Author's note:

Hi guys! Did you think this fic was dead? Nope. It was just on school Hellatus. This is the first posting in a series of final chapters over the next couple of weeks so...yay! Thank you in advance to everyone who reads and comments and stuff. And muchas gracias as always to my partner in crime, Agelade, who would never ever let me NOT finish this story, who betas my work, and writes much more amazing SPN fanfic than I do over on her page. And we're also on Tumblr and LiveJournal now thanks to her and her persistent marketing skills. Lustraverse is the name of our collective little universe if you want to check it out.

-Caladrius

p.s. Sorry for that nasty cliffhanger last chapter...

1993

Sam - 10

Dean - 14

Dean's hands were ice cold on his brow. He wiped his face down because he had finally paused for ten seconds to think and he needed to breathe, to keep it together, because there was a vampire upstairs that sounded pissed even while it laughed, and that was clearly a bad combination.

The stub of a candle didn't give off nearly enough heat to cut the wet chill in the basement, but Dean needed to see Sam even if Sam couldn't see him. A halo of yellow stretched just to their faces and then was lost in the gloom of old shelving and abandoned paint cans and dissolving concrete floor behind them.

A deep clatter and a yowl indicated that the vamp had found Dean's holy-water-in-suspended-paint-can trap, which meant it had taken the bait and was on the second floor. With any luck the fucker would slide on the salt skid in the first bedroom and at least hobble himself on the waiting broken glass scattered all over the place. Kevin McCalister had nothing on Dean Winchester when it came to resourcefulness and a house full of crap, but at the end of the day, a vampire was still a vampire and Dean was just a 14-year-old kid with a freshly sharpened machete and a wooden stake whittled from the leg of a kitchen chair. In other words, this whole thing was to buy a little time and maybe the barest barest advantage. Dean wasn't even sure he could even classify it as an advantage, but they were still alive at least, and there was always a chance Dad was on his way.

There was a chance, but not a good one.

Dean was on his own, and he knew it.

The rafters shook. Yelling, and then loud talking, but Dean couldn't make out what it was saying. It was impossible to know how many traps it had wandered into and if any of them had succeeded in doing anything beyond pissing it off more. The basement was deep, but vampires were known for their heightened senses and their ability to smell blood (which is why he had cut his arm and bled out a little on a pillow case upstairs and then sewed the shit out of the open wound, super glued it, and wrapped it with half a roll of bandages before getting them both into the basement).

Dean pursed his lips. There was nothing else he could do except go up there and face the damn thing when it got tired of the chase.

He looked up at Sam.

Sam was sitting on his calves. His gaze seemed drawn to the light, though it could have been the reflection of the flame in his brother's eyes.

"Sam," Dean whispered, brushed a hand through Sam's hair and then squeezed his shoulder, "We're gonna be okay. Don't worry-I got this. I promise."

Saying it out loud solidified just how much was riding on this-on him. A vamp bite would be pretty much the end if it didn't just kill them outright. And Dean was sure that a vamp on mission of vengeance, who'd followed them for literally hundreds of miles, was not going to let things end that clean. Dean was the only thing that stood between them and a scenario where Dad came home and had to cut off the heads of his sons.

Not gonna happen. Not gonna fucking happen.

Dean looked up instinctively as the stairs above them creaked.

And now he could hear the monster pretty clearly.

"-was my family, my people, so it's gotta be like this, kid. I'd fucking rip that cocksucker's neck open, but that wouldn't be enough. He has to fucking pay-"

Too close. Dean couldn't let the vampire corner them in the basement when the one light source was so fragile-vamps could see in the dark, but Dean had zero chance of a kill shot on a vamp if he couldn't aim.

Not to mention the fact that Sam was down here and Sam was pretty much helpless.

Still.

Dean took a deep breath. Shit always came down to that moment: that split second before he fired, that split second before he jumped, the split second before he stretched out over the abyss and looked hell right in the eye.

This was it.

Dean reached out and took Sam's hand. He put the machete into it, the sharpened stake in the other.

"Sam, I got no idea if you can actually hear any of this, but I'm gonna tell you anyway just in case."

Steps on boards above sifted sand to the floor nearby, a soft sound.

Dean continued in the lowest whisper he could manage. "There's a vampire upstairs and it's lookin' to do some damage. Don't wanna leave you, Sam, but I can't let it come down here, understand? So, if any fucking thing walks down that stairs and it ain't me or dad, you gotta break out of this and cut the goddamn thing's head off, you hear me?" Dean put both his hands on Sam's shoulders, tried to find that lost gaze, didn't want to think about how this could be the last time he ever saw his little brother, couldn't think about that now.

But his voice cracked.

"Don't you let that fucking thing touch you, Sam, do you hear me? Wherever the hell you are, you listen to me now, okay? Dad's not gonna be okay by himself if this ends bad. It might think you're easy prey because you're all out of it like this, but if it gets within one fucking foot, you come out of there and you kill it. Okay? But you gotta live. That's it. That's all. You gotta live, Sammy."

Dean stared into Sam's eyes, but there was nothing, no change. This part was hard. Dean's chest was way too tight, and that burning in his eyes wasn't going to do either of them any good. There was no way he could lose this, because the chances of Sam surviving after him were pretty much zero at this point.

Which meant that if the vamp won, Dean lost absolutely fucking everything.

"Counting on you, buddy." He gave Sam's shoulders one last shake, and then leaned over and kissed Sam's messy head fast. "Love you, Sammy." And then Dean picked up a second machete and stake and moved away.

At the bottom of the steps, Dean looked back one last time. Sam sat like the only living thing in a universe of darkness surrounded by a tiny halo of candlelight. His hands held the weapons like a totem god, and his still, small, form gave the impression that he was waiting for the world to be born around him.

Don't die, Sam.

Dean tightened his grip and started up the stairs.

May 2, 2007

Sam - 24

Dean - 28

Don't die, Sam.

Dean, no! Don't die, Dean!

Sam opens his eyes and sits straight up because, what the hell, is Dean in trouble?

Echoes fade into the swirling dark corridors of memory replaced immediately with facts: Dean is in the Impala surrounded by just about every protective charm known to man. And the last thing Sam recalls is being pulled under the bed with the smell of dust and rotting wood.

The smell hasn't gone away.

Sam looks around. He's on a bed, in a bedroom of some kind, but it's not one he knows and it's certainly not from the one from the motel in Osseo. For one thing, this is a four poster bed, and the covers he's laying on are dusty. Everything in this room is dusty. From the mantle over the lit fireplace to the wardrobe to his left, it feels like he's found his way to a museum and decided to take a nap in a model of a late 19th-century house that had been just let go by its caretakers.

"Hello?" He calls out and immediately feels a heaviness in his chest. The air is full of tiny bowling balls that hang inside his lungs when he takes a deep breath and press against his chest when he speaks. Instinctively, Sam goes to rub his ribs and his arms swim thickly through the air. Gravity? Something else? Maybe drugged? And where the hell is he?

The fire in the fireplace is ample light for the surreal scene to solidify. Sam is pretty sure that, beyond the troubling presence of a fire already going in the fireplace, no one has been wherever he is now or lived here for at least a hundred years.

Wood cracks, snapping brightly, and he can feel the heat from his vantage on the bed which means that some rules still apply to whatever theoretical plane he is in.

"Hello? Anyone?"

It's worth a second try. No boogeyman, so Sam wants to think he'd done some damage before he got dragged off to who-knows-where, but it's also pretty likely that the monster is messing with him, trying to get into his head, the way it had done with its illusion of Dad.

Dad.

All that training as a kid-all those calisthenics with weights and endurance regimens are hopefully going to come in handy in a place with less oxygen and heavier gravity.

Sam swings his legs over the side, waits to feel how it affects him, pulls on him, and then he stands.

It takes a few seconds to get his bearings, and it feels like he's weighted down with a wool blanket soaked in water, but he's still breathing and his familiar center of gravity still anchors him to the floor, so there's that.

Sam isn't panicking. Despite the fact that he's most likely not on the material plane, has been kidnapped by the boogeyman, and has absolutely no idea how he's going to get out, he feels calm. Centered. Because the boogeyman hasn't gotten away. Because Sam hasn't completely lost, and yes, maybe it all sounds like bravado in his head, that's the truth: He hasn't failed, not yet, and as long as he's alive, he has a chance of figuring out and making it back to Dean before the window closes.

The window.

Shit, how long has he been out? There's no way to tell. He doesn't spend precious time being frustrated over the fact that the anchor he had invested so much in has somehow failed because there's no time for it.

Sam takes stock of his weapons. He remembers losing the shotgun. No guns, then, but he still has the knife in his boot. It's not super impressive, but it's better than nothing if the damn thing gets close again.

Resources.

He takes a couple steps across the room and opens the wardrobe. Old clothes, faded and limp, swirl up a cloud of dust and Sam coughs. White shirts, some kind of tailored pants. Brown leather shoes. Clothes for a boy, then.

On top of the bureau he finds a small set of antique tin soldiers, actually pretty cool, and an old-fashioned whittled wooden top with a length of string to wrap and spin it. Sam shoves the top and string and a tin soldier into his pocket. Everything else in here is either weathered furniture or too decayed to be of any value, so he leaves it and heads for the door.

He turns the knob and the door opens with a rusty grind. Not like a locked door would have kept Sam in, but the fact that it wasn't locked is probably not a good sign-when things seemed too easy or good to be true, they probably are. Of course, being stuck in the boogeyman's territory means that it probably thinks Sam is trapped regardless. Sam hangs onto that hope because he's been underestimated before and it saved his bacon.

The door opens onto a hallway with candle-lit sconces. Sam's vision swims for a second and he braces himself on the wall. Right. Okay, yes. Maybe a little snag in that hope because there's clearly less oxygen in this plane. Oxygen deprivation slows reflexes, impedes critical thinking, everything he really needs right now. But of course, that's the point, right?

Sam bites his bottom lip, his short term memory seems intact so far, so that's something in the plus column-he's not too far gone yet, but he's going to have to concentrate on taking deeper breaths, and, of course, if he has to get physical he'll need to prioritize his actions.

Sam runs his hand along the wall. This is real. Solid. Just like Dad's planes hypothesis, the boogeyman's home plane had to be tangible in order to be able to hold the monster's physical form. Sam would have celebrated the little details that give him a fighting chance if the whole house thing he was put into acted more like, well, a regular house. The corridor he is in, for example appears to contain no doors at all, just a staircase at the end that goes up.

Of course it would have to go up when Sam is trying to conserve resources, but there is nothing left for it but to go until he can't go anymore. At the top of the stairs he opens a door leading to a small room the size of a stair landing which appears to contain just one thing: a small decorative hall table with nothing on it. To his right, impossibly, he finds a longer stairway than the first going down.

"O... kay? What the hell is this? A funhouse?" Sam spontaneously remembers the long, almost clownlike hands and arms that had reached out for him from under the bed in Osseo and shudders.

Just as Sam's toe touches the threshold of the new staircase, the silence of the place is disturbed by an incredibly loud bang behind him. Sam flinches and turns, ready for those freakishly impossible limbs coming for him again, but encounters nothing save the hall table wobbling slightly in the reverberation.

Okay, so the sound was real.

"Hello?"

Sam quickly crosses to the wall. It sounded like it had come from the other side maybe. His eyes and fingertips trace the grain of the wood up and down. There aren't any visible seams. He lays his palm flat against it and waits, but there's no vibration at all.

So he knocks on the wood.

"Hello? Someone there?"

And waits.

After a good sixty seconds, Sam takes a big breath and turns away.

A low knock from the other side of the wall seems to mock him.

Sam turns around and looks sideways, hesitating, before he knocks back two times. He's answered almost immediately with two deep knocks.

Sam feels a momentary excitement that there might be other life here after all. "Hello? Hey? Can you hear me? Are you okay in there?" He knocks three more times.

Three times the wall knocks back.

Just from his own testing of the wood, Sam knows it's not plywood-it's thick and heavy and he doesn't have many resources, but if someone is trapped in there...

He looks around, wonders if the little hall table has any heft to it and how much this is going to cost in oxygen. "Hang on. Let me see if I can get you out."

And then the knocking starts again.

And this time it doesn't stop. It gets louder.

Louder.

Sam freezes. The wall begins to visibly shake with the concussion and he's starting to get a bad feeling. Like maybe whatever is in the wall isn't in distress at all.

Maybe he's the one in distress.

He backs up several steps as the pounding becomes a thundering that works on Sam's eardrums and causes his heart to pump doubletime, his body giving him the message that maybe it's time to go.

And then the ornamental table flies at him without warning, slamming him in the thighs and with the heavier gravity on its side, almost sends Sam to the floor.

Okay, now we can't be friends.

Sam manages to stay upright but recognizes this now for what it is-angry poltergeist activity. And while it's familiar in its way, and that's oddly comforting, it's also bad news. He turns for the only exit that has potential to take him to someplace that isn't a dead end in the room he started-he hits the down stairs and instinct causes him to duck as the table sails an inch over his head, clatters over several steps and splinters near the bottom. Adrenaline pumping, Sam takes two steps at a time, grabbing the railing for his compromised balance. Behind him, what sounds like two enormous booted feet are racing to catch up. Sam doesn't waste the energy to look back-he knows what he is going to see.

Absolutely nothing.

But the danger is fully real, and he knows that too.

Sam has to practically jump over the table debris at the bottom of the stairs because of his shaky momentum and he sails into the wall of another corridor. The impact drums out what air he's got and for a horrifying moment, he's sure he's going to black out. Sam sucks in a gasping breath and when his blurring vision begins to come back he's confronted with a boy.

Sam can't make out details - blond, maybe five feet, wearing blue.

He tries another breath and his eyebrows draw together in confusion. Please God tell me I'm not hallucinating already.

"Come with me."

The banging from the stairs hasn't ceased, and now it's far too close.

"Hey..." Sam tries but there's nothing in his lungs for speaking so he bites his lips closed. Priorities.

"Hurry. Hurry, come with me right now."

The figure turns and takes a few steps down the hallway before looking over his shoulder. Sam pulls himself together with effort, and with each breath the boy looks more like a boy than an apparition. Sam begs his legs to move, and then he's running after the kid. Behind him are the sounds of the devastated hallway table being kicked around.

The boy opens a random door and faces Sam. He's young, but not that young-just on the cusp of a major growth spurt, and he looks anxious.

"Get in here, quick, and be as quiet as you can."

Sam doesn't ask, he ducks inside just as the door shuts behind him. Against his will, adrenaline tapped out, he slides down the wall to sit on the floor. His face feels numb and he's not sweating though his heart is pounding. Just as the darkness descends in earnest this time he swears he can hear the boy outside somewhere saying, "No, Charlie!...No! Go back to sleep. Please go back to sleep, Charlie. Go back to sleep..."

Sam wakes with a start. The automatic responses to falling asleep in a strange place are not running on all cylinders and it's an effort to remember where he is and what is happening. It takes too long to get his senses online which does have the effect of helping him recall the unfriendly atmosphere of the boogeyman's house of chutes and ladders.

Crap. How long had he been out? How long? Sam feels himself out internally and is relieved that except for maybe a bruise on his shoulder and his thigh, he's okay. He grabs the door jam to his right and hauls himself with an effort to his feet.

The room the mysterious boy led him to is similar to the one in which he originally woke up after being dragged to this place: old, turn of the century four poster bed, bureau and wardrobe, a chair facing a cold hearth. Like his own room, this one is faded and dusty.

He catches sight of blue fabric on the armrest of high backed chair near the fireplace and remembers the boy who probably saved his life. He approaches it casually.

"Hey," he begins. "Um, thanks for the..."

But the words dry up in his throat. There is a boy in the chair facing the cold ashes, but this boy hasn't been alive for long time. It's the same outfit, Sam is pretty sure, and now he realizes that it's a pair of blue pajamas, but the flesh that once filled it out has been dried and shrunken with time. Skeletal fingers clutch the armrest, and while Sam doesn't see any blood, that makes the discovery no less horrific. The boy's blonde hair still sits atop his head, but the eyes are nothing but sunken hollows, the cheeks leathery and drawn back against a too-small jaw in a rictus grin.

"Jesus..." Sam breathes and steps back. He wants to look away, but he can't because this is how it ended. Maybe how they all ended. Trapped and alone and dead and no rest for their bones or their loved ones or them...

His eyes blur and he rubs his mouth.

"Does it make you sad?"

Sam turns towards the door and blinks rapidly at the boy standing there. Now that he's recovered enough air to see well enough, Sam takes stock of the kid: Blond hair, yes, and blue eyes that almost match his pajamas. His pale cheeks have a smattering of freckles to boot.

"What?"

The boy takes a step forward and points to the chair. "You look like you're gonna cry."

Sam lets out a breath at a momentary loss for words. He shakes his head and it turns into a small nod. "Yeah, I'm sad. I didn't..." He stops and restarts. "My name's Sam. What's yours?"

"Patrick Dulin."

"Patrick..." The name sparks a memory somewhere in the back of his mind. It takes too long for his page of notes to materialize in his mind's eye, another drawback of the punishing atmosphere. "You...you were one of the boogeyman victims. You fell through a lake when you were 8."

The boy tilts his head. "Yeah. That's right. How did you know all that?"

Sam takes a deep breath. "I was researching the boogeyman. Trying to find a way to stop it."

"You were hunting it?"

Sam squints his eyes. "Y-yeah. Why...that word?"

The boy purses his lips in an exaggeration. "Which word? Hunting?"

"Yeah, that."

"Oh, because Amber said you were a hunter who hunted monsters. So, you know, I just put it together."

Amber.

"You know Amber?" Sam feels his heart skip a beat.

"Yeah, we mostly all know each other. Once you're dead, as long as the boogeyman isn't grabbing you all the time, there's not much else to do but wander around and look for other dead people. There are a lot here." Patrick picks at the cover of his bed.

"Where's Amber? I'm looking for her."

Patrick shrugs. "I don't know. Around. She said you'd be coming to stop the boogeyman and we should all be looking for an adult, but we didn't know where you'd show up." He makes a face. "She made it sound like you were some kind of Superman, but you're pretty stupid to get pulled into here. I bet you don't know how to get out, do you?"

Sam sighs. Looks around the room. "I'm working on it."

"See? Stupid. I bet you can't even spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Huh? I bet you can't spell it."

Sam raises an eyebrow and cracks a smile.

"Yes I can. I-T. I spelled 'it.' Any other IQ tests you wanna throw over here?"

Patrick makes another face of disgust but Sam sees a hint of maybe a grin.

"Okay fine. You know that one. Doesn't mean you aren't stupid. Like bangs-on-the-wall stupid."

"You got me there," Sam admits. "Bad move. What was that?"

Patrick's face falls.

"That's Charlie. Or. What's left of Charlie."

"What's left?"

"Yeah. Come on." He moves to the door and he really, for all the world, looks, acts, and sounds like a solid, living kid. But he isn't-he's dead. And worse, he's dead because Sam couldn't end the boogeyman in 1993. At another time or place, Sam would be latching onto that guilt and letting it have its way with him. Whether it's the low oxygen forbidding his brain from overworking or the sense that, even now, he might still be on a path to redemption, Sam steps out behind Patrick with a laser focus on the present only.

It's almost a relief.

"Where are we going?"

"You wanna find Amber, right? She sure as hell wants to find you. I'll tell you about Charlie and some of the others on the way. Don't wanna stay in here and stare at 'Curse of the Mummy Patrick' anymore if it's all the same to you."

Sam gives Patrick a flat smile in agreement. "Lead on."

"Okay, but before we go out there, you need to try to make your gigantic body as quiet as possible." Patrick's face is earnest. "I'm serious. No yelling out like an idiot and for God's sake, no pounding on the walls. Got it?"

Sam nods. "Got it."

"Charlie was one of the unlucky ones."

"Unlucky?" Sam ambles along next to Patrick and is grateful for the kid's shorter strides to give him a pace his lungs can manage even though his instincts beg him to run through the maze to get to Amber faster.

"Yeah. The boogeyman liked what he could do. You know. Like, his psychic power."

Sam winces.

"What could he do?"

"I don't know exactly because when I got here he was already fading. See, if you're lucky, then you don't have anything the boogeyman really wants. He mostly leaves you alone, like me and Amber and few others. We spend time hiding from him, but he doesn't try hard to find us because he's got the unlucky ones to play with."

They walk to the end of the corridor and enter a billiards room. It's perfectly intact, right down to the dusty table and a bar that even looks like it might contain some ancient liquor. From there they take another set of stairs down.

"And what does he do with the unlucky ones? Does he...feed on them?" Sam hesitates to ask, but it isn't like he could add more horrors to this kid's experience and Sam needs answers.

"Don't know. Maybe. Probably. That would explain why they fade. See, after awhile if you see the boogeyman too much, you just start to...lose yourself. Lose who you are, you know?"

"Like, your personality starts to deteriorate?"

Patrick looks at Sam with a face. "Okay, big words also don't make you not stupid. If that word means 'fall apart,' then yeah. First you stop remembering your mom and dad and your life and stuff. And then you get time all confused, like you forgot what you did two seconds ago and think you just did something you did a hundred hours ago. Stuff like that."

Sam puts the pieces together. "Can't move on to the place you're supposed to go, and your soul is drained. A person would become an angry spirit. A poltergeist is like the very last and worst stage of that. So, that's what happened to poor Charlie."

"Yeah, more or less."

They pass a stairway. Sam looks up and notices that it goes nowhere but into a ceiling.

"What the hell? What is this place? Seriously?"

Patrick stops and follows Sam's gaze. "It's crazy, right? Trust me, it gets weirder. There are rooms with five closets. Stairs that go up and down for no reason. And there are a million secret passages to boot. If I wasn't dead and if the boogeyman weren't such a scary bastard, it'd actually be kinda cool. Come on."

Patrick starts to move on but Sam can't stop staring at the ceiling. Something about this place rings a bell far, far back in his mind. Like maybe he had seen this before. But how? In a dream?

"Sam?"

"Huh? Yeah. It's just...I can't shake this feeling I've maybe been here before."

"You were high."

"What?" Sam half laughs.

"You know. Drugs. I think acid makes you see crazy stuff," Patrick responds matter-of-factly.

"Okay, hey, I don't need to take drugs to see crazy stuff," Sam assures him with a head shake. "Believe me."

"Right, because you hunt monsters."

"Bingo."

There's a few seconds of silence as they walk through what looks like a drawing room into another hallway.

"Wish I had known about monster hunters...before...even if I would have thought you were all on crack because...I told my mom." Patrick's voice drops. "I told her for days. I told her and she didn't believe me, of course."

Sam stops. There's a catch in this kid's voice, and it reminds him that, spunky attitude or not, he's talking for all intents and purposes to a ghost who's had to watch his own body rot.

"And you didn't really totally believe it yourself either, right? You thought, 'I'm too big for this' and tried to ignore it. Wanted her to be right, that monsters didn't exist."

Patrick sniffles and nods in agreement, defeated. "Yeah, exactly. Exactly like that. You know about it."

"Yeah, I know about it because I was there when I was nine. I tried to ignore it, too. Tried to hope it was all my imagination."

Patrick shrugs sadly. "So, then, how did you live? How did you get away back then?"

"Honestly?" Sam starts, and then his voice catches. "It's because I have a big brother who knew monsters existed."

Calling up that memory brings back a collage of images of Dean over the last almost two years. Anytime the boogeyman came up, anytime it did, Dean had had a strong reaction, tried to stop him. For two years Sam wished Dean would just give up the attitude and support him doing this one thing that might make a huge difference in his future, but even an idiot now could look at those pictures in his head and know that Dean's primary emotion every single time was fear.

Fear that this exact scenario was going to play out. That Sam was walking a straight line to death or worse.

And Sam was always looking at hope for a future beyond defeating the boogeyman and not really at the boogeyman itself. But Dean was. Never saw the damn thing, even in 1993 when he faced the closet all night, but every time Sam had to bring it up, Dean was in the room with it, with the reality of its danger.

At the end of this, one of them was going to end up being right...

Dean. Are you okay? I swear, I'm making it out of here. I swear I am.

It's tugging at his heart. Almost literally. For a split second, Sam can almost feel the connection between them spanning planes, universes, past, present and future, showing him a path...

Patrick's voice shakes Sam out of the moment.

"Then I guess you lucked out. Major."

Sam feels the despondent half laugh in the back of his throat that catches on the guilt for not really getting Dean earlier. "Never would have counted myself lucky about anything, but for Dean? Yeah, I guess you're right."

"I have...had...a little sister. Cassidy. Hey, Sam. What year is it out there?"

The vise in Sam's chest just clenches tighter. "2007."

"Yeah? Jesus. Seven years already? So then, I guess she'd be...13. Wow. She's older now than I was when I died. Doesn't that suck ass? Now...she could be the big sister."

It reaches some breaking point and Patrick clearly can't hold it in anymore. He turns his back to Sam and his shoulders shake. Sam recognizes that posture because he's had to force it so many times-he's trying to be stoic, trying to take it in stride. But nothing can change the fact that Sam just reminded Patrick that life went on, completely, without him. And that's not fair, and it's not right, and Sam can't help but beat himself up. He was a coward once and now a kid like Patrick will never see his sister again. Never see her grow up, get married. Never be a proud uncle, or anything.

"Patrick...I'm so. So sorry."

It was probably the tone of his voice-too pitying for the budding manhood of an 11-year-old boy. Patrick rubs his face..

"Here's the bad part. There's nothing to eat here, Sam. No water either. So, yeah, it's lucky when the boogeyman leaves you alone, but then you just get weak and sick and die. That's it. That's how it goes. And man, I remember those days sucked forever and then it's over and it doesn't really get better. It's supposed to get better, right? I mean, it has to get better."

Sam nods emphatically and when Patrick turns around to fix Sam with his red-rimmed eyes it's all he can do to keep a strong face himself. "Yeah. Yeah, it gets better. Out of here, out of this place, something is going to come and take you to a much better place."

"You swear?"

Sam, of course, has no idea what lies beyond death, but he knows that whatever it is, it does have to be better than this hell. Sam believes in God. If there is a hell, there has to be a heaven, and that's where these kids have to be headed. They deserve it.

"I swear. I swear, Patrick, and I'm gonna find a way to get you, Amber, and anyone else I can find, out of here."

Patrick scoffs, but it's not cruel, just realistic. "Yeah? Well, if I were you I'd just concentrate on trying to stay alive and hope that you're a lucky one down here. I don't mean to be a downer, but no one gets out for good, especially no one alive."

Sam opens his mouth to speak, to tell Patrick that the boogeyman never grabbed a Winchester before, when a tendril of condensation curls up from his lips. The temperature takes a dramatic dive.

He stops dead in his tracks. Patrick's spirit doesn't even seem to notice and takes a few more steps before he turns around to see what the holdup is.

Sam looks up from his cloudy breath to Patrick's eyes. The kid may not feel cold anymore, but the fact that he recognizes something about this is written plainly all over his face. It's impossible that the boy could get paler, but he does somehow.

"Oh, shit. You're not a lucky one, are you?" Patrick backs up.

"It means he's coming, right?" Sam says calmly. "If you wanna run, I don't blame you."

The candlelight sputters, dims, and then goes dark for Sam. He hears Patrick say, "Don't die, Sam!" but it sounds like it's coming from far away. Sam tries to brace himself against a wall, bends down to find the knife in his boot as his blood feels like it's trying to freeze in his veins, when the monstrous grasp of an unseen hand on his shirt pushes him prone onto his back, forcing all the air he had been saving out of his lungs.

He gasps, focussing every ounce of power he has left to him to try to make his lungs expand because his arms and legs are already feeling useless.

Sammy...Sam...you're lucky. Yes. So lucky that you're unlucky. Isn't that a fun puzzle?

The words are in his head, and once there, Sam realizes he's been trapped inside as well.

Get the hell away from me! Get off me!

Sammy, we have so much catching up to do...don't waste it. You're here. You can use it now, better than ever, you can use it.

I'm never doing a damn thing for you. Now. Ever.

We help each other, Sammy. That's why you're here. To save Dean, remember?

Dean's in no danger from you. You can't twist that. You can't use that anymore.

Who said? Sammy, who said Dean was in danger from me? I don't want Dean-but everyone else does. You remember, don't you? You heard the voices...what they will do to him...to you. Up there.

And then Sam's consciousness falls back. Back in time. He feels small. Vulnerable. He's in a world almost entirely encased in ice-facets of it reflect strange light. There are passages that he knows lead back here. Leads back to the boogeyman who hovers over him with eyes...those shiny eyes sunken in a deep darkness under a strange looking tophat? The pitch midnight of what should be a face is broken up only by the twinkling, hateful orbs and the teeth.

Jesus Christ the teeth...

A child's worst nightmare-long, some broken, all jagged...too many...they fill the darkness and when it smiles...when it smiles...Sam wants to run but he can't. His feet can get no purchase, and the boogeyman's hands on his head violate his subconsciousness, his soul, push him to see things he doesn't want to see...hear things he shouldn't ever ever ever be able to hear.

Sammy...I'm not the scary one. You are...

And it smiles and smiles and then Sam knows, for certain, that Dean is going to die and that's just what they all want...

One chance to save Dean, Sammy...one chance to save everyone...think it over. We have forever now for you to think it over...you taste so good...the very best...so all is forgiven. All is forgiven.

Dean!

(to be continued...)