25Sam wasn't sure what he had expected when he walked back to the hospital room, coffee clutched tightly in his hand. He smiled a tight lipped, pinched twitch of the facial muscles at the nurses that turned their flirty gazes on him as he made his way down the corridors. It was an unnerving sensation to walk down next to the blank walls, it felt far too similar to the time that he'd found his father on the floor of the hospital room, having sacrificed himself for Dean's life. The coffee that he'd gotten was even the same type - a mostly black coffee with no sugar. It's only mostly because he always feels the need to add a teaspoon of milk into the coffee, it was a habit he'd picked up from when he lived with Jess, she enjoyed her coffee black with two sugars, and sugar in coffee was just horrible, so Sam took to adding a small amount of milk to his so that he didn't get it mixed up with Jess' and get an accidental mouthful of teeth rotting sweetness.
Whatever he had expected was not what he came across when he arrived in the room that his brother was occupying with the disgruntled angel.
Opening the door without caution, having not expected there to be a body collapsed on the other side of it, Sam pushed the handle down and shoved the door forwards. It collided with a skull after a few centimetres.
"What the hell?" Sam muttered. "Zoe?" He called into the room, shoving harder against the door until the body began to give and slide across the floor with a squeaking sound - at least they knew the floors were clean.
After a moment of slight panic, a face appeared between the crack of open door, Zoe was smiling a little apologetically. "Sam! You're back!"
"What's going on, who's behind the door? Where's Dean? I shouldn't have gone for coffee-" Zoe rolled her eyes at him and, using brute angel strength, opened the door the rest of the way as though the dead weight of the body leaning on it was merely a feather pillow.
"Calm down, Sam. Dean is still in bed, still looking like the Pompidou Centre. He's fine."
"The Pompidou Centre?" Sam raised an eyebrow at her, taking a step into the room, and glancing at the body on the floor; he didn't recognise him. Then again, that may have been because he was face down, head now shoved under the chair that Sam had previously been sitting in, the movement of the door had shoved him very far forwards.
Zoe sighed and said: "Yeah, it's this building in Paris, it's covered in tubes and-"
"I know what it is, I just meant it was an odd analogy." Both of them were standing in the room, quite unsure what they had to do next. The body lay on the floor, a discarded rag doll. Dean lay unaware in his bed, still breathing steadily, his physical state being as good as it ever was, his mental state on the other hand, more than a little worse for wear.
"He isn't dead," Zoe said quickly, gesturing at the body on the floor, "If you're wondering. I didn't kill him." Nodding slightly, Sam knelt down, holding his coffee out to Zoe for her to hold. She just watched it getting closer to her and continued to stare at it when Sam's arm was fully outstretched.
"Hold it." Without waiting for her to actually grasp it, Sam let go of the cup and Zoe's hand immediately caught it without spilling a drop. "Nice reflexes," Sam said before turning back to the collapsed man on the floor. He turned him over with a great heave, hands under the man's arm pits.
His eyes were burned out almost completely.
"How the hell are we going to explain this?! If he even does wake up?" Sam wasn't sure what to think. Had Zoe done this to protect Dean? If so, that made her at least deserve a little bit of trust, but what did this guy have against them? He wondered if they had made enemies here already. What had they been told to forget, and was this guy a part of it?
"Just watch." Was all Zoe said in response.
Sam did as she said, focusing his gaze on the man's eyes and saw something that made his heart settle heavily in his chest. Slowly, the cells of the man's eyes were re-growing and reattaching themselves together. His eyes were reforming.
"Who is he?" Sam took a step away from the man so that he was standing beside Zoe where she was still by the door, having closed it after Sam came in. She looked up at him, a grave expression on her face.
"His name is Damon Salvatore," She began, nudging his arm with her foot, squinting at him with her arms folded.
"Like Stefan Salvatore?" Sam interjected, remembering the name from the first meeting at the Grill. "He seemed a bit off, is this guy related to him?"
Zoe hesitated, trying to recall any facts that she could. It wasn't as though she knew much about this town at all, but through her 'angel vision' she had seen a few more facts about Damon, but his name had been circling in the air around her like it had come down across angel radio even though she hadn't been trying to find the name at the time; that would have been impossible though, since angel radio didn't have good enough reception across the fabric of time and space.
"Yes," She muttered, pulling forth in her mind the knowledge that Damon did have a brother, Stefan. Pulling her foot back from where it rested next to Damon's arm, Zoe walked over to sit in the chair next to Dean's bed. "He's Stefan's brother. He's a vampire. I saw him when we went to go and find Dean; he was lurking in the shadows by the Grill.
"He's probably the one that attacked Dean, he seems like the type to be unpredictable - or predictable, but predictably evil. Though I think he may have been back to finish the job when we got to Dean. Like he was now."
Damon's eyes had almost fully reformed now, and he was regaining consciousness and he groaned, putting a hand to the side of his head.
"Crap." Sam muttered. "Do we kill him, or what? I want to do the former."
"No. We can't kill him. It's my theory that everyone is in on what's going on. To kill him, you would raise the suspicion of the entire town. I'm going to take him out of here, get him to his home, I might be able to make him forget. I hope. I'll be back soon."
"Wait!" Sam grabbed Zoe's arm as she glided past him to take his previous place kneeling beside the body, "The angel mojo thing, it doesn't allow you to carry more than just you, remember?"
Zoe nodded, " It's getting stronger. I can pull some extra strength off of Castiel, but Damon is a vampire. Vampire's aren't well known for having souls, it's the soul that uses a lot of effort and strength to transport, I can take him far enough away that he can get home without arousing suspicion. He's already made everyone here forget."
Damon groaned again and his eye lids began to flutter as they finally had a fully formed eye to close over. Without waiting for another response from Sam, Zoe yanked her arm out of his grip and touched Damon's forehead, both of them vanishing in an instant.
Sam was left in the room, dazed and tired, with only his unconscious brother for company. Reaching for his coffee, Sam yawned and then winced when he realised that the cup had gone cold. Taking a sip, he spat the Luke-warm liquid back into the container in disgust, it was not only cold, but his taste buds rejected the coffee in accordance with it tasting like the petrol that they fill up the Impala with. Stupid hospitals and their crap tasting food.
Dean hadn't moved a muscle during the entire time he had been at the hospital. Sam sighed, replaced the cup of the table, and sat, watching his brother, hands clasped under his chin in a way that may have looked like praying, but in fact, was just silent contemplation of how the hell his life had gotten this weird.
Damon stumbles into the Salvatore Boarding house feeling as though he had drunk far too much, when he wasn't sure that he'd been drinking at all. He had woken up with a bad headache that was fading gradually, in the front lawn of the house. It wasn't his head that hurt the most though, it was behind his eyes, as though they'd been torn out of his head and then shoved in backwards so that he could see his skull.
Climbing to his feet, Damon had wandered the short distance and gone inside the house, heading straight for the table with the bourbon in their crystal decanters. He pulled the top off of the closest bottle and poured a generous amount into the glass that he turned the correct way up, looking around the room for any signs of life.
Despite being disorientated, Damon knew where he had been going, where he had ended up and what had happened. He had been heading to the hospital... then he had... he had... what had he done? So the remembering thing worked in theory. In practice, when he tried to think back, he hit a sort of mental wall in his memory. That was never a good sign. Had Klaus or Rebecca or Elijah found him? What did they have to gain from taking away his memory?
A conversation swam at the edge of his mind, Damon tried to grab at it. It remained just a tiny bit out of reach for him, as though it was something that had almost been taken, but forgotten about at the last minute and left where if he just stretched up enough, he could find something out. It stayed just out of the reach of his mental fingertips.
Frustrated, Damon drained the contents of the glass in one large mouthful and stalked from the room, deciding to head to a place where no one would look for him so that he could talk it out without being interrupted. That was how he found himself sitting on the logs beside Alaric Saltzman's grave, pulling at the long grass and staring at the date of birth on the stone. It was the wrong date.
"I'm confused, man." He scowled. "I'm missing parts of my memory, Elena's emotions have gone awol. There's new dudes in town. And here's the weirdest part, I've got the strangest feeling that the girl with them.. She's an angel." The memory came flooding back like a tidal wave and Damon was mentally thrown back into the hospital room, feeling groggy and listening to Sam and the girl argue about Angel Mojo. What the hell is Angel Mojo? In his memory, as the girl touched his forehead, Damon was transported from the room and from the memory and he became aware of his actual surroundings once again.
The date was still wrong on the headstone. Damon had the strong urge to smash the stone and carve a new one for his best friend.
He didn't do it. Mostly out of respect, partly out of exhaustion. Having emotions and angels in town were really irritating. He decided that it was probably time to tell the others.
He didn't do that either, not for a little while. Instead he sat there, on the log. Telling Alaric things about the town, apologising over and over for what had happened to Elena.
"I love her, Ric. I always have." He put his head in his hands.
"I know you do, Damon." A unheard voice replied.
"Sam..." Zoe appeared next to the younger Winchester, putting her hand on his shoulder. 2 hours had passed since she had last been in the hospital room, and Sam had fallen asleep where he watched over his brother. In the dark of the room, moonlight streaming in through the window, Zoe frowned. "Sam, I think I know how to save Dean..."