Fractured

Summary: Dean Winchester knows who he is. He remembers it all, from the first time he fired a gun to his first kiss… his first kill. What he can't remember is the face in front of him claiming to be his brother. Dean-centric.

Disclaimer: I do not own Supernatural or anything associated with the show.

TRIGGER WARNINGS: Suicide/Suicidal thoughts

AUTHOR NOTES: Updates are running slow but I'm hoping to keep going and get this story finished by the end of July. Please, feel free to come after me with pitchforks if that doesn't happen. In the mean time, I've got a new project going on that I wanted to let you guys in on, so...

*PERSONAL ANNOUNCEMENT*

Basically, I have a somewhat exciting update about my life. As well as writing fanfic, I write original stories and it's my dream to get those published one day. So, I finally decided to take that leap forward and take the first step toward garnering interest in my original work and promoting it. To do this, I created a Facebook page and Instagram page.

It would mean the world to me if you guys would check it out and give the pages a like and a follow. Your support and encouragment has always meant so much to me and I would never give up writing fanfiction, but I'm hoping that as well as fanfiction, one day soon I'll also get to introduce you guys to my original stories and characters. I would never have gotten this far with my writing without such fantastic readers so I really hope you'll also join me in my journey to becoming published.

Facebook page: you can search for 'RayMorganAuthor' or go to the Facebook website (slash)raymorganauthor

Instagram page: you can search for 'theoccultus' or go to the Instagram website (slash)theoccultus

Thank you for always being such amazing people! Hope you're all staying safe out there!

*PERSONAL ANNOUNCEMENT OVER*

Now, once more - a quick reminder: there are trigger warnings on this story for manipulation and for suicidal thoughts.

Set early Season 14.

.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

Echo

.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

The bright light from the laptop screen lit up Sam's face, but even that wasn't enough to keep his eyes from closing. He was fading fast, his lack of sleep catching up with him. Still, he fought it, blinking and rubbing a hand across his face and up through his hair as he pushed back in his chair a little. He pushed out a breath and tried to refocus on the screen in front of him once more.

"Sam," Cas spoke gently as he approached the table, placing a mug next to Sam, "you should sleep."

"Yeah, I should," Sam agreed, trying his best to stifle a yawn as he did so. "But unless I figure out a way to help Dean, I could lose him, and I'm not prepared to do that."

"And you think you'll find the answers on the website for West Springs High school?" Cas questioned, hovering behind Sam and leaning over his shoulder just enough to squint at the same page Sam had been staring at for the last twenty minutes.

"Abigail – the girl who cast the spell – this is where she was from." Sam motioned to the screen before tugging the box of tricks toward him once more and pulling out the piece of torn yearbook paper. "I think this is where she first met Dean. We stayed there one summer. Dad was working a case in a town nearby so he shoved us in local high school. It was one of the only times we were in a place long enough to even have a yearbook."

"And you think this Abigail attached herself to Dean there?"

"It's possible. Then with Chuck's books… she knew everything about us." Sam sighed, fingers wrapping around the warm mug Cas had brought for him. It wasn't much of a coffee, but it was a caffeine kick regardless.

"Do you think she intentionally followed you to Oregon?"

Sam shook his head. "I don't know. At first, maybe she was trying to find us but in Oregon… I don't think she actually expected to see us. Still, she didn't exactly stumble on that spell by accident, or those pictures." He motioned to the box and the photos it held inside.

Cas took a seat at the end of the table and pulled the box toward him, looking over its contents idly. "More than likely, she saw an opportunity and took it."

"But why Dean?"

"Maybe she saw something in him… something she had been missing in her own life."

.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

Dean had lost track of how long he had been sitting on the edge of his bed, head in his hands. He had lost track of a lot of things lately and he wasn't entirely sure what to make of it anymore. There were a lot of things to be unsure about in his life, but through it all, he thought that at least he knew his own mind. Of course, there had been times when demons and angels and other beings had messed with him, but there had always been something there underneath it. There had always been a persistent itch that scratched and scratched and scratched at the walls of his mind, telling him that something was wrong.

Maybe that was what scared him.

He knew who he was. He knew who his family was. He knew in his heart and mind that Abby was his sister and this Sam was some imposter… and yet, there it was. That ever persistent itch.

Why?

He swallowed hard and lifted his head from his hands to stare straight ahead at the wall of his room. The familiar wall that looked exactly the same as he remembered it. Even as he flicked the light on and the shadows were chased away, everything fit. The room, it was his. But outside of that room, that was where things began to fall apart.

A quick glance at his phone told him it was still far too early for him to be awake and up and about, but his mind couldn't settle and if he slept, he knew it would just be filled with nightmares once more. So he grabbed his robe from the back of his door and pulled it on before leaving the room and pushing out into bunker.

It was hollow and cold, and he shoved his hands into the pockets of the gown as he headed down the silent corridors toward the kitchen. It was too early for Scotch and he wasn't hungry enough for food, but he knew he needed something and if that something was a good cup of black coffee, then so be it. That was what he went for.

With a fresh cup of coffee in hand, he held it close and took a long breath, allowing the caffeine to wash over his senses before heading off once more into the bunker. There were no signs of Sam or Cas, for which Dean was thankful, and judging by the abandoned laptop and half finished cup on the main table in the library of the bunker, he figured the former must have finally given up and gone to sleep.

Dean stood at the archway for a moment, leaning against it was he looked over the scene, taking it in. It took another breath before he dared venture further inside, one hand still holding his mug as he used the fingers of his spare hand to trail across the wooden surface of the table, his eyes on the laptop and mind wondering what he would find there.

However, his thoughts were drawn away as his fingers passed over the rough etchings on the table. He looked down at the DW clearly scratched into the wood, a vague memory playing out in the back of his mind, but there was a large hole missing in that memory, and when Dean lifted his fingertips to reveal the second set of initials in the table, his heart skittered in his chest.

SW.

He closed his eyes and shook his head. No. That… it couldn't. It was impossible.

But there was no mistaking it. The letters were clear, even in the dim light.

"What do you think our legacy's gonna be? When we're gone, after all the stuff that we've done, think folks will remember us? You know, like, a hundred years from now."

"No."

"Oh, that's nice."

"Guys like us, we're not exactly the type of people they write about in history books, you know? But the people we saved, they're our legacy."

Dean took a breath, tracing the letters with his fingertips, his gaze following the movements they took.

"What are you doin'?"

"Leaving our mark."

"Sam…" Dean whispered, the name slipping out onto his tongue without him meaning it to. He tried to swallow around it, tried to quell that aching in his chest that told him he was missing something, but there was just no denying that there was something there.

Taking a seat in front of the laptop, he pushed the other cup away and put his down beside him as he used his other hand to power the laptop up. It hadn't been turned off completely, just put to sleep, and it whirred back to life with the same stuff open on it as had no doubt been open when it had gone to sleep, along with its owner.

West Springs High school.

A frown settled on Dean's face, tugging at his brow. Abby had mentioned West Springs before. Just days earlier, she had brought up the douche from the football team, Brock Johnson and the incident under the bleachers. Dean stared at the webpage and tried to make sense of it, tried to understand the link. But it didn't make sense. None of it made sense.

Pushing out a frustrated breath, Dean closed the laptop and shook his head. It was then that his eyes landed on the box on the table. It wasn't anything remarkable, but Dean had enough experience with many different things to know that a box didn't have to be remarkable to be trouble. Perhaps that was why he was so reluctant to pull it closer and take a look inside.

Everything was already muddled up in his mind without anything adding fuel to the fire… and yet, he couldn't resist and no sooner had he looked, he wished he hadn't.

.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

Sam was almost out of his room, door half open, when Cas ran into him, looking more than a little flustered.

"Sam," the angel pushed out, more tension than usual coating his voice.

"Cas?" Sam questioned, leaning out and looking up and down the corridor for the figurative fire that had Castiel looking so anxious. "What's going on?"

"It's Dean," Cas answered, taking a step back.

There was a flitter of anxiety in Sam's heart, his brows knitting together as a frown found its way onto his face. "What about him?"

"He's err," Cas continued, before flapping his arms and straightening himself out again, taking in a deep breath and letting it out with a shake of his head. "He's gone."

As soon as the words left Castiel's mouth, Sam was moving. He pushed out of his room, heading down the corridor until he came to Dean's ajar door. His movements were tentative as he pushed it open all the way and took in every inch of the room, every inch of the very empty room.

"I already checked," Cas said from behind him. "And I checked the bathrooms and the kitchen and the library. He's gone."

"Gone?" Sam swallowed hard. "How can he be gone? We only just got him back."

"I did find something," Cas went on, already taking the first few steps down the corridor toward the library. "You're going to want to see this."

Sam followed in silence until they reached the table in the library Sam had been set up at before. Aside from what Sam figured must have been the abandoned bag of groceries Cas had left the bunker for, the laptop still sat there, open, and the bits and pieces from Abby's box were spread out across the surface of the table. Cas clicked a button on the laptop and turned it enough for Sam to see.

"This is…"

"Chuck's books. He must have seen the cover from the box and done some digging."

Sam sank into one of the chairs and pulled the laptop closer. The books weren't the only thing that Dean had been looking into. He had been researching Sam too – from 'death' certificates and FBI records, even down to files from Stanford.

He felt his stomach drop. With that much information at once, how was Dean supposed to take it in? Rowena had warned Sam about what could happen and now Dean was missing again? Sam knew all too well what a break in your mind could feel like. Hell, he'd been there. He had gone through hell after coming back from, well – Hell.

The thoughts were already twisting at his mind, leaving dark and worrisome images in their tracks when the sound of the bunker door had his gaze shooting toward Cas. Slowly, Sam pushed up and both of them moved on toward the entrance of the bunker, unsure of what exactly they would find. A rain soaked Dean standing at the top of the staircase was most definitely not what Sam expected, but it was certainly better than the alternative.

"Dean?" he questioned, his voice barely a breath, unsure and cautious.

Dean didn't quite meet their eyes as he walked down the stairwell, his features as carefully composed as each step. It wasn't until he reached the bottom, along with Sam and Cas, that he lifted his gaze and swallowed hard.

"Okay," he said, splaying his hands. "Let's do this."

"Dean," Cas started, already a step ahead of Sam's mind, "are you sure? This could be dangerous."

Pulling himself from his wet coat and draping it over the railing, he held his arms out wide. "Honestly – I'm not sure of anything anymore."

.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

Dean felt like his mind was splitting in two. If he thought too hard on it, his memories became more and more muddled, like distorted moving images overlapped and out of sync. They bled into each other, the differences subtle but there, and the problem Dean was having was that everything – every God damn thing – from the internet searches to the random marks left around the bunker, they all fit with what Sam and Cas had both said to him. It just didn't fit with him… not completely.

Sitting there, in the centre of the bunker, with all of that pushing down on him – it had been like the walls themselves were closing in. That was why he had found himself outside, wandering the road for no other reason than to escape the claustrophobia of the place he was supposed to call home. The rain had been refreshing, or maybe he had just felt too numb to care about how wet he had been getting. Regardless, his feet took him further and further until he could go no more. Until his chest felt so tight and his mind so confused that he knew, without answers, without something concrete, he would surely crumble.

So he made his way back, forced himself through the door and down the steps, feeling like a shadow of the person he once was, like an echo disappearing more and more as time went on. He was barely even aware of the words coming out of his mouth or the ones being said to him in return, barely away of his movements toward the library and of taking a seat at the head of the long table.

"Okay, Dean," Cas said, his words gentle and a little apprehensive, "are you ready?"

Dean cleared his throat and nodded, focusing his gaze ahead on the stacks of books but paying little attention to them.

"Right…"

There was a moment's silence, and Dean imagined Cas and Sam to be sharing a worried glance, but before the image could form in his mind, Cas was placing his hands on the sides of Dean's head. The sudden intensity that hit him had him taking an involuntary breath, as if he had just been plunged head first into a river… but instead of finding himself drowning in water, it was images that washed over him, words crackling through static that rang out in his head.

It was all mashed together – from cradling a young baby as he sat on the hood of the Impala, a mere bairn himself, to waking up in that hospital, unsure of anything except his name. He remembered Abby crying beneath the bleachers as he wrapped his coat around her shoulders, but he also remembered wrestling a young floppy haired Sam for the TV remote.

Bright light crashed across his vision and pain split through his head. He felt a scream rip from his throat and felt his body arch. There were words there, words that weren't memories, despite how familiar the voices were. He tried to blink the light away, but felt like all he was seeing were after images. As the pain worsened, like lightening shooting through his entire being, he was sure he saw the bunker briefly, sure he felt the dripping of warm blood from his nose once more… but when he tried to focus, tried to bring himself out of whatever it was that gripped him now, the only thing he could see was the vision of a girl at the end of the table, looking at him, watching him… forlorn and lost. And as she flickered, like an image on a broken film reel, Dean felt his world turn to black, one name on his lips.

"Abby?"

.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

A/N: More to come...