So I know the first chapter did technically say Chapter 1, but I never actually specified that this is a multi-chapter story. But...it is! Anyway, we're back. I'll be posting every Wednesday!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Chapter 2~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Lisa Braeden is one of those people who still has a landline. Said it was because her mom refused to memorize a new phone number for her, and would only ever call the house. She dragged it along with her on every move, kept the number and the plan the same no matter what.

Dean deleted that number two days after he'd left her and her son behind in a hospital with memories of a car crash that never happened. After he'd dialed four times in one day, just to hear the voicemail.

Lisa's cell number, on the other hand, stays nestled in his contact list.

Just in case.

"Dean. You...I think you should call."

They're still standing on the side of the road with the sun beating down, and Dean can practically feel his skin sizzling off. There was no sunlight in Purgatory.

"And say what?" he argues. "She won't know me. It won't mean anything. It'll just make everything worse. I mean Ben...her kid is gone, Sam. You understand that? He's gone, and I did that."

Sam huffs a sigh, like he's about to explain an extremely simple concept to the town idiot. "Dean, no. This isn't on you."

Dean almost laughs, but he's afraid it will sound the way it did before, so he just rolls his eyes. "Oh yeah? Tell that to the kid. He wouldn't be here if it wasn't directly my fault, Sam."

"You haven't asked, have you?"

Dean stares back, uncomprehending.

"You haven't asked him how it happened. How he died."

"That's not…"

"Don't you dare say that's not relevant," Sam cuts him off. "You've been beating yourself up for weeks, and you don't even know why."

"I know why."

"Ben? Ben, can you hear me?" Sam yells into the sky, flinging his arms around almost comically. "Tell Dean how it happened, please. Tell him how you died."

Dean turns to face Ben again, sorrow etched into every line of his face.

"You wanna know?" Ben asks.

Dean swallows and nods. He really doesn't.

"Well I guess I gotta start a while back," Ben says. He pauses for a moment, and Dean watches as he searches for the right memories. "I don't really know when it happened, but something changed. We got back from the hospital after the...car accident, and there was just something. Something wasn't right. Something was missing."

Sam shifts on his feet, almost reaches for his brother, staring down at nothing. "Dean?"

"Shh, Sam. Just...wait. He's...just wait."

Sam nods his understanding, isn't quite sure what to do with himself while his brother holds a silent conversation with a ghost. He kicks at a small stone at his feet, watches it skitter out into the road.

"He can hear it, too," Ben says. "I can make him see me. Hear me. It takes more effort, because we don't have as much of a connection. It's like Wifi or something. But if you want, he can listen."

Dean hesitates, then nods again.

It takes a moment, but then Ben is flickering in front of him, face pained.

"Ben!" Dean shouts, but the name hasn't fully left his lips before the flickering stops. Dean is about to ask if it worked, but then he hears Sam's gasp.

"Dean…?" Sam asks, unsure.

Dean shoots a quick look over his shoulder, sees that Sam's focus has shifted to the spot where Ben is standing. He nods, almost to himself, and then turns back to the kid. "Go ahead, Ben"

The ghost smiles a little, like a grimace. "Something was missing," he repeats. "I think Mom and I both needed to know what it was. So we went looking. Guess I found it first."

"Found what?" Sam asks, and then seems to regret it, as if he's interrupted some sacred moment.

"Monsters," Ben answers, matter-of-fact.

Dean lets out a breath. "Ben…"

"I started salting the doors at night," he continues. "Kept holy water under the bed. Mom thought I was nuts, but she let me do it. She was distracted. Looking, too, for that missing piece. She started drinking."

Ben sees the look on Dean's face and amends quickly. "Nothing crazy, you know. Just a glass of whiskey with dinner every once in awhile. Like she was trying to remember the taste of something long gone. We had these pictures hanging above the counter in the kitchen, you remember?

Dean nods. He remembers. "She'd stare at them for hours sometimes, after she thought I'd gone to bed. Me and her at a neighbor's barbeque. Her at the Art Museum. Me with engine grease all over my face standing next to a pretty, black car. Pictures you used to be in."

Sam makes a noise from somewhere behind his brother, a little huff barely heard on the wind. Dean wonders what Sam is thinking, if that lost year with Lisa and Ben is becoming clearer to him now. He wonders whether or not that's a good thing. Ben continues, unheeded.

"See, you can't really erase things like that, Dean," he says, almost like a scolding. "I mean, you can. But the feeling is still there. It sat inside of us for so long, it drove us crazy. I started researching, started looking up explanations for the unknown. Deja vu. Glitches in the Matrix. Unexplained events. It was just a small leap into monsters after that. I accepted all of it as truth, started doing whatever I could to protect us from ever losing anything ever again. I still didn't know what we'd lost, obviously. Neither of us did. But we knew something was gone, something we couldn't get back."

"I...Ben, when I...when Cas did that- I thought it would be better," Dean stutters, voice almost a whisper. He runs a hand along the side of his face, brushing away the sweat that has settled there. It's a warm day. A nice day. "I thought you guys could get on with your lives. Could just go back to the way things were before I came along and screwed it up. You didn't deserve that life: always being on the run, always looking over your shoulder. I didn't want that for you. Or for Lisa."

Ben purses his lips, shakes his head. "Doesn't matter what you wanted, Dean," he says. "That wasn't your choice to make. Those weren't your memories to take away. You did more than just erase yourself that day, Dean. You erased who we became with you. And that? Who I was with you around? That was the best I ever was. I think Mom would say the same about herself. Sure, you were a mess and you made a mess, but you were family. You made us better."

"Ben…" Dean doesn't know why he starts a sentence he can't finish.

"Do you want to hear the rest?" Ben asks, impatient.

Dean huffs, willing himself to regain some control over his emotions. He'd ignored them for an entire year, and the transition back to their version of normalcy has been more difficult than he'd ever admit to Sam. At the moment he's simply fighting to stay upright, fighting not to collapse under the weight of all this crap that's been dumped on him, all this new guilt he can't even fully comprehend yet. Distantly, he feels Sam's presence behind him. Enough space between them to afford some privacy, but close enough that all Dean has to do is turn around and find his eyes, and he knows Sam will be beside him in the next moment.

Dean doesn't turn around. "Yes. Tell me."

"Things started coming back. Little pieces, nothing complete," Ben continues. He starts pacing a little, as if self-conscious of having an audience after being invisible for so long. "That long, black car. A blurred face singing along with me to Led Zeppelin. The feeling of kernels between my toes when I'd forget about the salt line outside my door and step right into it. Mom got glimpses, too. We'd talk about it all the time. It became an obsession. She got a clearer picture of you than I did, I think. I was always jealous of that. We started calling you 'Soldier Man' because Mom said you walked like you were always at war."

Behind him, Dean can almost feel Sam flinch. Ben doesn't notice, lost in the memories of him and his mom.

"We couldn't get your face quite right. Tried imagining it together. Even tried to draw it a couple times. But it never really got past that." Ben chuckles a little to himself, a sound that doesn't fit the story he's telling. "We're shitty artists," he explains when he sees the question on Dean's face. He grows serious again, the smile fading as he speaks. "And we never made the connection between you and the guy from the hospital, the one who said he hit our car. At least, not for a while."

Dean nods. "So what changed?"

"You got famous," Ben smiles. Dean blinks at him in confusion. "You and Sam, you were all over the news. Killing people."

Dean flinches. "The Leviathan with our faces."

"Sure. Whatever they're called," Ben agrees easily. "We saw, and we just knew you. It didn't all come flooding back like some miracle cure, but it was enough."

A car whizzes by along the opposite side of the road, startling all three of them. Dean's fingers wrap around the gun in his waistband, momentarily thrown when he doesn't instead feel his Purgatory blade. Ben stares at him, and Dean pulls himself back, forces his body to relax. He lets his hand drop back down to his side and clears his throat, embarrassed. He doesn't look back to see Sam's reaction, instead jumps to fill the silence left behind by the car's fading engine.

"Ben, you still haven't told me…"

"You're rushing along to something you don't even want to hear about. Just wait, okay? I'm getting there." Ben interrupts.

Dean nods, and tries not to think about how much more mature Ben seems since the last time Dean saw him. How he carries himself taller, chooses his words with more confidence. Practically a man, Dean thinks, and stops.

"We started following the story. We both knew it wasn't really you. Wasn't even a question," Ben says, making sure to catch Dean's eye. "I wanted to track you down- the real you- but Mom said it was too dangerous. She thought maybe you were both possessed, that the Sam and Dean we were seeing on our screens were the real you, just trapped inside your own bodies. She told me to let it go, that there was nothing we could do for you. But I had to try. Dean, I had to try."

Sam gapes at the boy. "You found us? Fake us?" he asks. It doesn't feel like as much of an intrusion this time.

Ben just nods. "He looked just like you," he replies. But he's only looking at Dean. "Same smile and everything. I only knew I was wrong once I'd cornered them in that alley, started reading off an exorcism."

"Oh, Ben," Sam murmurs sadly.

"It was over pretty quick," Ben says, as if that will make it better. "I guess they were hungry."

Dean chokes, holds a fist over his mouth like he's about to lose breakfast, lunch, and dinner all at once. Ben wrinkles his nose. Behind them, Sam takes a few steps forward until he's right behind Dean. He rests a hand on his brother's shoulder.

"Ben…" Sam begins, and Dean feels the rumble of his brother's voice through the fabric of his shirt.

"You're going to ask me how I'm here," Ben predicts, looking at Sam now. "You're wondering what to burn if all my bones are sitting inside the stomach of some Shapeshifter-thing that could be anywhere. And the answer is that I don't know. I just know I came back. One second there was nothing, and the next I'm laying on my bed, and I remember everything, all those memories that got erased. And I walk downstairs and Mom's eyes are puffy. And she can't see me. But I felt this pull, this force. Somehow I knew it was leading me to you, Dean. Only problem was I couldn't find you. Not for a long time. And then one day, boom. You were in a stranger's truck, covered in dirt, and I was sitting right next to you. You still couldn't see me, but I knew one day you would." Ben's looking at Dean again, but Dean can't meet his eyes. "I knew you'd find a way to make it even just a little bit better."

At the last of Ben's words, Dean sinks to the ground. He's got his head in his hands and he's balancing on his heels on the side of the road, and he's trying so hard to breathe but nothing's flowing right and it feels like he might really be sick this time but he isn't. Sam is there, holding him up, but Dean is still falling and tumbling and reeling, and he doesn't think anyone could catch him now. Not even his brother.

It stops, after a while. Everything does.

Dean doesn't even know if anyone talks, if Sam even mumbles a word of advice or comfort or whatever he'd be able to offer in this situation. He just curls over himself and blocks everything out for a second, tries to figure out what the hell he's supposed to do now. He figures the next step is probably to straighten up, get a goddamn grip, so he does that, and he feels Sam help a little bit, but not too much. They make their way back to the Impala, and no one breaks the silence except for the humming of another car that slows a little as it passes, the driver leaning curiously out his window to catch a glimpse of the action. He moves on without asking if they need any help.

Sam has a hand on his brother as they walk, and Dean thinks this is the most they've touched since he's been back.

Ben trails behind, unsure of where he fits in this dynamic. Sam shuffles Dean to the passenger seat, and Dean doesn't argue. Ben vanishes and reappears in his now-customary position in the backseat without a word. Silence holds them.

"Dean," Sam starts, breaking it softly.

"Sam," Dean says. "I...We have to go see Lisa."


A/N: I thought about this story for a while, and I've decided to write it based on the idea that Cas somehow wiped Dean not only from Ben and Lisa's memories, but from everyone Dean met and interacted with during his year with her. Otherwise the two of them would constantly be fielding questions from friends/neighbors about where Lisa's cute boyfriend Dean went, and that seemed like a pretty big hole, so I just decided to fill it up. So yeah, that's what we're going with, and that'll be important a bit later on. =).

Thanks for reading! Happy Hump Day!