Sam hasn't bothered celebrating his birthday in years. Half his friends don't even know when it is. Jess does, but after the almost-fight the first spring she knows better than to call attention to it. Sam has learned something by then of the art of compromise, and is never anything but pleased when she buys unbirthday presents a day or so later.



He never thinks about the birthdays of his childhood. If he did, he would have to admit to himself how hard Dean tried to make them special. It's not Dean's fault he couldn't steal an unhaunted suburban family, a Mom who'd bake birthday cake or a Dad who'd teach his sons bicycle riding instead of knife fighting. He did get a bicycle once, Sam remembers; it was battered, far too big for him and got left behind at the next Winchester migration, but he had three glorious weeks with it. Adult Sam hopes the kid it belonged to got it back.

His legs are numb with the great warm weight lying on them, and he really needs to pee. When he opens his eyes, he's oddly unsurprised to find himself in what looks from inside like a derelict shack. He's fully clothed - just as well, since the mattress under him is bare and none too clean. That's all he has time to take in before the enormous white dog on his lap starts licking his face.

He pushes her away, laughing, and rises to his feet. Sam had yearned for a dog of his own when he was a kid, hoping breathlessly against hope in the dark of birthday mornings that this would be the year there was a puppy. I'd look after him, Dad. It had never been possible, of course; it had just taken Sam a long time and a lot of bitter resentment to accept it. The dog of his dreams had been variously a golden retriever, a beagle, a collie and a German Shepherd. Greta - Sam does not wonder how he knows the dog's name and sex, nor notice that he has no memory of acquiring her - could perhaps be taken for a portly white German Shepherd if you saw her from a distance. And had really poor eyesight. Close up, she's the right shape for a shepherd, but otherwise resembles a shepherd unexpectedly fathered on a polar bear. Her ears are level with Sam's waist, even when she has them tilted lopsideways to go with her broad, goofy grin.

Sam looks around, is unsurprised to find no outhouse and probably wouldn't have wanted to go inside if there had been; the shack he woke up in is bad enough. He walks around to the back, finds a scrubby tree and luxuriates in peeing copiously on it. Greta bounds outside beside him, gives him an unmistakably amused look when he unzips, then demurely turns her back before squatting to water her own patch of reddish, dusty ground.

He uses the time to look around, his brain scrambling to identify his next move by the time he's completed this one. The shack appears to be on the outskirts of a small town that might be anywhere in the enormous ass-end of the Midwest. The buildings have that timelessly shabby stillness to them that reads to Sam as uninhabited before the absence of overhead wires, television aerials or satellite dishes confirms his hunch for him. His eye falls on a dilapidated bell tower, and a place name drops into his mind - Cold Oak. South Dakota. He has been here before, but when he tries to remember when and why, pain spikes up behind his eyes like a hidden bear-trap; he staggers and has to pay urgent attention to his hands to avoid peeing on his shoes.

He already knows, and doesn't care to wonder how he knows, that there'll be no cellphone reception and no Internet here, but he pulls out his phone anyway and is rewarded by the blinking line of text that tells him there's a message. Bizarrely, it's from himself, right down to the specific wording in the title that he and Dean use to convey that the message isn't under duress or possession.
"Curiouser and curiouser," he tells Greta with a wry grin, aimed at himself as much as her. She responds by tilting her head, her blue eyes and pricked ears conveying curiosity more precisely than words; he rubs her head briefly and opens the message.

It is the filename of a short video on the phone itself, and a terse two-word instruction: PLAY ME.
"Should I?" he asks Greta facetiously, and she nosepokes him forcefully as though taking his question literally. "All right, cool your jets," he replies, and hits the play button.

It looks like coloured white noise, with a soundtrack of something like crickets or, perhaps, spring peepers, but the voiceover is his own. "Keep watching," his recorded voice tells himself, then it starts counting down backwards from ten. By the time he has reached four, Sam is somewhere else.