A/N: Sorry for the later than expected update. This one is a little long and was mostly unplanned so it did take longer to write. The next chapter is mostly planed out so it shouldn't take too long to write, but no promises(mostly because I don't want to make promises I can't keep) ;) Enjoy.

Chapter 14: To Love and Understand

The next few days are uneventful at most, no cases surface in the area or in the news. While unusual, it is not unheard of for even monsters and spirits to take a few days off, or whatever they do when they aren't killing people. I eventually tell Mike about working with Sam and Dean on my last hunt, however, I decide against telling him about the whole demon children thing for now. He tells me about the successes of his own hunt. I listen, but my mind is still stuck on what Sam and Dean told me. The day after I return, Mike goes shooting with a buddy of his, leaving me alone in the house. With Mike gone, I scour the house for any books that concern demons or my family history. I do feel bad about keeping this from Mike, but I hardly even understand it myself. After hours of sifting through dozens of books, nothing useful presents itself. In fact the only new realization I come to is just how many books Mike and I have accumulated in recent years. I try to think of anyone I can talk to who would know anything about my family. Of course the first home I remember having was in Florida, but, from what Mike has told me over the years, my parents never really lived there long before I was born. Before I was born, my parents lived in Lakewood, Colorado, which is where Eric was born. We moved back to Colorado when my mother got sick and lived there in-between hunting jobs before my father died. I know my father's parents were from Colorado as well, my grandmother came from a very wealthy family and my grandfather was from a family of hunters. I never met either of them, but the stories my father told me were enough to make me admire them. The only living relatives I have on my father's side are my Uncle Harry and Aunt Eliza, my father's brother and sister. I remember staying with both of them after my mother died, but I haven't spoken to either of them since my father died. All I know about my mother's parents is that they were very religious, she never really spoke of them much. She once told me that she had brothers and sisters, but I never met any of them and she never mentioned them again. It is only now I realize how much I don't know about my family beyond just my parents and my brother. If I want more information about my family, I am going to have to look a lot further than this house.

Before I can plan an entire trip to Colorado, Mike calls to tell me he's coming back early. I decide to give up my fruitless search for answers for now. After all, I'm in no hurry to discover that Sam and Dean could be right about the demon child thing. When Mike gets back, I know he notices some of the books are out of place, but he doesn't say anything. It is only when I realize what the date is that I understand what he thinks I was doing with the books. When the next two days pass without any monster or spirit news, I start to get suspicious. Considering the date, and the fact that I don't want to look this particular gift horse in the mouth, I put my suspicion aside and enjoy the leisure time. When the beginning of the next week rolls around finally I know why Mike hasn't told me about any cases. I am sitting on the couch with my laptop when Mike approaches me. I recognize his sensitive-subject demeanor even before he sits down on the couch beside me.

"Lara," he starts and immediately I know what he is fixing to talk about.

"I was thinking we could do something a bit special this year. How do you feel about going to Colorado?" he says in a level tone.

My recent curiosity about my family doesn't even cross my mind when I reply.

"That sounds nice, actually," I say, managing a small smile.

"Good. How about leaving tonight? I booked a flight a while back just in case you said yes."

"I'll go pack," I say, heading back upstairs.

Airplanes are something I'm not entirely used to. Mostly I drive everywhere I need to go, no matter how far, because it's hard to get all the hunting essentials into a suitcase. Once we get out of the airport, we get into a cab that takes us outside of Denver. I know where we are going, Mike explained the whole thing to me during the flight. This is as close to a vacation as we will probably ever get; hunting doesn't normally allow for vacation time. The hotel the cab pulls up to is one of the best I've seen in a long while. With what I have to compare it to, it isn't saying too much. It's no Hilton, but it is nice.

"You know we didn't have to-" I start.

"No, but this isn't a job, I don't want to act like it is," Mike replies, getting our bags from the trunk of the cab.

Mike and I end up talking most of the night about the quality of the hotel. We both know what we are really trying to do, but neither of us decides to give a damn. The last thing I remember before falling asleep is watching mindless TV, something I almost never do. Tonight is the one night I would prefer not to dream at all.

Sleeping in also a luxury I do not get often, neither does Mike, but I can't sleep in today. I wake up before Mike and decide to walk outside. The mountain air is something I've missed about this place, there really is nothing like it. Our family house in the mountains is where some of the best memories of my life were made, the majority of them better than any memories that followed them. I watch the sunrise from a park bench across the street, beyond grateful that I woke early enough to see it. Watching the sun's rays peek over the mountaintops is one of my favorite memories from home. Not long after the sunrise I see Mike walking toward me from the hotel.

"Figured you'd be here," he says, standing next to me.

"I miss this sometimes," I say, looking up at the mountains.

"Oh, come on, Kansas is nice too," Mike teases, no doubt trying to cheer me up.

I smile, "I never said Kansas wasn't nice."

We grab a quick breakfast at a good, hole-in-the-wall cafe and head away from the town's center. As the car crests the last hill on our route, the full weight of our trip finally gets to me. We haven't made this trip in about five years and now I remember why. Mike never leaves my side, however, and I know we both can make it through this trip together. He wraps an arm around my shoulders as I stop in front of the magnificent metal archway.

"You can do it, kid," he says.

I smile at him, trying to keep from tearing up, and cross under the archway that reads: "Golden Cemetery".

The land is absolutely gorgeous, a large acreage of vibrant green grass surrounded by the mountains. Under different circumstances this view would take my breath away in awe, but instead it takes my breath away in a very different way. We walk silently towards the large willow tree that sits atop a small hill. Due to the rather mild weather this winter, the willow is already mostly covered with its small, yellow-green leaves. When I was a child, I never understood why people thought the trees looked like they were "weeping"; I always thought the long, thin branches with their hanging leaves looked like giant, feathered wings. It wasn't long until I started associating the willow with grief like everyone else. As we get to the top of the small hill, Mike stops without a word and lets me continue on my own. A few feet in front of the base of the willow's trunk, gently caressed by some of the tree's longer branches, are four headstones. Right here, under this willow tree, lies my entire family.

There are no flowers adorning any of the headstones, there haven't been in nearly two decades. My mother didn't particularly care for flowers, but she loved trees, especially the willow. She is buried next to Eric, whose headstone lies the furthest right. I do not look that way, not yet, I can't. The placement of the plots was actually my mother's idea. She loved poetry and it is poetry, painfully emotional poetry. Of course she never would have known her entire family, except me, wouldn't even make it to their fiftieth birthday. I'm not even sure I'll break that grim trend myself. The first to buried in this spot, many years ago, were my grandparents, they are buried together the furthest left. They happen to be the only two of the five that made it past fifty. My father is buried next to my mother, but also next to his parents, my mother knew how much family meant to my father. I find myself on my knees in front of my parents' headstones, my eyes fixated on the ground before me.

"I-I know it's been a while...and not coming only made it harder. But, if I was going to come any year, it was this one. I'm still hunting, sorry, Mom, but I just can't give it up."

I actually manage to make myself smile.

"Dad, I broke your rule. I worked with other hunters, The Winchesters, actually. And, you know what, they're really great. I know you worked with their dad once or twice, but Sam and Dean are amazing. Mom, I think you'd even like them too. Mike's taking really good care of me, so don't worry about that. He's here with me too. This was his idea, and I think it was a great one. Mom, the willow is beautiful, I wish you could see it, you'd love it."

I start choking up on my own words and decide to stop. I've never done anything like this in the past. In the past I've just sat here and cried until Mike decided I had enough. I say a quick prayer and finally allow my eyes to look up. Of the three worst days of my entire life, the one that lies furthest right still stings the worst.

March 12, 1997

As I finally cast my eyes over to Eric's headstone, I can't hold back my tears any longer. Ten years to the day and it still hurts like it happened yesterday. I don't think it will ever hurt any less, no matter how many years go by. Even though my voice has gone all scratchy and uneven, I manage to say something along the lines of a prayer. Religion was a hard thing to keep to considering my father and brother were both murdered by a demon, but it still gives me some degree of comfort. I sit on my knees in the grass, letting the tears flow silently. Whenever I come here, which is not very often, I look at my brother's grave and have one thought: It should have been me.

I don't know how long I sit there before I hear Mike walk up behind me. I stand up and place my hand lightly on the top of Eric's headstone. I stand beside Mike and he once again places his arm comfortingly around my shoulders. I don't make eye contact with him yet, I still need a minute or two. Besides, I know he is silently paying his own respects. After a few minutes, Mike rubs my arm.

"You ready?" he asks me.

I nod and we turn away, making our way back down the small hill. We pass back under the archway and out of the cemetery before I decide it is appropriate to bring up the next ritual of the day.

"All right," I say, fighting off the last of the tears. "Time to get wasted."

Any other day, Mike would never condone a behavior like this, but today is not just any other day. I don't normally turn to drinking to dampen my emotions, but it would take a stronger person than me to resist that temptation today.

Hours later, I find myself lying on the bed in the hotel room, staring at the ceiling with hardly a clue to how I got there. Every year I think I will spare myself the drunken blackouts and the horrible hangovers that follow soon after, but the bars still remain part of the annual tradition. Coming to Colorado this year did me no favors either. I sit up, the entire room seeming to spin around me, and notice a small note sitting on the nightstand. I manage to get the gist of the note through my unfocused brain. Mike has gone out on his own and will be back later. I sit on the bed until the room stops spinning and then head to the shower. I know it won't sober me up, but it will make me more presentable. And for what I'm about to do I need to be taken seriously, not passed off as some random drunk.

The local library also doubles as a sort of town hall. In any case, it is where anyone in the town would go to find public records, and that is where I head. Going through public records is usually just part of the job, but not today. Today, the only case I'm working is my own. An elderly woman sits at the front desk, shuffling through papers. I am shocked to recognize her as the same old librarian I was afraid of as a child. By now she has to be at least ninety years old, if not older. When I approach the desk, I feel like her eyes are studying me beneath her thick-framed glasses.

"Hello, I would like to look at the public records for a family that lived her back in the eighties," I say, flashing one of my fake IDs.

Even though this trip wasn't a job, I still had one of my IDs stored in my bag, just in case.

"You have a name?" the librarian asks, still looking me over.

"Yeah...the, uh- the Wright family. Daniel and Sarah Wright," I say, hoping she doesn't get more suspicious than she already is.

She turns to an old desktop computer, pushing a few papers off of the keyboard. My eyes start to wander to the library behind her as she types a few things into the computer. She stares closely at the computer screen and then writes something down on a small piece of paper.

"You'll find everything we have right here," she says, handing me the piece of paper.

"Thank you," I reply, taking the paper.

She looks at me for a few lingering seconds before turning back to her stack of papers. Written on the small piece paper is the location of the files I am looking for, they are in the back sections of the library. I am relieved to find the area is mostly empty when I get there, I feel a lot more comfortable knowing no one is watching me. I pull out the large binder from the shelf and open it on the nearest table. The binder is pretty bare, which is not surprising, considering my family tried to keep a low profile.

The first page in the binder is a family tree of sorts, a pretty incomplete one at that. It only dates briefly back to my great-grandparents on my father's side, starting mostly with my grandparents. My mother's side of the family tree only starts with her, not exactly what I was hoping to find. I'm only here to fill in as many blanks as I can, so any new information is good information. I flip the page and the written, detailed information begins. I start to read up on my grandparents and find their lives involved a lot more than just what my father told me. My grandmother, Isabelle Turner, came from a rather wealthy British family who moved to the States when she was a little girl. She married my grandfather, Stephen Wright, in 1945 at the age of twenty. According to some old articles I find, their marriage was quite a controversy for her family. Not only did they not want her to marry so young, she married an all-American farm boy. I know from my father that this "all-American farm boy" was actually the newest generation in a long line of hunters. For some reason, my grandmother's family changed their minds about my grandfather because the next article I look at talks about them praising my grandfather as one of the best things that happened. I also know my family was never poor, even though my father and mother did not have well-paying jobs. I assume it was my grandmother's wealth that helped out in that respect. According to the dates on the paper, two years after they were married my grandparents had their first son, Harrison. Two years after that came my father, followed another year later by a daughter, Elizabeth. The Wrights were heavily involved in their community, I see my grandmother and my aunt's names appear in a lot of small article clippings about community events. My uncle starts to appear in articles of later dates, mostly for being an all-star athlete. My father does not appear hardly at all and I know this is due to his taking up of the hunting tradition. Dad always told me that my Uncle Harry never really liked hunting and gave it up almost as soon as he started. As a result, my father became a lot closer to my grandfather, which put a rift between the brothers. It is not long before the information on my grandparents starts to merge with the information on my parents.

Dad always said, however cliché it seemed, when he saw Mom it was love at first sight. She was new to town and, seeing as he had lived there his whole life, he took it upon himself to show her around. They dated for a few weeks, until Mom decided to go back home to tell her parents about Dad. He said her parents didn't approve of him, but she made her way back to Colorado anyway. They dated for a while, got engaged, then my father married my mother when she was twenty-five, he was twenty-six. Only a year later my brother was born. My father never really talked about what happened two years later, but it was the reason they moved to Florida. In these records the reason they moved is as clear as day and the 1978 news headline sums it up: "Tragedy Strikes Lakewood: Isabelle and Steve Wright Perish in Car Accident." That explains why Eric met our grandparents, even though he was far too young to remember, but I never did. They died two years before I was born. I read the news article, which blames the crash on a tree falling onto a mountain road. Though an accident, the word at the top of the article pretty much outlines my entire family history: "Tragedy." The rest of my family history I know all too well. The only thing the records have really filled in about that is the reason I rarely saw my aunt and uncle before my mother passed. I vaguely remember staying with both of them a couple of times right after Mom died, more with Aunt Eliza than Uncle Harry. Obviously my father's rocky relationship with his brother didn't improve with time. After Eric and I started staying with Mike, we only saw our aunt and uncle at occasional Thanksgiving or Christmas gatherings. Then, after Dad died, we stopped seeing them altogether.

Even though I still hardly know anything about my mother's side of the family, the trip to the library was a success. I do not find anything that could link either me or my brother to this demon-children thing, but what I did find was some comfort. Somehow reading about my family in the past slightly eases the pain I still feel from this morning. I am getting up to leave when I finally see Mike standing behind me.

"Thought I might find you here," he says.

I place the binder back where it belongs and start to walk toward the exit, Mike following me.

"What were you expecting to find in there? Literal or figurative skeletons in the closet?" Mike says as we walk outside, in the direction of the hotel.

"I just wanted to know about my family. I wasn't trying to find anything specific. I just needed something to hold on to."

"Then why didn't you just ask me? Lara, I've known your family for a very long time," Mike says.

"I couldn't...This was something I had to do for myself."

We get back to the hotel within a few minutes. Mike does not bring up the library or my curiosity about my family again. There is no tension from it, but the subject just seems a little too sensitive right now. I decide to turn in early, welcoming the comfortable bed after the long, emotional day. Before I fall asleep, I watch Mike start to pack up for our return trip tomorrow.

"This was good," I say. "I really needed this trip. Thank you."

He smiles at me and goes back to packing.

"And, Mike," I add, "you don't just know my family. You are family."

A/N: Hope you enjoyed it. As always, comments/reviews/feedback are very welcome and encouraged. I really enjoy writing this fanfic because Supernatural is something I am very passionate about. I love to hear back from my readers :) Next chapter coming by next week.