Wish

Chapter Sixteen: Seeing Double

"He's a Winchester.  He's already cursed."

I leaned against the doorframe, watching Adam's chest rise and fall as he slept on a bed for the first time in five and a half Earth years.  And it was much, much more than that in Hell, especially in the Cage.

Sam walked up to me, handing me a cup of hot chocolate, since he knew I wasn't a coffee fan.  I nodded in thanks.  "How is he?"

Adam squirmed, his face twisted.

"Okay.  At least, for the state that he's in.  He's just going to have some pretty bad nightmares."

Sam nodded, hurt in his eyes.  He could relate to what Adam was going through, at least for some of it, when the two of them were together.  Sam had never really talked about their time together in the Cage, only about Lucifer.

"Do you...?" I stopped myself, wondering if it was a good idea to ask the question.

Sam looked at me expectantly.  "Do I what?"

"Do you still...have nightmares?"

"Occasionally," he replied, not as affected by what I said as I had imagined him to be.  "Not as many as I used to.  The memories only haunt you if you let them."

-

"We should start a band," Dean said.

"What?" Sam looked at Dean with surprise.  It was one of Dean's random, only half-serious comments to make humorous conversation.

"I'll play the guitar.  Electric.  Nicole will play acoustic.  Cas gets the keyboard."

Sam rolled his eyes.

"And you"--Dean pointed at Sam--"get the drums.  Bam bam bam..."  He slung his arms around like he was playing the drums.  He threw his hands to the side.  "What do you think?"

"How long did it take you to come up with that?" Sam asked.

Dean grinned.

I entered the room, sitting at the table with the two of them.  "Cas is watching Breaking Bad, so he may or may not come out of his room today."

"And Adam?" Dean asked.

"Still asleep."

"Right."

There was silence for a moment, and I brought up the one thing that we had all been thinking about.

"We still have one more trial left," I said.

"What the hell does it even mean?" Dean asked.  He began to read from the paper God had given me, "'Receive help from people in the past and present simultaneously while keeping their history intact.'  Is that some kind of riddle?"  He threw the note onto the table.

"No," Sam said.  "We do exactly as it says.  Nicole has to take someone from now back into the past and have both versions of the same person work together."

"Oh," Dean said.  "That doesn't sound complicated at all.  How is that even possible?  Changing events in the past really screws up the future, just ask Balthazar that."

We were all silent, with no ideas.

"It says their history right, not anyone else's?  Whatever you receive help to do, that has to change history, but you just have to make sure that the people you are working with are unaffected," Sam said.

"Yeah, but how the hell do you do that?" said Dean.

"We could avoid being seen," said Sam.

"How much can you help someone if you have to worry about hiding from them too?  There's a limit on what you can get away with.  And what if we get caught?"