LaceyoftheTypewriter

The Road Goes Ever On

"The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say"

~ J.R.R. Tolkien

CHAPTER ONE

Pre-Series

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road ~ Elton John

"I've finally decided where my future lies,

Beyond the yellow brick road."

There was something beautiful about the open road.

Ronnie had always thought that, at least. Through every phase of her life, through all of the changes she had experienced, through every test and challenge that she'd overcome, she always harbored a deep appreciation for a good, long stretch of highway. Some of her fondest childhood memories were formed while she was packed up in the back of her dad's old pickup truck, reading books or chatting up a storm or listening to whatever old country song her dad had on the radio or just staring out the window, watching as mile after mile of American countryside flashed by her.

The open road was beautiful. But the older Ronnie got, the more she realized that for her, its beauty had changed. When she was five, it was her yellow brick road to adventure. There was always something out there to explore, to discover, to encounter.

But now, at twenty-one, things had changed. The beauty was still there, but it was darker. Now, the road was her own avenue of uncertainty, a path that could lead to just as much fear and pain as love and joy.

Although, at that particular moment, she doubted that there was much love or joy in her future.

Not after the hell she'd experienced just a few months before.

The fingers of her left hand were hanging loosely on the bottom of the steering wheel of her navy blue 1999 Jeep Wrangler as she glanced at the GPS attached to her front windshield. Judging by what she saw, she was supposed to arrive in Matlock, Washington in about thirty minutes.

She took a deep breath, leaning back in her seat and keeping her eyes on the road. Even after six months of being back at the job, she still wasn't used to it. She had thought that, given the circumstances, she'd go back to being just as sharp and quick as she'd been before, but she had to admit—civilian life had made her soft.

Maybe her softness was why she'd been booted back into this life in the first place. The thought tortured her.

One wrong turn and forty-five minutes later, she was pulling into the parking lot of a motel in Matlock. The old lady at the front desk gave her a discount on the room when Ronnie told her she wanted to pay for the motel for a week in advance, and after a quick little lecture about how she would have to jiggle the knob in the shower to get the hot water to flow, Ronnie was hauling her backpack and her duffle bag into Room 104, quickly bolting the door shut once she made it inside.

She glanced at her watch after dumping all of her belongings onto the floor. It was nearly midnight, and she was exhausted. Her body ached from the long drive, and her eyes felt heavy and sore.

But when she collapsed onto the bed and closed her eyes, she could feel memories creeping back into her mind, the memories she spent every hour of every day trying to push far enough away so that by the time night came, she could maybe get a few hours of shut eye.

But it looked like tonight was not going to be one of those nights.

She heaved a big sigh, standing back up from the bed and walking to the bathroom. She stared at herself in the mirror. She was nothing special, really. She'd had dark brown, sometimes-red-in-the-sunlight-if-you-squinted-just-right hair for a majority of her life, but a little over four years ago she'd gone lighter, dyeing her hair to a light dirty blonde color. Blue eyes stared back at her above what her dad used to call her dainty princess nose, with a light spray of freckles across it and her cheekbones that would always darken if she spent any more than twenty minutes out in the sunshine.

She'd always hated the freckles. They made her look younger than she was, and even though she was only twenty-one, it still annoyed her that even at the crappiest, sketchiest dives known for letting underaged kids drink, she was always carded.

She had that All-American, girl next door look about her, that look of unassuming innocence.

Which is probably why it generally came as a surprise to people when they found out she was a hunter, and a pretty kickass one at that.

She ran a hand through her hair, taming some of the soft curls that had gotten a little out of hand over the course of her ten hour drive. She wiped the mascara that had smudged under her eyes away with her hand, adjusted the loose gray T-shirt that she wore so that the sleeve wasn't falling off of her shoulder, and then she grabbed her keys and left the room.

As she drove down the empty street, she only had one destination in mind—the tiny little hole-in-the-wall bar she'd seen on her way in. It looked like an absolute dump, and she would bet a lot of money that it would fail each and every health inspection if anyone cared to actually call them up.

But Ronnie didn't care. She just wanted a drink.

She parked her car outside of Joanie's Tavern, quickly grabbing her wallet and locking the car up.

For a town so small and a bar so crappy, Joanie's Tavern was relatively packed for an overcast Thursday night. There was a group of about five young women, a couple of whom Ronnie might've pegged as hookers if she had been in a judgmental mood, smoking at a booth in the corner. Some men and women were shooting pool at the one pool table in the joint, and everyone else was sitting alone or in quiet couples, drinking and chatting. Ronnie was glad that she wasn't the only one there; she hated to stand out anywhere in public places, so the busier the bar, the better.

She approached the bar and was quickly greeted by a girl that looked about her age with a high blonde ponytail and red lipstick. "Hey there," the girl said brightly, a disposition Ronnie found to be quite strange in this piece of crap bar on this piece of crap night in this piece of crap town. "I'm Holly. What can I get you?"

"Whiskey, cheapest you got, neat," she said without hesitation.

"Can I see some ID?"

Ronnie couldn't even muster up the will to heave a big sigh. Some things never changed. She pulled out her ID, showed it to Holly, who gave it a quick glance and then nodded. "You said a whiskey neat?"

Ronnie just nodded, glancing around the bar.

The bartender raised an eyebrow in what seemed like appreciation, and then she just nodded. "Rough day or something?" she asked as she got a clean class out from underneath the bar.

"Or something," Ronnie sighed, watching as the girl poured the amber liquid out of a bottle and into the glass before sliding it her way. "Thanks."

"Of course," she replied. "Hope it helps your bad day."

"I'll drink to that," Ronnie said, lifting the glass in a little 'cheers' gesture and then taking a drink of it. It wasn't all that good, if she was being honest. But she wasn't going to pass it up just because it didn't quite do it for her. A couple glasses of this, and it wouldn't really even matter how it tasted.

She glanced around the bar as she sipped her drink. Everyone seemed to be doing their own thing, a classic small town bar scene. There were a few eyes on her—a woman in her late thirties was eyeing her questioningly, and a few men looked at her with a mixture of interest and uncertainty. This was pretty normal, too. She figured all of the people in here late on a Thursday night were regulars.

And she was just a stranger who sat at the bar and drank whiskey.

She was a perceptive person, which came about from a childhood of always being a little shy and observant. It was easy for her to pick up on cues that others missed. For instance, she could tell that one of the women that looked like hookers sitting in the back corner had probably just had her first night on the job, judging by the slightly stricken, permanent look of surprise on her face. She could also tell that one of the guys at the pool table was clearly cheating on his girlfriend judging by the way his arm was wrapped around her waist while he shot bedroom eyes at the giggling girl on the opposite side of the pool table.

Ronnie just shook her head and took another drink. If there was one thing you could count on in this world, it was that crappy men would cheat on girlfriends with crappy women.

She listened to the pretty bartender—Holly, wasn't it?—flirt with some guy sitting about six seats down from her at the bar. Whoever she was flirting with was eating it up and giving it right back to her, his voice low and gruff and clearly trying to find the best way to convince her to go home with him.

Ronnie had glanced over in his direction once to make sure he wasn't a creepy old man, and while she couldn't see his face because of the direction in which he was turned, she could tell from the back of him that he was young and fit, with close cut blonde-brown hair and a brown leather jacket. Even from the back, she could instinctively tell that he, like her, was here alone, and that he, like her, was probably not from here.

She felt a little relieved. At least she wasn't the only stranger sitting alone at the bar.

About an hour later, after she drank so much that Holly had told her the last drink would be on the house if she promised to actually make it her last, Ronnie felt comfortably drunk and tossed too many bills on the bar to show for it.

This. This was how she was able to fall asleep at night. She needed to be so drunk that the world was brighter and her mind was fuzzy and the only possible way to escape that was to collapse in a blacked out heap.

That was the only way to fend off the nightmares, the memories.

The moment she slid off of the barstool, she wobbled unsteadily. Holly, who had been flirting up a storm with Leather Jacket Man, stopped her conversation and made her way over to Ronnie. "Sweetie, let me call you a cab."

"No thanks," Ronnie said as clearly as she could, although she was pretty sure that the words had still slurred together. "I'm good."

"Are you sure?" Holly asked. "You're not driving are you?"

"No, no," Ronnie lied. "I walked here. Don't have a long way to go. I promise, I'm fine."

Holly looked uncertain, and Ronnie was pretty sure that if she hadn't had a potential conquest in Leather Jacket Man waiting for her, she would've insisted on driving her home. Instead, Holly just nodded. "Alright. You be careful now."

Ronnie just nodded, stumbling past Leather Jacket Man. She saw him turning to look at her, but she had already passed him by the time he faced her, and while a part of her wanted to turn around and see if the man Holly was going home with tonight was hot enough for the pretty bartender that had been kind to her, she didn't want to risk turning too fast and falling over like the drunk idiot she was.

She passed by the group shooting pool, ignoring how they all stopped to watch her leave. She heard one of the men, the one she was sure was cheating on his girlfriend, whisper something to another girl when his girlfriend wasn't looking. But Ronnie was too focused on making it out of the bar without falling over.

And then, right before she made it to the door, the cheating pool player called to her, "Hey, Whiskey Girl! Wanna play a round with us? We promise we'll go easy on you the first time."

The double entendre practically dripped out of the man's mouth, and while Ronnie was wasted, she was not wasted enough to miss that. She didn't know whether it was her pent up emotions, the liquor, or a combination of both, but she found herself turning around to walk over to them, to the sound of drunken cheers.

But she walked straight up to the girlfriend, a short, pretty, curvy girl with bright red hair and dark eyeshadow, and she wrapped an arm around her shoulder and swiftly turned her so that she was looking in the direction of the other girl with them in the group. "Just thought you should know," she slurred, pointing at the other girl, "your boyfriend, Mr. Can't Keep It In His Pants, is screwing Ms. Bleach Blonde Double Ds right there." Then she looked at the man who'd called her over, whose expression had just melted from victorious to livid. "You wouldn't want to play a round with me. I'm damn good at pool."

Then she gave a lopsided, drunken grin, offering them nothing more than that before turning and making it to the door, pushing it open with ferocity, and walking outside. Right before the door closed, she heard the girlfriend yelling at her boyfriend in fury, and Ronnie couldn't help but smile.

The moment she stepped outside, Ronnie wrapped her arms around herself. The late night air was pretty chilly, which she'd noticed earlier and disregarded, but now it had started to drizzle. Unsteadily, she made her way to her car, putting her hand on it in an attempt to steady herself.

She was starting to regret that last drink. Normally she had a good sense of when was truly too much as opposed to what just got her nice and sleepy, but today she'd overestimated herself.

She reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out her keys, but her hands were slippery from the light rain and they dropped to the ground. She sighed, bending down and searching for them in the light from the bar's neon sign, finding them about twenty seconds later and wrapping her hand around them.

That's when two large hands came from nowhere and wrapped around her shoulders, latching onto her as they dragged her to her feet.

Her instincts kicked in and she snapped her head back into her assailant's face and rammed her elbow into his gut, causing a howl of pain to tear itself from his lips as he released her shoulders. She was just about to turn around and stab him with her car key when another strong arm slammed her face first into the driver's side window of her car.

"You friggin' broke Mike's nose, bitch!" a voice growled in her ear.

Now she was really starting to regret that last drink. She wasn't thinking clearly, just reacting, and she tried to kick behind her to knock her second attacker off of her, but he just dodged her foot and yanked her off the car, turning her around so that her back hit the car door and she was facing one of the men she'd seen at the pool table in the bar.

He was about her height, with black stubble and dark eyes and a giddy smile on his face. "Hey, Mike, I've got her, and she's so plastered she ain't going anywhere."

Ronnie whipped her head to the side and saw the man that had first grabbed her when she was getting the keys that she'd dropped. She wasn't surprised when she saw that it was the cheating pool playing guy.

He grinned nastily at her through the blood pouring down his chin. "It's a shame you're so damn pretty," he said, and he quickly grabbed her by her hair and pulled her down to the ground, causing her to cry out in shock and pain as her head slammed against the pavement. "I'd give you a go on the Mikey train if you hadn't just lost me my girlfriend."

"Let go!" Ronnie yelled, feeling fear for the first time in a very, very long time. She kicked out at Mike's ankle, but her reflexes weren't spot on, and she only clipped him.

On a regular day, she would've made a mockery out of these two idiots. By now she would have already handed their asses to them on a silver platter. But now she was so drunk, and her world was spinning, and she was in pain, and she was scared. If she hadn't been in such a predicament, she would have marveled at the fact that she could even feel fear anymore.

Mike just laughed. "You were right, Jim, she's got spunk. Tell you what, when I'm done beating the living hell out of her, you can have her for whatever you want."

Ronnie's head spun as she saw Jim grin, and her stomach twisted in disgust. But before she could do anything else, Mike had swung his foot into her ribs and she couldn't help but cry out in pain. "Yeah, bitch! How do you like me now?"

She tried to roll away from him, but then the toe of his shoe rammed into her back and she screamed at the sharp pain that shot up and down her spine. Suddenly, there was a hand over her mouth stifling her screams, and she looked up to see Jim's grinning face above hers. One of his hands covered her mouth and the other slammed straight across her chest, grabbing her none-too-gently and pushing her down flat on her back into the pavement so that she couldn't move.

She was about to try and kick out when she felt Mike's foot connect with her upper ribcage and she screamed into Jim's hands. Then something hard connected with her head and her ears were ringing and the world was spinning and they were both laughing and she was starting to find it difficult to breathe.

She couldn't believe it. How the hell she had let herself get into this position?

And then just as she was allowed to let herself float away, and give in to the creeping exhaustion, she heard a deep, angry voice yell, "Hey! Get the hell away from her!"

There was a sound of boots running on wet asphalt, and then suddenly Jim was being ripped off of her, and she could vaguely hear him being slammed against the door of her car and a fist connecting with his face. She watched, stunned, as the form of Leather Jacket Man proceeded to bash in Jim's ugly face.

She didn't take that much time to process that, though, because immediately she used the strength in her newly freed legs to twist out from under Mike and land a solid kick to his left knee. He cried out and fell to the ground, and she quickly placed another kick to his cheek, stunning him momentarily. Shakily, she rose to her feet, grabbing onto the side of her car for support as pain radiated throughout her body, and with every last bit of strength she began to kick him over and over again, not caring where her foot landed, just hoping that somehow, maybe, this might kill him.

And then she heard the same voice say the same word as before, except this time it was a little less rough and angry. "Hey."

She didn't respond, she just kept kicking Mike, even though he had long been unconscious. But when a hand fell on her shoulder, she immediately whirled around and threw the hand off of her, instinctively throwing her fist in the general direction of the person's face.

To her genuine shock, a hand shot up and expertly blocked her punch, grabbing her wrists with surprising gentleness and lowering them to her waist. "I'm not going to hurt you," the man said in a gruff voice. "I just wanted to see if you were okay."

She looked up, breathing deeply, trying to come down from the strange sensation of being very close to blackout drunk and also being on an adrenaline rush. She was shaking like crazy, her shirt was soaked through with rain, she was pretty sure she had a cracked rib, and blood was trickling down from her head where Mike had kicked her.

But then she looked into the eyes of Leather Jacket Man, and she recoiled. Everything inside of her froze up, like she had just been pushed out of the rain and into a snowstorm. Her blue eyes widened, and a look of pure disbelief crossed her face.

No. No way. She was just beyond drunk. That was the only explanation.

The green eyes that she was looking into looked hopelessly confused for just a moment, before the same disbelief seemed to flood his senses.

And then the dam broke, and she was feeling more emotions than a beat up drunk girl should ever feel. For a brief, infinite little moment, she went back in time and experienced it all again.

Bare, muddy feet… a little red and yellow playground…a winter coat…a four word note scribbled on motel stationary.

Just one little look into those eyes and she was back in time, in a hundred different moments, and all of them tinted jade.

Leather Jacket Man's hands loosened on her wrists, but he didn't let go. Those eyes just stared into hers until finally, he opened his mouth.

"Ronnie?"

She was starting to see double, and now four green eyes stared down at her in hurt and incredulity. She realized as her lips parted to say something that she was still trembling like a leaf, and the line she had ready about how she had no idea who Ronnie was immediately flew from her mind.

"Dean?" she whispered.

Immediately his hands left her wrists and one curled around her waist. She was about to ask what the hell he was doing when she realized she'd been sliding down the side of her car, too shell-shocked and intoxicated to even remain standing. With surprising tenderness, he used one arm to pull her against him and the other to move one of her arms around his neck. He did this so quickly, without any hesitation, like even though seeing each other had shocked the hell out of both of them, there was something in his nature that compelled him to always, always protect her.

"Alright, then," he said under his breath, almost to himself. "C'mon, freckles, let's get you out of here."

That voice that was impossible for her to forget. That voice reserved just for her. That voice that he'd used when she was three and he had to calm her down after she'd gotten lost in the woods, or when she was seven and she'd jumped into that puddle of mud out behind the motel they'd been staying at, or when she was ten and she'd broken her arm wrestling with his little brother, or when she was fifteen and she'd had that awful first date, or when she was seventeen and she'd just walked in on one of the most terrifying scenes in her life.

Hearing his voice like that was enough to zap her of her remaining strength. She crumpled against him, a drunk, hurt, exhausted mess, and he wordlessly lifted her up off of the ground and into his arms. And then, unable to take any more of the shock, her consciousness dissolved into darkness.

Let me know what ya think! Until next time

~ Lacey :)