A/N: Thanks for the reviews and alerts! Mwah! How about some Winchester action now?
Deja Vu All Over Again
Chapter Three
"I don't know, Bobby, he's just gone, okay?" Dean Winchester said, phone pressed tight against his ear. "I knew this was going to happen again eventually. Didn't I tell you?"
"That's all you've been saying, even though you know better'n anyone that if you tighten a leash too much all you're going to do is choke your dog."
"Jesus. Sam's not a dog, Bobby."
"That ain't what I meant and you know it."
"Fucking A. I'm going out of my gourd here."
Dean paced a tight line at the foot of the beds. The thing of it was, he'd just started relaxing when it came to Sam. His brother hadn't had any random fugue states, hallucinations or anything like that lately. If anything, he'd been a little too normal. Even the tantrum about Dean killing Amy Pond against his express wishes had been mild, all things considered. Given their lives, Dean had taken the normalcy as a gift horse and he wasn't going to look it in the mouth. Well, he guessed now he should have figured that was the wrong approach. He shouldn't have let his guard down, not for a second. The next gift horse was headed for the damned glue factory, no hesitation.
"Will you stop a minute to get your undies untwisted?" Bobby snapped. "Calm down. I think you'll agree the last thing we need is for both of you to get unhinged. How long's it been since you last saw him?"
"About five hours."
If their lives were regular, Dean would have been one of those hysterical people calling the cops and being told there was nothing to be done until a person was missing for twenty-four hours. A logical rule, but nothing Winchester was logical. Regular people didn't have a brother whose soul was filled with memories no one could remember and stay sane. Regular people didn't have a shoddily constructed wall inside to keep the bad shit from spilling out. There were too many possibilities for Dean to contemplate, and none of them good.
"You think this could be about the kitsune girl again?"
"Shit, I don't know. I know he's still pissed about that, and he should be. I don't begrudge him that. I just don't think he'd ditch me because of it, not again."
Bobby's silence didn't really ease his mind in that regard, but Dean was glad the other man didn't remind him of the times Sam had wandered off on his own as a direct result of far lesser transgressions. Sam Winchester, sensitive soul. Unfortunately, now that sensitive soul was also likely to break into a billion pieces. He didn't know if Sam heard or saw Lucifer anymore; he was holding his cards close. He did know he didn't like the odds of Sam staying sane for long.
"Sam didn't leave a note, no nothing, Bobby. His phone's GPS is being wonky or something and I can't get him to answer. I've left calm messages."
"And…?"
"And angry, shouty ones. This new Boy-Next-Door Sam would have answered before I got to that point unless he's really that pissed. Until the whole Amy thing, it's been like I'm riding around with a Stepford wife." Dean ran a hand through his hair. "He went to the library, so far as I know, and now he's gone."
"If not hurt feelings, you think maybe Leviathan?"
"No, I doubt that one too," Dean said. It was the only plus he could see at the moment. "They don't seem to contain a single ounce of subtlety. If they wanted us, they'd have come full on like that one you Boraxed, or try to get the cops on us. I don't think they'll make a play that public again."
"If it's not Leviathan related, did you and Sam have any leads on the missing folks in that area yet?"
By that question, Dean knew what Bobby was doing and was as grateful as he was annoyed. His tension actually eased the more he thought it through. It wouldn't completely dissipate until he had a visual on Sam– as fucked up as it was, once again Sam was all he really had. And Bobby, but Bobby had been trying to cope with the loss of his home, getting his feet on the ground. He felt guilty for calling their old friend when he knew the guy had a lot of shit on his mind.
"Not really. To tell you the truth, until Sam disappeared on me I wasn't sure there was anything here. People go missing all the time."
Bobby fell silent again.
"Don't say it, Bobby," Dean said. "Besides all that, this isn't exactly a great area to avoid encounters with the FBI. I want us to stay dead this time, you know?"
"I wasn't going to say anything," Bobby said, "and you're bang on about staying dead. Look, tell me what you do know. Maybe I can dig something up to help."
Of course Bobby could. Patching his library back together was a huge task, Dean knew, but he also knew Bobby had a firm grasp on which books to collect first. For all he knew, the old man already had a shiny new library set up.
"Four people vanished about two months ago, turned up in various places dead a month later. No pattern that we could distinguish, but all of them had been in the water for part of their decomp. Autopsy reports weren't good enough to determine if anything supernatural chomped on them," Dean said. He chewed on his thumb for a second. "'Bout the same time those corpses were found, more people started disappearing."
"Sounds like a pattern."
"Yeah, that's what Sam said."
"Any of the second batch show up yet so you can have some fresh intel?"
"No, not yet." Dean sat on the edge of his bed and pinched the bridge of his nose. "You can see why I'm worried. Sam could have gone all space cadet, or worse, and he'd be easy pickings for who or whatever this was. I'm not ruling out regular human sicko."
"And you're sure it's not Leviathan."
"Pretty sure. They'd have come for me by now or put on a big show. It's goddamned Halloween, the perfect cover for things that go bump in the night."
Shit, Dean hated Halloween.
"I'll get there as soon as I can, if you need me."
Inside, Dean was itching for exactly that. Not that he wouldn't have been twitchy anyway, but with Sam prone to hallucinations not that long ago, and still managed a thousand-yard-stare at least once every day or two, the ante seemed about four hundred times higher than usual.
"No, Bobby, I know you've got a lot on your plate. I'll poke around, see what I can see first."
"I'll let you know what I can find, but you haven't really given me anything to go on. If that changes, let me know, and if you find Sam in the meantime, give him a smack for me, will ya? I'm getting too old for this crap. And, Dean? Don't do anything stupid like get yourself caught too."
Dean felt a little gratified that Bobby was concerned even while he was being practical and lending a call for common sense element to Dean's mild panic. Sam was in extremely good shape, physically, so whatever got him had to be bad or had to have another advantage to exploit. That narrowed it down to just about a billion possible suspects, natural and supernatural. He needed this like he needed a festering boil. He tossed the phone on the bed to go splash cold water on his face. It didn't really help, and he had no idea why he'd thought it would. What he needed was a bottle of whisky and maybe some aspirin. And they, too, he knew, would do jack squat to make him feel better. Booze was his only outlet, though he knew he was doing no one any favors by drowning in bottle after bottle.
He scrubbed his face dry with the rough motel towel and threw it angrily into the sink basin when he was done. As Dean stepped from the bathroom intent on having at least two shots of whisky despite it all, his phone buzzed, then buzzed a few more times. Finally, that had to be Sam marathon texting him. He pulled the messages up, frowned. They were short bursts, really. First, "Think I got." Then, "It. Nizxc it." And finally just, "mic, wate." Three separate messages, and none of them told him a damned thing. It didn't sound like Sam being cryptic so much as Sam being … terrible at texting, which wasn't very Sam-like at all.
"Well, that's helpful," Dean muttered.
At least he could call Sam, get some straight answers and while he was at it, unload a few hours worth of pent-up worry off his chest ala disproportionate anger. When the attempt to do all of that was thwarted by an unanswered phone, he bit back a curse, then did the only thing he felt like he could. He dashed out a text of his own, "You better be okay", with little to no hope his brother would actually receive it. The more he thought about it, the more he thought maybe Sam's own texts could have been sent hours ago. What a time for failed technology. On a whim, he checked Sam's GPS again and it was on. To think, the idea of GPS actually used to creep him out.
His worry notched up about Sam not answering, but a location was good. It was somewhere to start. 2713 Mitscher Rd. Dean leaned closer, out of reflex. Anacostia. Shit, that sounded familiar, though he didn't know why. It couldn't be good. A quick click on Google Maps clarified that address was the headquarters for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. No, no, so not good.
"Sam, you idiot, what did you get yourself into?"
This was all very coincidental. Dean vaguely remembered years ago Sam bragging about breaking into NCIS' extremely secure system to find him after that bitch vampire snagged him, and he remembered that NCIS agent who was also vamp bait. Mouthy guy, the kind that knew he was charming and therefore wasn't charming at all. Dean hated guys like that. He had to wonder, though, if saving the guy's life might give him an edge. If only he could remember his name. He was pretty sure he'd remember the face. Too bad he wasn't the geek Sam was when it came to computers. Out of curiosity and maybe the glimmer of an impulsive, stupid idea, he hit the NCIS homepage to see if they had any images of their headquarters. Blueprint would be better, but what could he do? He wasn't a hacker.
Finding that guy for potential favor/potential blackmail would be a Plan B, only used if he couldn't figure out how to retrieve Sam on his own. After all these years, the last thing he expected was the law, even some rinky-dink agency of it, to catch them. Looked like they weren't going to stay dead for long after all. He sighed. Playing cop and walking in to their own offices was stupid and risky, but if they already knew Sam was alive, they had to figure Dean was too. If he could avoid certain people, the risk could also pay off. There really was no debating. He wanted Sam back in one piece, and Sam was likely at NCIS. It was time to pull out the suit and aviator shades.
It didn't occur to Dean that like the Leviathan, if Sam had ended up in the clutches of a government agency, they would have tried to locate him. There'd have been some kind of manhunt if that were the case, with half of the sadistic Winchester brothers resurrected yet again and in custody. He didn't think for a second Sam'd give him up, but he also knew from Sam's stories that even years ago NCIS had state of the art equipment. How much easier had it become to track someone like them, now that someone might know to look?
Dean took back his gratitude about the GPS, and all the advances in technology. He wouldn't go so far as to recollect the good ol' days of hunting John Winchester style, but damn. It threw a wrench in his thoughts. It might be Sam's phone was at NCIS, but Sam wasn't and they didn't know what they had. He was fairly sure Devereaux had cleared them totally and NCIS would only discover the phone belonged to one Mr. Tom Smith, a guy with zero credit or criminal history. The phone wasn't vital, but it was his only link.
He had to find out, one way or another, if Sam had gotten snagged or if he'd lost his phone and somehow got really, really lost on the way back to the motel. Dean used that blessing-or-curse-depending-on-scenario technology to find the directions to NCIS, put on his best suit, most winning smile and went to follow the only lead he had on Sam. He'd worry about potential supernatural beings and re-killing him and Sam later.