4
Cinderella and Boxers


Aria


To say Sam Winchester looked shocked would've been a gross understatement of an understatement. Disturbed would be a better adjective anyway. "Three times? W-Why?"

Aria's eyebrow shot up condescendingly. "Do you know anything about birds? They need a hell of a lot of calories in order to have enough energy to fly."

"How much do you need?" he asked, seemingly unsure of whether or not he really wanted to know.

"About three or four thousand a day. Sometimes I've gone up to six thousand. It depends on what I do, what my mood is, and what kind of food I'm eating."

"Sixthousand calories a day?!" he cried.

"Mutanthybrid, remember?" she reminded him. "Besides, that's not nearly as bad as the others."

"Others?" he echoed, urging her to go on.

She didn't go for it. "Others."

"You're…just gonna leave it at that?" he asked with a hesitant smile.

"I'm not the only mutant," she pointed out blandly.

He raised an eyebrow in amusement. "I got that."

She broke eye contact and shuffled on the chair, trying to end the conversation, but Sam wasn't to be deterred. He wasn't the most persistent bastard she'd encountered, but she certainly didn't want to see exactly how persistent he could get.

"So how is it that you manage to take flight with those wings?" he asked suddenly. She frowned as he continued. "I mean, from what I've gauged, those things aren't as heavy as they look. It'd be virtually impossible to take off with the normal human mass with wings that light without gale-force winds."

When she wasn't forthcoming with any information, he shifted and kept going.

"Not to mention the issue of steering. If you didn't plummet straight down, you'd be buffeted back and forth. But since you managed to stay airborne, and it's not even a windy night, I'd say your bones must be light, right? Or are your wings stronger than they look? No, that doesn't make sense."

He continued to ramble on and on about bones. Bones. Yes, fucking bones. It was ridiculous. He managed to find nearly a thousand theories about how she managed to get off the ground within a time span of twenty minutes, and by the time he finally argued himself into a circle in which he finally decided to convince himself it was because her bones were like a bird's, Aria finally cracked.

"Okay! For God's sake, I have bird bones!" she snapped impatiently, choosing to roll her eyes at Sam's smug expression. "They seem smaller and should seem lighter, but they've got a much denser composition than normal human bones. That's why I managed to kick Trench Coat's ass without cracking my own skeleton in the process."

"So that contributes to the high caloric intake?" he clarified. "Because of high energy expenditure?"

She didn't see how her bones and high energy expenditure correlated, but whatever. "Because of high energy expenditure, sure."

"You should see Dean eat," he said, crossing his arms over his chest and smiling at some spot on the carpet. "Especially when there's pie in front of him."

She scoffed. "Like a pig in a trough?"

"More like a zombie," he corrected her.

Aria threw her head back and laughed. "Oh, no, no, you have never seen a zombie eat."

"And you have?" he teased.

She smirked, leisurely leaning back with a smirk. "Oh, yes, I have."

The smile was wiped off Sam's face as he saw exactly how serious she was in spite of her smirk. "A-Are you serious? A real zombie? Flesh-eating, gimpy gait, and everything?"

She nodded once. "I told you, Sam. I'm not the only mutant, and I'm most definitely not the only experiment."

"Are you telling me that the government produced a zombie?"

"Among other things," she answered bitterly.

But he wasn't about to let that little piece of disturbing information go. "On purpose?"

"As far I as I know? No, but one can never be sure about government agendas," she said nonchalantly. "They could very well have made one just to see if it could be doneto see if a Zombie Apocalypse was something to be feared."

"And it is," he said flatly.

She nodded. "It is."

He sighed, and ran a hand down his face. "There anything else you wanna share? Any sphinxes? Centaurs?"

"Zombies aren't mythical creatures, dimwit," she reminded him teasingly. "Don't confuse DawnoftheDead with TheChroniclesofNarnia."

"For a government-made mutant, you seem pretty well-versed in pop culture."

"We didn't train all the time," she said, slightly affronted.

"Waittrain? Train for what?"

Shit.

She mentally berated herself for slipping up, but she refused to let it show.

"Aria, what were you trained for?" he asked, pleading for her to elaborate with those puppy-dog eyes.

When she continued her silence, he gave up on pushing the subject and turned to a different aspect of their previous conversation.

"So those scientists didn't keep you locked up in cages?" he asked cautiously, choosing his words carefully.

"No."

"And aside from this…training, were you guys able to do a lot of other things?"

She sighed and threw him a bone. "We were kidswe tried to occupy ourselves the way normal kids did. Read books, watched bootleg movies, played pranks on each other, etcetera, etcetera."

"The otherswere they like you?"

"Mutants?"

"Human-avian hybrids."

She watched him for a few seconds, gauging whether or not he was genuinely curious or simply collecting information. He didn't blink.

"Yeah, they were bird-kids too."

"What were they like?"

She'd half-expected him to ask things like, "How old were they?" or "How many of you were there?" or even "Where are they now?" So she was just a little bit thrown off that he asked about their personalities. She sat there for another silent couple of seconds, debating with herself about whether or not she should keep talking, but the longer she stared at him and the longer he met her gaze, the less she…

Hm.

"They were just like every other kid," she sighed finally. "They were weird and funny, could be moody and temperamental at times, loved to watch movies and read books and play video games."

"And these…scientists? They allowed you to play games and…?"

"It was either give us entertainment or have a frustrated, volatile, dangerous mutant on their hands, so, yes, they gave us a Playstation, gave us books, movies, decks of cardsall that shit."

"And were you… Were you happy?"

"As happy as a lab rat could get, yeah, sure. The others made it better for me."

"What do you mean?" Sam asked, keeping his tone light so as to not push her. She appreciated it. "They…protected you?"

She hesitated and then nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, they did."

"Why?"

"I was the baby of the group," she finally answered, feeling just a little pang of defeat at having surrendered some crucial information.

Sam's brows furrowed in concern. "How much younger were you? And the government was training you already?"

Her eyes narrowed at the implications of the last part of his sentence. She'd slipped up big time by mentioning the training. If she was rightwhich she almost always was, anywaythen he must've already figured out exactly what they'd been training her for. Coupled with the way she'd fought Castiel, it wouldn't be hard to put two and two together.

To hell with it.

"I was only two years younger than the second-youngest," she answered. "And we'd been doing missions since I was seven. Don't look so disturbed."

"Seven?! Buthow did you manage it?!"

"We all had our parts to play in the team," she explained. "I never had any hands-on roles until I was old enough. They sent us out on missions, but we were still a priceless instrument for them. They wouldn't risk our well-beings unless it was something incredibly important, and even then, we always had a fully-human team waiting on standby in case something went wrong."

"And you were trained?" he persisted.

"By the best."

He gave her this look that had her skin prickling. "But were you scared?"

She stared up at himat those hazel-green eyes that he and his brother shared. Eyebrows furrowed in worry, mouth set in an anxious line, jaw twitching…

"No."


Burning aches were what slowly brought her out of the black haze of unconsciousness. She didn't stir or move on whatever bed she'd been set on—she didn't want to alert whomever was watching to the fact that she was awake yet. The burning would only get worse, but if she managed to keep a lid on it, she wouldn't have to divulge even more information that they simply did not need to know.

So she lay there, cursing the shitheads who'd done this to her—those labcoat-wearing sons of bitches who were to blame for driving her to insanity and beyond.

Because that's the only reason why she managed to survive the excruciatingly obscene amount of pain she'd been forced to endure these last few years—hell, these last few days. She was already batshit crazy, so no amount of pain could make it worse anymore.

She'd once been fairly nonviolent. She loved flowers, puppies, kittens, and fluffy little bunnies whose noses twitched like Thumper's. She only broke out the roundhouse kicks and sucker punches when necessary. But every time she dwelled on the shit those probe-poking degenerates put her through, she wanted to stomp on chicks and throw puppies into wood chippers.

So when she'd rammed her fist into the defibrillator, she was merely intending to push the "shock" button, but she'd been just so damn pissed off at everything in her life that she unintentionally punched the stupid thing. Fortunately, it still had the desired effect.

Frankly, she was surprised she hadn't gotten struck by lightning in the process too. But that would've been overkill. Sam and Dean were probably already scared shitless enough. Had her electricity-addled brain not been roasting in pain, she would've laughed at the expressions on their faces. She honestly hadn't expected them to be as surprised as they were—especially after all they'd been through already. The history of the Winchester boys was just a series of nightmares one right after the other with the occasional manic or hallucinatory episode interpolated here and there.

Shapeshifters? Wendigos? Flesh-eating ghosts—ghouls? Demon blood-infected children? Spirits of hook-handed priests who abhorred sins of the flesh? Bloody Mary?!

Just hearing the occasional reference in Sam's general overview of their lives was enough to induce nightmares for the rest of her short, pathetic life. She hadn't actually believed him at the time—back when Dean had been off on the food run. But now, after seeing all those demons and suffering through all the shit they'd put her through, it just sunk in.

And it scared the shit out of her.

She'd been lying in the trunk of that fuckwit's car, reminiscing about how in the ever-loving hell she found herself in this new predicament, and the next thing she knew, she was clamping her eyes shut against wave after wave of hot tears and gulping breath after breath to keep herself from screaming in a meltdown.

Demons had kidnapped her and were planning on using her body to survive the Apocalypse.

Even for a mutant freak, this was a shitload to swallow.

You know what else was hard to swallow?

Pain—white-hot, burning, searing, I-am-being-deep-fried kind of pain.

Gritting her teeth and steadfastly keeping her face completely blank to maintain the guise of sleep, Aria was having an increasingly difficult time keeping herself from screaming bloody murder at the intense amount of pain in her torso and in her wings.

Until she finally cracked.

Fuck this.

Sam jerked awake from his hunched position at the dining table as soon as the first sound of her combined scream/growl. He bolted to her side, pushing her shoulders back down on to the bed so she wouldn't curl into a ball and ruin her stitches. Dean had jumped up off the other bed and came to stand on the other side of her bed to hold down her legs.

"Aria! Aria, what's wrong?!" Sam demanded, still struggling to hold her down. Her back arched as she tried to push the weight off her burning wings. "Aria—Aria, honey, it's okay. It's oka—"

"She's not freaking out 'cause of demons, Sam—this is pain!" Dean barked. "Aria, breathe! Come on! Breathe, goddamnit!"

Eventually the white noise in her ears faded enough for her to hear her own breath hissing through her teeth as the residual agony began to ebb. Her breathing slowed, and she finally managed to unlock her jaw and unclench her teeth. She didn't relinquish her death grip on the mattress, but she'd relaxed enough for the Winchesters to let go.

Her eyes opened slowly, taking in the dim light of the motel room. She noted the distinct lack of retro furniture and trench coat-clad angel.

"You were stabbed twice, and God only knows how much blood you lost. You should be dead and cold right now," Dean said, breaking through the silence. "Even Cas tried to heal you, but for some fucked-up reason, it wasn't working."

She groaned and shifted on the bed so she wasn't lying on her back and adding unnecessary pressure on her aching wings. "Did you forget the whole mutant-thing?" she grumbled, wincing and grimacing as she turned. "I'm practically an abomination to nature. I guess it makes sense he can't do shit. Besides…" She groaned and took a break from adjusting herself. "Scientists like to experiment, and I was the lucky bitch who won the super-regeneration."

"Regeneration?" Dean echoed in disbelief. "Like a starfish?"

She didn't have the energy to shoot back some sarcastic comment. "I don't regenerate limbs. I just heal a lot faster than normal people. If you chop off an arm or a finger, it ain't coming back."

"But it's not…instantaneous, right?"

She gingerly lifted up the black shirt she was wearing to peer into the bloody gauze wrapped around her middle. "Almost, but not quite."

"Holy fuck," Dean mumbled under his breath as he leaned over to see the partially-healed stab wounds

"Wait, what about the stitches?" Sam asked, pulling back the gauze in order to let her closed-over wounds air out for a few minutes. "I think we can leave them in for a few more hours."

"No," she said, gingerly touching the edge of the cut. "You may as well take them out now. Stitches help me heal faster."

He sat down on the edge of her bed and pulled out the first aid kit from the bedside table. Dean pulled off the rest of the gauze and tossed it in the trash as Sam pulled out the scissors and tweezers and bent over her stomach to start pulling out the stitches. If he noticed how she'd tensed at his touch, he didn't let on. She didn't have much time to dwell on that, though, as she defiantly ignored the eye-twitchingly weird sensation of the thread being pulled out of her skin. She'd always hated stitches.

"Where are we?" she asked, pointedly staring at the ceiling and the nasty-ass water stain on it.

Dean vanished into the bathroom to wash his hands, but his voice still carried out into the main room. "Still in Florida. Had to fix you up quick before all your guts spilled out."

She blanched. "Were my guts spilling out?"

Sam chuckled, his warm breath brushing over the skin of her stomach and making her skin break out in goosebumps. If he didn't notice that, he was blind and should not be tinkering around her wounds, but once again, he didn't let on.

"No," he said instead, "the only thing that was coming out was blood—and a lot of it."

Something in his tone had her eyes moving away from the ceiling and to his face.

She could sense something about him—something that he'd left out when they'd talked back in the other motel. He was like Vance: broken, but the pieces weren't all laid out. Some were hidden or shattered beyond recognition. And even though these two did a good job of keeping up appearances, she knew that there was a rift between them. She'd spent enough time with Vance and Paul to familiarize herself with that kind of tension.

Dean cleared his throat from the doorway of the bathroom, and her eyes trailed up to his just in time to see the corner of his mouth twitch in a smile. He'd seen her watching Sam.

Shit.

The tugging stopped at her stomach, and she looked down to see Sam throwing away the stitches in the nearby trash bin.

"There—you're done," he announced, heading into the bathroom to take his turn washing his hands.

"Thanks," she muttered, pushing her shirt back down.

Then she finally noticed.

This was not her shirt. She wasn't one to wear skin-tight outfits, but the shirts she chose for herself weren't quite this loose either. It covered the barest minimum, but it still skimmed the tops of her thighs enough to make it extremely uncomfortable being in the room with them. But she didn't say anything about it because these two were nice enough to lend her one and have it all bloodied up.

Until she shifted her legs under the covers and realized she wasn't wearing any pants either.

She cleared her throat and did her best to keep her voice from shaking. "Where are my clothes?"

It was a testament to the state their lives were in that neither of them blushed. In fact, Dean winked at her lecherously. Sam, at least, had the decency to look a little guilty. But not nearly enough to make her feel any better.

"Don't you remember?" Dean reminded her teasingly. "You ripped off your shirt back in Disney—before you tried to commit suicide the first time."

Aria winced but didn't dispute him. It technically was suicide. Technically.

"Then when we got here," Dean continued nonchalantly, "we were trying to fix you up, but you were perforated all over the damn place, so we had to cut off your jeans to really be able to, uh, assess the damage."

Her eyes slid up to the ceiling. By far, this wasn't the most compromising position she'd ever gotten herself caught in. But it certainly wasn't a fun, comfortable experience nonetheless.

"You've got the most ridiculous amount of scars either of us have ever seen, by the way," Dean added. "And in our line of work, my saying that should mean a hell of a lot."

Aria scoffed, unimpressed. "This is nothing. You should've seen Paul." Then she cleared her throat and changed the subject. "I kinda liked those jeans, by the way."

"Hey, at least we didn't take off your underwear!" Dean snapped defensively. Then he blushed. Finally.

"Yes," she agreed lamely. "Fortunately you didn't have to do that."

He scowled. "This how you thank us for saving your life? We thought we'd saved your skinny ass just so you could die, you know that? Had us all nervous you weren't gonna wake up in the morning."

She frowned at him. "That your version of saying you were worried about me?"

He shot her a longsuffering look before going to the mini-fridge. He bent to grab a beer bottle, but he hesitated when he saw that she was watching him with one raised eyebrow.

"You do realize it's five in the morning, right?"

He exaggeratedly pulled out a bottle and made a show of popping the top off and taking a long, dramatic swig. "I need to recover after watching you shock and then stab yourself. You're a suicidal weirdo, you know that? Forget the wings and the crazy-mutant healing crap. You're just a weirdo in general."

"Aria, why did you shock yourself?" Sam asked from where he was still sitting next to her. Her entire right side was warm just having him there.

She sighed and rubbed her forehead for a few seconds. "When a lightning storm hits, it messes with the part of my brain that deals with my tracking ability," she began. "At first, it just threw my sense of direction out of whack, but it's escalated. I don't understand how or why—it's just another glitch that came with the upgrades. It didn't start until about two months ago, and I stumbled on the remedy when a headache hit me when I was flying and I smashed into a transformer."

"What happens when you can't electrocute yourself?" Sam asked, ignoring his brother.

"The pain gets so bad to the point of me blacking out, and I don't wake up until three days after the storm passes," she replied, a little too blasé.

"So either you avoid lightning storms or stay near something that can electrocute you?" Sam clarified.

She nodded once. So much for getting out of these boys' hair without giving them too much information. She'd gone and told them about 60% of her secrets, and it hadn't even been a week.

Dean frowned down at his bottle, swirling the amber liquid contemplatively. "Why exactly did the demons think it'd be a brilliant idea to auction you off at Disney World anyway?"

"I only got snippets of the plan from what I heard from the trunk of the car they stashed me in," she replied, narrowing her eyes and sneering at the memory. "It wasn't a straight-up auction in the first place. Tom was never gonna give me away."

"Tom?" Dean queried.

"The scumbag who kidnapped me and tried to sell me off to the highest bidder," Aria answered, surprised that some smart-aleck retort didn't pop out like it normally did. Hm. Jazz Hands was growing on her. "I know it had something to do with Cinderella's Castle. He said something in passing about magic, and considering the situation, I'm assuming it's got nothing to do with turning pumpkins into carriages or Avada Kedavra-ing people and everything to do with…your kind of magic."

She caught Sam's smile at her Harry Potter reference, and she winked in reply. Thankfully Dean was too engrossed in her newly-supplied information to notice.

"But Cinderella's Castle?! Cinderella?!"

She rolled her eyes. "Why don't you guys research it or something? Isn't that what you do? Research whatever lore or legend might be tied into the town or situation you're dealing with?"

"Did you tell her everything?" Dean accusingly hissed at Sam, who scowled and stood up to grab his laptop off the table.

Aria would deny to the depths of hell itself that she did a mental happy jig when he came over and sat back down in his previous seat—right next to her—and proceeded with his research.

"What exactly are you gonna Google?" she asked. "'Cinderella's Castle lore mystery?'"

"Further research will not be necessary."

All three of them jumped when Castiel suddenly materialized in the middle of the room, tie still askew and coat still rumpled.

Sam glanced at her with a sheepish smile. "You never get used to it."

She smirked, and he dimpled back at her. Then she stiffened when she felt Dean's eyes on her face, and cleared her throat awkwardly before turning back to the angel.

The older Winchester shot her a weird look but shook his head with a sigh. "You find out anything about Tim's—"

"Tom," she corrected him.

"—the shitwad's plans?" Dean finished.

"Yes," the angel answered in his gravelly voice. "From what I gathered, the creator of the park had made a deal with, erm, Tom, a crossroads demon. Oh, and I also brought your car."

She flashed back on her crash course in demonology, courtesy of the younger Mr. Winchester, as Dean rushed to the motel window to see his beloved Impala sitting in the space right in front of the room.

"Walt Disney sold his soul?" Aria sighed despondently.

Sam snorted. "For what?"

She wished she could say that she was just as skeptical of Walt Disney's business dealings, but frankly, at this point in her ludicrous life, nothing could surprise her anymore. "Let me guess," she deadpanned. "He sold his soul for an imagination that could dream up the most amazing stories to bring happiness and joy to the hearts of every child in the world and eventually bring it all to life in a theme park that made dreams come true, even for a day."

Castiel narrowed his eyes at her. "Essentially, yes, but his intentions weren't quite that noble."

She blinked. Nope, still not surprised.

Sam glanced at her out of the corner of his eye before turning back to the conversation. "Didn't Disney die of lung cancer?"

"Apparently Tom was quite partial to the stories and actually enjoyed the park. He let Disney die of different means rather than being torn asunder by the traditional hellhound method," Castiel answered blandly.

"Well, wasn't that kind of him? What the hell does it have to do with why Todd was in Disney World?" Dean snapped impatiently.

"The deal was that all Disney had to do was build a center of attraction and mark it with a symbol—it had to be big and would bring together large amounts of people," Castiel explained—still not flat-out answering the question.

"Cinderella's Castle," Aria said.

The angel nodded.

"But there are two of them," Sam pointed out. "One in Anaheim—in Disneyland—and the other in Orlando—in Disney World. Disney World wasn't built 'til after Disney died, so the mark should be on the other castle. Why did Tom go to Orlando?"

"Disney World began to attract more attention since it was bigger," Castiel said. "Tom simply took whatever block or brick the symbol was etched on and transported it to the castle in Orlando since it served the same purpose anyway."

Dean sat down at the foot of Aria's bed and ran his hand through his hair. "What does the symbol do?"

"It works like a shtriga," Castiel answered.

Dean visibly stiffened, and Sam's frown deepened. When he saw Aria's confused expression, he explained, "A shtriga is a witch who feeds on spiritus vitae—"

"Life spirit?" Aria offered, her mediocre Latin skills kicking in.

"Breath of life," Sam corrected her. "But close enough. It preys on children. Dean and I…actually got caught up with one twice. Once when we were kids and then again when we finally got rid of it."

"So you're telling us that the castle is sucking the life out of the thousands of little kids who come to visit that place every day?!" Dean demanded. "That's bullshit!"

"It works on a less aggressive level, Dean," Castiel said. "It seems to only take a small percentage. It's why every child falls asleep in the car ride home or quickly falls asleep once they reach either home or the hotel they are occupying."

Sam, Dean, and Aria gave him identical skeptical looks.

"Well, obviously. They wear themselves out by jumping and running around and screaming all day. It's a theme park, for crying out loud," Aria said. "They're kids hopped up on a Disney high. What'd you expect?"

"That's why it's so ingenious," the angel insisted. "It takes such a small amount that it's hardly even distinguishable from normal biological responses, but since there's such a massive influx of children coming to the park every day, the amount of spiritus vitae stored must be enormous."

Sam rubbed his forehead wearily. "The castle is sucking up kids' life energy?"

"The castle simply acts as a sponge or a storage compartment," Castiel said. "Anyone can take from its stores."

"But what does this have to do with the demon auction?" Dean asked, trying to redirect their derailed train of a conversation.

"Tom was planning on finally tapping into those stores and hoarding it all together. By absorbing that much life energy, he would've achieved immortality."

Dean sighed. "What did he need immortality for? He was a demon, for God's sake."

"Wait, if he never intended on actually selling Aria, he must've had plans to use her body for himself," Sam said.

She grimaced at his wording, and he sent her another apologetic look as he set the laptop in her lap as he stood up and started pacing. Aria herself could practically see the cogs clicking into place and turning 'round and 'round.

"Remember what he said on stage?" he continued. "She'd be able to survive the Apocalypse itself. He was gonna be the one to possess Aria and use the immortality to ensure her mortal body's survival—like a contingency plan in case she actually wouldn't be able to live through Lucifer's takeover."

Dean nodded, frowning in concentration. "But that doesn't explain why he would be auctioning her off. Why didn't he just take her and then use the castle? Why'd he have to drag out a couple hundred other demons? Did he just want a show or something?"

Castiel's head snapped up, his eyes wide. "Souls. He would need souls. Immortality burns through mortal bodies quickly. He would need the life essences of souls to make sure Aria's body wouldn't fade into ash."

"Is that the recipe for immortality then?" Aria asked contemplatively. "Spiritus vitae and souls?"

"The demons that had come were all exclusively crossroads demons," Castiel continued.

"They would've collected a bunch of souls each," Sam muttered, still deep in thought.

"So I was right before. They were auctioning Aria off for souls," Dean stated triumphantly.

"He would've pretended to sell Aria to whomever was willing to cough up the most souls, and he would've ended up killing that demon and taking the souls, possessing Aria, absorbing the spiritus vitae out of the castle, and he would've been set for the rest of eternity," Sam almost growled.

Wow.

They were pros at this. That was a pretty badass brainstorming session right there. She would never have pieced all that together in a thousand years. Then again, she only knew a fraction of an insignificant percentage of what they already knew, so she was hardly the best candidate for the job, but regardless.

"So now that you've figured out the dead demon's plan, what are we gonna do?" she asked into the following silence.

Sam quirked an eyebrow. "We?"

Dean stood up and gave her a stern look that had her rolling her eyes. Oh, here we go. "Sam, Cas, and I are going back to that godforsaken hellhole you people call the happiest place on earth and burn down that damn castle if need be. You are gonna stay here where you won't get caught up in any more apocalyptic contingency plans."

Aria huffed, not entirely oblivious of the defensive stances the Winchesters had suddenly taken. They'd braced themselves for some sort of argument about how she was a part of this and shouldn't be left behind.

"'We' is a collective noun, you numbnuts," she said slowly, enunciating each syllable. "It means as a whole. I've been fucking electrocuted, stabbed, and beat up. I ain't goin' nowhere with you."

Sam relaxed and covered his mouth to keep from laughing, but Dean just looked confused.

"You're not…gonna put up a fight or anything?"

Aria shrugged. "I'm not that type of girl, hombre. If I can sit shit out, you can be damn sure, I'll sit it out."

Dean finally smiled a little and chortled. He walked over to his duffel bag, took one last gulp of his beer, and pulled out two bags of salt, weighing them in his hands.

"So what exactly are you gonna do?" she asked. "Waltz back into Magic Kingdom and set the castle on fire in the middle of park hours? In case you haven't realized: it's Saturday. The weekend. You know how many people are gonna be there?"

Dean scoffed, ripping open one of the bags and crossing over to the wall to start pouring a salt line around the room. "First of all, we're just gonna find that damned symbol. Then we'll figure out what we're gonna do with it."

"So should I do anything from here? Research symbols online or something?" Aria asked.

Dean chuckled, still pouring the salt. "You'd be useless on that front since you wouldn't know what we're looking for. Hell, we don't even know what we're looking for."

Sam nudged the first aid kit closer to her on the bedside table. "Just…take the opportunity to sit and relax for a bit."

"Yeah," Dean agreed. "Relax. Drink some beer. Watch some porn."

Aria scowled and debated throwing something at him. But then she decided it wasn't worth the effort. Instead, she propped herself up against the headboard and crossed her arms over her chest.

"I do need you to promise me something first," she said.

"Yes, Aria, sweetheart. We'll get you a Mickey Mouse ears hat."

The motel pen lying on the bedside table smacked the older Winchester right in the forehead.

"OW!"

"Suck it up!"

"Fine—what do you want?!"

"Try—for the love of God, please try—not to get into any fights with those demons," she said flatly. "Just don't take them on without me, okay? For one thing, the asses of those wing-wrenching Neanderthals are mine, but primarily, guys, this is mostly my fault."

Sam stepped forward and moved to rest his hand on her shin. Dude needed to stop touching her. "Aria—"

"No, shut up," she said. "I'm not saying that 'cause I wanna redeem myself or some shit. I just don't want you going in there without backup especially when most of this is my fault. I shouldn't have knocked y'all out and left. I wouldn't have been possessed if I'd stayed."

"Damn right," Dean groused.

This time, the motel notepad went flying.

"Woman! Stop throwing shit at me!"

Honestly, it was just too fun, though. "Then promise you won't go looking for a fight."

"It's not your fault," Sam insisted. "We're the ones who got you tangled up in this."

She rolled her eyes for the eight-hundredth time. "Then call it revenge and label it mine. Do not engage until I'm there. Promise? If you walk into a middle of a war, then by all means, go nuts. I'm just saying—don't plan shit without me."

"Why is that such a big deal to you?" Dean asked, finishing up the salt line and straightening up to frown at her.

"Because regardless of who got me involved in this mess, they're the ones who threw me into this whole for real. Kidnapped me, beat me up, and want me as a prize," she explained blandly. "So if they want me in this world, I'll be in this world."

Sam and Dean exchanged a look and then nodded at her.

"Fine," Dean conceded. "We'll be back before nightfall. There's beer and some sandwiches in the fridge, Casa Erotica on the TV, and the remote's under your pillow. Have a nice day, birdbrain."

With one last evil smirk from Dean, a stiff nod from Castiel, and an awkward smile from Sam, they finally left, slamming the door behind them.

Aria let out a breath and flipped off the covers. She braced her elbows against the mattress and pushed herself up into a sitting position, almost crying out in pain when fire shot through her chest and stomach. Stitches or not, regeneration was a bitch. She swung her legs over the side of the bead and groaned her way up to standing, swaying as blood rushed down from her head and sparkles of light tangoed across her eyes. As soon as she was steady again, she wobbled over to the bag on the couch she knew to be Sam's. Dean's was closer, but she wasn't gonna rifle through his stuff and risk finding certain things she could live without seeing. She zipped open Sam's duffel and sifted through his pants and shirt to yank out a pair of plain gray boxers.

Yes, boxers. She wasn't used to walking around in just a T-shirt and underwear, all right? She needed pants, and since there was no way in hell she was gonna yank on a pair of jeans, she was gonna settle for boxers.

What she failed to realize, however, was the pain of bending down to pull them up. She almost shrieked and wound up collapsed on the couch, trying not to clutch at her stomach. Vance always did chew her out for not thinking small things through.

So she consigned herself to spending the rest of the day trying to figure out a way to pull on a stupid pair of boxers without torturing herself, but it seemed that the shotgun lying on the table wasn't exactly left behind on purpose. Though why they were planning on lugging around a shotgun at Disney World was just beyond her. So when the door suddenly swung open again, both Sam and Aria froze and stared at each other, his mouth hanging open as she lay on top of his bag on the couch with his boxers.

Shit.

"Aria," he said slowly, evenly, as if one wrong word was gonna send her into an emotional tailspin. "What are you doing?"

She sighed and dropped her head back against the couch. "I don't wanna walk around in just my underwear," she answered pathetically. She was in too much pain to even bother blushing.

"You're not even supposed to be walking around in the first place," he pointed out, closing the door behind him as he stepped in.

She lifted her head off the back of the couch to watch him curiously. He seemed at a loss for what to do for a few seconds until he finally sighed and straightened up. She stiffened, though, when he strode over to her with this determined look on his face. He bent down close, snaking his arm around her to help her up. Her arm instinctively went around his shoulders, and she pointedly ignored the clean scent of soap on his skin and the fact that his jaw was twitching just inches from her face. He still didn't meet her eye as he tugged the boxers out of her hands and dropped down to one knee.

Her breathing stuttered when he finally looked up at her and held the waistband open.

"Step in," he said, his voice low enough to make her stomach clench.

His breath warmed the skin of her shins. She swallowed and stepped in, careful not to let any part of her bare skin touch his hands. But it was for nothing. Still holding the waistband open, he slowly stood and pulled the boxers up along with him, the knuckles of his thumbs and index fingers trailing all the way up her legs, leaving goosebumps in their wake. The more he straightened up, the harder her nails dug into his shirt, and the darker both their eyes got. He stopped holding the waistband open when he finally reached her hips, but he left his thumbs and index fingers inside, rubbing them against her skin in the smallest of circles as the rest of his fingers rested on her outside the boxers.

She barely even registered how the hand that had been clenched around his shoulder had loosened and moved up to the back of his neck while her other hand wrapped around his…very nice bicep. His face was literally less than two inches from her, and she finally saw exactly how tall Sam really was. She'd gotten used to being right up there in the stratosphere of a guy's average height—a solid 5'9". She could only imagine how much of a giant Sam must've seemed to every other girl, but as she saw and felt his face get progressively closer, she couldn't help thinking that no other girl better get within a distance close enough for them to even think about him.

She'd never really known what hazel looked like until then. Sort of brownish-green with light brown flecks here and there. The morning sun slanting in through the windows turned the flecks gold. His breath drifted across her face—minty fresh—and the tips of their noses were brushing ever-so-slightly. Their lips were only a hair's breadth apart when a horn honked outside.

Dean Winchester, that little shit.

They stood there for a few more seconds, not wanting to let the moment go. Then he bent down, scooped her up, gently set her down on the bed, kissed her forehead, grabbed the shotgun, and walked out without a word.