Find it hard to tell you, find it hard to take. Who: Dean and Lisa What: Dean's first good look around Marrowood finds the last person he'd expect. Where: The Square When: Monday morning Warnings: All the Feels. Plus some language. Status: Complete
"This is some creepy bullshit," Dean muttered under his breath, stepping outside the Sleepy Hollow, slotted eyes glaring at the Pentagram map. Once out the door, he took in his surroundings, taking one last glance at where he was going before folding and tucking it into his back pocket. Hesitantly, he began walking ahead, smiling disarmingly at a passerby.
No matter where he went, he couldn't shake the feeling that he was being followed, and it gave him the chills. He thought about trying that device he found in his room, but the fact that he didn't know it's origin made him suspicious. Especially because he had no idea where he was. The more he thought about it, the faster he walked. He had to find Sam.
For whatever reason, he had been sure that he'd find his brother in the center of town, but when he got there and saw no Sam, he felt himself getting frustrated fast. Where else would he go? He wasn't at the hotel, but he had to be here somewhere. Dean never got caught up in this fucked up demonic shit all by himself.
"Sammy!" When all else failed, yelling at the top of your lungs in the middle of town usually tended to lead somewhere. "C'mon, quit messing around, we got work to do."
Meanwhile half a block over, Lisa could practically feel the circles under her eyes getting darker. The hope that she’d get some kind of relief as far as sleep goes after moving into the apartments (with Emma’s help) was dashed by increasingly disturbing nightmares. Oddly enough, she felt more rested passing out from exhaustion in the Sleepy Hollow after wrestling her covers back from the invisible bed-hog that liked to press cold feet against the small of her back in the middle of the night. The private residences were nearly poltergeist-free, but with deeper sleep came a deeper dreamscape that was robbing her of anything resembling ‘rest’. She just couldn’t win.
Trying not to think too hard about how this whole place had to be some kind of coma-dream, and she was having dreams inside that coma-dream, plus fighting hunger pangs, she’d decided to wander the creepy town square. Why? A bunch of half-reasons; distraction, more searching for Ben, even some half-assed job hunting, since she apparently still had to make a living inside this non-reality, on top of avoiding demonic people-puppets around town and mutant monsters that came out of the dark.
Her leg was still hot and angry looking under it’s bandage and stitches, and gave her stride a distinctive lopsided limp, but at least it was healing. Just slowly. Probably because of lack of sleep.
In the distance somewhere up ahead, she’d caught the yell of a man, obviously searching for someone he knew in a place he didn’t. Lisa knew that tone well. It was the only thing that’d come out of her own mouth for the first two weeks of her residence in Marrowood.
When no one answered his call, Dean quickly began interrogating nearby residents. "What is this place? Who brought me here?" Soon turned into, "Have you seen a big dude 'bout yey high? No? What about a little dude in a trench coat? Kinda looks like a lost puppy?"
The people, though, there was something... off about them. Within just a couple minutes, he was already getting fed up with being ignored. "Look, if I don't start getting some answers soon, I'm gonna have'ta start busting heads," he said, gripping the arm of the nearest weirdo.
The second Dean laid his hands on the sleeve of the plain-faced man’s prim grey suit, all four dead-eyed pedestrians within twenty feet of him stopped; stopped walking, stopped reading, or sipping at the straw of a coke. Their faces remained straight ahead, all except for the one he grabbed.
He craned his neck over his shoulder, almost mechanical in his slowness. Though his eyes were on the man who had a hold of him, and briefly, where he had a hold of him, they held about as much life as a bag of rusted hammers.
“You’re causing a scene, sir,” the man said in a dull voice that was more monotone than not, yet still somehow menacing.
Having been heading that direction, Lisa saw the whole thing, and her gut dropped like a stone.
Dean froze just as quickly as the atmosphere changed around him, his instincts screaming at him to either fight or flee, but he didn't jump backwards until the thing spoke.
"What the..." His mind raced through every hunt he'd ever been on, but he couldn't pinpoint whatever it was he was dealing with. Logic told him it had to be archangels, but there was nothing heavenly about this place. It felt like a nightmare. His hand automatically began inching toward the First Blade.
“Hey- no… no scene here.” The thick atmosphere was cut by the interruption of extremely forced cheerfulness in Lisa’s voice. She’d limped herself right into the middle of it, shouldering her way as casually as possible between the lost guy and the demonic puppet he was about to piss off.
“Keep walking,” she said through her teeth, this time obviously to the only other person in their vicinity that looked to have a soul behind their eyes. “Don’t make’em mad- just keep walking.” And she made herself an example.
Once Dean laid eyes on the figure approaching them, all thoughts of the mess he was caught up in took a header right out the window. "Lisa..." He tried, but no sound came out, like someone was vacuuming the air from his lungs.
He didn't come to until she was already walking away, with a shake of his head and a glance back at the creepy dude, he grinned. "Oh, I get it. I'm dreaming." He began almost pleasantly, falling in step behind Lisa. "This is just a really bad, bad dream. Nice to see you again, by the way."
The look of confusion she sent over her shoulder couldn’t have been more clear, save for the fact that it was still laced with mortal concern. Nice to see you again?
The hell did that mean?
Once they were at least half a block away from the Freaks (as she’d been calling them lately), and a glance back assured they had gone back to milling about in their lifeless way, only then did she turn to face him. Only then did she get a good look at his face.
“Sorry, no… not a dream,” she started, pushing the gut-wrenching flare-up of deja vu back down as far as it would go. Those happened every once in a while- been a long time since she’d felt a pang that strong; it took a little of her breath away, and her eyes refused to stop searching his face. “I-uh… You must be new. Did you say ‘nice to see you again’?”
Dean had no idea what to think. Was it normal for dream apparitions to tell you it wasn’t a dream? As many nightmares as he’d had in his day, one would think he would be an expert by now. Then again, he couldn’t remember the last time he had one that felt this real.
He watched as Lisa studied his face, only then remembering that Cas had wiped her memory the last time he’d seen her, and he felt his heart sink into his gut. After that realization hit, he naturally stepped back into denial and stuck to it like glue.
“Yeah, it uh, it doesn’t matter. Look, I don’t know what’s going on here, maybe I hit my head or drank a little too much last night, but trust me I’m gonna be waking up in some grungy motel room any minute now. Just gotta wait this out.” His grin returned to his face, but it was just as forced as his blase attitude. The conviction he had built up in his mind deflated like a popped ball as he spoke, taken over by the grenade that just went off in his stomach. In the end, his hunter instincts took over, and just in case he wasn’t just in some Hellish nightmare, he quickly added, “where is this place, anyway?”
Pensivity washed across Lisa’s face like a wave, but it was mostly on the surface- at least, right now, because it was competing with the seriously invasive sense of familiarity coming off the man- that was taking up most of her thoughts.
“That’s just it- nobody knows,” she answered. Priorities. There were more important things right now than the wiring in her brain short circuiting again- like making sure another captive of this Hell lived through what was obviously their first day. “Let me go through your day so far-- you woke up in that shoddy truck-stop of a hotel down the street, with a map and a phone that doesn’t work? Might’ve seen or heard some weird shit on your way out? Not including the Freaks you almost riled up-- don’t do that, by the way. Don’t piss them off. Trust me, you won’t like it.”
She didn’t wait for him to answer any of it, only sighed hard and pushed a hand through her black hair, favoring her leg when her steps started up again. What had it been- a month for her? She still wasn’t sure of it all herself, and now here she was, inducting someone else like a fast-food trainee.
“I woke up here the same way- just, laid down to take a nap, then boom. Hell. -or whatever this place is. There are a lot of us, people who were just yanked from their lives and dropped in this horror movie.”
Dean was left almost stunned as she proceeded to describe his entire morning, and the ugly ‘This might not actually be a dream’ monster began poking his head out again before he again smashed it with the Nope hammer. If this was real, then based on what Lisa was saying, he was basically screwed. Not to mention Lisa… if this was real, that meant Lisa was actually standing in front of him, and that was something he wanted to deal with even less than Nightmareland.
He couldn’t even look at her anymore, his gaze painfully travelling across the ground and around at the scenery, even as his voice clung to it’s nonchalant mask. “Oh, believe me, this isn’t Hell. This place is too hardcore to be Hell. Hell is a child’s beauty pageant compared to this place.” He paused with a small shudder, quietly adding, “actually, that does sound like Hell.”
It wasn’t until that moment did he notice she was limping, and he nearly cut himself off as he rushed to close the gap between them. “Woah, hang on. Are you hurt? You’re hurt.” Concern pinched at his features as he naturally laid his hand on her shoulder, barely able to ignore the searing shot to his emotions that small gesture caused.
Lisa was tired- exhausted, actually- she’d been dealing with a constant state of mortal and parental fear for several weeks, she’d been poked and prodded by invisible things, starving, and forced to wear the same clothes every day for a month. She wasn’t just traumatized- she was still in the process of being traumatized- but for reasons unknown to her besides simply not having the energy (or the balance, given the state of her leg) to go on the defensive, she was fine with a little concerned human contact.
Maybe even relieved. It’d been a rough four weeks.
“Yeah- that,” she breathed sourly. “Everything here seems practically designed to kill you.” She didn’t know how to describe the mutant nightmares that’d come out of the dark to someone who’d just arrived. As the images played over in her head, she realized maybe this whole Greeting Committee thing needed to be paced.
She went quiet, in lieu of knowing really what to say. He was just another rat in the maze like the rest of them; she couldn’t even give him a ray of hope, except that the coffee wasn’t too terrible, and the bathrooms in the hotel seemed a good place to avoid the ghosts. She’d only mulled over it all for a few seconds when the deja vu struck again, triggered by how close his face was in his concern. It was practically tangible; wires tied around her heart being tugged.
“I know you,” she finally blurted out- all the confusion and distraction of Marrowood for a moment falling away from her face. What replaced it was was pure desperation, reaching for why she definitely knew that anvil jaw and those green eyes. “How do I know you?”
Dean’s mind was everywhere, trying to process his new reality, being ripped from everything he knew, and this sudden reunion with the woman he struggled to forget about all at once. It was all almost too much to deal with, and he knew he would’ve been freaking out if he hadn’t already been through the wringer more than a few times.
But then, she blindsided him with a question, which sent waves of emotion slamming against the stone cold dam he’d built. All he wanted to do in that moment was hold her, but he stopped himself, if only for the tiny speaker in the back of his mind blaring through the fog of denial that this was all too real to be a dream. It was all too real. And, as long as this was still real life, he couldn’t let himself get close to her again.
The look he gave her was the same as if she’d abruptly stabbed him in the chest at a dinner party and left him wondering why as he bled out on the floor. There was a long pause before he could give her an answer, each word appearing as if it physically pained him on it’s way out. “I hit you. With my car, remember? I hit you, and you were in the hospital. And that was the last time I ever saw you.” Even as he tried to explain himself away, his eyes continued to watch hers, searching for some hint of recognition, some sign that the time they’d spent together wasn’t completely lost. He longed for it, just as much as he hoped and prayed those memories never came back to her, there was truly nothing more he wanted in that moment than for her to remember. “I’m Dean.”
Lisa didn’t understand where his look of confused hurt came from, but she sure as hell recognized it for what it was- at least, something in her did, and it tore through her chest in the form of unexplained guilt. She should know, but she didn’t, and it hurt him. But why?
“Oh...” With the big mystery solved, clarity widened her eyes as they flicked back and forth between his. The accident she didn’t actually remember; not a single image of two cars colliding, or even getting in the car in the first place- nothing, because of how it’d apparently screwed up her head afterward. But his face, she knew, and suddenly saw it clear as a bell in the hospital room doorway two years ago. That explained why his name was rippling through her, it’s own killer tidal wave scouring every synapse and nerve ending with raw emotion- so powerful she had to look away.
Or did it? That empty feeling of missing something extremely important still had a hold of her, and hard.
“Wow- I….” As if on cue, the weird headache and dizzy spell that often came with these flashes rolled in like thunder, putting her palm against her brow. Thank god for the park bench she wavered toward, or else she’d have to sit on the sidewalk to recover, and that was going to be a bitch to get up from. “Sorry,” she explained, finally looking back to him with a genuinely apologetic, but haunted smile. “My head’s been kinda messed up ever since. And now I’m wondering if this place really is a fever dream.” Because of all the people in her life, why else would he end up in ‘Marrowood’?
The image of concern on Dean’s face somehow multiplied when she pulled away to sit down, his figure following hers like a magnet onto the seat next to her. “I’m… I’m sorry.” He muttered, finally, a couple of words that were never easy for him to say, but they seemed extremely warranted in this situation. “It’s my fault, I shouldn't have… God, I’m so sorry, Lisa.” Just the knowledge that she had been suffering all this time because of him was suddenly just too hard to deal with, and he found himself retreating from the protective bubble he’d formed around her to lean back against the bench, fingertips pressed against his eyes.
He wanted nothing more than to tell her all the things he was actually sorry for, but he knew the truth would just make things worse for himself. It was an art he’d all but been perfecting with his brother - lying, pushing away feelings, hiding who he really was. All he had to do was keep on that path with Lisa and he would be fine. Somehow, telling himself this didn’t keep the held back tears from stinging at their closed lids.
The simple fact that he’d remembered not only her, but her name after more than two years knocked Lisa back- not in a necessarily bad way, either. The cottony vertigo in her skull evaporated as she watched him in what was obviously a hard dive into emotion. She could hear it in his voice as much as see it in his posture, and that… that was really something from a near complete stranger.
“Hey- you know, I don’t even remember that accident-” She tried to assure him, a weird-feeling half-smile on her face- because this was the strangest conversation she thought she’d have today, here in this nightmare they were trapped in. “And here you are, knowing my name- after two years? Dude, don’t be sorry. I’ve dated guys who couldn’t remember that much after a week. Besides- you’ve got bigger problems to deal with, here.”
Her words helped, in some strange way, but once he dropped his hands and looked at her it was like twisting the knife all over again. A big part of him just wanted to cry in that moment, but he managed to bite it back with a sour laugh. “It’s better that way. That you don’t remember, I mean. It’d just be… traumatic,” his words were as honest as the slight break in his voice, though he was able to maintain the fake smile.
“Speaking of bigger problems, you ok? You got someplace you need to be?” Dean’s voice leveled out as he went on, trying to focus on her again and get out of his own head - but as the last word left his lips, he was hit with a horrific realization and he jolted upright, with worry once again veiling his features. “Oh, God. Where’s Ben?”
She’d been primed to answer his first questions when the sudden interruption of the last one threw her off track; her son’s name on his voice, wired tight with genuine parental fear struck Lisa right in the chest. Her expression may’ve been pure dumbstruck confusion, but her thoughts were reeling from the blow. Raising flags way in the back with messages on them that she couldn’t decipher.
“He’s-- not here,” she finally managed. “I’ve tried everything to get back to him- god knows he’s probably tearing the town apart looking for me.” Her tone belied the heart-wrenching conflict of her deep, evolutionary need to be with her son and being stuck in this unearthly prison- but beneath it was something else.
She didn’t remember ever saying Ben’s name in that brief exchange in the hospital room. Then again, that room was the first and only thing she actually remembered of the accident that put her there. She couldn’t exactly trust her recollection- but his seemed goddamn superhuman.
“Christ- you’ve got a fantastic memory..” That was under her breath, somewhere between amazed and really weirded out. Lisa didn’t realize she’d said it outloud.
As soon as the name Ben had been uttered, he knew it was a mistake. His mind reeled for a way to cover it up, but only after she confirmed that he wasn’t in whatever Hell they were. That was the only comfort he needed, knowing the closest thing he had to a son was at least relatively safe in the real world, even on his own, it had to be better than here.
The real world. Just the spark of that in his mind brought back the rush of what he’d been doing before he’d magically appeared in Motel Creepy. Thoughts of Sam, Cas, Crowley, Abadon - the angelic bitch he’d gotten the Mark to kill. The reminder made the charred flesh under his right sleeve burn, and he covered it with his other hand out of habit. Waves of death and blood waged war in his mind with the priority of taking care of Lisa, and after a few moments he realized he’d been zoning out and blinked back into their pseudo-reality.
What did she just say? Something about his memory. Right, because he’d just mentioned Ben when he shouldn’t have. Once he immersed himself back into the present, the look in his eyes solidified, which seemed to trigger his default half smile. “Yeah, it just had a big effect on me, I guess. What happened to you guys. Kinda stuck with me, you know?” He tried to explain, pausing to let out what looked like a relieved sigh. “It’s good though, that he’s not here. This place… it’s not the place for a kid like that.”
“Yeah…” Though Lisa nodded, her agreement was slightly detached. She’d been watching him, still trying to figure out the feeling of connection that seemed too hardwired in her system to be from a thirty-second long conversation more than two years ago. In the end, after a few dragged out seconds and a pensive roll of her lips, she decided the best idea was to just stuff it down- let it dissolve into the background, like the rest of the things that triggered the bad wiring in her head.
She sighed, pushing a hand through her hair. Now she was just thinking about Ben. “I know. He’s smart- mature for just fifteen. I just… I still need to get back to him.” That last part was obvious to anyone with a child; she said it more out of her own growing desperation than to inform. Out of habit, especially as of lately, Lisa hooked a fingertip under the thin brass chain that hung around her neck, and slipped an antique locket out from under her white camisole. The front was an ornate embossed moon and stars design- the back had been smooth, until whoever owned it before scratched the strange symbol into the plating.
Lisa dug a thumbnail under the latch and opened it, showing Dean. Inside was the chest-up picture of a broad shouldered teenage boy wearing a baseball jersey, light brown bedhead hair, and a bright dimpled smile. “I took this a week before I ended up here.”
Dean was doing just fine at keeping his composure, until Lisa decided to play show-and-tell. Looking at that familiar face and dark brown hair brought on a storm of something overwhelmingly heartwarming and soul crushing all at once, and he could only bear it for a few moments before pulling away and rubbing his eyes yet again, no longer able to keep it from showing all over his face.
“Yeah, good lookin’ kid,” was all he managed to say, trying to focus on keeping his cool and not saying too much, but ‘focus’ might as well have been a foreign concept in his mind, at that moment. Using the momentum from his pullback to abruptly stand, he avoided looking back at Lisa completely as he gazed around at their surroundings, trying to get his head on straight. “We should probably head, get you to wherever you were going. Look for a way out of this nightmare.” He announced, as if he had some kind of plan already. Which he didn’t.
The display wasn’t lost on Lisa, who tentatively closed the locket and put it back where it belonged, as close to her heart as possible. There was a lot about it that didn’t make sense, but an even deeper understanding, somewhere well beneath her surface, that felt it did. She justified all of it pretty quickly- his emotional attachment to her and Ben after such a brief interruption in each other’s lives, to the car accident sticking with him so tenaciously- with one moment of striking clarity.
He’d lost someone- maybe someones. A wife and a child of his own, perhaps. That had to be it- but there was no way she was going to ask. Just in case she was right.
“I’ve been here for almost a month- I think- it’s hard to tell the days and nights, sometimes,” she sighed, pushing up to stand as well. “And as for where I was going…” Lisa shook her head, looking past him back at the collection of shops in the Square, and the ‘people’ mulling about.
Job hunting could wait. She wasn’t exactly feeling the need anymore.
“It doesn’t matter. There’s some things you need to know about this place before it kills you.”
As Lisa stood, Dean’s attention was pulled back to her for a moment, and he naturally took a step towards her in case she needed something to lean on, but something kept him from actually reaching for her like his instinct demanded. Maybe something deep inside knew it was just best to keep his distance. Dean didn’t even question it.
It was her words that kept his focus fixated on her, instead of turning and taking the lead as was his nature. At first, his brows pinched in confusion, which quickly gave way to his first genuine smile of the day. She was going to teach him something about monsters? The sheer absurdity of that idea actually made him laugh a little bit, only because it was literally the last situation he imagined himself ending up in.
Still, he knew he needed information. Not only that, but he was damned grateful she had some to give him. Back home, he usually had Sammy to help with that stuff. But here… besides Lisa, he was preparing himself to go at this alone. It was better that way, he thought. With the downward spiral he had been on with his brother, and now being infected with the will of Cain the famous brother-killer, he felt it was probably for the best that he wasn’t anywhere near Sam, for the moment.
But, he had a mission. He had to get home and save the world. Shit, he had to get Lisa home, and back to her kid. Dean wasn’t even sure which was more important to him, though he was hit with another strong sting of reminder from his right forearm, which was lifted along with it’s twin into an almost surrendering shrug. “Damn, if you know anything that’s gonna help me here, please. Lay it on me.”