A/N: Nothing to say today except I'm sorry about not posting, but I was busy yesterday...

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Part Three: In the Beginning

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Scene Four

New Mexico, fall 2019~

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"That's impossible!"

Sam's incredulous whisper drifted through the white noise of TV commercials.

Dean, stomach grumbling in anticipation of the food they had sent Ben out to buy, looked up from his spot on the motel bed to look at his brother. True to form, Sam sat by the rickety table, immersed in his laptop in front of him, staring at the screen in shock. Some things just never changed.

Managing to tide that thing over the first, worst post-pulse years and hold onto it this long had been nothing short of a miracle. By now Sammy's favorite toy resembled more the Frankensteined bit of ingenious hacker technology dear old Ash had presented them so proudly with back in the day, but it had been well worth the effort. The US might have turned into a third world country overnight, but that didn't mean other nations had followed the trend. Thus, the inter-net was still up and running, even though a lot of data had been lost during the Pulse. It wasn't quite the well of information it used to be, but ten years had definitely made a difference in the restoring process; the real trouble was getting a connection.

"What is it?" Dean asked after waiting for several moments. His brother startled at the question, head snapping up to meet Dean's gaze. The wide-eyed look quickly morphed into Sam's 'Oh shit!'-expression. It told Dean Sam hadn't meant to talk aloud. Suddenly all kinds of alarms were blaring in his mind.

"Sam?" he prodded. Knowing exactly that Sam had never managed to outgrow the compulsion to answer truthfully whenever the older Winchester used that kind of tone, Dean used the best big brother voice in his repertoire. Much to Dean's never-ending source of amusement (and often enough sheer relief), it had the same effect on Ben whenever Dean needed to call the kid on the carpet for some stunt or another.

"I... uh," Sam stuttered, shut his mouth with the clicking of teeth and tried again. "Bobby sent some more information on the breeding cult."

Nice. The bits and pieces the brothers had managed to unearth hadn't really given away a lot save for what they already knew from Alec. Those people had generations of experience to cover their tracks and they were annoyingly good at it.

Still didn't explain Sam's deer-caught-in-headlights imitation.

"And?"

"And there was a cross-reference for one of its higher ranking members. A man named Sandeman."

"Cross-reference to where?" God, this was like pulling teeth!

Sam cringed and a moment later Dean had his explanation for Sam's guilty demeanor.

"Manticore."

Before Dean could let loose with the admonishments, Sam went on, defiant as only a little brother could be no matter how old he was.

"It's not even another year, Dean! Alec told us the Seattle facility will be burned down in spring 2020 and I figured we may as well get what information we can beforehand."

"Please tell me you were being careful!"

Sam shot him a look of such unadulterated disgust and condescension Dean had to swallow the urge to laugh.

"Dude, seriously! What do you take me for, an amateur?"

Sighing, Dean knew defeat when it sat smugly in front of him and got up. He couldn't quite deny being curious himself.

"What did you find?"

Sam adjusted the screen when Dean came to stand behind him, one hand on Sam's shoulder, the other on the table.

"Alec," Sam replied. "Or rather X5R-494. That's his designation."

494. Ben's was 493.

"The littlest Winchester," he muttered, Ruby's lecherous voice suddenly ringing in his ears as if it had been said only seconds ago. They hadn't heard of their favorite demon in years, but Dean had no doubt that she was still around somewhere and not yet exorcised. Dean just wasn't that lucky.

"He's been in 'psychological observation' for the last four months, because and I quote 'the subject's twin unit shows signs of paranoid schizophrenia.'"

"Bastards!" Bone-deep hatred that Dean had once thought was only reserved for the creatures he hunted was his first reaction, not to the words as such, but to the detached, sterile, emotionless way they were written. As if that wasn't a person's life they were talking about. As if that wasn't his family they were talking about.

Only then did he realize the actual meaning of the words.

"Wait, what? But that's impossible!"

Ben wasn't schizophrenic. Oh, he was by no means a normal twenty year old, but he was not schizophrenic. Both Dean and Sam had constantly, inconspicuously looked for the signs, hoping the best but not able to disregard the possibility. By the time 2020 was almost in sight, they had let themselves relax somewhat, but even so...

Browsing the site Sam brought up, Dean looked through the crime scene photos, the dates of the murders, the locations.

Even so there was no way Ben could have taken a quick trip to Florida without them noticing when they were halfway across the country at the time of the third murder, somewhere in North Dakota.

"What's impossible?"

Sam wasn't the only one wearing his 'Oh shit!'-expression when both brothers' heads swiveled around to meet Ben's curious eyes.

The young man was balancing two brown paper bags while locking the door with his foot in a fluid motion that bespoke of long time practice carrying more than was necessary just so he wouldn't have to make the same trip twice. During the last few months, since Ben had shot up another three inches and had finally gotten himself a haircut, Dean caught himself startled more than once to see an almost exact replica of Alec (of himself, but he had gotten over that aspect years ago) instead of the young, nine year old kid his brother and he had taken in. It brought on a feeling of unwelcome nostalgia. It made Dean feel not just old but ancient.

"What?" Ben asked again when the brothers kept staring at him.

Sighing heavily, Dean shared a reluctant look with Sam before straightening up to his full height.

"Put the bags down and make yourself comfortable. We need to tell you something and it might take a while."

Glancing over at his brother, Dean discovered that Sam looked as uncomfortable as he felt. This wasn't a conversation he looked forward to. If he were honest with himself, though, it had long been overdue.

While Ben warily did as he was told, Dean grabbed himself one of the bags and searched for his requested burger. There was no way he was going to get through the imminent argument without something to eat first.

Almost an hour later and Dean reconsidered his previous idea. The greasy fries and burger he had eaten sat heavily in his stomach as Sam and he laid out the events of the past (a certain month about twelve years back in particular) and what Sam had found with his hacker skills and an apparently decent modem connection.

"You thought I was a psycho?"

Right there, Dean saw the most obvious difference between his two transgenic clones. Ben had never learned to hide his emotions as well as Alec had done even during the short time the Winchesters had come to know him. Ben had never needed to. Whatever the first nine years of his life had taught him about not showing his emotions had worn off by this time, and Dean could clearly see the hurt and anger flashing in his clones (his son's) eyes.

"What, just because I believe in something else but myself I'm a murderous raving lunatic? What did you plan to do, Dean, would you have..."

"Stop right there, Ben!" Dean really didn't want to hear anything about killing his own family ever again!

Fortunately the younger man backed down, but he still glowered at the two brothers from where he was standing by the door, arms crossed over his chest and fingers clenched into his shirt. His posture was at once defiant, angry and strangely vulnerable.

"You know damn well that we don't think you're a psycho! And we never have!"

"But you were looking for the signs, didn't you?" Ben accused them.

It didn't matter what he answered to that question, Dean had just moved himself into a corner. Like so many times in the previous years it was Sam who managed to find the right words and break through both Ben's and Dean's stubborn anger.

"Yeah, we did," he confessed in this soothing tone of voice that managed to drive Dean up the walls sometimes. Right now, though, he was grateful that at least one of them was keeping a clear head.

"With what we just told you," Sam continued, "what else would you have done? We hoped for the best, but we couldn't risk neglecting Alec's warning!"

"Only it doesn't seem to have done him any good." Dean glared at the laptop screen where Alec's Psy Ops file was still open. "He still got screwed over for something neither of you did!"

He looked up again when Ben moved towards the bed nearest the door and plopped down. Raking his hands through his hair, the young man palpably let go of his anger and broached the other subject of this discussion.

"So I have a twin brother?" he asked, expression unguarded and curious this time, and Dean was struck again by how unused he had been to seeing the same expression on said twin back in '07.

Sam only nodded in confirmation.

"And he's still in that hellhole, why?" There was anger in Ben's voice again, on behalf of a brother he had never even met. God help him, but Dean loved that kid!

"Because he asked us not to interfere," Sam explained, "and like it or not, Ben, he was right."

"Yeah, but you promised him something else, too, Sammy!" Dean's rueful smile was mirrored by Sam even as Ben looked from one to the other in confusion and barely contained curiosity. For the young one's sake, Dean added, "You'll get to meet him in about another year or so. Sam promised to see him on the other side..."

"So," Sam fidgeted on his chair, alternately looking at Alec's file and the other two men in the room. "Now that we've all agreed that Ben isn't, you know, a 'murderous raving lunatic' – has anyone an idea why they think you are?"

"Well, there's the bar code, obviously," Dean replied, but honestly, that just raised more questions. Why would anyone tattoo Ben's bar code on the necks of the victims?

When Dean looked over to the bed, not able to think of an answer to that, he noticed the kid squirming.

"Ben?" he asked warily.

Wide cat-green eyes met his for a long moment. Then Ben sighed. "It's not just the bar code."

"Then what is it?" Sam asked.

"It's... the way they're displayed," Ben explained with a grimace, eyes darting from one Winchester to the other in obvious discomfort and anxiety. "About half a year before we escaped, Colonel Lydecker took us into the woods. There was this death row convict."

Ben stuttered to a halt and Dean couldn't help but think that this sounded eerily familiar. Glancing at Sam who wore the same pained expression that Dean knew was on his own face, he spared the kid from having to recount that particular experience.

"First kill scenario," were his only words, but Ben's head shot up in surprise nonetheless.

"How...?" he started, then, "Alec told you."

"Yeah. So what about it?"

"We were afraid of him." Ben avoided both brother's eyes once again and Dean had the distinct feeling there was something he was not telling them. "The way those bodies are arranged? It's what we did to that man. Including taking his teeth. He never stood a chance. I think even Lydecker was afraid of us that day."

Silence descended on the small group for a few long moments. Grinding his teeth Dean thought that this was exactly why he usually let Sam deal with the emotional fallout of Ben's past. He himself just got too blind with fury at his own kind to think straight.

After a few minutes, Ben sighed again. "I think I know what happened," he then declared. "Remember that shifter last year? I thought I put a bullet in its heart, but what if I haven't? We haven't exactly been able to stay around to check and it was pretty far away. Maybe it survived. You once told me that it's like they download the memories of whoever's skin they steal. And Grandpa's journal said that they can't shift into animals."

"But you're part cat," Sam supplied, following Ben's line of reasoning effortlessly. "So maybe it got stuck in your skin, and if that bullet's still in it it's poisoning this shifter from inside out. Making it go crazy – or, well, more crazy. Like a... a lead poisoning would do to a human." Scratching his brow, Sam scoffed. "Huh. It's a thought."

"So what do we do about it?"

Dean was ready to pack their bags at the first sign of a decent plan, but Sam's next words stopped him cold in bewilderment.

"I'm not so sure we should do anything."

"What the hell are you talking about, Sam?" Shooting his brother an evil glare, the older Winchester snapped, "Of course we should do something!"

Sam, however, just shook his head, using that soothing voice once again, but now all it did was piss Dean off. "No, Dean, think about it. We picked up Ben just like Alec asked us to, but the killings he told us about still happened! Who's to say it wasn't like that all along? Maybe that's what happened, maybe the killer everyone thought was X5-493 was a shape-shifter all this time? A shape-shifter stuck in a transgenic body, with Ben's memories and a silver poisoning."

"You're talking about a temporal paradox, aren't you?" Ben questioned, his intent gaze never wavering from Sam's face. "That... the way things happened in Alec's past happened that way because he messed with the timeline and not despite trying to change the timeline?"

"Yes. He told us you were stopped eventually. Or," Sam frowned in bemusement, "not you but the one he thought was you."

Dean was still trying to get his head around that particular concept when Sam said something that was sure to garner his agreement a whole lot easier.

"Besides, that case file looks like Lydecker is fast moving in on that shifter. We didn't try to keep Manticore off your tail all those years only to run into their waiting arms now."

Wasn't much Dean could argue with after that. Even if they did stop the shifter without the good Colonel noticing, the damage had been done and Alec had been the one to pay the price.

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to be continued...

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A/N:One more to go...