Chapter 2: Chapter 2
Sam woke up in strange room. Weak sunlight filtered through the blue curtains beside his bed, and posters adorned the walls. A dirty mug sat next to a few stray papers on a desk by the door, but the room was otherwise neat and clean. Sam took all this in in an instant, and then shoved the information to the back of his mind and closed his eyes again. The pain had ended, and that was the most important thing. His shuddered in his lungs and caught in his throat as he remembered the sheer agony that had tumbled him unstoppably into unconsciousness. The room around him was peaceful, and for a moment that was all Sam allowed himself to care about.
His respite lasted about five seconds before someone burst through the door.
Sam was out of the bed before the door finished banging off the wall. Just as quickly, he found himself tangled in blankets and making a swift trip straight to the floor. An unfamiliar presence knelt by him as he struggled his way out of the blankets, and he shoved the strange arms away from him, scanning the room for Dean. As soon as he found Dean, he could figure out what the hell was going on.
In his frantic state, it took several moments for the voice murmuring by his ear to penetrate through his confused senses.
"Shh," it was saying, in a soft feminine voice. "Shh, sweetheart, it's okay."
As his mind slowly cleared, Sam became aware of a woman crouching next to him, hands folded carefully between her knees. An old hunting rifle lay propped against the wall by the door behind her, but she radiated a certain soothing presence that made Sam reluctant to find her threatening.
As the panic wore off, he began to feel a bit ridiculous, tangled in blankets and crouched on the floor next to the bed he'd woken up in, eyes wide and breathing ragged. He had been a hunter for years, had literally been through hell. Whatever was going on here was nowhere near worth the panic he'd gone into. The thought, "Just another sign of weak little Sammy," passed through his head, but he ignored it. Instead, he took several deep, slow breaths to calm his racing heart and looked more carefully at the strange woman. There was something familiar about her. She gazed back at him with wide, blue eyes, panic carefully hidden behind concern.
She was so familiar, a face he'd seen once in a dream, or a half-remembered voice from long ago.
When her name finally clicked into place, he reared back into the bed frame, an unfamiliar emotion flooding through him. Tracking down the name of that feeling that had the tension draining from his body and a smile tilting up the corners of his mouth was unexpectedly difficult, but he managed. With distant surprise, he realized that he felt relief.
An irrefutable certainty wormed its way up from the depths of his mind to replace the commotion and confusion.
"So," he said, "am I dead then?" It was the only explanation he could see for why his mother, Mary Winchester, was crouched in front of him.
When Mary Winchester heard her youngest son screaming fit to raise the dead, her first thought was that her past had finally caught up to her. Her Sammy was a tough and often quiet child, but the sounds currently coming from his room upstairs could only be described as agony. She barely remembered to shut off the stove, on which she had been making him a surprise birthday breakfast, before she was rushing to the safe in the study to grab her shotgun. She was years (decades, really) out of practice, but the devil himself would have to take her on before she was letting anything hurt her child.
The screams stopped when she was halfway up the stairs. She found the silence more terrifying than the screams and increased her pace, throwing open Sam's door only seconds later.
A baffling sight greeted her. Sam shot out of his bed as she entered the room, got tangled in his blankets, and face-planted onto the floor. Other than that, no obvious danger revealed itself to her searching gaze. She set her rifle on the floor and ran to her son, but he pushed her away as soon as she tried to get her arms around him and help him up. Backing off a few inches, she decided it would be best to wait this out. "Shh, baby, it's alright," she said, looking around the room to assess the truth of her words.
"What's wrong, sweetheart?" she asked. On receiving no answer, she reverted to generic calming sounds, still scanning the room with half her concentration.
Several minutes passed before Sam came back to himself. "Hey, Sam," she said, keeping her voice gentle. "You want to tell me what that was about?"
The dazed look cleared from his eyes a little more, but there was still far too much confusion and pain in the set of his mouth and the tightness at the corners of his eyes for her liking. His first words made her blood run cold.
"So," he asked in a disturbingly flat voice, "am I dead then?"
"Why would you think that?" she asked, scooting back a few more inches to be closer to her shotgun. There was no way she wanted to shoot her baby boy, but there was only rock salt in the gun, and plenty of dangerous things could possess people. She couldn't think why it would start with such an absurd question, though.
Rather than explaining himself, Sam's brow furrowed in confusion at her question.
"I was dying," he said, the words pouring ice into her veins even as her bewilderment increased. "I was dying, and then there was pain, and now I'm here with you and Dean isn't here." He glanced around the room again, as though to confirm the truth of his words.
Mary bit back a few retorts to those statements. "Sam, honey," she said, chosing her words carefully, "why would you expect Dean to be here? You two haven't been on good terms since middle school. You asked us not to invite him today for your birthday."
"Us?" Sam asked, picking up of course on one of the least important details.
"Your father and I," she said.
Sam nodded, as though she had finally said something he expected. "That's good that he's here, too," Sam said, which cleared up absolutely nothing for Mary.
Sam and Dean had stopped getting along around the time that Dean hit middle school, but Sam had sounded inexplicably sad at the thought of his big brother and part-time tormenter not being there. "Dean's probably at the garage with your father," she said cautiously. "Your father's coming over later for your birthday dinner, but last time we talked you didn't want Dean around today."
That certainly got Sam's attention. The way he looked at her after she told him about Dean made her feel like she was being peeled open.
Before she could think of something to say to that, Sam suddenly stood and bolted out the door. Times like this, she found herself cursing her choice to not keep up with her old training. Once upon a time, she could have caught Sam easy as breathing. Once upon a time, she also would have had some holy water and salt on her to make sure Sam wasn't being possessed. Her dad would be fucking insufferable if he ever heard about this.
Find Dean.
The thought looped through Sam's mind in time to his frantic heartbeat as he raced out of a too familiar house and into a too familiar street, eclipsing all else. Once he found Dean, things would be okay. They could figure out what the hell was going on and tackle it together, as always. He just needed his brother.
He was halfway down the street when he realized that he had no idea where he was going. The street he was on looked like any generic suburban street: modest houses lined the block as far as he could see, and there were a few kids outside in the sun in a nearby yard, while in another yard an older woman cleared weeds from her garden. The familiarity from a moment ago had disappeared as he got further from the house. He paused and took a deep breath, trying to calm down and think about what might have happened.
This goal was hampered by the fact that his ever-present headache from the past few months was returning. He ducked his eyes away from the sun and continued walking.
He clearly was not dead; his mother would not have reacted as she did if they were in heaven together. He also couldn't be in the past, as his mother had recognized him. The only options left that he was aware of were a Djinn dream or an alternate reality. He had never experienced a Djinn dream, but he was pretty sure that it would include Dean being nearby, so that ruled that out. Therefore, alternate reality it was. Which meant that if he had come through in the same place as his alternate self had been, Dean had likely done the same. The theory was consistent with his previous (admittedly limited) experience with alternate realities. So, all he had to do was find out where alternate Dean was, which brought him right back to square one.
The question of who had sent them to this alternate universe also nagged at the back of Sam's mind, but finding Dean was more important.
The last time he'd been to Lawrence was a long time ago. Even if he'd been back recently, there was nothing to say that a Lawrence where his mother was alive would look the same as the one he had seen.
He had to find Dean. Dean would know what to do.
Stumbling over a crack in the sidewalk jerked him out of his thoughts enough to hear the sound of a car pulling up beside him. He turned to look just as the window rolled down.
"Sam, honey," his mother said, and only years of experience with lying allowed him to hear the anger behind the worry in her voice, "Can you please talk to me?"
Sam slowed to a standstill, and his mother (no, alternate Sam's mother) stopped next to him. A closer look let him see the outline of a gun at her waist.
"Sam," she said, still in the same tone of voice, "I'm kind of worried about you right now. You're not acting like yourself."
Recalling his last experience with an alternate universe, Sam wasn't entirely sure he wanted to know what "acting like himself" would entail. Instead of answering her question, he stared her down as well as he could with the pounding behind his eyes and said, "I'm finding Dean. I'd appreciate if you would leave." He had only a moment to see her eyes harden before she was out of the car and had a gun pointed at him.
"My son hasn't talked to his brother in months," she said, the anger overtaking worry in her voice, "and he doesn't treat me like a stranger. I don't know what you are, but if you've hurt my boys you will have hell to pay."
Sam stared down the barrel of the gun and almost asked her to shoot. He was so tired. He'd been prepared to die in that church, until Dean dragged him out, and now he was stuck in some new horror all alone. There wasn't a single part of him that didn't ache with weariness. The rest of him wanted to tell her that he'd already paid hell, and now all he wanted was to close it and sleep for good.
Instead, he felt his knees giving way beneath him before he hit the ground. Mary Winchester cursed and ran towards him, though she kept the gun out. "Do you think it's a sign of something that we're never talking in other worlds?" he asked her, before his world went black again.