AN: Me again, back with another story. This is set after 12.16 Ladies Drink Free, but isn't related to that episode. This does contain spoilers for most of season 12 and prior seasons. As with most of my work, I try and make my stories canon compliant and this is no exception despite some fantasy elements. The majority of this story is already written and it should work out to about 7 or 8 chapters in total. I plan to post every other day because I have no patience. Constructive criticism is always appreciated!

As the four hunters panted, sweaty and catching their breath after the battle, the night sounds of the heavy forest started to come back. The crickets began to chirp again,and the faint hoot of a distant owl could be heard. It would have been a peaceful April night if it wasn't for the dead body in front of them, leaking goo into the ground. Dean toed the corpse gingerly. He and Sam had killed a lot of monsters over the years, but this one was particularly ugly. Muddy scales trailed down its back like a lizard, but it had a furry wolf-like head and a mouth full of a double row of sharp teeth. It had been particularly hard to kill too, impervious to magic and with skin like armor.

In the end, it had taken the four of them a long struggle to harry it enough so that it rose up on its hind feet, giving them a shot at its vulnerable underbelly. The razor sharp claws had barely missed Cas, leaving ragged tears through his trench coat. And thank God, Sam had only been tossed with a back of it's hand instead of with it's claws. If Mom hadn't hacked off the barbed tip of its tail as a distraction, the thing would have gutted Sam in a second as he lay stunned at the foot of the tree got thrown against. Finally, Dean had been able to duck under its reach and drive the silver, short sword into the monster's guts. It had dropped like a rock at that point. Dean gave the body another nudge, then walked to where Sam and their Mom were standing.

"Really Sam, I'm fine," Mom said, holding her arm. Dean hadn't seen her get tagged, but the blood he could see on her flannel shirt confirmed that she was injured.

"Claw or spike?," Dean forced himself to ask calmly. What he wanted to do was pull her arm free and check out her injury for himself, but he and Mom had forged some kind of relationship, and he didn't want to overstep. He was trying to give Mom the space she had asked for.

"It's fine. One of the barbs caught me, but it's not even bleeding that bad." At that confession, Cas, who had joined the Winchesters frowned and offered his two cents.

"Mary, it is unclear if the barbs are poisonous. It would be prudent for me to check, as we are a long way from conventional medical assistance." Dean mused that Cas was far from wrong. They had hiked deep into the Ouachita National Forest in search of the creature that had killed a party of four backwoods campers. They were at least an hour or more away from the cars and another hour to medical help in Hot Springs.

Mom pursed her lips, but extended her arm. Cas pushed up her sleeve, revealing a bad laceration which was running with blood. He steadied her arm with one hand and with the other, raised his palm, placing it just above the nasty wound. There was a brief blue glow and Cas closed his eyes. Dean had seen the angel heal injuries dozens of times, but it never failed to amaze him to see new unblemished skin, once the glow faded.

"The wound was not poisonous and I healed it for you." Cas' tone was solemn as usual even as he smiled almost shyly at Mom. He gently tugged down the blood soaked sleeve before letting go of Mom's arm.

"Thank you Castiel," was all she said, smiling back while patting his arm fondly. As weird as it was to think about, Dean was glad that Cas had grown close to Mom. For a long time, he and Sam had thought of Cas as family - an honorary Winchester, who had stood by them through a mountain of crap. It was nice that Mom had kinda adopted him as a third son. Nice, but still a little weird. He turned to Sam who was rubbing his shoulder.

"You good?," he asked, but Sam just rolled his shoulder one last time and nodded.

"Okay. Well, c'mon, let's burn this sucker so that we can get out of here. It's getting late." Dean suppressed the urge to check Sam out for injuries. At this point, he trusted Sam to tell him if he was hurt, but old habits can be hard to break and there had been a time when everything else would have waited while he made sure that his brother was all right. Before he gave in to his big brother instincts, he began dragging his foot around to clear some of the leaves and debris from a rocky part of the forest floor. Sam joined him to open up an area on which they could burn the body. Nobody wanted to cause a forest fire. Once the area was safe, Sam grabbed the monster's body by its horns and, his muscles straining, dragged it over to the cleared area. Dean went to pull the salt from their bag and Sam pulled out his phone.

"Really, dude? You need something to remember this fugly by?," he teased. Sam shot Dean a sour look.

"I've never seen or heard of something like this before, and I want to document it for the archives."

Dean rolled his eyes at Sam's nerdiness, but he couldn't help but admit that it made sense to record what they'd learned for future hunters, just in case there were more of these out there somewhere. As Sam snapped a few photos, he doused the body in salt and a splash of lighter fluid. Mom and Cas kept an eye out, just in case. Once they were all out of range, he lit a book of matches and dropped them onto the corpse. It flared up and burned hotly, illuminating the dark forest with flickering shadows.

The little group stood quietly, watching the fire. In the firelight, he caught Mom's expression. She looked sad, but when she spotted him staring at her, she shot him a tentative smile. He grinned back, but grimaced inside. Thinking about their mother always tied Dean in knots. He'd idolized her for most of his life, perhaps unfairly putting her on a pedestal. He had been over the moon to get his mother back, and eager to get to know her. But things hadn't gone like that. Frankly, she had been distant and distracted almost since she'd been brought back, but it had gotten worse after the vampire attack at the Men of Letters compound. He wished he knew what was going on with Mom, then maybe he could stop vacillating between being angry at her and worried about her. He sensed Sam's comforting presence just behind his right shoulder and turned to give him a nod.

It felt good to have Sam by his side. The memory of their time locked up by the Feds was still painfully fresh for Dean, despite the months that had passed. It had been awful to be separated from Sam for so long. At the time, the silence and the boredom had almost driven him crazy, but was a hundred times worse because he couldn't communicate with his brother. He could only imagine what being locked in a small space had been like for Sam after his history with the Cage. Sam wouldn't talk about it, but if Dean had been suffering, not even sure if Sam was alive, then it had to have been way worse for the kid. He shuddered, and tried to shake off the memory of being locked in that horrible cell.

Dean found a fallen log to sit on and shoved his hands into his pockets against the cool night air. After a few minutes of watching the flames Dean realized that, despite his worries and his dark memories, right now, he was pretty happy. Sure, they had to find Kelly and Lucifer's spawn-to-be, but his family was here, safe with him, the world hadn't ended yet and the fugly of the week was merrily burning in front of them. Even the sky had cleared and the moon appeared, a gentle breeze shook the leaves above and brought the fresh scent of the forest to counteract the muddy, sour smell from the fire. With a soft sigh of contentment, Dean squirmed to find a comfortable way to sit on his log. Bodies took a fair while to burn.