Chapter 6

Bobby scratched his beard, looking doubtfully at me. "So where'd we find out about all this stuff?"

"Samuel's library," I answered absently, wondering if there was a way to stream-line the next part. "He has a book that tells you that the ashes of a phoenix can burn the Mother of All, and he also has Colt's journal which gives the time and place of the death of a phoenix."

"Handy," the old man remarked. I looked at him and shrugged.

"It's TV, what'd you expect from a forty-five minute episode?"

"And Cas is down with taking us back in time?" Dean asked, leaning against the doorway between the kitchen and dining room, a bottle of beer dangling from two fingers.

"He seemed to be," I told him.

"Okay," he said, lifting the bottle and finishing his beer. "I gotta – a thing. Be back in an hour."

"What?" Bobby looked at him.

"Relax, it's related," Dean said, dropping the bottle in the trash can on the way out the back door.

"Related?" Bobby looked at me, eyebrows disappearing under the brim of his cap. "Related?"

"Uh…um…" I hedged, giving up the pretence with a sigh and handing him the script. "He's gone shopping."

"What?"

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"Get your hair done too?" Bobby growled at him when he came back in an hour and a half later, shopping bags clearly marked "Wally's Western World" gripped in both hands.

"Bite me," Dean told him cheerfully, dumping a bag next to his brother and heading for the stairs.

Sam leaned over and peered in the top of the bag, his expression pained as he took in its contents.

"What'd he get you?"

Sam pulled out a white shirt, the fabric gleaming and embroidered with fancy yellow roses over either shoulder. He held it up, his expression adequately describing how he felt about it.

Bobby snorted and shook his head. "Didn't figure this."

"He's like a freak when it comes to Westerns, you know that," Sam said tiredly. "He can recite every line from every Clint Eastwood movie ever made."

"Even the monkey ones?"

"Especially the monkey ones."

"His name is Clyde and he's an orang-utan," Dean said from the doorway to the hall.

We all turned around to look at him. He was wearing a cowboy hat, jeans and boots, a dark shirt with a string tie just visible under the stripe serape that covered everything else.

"You goin' to a hoedown?" Bobby asked him, the side of his mouth lifting.

"Sammy, get dressed," Dean continued, ignoring the comment as he walked into the dining room.

"I can't wear this," Sam said, standing up and holding up the bag.

"Sure you can," Dean overrode the expected argument. "You wanna blend in, right?"

Looking into the bag, Sam shook his head. "I can't imagine anywhere I'd 'blend in' wearing this."

"We don't have time for this," Bobby cut them off. "Get on the horn to the angel, I ain't getting' any younger here."

Dean shot a look at his brother and ducked his head, the hat shadowing his face. "Castiel. The, uh, fate of the world is in the balance. So, come on down here. Come on, Cas, I-Dream-of-Jeannie-your-ass down here pronto. Please."

The rustle of wings was expected. The angel who appeared was not. In jeans, a short jacket and a frilly grey blouse, straight blonde hair over her shoulders and sporting a not-very-hidden pained expression on her face, Dean stepped back slightly as she stared expectantly at him.

"Jeannie?" Dean asked, one brow rising as he glanced around to me. I spread my hands helplessly. There was nothing in the script to indicate that Cas had switched vessels.

"Rachel," the blonde said shortly. "I understand you need some assistance? How can I help you?"

"Well, uh, we kind of need to talk to the Big Kahuna," Dean said, looking back at her, frowning a little as he heard the underlying edge to her voice.

"I'm here on Castiel's behalf."

"Where is he?" Sam asked, moving to stand beside Dean.

"Busy," Rachel said, barely looking at him.

"Busy?" Dean asked disbelievingly.

"Yes."

The clipped answer stopped him cold and I thought I'd have to remember that next time I had a confrontation with him. It seemed a lot more dignified than stuttering and babbling some futile explanation anyway. Less is more, I thought to myself.

Dean drew in a breath, a sure indication he'd just about run out of his store of forbearance for the niceties of small talk. "Well, we've got a line on the mother of freaking everything, so –"

"I'm sure your issue's very important. But Castiel is currently commanding an army, so…" she let the sentence trail away pointedly.

"So we get stuck with Miss Moneypenny," Dean finished sourly.

"So you need to learn your place," she said, her tone a hair's breadth from a snap.

Watching her, I could see that she was really getting under Dean's skin. It was a great lesson.

"Look, I don't know who you think you are –" he said, his voice deepening as patience vanished and he realised she wasn't going to budge from her position.

"I'm his friend," Rachel cut him off sharply, emphasising the word a little.

"What, you think we're not?" Sam asked, his tone a bit too defensive. I knew what he was thinking and that the word was sounding a teensy bit hypocritical to him, given what I told them. This time, however, he got her full attention. She turned to look at him coldly.

"I think you call him when you need something," she said bitterly. "We're fighting a war."

"We get that –" he started, but she didn't give him time to say anything else.

"Clearly, you don't, or you wouldn't call him every time you stub your toe, you petty, entitled little pie–"

"Rachel. That's enough."

I didn't even hear wings when Castiel appeared, his gravelly voice drowning out the no-doubt choice insult she'd been working her way up to. I was kinda sorry to have missed out on hearing it.

"I told you I'd take care of this."

"It's all right. You can go," Cas told her firmly.

"You're staying?"

I hate to say it because she'd been pretty offensive from the moment she'd appeared, not even giving the brothers the benefit of the doubt, but I actually felt a little sorry for her. Her voice rose and got a bit squeaky as she took in the fact that he was clearly choosing Dean and Sam over her and she was being dismissed out of hand. She probably didn't know the angel as well as she thought she had because insulting the Winchesters did not sit well with him.

"Go. I'll come when I can," he added, his tone softening slightly. It didn't seem to make a difference. She disappeared and I'm sure I heard a disgruntled huff along with the pop of the air zipping back together to fill the space her vessel had taken up.

"Wow. Friend of yours?" Dean asked, his expression showing how unimpressed he'd been with her.

"Yes," Cas said. And I sighed. Now he was standing up for her, not when she'd been dissed by his other friends. Even angels had the capacity to be royal douches. "She's, uh, my lieutenant. She's...committed to the cause. Now, what do you need?"

"A return trip to Sunrise, Wyoming, circa 1861," Sam told him bluntly.

"Why?"

"Need to find us a phoenix," Dean expanded, his good humour returning with the prospect of going Western. He really was the most straightforward man I'd ever seen. "We can take down Eve with its ashes."

The angel looked from him to Sam. "I can give you twenty-four hours, that's all."

"Why?"

"The further back I send you, the harder it becomes to retrieve you. Twenty-four hours is all I can risk. If I don't pull you home within that time, you'll be lost."

The brothers exchanged a glance and Dean shrugged. "Twenty-four hours it is," he said. "C'mon, Sam, wear the damned hat at least."

He pulled it out of the bag and passed it to his brother. It was plain. Sam sighed softly and took it.

Bobby walked to the scroll-top desk against the wall and pulled out a small cotton bag. It clinked softly as he carried to Dean and handed it over.

"What's this?" Dean asked as he pulled open the draw-string and looked inside.

"Don't take plastic where you're going, son," Bobby said heavily, rolling his eyes.

Dean lifted the blanket – sorry, the serape – up and tied the bag to his belt as Cas turned to face them.

"I'll send you back to March 4th," he said, looking at them. "That should give you sufficient time to find what you need."

He lifted his hands and touched them lightly on the forehead and they disappeared.

It was a bizarre thing to watch.

I'm a huge fan of the show, and a pretty big fan of the genre, actually, and I kept thinking it should've looked natural, you know, should've looked…normal. But it didn't. They vanished into thin air and Cas turned around, his eyes deep blue and I couldn't get a breath into my chest, mouth opening and closing like an out-of-water fish.

"Are you alright?" the angel asked me, and Bobby turned to look at me as well, slapping his hand on my back as I stood there gasping for air. It worked. The next breath went in and I guess I stopped turning blue in front of them.

"I have to go," Cas said to Bobby, probably deciding that I wasn't a part of the decision-making process here.

"What about the boys getting' back?" Bobby asked immediately and I could hear the suspicion in his voice. Fortunately Cas didn't, or at least, didn't seem to pay it any mind.

"Pray for me in twenty-four hours and I will return."

"I'll be prayin' for all of us," Bobby confirmed sourly, turning to the desk as the angel disappeared and picking up a timer. He set it for twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes after glancing at his watch and put it down, looking at me.

"Well, any bright ideas?"

"We should probably go and get Samuel's library," I said. "The more resources we've got, the better off we are, right?"

He nodded, a trace of humour showing in his eyes. "Not bad. Might make somethin' out of ya."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The truck was noisy, cold and uncomfortable, but it made good time. I was hunched in the corner of the passenger side, my jacket as tight around me as I could get it, just trying to Zen my way through the trip.

"What's goin' on between you and Sam?" Bobby asked, well, half-shouted, at me, his gaze staying on the headlight-lit road in front of us.

"Nothing," I said back, absolutely not wanting to talk about that.

"Doesn't look like nothing," he persisted, this time throwing a quick look my way.

Bobby didn't remember the alternative time-line and Dean had been specific that it would stay that way. It wasn't like I could've explained the whole disastrous sideways journey to him, even if I'd kept the details of his alternative life a secret. He knew that something had happened, because he'd read the outline of the script. He didn't know exactly what the something was because my presence had apparently completely screwed over how the writers had seen it anyway.

"It's not important," I said.

He muttered something and I had the feeling it wasn't 'Happy Birthday' but there was no way I was saying anything else.

"Why you?" he asked, a few minutes later, and I wondered what he was trying to figure out with all these questions.

"I don't know," I told him, honestly enough. I didn't know. "Wrong place, wrong time?"

"No such thing as coincidence, in this life," he said, taking his eyes off the road to turn and give me a long look.

"You think this was – is – like their life? Planned somehow?" I asked him, and I'm afraid a note of disbelief found its way into my voice with that idea. Destiny was for people like the Winchesters, people who did things, who changed things just by being themselves. It wasn't something that centred itself – or even noticed – someone like me.

"I don't know," he admitted, his voice gruff. "Just seems strange that the angel they've been relying on has turned his back and then you show up with at least some of the answers."

I huffed at the glass beside me. "I'm not sure that the answers I've got are so good, Bobby," I said, pulling my legs up and wrapping my arms around them as I leaned back against the passenger door. "They haven't done much for them."

"Maybe, maybe not," Bobby said. "But we'll see when the dust settles and we can figure out the wins and losses."

He turned to look at me again. "You ain't one of those fan-girls, like Becky, are you?"

The thought of being compared to Becky was like getting a bucket of ice water thrown over me. I attempted a mocking snort and nearly choked on it, coughing and sputtering for several minutes before I got my breathing back under control.

"No, not like Becky," I said, shaking my head. "Guess you could call me a fan, though," I added, a little reluctantly since the word had connotations that weren't all that complimentary. "I liked the first three seasons the best."

Bobby's mouth turned down as he calculated what those seasons had covered. "Those were nearly the worst years of their lives."

"I know, I didn't mean it like –"

"Yeah, I get it," he said, his voice softening a little. "When they got into your world, how'd you know it wasn't the actors that were playin' them?"

"The scars," I said simply. "The actors don't have any."

He laughed at that. "I bet."

This time the silence that followed was companionable and I was just starting to relax, drift off a little even when he cleared his throat.

"You get any idea from that tv show that Dean got a handle on what happened to him?" he asked me. "Or that Sam did?"

What happened to them, I thought uneasily. That covered a lot of ground.

"No," I said. "Not on the show."

I turned and looked at him. "What about here? There's so much we didn't see, weeks, months, Dean's year with Lisa and Ben…have either of them talked about it? To you, or-or anyone else?"

"No."

The single short word encompassed a lot of pain. It seemed to fill the cab of the truck as we both thought of all the things the brothers had gone through, and I thought with a sinking feeling, were still to get through.

He slowed down, peering into the darkness at the street name as we passed. "Next one on the way outta town," he said quietly.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The compound was dark and empty when Bobby drove past it, the chain-link fences and razor-wire topping them shedding light as the truck's headlights lit them up and passed.

"Looks empty," he remarked, not particularly to me. "We'll go right round, take a slow look."

"Where are they all?" I asked him, looking at the buildings. I couldn't see a single vehicle in there.

"Hunting for Crowley, runnin' for their lives? Who knows?" Bobby said, slowing as he came to a gate in the fence at the rear. There was no reaction from anywhere when he nosed the truck up to the gate and put it in Park.

"Slide over," he said to me, opening the driver's door. "You hear or see anything, turn this thing around and put your foot down."

"What about you?"

"I'll be on the back, keepin' my damned head down," he said, with a sniff.

No one came out firing when he walked up to the gate and he lifted the chains up, the open padlock showing in the headlights. Unthreading the chain from the gate, he let it fall, pushing the gates open and leaving them like that as he walked back to the truck.

"Looks like they've gone," he said, climbing back in. We drove along the bumpy gravel road and Bobby stopped next to the largest building, turning off the engine and reaching behind the seat for his gun. "Any ideas on where we might this fabulous library?"

"It was under Samuel's private office," I said, looking around. Which building held Samuel Campbell's private office was anyone's guess.

"Well, we'll start with this one and work our way through," Bobby said with a sigh.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

We found the library an hour later, and Bobby nodded enthusiastically when he started to read off the titles. I was sent off to find boxes and when I got back with a dozen, he'd already started to stack the books along the table, ready for packing.

Nothing else happened in the compound. When the library had been packed and loaded, we checked out the other buildings. They'd been roughly packed up, Bobby thought, most of the weapons and ammunition had been taken, but there was a lot left there as well.

"Why didn't they take this stuff?" I asked him when we got back in the truck and he reversed down the narrow road. "It must've been hard to find it, originally?"

"Got me," he said, spinning the wheel and driving back out through the gates, pointing us back toward South Dakota. "Maybe they panicked?"

I looked at him curiously. "Do hunters panic?"

Shooting me a sideways grin, Bobby said, "Oh hell, yeah, everyone panics at some point."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

We turned into the yard just after dawn, the truck bumping down the driveway and both of us yawning our heads off. Bobby stopped in front of the porch and we carried the boxes in, leaving them stacked to one side of the dining room for a closer look. I made a pot of strong coffee, because neither of us were going to be able to relax enough for sleep until Sam and Dean were back.

I'd just filled a cup and put it down in front of Bobby when Cas appeared on the floor of the kitchen behind us. I saw Bobby's eyes widen dramatically and heard a groan and the angel was struggling to his knees, his bloody hand hitting the fridge door.

"Christ," Bobby muttered, getting up and walking around the table. "Gimme a hand with him."

I followed him into the kitchen as Cas swiped a circle in red on the door, drawing the sigil clumsily.

"What the hell's goin' on? Cas!?" Bobby said, looking at the mark as Cas clambered to his feet. "Cas? We runnin' or fightin'?"

"We're –"

He fell into Bobby's arms, and I scurried up beside them, grabbing the angel's arm and pulling it over my shoulder as Bobby did the same on the other side.

"Balls."

"Where?" I grunted. He didn't look that heavy but I could hardly keep my knees from going under half his weight.

"Sofa," Bobby said shortly, taking more of the angel's weight as we staggered across the kitchen like a bunch of drunks.

When he was lying on the sofa, Bobby turned and barked at me, "Medical kit's in the bathroom, I'll need a bowl of hot water as well."

I sprinted out of the living room and got the kit, a great big box painted white from the cupboard in the downstairs bath, then pulled a big mixing bowl from the kitchen cupboard and filled it with hot water. Trying to carry both defeated me immediately and I took the box first, then went back for the bowl.

"Salt, towels, there's a bottle of clear alcohol in the cupboard next to the sink, grab that too," Bobby ordered and I ran back out.

I got back to see that Bobby'd undone Cas' shirt and along with the blood flowing steadily from the oddly-shaped hole in his side, a brilliant white light was also leaking out, lighting Bobby's face brightly.

"Can you fix that?"

He shook his head. "I doubt it, just gonna plug up the hole so's he don't lose too much blood." He jerked his head toward the desk. "How much time the boys got left?"

I looked at the timer. "An hour."

He'd just finished cleaning the hole and had taped a thick dressing over it when Cas' eyes opened and the angel sat up.

"Cas, you-you look like you went twelve rounds with Truckasaurus. What the hell happened?" Bobby sat back on his heels, looking at him.

"I was, uh...I was betrayed. Rachel, uh...Raphael...he corrupted her. She turned on me," Cas said, reaching up to press against the dressing.

"Sorry. Girl's a real... peach."

"She's... dead. I... was wounded. I needed... safety. Thank you," he said, the words coming out in fits and starts. He leaned forward, trying to get up and started coughing, and both Bobby and I saw the sweat that covered his face with the effort. Bobby pushed him down impatiently, looking down at him.

"Hey, hey, hey, hey, slow down there," he said, and waved his hand toward the kitchen. "What's with the finger painting?"

"It's a warding symbol against angels," Cas said, wheezing.

"How bad's it hurt?" Bobby asked, looking down at the dressing. It'd already turned red.

"I'll heal."

"Well, good...'cause we got less than an hour before you pick up the kids at Frontierland," Bobby said gruffly.

The angel looked up at him, his face stricken. "I can't."

It definitely was not what Bobby wanted to hear. "Come again?"

"The wound...drained me," Cas admitted.

"Well, if you're up on blocks, then call in another halo who can get the job done."

"I can't."

"There's got to be something that can juice you up. A spell…somethin'."

I could hear the desperation starting to lace Bobby's voice. He didn't mind facing a bunch of dark buildings with the possibility of getting shot just for a bunch of books that might prove useful sometime in the future, but the idea that he wouldn't see Sam and Dean again, the idea that they might be trapped in a world that wasn't theirs with no way of getting home, that he couldn't face.

Cas must have heard that desperation as well, because a reckless look filled his eyes. "There is one thing that might work, but...it's extremely dangerous."

"Shocker," Bobby said sardonically. "So, lay it on me."

"It's your soul," Cas said, his voice dropping as if he was suggesting some kind of blasphemous act. Maybe it was.

"What do you want me to do? Make another deal? Seal it with a kiss?" Bobby asked tersely, and he didn't look happy with the idea of any of those things. He turned and looked at me, and I couldn't do anything but shake my head at him. None of this had been in the original script, I'd been wondering if there wasn't a big rewrite going on back home.

"I need you to let me touch it," Cas said.

"Touch it?"

"The human soul – it's pure...energy. If I can siphon some of that off, I-I might be able to bring Sam and Dean back."

Bobby tilted his head to look at him warily. "And the catch is...?"

"Doing this is like...putting your hand in a nuclear reactor. I have to do it very slowly, very carefully," he explained unwillingly.

"Or...?"

"Or you'll explode."

"Well. Keep both hands on the wheel," Bobby advised the angel, throwing me a look. "Let's do this."

"No," I said, not sure why, but stepping toward them anyway. "Bobby, no offence but you're on the wrong side of sixty," I added, looking at the angel. "You've got a better chance of not killing someone younger, right?"

"Normally," the angel said, with an apologetic look at the hunter. "That would be correct. However, I can't touch your soul, not here."

"Why?"

"Because this isn't where you're supposed to be," he said, somewhat cryptically. "We don't have the time for me to explain the nature of the different worlds my Father created right now."

He looked back at Bobby. "Are you sure about this?"

"No, I'm not damned sure," Bobby growled at him. "But we can't just strand those idjits in Deadwood, can we?"

"It's very painful," Cas warned him, a bit of a bad time to mention it, I thought.

"Great, just what I wanted to hear," Bobby snapped. "Just do it."

I reached out and grabbed Bobby's hand as the angel pushed his under Bobby's ribs. Bobby held on for as long as he could, jaws clenched tight and the sinews standing out on his neck as his head tipped back. Just about crushed my hand with his fingers, which shows how dumb I was to give it to him instead of finding a leather belt or something he crush without it hurting me.

Then he screamed and it pulsed through the house like a fire alarm, rising and rising until I was worried he was going to burst the veins in his throat with the force of it or have a stroke or give himself a heart attack. I didn't give it much more thought, though, I was pretty close to screaming myself by that point.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Dean was still kneeling when he reappeared in Bobby's living room, his hand brushing the carpet. Sam stood behind him a couple of paces and looked around, seeing Cas kneeling in front of Bobby, who was half-unconscious in the armchair, and me cradling my hand against my chest, all three of us milk-white and sickly-looking, I thought, from Sam's sudden change of expression.

"What happened?" he asked, striding past Dean to Bobby.

"Long story," I said, going to the sideboard and pulling out a bottle of Bobby's best. "Can you give him a shot?"

I couldn't undo the cap one-handed and Sam frowned as he took the bottle from me, unscrewing the cap and tipping a little into Bobby's mouth. The hunter's eyelids flickered and he opened his eyes slowly.

"Good to see ya, Sam," he said, lifting his head just far enough to see Dean on the floor behind the angel. "You too, boy."

Dean nodded as he looked at the empty bottle in his hands. "Cas, you gotta send us back!"

"Dean, look at him. He's fried," Sam said, kneeling in front of Cas and helping him to his feet.

"I never want to do that again," the angel groaned, tottering the two feet to the sofa and collapsing onto it.

Dean suddenly noticed the shade of Bobby's face. "Bobby, you –"

"I'm still kickin', Annie Oakley. Be back good as new in...a decade or two," he said slowly.

"And we screwed the pooch," Dean said, looking at his bottle, his shoulders slumping. "Bobby, I'm sorry."

The knock on the front door seemed too incongruous to be real and it took a second hard rapping before Sam passed the whiskey to Dean and walked down the hall to open it.

"Is there a Sam Winchester here?"

Dean gave Bobby another shot and I walked to the sofa to sit next to the angel.

"Who's asking?" Sam's voice rumbled indistinctly.

"Look, this is nuts…me and a couple guys made a bet. So…this thing's been laying around the office since...ever!? Uh, with a note on it saying to bring it here today. It's from a-a Samuel Colt?"

"Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's-that's mine. Great. Thanks," Sam said quickly, his voice a lot higher than usual. "Thanks!"

"Not going to believe this," Sam muttered as he came back into the room, ripping the paper from the box and slitting the top. "Dear Sam, I got this address and date off your…thingamajig, and I thought the enclosed might come in handy. Regards, Samuel Colt."

He reached into the box and pulled out his phone, smiling a little at it. Under another layer of paper, he found the bottle. Old-fashioned glass and filled with something almost black.

"That what I think it is?" Bobby leaned forward as Dean got to his feet and took the bottle from his brother.

"Ashes of a Phoenix," he said, looking at it, his face expressionless, but his eyes all lit up. "You know what this means?"

"Yeah," Bobby said with a grimace at the angel on the sofa. "I didn't get a soulonoscopy for nothing."

Dean blinked. "Yes," he acknowledged, realising that he needed to hear more about that but not right now. "And... it means we take the fight to her."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"Keep your hand in the water," Sam admonished as he unrolled the start of a bandage. "How come none of the angel stuff was in the script?"

"I don't know," I said, gritting my teeth as he moved my hand from the bowl of boiling hot water to the bowl of freezing cold water. "What's the point of this torture again?"

"Brings down the swelling," Dean said, coming around the table behind me and pulling out a chair. "Bobby didn't break any bones, just bruised them real good."

"If that script was wrong, and the other one, how can we trust the rest of what's in there to be right?" Sam looked at his brother as he put my hand back in the boiling water. It probably wasn't actually boiling, just felt that way. Especially after the bowl filled with ice-cubes.

I sucked a breath in through my teeth, making a whistling sound as my hand turned from blue back to an angry red. "The broad strokes were there, but not the details."

"Devil's in the details," Dean pointed out unhelpfully.

"Most of the script covered what you and Sam were doing in 1861," I said, looking at him to avoid looking at my hand as Sam lifted it out again. "Did you read it? Were those details right?"

To my surprise, Dean looked away and Sam snorted.

"Ah, yeah, some of them," Dean said, keeping his eyes on the far wall.

"They were nearly all right," Sam said, his dimples very evident as the corners of his mouth tucked in. "The rotgut whiskey, the saloon girls…"

"Alright, alright!" Dean shook his head. "There were a couple of things that were off, Finch's wife was attacked but not just by the deputy," he said. "The sheriff was in on that as well."

"Bit much for prime-time?" I suggested.

He shrugged. "What about Colt, Sam?"

"Pretty much word for word," Sam said, patting my hand dry. I tried to ignore how that felt and focus on what he was saying. "He was a lot more surly than it was written though."

"More like Rufus?" Dean asked, his mouth lifting to one side.

"More like you, in fifty years," Sam said, looking at him.

"So, if we take out the smoothing and polishing for a tv audience," I said slowly, looking from Sam to Dean. "And maybe the parts of the episode that don't focus strictly on you two…?"

"Maybe," Dean admitted. "How well do you remember those episodes, anyway?"

"All of them, you mean?" I asked him, wondering why he wanted to know. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy a good discussion of the seasons and their episodes, but it wasn't that easy to talk to either of them about what were, to them, events in their personal lives.

"Yeah," he said, putting his beer on the table, his gaze locked onto the table top.

"Pretty well, I think."

"Why?" Sam wanted to know. I was glad he asked, since it meant I didn't have to.

"Because we could probably figure out how accurate these things are," Dean said, waving a hand at my folder. "If we can judge for ourselves," he finished.

Sam was smoothing some kind of creamy paste over the back of my hand and I got the distinct feeling that his brother was noticing something that I was missing.

"Okay," I said, turning my hand over as Sam scooped another gob of the stuff onto his fingers. "Where do you want to start?"

Dean pursed his lips, his gaze flashing up to gauge his brother's expression then down again.

"Uh, not sure," he said, suddenly evasive. "We'll talk about it later."

"Later?" Sam looked up at him, his eyes narrowing. "We don't have that much time."

"Well, Dorothy's had a hard day, and we haven't had any sleep for more than forty-eight hours," Dean said reasonably. "I could use four hours. And she'll need a decent pain-killer to take the edge off that."

He got up, walking out casually. It was, I thought as I watched him, pure Dean-diversionary tactics. And as transparent as it always was.

Sam wasn't fooled, his mouth compressing as he finished the basting and picked up the bandage. He wound it around my hand, slowing down as he got near the end of it. I could see that he was no longer thinking about his brother's tactics and I dropped my gaze to the table.

"Terry," he said as he fastened the end and tucked the tail under. "About what happened, in the, um, other time-line."

I looked up at him and nodded uncomfortably, trying to keep my face expressionless.

"You, uh, you didn't have any of the previous memories, did you?"

"No," I said. "When I woke up, all I remembered was that we'd just summoned Balthazar."

He looked at the bowl of hot water, steam still rising slowly from it.

"It, um, feels weird, right now," he said uncertainly. "I mean, I remember summoning Balthazar too, but I also, uh, have memories of that other life. You know?"

"It wasn't real, Sam," I said it as gently as I could, but he still flinched back.

"Yeah," he said quickly, pushing his chair back from the table. "Yeah, I know that."

"Sam," I said, getting up as well. I didn't know if he'd wanted it be real or if he was just embarrassed about his memories, or what exactly was going on with him. It hadn't been real, and I couldn't say anything that would make that feel better if that was what he'd wanted. "I'm sorry."

He looked at me briefly before he reached out to take the two bowls. "For what?" he said lightly, turning to the kitchen. "Uh, hang on a sec and I'll get you the pain-killers."

I sank back slowly into the chair. From the hallway, I heard a slight noise. I turned around, but there wasn't anyone there. At least, not in view.

Sam was rummaging in the cupboards, and he came back with a small white bottle in his hand, his fingertips brushing mine as he handed it to me.

"Sam."

He was gathering up the cream and the wrapping from the bandage, dropping things as fast as he picked them up, and he stopped, waiting.

"Did you want it to be real?" I asked, wishing I could've asked anything other than that.

For an eternally long moment, he didn't move, didn't say anything or look up. Then he exhaled softly and shrugged. "I don't know. It feels like it was real, you know, the memories of everything," he said quietly. "They're as…present…as any other memory I've got. Makes it all kind of suspect." He looked up then, smiling slightly. "It's my problem, not yours. I'll work it out."

I nodded as he turned away and took the trash to the kitchen, my fingers closing hard around the bottle in my hand. They were strong, and two of them would give me four or five hours complete escape from all of this. I got up and headed for the stairs, the promise of that the only thing kept me putting one foot in front of the other.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

AN: I hope that the story's still enjoyable. The fun bits come and go, since it is Season 6, after all. Let me know what you think, I live for feedback!