It had taken less time and energy to find and pirate the Supernatural pilot than to convince Dean to watch it. Gi had been forced to make a conscious effort to block out the waves of anxiety the misplaced hunter had been throwing off just from discussing it. He had finally, begrudgingly, agreed, on the condition that it would be a private viewing.
A reasonable request, but no way was Gi leaving Dean alone, unsupervised, with his hardware. The Walmart special currently taking its sweet ass time downloading the video had been purchased that morning out of Dean's Poker winnings. It would get the job done and be no real loss if Dean lost control and yeeted it into a wall. From the state of the motel room, Gi figured about 70 percent odds on that.
It had seemed like a bad move to him, gambling with what little money Dean had left, but Dean had insisted, so against his better judgment, Gi had found him a game. Turned out, Dean was big boss level in either Poker or cheating, maybe both. Gi didn't think it was any of his business and didn't ask. After all, Dean wasn't being shy about picking up tabs with his newfound wealth, so who was he to question how he had come by it?
The sudden generosity was just part of the improvement in Dean's mood. An evening in a familiar environment had brought out a relaxed, fun loving side of the guy that Gi hadn't seen before. Too bad it hadn't lasted. It had dissipated gradually the nearer they got to zero hour.
Now, almost go time, he was right back to his angry, agitated old self, currently alternating between perching antsily on the edge of the bare mattress and jumping up to prowl the room like a nervous cat. More than once Gi had caught him eyeing the door, probably considering pulling a runner on the whole idea.
The download bar crawled across the screen while Gi watched. He had let Dean think that it required his attention. What actually required his attention was the mental wall he had to throw up between himself and Dean's aggressive emotions. The guy was full on radiating.
Finally, the bar filled and the substandard machine chimed apologetically. He'd be able to escape soon. "I think we're all set." he said, "You can just hit play whenever you're ready."
He cleared the chair to make way for Dean, who hesitated in approaching long enough to grab the bottle of whiskey purchased on the morning's supply run. He plunked it down next to the low grade laptop and sat down to glare at the screen.
He wasn't sure what to expect, but he was pretty sure it was going to hit epic level weird. That wasn't too bad. Weird was part of the job on the best days.
But there was usually a degree of separation that was a critical piece of a hunter's armor. Generally, it was somebody else's weird. He would be an outsider that could show up to wade into and put a stop to the weird without too much of it getting on him. This weird was all his and he was drowning in it.
"It ain't gonna bite you, dude." Gi prodded him.
"I know!" Dean snapped, "It's just...just get outta here, will you?"
"Already gone," Gi said, throwing his hands up as he headed for the door. It was just as well that Dean had insisted on doing this alone. Gi didn't think he would actually have been able to handle sitting through it with him.
Alone, like he wanted it, Dean confronted the loss of his last excuse to stall. Out of ways to put it off, he gritted his teeth and forced himself to press the start button. The screen came to life with a single word, "Supernatural" bouncing around to an annoying electrical static sound effect. He was mid-eye roll when a sub-title appeared and grabbed his attention-Lawrence, Kansas, 22 years ago.
It had been a few more than 22 years, but Dean had a sick feeling that he knew where this was going. The camera did a slow pan over a house he recognized, one he had spent most of his life wishing he could forget.
He tensed. How much did he really want to see this? Did he need old wounds poked at, long buried heartaches yanked out of their graves to come at him like his own personal horde of zombies?
"Come on, love. Let's say good-night to your brother." he heard. The dark screen lit up before he could react to the voice and there was a face to go with it.
"Mom?" Dean whispered in awe. The face was already gone, passed by in just a handful of frames. Dean lunged for the keyboard and fumbled with the keys, searching for a way to rewind.
The woman came back on camera, alive and beautiful, holding a young child on her hip. He slapped the space bar, freezing the image.
Dean stared at it. Elation, sorrow, pain, confusion all churned around each other inside of him. She looked exactly like the few rare pictures from before the fire. How could that be? It couldn't, and yet there it was, right in front of him, in all its impossible glory.
OK, they, whoever they were, had tried to make a television show about his life and somehow found a double, or a relative, or something, to play him. That was a stretch, but not impossible. That they also found an actress that looked exactly like his mother? No, that was way off the "what the hell" scale.
Why bother with that level of detail? How would they even know what she looked like? How was this Carver Edlund even writing his books in the first place? Dean reconsidered tracking him down and getting some answers right from the source.
Tracking him down, however, was easier said than done. All Gi had been able to discover so far was that Carver Edlund was a pen name. Whoever was behind it seemed to be as non-existent as all the other phantoms that had plagued Dean's life lately, for all the trail he left behind him.
Besides, he still didn't know what was going on in his head, why he kept remembering things that either hadn't happened, or having happened, didn't stay happened. He was in a minefield and had to watch where he stepped. No going off half cocked.
He didn't want to restart the video. He wanted to stay locked in the frozen image on the screen, time paused forever on that perfect moment, one of his last before it all burned down.
He knew what was coming, that is, if everything was as accurate as what he had seen so far. It wasn't something he wanted to relive, not even from a separated vantage, knowing it wasn't real.
And it wasn't real. This wasn't his family. That wasn't their house. No omnipresent cameraman had been there that night, secretly filming a macabre set of home movies. These were actors, on a sound stage, speaking scripted lines, and everything was done with special effects. No one actually died.
He reached out and let his fingers brush the cheek of Mary's image. He didn't know if he could do this. A ghost, a ghoul, any kind of flesh eating nightmare fodder that he could meet on its own terms and duke it out with, sure, that he could handle. But this? This was just asking to get cut in ways that went way beyond what a knife or claw could do. It wasn't the kind of pain he was good at managing.
His hand jerked away from the screen. It isn't us. You can't think of it as us. That's just going to make this harder to get through. He made himself hit play.
Only way around it is through it, so just man up and do it, Winchester.
His resolve held right up until he heard his name and John entered the room. Again he paused. It was the smile that made him do it, a real, sincere smile of a happy and content man. It wasn't that John had never smiled after that night, but it was always tinged with the pain that lurked behind it, like a mask that he wore over his pain.
Dean wanted to remember this one, wanted it burned into his memory so deep that whatever it was that was happening had no hope of stealing it from him.
Time was burning. Gi would be back in an hour to discuss and strategize. At the rate he was going, Dean would only be five minutes into this twisted version of "This Is Your Life" by the time the clock ran down.
It was time to crack the whiskey.
Now it was sort of a masochistic drinking game. Every time you want to pause, take a shot instead.
Mary went running up the stairs. The rules expanded to include, take a shot whenever something's going to hurt.
Mary burst into flame on the ceiling. He had never seen it. He had heard about it, sure. But he hadn't been in the room. He could only imagine what it must have been like and had always tried to not even do that. The rules changed to, take a shot whenever you damn well feel like it.
By the time Sam poked his head around the door frame to whine about going to the Halloween party, Dean had forgotten about the no pausing rule.
He hadn't realized how much Sam had changed. Still wearing the pudgy cheeked, baby face he had as a young man, he looked more like he had as a kid than like the last time Dean had seen him, the night he had died.
But, that wasn't Sam, not unless the Supernatural pilot had been filmed with the help of some super high powered mojo.
Dean took another drink, directly from the bottle and hit play.
When Gi returned, he found Dean, still seated, staring transfixed at a freeze of the show's final scene. On the screen, the two brothers stood, side by side, just before Sam would slam the trunk hatch and black out the action.
"You done?" Gi asked. The whiskey, unopened when he had left, only looked about two thirds full.
"Yeah, I'm done." Dean growled huskily. He didn't look up.
Gi waited silently for Dean to say something more, but it seemed that the hunter had already said everything that he felt needed saying. The younger man's eye drifted back to the depleted whiskey bottle. OK, first things first. "I'll be back in five." he said turning back to the door, "You, my man, need a cup of coffee."
