Song Remains the Same

Chapter 120: Hallelujah

"You're my true north. No compass would point me in any other direction but to you."
- Kristen Hope Mazzola

It was sometime in the dead of the night and Alex was wide awake, finding sleep impossible yet again. So instead of laying there and staring at the ceiling as she'd done for an hour or more already, she sat up, switched the light back on, and then sat on the floor to look through the small box of photos Sam had brought her to 'look at and see if they helped.'

She had been out of Heaven for something over twenty-four hours now. No sign of Castiel yet and no twinge of recollection on her part either. But that wasn't stopping Alex from trying to figure herself out. There weren't many photos in the box she was sorting through and some were water-damaged and wrinkled... but Sam said this was about all of the family photos they had in existence. None of them were portraits or studio pictures... not a single one. Alex looked at the snapshots again and again, studying the man who looked like a more thickly-built, darker-haired Dean in a lot of the pictures. That was her father, apparently. And he looked pretty rough in all of the photos. Like a man who lived by the bottle, never slept much, and was incredibly miserable with where he'd ended up in life. He always looked guarded and slightly sour or pained in pictures where he was looking into the camera, like he didn't want his picture taken. He was only smiling with teeth in one picture, and it was one of himself hugging his young wife in front of a house. Alex studied those two people and didn't recognize them in the least. But she still felt sad.

There was only one picture in that box where her father was shown with all three of his children and it was an odd family photo. They were in front of the Impala and John stood with his hands in the pockets of his jacket—he didn't touch his kids or even stand with body language that suggested he was comfortable with them. He was unshaven and his dull eyes were rimmed with dark circles. His teen son Dean stood adjacent to his father with his arms draped over pre-teen Sam and Alex's shoulders. Sam was smiling for the camera but it was obviously a forced expression—his body language looked stiff. Alex looked sort of smug and up to no good with the slightest defiant smirk at the edge of her mouth but she had an arm casually hung over Dean's shoulder. And Dean grinned widely, pulling his siblings into his sides tightly. Some kind of amulet thing hung around his neck. He looked genuinely happy. He was the only one.

Times had changed, Alex guessed. Dean didn't seem to be happy anymore. None of them seemed to be happy people. Was I happy...? Probably not. Am I maybe better off not remembering everything? The more she found out about the life she had supposedly come from, the more she wondered why anyone would stay in it willingly.

Alex stopped looking at the pictures after awhile and looked around, aware of a certain hollowness and loneliness that echoed quietly in her bones. The bunker had a constant low whir of electricity that was sort of comforting so she focused on that and listened to it for a few minutes, then glanced around the room again.

After she had made abysmal soup for Sam a few hours ago, she'd said goodnight and wandered back to this room, her room, deciding she needed a shower and some rest to get her mind right. She took her time underneath the hot water, examining the skin of her legs and the shape of her hips and the spaces between her toes. Discovering who she was, or trying to anyway. She examined the penny necklace she wore yet again—she'd found it yesterday and wondered at its significance especially when Dean had made a point of asking her if she remembered why she wore it. The short answer was nope. But for whatever reason, she kept it on. After the shower, she wrung out and combed her very long hair then put on underwear and an oversized t-shirt she found in the duffel bag of stuff Sam had shown her. Her old things, apparently. The shirt she donned was big enough to almost be a dress except it was too short to wear in public. If she lifted her arms up, underwear showed. But since she was locked in her room alone, it didn't matter.