DISCLAIMER: I only own my character! Anything you might recognize is courtesy of the CW.
WARNING: Some of these episodes/chapters may contain graphic violence, cursing, mentions of suicide or assault and other triggering aspects. Proceed with caution please.
Episode Summary:
The Winchesters race to Bobby's side after he lapses into a coma and can't be awakened. While unconscious, Bobby battles his personal demons and the reason he became a hunter is revealed. Angel, Sam and Dean discover someone poisoned Bobby with a potion that will kill him if he doesn't wake soon. When the siblings decide to take the potion themselves to enter Bobby's dream in order to save him, they come face to face with their own personal nightmares.
Prologue…
Bobby walked through his house, flashlight in hand, as he looked around. The wind was whistling loudly outside. Bobby heard a sound behind him and jumped around, but there was nothing there. Worry etched his face as he reached the doors to the kitchen. He slowly slid them open, and took a few steps in, scanning the room carefully. Suddenly a woman screamed and attacked him, making him fall to the floor with her on top. She struggled with him, pulling him back and forth, while she screamed.
After a few seconds the screaming echoed as Bobby was now lying asleep on a motel bed. The door was opened from the outside before a maid entered the room. After a few steps she saw Bobby on the bed, who didn't react to the noises she made.
"Oh! I'm sorry." She began to walk out again, but as she retrieved the keys from the door, Bobby sill silent and unmoving, worry creased her face, "Sir?" She left the keys in the door and walked over to his bed before gently shaking his shoulder, "Wake up."
He didn't react. Inside his mind the woman he was grappling with was still screaming as Bobby tried to survive the attack. She slammed his head against the floor. The maid then grabbed his shoulders and shook him, trying to wake him up.
"Wake up, do you hear me? Wake up. Sir, wake up!" She turned around to the door in a panic, "Help! I need some help in here!"
Later on, in a dive bar…
Long Train Runnin by the Doobie Brothers played as a bartender grabbed a bottle of whiskey and walked over to a man and a woman.
He grabbed a glass and walked down the bar, "Cheers!"
As he poured the couple a drink Sam sat down at the bar as he nursed his own. He tilted his glass back and forth slowly, almost spilling out the contents. Sadness filled his entire body. The usual hope that kept him going was long gone. Also, he appeared to be a little drunk as he shot back that glass and motioned for another. As the bartender poured him one, the bar doors swung open and Dean peaked his head in. He looked around for a second and then his brows furrowed once he saw Sam.
"Ang." Dean ducked out momentarily before reemerging with their sister, "He's over there."
"Sam, we've been looking for you all day." Angel watched the bartender finish pouring the drink before looking back down at Sam, "What the hell are you doing?"
Sam turned to her and shrugged, "Having a drink."
"I can see that, little brother." She crossed her arms, "But it's two in the afternoon, we're in the middle of a case, and since when do you even drink whiskey?"
"I drink whiskey all the time."
"No." Dean shook his head at that as he sat next to him, "No, you don't."
"What's the big deal?" Sam slurred as he looked between the two of them and then motioned around the bar, "Both of you get sloppy in bars, and both of you hit on people all the time. Why can't I?"
Angel and Dean each looked around the bar with matching frowns. There weren't many people present currently. The only woman being quite older than Sam himself.
Dean cocked an eyebrow before chuckling a little, "It's kind of slim pickings around here."
"Bartender's kinda cute." Angel smirked as she met the man's eye and got a smile in return, "Although, I thought I was the only one of us that dipped in both ponds." When she didn't get a reaction from Sam she sighed and leaned between them onto the bar, "Sammy, what's going on with you? Talk to us."
Sam shook his head, staying silent for a few moments. The completely lost look on his face worried both older Winchesters as they waited for a response.
"I tried, Ang."
"Tried…" Confusion filled her as she studied him, "What?"
His voice broke, "To save you."
Angel tensed at his words, realizing what this was and why he was so upset. Sighing she briefly looked at Dean, who wouldn't meet her eyes, and then motioned for the bartender.
"Can we get two more whiskeys?" She motioned between herself and Dean, "Double, neat."
"I'm serious, Angel."
"No, Sam, you're drunk." She dismissed, "And this is a conversation we should be having when you're sober." Her voice dropped to a mumble, "Or not at all preferably."
"I mean, where you're going…" He trekked on, ignoring her dismissal, "What you're gonna become." Tears filled his eyes and he scoffed before shaking his head, "I can't stop it. Dean can't stop it." He paused for a second as he studied his drink, "I'm starting to think maybe even Ruby can't stop it. But really, the thing is, no one can save you."
Angels jaw clenched as she kept her gaze firmly on the bottles in front of her, "Sam-"
"No one can save you because you don't wanna be saved." He paused as Angel's eyes snapped to his, Dean looked between them with raised eyebrows, "I mean, how can you care so little about yourself?" She painfully took in his words before scoffing and tearing her gaze from his, "What's wrong with you?"
Angel looked over and met his eyes again, the pain mirroring between them. Before she got a chance to respond, Dean's cell rang.
"Hello?" He paused as the other person spoke, "Yes, this is Mr. Snyderson." Surprise filled his face, "What?" Looking over he met Angel and Sam's worried gazes, "Where? I'll be right there." Hanging up the phone he shot a grim look to his siblings, "We gotta go. It's Bobby. He's in the hospital, in a coma."
"What?" Angel was instantly on her feet, "Ill- Ill tell Asa to finish the case without us and pack up everything." She quickly threw some money on the bar before motioning to a wobbling Sam, "You go get him some coffee or something."
In Bobby's hospital room…
Bobby was lying in a hospital bed motionless as the Winchesters stood at his side. Angel's jaw tensed as she stared down at the man who had been more like a father to her and her brothers than their biological one. Her hands gripped the metal railing on his bed tightly as her brothers spoke to the doctor.
"So…" Sam looked from Bobby to the doctor, "What's the diagnosis?"
"We've tested everything we can think to test. He seems perfectly healthy."
Dean motioned to Bobby's still unmoving body, "Except that he's comatose."
"Mr. Snyderson, you're his emergency contact. Anything we should know? Any illnesses?
"No, he- he never gets sick." Dean shook his head, "I mean, he doesn't even catch a cold."
Angel pulled her sad eyes away from Bobby to make eye contact with the doctor, "Can you help him?"
"Look, I'm sorry, but we don't know what's causing it, so we don't know how to treat it." He shook his head sadly, "He just… went to sleep, and didn't wake up."
Angel's jaw clenched again as she shared a look with her brothers before all three of them looked over to Bobby.
At Bobbys motel room…
"So, I'm thinking Bobby's in Pittsburgh for a job." Angel said as she led her brothers into his room, "Unless he's taking an extremely docile vacation."
Dean sighed as he began looking around, "And by docile you mean lame." They moved around the very plain, very empty room trying to search for any clues, "Well, you think there'd be some sort of sign of something, you know?" He opened a drawer but came up empty, the room looked completely clean, "Research, news clippings… A friggin' pizza box or a beer can."
Sam turned to the closet and opened it. Bobby's clothes all hung there neatly but he could see papers littering the back wall.
He turned on the light, "How 'bout this?"
Sam moved the clothes out of the way and on the wall behind them hung all of the news clippings, maps and pictures they were looking for. There were pictures of roots, mushrooms, seeds and a map where Bobby had written 'Pittsburgh' in big letters and underlined it. Post-it notes hung with addresses and numbers etched on them and there was a piece of paper that held information about a plant.
"Good old Bobby." Dean chuckled as he and Angel walked over, "Always covering up his tracks."
Sam frowned, "Either of you making heads or tails of any of this?"
"'Silene Capensis.'" Dean took the paper about the plant and read the title with a frown, "Which of course means absolutely nothing to me."
"There's an obit." Angel motioned before taking the newspaper clipping and skimming it, "'Dr. Walter Gregg, 64, university neurologist.' They aren't sure how he bit it." She cocked her eyebrow at them, "Says he just went to sleep and never woke up." She handed the obit to Dean, "Sound familiar?"
"Alright, um…" Sam thought for a second as he frowned, "So let's say Bobby was looking into the doc's death. You know, hunting after something-"
Dean looked up at him, "That started hunting him."
"Yeah."
"Alright, you two stay here." Dean pointed to the closet, "See if you can make heads or tails of this."
Angel crossed her arms, "And what will you be doing in the meantime?"
He smirked and walked to the door, "I'm gonna look into the good doctor myself."
Angel sighed at him as she shook her head at Sam, "He gets the fun stuff while we get the grunt work."
Later on Dean called to inform them that Dr. Gregg had been conducting sleeping experiments on test subjects to alter their dreams. He was administering a yellow tea to the test subjects in order to do so. One of which said the experience was like a 'bad acid trip' that scared him out of the study.
After doing some research, Sam and Angel met Dean back in Bobbys hospital room. Angel sipped on a black to-go coffee cup as Sam held onto the file with all the information they had acquired. They stopped at the door frame to see Dean sat by the man's side, a thoughtful look upon his face. Aware of their presence, he turned around and shared a knowing look with both of them as they walked further into the room.
Angel looked the older man over as the three of them came to stand at the foot of his bed, "How's he doing?"
"No change." Dean rubbed his hand over his chin, "What you got?"
"Well, considering what you told us about the doc's experiments…" Sam sighed, "Bobby's wall is starting to make a hell of a lot more sense."
"How so?"
"Silene Capensis AKA African Dream Root." Angel pulled up a picture of a plant from the folder they brought, "Shaman and medicine men have used it for centuries."
"Let me guess." Dean interjected, "They dose up, bust out the didgeridoos, start kicking around the hackey."
"Not quite." Angel smirked but Sam shook his head at their brother's explanation as he continued explaining, "If you believe the legends, it's used for dreamwalking. I mean, entering another person's dreams, poking around in their heads."
"And of course, in our line of work, since when do we not believe the legends? It gets crazier." Angel handed over a paper from the folder that contained info on the root as well as a drawing of it, "This stuff is powerful. You take enough of it, with practice, you can pretty much become Freddy Krueger."
"You can control anything." Sam added, "You could turn bad dreams good, you could turn good dreams bad."
"You could kill people in their sleep for example."
Dean sighed tensely at that as his eyes flashed to Bobby worriedly.
Sam nodded, "Let's say this doc was testing this stuff on his patients, Tim Leary-style."
"Somebody gets pissed at him, decides to give him a little dream visit." Dean finished, "He goes nighty-night."
"Yet it doesn't explain Bobby." Angel looked over to the older man sadly after tossing her now empty cup in the trash beside the door, "If the killer came after him, why is he still alive?"
Dean frowned, "I don't know."
In Bobby's subconscious…
Bobby was back in his house once again at the beginning of his dream. He was holding a closet door closed as a woman was banging on it, making it rattle. She continued to scream as Bobby panted in fear on the other side. He looked around for something to hold the door, and grabbed an old suitcase. Desperately grappling around the space he gripped anything he thought could hold the door. Grabbing a broom to use as a weapon he held his back to the door, trying to keep it closed.
"Help me!" He screamed, "Somebody help me!" The small space of the closet was now gone, replaced with a very long never ending hallway, "HELP ME!"