Sink or Swim

by GinnyPotterr

SISFIC! Being the youngest of four siblings is hard for anyone, but being the youngest Winchester is even worse. Lily is the younger sister of Dean, Sam, and Adam Winchester. When their father went missing two years ago, the four Winchester siblings were forced to band together to figure out his whereabouts. Now Dean has only a year to live and no one knows how to cope.

4. Fade To Black

CHAPTER THREE: FADE TO BLACK

Song: Fade To Black - Metallica

The Impala rumbled down the highway, the darkness of the night outside reflecting the tense mood inside. Lily's two eldest brothers had been arguing for awhile now and they didn't seem like they would be stopping it anytime soon. Sam was yelling at Dean, Dean was yelling at Sam, Adam seemed just plain annoyed, and Lily, although she hated to admit it, agreed with Sam.

Sam had been talking to a demon, like, an actual demon, and Lily would usually be 1000% against the idea of working with one, but she had to agree with Sam that the pros outweighed the cons here. Ruby, the demon Sam had been talking to, said that she could help Dean, and, frankly, Lily knew that they couldn't pass up help. She was getting more and more desperate with each passing day, and she knew that Sam was, too. If they didn't find a way to get Dean out of this deal, he was gonna die. It was such a terrifying thought, but it was pretty much all she could think of anymore.

"Because Demon, that's why," Dean was saying to Sam as he drove, only half paying attention to the road which put Lily on edge; her brothers had already been in a car accident once, before Dean had made the deal and before Sam and their father had died, when everything had seemed like it was gonna be okay. They didn't need to be in another accident. "I mean the second you find out that this Ruby chick is a demon you go for the holy water! You don't chat." Lily had to admit that Dean had a point, but Sam had an even bigger one.

"No one was chatting, Dean," Sam snapped. Lily could see his frustration clearly through the mirror.

"Then why didn't you send her ass back to Hell?" Dean asked, angrily, glancing at Sam for a moment. Lily was about to tell him to watch the road, but he turned back to face it quickly enough. She sighed, wanting their arguing to stop; was this how it was when she argued with one of her brothers? Was it really this frustrating for the other two? Lily had been around some of her brothers arguments before, of course, but it had been awhile since the last one; it was usually Lily arguing with someone these days. She didn't know what was wrong with her, but she was always so angry and emotional. In her defense, she did have the whole 'my brother is going to die soon' excuse at her disposal, but so did Sam and Adam.

"Because -" Sam stopped himself for a second, hesitating. "Because she said that she might be able to help us out!" He exclaimed.

"How?" Dean yelled.

There was a beat of silence in the car.

"Jesus," Adam muttered from beside Lily, sounding just as sick of the arguing as she was, and it wasn't like the two of them could just get up and leave either. They were trapped. "She said that she can help you get outta your deal." Adam revealed, breaking the momentary silence in the impala.

Adam and Lily had been with Sam when Ruby had shown up in their motel room. They were with him when Ruby had told him everything, even about Sam and Dean's mom and all of her friends. Ruby had seemed very convincing, but Lily knew that she could still be lying about helping Dean. She figured that that was a risk they could take - that they had to take. There seemed to be no other way to save Dean from his fiery fate.

"What is wrong with you guys, huh?" Dean asked, incredulously. "She's lying! You've gotta know that!"

"Yeah, she could be lying, but, Dean, she could be telling the truth!" Lily exclaimed, finally jumping into the conversation. "We need to get you outta that deal, no matter who we get help from." Lily was getting desperate at this point, and they still had a few more months to go.

Dean looked back at her through the rearview mirror, and Lily could clearly see the frustration in his eyes. "No, you don't," He said, looking back at the road. His voice sounded grim. "You need to let it happen, otherwise Sam dies."

Lily felt her stomach drop at his words. "How could you say that?" She asked, her voice sounding too emotional for her liking. "How are we expected to just sit back and watch our big brother die?" She asked, catching Dean's eyes in the rearview mirror, again. In that moment Lily could tell that Dean didn't want to die, but he knew that he had to. It broke her heart. Dean didn't deserve this. None of them did.

"If we have the chance to save you, we're gonna do it, Dean," Adam spoke up, agreeing with his sister.

Tensions already running high, Lily's slight annoyance quickly heightened at this. "So, now you care about him and his deal?" Lily snapped at her brother, quickly. She knew this wasn't the right time or place to be doing this, and maybe she shouldn't be doing it at all, but Lily had just lashed out at him without really thinking it through. She'd noticed that she'd been doing that a lot more recently.

Adam furrowed his eyebrows in confusion, sending her a questioning look. "The hell do you mean 'now'?" He asked. "I've always cared about the deal and everything. How couldn't I? Dean's my brother."

"Really?" Lily asked, her frustration rising quickly. She could practically feel her blood boiling beneath her skin. "You've been pretending like it hasn't been happening!" She yelled at him. Her fingernails began to pierce her palms as her anger grew, but Lily barely registered the sharp pain it was causing. "You haven't cried, you haven't yelled, you haven't researched ways to stop it, you haven't done anything. So sorry if it seemed like you didn't give a damn."

"I don't wear my fucking emotions on my sleeves, but I do care!" Adam yelled back, his own frustrations clearly getting the better of him. "I've been dealing with it!"

"Alright, you two, stop it," Lily heard Dean order from the front seat, but she didn't pay attention to him, really. She was close to seeing red, her frustration over everything just piling up, again. It wasn't just Adam she was angry with (and, admittedly, she wasn't that mad at him at all), it was just everything: Dean's deal, the fact that Sam had died in the first place, her killing Tamara. Lily was even still upset about their father's death; it may have been over a year ago, but it was still affecting the young girl. She just wanted all this pain to stop. She just wanted everything to stop.

"If you cared you would've tried to help him in some way! You wouldn't have just sat there, doing nothing, pretending like everything's a-okay," She spat, glaring at Adam, furiously. Her teeth were clenched, her fingernails were still digging into her palms, close to drawing blood, and her whole body had tensed up."I stay up every night researching ways to stop it!" She exclaimed, not even caring that she'd been keeping that a secret. "You've done nothing!" Lily paused, breathing heavily. "Why do you have to hide everything, anyway? You never used to hide your emotions and stuff from me and now you don't talk to me about anything anymore. At least not recently."

"Sorry I don't want to share my feelings like some little girl," Adam spat back. "And fine. You want me not to hide anything? Then I'll just tell Sam and Dean what you got up to at school."

Lily's jaw dropped. "You wouldn't." He wouldn't. Right?

It was too late. He basically already had.

"Wait, what?" Sam asked, turning around to face his two younger siblings, his eyebrows furrowed in confusion.

"What the hell did you do at school, Lily?" Dean asked sternly, looking at his little sister through the rearview mirror. He was using his parenting voice again, the one that made Lily feel like a kid who had just gotten caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

Lily felt trapped; she couldn't get out of the car, so she couldn't leave the situation. Being stuck like this did not sit well with her. She felt the sudden urge to punch something, or, specifically, someone, but she resisted it. That would take things from bad to worse.

She glared at Adam; was he seriously so angry that he would tell on her? She guessed so, considering he basically already had. That asshole. She couldn't believe it. Sure, Lily had been the one to start their argument, again, but she hadn't expected it to get this heated (especially this quickly) or for him to go blabbing out all her secrets.

Well, two could play at that game.

"Adam skipped school to go 'hang out' with some girl last month," Lily tattled, childishly, putting air quotes around the words 'hang out'. Adam, thankfully, had spared her the details, but he had told her that he'd hung out with her, and Lily could piece together the puzzle quickly enough..

Sam and Dean shared a glance, both seeming like they didn't know what to do with that information.

"Lily skipped school to get drunk," Adam himself tattled, spilling Lily's secret. She had expected as much, though, so she wasn't surprised, just angry. He would regret starting this - boy, did she have dirt on him. She knew practically everything about him, after all.

"Adam's been stealing your alcohol for years!" Lily yelled. "And dad's, before he died."

"Guys, stop it!" Sam yelled, ending the childish charades between the two youngest Winchesters. Silence immediately replaced all the yelling, and Lily was almost sure that Dean was going to threaten to turn the car around using his 'father voice' again. It would be sort of humorous considering they didn't have anywhere to turn back to.

A cell phone ringing broke the silence.

Sam pulled his phone out from his jacket pocket, using the passing street lamps to see. "It's not mine."

Dean patted his pockets as he drove, probably feeling for a vibration. "Me neither."

Lily pulled her own phone out, but hers wasn't ringing either. "It's not mine, either," She spat, still feeling frustrated. As she put her phone back in her pocket, she noticed the blood that had collected on her palms. Pulling her sweatshirt sleeve over her right hand, she wiped the blood off her left hand, before switching hands and repeating the process. She had four small, curved cuts on each her palms in the shape of her fingernails, but they weren't deep enough to raise concern. Lily was used to seeing injuries fifty times worse when her brothers and father had come back from hunts.

"Not mine," Adam said, after pulling his own phone out.

Lily's eyebrows furrowed in confusion; whose phone was it, then?

"Check the glove department - it's dad's," Dean said, pointing to the glove department that sat in front of Sam.

"Dad's?" The three younger Winchesters asked in unison, matching looks of surprise on their faces.

"Yeah, I keep it charged up in case any of his old contacts call," Dean explained, glancing between the road and the glove compartment.

Lily heard the glove department open, the ringing of the cell phone becoming less muffled. Sam flipped it open and answered it, sounding uncertain.

"Hello? Yes, this is Edgar Casey." Lily scrunched up her nose as she heard the alias. Edgar was a gross name. "No, no, no, no, no. Don't call the police; I'll handle this myself."

Despite the fight the two had just been in, again, Lily and Adam shared confused looks, both wishing that they could hear the other side of that phone call.

"Thanks. You know, could you just lock it back up for me?" Sam asked whoever was on the other side of the phone. "Great." There was a beat of silence. "Oh, I don't have my book in front of me," Sam spoke, motioning for a pen. Lily began to dig in her backpack that laid at her feet, but Dean pulled a pen out from his jacket faster than she could. He handed it to Sam, and Lily zipped her backpack closed again.

"Could you give me the address? Go ahead." Sam began to scrawl the address down onto his palm, holding the phone between his shoulder and his ear. "Thanks a lot." He snapped the cell phone shut.

There was a beat of silence again.

"Well?" Adam asked, sounding just as curious as Lily felt.

"Did dad ever tell you guys that he kept a container at a storage place?" Sam asked, sounding surprised.

"What?" The other three siblings asked, again in unison.

"In Buffalo?"

"Ew, why Buffalo?" Lily asked, scrunching up her nose at the name of the city. She had only been there once, but she hadn't enjoyed it too much. It was too snowy for her liking. She'd rather be in a more southern city, though she did love to see the changing leaf colors in the fall.

Sam shrugged. "I'm not sure, but someone just broke into it."

"Lemme guess, we're spending my birthday in Buffalo?" She asked, dryly. She was turning fourteen in less than four hours and the quartet of siblings had been planning on going to a waterpark, per Lily's request; she had always wanted to go to one, but she guessed she wouldn't be getting that chance anytime soon.

"Yeah, sorry Lils," Sam said, apologetically. "We can still do something fun, alright?"

"And then after your birthday we can talk about you ditching school to get drunk," Dean added in, in mock-excitement.

"I wasn't drunk," Lily defended herself.

"You were drunk," Adam butted in, matter-of-factly.

"Shut up, Adam." She glared at him, feeling exasperated and just very overwhelmed with everything that was going on. It felt like she was handling all of this the worst; why was she so weak? Yeah, she'd been dealing with it all, but maybe she had been dealing with it too much? If that made any sense. Adam and Dean hadn't been showing much concern about the deal, both pretending like it wasn't actually happening, but Lily had been angrier than usual and far more upset than usual and lashing out on others much more than usual. Why was she so emotional? Was it because she was a girl, or was it just because she was inferior to all of her siblings? Lily didn't know and she knew that she was never going to get a real answer.

That night, after the four Winchesters arrived in Buffalo, Lily found herself tossing and turning in her sleep, but not really for her usual reasons. Glancing at the clock on the bedside table, the bright, red numbers glaring back at her, she sucked in a sharp breath.

She was turning fourteen in two minutes.

Her birthday always made her a bit upset, considering she never got to spend it the way she really wanted to: with her family - all of her family. It was completely impossible to celebrate it with everyone, though, considering her parents were dead.

Sometimes, at random moments, Lily would remember that she's an actual orphan. Both of her parents had bitten the dust, and that realization always hit the young girl like a punch to the stomach, knocking all the wind out of her. An orphan - like Annie or whatever (she'd never actually seen Annie before, but she knew the concept). It was scary to think about, and sad, and frustrating. She had always fantasized about being a normal kid and having a normal life and just being completely and utterly normal. But Lily had gotten a rotten hand in life, and now she was a hunter, an orphan, and a teenage girl with advanced fighting skills and perfect aim. Nothing like Annie, really.

Lily turned onto her side, again, to check the clock.

11:59.

She shut her eyes, not wanting the time to come.

This would be her very last birthday with her eldest brother alive.

Without meaning to, Lily let a tear slip out of the corner of her eye. It traveled down the side of her face and onto her pillow, absorbing into the fabric. She couldn't do this. She couldn't face this day knowing that it'd be the last one with her brother there. Lily knew that Sam, Dean, and Adam would all be thinking about it, too.

None of this was fair.

She couldn't look back at the clock, knowing that it probably read 12:00 by now. Instead, the now fourteen-year-old stared up at the ceiling until she felt herself drifting off into a restless slumber, wishing and praying that she could somehow save her brother.

---

"Lils, get up," A deep voice said from above her, but it was muffled and Lily couldn't tell who it was that was speaking. Groggy and still more than half asleep, Lily pulled a pillow over her head, trying to shut out the world - a.k.a her brothers. She didn't know what time it was or how long she'd slept for. All she knew was that she hadn't been awoken by a nightmare for the first time in forever; she wanted to savor it.

"Come on, birthday girl, get up." That was Sam's voice, Lily recognized now that she wasn't 90% asleep. Letting out a tired groan, Lily pulled another pillow over her head. Satisfied that even if her brothers kept talking she'd be able to get back to sleep, Lily relaxed.

That had been a bad move.

Suddenly, Lily felt her cocoon of blankets being ripped off of her and she instantly began to shiver. The freezing air hit her body in a wave, forming goose bumps on her skin. It felt as if someone had dumped a bucket of ice water onto her, which she wouldn't put it past her brothers to actually do to her on a normal day. Lily quickly curled herself into a ball, cuddling her bare legs to her chest to try and retain her remaining warmth. She heard someone sigh from her right, but she wasn't paying enough attention to tell who it was; she just wanted a few more hours of sleep. If she could trade her brothers in and get new ones, Lily would in a heartbeat - at least for right now, anyway.

"Come on, Lily, this is your last chance to get up." That was Dean's voice, though muffled from her pillow barrier, it was still pretty obvious. Lily ignored him, trying to will herself to fall back asleep.

Another bad move on her part.

One second she had been on her bed - albeit feeling like she had been dipped into a bucket of cold water, trying to sleep and the next she was on the floor of the motel room. Her side ached from the rough landing and Lily quickly sat up. Standing around her bed, her three brothers were looking down at her and laughing. Those assholes. But while Sam had at least had the decency to hide his laughter, Adam and Dean were laughing at her freely with no remorse. She was going to kill them; she didn't care if she ended up in jail or juvie or whatever, she was going to make them pay for interrupting her sleep.

"What the hell, guys?" Lily snapped, stumbling to her feet. "Did you seriously just push me out of bed?" Her tone shifted from anger to a slight whine. Shivering, she tried to wipe the sleep from her eyes. She wasn't as tired as she had been a few minutes prior. Turns out that being literally shoved out of bed and landing roughly on the floor did wonders in waking a person up.

"Sorry, Lils," Sam spoke, the grin not falling from his face. "You wouldn't get up." It was obvious to everyone that Sam was not the least bit sorry, neither were Adam or Dean. Typical.

"Come on, birthday girl, we've got a gift for you," Dean said, leading her to their motel's table by her hand. He sat her down in one of the chairs and Lily winced slightly as her bare legs met the cold, wooden surface. Her pajama shorts left most of her legs completely bare, which may not have been the best move in New York during October.

Dean handed her a poorly-wrapped gift. Instead of wrapping paper her brothers had used old newspapers, and instead of regular tape they had used duct tape. The package itself was also an odd shape, but she couldn't make out what the present inside of it was. Dean had wrapped it, probably. She smiled at the failed attempt to make it look presentable, knowing that it was wrapped with love, at the very least. She looked up at them, making eye contact with Sam and Dean, but purposely ignoring Adam. She wasn't sure where they stood, after their argument last night. Though the two siblings had been having lots of arguments recently, but they always made up quickly.

Lily looked back down at the crumpled package in her hands and began to rip the newspaper off. The duct tape was making it particularly difficult, and Lily quickly got her pocket knife off the table beside her and flipped it open. Seconds later she was ripping the final piece of newspaper off, grinning as she realized what it was.

A gun.

Lily turned the gun over in her hands, instantly recognizing it as a .45 caliber handgun. It was an off-white color, the exact opposite of every gun that Lily had ever used, and the sides of it were engraved with simple leaf designs. Lily could make out the word 'Colt' etched on one of the sides. It was a truly beautiful gun, and Lily couldn't wait to try it out. She looked back up at her brothers, her grin never leaving her face. Did this mean that they would be letting her join in on hunts more? It would be cruel to give her a gun but not let her hunt.

"I love it," She said, still grinning from ear to ear. "I mean, I've never seen a hunter use a gun like this, but it's great." She got up off her chair and pulled Dean into a hug, then Sam, but she hesitated when she turned to Adam. Should she hug him, too? Adam made the decision for her, however, when he pulled his little sister into a hug. Lily smiled as she returned the hug, but she was still somewhat frustrated with him. She sighed, wishing she and Adam could go back to normal. They had been arguing so often recently, it was so unlike them.

They released their hug and Lily grinned as she looked at the gun again - her gun. It was all her own and she couldn't help but be excited about it.

Then it hit her all over again that Dean was going to die.

Her smile dropped instantly, and she made eye contact with her eldest brother. There must've been a certain sadness or hopelessness in her eyes as Dean sobered up as well, seemingly understanding what was going through her mind. Lily quickly pulled him in for another hug, wrapping her arms around his torso and savoring the feeling of his arms wrapped around her. She savored the scent of his after shave and dollar store soap. She savored all of him, hoping that she'd never forget what he felt like, or what he smelled like, or how his voice sounded, or how his eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled or laughed.

She released the hug a few moments later, trying to pretend like she hadn't been on the verge of tears. Her eyes dropped to her feet, trying to push the negative thoughts from her mind - like usual. It seemed all she ever did anymore was think about his damn deal. She wished she could take her mind off it for more than five minutes at a time. Hopefully her birthday could help distract her from those thoughts, but so far it wasn't doing a very good job.

Lily looked back down at her new gun, tracing the intricate design on the side with her finger. It wasn't as exciting as it had been a few seconds prior. What did it matter that she had her own gun when Dean was going to die? None of it mattered, really, and she realized that she needed to stop arguing with Adam - he could end up dying, too.

"How 'bout we go get breakfast then?" Sam suggested, obviously trying to lighten the mood back up. "I'm sure they have chocolate chip pancakes," He added in, knowing how much his sister enjoyed them.

Lily mustered up a smile, but even she could tell that it didn't reach her eyes.. "Yeah, that sounds great."

After breakfast, where the diner did, in fact, have chocolate chip pancakes, the four siblings were in the elevator heading down to their dad's storage unit. Lily wasn't sure what exactly they were going to find, but she figured there were important hunting items in there. The elevator doors opened to reveal a dark and musty hallway where the storage units were. Lily sighed; this was definitely not as fun as the waterpark was gonna be.

Dean unlocked the door to the storage unit while Sam and Adam shined their flashlights onto it. Lily was pointing her own flashlight around the rest of the room, making sure that they were really, truly alone - sue her for being paranoid. Dean slid the door open and the four siblings entered the darkened storage area.

There was junk cluttered everywhere, on every wall, and on every shelf. The open area by the entrance had a devil's trap painted onto the floor, but there were bloody boot-prints going through it. The footprints lead back towards another section of the unit.

"No demons allowed," Sam said.

"Blood," Adam spoke after he knelt to the ground beside the tracks. He had reached down and felt some of the blood in his fingers. Lily crinkled her nose in disgust, but let him continue. "Check this out," He added, pointing to the wire that went from one wall to the other - a trip wire. Lily noticed Sam following the wire with his flashlight until it lead to a gun. When the trip wire was, well, tripped, the gun had went off. It was smart, really smart - damn, their dad was good. Key word there being was. She mentally sighed, trying to push those thoughts from her head.

"Whoever broke in here got attacked," Sam noted.

Lily nodded. "What did they take, though?" It was a rhetorical question, but she did want an answer; she just knew that none of her brothers would be able to give her one. The thief must've taken something, considering the bloody footprints lead to the back of the storage unit. If she had been shot coming in here she wouldn't have left without whatever she'd come to steal.

"I got two sets of boot tracks here," Dean said. He had crouched down next to Adam to inspect the footprints closer. "Looks like it was a two-man job. And our friend with the buckshot in him, looks like he kept on walking."

"Probably only got hit in the shoulder," Adam suggested as he and Dean stood back up.

The four continued further into the unit, flashing their lights onto everything. Would it have killed dad to invest in a light for this place? They soon split up, as much as they could split up in the small storage area, and Lily noticed a pile of cardboard boxes off in the corner. Curiosity peaking, Lily headed over to them.

"1995," She heard Dean read. She looked back over to her eldest brother, wondering what he had found. Lily had been two in '95 . . . and her mom had still been alive. She tried to push those thoughts from her head, again. She could barely go two minutes without thinking of something upsetting.

"No way!" Sam exclaimed, sounding somewhat excited. Lily raised her eyebrows, slightly amused with her brother. "That's my division championship soccer trophy." Sam took the trophy from Dean's hands, examining it beneath his flashlight. "I can't believe he kept this."

"You played soccer?" Lily asked from across the room. She hadn't known that. What else about her brother's lives did she not know?
"Yeah, for a couple of years," Sam replied, offhandedly, as he was still examining his trophy.

"He probably kept it 'cause it was the closest you ever came to being a boy," Dean spoke, jokingly, as he moved past Sam to look through other stuff.

Lily turned back to the boxes in front of her. There were about four or five stacked in a pile. There was writing on the box closest to her, so Lily bent down and rubbed the thick layer of dust off of it with her free hand. She wiped the dust that had stuck to her hand onto her jeans, not caring about getting them dirty. Lily's eyes widened as she read the writing.

On the box, scrawled in her dad's messy handwriting, was her name.

Lily practically threw her flashlight to the ground, not even registering it clattering on the floor and rolling a bit away. She was too curious about what was in the box to care. She ripped the first box open then stretched across the floor to reach for her abandoned flashlight that had rolled away. Once she had grabbed it, she pointed it into the box, revealing its contents.

There were toys in there. Old, broken, and tattered toys, but still toys. Her eyebrows furrowed, Lily pulled a dusty, old barbie doll from the box. It was a barbie with brown hair and brown eyes, one that heavily contrasted to the stereotypical barbie that Lily knew. The barbie had random bald spots on her head and one of her painted-on eyes had chipped off. It was also only wearing a single shoe. The poor barbie looked as if it'd been through Hell.

Lily placed it carefully on the floor next to her, treating it as if it were made of glass. She dug through the box some more, still using only one hand. There were more toys in there, presumably from her childhood - from before her mom had been killed. Why hadn't her dad given her these when she was a kid? All she had had to play with as a kid were mostly toy cars, army men, action figures, and a couple of beanie babies, if her memory was serving her correctly. But six-year-old Lily would've killed for a barbie or, even better, one of those Spice Girl dolls that all of her classmates seemed to have had, that they had teased her for not having. Why hadn't her dad given her these toys? He had probably thought that they didn't have enough room to be carrying them all around, which was fair enough (not that Lily had wanted to admit it), but he hadn't given her any of them? Why? Annoyance flooded through her as she realized she'd never get an answer. It wasn't like she could ask him.

She vaguely heard Dean talking about his sawed-off shotgun that he'd just found and Adam talking about his hockey trophy from the sixth grade, but Lily was too preoccupied to care. She did, however, notice when they entered the next section of the storage unit. Lily knew that they had to figure out what had been stolen, and by who, but she didn't care. This was her stuff in here. Her stuff from before her mom had died.

Lily could feel tears welling up in her eyes. Damn it. She had promised herself that she would stop crying so much, but she'd failed. Again. Lily placed the doll back into the box and moved to the next one, opening it up as quickly as she could one-handed.

There was a mini Belle dress from Beauty and the Beast. It was cheaply made, and there was a stain on it (maybe spaghetti? It looked like some sort of sauce), but the yellow dress was undeniably like the one from the cartoon. It was so small, small enough for a two or three year old, and Lily felt a tear roll down her cheek. She let the dress fall into her lap as she began to cry. These were items that her mom had bought for her when she was little. It was the closest Lily had ever felt to her mother - the mother she had never gotten to know. She felt the loss heavily in her chest, and she just wanted to go back in time and get the chance to see her, not even meet her, necessarily. But she'd never get that chance.

Composing herself, Lily brushed the tears from her now salty cheeks and set the Belle dress carefully back into the box. She dug around in it a bit more and pulled out a photo. The photo was obviously old. It was a polaroid, aged with a bit of yellow around the edges. In the picture there was a young woman. She had long, black hair that cascaded down her back, tanned skin (quite a bit darker than Lily's was), and, from what little Lily could see in the picture, brown eyes. She had a toddler on her lap who looked quite like the woman did, but just much younger and paler.

It was a picture of Lily and her mother.

And, just like that, the dam of tears broke, again.

It was the first time Lily was seeing what her mother looked like, besides from her hazy memory of the woman's death. Her father had always told her, when she had mustered up the bravery to ask about her mother, that he didn't have any pictures of her. Why did he lie to her all these years? Despite her anger towards her father, Lily couldn't help but smile through her tears; her mother had been beautiful.

Lily continued to analyze the picture, but it was difficult to see through her blurry vision. She blinked the tears away, trying to get control of herself again, and looked back at the picture. There was a window behind them, but it was blocked by silver bars. They had lived in a bad neighborhood, Lily was guessing. She looked back into the box, noticing again how battered the toys were. They hadn't had much money, she realized. They didn't have a lot of money, but her mom had still gotten her toys, even if they weren't new and perfect.

And there went the tears, again, but they hadn't truly dissipated in the first place.

Lily cussed under her breath, roughly wiping the tears from her cheeks again, irritating her skin. She could feel her cheeks growing more itchy and red.

This is definitely not how she had expected her birthday to go.

"Lily, are you okay?" Lily heard Dean ask as he went over to her. She saw Sam and Adam following behind him from her peripherals. Dean crouched down next to her, looking at the boxes and trying to figure out what was wrong.

"He had a damn picture of her!" Lily exclaimed, trying not to sound as emotional and upset as she felt. "He had this friggin' picture, and all this fuckin' stuff, here this whole time and he never told me!" More tears began to run down her cheeks and Lily just wanted to punch something. Not only was she angry with her dad, but she was also angry with herself for breaking down like this, again. Especially since she was breaking down over a pile of junk and a single picture. But it was a picture of her mom, she reminded herself. She had a right to be pissed off and upset right now, but she was still angry with herself for it.

Lily felt Dean put a comforting hand on her shoulder. "What is this stuff?" Dean asked her, softly.

She let out a small hiccup, involuntarily. "Stuff from before my mom was killed," She explained, wiping a few more tears from her cheeks. "He had it all this whole damn time and he never gave any of it to me, he never told me about it or anything!" She threw her flashlight to the ground, again, and it was hard to miss the sound of the glass cracking.

"Hey, hey, Lils, calm down," She heard Dean murmur from beside her, but Lily was too frustrated, too upset, and just too done with everything. She stood up, gave Dean the picture of her and her mom and walked towards one of the shorter shelves that was stacked with her dad's junk. She let herself cry, facing away from her brothers; she was embarrassed.

It felt like this place was just a junk yard for her dad, and that that picture was just junk to him, though deep down she knew that probably wasn't true. Her frustration peaking, Lily let out a yell and pushed the shelf over. Glass shattered, papers went flying, and some dark liquid broke free from its bottle and seeped beneath her shoes.

That had felt good.

She could hear Adam try to say something to her, but she ignored him.

Lily pushed another shelf over, needing a way to get her frustrations out. Breaking her dad's things was more satisfying than Lily had thought it'd be. It felt like she was getting back at him, at least a little bit, which was helping to relieve her anger. She pushed a third shelf over then began to kick some of the objects that had fallen. She put everything she had into those kicks - thinking about her father, thinking about her mother's death, thinking about her fights with Adam, thinking of Dean's seemingly inevitable death, thinking of the way she had clung to Sam's dead body and sobbed, and thinking of Tamara's life leaving her eyes as Lily stabbed her. Lily soon stopped, feeling her anger dissipate. She collapsed to the floor and continued to cry, feeling just plain sad now. Well, more like devastated.

She felt sort of ridiculous as well; none of her brothers had ever broken down like this and they had all been through some shit, too. Was she just being too emotional? Was she just being too girly, letting her emotions get the better of her?

Lily continued to cry, pulling her knees up to her chest. She just wanted everything to be okay. She wanted her mom and dad to be alive, she wanted Dean to not be dying, and, despite how much Lily wanted to hunt, she found herself loaning to be normal. Normal teenage girls didn't have problems like these. Normal teenage girls weren't as hurt as she was. Normal teenage girls were happy. True happiness just seemed so foreign.

Her brothers comforted her, each of them hugging her and telling her she was gonna be okay. Although they were making her feel a bit better, it was also just getting her angry. They were always the ones comforting her. She needed it to be the other way for once. She needed them to need her the way that she needed them. Because if they didn't need her like that then, well, what was she good for? She couldn't hunt like them, she couldn't fight like them, she couldn't do anything better than any of her brothers could. She wasn't smart, she wasn't funny, she wasn't anything. Her brothers never needed her and it just made her feel so useless, like she was holding them back or dragging them down.

The quartet left the storage unit half an hour later, Lily still wiping away some stray tears. She tried to pretend like her breakdown hadn't happened, and she was grateful that her brothers were doing the same.

Sam filled her in about the missing box from dad's storage unit while they drove. Lily wasn't sure where they were driving, but she wasn't in the mood to question things. She spent most of the car ride staring out the window, watching the people blur past as they drove by. She wondered what their stories were, what kinds of people they all were.

Sometimes, when she was really bored, Lily liked to make up a life story for people she passed by. It helped pass the time more quickly, and Lily liked to imagine how normal people lived; how their biggest problem could be forgetting to buy the onion dip for their barbecue, or maybe forgetting to buy a gift for their cousin's baby shower. She liked to imagine how their lives were happy, how they would never feel as much sadness and loss as she had felt.

Minutes later, the Impala rumbled to a stop outside a sketchy-looking apartment building and Dean leaned out the window, reading the license plate of the car parked next to them.

"Connecticut," He declared. "Last three digits 8-8-0."

"Yep, that's it," Sam replied.

Dean shook his head. "Should've blacked out their plates before they parked in front of a security camera," He sang.

"We goin' in then?" Adam asked, pulling his gun from the waistband of his jeans.

"Yep, let's go."

Lily followed her brothers out of the Impala, just waiting for one of them to say something to her. She pulled her new gun from the small of her back, holding it in front of her the precise way she'd been trained to.

Dean sent her a look.

"It'll be four against two, you probably ain't even gonna need me - and I'll stay in the back!" Lily promised, her tone sounding a bit pleading. "Plus, it's my birthday." She sent Dean the puppy dog eyes, the ones she had learned from Sam all those years ago.

"Stay behind us." It was all that Dean said. Despite how crappy Lily had been feeling for most of the morning, she actually found herself with a smile on her face. She was torn between feeling upset and feeling somewhat content; she finally had a picture of her mom, she'd gotten her own gun, Dean was letting her on another hunt, and it was her birthday. Maybe it was just her lucky day. Well, besides the fact that she'd had another breakdown, of course.

They approached the correct apartment and Lily went to town on the lock. It opened with a soft click seconds later and, true to her word, Lily let her brothers go inside first. She shut the door as quietly as she could, not wanting to tip off the men she could hear from the other room. From the sounds of it, there were only two of them. Four against two was hardly fair, but these guys had stolen from their father - who cared if it was fair?

"There's no way in hell we are handing it over to that stuck-up bitch," Lily heard one of the men say, his voice slightly muffled. She furrowed her eyebrows as she pushed herself against the wall next to Dean. Who were they talking about?

Sam, Dean, and Adam continued to inch forward. Soon they popped into the living room, guns drawn and pointed at the men.

"Freeze!" They shouted, moving in farther. "Nobody move!"

Wishing she could've have a shot of tequila or something before this to loosen her up a little, Lily followed them in, pointing her own gun at the balding man that Sam was pointing his at, too.

The apartment was shabby and small. There were papers and beer bottles randomly cluttered on the floor and, damn, would it kill them to get a vacuum cleaner? Not that Lily was the poster child for being neat and tidy (she was the opposite of that, really), but she wasn't this bad.

"Give us the box," Dean ordered, getting straight down to business. "And please tell me that you didn't -"

"Oh, they did," Adam, who was standing on Dean's side of the room, said, looking down at the coffee table which held the opened box. Lily rolled her eyes. People were dumb.

"You idiots," She snarled. "It coulda killed you!"

"What the - ?" One of the guys was saying, just now noticing Lily. Lily cut him some slack for that one; it wasn't everyday you saw a teenage girl holding a gun to your head.

"You opened it?" Dean practically roared, his free hand reaching out to shove one of the men against the opposite wall. It always amazed Lily how her brothers could go from her big brothers that gently wiped her tears off her cheeks to these intimidating hunters who could kick anyone's ass.

"Are you guys cops?" The guy who was pinned yelled. Lily furrowed her eyebrows. She was a fourteen-year-old, how would she be a cop? People were really dumb.

"What was in the box?" Dean asked, his gun pointed to the bald guy's heart. Lily and Sam were pointing their guns at the second man, who had backed up towards the window. Both of the men were wearing dirty clothing, but the one that Dean was currently threatening was clearly the one that had been shot. His white t-shirt was splattered with scarlet red blood, particularly on his right shoulder. Adam had been right about that one.

The guy didn't answer, he just looked past Dean and to the coffee table. Lily didn't look back, knowing that at least two of them should still be watching the guys. This could've been a way to distract them so they could get away.

"Oh, is that it, huh?" Dean asked him, turning back to face him while still digging his gun into the guy's chest. "It is, isn't it?" He turned back to the coffee table, again. Lily couldn't see her brother's face, but she figured he had furrowed his eyebrows. "What is that thing?" He sounded confused.

And it was at that precise moment that the guy shoved Dean's arms. Dean dropped his gun and it went off, the bullet ricocheting off of several different walls and pieces of furniture before hitting Sam's own gun. It slipped from his hands as Sam gave a yelp, the gun going off as it landed on the floor. The bullet hit the lamp on the other side of the room, shattering it. Lily heard Adam's gun click - he didn't have any bullets. How could he just not have bullets? Lily shot her own gun off at the man, but her bullet landed inches away from his leg.

Her jaw literally dropped. She had missed. She hadn't missed a shot in years, not since she had still been training when she was younger. Lily was almost always a perfect shot, but if not then she usually still hit around the center of the target. But now, when it was actually important, she had missed. She could practically hear her father's gruff voice in her head telling her to get it together, that she couldn't afford to be off her game.

What the hell was going on. Were they all off their games?

Lily shot at the man again, but she missed again. The bullet instead hit the wall next to him, going through the drywall. Now she was just getting angry. She shot her gun twice more, but both shots still missed.

She heard Sam rushing toward his gun on the ground, but the second man reached it first, shoving Sam away and into Dean. Sam crashed into Dean with a shout, causing Dean to go crashing into the coffee table. The table completely broke beneath Dean's weight and he fell to the floor. His gun went flying, clattering to the floor a few feet away.

Adam was in a fist fight with the balding man, considering his gun wasn't going to work, but he was obviously losing. The man flung Adam backward and he landed into a bookshelf. Collapsed onto the floor, Adam didn't have enough time to move before the bookshelf fell on top of him. Thankfully, from what Lily could see, the bookshelf wasn't very heavy. She went to help Dean up, as he was closest to her, when Sam got tackled, brought down to the floor as if they were playing football.

While one of the men was on top of Sam, punching him over and over, the other had picked up an abandoned gun. Just as Dean had stood up, the man pulled the gun up, somehow smacking Dean in the face with it. Dean fell over, landing on the floor, again.

Okay, now Lily was pissed.

Another bullet flew from her gun, but it missed again, imbedding itself in wall behind the man. This was ridiculous. Aiming perfectly came almost as easily to Lily as breathing did, so what was happening?

Running out of ideas, Lily tried to punch the man's gun from his hands, but she lost her balance and collapsed onto the floor. Groaning and feeling desperate, the girl crawled to the man's feet, trying to trip him from the ground. Something had to work against these guys. The man kicked Lily in the face and she felt her nose snap, hearing the resounding crack loud and clear. She screamed in pain and she could feel the blood begin to seep from her nose.

Okay, so that hadn't been her best plan.

Blood now streaming down her face, Lily tried to get back up but the man kicked her in the stomach, knocking the wind out of her. She smacked her head against the floor as she fell back down and her vision blurred, her head feeling as if it had been cracked open. He kicked her gun out of her hand and it slid across the hardwood floors, way out of her reach.

Lily could see the blurry outline of the balding man choking Sam and she panicked. She tried to get up, or to at least crawl, but her head just felt so heavy. She couldn't let Sam just die, but she couldn't move. She looked to Dean, but he was still reeling from his own fall. Lily was pretty sure that Adam had been knocked out, but she wasn't positive.

Struggling against his attacker, Sam began to reach his arm out for some object that lay a few feet away from him. Lily couldn't tell what it was (it definitely didn't look like a gun), but if it helped save him then Lily wouldn't question it. Mustering up all the strength that she could, Lily slid her leg across the floor and weakly kicked the object (which was surprisingly soft beneath her boot) towards Sam. It was a good enough kick, however, as Sam was able to reach whatever it was. He picked it up, quickly, and it seemed as if he had suddenly found the strength to break free.

He kicked the man backwards and he flew practically to the other side of the room, hitting his head against the wall.

"Dean," Sam said, as he noticed his brother clambering to his feet. "I got it."

"No you don't." It was the man who had broken Lily's nose. He was pointing a gun at her brother. Silently, Lily urged Sam to beat his ass, considering she couldn't do it herself at the moment.

The man pulled the trigger, but the gun just clicked. He cocked the gun and tried it again, but it was jammed. "Damn it." Sam moved forward, forcing the man to take a step backward, but Sam hadn't even had to do anything as the man tripped over the broken coffee table. He fell over the couch and hit his head on the floor, knocking himself out. There was a beat of silence.

What the hell was going on?

"Sam!" Dean yelled. Lily couldn't see what was happening over the couch, but her brothers were looking in the direction of the other man, the one that Sam had shoved into the wall. She couldn't see it for herself, but she sure as hell heard the sound of another bookshelf collapsing on the guy's head. Lily also hadn't seen the guy's gun fly from his hands, but she did see Sam catch it from the complete opposite side of the living room.

Although everything was sort of hazy and blurry, Lily knew that that couldn't be possible.

For the second time in the past three minutes, Lily's jaw dropped. What the hell was going on?

"That's a lucky break," Dean spoke, just as confused as surprised as she was. "Is that a rabbit's foot?"

Sam looked down at the small, grey object in his hands, finally getting the chance to look at it closely. "Yeah," He said, his eyebrows furrowed. "I think it is."

"Wasn't so lucky for me," Lily groaned from the floor, her voice sounding thick from the blood that was still seeping from her nose. Some of it was leaking to her throat and mouth, but she couldn't even be bothered to try to stop it; she just felt too dizzy and woozy to move. She figured that she could have a concussion - she knew the symptoms well enough from her years of experience in a hunter family.

Dean rushed to Lily's side, helping her sit up. She grasped her head in pain, the sudden movement making her feel even more dizzy. And then a wave of nausea hit her. Praying to God that she wouldn't puke, Lily closed her eyes and tried to steady herself.

"Um, Adam's kinda dead under that bookshelf," She muttered, her eyes still closed. She needed them to go check on Adam, too. The bookshelf had looked light, but her brother had still bumped his head against the floor - hard enough to knock him out, anyway.

Half an hour later they were back in their motel room. Sam had broken Lily's nose back into place, which was about as pleasant as it sounded. She had screamed so loud she figured that someone in a nearby room would complain, but, thankfully, no one had come knocking on their door. Breaking her nose back into place had seemed like it'd hurt more than breaking it originally had. Maybe it was because she had been mentally preparing herself for Sam to snap it back to its original place, but when that man had kicked her she hadn't been expecting it.

Both times had still hurt like a bitch, though.

Hours later, after Adam had woken up and had been deemed okay, the siblings decided to head to a diner for lunch. It seemed like a weird thing to do after getting your asses kicked, but that was the life of a Winchester, Lily supposed. Her nose and head still hurt like hell, but she was hungry. Hunger won out over her protesting body. Lily figured that Adam felt the same way, considering he had a large bump on the side of his head and bruises scattered in random places from when the shelf had fallen on top of him. None of her siblings could beat the gigantic bruise that Lily had on her stomach from when the man had kicked her; it was different shades of blue, with a bit of yellow mixed in as well. It stretched from one side of her stomach to the other, going over her belly button, but it was much longer than it was wide. It ached even at the slightest touch, and Lily was sure that there was a slight boot imprint on her skin.

Dean stopped at a convenience store, not telling any of his siblings what he was going in to buy. He was acting pretty excited for a guy who had just gotten beaten up alongside his younger siblings.

He came back out a few minutes later, holding a small paper bag, a grin etched on his face. He sat back in the driver's seat and opened up the bag. Lily sat on the edge of her seat and looked over Dean's shoulder to see what he had bought.

Lottery tickets.

Her brother was an absolute genius.

Lily grinned, but a sharp pain in her nose made her quickly drop it. It was still throbbing and the last time she had looked in the mirror it had begun bruising and swelling, turning her nose and the underneath of her eyes a dark shade of purple. She looked absolutely ridiculous.

"I can't find anything on it in dad's journal," Sam announced, not even looking up from the leather-bound notebook.

Dean held up the lottery tickets to Sam.

Adam, who was sitting in the other back window seat, saw the tickets and laughed. "Dean, you're a genius," He exclaimed, voicing Lily's own thoughts. "If the foot's really making Sam lucky then we're 'bouta be rich."

"Hell yeah, we are," Dean agreed, grinning at his little brother.

"Dean, come on," Sam complained.

"Sam, it's a great idea," Lily piped up from the back. She had sat back down in her seat properly; she didn't need her ass to be uncomfortable, too. "Maybe this birthday isn't goin' too bad, after all," She remarked, smiling just a little. She was about to be rich, after all.

Adam sent her a look, his eyebrows furrowed. "Dude, your nose is the same color as fuckin' Barney," He said. "And a bookshelf fell on me."

Lily shrugged. "If we get rich then it was all worth it."

"Speak for yourself," Adam grumbled, rubbing at his lower back.

"Who says the foot is even lucky?" Sam asked, raising his eyebrows at them through the mirror.

"Sam, that was my gun he was aiming at your head. And my gun don't jam - that was a lucky break," Dean explained. "Not to mention them taking themselves out - also a lucky break." He handed Sam one of the scratch-offs he'd bought. "Here, scratch this."

Sam didn't move.

"Come on, Sam."

Sam begrudgingly took the ticket and Lily found herself smiling again, despite the pain it caused her nose still. They were gonna be rich. She could probably buy herself a new nose after this.

Dean threw a penny at Sam to scratch it with.
"Dean, it's gotta be cursed somehow," Sam spoke as he scratched, revealing the numbers that were hidden underneath. "Otherwise dad wouldn'a locked it up." When he had finished scratching he handed the card back to Dean.

Lily had to resist the urge to rip the card from her brother's hands and see it herself.

"1200 dollars," Dean said, sounding shocked. "We just won 1200 dollars."

And, for the third time that day, Lily's jaw dropped.

Adam and Dean instantly began to cheer, encouraging Sam to scratch more of them. Lily grinned and she didn't even care that her nose was protesting with pain; they were gonna be rich after this.

"Doesn't seem that cursed to me."

Sam decided to call Bobby about this, which Lily figured was a smart idea. Dad wouldn't have stored that rabbit's foot in a cursed box for no reason. Although, she, Dean, and Adam were really more concerned with the lottery tickets. They had them laid out on the hood of the Impala as they counted how much money they'd won already.

While Sam was listening to Bobby on the phone, he bent down and picked something off the ground. He turned back around and lifted a gold watch up in the air. Lily hadn't felt this excited in what felt like forever. They were gonna be rich.

Dean was trying to add up all the amounts in his head, but he was having trouble and kept on starting over. Adam had taken out a sheet of paper and a pen and was trying to tally it all up on there. Lily, however, added up the total amount in her head without much of an issue.

"It's fifteen thousand, three hundred dollars," She stated, straightening one of the tickets that had been crooked.

Lily missed the confused, yet pleasantly surprised, looks that Dean and Adam shared with each other behind her back.

Once Sam's phone call had ended, Dean held a few of the tickets up for him to see. "Dude, we're up fifteen grand."

"Well, we've got bad news," Sam replied, walking back to the Impala. "The foot is cursed. My luck is good until I lose the foot, then it turns bad and I end up dead."

Lily's eyes widened at Sam's announcement. She couldn't have two dead brothers. She cared about all three of them so much, even if it didn't seem like it at times, and she just couldn't handle the idea of having ⅔ of them dead. She couldn't lose them. Dealing with Dean's impending death was bad enough, now Sam too? And Sam had only been brought back to life not that long ago. Lily also came to the realization that Dean's deal would be for nothing if Sam died.

"What do we do?" Lily asked, quietly. She was still trying to digest the news. She had never been good with dealing with losing someone she loved; she always seemed to just handle it the worst. With their father's death, she stopped talking for weeks on end. She hadn't seen a point in doing anything. Sometimes it felt like she was still trying to digest that, and it had been over a year ago. With everything else piled on top, Lily felt as if she were drowning. She was being pulled down by some invisible force and her lungs were bursting, needing air, but she couldn't get to the surface; she couldn't be relieved from all her pain.

"Bobby's gonna fix it, I promise," Dean spoke, not only to Lily, but to all of them. There was a certain look in his eye that made Lily think he was trying to reassure himself as well.

None of them would've died if they had just gone to the damn waterpark.

The quartet finally entered the diner twenty minutes later, and Lily's stomach was rumbling. It'd been hours since she'd last eaten anything, and, man, did Lily like to eat. Lily followed her brothers inside, not paying much attention to their conversation. She was trying to think of ways to break Sam's curse. Could burning the foot do anything? Or would that count as losing it? She hoped that Bobby would find something, because she had absolutely nothing. Though, in her defense, she had no books to look through and her phone didn't have internet access.

They reached the podium where the hostess, an old silver-haired man with a receding hairline, was standing.

"Hi," Sam greeted him. "Table for four, please."

"Congratulations!" The man exclaimed, grinning at them.

Lily raised an eyebrow, sharing a bewildered look with Adam. A bell rang out, loudly, catching the attention of everyone else in the diner.

"You are the one millionth guest of the Biggerson's restaurant family!" The man handed them a huge check - like, a physically gigantic check. It was probably taller than Lily if you turned it on its side. Sam, Dean, and even Adam, who was seemingly growing taller and taller every single day, were so tall that when they held the check at their chests it completely covered Lily's face. Standing on her tippy-toes, Lily tried to see over the top of the check, but she was still too short.

Lily took a step back just as balloons were released from the ceiling. She looked up, confused, as red and gold balloons and golden streamers floated down on top of them; had those been up there the whole time? A few camera clicks and flashes later, she and her brothers were finally led to their booth; a check for free Biggerson's food for life in their hands.

Lily had to admit that the rabbit's foot was doing them some good, but none of it was going to matter if Sam died. The constant nervousness she had been feeling in the pit of her stomach had been doubled. What were they going to do?

Order ice cream, apparently.

She, Dean, and Adam had each ordered an ice cream sundae - Lily's sans cherries. Sam, however, was looking up lore on the rabbit's foot on his laptop. Adam, who was sat beside Sam, was peering over Sam's shoulder and dribbling vanilla ice cream down his chin. Lily hoped he dribbled some onto Sam's laptop; that'd be a funny argument to see.

"Bobby's right," Sam was saying. "This lore goes way back - pure hoodoo." He shut his laptop, nudging Adam and his vanilla-coated chin away from him. "You can't just cut one off of any rabbit; it has to be in a cemetery, under a full moon, on Friday the 13th."

"Damn," Lily spoke up, in between bites of ice cream. "That's really specific."

Dean set his empty bowl back down onto the table, the spoon clattering against the side of it. "I think from now on we only go to places with Biggerson's," He said, his mouth still full with his last bite of ice cream.

Adam nodded in agreement, his own mouth too stuffed to say anything.

"What does that have to do with the rabbit's foot?" Lily asked, furrowing her eyebrows at her brother. She scooped another spoonful of ice cream into her mouth. "Oh, can we see it?" She asked, after swallowing.

Sam rolled his eyes, but took the grey foot out from his pocket and held it out in his palm.

"Wow, it's literally a rabbit's foot," Lily remarked. "Poor bunny," She added, frowning as she realized that a bunny either had to be killed for this or had to get its own foot cut off. Why did everything bad always happen to the rabbits?

"I think it's cool," Adam replied, setting his own bowl down. "Lemme see." And, before anyone could stop him, Adam grabbed the foot from Sam's hand.

"Adam, no!" Sam, Dean, and Lily all yelled out at the same. Adam dropped the foot onto the table like it had burned him, but it was too late. The damage was done.

"Adam!"

Adam cursed beneath his breath. "I'm sorry!" He exclaimed, sounding truly apologetic. "I wasn't thinking."

He now had the good luck, while Sam's had gone rotten. Lily's heart began racing as she thought about Sam and now Adam dying; if Bobby didn't find a way to fix this soon they were screwed. The nervousness in her stomach had turned to full fledged anxiety, and her breathing began to quicken its pace. This couldn't be happening. It felt like the walls of the room were closing in. Tears welled up in the corner of Lily's eyes as she struggled to breathe, just thinking of life without any of her brothers, which would be her harsh reality if they didn't fix this soon. Lily didn't know what was happening, but she wanted it to stop. She just really wanted everything to stop.

Minutes later, after Bobby had been called again and Lily had begun to calm down, their waitress came over to the table. She was of average height, had short black hair that only fell to her chin, and blue eyes. She smiled at them as she approached, then leaned across the table slowly to grab their empty bowls of ice cream, her breasts slightly peeking out from beneath her low cut shirt. Lily didn't know why, but she found herself staring at the woman's chest along with her brothers.

Once the waitress had walked off, after sending them all another smile, Lily furrowed her eyebrows in confusion; why had she been staring at the waitresses' boobs? She couldn't be . . . . Lily didn't even want to think about that, especially not right now. Besides, that was impossible. She couldn't be.

Once the waitress had disappeared into the kitchen, the boys stopped ogling after her. Lily didn't know how to feel right now. She was just so overwhelmed over everything and she had so much on her mind it was hard to focus on only one thing. Lost in her own thoughts, Lily missed it when Sam spilled his coffee all over himself.

Lily couldn't hide her small giggle as Sam jumped out of his seat, knocking over a tray that a waitress was carrying, plates and bowls crashing to the floor. Adam tried to leave the booth after him, but he tripped as he was standing up, falling onto the floor next to their table. Lily burst into laughter at this, although in the back of her mind she knew that was a really bad sign. Why did Adam have bad luck, too?

Lily and Dean made eye contact, coming to the same conclusion; the damned waitress had stolen the rabbit's foot. One minute Adam has good luck, then she comes over and Adam has bad luck - it wasn't rocket science.

"Son of a bitch," Dean spoke, getting out of the booth as well. Lily followed after him and helped Adam to his feet. Adam slipped and went crashing to the floor again, but this time he pulled Lily down with him.

She yelped as her heavily bruised stomach came in contact with the floor as she landed. Swearing beneath her breath, Lily pushed herself off the floor and clambered back to her feet, her bruises aching and throbbing more than they had already been. Maybe that had been karma for laughing at her brothers, but that didn't mean she was okay with it. This time she left Adam on the floor, not trusting him and his newfound clumsiness.

Her brothers clambered to their feet and the quartet of siblings ran from the restaurant in search of the black-haired waitress who had stolen the foot. Dean was up front, followed by Sam, then Adam, then Lily, so when Sam tripped over nothing and fell to the ground, Adam didn't have time to stop himself or jump over his brother, so he tripped too. Though Lily, who didn't have bad luck, was able to come to an abrupt stop before she tripped as well. Adam had fallen on top of Sam and the two siblings had identical groans of pain as they tried to get back up.

Despite how serious this could turn out to be, Lily grinned. "Maybe this birthday hasn't been so bad."

"Man, you two suck," Dean said at the same time to their brothers, helping them both to their feet. Sam had cut both his knees open, but compared to Lily's bruised-up face it was nothing. At least in her opinion, anyway. Adam came away mostly unscathed, probably because Sam had broken his fall.

"How bad is this damn luck gonna get?" Adam groaned, holding his stomach where Lily guessed he'd hit during the fall.

Lily sobered up immediately, knowing the answer to that question. Neither Sam nor Dean answered their little brother's question, mostly because they all already knew the answer. They needed to get the foot back to one of them, at the very least. Maybe her brothers could trade it off, keeping the good luck for long enough to ensure they weren't about to die, before handing it back to the other and suffering through the bad luck for a little while, but not long enough to die. It could work, Lily supposed, as long as Bobby or someone could come up with a solution quickly. Her idea wouldn't work forever, she knew that, but it would buy them some time.

She wasn't going to sit around and let the rest of her family die.

The siblings headed back to the apartment building of the two men who had originally stolen the foot. Apparently one of the guys died in an accident earlier that day, conveniently after he'd lost the foot. Despite the fact that the guy had been a greedy idiot, Lily knew that his death meant bad news for her brothers and for her. It meant that, once the foot was lost, your luck really did go so sour that you ended up dead. Lily had figured this already, but to actually see it in action had been worse, like it had just been in theory before but now it was real.

Lily, her new gun at her side, followed Dean into the apartment, Sam and Adam following in behind. It was sort of ironic that, earlier that day, Lily had been the one in the back as she was the least experienced and the most likely to mess up and get herself hurt, but now Sam and Adam were officially lower on the totem pole than she was. It was sort of a nice feeling. It just felt nice to not be the worst hunter out of the four siblings for once.

The surviving man of the duo was sitting in the apartment alone, drinking a bottle of some sort of alcohol. The lights were dimmed and there was soft Spanish music playing in the background, talking about God. Lily couldn't help but feel bad for the man, despite the fact that he'd stolen from her father and his friend had broken her nose. He had just lost his roommate, and he'd been the one to find him dead, too. She could truly empathize with the man, having lost both of her parents, and she felt his sadness as soon as she stepped into the room.

"Oh, man," The man groaned as he spotted the siblings. "What do you want?"

"Heard about your friend," Dean said, moving further into the apartment, his younger siblings on his tail. "It's bad luck."

"Piss off."

Lily glowered at him, but she understood why he was angry with them. If she were him she'd be angry, too - hell, she was always angry anyway these days.

"Look," Lily spoke from beside Dean. "We know some woman hired you to steal the rabbit's foot."

"Yeah? How do you know that?" The man asked.

"Because she just stole it back from us," Dean replied.

The man began to laugh, hysterically, as if someone had just told the funniest joke in the world. Lily rolled her eyes, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

"Listen man," Sam said from behind her and Dean. Lily could hear him walking forward, but he must've tripped over something as, seconds later, she heard crashing noises and yelps as he fell to the floor. She whipped around to see him laying on the floor next to a now broken lamp and a busted up radio.

"Sam, this is like the seventh time you've fallen," Lily said, trying to keep a straight face. In truth, this was sort of funny. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm good," Sam replied, groaning and sounding muffled.

Adam, who had been standing next to Sam, moved to go help him up. "Adam, don't move," Lily ordered, shooting him a stern look. "As funny as it'd be, we don't need you falling, too." It felt strange to be ordering around her brothers, considering that she was the youngest and that was how they treated her. Oh how the tables have turned.

Lily moved to help her brother up off the ground, but Sam moved one of his legs and she tripped over it, falling on top of Sam roughly. Both she and Sam groaned in pain; they had bumped heads as she landed. She was pretty sure she could hear Adam laughing in the background and she made a mental note to punch him for it when everything had gone back to normal.

"Lils, you okay?" Dean asked, pausing from his talk with the man.

"Just dying a little, no biggie."

Lily clambered to her feet, leaving Sam to his own devices, and moved back to where Dean was standing. She rubbed the side of her head where her head and Sam's had collided, wincing as she put pressure on it.

"It wasn't a freak accident that killed your partner," Dean was saying when Lily tuned back into the conversation.

"What?" The man asked, clearly confused.

"It was the rabbit's foot."

The man scoffed. "You're crazy, man."

"You know I'm not. You saw what happened, what it did - all the flukes, all the luck. When you lose the foot that luck goes sour," Dean explained. "That's what killed your friend." He gestured back to Sam, who had made it back upright, and Adam. "And my brothers here are next, and who knows how many more innocent people after that. Now, if you don't help us stop this thing then that puts those deaths on your head." The man's eyes widened at this. "Now, I can read people, and I get it. You're a thief, and a scumbag. That's fine, but you're not a killer, are you?" Dean and the man stared at one another, neither one breaking eye contact. The man seemed to be mulling over what Dean had said. Eventually, he broke, spilling the name that they needed.

Dean was seriously impressive; he was so good with people and Lily couldn't help but feel a bit jealous. Dean was so good at everything, and Lily? All she was good at was messing things up.

The four of them left the apartment building soon after that. It had grown dark, and Lily's birthday was soon going to come to a close. It hadn't even really felt like her birthday, not really, and now it was almost over. Though, Sam and Dean didn't really celebrate their own birthdays anymore, and they hadn't really done much for Adam this year either. Lily figured that they had made a bigger deal of her birthday because she was still so young, because they wanted to give her some sense of normalcy. Normal teenage girls celebrated their birthdays, normal teenage girls went out to breakfast or lunch or dinner with their families, but normal teenage girls weren't orphans who spent their birthdays getting beat up by the men who'd stolen from their father. Despite her brother's (and even her own) attempts, Lily wasn't a normal teenage girl and she never would be - no matter how hard anyone tried.

Dean's cell phone began to ring as they walked to the Impala. He quickly answered it and came to a stop next to the car. Lily tried to put her ear next to the phone so she could listen in on the conversation, but she was far too short to reach. Slightly annoyed, she crossed her arms over her chest and turned back to Sam and Adam.

Sam was attempting to scrape some chewed up gum off the bottom of his shoe using a broken sewer grate, while Adam was making disgusted noises as he realized he'd just stepped into dog crap. Lily couldn't stop the grin that formed on her face; this was just too damn funny. She put her hand over her mouth to try and muffle her giggles. The giggling made her nose ache as her bruised skin was tugged and moved, but she ignored it, having become more used to it as the day went on. Suddenly, as he was trying to rub the crap off his shoe, Adam lost his balance. He toppled over and landed on the ground with a squish. Lily's jaw dropped as she realized what had caused the squishing noise: Adam had just fallen on top of the dog crap. Failing to control herself, Lily doubled over and held her stomach as she laughed - loud and unapologetic. Adam let out a string of loud curses as he stood back up, and Lily figured that maybe this birthday hadn't been all bad.

A splash to the left caught Lily's attention. She looked over at Sam and noticed he was now sporting only one shoe. Her laughter intensified at this - real, unapologetic, laughter. It was laughter that wasn't being held back, the kind that Lily hadn't had in a long time. She couldn't help but notice just how good it felt.

Sam had knelt down to try and get his shoe out of the sewer, but it was too far down to reach. He stood back up, looking thoroughly defeated. Lily soon calmed down, sending both of her brothers a grin, but she was only met with matching glares.

Dean ended his phone call, hanging up and stuffing his phone into one of his pockets. He turned back around and noticed the look on Sam's face and the way Adam was wiping off his jacket. "What?" He asked them, eyebrows raised.

"I lost my shoe," Sam spoke.

Lily giggled, again. "And Adam fell in dog crap." She felt a punch on her shoulder and she threw a sharp glare at Adam as she rubbed at it, knowing it was him. He continued to glare at her, but she ignored him.

Dean turned back toward the Impala, sighing.

"Adam, you smell like shit," Lily commented, scrunching up her nose in disgust.

"Thanks, Lils."

---

Not long after they had arrived back at the motel, Dean on the phone with Bobby once again. Lily had argued with her brothers and had actually managed to be allowed to sit in the front seat, Sam being booted to the back with Adam. It was part of her birthday celebration, she supposed, but she had really wanted to sit as far away from Adam as possible. He needed to just throw out that jacket; it was torn a bit and had small splats of dried blood on it, too. It wasn't worth it anymore.

"All right, Bobby, thanks. We owe you - another one," Dean spoke into his phone as the Impala came to a stop. "All right, Bobby's got it on pretty good authority that this Bela chick lives in Queens," He explained, after shoving his phone back into his pocket. "So, it'll take me about two hours to get there."

"So, what are we doing then?" Sam asked from the seat behind Lily.

"Both of you are staying here, 'cause I don't want your bad luck gettin' us killed." Lily chuckled; now look who wasn't allowed to even go hunting anymore. "And Lily is gonna be watchin' you guys."

Lily sent Dean a look. "What?" She asked. "I want to go with you! I wanna hunt, not babysit!" She exclaimed, angrily.

Dean chuckled. "Welcome to my life, Sis," He said, sarcastically.

"I'm serious, Dean! Don't you need backup or something?"

"They need you more than I do."

"Dean, Lily's right, this is dumb. I don't need my little sister to babysit me!" Adam added in, equally as annoyed. Both Sam and Adam were being treated like little kids, which was admittedly entertaining, but it was now becoming annoying. Now she couldn't go to Queens with Dean because of it.

The four of them entered the motel room, the three youngest feeling incredibly annoyed at the current predicament. Dean immediately headed over to the table and pulled two dining chairs out, setting them side by side. He dragged Adam and Sam over to the chairs, ignoring their complaints, and sat them down.

"I want you both to sit here and don't move, okay? Don't turn off the light, don't turn on the light, don't even scratch your nose," Dean ordered them, then he turned to Lily. "Watch them, make sure they don't die." Lily said nothing. She just glared up at him, her arms crossed over her chest. She would claim that she wasn't bitter, but she was.

Dean quickly left, shutting the door behind him.

Sam immediately began to scratch at his nose, doing exactly what Dean had just told him not to.

"Hey!" Lily exclaimed, sending Sam a stern look. "Dean literally just said not to do that! I swear if either of you guys die on my watch I'm gonna kill you." Babysitting - or, brothersitting? - was already harder than it looked. She should be getting paid to do this, she thought to herself.

The three of them sat in silence for a few moments.

"Jesus Christ, this is gonna be the most boring four hours ever." It was one thing to be stuck in a car for hours on end - at least there she didn't have to keep an eye on her incompetent brothers, she was able to think about other things, and she was able to listen to music. Right now she wasn't able to do anything of that. She had to watch her siblings and make sure they didn't knock themselves out or anything dumb like that; it was honestly like having to keep two-year-olds from hurting themselves.

---

Lily wanted to scream. It had been two hours of nothing - two hours of boring. She was going to explode before Dean got back. Sam kept leaning back on his chair, which could end up with him cracking his head open if he fell, and Adam kept jiggling his leg up and down, which was just plain annoying. If she didn't explode, Lily was gonna end up banging her head against the wall. Babysitting was exhausting.

All of a sudden, Lily heard their air conditioner sputter and die. This wasn't what she had wanted. With a groan, Lily went over to inspect the broken device. "You guys and your damn bad luck," She muttered beneath her breath. Leaning down, Lily pressed a few of the buttons, but none of them worked. It began to release light, grey smoke into the room and Lily looked back at her brothers with her eyes widened. Smoke meant fire, right? This was not how Lily had planned to die - not by a long shot. She wasn't about to be killed by an air conditioner, that was just lame. She sent her brothers a panicked look; she didn't know anything about air conditioners.

Sam went to stand up, but Lily began to shout at him. "Sit down! Just tell me what to do from there." She didn't need him breaking a leg on top of this.

"Maybe, I don't know, try using the blanket to stop it?" Sam suggested, forming his words as more of a question than anything.

Lily raised an eyebrow at him, but shrugged and headed to the nearest bed, ripping the blanket from it. She went back to the smoking air conditioner and began to hit it with the blanket, trying to stop it from smoking. Once the smoke died down, Lily dropped the blanket to the floor with a relieved sigh, glad that nothing too horrible had happened.

She'd spoken too soon.

As she was standing back up, Lily felt something strange on her arm. Looking down, she noticed that her sleeve had caught on fire. Completely panicking now, Lily began to shriek. Sam and Adam immediately rushed over, ignoring their orders to stay put, and began to try and put it out. Adam grabbed the large curtain from the window and began to pat Lily's arm with it, effectively putting out the fire, only to trip over his own feet and bring Sam and Lily down with him. All three of them hit their heads on the floor - hard. On a normal day their falls wouldn't have been too bad, maybe a few bruises, but with Sam and Adam's bad luck it caused them all to lose consciousness.

When Lily woke up, sporting a massive headache, she was duct taped to a chair. Confused and groggy, she looked up to see an older man with sandy blonde hair. Eyebrows furrowed, Lily took in her surroundings: she was still in the motel room, albeit duct taped, and Adam and Sam were in the two chairs next to her. They'd been kidnapped, but she had no clue who these guys were and why they would want to kidnap them. She tried to rack her brain to figure out what they'd ever done to them, but she couldn't remember ever seeing them before. Looking to her right, Lily realized she was the only one awake; their bad luck must've meant they'd hit their heads harder than Lily had. It was their bad luck that had caused Lily to get knocked out in the first place, she thought, bitterly. If Sam had never touched the rabbit's foot this hunt would've been a lot easier. She certainly wouldn't be covered in multiple dark purple bruises, that's for sure.

"Oh, the girl's awake," The blonde man standing in front of her exclaimed. He grinned at her and Lily forced herself to not panic, to not be afraid. "Welcome back," He said, now smirking at her. "We'll wait for your brothers to wake up before we explain."

Adam and Sam were both awake within the next few minutes, groaning in pain and looking around in confusion. Lily said nothing to either of them; she just threw them both glares, showing her clear annoyance at the situation they had both gotten her into.

Admittedly, Lily felt a lot safer once her brothers were awake. Despite the curse, Lily felt more comfortable knowing that she wasn't alone in this, that her brothers were there to protect her - although she had a feeling that she might have to be the one to protect them if it came down to it.

Looks like Sam and Adam actually did need her.

"We didn't even have to knock you guys out," The other man, this one a brunet, commented. "You guys just went all spastic and knocked yourselves out. It was like watching Jerry Lewis trying to stack chairs." Lily didn't know who Jerry Lewis was, but she figured it wasn't important.

"Sorry, not sorry, but who the hell are you?" Lily asked, raising her eyebrows at them. She sounded a lot braver than she felt, even with her brothers at her side.

The sandy blonde haired man snapped his fingers at her. "I used to think your friend Gordon sent me," He said.

Lily groaned. Gordon Walker had been a hunter who had tortured an innocent woman for information, something that she and her brothers were very much against. Lily hadn't actually met Gordon, considering she still hadn't been allowed on many hunts last year, but her brothers had told her about him. He had killed his own sister, something that Lily couldn't even begin to try and understand. How could someone just kill their own sibling like that? When Lily thought of her own siblings, she could never picture herself hurting them like that - not ever.

"Gordon asked me to track you down, Sam, and put a bullet in your brain," The sandy haired man continued. Lily's breath hitched as he said this; now Sam's life was even more at risk than it already was. Her brothers were good people, they didn't deserve to die, and she couldn't even fathom the thought of it actually happening.

"Great," Sam said, sarcastically.

"But," The man continued, paying no mind to Sam. "As it turns out, I'm on a mission from God."

Lily furrowed her eyebrows in confusion, but she didn't have much time to digest this as the man punched Sam in the face, knocking him out cold.

"Hey!" Adam yelled, angrily. His face was turning red and his fists were clenched at his sides, where they were still duct taped down. "Don't touch him!" The man punched Adam in the face as well, just for this remark, and Adam fell unconscious. Damn that bad luck, Lily thought to herself.

Lily looked back up at the men, trying to not make them angry with her. "A mission from God?" She asked, skeptically. Okay, maybe this wasn't the best thing to say when she was trying to stay on their good side, but she was curious.

"Yes, he chose me," The sandy haired man said, crossing his arms over his chest.

Lily raised an eyebrow. "To do what?"

The man didn't reply, he just went over to the kitchen area and filled up a glass of water. Moving back to Sam, whose face had begun to bruise from the punch, he splashed the water onto his face, awaking him instantly. He repeated the process with Adam, and Lily failed to see what the point of knocking them out was - for fun?

"You were part of that demon plan to open the gate, weren't you?" The man asked Sam.

"We did everything we could to stop it," Sam replied, instantly.

"Lie, lie, lie!" The man exclaimed, and Lily couldn't help but think that he was insane. "You were in on it. You know what their next move is, too, don't you?"

Sam, still dripping with water, glared at the duo. "No, I don't, okay? You're wrong about all of this."

"We tried to stop it," Adam chimed in, also still dripping. "We spent months trying to stop it all, I swear."

"Where are they gonna hit us next?" He asked Sam, ignoring Adam's remarks. Sam sighed, refusing to answer, which angered him. "Where?" He asked, slapping Sam across the face.

Sam sucked in a sharp breath, wincing in pain.

"Stop it! We don't know!" Lily yelled, struggling to break free from the duct tape, but she wasn't nearly strong enough.

"Shut it!" The brunet man snapped at her.

"Don't talk to her like that," Adam snapped.

"Gordon told me all about you, Sam, about your powers. You're some kind of weirdo psychic freak."

"No, not anymore," Sam said, truthfully. "No powers, no visions - nothing."

"Lie!" The sandy haired man yelled, punching Sam in the face.

Lily, now growing more and more frustrated, continued to try and break out from the duct tape, but she was still too weak. What the hell was duct tape even made of? As she struggled, Lily caught a flash of yesterday morning, when she had been struggling to rip the duct tape off her birthday present and had used her pocket knife. Remembering that her pocket knife had been in her jeans' pocket, Lily tried to reach into her pocket and grab it. It was a bit too out of her reach. Anger rising, she strained herself to grab it, her wrist beginning to hurt from the effort. Thankfully, she reached it and pulled it from her pocket stealthily, seeing as the men were preoccupied with Sam.

They were dumb for not noticing the pocket knife in her jeans when they'd patted them down - if they had patted them down. Maybe her luck wasn't all bad? Maybe Sam and Adam's bad luck wasn't always affecting her? Lily didn't understand how it worked, considering she didn't have a rabbit's foot rule book, but she was just thankful that the men had overlooked her front pocket.

Tuning out the conversation between Sam and the man, Lily began to cut through the duct tape near her hand, but she had to turn her hand at an odd angle to be able to do so. Powering through her growing discomfort, Lily continued to saw through the tape, trying to stay as silent as possible. It was gonna be a long shot, considering they had wrapped the tape around her three times, but maybe she could loosen it enough to be able to break free.

But, even if she did, her brothers still had bad luck which meant she had sort-of bad luck, so there would be no way in Hell that she'd be able to take down two 6'0" men without her gun, which she had left on the table a few feet away. Despite this, she knew that she couldn't just do nothing.

Lily had made considerable progress when she heard Dean's voice from the doorway. She quickly tuned back into the conversation. "Nope. No destiny, just a rabbit's foot." Despite the seriousness of the situation, Lily couldn't help but grin as she saw her brother. He would always come to save the day, she thought to herself.

"Put the gun down, son," The sandy haired man, who had a gun pointed at Sam's head, spoke. "Or you're gonna be scraping brain off the wall."

"Oh, this thing?" Dean asked, motioning to his gun.

The man nodded. "Yeah, that thing."

"Okay," Dean said, setting the gun down, and Lily realized that he must've gotten the rabbit's foot back. He must have good luck, which meant Lily sort-of did, too. She began to cut through the duct tape more quickly. "But, see, there's something about me that you don't know." He picked a motel pen off the table.

"Yeah?" The man asked, now turning around and pointing his gun at Dean. "And what would that be?"

"It's my lucky day," Dean spoke, a small smile forming on his lips. He tossed the pen at the man and it perfectly flew into the gun, jamming it. "Oh my god, did you see that shot?" Lily grinned as the men looked incredibly confused.

She quickly figured that this was as good a time as any to break free, so she did. Ripping the duct tape from where it had been cut through, Lily managed to free herself - it was a lot easier than it should've been, but that was probably due to the good luck. She quickly got to her feet, drawing the attention of the brunet man. He advanced on her, reeling his fist back to punch her, but she stuck her foot out and he tripped. The man went crashing to the floor, getting knocked out as his head broke his fall. She grinned, loving the feeling of taking a guy out with minimal effort. Dean picked up the T.V remote off the same table and chucked it at the other man, knocking him out as well.

"I'm Batman," Dean said, after a pause. Lily grinned at him, running to him and pulling him into a tight hug. She always felt so elated when they took down the bad guy, or when her brothers did at least, considering she wasn't really ready to take down the bad guy by herself just yet.

"Yeah," Sam agreed, sarcastically. "You're Batman."

"Hell yeah, you are," Lily said to Dean, Sam's sarcasm going over her head.

"You were pretty awesome, too, kiddo," Dean complemented, hugging her back. "You knocked one of 'em out."

Lily pulled away from the hug, still grinning. "Hell yeah I did."

Once Lily and Dean had gotten the duct tape off of their brothers, Adam turned to Lily, looking a bit serious. Lily's eyebrows furrowed as she saw his expression, not knowing what he was going to say.

"Look, I know you don't think I do, but I do care about Dean's deal, okay?" Adam said, looking and sounding genuine. Besides, Lily could tell when her brother was lying. He was an excellent liar, it was part of being a hunter, but everyone had tells for when they lied and Lily knew Adam's - he was being genuine. "He's my brother and I -" He trailed off, looking conflicted. "I care about him, obviously. I've just . . I've been trying to not think about it."

Lily nodded. "Me too," She admitted. "It's hard to think about. I don't know how I could live without any of you guys. I don't know how we lived without Sam for four years."

Adam nodded in agreement or maybe understanding, and he pulled her in for a quick hug. He pulled away seconds later. "No chick flick moments, Lils." He sounded so much like Dean in that moment that, if she hadn't been looking at him, she would've thought that it had been Dean speaking. Him and Dean both had deep, kind of gruff voices, but Adam's was admittedly more high-pitched still. The two of them were still incredibly similar, and sometimes Lily forgot that they were only half-siblings; Adam seemed a lot more like Sam and Dean than Lily felt she herself was. They all looked quite similar, even though Sam had darker hair, but Lily looked different. Maybe it was because she was half Latina, but she just felt like she was so much more different than they were. She knew she was being stupid for thinking this, but she just felt like an outsider to them at times.

Lily playfully punched him on the arm. "You started it, asshole."

Hours later, the four siblings were at a cemetery using the solution Bobby had come up with to get rid of the foot for good. Sam sprinkled the last ingredient onto the fire before tightening the lid onto the jar. "All right," He spoke, standing up. "Bone ash, Cayenne pepper - that should do it."

Dean was paying no attention to his brother, more preoccupied with his lottery tickets. Adam was looking over his shoulder as he scratched, trying to figure out how much money they'd won. "One second," Dean said.

"Dean," Sam groaned.

"Hey, back off, Jinx. I'm bringing home the bacon."

Lily smiled. "We're so gonna be rich, this is great," She remarked, ignoring the look Sam threw her.

Dean stuck the lotto tickets in his jacket pocket, which was laying on top of a nearby grave. "All right." He grabbed the rabbit's foot from the other pocket and held it up. "Say goodbye to 'wascawy wabbit'."

Suddenly, Lily heard the tell-tale sound of a gun cocking. All four of them whipped around, coming face-to-face with Bela, the girl who had stolen the rabbit's foot from them in the diner. Lily glared at her. Damn her and her sticky fingers and her perfect boobs for getting them into this situation, Lily thought to herself. Her eyes quickly widened as she realized what she'd thought. Perfect boobs? Why had she thought that? Lily quickly tossed these thoughts aside, pretending like they hadn't happened.

"I think you'll find that that belongs to me," Bela spoke in a smooth British accent, pointing a gun at them. "Or, you know, . . . whatever." There was a pause where they all just stared at her, and she stared back. "Put the foot down, honey," She told Dean, a smile on her face.

"No," Dean said, defiantly. "You're not gonna shoot anybody. See, I happen to be able to read people." He was repeating exactly what he'd said to the man in the apartment building. "Okay, you're a thief - fine. But you're not -" He was cut off as Bela shot Sam in the shoulder.

Sam collapsed to the ground, and Lily quickly knelt down beside him to check if he was okay. Face contorted in pain and teeth clenched, Sam claimed he was fine.

"Son of a -" Dean moved towards Bela, but stopped abruptly as she spoke.

"Back off, tiger," She snapped at him. "Back off. Any of you make another move and I'll pull the trigger." Lily helped Sam clamber to his feet. "You've got the luck, Dean, you I can't hit. But your brothers? Them I can't miss." Despite the anger she felt as this, Lily couldn't help but admit it was incredibly smart. Damn her.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" Dean exclaimed, loudly. "You don't just go around shooting people like that!"

"Relax; it's a shoulder hit, I can aim. Besides, who here hasn't shot a few people?" Bela asked, rhetorically. Lily racked her brain to remember a time where she had actually shot an actual person, but she couldn't - not that that really mattered, of course. "Put the rabbit's foot on the ground, now."

"All right!" Dean yelled, putting his hands up. "All right. Take it easy." Dean began to lower the foot to the ground. "Think fast," He said, throwing the foot at Bela. Bela instinctively caught it, transferring the luck from Dean to her. Lily smirked; she'd have to burn it now.

"Damn," Bela muttered beneath her breath.

"All right, let's destroy that piece of crap now," Adam suggested, before turning to the fire that stood behind him.

The five of them gathered around the fire and Bela tossed the foot in, looking extremely annoyed about it. Lily really couldn't blame her; that thing was worth millions of dollars. At least they still had the lottery tickets.

The foot began to burn, golden sparks flying from it as its powers were destroyed.

"Thanks very much," Bela said, sarcasm practically oozing from her voice. "I'm out one and a half million and on the bad side of a very powerful, fairly psychotic buyer."

"Wow, I really don't feel bad about that," Dean replied. "Sam? Ads? Lils? How 'bout you?"

"Nope," Lily agreed.

"No," Sam replied. "Not even a little."

"Sucks to suck," Adam added, smirking.

Bela walked away, but turned back around and leaned against a nearby grave. "Maybe next time I'll leave you out to dry."

"Oh, don't go away angry, just go away," Dean said, and Lily couldn't help but agree. The sooner she was gone, the better.

"Have a nice night, boys," Bela replied, before leaving.

"I'm a girl!" Lily yelled after her, throwing her hands up in the air in annoyance.

Once the rabbit's foot had fully burned the four of them headed back to the Impala, Sam still holding his gun shot wound. He'd been carrying their shovel with them, but Adam had taken pity on him and carried it for him.

"You good?" Dean asked Sam as he lead the way back to the car.

"I'll live." Sam sounded so defeated and Lily honestly couldn't blame him; he'd been through more crap these past two days than she had, and she herself was feeling the exact same way.

"Guess we're back to normal now," Dean commented.
"Whatever normal is," Lily muttered to herself.

"No good luck, no bad luck," Dean continued, having not heard Lily's comment.

"At least we've got the lottery tickets, though," Adam said, a grin spreading across his face. Lily's grin quickly matched his as she realized that they were gonna have so much money once they cashed those things in. There was one good thing that came out of this besides seeing Adam covered in dog crap.

"Oh, I forgot." Dean patted his jacket pocket, looking for the lotto tickets, a grin plastered on his face. "We're at 46,000 dollars." He continued to pat down his pockets, but he came up empty-handed.

He had lost them.

As Bela's car drove past, she beeped at them a few times and it suddenly clicked in Lily's head. Dean hadn't lost them.

Bela had stolen them.

Lily's jaw dropped and she made eye contact with each of her brothers. She couldn't believe this. They were out almost fifty grand. Fifty-thousand-dollars was now down the freakin' drain, as if these past two days hadn't been bad enough.

"Son of a bitch!" Dean screamed.

---

The next morning Lily was in the motel bathroom, sitting on top of the toilet seat. She had just wanted a bit of privacy, and the bathroom was the only real place she was ever able to get it. She didn't have a bedroom or anything like it, so when she wanted private moments she was forced to find solace in a grungy, old motel bathroom.

In her hands, Lily held the photograph she'd found of her mother. She had tried to understand why her father hadn't given this to her, but maybe he just hadn't looked through the boxes carefully enough? Despite that, Lily was so glad that she had this picture now. She had never known what her mother had looked like, what physical features Lily had gotten from her mother besides her hair and eyes. Now, after analyzing the picture in more depth, Lily could see more similarities between the two of them. They had quite similar noses (you know, when Lily's wasn't bruised and swollen) and, even better, the same smile. Everytime she smiled from now on she would think of her mother and her smile, their matching smiles. It felt nice to be able to feel a connection between herself and her mother for the first time ever. It felt nice to be able to have a part of her mother with her, even if it was just a smile. It meant a lot to Lily, who hadn't known of this connection up until now, who had never truly had a mother in her life.

Lily stood up to look at herself in the mirror. Dark brown hair, brown eyes, her busted up nose, and her mother's smile stared back at her. Her soft smile soon turned to a grin, but it was short lived. Life was unfair - too unfair to Lily - and it made her angry. There were so many awful people in this world that had mothers who loved them, who were still alive, but Lily was a good person - despite what others thought and despite what she herself thought at times - and she didn't have a mother. That was just unfair. She didn't get to choose if she wanted to be part of a hunter family, she didn't choose if she wanted a mother or not, she didn't choose if she wanted any of this - not really. She didn't get to choose anything, and none of it was fair.

Still looking at herself in the mirror, Lily knew what she did get to choose, what no one else could have a say in.

It was going to be her choice and her choice alone.

And her brothers were going to hate it

A/N: I had said that this chapter was gonna be more happy but I guess I lied because Lily has a breakdown in this one, too, but what's new? The good news is that she definitely won't be doing that every chapter, especially as she begins to control her emotions more as she grows older. Anyway, I've got some good foreshadowing going on in this chapter, but I'm not gonna say what they are haha. But I am definitely laying down the groundwork for a plot in season 4, which you can probably already guess. Also, this ended on a little bit of a cliffhanger ooooh haha. I had Lily say stuff about Buffalo because that's where I'm from ! Which, by the way, Queens is 6 hours from Buffalo so what the heck Supernatural ? Anyway,,,

Thanks to you all for sticking with me through these long waits, I know it sucks! Believe me, I know, but life gets in the way a lot. The good news is that summer is about to officially begin for me! Hopefully, that will mean more updates!

As always, if you want to stay more updated with me and this story, you can follow Lily's tumblr! Especially if you have any questions about Sink or Swim, about Lily, or about me as I'm easier to reach on there. Brilliantlily. Tumblr . com :)