Chapter 3 This is Now

Ellie stared at the floor, the weariness vanishing as her temper started to rise, burning with the injustice of his accusation. Had he thought it'd been easy? Just walking away – and staying away?

"The only reason I left was to make sure I didn't lead anyone to you, Dean," she snapped at him, lifting her head and meeting his eyes. "To protect you and Sam from being found by anyone who wanted to kill you, or turn you into a vessel for the Apocalypse. Raphael found you through me. Michael would have found you."

Penemue's request flashed through her mind. The Watchers had needed Michael's help, but it would only come at a cost. The man standing in front of her. Even then, Michael had been confident he'd get Dean eventually.

However she'd survived the archangel's attack, God's touch or fate or some other multi-dimensional manipulator, it had lit her up like a beacon, and she'd been easily visible to every creature from the other planes, the angels having no trouble in following her everywhere. Crowley had laughed about it when he'd almost caught her in Hell.

"Yeah, right. Even after Lucifer and Michael dropped into the cage?" Dean grated disbelievingly, his fingers digging in a little harder again. "Who were you protecting me from then?"

Ellie felt her anger drop away as suddenly as it'd risen, memory bringing pain, sharp and corrosive. Her gaze dropped, and she slumped a little under his hands, seeing Bobby's face again, in her mind's eye, the old hunter's expression screwed up in apology.

"Me."

"You?"

She looked up at him, seeing his confusion and trying to steel herself against the feelings that'd hounded her for the last two years. The last thing she would be able to cope with was letting him see what it'd done.

"Bobby told me about your promise to Sam, after you'd left for Indiana. I watched you fulfil it, Dean," she said, dragging in a deeper breath as she heard weakness in her voice. She'd wanted to walk right up to that door, had wanted to make him see her. But, when she'd watched, when she'd seen him in that life … she hadn't been able to bring herself to do it. He'd wanted a normal life. She'd left, fast the first time, telling herself she could forget him. Looking into his face, she realised she'd been wrong about that too.

Dean's hands let go of her, his arms dropping to his sides as he took a step backward, the raw anger in his face wiped away by shock. "You knew about that?"

Turning away and leaning her shoulder against the wall, she made a small, vague gesture. "I thought that you deserved a normal life. It's what you wanted. You always said it was what you wanted."

She should've waited for Bobby to be here on his own, she thought, turning a little further from him, her eyes closing tightly as she fought to conceal the emotions that were rising too rapidly, closing her throat, tightening her chest, blurring her vision.

"What I wanted?" Dean repeated, his voice deepening slightly. "You were there? You saw – saw me?"

The one thing she wasn't going to do was lose it, she told herself. Maybe they had to go through this … this post-mortem discussion … maybe that was a part of being able to let go, but it didn't have to include how she felt, on display. She opened her eyes, wondering irrelevantly why it was so much easier to hide physical pain than emotional as she turned her head and looked back at him.

"Yeah. I was there," she told him, grateful her voice was no longer wavering. "So, I stayed away."

Dean stood still, looking at the woman in front of him, his thoughts and emotions a tangle of half-formed and chaotic snapshots, from what he'd thought, what he remembered, what he could imagine.

In the shadowy interior, he could see the gleam in her eyes, making a lie of the cool and closed-off expression on her face. He swallowed against that sight, everything he'd believed, everything he'd figured turning upside down and inside out.

Had she stayed away, thinking he was happy in that ordinary life? She'd seen him … she said she'd been there … he'd felt someone, watching, at least twice … all this time … all this time, he'd thought … he'd been trying to convince himself that she'd betrayed him, had lied to him, had played him … disappearing. Offering what he wanted and vanishing without a fucking trace. Staying gone. And all this time, she'd known where he'd been, had known what he'd been doing, who he'd been with.

He dragged in a deep breath.

"I thought you …" he stopped, the words jamming up in his throat. "I thought you weren't coming back."

Her gaze lifted to meet his briefly. "There didn't seem anything to come back for."

He closed his eyes, his expression tightening. "You were there, in, uh, August?" he asked, trying to remember when he'd had the sense of being watched.

"August, and I –" she faltered, ducking her head. "And in November."

Thanksgiving. He remembered the prickle of his instincts then. He remembered seeing the white pickup cruise slowly from the vacant house and down the street. It'd been her, so fucking close and leaving without even giving him the chance to do anything about it.

"Why didn't you –?" he started to ask, then stopped, his jaw clenching. "Why the hell didn't you show up at the door?!"

She looked up at him, her mouth twisting up in a smile completely devoid of humour. "I wanted to," she told him, a little defiantly. "But … you looked settled. Bobby said you were finally h-happy, and I – I couldn't see anything that indicated you weren't."

"Happy?" he repeated. All of them, he thought with a sharp stab of anger. All of them had looked at him and seen something that hadn't been there. "I –"

Cutting himself off abruptly again, he realised it no longer mattered. "I wasn't 'happy'."

He'd been grieving for Ellie as well as for Sam when he'd turned up on Lisa's doorstep. Grieving and angry, filled with so many conflicting emotions, he hadn't been sure he'd even been sane. But while he'd been able to talk to Lisa about Sam, a little at least, there was no one he could talk to about Ellie. She'd always been the one he'd talked to about the things that were deepest inside of him. She'd been the one he'd trusted with his secrets.

And she'd been there. She'd seen it. He felt that sink into him. He knew that to anyone looking at them, him and Lisa and Ben, they probably had looked happy. Sid sure hadn't been able to tell. Bobby had thought he was out, with the home and family he'd wanted. No one had been able to see inside his mind, inside his heart, to see how he felt when he wasn't being watched.

I wanted my brother, alive!

He'd said that to Sam when Sam'd come back, giving him the news that his grief and pain for a year had been for nothing. At the time, he hadn't been able to admit what else he'd wanted, already sure that it'd been her choice to go and her choice to not return. When Sam'd come back, and he'd taken Lisa and Ben to Bobby's, the old man had said nothing about Ellie, and he'd had to accept that was going to be the limit of getting what he wanted.

He lifted his head and looked at her, her gaze back on the yard outside. He could see tension, in every line of her body, in the tightness of her jaw and the tendons standing out in her neck. She looked like there was nothing she'd rather do than walk away, walk out and keep going. The thought shocked him and for a moment, he saw beyond what he was feeling, saw what it must've been like for her.

Bobby told me … you looked settled … she'd been a few weeks too late and he'd been with someone else. Living another life.

"I'm sorry."

She threw a glance at him, then shook her head, her gaze returning to the sunlit yard as she said, "You've got nothing to apologise for, Dean. You didn't know."

There was a faint edge to her voice, but he didn't get the feeling that it'd been aimed at him. His chest was aching, bands of steel compressing it as he watched another slight shiver run through her, trembling the braid down her back.

Why'd it been so easy for him to believe that she hadn't wanted to come back, that she hadn't wanted him, he wondered? You don't believe you deserve to be saved? Cas' voice came back to him and he took a deep breath. He hadn't believed it, hadn't been able to admit to it either. He hadn't believed he'd deserved anything. Least of all what he'd kept a secret, sometimes even from himself.

He took a step closer to her, reaching out his hand, and touched her lightly on the shoulder. She flinched away from the touch, a reaction that made his nerves jump in sympathy.

"Ellie." He looked at her back. The implications were still hitting him, one wrecking ball after another. He'd spent a year with Lisa and Ben, and had been running back to them every few weeks over the year just passed, trying to make it work, trying to salvage something of what he'd thought he'd wanted, a home and a family, mostly making things worse.

"Cas, uh –" his voice was too high and he cleared his throat, trying again. "Cas said you had a couple of dicks on your tail."

She nodded, and he saw her back straighten, her shoulders lift a little with the deep breath she drew in. "Yeah."

"They told you about Sam? The Cage closing?" he asked, feeling his way through the things he wanted to know, the answers he'd needed for too long, and what he thought she might be willing to talk about.

Nodding again, Ellie glanced at him. "Yeah, they told me."

"Did you know Cas raised Sam?"

Her expression twitched, as if it at a memory. "I saw Gwen Campbell, just before I – uh, a few months after – she told me Sam was hunting with them," she said, her gaze shifting away from him.

"Cas didn't pull out his soul," Dean said, wondering at the things he could hear being left out of what she was telling him. Too many things.

"Bobby told me, um, later, about that," she told him, another swift glance showing him nothing of her expression, but the omission clearer than words.

"You know me, Ellie," he said, his voice dropping low. "How'd you ever think I was okay, thinking Sam was in Hell and you were gone?"

She shook her head. "I saw you. And Bobby said you were dealing – and Sam didn't want anyone to contact you, drag you back in."

He laughed, a short bark holding no humour at all. "Yeah. That didn't take too good, did it?"

"If you were so damned unhappy there, Dean, why'd you stay?" she asked.

"Because I made a promise," he said, his voice thickening. "I thought – fuck, I thought it was the only thing left I could do for Sam, 'cause I sure as hell couldn't find a way to get him out!"

She looked up at him, and he caught sight of the gleam again, swallowing hard.

"I'm sorry," she said, her voice small and contrite. "Nothing – it wasn't – I – I'm sorry, Dean."

Under the words, he could hear pain. It was a pain he knew, and he ducked his head, retreating from it.

He'd made a promise to his brother, Ellie thought, but he'd made one to the woman and boy he'd gone to, as well. When she'd seen him there, standing with them, she'd seen it. A commitment to be with them, to stay with them. That'd been the reason she'd left.

Watching him turn away, she said softly, "I didn't want to disappear, Dean."

He seemed to hear that, stopping where he was and looking down at the floor.

"I know."

Out in the yard, the wind skirled around the dirt alleys, kicking up a short-lived spiral of dust, banging a sheet of loose iron against a metal frame.

He looked older, Ellie thought. The last of the young man she'd first met had gone, buried under responsibility, under pain and loss and decisions that had cost him more and more as the years had gone by. Under the tee shirt, stained with oil and sweat, his body was hard, working muscle, heavy with everyday use. A bit thinner than she remembered, pared down with what'd gone on in the last few months, with worry for his brother, with the betrayal of an angel and the end of the world looming on his doorstep, once again.

A faint flush of heat bloomed through her, sense memories returning and she looked away, forcing them back down to where she'd thought she'd buried them for good. Watching him slide out from under the car, she'd tried to ignore the fact that, for her at least, nothing had changed. All the effort she'd put in over the last two years, telling herself he was gone, telling herself that time would ease the way she felt … she could've saved her energy for something else because when he'd looked up, everything she'd thought she'd locked away had risen through her like a storm.

Dean stared at the oil stains over the patched concrete floor, his heart irregularly thumping against his ribs, his lungs seemingly incapable of remembering what they were there to do. He couldn't find a way past the thought of her seeing him, living that normal life, hiding who he was, hiding everything.

"By Thanksgiving, I was pretty much at a dead end," he said, glancing across at her, then looking away again. "I couldn't find a way to get Sam out. Couldn't find a way to let him go. Couldn't do anything, but try and make what I was doing – where I was – work, somehow."

He turned around, lifting his head, the same disorienting sense of disbelief hitting him again at the sight of her. She was here. It was, he realised, the third time she'd appeared from nowhere, just stepped back into his life with no warning, when he'd thought her gone forever.

"I wasn't dealing," he continued, taking a step closer. "The first couple of months, I was – uh –avoiding, I guess. Mostly. Then I – I just tried to – uh – adjust."

Adjust, he thought sourly. Getting up every night, drinking until dawn, losing himself in memories of the past. The days had been okay. A lot of the time. He'd thought that gradually – maybe – he'd start to sleep more. Sleep better. It hadn't happened.

Cas had stopped answering and Bobby'd stopped calling and he'd never wondered why. Just figured it was their way of leaving him to work out how to live like a normal guy. How to be a normal guy.

He took another step toward Ellie, his gaze fixed on her. If she'd walked to the door, in August, knocked at it and told him she'd made it back, what the hell would've he done then, he wondered?

Gone with her, without a backwards glance, he thought, that answer coming immediately. And left Lisa and Ben behind, breaking another promise, one that he'd never said aloud, but that'd been there, all the same. When Sam'd come back, he'd done more or less that exact thing. Lisa had tried to make it work, tried to give him what it'd taken him a year to realise he'd needed, but that still hadn't been enough. He'd tried to do the right thing, for his brother, then for Lisa and Ben and it'd all been screwed up from the word go. Not one of them had gotten what they'd wanted. Least of all, him.

He'd tried to be something he wasn't, in that house in the suburbs. Tried to be what they'd wanted him to be, what he'd seen in their eyes when they'd looked at him. He'd tried to be someone he could never be and the trying had been killing him, slowly but surely, with every lie and every secret and every nightmare.

She wasn't looking at him, her head bowed, arms crossed defensively over her chest. He was close enough to touch her, close enough to see a faint tremble in her frame, shivering a loose strand of her hair against one cheek. Close enough to catch her scent, carried on the warm trickle of wind through the open doorway.

He reached out again, more tentatively this time, his hands curving around her shoulders, his chest tight with the breath he was holding. Turning her to face him, he looked down at her, his chest constricting.

"Why'd you come here?"

"You're the only one Cas might listen to," she said, not looking up at him, her voice indistinct. "You're the only one who might be able to stop him."

"That's not it," he said, his grip tightening a little.

"Don't." She stepped back from him, pulling free and turning away. "Please."

He watched her walk around the Galaxy Bobby had up on blocks in the middle of the workshop, his hands curling up a little, the feel of her still tingling against fingers and palms.

"I can't … not," he said, scowling a little at the admission. She was here and he couldn't ignore her, couldn't pretend that he wasn't feeling what he was feeling, even when he had no idea of exactly what that was. "I thought – I spent the last two years thinking –"

The words dried up in his mouth, and he stared helplessly at the ground as he tried to find another way to say what he meant. Most of the thoughts he'd had about her over the past two years were still raw and aching. He couldn't let them out.

She turned around then, her face expressionless as she looked over the roof of the car at him,. "You spent the last year trying to make it work out with Lisa, Dean. I wouldn't even be here if you'd still been trying."

Bobby again, he thought, brows drawing together in frustration. "I tried to make it work out with Lisa because that was all I had left. You weren't here and so far as I knew, that was your choice. Not to come back. Not to –"

How the hell was he supposed to be able to explain how he'd felt? As if Lisa and Ben were all that was left for him, not what he'd wanted but what he'd been allowed to have, and then, even that had gone.

"You're right," Ellie said, nodding slightly as she turned away from him. "It wasn't my choice, but that doesn't matter."

Watching the way he kept starting and stopping, his emotions swinging one way then the other, she couldn't see a way for them to even disentangle the past. Too much had been lost, over the last two years. Too many things had happened and neither of them could admit that what had seemed too good to be true, probably had been.

"This isn't going anywhere," she continued slowly, looking over the workshop's benches without seeing them at all. Was it relief or agony she felt as those words came out? Was goodbye the only answer now? "We had a couple of nights, Dean. That's all it was."

And three years, the voice in her head reminded her quietly, three years of learning about each other, relying on each other, trusting each other. You're going to lie to him, tell him that what was there didn't mean anything to you?

It meant too much. It still meant too much. That didn't change the facts, she argued with herself.

"A couple of nights?" he repeated, staring at her before his gaze shifted abruptly away. "So – uh – yeah, that didn't – that wasn't anything, that's what you're saying?"

"What I'm saying is that I can't stay," Ellie said, suddenly realising how true that was. What was there for them, now? The last two years had changed everything, changed the whole world. They'd both changed. They weren't the same people they'd been. Where they supposed to pretend that the last two years hadn't happened? Hadn't cost?

"And you can't go. And there's Sam – and Cas – and a thousand other things that are in the way, even if – even if what we – "

She took a deep breath, closing her eyes and forcing herself to admit it. There was no going back. There never was. The hope she'd held onto had been a lie from the very beginning. "Why go through it all again, pretending it would be the same?"

Dean kept his eyes locked to the Galaxy, his jaw tight. He wanted to be out of there, wanted to be somewhere else, someplace far away. A couple of nights? Was that all it'd been to her? What she'd said, what she'd told him, had that ever been real? Or had it changed, sometime over the last two years? It had been a couple of nights and … and three years, he thought, wrestling aside his reactions and trying to think. Three years of a slow-growing friendship that had given him more strength than he'd realised, that had changed the way he'd looked at things. And those nights had changed him irrevocably, no matter what he'd told himself, tried to convince himself of in the last two years, those nights had given him hope when he'd been drowning in despair.

It hadn't been a lie, he recognised abruptly. He knew what lies sounded like.

He looked back at her, registering what she was saying … hearing the excuses, and under them, hearing something else. Something he knew.

"Bullshit. I don't buy that." He watched her, pushing aside emotion to look past what she was trying to show him, trying to make him believe. Under the rational-sounding words, he thought she was scared.

"Did you stop loving me, Ellie?"

She looked away, her breath catching in her throat. "That doesn't have–"

"Did you?" He walked to her, cutting her off, his chest tight. "Just tell me."

Put me out of my fucking misery, he thought, searching her face for the truth.

Ellie looked at him for a long moment, wanting to lie to him, to stop the conversation that way. All it would take is one little lie because he was ready to believe what she told him, half-convinced she hadn't wanted to come back at all. She couldn't make the single word come out. There'd never been an occasion when she'd been able to lie straight to him.

"No." She looked down at the floor, wondering why that admission felt like a knife through her heart, wondering why he'd even asked. "I didn't stop loving you."

She heard his exhale, and looked up, seeing his head tip back, his eyes close. The tension that'd filled him a second before seemed to flow out and away, his body relaxing as he stood there.

Had it meant that much to him, she wondered? It hadn't seemed like it, earlier. It had taken her so long to get to this point, and just seeing him again had undone every barrier, every defence she'd put in place. Letting herself hope for more, and losing it again, that would be more than she could deal with. She tried to think logically, reasonably, tried to keep her concentration on the problems. There were too many obstacles. Too much pain in the past for either to live with. It would be too hard. It had been the start of something, maybe, but they'd never had a chance to see where it might've gone. And, she thought, they probably never would. Then why can't you let him go? Why couldn't you forget him?

The question was the answer, that little voice whispered to her.

Standing still, eyes closed, Dean felt the tension that had been knotting his muscles, squeezing his guts, loosen and fall away. I didn't stop loving you. It was, he realised, all he'd been waiting for her to say. The only thing he'd wanted – needed – to hear. The tangle of emotions, that he'd thought he'd burned and buried, that had started rising and twisting in him when he'd rolled out from under the car and seen her silhouetted against the sun-bright sky, was making his heart pound, and his breath come short and he tried to focus on breathing, on getting his head clear.

He hadn't known what those feelings were, not really. In some ways, it felt like they'd been there since he'd woken, body aching and half-freezing with the ice lying over the side of his face, over his shoulders, and seen her leaning over him, her gaze on his injuries, the half-moon crescent visible in the neckline of her shirt. At other times, he thought he'd really only felt them when she'd walked out the door of the Manhattan hotel, and he'd let her, too uncertain of what he'd wanted to try to keep her there.

He hadn't understood then why the things he felt contradicted each other, turning him in circles, and he didn't understand any of it any better now. He felt as if he were drowning, sometimes, drowning in a longing for something he couldn't make sense of, couldn't find the beginning or end or edges for. Every time he'd tried to tell himself he'd been mistaken, every time he'd tried to bury his memories, those feelings had jumped right back up, making it impossible to know why he couldn't forget her, couldn't let go. But they were starting to make sense … now.

"It doesn't matter," she told him, her voice unsteady. "It's too late."

No, it wasn't, he thought, eyes snapping open, focussing on her. That nervousness he could see so clearly now had been there the whole time, he thought.

"No." He walked closer, stopping in front of her. "No, it's not. Don't say that. Don't you –"

Don't you understand? Losing you nearly killed me the last time.

"I can't stay here, with you and Sam."

He felt a frisson touch his nerves as he imagined that, her being here, staying here, with him … it might not be possible, but he swallowed hard against how much he wanted it.

"Too much has happened, Dean," she continued, lifting her face to look up at him. He caught a fleeting expression in her eyes, his heart racing as it seemed to contradict what she was saying. "We're not the same people we were. And you can't come with me. You won't. You need to be with your brother. This can't work."

"You think if you say that enough, it'll make it true?" he asked her, his voice deepening. "Nothing changed, Ellie. The world's as fucked as it was before. I haven't changed that much."

It was and it wasn't true, he thought. But the changes he felt, the things he'd learned, had had bludgeoned into him in the past two years, none of them had impacted him so much that he could give up the one thing he wanted again. If anything, he decided, reaching out hesitantly, running his thumb lightly over her lower lip, absently tracing its shape, that'd only gotten stronger.

He felt her reaction to the light touch, her eyes closing tightly, a deep shiver that ran through her, and into him. He sucked in a sharp breath as a combination of emotion and heat surged inside of him, shaking him, memory, instant and intense and demanding, returning.

"We're not talking about rocket science," he told her, moving a little closer. "We could figure it out."

She didn't say anything, her gaze falling away. Watching her pulse, fluttering rapidly against the thin skin at the side of her neck, he added, "You came back. It wasn't just to hand off the spell – was it?"

No, Ellie thought, her throat closing. No, she hadn't come here just to give him the spell to bind the demon.

What do you want, she asked herself angrily? You want to spend your life wanting something you tell yourself you can't have? When you know it's a lie? He was standing there, right in front of her, wanting what she wanted … and what'd happened, what he'd done, she realised slowly, hadn't been his choice. Driven by grief, bound by a promise, losing hope with every day that'd passed. How could she pretend that was a choice? Anymore than what she'd done had been a choice for her?

She'd been too late and he'd been gone. And when she'd told Cas to tell him what she was doing, she'd known then there was a chance of that happening. Had felt it, like a ghost walking over her grave, a premonition, possibly, of what was to come.

The question is the answer.

She hadn't stopped loving him. The question was, did she love him enough to risk everything again?

Perhaps the odds were higher this time, but not trying at all was a guarantee of failure. She'd missed him, so much that every memory had cut to the bone. She'd struggled to forget him, to forget everything about him, and that had failed spectacularly. There hadn't been a single night in the last two years where he hadn't invaded her dreams, slipping in when her armour was thin and her subconscious had tried to tell her the truth.

There is a reason for everything that is suffered through, a reason for the struggle.

She blinked at the memory, appearing from nowhere, edged with the light of an archangel's power, whispering without words through her mind.

Lifting her eyes to the man in front of her, she wondered if there had been a reason for what had happened to have occurred in precisely the manner it had. More cosmic manipulation of his life? Of hers? He was looking at her, his eyes searching her face for his answers, and she drew in a deep breath, trying to banish her doubt, the uncertainty that was shivering through her like distant thunder. She could tell him the truth or she could turn around and walk away.

"I came back –" she hesitated, swallowing against the tightness in her throat. "I came back because I wanted … I hoped … because … because I couldn't find any more reasons to stay away."

His exhale gusted out, past her cheek, and she looked down, her hands closing around the straps of her pack to keep them from shaking.

"I tried to forget you," he said.

She nodded, understanding that. She'd tried as well.

His fingers slid along her jaw, sending a charge through her nerves, stopping under her chin. She lifted her head with the slight pressure of them, looking up at him.

"I can't – I don't want to have to do that again," he told her, his voice thicker, deeper.

"No." She kept her eyes on his. "This might not be possible."

"I've done a lot of impossible things. This'll be a piece of cake," his voice dropped to a whisper as he bent his head and kissed her, his lips soft on hers, then demanding, his arms going around her, pulling her closer. The charged frisson that had always leapt between them with a touch crackled through her, taking her breath as she leaned against him, dissolving her doubts, mocking her fears.

It'd been a little more than two years, and sometimes, over that time, she'd wondered if her memories of how they'd been together had been unrealistic, polished and honed by an unrequited longing and an undiminishing pain. The kiss deepened and intensified, and she was barely aware of the faint moan that rose from her chest and hummed against his lips, need building as rapidly as arousal, a need that amplified sensation, ridiculed control, reached down and spread up, a wildfire through nerve and muscle. She could feel the heat of his hands, through her clothes, feel the heat of his body, could feel it spreading in herself.

Dean felt the soft hum against his mouth, and his arms tightened around her. He wasn't asleep, she wasn't a dream, he told himself. Need was outracing his senses, clouding out his thoughts. He was drowning and he didn't want it to stop, didn't want to ever come up for air. For the first time in months, in years, he felt as if he was where he should be. Exactly here.

It didn't matter what fate threw at them, they would figure it out, he thought incoherently. He'd waited too long and it'd been too hard and for once, just once, he needed to have this, he deserved to have this … this woman who knew him, who loved him, all of him, exactly as he was.

"Stay for a little while," he murmured against her mouth. "Please. Stay for a while longer."