Disclaimer/Spoilers: See Chapter 1

A/N: So this chapter is dedicated to freetobescary, who told me, and I quote "I love pain, so bring it lol Can't wait!", so, I hope it's everything you hoped for. :P

IMPORTANT: This is the last chapter of Providence, the story continues into a new story titled Causality, which should be posted by the time you finish reading this, if not it will be posted within a few hours. It WILL be posted today. And not to worry, since this is Providence's last chapter it won't have to worry about a cliff hanger like last chapter.

Enjoy, and don't forget to review.

Carry on Wayward Son

Once I rose above the noise and confusion

Just to get a glimpse beyond the illusion

I was soaring ever higher, but I flew too high

Though my eyes could see I still was a blind man

Though my mind could think I still was a mad man

I hear the voices when I'm dreamin', I can hear them say

There was a brief moment of clarity where he registered he was sliding from oblivion and back into the harsh, violent reality. He heard something shift nearby, a broken board scuffing against cement. In stages, he smelled the rotten scent of decayed wood, dust mixed with the faint trace of gun powder, then the overwhelming scent of blood.

"—ean?"

His little brother's voice, but distorted and faraway, like it was coming through on a bad connection. He wanted to reach out toward the sound of Sam but found himself barely capable of breathing, let alone moving.

". . . n't move . . . on it's . . . Dean?"

Dean frowned and rolled his eyes around, searching out the hazy outline of his brother. Sharp, white hot pain lanced through his head, stealing what little he could see. He felt fingers at his face, patting his cheek, then pressing against his side with a vicious bite of pain that echoed through his entire body. It was too hard to hold on, and He felt himself slip back toward that warm gray oblivion that held promises of comfort, peace, freedom from the pain.

"No . . . hey, Dean . . . you . . . awake."

He tried, he really did.

There were more hands on him now, cool and persistent and incredibly unwelcome. They were poking and prodding, grazing sensitive areas that screamed under their inspection. Or maybe the screaming was coming from him.

They were moving him, or trying to. He gathered from the hushed, serious exchange between his brother and the voices of strangers that it wasn't an easy process. Sorry, fellas. He choked on a laugh, brought warm blood up his throat to splash over his lips.

A flurry of activity was taking place over his head, lights and sounds that stabbed like a drill bit through the temple. The rest of the pain was distant, for the time being. Waiting in the wings.

A giant hand gripped his arm in maybe the one place in his body that wasn't shrieking with pain. He licked dry lips, tasting coppery blood, and tried to call for Sam, but had no way of knowing whether he managed to make a sound. Before he could try again, the darkness came back to greet him.

ooooo

"Sam?"

Sam abruptly paused his pacing, eyes easily following the familiar voice to its source. "Bobby? What—what are you doing here?" Not that he wasn't happy to see the older hunter, but when he'd called to let him know what had happened, the hospital they'd taken Dean, he hadn't expected Bobby to make the drive all the way from Sioux Falls.

"Planting daises, what's it look like?" Bobby walked over, clapping a hand on Sam's shoulder and giving it a tight squeeze. He cocked his head, expression falling somber. "How's he doin'?"

Sam cast a pained look toward the closed doors of the ER. "Uh, concussion. Pretty bad one, they think. Broken forearm and probably some ribs. He was having trouble . . . breathing, and the, uh, the medics think he may have punctured a lung." He gave a weak smile then shook his head. "I don't know, Bobby. It didn't look . . . he was pretty beat up. The paramedics said he should be okay, but the doctor hasn't been out yet."

ooooo

The pain is what woke him. Or more accurately, the sudden absence of painkillers.

A vicious ache raged in his ribcage, an icy-hot stabbing sensation in his side that pulsed with each deliberate, shallow breath. A similar pain sang out from his right arm, strapped uselessly to his chest, where at least one obviously broken bone waited to be set.

"Sam," he croaked, throat raw.

"Sammy's not here," a cold female voice responded. "It's just you and me. And we need to talk."

Dean blinked roughly, but his eyes refused to focus, and the room wouldn't stop spinning.

Hospital. He knew it by the smell, and the wash of stark white that assaulted his eyes when he finally managed to work them open. His head felt heavy, a sack of rocks in his skull, and the blurry patches of light overhead rocketed up his nausea.

He didn't remember much, just flashes, blinks of action and pain and Sam shouting his name, a horrible, loud splintering of wood or bone or both. More shouting.

He sluggishly raised his left hand into his field of vision, found a strip of tape near his wrist, a bright line of blood snaking down his arm from where the IV had been ripped free. Crap.

He was one wing down, and his head thumped mercilessly. Everything looked hazy and his memory was soupy, and he couldn't form a single coherent thought beyond the fact that Sam was nowhere to be seen. He was undoubtedly, monumentally fucked.

"Where's Sam?" he gritted through clenched teeth, furiously blinking and trying to bring the stranger in his room into clear view.

"Waiting room," she replied lazily, like she was bored by this entire throbbing head, broken body thing. "Thinks you're in surgery, repairing some severe internal bleeding, a collapsed lung or something. . ."

Fingers suddenly pressed viciously against the side that already felt like it was on fire, and Dean's vision went red. He gasped, head snapping back against the pillow as he flinched away from the torturous contact.

Her dark eyes lit up. "Not so far off, huh?"

"What do you want?" he demanded, aiming for threatening but only succeeding in breathless and screwed.

"Just to talk." She raised her hands, stepped away from his bed and leaned casually against the wall. "You see, Dean, some of my friends are getting antsy. Events haven't quite transpired the way we've been expecting. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"

ooooo

"We just pulled your brother's butt out of the fryer. How did this even happen?"

"I don't know." Sam scrubbed his hands over his face. "Bobby, the hunt went fine. We killed the mistling easily enough, then as we were leaving, the floor . . . it just—it just gave out and he—" Sam gestured openly, not really knowing how he could put into words the horror and terror he felt as he watched his brother drop through the floor with an abbreviated yelp. The frantic fear that came from standing by and listening as he crashed all the way down to the farmhouse's basement.

Bobby let out a deep sigh then shook his head. "You know, if there was no such thing as bad luck, you boys would have no luck at all."

ooooo

"Can't say I do," He aimed for a cocky smile, but it felt more like a grimace. He tried to ignore the thumping in his skull, the raging fire in his chest and fractured arm, and focused all that energy on concentrating on the figure standing across the room. Dean's vision wouldn't cooperate, kept blurring and refusing to focus.

The woman's lips twisted. "You have no idea who I am, do you?"

He squinted sharply as pain bleated in his skull, swallowed against a rising wave of nausea and forced his own lips to sneer. "You're the waitress from Florida who spilled the syrup. Alex." Dean bit his lip and struggled to scoot up in the bed, to find a less vulnerable position and buy some time for Sam to figure out that he needed to get his ass in gear. The transition left him pathetically winded and trembling from the grinding pain in his ribcage, ratcheted up the icy-hot throb in the arm strapped to his chest.

Dean watched as the blurry figure moved closer to the bed, trying to calculate exactly what level of completely fucked he was currently sitting at. He tried to locate the 'call nurse' button on the bed but it was nowhere to be seen, just the frayed end of a thick cord. He finally spotted the device clenched in Alex's fist, watching him with an amused smirk on her face.

"Alex is actually the name of this lovely young vessel. Didn't care for her much at first but—" Alex looked down at herself, shrugged. "—she's sort of grown on me."

He narrowed his eyes. "It'll probably take my brother all of five minutes to exorcise your low-level ass."

The woman laughed, tapped the call button against her chin. "You think so?"

ooooo

"What if this is our fault?"

Sam's question disrupted the thick, tense silence that had fallen between them. Bobby eyed the younger hunter carefully. "What if what's your fault?"

Sam chewed on his bottom lip, then gestured vaguely toward the ER doors, which concealed whatever urgent struggle was presumably taking place to keep his brother breathing. "This. Dean he —he came back in time, Bobby. Said he altered things, changed what had happened in his time."

Bobby's eyebrows drew tightly together as he listened. He offered a small nod, encouraging Sam to continue.

"What if this is just . . ."

"Just what Sam?" the older man prodded gently.

He shrugged his shoulders helplessly. "Fate?"

"Fate?"

Sam lifted another shoulder, raised his eyebrows. "What if messing with time, if changing things is what caused this. Like – like Fate is trying fix things or—" he hesitated before finishing, "—or stop us." He trailed off into a mumble, as though saying the words would make them true, on the off-chance they already weren't.

"Sam," Bobby started softly. "It wasn't Fate that caused your brother to fall through two floors. Rotted wood in a house that should have been condemned a damn long time ago did. Fate isn't . . . it's not real." The older hunter tore his eyes away from Sam, coming to a rest on the irritatingly still doors that separated them from Dean. "There's no higher power pulling the strings, no destiny or fate. It's just the choices we make, and the consequences we're left to live with."

ooooo

He was in rough shape and knew without a doubt that if "Alex" decided to make a move, he wouldn't last long.

She smiled sweetly, her fingers brushing over Dean's arm, stopping just before they reached the break in the bone. "Pity we don't have more time."

Dean narrowed his eyes at the woman. "You gonna kill me, or are we gonna make out, cause I'm getting some real mixed signals here."

Her soft chuckle turned Dean's stomach.

"Dean Winchester." She slid her hand across his chest, until her palm was flat against his sternum. "We know what you did. We know that you're harboring not one, but two human souls. Both yours. And we know that one traveled here from the future." She cocked her head, made a tsking sound. "Shall we see what all lies beneath?"

The pressure on his chest increased uncomfortably, then unbearably, and Dean lifted his uninjured arm, wrapped desperate fingers around her small wrist. He attempted to dislodge her but only managed to aggravate the various injuries throughout his battered body that were already screaming for his attention. He struggled to breathe as the building pressure shifted sharply into a painful stab radiating from her palm. His vision began to gray, then blacken at the edges as the pain increased again, and Dean let out a strangled cry through tightly gritted teeth, pressing his head back into the pillow. Just as the ominous black started crowding his vision, the pressure stopped, was gone so suddenly that it left Dean dizzy and gasping from its absence.

Alex stumbled back a step, holding her hand against her own chest. Mouth agape, she eyed Dean curiously.

ooooo

Sam fidgeted in the uncomfortable plastic chair, drawing the older hunter's attention as he pursed his lips into a tight line. "You . . . " he started, stopped. Tried again. "He's gonna be okay, right?"

Bobby rubbed the back of his neck then blew out a breath, "Yeah. Yeah, your brother will be fine. I don't know what all he survived in the future, but I have a feeling this is nothing in comparison. Couple of breaks and a knock to the head isn't gonna keep him down long. Give it a few days and I'm sure he'll be driving us both crazy with his bitchin.'"

Sam nodded, reassured, at least for the moment, by the older hunter's words. They sat in silence for a few minutes, eyes skimming the waiting area and periodically bouncing back to the ER doors.

Bobby shifted in his seat, casting a glance to the younger hunter. "Isn't your brother's birthday next week?"

"Hmm?" Sam paused, taken slightly off guard by the seemingly random question. "Uh, yeah. It is. But you know Dean. He's never really liked to celebrate or draw attention to it. Somehow I don't think that's changed in the last twelve or so years."

"Yeah," Bobby started slowly. "But when has that ever stopped you?"

Sam spared the older man a smile and hitched a shoulder. "True, but what do you get the brother that's traveled through time to save the world?"

"Xanax? Tums?"

A smile tugged at the corner of Sam's mouth, and he almost meant it when he replied, "that's funny."

ooooo

"I see you fixed the dissonance between your souls." Alex shook her hand as though it burned. "And added a little something more. A seal on your memories." She tilted her head, an almost appreciative smile pulling at the corner of her meatsuit's mouth.

Dean swallowed against the coppery taste of blood in his mouth, willing the shakiness spreading through his body to settle. "That's what this . . . is about? Trying to get a sneak peek at . . . the next hand?"

"Not quite." She closed the distance between them once more, face stony. "See, you threw a great deal off-track, and I'm here to . . . set things right." She propped an elbow onto the guardrail, leaning her chin into her palm. "Put all the little wayward chess pieces back onto their proper squares. Can't have our pawns moving outside their bounds, can we?"

Dean shifted uselessly on the bed, cursing once more at his vulnerable position. "You even think of touching my brother and I will take your demonic ass apart, one tiny, ugly-ass piece at a time."

An almost imperceptible shudder crossed the woman's face before the corners of her lips pulled upwards. "So protective," she replied in a mocking voice. "No need to strain something, Dean. Sam will play his part when it's time. We're not worried about him. You're the pawn going off-script here. Knocked some big events off the board that my . . . friends are interested in getting underway. Sooner, rather than later."

"You mean Judgement Day? Yeah, well, good luck with that." The pain wasn't fading, and Dean was having a hard time catching his breath. "Last time I checked, you're still one righteous man short of having a complete apocalypse jump-starter kit."

She smiled again, wider this time. "Aw, poor little Dean. Never quite good enough. Never the man your father needed, or the brother Sam wanted. Always choosing to believe a version of this story where you're the one at fault."

His breath hitched painfully in his chest. "What?"

"Tell me, Dean. Do you know what makes a man truly righteous?"

His heart thumped in his chest, but his kept his face straight. "Whiskey? Sublimation? A lifetime of poor coping mechanisms?"

ooooo

Sam's head shot up as the ER door opened. A man wearing a long white coat looked down at a clip board then up to those in the waiting room. His eyes immediately settled on him and Bobby. "Jack Lee Marie?"

Sam all but jumped from his seat, covering the distance between he and the doctor in a matter of seconds, with Bobby following closely behind. "How's my brother?"

The doctor dropped his eyes with a frown, looked down at the chart in his hand. When he raised his gaze back to Sam, it was with a steadying breath.

A chill ran down Sam's spin.

ooooo

"Cute." Alex leaned forward, until her face was right above Dean's. "All right, then. Riddle me this, Batman: what kind of man do you think risks everything to go back in time for the thinnest of chances that he can save the world?"

Dean's stomach filled with ice. He swallowed and shook his head, grasping at straws. "I didn't choose this."

"Yet, here you are. Risking everything to save the world."

ooooo

The Doctor tucked the chart under his arm before speaking. "It appears the trauma to your brother's head caused some swelling."

ooooo

Dean blew a hard breath through his gritted teeth. "Go to hell."

ooooo

"We did everything we could."

ooooo

Alex leaned over Dean, once more pressing a heavy hand against his abused chest. "You first," she whispered.

ooooo

"I'm sorry."

ooooo

Dean choked on the air around him. It was fire and ice, death and damnation and for just a moment, peace. Then it was just fire.

ooooo

"He didn't make it."

Carry on my wayward son

For there'll be peace when you are done

Lay your weary head to rest

Don't you cry no more

A/N: Okay, I lied, I do that. All right, now go "MMMbop" your way on over to Causality.