Title: Identity Chapter 5 of ?
Rating: PG13 I suppose, for minor swearing
Characters: Dean, Sam, Young Dean, Young Sam, Pre-Series John, Pastor Jim
Notes: Thanks http://michelle2007. for the great beta job! Takes place after Kansas City Shuffle. No real episode warnings.
Disclaimers: I own nothing, I just like to play with what's not mine.
Summary: After the events of Kansas City Shuffle, Sam and Dean are on a hunt for a cult. Once again, Dean can't keep his hands to himself, only this time he ends up traveling back to the past and trading places with his 10 year old self. Now Sam has to deal with taking care of a 10 year old, while Dean has to convince his father he is who he says he is.

Identity
Chapter 5

Dean had gone through 3 books and come up with nothing. I myself had been through all of the pages I had gathered and found nothing of use. I stretched and let out a groan. I had been hunched over the table for hours without moving much. I told myself we needed a break, to re-group, get some lunch then get back at it. I decided we'd go back to the motel and order a pizza. I looked over at Dean who looked up at the same moment.

"We need a break, how about we get a pizza and go back to the motel for a while?"

He sighed. "I guess." He got up and picked up his papers, placing them with the laptop. I once again stuffed them into the bag and looked around for a phone book.

"What do you want on your pizza?" I asked. Without looking up, Dean muttered, "Whatever," and headed towards the door. I walked to the phonebook, looked up the nearest pizza placed and called in an order. I figured he'd probably like the same things no matter what his age was so I ordered what we would have normally and walked out. He was already at the car waiting, so I unlocked it and we climbed in. After we picked up the pizza and some drinks, we went back to the motel. He sat and ate in silence, and I noticed he picked off the black olives. Must have been something Dean picked up in his later years. Oh what an odd thought that was. I could tell something was bothering him, and I wondered if it was the whole time travel thing, or something else. Finally I decided to approach the subject.

"Dean, what's wrong?" He looked up guiltily and shook his head. "Nothing." I knew better.

"Liar. What's up?"

"Why hasn't dad called?" He looked really concerned.

Aw shit. In the hunt for getting Dean back, I had forgotten all about my fake phone call to dad. Of course there would never be a return call. So Dean would worry, because dad wouldn't have gone this long without checking his messages, and he would've called by now. Shit, what the hell was I going to do? I wasn't sure how long I could keep up the lie about him being on a hunt. But it was my only option so I had to run with it.

"Well Dean, like I said, he was in deep on this hunt. I'm sure he just hasn't had a chance to get to his phone. After all, you're 28 now and I'm 24. We're both old enough to go on hunts by ourselves. Sometimes when we're all too busy it's days before we talk to him. Honestly Dean it's nothing to worry about."

He still looked concerned, but nodded. We both went back to eating our pizza.

When I was finished, I decided to look through dad's journal to see if I could find any other contacts that might be able to help. When I opened it up and started flipping through, I caught sight of a page I didn't recognize. I frowned. It had Dean's writing on it, and at the top was the same symbol that Dean hadn't been able to figure out. I stared at it for a full minute before it actually sank in. Of course! Dean was in the past. Anything that he added to Dad's journal I would be able to see, because it had happened in the past. I couldn't leave him messages, but he could leave them for me! I grinned as I read what he had written. I laughed as I read his post script. He had better not even look at another statue for as long as we lived. Dean looked up when he heard me laughing.

"You left me a note." I told him. He got up and walked over to see what I was looking at. As soon as he saw the journal he freaked.

"Why do you have dad's journal? He never goes on a hunt without it! Why do you keep lying to me?"

I had no idea what to tell him. Finally I settled on a half truth.

"When Dean was old enough to hunt on his own, dad gave this to him. Dad has a new one, but he wanted to give Dean this one. That's why we have it. But look, he left me a message. He figured out what that symbol is. It's an I Ching symbol that stands for the Well. It says 'Now is the time to draw strength and inspiration from the past. Both from your own experiences and tribulations and that of your ancestors who have come before you. Learn from the past and build a better future.'"

When I read that he had gotten the information from Pastor Jim I frowned. That was when it hit me that Dean was once again faced with dealing with people that in our time were dead. He hadn't spoken at all about his last experience. Not for a month. Finally one night after he and I had finished a hunt successfully we went out to have a few beers to celebrate. Dean had one too many and I had to drag his drunk ass home. He admitted to me how much he hurt after seeing mom and dad, alive and happy together. He denied any knowledge of the conversation the next morning and we went back to pretending it had never happened. Now it seemed Dean was having to interact with Pastor Jim as well as dad. I sighed. We needed to get this fixed and soon.

"Ok, so let's go over the hieroglyphs and see if we can come up with a meaning that matches that." Dean nodded and quickly went to get his papers. When he returned, he and I sat and went over everything he had. I hoped like hell we would come up with a solution before the night was out.

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I wanted to die, but kept that to myself. After our 'short' 3 mile run which I swear was longer than that, dad and I had ended up back at the house. We got a drink, before heading out back to spar. My feet were killing me, but there were too many twigs and branches to do this barefoot. I knew that soon I would have an interesting collection of bruises to take back home with me. Dad never sparred light, it was always full contact.

We faced each other and I waited for him to make the first move. When he didn't I got impatient, just wanted to get this over with, so I took a swing. That was stupid. He easily blocked it, then got in a good kick of his own before moving back out of range. I told myself to focus, then looked for an opening.

It wasn't long before he gave me one and I took it. It was however a trick and I ended up on my ass for my trouble. Growling I hauled myself up, intent on getting in at least one good hit. Dad was having none of that, then started in with the critiquing.

"You're letting your guard down on the left too much. You're wide open when you drop your hand like that." He punctuated that with a good hit to the left side of my head. When the bells finally stopped ringing and my vision cleared I doubled my efforts to keep him out of reach.

I'm not sure how long we were out there, but when he finally called it quits I had landed 4 good hits and several good kicks. He on the other hand...well on top of the blisters I was sure I would have a hell of a lot of aches and pains when I woke up. I wondered what Sammy and my alternate self were up to.

Lunch consisted of Mac and cheese that I made when I got hungry enough. I made two boxes and it was a good thing because Dad and I polished it all off. After lunch I sat down and went over the note I had written to Sam.

"Now is the time to draw strength and inspiration from the past. Both from your own experiences and tribulations and that of your ancestors who have come before you. Learn from the past and build a better future."

I wondered what that meant. Was I truly supposed to learn something from this? Something that would help me build a better future? Well, one way to do that would be to give Dad the information he would need to kill the damned demon. Or somehow leave myself a note that would help us in the fight later. But I couldn't do that. The world would implode or something. Ok maybe not, but it wouldn't be good. So what was I supposed to learn? I sat and drew the symbol out, then sketched over it again. Somehow I had a feeling there was a lesson to be learned. And it wasn't 'Don't touch the statue.'

I picked up a pen and added more to my note to Sammy.

"Sam, I have a sinking suspicion that I'm stuck here until I learn something. I don't know what it is yet, and I'm not sure how long it's going to take but I really think that's the only way to solve this. The thing says to learn from the past and build a better future. Hope I can figure that out soon. Until then, stay safe and keep me safe, will ya? Dad'll kill me if I don't get me home to him soon."

I closed the journal and stood up. I winced as a few places protested moving. So I needed to learn something from the past that would help me build a better future. What the hell could I possibly learn? After all, this was my past, and I had lived it. I heard dad talking on the phone, it sounded like he was discussing a job with someone. That would be good. If he left on a hunt, maybe I could have a chance to think about this. On the other hand, if I was supposed to learn something from him...shit. But what could there be to learn? After all, I had already learned everything I could from him. There was really nothing left for me to learn. I rubbed a hand over my face and sighed. I decided a nice long hot shower was in order so I grabbed my only other change of clothes and headed towards the bathroom. Thankfully I was able to shut off my brain for a while and just enjoy the hot water beating down on my tired muscles. All too soon I heard dad banging on the door telling me to stop wasting water. I sighed as I shut the water off. Once I was dried off and changed I headed out to find Dad sitting at the kitchen table. I grabbed myself a beer and sat across from him.

"We're going on a hunt, we leave in half an hour, be ready." I stared at him for a moment with an eyebrow raised, then started to say I couldn't do that but he was already up and out of the room.

I sighed and contemplated what would happen if I went on a hunt with him. I supposed it wouldn't really hurt anything. As long as I didn't change the outcome of the hunt it should be just fine.

I wondered briefly what I should do to get ready. All I had were the clothes on my back, a gun, and 2 knives. So I remained sitting at the table to wait for him. It wasn't long before he came in dropping a bag on the table.

"So what exactly are we hunting?" I needed to see if I remembered this hunt or not.

"There are some nasty ghosts playing havoc on the owners of a motel. They just remodeled it and apparently pissed off a few ghosts in the processes. They had kinda known about the ghosts before, but now they've become violent. I've been researching the history and I think I know who the ghosts are. We need to go salt and burn the bodies tonight and that should take care of it. But we'll sweep the motel after we're done just to make sure."

The hunt didn't ring a bell, and it didn't sound all that bad, other than I had a feeling I'd be doing most of the digging. I nodded and we headed out, him driving. It was fully dark by the time we arrived at this old cemetery on the outskirts of the town. Most of the headstones were dated in the late 1800's to early 1900's.

Hours later we had salted and burned three corpses. I was tired, sweaty, and sore as hell. After we cleaned up, we headed to the motel. Dad talked briefly with the night clerk and found that the few rooms that had the highest level of activity were vacant. She gave us a key to the rooms and we set off to check them. There were 10 rooms we had to go through. Dad decided we should split them up, so I took the ones on the right side of the building while Dad took the left. All we really had to do was make sure there were no signs of the ghosts and since they had been active every night after it got dark, that wasn't hard to do. I opened the first door and walked through the room. EMF picked up nothing, and I didn't get a TV thrown at me, so I decided it must be clear. I cleared 2 more rooms, then entered the fourth room. As I stepped into the room I knew there was going to be a problem. It was freezing and the door slammed shut behind me. I had brought a gun loaded with rock salt, which of course is useless when the gun is flung in the opposite direction as you are. I found myself pinned to the wall and muttered a curse. Ok well that sucked. So we had obviously missed something, or rather someone. I tried to pull myself from the wall. I pulled my upper body off when I felt something grab my shoulder.

"What the…" I didn't have a chance to finish that as I was thrown across the room. I hit the TV and we both crashed to the floor. Unfortunately I landed on the bottom of the pile. The TV was thrown off me a moment later and I thought perhaps dad had shown up. I was wrong however. The hand I felt on my arm wasn't Dad's. I was flung again, this time landing against the large mirror. I hit the floor in a rain of glass. I groaned and picked my head up then grinned when I saw the shotgun loaded with rock salt. I grabbed it at the same time I felt a hand on my ankle. I turned and fired at what I hoped was the ghost. There was a shriek and I took the opportunity to jump to my feet. The door swung open and dad charged in.

"What the hell's going on?" He asked as he looked at the damage in the room. I quickly shoved him out the door and it slammed behind us.

"We missed one and it's pissed." I explained as I brushed glass off. Dad swore under his breath before turning to stomp off down the hall. I followed behind him, the adrenaline still pumping. I knew later I would be sore from my hits but for now I was feeling no pain. Dad informed the night clerk that we had missed something and not to go in the one room. He told her we would have to do some more research, but would be back. We loaded up the car and headed back to the house. Half way through the drive the adrenalin wore off. I shifted in the seat as I felt a throbbing in my lower back. Dad glanced over.

"You hurt?" he asked.

I figured that the run, the sparring, and getting tossed around a motel room had finally caught up with me. I shook my head and dad dropped it. I apparently dozed off because I didn't remember much of the rest of the trip. Dad nudged my arm when we got back to the house.

As soon as I moved to get out of the car I knew there was a problem. My shirt was stuck to my back. I winced and headed inside. I went straight to the bathroom and attempted to pull my shirt off. I found that to not be an option.

"Fuck!" I yelled. Dad appeared in the bathroom door.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Uh…well…I think it may be worse than I thought." That was the last thing I remember saying before my legs decided to turn to rubber and I hit the floor. I saw a look of concern on dad's face, and then I saw all black.