First off, a bit of an apology. This chapter's a bit shorter than normal, but it gets the ball rolling on a few things. This is me trying to chip away at writer's block while hopefully not failing too spectacularly. Next chapter should have a good amount of angst and I've got some stuff planned for the next few, so stick around ;) Giant, giant thank yous to Celtic Knot and freetobescary for reviewing! Rest assured, the story will circle back to Lisa and Ben, they're not getting a few sentences of thought and then dropped, they're too important.

I own nothing officially Supernatural related. I just dabble with the characters.

December 14

The next day passed slowly, quietly, and a bit awkwardly. Dean walked around with a headache for most of the day, but the second he saw Sam, his younger brother looked at him for one second before he turned, grabbed a bottle, and placed a few pills in Dean's hand. Dean tried to say no, because the medicine he was taking made his head fuzzy enough as is, but Sam refused. Dean was hurting, and he would take medicine to help, end of story.

They ended up in Sam's room, catching up on some Game of Thrones, which Dean was thrilled to find was still on. They even got Cas in the room for an episode or so. The rest of the day passed by, all three of them trying to ignore the eggshells that they were walking on.

The day afterwards, Dean wandered into the kitchen to see Sam already up with his phone out. Sam always had been the earlier riser, and it looked like that hadn't changed.

Sam looked up as Dean entered to grab himself a cup of coffee and smiled at his older brother. "Morning. How'd you sleep?" he asked and moved aside the newspaper and the cereal box so Dean could sit at the table.

Dean shrugged, only about half awake and not ready for the questions. It wasn't early, but he hadn't in fact been sleeping that well. Not at all, but he didn't exactly want to come right out and say it only to make Sam worry more. "Fine," he said passively.

Sam could obviously tell something was up just by the look on his face but he elected to say nothing. He simply nodded and put his phone down. "Good, yeah, good," he paused for a moment. "You've got a check up at twelve also, down at the hospital, Monroe set one up before we left."

Dean looked over his cup of coffee at Sam, his eyes narrowing a bit. He probably knew about the appointment and had forgotten. "A check up? Really? Sam, I'm-"

Sam cut him off by holding up a hand. "If you swear you're fine, Dean…" he trailed off before he shook his head.

Dean shrugged back. "I feel good, up and around, can put on my socks and the whole nine." When he looked back to Sam, his younger brother didn't seem to be amused.

"This is non-negotiable, Dean. They need to check medication, probably take another scan, make sure everything's alright." Dean opened his mouth to refute, but Sam kept talking. "You were in a plane crash, Dean. You were in a coma and you had a traumatic brain injury that led to amnesia. You're going."

There was not a single ounce of wavering in his brother's gaze, and by the way he put the emphasis on coma, Dean knew to drop his argument, no matter how much he hated hospitals and doctors and everything about this whole situation. It probably was important that he went…

"Hey," Sam tried. It was soft enough to break Dean out of his own head while at the same time assuring him that Sam did indeed understand his brother's hatred of hospitals. "If they clear you and your meds and everything, maybe you can take the Impala out for a small spin."

Dean perked up as much as he could at the thought. He hadn't driven Baby in, well, months it felt like for him, but it was probably in reality only a few weeks. Either way, it was still too damn long.

"Deal," Dean eventually nodded and took another swig of his coffee before he checked his watch. They still had probably an hour before they had to leave so that they'd have plenty of time to get there, given Sam rode the breaks like a freaking grandma sometimes.

"Sounds good," Sam smiled a bit back, obviously happy that Dean had some reason to not totally hate their most recent excursion. Sam read off some of the sports stories and filled Dean in on a few Superbowl winners, and before they knew it, it was time to head out.

Once at the hospital, Dean was even less pleased to find that Sam would probably be in the waiting room for the majority of the time. He left Sam sitting in a plastic chair with the promise that everything would be fine and followed a brown haired nurse down the hall towards one of the smaller rooms. She left him with a gown and said that someone would be in to see him in a few minutes.

"Stupid piece of fabric," Dean muttered under his breath as he changed into the gown and did up the ties. He fished the amulet out from beneath the gown, grateful to have its familiar weight back on his chest. But he figured that it would be best if he took it off, so he reluctantly placed it on top of his pile of clothes. It had only been a few days that he had it back, and suddenly having it off once again reminded him how naked he felt without it.

He then sat down on the table and stared at the ceiling. The white tiles were speckled slightly with different colors, and Dean tried to pick out patterns on them. It was a normal way of passing the time that he and Sam had done for forever in motel rooms when they were bored.

But after a few minutes, the noises from across the hall and the stillness of his own room made counting colored dots on the ceiling not quite good enough. Then again, he needed to be there, he had to be there, no matter how much he hated it.

Eventually there was a tap on the door, which Dean looked to as it opened and one of the doctors walked in. She was probably mid fifties with blondish hair that was up in a bun and a name tag that read 'Rogers'

"Dean Winchester?" she asked, looking between him and the clipboard in her hand for a split second before she smiled at him.

"You got me, doc," Dean replied with a bit of a smirk back.

She then nodded and placed the clipboard on the edge of the table. "I'm Dr. Monica Rogers, Dr. Monroe set this meeting up a few days ago, I got a call from his office, said you and your brother were headed back from New York, that right?" she asked, looking up from the clipboard.

"Mhm," Dean hummed in affirmation.

"And you were in New York for…"

"Business. Flew out, the plane didn't exactly fly, and yeah," Dean shrugged, figuring all of it should have been on the chart, which it probably was and she was just testing him.

Rogers looked and flipped to the next page, nodding a bit as she did so. "So…got a nasty bump on the head, TBI, coma, and resulting retrograde amnesia," she said, almost to herself, before she turned her attention fully to her patient and smiled again. "Alright. What we'll do here today is a check up, see how you're progressing, if any medications need changing, and take a quick scan to make sure that everything's healing properly."

Dean shrugged, not really in a position to say no. "Good by me."

"Great. So tell me, Dean," she started, grabbing a few things out of one of the drawers before she came over. "How are things in fact progressing? Headaches, dizziness, nausea, anything like that?" she asked as she waved one of the stick lights across his eyes. Dean followed it when told and when she was done, shook his head.

"Nope, all good," he added a smile for good measure. He, of course, had headaches, but they weren't migraine level, they just sucked, and nothing else. The medicine helped, but some of it made his head feel like it was stuffed with cotton balls. When he wasn't alert, then he was anxious because anything could be slipping past him at any time.

"Really? No symptoms whatsoever?"

"All aces," Dean affirmed.

Rogers turned around from where she had been writing on the papers, with a bit of a frown on her face. "And you're sure about that?" Before Dean could open his mouth to reply, she held up a finger. "Because, just to be sure, someone with your level of injury should have some lingering side effects, it's completely normal. With a head injury of this size, downplaying how bad it is will get you nowhere but a hospital bed because of something we could have detected but you refused to mention." She looked crossly at him, but not angrily. Dean guessed it was because she had seen his act all too many times with different patients on a multitude of different injuries.

"Headaches," he eventually muttered. "Not awful, but they're there."

Rogers smiled a bit at that and nodded, as if expecting as much. "Not so bad, was it?"

Dean shrugged. It was just one more reason why he hated hospitals: he was completely, totally, and utterly exposed and it sucked.

She then had him do a few exercises to demonstrate his motor skills, which had returned to where they were before, which she was very pleased about. His speech was also fine. The only lingering things were of course the headaches and the-

"Amnesia," she said slowly once Dean had sat back down on the table. "Sometimes memories can start surfacing, sometimes not. Have you had any?"

Dean took a moment to respond before he nodded slowly.

Rogers scribbled something else down in her notes. "Are they chronological? Did they start from what you last remember or are they random bits of time without context?"

"Second one," Dean said in a voice that was smaller than what he had intended. For a split second the hammer came back into his mind.

Rogers nodded again. "And your brothers, Sam and Cas," she flipped another page to get the names, "have they filled in any of the blanks?"

"Some of them. There's a lot of blanks to fill in," he replied, trying for a breathy laugh and a smile but they both fell flat.

She jotted down a few more things before she turned back to Dean, concern written on her face. "With how you're healing, your memories should return. Maybe not all of them, but the majority. It's just a matter of time and healing."

"How long?" Dean asked quickly.

Rogers took a few moments to think before she answered. "It honestly just depends on the patient. Normally it it within a year, sometimes months, depending on the length of memories missing."

Dean's chest fell a bit at that, the gown crinkling as it did so. "There's no way to…I don't know, speed it up?"

She shook her head. "The brain is a fickle thing. It does things at its own speed in ways that we can't completely comprehend yet." Silence filled the room, as it was obvious that had not been the answer Dean had wanted or been expecting. "But, your medication is helping, your motor and speech skills are good, those are all things to be thankful for."

Dean tried to nod slowly at that. Hell, he was probably lucky he woke up at all, but it seemed to pale in comparison to what he was dealing with on the flip side.

"Alright, do you have any questions?" Rogers asked after giving Dean a moment to think, to which he nodded.

"Yeah, any way to tell if I'm good to drive?" he questioned, the smallest spark of hope flaring up in his otherwise deflated chest.

"So long as you're not having a headache or taking medication specifically for a headache in the few hours around it, you should be fine," she answered, to which Dean responded with an actual smile. So the day wasn't completely awful then, there was one small win. Rogers asked if he had any other questions and when he shook his head, she continued. "Then I'd say we're done here. Someone will come to collect you for a scan in ten minutes or so. What's your schedule like the next few days?"

Dean quirked his head a bit at that. Was something else wrong? "Open, for the most part," he said, a bit confused.

Rogers nodded and made one final note before she picked up her clipboard again. "I'd like to get you in to see our resident psychologist. She's dealt with patients with amnesia before, and sometimes it can be helpful to talk to someone outside of family about what you're missing. It's helped numerous people in the past."

Dean could tell she was trying to help, he honestly could, but the only thing he could think about was that he did not want to and could not talk about this stuff with a shrink. Hell, he could barely talk about it with Sam and Cas, he couldn't with a stranger.

"I'll give you some time to think about it, we'll be in touch," she said with a small smile and began making her way to the door.

"Thanks, doc," Dean managed with a smile of his own. But as soon as she was out of the door, the smile dropped and his eyes fell to the floor.

The scan itself was nothing important. Lie down here, don't move, the whole nine yards. If something was up, they'd call. Dean heard most of the details, he was pretty sure, and eventually he was allowed to get changed and head back out to the waiting room. Sam put down his phone when he saw Dean approaching and greeted him with a bit of a worried smile.

"How's it going? Everything alright?" he asked, following his older brother as they began to walk towards the front of the complex.

"Yeah, all good," Dean said, trying to not make it sound as flat as it felt. "Motor skills are good, they took a scan, doc said the memories should start coming back in a few months or so. I'm good to drive," he listed off, mentioning the last thing as they neared the Impala, but Sam already had the keys out, and he was looking at Dean worriedly.

"All good? I know you hate hospitals, man, but what else?"

Dean shook his head and propped his elbows up on the roof of the car. "She wants me to see a psychologist. A damn shrink, Sam," he muttered. When he raised his head, he was surprised to see Sam look like he was thinking it over.

"Maybe it would help?" he tried eventually.

"Help? Talking about my problems with how I can't remember anything to a stranger? How is that gonna help, Sam?"

His brother shrugged his shoulders, obviously trying to get Dean to see that maybe it wasn't all bad. "I don't know, Dean. Maybe just…getting it out in the open so it's not sitting in your head locked up all day."

Dean just shook his head at that. There was no way it was going to end well.

"Just…give it a chance? If it sucks, don't go back, but it may help, Dean, and we could use all the help we can get."

Dean looked across the car to his brother, who looked back with a pleading gaze. They were all trying to learn on the job, Sam and Cas included, and Dean wasn't exactly the most open guy in the universe. Maybe it was a bit of a guilt trip, yeah, but it was born out of actual worry and the need to find something that worked, at least a little bit.

"Fine," Dean ended up muttering. He didn't see Sam's slight smile at the admission because he had already opened the passenger door and was on his way into the Impala, ready to head back to the bunker that had apparently been a home for the past few years. If only he could remember it that way.