It wasn't the first time he'd seen such a thing, but it was the first time that it had happened in front of one of the doctors. That didn't really matter, though, because the man's presence didn't seem to make any difference. It certainly didn't lessen the pain or the sharpness of the image.

This time it was a little girl. She was pale, her face somehow distorted, wrong. She held a razorblade in one hand, a doll in the other, and somehow the two items together, so drastically different, increased the terror that the image brought. She walked slowly toward him, looking solemn, the doll dragging on the floor behind her. The razor rose to slash and slice, and…

There was the too-familiar prick of a needle in his arm, and Sam was jerked back to the hospital, and the padded room, and the doctors.

The one who had come to torture him today was staring down at him, a look of mixed pity and interest on his face. He looked very much like a scientist who felt bad for the lab rat—but not bad enough to stop experimenting on it.

"Sam, it's okay," he said in a soothing voice—or at least an attempt at one. "Just let the sedative do its job. You'll feel better when you wake up."

Sam wanted to glare at him, wanted to protest that that was a lie, that he never felt better when he woke up—but even if he had been able to find the words, he wouldn't have been able to use them, because there was already blackness swirling around the edges of his vision, pulling him in, pulling him down…

XXX

He had another vision while he slept, and like the last, this one held a faint tinge of familiarity—like something from another lifetime entirely, something that he should remember but didn't and probably never would.

This time it was a mirror, and his face in it, talking to him, yelling at him, telling him exactly how much he was to blame for all the death around him. And then it was the mirror shattering, and falling back, and a woman crawling out of the broken wreckage, swaying and scuttling toward him. She got to her feet, her straggly black hair parting to reveal a pale, distorted face, and…

He woke back to the real world, and the woman faded from his eyes, gone as if she had never been.

The problem was, Sam wasn't sure she ever had been…

The door opened then, and the same doctor from yesterday came in, shuffling papers and still wearing that peculiar expression of mixed pity and interest.

"Hello, Sam, how are you feeling after your nap?"

In reply, Sam went to his corner and curled up with his knees to his chest, his head resting against the wall, his eyes fixed resolutely away from the doctor.

"Not so good, huh? Does your head still hurt?" the doctor asked, sitting down in the chair.

Sam rested his head against the wall and prepared for his usual method of escaping into his memories. This time, the one he chose was of when he was about eight and Dean about twelve, and Dean decided to take the opportunity when John was out for the night to sneak a bunch of horror movies into the house.

"C'mon, Sammy, we won't get in trouble!" Dean said reassuringly, clapping an arm around his shoulder. "We'll have the tapes out by the time Dad gets home, okay?"

Sam grinned up at him and said, "Okay, Dean. Can we make popcorn?"

"Sure thing, kiddo. Why don't you set up the first movie and I'll go make us a bag?"

So, five minutes later, the brothers were sitting on their bed, watching Chucky.

And twenty minutes later, Sam had his eyes hidden firmly behind both his hands. Every once in a while, he would peek out between his fingers, only to hide again at the merest sight of the evil redheaded doll.

Dean laughed suddenly—probably after looking over and finally noticing Sam's antics.

"Sammy, you sure you can handle this?"

Sam nodded, peeking again, then uttering a little squeak and closing his fingers once more. "I'm fine," he said, his voice muffled.

But he wasn't fine later that night, when Dean had returned the movies to the video store and come back and turned out the lights and they'd gone to bed. He hadn't been fine when he'd woken in the dark after a nightmare and begun to cry.

Dean hadn't said anything, though. He'd just put an arm around Sam and held him tight, comforting even as he chuckled about Sam being a girl.

And, oddly, the teasing had helped even more than the hug.

"Sam? Sam, focus," the doctor said, interrupting his memory with his frustrated voice. "You need to focus and try to answer my questions if you ever want to get out of here, okay?"

That, though, only puzzled Sam more. Why did the doctor think it mattered to him whether or not he got out of here? There was nothing waiting outside for him, anyways—in here or out there, it was all the same to him.

Some more time passed while the doctor questioned him and Sam dwelled with some measure of peace in his memories. He wasn't sure if the doctor got what he came for—probably not—but after a while the man stood up and said stiffly, "I hope you feel better, Sam," and left.

And as he did, Sam had another vision.

He only had time to think vaguely, Three times in one day. That's a lot…

And then he was watching a man, maybe twenty-five or so, running down a dark street. He looked afraid, terrified, his eyes staring over his shoulder. He didn't seem to see what he'd been looking for, but that only made him run faster. He turned down an alley—and fell.

Sam watched as the skin on the man's back was split open by enormous claws. He listened as the man's screams of pain quieted into choked moans, and then faded all together.

Sam watched, unable to intervene, as the man died.

It was only as he came out of the vision that he wondered, vaguely, why this one didn't have that faint familiar tinge to it.

And then a memory came to him in which Dean decided to teach him poker, and Sam forgot about the vision almost entirely.

He couldn't know that a few hours later, the cops would find the body of a young man about twenty-five, barely recognizable under all the blood, in an alley not five miles away.