"I'm sorry, what?" Dean asked, the combination of cheap beer, marginal weed, and whatever it was that had just happened sloshing around in his head.
"You're not human." Gi stammered, "You can't be."
"OK, whoa, dude," Dean said calmly, shaking his head as he stood up. Gi jumped from his chair and circled around behind it as if the flimsy aluminum frame and plastic webbing could provide any kind of protection.
The sensitive thing to do would have been to back off, sit back down, and try to talk Gi off the proverbial ledge. Dean wasn't in a sensitive place at the moment. The whole world had been freaking out around him for a week running. He had one singular asset in his favor, Gi's questionable abilities. As far as he was concerned, the kid wasn't allowed to go guano on him, not until he had some answers.
He stepped forward causing Gi to scuttle backward, dragging the chair with him.
"OK, enough," Dean growled, snatching the chair away and setting in firmly back on the floor. He caught Gi by the shoulders. The younger man froze up and didn't resist as Dean maneuvered him back into his seat.
Terrific, Dean thought absorbing the sight of the jittery kid. "You need a drink." he said, clapping Gi on the shoulder, making him startle.
"I should have made that booze run." he said conversationally, as if to someone not in mid-meltdown, heading for the small kitchenette to dig into the tiny counter top fridge, "I figure this might take something with more kick. I might be needing it myself before we're done."
Gi's last beer in hand, he twisted it open and tossed the cap aside to land with a clatter on the counter top before going back to push to bottle on Gi. With a little persistence, he got the boy to hesitantly accept it before returning to his spot on the sofa.
It took restraint to stay quiet while Gi nursed his way through the beer, risking the occasional shaky glance in Dean's direction. The bottle was still half full when Dean asked, "You good?"
"Not even close," Gi sputtered out, his eyes darted towards the apartment's door.
"Yeah, well, good enough," Dean decided, "Look man, I know you're freaked, but I'm going to need you to fight through that. Just tell me what you saw and then I'm gone. Then you can blaze up or meltdown or whatever you need to do."
"What the….no," Gi shook his head firmly, "I'm not talking about that. Dude, I'm pretty sure, I gotta take therapy for you. Like what the actual hell?"
Dean had been here before. Most people lived in a nice, safe, little bubble, where the really nasty stuff only existed in movies and stories that pre-teens passed around at sleepovers. They didn't deal well when that bubble burst and the nightmares crawled out of the shadows and into the harsh light of reality. This wasn't the first time he had seen sanity defended with a wall of denial, or the first time he had to plow through the wall because there wasn't time for it.
It was weird though. Gi was supposed to be a psychic, be on the inside track about the things in the dark. He was pretty rattled for a guy that had taken felonious assault and Dean's "Tales From The Crypt" backstory in stride.
Oh well, what was one more thing that didn't add up?
"Come on, man. You've gotta give me something. One solid lead and I'll go chase that down. You can get back to," Dean's eyes swept over the meager contents of the room, "whatever it is you do."
Gi's face creased with indecision.
"Your call, man. We can do this fast, or we can do it slow." Dean prodded.
"You're out of sync." Gi said after a long, slow breath, "I don't know how else to explain it. You can't feel what I feel, so it's like trying to explain blue to a blind guy. Something about you just doesn't vibe right."
"I wonder if Hell will do that to a guy." Dean mumbled, digesting the words. He gave Gi a sharp look. "So, that means I'm not human?" he asked pointedly. That was one thing, maybe the only thing, that he knew he could be sure of. He didn't need some barely legal, unproven psychic poking at the last shred of himself he had left.
"I've never felt anything like that before. And no human could have dreamed up that...that thing I saw. That was some next level grim-dark."
"And you're not talking about that part?"
"Goes to the grave, dude. Trying not to think about it is already going to blow through my whole stash. I'm not going to feed the beast."
This had turned out to be a whole lot of nothing. Dean slapped his knees as he stood up. "OK, good talk, enjoy the caffeine and cholesterol." he said, heading for the door. The whole thing had been a big waste of time, and it didn't even matter. It wasn't like there had been any more promising or productive alternatives. Which begged the question, what now?
"Wait," Gi's voice called cautiously just as he reached for the knob. Hopeful that something useful had occurred to the psychic, Dean turned to face him.
"Do you know what it's like to be a glitch in the matrix?" Gi asked.
"English, dude," Dean grumbled impatiently.
"OK, so my whole life, I'm the bizarro kid that can see things and knows things. People avoid me because I weird them out. I grow up like that, and then I figure, just own it, dude. So, I go hide in plain sight, let everybody think I'm running the same BS shell game as all the other grifters. And it's the most normal I've ever felt.
"And then you come along, and knock on my door, and you don't fit. In my whole life, it's the first time I find somebody else that doesn't fit. It's the first time I can think that maybe I'm not just some mistake reality made, some piece of broken code. Maybe there's more to the world than I know, and I actually make some kind of sense."
"Not that I've ever seen." Dean said.
"Not cool, man, I'm dropping my shields here." Gi chided him. Dean had the decency to look chastised, almost convincingly. "Whatever you are," Gi went on, "if you can be here, then it means the world's bigger than I ever knew, and maybe that's a world where I don't crash the drive just by existing."
"So, you've never met another psychic?" Dean asked, "Or a hunter?"
Gi rolled his eyes. "It's small town, South Dakota out there, my man. Of course I know hunters. Around here, who doesn't?"
"No, I mean...have you ever seen a ghost, a ghoul, any kind of nasty boogie man like that?"
Gi eyed Dean suspiciously. "I don't know. You tell me." he said.
"Will you stop with that?" Dean snapped, "If I wanted to hurt you, you could have been dead about five times already." He shook his head in frustration. "So, you poured your guts out. Are we done?"
Gi thought for a moment. "No, I don't think so." he said, "Look, I won't lie. I'm freaked all to hell. But this could be my one chance to find out my own truth. If I don't take it, I may never know why I am the way I am. So, I guess I'm in until the credits roll, because I'm not sure I have a choice. I think maybe I was born in."
Dean could relate to that. "Yeah, it sucks, but sometimes it happens like that." he said sympathetically. "OK," he said with a clap of his hands, "Well, we're fresh out of leads. My head's too "out of sync" to be any use. If you've got an idea, spit it out."
"I've got one, but you're not going to like it." Gi ventured.
"Why should today be different?" Dean sighed, "Tell me what you've got."
"Like I said last night," Gi said with a shrug, "we should watch the show."
He was right. Dean didn't like it.