The screen returned to the main menu, a blinking cursor beside PLAY AGAIN Y/N?, and Sam tentatively removed his hands. Dean had that Look. Sam knew it well. The one Dean used when he wanted the other poker players to think he had a losing hand.
Frowning, Sam knelt down to untie Dean from the chair, noting the way Dean wouldn't meet his eyes. "Dean, what was it? What happened?"
Dean's jaw worked, some chivalrous impulse rising up in him. Sam must never perceive his intentions as anything less than pure, at least until the case was over. He smiled.
"It's just us, whining about the job. Well, Past Us, the ones we lost. Either way," he said, standing up and straightening his shoulders, "It's not very helpful."
"Hm," Sam said, eyeing the blinking cursor. He glanced back at Dean, who was rummaging through the documents on the table again, and sighed.
"Well, we've got some answers now." Sam opened the ARKHAM folder again, quickly flipping past the photos of the woman and the church to find documents and maps, which he scanned. "A whole other apocalypse, and we helped end it. Angels. The government. The amniotic tanks, the memory wipes."
He could still feel the gaps in his memory, though it seemed that the longer he was in the compound, the more things tickled at the edges of his mind, waiting to be recognized. Words sprang up in his mind at random, singularly and in strings, alien words which were at the same time familiar to him. Random sensations assailed him as he flipped through the folder. Cold water, sea spray on his face, a hand combing through his hair.
"We've still got the worm to deal with," Sam said, "And…"
He got to the end of the documents. A slick hand clenched in his guts. "They never closed the file on her. She was never accounted for."
Dean nodded, scanning the papers for anything incriminating, another transcript, another string of random numbers, and when he considered the recording might have taken place in that very room, his hands flew off the desk as if they'd been burned. "Yeah, we oughta see what that lady's been up to the last eight years. This thing may not be done with us."
Dean gathered up stray papers, the strain of the last few hours landing on him heavily. "We'll grab some coffee and go through the rest of this...on the ride out...there's this great Indian taco stand..." He yawned involuntarily and shook his head. "Sorry, tacos? Tacos. Yeah."
Dean grabbed the key ring and gestured toward the elevator. Sam hefted an armload of file folders and followed, watching the slump of Dean's back. His own shoulders felt heavy too, his mind strained by all they'd been through in the past two days. It was almost too much.
But they'd been through more before, and even more that they couldn't apparently remember, and they'd be through more again. They were Winchesters. It was what they did.
They rode up the elevator in silence, and there were no robot watchdogs to greet them, no menaces awaiting them in the room full of amniotic tanks. Finally they reached the exit, the room half-filled with water, and Sam watched as Dean scooped up the jar containing the blue worm, still struggling to push through the door.
"In you go l'il man," said Dean, gently laying the jar in a plastic bag with the papers and turning away to peel off his shirt, "Soon as we're back in civilization we are writing all this down, making Xerox copies, and then blacking out the bits about my poor music choices."