Four days later, RC was still in hospital, but out of immediate danger.

Carl hadn't meant to fall asleep in an ICU in a chair like a worried mother, but had woken several hours later to find RC watching him. Adrenaline and surprise had shot through Carl, who gave a guilty start and sat up, clearing his throat. He half expected a grin and a smart remark about being caught sitting by his bedside, a return to normal and a subliminal communication that the slip Carl had witnessed never happened. He wasn't sure how he would feel about that eventuality if such was the case, but was spared consideration when he got neither. He wasn't sure if it was the drugs at first - morphine didn't exactly inspire normal, rational behaviour, but he was to learn during the next three days that it wasn't. RC had simply stared at him a moment, and Carl stared back, at a loss for anything to say, before RC smiled at him slowly, and closed his eyes. Carl had gaped at his friend a moment, before realizing he had been sleeping in an ICU, hastily washed and dressed in nurse's scrubs. He judged it well past the point where he aught to get grip, so he had left RC to more sleep and pain medication while he returned home to shower and sleep properly.

He had changed into decent clothing and checked the answering machine before returning to the hospital. West had called again, to inform RC he had sent his research on the checkpoint guy along if the similarity was of any help on their hunt. Despite his general dislike of West, Carl had called him back to thank him, and let him know RC had been torn up but was going to be okay. West's obvious concern and promise to swing by LA in the next week or two to check in went a long way to changing Carl's opinion of him.

Four days later, and the pair were exploring West's research, RC still confined to his bed for the meantime. Between them, things had both stayed the same, and changed irreversibly. RC could have swept his honesty under the rug and more than likely, Carl would not have pushed. He had always allowed RC his bullshit in the past, believing the younger man thought it necessary. RC was still RC - he still had that sardonic sense of humour, the same crooked grin, that same cockiness, but it was more the staples that his more flamboyant persona had been built on. Those things were a part of the man he really was - he had just exaggerated them out of all proportion in the past, to keep the world, including Carl, at a distance. The world was still at arm's length - Carl wasn't. He knew without question when the next time RC had woken with the ability to think reasonably, the first thing he had said was "thankyou. For saving my life. I mean it." It was more serious straight-forward honesty than Carl had probably ever got from his friend, and all he had done was nod, honouring that. Since then, they were easing into a new dynamic.

As for the other side of the hunt, the fire had been reported, but no mention of a supernatural beast had splashed across the front page of the Los Angeles Times, so it had been put down to arson, someone lighting rubbish bins on fire again. Of the woman, they never had contact with again. Carl had wriggled in place. It was messy. He couldn't deny it.

RC flicked through West's notes, stopping every so often when something snagged his attention in regard to their own strange hunt, Carl sitting in the chair beside the bed with RC's laptop, looking for any possible physiological contributions to the whole bizarre transformation. The monster was down, the hunt was over, people had stopped turning up around LA eviscerated, but there were still many questions left unanswered, and if it had happened likely twice now if West's checkpoint man had been of the same persuasion, then it was more than likely to happen somewhere, to someone else, again. Both hunters were keen to be more prepared next time.

Carl twisted to dig his buzzing cell phone out of his pocket, answering the call as a nurse came to check RC's temperature, blood pressure, dressings and similar for at least the fifth time, casting Carl and his cellphone a glare. RC complied - it was the quickest way to get rid of her.

He took West's folder back up and looked over at Carl when the nurse filled his chart and moved on.

Carl was staring hard at RC's blanket, his eyes abstracted, cellphone curled in one fist.

"What?" RC questioned.

"That was Bobby," Carl replied, a distant, empty quality to his voice. "Winchester's dead."

RC frowned in thought.

"Winchester … ain't he that blow weed from Texas?"

"Guy like that isn't really from anywhere in particular," Carl answered, still with that careful, considering tone to his voice. "But yeah, we worked a job with him a few years back through Texas and then Arkinsol."

RC's expression cleared into surprise when he recalled John Winchester, a big, dark man who had not trusted either he nor Carl, despite the fact they worked that hunt together. They had regarded him as both an excellent hunter, and a bit of a prick.

"What happened to him?" He asked.

"Singer said a demon got him, like as much," Carl returned. "Guy had been hunting some demon for twenty years, and in the end it got him instead."

"We all got it coming," R.C quoted Turner's familiar phrase, directing his attention back to West's intel and off Winchester.

"Yeah. Guess so," Carl said faintly, but there was that something in his tone again which tickled at R.C's inattention. Some sense of distracted pensiveness that coloured his voice and turned his eyes vacant, gazing inward.

"What now?"

Carl licked his lips and slowly rolled his eyes up to settle on RC, something indefinable bleeding into his expression.

"I been thinking … thinking maybe we should get out of here. Head out somewhere where they hunt things other than monsters. Montana way, maybe."

RC's expression slid into shock, as if he would have been less surprised if Carl suggested they quit hunting, settle in the suburbs of New Jersey with a mortgage and a white picket fence and sell tyres at a retail outlet for a living.

"Are you serious?" Was all he eventually said.

"Yeah, I think I am," Carl replied. He had been sitting back with one leg cocked ankle to knee to prop up the laptop, but he closed the lid and set both feet on the floor to level RC with his eyes.

"This city, its wearing down on me these days. Never used to. All we ever do here is damage control, man. Burying evidence, trying to keep everything under wraps, keep Hughes and Jacobson and the others from suspecting us as anything but quiet, normal clean-up guys. I'm sick of the bullshit."

It faintly amused Carl to register RC's shocked expression at the phrase. RC habitually swore like a sailor (though Carl was yet unclear on how much of that had been deliberate affectation) but he seldom did. The topic merited it, though, in the spirit of newfound honesty. He was sick of the bullshit. RC's new honesty with him had only made it more obvious how much the constant hiding, lying, sneaking around and covering for themselves was wearing him down. They needed something more simple, in his book. They were hunters and he wasn't naïve enough to believe there could ever be absolutely no cloak-and-dagger in their line of work, but he was beginning to understand why very few hunters tried to maintain a normal civilian life. The double quality of it was exhausting. Ironically enough, it was easier to be outside the fringe, not part of settled society for a hunter than it was to try to coexist within it. All the hunters they knew were on the road in one way or another.

"Why Montana?" RC asked, a flat, direct quality in his voice to match the levelling look in his eyes, demanding nothing less than the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Carl shrugged, again revisited by that unfamiliar sense of shyness.

"I don't know, Singer's up that way in South Dakota, and old Harvelle's wife, she's still up there in Nebraska. I heard she runs some kind of bar, has a lot of contacts come through. Even West bounces back to his army friend's widow in Minnesota a couple of times a year. People we don't have to lie to and cover for, is all."

RC was regarding him with an uncharacteristic frown - part consideration, of both Carl and his words, part something that looked equal in pity, affection and sadness. Where once Carl would have got a sarcastic quip designed to shut down the merest possibility of a serious in depth conversation, instead RC tilted his face down to regard Carl through the tops of his eyes and smile a softer version of his usual challenging grin.

"Our people," he said.

Carl felt himself flush deeply - an obvious tell that had exposed him relentlessly and much to his embarrassment all through his adolescence, that he had long since conquered and controlled as an adult. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair and dropped his chin to his chest, horrified. Through burning ears he heard RC's low chuckle, but it held none of his customary meanness.

Again, where once the younger hunter would have heckled Carl mercilessly for being a sentimental old fool, RC spared him a moment without deliberately finding sport in embarrassing him any further.

"I get it," he said eventually, when Carl had more control of himself. "Just tell me one thing - tell me this is only about the tribe, and not having to cover your ass all the time."

Carl swivelled his head at the door, the floor, anywhere but at RC for a moment. RC watched him, understandably fascinated that his customarily understated friend had suddenly started behaving like a nervous pre-adolescent boy.

"You almost died," Carl admitted eventually, the three words sounding like they were ground out of him.

RC cast him an expression of mixed sadness, affection and frustration. Whether it was the light that slanted in through the window at the end of the room to highlight half the hunter's face and set his shaggy pale hair glowing like phosphorescence, or perhaps simply the weight that existed behind RC's mask, Carl could not have said for sure. Whatever the reason, the expression made RC suddenly look older than Carl. Dispensing with the pretences had if anything, ironically enough, only made RC more complicated. Carl shifted his gaze back to the floor. His friend's voice was low and conciliatory when he spoke, as if speaking to a spooked child, and Carl felt a confused momentary flash of hatred for him.

"Carl. I've been hurt before. Hell, so have you. Its part of the gig. You know that."

Carl shook his head, flicking his eyes back up to RC's face.

"Not like this. It was too close this time, man. We're not young gunslingers like West anymore, we cant afford to take risks and pretend there's no consequences."

"Speak for yourself," RC replied with a half smile, but his voice was soft.

"I'm serious."

RC nodded, looking down at West's file in his lap without seeing it.

"And Bobby's call didn't help, I'm guessin'."

Damn the man for knowing him so well, Carl thought. It was true that the thoughts bad been bouncing around his head for a while, but RC's injury followed so closely by both speaking to Bobby Singer again and hearing of Winchester's death - a bit of a prick, maybe, but one of their own nonetheless - had compounded those thoughts, pushing the feelings from background to foreground. Death was always waiting on down the road for a hunter, but being so close to it in two different ways in one week rattled Carl into unfamiliar territory. The need to tighten ranks. To keep their connections closer to hand, before they were all dead and it was too late. It was stupid and sentimental - RC's previous taunts in allusion to his nature had been correct on that score at least, but he couldn't help himself. Nor, if he was honest, would he really want to. If he was soft-hearted, it beat the alternative, and he had seen enough men of that persuasion in this life. Hunters who were as cold as the creatures they killed. This life had a way of hardening a man insidiously, so he lost the ability to see it happening in himself. Hunters like that didn't even fit into his yahoo category - men like that were dangerous, to themselves and everything around them. Carl heard his own voice before he even thought about talking.

"Winchester - I think he had family, somewhere. Man like he was, they probably never even saw him again before he died. It's not right."

RC was silent beside him, and Carl refused to look up.

"Okay," he said eventually, drawing Carl's surprised gaze.

"Okay?"

"Yeah, okay. We'll do it. Montana it is." He smiled sardonically at Carl. "So, inform the tribe. Tell Singer we're heading up his way, if he needs us or visa versa, he'll know where we'll be."

The end.