Supernatural: Next Generation

( Takes place before the trio gets on the road at the end of 17.2 )

- THEN -

NOW

“I have no idea how you’re gonna run EMF in a hospital,” Izzy said quietly, chewing her lower lip in thought. “With all the interference, you won’t find much in the way of clues.”

“Cold spots?” Jesse asked. He had half a sandwich in hand but wasn’t really eating it. The diner had piled their plates high with food, but as good as it looked, it just wasn’t on his mind. Claire’s either, although her coffee mug certainly had a lot of her attention; she was on her fourth cup in the last twenty minutes, but it didn’t look like it was helping any.

“Thing had the look like it wanted to be seen,” she said, stirring a pack of natural sugar into the brew. “It just had that feel.”

Izzy chewed her lips thoughtfully. “Doesn’t really sound like a normal ghost. Maybe it’s a death omen?” Her hands twisted around the mug, soaking up the heat.

Jesse straightened immediately, looking at Claire, then back at Izzy. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Claire just kept staring at her mug. The words ‘it crossed my mind’ kept getting stuck in her throat, because then that would be admitting the idea that a death omen had just shown itself to her--around Ben, which meant either one of them could’ve been on the Reaper list.

( “My gut says no.” )

***

“Do you love her?”

Ben watched as the sounds beneath the car suddenly stopped. Everything felt like it was moving faster than it ought to; he could hear the words before they were actually said, whispered echoes that made his pulse feel like it was pumping faster and harder. On the opposite side of the car and leaning against the far wall was his doppelganger; Ben could senses him there and see the shape of him, but he hadn’t made eye contact with him for at least twenty memories now.

“It’s complicated, Ben.”

“Don’t give me that crap,” he heard himself say, his hands going to Dean’s ankles and yanking. Dean’s body rolled forward, his face revealed and his expression unreadable. Or at least, it had been to his twelve-year-old self. At twenty-five, Ben recognized it: conflict.

( “It doesn’t have to be complicated. You’re /making/ it complicated.” )

***

It was still dark out when something in the back of Claire’s mind started to drag her out of deep sleep. She and Jesse had passed out around midnight, scrunched up in the loveseat opposite Ben’s bed. Izzy and Jed’s trip down to the morgue had been fruitless, and most of the rest of the day had been spent looking for more leads on the Burned Thing that she was sure had been behind the attacks.

Her eyes opened, though they were still glossed over with sleep. Pushing her hair out of her eyes, she pushed off of Jesse’s chest and turned her face toward the hallway. People were running. Someone was wailing. She watched the scene with a detached, almost drugged curiosity, slowly becoming aware of the warmth spreading through her bones, bringing with it another wave of extreme fatigue. She willed her feet to move, but they didn’t obey. Seconds later all her fuzzy resolve had melted away.

( With a deep breath that felt heavy and acrid as smoke, Claire laid her head back down and closed her eyes. )

****

Jesse sat on the end of Ben’s bed, watching as Claire lined every entrance with salt-tape. He opened his mouth when she went for the door but thought better of it. They needed to keep Ben safe, and Jesse wasn’t about to leave the room anyway.

Just as Claire finished up, he saw a couple of cops outside the glass, headed their way.

“Looks like we got a Q & A coming at us,” he said with a sigh, getting to his feet. Like they really needed to waste time on telling the police they’d been sleeping. Claire glanced up, then pinched the tape down to the door’s corner and stuck the roll in her pocket, right as the two officers crossed the threshold. It was the woman who spoke first, her eyes falling on Claire:

( “Hello, I’m Officer Fisher, and this is my partner Officer Hamill. You’re Miss Greene?” )

****

Ben paced the floor of his room, having left three messages on Dean’s phone in six hours. It was pushing on two in the morning, and he halfway through a second message.

“I know you’re on a hunt,” he babbled thoughtlessly. “And I know mom’s cool with you bein’ gone, but--”

An incoming call beeped midway through his sentence, and Ben pulled the phone back. Dean’s name and number appeared on the Incoming Call screen. He beeped over.

”What is it? Are you all right?”

Ben immediately felt a rush of remembered shame. Dean’s voice sounded gritty, like he’d just woken up. His eyes rose to find his doppelganger standing ahead of him, but he quickly averted his eyes again.

“Yeah. I-- I’m fine.”

”Why the hell are you awake? It’s--” There was a pause, and Ben knew that Dean was looking for a clock to see just how late it was. ”2 am. You have class tomorrow--”

( “What happens if something comes after us when you’re gone?” )

****

They had researched for going on ten hours straight with no breaks, but Izzy and Jed finally found the potential death resulting in the body of their ghost: Camilla Groff. She had been listed as one of the people brought into Shady Grove Advenist Hospital as an injury, when in fact she had been living in the apartment complex in a coma. Her parents had moved her from the hospital and hired a private nurse so that she could be cared for in their home. According to the file, she had been comatose for nearly two years from a horseback riding accident. All the pieces fit; now they just had to find the body. There were over 150 cemeteries in the Shady Grove area.

It was times like these that Izzy was so incredibly thankful for modern technology, as it only took ten minutes to type her name into a gravesite locator website, and that was because there were three C. Groff’s listed in the database.

Now it was just a matter of digging up the grave and keeping an eye out for the caretaker.

( “Y’go ahead and call her. I’ll unload the truck,” Izzy said. )

****

Regaining his lost memories had filled Ben with mixed emotions. Some of them had been wonderful, others bittersweet.

( Nothing had prepared him for his reoccurring nightmare finally taking full length, with color, sound, and sensation. )

****

The first thing Ben noticed as he started to wake was how incredibly uncomfortable he was. It was a slow process, but there was no ignoring the fact that his back ached. It refused to be ignored. His arm also itched like crazy, but when he tried to raise his hand to itch it, there was resistance.

“Ow,” he whined.

Claire half-stirred from her crumpled position on the chair next to his bed, dragged away from an exhausted attempt at sleep by the noise. Her eyes were still glazed by sleep when she opened them, just slits through her lashes that didn’t quite see anything they looked at. Until the noise that woke her up finally registered.

“Oh, God--!” She was on him in a breath, arms curled around his neck and the chair nearly thrown across the room. Her sudden presence was enough to make him wheeze in surprise as he became steadily more aware of everything that was attached to him.

Jesse jerked to his feet from where he’d lain, near dozing. He hadn’t heard Ben, but Claire was hard to miss. For an endless, terrible moment he thought something else had happened to Ben. Then he saw him moving. He rushed over, nearly squashing Claire in the process, his hand running up into Ben’s hair.

( “Welcome back, you asshole.” )

****

Even after a night of sleep in the nearest hotel, they still hadn’t told him what had happened when he’d been unconscious. Ben felt the itch to ask, but it was merely background frustration to the driving need to leave. While Jesse and Claire slept, his mind had raced on, trying to piece together the overwhelming return of his memories. Already the unimportant ones seemed to be settling in his head, blurring and undefined, but one particular memory stuck out like a blaring neon sign: Lawrence. He had to get to Lawrence. If he could find the woman Dean told him about, maybe... just maybe he’d be able to find him, if for nothing else than to get the Colt. The question was, did he tell them what had happened to him?

Need to know basis, Braeden, he told himself. ( Get the gun. That’s the only thing that matters. )

He could hear sobbing, somewhere in the house. The thing was, Ben knew that it wasn’t real, because they’d moved out of that house when he turned 13.

The hallway was dark and all the familiar sounds and smells assaulted him, but when he looked down at himself he was the same as he remembered currently being: tall, wearing street clothes, his hair swaying faintly against his neck and into his eyes as he cautiously followed the sound. It was masculine, that much he knew for certain.

It was also achingly familiar.

As he came closer to the door, he could hear a woman’s voice murmuring. His mother’s voice. Ben’s feet moved with more confidence, his hand pushing the door open. There she was, sitting in the bed, holding a man against her. His hands clutched at her back as he buried his face in her neck. His mother rocked the man gently, not too unlike Ben remembered her rocking him as a child after he’d woken from a bad dream.

( “I’m here,” she murmured. “I’m here, Dean.” )

****

Jesse stormed through the beach house. It was small; a kitchen and living room on the first floor, an open bedroom and balcony on the second, the furniture sparse and clean. There was very little room to hide.

“Where are you?!” he snarled, slamming the balcony railing. “You fucking come here right now, you piece of demon shit!”

But there was no one around. Upon a closer inspection, there was a thin film of dust on the flat surfaces. Clearly the house hadn’t been occupied in a very long time. Five more minutes passed before there was a voice just behind him.

“Did you find the relic?”

Spinning, Jesse swung at the demon’s head, which whipped back hard with the force of the blow. He brought his face forward slowly, bringing a hand up to his mouth and pulling his fingers away with blood. ( Then he glowered at Jesse in rage, his eyes suddenly rolling back and staying there. )

***

Claire stared at the ghost of herself in the reflection of a thick piece of glass, the thing that separated her from the figure laying prone and still in the hospital bed in the room on the other side. Machines beeped, a Labcoat talked to another Labcoat at the foot of Ben’s bed, discussing things she’d already heard about ten times at that point.

Words like seizure and unknown variables floated around in the space between her eyes, which were dry. Red, and stinging--but dry. If she let them run, they’d erode what forced stability she had left, and Claire simply couldn’t risk crumbling.

Another reflection walked up to join hers but Jesse didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. He could only stare at Ben, an alien panic streaming through him. His breath grew faster, more shallow, and more than anything he wanted to run away from there. Instead, he gingerly touched Claire’s hand. She responded by naturally curling her fingers into his and pulling him close, but her eyes didn’t stray from the scene in the room through the window.

( “He had a seizure,” she said somberly, swallowing the brick in her throat. “They don’t know why.” )

****

By the thousandth memory, Ben knew what was happening. He’d tried to break away from the dialogue, to beg for someone to tell him what was going on, but it was almost like he was being possessed and forced to relive every detail he lost.

Dean, finally coming out of his room, watching him try and eat cereal -- “Sit down, kiddo. You’re not eating that sugary shit. A growing boy like you needs real food” -- and making him breakfast for the first time. Dean, pulling away from his mom in a not-very-subtle way when he’d come back from the bathroom while they were watching Zombieland. Dean, secretly taking him to a parking lot behind the movie theatre after it closed -- “Let’s keep this between you and me” -- and letting him drive for the first time. Dean, salting the doors and windows -- ”It keeps out tons of things.” / “Like what?” -- when they took a three-day vacation in Chicago, then taking him fishing the next day and telling him everything. Hundreds of other things he did remember were left unvisited, but these memories... they burned inside him, filling him with limitless yearning.

( He didn’t want them to stop; he just wanted to relive them, over and over again. )

****

Claire didn’t always pace while she was on the phone--only when she was extremely agitated or worried. Right then, as she listened to the ring on the other end of her phone, she was damn near wearing a line in the tile floor of the hospital lobby: the only place she could get any good reception (and not be barked at by the hospital staff for having a phone in use around the machines).

“Hey Claire.” Lucas answered on the second ring. His voice was friendly, but not as easy as usual. “How’s he doing?”

Claire brought her hand to her brow, sighing into the phone regardless of how she tried to suppress it. “He hasn’t woken up...”

There was a short silence before, “Shit, Claire, I’m sorry.” She pinched the bridge of her nose for a moment, then stopped pacing. Claire had no idea how her voice was even working at the moment.

( “Tell me you found something.” )

***

The constant beep of the heart monitor, the hiss of the saline drip on its timer, even the murmur of people wandering back and forth in the hallway had already faded into the background for Claire--and he’d only been there for six hours or so. She hadn’t been logging the time.

All her concentration was torn between her ears and her eyes; watching the rise and fall of the blanket over his chest, listening - straining - to hear anything besides breath. Occasionally, her fingers would tighten around his hand, caught between her two, just to see if there’d be a reaction. Of course, there hadn’t been one yet.

“You’ve got horrible timing,” Claire uttered flatly, and mostly to herself in some vague attempt to inject something other than excruciating worry into the still atmosphere. The triple-shot espresso she’d gotten after talking with Lucas sat on the tray near Ben’s bed, forgotten. She’d barely taken three sips.

Claire swallowed the thick knot in her throat and looked down at his hand, carefully avoiding the IV taped to the back of it. Nearly dwarfing her own, it was warm and relaxed, like he was sleeping. The stark difference between her stress-tightened and cool skin made her squeeze again.

( “I know that whatever this is, you’re fighting it tooth and nail... I just hope you can hear me.” )

***

Claire had finally managed to fall asleep. On the one hand, this was a good thing, because she needed it badly. On the other, it meant Jesse had to stay in Ben’s room because someone had to be ready if he woke up. Jesse hated Ben’s room. It was too quiet, with the two of them sleeping there and just the beeping of the machines. He was trying to research, but they had done about as much as they could do. Which only left him sitting there, staring at Ben and thinking.

He’d said before he wished he could do more. Healing and transporting himself was well and good, but when the people he cared about were hurt or trapped, it meant exactly dick. He wanted to be something better, someone better.

But maybe he could settle for knowing someone better.

He knew Claire would object to Ruth coming around to help, and that Ben would probably agree with her. But Ruth wasn’t a demon, he knew that much. And if she could help, he didn’t really care if they didn’t like it.

Feeling a little ridiculous, Jesse closed his eyes. “Ruth?” She’d said he was her master, so he hoped she was listening. “Ruth, could you come help me?”

At first there was no answer; just silence, resounding in his head. Then he heard it, the whisper-soft feminine echo:

( [ Shouldn’t be here they’ll see me they’ll see me can’t let them see me ] )

***

“Where the hell were you!?”

He’d taken the long way home after getting in a fight with his friend Aaron at school. They’d gotten permission slips to go on a field trip, and their teacher had pointed out that they were looking for additional chaperons. Aaron had suggested he “ask his dad” to come along. Ben had shouted at him that Dean was not his “fucking father.” Luckily, it had been the first time he’d ever used profanity in class, and the principal had let him off with a warning. Rather than wait for his not-father to pick him up in front of all his friends, he’d walked. Dean was livid.

“Dude, chill. I walked. It’s no big deal--”

Dean tried to touch his face but Ben jerked back, feeling a complicated twist of emotions rush up from his gut and into his throat. Some of the anger had faded from Dean’s eyes, but he looked scared. Honest to god scared, like his mom did the first time he’d gone biking alone without telling her.

“I waited for half an hour,” Dean nearly shouted. “After going in and checking every single classroom tryin’ to find you. You can’t just up and leave me like that without letting me know where you are! What if something had happened--”

( “You’re not my dad!” )

TO BE CONTINUED...