A/N: MY GOD I'M SORRY. No excuse for this absence. Hope some of you will give it a try anyway. Am almost finished, will post again promptly.

A quick summary to date: Sam is kidnapped by a witch after a hunt gone wrong; Dean tracks him down in the witch's underground maze; but Sam's been trapped in a virtual reality where Dean dies over and over, and refuses to believe it's the real Dean.

P.S. Note: this was totally written before Mystery Spot. That, or I secretly communicate with Eric Kripke. You'll never know!

"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.

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

"I'm not going to care."

Then why are you following me?

Dean spun around.

Sam was gone.

CHAPTER THREE

Sam breathed in, out, soft and slow, counting. In. Out.

At a hundred and eighty seven, he heard footsteps and then cursing. "Sam!" yelled the thing that looked like his brother, and then again: "SAM!"

Sam stayed where he was, his long limbs folded up against the wall of one of the alternate tunnels they'd passed. His breath hissed loudly in his ears and he tried to soften it.

"Little piece of fucking shit!" his brother swore, his voice getting louder as he drew closer to Sam's hiding spot. "I cannot believe you are doing this to me. Christ on a motherfucking cracker!"

Sam's mouth opened, and then he clamped his jaw shut. He hadn't heard Dean say that since Pastor Jim overheard them at a grave-dig in Sacramento when Dean was seventeen. That fucking witch, always getting back underneath his skin, no matter how he tried to shut her out.

The Dean-thing was in front of him now, stomping far more loudly than should have been possible on a dirt floor. "When I get ahold of you, you're gonna wish that pussy-ass school had never let you leave," it hissed.

Too late, thought Sam, I already wish that. He shut his eyes and leaned back against the wall. The footsteps carried on past him without pause, and soon his name was bouncing off the walls far ahead of him.

Sam let out the breath he was holding and stretched his legs out, then got carefully to his feet. The break in his collarbone was throbbing dully again. He leaned his back against the wall and tried to think. He didn't have a plan. He needed one. His only objective had been getting away from the Dean-thing.

It was time to explore the limits of this false reality the witch had trapped him in. Each time that Dean had been his guide, it had led to Dean's death. Sometimes it ended there, after Dean had fallen off the cliff, and he was whisked off to the next hallucination, or sometimes the witch let him linger there, in the woods or the desert or an alleyway, his brother's body a lump of cold meat beside him.

That wasn't going to happen again; not if he ditched Dean first.

He rubbed his palm against the wall, feeling dirt clods crumble away at his touch. Underneath his hand, the walls vibrated slightly, in time with the low, distant rumbling that had started up when they left the witchpit.

It felt so real. Dean felt so real. The witch was a true artist.

Sam flattened his palm and used it to push his body off the wall. He turned and headed down the pitch-black side tunnel, away from the receding sound of his name still being called.

Dean quit calling Sam's name after fifteen minutes of silence, and stopped only because he'd run into the lip of the hole where he had so briefly found his brother.

God, this sucked. He'd lost his damn brother. Granted, he was pretty sure, if not positive, that Sam had purposely hidden from him. He'd spent the time walking back trying to put himself in his brother's shoes. Sure – if Sam was so sure that Dean was going to die, he might run away from him. But to where? His brother had denied seeing the witch's warren in his other hallucinations. Had he lied? And most importantly, how the fuck could he find his brother in this maze?

There were innumerable side tunnels that Sam could have taken. The answer was: he couldn't find his brother by luck alone. His best chance was not to try to follow Sam, to find the witch herself.

Dean had not been able to find much about the sorginak, the witches from the Basque-speaking regions of France and Spain. His father had briefly visited the topic in his journal. From him Dean knew that sorginak drew their powers from spells that had to be first laid down in herbs, then activated by chanting. And the blindness spell that the sorgina had cast on Dean when she first took Sammy had only lasted half an hour; he hoped that was standard – and if it was, then she had to be renewing Sam's hallucination spell every half hour.

And he guessed the witch had to return here if she wanted to fix the spell on Sam.

It was a moment's work to set up the rope and to slide to the bottom of the pit. His thumbs burned on the way down this time, and he opened his palm to find the red beginnings of blisters on both hands. Sam notices this later?

This time he took a minute to canvass the circular walls of the pit. He had noticed the dull gleam of glass bottles in the flickering candlelight before, and seen that most of them were unlabeled; now he picked up the jars to find the usual witch's array – mostly herbs, a few unpleasant bottled specimens of who-knew-what floating spider or eel.

The air suddenly turned cold and Dean sprang into action, scrambled to flatten himself against the far wall of the pit, well aware that a cold spot accompanied paranormal activity. The witch was coming.

She shimmered into view a moment later. She looked just as Dean remembered her: wispy white hair, wrapped in a huge furry-looking coat, and almost like someone's (very aged) grandmother until she turned and the large sightless brown eyes settled directly on him.

Shit.

"Anaia," she rasped at him, and her face closed up in anger and she raised her twisted hands.

"Fucking hell," Dean spat, and went for the revolver at his hip.

Sam got a faceful of cobweb. Again.

He tried to pull it off him intact, but the strands stuck to his hands and twined around his fingers. The silky-stranded web was huge – it stretched from ceiling to floor and spanned the tunnel width. He tried not to think about the size of the spider that must have spun it.

On the other hand, that must mean that no one had gone down this tunnel for a long time. He couldn't figure out whether that was bad or good. It was half an hour since he had ditched Dean in the maze of tunnels, and the side trail he'd chosen continued to wind. It was frightening. He almost wished for his fake brother back. Almost. He could imagine himself condemned to wander in the tunnels without end.

Was it possible that the witch could lose him in her own mind?

Could he exist as nothing more than imagination? Would he just crumble away?

Dean woke up upside down. It took him a minute to figure it out, because frankly the dirt that was making up his ceiling could have been anything. First he noticed that his head was pounding and his hands felt strangely heavy – and immobile. Then the corner of the witch's robe flapped into view, and he saw that she was standing on the ceiling and he put it together. She had pinned him upside down against the wall like a … well, an upside down bug in a collection.

"Whatre you doing?" he slurred.

The witch, who had been bent over something on the ground – ceiling – ground? straightened and turned to face him.

"Anaia." She said that foreign word again, and spoke in a different language, a phrase that ended with a raised voice. He guessed it was a question. Dean cleared his throat.

"I don't speak Basque."

She squinted at him through heavy, age-spotted eyelids for a moment, and then turned back to whatever she was doing. It looked like she was carving something; little flakes of wood littered the ceiling (no, floor, floor, Dean) around her.

Dean tried to wiggle his fingers experimentally. There was no rope binding him, but strong forces kept his hands down. It felt as though a giant, invisible hand was pinning him to the wall. The belt containing all of his weapons was gone from his hip, and he could see his precious salt-containing knapsack leaned against the far wall.

Damn. Dean had fucked up. He thought he knew what the witch was capable of; thought she needed time to lay down a spell before it took effect. Clearly, he was wrong. The spell that had knocked him out was almost instantaneous. He hadn't even been able to get to his gun.

Frustration filled him. The fucking witch only spoke Basque. Then why was she so obsessed with his brother?

"What do you want?" he burst out.

The witch, back turned, didn't move. "Euskal herria," she whispered, and this time it was definitely sad. Dean bit back a curse. Fucking foreign languages! Then:

"Home," she said. Dean did a double take.

"You can speak English?"

She didn't answer, just chipped faster at whatever she was carving. Wood shavings curled away from her knife, which glinted in the dim candlelight.

Dean shifted in impatience. The blood rushing to his head was making him dizzy, and being pinned spread-eagled upside down made him feel vulnerable. "What do you want with my brother?" he demanded.

"Your anaia?" the witch said in raspy, thickly accented English. She sounded about a thousand years old. "Your anaia . . . Sam."

"Yes – Sam! Where is he?"

She shook her head. "The anaia. He is lost."

The hairs on the back of Dean's neck stood up. "You lost him!" he practically shouted at her.

"No. You. You break … you broke it."

"I – You're the one who made him think I was dead!"

"Nire sorginkeria. My spell. You broke it. You lost the anaia. Now I bring him back. With you."

"I'm not doing anything for you!"

She got up heavily, joints popping, and Dean took a moment to rage at the injustice: were it a physical fight, he could kick her ass to Toledo in an instant.

Then, knife in hand, carved wood thing – it looked like a cup -- the witch was in front of him. "Hey! What are you doing?" Dean yelped, and struggled against the invisible grip. The witch just calmly reached out with her knife to slice a diagonal cut across his forearm. Dean watched as blood snaked down his arm to pool in the carved wooden cup. When the cup was full of Dean's blood, she pulled it away.

"This," she said, waving the cup in front of his face, "brings the anaia back, see?"

"Oh, shit," Dean breathed.

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