So, I'm figuring about 4 or 5 more chapters left to go to tie up all the loose ends . . . for everyone still sticking around, thanks for reading and for the really encouraging reviews!! bambers;)

Chapter Fifty-Six

Unbearable silence had settled between Sam and Dean as they both eyed the uneaten food on their plates, yet neither seemed willing to strike up a conversation as the moments slowly ticked by. Sam had opened his mouth several times to speak, throat constricting painfully with the need to say something – anything, but the words died on his lips. His mind reeled, churning with irrational and paralyzing fears, yet for all he had endured, he knew it was not Dean's fault, but didn't know how to stop blaming him nonetheless.

His drug induced hallucinations, were just that – Hallucinations. They weren't real. Dean had never hurt him. He hadn't cruelly taunted and tortured him, nor had he tried to kill him. Yet no matter how he tried to reason it out in his mind, those drug filled delusions still weighed heavily on his thoughts and actions. For months they had crippled him, had kept him a fearful prisoner too afraid to see and accept the truth of things, so how was he suppose to let go of that in just one day's time?

With his head bowed, he chanced a quick look at his brother. Their eyes locked for the briefest of moments, and then Sam hastily lowered his sights to stare at the unappetizing chicken sandwich on his plate. At the sound of tinkling bells, he tilt of his head, glanced over his shoulder at the entrance of the diner, and breathed a sigh of relief noticing that the newest patrons entering the building both had full heads of hair, looking nothing like any of Dominic's cult members. With another heavy sigh, he returned his attention to his meal.

"We can go if you want, Sam," Dean muttered, pushing aside his plate, and motioned for the waitress to bring the check. "Guess I'm not as hungry as I thought," he added when Sam lifted his head to look at the untouched hamburger and fries on his plate.

"Why the Simmon's place, Dean?" Sam forced out the words, desperately searching for a connection with his brother that had nothing to do with Dominic or the cult. "Did we miss something there?"

"Not exactly," Dean replied evasively, and fell silent again as the waitress sauntered over and handed him the check.

As soon as the young blond waitress walked back to the counter Sam leaned forward in his seat, rested his arms on the table, and asked in a hushed voice, "What do you mean by not exactly? Either we did or we didn't."

"I was just passing through town, knew the place would be empty, and seein' that I was kinda short on money, I thought I'd stay there for a while."

It was a logical answer, one Sam normally wouldn't have questioned as they had stayed in abandon dwellings in the past when money was tight, but there was something about the look in Dean's eyes that clearly indicated he was lying. Biting at his low lip, he recalled how the EVP recorder went off when he'd thought Dean had died, strange fluttering noises mingling with the dull shhhhhing sound of the tape, and knew it wasn't a coincidence. Something was in that house, Sam would stake his life on it, but whatever it was, Dean didn't want him to know about it.

"So there's nothing wrong there?" he questioned again, silently willing his older brother to confide and tell him the truth, and couldn't manage to hide his look of momentary disappointment when Dean gave a quick shake of his head. "Alright," he uttered with a curt nod, and paused for a moment to gather his courage before further adding, "so it'll be okay if I stay there with you?"

At first it appeared as if Dean would tell him no, quivering lips softly mouthing the word, but as he chanced a glance at Sam and their eyes locked, he nodded. "Sure, if you want to." Sam hesitated just long enough in his response that Dean tried to let him of the hook. "It's okay if you don't want to, Sam – believe me, I get it. I understand you don't really wanna be here . . . I've watched you eying the door, searching out all the exits when you don't think I'm looking . . . so I guess what I'm saying is that if this is how it's going to be, I'd really rather you didn't."

"It wasn't because of you," Sam reluctantly replied, loathed to admit that he was seeing potential cult members in every person he encountered. "It was really hard getting here – once I tried going inside this convenient store, saw this damn bald-headed guy, an' . . . an' I jus' froze. After that I never got out of the car unless it was to get gas. So if I was looking toward the door, it had nothing to do with you." With a subtle nod, Dean combed a hand through his scruffy hair, and Sam smiled in understanding of the simple gesture. "Does that mean I can stay with you, Dean?"

"The place is falling apart." Dean grinned, reaching into his pocket to grab his wallet.

"I'm sure we've stayed in worse places." Sam eyed the wad of cash in his brother's wallet as he opened it, and threw down a couple of bills on the table. There had to be at least several hundred dollars stashed inside the leather wallet, more than enough to rent a motel room, further confirming Sam's suspicions about the Simmon's place.

"I wouldn't be surprised if there's a ton of rats there as well," Dean further added as he stood and headed toward the door, giving Sam another opportunity to change his mind.

"Again, not unlike a ton of other places we've stayed." Sam eased himself out of his seat, stood and followed his brother out of the building.

At the Impala, Dean paused with his hand on the door handle, and looked up at Sam. For several long moments, he stood motionless, staring long and hard at him. "You're sure, Sammy . . . I mean, you're really certain you want to stay with me? Cause I just can't do this again . . . I can't." Pulling his lower lip into his mouth, he worried at it as he bowed his head and glanced up at Sam's through veiled lashes. "Leaving the first time was hard enough, it'd kill me to do it again – but I would if it hurt you too much if I stayed."

"I'm not going anywhere, and neither are you. So if you're done trying to make me leave, can we get going cause I'm exhausted." Sam opened the car door, and slid onto the passenger's seat before Dean had a chance to say another word, leaving him with no other alternative than to follow suit.

XxXxXxXxXxX

Sam hadn't been lying when he'd said he was tired as the moment his head hit the pillow he was out cold, and Dean was forced to wonder if his little brother had gotten any sleep at all in the last few days. For the longest time, Dean stood at the entrance of the bedroom their mother had given him to use, watching his brother toss and turn in fitful slumber, and winced every time he heard Sam cry out in anguished pain.

Although, admittedly Sam looked a helluva lot better than the last time Dean had seen him, he couldn't help but notice how much paler and thinner he appeared, not to mention the dark smudges that rimmed his eyes. Dean had also noticed how his brother's hand trembled as he picked up his chicken sandwich as if the simple movement required extreme effort on his part, and cursed under his breath recalling the casts on both his hands.

He understood that it had taken every bit of sheer willpower and courage Sam possessed to set out to find him on his own. Yet, instead of feeling relieved at being found, he was terrified that he wouldn't or couldn't be deserving enough of the effort it took on his brother's part. His fingertips trailed over his chest, rubbing at the word etched into his skin by Dominic. He was weak because he couldn't make it without Sam – didn't want to make it without him. Weak because deep down in his soul he wanted things to return to normal – not that they had ever been normal – but normal where sarcastic banter meant 'hey, I'm sorry for all the bad shit that's happened along the way', and the actual words were never needed. And weak because even if it was in his heart to apologize for everything that had happened to Sam, the words would stick like cement at the back of his throat, and never make it past his lips.

With a heavy heart, and drooping shoulders, Dean pivoted on his heel and headed downstairs. At the landing, he dropped to his knees, and peered down the darkened hole in the floorboards. Moisture blurred and stung at his eyes as he recalled that long ago night when he was what Sam needed. When he was the one who saved his little brother from more pain, instead of being the cause of it, and wished with all the ache burning in his soul that he could somehow turn back the hands of time, so he could be his brother's hero again.

"Mom?" The softly murmured word left his mouth in a breathy rush as he tilted his head from side to side to look around the abandoned home. "Please, Mom . . . tell me what to do here, cause I don't know what to do." His head dropped back onto his shoulder, glancing at the ceiling, but only envisioning the utter look of devastation and mistrust in Sam's eyes the night Dean had disarmed the bomb that Dominic's men had wired to him. "He doesn't wanna be here . . . I don't know why he is, but if he does stay I'm only gonna end up screwing things up worse than they already are. So how am I supposed to get him to leave when I don't want to let him go?"

Dean fell quiet, waiting for his mother to appear, but as the moments stretched outward in awkward silence, he understood that his mom was taking her cue from their father, and conveniently wasn't around when he needed her the most. "So this is how it works?" he gave a curt nod, eyes narrowing in disgust. "You somehow manage to get Sam here just so I could screw things up royally while you take off?"

"Dean?" came Sam's groggy voice from the top of the stairwell, startling Dean. He lurched, splaying his arms out to the sides to catch himself before toppling face first into the crater in the floor. "Dean!"

Sam sprinted down the stairs, taking them two at a time. Suddenly a loud crack reverberated down the stairwell, Dean glancing up in time to see Sam's foot go through the weakened wood before he tumbled forward, fell the rest of the distance, crashing into him. Braced for impact, Dean's stomach clenched as the the ground beneath him splintered. Pushing off the ground with the tips of his fingers, he vaulted backward, knocking Sam back into the stairs.

"You okay, Sammy?" Dean managed to utter between rasping breaths, pivoting in his spot to check his brother over for any apparent injuries, and cursed under his breath as he noticed blood trickling from his nose. "I-I didn't mean to . . . I was just trying to – damn it, why'd you have to come running down the stairs? I wasn't gonna fall."

"From where I was standing it sure as hell looked like you were," Sam argued, pinching his nose closed with his thumb and index finger.

"You could've broken your neck."

"An' you could've broken yours, too." Bracing his hand against the wall, Sam pushed himself to his feet, and limped into the living room with Dean following close behind him.

"You want some ice for that?" He gestured toward Sam's nose.

"No," Sam shook his head, "what I wanna know is who you were talkin' to when I was upstairs."

"Let me get you a cold cloth, Sam, you're bleedin' all over the place." Dean spun on his heel, and hastily backtracked out of the room before his brother had the chance to ask any more questions.

"Don't walk away from me, Dean," Sam shouted, storming after him, following him into the kitchen. "Something's wrong about this place . . . Something you're not telling me about, an' I think I have the right to know."

It was on the tip of Dean's tongue to tell Sam about their mother, but couldn't even begin to imagine how he would explain what she was to him. They'd dealt with every kind of evil imaginable, never once coming across something supernatural that was purely good in nature, so he seriously doubted Sam would accept that angels were real. "I'm telling you there's nothing evil here, can't we just leave it at that?"

"The EVP recorder turned on by itself."

"Maybe the batteries were faulty."

"Batteries are never faulty where we're concerned. You know that, Dean, so tell me what's going on."

"Well, this time they were." With his back to Sam, Dean shuffled through the cabinets, found a clean dishtowel, and wet it down. Handing it to Sam, he took a seat on the barstool, and rested his arms on the marble table top. "Trust me, Sammy, there's nothing to hunt here."

Sam pushed back a stool, took a seat beside Dean, and pressed the cloth to his nose for a few moments, then wiped away the blood from his mouth and chin. "I'm trying to trust you . . . I really am, but you're not giving me much of a reason to, Dean. I show up here to find you're apparently choking to death. Then you die on me . . . I mean, really die, an' not ten minutes later you're up looking for dinner. And that's not to mention how you tell me you're broke, but then you open your wallet, and I see that you've got several hundred dollars stuffed in there." Sam heaved an irritated sigh as he cast a sideways glance at Dean. "Now I find you talkin' to someone who's not there, so you tell me what I'm suppose to think?"

Dean remained quiet, silently cursing himself for not realizing that Sam would pick up on the fact that he had more than enough money to rent a place to stay. What am I suppose to say to him? Yeah, Sammy, Mom was here. She sent me to another reality so I could see how screwed up things would be there, then I died and came back to life. Yep, he'll be takin' me to the funny farm for sure.

"You know the last time we were here was the day after my seventeenth birthday." Sam stood, strode to the arched kitchen entrance, and nudged his head toward the hole in the floor. "Easy hunt, vengeful spirits – nothing we hadn't dealt with before, right?"

"Sam, don't." Dean was on his feet the moment Sam mentioned the last time they were at the Simmon's place, knocking over the stool, but he scarcely noticed as he headed for his brother. "Let's just go . . . we can go find a motel to stay at."

"Dad outside searching for the graves, you an' me in here just to distract them." Sam tilted his head to the side and cast a quick glance at Dean before retraining his sights on the broken floor boards. "Except it was anything but normal . . . that thing had me pinned to the ceiling, an' there wasn't a damn thing I could do . . . it reminded me of mom." Falling silent for a brief moment, Sam rubbed his eyes, then raked a hand through his hair. "All I could think was that it was the thing that killed her, an' I just shut down."

"Please, Sammy, don't – " Dean once again tried to stop him from reliving the horrible memories of that night, but Sam cut him off.

"An' then you were there, an' I was falling . . . you know, I don't even remember going through the floor." With a deep breath, Sam took a step into the open foyer.

"An' I'll never forget it," Dean mumbled under his breath, following his brother as he made his way back to the stairs.

"But I do remember you carrying me up those basement steps," Sam uttered as he trailed his foot over the edge of the broken floorboards. "In fact it's all I thought about while I was driving here . . . it was the excruciating pain you felt that night that led me here to you now."

Dean swallowed hard at the unwanted memories Sam's words were rekindling in his mind."You were in an' out of consciousness for six days before you finally came around."

Biting at his lower lip, Sam looked up at him, pinning him with a stare. "Is that a first hand account or secondhand knowledge, Dean?"

"What?"

"It's not a hard question . . . do you know that cause you were sitting beside my hospital bed the whole time or is it what you heard when you finally woke up from the coma you were in?"

Confusion furrowed Dean's brow. "I-I don't know what you're talkin' about."

"I wasn't the only one who went through that hole, Dean," he tapped his foot on the splintered boards for emphasis, "but I am the only one who seems to remember what really happened that night. Think I might've blacked out for a few minutes, but the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was you falling straight at me, but you go caught up in the wood, an' it sliced you open pretty bad before you fell the rest of the way."

Backing away from the crater in the floor, Dean shook his head. "That's not how it happened, Sammy. I found the basement stairs, and came after you."

"Just lift your damn shirt, Dean, you've got the freakin' scar that runs from your right side around to your back. From what dad said, you had to have something like a hundred-fifty stitches . . . how can you not remember that?"

"You know what, I'm not gonna stand here an' listen to this." Thinking of the jagged scar Sam mentioned that he could never quite recall getting, Dean turned on his heel, and stormed toward the door, calling back over his shoulder, "I'm going out for a drink, don't wait up."