A/N: I make quite a few references in this chapter. To several TV shows and a movie. If you read the summary and have been following along with the plot, you should pretty much be able to guess what I'm talking about. And if I didn't mention it before, I don't own any of it. They just fit it in so nice and neat with this plot that I stole them.

Hope no one minds.

Chapter Ten

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"Open yourself up to 'extreme possibilities' only when they're the truth." -Mulder

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"You've got to be kidding me." The youngest Winchester mumbled to himself.

A relatively young woman stood in the doorway of his hospital room. He knew, without knowing why he knew, that her name was Lyn. The first emotion that came to him when he saw her was something akin to extreme irritation, only he couldn't figure out why -because as far as he could logically recall, he had never met her before.

He shouldn't even know her name.

Then again, logic was a crapshoot.

"You know me." She seemed just as surprised, as taken aback by the notion, as he did.

The only difference was that she sounded distantly excited. Sam was just weary, if not a little disconnected.

"Yeah." He paused. "I think so."

"How?" She inquired, stepping farther into the room, just enough to shut the door behind her.

Which made sense, 'cause they wouldn't want any sane person to accidentally overhear this little exchange.

"You tell me." He prompted; because he was tired, his head hurt, and, if he thought about it, he probably was hooked up to some sort of pain-reducing, emotion-settling drug. It would explain why he wasn't more freaked out, anyway.

Western medicine is your friend.

She didn't exactly honor his request right away. She said simply, "You've never met me before, right?"

Seemingly forgetting his reluctance to talk, he answered honestly and without much hesitation, "I don't think so. I saw you in the diner right before-" he cut himself off abruptly.

"Before?"

"Before I passed out."

"That's not exactly what happened." She said slowly, but Sam's lips were pressed tightly together.

"Why are you here?" He snapped, head pain, irritation and just the barest strands of something he absolutely refused to name fear making him edgy and impatient.

She took a few steps closer to him and Sam could finally see her eyes, which had been hidden in the shadows of the room thus far. They were dark brown and filled with emotion.

They were also familiar to him. So, very familiar.

"Because I think you can help me." She took a deep breath and seemingly sealed herself for the worst. "What do you know about spells?"

Sam had a thousand and one useless, sarcastic, comments on the tip of his tongue as soon as he processed the question. Simply because he was Dean's little brother.

He sometimes forgot how hard it was for other people to notice the intricate similarities between the two of them, because Sam so often chose to keep his mouth shut in situations where Dean simply wouldn't.

Take right now, for instance. If his brother were hearing this, he knew Lyn would already be privy to a good half dozen or so of those sarcasms. Only Dean wasn't here with him. Sam realized with a pang that he wished he were.

As it was, all the younger brother could manage to do was take a deep breath and ask, only a little patronizingly, "Like, witchcraft spells?"

Lyn must have been encouraged by the tone of his voice or the words spoken, because she nodded eagerly and took a seat in the chair that had, for the last several hours, been home to his brother.

"What makes you think I even know what you're talking about?" He couldn't help question, taken aback by her readiness to have an in-depth chat about this.

"Because the first words out of your mouth weren't; 'I have no idea what you're talking about'." She pointed out baldly, and Sam felt heat rise to his face.

Oh, yeah. Good point.

"And because when you walked into Randy's today, I saw you look at me." She was looking at him now as if he might possess all the complex answers to life's greatest riddles. It was a bit daunting. "You looked at me like you knew me. And I have to know why."

For whatever reason; be it his vision, his greater sense of duty to all things supernatural, his pounding head, or the clawing voice in the back of his mind- that sounded so much like Dean- that was telling him he'd been hunting for too long not to trust his feelings on something like this.

Because he was feeling like he should trust this woman. That there was something much bigger going on here.

Whatever the reason, he made a decision in that moment to have this conversation. To talk to this woman like she was something more than a babbling loony. And hey, if he was wrong, if she was a psycho, he could always blame the meds.

"You told us," he searched the recesses of his memory, having talked to Dean about it all afternoon, and well into late evening, helped him dredge it up fairly quickly. "You told us that we didn't know what we were getting into. That we weren't supposed to be here."

"I told you that?" He voice was so indefinable that Sam didn't even try to gauge her emotions.

He did, however, remember with a start that he was talking about a vision. "You're going to tell us that." Then he realized that that didn't sound too much better. "I mean-"

Lucky for him, she interrupted, looking so dazed that Sam wondered of she'd heard anything past his first admission. "You remember."

"I-"

"Oh God," she gasped, and to his surprised horror, tears were quickly filling those dark brown orbs. "You remember. You can help me. You were sent here to help me." She let out a choked sob.

Sam stared, dumbfounded.

"I prayed," she gasped. "I prayed and prayed that someone would come. And now you're here. Someone, something, must have sent you."

"Um..." Sam watched as she covered her face with her hands, tears leaked down her face and her sobs were scarcely muffled. For all his people skills, he'd never really been good at this. "Actually, Dean just threw a dart at a map."

Lyn looked up in confusion, and Sam shrugged. Hey, it was the truth.

"I swear," he went on, if not a little stupidly, "I don't have any religious affiliations, no higher power sent me. I'm defiantly not working for the big guy." Which was kind of what she's just implied. He thought. Maybe.

"You don't understand." She stated slowly.

"That seems to be the theme for the day." He told her sardonically. "Can you fill in some of the blanks?"

Lyn seemed to be more calm, more at ease with...whatever it was she was dealing with internally. Her breakdown had subdued itself and only red eyes and an occasional sniffle gave away that it had occurred at all.

"I don't know where to start." She sounded overwhelmed as she pulled at the sleeves of her faded leather jacket. Sam got the fleeting image of a slightly younger woman burying her head there, trying to escape from something that was happening in reality. But he let that image go as quickly as it had come; not wanting to dive into whatever was waiting behind it.

"You said something about a spell," he encouraged. "Witchcraft?"

"Yes," she sighed heavily, moving her hands from her lap to the railing that was pulled up on the side of Sam's bed. She gripped it until her knuckles went white. "A spell. I did a spell."

Witchcraft gone awry. Hell, how many times had they gone through this before? It felt almost comfortingly familiar. A little fickle too, but he ignored that, because after today, how good could his senses possibly be?

"You did a spell," he repeated. "And something went wrong?"

The only question now was, how did the demon fit in? He only had visions if the yellow-eyed bastard was involved.

"We're in a time-loop." She spoke the words so factually, without hesitation, like she thought that he had already known what she was going to say; and Sam simply stopped.

His whole mind just stopped.

He was having an out-of-body experience. He had to be.

Lyn started talking again, her mouth moving, lips contorting to make work-like shapes, and vague, monotone sounds came out.

But Sam existed on his own, separate from reality, in a stop-time, a time-out, he mentally disengaged from the real world. It took him a while to catch up - of course, the time probably felt longer in his head than it did to Lyn.

"Wait, wait, what?" Sam heard his own breathless words after a slight delay. Like a translated Kurosawa movie, where the English was just said over the initial dialogue and the words never quite matched up with the sequence of events.

"Huh?" She sounded puzzled and Sam took a moment to gather his bearings.

"A time-loop?" He repeated, wondering absently if he waved his hand in front of his face how many fingers he would have.

"Yeah." She sounded hesitant again. "I just... I kinda thought you knew."

"You said a spell." Words were matching up again, he cold focus. Which wasn't such a good thing.

"A spell that created a time-loop." She said, sounding again like this was repeated knowledge.

"That's not possible." Sam argued.

He thought about that episode of the X-Files where Mulder got caught in the continuing bank explosion.

He thought about Bill Murray in Groundhog day.

He thought about the three Super Geeks in Buffy The Vampire Slayer copying that movie and that episode of the X-Files and doing the same thing to Sarah Michelle Geller.

He thought about the Season One finale of Charmed.

Then he recalled a conversation that he and his brother had had today about Lyn looking like Holly Marie Combs, who played a witch on the popular TV show his brother liked so much - only because of the hot chicks, of course.

Then he went over the events of the day and realized that that conversation couldn't have happened.

There was no time for the conversation to have happened. Especially since neither him nor his brother had met the woman he was currently talking to.

Yet Sam remembered it happening. Remembered it like he remembered his big brother taping their map to a motel wall at the end of their last hunt, not twenty-four hours ago, and throwing a dart at it to see where they would go next.

He remembered himself, after blindfolding Dean, moving the map, placing it at an obscure angle, because he knew his brother would always hit the bulls eye, and that they'd end up in Colorado or some other central state if he hadn't.

Only he didn't remember that as if it had happened less than a day ago. He remembered it like it happened a long, long time ago. He remembered it like it had been the start of something huge and life altering. The start...

He pulled himself back to the present, to his hospital room and Lyn. "A time-loop?"

She nodded wearily, not as excited as she had been; a subdued calm replacing her eagerness. "Maybe I should start at the beginning."

"Maybe you should." Sam agreed, deciding not to analyze anything until he had at least the majority of the facts. Or whatever she was about to lay out for him to pick apart.

They both indulged in a deep, calming breath. Sam settled back against his flat pillow, Lyn leaned forward slightly in the chair. Looking deeply into Sam's eyes, she began.

"It all started just over a month ago."

TBC...

A/N: I had actually planned on making this all one chapter, but as soon as I got it down, I realized that it'd be way, way too long. Sorry about the cliffhanger.