Chapter 20

"You want to come out, or do you want me to come in?" Sam asked him sheepishly as his head peeked through the door a little further than it had already been, his voice no longer the embodiment of sheer terror now that he could see that Dean was still breathing and physically still in one piece.

"Why don't you come in Sammy? I kinda like it in here. It's cozy, don't you think?" Dean replied, doing his best to hide the remorse he felt when he looked into Sam's eyes, especially when he noticed that they were clearly bloodshot and wet around the edges.

Sam quickly turned and threw Bobby an 'I think it's gonna be ok' look before he quickly slipped in through the door and closed it behind him, afraid that Dean would go bi-polar and change his mind at any second which would definitely cause him to start screaming at him to get the hell out. . Once he was completely inside, he rubbed his eyes hard to rid them of the moisture that had somehow washed over them so that Dean didn't see it and took a good, hard look at his brother. Little did he know Dean had already noticed.

Sam sighed when he saw how frail and broken his seemingly invincible brother looked as he sat in a wheelchair, soaked in sweat and trembling from head to toe. Avoiding eye contact with his little brother, Dean was staring at the wall next to Sam instead, just waiting for him to initiate the conversation. The older brother had no idea what to say to the younger once it was blatantly obvious to him that Sam knew what he had been mere seconds away from doing, and for one of the few times in their lives, he decided to let Sam take the lead, which he finally did when he couldn't take the uncomfortable silence anymore.

"You're bleeding Dean," he started off, breaking the ice with the last thing Dean wanted to hear first. 'Way to go for the throat right off the bat Sammy.'

Looking down at his arm, he hadn't really realized how badly he had been bleeding until Sam had said it to him and now he knew why he'd brought it up first. He didn't think he'd driven that knife in that far before Trish had stopped him, but apparently he had and was probably going to need a few stitches. Guess there was no way of hiding this one from the nice doctor Mark.

"Yeah, I think I may have slipped while I was trying to shave," he joked, knowing Sam was NOT going to find it the least bit amusing.

"Shaving? With one of Bobby's Bowie's? What were you trying to shave, your armpits?" Sam asked with his eyebrows raised, ignoring Dean's feeble attempt at humor as he reached for a towel to toss at him. It landed in the bleeding man's lap, but he just sat there and ignored it.

"Yeah, how'd you know? Besides, it was the only sharp thing I could find," Dean huffed as he finally, and quite reluctantly, met Sam's stare, the mixture of emotions in it hard to decipher. Fear, anger, shock, shame, sympathy; they were all there, blended together in one long look that made him feel two feet tall. He'd hurt Sam, and hurt him bad.

"Are you going to pick up that towel and clean your arm off before anymore of your blood drips off your elbow into your lap?" Sam asked his brother, prompting Dean to look down at the little stain that had started forming on the blanket covering his lower half. Reaching for the towel with his bloodied right hand after the slice he'd put in his thumb went deep enough to draw its own free-flowing blood, he raised it to the source of the small river snaking its way down his arm and tried pressing it against the still bleeding wound he'd made there, the shaking of his hands making any kind of direct pressure nearly impossible.

Sam couldn't bear to watch his brother struggle with the towel when it was clear to both of them that he couldn't stop the tremors that had been plaguing him since he'd finally come out of the drug induced stupor he'd been forced into by Trent Waterson and made a tentative move in Dean's direction before pausing briefly to see what kind of reaction he would get. When he got no reaction of any kind whatsoever, he figured he had his brother's permission to go ahead and do what needed to be done. Taking the towel from Dean's shuddering hands, he pressed the white cloth firmly against his brother's arm and held it tight against him as Dean just dropped his head down and closed his eyes.

"You wanna talk about it?" Sam finally broached the subject, and Dean actually thought he was going to get away with avoiding it when Sam had gone as long as he had without saying a word. 'Fat chance of that.'

"About what?" No, he really didn't want to talk about it, he really didn't want to talk at all. He wasn't sure he could hold his tongue and really didn't want to share his feelings with his baby brother. His feelings were the only thing in his pathetic excuse of a life he had that were his own, and he liked keeping it that way, no matter how much they hurt him as they festered inside.

"I think you know what," Sam offered, curious as to what sort of answer he would get.

"What do you want me to say Sam? You want me to admit that I just tried offing myself with one of Bobby's knives? Is that what you want to hear? Ok, well, I did, and I don't even know why," he rambled, the barrage of questions fueled by his own raw emotions that he suddenly had a bad feeling were coming out whether he wanted them to or not as Trish's words telling him to let Sam help him echoed in his head. "I say things I don't mean and can't control, I can't eat without throwing up, my stomach hurts all the time, I can't stop shaking for more than five minutes, and my head is always throbbing. That about sums things up Sammy, so I'm sorry if I just didn't want to do this anymore."

Sam swallowed hard when Dean had finished his confession, and decided that maybe it was the time to tell his brother everything because keeping the truth from him had nearly killed him. "Dean, I wasn't totally honest with you when I said you had a 'reaction' to the medication they gave you. I didn't want to tell you what really happened until you were better and could handle the truth."

"Because I've handled everything so well already, right?"

"Touché. Ok, here it is. We think that person that's trying to kill you purposely overdosed you hoping that you'd die, which you almost did. If I hadn't been here when…man, when you stopped breathing, it scared the hell out of me. Hell, everything over the last six weeks has scared the hell out of me. Then I read what the side effects could be, and you pretty much just rambled off half the list in one breath just now. I knew you would have major mood swings and could become suicidal, Mark even warned me that you might, but I never thought you'd actually try it, not you of all people. I should have seen this coming, I should told you everything but you were so out of it, I just wanted to…I don't know, protect you somehow like you're always protecting me. The person that did this to you, we think it's the same person that killed Trish and those two other women," Sam started before Dean promptly cut him off, sensing Sam's own emotions were starting to get the better of him too. Two emotional wrecks in the same room was one too many at the moment.

"Trish's brother, I know. He killed them all, and for some strange reason he wants me dead too. I guess I shouldn't have let it slip to him I knew what he had done," Dean added to what Sam seemed to already know.

"You did what?" Sam had to ask, unable to hide his surprise; not only at what Dean had just said but that he remembered it at all.

"Right before they put me under, I may have told him I knew he killed her," he informed his brother, pretty sure his slip of the tongue is what earned him a death sentence in Trent's eyes.

"How the hell do you remember that?"

"I don't know, I just do. It's like someone turned on a light switch in my head and I can remember everything that happened while I was awake clear as day. Maybe Trish left me with a little more than good advice when she took off while you were trying to break the door down," he told Sam with the best possible answer he could come up with and damn it if it wasn't a good one.

"She was here? You saw her? Actually saw her?" Sam asked, totally stunned at that new revelation. Dean was just full surprises today.

"Yeah, she was here. She's the one that stopped me from…well, you know. If she hadn't come when she did, you'd probably be salting and burning me right now."

"Yeah, well, don't expect me to add her to the Christmas card list just yet. She's still done one hell of a job putting you through hell. In my opinion, she owes you one, or two, or three."

"Christmas card list? Dude, you send Christmas cards?"

"You know what I mean. So, now we know exactly who we're after. The question now is what do we do about him?"

"Bring him in here, I'll gladly drive a stake through his heart, then blame it on the drugs. They made me crazy, I thought he was a vampire and I just couldn't help myself," Dean offered, and Sam just shook his head.

"Dean, you can't kill a vampire with a stake to the heart, you know that," Sam needed to remind him even though he knew Dean wasn't serious. At least he hoped Dean wasn't serious.

"But Sam, we're probably the only two people in this entire state that knows that," Dean tried to reason, and Sam actually thought he may not be kidding.

"Three people Dean, you forgot about Bobby," Sam reminded him again, and this time Dean fell silent.

"You think he's still pissed at me?" Dean asked after another long moment of silence.

"I think he'll get over it, but why don't you ask him yourself? He's right outside and besides, we can't stay in here all day," Sam reassured him and couldn't help but feel thankful when he pulled the towel away from his brother's arm and noticed that, save for an occasional shudder, he'd pretty much stopped shaking and bleeding. "We need to have Mark look at that arm…and that thumb. You really did a number on both of them. How can that not hurt?"

"Well, that knife was pretty sharp and started going in pretty clean. Besides, I haven't been able to really feel my fingers since yesterday anyway. They just sort of feel like they do when they start waking up after falling asleep, you know, that pins and needles feeling. That one of those side effects you were talking about, because I'd hate to think that's gonna be permanent too. It may seriously interfere with my trigger-pulling abilities."

"Yeah Dean, that's one of them too. Anything else you haven't told me yet because I don't think I can take too many more surprises?"

"Nothing that comes to mind right now, Sammy."

"Come on then, let's get out of here before Bobby files a missing person's report and sends a search and rescue team in."

"Hey Sam, do we really need to tell that quack about what just happened? I mean, you could just put a couple stitches in there yourself, couldn't you?"

"Don't worry Dean; he won't put you in restraints when he's done, unless you piss him off. You haven't exactly been a ray of sunshine to him you know?" Sam reminded him of his lack of friendly personality when it came to Mark, and immediately changed his tune when he saw the frown spread across Dean's face. "If it will make you feel better, I'll ask him to keep it between us, deal?"

"Yeah, whatever. Just help me back into bed Sam, please. I'm so tired I can barely keep my eyes open anymore," Dean asked, honestly wanting nothing more than to sleep for the next two weeks. He was physically and emotionally drained and could only hope he felt better in the morning.

"Only if you promise not to try dying in your sleep," Sam snorted back, and this time it was Dean that was left just shaking his head.

"So not funny," Dean commented, then asked a question that suddenly popped into his head from out of the blue. "Hey Sam, if Dr. Kevorkian wants me dead so bad, why didn't he just off me during the surgery? It's not like he didn't have the perfect opportunity."

"I think because Mark was there and he couldn't get away with it, not without getting caught. I still don't think he's done with you yet, but at least we're safe for now."

"What do you mean, 'safe for now'?"

"Trent took off right after you almost died. Someone tipped off his old man, who owns like half of Wisconsin, and he sent the prick away until this all blows over. You know serial killers though. Like any other predator, they never hunt too far from their comfort zone. He'll be back, and hopefully we'll be ready."

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He was angry. Angry and frustrated. It just wasn't fair that one man could have so much good fortune. Everything he had done and Dean just wouldn't die. He felt like it was becoming some sort of twisted game that he just couldn't seem to win, even though he had all the aces in the deck stacked up in front of him and all Dean had was a lousy pair of twos. It was what had partially prompted him to tell his parents that he was taking a drive to the mountains to clear his head for a couple of weeks before returning to face the music for what he'd 'accidentally' done to that 'poor young man' that his sister had almost killed with her reckless driving. God, his parents were idiots, and one of these days, he was going to add them to his steadily growing list of things to do. For now though, he was more concerned with what was at the top of that list…Dean and Julia.

Once he'd checked in with his sperm and egg donors when he'd arrived on the red eye from Milwaukee, they really didn't give two shits where he went or what he did. As long as he wasn't treating patients anywhere near the one he'd almost done in for the time being, he could take a trip to the moon and they probably wouldn't even notice. He had never even bothered to unpack his bag, knowing full well he wouldn't be staying very long. He'd shown his face, made his announcement, taken one of the family cars and took off for the White Mountains some two hours away. Leaving the car at one of the numerous family homes, he 'borrowed' a car from someone at a local grocery store and headed east, taking the nearly twenty-four hour drive slow and steady.

He was in no real hurry, after all. Dean wouldn't really start noticing anything was wrong until they finally took that catheter out, which probably wouldn't be for another three of four days at the least considering how much damage he'd actually done to himself by falling from that bed and then it would take another few days for it to become totally unbearable, maybe even deadly if left ignored. Considering stomach cramps were one major side effect of those drugs he'd overloaded him with, they would more than likely be treated just that way too…ignored.

He was positive he'd torn those few stitches he'd actually bothered to place inside him to close that sizable tear that had been made with the forceful extraction of the previous tubing after that hard jab he'd shot him before he'd left, but until his bladder started holding fluid and filling up to work on its own, it just wasn't an issue. He did enjoy the thought of what would happen though when the time did finally come and butterflies started circling his stomach when he thought about just how painful it would be. God, how he hoped and prayed he could watch it firsthand.

Then there was Julia. He thought about her every day also, so pretty, so blonde, so perfect. He didn't hate her, not personally, but he hated what she was. She was the most important person in the world to Mark Horton and for that unfortunate twist of her fate she would be sorry. He had big plans for her. She wasn't just going to be his Trish for a few hours; she was going to be his Trish for few days, maybe even a few weeks. The ideas that ran through his head were endless, and he was anxious to set them into motion.

He'd been away for nearly four days, and it had been four days too long. Stopping only for gas when needed at the most remote stations in the smallest towns he could find or sleeping in the back seat for a couple hours at a time here and there at rest areas or truck stops, he completed the trip in just under two days time. The sight of his secret hideaway had put the first smile on his face that he had had in those four days, the last one he'd sported being the one that spread wide when he'd last seen Dean. There was something about the way his body jerked against his hands when he'd thrust his fingers into his already damaged parts that always seemed to make him happy, even when he was down. 'Oh well, I'll have plenty of amusement soon enough,' he thought as he pulled into the garage and let the door close before killing the engine and going inside. For now, he was going to sleep, but tomorrow, he would prepare.