"Well, why don't we start from the beginning in that case?" Dean asks.

"In the beginning, there was just me," Chuck says, reminding Dean an awful lot of the sermons he would hear now and then at church services with his mom. "Well, and my sister, but this story isn't about her."

As he takes a breath to continue, Dean stops him. "Okay, can we maybe start at a more relevant point? The beginning of this mess wasn't a one man job."

"No, Dean. It all comes back to me," Chuck says. "It all comes back to me because I was the beginning of everything."

Dean shakes his head. Chuck has finally lost it. He's always known this day would come, but he didn't expect it to go this way. He expected incoherent crying and Chuck rocking in the corner in the fetal position.

Life is full of surprises.

"You didn't think I was crazy when I was claiming to be a prophet," Chuck says.

"Well…"

"Okay. Okay!" Chuck says. "But you more-or-less accepted it after a grace period."

"I guess, but this isn't the same. The beginning of everything happened a long time before either of us were born and—wait. I didn't say anything about you being crazy out loud."

"No, you didn't."

"So you're just pulling out some—"

"It's not just some prophet stuff," Chuck says, cutting off Dean. "I don't expect you to believe me, and that's not important. What's important is that I want to help now. I still have some power. A great deal of power, depending on who you might ask."

"Why now?" Dean asks.

"Because Gabriel thinks you're ready."

"Gabriel thinks—" The realization hits Dean at once and he turns to check on Sam in the bedroom, but finds that he's unable to take a step.

"You don't want to interrupt an archangel trying to heal what he can of your brother, but I can see that he was right. When you thought that someone might be doing something to Sam—even something beneficial—without you there, you wanted to head there immediately. Like you would have before the Apocalypse."

Dean tries again to move towards Sam, but finds that Chuck has his hand raised and will only allow him to move back to join him at the table.

"Is this some kind of joke to you?" Dean asks.

Chuck smiles, but there's no joy in it. Rather, it has an ageless wisdom to it that Dean remembers seeing on Sam's face when they were kids and he was shut out of conversations or hunts their dad said he was too young for. "I wish it was, Dean."

"You don't think that Sam should be present for whatever revelations you have to share in the middle of the night?"

"What I'm going to share with you is nothing new to Sam. In fact, he lived through it. You have some idea of what he experienced in your time apart—and you've definitely held him accountable for what Lucifer did while possessing him—but haven't you wondered about what was happening to his soul during those years of being used as an archangel's puppet?"

"I guess I just thought that it'd be like being unconscious," Dean says, not having put more than a passing thought into the matter. Not letting himself put more than a passing thought into the matter.

"It could have been like nothing more than a deep sleep," Chuck says. "But do you really think Lucifer would give that kind of a mercy to Sam?"

No. Of course not.

"Exactly," Chuck says.

Dean feels the force Chuck is using to keep him from checking on Sam instead start to beckon him forwards until he takes a seat at the table, like invisible chains wrapped around his limbs. The chair creaks beneath his weight, not able to withstand many more uses with its rotting and fractured wooden legs.

"Lucifer claims that he doesn't lie, and that's true. However, it's also true that vengeance has been the first thing on his mind for thousands of years, and mercy the last," Chuck says. "All he thought about was the moment he'd be able to act on those vengeful thoughts."

"He's dead now. What does that have to do with anything anymore?"

"Everything. Well, everything involving Sam."

Dean doesn't get the chance to respond. His perspective shifts and where he saw Chuck sitting across from him a moment ago is replaced by the slow whoosh of a fan in the ceiling he finds himself looking at from on his back. It takes him a second to stand and regain his balance, feeling like he's just been hit by a car and thrown across the street.

Once he gathers himself and looks around, he finds that this place is achingly familiar, but this view of it is not.

He watches the lazy revolutions of the fan as he thinks.

This isn't real. Whatever it is, he knows there's a disconnect from reality. A disconnect caused by Chuck.

But if he's disconnected from reality, then what state of existence has he been shunted into?

When the smell of Old Spice and whiskey hits his nose, he knows exactly where he is.

Bobby's.

He hears the jangling of shackles, but his wrists move freely. Then, he hears a groan that he's so painfully familiar with: Sam's.

He turns and finds that the interior of the Panic Room has shifted and its few contents come into being.

Sam, without the burn scars covering his body from Lucifer's final fight, is on the cot in Bobby's panic room, the cot that Dean left in there as the sole piece of furniture when he staged a detox from demon blood. As he looks around the room, he finds that its current state is eerily the same as there is nothing else in the room aside from themselves and the cot. The way it had been when Dean forced Sam through detox for the demon blood.

"Hey, Sam? What's going on here?" Dean asks. He reaches out to touch Sam's shackled wrist, to undo his binds, but his hand passes through like nothing's there.

"What the?"

"This isn't real."

Dean looks up to see Chuck standing in the middle of the room. "Then, what is it?" he asks.

"In a way, it's Sam's mind," Chuck says. "Or it's where his mind was kept when Lucifer had control of his body. So it is reality, but it didn't take place in the real world. Regardless, the events left different scars on Sam."

"I don't want to see this," Dean says, the words escaping before he can think about them.

"No one wants to watch someone they love suffer," Chuck says. "But you can't fully heal your bond with Sam if you don't understand what he went through while you were out in the world having written him off as dead."

It's true. He knows it's true.

But that doesn't mean he has to like it.

He looks back at Sam on the cot, staring up at the fan and oblivious to the conversation going on around him.

"Naturally, we can't change or affect anything here. We're just observers," Chuck says.

"Naturally," Dean echoes in a murmur.

They wait for so long that Dean begins to wonder if anything will happen at all, but then again he isn't sure if the flow of time is different here. That was the case in Hell, so it wouldn't be far-fetched for this reality under the control of Lucifer to have its own time flow as well.

But of course Lucifer would not be so kind as to leave Sam alone, even after he gave Lucifer everything he wanted in agreeing to be his vessel.

Lucifer appears, looming over Sam on the cot. Dean recognizes Nick's body, though he's never known its original inhabitant.

Sam turns his head to face the wall, struggling to be as fair away from Lucifer as his bonds allow.

"I felt you fighting back again, Sam," Lucifer says. "You know that our deal was my control of your body in exchange for Dean's safety."

Deans sees how Sam clenches his jaw, remembers how many times he saw that expression when they were growing up and he'd butt heads with their dad. He hated that look and the days of tension that always followed it.

He finds that he still hates the look on Sam's face even in this place. And what was he doing at this time? Sitting around and pretending that his brother was dead? Writing off his family without trusting that Sam would make his choices for a reason? Playing leader in a budding village?

"I'm a real piece of shit."

"Well, I won't disagree," Chuck says. "Not in this case."

"Nothing to say?" Lucifer asks.

Sam remains silent.

"Well then, I'll leave you with some entertainment."

Lucifer vanishes, and Dean doesn't understand what he meant by leaving Sam entertainment as he doesn't notice any changes in the environment. Not immediately.

Then, he notices that the shadow of sluggish fan rotations is gone. A mass of darkness hides the ceiling of Bobby's safe room from view.

A splash of liquid appears at the center of his forehead, and Dean flinches, reaching his hand up to figure out what it is. Blood.

Blood?

It's still warm on his fingertips, but cooling quickly. He goes to probe his head and make sure that he didn't get hurt somehow when he hears a sound from Sam on the cot.

"No, no, no," Sam says, his voice a raspy whisper.

Dean looks from Sam and back to the ceiling at the sound of combustion and raging flames. For a second, he's four years old again and catching a glimpse of his mother pinned to the ceiling. Years later, he found himself being thankful that she was most likely dead by the time the fire started. He couldn't imagine what sort of agony it would have been otherwise.

But it isn't Mary whose empty eyes are staring back at him and whose blood is dripping onto his forehead.

It's Jess.

The woman who was there for Sam during the years that he felt his family turned against him. That they were the enemy. Even Dean wasn't a source of comfort or support for him at Stanford. Hell, he'd hardly heard from or seen Sam during those years. Through his own stubbornness or bitterness, he couldn't be sure which kept him away from Stanford back then.

He looks away and over to Chuck. "I don't want to see this," he says.

Chuck gives him a sad smile. "You think Sam did?"

"Of course not. Having to watch shit like this just reminds him of all the times he felt like a failure."

"Exactly," Chuck says. "Lucifer kept Sam controlled by making sure he always felt beat down, and if that didn't work, he brought up the threat that if Sam fought back, then Lucifer would go after you and throw you back into Hell. I know you thought that Sam was just gone, but the truth is that Sam was living in his own Hell so that you wouldn't have to."

"I think I knew that," Dean says. "That whatever was happening to him wasn't good."

"Then, why have you spent so long punishing him for surviving after Lucifer was gone?"

Dean feels acid burn at the back of his throat as bile threatens to spill over from his stomach. "Because it was easier."

Dean takes a deep breath before he continues, feeling like a child with his admittance of the truth. "I know how to be angry. Ask the villagers, they'll vouch for that given what they've seen of me in the past years. Ask anyone who's ever known me even a little bit. I'm better at being angry and running from problems. It's been so long since I've had to do something other than survive that I don't remember how to do anything else anymore."

Glancing up to the ceiling, Dean is almost relieved that the image of Jess is gone. He's dismayed, however, to see that she's been replaced by Andy's blank stare. Cold Oak, then.

Dean hates that place.

"You don't forget how to take care of someone else," Chuck says. "You just start to avoid it because you're afraid of messing up again. Because you feel like this was all your fault. Because the pain you felt is something you don't want to experience again and you're terrified of bringing more pain to him."

Dean looks down at his feet. "Isn't it? Sam agreed to be Lucifer's vessel because of me. If it hadn't been for me, the world wouldn't have ended!"

"You know that for sure?" Chuck asks.

Chuck is looking at him with a blank expression, a far cry from the nervous wreck that Dean put up with in the beginning of the village's establishment. Dean meets his gaze in silence.

"That's what I thought," Chuck says.

Screaming from both the images on the ceiling and Sam on his cot abruptly stop as Dean finds himself shunted back to reality and his spot at his rickety old table. He puts his hands on the table for support as his brain reorients to the change in scenery.

"All that time?" Dean asks, daring to look at Chuck for the answer.

Chuck nods. "That was how it went for years. Sam was shown his worst moments, and he was powerless to get away from them as Lucifer kept him trapped within the recesses of his own mind."

"Then he came back, and I was an ass to him."

"Well, I wasn't going to be the one to say it."

Dean lets the silence rule the room for a few moments before he asks, "Well, what am I supposed to do now?"

Chuck looks past Dean and at the door to the bedroom, where Gabriel is (presumably) still doing his best to heal the wounds of Sam's that haven't yet scarred. "You make a choice," he says. "There is one path that has led you here, but there are countless paths in front of you. After all, this is what free will is for."

Dean takes a deep breath and rises from the chair, invisible power from Chuck no longer keeping him in place. In this moment, he sees the paths of the future stretching out in front of him, lines spidering over the floor and up the walls, branching out from each other like the scars of a lightning strike.

And countless paths are burned off with each step he takes towards Sam's room. The wrong paths, he hopes.

He doesn't have enough chances left to make the wrong choice here.