AND another one! Be happy, I love you guys!
By the time Dean got back to the room, he only wished he was drunk. Sam met his eyes and gave him a confused look. This was usually the part where Dean would stumble into the room and Sam would be hit with the strong scent of Jack Daniels and cheap women's perfume. But this time it was just an incredibly tired looking Dean. The circles around his eyes were pronounced by the haunted look in the green orbs. He had talked to Cas, that much was clear. Whatever it was that he had learned had both made him think and made him afraid. He sent a nod to Sam and cast his gaze to Kat. His eyes held nothing short of awe as they roamed over her sleeping form. She was on the floor again. Dean kicked off his boots and stripped to his boxers. Then, he walked to her and lifted her carefully off the floor, the sheets still draped around her. He laid her gently on his bed and climbed in next to her, providing her plenty of space.
Kat groaned and her face contorted. Both the boys could tell she was having a nightmare. Her back arched off the bed and her forehead crinkled. Sam sat up off of his bed and moved to do something, but Dean beat him to it. His eyes worried and his movements careful, Dean slid his arm across her stomach. He flipped her so that her back was facing him and moved until she was cradled to his chest.
Her breathing slowed and her muscles relaxed, her eyelids fluttered and the ghost of a smile appeared on her sleeping face. Sam smiled brightly at his older brother, more convinced that they were connected. Before returning to his bed, he allowed himself to cup her cheek with his large hand. She snuggled into it unconsciously and Sam smiled to himself. He could put her at ease too. It made him sleep better.
When Kat woke, it was to the pleasant feeling of warmth. The kind you can only achieve from another body. Her eyes opened slowly and were met by a bare tan chest. Her instinct was to shoot first and ask questions later, but she was so warm. It was seeping into her soul and made her smile. So she snuggled deeper, not caring who the person was, only positive that he wouldn't hurt her. She wasn't sure how she knew that, but it was one of those times she just felt safe.
She woke again an hour later to the feeling she was being watched. This time when she pried her eyes open, it was to meet a pair of bright green eyes. They gazed at her carefully, as if the owner of the eyes was unsure of himself. Unsure if he had overstepped his boundaries. So Kat gave him a slow smile and disentangled herself from his arms. He let her move, though seemed as unwilling to let her go as she was to leave. She grabbed clothes from her duffel and went to take a shower, feeling rested.
Dean smiled to himself as heard the water start. What he had learned in his car from Cas was eating at his mind, but at the moment it didn't matter. Because it was time to get to work, and they had a new set of hands to help them. That would hopefully make killing the Devil a bit easier.
Sam came back a moment later with breakfast and flashed his brother a soft smile.
"How should we act around her?" he asked, scared of doing something wrong.
"Like nothing happened," Dean said as though Sam should have known this. It was what they did with everything. It was the only way he kept his family together. To forget and move on. Dean grabbed his coffee and a doughnut and looked toward Sam's laptop.
"Got anything new on Lucifer?"
"Well, now that you're done staring at Kat while she's sleeping…" Sam teased with a smirk.
"Bite me."
"Why don't you ask Kat?"
"Bitch"
"Jerk."
Neither of them would admit how good that felt. To smile and joke around like nothing had changed since Sam first got back in the impala so long ago. They felt like brothers again. Funny how the world ending and a traumatized girl could do that to you.
Sam sighed and pulled himself from memories and back into the soon-to-be-apocalyptic world he lived in. He sat down on one of the flimsy plastic chairs and began scrolling through an article he'd had up before his breakfast run. He kept his eyes on the screen and said one sentence.
"The Horsemen of the Apocalypse," he said, flipping the screen around to show Dean a picture of the Horsemen. Dean stared at him. Intent clear. 'Explain'.
"The rings," Kat said simply from her position at the doorframe. Dean took a moment to examine her. Her hair was wet and tangled around her shoulders in the perfect way, and her porcelain skin was discolored by a dark bruise forming in her neck in the shape of a handprint. She gazed at him steadily, almost challengingly and Dean stared back. He was unwilling to break it first. She inclined her head and looked to Sam.
"We need the rings right? To open a gate to hell," she said, looking apprehensively at the picture.
"Yea, the rings are where they get their power from. Lucifer's gonna get busy raising these guys soon, and when he does-"
"The end begins," she finished for him. Sam nodded and she sighed. "Okay, we need to run some traces. I'll call Ash."
"What for?" Dean asked, hating that he felt stupid and not really caring at the same time.
"Stuff like…towns that aren't dying…unheard-of flu spikes….random war breaking out….people that eat or otherwise consume themselves to death," she said dialing Ash. She put the phone to her hear and relayed all of that to him.
"Hey Darlin'?"
"Yea Ash?"
"Did you get him?" His southern twang gave his voice a child-like quality.
"Yup."
"Darlin'?"
"Yea Ash?"
"Come visit soon, okay?" He missed her, and she could tell. Truthfully, she missed his strange hair and jarring intelligence. She didn't miss the junkyard he called an office, but she could always deal.
"You got it, Bye!"
She rubbed her forehead gently, already feeling a headache coming on. "He's gonna run the searches and call us when he has something."
"So once we get the rings…" Dean trailed off. Sam looked at him and considered telling him to just read the damn article, but kept his mouth shut.
"Together, you can open a hell mouth." Kat said.
"Uhh, How?" Dean asked, thoroughly confused.
"I don't know," she said shrugging. "Anything that I've read says that you have to do something…but never tells you what."
"Same here," Sam offered.
"Okay, so we have a plan…that we don't know how to activate?" Dean summarized. Kat nodded and shrugged again.
"We could ask one of the horsemen," she offered. Sam laughed and Dean looked at her like she was nuts.
"Like they would help us?" He said.
"Think about it. Death, for instance, it's been around for thousands of years, much much older than Lucifer. How would you like to be chained to a toddler having a tantrum?" she questioned, smirking. Sam shut his mouth and thought about it. Dean shrugged.
"We got nothing else," Dean said, plopping back down onto the bed. "So…what now?"
They had time to kill before Ash called. At least a few days.
"Do, do you think we could, umm," Kat started and then stopped. Dean nodded for her to continue. "Maybe visit my parents?"
Dean froze for a minute, then it registered that she was asking to visit their graves and he smiled warmly. "Sure, where are they?"
A look of concentration crossed her face as she tried to recall where she had been born. It was one of the many facts Andrea had drilled into her in the darkness of the warehouse. "Derry, Maine," she said slowly. "But I don't know their names." She looked ashamed of herself and Dean rushed to console her.
"We pose as FBI all the time, it shouldn't be that hard to get the information you need," he said smiling.
"We're not too far from Derry, let's head out," Sam said, calculating the miles in his head.
Hey Dean," Kat started, her eyes full of something that made Dean stop and look at her. He was not sure what he was expecting her to say, but a thousand things ran through his mind. About nine-hundred of which ended with a passionate kiss against the door frame. "Can I drive?"
He deflated, and his mind rushed to her doing eighty on his poor baby. He took in her wide blue eyes and the pleading in them. They were sucking him under to a dark dark world where she drove his car and shot his guns and called the shots. "No." He wasn't ready for that nightmare.