Fans of the TCD 'verse: There is much more of this 'verse on AO3 and the LJ. Chances are that, except for long pieces like this, I am not going to put more up on FFN, not only because it takes a whole different set of acrobatics to upload than the other two sites, but because there is no easy way to organize them (I seriously detest editing my profile). I can be found on either site under the same name.

Disclaimer: If I could lay claim to it, whoever was responsible for that godawful 200th ep would have been shot in the street, resurrected, and run over by seventeen freight trains. Then I'd get mean.

For nwspaprtaxis, who for some reason keeps encouraging this thing.

Chapter 1

"Oh, good, you're up."

Sam shot his brother a bleary glare. Just because he avoided the morning chaos didn't mean he could sleep through it. That private entrance to his room was nice, but it connected to the garage, and the garage echoed—and the sliding door tucked in the closet, the one that gave him convenient in-house access to the laundry room and kitchen, wasn't much for blocking noise either. He knew better than to come out into the mob scene that was a weekday breakfast in this house, but there was no going back to sleep after all that, either. He just holed up in his room until they were all gone. Usually, he ate breakfast in there, safely alone, but he'd forgotten to get milk yesterday. "Don't bet on it," he said, and swore as the milk splashed enthusiastically over his cereal and the counter.

"You did get in kinda late," Dean said, with a smirk, as Sam fumbled with a towel, then managed to get to the kitchen table without spilling the bowl. "You're not wearing any new casts, so I'm guessing it was wedding planning fighting instead of her other kind. Or did she restrain herself to scratches this time?"

Sam reminded himself that his brother was letting him live here for free, therefore it would be rude to murder him. "October tenth."

"I'll take 'dates that mean absolutely nothing' for a hundred, Alex."

"The wedding, jerk." He stared at his spoon for a second, trying to remember what it was and what he was supposed to do with it, before enough of the fog cleared that he could actually take a bite of his breakfast. "The—um—"

"Argument?"

"It wasn't an argument, it was a—a spirited discussion—" Dean snorted "—and it wasn't about the wedding, it was over whether or not to try to get out of the premarital counseling."

Dean grimaced. "Oh, that. Yeah. You don't get out of it, by the way, but if you know people, you can speed it up."

"Did you and—"

"Yep. Funny thing, after about twenty minutes, they didn't want us to stay. Gave Marcy a dispensation and everything. Without Anne threatening anybody." Dean grinned, leaving Sam absolutely no doubt as to why that decision had been made. He was not at all surprised that his brother had terrified even the Catholic Church's bureaucracy. "Anyhow. I need a favor around the first of June."

"You're not going to ask me to pick them up on the last day of school, are you?"

"Oh, hell no. I wouldn't wish that on anyone who didn't sign the paperwork."

"Then sure. Whatever you need."
"You might want to find out what it is first," Dean said dryly. Sam looked up from his cereal. "You know the trip we're taking?"

"Do I ever." Dean, Marcy, and all the kids out of the house for nearly three weeks. Sam not only knew it, he was looking forward to it, and thinking about buying a calendar just so he could steal little star stickers from the playroom and put them on it to mark the dates. (It was entirely possible that he had been around the kids too long.) Peace and quiet, the big TV to himself, breakfast without risk of dismemberment, no snide remarks about eating vegetables, no nieces breaking into his room with methods he still hadn't figured out and stealing his pillows while he was still using them—oh, and no coloring, no Legos, no Care Bears, no tea parties, no Ananda insisting that he'd look better with purple eye shadow. For that matter, being able to go anywhere without Ananda doing her crazed leech impersonation—

"Dude, your eyes just glazed over."

"Sorry. Just imagining the vacation I'll have. So what's the favor?"

"Well, our trip— We're going camping."

"Camping?" Sam repeated. "I'm not sure if I should start with the wheelchair or the fact that you're trusting Mikey around fire."

"Camping, not that wilderness survival shit Dad used to do with us," Dean corrected irritably. "Not even real camping—it's like the family equivalent of a summer camp, if I'm understanding it right. Very fancy tents, actual food, accessible showers, rainy-day activities, the whole nine yards. And it's a private campground off a major highway, not the freakin' Himalayas. If Firth can handle it, I can handle it."

"Can Firth handle it?"

"So I'm told."

So the chair really wasn't an issue. "You hate camping."

"I know. I was outvoted."

"This is a democracy now?"

"On some things."

Sam eyed his brother, mentally tallying the grumpiness. "Marcy's idea, huh?"

Dean quit trying to pretend he was taking this gracefully. "They apparently did it once awhile back and now she wants to inflict it on our kids. Every now and then I wonder what's wrong with that woman."

Sam couldn't resist. "Well, she did marry you."

"Big talk from the guy marrying Hannah," Dean shot back.

Sam refused to rise to the bait. "You told me to get my own Reynolds," he pointed out. "Although if I'd realized that meant getting five big sisters and two more big brothers, I might have reconsidered. I can barely handle the one I've got."

"Three," Dean corrected. "Sean—"

"Sean's the same age I am. He doesn't count as a big brother."

"Spoken like a true Reynolds in-law," Dean said, laughing. "You're learning, Sammy. Anyway—"

"Mikey. Open flame."

"We have extra fire extinguishers."

"I'll notify the Forest Service."

"The thing with the candle was an accident. Anyhow, the favor—"

"I am not going with you just to make sure Mikey doesn't torch anything."

"Sam! It's not Mikey, it's Rissa."

Sam flinched. Rissa had quit running away when he entered a room, at least, or she'd never get to eat, but she still kept as many people as possible between them. And that day in the hall where she'd accidentally collided with him and then froze, just staring at him in sheer terror, like he was some kind of monster, like he was going to grab her and rip her into shreds or worse—

Sam had intimidated a lot of the kids, because of his height or his scar. Most of them had been skittish at first; he was a stranger, and no kid in the foster system trusted strangers easily. But almost all of them had gotten over it pretty quickly—kids in this house knew to trust Dean's judgment when he said someone was "safe"—and he'd never terrified any of them. It was a family joke (one Sam was well aware of) that the kids terrified him. And for it to be Rissa, who herself was scarred so badly...

That meant it wasn't just about the scar, but something else entirely.

But no one had been able to get an explanation out of her—not Dean, not Marcy, not Maggie, not even Hannah, who had a special affinity with Rissa because of their shared background as poltergeist victims. Rissa was so scared of Sam that she'd actually had a full-on panic attack when Hannah broached the topic of her being in the wedding, and Sam hadn't even been in the same house at the time.

"Rissa isn't exactly an outdoor girl in the first place," Dean was going on, "and something that involves actual fire—"

"You're not taking her? I thought this was a family vacation." He seemed to remember that applying the word "family" to any kind of event usually made participation mandatory. That was the way his few normal friends had put it, anyway. Everything with John Winchester had been mandatory.

"There's this crafts camp thing she really wants to go to, and since she's so panicky about fire—" Dean shrugged. "Normally, we'd send her to the later session in July, and frankly, I'd rather have her with us, but Marcy thinks it'll be better for her if we don't push too hard. So does her therapist. She's still kinda—fragile—in some areas. Cookouts still give her trouble—she thinks we haven't noticed, but you get a barbecue going and she fucking well hides, assuming she doesn't have an attack outright."

"Panic attack?" That didn't jive with what little he knew about panic attacks.

"It's sort of a combination panic attack and flashback, and it hits her like a fucking seizure. So it's not like she's just whining about bugs and being away from the Internet, it's a real risk. But the camp—it's a day camp. There's no boarding option. She'll be coming back at night and need somebody to drive her there in the morning, plus general watching and having somebody to handle emergencies. Not that she'll give you any trouble—"

Sam froze, spoon halfway to his mouth. His brother couldn't be that stupid, could he? "Dean, Rissa's scared of me."

"No, really?" Dean asked acidly. "'Cause I'd completely missed the way my daughter runs away every time she sees you."

"I just—"

"I know, Sam. Believe me, I wouldn't be asking if there was anybody else."

"Nobody else? There's three hundred relatives within five miles of here. Why can't—"

"Because it's exodus season."

"I don't—"

Dean sighed. "Fifty weeks out of the year, they're all up in each other's business. Like you said, umpty bazillion of them in five square miles. But the only way they can manage that without killing each other is the other couple of weeks. It's family tradition. Between the kids getting out of school at the first of June and the big extended family reunion at the Fourth, they all split into individual families and hit the road. Third and Anne are going to France, Ally's taking Deb and the brats to New York, Kim and Andy go to see his family in Michigan, Nick and Courtney are hiking the Grand Canyon—"

"The size of their family, they could fill the Grand Canyon," Sam muttered.

"Yeah, well, they didn't appreciate it when I made that observation." Dean grinned. "Anyhow, every Reynolds grabs the family and runs and they don't talk to each other until they're all back in Charlotte. No calls, no e-mails, no texts, no nothing unless somebody winds up in the hospital. The most they're allowed to do is post pictures online, and that only if it's stuff people other than the Reynoldses might be interested in."

Sam thought on it a minute. "Is this what Hannah meant when she said we'd have to take our vacation time after the wedding instead of now? I couldn't figure out what vacation time she meant, since I don't have a job and technically she won't have one until June."

"Exactly. Swapping it out is allowed, and that way, she can be sure nobody bugs you two, because if they do, rules say she can try to ruin their vacation next year without penalty."

"They have rules?"

"They can populate a small country, Sam. Of course they have rules."

"Good point."

"We usually go out to Bobby's, and then take a vacation trip later in the summer, but since he'll be coming here for your wedding, we decided not to. Dealing with the kids twice in one year would probably kill the poor man." Sam snorted. "But now we have this." Dean practically spat the word, and Sam managed not to laugh. Barely. "Firth's still going to be here—in town, I mean—but he's minding the store. He saves his vacations for DragonCon. Anyhow, the company's a handful in and of itself, and he—well—"

"He can't take care of Rissa if she hurts herself," Sam finished. Firth was as self-sufficient as a paraplegic could be, but the modifications in Dean and Marcy's house weren't enough for him. Not upstairs, anyway, where the modifications were mostly in the master suite, not in the kids' rooms. If the worst happened and Rissa got hurt, there was no way Firth could do anything but call 911, and in some situations, that just wouldn't be enough. Dean said the local response times were pretty good, considering how far outside the city limits they were, but they still weren't what they would be in town, and in that kind of emergency, seconds would count.

"Exactly."

Sam munched another spoonful of cereal, thinking. He knew damn well that Dean would cart Rissa off into the wilderness if they couldn't find someone trustworthy to watch her, even if it might traumatize her more, because Dean would rather have her where he could take care of her than run the risk of something happening where he couldn't protect her.

Besides, no matter how many times he'd brought it up, Dean and Marcy wouldn't accept any payment from him towards rent or groceries—they hadn't once suggested that he find a job, and had even started giving him an allowance when his unemployment ran out, as compensation for taking over the older kids' self-defense training. Not to mention they'd been nice enough to not invite him on this little family jaunt, even if it was just because he and Hannah had their hands full. He owed them.

Still. "You—um—" Sam hesitated, trying to find the words. "You don't expect me to—you know—fix this, do you? Between me and her?"

That got him a smirk. "I don't think you're licensed for that, Sammy." Dean sighed. "No, just keep her in one piece. I mean, if you do figure it out and can fix it, great, but nobody's going to be surprised if you can't. Oh, and I'll have a phone. Marcy will make me leave it in the van, but one of us will be checking it, in case anything happens or you need to know something. And I'll show you where the emergency files are—the medical information and all that, just in case."

"If you're sure," Sam said finally. He wasn't sure this was the best idea, but if Dean and Marcy were agreed on it...

"A little less enthusiasm there, Sammy."

"You know what—"

"Yeah, I know. I promise, if we find a better situation, I'll let you off the hook."

That wasn't exactly reassuring—if there was a better situation, Dean wouldn't be asking Sam to do this in the first place—but Sam let it go. The end of school was still several weeks away. Somebody's vacation plans could change. "Dean— Rissa— Has she ever said why?"

Dean sighed. "No. We didn't notice it until you moved in, anyway. Before then, you were never here often enough for it to matter. She— Well, in a family like this, the others kinda drown her out, you know? And if it was something like that time Tyler got hold of you—" Sam growled, but Dean only grinned. "Our attention was elsewhere, is all I'm saying. Plus, for the longest time, she was afraid to be near strangers because of the burns. I— To be honest, I thought it was just that."

"There wasn't anything they could do? Reconstructive, I mean?"

"What you see is what they could do. At least for now. They had to focus on making sure she got the movement back in her hand and that she'd be able to walk. It was questionable for awhile, especially after she lost the toes and finger."

"What?" There was no way Sam would have seen that she was missing toes, but a finger, given all the stitching she did—

"Two toes and her little finger had to be amputated. It was touch-and-go on the rest of her fingers for awhile." Sam stared at Dean, feeling vaguely sick, and suddenly glad he hadn't attempted bacon or sausage for breakfast. "She mostly compensates with the left, so it's not really obvious, but she's still working on getting all the movement back. All the stitching and knitting is part of that. We bring it up every now and then, but..." He let the words trail off, then shrugged. "She's in the doctor's office every couple of months with followups anyway. If she doesn't want to go in for something optional— Marcy can make her, because I'm not. I know what it's like."

Right. Even in a good year, Dean had to go in for x-rays and ultrasounds of his legs every couple of months, checking for occult fractures and asymptomatic blood clots. In bad years, he wound up hospitalized for another surgery to fix a broken bone. A few years back, he'd broken one leg in three different places over the course of six months.

Sam swallowed another mouthful of cereal. "Could I maybe look at her file, then?" he asked. "Not to be nosy, but— I know it was a poltergeist, but that's about it, and—"

"And maybe there's something in there that might give you a place to start?" Dean finished. "There might be at that. I never looked at it like—" There was an ear-splitting screech followed by a crash from the direction of the playroom. "Oh, for the love of— I'll get it out for you at naptime, assuming we're all still in one piece," he said, wheeling around and heading for the door. "You can see if there's anything helpful. Hey! Three Stooges!" he bellowed. "Who said you could demolish the house without me?"

Ah, mornings. Sam looked down at his cereal, and wondered if he had time for a second bowl before the Terrible Trio decided they needed him.

"Uncle Sammy!" someone shrieked.

Probably not.

Maggie was already finished with her homework, and Sam had claimed her for some extra training; apparently her kicks were too sloppy for his taste. Kevin and Johnny were done too, but since Sam had declared it a Maggie-only session, they were playing a video game. Mikey, Rissa, and Consuela were still at the table, working on homework, when Dean rolled in.

"Rissa?" She looked up from her— That didn't look like homework, unless homework now involved graph paper and loopy drawings. More likely another of those embroidery patterns she was always puttering with, but she was using her scarred, weaker right hand to draw it, so Dean decided to classify it as working on her therapy and not playing around. He was awesome that way. "We need to talk to you for a minute."

She only nodded and stuffed the paper into her backpack— No, that was the stitch bag; her school bag was blue. Definitely not homework. Like his little bookworm hadn't done all her homework already, probably for the rest of the year.

Really, he didn't understand why she didn't like Sam. She was just like the big geek.

"Somebody's in trouble," Mikey said, singsong, but Rissa, well schooled in being a big sister, didn't answer except to smack him on the back of the head as she walked by. With her right hand, so that it not only wouldn't sting the scarred, numb skin, it counted towards her therapy.

The toughest part about being the parent was not laughing when they did shit like that.

He drove behind her to the dining room, where Marcy was pulling a second chair away from the table so that they could have their little conference. Rissa waited for him to get him, closed the door, then sat down, a little gingerly. Dean thought at first that maybe her leg was bothering her—her PE teacher wasn't the best about respecting her limitations, and at this point, Dean was just hoping to get through the rest of the year without having to demand another conference about the idiot—but then Marcy said, "Honey, you're not in trouble."

Marcy was way better at reading Rissa than he was. It was kind of annoying.

Then again, he read Maggie better. So as far as their daughters went, they were even. They'd have to see with Ananda and Kara—

See, hell. Ananda's Sammy's and Kara's Maggie's. We have nothing to do with it beyond providing the college funds.

Marcy got herself settled, and he parked next to her. "Here's the thing, sweetheart," she went on, tackling the topic the way she'd said she would. "We know you're not all that keen on going on vacation this year."

"I didn't say anything!" Rissa protested, clearly thinking she was here for a talking-to.

"We know that. If you had, this would be an entirely different meeting. Anyway, we talked it over, and asked Marta, and we think you might not be ready for camping yet."

Rissa gave them both that special teenage are all parents this stupid? look. Seriously, did that thing come with the thirteenth birthday cake? "Dad's in a wheelchair and he's going."

"Little phoenix," he said gently, "I'm not scared of fire. And there is going to be a lot of fire involved in this. No way to hide—you'll be able to smell it even if you try not to look at it. You'd have at least one attack out there. Not maybe, definitely. Your meds are dangerous for you here. Outdoors—you could wander into the lake. Or onto the highway." She nodded, understanding. Mostly the meds she took for her attacks just sedated her, but sometimes she'd sleepwalk. Hyperactive toddlers weren't the only reasons they had a gate at the top of the stairs.

"So you're staying here and going to the early session of your camp instead of the late one," Marcy said.

She brightened immediately. "Really?" Most of her friends were going to the first session, and she'd been disappointed at the timing, but she hadn't complained. She hardly ever did. Even as scared of Sam as she was, she hadn't complained about him being in the house. It wasn't uncommon with kids adopted out of the system, they were so afraid of being sent back, but Rissa's period of adjustment was way longer than anybody else's. Even as hostile as Johnny had initially been, he'd graduated to sarcasm and bitching within a few months. Rissa had been with them for five years, adopted for three. There were little flashes, scattered moments when she was very relaxed, and they had been getting more common, but thinking about it, Dean wasn't sure he'd seen a single one since Christmas. That might explain the pain if her leg was hurting; constant tension was not good for her damaged muscles.

Which brought him back to the uncomfortable topic at hand. "There's just one thing," he said, and a little of the brightness dulled. She knew it had to be a big thing, or it wouldn't have called for a private parental conference. "You know that everybody leaves as soon as school's out. The only person who can stay here with you is your Uncle Sammy."

Her head jerked up so sharply that her carefully-maintained curtain of hair fell back from her face, exposing the burns and her blind eye. Her good eye was filled with sheer terror, the unscarred skin gone corpse-pale. Her good hand clenched into a fist, and the right hand tried, but even after years of therapy and exercises, the burned fingers still couldn't quite manage one.

Dean exchanged a glance with his wife. Sam had said something about Rissa freezing like this when she ran into him in the hall, but Sam was so awkward with the kids that they'd both thought he'd simply misread Rissa's normal shyness. This...

This worried him. Sure, Sam had been a relative stranger to most of the kids when he moved in at Christmas, but that was nearly six months ago. Everybody else was used to him, even if they weren't all as clingy and obsessed as Ananda. Hell, Nyssa had only been here a couple of months, and she was comfortable enough that she periodically climbed Sam like a tree. But Rissa wouldn't even talk at meals if Sam was at the table—not that she'd been a chatterbox before, but they'd at least been able to pry the occasional tidbit about school out of her. Get her going on anything involving needles and threads, and it was hard to get her to shut up. With Sam in the room, though, Dean couldn't even get her to correct him when he said "crochet" and meant "knit." Sam felt so bad about it that he hardly ever ate with the family anymore; he'd started using the wedding planning as an excuse to eat at Hannah's place, and Marcy thought that might be part of the reason why Sam was so gung-ho to move in with Hannah now instead of waiting until after the wedding.

Now that he thought about it, he wasn't sure he'd ever heard Rissa even say his brother's name—it was always him, with this weird emphasis that made it plain who she meant. Maybe, once, my uncle or my father's brother, but he couldn't be sure of even that. She wasn't like that with her other uncles. Nick, especially, had a talent for simultaneously calming her down and bringing her out of her shell, which was really impressive for a man who still wasn't quite convinced poltergeists were real. Too bad this wasn't Nick's summer to work; Rissa could have handled staying at his place, even if it were just the two of them. Nick might not fully believe, but his house was properly warded anyway, and Dean trusted him.

"Can you handle that, sweetie?" Marcy asked. "If you can't—"

"I—" She looked down at the floor. Her good hand clenched again. "I'll manage," she whispered.

"Rissa—"

"I'll be fine," she said, louder, a little desperately. "I— Dad's right. There'll be too much smoke out there. It— I can manage," she said again.

It wasn't convincing at all, but what else were they going to do? Force her to admit that she wasn't comfortable with it? And if she did, then what? Comfortable or not, they still couldn't take her camping.

If Maggie or Johnny said they could handle something, he and Marcy took them at their word, and let the kids learn from the consequences if they couldn't. They couldn't treat Rissa differently just because she was scarred. It wasn't like this was something that would endanger her. Whatever this weirdness between them was, Sam wouldn't let her get hurt.

"Isn't Sage going to the early session?" Marcy asked, and Rissa did that embarrassed little smile she did whenever her parents brought him up. "Why don't you go tell him?"

Rissa glanced sideways at Dean, and he made a show of being disgruntled. Well, when it came to Sage, he had the right to be. "If you have to." Marcy made a noise that he chose to ignore. "Gimme a finger wiggle," he added.

"Finger wiggle," Rissa replied, wiggling the fingers of her burned hand at him—a little gesture they'd developed back when they were sharing PT, shortly after she came in, her trying to get the damaged fingers to work and him retraining fingers left stiff by a broken arm. Hugs had been too painful for her, with so much of her skin burned, and too awkward for him, with both legs in fixation devices and one arm in a cast, so what had been a way to check her progress with her hand exercises had become their own personal shorthand.

He wiggled his own fingers back at her. As always, it made her laugh, and then she put her chair back under the table and left, her walk much less awkward than when she'd come in.

Marcy got up, closed the door, and turned around. "Did you see that?"

He sighed inwardly, and slumped back into his chair. "I saw."

"That was a PTSD response, Dean—"

"I know."

"Maybe—"

"You're the one who said we couldn't take her out there." Not that he'd argued, really. He never argued with Marcy when she was right.

"If she's that scared of him— I can call around. Maybe she could stay with one of the kids going to camp—"

"No." They knew all Rissa's friends and their parents, but they weren't family, and none of them knew what was really out there. Sam did. "Sam can handle this."

"I know he can, but can Rissa?"

"She—" No, he wasn't going to say that either. His father had done the best he could, but even Dean knew that John Winchester's parenting style was not necessarily the best. And Rissa was way more fragile than Dean had ever been; God only knew how she'd take an ultimatum of She's just gonna have to get over it. Especially if the it in question was Sam. "She's going to have to get used to him someday," he said instead. "He's not going back to New York this time. He's going to be here. Even after he moves out, he's going to be over here a lot, you know that." Despite the clean-up Ally had done on their records, Sam had next to no chance of finding a decent job unless he accepted one with the family, and he was too smart to do that. He'd spent the last ten years working in high-dollar art auction houses; the only ones around here were strictly family businesses, not looking to hire outsiders. One background check would reveal that he was still listed as a suspect in Jessica's death and that her case was still open. With Third paying Hannah quite the princely salary to create a home office for the Reds, not to mention what she'd be getting from her trust fund, it just made more sense for Sam to stay home and take care of the baby—which meant he'd be over here most days trying not to hyperventilate himself into his own panic attacks every time the baby moved wrong.

"I know." She sighed. "I just wish she'd tell us. So we can fix it."