Part One: Down the Rabbit Hole

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Scene Two

~A comfortable bed in some room, December 2020. Summer 2021?~

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Awareness came as abruptly as he had gone down. Naturally, Alec felt the stinging pain in his shoulder first and foremost. His brain was still rebooting, so to speak, when he felt a presence at his side. Fingers that weren't his own barely had the chance to touch his elbow before his good hand shot out to grab them. Alec's eyes snapped open, and he lurched off the mattress, a lifetime of training kicking in when the lingering drowsiness should have made him slow.

It was a mistake if ever he made one. The room started spinning around him, and all of a sudden, he wasn't clutching the hand to keep the person away but to stay upright.

Right. Blood loss. He had been shot at again.

"Whoa. Easy, there!"

Another hand grabbed his uninjured shoulder and pushed him back onto the bed.

"I just wanted to check your wound."

Alec finally let go of the hand in his grip to absently feel over the injury himself. His fingers met crisp, thick gauze before the freed limb swatted them away, then set out to unwrap the bandage.

"You had us worried for a while," the soft voice continued. Alec kind of liked it. Liked it enough that he didn't stop the man from his self-appointed task of checking him over, because, honestly, if the stranger had wanted to harm him, he could have just let him bleed out. Anyway, the guy had undoubtedly gotten a good look at the bar code in the nape of his neck while dressing his wound when Alec had been unconscious. If he hadn't spouted off some trannie hating line by now, there was no reason to believe that he would in the future.

Shaking his head to dispel the last remnants of fuzziness, Alec got his first good look at the stranger tending to his wound. He was tall, almost as tall as Joshua, and broad-shouldered but lean with the heavy muscles of a fighter, not that much older than the transgenic himself. An unruly, too long mop of dark brown hair framed a face with high cheekbones, a fox-like nose and warm but wary brown eyes.

Movement behind the stranger's frame caught Alec's eye, and he bend his head a little to look at the other man sitting on the second bed in what appeared to be a motel room – although a cleaner looking one than he had ever known. It took a moment to register what he was seeing (and Alec totally blamed the blood loss for that), but when it finally sank in, he froze.

Oh. Sammy and Dean. He had almost forgotten about that.

"Who are you?"

Not Ben, of that much he was certain. Neither of them even smelled like a transgenic when he tested the A/C controlled air with an inconspicuous little sniff. Gunshot residue, leather and... salt? But above all, ordinary. Not that anything about this situation was ordinary. Dean seemed a bit more bulky than Alec, not fat just muscled, and older, but other than the darker hair that reminded Alec of a grown out boot cut, he could have been his clone. No pun intended.

His voice was rough, unconsciousness and dehydration working together to make his throat scratchy, and Alec swallowed several times in the hopes of alleviating the urge to cough.

"The name 'Winchester' ring any bells for you?" Dean asked apprehensively right before Sammy pushed a glass of water into his fingers.

"You mean like the rifle?" Gratefully, Alec took a sip of the cool liquid. Then he scrunched his nose up in disgust. Noticing they were both watching him like hawks, he drawled, "I realize times aren't what they used to be, but you couldn't have found water that didn't taste so much like cheap plastic?"

Because, yeah, he might feel like crap, and he didn't know these guys from Adam; that wasn't reason enough for him to keep his mouth in check. The truth of his statement notwithstanding, he gulped the whole glass down, he was so thirsty.

Sammy snorted in amusement, taking the glass from him and handing him a whole plastic bottle of water instead while Dean narrowed his eyes at Alec. The bottled water tasted significantly better, curiously enough.

"Yeah, like the rifle," his... Dean picked up from where they had left off, not so much answering Alec's question rather than parroting it back to him. "Actually, I meant more along the lines of 'John Winchester.'"

"Never heard of him. Why?"

"So your mother never mentioned his name?"

Oh. He could see where this was going now. They thought he was the bastard son of Dean's father (Sammy's father too? They did share some family resemblance if you looked close enough). Cute.

Even though nothing could be further from the truth.

"Don't get your panties in a twist," he told them between gulps of water, his trademark smirk on his lips. "I know exactly where I come from, and it ain't your daddy."

That wasn't exactly true, and as coincidences went, he probably did share some DNA markers with Dean, but as far as those two were concerned, it was true enough. Not surprisingly though, neither of them looked convinced. Now that he thought about it, Alec was starting to wonder whether they had failed to notice his bar code after all.

"Well, you sure have the attitude to fit into this family!" Sammy shook his head in almost palpable exasperation and rose from Alec's bedside. "This looks good." He indicated the scabbed over bullet wound in Alec's shoulder, completely ignoring Dean's indignant "Oh, please!"

"Better than it should, actually. I'll put some more antiseptic on it and we'll leave it undressed for a while, if you can manage to keep the arm still. Unlike some people I know." A pretty unsubtle glance in the other man's direction accompanied his snide words.

"Hey! I'm a model patient, I'll have you know." The unrepentant grin Dean flashed the younger man was anything but convincing. "Just ask Nurse Emma back in Wichita!"

Leaving the brothers to their bickering (had to be brothers, they had that certain vibe going on) Alec took a closer look at his new surroundings. He was getting bored already, but he wasn't ready to try standing up again. Not just yet. Even with his transgenic healing, he needed some time to recuperate. He could go on if he absolutely had to, had done it more times than he remembered, but he always paid the price for it afterwards. And he didn't seem to be in any immediate danger, so he might as well take advantage of the chance to rest.

A small table calendar on the edge of the nightstand caught his interest.

"How d'you guys find a place like this?" He reached out with his arm, the injured one, ignoring the flare of pain in his shoulder and Sammy's glare alike, and brought the calendar up to his eyes. The page for June 2007 was on top. "This is practically ancient!"

There was that certain flavor to the following silence that meant people were staring at him because he had let his mouth run away once again. He had absolutely no idea what it could have been this time, though.

Raising his eyebrows in question, Alec snapped, "What?"

"What, exactly, do you mean by 'ancient'?" Tall Sammy sounded a bit strangled. Dean just kept staring at him incredulously, sparing a concerned, questioning glance at his brother.

"This!" Alec waved the calendar through the air and waited for comprehension to sink in. They must have noticed the year written in bold cyphers on top of the page! It was pre-pulse, for Christ's sake!

"I mean this is, like, thirteen years out of date!"

The brothers shared a baffled look, comprehension finally dawning in their expressions. Honestly, how slow could you get? Only... something was off. That wasn't just comprehension he saw on Sammy's face when he opened his mouth to say something, only to close it again, struck mute. There was that 'Uh, oh!'-look Max usually got when a perfectly safe and easy heist suddenly got complicated.

It was Dean who got out something at last, after compulsively clearing his throat. "No, it isn't."

Well, that explained a whole lot of nothing.

"It's not out of date," he elaborated. "Kid, what year do you think we have?"

Kid? Alec hadn't been a kid since...ever. And at any rate, "You guys are weirdos, you know that, right?" Although there was a sinking feeling in his own stomach now. Nothing could explain away the sudden disappearance of about a dozen men and three vehicles, or the premature and entirely too fast arrival of summer. Unless...

Almost pleading, he added, "It's 2020."

They both shook their heads in various states of speechlessness, incredulity and pity. Alec didn't appreciate the last one at all.

"It's 2007," Sammy contradicted quietly. "June 17th, to be exact."

Well, that was...

Staring at the brothers, down at the calendar in his hand and back again, Alec had the hysterical thought that, even if he did get himself into trouble a lot, no one could accuse him of not being creative about it.

A beseeching moan slipped past his lips.

"Maxie is so going to kill me!"

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to be continued...