The pizza dude turned out to be a chick, and not a badly shaped one, who, while initially flustered, didn't seem all that displeased with the door having been answered by Dean Winchester, wearing nothing but a towel. Dean couldn't find it in himself to flirt back. He didn't even bother to watch her wiggle back to her car. He just turned his back, closed the door, and tossed the pizza box onto the table before he succumbed to the urge to throw it across the room. He didn't even want the damned thing anymore.
He dropped heavily onto the edge of the bed, his face buried in his hands. Briefly, he considered trying the number one more time but quickly decided that all he would be doing was torturing himself.
The first time he'd gotten the recorded message he had assumed that, in his enthusiastic rush, he must have misdialed. The second time he'd forced himself to go more slowly, take more care. By the third time, he was meticulously triple checking every number before pressing its corresponding button, like it was Sesame Street, or Phone Calls For Dummies, or some shit.
Each time, he got the same result, "no such number", not, "currently unavailable", or "no longer in service", no such freakin' number. The lifeline that he'd worked so hard to pull out of the cluttered pile that was currently his brain didn't exist.
He'd briefly grasped onto the hope that the problem had been on his end, but dismissed it. The pizza order had gone through with no trouble, as evidenced by the bang on the door that had interrupted his thoughts and announced the arrival of said pizza, which was now cooling, forgotten on the table.
He pulled his face up out of his hands, but his head still hung. The number wasn't real, and if the number wasn't real how could he know any of it was? The only evidence he had of anything was his own memories, or whatever they were, and yeah, like that was reliable information. He had even less to go on than he did before.
When he wandered aimlessly into the bathroom, it had been more just a way to move around, to do something besides sit and think increasingly dark thoughts, than for any actual purpose. "Are you even real?", he queried his reflection. Hell, it's not like the other him in the mirror taking on independent life and imparting the secret knowledge that would be the key to sorting this mess out would even be the weirdest thing to have happened that day. So he looked deeply into his own tired, pained eyes, silently imploring them to give him, if not answers, at least a clue.
And then he saw it, just below his collar bone, the black, sun ringed pentagram, the twin to the one Sam wore. He watched as his reflection ran its fingers over it, tracing the familer lines. It was here. I was real. He remembered the buzz of the needle, the sting, the blood, Sam in the next chair, throwing him the bitch face because he had told him to, "pretend he was a man, and take it like one". Maybe all that was the product of some messed up head injury, or coma dream, or who knows what, but this, right here, right now, was real. It was there, which meant as some point he had gotten it, which meant that the memories were just as easily real as false.
It was one bad phone number, he soothed himself, no reason to panic, no reason to give up. In fact, there was every reason in the world not to, because Sam was out there somewhere. Dean was going to find him, and God himself had better not try to stand in his way.
Feeling renewed drive Dean smirked at his reflection. "Thanks, dude." he quipped before striding from the room, homing in on the abandoned pizza, suddenly very hungry. He did not look back, half afraid the face in the mirror would answer.