Warning - this has spoilers for season seven finale. It centers on an OC. I had to. I just had to. This picks up right after the end of Season Seven. Two minutes after Cas leaves Dean, to be exact.

~.~

I was mid step on the hiking trail when my world ended.

My head hurt. With a capital 'cut it off please'.

That was all I had time to take stock of. Because after that, things were on fire. I must have misstepped, I must have stumbled off the side.

And I was falling. Possibly drowning.

Minus the water.

~.~

When I woke up, the first thing I noticed was that my head still hurt. It wasn't quite the demanding pain it had been prior but it was still enough that I wasn't in a hurry to move. Actually, I'd be pretty happy to just keep my eyes shut and lie still forever.

Only I was lying on something sharp and it was stabbing in to my hip with each breath. The ground I had landed on was about as forgiving as the business end of a knife. New aches were cropping up with each tiny twitch of my muscles and some of them were probably drawing blood.

I had a second to really, really debate on how badly I wanted to open my eyes. It seemed a daunting task. It wasn't like I had gone hiking alone. Any second now, my friends were going to come skirting down the ravine, gasping apologies and putting their cell phones to good use. And I could just keep laying here. An airlift on a backboard sounded awesome right now.

Except that pain in my hip was becoming insistent and my nose itched. I was a blink away from falling in to a nice deep coma and it was the itchy nose that finally got through to me and helped clear my head.

With a moan, I forced a weary eye open.

I focused on a dull colored rock closest to me. It was unremarkable under the light of the moon.

Moon?

That got my attention. With shaky arms and a head full of electric cotton balls, I managed to sit up and take in my surroundings. I was at the edge of a wooded area, one thick with overgrown roots that tangled through boulders like they were trying to drag them back in to the ground.

Despite the full moon, the sky was locked in twilight, an eerie glow hovering on the horizon as if the ground was burning. Not distant enough for my comfort, things were moving through the trees with alarming speed. Big things.

That was my cue to panic. I knew I shouldn't. That was what all those survivor shows preached, stay calm, be rational. Hold out till help came.

Thing was, the dark I could handle. Being lost in the woods I could deal with because sooner or later, someone would come. This was Pike's National forest for god's sake, not the Andes.

However, going hand to hand with a grizzly bear wasn't going to end well, panic be damned, so I might as well indulge.

A steady stream of 'oh my god's' had started bubbling out of my mouth, quite and tight to each breath. It didn't offer any comfort but the 'ohmygod' was the pressure valve on my emotions. If I didn't let a little of the panic out at a time, I was going to start screaming. Or worse, crying.

It didn't make any sense that help hadn't already came, but that didn't mean it wasn't coming. I needed to sit tight, not move and wait.

I couldn't remember if playing dead worked on bears or if that was a myth. Indecision was going to be the death of me. Either I needed to lie down right now and go limp or I needed to get running.

Yeah cause my lazy ass is going to out run a bear. This hiking trip had been the first time I had been out to the mountains since last spring. I wasn't like fat fat but I wasn't delusional about what kind of shape I was in. I wasn't outrunning Yogi.

The 'ohmygod's' morphed in to a few quivering 'ok ok' and I started to try and bring my breathing under control. Maybe if I was really quiet, I'd be left alone.