NOT a tag to 12x01. Semi-vague spoilers all the way up to season 11, but nothing too crazy. The structure of this is a bit different from my usual stuff because variety is the spice of life. I guess you could call it Outsider POV. Warnings for language!

Things Left Behind

A small piece of motel stationery is folded in half and propped up on the bedside table, three words scrawled onto it.

"Thanks for everything," it says.

Joanne smiles and rolls her eyes. The man who had been conscious and coherent, the man not bleeding out all over the sheets and extra towels Joanne had hastily grabbed from the back office, had been charming. Not at first, of course. At first he'd been downright scary, the wheels of his beautiful, black car screeching into the motel lot well past three in the morning, waking her abruptly from sleep. After years managing a motel, Joanne figures she'd be used to sleeping through all kinds of noise, but she's never been able to fully shed the motherly instinct that had her sitting up in bed, already knowing that something was really, terribly wrong.

She had watched cautiously through the window, saw the blood dripping onto the pavement and heard the wheezing, wretched cough of the taller of the two men as he was dragged from the passenger side of the car by the other one—Dean was his name, she found out after. After he practically screamed at her, told her that as long as she was awake and standing there outside the door, she might as well grab all the towels she could find and make herself useful.

Joanne shook her head at the memory. It had been a long night, and by the end of it, most of her questions were still unanswered.

"Trust me," Dean had said, eyes never leaving the man Joanne had come to know was his little brother, now laid out on a queen bed too small for him, unconscious but no longer in danger of bleeding out. "You don't want to know."

Dean had smiled then, soft and relieved, reaching out to smooth a hand over his brother's forehead, ruffling his hair.

Joanne expects to see Dean moving his way through the breakfast buffet this morning, most likely hoarding enough food for two. But the black car is missing from the lot and Joanne knows before she knocks that the room will be empty.

Sheets already folded neatly on the bed (the ones not thrown away last night, covered in too much blood), not a stray sock or t-shirt to be found. Just the note on the table. Joanne leans to pick it up, examining it for an extra moment before tucking it neatly into the front pocket of her jeans. She's pretty sure she'll never see those boys again.

She's okay with that.

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A receipt sits crumpled on the sidewalk outside a family-owned gas station in Backus, Minnesota. Only 245 people live in the tiny town, so most of them heard about the gorgeous 1967 Chevy Impala that had rolled to a stop at the only fill-up joint around for miles. Desmond Charles picks the receipt up off the ground and throws it into the trashcan on his way into the gas station's convenience store, flipping the sign on the front door to "Open."

If he had looked at the receipt, Desmond would've seen a gas purchase for $36.42 coupled with a few miscellaneous road-trip snacks, three cups of coffee, and three bottles of 5-hour energy. If he had read far enough down to get to the coffee, Desmond would've no doubt remembered the exact customer that receipt had belonged to. Short haired and bleary eyed, Desmond had watched the man drain two of those cups of coffee in record time before he'd even ventured up to the counter to pay, dropping his other items clumsily on the counter.

"You guys got any of that 5-hour energy crap?" the man had asked, already sliding a handful of bills from his wallet. Desmond had pointed to the display right in front of the exhausted man's face, watching with a fair mixture of amusement and concern when the man smiled sheepishly and added three bottles of the stuff to his pile.

Desmond doubts the guy even realized he'd been given a 25% discount on gas. The crumpled receipt in the trashcan outside guarantees he never will.

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There's a fucking hole in Randy's wall.

A fucking hole.

Hadn't been there yesterday, that's for damn sure. Randy knows because he'd been parked in front of the TV, same as every other day, right up until about eight when he'd gotten that stupid call from his stupid brother-in-law, Phil.

"Randy, something's wrong with your sister," Phil had said. "She won't leave her room and she's barely been eating. Can you please come talk to her?"

Randy had been about to answer, something to the effect of "That's clear across town and it's late, can't it wait til tomorrow?" but the call had cut off too soon and it was Bethie, after all. So he'd hopped in the car and gotten all the way out there and wouldn't you know it, it's Beth who answers the door, looking all confused, wondering what on earth Randy's doing driving over so late. And to top it all off? Phil's out of town on business for the week.

Randy had tried not to think too hard about the amount of dedication that prank-call had taken. Instead, he'd driven home, half convinced he was being robbed at that very moment. But nothing had been out of place—alarm still on, all the doors locked, and nothing missing. So Randy had crawled into bed and woken up this morning and boom. This fucking hole. Randy nudges at it with his foot and watches as it widens a little bit, more pieces of drywall crumbling into it. Looks like someone just decided to kick right through it just as hard as they could. Randy knows it wasn't him, not even on drunken accident. So what the Hell?

He moves to the kitchen and grabs a beer from the fridge, sipping on it thoughtfully. Moves back into the living room and walks the opposite way around the couch and are you fucking kidding me there's another goddamn hole in THIS wall now!?

Randy sputters out the little bit of beer he'd been sipping, groaning disdainfully as it dribbles onto his shirt. He walks the rest of the living room and finds TWO MORE HOLES IN THE WALL and pretty soon he's just pacing around the room with his beer, trying real hard not to hyperventilate.

It must be that thing again. That thing that's been moving furniture and banging cupboards and tossing cutlery. Yeah, yeah. He knows it sounds crazy, but it's true! Something or someone is messing with him.

Randy was living with it, he really was. Had been going about his business and simply ignoring the fact that he's being haunted or whatever. Better to be haunted than to tell people you're being haunted and then be labeled as a crazy person (who's still being haunted because no one believes you enough to do something about it). So he's been dealing. But the fucking holes in the wall are taking it WAY TOO FAR. Randy growls and finally stops pacing, settling back down onto the couch and flipping the TV on. Nothing he can do about it now, he supposes.

It isn't until a few days later, after he's patched up the walls, that Randy realizes there's no more flying furniture. No more creaking and groaning in the middle of the night. No more ghost or snot-nosed kid or whatever the hell had been going on.

Randy settles back into a life of lonely TV dinners and never bothers to learn it was actually a poltergeist, doesn't bother to dig into the house's history and realize he wouldn't have lasted much longer.

But his next-door neighbor, Mrs. Bennett, knows exactly what happened, and she thanks two tall, kind men with a batch of her homemade cookies for the road.

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Pieces of an expired credit card have been sprinkled like some sort of weird garnish over what remains of Chinese takeout, and all of it is stuffed into a small garbage can in the corner of the musty motel room. When a woman named Lucinda cleans the room later that afternoon, she has no reason to realize that the name on the credit card doesn't match the real name of either of the two men who stayed here last night.

She does find a dirty sock under the bed, and judging by the stench, that definitely belongs to whoever was staying here last night. It smells like whoever wore it had decided to trek through a cave of dead bodies or something.

Ew.

The following week, Lucinda's boyfriend convinces her to go hiking despite all the recent warnings about mountain lions. When they both get back safely and in one piece, Lucinda breathes a deep sigh and thanks God because she doesn't know about the two men she should really be thanking.

She doesn't have to find out that it was never actually a mountain lion, either.

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A garbage bag full of bloody clothes sits in the dumpster.

When Darren, the garbage man, goes to retrieve the week's waste, a bloody shirtsleeve slides free from the bag and sends a whiff of iron out into the air. Darren's been working this same gig for the last nine years now, so he's grown pretty used to blocking out all the sights and smells that assault him on a daily basis. Plus, Darren is thinking about his wife, Karen, and how she's due to give birth in less than a month and there's still so much to do before he becomes a Dad (a Dad, can you believe it?), so he doesn't take notice of the incident.

But weeks later, in a hidden bunker in Lebanon, Kansas, Dean Winchester growls in frustration, throwing a pile of plaid into the air just as his brother walks past his bedroom door.

"Dude, what's wrong?" Sam laughs, leaning against the doorframe with his arms folded over his chest.

"Sam, where's that one shirt?" Dean asks without turning around, still flinging fabric every which way like he's Daisy Buchanan in a scene from The Great Gatsby. "The blue and black one that..."

"Shapeshifter, West Texas," Sam cuts him off, leaning down to pick up a stray shirt. "Remember?"

Dean sighs and turns around just in time to get hit with a faceful of plaid.

"SAM!"

A few weeks after that, Darren the garbage man becomes "Darren the Dad" when he welcomes his baby boy into the world.

He's pretty sure it's the most important job he'll ever have.

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An entire pack of burnt out matches sits on the street right outside the entrance to Sheila Baker's Bakery (don't joke about the last name, she's heard it all before). Sheila knows they've all been used already (all at the same time too, stupid bastards) because she notices it when she parks her car that morning and she bends to get a closer look, hoping for a full box. Something to help light her next pack of cigarettes.

She'd just about quit smoking a few weeks back, but then all that weird shit had started up at work and she'd taken to it again like the coping mechanism it had always been for her. Hell, she'd probably smoked half a pack just to get through the interview with those two agents last week. And what the hell kind of FBI guys ask about cold spots and flickering lights, anyway? Not that it hadn't been true, all of it, but how would they know? She'd re-watched Men in Black after getting home from a blissfully uneventful day at work the other night, and now she was pretty certain: it had been some kind of alien encounter.

It was the only explanation.

Clucking her tongue, Sheila leaves the used-up matches on the ground and walks into the bakery to start prepping. She rarely goes back into the supply room anymore (she's got people for that) so it takes her a long time to notice that the specially-ordered Navajo spices are missing, and by then it's too late to connect the dots to the pack of burnt matches and the two discount Men in Black.

If she really thought back to it though, Sheila might've noticed the faint aftertaste of those very spices hovering in the air that day.

Almost as if they'd been burnt to a crisp.

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There is a gravestone in Lawrence, Kansas that looks quite similar to a lot of others there, only this one is inscribed with the name 'Mary Winchester'. Years ago, Sam Winchester left his father's dog tags there. They remain even now, buried beneath the earth, the metal long since rusted and folded into the dirt surrounding it. Sam thinks about it sometimes. Dean tries not to.

There is an old bottle of whiskey that will age for many more decades, locked away in a special cabinet in the home of a hunter named Rufus Turner. The label reads none other than "Johnny Walker Blue," and there is a note attached to it that only says "Thanks. –Dean." By now he's forgotten that he ever sent along the extra bottle, years ago after Rufus gave him information about a woman named Bela Talbot.

There is a patch of dead grass that sits in the center of a different graveyard in Lawrence, Kansas. From the wrought-iron gate hangs a sign that reads "Stull Cemetery," and the spot where grass will never again grow is the place where Sam Winchester opened up a door to the Devil's Cage and let himself fall into it. The rings of Four Horsemen have forever scorched the earth dead, and only a select number of beings realize the rest of the world nearly went with it.

There is a pizza shop in Chicago, Illinois that shut down just a few months after the worst storm in history blew through town. No one really understood why, because the pizza had always been good and the owner had always been welcoming, but suddenly people just stopped coming. Perhaps they would laugh in the face of anyone who told them that Death had visited there, once, to talk to a man named Dean about defeating the Devil. Or perhaps that would simply explain everything.

There are three letters carved into the baseboard of someone's bedroom in Canton, Ohio. The letters are S-A-M, and they were carved there in the year 1944, long before the Winchesters would ever stay in that very same house, now deserted. There used to be a note there too, hidden in the wall, but it was found and read, and it was the clue that led to the clue that allowed Sam to get his brother back from the wrong time.

There is a hex bag wrapped around the wrist of a woman named Ellie who is in New Mexico for the next few days before she has to move on again. A man named Dean Winchester gave it to her and told her to keep running, so she did. And for now, she's still alive.

There is a devil's trap carved into one of the bedposts in a Boy's Home in Hurleyville, New York. If enough of the newer name-tags are peeled away from the corner of that same bed, Dean Winchester's name comes into view. Someone did peel away those other name-tags not too long ago, so now every time Sonny walks into the room, he sees the name and smiles.

There is a house in Grand Rapids, Michigan that has a strange, red symbol painted onto the wall of the kitchen in something that looks an awful lot like blood. The previous owners complained of strange noises and flickering lights, and there was a young girl who always used to talk about the "Bad Nest" she had found there. But the new owners have no such complaints, though they've scrubbed and scrubbed and never quite been able to get rid of that ugly red mark. Eventually they just decide to paint the entire wall crimson. They say it brightens up the room, anyway.

These are the things left behind, the things that slipped through the cracks and got lost. Some are left behind on purpose, remainders of a job well done. Some are missed, some are unremembered, and quite a few of these things don't matter much at all.

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But there is also a woman who lives in what looks to be an ordinary house in Lawrence, Kansas, and every once in awhile she'll pull out the photo she found in the attic not long after two young men saved her life and the lives of her children. It was half-trapped beneath a musty old box, curling at the edges, which is why she didn't see it before. But she smooths it out and looks at the young toddler holding his baby brother tight to his chest, and she decides to keep it.

There is a boy named Lucas who loves to draw and is hoping to go to art school in a few years. He's quiet sometimes when he's working on a piece or when he's thinking really hard about something, but there was a time when he wouldn't talk at all. He still remembers the words that made him speak again (and the man who spoke them), and he's altered them into a phrase he recites every day. "My mom needs me to be brave. So I will be brave today." He's still afraid of the water, but last summer he finally learned to swim.

There is a woman named Sadie who swore she was going to die the moment that ugly, black smoke swirled straight into her screaming mouth. And for two months, it had felt like something worse than death. Something moved her limbs, spoke with her lips, and killed with her hands, and sometimes she still swears they are stained red, even after hours of scrubbing. But today she wakes up and she is alive, free from the kind of evil she will never want to understand. Today there is something like joy fluttering against her chest, right next to the necklace given to her by a man named Dean Winchester who warned her never to take it off. She hasn't, and so far things have been okay. Better than okay. After all, she's getting married today.

There is a young boy named Jesse who is more extraordinary than the world will ever get to know. He carries the power of a demon inside, and if he's not careful, he could wipe away the surface of the world. But years ago, a man named Sam Winchester told him he had a choice. So Jesse chooses good, each and every day, and he stays hidden where no one can use him for evil.

There is a hunter named Tracy Bell who killed four monsters just this week alone and is working on a new case that she's pretty sure is a werewolf. She used to carry hatred in her heart like a disease until she met the man she had assigned it to and realized he used to be a lot like her—young and stupid. Tracy would like to think she's become a little less stupid now for having met him. For having learned how to forgive.

There is a boy named Aiden who lives in a house with two other kids his own age and no one else. One's name is Josephine, and the other's name is Krissy. Aiden's pretty sure he's in love with Krissy. He's also pretty sure she could kick his ass. But they all take care of each other because they know what it's like to lose and they've learned pretty quickly that family can extend beyond blood. Aiden watches Krissy as she leans over her laptop, curling a strand of long hair around her finger as she works on her college application essays. She catches him staring and sticks her tongue out at him, and Aiden thinks he's pretty glad those Winchester guys came around and helped them find the truth. Helped them stay together like this. Even though he still kind of hates Dean a little bit…

There is a girl named Tina who is older than her years, getting to live again inside the eyes and mind of a child once again. This time, she promised herself she will do things better, and she is. Sometimes she thinks about the men who saved her life and wonders if maybe being turned back into a teenager was just about the best thing that ever happened to her, second only to the day she spent talking and drinking in a bar with a guy named Dean.

There is a strange little conglomeration of women sitting around a dinner table in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, talking around mouthfuls of a home-cooked meal. Jody Mills grins at the blob of marinara sauce dribbling down Alex's chin and shakes her head at Claire, who is giving about ten percent of her attention to the food in front of her, the other ninety percent focused on her latest purchase: the next book in some cult-classic series by a guy named Carver Edlund. Jody swears this kid finds the weirdest stuff to read, but hey, at least she's reading. Watching her two almost-adopted daughters (they are hers more completely than if she'd signed some stupid papers), Jody thinks she might give Sam and Dean a call, just for the hell of it.

And there are two brothers sitting in a hidden bunker somewhere very close to the exact center of America, bellies full and legs stretched out in a scene that is becoming more and more familiar after so many years without any real place to call home.

Dean Winchester looks up to find his brother staring at him over the top of his half-full whiskey glass.

"What?" Dean asks.

Sam smiles. "Nothing," he says. "Just...thinking."

"Thinking about what?"

"Everything, I guess," Sam says, bringing the glass to his lips and taking a long sip. "Just...us. All of it."

Dean nods like he understands, because he does. They sit like that for a long while. Tonight, Dean is the first to surrender to sleep, folding his book closed and pushing off to his room with a wave and a "good night." Sam watches him go. It isn't much longer before he finally calls it a night, too.

There are two empty whiskey glasses left behind on the table.

Man, I don't know. I just got all sentimental about the show lasting this long and then I got to thinking about all the ripples the Winchesters must leave behind in other people's lives, the tiniest things that they would never attach any real significance to. And this is what happened. If you liked it, let me know. If you didn't, you can still let me know, but be constructive about it please =). Thanks for reading!

P.S. I hope everyone enjoyed the season 12 premiere last night! I always love to talk about the show (duh) so feel free to spill your guts about all that went down =).