw than something I lived," he admitted.

Castiel looked at Lauren. "And you think the Scribe is here, on earth, doing this?"

"Who else has that power, Cas?" she asked him. "Who else could bend some realities but not affect others?"

He tucked his chin against his chest, his hands locking behind his back. "Heaven has been looking for Metatron for more than a thousand years."

"The order would have been the perfect hiding place for him," Sam said, unconsciously rubbing the heel of his hand against his temple. I wasn't the only one who noticed that, along with the twitch of a wince, as if he had a headache developing. "He would have access to whatever Heaven was doing, with the Legacies who were still keeping in contact?"

"The order ceased communications with Heaven when this group was attacked," Cas said shortly. "Their homes and the libraries of information were warded against angels."

"Even better," Bobby said. "That way none of the god squad could recognise him through his disguise."

"Perhaps," Cas allowed. "I must seek counsel about this. It's –" He looked at Dean unhappily. "There has to be a reason he's chosen this way to stop you and Sam from doing what you were doing."

"He's a dick," Dean mumbled, looking at the floor.

"Yes," Cas agreed, straight-faced. "But another reason as well."

"Cas, you need to get rid of these fake memories," Sam said, looking at Dean. "Half the time, I don't know what I'm remembering."

"If I could do that now, I would, Sam," Cas said, shaking his head. "I will need help for this. In the meantime, you must add this to the protections around the bunker. It will keep further meddling from the scribe from affecting you while you're here – I will find out if there's anything we can do about something more portable."

He set his hand on the table next to Dean and a piece of parchment appeared under it, inscribed with several symbols.

"The sigils must be of gold," he said to Dean. "Pure, embedded into the building or it will not keep his power at bay."

"Awesome," Dean said, looking at the paper. "Usual points of the compass, or do we need to do more?"

"Each direction, above and below," Cas said, as if it was something he'd memorised. Did angels have to memorise their lore, I wondered irrelevantly, or was it something they'd been programmed with when they'd been made? Something struck me about that as being odd.

"Pure gold won't adhere to anything," Bobby remarked, too late as the room filled with the restless sound of rustling wings and the angel vanished.

Charlie looked at him, one brow arched. "Sure it will, if its melted and poured into place."

Dean looked at her, his gaze sliding over me without pausing. "Well, we got work to do."

Bobby nodded, his glance at me telling me he'd noticed the snub. "Let's get on with it."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Don't let anyone tell you how nice gold is – it's not. It's soft and annoying and really, really heavy and it can nearly break your toe if you drop some onto your foot, even if you're wearing boots.

The melting was done in the bunker's armoury workshop and it all looked pretty medieval, what with the stink of molten metal and the burners going and Charlie, Dean, Sam and Bobby all wearing welding masks and thick reinforced gloves and the steam and the glow of the furnace. It took three days for Dean and Bobby to carve the sigils into the stone and concrete of the floors, one against each of east, west, north and south-facing walls, one on the roof and one on the lowest of the basement levels' floor.

Cas didn't show up again, and he wouldn't be able to enter the bunker once the sigils were in place. They were like a solid wall to angelic entities, he'd said. He literally couldn't cross one.

I don't really know what we were expecting would happen, when the last one was poured and had cooled to solidity in its channels. Dean and Sam returning to their old memories, maybe? When nothing did happen, Bobby caught my eye and jerked his head upwards, indicating, I thought, that he wanted to talk.

I walked up the stairs to the top floor, curling into the window seat and waiting. He showed up a few minutes later.

"Sam seems to be either less affected by this, or he's recovering better," he said, sitting down in the chair and looking at me. "Probably because he's got Lauren to talk to."

I shook my head. "Dean doesn't want to talk."

"He may not want to, but he has to."

"It's not much good looking at me, Bobby," I said, feeling a trickle of alarm at the suggestion. "He thinks I'm one of the bad guys."

"He did," Bobby allowed reluctantly. "I don't think he does now."

I shook my head. "Cas said he would be back, he'd help them get it straight."

"You gunna wait for Cas, Therese? Dean already looks like someone kicked his dog clear across the state – he needs someone to talk to now," Bobby said forcefully.

"He won't talk to me," I said, certain of it.

Bobby heaved a slightly dramatic sigh. "This is hard, sure. But I got an idea that you're the only one he's gonna be able to talk to, because you're the only one who can tell him which memories are real and which ones are fakes."

I hate it when he takes that tone, that reasonable, rational, logical tone, with me.

"I could make it worse," I told him, hearing the thrum of my fear clear in my voice. That was why I hadn't even tried, had turned away if he was the only one in the room, had walked in the opposite direction when I saw him coming. I didn't want to talk to him. Didn't want to hear the worst.

"Yeah, or you could make it better," Bobby pointed out.

Right now, I could tell myself that it was like Sam's getting married to Becky – just a kind of a spell, one that the angels could undo when they finally remembered us and got back here. If I cornered Dean and talked to him…and he said that it was all true…even that pretence would be gone and I'd have to deal with the consequences.

I think I've probably mentioned once or twice that I'm not one of the world's stock of brave people. I don't hide under the bed when I hear a noise in the dark (although I do think about that option, just as a last resort) but I probably wouldn't be the lady getting up, grabbing the baseball bat and charging out into the hall, yelling at whatever it is to show itself either.

"Therese, I can't force you to talk to him," Bobby said heavily, looking at me from under the shadow of his cap. "But you remember this, if the positions were reversed, you know he'd try whatever it took to get you back."

I looked away at that. Darned old man had nailed it with that statement and I knew it was true. Dean would be just as scared as I was in the same position, but he'd try, even if it hurt like heck. He'd try.

Bobby got up and walked away, leaving me crunched into the corner of the window seat feeling like the world's smallest heel. After a while I got up and walked slowly downstairs, wondering where I'd find Dean.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

As it turned out, I didn't have to look for him. He came and found me.

I was sitting in the bedroom, putting off the moment when I needed to get up and start searching the bunker, and there was a knock on the door. Getting up, I had a brief moment of déjà vu as I walked to open it and saw Dean standing there, his gaze lifting reluctantly from the floor to my face.

"Bobby said you wanted to talk?" he asked, his tone every bit as reluctant as his stance.

"I didn't play you," I said, the words coming out without me thinking about them.

"Yeah, I got that," he said, taking it as an invitation to enter and walking past me. He stopped in the middle of the room as I shut the door and turned to face him. He was looking around, as if the things he could see were all strange to him, not his own.

"However it happened," he said, turning around. "It's a mess. In my head."

I nodded and walked slowly past him to the desk, taking the chair there as he backed up and sat on the bed.

"Lauren and Bobby said that's why Sam and me got tangled up in that spectre business," he continued, his gaze drifting around the room and stopping on the grouped photos on the bureau. "All the crap we went through, before Sam went into the cage, last year, that was all erased and replaced with something else."

"The books the order has here on Metatron said he can re-write people's stories," I offered hesitantly. "Change their memories of what had happened."

"Why would anything have that power?" Dean wondered, then shook his head, looking at me. "What I said to you, before the vamp nest – I don't think it was true, but I don't know, not for sure."

"I understand." Two of the hardest words I've ever had to force out of my mouth.

"It doesn't match up with the memories of things before that," he said cautiously. "And, if I try to dig deeper, I start to feel weird."

"Like a headache?"

"Starts that way," he said. "After a while it feels like maybe my brain's boiling in my skull."

Vivid, I thought. "Sam seemed to having headaches too."

His eyes widened a little and I wondered if that had triggered a different memory.

"He had one when I played Lauren's voice mail to him too, when he was married to Becky," he said, his eyes narrowing. "You think that was because some part of him knew it couldn't be real?"

"I don't know," I said, thinking that very thing. "I think the mind has its own mechanisms for defending against things that are forced on it," I added, a bit more slowly. "I think it can baulk at a lie and try to force the truth to come out."

He looked away and I wondered if anything had made him feel that he'd been fed a lie.

"What happened in the nest, Dean?"

It seemed to be the right question, because he relaxed a bit. "I – there was –" he stopped abruptly and looked at the floor. "I can't explain it. One minute, it was all just the job. The next – it was like I was in a different life."

"What did the vampire say to you?" I was curious about that because it seemed like one of the points that both Sam and Bobby had said he'd changed.

"He, uh, he said that, uh, the woman, the blood slave, and him were – in love. Together," he told me disjointedly. "Said that he'd stopped working for the nest, that they were going to leave the others."

"A vampire in love?" I asked, not bothering to hide my own incredulity.

"Yeah, that's what I thought," he agreed immediately. "Told me that he'd been on her yacht, and he was supposed to kill her, but he couldn't. They'd, uh, sailed off. Then the nest had found them."

"And when he realised that she'd been turned?" Sailing together into the sunset. It was romantic, although the more pragmatic side of me couldn't help but wonder what the vampire had been living off while they were out at sea.

"He looked like – he looked like someone had knifed him in the guts," Dean said, his eyes darkening with that memory. "I don't know what happened, I couldn't move. I just froze, in between them. I could see her teeth, coming down and I knew she was going to attack, but I just – couldn't – move."

He looked at me. "It wasn't her," he said slowly. "It was the vamp. He couldn't believe it. And I couldn't believe it had that much impact on him."

Clearing his throat, he continued, "I watched everything he'd felt for her drain right out of him. What he'd felt, what he'd loved, was her humanity."

I wasn't surprised Dean had seen that in the vampire. He saw, with a deep compassion and an empathy for others' emotions, people's feelings very easily. Maybe because he felt deeply as well. I was surprised that he could talk about it.

"You think that dick angel meant her to kill me?" he asked, rubbing his hand over his jaw and down the line of stubble on his throat. "Wrote it that way?"

I did. I couldn't imagine why, if he'd had other plans for the Winchesters, but when I visualised what Dean had described, I thought that's exactly what Metatron had wanted. Sam alone, maybe? Bobby devastated? The vampire – was the love of the vampire something he'd put in or something outside of his control?

"I thought about you, then," Dean said, and I felt my heart almost stop in my chest in shock at the words.

"Bobby said that you told him you couldn't have killed me," I said, making it not quite a question.

Emotion flitted over his face, gone too fast for me to work out what it'd been. He shook his head.

"I couldn't have," he said, lifting one shoulder in a resigned shrug. "I knew that and the next thing I knew my head was pounding like one of those giant migraines, where you can't take noise or light or movement or any fucking thing because your brain might explode."

"Do you think the headache – the weird feeling are coming when you remember something different from what you've been –" I tried to think of a word to describe what was going on. "– implanted with?"

His mouth twisted up mockingly to one side. "Implanted?"

"You know what I mean," I said, waving my hand vaguely. I didn't know what to call it.

"It feels like that," he said warily. "Feels like if I just accept what's going on, it's all good. If something is different, or if it feels wrong, that's when the pain starts."

"What about now?"

He shook his head. "Nothing. Guess that means the sigils are working?"

"Not much good if those memories are still there, making you doubt what you know…or feel," I said, a touch more honestly than I probably should've been.

There were a million things I wanted to ask him, but I couldn't. He'd said he didn't know if what he'd said was real or not. If he didn't know, I couldn't think of a way to help him to find out.

"Do you remember killing Paris Hilton?" I asked, deciding it would be safer to go back further, start from where it'd been simple…well, more simple.

He nodded. "Yeah, skinny but packed a punch," he said, his grin without much humour in it. He looked down for a moment. "Sam killed her."

"She would've turned into your father," I said, knowing exactly how much he'd feared that. He looked up, a bit surprised, I think. "And after, you told Sam that you were as much to blame for Lucifer being out as he was."

He frowned slightly, brows pulling together. "He – I – did I?"

"You don't remember that?"

"Sort of," he said. He leaned forward, knuckling his forehead. "But it's – I don't know – blurred, I can't remember exactly what I said."

"You said you weren't Mr Innocent in all of it, you broke the first seal," I supplied. I thought he'd turn away or clam up when I said it. Not exactly the best memory to bring up, but it's what he'd said to Sam at the time.

"He told me, uh, he told me that we should, uh –" The frown got deeper as he struggled to recall what his brother had said.

"He told you that it was time to stop worrying about Lucifer and Michael, and to fight together," I said.

"Yeah." But he didn't sound certain.

"Dean, you told him that you'd been so worried about watching his every move, that you hadn't seen what it was doing to him," I added, more than a bit embarrassed that I knew these lines by heart. Still, he didn't seem to notice that, looking up at me, nodding slightly. "You said you were sorry for that, and Sam accepted it. And he said that you had to fight together on the same level, and you agreed to that."

There was a flicker of recognition in his face, as if the memory had returned, then his eyes screwed tightly shut and he pressed his hand against one temple, half-turning away.

"You saw it, didn't you?" I said, getting up.

He nodded, his jaw clenched tight.

"And when Sam told you how he wanted to deal with Lucifer?" I pressed, walking toward him.

The only answer I got was a groan, and he toppled sideways onto the bed. Something was resisting those memories.

"Dean, stay here," I told him, probably unnecessarily since he didn't look like he could see, let alone walk. I opened the door and raced down the hall, sling-shotting around the banister post and down the stairs. There had to be something in the order's drugstore to deal with a blinding headache and maybe brainwashing.

I don't know why Lauren or I didn't think of it earlier. Dumb, maybe? Too wrapped up in our fears and speculations to see the forest for the trees – or is it the trees for the forest? – whatever. The darned pharmacy had the cure for vampirism, for cryin' out loud, it had to have something to counteract what the brothers were going through.

Stopping in the doorway, I stared blankly around the packed shelves, wondering where and how to start, then I remembered the card index and ran to it. I started with 'headache', feverishly skimming through the listings. Near the end of the section there was a card that had a footnote to severe headache, cross-referenced to memory. I jumped over to the 'M's and starting looking for 'memory'.

Another footnote led me to 'alternative past' and another to 'implanted event memories' – why that wasn't under 'memory' I didn't know – but it had a recipe for a potion that claimed to be able to undo spells and curses that had overwritten memories with new ones, provided the old ones were still there. I thought they were. If they hadn't been, Dean wouldn't have been getting the pain.

It wasn't already made up, on the shelves, and I went back to the book, going to the store-room and hoping that everything would be there. Potion-making, beginners, I thought, moving along the shelves as fast as I could, not wanting to miss anything but aware that Dean's brain might be leaking out his ears if he kept trying to remember and the headache got worse.

I had a stack of boxes and small, fabric bags gathered into my arms when I found the last ingredient – powdered lamia teeth, if you can believe that – and I went back to the still room, setting them on the preparation table and grabbing the old-fashioned stone mortar and pestle and propping the book up against the wall as I followed the instructions. I had a new respect for Hermione and Snape by the time I was finished. It's a fiddly, annoying, precision-oriented job to make a magic potion. I didn't think I was all that naturally gifted at it, but I was hoping that I'd done a good enough job this time.

The resulting liquid was a greeny-grey, as the book said it should be. It was also very thick and clung to the spoon I'd used to mix it together and it stunk like month-old rotted vegetables. I hoped that Dean was going to be able to swallow it without heaving it back out again. I thought of all the times he'd drunk foul stuff and decided his stomach must be pretty strong.

The instructions had said that it was a single dose, and each dose had to be made fresh and one at a time, not in bulk. Carrying the glass beaker back up the stairs carefully, I couldn't help but wonder why on earth anyone, let alone an archangel who'd been in hiding on earth for centuries, would be worried about re-setting the brothers' memories. It was a waste of time worrying about it since I certainly wasn't going to come up with an answer but it really was bugging me that I couldn't even get close to a motivation.

Pushing the bedroom door open, I was relieved and alarmed to see Dean lying on the bed, his face chalk-white and his breath whistling softly, both hands pressed tight to his skull.

"Sit up," I said peremptorily to him, holding the beaker and closing my hand around his coat lapel to pull him up. His nose wrinkled up in disgust the second it caught wind of the potion and he squinted at me.

"You trying to put me outta my misery?"

"Yeah," I said, as no-nonsense as a veteran nurse. I really was learning a lot of new skills in this life. "Drink."

"Agggh." He turned his head away as I brought the beaker close to his mouth. "C'mon, I'll hurl."

"Dean."

He managed to get his eyes to open a little bit wider, peering at the potion then at me.

"Trust me, okay?"

I don't know if that did it, or what he was thinking, but he sucked down a deep breath, took the glass from me and closed his eyes, lifting it and tipping the whole lot into his mouth, swallowing as fast as he could.

When it was gone, he held out the beaker and tucked his chin down hard, lips compressed tightly together, his eyes closed and watering, the tears running down his cheeks.

It took about three or four minutes before he looked up, took another breath and wiped the moisture from his face impatiently, moving his tongue around in his mouth, trying to get rid of the taste.

"Blech."

"I know," I said, taking the beaker and putting it on the nightstand. "It didn't smell real good."

"Ack."

For a moment, I was worried that I'd done the wrong potion and had removed his ability to speak since he was only making noises that indicated varying levels of disgust.

Then he felt his temple gingerly, and looked around. "It's gone."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Sam turned a murky shade of green when he filled his mouth with the potion, and I'm pretty sure it was only the sight of Dean's mocking smirk that enabled him to swallow and keep the gross stuff down.

The book with the potion's recipe in it was cross-referenced to another book on the magic-and-spells section of the library and Laure and Bobby read through the series of interlinked spells that was in the blackest section of the book on black magic, both of their expressions showing their distaste for the subject.

"The constructed memories are disengaged from the memory cells of the brain," Lauren read out loud. "The spell is not broken nor is the intent of the magician denied, only the physical aspects are removed."

"But you think it's not a spell," Sam said, his forehead wrinkling up in little furrows.

"Doesn't matter if it is, or not," Bobby told him, leaning over Lauren's shoulder. "The potion works on wiping out anything that's not supposed to be there. Damn…didn't know there were spells like this in the world."

He made a face as he read further. "The heart of a nephilim, a Cupid's Bow, the Grace of an angel…now what the hell –"

Stopping as he caught sight of Lauren's severely disapproving look, Bobby shrugged. "Just sayin', who knew?"

"What do we do about it?" Dean asked truculently. Since Sam had swallowed the potion and the two of them had gone through their shared history, a lot of things that had been tense in one or both had vanished. But Dean was still pissed and under his mostly neutral and only slightly forbidding expression, something was eating at him. "Not like I can carve out and pour gold onto or into the car. We go back out there and can that dick see us again? Fuck with us again?"

"Cas said he was looking for something portable –" Sam started to say and stopped as Dean swung around to look at him.

"You see Cas here?"

"No, but I mean, give him time," Sam said, a little defensively.

"We don't have time, Sam," Dean said through clenched teeth. "We have a job – the biggest job we ever had – to do and we're trapped in here."

He waved a hand toward the book Lauren was holding. "Isn't there anything in this place to counteract this crap?"

"Probably," Bobby said, his voice gruffly soothing. "But we need a couple of days to look for it."

Dean huffed in frustration but dropped it.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

It was well after midnight that we climbed the stairs, and I listened to Dean's tread on the steps behind me, wondering how hard it was going to be to get from here back to where we'd been two weeks ago. The fake memories, along with their burdens of fake concerns and fake thoughts and fake feelings, were gone, but he remembered everything he'd said and done over that time, and neither of us had seemed to have the courage to bring it up. Well, I guess it wouldn't be appropriate in front of everyone else, but I wondered if it would even come up in private. I couldn't figure a good phrasing to ask if what he'd said and felt had been the effects of the false memories or something he was feeling anyway.

As I pushed open the bedroom door, Dean reached out, his hand closing around my wrist. I looked around at him.

"You want me to stay somewhere else?" he asked.

"Do you want to stay somewhere else?" I countered, that being the first thing I thought of that didn't expose me entirely.

He grimaced, just a little at the stale-mate, looking down the hall. "I didn't mean what I said to you," he said, a bit distantly. "That wasn't me."

"It was a little bit you," I contradicted as gently as I could. "You want to back up and look after your brother."

For a moment, he said nothing, then he turned back to me, his face settling into a hard expression.

"I do want to make sure Sam has the best chance possible of doing this and walking away afterward," he said, leaning close. "But I'd get out of it if you asked me to, Terry. I can't keep giving up what I want, I won't keep doing it, I can't lose you."

He was close enough that I could feel his breath against my mouth, close enough that the familiar and comforting scents of the car, leather, whiskey and gun oil enveloped me, close enough to see a fear in his eyes that he already had, that what he'd said had somehow killed how I felt.

I kind of wanted to laugh, probably mild hysteria, at that thought. If someone else had said that to me, and walked away, I'd have accepted it, told myself I was best rid of such an asshole and gotten over it. Then again, I'd never been in love with anyone else, so it would've been easy to do it that way.

To tell you the truth, the idea of sneaking away and going to lick my wounds in private had occurred to me. I hadn't done it because it meant giving up. And giving up meant dying. Not all at once, not in a big dramatic Juliet kind of way, but little by little, every day, for the rest of my life. Like I said, I'm not brave. I couldn't face the thought of that, even it meant being hurt and humiliated more if it'd turned out that Dean really had felt that way.

I was beginning to understand something I'd known but never really thought about before. Love, and I mean real love, the sort that does actually last more than a lifetime, can't exist in a vacuum. I might've mentioned that a while ago. You just can't sustain feelings like that if the other person doesn't feel the same way. It needs two. I hadn't lost one drop of the way I'd felt. Ergo…as they say…

"You can't lose me," I said to him, my voice all froggy and rough from some obstruction in my throat as all those thoughts ran willy-nilly through my head. "You can tell me to leave, you can walk away, but you can't stop me from feeling the way I do about you."

He blinked, and I suddenly realised he'd been holding his breath as he sucked a massive mouthful of air and he stepped forward, his arms going around me and his head bowing to rest his cheek against mine. I hugged him back, guessing that he'd been as worried about the conversation as I had. That we'd somehow got past this point, where a misunderstanding would have been all too easy if one or the other of us had been more circumspect, more protective of ourselves, whatever…it just brought it home to me that the long haul is only possible when being honest is more important than being safe.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~