And we're back! If anyone's still around, I can't thank you enough for still being here even with this insane update schedule. First things first, my family, our direct friends, and our belongings are safe. All the hills around us are burned, and there are a few structures some streets down and across that were lost from the embers and high winds. Friends of friends lost homes, and a town on Northern California is gone, but the first responders from multiple states did an incredible job given what they were up against. We're alright, and I am so thankful for that. I am incredibly thankful for all the messages I got, I will admit that I kept them in my inbox whenever I was in need of a smile, and they helped pick me up on some bad days.

I didn't write at all in November, I wasn't in the mental space to. December brought finals and I got sicker for two weeks than I've ever been in my whole life. Factor in some writer's block, and here we are, two and a half months later.

I mean it, this story will be finished eventually. I have an ending in mind, it's just a matter of moving the story there. I'm headed to the Las Vegas convention this year (if anyone else is going let me know!), and I'm aiming to have the story done before then, in about two months, since there isn't that much left to go.

Apologies for the long A/N, I felt some stuff needed to be cleared up. Again, thank you all for reading and for your patience, and I hope your 2019 has gone well so far.

I don't own Supernatural. (But the most recent episode? WOW. Favorite of the season so far.)

That night, when he finally managed to fall asleep, Dean dreamt of fireworks. It was a memory he had retained throughout the whole ordeal, and the smile on both his and Sam's faces continued to be a comfort. Of course, since pleasant dreams never came with the job, the crackles of colorful light soon turned into blasts from shotguns and nondescript angels and demons being lit up as they were taken down.

Dean woke with a start, hands fisted so tightly into the sheets that they ached when he uncurled his fingers. Billie didn't promise that the process of regaining his memories would be fun, but still.

He sat up on the edge of the bed, trying to flick through some of the images he had seen. A few things popped into his head, each flash of light accompanied with the sound of a shotgun going off; Cas smiting a whole bunch of demons outside some facility, Dean himself with a redhead at the end of a crude knife in his hand.

Abbadon, his mind supplied. Even without the context or the full understanding, a few things at random had slipped back into place where they once belonged. Billie also hadn't said they'd come back in chronological order, which was super helpful, as if his brain needed any more scrambling and piecing together.

But even minus the context, his left hand had come up to absently rub at his right forearm, where the mark of Cain had been in his other memory fragments. Which made the crude blade the actual First Blade and Abbadon the attempted queen bitch of hell. Good to know.

He didn't know whether to feel proud he had been able to get a few things straight, or still thrown off by the lack of context, but Dean figured floating somewhere in the middle wouldn't hurt anyone. So he hoped.

Still, it was a reasonable time to get up, so he got out of bed and put some socks on (cement floors in winter in Kansas were cold after all), but paused before he actually left. By muscle memory, he reached into the bottom cabinet of his dresser and pulled out a gray robe, "the dead guy robe", his brain handily supplied for him.

Dean smirked to himself and shrugged before he put the robe on and finished his walk into the kitchen. How exactly he remembered the robe he didn't know; there wasn't a specific memory that was triggered, he just knew. Oh yeah, that would be easy to explain when the time came.

Sam was already in the kitchen, two steps ahead of him where coffee was concerned. And while he didn't ask about Dean's robe, the sight of his brother in it made him grin and shake his head.

The next few days passed in much of a similar state. Dean would wake up after his brain had thrown some sort of new information at him, he sat for a few minutes to process it, and then went about his morning. It was nothing like the nightmares he had gotten after hell, or the more generic ones that had plagued him pretty much his whole life.

These were more unsettling, in a variety of different ways. It served as a reminder to how much he had lost, how much he still had to gain back, and how he would sort through it all. It was like trying to put books back on a shelf in alphabetical order by author without knowing who all the authors were. Sam would probably be pretty proud of his metaphor, but in a way it helped Dean try to visualize what made so little sense in his own head.

Sometimes Sam would ask, sometimes not, but whenever he did, Dean would talk about what he could. He owed Sam that much. They settled into some form of a routine, the three of them, checking in on a few cases and calling up hunters that may be in the area to swing by. Of course, they also called Jody and Donna to assure them that things were actually going alright.

Dean was making Mexican food on a night in the middle of the week, Sam and Cas sat at the table with a laptop and a book open, respectively, when Dean grabbed a bag of chips.

"Marshmallow nachos? I mean, really, Sam?" Dean asked, shaking some from the bag into the bowl. He didn't even register it for a moment until the keys on the computer stopped clacking. It was another one of those things that just naturally popped up.

He turned around to see Sam looking at him over the laptop screen, and Cas glancing between the two of them before he too settled on Dean.

Sam eventually shrugged. "Sweet and…salty? I don't know man, I was a kid," he said with a smirk on his face.

"Yeah, a strange kid. They do make salted caramel for that very purpose, you know," Dean pointed at him with a spatula and went back to stirring the beans.

Sam let out a breathy chuckle at that, and from the corner of his eye Dean could see him shake his head.

"From what I understand of Mexican and Spanish culture, marshmallows are not the typical choice of addition to chips," Cas brought up, apparently trying to understand what was going unsaid between the two Winchesters, who were starting to be brought back together again by their shared memories.

Sam then launched into a tale involving not so imaginary friends, to which Dean interjected "freakin' rainbow suspenders," while listening in. It all felt familiar, and the actual images were right at the edge of the fogged up window in his head. The longer Sam kept talking, the more it helped the memories to come back.

By the time the food was done and the stories were over, the three of them had launched into a discussion as to if mermaids, imaginary or not, were technically real creatures.

Of course, it only took a few more days before an unsettling dream slash memory slash whatever turned into an actual nightmare. And no, he had not missed those. He especially had not missed the ones involving his family.

This time it revolved around Lisa and Ben, but they were still family all the same, as Bobby had once said.

He woke up in a sheen of sweat, seeing the demon inside Lisa turn the blade on herself. Ben's terrified face. Asking Cas to wipe their memories (there was irony somewhere in there if Dean would have looked hard enough, which he didn't). Talking to them one last time. Leaving them in that hospital, none the wiser. The hole in his chest.

He processed and processed and processed, as best he could, but he still couldn't shake the feeling that maybe he had been wrong, leaving them defenseless when some monsters out there had to know the Braedons had been connected to the Winchesters.

Lisa, dead on the couch, and Ben dead in his bed. Both from another set of nightmares, but they flashed through his head all the same.

Sam said they were fine, he had to trust that.

And he did. But he wasn't getting back to sleep, and Dean figured he may as well try to figure out for himself.

He didn't really care what time it was, but five minutes later he was sitting down at a table in the library with a laptop and a cup of coffee. He opened it, turned it on, and wracked his brain for a solid minute about the last house Lisa had been in. The one he had moved them to.

Battle Creek, Michigan. As long as they hadn't moved, Dean was hoping he could pull up some information from the local news about them. He did some quick mental math, finger counting included, and if he was right, Ben was in his senior year of high school. If he still played baseball, he'd probably be pretty good.

There were so many if's, but he didn't know where else to start looking. Basic street address maybe? If the baseball didn't pan out, he'd search that up.

Dean took a swig of his coffee and entered Ben's name, baseball, and 'high school' into the search engine. Half a second later, a multitude of sites came up, all listing various local papers, and a few from the high school's paper itself, about the baseball program. He clicked on the first article that came up, even though it was from the previous year.

His shaking fingers scrolled down the trackpad until he landed on a photo of the team in its entirety, players listed below it. But Dean didn't need the name listing to pick Ben out. He was standing in the second row up, hat and uniform on like the rest of the group, wearing a smirk all his own.

Dean let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding, and went back a page and clicked on an article from the end of the previous school year. Apparently Ben had been named one of the MVP's, along with two seniors, and short interviews from the school awards ceremony with each player and their parents had been transcribed as part of the article.

He skipped down to the short paragraph, reading through Ben's words about how he was grateful to have been chosen and be on a team with his closest friends. Dean was smiling sadly to himself, and his fingers stopped moving on the trackpad when the article mentioned his mom, Lisa Braedon, and how proud she was that all the hard work Ben had put in had been recognized and celebrated.

There was his proof, right there in black and white text, with a colored picture a few clicks away.

He'd be lying if he said it wasn't a relief to reaffirm that they were alright. But then again, the whole off-ness of the situation was highlighted on the older features on the kid Dean had once taken to earlier baseball lessons. Again, it just came back like it had always been there, and something about it took the sting away from the situation he found himself in.

It was still unsettling and thirty-one different kinds of messed up, but it wasn't as present.

Dean still had the laptop open and was sitting with his chin resting on his hand as he stared absently at the article in front of him. He didn't notice Sam coming into the room until he actually appeared in Dean's peripheral vision, pushing some sleep-mussed hair out of his face. Probably because it was still close to four in the morning, yeah Dean himself should probably still be sleeping.

Dean turned his head to see Sam appear more alert when he noticed Dean's position around the laptop.

"Too early to say good morning?" Dean tried with a smirk and took a drink of his now cold coffee, which wasn't very appealing.

"Depends." Sam shrugged it off and parked himself in the library chair across from Dean at the table. "What's up?" It was clear that things weren't necessarily okay, and Dean was glad he hadn't phrased it that way. He'd heard that question enough times for the rest of his life, thank you very much.

Dean sighed and dropped his hand. They had agreed, there was no point in lying through this. No blowing it off as a case or simple 'can't sleep', that wouldn't do anyone any good.

"In these, not sure what to call them…resurfacings?" he made a face, "Lisa and Ben came up. What happened to them, I got it back, like it never left."

"All of it?"

Dean nodded in reply, and Sam's face fell. "I won't break your nose if it's any consolation." The look itself said Sam didn't really care about that part of it. "Just wanted to see if they were okay. And I know you said you checked into it and it's not because I don't believe you or anything-"

"You don't need to explain, Dean, really it's alright," Sam gently cut him off mid-ramble, and there was nothing but understanding and a bit of sadness in his eyes. "What did you find?"

If it was possible, Dean quirked a small and almost proud smile as he turned the laptop towards Sam. "Ben made MVP on the baseball team at his school."

He watched as Sam scrolled through the article and smiled as he landed on the picture and little interviews below it. "He's done good," Sam nodded back and turned the laptop around to Dean again.

"Yeah, all things considered." Dean took one last look before he closed the device and toyed with his coffee cup.

Sam eyed him for a few moments, probably knowing exactly where his head was at. Damn, that kid could still read him like a book, especially while his defenses were down. "Dean, what happened to them, you were involved but it wasn't your fault. And you did everything you possibly could. Ben's on that team because you made a choice nobody should ever have to make, and you did it to protect them," he tried to assure. "It probably has protected them."

And Dean knew he was right. "It's just…with this timeline mess in my head," he shook it, and Sam made no move to ask anything else, just gave Dean his space. "I still feel it, but it's already…I don't know, in the rearview mirror? Right back where it was."

"So things are settling?" Sam asked after a pause, since there were no words to really describe the situation and trying to come up with any sometimes took a moment.

Dean nodded slightly, and then responded with a muttered, "more or less."

Sam eyed him for a moment, as if debating whether or not to go ahead with his next sentence. "But you're still not sleeping so great." It wasn't a question, but a soft statement, a fact that was known between the both of them.

"Did we ever to begin with?" He waved off Sam's raised eyebrows in a patented 'really?' expression. "I'm tired, Sam, of this mess in my head, not knowing where things fit or when."

Sam leaned forward a little against the table. "It'll get better, Dean."

"I know. Process just sucks." Dean took another swig of his coffee and rubbed his thumb along the slightly chipped handle, half expecting another remark from Sam. When that didn't happen, he raised his eyes back up to find Sam staring blankly at the table, thinking about something. He looked back to Dean, and it only took a split second for the older Winchester to realize the desperation and a certain degree of lostness in his brother's eyes.

He was doing everything in his power to help Dean, and had been throughout the whole process, but for the entire ordeal he hadn't been able to do much other than be a listening and reassuring ear. In a world where they were used to fixing the problems themselves and looking for immediate solutions, not being able to find one was probably a type of hell all its own. Dean knew about that firsthand, in a general sense, but also in a more specific sense that he couldn't quite yet hold on to. One day it would come back, he just had to bank on that.

But what Sam had done, and Cas too, the unwavering support no matter what, it had helped, and it was currently still helping. Dean knew they were doing their best, hell, more than their best, and that was all and more than anyone could ever ask for.

It was pretty much the only way Sam could feel like he was actually helping, and in a rare (though it had become more common in recent weeks given his world literally falling apart at the seams) moment of accepting help, Dean opened his mouth instead of Sam.

"Ya know," he cleared his throat, which made Sam immediately look up, "I was wondering if maybe you could clear something up?" Dean raised an eyebrow.

And there it was, the light in Sam's eyes, the promise of maybe being able to help fix something. "Name the puzzle."

Abbadon was big, Dean could wait for a few more memories to pop up before he asked about that. He figured starting hopefully small may be better. "What happened to Meg? We were on a hill watching as Cas blew apart some demons in front of a facility, but that's as up to date as I know."

Sam listened intently and nodded along, trying to figure out where to start putting the pieces back into place. Eventually he seemed to have settled on a decent starting point, and started explaining. The longer he talked, the more images flitted past Dean's eyes and into their proper place in his mental bookshelf. He probably couldn't recall them all perfectly at the moment, but he could feel that they were there.

Besides, listening to Sam explain it all was much more preferable to waking up before dawn trying to figure it out by himself. Progress, right? That was what mattered.

As I mentioned above, there's not too much story left to tell, at least I feel, without getting too redundant. But if anyone has any specific scenes they'd like to dredge up from poor Dean's mind, let me know and maybe I can work them in ;) it is a h/c and angst story, after all.