It was well after midnight, so the parking structure was both darkened and empty. Dean hadn't even had to bother with disabling the one security camera he had found since it was out of order anyway. He picked himself a mid 90s Camry and put Pontiac Community General in the rearview mirror.
He drove straight through and by the soft light of an early morning he was turning down a familiar road on the outskirts of Sioux Falls that lead the closest thing he had to a home outside of Baby, Singer Auto Salvage.
He was buzzing a little. It had been a long hard road getting here, but this was finally some progress. Bobby would know where Sam was. Hell, he realized, odds were pretty high that Sam would be at Bobby's, and the thought filled him with an eager anticipation. Almost as good, if anyone would have any idea what had brought him back, and what had gotten knocked out of alignment in the process, it would be Bobby. Failing that, he'd at least have some idea how to go about figuring it out. Things were about to start getting a whole lot better for Dean Winchester.
XXXXX
He'd had to get out of the car and actually walk the ground himself before his mind would accept it. This was definitely the right spot. He'd know it with his eyes closed. He stood where the front door should have been, but just inexplicably wasn't. He walked forward through what should have been the living room. Here, he stopped, should be the kitchen doorway.
He turned to the right and glared at the spot where the god damned refrigerator should have been holding the god damned beer, that he could sure god damned well use right now. He stalked off in a different direction to the spot that should house the phones that went with the numbers that he had stressed himself into an anxiety attack trying to retrieve. No wonder none of them had worked.
"Are you freakin' kidding me?" he yelled at the sky. "Is this a joke? Cause it ain't funny!" He fumed pacing aimlessly around the empty field, not "the place burned down", or "got bulldozed" empty, but "untouched, never was anything here" empty. Dean would have given anything for just one familiar wall so he'd have something to put his fist through.
"This is hell, isn't it?" he continued ranting. "This is how it works! You give somebody hope and then jerk it away and watch them twist! Is that it?" The clouds silently rolled by overhead.
"Answer me, you god damned demonic sons of bitches!" Somewhere in the distance a crow cawed.
"Damn," he muttered, almost too softly to even hear himself. At this point, he'd welcome Hell. Pain he understood. Pain he could do because it was familiar. Right now, he couldn't imagine anything so painful that it wouldn't be preferable to everything he knew being yanked out from under him over and over, leaving him no solid place to stand, no reality in which to anchor himself. Torture, at least, would be something real to hold on to, the pain carrying with it reassurances of his own existace. Dean Winchester's philosophy of life, I hurt, therefore I am.
His mind replayed the image of the hospital room exploding around him, leaving no evidence in its wake. Had he imagined it? Or had it happened, and then the world...what? Reset and went back to the last save point?
And what was happening here? He remembered Sam, Bobby, a whole life, but just like the hospital, none of those memories seemed to come with any attached evidence of actually having happened. He couldn't know that any of it was real, or that he was even who he thought he was. An awful feeling barreled through his gut and he had to fight the urge to hurl.
"Ok," he reasoned, trying to calm himself, "maybe I'm not remembering, maybe I'm just imagining things. Maybe I'm in a rubber room or a coma, or bleeding out in some dirty alley, but right now, right here, this is the reality I've got, so I'm going to do what I always do, work the case."
As he roared down the road with renewed determination, he thought bitterly that Sioux Falls had god damned well better be there, or there'd be hell to pay.