Hello again, chickadees!

I'm back with another adventure for Dean and his little sister, Samantha. If you haven't read my other fanfic, lemme do some explaining. I had an idea for a fanfic one day about what Supernatural would be like if Sam was a Samantha instead of a Samuel and voila! I wrote out the pilot episode with these two, modeling our new-and-improved Sammy after Alexis Bledel; it's called Relapse if anyone would like to read that. I recommend it, though it isn't mandatory for this to make sense.

As always, I appreciate any reviews left for me, and if you think there's something I should change, be polite about it. I respond much better to civility than bluntness.

I hope you enjoy this fanfic. It was quite a challenge for me to write this considering that this follows Sam's trauma with her boyfriend Roger. I tried to follow how I think she'd react to the best of my ability, and I'm very satisfied with how it turned out. Sam's anger man... in some ways it's more terrifying than Dean's because Sam is normally the gentler of the two siblings, so when he explodes it's much more of a shock.

Anyhoo, I've talked enough now. The chapters are a lot longer in this "episode" so please bear with me.

Enjoy!

Yours truly,

MD

DISCLAIMER: I so not own any part of Supernatural. All credit for the show goes to Eric Kripke and the beautiful writers that thought this up. Bits from the actual episode were taken for accuracy purposes only. Enjoy!

Considering the reason she was here, it was an unnaturally happy day. Birds were chirping throughout the whole cemetery and the sun shone down without a cloud in the sky to blemish its heated stare. The grass looked a more vibrant shade of green than normal, and there wasn't a single breeze. It was a beautiful day. Too fucking bad Sam was here to see her dead boyfriend.

Samantha trudged past headstones as slowly as she could, staring down at the bouquet of flowers in her hands. She knew the path to Roger's grave, she'd walked it a million times and it had only been a few days. Sam felt unsatisfied with everything. The damn sunlight being too fucking cheery, the damn birds that couldn't shut the hell up, the eerie silence in this stupid fucking graveyard. Which was the last fucking place Sam wanted to be right now, by the way. In case God, or angels, or who-the-fuck-ever had let her innocent boyfriend just burn even gave a shit about how Sam felt.

The flowers she'd chosen were simple, and a little cliché, but she'd barely been able to remember that she needed flowers for her visit, so all things considered, Sam was proud of herself. A few white lilies with a few leaves for accents. It was small, but it served her purpose. Why go to all the trouble to buy an extravagant bouquet when they'd just wither away within a few days anyway? Wither away with Roger. Dust to fucking dust, man.

All too soon Sam was in front of Roger's grave. The brown dirt in front of his headstone still had that newly-turned-earth smell. It made her fucking sick. This whole god damned situation made her sick. It made her sick to her very soul. But Sam was tired of always feeling heartache, always having her emotions torn and shredded over nails and glass until they came back to her tattered. It was so much easier to just shove them in a box and ignore them all. If all that baggage just stayed in the box, nice and quiet, it was easy for her to pretend like none of this had happened. It was easy to believe this was all just another nightmare.

Sam stared on, lamely. She didn't quite know what to say. She'd had a million things to tell Roger when she got here, and for the life of her, she couldn't remember one. It was an odd sort of feeling to be standing there, staring at the plot of ground her boyfriend was buried in, but more than that, the lack of emotion Sam felt while standing there was the oddest thing of all. She wasn't sure how long she stood there, just staring at the name "Roger James Woodburn." She avoided looking at the date of death.

Sam knelt down next to the headstone and just sat there. She didn't have any words to describe how she felt because she didn't know how she felt. She couldn't access that part of her brain right now, it was too taxing. Too much energy was spent on emotions. Fuck emotions. This kind of shit is what happened when people felt emotions. When people fell in love. That just made the pain of them leaving all the more unbearable. Sam mused, for a moment, that she understood her dad a little better now.

"Hey, Roger." Her voice was quiet, subdued in this hushed place. "It's me. I brought you flowers." Her tone was thin and dry, blank of everything; it lacked any kind of conviction. Sam knew that if she was a normal girl she'd be crying by now. She'd be a sobbing mess. She'd be overflowing with everything she'd felt the night of the fire and couldn't even begin to understand. She'd be pushing her own feelings out of her body in the forms of tormented gasps and sobs because it just could not possibly be contained within her small, tiny frame. She'd admit to Roger all the things she'd kept from him in their relationship about who she truly was, even if it was a lost cause at this point. But Sam couldn't hold onto those thoughts. No sooner had she dredged one up from the blackness than it evaporated out of her grasp like smoke. She just couldn't process her own thoughts anymore.

"You know I've never been one with words. I'll just…" Sam's voice died down, her sentence left unfinished. She reached down stiffly to set the flowers by his headstone, but as soon as they touched the earth, they decayed to dust and fell away from her hands. Sam stopped, and after a moment drew back her hand, staring at it like she was seeing it for the first time. Black ash from the lilies dusted her hands. Sam ignored it and placed her hands in her lap. It was an eternity before she stood up and started to trudge back to she-didn't-even-know-where. Her feet felt weighed down to the ground, like she was wearing concrete blocks instead of her customary boots.

Faster than Sam could blink, a hand shot out from the dirt and grabbed her ankle. Sam fell forward and landed on her face. Slowly, she turned around to examine what it was that had stopped her. Sam watched with a blank face as another hand shot out and grabbed a handful of dirt, unperturbed. It wasn't until Roger's ink black hair popped up that her eyes widened. Sam began screaming as loud as she could while he crawled out of his grave, his eyes blank and filmy with death, and the gash on his stomach still bleeding.

Why was it bleeding? It wasn't supposed to be bleeding. Roger was dead. She had gone to his funeral just two days ago… So why was he bleeding?

Roger yanked on her ankle, dragging her towards him. Sam reached for something, anything that she could hold onto. Roger was dead. She'd watched him die. She'd seen it happen. He was dead, so what the hell was this?

It wasn't long before she was lying flush on the dirt Roger had sprung up from. Half of his body had managed to weasel out of the grave, and he bent over her from the side. His blood poured out, soaking the dirt around Sam, and ruining her clothes. He pulled in a ragged, raspy breath, staring down at her with those cold, dead eyes. Sam felt her tears burning paths to the earth, her own breath choking in her throat.

"Why, Sam?" Roger's voice was hollow, broken. It sounded strained, like it was hard to speak. Sam just closed her eyes, the tear tracks searing into her skin, and shook her head. She wasn't hearing this. She wasn't seeing this.

"Why Sam?" Roger demanded again. "Why couldn't you save me? Why did I have to die because of you?" Sam just kept shaking her head. She couldn't speak. She could only cry. It felt like someone was taking a razor blade to her heart; she couldn't go through this again. She was going to break. She could already feel the cracks on her skin. She couldn't contain this emotion anymore, it was boiling around in her gut. It was going to split her wide open, rip her seams apart and explode in the world around her.

"Why, Sam?" She wasn't sure if Roger was still talking or if it was a voice in her head. Either way it just helped drag the razor blade one more time. It added more pain to the pool in her gut. She was going to break.

Hot. She felt so hot. Her blood was on fire, boiling, it burned her veins wide open. All that fire seared its way down to her stomach, to the pit. Sam opened her sobbing eyes and looked down at the blood stain on her stomach. The skin on her gut had melted away with the force of the heat, and her stomach was bleeding onto the ground to match Rogers. His eyes still bore down on her, and Sam arched her back, screaming. When she'd seen the wound, she'd suddenly noticed that it hurt unlike anything she'd ever felt before. Her intestines and internal organs were literally burning away, and there was so much blood. She didn't know a human could hold that much.

The fire spread out from her stomach now, traveling in her veins to her limbs. It made her skin itch and crawl. Roger watched on in silence. Fire sprung up around her and suddenly she was burning, the fire sucking the oxygen from her screeches and wails of desolation. Her back fell to the ground, and suddenly she was pinned. She couldn't move, couldn't even make a sound as the fire burned and her stomach boiled. Roger's eyes were so horrifyingly blank.

This was not her Roger. This was not her Roger. This was too much to handle, there was so much pain. Why was he bleeding? Why was he here? How was she burning? Why did he have to die? It was all her fault. How could she not have protected him?

Why did he have to die? Why? Why, why… WHY?

Sam gasped and shot away from the window, her arms flailing wildly. She needed to put out the fire, or she was going to buan away to ash. Sam's chest heaved and she whipped her head around, groggy. After a few moments, she sat back, slightly confused. She wasn't at the cemetery anymore. She wasn't even outside. She was sitting next to a very concerned Dean in his '67 Chevy Impala as they drove down the highway at an alarming rate. Slowly, as her brain woke up from that nightmare, she remembered that they were heading to Black Water Ridge, Colorado. The coordinates they're indirectly gotten from their dad over a week ago had led the siblings there, for whatever ungodly reason.

Sam sighed heavily, thanking whatever deities were listening that it had only been a nightmare. But at the same time… what a nightmare. It had felt so real to her, she could have sworn she'd smelled the hairs on her arms and legs burning. Her heart was still racing painfully from the paralyzing fear she'd been struggling to reel back from in that dream world. Her head was pounding its protests against the mental trauma, and she could already feel it morphing into a migraine. Sam groaned and tossed an arm over her eyes.

Normally, Samantha Winchester was very well-kept in her appearance. She wasn't like a lot of girls in that she traded shorts, skirts, and heels in for tattered jeans and her favorite black leather GI style combat boots or sneakers. In her life as a Hunter before college at Stanford, she'd never dolled herself up with that makeup shit all girls seemed to obsessively lather on themselves, and once she'd stepped away from "the life" for those two years, the desire had never caught on. Her shirts were all simple, single color V-necks, no designs. She had a few jackets of browns and grays, one black pea coat and one dark brown leather jacket she'd gotten from her brother for Christmas when she'd turned fifteen. That was it for her fashion sense. Sam didn't see the point in wearing all that clingy shit when most of it had always gotten ripped and bloodied anyway. What was the point of spending all that time picking out mauled her to death? Wearing practical clothes that were easy to run and fight in made a lot more sense than miniskirts and dresses.

Her straight brown hair was down, for once, and fell a little past her shoulders, all tangled and messy. She must have been thrashing her head in her sleep. Normally Sam liked to keep her hair out of her face and back in a tight ponytail with her short bangs resting just above her eyes, but her traitorous body had given out on her before she'd had the chance to pull it back. Her eyes felt puffy, and she knew she had dark circles under them. Sam had inherited her mom's hazel blue eyes, a charming mixture of light, piercing blues and honey-colored browns that usually twinkled with mischief or blazed with determination. Well… before a week ago, that is.

Her slender nose was a little small for her face, and her lips just a little too large, but the overall effect, with the added freckles, rosy cheeks, and soft jawline made Sam look quite endearing. She had a subtle beauty about her that one had to really take a moment to discover, but once people did, it was obvious why guys had always been unconsciously drawn to here, despite her tomboy-tough-as-nails-touch-me-and-I-break-your-face attitude. Being raised by two Hunters surrounded by death and blood hadn't exactly been an environment where a frilly-girly-foo-foo attitude kept you alive. Sam had needed to learn to get her shit straight and take everything head-on if she was going to keep herself and her family out of trouble. But, that had never stopped her from at least looking clean and… human.

Now, she just looked haunted. It was only natural after what she'd seen after Jericho a week ago, but her face looked so foreign in her eyes that now she avoided looking at anything reflective, if she could help it. Sam looked like a shell of herself. Roger's death had twisted something in her mind, and where Sam had been gentle and compassionate to those she cared about, she was now angry and gruff all the time. She snapped at the slightest drop of a hat these days, and when she got angry it was so completely blown out of proportion and out of control that it left Sam gasping for breath. For being such a caring person, her anger had always been something she'd had trouble with. Now, with this pain in her past adding fuel to the fire, it was almost unbearable at times.

It was a few moments before Sam realized that Dean had spoken to her. She dropped her arm away from her eyes and tilted her head to look at him, still trying to pull herself out of that nightmare.

"Huh?" Dean's frown out the windshield deepened. He reached over and turned Foreigner's 'Hot Blooded' down a little bit. Sam hadn't even noticed it playing.

"I asked if you're okay." Sam pinched the bridge of her nose and reached for her brown leather knapsack and her migraine medication. Pills, pain relief, now. Anything to stop the beating her exhausted mind was taking.

"Yeah," she muttered, sounding unconvinced even to her ears, "M'fine." Dean nodded, but his face said he knew otherwise.

"Another nightmare?" he asked. Sam, uncomfortable, avoided the question by grabbing her bottle of pills and popping the cap off. She looked inside and winced. She only had four pills left. Two doses. Fucking Mondays, man. Something always went wrong on a fucking Monday.

Sam pulled out two of the pills and swallowed them dry. She snapped the cap back on and tossed the bottle in the direction of her bag. She cleared her throat and pulled her legs up under her on the leather bench seat. She leaned her head against the window and shut her eyes, willing the pounding drums in her head to stop. She wasn't trying to sleep; no way. She wouldn't be sleeping for a very many hours, not after something like that. She just wanted the coolness of the glass to seep through her skull until her brain was numb. She wanted to stop thinking, and just float through the day without any real effort or concentration on her part. She wanted to stop feeling.

"Wanna drive for a while?" Sam's eyes opened. She looked at Dean, shocked. Had she heard that right? He was offering to let her behind the wheel of his precious Impala and sit in the passenger seat himself? He never let anyone drive this car. This car was the love of his life. Dean's green eyes met her own pair of hazel in her stunned silence.

"Since when do I get to drive her?" Sam's eyes were wide and her voice conveyed all of her surprise and confusion at her brother's question. Dean grumbled and looked forward once more.

"Just thought you might want to. Never mind." His tone sounded slightly offended, and Sam realized that he'd been trying to cheer her up. She managed a small smile and closed her eyes, leaning her head against the window once more. Her brother always showed his affection in awkward, bumbling manners, but it meant a lot to her that he even tried. Dean was secluded so far behind his walls and barriers from the world and any real emotional attachment, that for him to try and come out of his shells for Sam and her well-being spoke volumes.

Dean had always been Sam's caretaker. He was her best friend, her idol, her brother, and her protector, equipped with silver bullets and rock salt. Their dad, currently fallen off the face of the planet, had been absent for most of Sam's life. Granted, he was out hunting monsters that would break the most hardened of criminals, but still, the lack of his presence had been felt very acutely by Samantha and her brother. Dean had tried to step in for her and take care of her so well that she didn't even noticed when their dad wasn't around. He put Sam's well-being so far above his own, it amazed her when she seriously thought about it. Dean was the single most giving person Sam had ever met.

He wasn't one for words, her brother. He opted for just shooting at his problems rather than talking things out, and whenever situations got too close to actually forcing him to voice his emotions and fears, he ran away. He did it so charmingly too, most people didn't even notice. He'd tell a sly joke or make a stupid comment, and before ya knew it, the son of a bitch had you forgetting the whole damn situation. But he tried, sometimes, for Sam. He could never truly just be outright about things though, even with his sister, so he did things that seemed insignificant and simple in their meaning to show that he cared for her. Like offering for her drive the Impala. Dean hadn't once said the word love to her since she was about five, but he tried to get it across all the same in the silent, fumbling gestures of compassion that he used to cover up his macho-bravado-façade. It was sweet. Infuriating, sometimes (Sam didn't always get why it was so damn hard for him to just talk to her when he was pissed or whatever), but still. Sweet.

Usually Sam could pick up on these things; all that time Dean had spent alone with her in her childhood had taught her how to read her brother. When Sam was just a little girl and cried at everything like the baby she'd been, she'd prayed every night to God to make her tough like her cool, older brother. She'd watched him closely, and in doing so, she started to learn about him. So, Sam really should have noticed the offer to drive for what it was, but her mind wasn't firing on all pistons these days, and especially not after a nightmare like the one she'd gone through.

"Look, Dean. You're worried. I get it." Dean shifted in his seat at this, but said nothing. "Thank you for trying to cheer me up, but I have a migraine again, and driving would probably be conducive to bodily harm. So, thanks, but I'll pass. I'm fine." Dean scoffed at that. Sam just kept her eyes closed, blessing the cold pane of glass against her temple.

"Uh-huh. Yeah. You're just fucking peachy." Dean's voice dripped with sarcasm, and was tinged with concern, but Sam didn't have anything to say to that. She was obviously lying when she said she was fine; Lord knows what kinds of things she had been muttering in her sleep, and Dean wasn't stupid. It had only been a week since Roger had… passed. No one recovered that fast. So Sam knew Dean knew she was lying through her teeth, but she didn't – couldn't – say it out loud. She couldn't talk about it so soon. Her pain was still fresh, and the wounds on her psyche were still bleeding. Maybe someday, when she felt it scabbed over enough to keep the pain down to a dull throb instead of the stabbing, ripping, tearing at her soul, she would finally talk to him. She would unload everything she couldn't handle herself, and dammit if she wouldn't make the bitch listen to her. Chick-flick moments or not, he would put his pair away for a couple hours and trade it in for a uterus and estrogen, if that's what it took. But not now. No, not now. Now, she only wanted to sit in the seat that smelled of car oil, greasy food, leather and home, and pretend that she didn't have to think.

Sam ignored Dean's question and pulled her leather jacket tighter around her.

"Where are we?" Dean hesitated for a moment, probably deciding whether to really drop the subject or not. Thankfully, he was just as uncomfortable with this topic as she was and easily shifted his focus from his sister to the job.

"We are just outside of Grand Junction." Sam grunted and fell silent, pensive. They'd spent a week snooping around for any clues to tell them what had killed Roger, but they'd gotten absolutely fucking nothing. All they knew was that it was powerful, and that it had killed their mother Mary in the same exact manner the day Sam turned six months old. Their father had witnessed the supernatural circumstances with which their mom had died, and it's what had gotten their family into this life. It'd made Hunters out of them all. Sam thought of her mother's face from a picture she had lost to the fire of when she was just a baby and her parents had been holding her, smiling. It had been the day they'd brought her home. Her mom had had light blonde hair that she'd passed onto Dean, though his was darker and straight where hers was curly. Her eyes were the same shades of piercing blue and honey that Sam's were. She'd had high cheekbones, a small nose, and thin lips, but her face was soft and kind. She was warmth and comfort in a pretty blonde bottle. Sam tried to picture her pinned to a ceiling, bleeding from her abdomen while an unnatural and evil fire burned her away to ash.

Sam quickly shut down that train of thought when she almost puked. Not only would Dean flay her ass for ruining his car, he'd be worried about her, and in all likelihood, she wouldn't be able to evade his questions then. She forced her thoughts somewhere less dangerous, and instead wondered about the coordinates their dad had given them. Sure, they pointed to Black Water Ridge, but it wasn't anywhere close to a town. It was a part of Lost Creek National Park. Right smack dab at the center of it, actually. Sam felt a flash of irritation at her father. He was parading them around on a leash. She was still pissed for her dad having skipped town in Jericho, in the middle of a job no less, and then just expecting them to hop on over to Colorado. Sure, Dad, no problem. We'll just be on our merry-fucking-way. With no answers and a million questions. Oh yeah, and no fucking way to even talk to you. Sounds awesome.

"Ya know, it's weird, Dean. Those coordinates Dad gave us, this Black Water Ridge…" Sam opened her eyes and stretched her legs out a little, frowning at nothing in particular.

"Yeah, what about it?" Sam looked down at her hands.

"There's nothing there. It's just… woods. Open wilderness. Why the hell is Dad sending us to the middle of nowhere?" Dean didn't have an answer for that. He just looked over at Sam and shrugged. He faced out the windshield again when they passed a sign welcoming them to Lost Creek Colorado National Forest.

"I dunno, Sammy, but we'll find out. Dad wouldn't send us here for nothing, okay? There's gotta be something here he wants us to see." Sam mulled this over in her head for a little while before resting it back against the window. She reached into her jacket's right pocket and pulled out half of a blueberry muffin wrapped in a paper towel. She needed to eat something before her medicine made her sick. Dean flicked his eyes warily over to the muffin.

"You be careful with that thing. You get my baby dirty, and I will make detail her with a single cue tip, you got me?" Sam just rolled her eyes and took a small bite. Such a fucking drama queen.

'Hot Blooded' ended and Led Zeppelin's 'Immigrant Song' followed suit. Before long, Sam had finished her muffin and stuffed the paper towel back in her pocket. Now that that was over and done with, Sam drew her legs back in and rested against the door and window, curled in a ball, trying not to think. Trying not to feel. Her head still hurt, after all.

And there we have it. The start to their next hunt.

How am I doing so far? Please leave some love and let me know!

Much appreciated.

Peace.

P.S. I've been watching a marathon of The Twilight Zone. Talk about old-school horror.