A/N: Welcome to the second chapter! Hope you enjoy, and as always, please share your thoughts. I'm also looking for a beta, if anyone has recommendations. Thanks!

It all snapped into place.

"The witch," Dean whispered. "You think I'm the witch."

"I don't think it, witch," Sam said. "I know it."

CHAPTER TWO.
While Dean pondered how to respond to this, his brother added, "I see you brought the knapsack this time. That's a nice touch. There a first-aid kit in there?"

Dean silently handed him the knapsack. Sam unbuttoned it and rifled through the contents. "Nice. This set of knives? That's Dean's favorite. That's good; but you forgot the salt. Dean wouldn't go anywhere without salt."

"I used it for the barrier," Dean said automatically, a little defensively. "Dude, Sam. This is Dean. The handsome mug, the fantastic hunting skills – are you seriously doubting it?"

"Cut it out," Sam said. "I like it better when we're frank with each other."

"And the witch has been, what – making you hallucinate?" Dean looked around at the room, seeing the incense this time, some of them still burning, filling the room with a heavy sticky sweetness. "And you've been hallucinating me." He swallowed. "My death."

"Deaths," Sam corrected.

"God, Sam." Dean could hardly get the words out. "That's – you – "

"Quit it with the drama, okay?" Sam wiped some of the blood from his face with cotton in the first-aid kit, then gathered his feet under him and stood. He wavered slightly, but kept upright. Dean stayed on the ground, staring up at him. "Remember, you're just another hallucination."

Sam looked up at the rope that still dangled from the tunnel above. "Damn, is that how you got down here?"

"Yeah," Dean said automatically. Humor him, he thought. He would play along with this for now, as long as Sam was willing to work with him to get out. After they got the hell out of this burrow, then he would work on fixing Sam.

"Well, I can't climb out," his brother prompted.

"Not with a broken bone, I guess."

"Two."

"That's – wait, two?"

"Wrist," Sam raised his hand, "and collarbone." He pulled down the collar of his shirt to reveal something bruised and red and awful-looking.

"Collarbone? What the fuck, Sam? Why didn't you tell me about that?" Dean jumped to his feet and reached for Sam. Sam drew back.

"Don't touch me," Sam whispered harshly, and they stared into each other's eyes for a moment.

And then Dean stood back, because it had occurred to him that maybe it would convince Sam that it was really him.

Sam turned away from him, and for a long moment they were both silent. Then Sam squared his shoulders and said, still not looking at his brother, "How are you planning to get me out of here?"

"You're the one with the brain," Dean said.

Sam looked up at the lip of the hole again, and Dean could see the gears turning in his head. That was like the Sam he knew.

"What did you tie the rope to?"

"Stakes," Dean said. "I brought stakes, just in case, cuz I don't know what will kill this bitch. Up there is a tunnel and the dirt on the floor is pretty hard-packed, so I pounded two into the ground and used them to secure the rope."

Sam studied him carefully. "Flaw," he announced, loudly, as if he had just spotted the mistake in a math problem. "My Dean would never think of that. Better luck next time, witch."

Dean gaped incredulously. "Wh -- screw you, Sam!"

"Go on then; climb up, and you'll have to pull me up after."

"I do not believe you," Dean muttered, hefting the knapsack onto his shoulders. "Witch hallucination or not – you are gonna pay for that. How are you going to hold onto the rope with a broken wrist, anyway?"

"I'll tie it around me."

"Better check the knots twice. You might fall and knock some sense into your

head."

Dean shimmied up the rope with the same technique that had earned him the praise of his fourth-grade gym teachers. Dean killed at gym class. When he got to the top, he checked the knots that he had tied around the stakes, and was pleased to find them as tight as he'd first tied them. At least something was still straight in this world.

"You ready?" Sam called from below.

"Hold on," Dean said. "I might be able to rig something like a pulley out of this." He studied the stakes. It was easier to pull a weight with a pulley, right? Well, he didn't have a wheel, but he did have several stakes. He slipped the rope around one and tugged on it experimentally. It moved smoothly enough. He'd show Sam, that doubting asshole.

It was easier to pull Sam up than he'd anticipated, but Dean suspected that had a little to do with his pseudo-pulley system and a lot more to do with the weight that Sam had clearly lost over the past few days. When they both collapsed on the floor of the tunnel, Dean was the first to roll into a crouch and then onto his feet. Sam stayed down for a few more moments.

Dean had the idea that Sam would bat away his hand if he offered, it so instead he said, "So dude … do you remember how you got down here?"

"No."

"Have you seen it before, in one of the … the hallucinations?"

"No."

"What do you remember, then?"

Sam got up carefully, as if he was sore, and stretched. "The last time I saw y—Dean—was at the Morrisons' house. I was out for a long time, I think. Then you started up with the hallucinations. And here I am."

"Have you ever seen her? The witch?"

Sam glanced sideways at him. "Other than right now?"

Frustration bubbled up in Dean but he squashed it back. "Other than right now."

"No. Not in person."

"I think she's a sorgina," Dean said. "A Basque witch. A lot fits. They operate on Fridays, which is when she took you. Sorginak also live in caves; that's where we are. Hey. Are you even listening? I'm telling you what took you!"

"Not really interested," Sam said, investigating his fingernails. "Can we get going yet?"

"Which way do you want to go then, genius?" snapped Dean. "The tunnel I came from leads to the witch. And I have no fucking idea where the other way leads."

Sam shrugged. "Let's go the other way, then."

"Your funeral," were the words that sprang to Dean's mind, but he clamped his jaw down over them.

They walked. Sam's head barely scraped the top of the dirt tunnel, so he had to walk with his head tipped slightly to one side. Dean led the way. As they traveled further away from the pit, with its small circle of candlelight, the blackness of the tunnel grew until Dean was feeling along the walls to find his way forward. Once or twice they passed holes in the walls, entrances to other tunnels in the burrow. They agreed that it was better to keep going straight, in case they needed to turn around to go back the way they'd come. The tunnel stretched on and on, though, and Dean was starting to wonder if they'd made the right choice. He also couldn't stop himself from glancing back at Sam every few minutes, to make sure he was really there.

"What would you do if I was Eurydice?" Sam's voice floated up to him after the third time he looked back.

"Now what gibberish are you talking about?"

"Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus followed Eurydice down to hell, and Hades let him take her back, but only if Orpheus never looked back at her during the journey back to earth. It's Greek mythology."

"Who in the what now?"

Sam laughed, and it sounded a little more normal. Dean felt the knot in his chest ease a little bit at the sound.

"Look, Sam," Dean said again, deciding to press his luck, "what do I have to do to convince you that this is reality?"

At that, Sam's voice, which had softened, got hard again. "You can't."

"But there's gotta be somethin. Ask me anything – any random memory, anything you know that only I would know."

"Don't you see why that's useless? You've got my memories. You've got access to the same things that I know about Dean, so why would that prove anything? And besides," Sam paused, "I don't know why you're so worked up. You haven't got much time to do it, anyway; you're gonna die again soon."

No matter how often he did it, Dean could not get over Sam dropping bombshells like that. Frustration at everything – this shitty job, this witch, this sudden complication with Sam – bubbled up and he couldn't hold it back.

"Dammit, Sam! I'm not gonna die!"

"You can't promise me that!" Sam shot back, and he sounded really angry now. They had stopped, and Dean had turned around, although neither of them could see each other in the darkness of the tunnel. "Not even if you were real. My Dean wouldn't want me to believe things he couldn't back up!"

"I AM YOUR DEAN! So I'll say whatever the fuck I want! If I say I won't die, then I won't!"

"I," said Sam, low and furiously, "like any sane person, only have so much emotion to spare. And I will not watch the death of another person I care about. So when you die, I'm not going to care about it."

The ground opened up beneath Dean and left him floundering. "You don't seriously mean that," he said uncertainly.

"I definitely do," Sam said, too loudly.

The dirt walls swallowed the echoes of their voices and left them both wrapped in complete silence.

Sam was the first to move. "Let's go," he said.

Dean didn't understand his rush. After all, his brother thought this was another hallucination to end with his death. But slowly he turned his back to his brother and walked forward once again.

"I'm not going to care about you," Dean's subconscious sang, over and over, in tune with his footsteps. "I'm not going to care about you." He had had no idea, when he started, how bad this was going to get.

"I'm not going to care about you."

Then why are you following me?

Dean spun around.

Sam was gone.

tbc