so, sorry about the long delay, but i had written another chapter of this that i just wasn't thrilled with so i just couldn't bring myself to post it...thanks again for reading and for all the great reviews!! Bambers;)

Chpter Six

A nagging feeling welled in the pit of Doctor Jason Carter's stomach as he sat at his desk leafing through Sam's files. The younger man certainly seemed to fit the text book definition of certifiably insane. Sam had been irrational, delusional, and even shackled in a straightjacket he had been extremely dangerous. Yet for all the evidence he had witnessed with his own eyes, the doctor was still uncertain.

His fingertip trailed down one of the pages and came to rest on the name Ellicott. As he tapped his finger nervously on the name, he recalled an article he had once read about the Roosevelt Asylum. Not remembering all the details of the story, Doctor Carter turned to his computer and typed in Roosevelt Asylum along with Ellicott's name, and after a few seconds several sites came up on the screen.

The first article he clicked on brought up accounts of a riot that had occurred back in 1964. Although the details of what had happened were vague, the doctor learned that Ellicott had apparently died during the siege. Although his body had never been recovered, the police speculated that the psychiatric inmates had somehow managed to conceal or destroy the man's remains.

As Jason read further, he discovered that several patients had also died during the riot, and one name in particular had his heart racing a little bit faster. Harvey Reeves. He skimmed over the rest of the article until another name nearly leapt off the page at him. Bo Raskins.

"Damn it, he can't be right." He scratched his head as he thought back to what Sam had said about his alter-egos being real people at one time. "There's just no way it's possible."

Doctor Carter clicked on the next link and was more than just a little surprised to find that it was a paranormal website. Page after page was filled with firsthand accounts of people who had visited the asylum and had some sort of paranormal experience. Although a lot of them seemed very far fetched, the last two entries on the bottom of the fourth page caught his attention. His mouth dropped wide open as he reread the first of the two entries again.

Katkat2490: My stupid boyfriend thought it would be so cool to visit the Roosevelt Asylum, but once inside, we somehow got separated. I kept hearing strange noises and I couldn't find him anywhere. I was so freakin' scared that I hid behind something in this one really creepy room. Think it might have been an overturned table, but I'm not really even sure what it was anymore. Then these two guys appeared out of nowhere. They said their names were Sam and Dean an' that they hunted ghosts. I know that sounds buckets of crazy, but believe me, they were the real deal.

While walking down one of the hallways, something grabbed hold of my arm and dragged me into one of the rooms. The door slammed shut with Dean on the other side, and I came face to face with the most terrifying thing I've ever seen in my entire life. This ghost with a freakin' messed up face an' long curly black hair was right beside me, an' Sam yelled to me to listen to what it had to say an' it would let me go. Right, like no way in hell did I want to hear what this butt ugly thing had to say, but Sam was right. The ghost whispered the number '137'.

Dean and Sam figured it was a room number, and as Sam took Gavin and I back to the entrance, Dean went to find the room. When we reached the front entrance, we found out that whatever was inside the stupid freakin' place didn't want us to leave. Sam told us that whatever evil thing was lurking inside the asylum, it didn't want us to go. Yeah, figured that one out myself. While we were waiting for Dean to return, Sam got a phone call from him. Sam headed off to the boiler room to help his brother, leaving me with a shotgun full of rock salt. Apparently, it is the weapon of choice when hunting ghosts . . . who knew.

Anyhow, not long after, Dean returned and was surprised as all hell not to find Sam there with us. Course Gavin an' I were like, 'duh, you called and told him to meet you in the boiler room'. Another thing I didn't know about ghosts was that they apparently can make long distant phone calls from the great beyond.

Dean went looking for Sam, and after what seemed like forever, Gavin an' I heard gunfire. Gavin now was being all macho like he wanted to go an' help out. Funny how he never made it more than a few steps before turning back to stand behind the girl with a gun. That's right, Gavin can't shoot a gun to save his life, so I pretty much was protecting him.

I clearly remember smelling something awful and then saw black smoke filter up through the vents. We heard the doors unlock by themselves, and not long after that, Sam and Dean returned from the boiler room. Sam looked as if something had punched him in the face, and Dean was clutching a hold of his chest and was kind of having a hard time breathing. I asked them if they were alright, and both said they were fine. Just like a guy, never wanting to admit he's hurt . . .Gavin could take some lessons from them.

Anyhow, they walked us outside, and we thanked them for everything they did for us. I know most people are gonna believe I am crazy for writing this, but it really did happen. The Roosevelt Asylum is haunted, and you'll never catch me going back inside there again . . . .

Doctor Carter quickly skimmed through Gavin's account of the same ghostly experience again. Although Gavin had tried to make himself look a lot braver than Katkat had, the story they had told was basically the same.

As a doctor, Jason had been trained to look beyond the irrational delusions of his patients to determine the underlying cause of their mental illness. However, this was the first time he had been confronted with the possibility that one of his patients was dealing with something that was well out of range of his capabilities.

Of course he knew he couldn't go to his boss with his doubts about Sam's case. Although he considered Doctor Warner a friend of sorts, Jason knew his older colleague was a stickler for the facts each individual case presented. From Sam's files, even Jason would have to conclude that the younger man was riding the proverbial crazy train, and had no doubt that Doctor Warner would want him committed.

Jason also knew he was running out of time in making his mental assessment for Sam. By law he only had seventy-two hours in which to determine if he had enough evidence to go to court and have Sam legally committed against his own will. His other concern was that if he didn't commit Sam to the psychiatric ward of Parkside Medical, the younger man would end up in prison. Two of the men that Sam had attacked on his first day in the hospital had both pressed charges against him for assault. If Jason declared him legally sane, Sam would go to prison.

The best Jason could figure, he only had a few options left open to him if he didn't have the younger man committed. First, however, he needed to talk to the only two people who might be able to shed some light on why Sam's alter-egos all believed they were at the Roosevelt Asylum. Doctor Carter highly doubted Sam's brother Dean would be any help at all as he was also undergoing mental assessment at the moment, but was unwilling to completely rule out speaking to him. The other person was a patient that had been admitted on the same night that Sam had been brought into the hospital. With that thought in mind, Jason pushed his chair back from the desk, and stood to go and talk to Bobby Singer.

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Doctor Carter stood at the doorway of Bobby's hospital room, uncertain if he really wanted to risk his job to find out if his suspicions about Sam were correct. Parkside Medical took the oath of doctor/patient confidentiality very seriously, and allowed for no leeway in the rules. If Doctor Warner found out Jason was speaking to Bobby about Sam's case, there was no doubt in his mind that he would be let go from his job. Yet, regardless of his doubts, Jason had to admit that he was more than just a little intrigued at the possibility that what Sam had said to him was true.

Pushing the door open, Doctor Carter entered the room, and unconsciously winced when he saw all the bruises and welts on the older man's face. From Bobby's medical file, he had learned the older man had been in a car accident, but as Sam and Dean had brought him into the hospital, Jason was skeptical as to the truth of that story.

Through narrowed, swollen eyelids, Bobby eyed Jason as he strode to the bed, and took a seat beside it. Jason flipped open Sam's file and yanked a pencil out of his coat pocket. Clearing his suddenly dry throat, he said, "Hello, my name is Doctor Jason Carter, an' I'm a psychiatrist here at Parkside Medical."

"Jus' hit my head, Doc, didn't lose my mind," Bobby smirked, and then grimaced at the subtle movement.

"Look," Jason pressed onward before he lost his nerve, "I wanted to speak with you about a patient of mine. Sam Winchester. I know he brought you in here." From the sudden closed-off expression on Bobby's face, Jason quickly determined that it wasn't going to be easy getting any information out of the older man unless he changed tactics. "If you aren't going to be straight with me in regards to Sam, I'm afraid I'll have no other alternative than to have him declared legally insane." Jason stood, turned his back on Bobby and walk toward the door, wanting Bobby to believe he would leave if he didn't get the answers he wanted.

"Wait," Bobby called out just as Jason grabbed for the door handle. "What do ya mean, have him declared legally insane? I've known Sam practically his entire life, an' he's about the sanest person I know."

Jason hesitated in turning back around just long enough to assure that Bobby would think he didn't believe him. "So your definition of sane must include having at least four other alter-egos fighting for control over his mind. Cause here, at this hospital, we like to call it a psychosis of the mind."

Doctor Carter made his way back to the chair beside the bed, and took a seat. Sure now that he had Bobby's full attention, he reopened Sam's file, and leafed through the pages. "I want you to understand something before we even begin here." He paused and glanced up at Bobby through lowered lashes. "By my sharing Sam's files with you, I am violating Doctor/Patient confidentiality. I could lose my job for this if our conversation goes any further beyond this room."

"Then why are ya even here?" Bobby quirked a brow, now seemingly intrigued by what Jason had just admitted.

"I usually like to consider myself a man who calls a spade a spade, but from time to time, even I begin to question the possibilities of certain things."

"What kinda things?" Bobby pressed his palms against the mattress, and pushed himself up a little bit straighter in his bed.

"When I was ten years old, my parents rented this cottage by the lake," Jason replied, suddenly feeling awkward at having to dredge up a memory he had done his best to forget. "It was real late one night, an' something woke me out of a sound sleep. I got out of bed, an' headed outside an' toward the water, realizing that it sounded like a little girl laughing." Jason drew in a deep breath, and slowly exhaled. His hands trembled as he wondered if Bobby would think he was crazy for what he had to say next, but now that he had begun to recount the tale, he needed to finish it. "The moon was full that night. I mean the kind of full that you can see everything clearly, ya know?"

"Yeah," Bobby said with a subtle nod.

"An' I saw her playing in the water. She had long dark hair." His fingers trailed down the length of his own hair as he recalled the memory of her face. "An' she was pale . . . even by the moonlight I could tell how pale she was. She dipped her hand into the water, splashing it all around herself, and then giggled she as motioned for me to come an' join her."

"An' you did," Bobby supplied when Jason fell silent, and he nodded in response.

"I didn't see anythin wrong with it. Figured my parents would never have to know, but then she changed. Sh-she was so strong . . . I mean, really strong. An' she dragged me down under the water, an' I couldn't breathe. Thought I was gonna die, but then I felt someone pulling me back out of the water. It was this guy I'd never seen before. He dragged me back to shore, then went after her. I was so scared that I never even waited to see if he made it out of the water okay. I just ran back into the cottage, an' wouldn't come out of house for the rest of the time we were there."

After a very long pause, in which Bobby eyed Jason the entire time, the older man finally asked, "So why are you tellin' me all this?"

"Cause I wanna know if you think the creature that dragged me under the water that night is the same kind of thing that's attacking Sam's mind now? An' if it is, maybe I can help."

"An' if I told you were probably dreamin' that night, an' things like that don't really exist, what would that mean for Sam?"

"It would probably mean he'd be spending an awfully long time here." Jason tapped nervously on his file folder under Bobby's close scrutiny. "But I have a strange feeling that I'm right. An' if I am then I need your help now before it's too late to get Sam and Dean out of here before their both committed."

"Dean?" Bobby's demeanor abruptly changed, and Jason clearly saw the look of fear in his eyes. "Why's he in here?"

"I'm not his doctor, but from what I've gathered he's dealing with his own psychoses. So why don't ya jus' tell me if I'm right, so we can figure out a way to get them out of here."

After much hesitation, Bobby finally heaved a weary groan. "What you saw that night was probably the vengeful spirit of a little girl who drowned in the lake. Although there are other possibilities, that one seems the most likely. The man who went after her was probably a hunter."

"Like Sam an' Dean?" Jason asked, although he already knew the answer.

"Yeah, like Sam an' Dean."

"An' the Roosevelt Asylum? They were there, weren't they? An' somethin' happened to them?"

"Not really sure what happened," Bobby conceded. "Guess it all started several months ago when they went there to get rid of this vengeful spirit who had somehow made this cop shoot his own wife an' then turn the gun on himself."

Jason scrubbed his hand across his face as he recalled reading about the murder/suicide in the paper. "An' they got rid of this ghost?" he said, his thoughts turning to what Katkat had written about the incident on the paranormal website. "But something went wrong?"

"Yeah, they found Ellicott's body stuffed in a cabinet in the basement. Dean salted an' burned his remains, an' they left. Only thing was, Dean started having some sort of memory loss tha' got progressively worse as the months went on."

"An' when did Sam start to figure this all out?" Jason uttered, thoroughly engrossed in what Bobby was telling him.

"Guess Dean was keepin' these journals as a way of remembering things. But it was gettin' so bad that he had to write down Sam's description to remind himself that he could trust him."

Jason's brows pulled together, not understanding how any of this related to what was happening to Sam. "So if Sam was fine after his visit to Roosevelt what changed things?"

"Sam went back to Roosevelt to try an' figure things out. He was certain that something happened there, but wasn't sure exactly what it was. While he was there, Dean totally lost it an' went after Sam."

"So that explains all the bruises on both boys . . . an' I suspect on you as well," Jason commented, although he really didn't expect Bobby to respond. "So Dean shows up at Roosevelt, they fight it out, but it still doesn't explain why Sam is suffering from a psychotic break from reality."

"While Sam was in Ellicott's office, he found a torn piece of paper with their father's handwriting on it. It said 'your mind tricked you to feel the pain'." Bobby heaved another sigh, his eyelids growing heavy from the sedatives the doctors had given him for the pain. "It was the name of a book written by one of Ellicott's so-called patients."

"An' what did this book have to do with what happened at Roosevelt?"

"I dunno how exactly it worked, but Sam figured that if he took the blame for all the guilt that was eating his brother up inside, it would somehow bring Dean back. So he placed his hands on the sides of Dean's face an' jus' started talkin'. He took the blame for everything bad that had ever happened to them. An' then Sam's hands jus' started glowin' this intense shade of blue. An' Dean kept tellin' him to stop."

"So," Jason narrowed his eyes in confusion, "Sam somehow took on Dean's guilt? That wouldn't explain all the other alternate identities Sam is suffering from now though."

"When Dean finally came around, Sam collapsed. Dean was so angry, said I should've stopped him . . . an' that it wasn't only Dean's guilt he took on. My best guess is that the spirits who still were trapped inside of the asylum somehow dumped off their guilt on Dean so they could move on. So when Sam took all Dean's guilt he took theirs as well."

"Which would explain the multiple personalities," Jason surmised, completely dumbstruck by the story Bobby had just recounted.

"Yeah, when Sam finally woke up, he was actin' kinda strange. Jus' got up an' headed for the door even though Dean was callin' to him. Then before leavin' he said his name wasn't Sam, but Bo Raskins."

"Who had died in the 1964 riot at Roosevelt."

"Right."

Jason leaned back in his seat, his head dropping backward onto his shoulders as he mulled over everything he had heard. After a very long pause, he finally looked back to Bobby. "From everything I've learned from Sam, an' now from you as well, this whole thing centers around guilt. Dean's guilt. Bo's guilt. Molly's guilt . . . an' whoever else is trapped inside Sam's mind. From a psychiatrist's standpoint, I believe we have to somehow relieve all these other identities of their guilt so they can be put to rest once an' for all."

"An' how are we supposed to do that?"

"Well, I would say dealing with Dean's guilt would be the easiest as he's still alive. So maybe we should start there an' work our way through the rest afterward."

"Huh, you don't know Dean at all. The boy practically bathes in guilt, an' he's definitely not gonna let go of it that easily."

"Maybe so, but we have to try." Jason hesitated again, his mind wandering back to the conversation he had with Sam when he had taken on Reeve's identity. Reeve's had said he felt no guilt for the things he'd done. If that was true, Jason worried that there would be no way to get rid of him. But while Sam was in Jason's office, the youngest Winchester had been certain that Dean was there most of the time. Jason recalled now that what had seemed like delusions of Dean at the time, were Sam's most lucid moments. Maybe Dean or the image of Dean was somehow sheltering Sam from the torment of the other voices inside his head. If they tried to take away Dean's guilt first, Jason feared that it would leave Sam at the mercy of the things that had taken over his mind. With that in mind, he realized that he just wasn't willing to risk doing any more damage to Sam's weakened psyche.

"Okay, here's what we're gonna do," Jason said determinedly, "first we figure out a way to get them out of here, an' then systematically go after each of the weaker identities until Sam is strong enough to push the rest of them out on his own."

"That's all well an' good," Bobby frowned, seeing the very real flaw in Jason's plan, "But I'm injured, a' you're a doctor here. How the hell are we supposed to get them out of here without anyone noticing?"

"I dunno," Jason admitted with a shrug, "haven't figured that part out yet. But I like to consider myself a pretty smart guy, so I'm sure I can figure something out."

"Yeah, can jus' see how well this is gonna work out." Bobby groaned.

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Hey, I am auctioning off a story for a very good cause to help a fellow writer, so if you get a chance, take a look!! If you bid and win, i'll write any kind of story your heart desires!! Bambers;)

"We're running a Supernatural fanfic auction for the next two weeks (June 28 - July 12) benefiting a fellow writer, publisher, and friend who is in need of a wheelchair. Twenty-two writers (and one vidder!) have generously offered their talents and time to this endeavor, and every penny goes to the fund. The auction can be found at , under Miscellaneous-General, and registering to bid is fast and free. Donations are also gratefully accepted. For questions or to make a donation, please contact me at . I hope you'll come check it out and not only have some fun bidding on some great writers, but also help us raise money for a good cause!"
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