Hello Hello m'dears. Again ,sorry for the long wait between updates. All during this last month when I was so busy with school I wasn't really writing, just fixing up and posting stuff I already had. And as a result, I'm now out of stock material so to speak, so things are coming hot off the presses. Hence, when something gives me grief, for example, the dialouge in this chapter, I've got nothing to put up until I hammer it out. Anyway, enough with the long winded excuses. Happy reading.

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Sam rolled his eyes and waited patiently while the little, elderly, blue-haired lady at the front of the line carefully counted out fifty pennies from her small black change purse. His arms were full of the kind of junk food that comprised he and his brother's 'on the road' diet. Chips, soda, plenty of chocolate for Reggie, and a couple of cans of iced tea because she didn't like coke. When his phone beeped he had a hell of a time juggling his armful around until he could snag it out of his back pocket. He needn't have bothered, the whole lot crashed out of his arms onto the floor when he read the text message from Dean. Racing for the door, he arrived just in time to see the Impala pull out of the lot and go speeding back the way they had come.

"Shit!" he cursed, earning a glare from the blue-haired lady as she made her way by him.

"Sorry" he mumbled sheepishly, but continued a steady stream of obscenities under his breath as he looked down at the message again.

It read, 7mS, DT.

"Sonofabitch!" he snarled, and, dreaming of all the ways he was going to make his brother pay for this, stepped out the door and headed down the road at a brisk pace.

Reggie's head snapped around toward Dean when he started up the Impala.

"What are you doing?" she demanded.

He ignored her and pulled out of the gas-station, turning right and heading back south.

"Are you out of you mind?" she cried, turning her head and craning to look back the way they had come.

"What about Sam?"

"Sam will meet us in a bit" said Dean calmly.

"But right now, you and I need to have a little talk."

And God how he wished there were another way to do this. For Dean, it was never the 'walking the walk' part of the equation that was a problem. It was pathetic really, he thought to himself as, keeping one eye on the odometer, he chose a suitably isolated stretch of abandoned road and turned onto the shoulder of the highway. He surveyed his chosen battlefield, noting the waving fields of dry grass and the endless canopy of blue sky. So, he'd lasted less than forty-eight hours. Two days of indifference from Reggie and he was reduced to kidnapping.

He dragged a hand through his hair. His life had never been simple, but Dean had always felt that he knew what he had to do. If there was something bad that needed killing, he killed it. If Sam was in danger, he saved him. In short, Dean dealt with the chaos that was his life by reducing the proliferation mind-numbingly intense and stressful problems to two very basic components. Problem and solution. If he'd dwelt on the details, on the probability of success, he'd have given up and died long ago. Dean didn't calculate odds, as far as he was concerned, there was only one possible outcome. Failure was never an option. Of course, the only problems of the touchy feely kind he ever dealt with were Sam's, and that was only when he was left with no other option. And with Sam it was different. Dean knew Sam better than he knew himself. Knew how to buoy him up, how to make him believe. Reggie was a whole different story. He felt he had a decent handle on her motivations, but he didn't know how to get through to her. So he was stuck. He only knew how to do one of two things when confronted with a problem, ignore it, or confront it, and since ignoring it wasn't working...

Phase one of his plan was helping her to feel safe with him. But words were so complicated and he never seamed picked the right ones. He didn't even know where to start and to make matters worse, the more he thought about what he was about to attempt, the tighter the knots in his stomach drew. Dean took on the kinds of creatures the average human imagination could never even conceive of, without batting an eyelash. But the thought of tackling an angry, defensive Reggie with no more ammunition than a handful of aural signifiers, scared him stupid. He didn't know if he was more worried about the idea that he might blunder again and drive her further away, or the idea that she might throw his attempt at peacemaking in his face. He was miles out of his comfort zone, feelings were her thing, not his. His father had always taught him that the first rule of engagement was to pick your battleground wisely, and here he was, strolling smack into the middle of her territory. Honestly, he'd take monsters any day.

Idly, he wondered how in the hell he'd managed to get here, and he wasn't talking about a deserted strip of highway in northern Louisiana. He decided that didn't matter right now, as he measured the waves of righteous fury rolling off the small woman sitting next to him. All that mattered was, here they were, and they weren't leaving until they'd had this out.

Reggie glared at Dean as he drove. For the first several minutes she'd been able to do nothing but gape at the green blur of scenery out the passenger-side window, as her brain denied the obvious. She'd struggled to convince herself that he was actually high-jacking her. That he could be so insufferably high-handed. Her eyes narrowed, the bloody arrogant bastard. She'd known he wasn't happy with the situation between them, but, she had to admit, she'd underestimated him. He hadn't backed down, she should have realized that he wouldn't. But if he thought he was going to bully her into confiding in him, he had another thing coming. Fisting her hands, she prepared herself for the coming battle.

When Dean pulled off the road and onto a small, abandoned dirt lane that had once lead to somewhere but was now just a weedy decoration and killed the engine, she felt a fission of unease snake through her anger. She considered, but only for a split second, getting out of the car. They were in the middle of nowhere, where would she go? She couldn't escape and, she realized grimly, that was exactly the point. Unlike Dean, Reggie was very, comfortable with words and, she knew that, as a man more comfortable with actions than words, Dean had no idea of the damage she could do with them. They bubbled up inside her now, a verbal arsenal seething at her disposal. Coupled with the very intimate knowledge she had, what she knew about the darkness that writhed, caged, inside him, she could have shredded him into pieces. Left him quivering and exposed. But, despite the dark allure given to that course of action by her fury and the worm of fear which urged a preemptive strike, the feral impulse to attack that masked her own vulnerability, was held at bay the prickling awareness assaulting the edges of her mind. Gone was the cocky, indifferent calm of earlier. She could feel his nerves, a discomfort that flirted on the edge of fear, that she felt even through the thick blanket of apathy she'd wrapped around her senses.

Dean turned to look at Reggie, noting how her eyes swept quickly over their new location, seeking an avenue of escape, and glittered with the light of battle when she accepted there was none. She turned that baleful glare on him and gave up any pretense of not knowing what this was about. Looking into those stormy golden orbs, feeling the air inside the Impala crackle with the force of her wrath, Dean was forced to wonder if he was going to get out of this one in one piece. He almost smiled at the irony. To think, that after all of the nightmarish horrors he'd faced, he might well meet his fate at the hands of a tiny, tawny-haired woman with the eyes of a vengeful goddess, her lovely face set into cool, foreboding lines. Looking at her in this moment, he would have believed she was capable of anything, but he'd passed the point of no return. Dean's resolve to deal with the situation between them hardened. He had to get through to her, he was positive that if he failed, there would be no second chance.

"What in the hell, do you think you're doing Winchester!? This isn't how it works. Just because you don't like something doesn't mean you get to drag me out to the middle of nowhere so you can try and make me tell you what you want to hear."

Reggie let her outrage vibrate in every, carefully enunciated word.

He had the gall to smile at her.

"Not too happy, are you?" he said, still in that insufferably calm voice.

"Oh, don't miss a tick do you Einstein?" she snarled sarcastically, tone clipped.

She crossed her arms,

"You have the emotional maturity of three year old. What in the hell is going on Dean?"

He didn't falter under the heated accusation of her gaze.

"I think that maybe I should be asking you that question."

She looked away,

"I don't know what you're talking about."

He sighed. Here goes nothing.

"Yeah, you do. And I'd really appreciate it if you'd stop treating me like some kind of emotionally stunted moron. You've been acting as though I was a mildly irritating stranger you're being forced to put up with ever sine I asked you about your Dad."

She stiffened.

"I told you to leave it alone."

"Yeah" he nodded,

"I remember. And then, since you knew that I wouldn't, you thought you'd try to make me."

His blunt and uncomfortably accurate assessment of her behaviour set Reggie reeling. She was surprised that he'd pegged her so precisely, so easily read the buried intent behind her actions. She had chosen to ignore, in her anger and panic, what she had always known about Dean. He was a far more astute and, well, sensitive wasn't really the right word. It was too, refined, too deliberate, too civilized to describe Dean's brand of insight. It was an almost primitive, visceral form of empathy. Dean's green eyes looked at the normal, safe world that most people lived in with the detached insight only someone who walked in that world without ever really being a part of it, could. The piercing gaze of the outsider bypassed all the trappings and societal conventions to reach truth. Dean saw the world he protected, but to which he could never belong, with a probing, measuring combination of intellect, but more importantly, instinct. He read people, places, and situations the way only a man who's life, and very often, the lives of others, depended upon his ability to not only see the veiled truth which so often hid in plain sight, but to process and react to that information under extreme duress. It was marriage of skill, honed practically from the cradle, and natural ability.

Dean, for all his internal isolation, was a people person. And he was more than capable of taking the disjointed strands of what he saw in you, which was more than most, and in Reggie's case, definitely more than she intended, and weaving them into a very accurate understanding, by filling in the blanks with information garnered by his sharply observational brain. Dean was always watching, even when you didn't know it, and even, Reggie suspected, when he didn't intend it. The guardian spirit that fueled Dean, that drove him through the continual tragedy, the fear, the deadly weight of responsibility, was never at rest. It really wasn't so different, Reggie realized, from what she herself did. Minus a few extrasensory advantages.

The point was, he'd guessed her game, and was calling her on it.

Reggie's stomach twisted as he threw the truth at her. She had done what she hated doing above all, used her gift against another. It was the first indication that what she had feared her interaction with Dean might lead to, was becoming a reality. Loss of control, a distorting of herself. It wasn't his fault, but, the threat he posed, and her desperate attempt to protect herself, was leading her to places she didn't want to go. Moving her toward a Reggie she didn't want to be.

Her guilt over her actions made her downgrade from snarling fury to denial.

"Please Dean. Don't, I…I…There's nothing wrong. And even if there was, it's my problem."

He shook his head.

"No good Reggie. I know that you're used to being the one calling the shots. I've noticed that that's how you generally interact with people. You always seem so strong, so in control, that they surrender the reins to you before they even realize that they're doing it."

He locked eyes with her.

"That isn't going to work on me Reggie. You can't manipulate me into leaving you alone, this relationship can't function only on your terms. Aren't you tired of always having to take all the responsibility, of having to do all the work in your relationships? You make all the decisions, for both people, about how you're going to interact, and then you set up a very complicated set of situational and emotional controls which allows you to direct the action."

He paused, and looked her directly in the eye, "I won't be lead Reggie."

She was looking shocked and horrified.

"I don't use my gift to control people emotionally!" she burst out, aghast.

Dean shook his head.

"I know that. I'm talking about how you set it up so that the people you're involved with are dependant on you, and you give everything, everything but trust, and so can never get as much as you deserve in return. The problem with that is, you're always having to be so careful, planning and directing every move and never able to just be. It's like you don't trust anyone to want you for yourself, you're always trying to hide something, while trying to pretend you don't have anything to hide."

He paused, trying to sort though the tangle of words that had spilled out so unexpectedly, to assure himself that he understood what he was saying, and hoped to God she could make sense of his ramblings, because to was too late to stop now.

"That's a lot of balls to keep in the air, but with me, there's already one less. I know that you've got a secret, and we need to talk about this."

She gave him an incredulous look.

"Now that's a sentence I never thought I'd hear pass you lips."

He gave a chagrined smile,

"Yeah, well, sometimes it's the only way to get it done."

He didn't sound too happy about that fact.

"Don't change the subject" he added.

Reggie didn't know whether the fact that solving her problems had made Dean's "get it done" list made her want to smile, laugh, cry, or scream. It did however tell her beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she wasn't getting out of this one unscathed. Saying that Dean was stubborn was like saying granite was hard, his whole demeanor, not to mention his energy, spoke of determination and purpose.

"Goddamn it!" Reggie swore softly, and looked into Dean's clear green eyes.

She'd known, right since the beginning, that he was going to be trouble. Her gut had told her that Dean Winchester was a very serious threat to her safe and stable world from the moment she'd laid eyes on him. She suddenly remembered with crystal clarity, thinking on the very first night she'd spent with the brothers, that he wouldn't be shuffled or shunted or manipulated into any of the tidy categories she used to organize her relationships and protect her secret. And she'd been right. Here he was, challenging the façade she'd so painstakingly built, the one that hid the many cracks in her soul. Reggie had spent her whole life carefully selecting the people that she let get close to her. In each of her relationships there was a clear, though often unacknowledged, agreement about boundaries. The problem was, Reggie hadn't chosen Dean, would have avoided him like the plague in fact, if it hadn't been for circumstances beyond her control, because he was clearly the kind of person who wasn't going to make that deal.

He was a leader and a protector. He wouldn't simply take what she offered. Wouldn't respect the walls and the no trespassing signs, the firmly closed doors and emotional destinations marked "off limits". He wouldn't, like the many other people she chosen to let into her life, carefully respect the boundaries she laid out and take care not to stray from the path that she set for them. No, Dean Winchester challenged her at every turn. He was as immovable as a rock, practically a goddamned force of nature, and he was proving it right now. All the walls she'd built, he walked right through them as though they didn't exist. She couldn't escape him. Couldn't push him away. He wouldn't allow it.

"Reggie"

Dean's tone was gentle, he could see something dangerously close to panic growing in her eyes, as she realized that he wasn't going to let her go.

And Dean was right. Reggie was panicking. Her breath was coming in sharp, short gasps as though she'd been trying to run from him physically as well as emotionally. Her pupils were dilated and her heat was fluttering wildly in her chest. The rapid, violent rhythm of a trapped animal. Her mind and heart couldn't take anymore of this. All the stress and strain of the extraordinary circumstances she found herself in were squeezing her in a vice of fear and uncertainty and she was certain she was going to shatter. Terror and worry warred for supremacy in her mind. Fear of an unknown demon enemy and fear for her sanity and very identity form the one man who could keep her safe, chased each other through her mind in an endless ring of conflict and trepidation. Add to that her concern for Sam, for Dean, whose deeply buried wounds she could not help but want to heal, for Cami and her family, the pressure of lying to them, and the fear that they would discover that she was missing and put themselves in danger trying to find her. Not to mention the strain of a handful of supernatural near-death experiences and one spirit possession. The spiritual, mental and emotional fabric of Reggie's body and soul were stretched so thin, her nerves wound so tightly, that she thought it was a miracle she hadn't given up the ghost weeks ago and just gone stark raving mad. It sure as hell would have been easier.

But in spite of all that, she hadn't, in all this time, been as terrified for herself as she was in this moment. Because Dean, of all people, had seen past all the illusions, had by passed all the defense mechanisms, and he was seeing her. And they both knew that she was vulnerable to him, that he had her on her heels. That she couldn't keep this up much longer. She was fighting for her life on a dozen fronts, to maintain a sense of self and protect those she loved so that if this ordeal ever ended, that life would be worth living. If Dean wanted to, if he kept pushing, she would break. She would tell him what he wanted to know, and watch her whole world come crashing down around her ears as a result, destroyed by the truth she could not live with, that she could not, must not, reveal to Dean's intense, questioning gaze.