Dean came to slowly. The first thing he became aware of was the warmth. He hadn't been this warm in a long time. He could tell it wasn't a dream, because he was still in so much pain. Even so, he didn't want to open his eyes. He wanted to go back to sleep, melt away into whatever soft thing he was laying on.

Then he became aware of hands on his arm, and a mild stinging sensation. The the events of the past few hours came rushing back to him with a horrible jolt. His eyes shot open in alarm, and he saw her. She was right there at his side, rubbing something into the cuts on his arms. He jerked away from her immediately.

"Get away!" he yelled, scrambling away and inadvertently backing himself into a corner. He tried to stand, but the cuts on his feet had been reopened in his mad dash, and he cried out and fell back to the ground.

"Whoa!" she protested, holding her hands out.

Dean shook with adrenaline as his eyes darted to take in his surroundings. He was in a cave lit by torches, and he had been on a bed of furs before he fled.

"Wait, I'm not her!" the woman said quickly. "Listen to me, please. My name is Diane. Clara Witford is my twin sister. I'm not going to hurt you, and I swear she doesn't know where we are!"

She held out the bottle for him to see.

"I'm going to patch you up, and then we can get you back to where ever you belong," she said. The bottle she was holding was hydrogen peroxide. Disinfectant.

It took Dean's exhausted brain a few minutes to work through what she'd said, and a few more to decide how to react. This was quickly shaping up to be one of the strangest situations he'd ever been in his entire life. Which was saying a lot.

Still, it seemed better than the situation he'd been in only hours ago. Warily, he nodded, and tried to stand to get back to the furs. He managed, holding onto the wall. Clara- no, Diane, approached him cautiously, testing to see if he would bolt again. He held her eyes as she took his arm and put it around her shoulder. The action stretched the cuts on his arm and sides painfully, but the relief in his feet was worth it. She shouldered nearly his full weight and helped him back to the makeshift bed, letting him fall into it.

"What's your name?" she asked, kneeling beside him.

"Dean," he answered.

She nodded, and continued her work silently, picking up her rag and pouring more disinfectant onto it so she could dab at the cuts on his arms. He watched her, seeing that she bore a remarkable resemblance to her sister. A glance at her arms told him that they even had the same scars.

He wondered if this was just another one of her tortures. After a moment of thought, he decided to keep his guard up, but not to act too paranoid. If this was a trick, he would play along. Bide his time until he could make another break for it.

Something else was nagging him too. That name, Witford. Why did it seem so familiar?

"Your sister's a basket case," he said finally, breaking the silence.

Diane shook her head. "I'm sorry about her. She just gets... unpredictable when she's left alone," she said.

"You think?" he asked.

"I know. And I apologize on her behalf. I try to keep an eye on her, but it's just me, and I can't be here all the time."

"It's just you and her out here?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Did it ever occur to you to commit her or something? I don't know, maybe after she started mutilating and killing humans? Children, at that," he snapped, anger kindled in him at this woman. She had sat idle through all her sister's atrocities, when she could have done something to stop them.

"You don't understand. It's complicated," Diane said softly.

"You're right, I don't understand. I mean, I get it, sort of. She's your sister. You want to protec- OW!" he jerked his arm away as one of the cuts started stinging badly, white foam forming quickly inside of the wound.

"It's infected," she informed him, pulling his arm back toward her. She wiped away the foam and poured more disinfectant on, straight from the bottle this time. It foamed less violently time but it still stung.

"I know," Dean said.

Dean watched as she worked in silence. He didn't feel up to arguing with her about her part of the blame for Clara's actions.

"I know what you must think of me," she said after a long time, surprising him. "Believe me, I think the same of myself sometimes. But I'm not brave enough to do what needs to be done."

She shook her head, expression bitter.

"Anyone else in my family would have been able to do it. But I can't. I guess that makes me the weak one."

Her words were genuine, and struck a chord with Dean.

"Hey," Dean sighed, meeting her eyes and holding her gaze for the first time. They were brown, like her sister's, but a warmer shade. Closer to chocolate than coal. "I know. Trust me, I do. I've got a brother. I love the hell out of the kid. And I know that he'd never do anything like this, but... but if he did- I'm not sure I'd be strong enough to do what I needed to either."

She smiled, but said nothing more as she finished with all the cuts on his arms, bandaging the deeper ones before moving to his chest and sides. Dean tried his best to stay awake, doubt of Diane's story plaguing him, but he was just too tired. Diane made her way down his legs quietly, letting him drift off to sleep. She bandaged his feet, and a few places on his legs, before covering him with another fur and leaving the cave. She concealed it's tall, narrow entrance with branches before she headed out, hoping it would afford her sister's latest victim a bit more protection. She needed to go back to the cabin, safely away from Dean, and confront Clara.

Dean was woken by a crash. He sat bolt upright, the winced and groaned at the pain that the quick action brought. The crash had come from the other side of the cave, where a pile of cans had toppled to the ground. One of them, corned beef, rolled to rest near his feet.

Against one of the backmost cave walls were about ten different piles of cans, and Diane was in the midst of them, cursing and gathering up the cans that had fallen.

"Morning," she greeted when she noticed that he was awake. She grabbed a bundle from the floor and tossed it to him. He caught it, and saw it was his clothes.

"How'd you get these?" he asked.

"I stole them back," she said as she stacked cans back.

"How? What about your sister?" he asked.

"I, uh... I talked to her. She wasn't happy," Diane said carefully.

"Talked? About what?"

"You."

"What did you say?" Dean pressed.

"I told her it was over. That I took you far away, where she can't get to you."

"Did she believe you?"

"Mmm... probably not," Diane sighed. "But don't worry. She won't find you. And you'll be out of here altogether soon enough."

"How soon?"

"As soon as you can walk."

"I can walk now."

"Not as far as we'll need to," Diane informed him. "The nearest road is ten miles away. The nearest town, nearly a hundred."

"I can make it," he insisted.

"It's too risky. Clara's out looking for you. It's the dead of winter out there. I know my sister, I know the land around here, and most importantly, I know the extent of your injuries," Diane said firmly. "The gashes on your feet aren't your biggest problem. All those bruises on your stomach? You need time to recover from a beating like that. It's a miracle you haven't already ruptured your spleen."

Dean didn't like it, but he knew she was probably right. The was she spoke reminded him of his smartass little brother. Sam would have told him the same thing had he been here. Strategy over strength.

He was silent for a moment, before he nodded.

"How long?"

"A week or two, probably."

Dean put his clothes on for the first time in a while. There were so many bandages on his feet that they were about twice their normal size, so he left his shoes and socks against one of the cave walls. Diane brought him a can of corned beef with a fork stuck into the hunk of cold meat. Dean remembered that he was starved almost to death, and grabbed the food so fast that he knew it came off as rude. He scarfed it down in minutes, nearly choking a few times.

"Thanks," he said finally, feeling a little bad that he had waited so long. "Sorry, I just-"

"It's fine. I was hoping to have it heated up before you woke, but... I figured you wouldn't want to wait," Diane shrugged. "I can't say that you can help yourself to anything... that's roughly two month supply for me alone. One month tops for two, and I'll need to hunt to supplement it. But if you're still hungry, there's beans, corn, chili... more corned beef."

"I, uh... I wouldn't say no to some beans," Dean admitted.

She handed him a can, and dug into one of her own. He watched her for a while, knowing that there was something he should let her know, but also fearing on some level that if she did know, she might not be so keen on helping him. He couldn't hold his silence though. There was something about Diane that made him feel like he owed her honesty.

"You do know when I get out I'm bringing people back for your sister," he said.

Her eyes were downcast, but she shrugged.

"Then she won't be able to hurt anyone else," she said. She was trying to sound casual, but Dean could hear the sadness in her voice. He knew that there was a story to be told here, and he wanted badly to ask what it was, pry past everything she would throw at him to avoid the truth, and wrench it from her. But he knew better. Knew that he wouldn't get anywhere. Knew that it would be selfish of him to demand her to tell a story that she obviously didn't want to share. Chances were, she wished she couldn't remember. Dean knew what that was like from personal experience, and couldn't bring himself to press. He went back to his, slowly this time, not as famished as he had been only moments earlier.

When they were both finished, Diane tossed the cans into a pile towards the back of the cave, then grabbed a bow and a quiver of arrows from a natural ledge on the cave wall. She pulled a half-finished arrow from the quiver, and sat by the fire facing the cave entrance. The bow drew Dean's attention. It was very simple, constructed of a pale wood, but looked hand-made.

"Did you make that?" he asked, nodding to it.

Diane shook her head.

"It was a gift," she said, running her fingers over the smooth wood fondly, a smile playing at the corners of her lips.

"Someone special?"

"My brother," she replied.

"You've got a brother?"

"I had a brother," she corrected him. "Two of them."

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Don't be. They're in a better place now," she said. She started whittling away at the half-formed arrow shaft, stripping the remaining bark.

Dean looked around, really taking in the details of the cave for the first time. There wasn't much to see. The cans stacked in one corner, a few buckets that looked like they held water, the furs that he was lying on, and a shadowy nook at the very back of the cave. It was too dark for him to see into, though he could make out a few indistinct shapes in the shadows. His eyes skimmed over the entrance, and passed over a few scratches in the cave roof above it. They darted back, realizing that the scratches formed a familiar pattern.

There was a devil's trap over the cave entrance.

"You're a hunter," Dean realized aloud.

That was why the name Witford sounded familiar. He'd once worked with a hunter called Jared Witford. They'd both been tracking the same ghost.

She looked at him oddly, well concealed alarm showing ever so slightly through her eyes.

"Of course," she said carefully. "I wouldn't be able to survive out here otherwise."

"Not that kind of hunter," he said, his tone full of meaning.

She straightened. "What do you know about hunting?" she asked, stressing the word.

"It's the business my family's in." He nodded towards the trap over the entrance. "Devils trap. Used to snag demons."

"Well. That's..." she started chuckling.

"What's funny?" he demanded.

"Nothing," she said, forcing a straight face. "Just..." she started laughing again, so hard that she had to thrust a hand out to keep herself from falling over. She calmed eventually. "What kind of hunter gets himself into the situation you did?" she asked.

"Hmmf," he grumbled, folding his arms over his chest.

"Right. Okay, I won't laugh," she said, resuming a straight face. "Seriously though, how small can the world be?"

"Did you get into it by yourself, or was it a family thing?" Dean probed, figuring that if she could laugh around the topic, it must not be too bad.

"Family thing. None of us were raised hunters, but my older brother, Jared fell in with some, and kind of brought trouble home with him." She shrugged. "We all learned the tricks, but he and Clara were the only ones who ever really went out looking for things to hunt," she said.

"Is that what happened? The life drove her..." he made a crazy gesture with his fingers at his temple.

"I don't know," she sighed. "We were always close. And honestly, I think that she was always a bit unstable."

After that, they lapsed into silence again, and this time, it remained unbroken.