Chapter 10

I woke up feeling tired and gluggy and with that heaviness low down in my body that belatedly told me why I'd been feeling so irritable with everything for the last couple of days. And, of course, there wasn't a single tampon in the house.

The tension had been creeping up in the last few days. Bobby had called two days ago from Vermont. His professor/monster lady friend had disappeared from her digs in California and he had a few ideas about how and where to find her, but it was going to take him some time. Sam had located another copy of Necronomicon in the Lovecraft collection in Columbia's library and Dean was antsy to get over there and steal it, while Sam was corresponding with two researchers about getting the information without breaking into the library. And Lisa and Ben were getting cabin-fever, stuck in the house without much to do, just waiting.

All in all, it was not a happy household.

I got up, looked at the spotting in my underwear with annoyance and went to the bathroom to figure out a temporary solution to the problem. Usually, I'd have a couple lying in the bottom of my purse for this kind of situation, but, in the way of fate when it's decided to turn against you, I'd given the bag a clean out the week that the Winchesters had dropped through from their world to mine, and I hadn't gotten around to replacing those essential items.

You might've been wondering what on earth I've been wearing, for the last four weeks, cloistered in a house with three hunters. I should say, right now and out in the open, that I'm not what you'd call a 'girly' girl when it comes to shopping and clothes. In fact, my wardrobe at home only had two dresses, a frothy concoction of mauve frills and such that I'd been convinced to buy for a friend's wedding and which was exiled to the very back of the closet, hidden and buried, out of sight and mostly out of mind; and a very plain, above-the-knee, sleeveless black dress that I wore whenever I had to go to a function that would frown on jeans. I'd very quickly learned that the job required a lot of getting around fast, usually at a run, and clambering through sets and equipment in a manner that was often unladylike and almost certainly revealing to anyone standing below, and had bought the rest of my clothes to suit it. That meant I had jeans. And that was pretty much it.

Having arrived here in a pair of jeans, a t-shirt, denim button-through and a hip-length, kind of ratty-looking black suede coat that had definitely seen better days, while Bobby and Dean and Sam had taken off to deal with Eve's monster mash that first week, I'd bought myself some more jeans, a couple of t-shirts, three soft cotton shirts in solid colours, underwear, socks and a toothbrush. As a result, I looked much the same in this world as I did at home. Probably should've mentioned this earlier, but you know, compared to hybrid monsters and renegade angels, what I'm wearing just doesn't seem that important.

So, in a clean pair of jeans, a white t-shirt and a dark-green shirt buttoned over it, I clomped downstairs, wondering if I could get Dean to lend me his car to get to town. Bobby's isn't that far from Sioux Falls, but it's a couple of miles to the shops and I don't know how you feel at that time of the month, but a four-mile round trip on my feet carrying shopping bags was not something I really wanted to do today.

The kitchen was, as it'd been for the last week, full. Dean and Sam were leaning over Sam's laptop on the small table under the phones and Lisa was at the sink washing the breakfast dishes she and Ben had used while Ben was drying. I'm not a morning person – at least, I'm not a morning person with other people around – I like quiet and I like my first cup of joe to be consumed in complete silence. It's antisocial. Sue me.

There was just enough left in the pot to be considered a cupful and I poured it out and turned, intending to take it elsewhere when Dean looked up.

"Where do you think you're going?"

I stopped and pivoted to look at him balefully. I briefly thought of warning him about the PMT situation then decided against it. Way too much unnecessary sharing. "To the living room. Do I need permission now?"

"We've got a lead on a higher-level demon in Nebraska," Sam said. "Means we'll be gone two-three days."

"Good."

"Not good," Dean told me, looking from me to Lisa. "Means we have to leave you three here without any protection."

"The house is protected," I protested. I'd spent days painting every entrance and vent and window and chimney with the darned symbols, I knew it was protected. "I changed the angel sigil as soon as Cas left."

"Not enough," Dean said, shaking his head. "Lisa knows how to shoot. You don't."

"Point and pull the trigger, right?" I said, half-turning to keep going to the living room and get some of the peace I was longing for. How much harder could it be than the shotgun, anyway?

He grinned humourlessly. "Lessons in five minutes."

"What? I'm not even awake yet," I told him, wondering I was going to get to town before the situation got worse. "And you can't leave us here without a car."

"There's a van in the workshop," Dean said, his smile turning callous. "It runs."

"Sort of," Sam threw in, with a kind of comme-ci-comme-ça hand-wave.

"Sort of," Dean agreed, his face becoming expressionless. He turned to look at Lisa and Ben. "Refresher course for you as well."

Lisa nodded, wiping her hands dry on the dishtowel and hanging it up. "Sounds like fun."

I turned away and clomped to the living room. I would need every drop of the caffeine in the cup to get through this.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Bobby had a target range at the back of the yard, about thirty yards long, sandbags stuffed into several wrecks to aim for, fields and marsh behind those. The Beretta wasn't all that heavy to begin with but it gained weight the longer I held it and the man-outline paper target looked a long way away, though Sam had set it up at what he said was only ten yards from us.

"Not like that, it hasn't got much of a kick, but you'll fire high if you hold it like that," Dean told me irritably, looking at the way I was standing and making a downward chopping movement with his hand.

I was going to point out that my sole gun-training experience had come from watching tv, but I gave it up before I started. He was crabby, I was grumpy, nothing good was going to come of arguing about it.

"Lise, you try first, whole clip," he said, turning away from me to look at her.

She lifted the gun in her hand and starting firing. I couldn't see if she was hitting the target or not but after ten very loud shots, she lowered the gun and ejected the magazine, and Dean nodded, seeming to be satisfied. Sam took the paper target off the frame and put a fresh one on, bringing Lisa's back with him.

"Not bad," he said to her, smiling. Closer up, I could see that she'd hit the outline with every shot, the ragged holes grouped quite close together in the chest region.

This is probably going to sound really lame, but I couldn't help but feel disheartened by the sight. Maybe it was a side-effect of my current state of mind, maybe I was being too sensitive, but I just knew I was going to miss the whole darned target and get yelled at.

"Okay, put your hand under the butt," Dean said, looking at me. "Don't aim too high, and sight along the barrel."

In the open air, the shots weren't that loud, but my eyes still closed involuntarily as I pulled the trigger.

"Gonna have more luck if you keep your eyes open, Dorothy," Dean grunted from beside me.

He moved around behind me, and his arms came around each side of mine, his breath warm suddenly on my cheek, and a very distracting flush of heat rising through me as I felt him press close from shoulder to thigh.

"Recoil comes through the wrists," he said, his hands closing over both of mine where they wrapped around the gun. "Keep your elbows soft. And squeeze, don't pull."

His finger slid through the guard over the top of mine, and the gun fired, a black hole appearing in the chest of the target.

I would've been ecstatic to get that shot if it hadn't been for the overwhelming rush of sensations my brain was trying to sort out and decipher.

"Try again."

No one should have a voice like that, I thought, squinting down the short barrel to the notch at its end and squeezing the trigger slowly. A second black hole appeared next to the first, but I'd flinched back against him and he shook his head.

"Stand still and concentrate," I was admonished.

"Maybe she needs some breathing room," Lisa said sharply.

Dean let go of the gun and stepped back. I didn't look around at either of them, pulling in a deep breath instead and trying to simultaneously stiffen my wrists, relax my elbows, keep my eyes wide open and squeeze the trigger. The retort was loud but this time I didn't flinch and didn't close my eyes and I was overjoyed to see the third hole barely an inch from the other two.

I looked around to see that no one else had even noticed. Dean was talking to Lisa in a tone deliberately pitched to be inaudible, Sam was fiddling with the target sheets and Ben had wandered off somewhere else.

"Don't stop, empty the clip!" Dean turned his head to snap at me in the middle of his conversation, turning back to Lisa before the last word was out.

I looked back at the target and managed to get the next three shots into the chest area. Deciding to experiment a bit, I tried for a headshot with the next bullet, clipping the target's ear which I thought might have hurt a bit but probably couldn't be considered fatal. The next one went into the target's mouth – or where the mouth might be if it'd been drawn in – and the thought of that just grossed me out totally.

"Stick to the body," Sam said quietly from just behind me. "Usually it's the part that's moving the least. It's only in the movies that anyone can shoot someone's hand, or shoot a gun out of it. Doesn't take that much effort to move it."

I nodded and put the last three bullets into the chest. They weren't as closely grouped as the earlier shots, probably because my wrists were aching, my head was pounding from both the noise and the tension of handling what was undoubtedly a very lethal weapon and my shoulders were somewhere up around my ears, but they were all within the outlines and I think they would've been fatal. At least, to a person, I realised. Maybe not to a demon or angel or monster.

"Will these even have an effect on demons and angels?" I asked him when the hammer clicked on an empty chamber and I tried to remember how to eject the magazine. Another thing everyone on tv made look easy, yet was surprisingly and annoyingly difficult.

"Here," he said, leaning past me and showing me the small, black button just above the grip. "Probably not much, it'll slow 'em down."

I managed to catch the magazine as it slipped out and juggled the gun, magazine and the replacement magazine Sam handed me for a long tension-filled moment, almost dropping all three. There was a click as the new one slid in.

"Come on, I'll show you how to refill that," Sam said, turning back to the house.

That seemed to be all that was required of me, so I followed him inside and down to the basement, and he pulled out a box of ammunition, demonstrating how to push each bullet into the metal sleeve.

"Did you read –" I started to say.

"You seem to be –" Sam said at the same time.

"Sorry, you go," I said quickly and he shook his head.

"Not important."

"I was just going to ask if you read the last half of the script?" I asked him, wondering what he'd about to say that suddenly wasn't important. You seem to be…what?

He nodded. "How did Crowley know about Lisa and Ben?"

"I think from when he went to Cas, the first time." I tried to remember back to the first episode of the season. "He saw him at Lisa's place, in Cicero. In the episode we saw from Bobby's point of view, Crowley kind of congratulated himself as being a part of your efforts to save the world from Lucifer, maybe he kept an eye on what Dean was doing?"

"Yeah, maybe," Sam said. He looked down at the gun in my hand. "Not much of a lesson, sorry. Keep the safety on when you're carrying it, but don't forget about taking it off once it's in your hand."

I nodded, pushing the small lever until I could see the red dot and gingerly sliding the gun into the back of my jeans. It was cold, heavy and uncomfortable, pressed against the small of my back, but I'd just have to live with it.

"If you find Crowley's location from this demon, are you going straight there?" I asked him as we climbed the stairs back to the kitchen.

"I don't know," Sam admitted, glancing down the hall. "Dean's fed up with being cooped up here, but he's worried about leaving."

Crowley knew this place, but he didn't know that it now held Lisa and Ben. Or did he?

"Does Cas know Lisa and Ben are here?" I asked him.

"Don't know," Sam said. "And Cas is one of the main reasons Dean's worried."

He headed out the back door and I turned down the hallway for the stairs.

"– really don't need to watch you cozying up to some girl, Dean," Lisa's voice came from the living room, rising in annoyance.

"Oh, I see, but it's okay for you to see some doctor –"

I veered wildly back around to the kitchen and followed Sam out through the back door, not wanting to hear that conversation. I have to tell you, I really didn't like Lisa over the odd episodes I'd seen her in through the years of the show. She'd seemed kind of judgemental in the first one, and it was a bit hard to imagine how she'd carried a torch for Dean for so long when she didn't appear to know much about him at all. The last week in close quarters with her hadn't done much to change my opinion. She seemed to be an okay person and she clearly doted on her son, but there wasn't a lot else there, if you know what I mean.

"Hey," Sam said, looking around as I came into the shed.

"Hey, is that the van that sort of runs?" I asked him, pointing to a six-seater parked to one side.

"Yeah, you need to go somewhere?"

"Uh, yeah, I thought it might be a good idea to stock up and stay put while you're gone," I told him.

"Do you want a hand with that?" He put down the tools he was holding and looked at me.

"Um…sure."

I could ditch him in the market, I was pretty sure.

The front door slammed at that moment, and we both turned to hear Dean's impatient yell.

"Sam! C'mon, we're going!"

"Sorry," Sam said, wiping his hands on an oily rag. "Keys are in it, should be gassed up, make sure you're quick."

"I will," I promised, watching him walk out to the Impala.

Dean barely waited for him to get in before he was moving, the tyres crunching over the gravel as he accelerated for the yard's gate.

I thought it might be a good idea to give Lisa a chance to cool off as well, and walked around the van. The keys were hanging from the ignition and the fuel gauge read half-full.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

By the time I got back to the house, I was uncomfortable, hot, tired and basically every guy's PMT nightmare. I figured it was lucky there were no guys around.

Unpacking in the kitchen, I could hear the tv going in the living room. Bobby had reluctantly bought a new one to replace his ancient floor-cabinet set and I guessed Ben was watching.

"Hey, need a hand with that?"

I jumped, not having heard Lisa come in, dropping the tins of tomatoes in my hands and flinching again at the noise of them hitting the floor. "Wow, uh, yes, thanks."

"How long have you known Dean and Sam?" she asked, bending to pick up the tins from the floor.

"Not long," I told her, turning back to the bag of groceries and pulling out cheese, milk and sliced ham for the fridge. I'm not entirely sure why I wasn't being all that forthcoming, some instinct maybe, or just the difficulties of knowing what to say, how much to say. It wasn't just my story, and the Winchesters were just as paranoid in real life as they were on the show.

"How long is 'not long'?" she asked, smiling to take some of the edge from the question.

It confirmed the feeling that she wasn't asking out of a desire to get to know me. I shrugged and went back to the bags for more stuff.

"About four weeks," I said, pulling out steak and ground beef and pasta. "They stopped by to see Bobby."

"And stayed," she said.

"Bobby had some stuff he needed their help with."

"This is – you know about what they do, I mean, all of it?" she asked, and I got the feeling her curiosity was overriding her main reason for talking for the moment. "The hunting, the monsters?"

"A bit about it," I hedged, walking around her to the laundry, my arms full of laundry detergent and fabric softener and soap. I'd pretty much bought whatever I could think so that it didn't look like the trip was just for a pack of tampons.

"How's that?"

"Sorry, what?" I called out from the laundry, looking at the cupboards that were already loaded with the things I was carrying. Should've checked them first. Putting them on the floor, I pushed things around a bit and made some more room.

"How is it that you know about hunting and monsters?" Lisa repeated, her voice clear now that she was standing in the doorway watching me.

Keep it simple, I told myself. Simple and unverifiable.

"I've helped Bobby out from time to time," I said, red-faced as I finished shoving the unneeded items into the cupboard and got to my feet. "Just information, I…um…used to be a research assistant, at a college out west."

"So you're not a hunter?"

"God, no," I said, laughing nervously as I eased past her and back to the counter. "Are you kidding? No."

"Is there something between you and Dean?"

That question came out of the blue and I gripped the pack of marshmallows I was holding so tightly I could see my finger marks in the soft confections.

"No," I said, glad to hear my voice quiet and steady. "I barely know him."

She looked at me for a long moment, her eyes dark and slightly narrowed as she considered the answer.

"Sorry for the third degree," she said eventually, shrugging. "Did he tell you about us?"

"Uh, no."

"We lived together, for a while," she said, walking closer to take the bag of oranges from me. "I thought it would be a lot longer, but his life…his life is impossible."

It would've been a good time to change the subject, to suffer a brain haemorrhage, to have a hole open up under my feet and suck me down into the earth. Unfortunately, none of those things happened and I opened my mouth, as driven by curiosity about her as she seemed to be about me.

"Didn't you know what he did, before, I mean?"

"Yeah, but when he turned up again, he said that part of his life was over, and I believed him. Sam had – had gone, and he said he was quitting and then…"

"Sam came back," I said, forgetting momentarily that I wasn't supposed to know anything about that.

"Yeah," she said, looking at me quizzically. "Good guess."

"He must still care, he went and got you and Ben when he thought you were in danger," I said, more carefully.

"He cares," Lisa agreed sadly. "Just not – not enough."

"Or too much?"

She turned back to me and smiled. I wasn't sure if it was at the thought or out of politeness. "He was good with Ben. We both miss that. Miss him. But what he does, I can't risk Ben in the life he has."

I refrained, somewhat miraculously I thought later, from asking why then was she worried about Dean being interested in anyone else, and finished unpacking the groceries. Just cause you love someone, doesn't mean you should stick around and screw up their life, I thought. What had they talked about before he'd gone to see Ben in his room?

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

In a tv show, when two women and a young boy get left alone while the heroes take off for parts unknown to torture demons, something always happens. It's like a rule. A tv rule. But, nothing did here.

Bobby called to say he'd talked to Eleanor and she'd disappeared on him. He'd be back the next day. Sam called to check in a bit later and said they'd found the demon and had him trussed up. I did a load of overdue washing and spent about an hour pegging it all out on the line behind the house, taking it in a few hours later and ironing the linen and the men's shirts out of sheer boredom. Lisa made fried chicken for dinner. We ate. The conversation remained impersonal and non-threatening. She and Ben went to bed. I read for another few hours and then did the same. The next day followed more or less along the same lines, and on the third, Bobby drove in at sundown.

I was in the living room, watching the fax machine when he came in, pushing his hat back slightly as he looked around at the piles of books, notes and folders that I'd been going through.

"Anything good?"

"The researchers Sam's been courting came through," I told him, passing him the pages from Necronomicon that had already been printed. "The ritual needs an eclipse."

"That gives us time," Bobby said, dropping into the armchair and starting to read.

"I thought I'd make spaghetti," Lisa said from the doorway, Ben hovering behind her. "Is that okay with everyone?"

Bobby glanced up and over to me. I nodded distractedly at him, counting the rest of the pages. I'd forgotten about dinner entirely when the machine had beeped and started printing.

"That'd be great, Lisa," Bobby said, his gaze dropping back to the pages.

Neither of us were particularly good in the making-folks-feel-at-home arena. She left and Ben gave the tv a wistful look before turning around and following his mother back to the kitchen. In retrospect, a bit more attention to them might've made a difference. It might not have. It can't have been all that easy, staying in a virtual stranger's house with nothing to do. And the worry about the school time Ben was missing out on probably didn't help either.

Bobby was listing the ingredients and I was still reading through the pages when we heard the Impala's deep rumble outside the house. Neither of us looked up.

Dean and Sam came in a moment later, Sam veering into the living when he saw Bobby, Dean following him in.

"What you find?"

"The ritual for the opening of doorway to Purgatory," I said, getting up and handing him a sheaf of papers. Sam looked at Bobby.

"What about you, you find Dr Visyak?"

"Yeah, I found her. Damned stubborn woman thinks she's better off protecting herself," Bobby growled without lifting his gaze from the paper.

"Well, if we can get this shut down before they open the door –" Dean started to say and Bobby shook his head, glancing up at me.

"We're all on the same timetable," I told him. "Next eclipse."

"So we can't get in first?" Dean asked disgruntedly.

"No, if you want to disrupt the ritual –"

"Sorry to interrupt, but dinner's ready, if anyone's interested," Lisa said from the doorway. Dean and Sam looked up at her, Bobby didn't move, and I was trying to find the ritual in the pages to show the brothers.

"Uh, you and Ben start without us," Dean said, waving his hand with the pages in it. "We just need to catch up…" he paused as she about-faced and disappeared. "…on this stuff."

"Better go deal with that," Sam said, looking at Dean. He shrugged and took the page from me when I found it.

Five minutes later there was a crash of breaking china and the echo-ey bonging of metal pans on the floor and Dean shot out through the door. Bobby sighed, Sam put down his pages and I gathered up all the fax pages, following them to the dining room and stopping behind them.

"It's been two weeks, we can't just stay here indefinitely!" Lisa was shouting at Dean, spaghetti sauce and pasta spread over most of the old linoleum between them. "We have lives! Ben has school! I can't live like this! This is exactly what we talked about before!"

"I'm trying to keep you alive," he said to her, stepping gingerly away from the mess. "That's the only reason I brought you here –"

Sam made a slight move to go to him and Bobby and I grabbed him, yanking him back and out of the room as Lisa more-or-less exploded at the ill-thought phrasing of Dean's defence. There are times to intervene and times when it's just best to let people slug it out. This seemed like one of the latter occasions and I knew Bobby felt the same way.

"Give 'em some time," Bobby told Sam as he sat back down in the chair and picked up his notebook. "They'll sort it out."

"But –"

"Seriously, Sam," I told him firmly. "The last thing they need is an audience, and that's all you'd be."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Bobby and Sam were still going over the ritual and ingredients when I ventured back into the dining room. We'd heard the front door slam open and shut, heard footsteps going up the stairs and then there'd been silence for the last fifteen minutes.

Looking at the sauce and spaghetti congealing the remnants of the broken china to the floor, I sighed and went to the cupboard for the dustpan, a mop and a bucket, filling a bucket as I scraped the mess off the lino and dumped it into the trash can.

"I would've done that," Dean said from behind me and I jumped, nearly knocking the bucket over.

"Not a problem," I said, grabbing the edge and holding onto it as I got to my feet. Don't ask me why I was so jumpy, I couldn't tell you. It could've been the tension in the house. Could've been a number of things. I didn't feel like self-analysis.

He stood there, looking at the mop as I cleaned off the last bits of sauce from around the table, chewing on the inside of his cheek.

"Bobby and Sam have figured out the list of things Crowley's going to need," I told him, uncomfortable with him standing there, saying nothing. "You should probably take a look."

He lifted his head and nodded, half-turning to go, then stopping. "You think she'll be okay?"

I didn't think she'd be okay. I thought she was quite a long way from being okay but I had the feeling he knew that.

"She feels left out, I think," I said, somewhat inadequately.

His face twisted as he looked away. "She didn't want to know about this stuff."

"Or you didn't want to tell her."

He looked back me, frowning. "I tried to, last year. I stopped because she asked me –"

He suddenly seemed to realise that he was talking to me about his relationship and the closed-off look came back.

"When you were turned, she said she wanted to know what was going on with you," I persisted, god knows why.

He barked a short laugh. "Yeah, right. Tell her everything when I'm a vampire and I'm figuring that Sam's gonna kill me when I get back."

"You didn't, even afterward," I reminded him.

"Afterward…" he hesitated, and the closed-off look vanished, the memories fluttering across his face. "I was a monster. And that could've happened again, anytime. I –"

He swung away and walked out without finishing that sentence, although I could guess at what he'd about to say. He'd said it to Ben. Not fit to sit at their table.

I shoved the mop into the bucket and took both to the laundry, tipping out the dirty water and rinsing both and putting them away.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Lisa must've coasted out of the yard very early the next morning because none of us heard the sound of the van leaving or had the slightest clue she was gone until Dean went upstairs to talk to her. Dean spent two hours driving around in the direction of Michigan, thinking she might have tried to head home, Sam riding shotgun and Bobby and I calling Bobby's contacts in the towns that were more-or-less along the route.

They got back at midday, and by then the reports were all over the news. Bobby gestured to the television as Dean walked in.

"The van seems to have crossed all six lanes before crashing through the guard-rail and over the drop. Police have not yet said if there were any survivors and –"

Dean's phone rang and he startled at the noise, pulling it from his pocket impatiently. He hit Call and the colour drained from his face.

"Crowley, let 'em go now, or I swear..." His face hardened into stone as he listened to the voice on the other end of the line. "I am going to kill you."

Bobby and Sam looked up as Dean's knuckles whitened over the cell he held. "I'm telling you, last chance to let 'em go easy."

His eyes closed and for a moment he just stood there, frozen. Then he stabbed the end-call button and shoved the cell back in his pocket.

"What's the story?" Bobby asked.

"He got 'em on the interstate," Dean said tightly, waving a hand at the tv. "Same as the script, the rest of it," he added, looking at me accusingly. "If we can't stop this crap from happening, what's the point?"

"We've got the location of his place," Sam said quickly, looking from Bobby to his brother.

"And Crowley's put a demon into Lisa," I said. "In the draft, you don't know about it –"

"I know! I read the fucking script! What am I supposed to do about it?!" he demanded. "I can't use the knife and I can't exorcise it without it hurting her!"

"You could 'cuff her," I said. The idea had occurred to me two weeks ago, before I'd realised it would ever get this far and I'd shelved it, thinking I'd ask how hard it was to engrave handcuffs sometime when the brothers had some free time – which had never happened. "Bobby, you said a devil's trap has no field of influence, the demon has to be right inside or it can escape."

"Yeah, so?"

"But the other trap, the one in the book of Solomon, didn't that have a field that could hold a demon even if it was partly enclosed?" I asked. I'd spent time studying the book for any clues about Purgatory, mostly coming up with nothing but there'd been a design I'd asked Bobby about.

Sam nodded suddenly. "I remember that as well," he said, glancing apologetically at Dean. "We didn't have the time to go right through it before the crash but I remembered reading about it, thinking we could use it for a hex bag, sometime."

"Alright," Dean said through his teeth. He looked at Bobby. "You got a copy of the book?"

The one Bobby had given them originally had been destroyed in the crash.

"'Course, think I could live without that?" he snapped back at Dean, getting up and going to the shelves. "How would you use it?"

"I thought, maybe you could engrave it on a pair of handcuffs…" I suggested tentatively. "If the meatsuit was restrained as well as the demon, you could exorcise the demon safely? For Lisa, I mean?"

"Bobby, you got –?"

"In the basement, third bench from the stairs," Bobby answered, flicking through the pages of the book. "Here, take this."

Sam grabbed the book and bounded out of the room and Dean looked at me speculatively.

"Anything else?"

"Can you make sure that Ben can't be possessed? Is there a charm or something he could wear? Or could the tattoo be painted on somehow?"

"He doesn't get possessed in the script," Dean said warily.

"In the script, Balthazar tells you the location and Lisa gets stabbed – we're off the script now and I'm just trying to think of all the possibilities."

"Ellen and Jo had charms," Bobby said, walking out of the room. "Think they got 'em from Rufus, I'll check his stuff, see if there're any more."

"Did you think she'd take off?" Dean asked when he'd gone.

"No," I said. Actually I hadn't even thought about it. A Winchester tells you that the King of Hell is after you and I wouldn't have taken off, no matter how much aggravation there was. I saw a familiar expression on his face.

Guilt.

"This wasn't your fault."

He looked at me and smiled, his mouth lifting but his eyes still dark and cold. "Only one in the room."

Shaking off the feelings he seemed to be drowning in, he looked around. "Sam and me'll get Lisa and Ben back. You and Bobby need to get that stuff to screw up Cas and Crowley's ritual. We gotta be ready to roll as soon as we're done there."

I nodded and watched him walk out the door.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

We were ready when they got back. They weren't.

The cuffs had worked fine, Sam had told me. Dean'd got the demon out and put the charms on both of them and Sam had been covering the alleyway from the door to the car and hadn't seen the guy on the roof. The bullet had been a stray, ricocheting from an iron door across the alley as Sam'd taken out the sniper and it'd hit Ben in the side, going through his ribs and lungs and lodging just under his heart.

Ben had been dying in the hospital room and Lisa had spilled her fear and anger and pain over them, Sam had said, Dean just sitting there, taking it. When Cas had appeared, he'd thought his brother was going to try to kill the angel. But he'd subsided when Cas had touched the boy and healed him completely.

"It was probably the only reason Dean came back at all," Sam had said to me in the kitchen. "But at the same time, it broke something in him, something in Lisa too. He asked Cas to wipe out their memories of him."

I frowned at him. "That won't reduce their vulnerability as leverage for him, it makes it worse, they won't know –"

"Preaching to the choir, Terry," Sam said gently. "I don't think he did it because of that." He got up from the table and yawned. "We're ready for tomorrow, right?"

"Yeah, today," I said, looking at my watch.

"I'm going to get some sleep," he said, with another jaw-cracking yawn. "See you in the morning."

"Night, Sam."

I stayed at the table for a few more minutes then got to my feet. I had a bad feeling that Eleanor Visyak had not made it past Castiel. Her blood was one of the ingredients for opening the doorway. I wondered if there was anything that would counteract a transdimensional monster's blood as I wandered around turning off the lights on the way to the living room.

Dean was lying on the couch, an almost-empty bottle on the floor beside him. I couldn't see if his eyes were open or shut and I tip-toed past him, hoping to be able to gather up the fax pages without waking him if he was out.

"I'm up," he said, the words slurring slightly. "Don't have to be quiet."

"Sorry, I'll just get this stuff and leave you –"

"Alone? You too?" he muttered, sitting up and swaying a little as he reached out to grab my wrist. "Don't."

I looked down at the hand curled around my arm. "You okay, Dean?"

"Nope," he said, letting me go and tipping back to lean against the high back of the sofa. "Not okay."

On the show, I'd never seen him try to talk to anyone but Sam. But the writers had kept on killing off all the characters – people, here – he might've tried to talk to so it was hard to say if that was a result of choice or a lack of opportunity. Either way, I thought it would best to keep quiet and if he wanted to talk, he would. If not, then it looked like he'd pass out fairly soon.

"Sam told you, huh?"

"Yes, he told me." I licked my lips a bit nervously. "It was just bad luck, the bullet, Dean. It wasn't on you."

"Tell you 'bout Cas?" he asked, peering at me with unfocussed eyes, either ignoring or not registering what I'd said. "Tell you Cas saved Ben?"

I nodded.

"I really did want him to be mine, you know?" he said after a moment. "I don't know why, I didn't think I'd get to thirty, but there was something…I don't know."

"You always wanted family, Dean," I ventured. His family, for a long time. His father. His mother. Sam. All together. But I thought that somewhere, under that wish, he'd wanted a family that belonged solely to him, as well.

"Yeah, I did," he said. He rubbed a hand over his eyes tiredly. "Mine kept dying."

"Why didn't you stay with Lisa and Ben, when Sam came back?"

He looked down, his face shadowed and hollowed out a bit. I didn't think he was going to answer, the silence getting longer and longer. Then he did.

"When I was there, it wasn't me," he mumbled, leaning forward as he looked around for the bottle. "Lise…Lise asked me about my life, and I told her, what I could, a bit anyway. I got the feeling she didn't want to know all of it. And I couldn't tell her…all of it."

He spotted the gleam of the light on the neck of the bottle and reached out for it, tipping to one side and catching himself just before he fell. His fingers closed around the neck and he swallowed the last couple of mouthfuls down.

"I couldn't let her in," he said, letting go of the bottle, blinking as it hit the floor with a dull thud. "And I couldn't be me. And I couldn't love her, but I knew she loved me. She thought she did. She wanted to," he said, the words falling out in a heap. "That year, it was already starting to…change…me. Didn't want it. Didn't want that."

He looked up, his expression almost startled that I was there, sitting there, listening to him. Then his eyes rolled up and his eyelids dropped and he tipped over onto his side, his alcohol tolerance finally reached, I guessed. I grabbed his feet and wrestled them onto the sofa so he was lying straight at least, then reached out for the blanket that lay across the back of the sofa, pulling it over the top of him.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

AN: Sorry this chapter was a bit of a long one. More action in the next! Apologies too for any errors. I was rushing this a bit.