𝐃𝐎𝐍𝐎𝐕𝐀𝐍

𝐄𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓𝐘-𝐒𝐈𝐗

"Charco-what?"

"Charcot-Wilbrand syndrome," Katherine repeats, pushing the file to Sam. He intercepted her on her way back from the bathroom, and he was on his way to get coffee from whatever cafeteria this place had. "Jeremy Frost can't dream. It started after a bike accident when he was a kid, and Charcot-Wilbrand is a condition resulting from brain injury. I did a psych thesis on an older man with it when I was at Yale. Due to the brain damage, a patient with CWS loses the ability to revisualize things from their dreams...essentially loses all ability to dream, really. Dream study is a seriously underfunded field of neurological science, even still, but with more money, hopefully neurologists be able to illustrate the neurological pathway for dream formation."

Sam looks away from her with a fond smile. "You're just a hat full of tricks, aren't you?" She smiles, resting her chin on her fist.

"I have more to show, if the audience pleases."

He chuckles. "The audience does please."

"Jeremy Frost started dreaming again when he began participating in Dr. Gregg's study. He said Dr. Gregg gave him a yellow tea that had a horrible smell and tasted even worse."

Sam's eyebrows furrow as he looks back to Katherine. "I'm assuming the tea has some importance."

"Knocked the guy right out. His words, verbatim, "it was like a bad acid trip."" Katherine's brows raise. "A super vivid dream. Maybe it could've been drugged. But that's not the weird thing."

"What's the weird thing?" Sam asks.

"He said he dropped out of the study right after that. That...something didn't feel right to him." Katherine shrugs. "He said it scared him."

"Why is that weird?"

"I think he could be lying." She nods to Sam's file. "What've you got for me?"

Dean is in Bobby's room. He didn't really want to do much else today but sit in that chair. He didn't even glance at a vending machine, didn't so much as stop when Katherine said she was hitting the bathroom.

Growing up, Katherine thought being a doctor meant being the hero. Saving lives, helping people, finding obscure diagnoses that other doctors had missed. She was blessed with her brain and her ability to speak to the layman. Usually, people get one or the other. She could make them understand what she saw, what she thought.

Her first day on rotation, she was stuck to the hip of some arrogant man in his fifties who greeted a man in his late teens or early twenties with a cold handshake. Katherine shuffled in behind him and the doctor closed the door. 

Grant was the only one in the room with his grandfather. Everyone else had left the room for the time being. Away from the ventilator that breathed for Joseph, away from the nine medicine pumps that beeped as they drained near empty. He had been in the hospital for one day, admitted for a prolonged cough. Katherine is fuzzy on some of the details as to how Joseph became admitted, but what put him on the ventilator was an infection that started in his bladder and invaded his body. His lungs were so full of fluid he could hardly breathe on his own. Grant and his mother drove down from Alabama that morning when they got the news.

And that arrogant ass doctor, the one with all the brain and none of the sympathy, said Joseph is gone, and the only thing keeping him here is the ventilator. 

And then he left.

All of Grant's weight went forward. His shoulders sagged, his head bowed and rested in his palms. It's how Dean looks now, sitting in Bobby's room.