Sorry about the slight delay in posting. We had really bad storms last night and I had to write thank you cards during the day.

Anywho, please enjoy this chapter. It really kicks things off in the story :)

Chapter 2

Welcome To The Fallout

White hot pain laced through Sam's skull as he struggled to sit up. He blinked, forcing his eyes open, trying to clear his head as the pain receded, leaving him dazed. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, away from the dusty shag carpeting.

Shag?

Every instinct his father had instilled within him kicked into overdrive at that one observation, his brain whirring to life. Shag. The motel room he'd performed the ritual in hadn't had shag carpeting. It had worked. It had actually worked.

For the first time in two years, Sam could feel hope rising within him. He didn't have to be alone anymore, didn't have to watch his own back. He didn't have to wake in the middle of the night with dreams of the torture his brother was enduring because of him still fresh in his mind. He didn't have to be so mechanical, so emotionless, so drained anymore. For the first time in two years, he actually felt like a person again.

He scrambled to his feet, senses alert, eyes and ears and nose and heart taking in everything that they could without overloading. It had worked. He was going to fix everything. Maybe even himself.

But the room was unfamiliar. It was dark, the windows boarded over, melted candle wax spilling over the sides of old bowls that had been too small to contain it as the fire ran out. The only things present besides the burnt-down candles were a single bed, a small television, and a small table. Trash had accumulated in one corner, and the bathroom door had been broken off.

It wasn't right. Sure, he and Dean had stayed in some pretty run-down places, but never anything this bad. Never anything that could be a hazard to their health.

Still, there was a possibility that he'd overshot, that he'd gone back to a time so far before the deal that Dean hadn't been concerned about health issues. It was possible that he'd gone back to the time when he'd been at college.

His stomach tying itself into nervous knots, a welcome feeling after two years without so much as a twinge, Sam approached the bed, keeping his feet quiet on the grimy carpet. He reached a tentative hand forward, wrapped long fingers around thin sheets, and slowly pulled what passed as covers from the single lump lying there. He held his breath. He let himself hope.

The kid in the bed wasn't Dean. He was skinny, no older than nineteen, with a shaggy mop of dirty-blond hair and features that were too soft, too weak to be his brother's.

Something inside of Sam clicked. It was the same thing that had clicked when the trickster had made him live for nearly three months without his brother, the same thing that clicked when the time had actually come to say good-bye. It was like a switch, not the ones that Ava had told him about, the ones that triggered psychic phenomena and eventually turned good people into killers. No, it was something completely different. It was the thing that made him numb.

He dropped the sheet and turned from the bed. For a brief moment, he considered killing the kid, making him suffer for pulling such a mean prank. For getting Sam's hopes up. But the switch had flipped, and he didn't care. He didn't care about the kid. He didn't care about himself. He didn't care about what he had done wrong, because this wasn't his motel room, and it wasn't Dean's.

Of course, that didn't mean that he'd been entirely wrong. It was always possible that Dean was there, just in another room. Time travel wasn't an exact science, after all; more of a crap shoot, really.

Hope welled up within him again as he considered the possibility. Maybe Dean was in another room, maybe all he had to do was look for his brother. Yeah. That seemed reasonable.

Casting one last glance at the stranger in the bed, Sam headed toward the door. The knob was cool to the touch, stained with something dark. For a moment, he imagined that it was blood, but that was impossible. What would blood be doing on the door knob?

Sam unlocked the door and backed out of the room, smiling to himself. He would look for the car in the parking lot, or check at the front desk for a Jim Rockford. He would find his brother and save them both. Then everything would be fine. Everything would be just the way it was supposed to be.

He spun around as the door clicked shut, and gasped. The landscape that stretched before him was even more unfamiliar than the battered room had been. Dried grass crumbled under the breeze as lightning forked across a desolate gray sky. Wind blew through the barren branches of dead trees. The silence was deafening, and a cold chill ran down Sam's spine. Wherever- or whenever- he was, it certainly wasn't Kansas anymore.

Hands shoved deep into his pockets, Sam gazed over the cracked pavement of the parking lot, searching in vain for the Impala. There weren't any cars there, weren't any people that he could see. There was nothing.

He turned toward what he hoped was the office, walking past boarded-up doors and broken windows. The office was just as bad. Wood nailed over the entrance, shattered glass scattered along the sidewalk. He peeked in through the window anyway, looking for signs of life, and saw none.

The wind gusted around him as Sam looked back toward the motel room, at a complete loss. He had to find out where he was, when he was. He had to find out what he'd done wrong so that he could undo it and try again later. And he figured that the easiest way to do that would be to ask the kid in the motel room.

He had just turned to go back and confront the boy when he heard what sounded like voices drifting his way from farther down the street. He stepped out toward the parking lot, eyes narrowed, searching.

A man and a woman were walking side-by-side down the street, deep in conversation. A black cloud of smoke that vaguely resembled a dog hung at their heels, shifting in the wind, its eyes glowing with the fires of Hell.

Sam's blood froze in his veins as he watched the couple walking with the hellhound, sometimes turning and talking to it like most people talk to their pets. As they grew closer he could see that their eyes were oily black, the eyes of the possessed. He ducked back into the shadows, trying to avoid being spotted as they walked toward the motel, across the broken street.

He slunk through the shadows, sticking close to the walls, as they approached. By the time he reached the room, the only one that wasn't still boarded up, the couple had made it to the lot. Sam opened the door and slid inside, letting his eyes slide shut with relief as he got something solid between the demons and himself, as the adrenalin faded from his bloodstream.

The sound of a gun cocking brought him back to his senses.

Sam's eyes snapped open to reveal that the boy he'd left asleep in the bed was now very much awake. The kid narrowed his eyes, glaring at the hunter as the gun glinted in the dim morning light.

Sam was quick in pulling his own weapon, brandishing the knife that he'd taken from Ruby nearly two years before. He smirked as he caught the uncertainty in the boy's eyes.

"Holy shit," the kid muttered, lowering the gun to get a better look at the intruder.

Sam wasn't phased by what appeared to be wonder. He'd gotten in the habit of getting down to business since his brother's death, and this was no different than any of the hunts he'd been on since that day. "Watch the language, there, kiddo," he quipped, taking a step toward the kid.

In the old days, he would have been afraid of getting shot, of dying, of leaving Dean alone. Now, though, death seemed a welcome release. Maybe he'd even get lucky. Maybe the murders of countless demons and one bitch would be viewed as evil. Maybe he could meet up with his brother again.

"It's impossible," the kid whispered, staring at Sam with wide eyes and a ghost of a smile.

"Just tell me who you are," he said, knife held steady as the boy's gun began to dip toward the floor, "and tell me where my brother is."

The teenager broke out into a full-fledged smile at that, tucking his gun into the waistband of his jeans. "Sammy," he said, "it's me." His eyes turned black as a moonless night, his tone amiable, body relaxed. "It's Dean."