"Dean," Bela snapped, finally reaching her breaking point. Her skilled hands clenched into tight fists, buffed nails digging into the soft flesh of the heels of her hands, as she struggled to maintain her composure. Snowflakes sailed gracefully outside the cabin walls to accumulate onto the ground outside as she ground her teeth together. "Stop that infernal pacing."

Dean turned around from the window to grace her with a venomous glare, his fingers twitching as though longing to wrap themselves around her pretty little neck and wring it. Black diamond and pearl earrings gleamed at her lobes as she moved her head from side to side and a ruby rose pendent dangled from a thin gold chain at her neck, but Dean's attention was focused on the woman who could, he hated to admit, outshine the most beautiful of sapphires, the most dramatic of diamonds. "Shut up, Lugosi," he shot back lamely, stumbling to hide his train of treacherous thought. "It's your damn fault we're stuck in here anyway."

Twin spots of rose glowed brightly on Bela's bladed cheekbones as her eyes glittered with temper, and Dean instantly wished he had kept his mouth shut. "For your information, Dean," she stated icily, her fingers drumming a pattern of music onto the arm of the ancient moth-eaten sofa she had perched herself on, "I would be on a plane to Cairo by now of it weren't for your pesky interfering. Not trapped in a log cabin in the middle of a bloody snowstorm."

Dean glared back weakly. "It's not my fault," he told her wearily. "If it's anyone's fault, it's yours."

Bela's expression was almost comical with outrage. "How so?"

"If you hadn't come in here and messed up my hunt, then we would both be out of here by now!"

Bela closed her eyes briefly with exasperation and growled, "If you hadn't insisted on interrupting me in the middle of a job, then we wouldn't be having any problems whatsoever!"

Throwing his hands up in frustrated defeat, Dean returned to furiously pacing in front of the window, and Bela resumed to boring holes into the back of his head with her glaring.

After a few minutes of tense silence, Dean spoke again. His tone was curt with frustration and lingering resentment. "Give me the nail."

"What?"

Dean spoke slowly as if he were talking to a child. "Give me the nail, Bela," he repeated.

Bela scoffed, her hand reflexively tightening on the nail in the pocket of her black cashmere sweater. "Like hell."

Dean locked eyes with her and her throat immediately went dry under his steady gaze. "Most likely."

The nail in question was actually the reason that either of them were in a log cabin in the middle of nowhere while a snowstorm raged outside. Bela had been tracking down an ancient nail said to have been used by a Chinese emperor to build a cursed room in his palace in the fifth century when her research led her to Alaska. Dean was trying to break a curse on an asylum in Austin, Texas, where he had gotten a lead that led him to the same deserted town in Northern Alaska.

Funnily enough, they had run into each other at the precisely most crucial part of the other's operation, and of course, Bela had ruined Dean's investigation. And, of course, Dean had forced her to return the nail. However, halfway back to the town, Dean and Bela had been caught in the middle of a violent snowstorm and forced inside a little abandoned cabin.

Obviously, they were both over the moon about this.

"I cannot believe you honestly expect me to give you the nail at this point," Bela told him disbelievingly. "Do you not understand that if it weren't for you, I would have already sold this nail and would be on my way to luxuriating in a bubble bath in a top hotel in Cairo?"

Dean tried very hard not to think about Bela naked.

"Do you not understand that if it weren't for you," he replied coldly, "I would already be on my way back to Texas with a way to break a curse?"

Bela rolled her beautiful eyes. "Oh, boo-hoo," she sighed mockingly. She crossed one leg over the other, then stood, the arguing supplying her system with too much tension to be stationary. She wandered over to the fireplace, dropping to her knees to investigate the old stone mantle. "Who do you think lives here?"

Dean shrugged impatiently, thrusting his hands deep into his leather jacket's pockets. He trailed his eyes over the bare floor, the skimpily furnished room, the lack of firewood and the one measly blanket on the couch. "Probably no one anymore. Maybe a hunter once upon a time. That is, a hunter of the regular sort," he amended hastily after some consideration.

Bela turned to face him, rising, her hands fisted on her slim hips. A speculative frown curled her slightly parched lips, and there was a worried glint in her emerald eyes. It was as though she was realizing for the first time that she might be trapped in the cabin for longer than she had anticipated. "Maybe. Maybe I can find some food."

She began rapidly opening and closing rusty drawers, the thud of heavy drawers closing the only sound for several seconds. Dean scowled out at the snowflakes piling up high outside of the cabin, mentally hurling obscenities at the fluffy white snow.

Finally, Bela spoke. Her normally curt tone had caved into concern. "There's no food in here. How much longer do you think we'll be snowed in?"

"Days," Dean replied shortly. At Bela's stricken expression, he hastily revised, "Kidding, kidding, Lugosi. Maybe a few hours."

She bit her lip absent-mindedly and Dean pretended not to find it insanely alluring. "Do you have reception in the blizzard?"

Dean shook his head, trying not to let his own worry show through. The last thing they needed was both of them losing their heads in the middle of a snowstorm. "I tried calling Sammy a few minutes ago. No go."

"Does he know you're here," Bela asked immediately, her eyes brightening hopefully. "He'll send someone looking, won't he?"

Dean tried not to laugh. "Are you scared of snow, Lugosi?"

She threw him a nasty look, but it was half-hearted and fell through. "I'm not a fan of blizzards," she admitted after a few seconds.

Dean crossed to the couch and raised his eyebrows questioningly. "Well?"

Bela fiddled her thumbs together. "It's really none of your business," she tried weakly, but Dean merely laughed.

"Come on, Lugosi," he smirked. "We might be here for hours. Least we can do is amuse each other."

Bela tried very hard not to think about the many, many ways they could amuse each other.

Dean leaned forward, a suggestive grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Don't you trust me?"

"In a pig's eye," she replied immediately, but it was more reflex than actual mistrust, and she knew he could tell. Shifting uncomfortably, Bela unlaced her boots with a few quick tugs and stepped out of the polished footwear, the dim light of the tiny lamp gleaming off of the nearly black leather.

Flexing her toes, she walked to the end of the couch opposite from Dean, crossing her arms over her chest. "It's not the snow," she began uncomfortably. "It's just…when I was little, the power would go out when there were blizzards and my family would have to stay together for warmth."

She broke off, her face uncharacteristically exposed. In that brief second, Bela was raw, stripped of protection. Human. But then she blinked, and she has her walls up again, and the moment of vulnerability was over so fast that Dean wondered if he had imagined it.

Bela cleared her throat, laced her fingers together. She began talking faster, kept her face hidden by a curtain of hair. "We would stay in the same bedroom for nights on end, and once, my mother was away on vacation. It was just my father and I in the house and…I…"

She trailed off, looking devastated. "I can't talk about this," she muttered, her throat dry. "I can't, Dean."

He ached to reach up and stroke her back, but he knew she would reject any sign of pity. Because she was Bela Talbot and God forbid she show emotion. "Hey, it's fine," he told her, his throat oddly dry. Why the hell did he care if she was upset? She had tried to kill both himself and Sammy before, and time and time again, she betrayed them every way possible.

But he did care. He cared a lot.

"No, it isn't," she said, her voice cracking halfway through.

"What did he do to you," Dean asked quietly after a few seconds of tense silence.

Bela ran her fingertips under her eyes and blinked hard, twice. When she looked at him, she was as composed as she had ever been. "It doesn't matter anymore."

"It always matters."

His words rang true, but Bela would rather impale herself through the throat with the cursed nail than elaborate on her story. "Not to me, it doesn't," she replied lightly, forcing herself to be composed. "What about you, Dean? Any daddy issues you want to talk about?"

His face blanked instantly and her heart twisted. Perhaps they were more alike than she had originally thought, she mused, running her hands along the blanket sprawled over her lap. In any case, it didn't change anything. He was still Dean Winchester, hunter, and she was still Bela Talbot, thief. He was white and she was black and he was good and she was bad. Any way you looked at it, it ended in disaster.

"No," he said hoarsely, interrupting her thoughts. "No daddy issues whatsoever."

She laughed lightly, calling him out on his lie without saying a word. "Touché," Bela murmured into the cold, dry air.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

She glanced up and was startled by the intensity of the gaze staring back at her. "I suppose John was a wonderful father," she began, her voice nearly trembling. "He must have been incredibly warm and nurturing growing up."

"Don't you pretend like you knew my father," Dean shot back, his hands balling into fists.

"Even if I didn't, I only have to take one look at his sons to know what sort of man he was," Bela countered, struggling to keep her voice even and emotionless.

"Yeah? And what sort of man was he?"

There was anger in his eyes, Bela realized. But there was also fear and a bone-deep sadness. She could relate more than she wanted to. "Angry. He was always angry and that's why you're so sad."

Dean let out a short bark of harsh laughter. "I'm not sad."

"You ache with sadness, Dean. It's in your eyes when you can't hide the pain for a few short moments, it's in your smile when you pretend that it's all so, so funny. I can see it in the line of your shoulders, hunched against the world that your father set on your back. I can see it in the way you just don't care that everything hurts, that you just want it to stop. You just want everything to stop, don't you, Dean? Isn't that it? Isn't that why you don't care that you might get killed hunting? Because you want it to stop. You just want it all to end. You just want to stop being sad."

His lips parted and he stared at her. His fists loosened in surprise and Dean forgot he had been angry with her. Clearing his throat, he blinked away a few unshed tears and scoffed instead. "Someone's been paying attention to me."

Bela burrowed deeper into the thin blanket, her shoulders shivering. "Someone has to. Sam's too busy being angry himself."

"Sam has reasons to be angry," Dean defended, but it was a weary response, not an angry one. He knew better than anyone that Sam had hundreds of reasons to be angry, angry at everyone and everything.

"Just as you have reasons to be sad."

"Damn it, Lugosi. I'm not sad." His voice cracked on the last word and he inhaled sharply, refusing to show emotion any more than Bela would.

She shrugged, patient and uncaring. "You can lie to yourself but not to me, Dean. Believe me, I have plenty of experience with sad and angry."

"Oh, yeah?"

"More than you could ever imagine."

It was hard to believe that Bela Talbot (smart, sexy, witty, stubborn, resourceful, strong) had ever had reason to be sad or angry but Dean knew well enough that looks could be deceiving. And he could see the gleam in her catlike eyes, the gleam that was almost too alone to comprehend. Dean was the one who never backed own, fearless, furious, and yes, desperately, desperately sad. And if he could hide that under sarcasm and sex, who was to say that Bela Talbot didn't bury her past, whatever it might have been, under layers of wit and sass? And if she could see through him, who was to say that with a little digging, he couldn't uncover the woman who was so damaged she had killed her parents to become a thief, the woman who had taunted him mercilessly and who had driven him crazy with curiosity for weeks?

Abruptly, he shrugged the leather jacket off of his shoulders and wordlessly handed it to her. Bela glanced at it, then at him, and then back at the jacket again in surprise.

"Thank you," she murmured, and slipped it on. "It…smells like you."

Dean was not known for resisting what he wanted and it would be insanity to deny that Bela in his jacket, silky honey spirals fanning out over the battered leather and the smooth skin of her neck pressed against the collar he had felt against his own throat so many times before, made him want, want, want.

"Perhaps we're more alike than I thought," he managed finally. He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans and wished for some of his generous charm to return to him. Why did Bela always leave him tongue-tied?

"Or perhaps I'm playing you like a fiddle," she replied easily. His gaze jerked back to hers in surprise and she smiled thinly. "I'm manipulative, Dean, and we both know it. To forget it would be a disaster."

"I won't forget."

"I might." Bela burrowed deep into the jacket and breathed in the scent of leather, soap, and a smoky wood she couldn't name. It smelled like home, and travel, and comfort.

"Tell me, Lugosi, what was the point in reminding me that you could break me just as you had me wrapped around your finger?"

Bela pondered the question, shaking off the effects of his scent addling her mind. "I was reminding myself as much as I was reminding you. For you to fall for me would be a mistake."

"But why remind me?"

"Don't let me charm you, Dean. It would be easy, all too easy for both of us, to trip straight into the trap we've set up for ourselves. Maybe if you remember that, we won't fall."

He took his seat across from her again and watched her. "You don't want me to fall in love with you."

It was a simple statement. It was also terrifying. "No. I don't."

"What makes you think I would, Lugosi?"

"I know you, Dean. And I know men. It's enough to put two and two together."

"That simple, huh?"

"It's never simple with you."

It was probably the most straight forward thing she had ever said to him and Dean's eyes widened. "Sounds like you're just as tempted to fall in love with me, Lugosi."

His voice was light and affable and she knew it was just as fake as her own and she scoffed back, "In your dreams, Winchester."

"Likewise, Lugosi."

Perhaps she was more like him than he had thought, Dean thought again as they drifted closer to sleep in the following hours. Perhaps she was just as stubborn as he was, and maybe even as broken. Maybe, he thought, his eyes drifting closed, he wanted to find out more about Bela Talbot.

And maybe, when Sam finally got to them the next morning, he found them curled up together on the couch, Bela tucked up against Dean, and her small had held in his. Maybe.

(And maybe Sam took photos.)

A/N: This is a long overdue fic dedicated to my wonderful anonymous reviewer M, who is always very supportive and fantastically encouraging. I really hope that you enjoyed this, my lovely readers, and please leave a review if so! Until next time!

P.S. - I wonder if Dean ever got the cursed nail from Bela...?