Disclaimer, Summary & Rating: see Chapter 1
FALSE MEMORY
Chapter 36
"Awake? Seriously?" Sam asked in surprise. "When?"
"About an hour or so after you did the burn 'n' urn on Williams' remains." Cale explained.
Missouri made a 'drink up' gesture at their coffee, since as well-brought up Southern young men they did not start quaffing the much-appreciated beverage until the lady who had prepared it had sat down and been able to have a drink. "We decided we should email Diana Ballard to update her as thanks for her help and to explain why those murders were never going to be solved. She decided to do some checking and emailed us back with the news."
"Apparently she rang the hospital where Latifah Lockwood is being cared for pretending to be a cold-case reviewing officer seeking an update." Shay took up the explanation. "The duty nurse remembered the call and rang her back in the middle of the night to say that a night nurse checking the patients had found Latifah awake and bewildered but coherent. So she emailed us the news."
"What's the prognosis?" Sam felt a surge of encouragement at this unexpected outcome to their job.
"Good." confirmed Cale. "She's weak, and confused, but lucid and apparently expected to eventually make a complete recovery. Diana wrote that everyone was amazed she'd just woken up after so long comatose."
Missouri sniffed at the limitations of medicine. "The mind is a powerful thing. She was attacked by a ghost that could pass through any security or bodyguard to get to her and she didn't know how to protect herself; but as long as she was unconscious it didn't come back and try again. Somehow she realised the danger had been taken care of and that it was safe to wake up, so she did."
Shay, however, had a pensive expression. "I want to thank you both for what you've done…I just don't understand how Drew could become so…twisted."
For a moment, Sam thought of Max Miller, Gordon Walker, Ava Wilson, Andy Gallagher's twin brother Anson Webber, Jake Tulley, Bela and Ruby…even Azazel. All of whom had, once upon a time, started out as not-that-bad actually-quite-nice individuals…
"Burns."
There was a moment of baffled silence and three pairs of eyes flicked questioning glances at Sam, but Dean's succinct declaration was too cryptic even for him. "What burns?"
"The Scotch dude – that wee sleekit beastie riff."
"Robbie Burns the poet? As in 'God grant us the ability to see ourselves as others see us'?" quoted Cale.
"Yeah, that was a whole load of Williams' problems." Dean drank the last of his coffee and slowly blinked at their blank faces.
"Could you fill in more of the spaces with words?" Sam asked sarcastically.
"Look, ok, there was this other dude. He wrote this book about a future totalitarian state where books were banned and named the book after the temperature when paper starts to burn."
"Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451," chorused Shay, Sam and Cale in unintentional unison.
"You people are scary. Anyway, supposedly ole Ray was no ray of sunshine and he once said, 'you are what you pretend to be, so be careful what you pretend to be.'"
"Sorry, I still got nothing." Sam admitted.
Dean shrugged. "All the trick-cyclists and head-shrinkers go on about how being detached from reality is a sign of madness, but everyone is detached from reality to a certain extent. For most people, 'cept those like us, the life they live inside their heads is much more attractive than the mundane things their meat suit is doing day to day."
"'The person we want to believe we are inside our minds is so much better, and the life we want to believe we live is so much more interesting, than the reality.'" It was Shay's turn to quote. "I think…David Eddings the novelist?"
"Whoever," Dean shrugged. "But that was the core of Drew Williams' problem and what turned him into the apparition with attitude. Probably when he was about 16 he started this pretence of 'life-n-soul' of the party lady-killer, no pun intended, to feel better about himself."
"But somewhere along the line he started to believe his own PR. He lost any ability to see himself as he really was." Sam began to understand what Dean had realised before any of them.
"And what he was…was an eternal frat-boy, like a prehistoric fly encased in amber," Shay was also no slow coach when given a couple of pointers. "You mean that Drew grew older but he never grew up?"
"Basically, yeah." Dean acknowledged. "Sam, you saw Drew's ex-posse in LA, what were the first words that came to mind when you saw them in the plaza?"
Sam didn't need to ponder. "Arrested development, followed by 'overgrown jocks'."
Dean gave an agreeing nod. "The reason Drew-boy was childless and single in his thirties was because any woman with sense took one look at him and realised that as Mrs Williams she'd effectively be a single mom with one kid much larger than the others. A sensible woman wants a mate, not a man-child and a lot of women are pretty good at spotting a guy who is unable or unwilling to step up to the plate and be a man. That's why Lisa looked me straight in the eye and lied like a rug –"
Sam's gut twisted as Dean abruptly cut off his own words; Dean had relayed Lisa's claims about a blood test on her son Ben as a baby with a cocky attitude that had failed to hide the tone of a man trying to convince himself he believed it more than anyone else. Sam had formed a very favourable impression of Lisa's intelligence and common sense – and her willingness to do what was best for Dean as well as herself. Hunters with families were always more vulnerable. Ironically, by her actions she demonstrated herself far more suitable to be a hunter's wife than self-absorbed Cassie Robinson had. Personally, Sam believed that if he himself wasn't Ben's uncle then he'd eat Bobby's baseball caps for a week. Mysterious uncles seem to run in the family – Mom Mary had her uncle Edward Campbell, and one day Ben will probably discover about his weird Uncle Sam the Psychic…
"So Drew went on a killing spree because he bought into his own mythology as a modern day Don Juan?" Cale deliberately asked to break the uncomfortable moment brought about by Dean's inadvertent slip.
"In a nutshell, yeah," Dean took conversational control again, glossing over his slip by the simple expedient of ignoring it. "But Miranda Wells destroyed his whole life."
"By blowing him off in a bar?" Shay looked somewhat sceptical.
"By shattering his entire sense of identity." Dean stressed. "When he looked in the mirror, Williams actually saw a real life Casanova. He believed – genuinely and sincerely – that he had left a trail of pining conquests achin' for his good lovin' from sea to shining sea. His entire sense of self was built on that and that was the picture he painted for his buddies. Then he recognised Miranda Wells as one of his college flings – or else got her mixed up with one – and went swaggering in –"
"Only to be cut off at the knees in front of his pack of cronies," Missouri declared with just a soupcon of satisfaction.
"Right, because Miranda didn't recognise him. At all. Not even a glimmer." Dean pointed out. "And that rocked his world. Not only would his little coterie of acolytes be a lot less likely to swallow his tales of sexual supremacy whole, but how he defined himself had taken a massive hit."
"That's why he ended up tracking Miranda down and accidentally killing her," Cale surmised, "he couldn't accept the reality that she had completely forgotten him – assuming he hadn't got her mixed up with one of his real exes in the first place."
"More or less," Dean agreed, "though I don't think he graduated straight from killing Miranda to killing Judith – it was a traumatic disintegration not a sociopathic pre-meditated killing spree. I bet if we'd been able to track his movements between Miranda and Judith we'd have found that he had contacted a couple of former conquests only to discover that they either didn't remember him as well, or that to them he was just a vague drunken college fling that they were cringingly embarrassed over and desperate to make sure nobody found out about."
"In short his whole fantasy of a long line of women reminiscing nostalgically about him to anyone who would listen was shot down in flames." Shay realised. "When he got to Judith and she didn't remember him either something must have made him snap and then he just carried on."
"Leaving behind the forget-me-nots as his calling card," Sam agreed. "Like Dean said, I bet if we'd been able to track where he went and what he did we'd have found several women who escaped unscathed because they did remember him – or at least were able to fake it well enough for him to happily go on his way without realising that she was really thinking, who the hell was that guy? I'm cancelling Facebook right now 'cause there are just too many weirdoes out there."
Missouri sighed deeply and shook her head. "Such a pointless life. But then, that's the he reality womanisers can't seem to grasp - that if the woman is vague and unmemorable within a week –"
"- then so too are they." Dean rolled his eyes as his finishing of the truism made them all blink at him like startled owls and he snorted derisorily. "What's with the looks? Sure, I flirt like I breathe, but that's all part of my master plan kids…I want to be instantly forgettable."
"You want to be forgotten?" Shay uttered with a wealth of disbelief, her eyes flicking to the over-gelled inferno waiting to happen that was his hair and the consciously 'cool' leather jacket he customarily donned.
"Yep," Dean leaned back in the armchair, smirking as they looked at him with a clear mixture of bafflement and scepticism. "The reason I act out like a man-slut on steroids is a) because I am one, and b) so that my image immediately gets put in that bottom drawer of people's brains labelled: Unimportant Memories, filed under Superficial Charmer. My face just gets mixed with all the others in that file and within 24-hours of the latest rinky-dink town disappearing in the Impala's rear-view mirror, not a citizen around could say whether I was blonde or brunette, had brown eyes or blue, was a lanky giant like Geek Boy here, or a four-foot midget."
There was a significant pause while they digested this. "Put that way…" Cale mumbled aloud half-to himself.
Sam sniffed, "Oh yeah, the burden of being a legend in your own mind, bro'."
"Dude, I'm Dean Winchester, sexy comes as standard." Dean preened. "What I mean is that strippers and diner waitresses are usually divorced single moms getting zero alimony from deadbeat exes actually proud of the fact they're not providing for their family. On top of that they're hit on by dickwads every day who suffer from the same delusion as Drew Williams: that they're God's gift to the double-X chromosome half of humanity. Me going in and being polite and not schmoozing them and actually meeting their eyes when I'm talking to them instead of ogling various points south and not trying a grab-n-grope within the first ten seconds would all combine in an unholy stew to make me –"
"Memorable," realised Sam getting hit with the epiphany as well.
"Yahtzee, Sammy. Me showing 'depth of character' would do nothing but blaze a wide, unwelcome trail of bartenders, diner busboys and truck-stop waitresses who all unhappily remembered my gorgeous self sufficiently to accurately describe me for every good ole boy sheriff, po-leece awficer and half-baked Fed around, leading straight to yours truly like my own personal Interstate – not conducive to Winchester Family Rule No.1, We do what we do and shut up about it. Hence, my simple yet brilliant stratagem…I call it 'hiding in plain sight.''
Concluded in Epilogue© 2009, CD Stewart