Dean knew it was too early to be drinking. He knew he shouldn't be drinking the hard stuff at all. Technically he was on a case. He threw back his fourth shot.
It couldn't be real. It just couldn't. This had to be a trickster, or a djinn dream world, or he had been right back at not-Bobby's and this was Hell. He didn't know what he knew anymore, but he knew, right now, he didn't want to know it sober.
He had never had what you would call a healthy, defined sense of self. He'd lost that years ago to the role of good little soldier. Being Sam's brother, John's son had been the anchors of his existence, the central point around which the essence of his identity had revolved. Looking after Sam had given him purpose. John's instructions had given him direction. What else had he needed?
But they weren't here now. They were missing, just like his car and everything in it, Bobby and the salvage yard. Everything that had defined him had been stripped away, leaving nothing but Dean, all alone with no connection of any kind to the world around him.
He raised the empty shot glass. "Sweetheart," he said, catching the bartender's eye. He shouldn't be drinking. He had a case to work. He didn't care.
"Girl trouble?" the bartender asked, refilling his glass.
"If only." he snorted sulkily.
"Look, it's none of my business," she said sympathetically, "but maybe you should slow down a little. I know a lot of people come in here to forget, and I get it, I do, but trust me, drinking faster won't get you drunk any faster. It just hits you harder when it kicks in. How about you give what's in your system a chance to work before you give yourself alcohol poisoning?"
He looked at her for a moment and then slid the shot to the side. "I'll give it a few minutes." he conceded.
"Want to talk about it?" she offered, "That's been known to help, too."
"You wouldn't understand." he declined.
"You'd be surprised," she prodded, "after five years filling glasses in this place, I've heard it all. Tell you what, I'll bet you a fin you can't shock me. What is it? Your woman and your best friend? Big gay freak out? Abducted by aliens?"
"Aliens? No, you know, there has never been one piece of solid scientific evidence of an actual alien encounter. I doubt I'd be the first." he eyed the shot but didn't pick it up.
"I don't know," she smiled, "you're awfully easy on the eyes. I can see if the little green men were shopping, you might seem like the pick of the litter."
"Wouldn't be the weirdest thing to ever have happened to me." Dean confessed. "Hell, it wouldn't even be the weirdest thing to have happened to me today."
"So, talk to me." she goaded him, "I can use the five bucks."
Dean was a sucker for flirting stone cold sober. With a pleasant, floaty buzz starting to kick in he found that he was willing to drop his guard a bit to keep the exchange going. "OK, did you ever remember something that didn't happen?"
"You mean like a dream?" she asked unphased.
"Yeah, kind of." Dean babbled, the combination of stress and whiskey loosening his tongue more than he normally would have allowed. "Say there's this place and you've been there a bunch of times. You know the creaky floorboard, and the smell of the must, and the spot that always leaks when it rains too hard because Bobby's always going to fix it once the storm season's over, but he never does. I mean, you know the place." he slapped his hand down on the bar for emphasis. "Then say you go out there one day, and it just isn't there." He grabbed the shot and downed it, too caught up in his animated narrative to remember his promise. "You heard that one before?" he challenged as he slammed the empty shot glass back down on the bar.
"So like Mandela Effect," she observed, taking it all in stride.
"Man-who?" Dean slurred slightly, his focus beginning to fall prey to the amount of liquor he'd jammed into himself in such short order.
"Hold on," she said and scurried off. When she returned she was fingering the screen of a cell. "Watch this," she instructed, handing it over to Dean.
He spent the next twenty minutes engrossed in a breakdown of the inconsistencies of the details of the Kennedy assassination. Drinking was forgotten as he got caught up in the video, which described just the phenomenon he'd been experiencing, a shifting reality, inconsistent with memories.
"Looks like I owe you five bucks." he conceded when he summoned the bartender back over to return her phone. "Can I borrow your pen?"
"Did that help?" she inquired, handing it over.
"I don't know, maybe." he answered as he jotted 'Mandela Effect' down on a cocktail napkin. "Could I get a coffee, black? I need to clear my head a little." He allowed himself a small smile. This was the first thing that had gone right all day.
While he waited for his coffee he let his eyes wander over the room, coming to rest of the scuffed up pool table stuffed in the back, looking like it had been an afterthought. His funds were starting to run a bit low again. If he could sober up some, he might be able to do something about that once the place started to fill up a little bit.
He was starting to miss the lucrative simplicity of a fake credit card, but that required set up. Fake names, fake documents, fake addresses with arrangements to forward mail to real PO boxes, none of which he had in place. Until he could set up a network, he'd just have to keep getting by as best he could on pool, a card game if he could find one.
He sipped his coffee. It was cheap generic stuff, the sort you expect to find in a dive bar where it was likely hardly ever ordered. It would do the job, but it was truly terrible. He debated breaking with his usual routine and asking for some sugar.
Gi was shoveling heaping spoonfuls of sugar into his own mug. He took a sip, grimaced and added another overflowing spoonful before deeming the coffee drinkable.
The image crept slowly past Dean's buzz and took shape in his whiskey addled mind. "Son of a bitch," he whispered hoarsely. How in hell had he missed that?