THEN:

In the middle of a rescue operation to save Danny Phantom from Freakshow's control, Dean receives a call from Ash saying that the yellow-eyed demon is a three-hour drive away from them. Anxious to save his brother from demonic influence, Dean pulls the Winchester brothers from the mission and drives off, leaving Sam and Tucker alone to save their friend. Almost a year and a half later, Sam and Dean have all but forgotten about their strange adventures in Amity Park, having been through literal hell. With the fate of Danny, Sam, and Tucker unknown, the brothers continue on: saving people, hunting things - the family business.

NOW:

"What are we thinking?" asked Sam from the passenger seat of the Impala.

Dean squinted at the abandoned storefront they had been staking out for the past few hours. Reports in the news and from the police said weird things had been happening on this lot for the past few days. Banging doors and flying objects. Typical poltergeist. Which was all well and good, but they had dug back to before the town had been founded and Dean didn't think he had ever seen a purer patch of land. No deaths, robberies, or kidnappings. Not even the barest hint of money laundering. There was always the possibility that someone had brought a cursed object or an object tied to a ghost to this location and left it here, but something in Dean's gut still felt something was off. Only one thing to do.

"Let's go say hi to old ghosty." He got out of the car, Sam following his lead.

They entered the building carefully. The glass doors had been broken years ago, so the metal frames were light as they pushed them open. Crunching glass with each step, they made their way through the interior as quietly as they could, Dean holding his EMF meter before him. It blipped lazily down in the "no ghost" zone. Granted, it was approaching evening and the ghost wouldn't be at its strongest until nightfall, but he should at least get something.

Glancing sideways, Dean saw Sam across the room with the other meter, also not having a lot of luck. Then suddenly his own meter was screeching wildly, the vibration almost making him drop it. Instantly, Sam was at his shoulder, shotgun raised and cocked as Dean turned to face the closed door of a supply closet. If he hadn't taken a moment to check on Sam, he felt sure he would have noticed the extremely obvious green glow coming from beneath the door.

Something tickled the back of his mind. He pushed Sam's hand away before he could touch the knob.

"Does this glow look familiar to you?" he whispered.

"What?" Sam glanced at the floor. "Oh." He screwed his face up for a moment, thinking. "Yeah, actually, it does. But where..."

Dean kept his own shotgun aimed at the door, but he didn't move to open it. EMF going off. No sign of violent history. Bright, toxic waste looking green light. He looked back at Sam. "You thinking what I'm thinking?"

Sam nodded. "Fenton ghost."

Dean jerked his head towards the exit. They needed to look back through their journals to remember what they had done for the last Fenton ghost they had encountered. As they cleared the store and made their way back to the Impala, Dean thought back. It had been many months since he had even thought of Amity Park or its strange occupants. To be fair, a lot had happened in the... wow, it had only been a year and a half since then. Sam had died and come back. Dean had been to Hell. Angels were apparently real and one of them wore a trench coat and had an annoyingly innocent view of the world. And now the world was halfway to ending.

Absently, he touched the handprint shaped scar on his left shoulder. It had been a while since they'd seen Castiel too. Not that he was in a hurry to see the stoic angel again with his bad tidings of doom and broken seals. Lucifer - the Lucifer - was now an imminent threat on the horizon and the angel was always coming around to remind Dean and Sam that it was their job to fix things. That Dean owed him for dragging him from Hell.

Dean shuddered involuntarily, memories of fire and pain and blood flickering just below his consciousness.

Something hit him on the shoulder. Dean jumped. "Hey!" Sam said, his face wrinkled with concern. "You good?"

Dean blinked a few times to dispel the visions. "Yeah, m'fine." He hastily got into the Impala, pulling a journal out of the glove box. A few seconds later, Sam opened the passenger door and stepped inside. Dean flipped through the pages of the journal. It wasn't their dad's. It was Dean's own. A new one he had had to start after he'd filled the rest of John's. He flipped back to some of the earlier entries looking for the sketch he'd done for Bobby. Not wanting to draw the Fenton ghost again, he'd simply taped the piece of legal paper into his journal. Eventually he found the entry and started reading it. He dimly noticed that Sam had pulled out his laptop and was tip tapping away searching for who knew what.

He read and re-read the entry, memories coming back to him slowly as he went. Salt hadn't worked. The only thing that had done the trick was fire. So they would just have to jerry-rig a flame thrower again. It wouldn't be that difficult. He thought he recalled a dollar store a few blocks from downtown-

"Dean." Sam's voice had that tone in it that told him it was urgent. Dean looked over. Sam had a news website pulled up. Dean leaned a little and saw that it was the home page for Amity Park News. Dean couldn't read the tiny print on the screen from where he was.

"What, Sherlock?"

Sam gestured to the screen. "Anything look funny to you?"

Dean thwacked him on the arm. "It's too small to read from here, dumbass."

Sam sighed longsufferingly and passed the laptop to Dean. Without waiting for him to take a proper look at the website, Sam said, "There haven't been any entries since October of last year."

Dean took a cursory glance and then handed the computer back to Sam. "Well, maybe the station went under."

Sam pushed the computer back at him. "There isn't another news station in Amity Park. I checked. Why would a town's only news station suddenly disappear?"

"I don't know." Dean shrugged and dropped the laptop back into Sam's lap without waiting for him to grab it.

"Hey!" Sam scrambled to catch the laptop, but Dean was already plugging the keys into the ignition. "Dean!"

"What?" Dean asked, slightly annoyed now as he mapped a route to the dollar store in his mind. Truth be told, he didn't really want to think about Amity Park. It was just another thing to feel guilty about. He had left teenagers to fend for the fate of their friend so they could chase the yellow-eyed demon. Who hadn't even been there when they had arrived. It was a sore spot, no doubt about it.

"What are we doing?" Sam asked.

"Going to the dollar store to DIY a flamethrower."

"To do what?"

"Get rid of the Fenton ghost."

"And then what?"

"And then we move on."

Sam crossed his arms. "You're not the least bit curious about what's going on in Amity Park?"

Dean came to a stop at a red light a little more abruptly than was absolutely necessary. "No, Sam. I'm not."

"What if those kids need help? Sam, Tucker and Danny? What if something happened?" Sam watched Dean's stony face. Ever since he'd come back from... that place, he had been different. Understandably so, but Sam was worried that the whole experience had changed his brother into someone closer to their dad. Dean didn't laugh as readily as he used to. Car trips were often spent in heavy silence, Dean's gaze lost in the distance. But when Sam tried to talk to him, to see if he could help, he was rebuffed by this wall of bare minimum answers. Sam would have bet money that the next thing out of Dean's mouth was going to be an explosion. He was right.

"We don't owe them anything, Sam! We were helping out of the goodness of our hearts and when we had to pull out to chase the yellow-eyed demon, we were looking out for our number one priority: us."

Me. Sam thought. You were looking out for me. Sam remembered that difficult conversation before the whole Gates of Hell thing had gone down. Dean had told him about the task their father had set for him before he died. How he was supposed to fix Sam or kill him. In the end, Sam had died, but not by Dean's hand. And, true to his nature, Dean had given up his soul to resurrect him and have just one more year with his little brother. Sam still wasn't sure he could forgive Dean for selling himself for Sam's sake, but it was hard to have a hard heart when he could see the invisible scars that still haunted his brother.

"Ok," he said, settling back into his seat. He would have to broach the subject again later. It really hurt him that they had left Sam, Danny, and Tucker to the whims of Freakshow. With all that had happened since they left Amity, he hadn't really had a chance for the guilt to sink in, but now it was hitting him with full force and he wanted to do something to make it right. Even if it was just a convenient drive through Amity Park on the way to somewhere else... He opened a new tab on his laptop and started searching for something - anything - that would get them to drive in that direction. Turns out he didn't have to.

He gave Dean a second to cool off by himself by staying in the car when they got to the Dollar Store. He used the time to look for cases near Amity Park that would make them drive through the city to get to them. What he found instead was a wealth of social media posts and backwater news articles about a disappearing city.

"Amity Park was weird for years," Sam read from one of the posts, "I knew one of the teachers at the high school and he was always telling crazy stories about ghosts. Well, I haven't heard from him in months and now people are telling me that Amity Park never existed." He found a trending hashtag: #amicrazy. Following it down the corresponding rabbit hole, he discovered dozens of posts of people asking the world wide web if they were crazy for thinking that Amity Park ever existed. Some people claimed to have friends who lived there or to have even been there themselves. But, scrolling through the comments, he found many many people rebuffing them by saying they had just recently driven through that part of Illinois and there was nothing there. Sam even found a few pictures. He recognized the barren, scrubby grassland that Amity Park had inhabited and it was glaringly empty of the small city.

Sam reviewed his own memories of Amity Park: the ghosts floating through every available surface; the super hero-esque fights between Danny Phantom and his enemies; Danny himself - half kid, half ghost. It was all very surreal in hindsight, and had Sam not been a Winchester, he might very well have given into the internet gaslighting. But he was a Winchester and, guilt or not, an entire town disappearing constituted a case.

He kept his mouth shut when Dean got back into the car, but his brother's older sibling instincts must have tingled, because a few minutes into their drive back to the haunted store front, Dean sighed and rested his head on the steering wheel.

"What?" he snapped.

"What 'what'?" said Sam, trying to inject some innocence into his tone.

"Don't 'what what' me, Sam. You got something to say, say it."

Sam hesitated, knowing this was going to be a fight. He thought about the three teens they had left behind, and his resolve strengthened. "I kept looking into Amity Park and-"

Dean slammed his hand on the steering wheel. "Dammit, Sam!"

Sam plowed onward. If he could pique Dean's interest in the case, he would have it in the bag, but he had to be able to finish his sentence to get there. "- and it seems like the town actually disappeared."

"What?" asked Dean, in spite of himself.

"Like, poof, gone." Then he waited. You couldn't rush this part.

They sat in silence for a few turns and Sam began to lose hope when they pulled up to the curb in front of the store. Dean turned the car off and looked like he was going to get out of the car. Sam held his breath. After an extended moment of staring at the broken glass of the store entrance, Dean finally sighed and said, "What did you find?"

Sam handed over his laptop, pointing to the various tabs he had open. "The news site went dark, but I already showed you that. But people posted stuff like this..." He let Dean scroll through the pictures and posts in silence for a minute before he asked, "What do you think?"

Dean's brow scrunched as he thought. "The city was definitely there. We were there."

"Right."

"And it just up and disappeared? Cities don't do that... How is this not national news?"

Sam pointed helpfully to the comment section of the post he was looking at. "Gaslighting. People are saying Amity never existed or that it was a government hoax. It's not helped that Amity had a large, high tech R&D center for Axiom Labs. That's just adding to the mystique."

Finally, Dean found the picture of the empty grassland where Amity Park used to be.

"What the hell?" he said under his breath.

"So," Sam said, unable to resist any longer, "We should go check it out."

Dean sat for a second longer, glaring at the laptop's screen.

"We've gone places a lot farther for a lot less," Sam said, barely able to breathe from the suspense.

Dean grumbled and slammed the computer shut. "Fine. First we light this ghost's ass up, then we go to Amity Park."

Sam smiled. "Alright!"

It was approaching dusk when they made it to the stretch of grassland where Amity Park used to be. Dean drove down the road - a four lane highway - up until it disappeared into the grass. The brothers got out and looked around, EMF meters extended just in case. The meters went wild immediately after they switched them on.

"Well, something's definitely going on here," Dean said, dryly. They put away the meters and switched to good old manual sleuthing, spreading out with DIY flamethrowers held before them. They searched for a few hours in each direction, and Sam was becoming discouraged. Just as they were about to give up, though, Dean found some tire tracks. He called Sam over.

The tracks were wide and deep: something big and heavy had come through, although not very recently. They looked like they had been gouged into the ground while the ground was wet, and had since dried. The tracks extended back towards the highway in a diagonal line, and then forwards towards where Amity Park used to be, before they stopped abruptly, disappearing completely. Just like the highway.

They stared at the grass ahead, serenely empty of human interference. Perhaps suspiciously empty. Dean bent down and picked up a rock. Standing, he tossed it past the end of the tracks. Neither of them had dared to step past the harsh demarcation. The rock disappeared. There was a clunking sound. And someone said, "Ow."

Instantly the world went from a windswept grassy plain to complete chaos. A hole opened up in the air before them and a wall of sound blasted out.

"Put your hands up! Get your hands where I can see them!" was shouted by at least five people. People in white armor reminiscent of storm troopers poured out of the rift in the air, brandishing very large, very dangerous looking guns. Sam immediately put his hands up, as did Dean a second later. The storm troopers approached them, guns still up, and pulled out handcuffs.

"Hey!" Dean took a step in front of Sam. "Who the heck are you? You're not the police!" As he moved, two larger guys bolted forward and grabbed his arms, forcing him to the ground and pulling his hands behind his back. Dean was forced to close his mouth or otherwise fill it with grass.

Sam immediately stepped forward to try and pull the armored men off his brother, but a loud cocking of many guns stilled him. He raised his hands higher just in case. Two more men peeled off the main group and approached him, pulling out handcuffs.

"Who are you? Do you have the authority to arrest us?" he tried, taking the barest step back.

"Does it matter?" As the cuffs were tightened around his wrists, Sam saw two men in formal white suits step out from the throng of storm troopers. "We've got the guns in this equation," one of them said. They were both bald, one black and one white skinned. Even though their wraparound sunglasses prevented Sam from seeing their eyes, he could feel their gazes on him.

The black one reached into an inner pocket, pulling out a badge that was too far away for Sam to read clearly. "But, if you really must know, we are the GIW, a branch of the federal government. And you're under arrest."

The white one raised two fingers. "Get the tow truck. We need that car off the road."

Dean staged an immediate revolt as they raised him, freshly cuffed, from the ground. He received a swift strike between the shoulder blades for his trouble.

"Calm down, sir," the white white-suited man said, "We won't scratch it. Much."

Dean started swearing like a sailor, promising curses upon curses on their heads.

The black white-suited man made a curt gesture to the soldiers holding Dean and one of them pulled a crackling green taser out, jabbing it into Dean's ribs.

"Dean!" Sam jerked reflexively, but was held back by his own pair of soldiers. Dean stiffened, then fell limp but breathing into the grip of the two men holding him. A couple seconds later, he wobbled to his feet, groaning.

"Again," repeated the white-suited man, "Calm down, sir. It will be better for you if you do."

"Operative K," said the black white-suited man, "We don't have any facilities for holding human prisoners on site."

"Noted, Operative O. We'll put them in the holding area for ectoplasmic entities. That way we don't have to waste resources guarding them."

"Roger, Operative K. I'll call HQ and have them send a chopper for transport to a max security lockup. These two obviously can't be trusted with freedom now that they know we're here."

"Agreed, Operative O."

"Wait," said Sam as the storm troopers started pushing him and Dean towards the rent in the air, "We don't know what you're doing here! We were just curious why the road ended!"

"A likely story," said Operative K, taking point to lead Sam and Dean into their territory.

As they passed into the hole in the air, what was revealed on the other side was nigh on apocalyptic. On the outside, the land had appeared flat and undisturbed. Here, on the other side of what Sam could only assume was a huge shield of some sort, there was a gigantic crater in the ground, at least several miles wide. Around the edge of the crater, the GIW had set up their camp. Large vehicles, mysterious metal towers, and hundreds of personnel were spread around the basin of the crater. Amity Park was truly gone.

"What...?" was all Sam could say. Unfortunately, Operative K heard him.

"Blindfold them," he said.

The storm troopers hesitated. "With what, sir?" asked one of the soldiers holding Dean.

Operative K whirled on them. "Do I have to make every decision for you? Use your brains!"

After a few minutes in which Sam used every second to observe his surroundings, the storm troopers managed to find a suitable set of "blindfolds"... which turned out to be someone's dirty shirt cut into strips. Sam tried not to breathe in through his nose as they tied the cloth around his face.

"This reeks!" he heard Dean say.

"I find that insulting!" came one of the soldier's voices.

"Shut up, Adam!" said one of the other soldiers, "You have some serious BO."

Adam shut up.

Operative O yelled from the front of the line, "Alright, let's get these two in containment."

The soldiers pushed Sam and Dean forward. The ground was much more uneven than it had been outside the shield, and they kept tripping. The only reason they didn't fall were the soldiers gripping them by their arms. Eventually, they heard a door being opened in front of them. They were led inside the interior of some structure and the temperature around them dropped remarkably. It reminded Sam of when they had entered haunted houses and the ghost suddenly appeared. Sam could hear Dean being secured nearby, but his own stormtrooper escort moved away, leaving the stinky blindfold. Dean apparently noticed the trend too.

"Hey!" he said from somewhere to Sam's left, "Aren't you going to take off the blindfolds?"

Back in the direction Sam assumed the door was, Operative O replied, "Absolutely not." Sam heard the stormtroopers' footsteps retreating. "Just behave and the chopper will be here to pick you up in a few hours. Then it will be a nice cushy cell in maximum security lockup."

And then the door slammed and they were alone.

Dean cursed quietly, but then he and Sam both started rubbing their heads against their shoulders to try and dislodge the blindfolds.

"Well, well, well," said an echoey voice in the darkness, "Look what the cat dragged in."

The brothers froze. "Who's there?" asked Dean.

"You wouldn't know me," said the voice, "But in a way, we've already met." The voice chuckled, and Sam noticed that, although it had a slightly malevolent undertone to it, it was very weak.

"You got a name, wise guy?" Dean asked, rubbing harder against the blindfold.

"I do," said the voice, "You can call me Dan."