"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.

Grant didn't cry, but he sat like that for a long time. Katherine could see him from the nurse's station, where she took her dinner that evening. He sat like that for the whole thirty minutes she was allowed to be there. She only had the stomach for saltines that night. 

It was around three in the morning when the family made the decision. No one else would be there. Their flights were delayed, cancelled...

That doctor wasn't in the room with the nurses when the nine medication pumps were cut. When the ventilator stopped breathing for Joseph. Katherine stood by the closed door with Sandra. Sandra watched the clock, Tony cut the ventilator, and Katherine switched off the medications. Joseph's lungs didn't even try. They couldn't. 

Staring at Dean's rounded shoulders and bowed head, she can still hear Grant crying, holding his grandfather's ankle through the blanket. 

Katherine wraps her arms around Dean's shoulders, and he jumps. 

"Hey," he croaks, sitting up. His face is a little swollen and his eyes are red. 

"How long have you been sitting like that?" She quietly asks.

"Dunno."

Katherine swallows the lump in her throat, forcing herself to look at Bobby. "No change, huh?"

"None," Dean sighs, starting to stand up. Katherine puts a hand on his chest and gently insists he sit down. He glances to the manila folder between her fingertips as he sits. "What's that?"

"What Sam dug up. He's getting coffee, but...Jeremy Frost's story is making a lot more sense now." She cracks the file open and slides a photograph from Bobby's wall to him.

Dean looks over it with furrowed brows and a wrinkled forehead. "This is the plant from Bobby's closet, right?"

"Mhm. African Dream Root."

"Yeah, but you knew that already."

Katherine nods, lips thin. "It's been used by shamans and medicine men for centuries." 

"Let me guess," Dean hums. "They dose up, bust out the didgeridoos, and start kicking around the hackey."

Katherine chuckles, leaning against the doorframe. "Not quite. It's used for dream walking...if you believe in the legends. Y'know...getting into a person's dreams, poking around in their heads."

He pops an eyebrow at her, green eyes boring into hers. She forces herself to look down at Sam's chicken scratch notes. "I take it we believe the legends."

"When haven't we? But the dream walking is just the skin of this rotten potato." She passes him another photograph.

He smiles a little. "Nice metaphor."

"Thanks."

"So what is the rotten potato?"

"Well, this stuff is some serious mojo," she hums. "If you take enough of it, with enough practice, you're the friendly neighborhood Freddy Krueger. Turn good dreams bad, bad dreams good...you can control anything." She looks at Dean and sighs. He takes all of three seconds to think about it.

"Including killing people in their sleep."

"A la Freddy," she says with a nod. Dean rubs the back of his head and stands up before nodding his head to the door.

"I can't think in here," he says. Katherine taps the file on the foot of the bed before pointing at Bobby. You better be alive when I come back, you old fart. She starts out of the room with Dean, whose hand is still on the back of his neck.

"So...let's say he's doing his tests," Dean starts. "Somebody gets pissed at him and decides to give him a little dream visit...and he goes nighty-night."

"Then what about Bobby?" Katherine mutters. "If the killer came after him, why is he still alive?"

"I don't know."

Sam is at the end of the hall with a tray of three coffee cups, frowning as he nears them. "So how do we find our homicidal little sandman?" Katherine wonders.

Dean stops and looks at her with a stupid little smile and soft eyes. "Was that a Metallica reference?"

"I...it was a reference to something," she says, brows knitting together. Then she frowns at him. "Do you think me incapable of making a Metallica reference?"

"I—well no—" 

"Leaving already?" Sam asks.

"We've got work to do," Katherine sighs, taking a cup from the carrier.

"That one's black," Sam says. Katherine puts it back.

Dean crosses his arms. "What's wrong with black, Katherine?"

She opens her mouth for a smart-aleck remark, but then she closes it and stares at him, deadpan. "Don't start that with me." Dean sniggers as he takes his coffee from the tray. Katherine looks at Sam with the annoyance of three of her. "Are you going to tell me which one is mine, or am I going to walk into another one of Dean's stupid jokes?"

Sam smirks and points. "This one's yours."

"Thank you." She takes her cup a little rougher than necessary and starts down the hallway. Dean is still giggling at his own joke. Katherine clears her throat. "Whoever is doing this obviously had access to the doctor's dream shrooms," she says.

"Test subject?" Sam suggests.

"Maybe," Katherine hums. "But his research is so poorly documented, we don't know if he took note of everyone he gave that dream root to." After a moment, she scoffs, shaking her head.

"What?"

"In any other case, we'd be calling Bobby and asking him for help," she mutters. Then her sneakers squeak against the tile as she stops, and the Winchesters turn around to frown at her. "We need to talk to him."

Sam's hazel eyes bolt to Dean before settling back on Katherine. "That might be a one-sided conversation. Just a bit."

Katherine rolls her own. "No, I know, but—" She huffs and shifts her weight like the sassy little shit she is. "I mean if we got some of the dream root—"

Dean snaps his fingers. "Yes."

"No," Sam says, looking between the two. "You seriously want to go dream walking inside Bobby's head?"

Katherine grins. "You can say it. I'm a..."

"Lunatic."

She purses her lips. "Not the adjective I was looking for. I'll take it, though."

Sam stares her down. She just straightens out, cocks her head just a few degrees, and raises a sigle eyebrow.

"We have no idea what's crawling around in there," Sam insists.

She scoffs. "Well how bad could it be?"

"Bad."

Katherine rolls her eyes. "It's Bobby, Sam. He'd do the same thing for any one of us in a second."

After a moment, he nods and glances down to her sneakers. "Yeah, you're right." He thinks for a moment. "Do you have African dream root." Less of a question, more of an accusation.

"Do I look like I carry a brief case with magical herbs?" She asks. "I would ask Tamara, since the woman has everything, but she's been radio silent since her husband died."

"Isaac."

She nods. "So if either of you know anyone who could score some..."

Dean closes his eyes and sighs to himself. "Crap."

"What?"

"Bela."

Katherine's jaw tightens. "I want to hit something."

"You need therapy," Dean mutters.

Rage-filled blue eyes flash at Dean. "You need a flak jacket," Sam quips to his brother.

"She's probably the only one who can get that dream root," Dean says to both of them.

"So you're actually suggesting we ask her a favor?" Katherine asks, squaring up to Dean. "Bela Talbot, the girl who has screwed me over, personally, in major, epic, I-swear-to-God-I-will-kill-you-someday, personal manner...Bela Talbot, who has screwed all of us in a major, epic, I-swear-to-God-I'll-throttle-you-the-next-time-I-see-you manner..."

"Yes. That Bela Talbot. I'm feeling dirty just thinking about it, but yeah." Dean glances to Katherine with annoyance. "I thought you were on this pious path to forgiveness or something anyway."

Katherine pokes a finger into his chest. "Righteous path to karma."

Sam glances between the two. Dean's bigger than her in every application of the word. Taller, wider, thicker. She's small, both in frame and size, in comparison to him. Katherine Donovan, who in the reality of things has only been an adult for a few years, has time and time again stood up to him physically, verbally, mentally. And she's never backed down. She challenges him every day. Be a better person, a better hunter. Even if it's completely unintentional and she's doing something to be a brat and get under his skin. But the change in Dean is real, is palpable, has been observed.

So maybe they're meant for each other. Like some cosmic conspiracy, something that's been there for a long time, and maybe it'll be there long after they're both dead.

Dead.

The thought makes Sam's blood run cold and turns his throat dry. Dean's clock is running out.

She's gonna die one day. It's going to be a werewolf who got too close, or a demon, or another person...and he won't be able to stop it. Dean won't be able to stop it, Charlie won't be able to stop it.

In a selfish moment, Sam wishes he'd go before Katherine so he'd never have to see it. He doesn't know how he'd cope without her there. And hen he wonders how it's going to be without Dean with them. How they'll cope, how they'll hunt, if they can't save him in time.

Katherine groans, pulling on the roots of her hair as Dean starts down the hallway. She looks to Sam, blue eyes burning with fury, and he holds up his free hand in surrender. 

What were you supposed to do when a bear sniffed you out?