Lawrence, Kansas
4 Years Ago
It was the third pregnancy test she'd taken in the past twenty-four hours. It was the third pink plus sign. The white stick sat in the palm of her hand with the weight of a ten pound dumbbell. The small apartment bathroom seemed to be closing in on her, getting smaller by the second, while the plus sign got bigger. Soon it seemed like a flashing neon sign, reminding her repeatedly of her carelessness.
"Shit…" she cursed under her breath, setting the stick aside, facedown. Her cell phone lay dormant, no buzzes or dings from the messages that Dean should have been leaving. She immediately picked up the ancient flip-phone and pressed the '2', signaling her speed dial to call her currently M.I.A. boyfriend. To her surprise, he picked up.
"Hey, Ry."
"'Hey, Ry?' Really?"
"Oh, come on. Now I'm answering the phone the wrong way?"
"Try not picking up the phone at all. It would be nice to know that you're alive throughout the day, Dean! It's not like you're a freakin' plumber doing his day job. This is the apocalypse, Sam's gone dark side, and you can't pick up the phone to let me know that you're still breathing?" She was coming off about five times more bitchy than she meant to, but the stress of everything was bellowing up through her lips, uncontrollably spouting out into the receiver. Dean always got the brunt of her anger, even when he'd done nothing wrong.
"I'm sorry, okay? I haven't exactly had a minute of down time."
"Whatever. Where are you?"
"Right outside of Detroit. On my way back. Chuck seems to think that this final battle is gonna go down in Lawrence."
Ryan sucked in a deep, irate breath. "Awesome. So, are you planning on stopping by here or are you just gonna go ahead and go full throttle on this suicide mission?"
"There's not a lot of time here, Ryan. The devil isn't just delay ending the world so that I can go see my girlfriend." His voice was uneven, she could tell that he'd been through a lot in the past twenty-four hours. Seeing his brother let Lucifer in, watching him embody the evilness that he'd sworn to always fight against. Dean was breaking. Quickly, meticulously breaking into pieces. And Ryan's rash of shit wasn't helping. But that was just her; selfish at the exact wrong moment.
Her jaw clenched, her temper flaring. After a few seconds, she dropped the bomb. "Well, not that it makes a damn difference to you, but I'm pregnant."
There was silence on his end, as expected. Ryan looked to the ground, and although she felt a twinge of guilt for giving him so much crap when he was already neck deep in it, she couldn't suppress her anger long enough to take it all back.
"Of course it makes a difference…" his voice was low and husky. Her heart tightened, because she knew that if she could see him, she'd see tears in his eyes.
"I'll be there as soon as this is over, okay?"
"Okay, Dean." She replied curtly, no sympathy in her tone. With that, she hung up the phone.
Little did she know, it would be the last time she would ever hear his voice.