Dean

Sam walks back into the motel room, a bag of take-out firmly gripped in one hand. His other hand was already loosening the tie on his FBI monkey suit. Dean sets his gun to the side, and stands up to usher his brother back out of their room. Behind him, sheets rustle as Anna tosses uneasily. Since their brief jaunt into the past, her mental state seems to be mostly holding steady. But Dean also knows she hasn't been sleeping much. She's always the last to fall asleep, and the first to wake up - if she sleeps at all.

In fact, he's fairly certain that the last two hours of restless sleep she's gotten is two hours more than she's had in the last three days. And that's not something he's willing to interrupt, even if he's also worried about her not eating enough. Sam looks up at her and blinks in clear surprise that she's still sleeping. Sam carefully sets Anna's food down in the motel mini-fridge before following him back outside their room.

"How's she doing?" Dean shrugged helplessly at his brother's question. Sam hands him his carefully wrapped sandwich and container of fries as they sit on the curb in front of their room.

"She's finally asleep. But other than that… the same as the last few days." Sam's lips thinned as he glanced over his shoulder at the closed motel room door. His knees stick up awkwardly as he balances his own box of fries in his lap while Sam tears open a couple ketchup packets.

"Dean… We've got to talk about what we're going to do with her." Dean glares at his brother. Sam steadfastly ignores him as he keeps his gaze trained on his food. "I think... I think it time we tell Bobby and Nico. Actually, I think we have to tell Bobby and Nico, and probably Annabeth and her other siblings too. I don't think we're helping her. We don't even know how to help her, let alone if what we're doing is working. Bobby isn't on the move constantly. He could give her some stability, regular access to doctors, reconnect her with her family, her friends. That's not something we can give her."

"Sammy…"

"Dean, it's not fair that we've kept her from them this long. She's back, and we haven't even told them. They still think she's dead. It's been months since we last saw Nico. We're supposed to see him in the next month, and he's going to be weirded out if we miss our meet up. He'll call Bobby, and then Bobby's gonna call us. What are we supposed to do then? Lie to them?" Sam huffed, shaking his hair out of his eyes as he swallowed a mouthful of fries. "After this case, we should head back to Bobby's. Ask Nico to meet us there and tell them both at the same time." Dean shook his head.

"Every time we've even hinted at heading towards Sioux Falls, or seeing any of her family she's freaked Sammy. And I don't want Bobby or Nico to see her all… empty. It's creepy as all get out, and we don't have to put them through that. We've gotta let Anna set the pace, it's her life. Now, tell me what the roommate said." Sam glared at him, but accepted the subject change without further protest.

"I mean there was no EMF or sulfur, so ghostly and demonic possession are both probably out." Dean sighed, scratching at his collar under his own loosened tie.

"That was where I was putting my money." Dean took a bite of his food while Sam shrugged in agreement.

"Well good thing your bet was imaginary, cause the house won that round."

"Well then, what is it? Ugh, at coroner's, you didn't see these bodies. I mean these two they just started eating, and kept going. I mean their stomachs were full. Like Thanksgiving dinner full." Sam took a sip of his drink, his expression pinched with faint disgust.

"I mean, we do have feelers out. You sent Bobby the details?" Dean nodded.

"Yeah."

"Then there isn't much more we can do tonight. Maybe Anna will have an idea when she wakes up. I'm just gonna go through some files, maybe try and find some diagram or picture in one of Anna's journals." His brother paused, "are you going out tonight?" Dean blinked at him in confusion.

"Out? Is something going on?" Sam shook his head, shooting what he probably thought was a sneaky glance back towards their room.

"Never mind." Dean huffed and deliberately turned away from his dumbass kid brother.

"Whatever Sammy. Let's just eat and get to those files." He could feel the prissy expression on his brother's face.

"Dean…" He resolutely ignored his brother. They were not going to talk about this. Because Anna was close. Closer than he'd been to a woman, any woman, ever. It wasn't sex and goodbye. It wasn't even like what he'd had with Cassie.

With Anna, it was sharing the backseat of his car and a bathroom and sometimes a bed, and checking each other for injuries and cleaning guns and sharpening blades. It's living out of each other's pockets in a way Dean's only ever done with his Dad and his little brother. It's knowing that Anna drinks her coffee so black and bitter and strong it would take off the roof of anyone else's mouth, but prefers her tea with more sugar than should be legal. Or knowing that it takes her half an hour to wash her hair, but she only washes it once a week, and when there's blood in it. It's keeping hair ties and bobby pins in a plastic bag in the glove compartment because she loses them as fast as they get replaced. It's the quirk of her mouth when she's laughing at them in public, but doesn't want anyone else to know and the blank shark-like expression she gets right before she solves a case.

It's the hundred little things that Dean knows about her just by looking at the way she stands. Even after hell, he knows her. He knows the clouded expression on her face when she's trying to remember something that should have come naturally, and he knows the nervous beat her fingers make when she's overwhelmed by the lack of pain and sulfur. He knows that if he or Sammy hold her hand when she starts to disappear into her own head her episodes are shorter, and he knows that she feels safer holding a weapon even if he and Sam worry that she'll accidentally hurt herself while she's not lucid.

He's never known anyone like this besides for Sam , and some days it feels like he blinked and suddenly Anna was right there, up on the same pedestal his little brother is on and he never even noticed himself moving her there.

And Sammy, his stupid idiot observant genius brother, noticed. And as the mildly emotionally healthier of the two of them, his brother wants to talk about it. Dean, on the other hand, has developed the classic hunter coping mechanism of shoving it down deep and washing the aftertaste of complex emotional issues out with a healthy serving of the cheapest liquor on hand.

Luckily for him, his rescue comes in the form of a door opening and closing behind them. Anna slumped gracelessly to the curb next to Dean, curly hair wild from sleep scraped back into a loose pony tail. In her hand was her room temperature bag of fries and sandwich. Dean noted with worry the dark bags beginning to form under her eyes, and the slightly hunted look in her expression as she scanned their surroundings as she settled in to eat.

"So, cannibalism without a witch or wendigo involved. That's a new one, even for me." Dean glared at Sam behind her back. His brother's eyes went wide, and he made a little shrugging motion with his chin.

They were supposed to be keeping her away from cases for now, especially ones that they suspect included demonic elements. While it is abundantly clear that Anna can defend herself, they still don't want to upset her, or trigger a dissociative episode unnecessarily. She's had enough set backs as it is.

"Uhh, no EMF or sulfur, so probably not a ghost or demon either." Sam informed her slowly, and Dean had to resist the urge to sock him in the shoulder. Anna wouldn't appreciate them protecting her, but that didn't mean Sam should involve her.

Anna nods thoughtfully as she chews.

"Well cannibalism features in rituals, myths, and stories all around the world. But none of the ones I can think of involve eating a person to death. Or eating a lover. Definitely nothing I can think of involves both at the same time. And cause of death feels too weird for it to be irrelevant… there are documented cases of legitimate erotophonophilia. But the statistical likelihood of both parties getting off on killing, then eating their partners is next to nil. Let alone getting off on killing them by eating them. It's a statistical impossibility. What else do we know?" Dean sighed as Sam started filling Anna in on all the details of the case.

So much for keeping her out of the case.

"We're pretty much stuck on that too. Besides for the fact that one of the victims was a virgin, and the other victim kept chewing until he was completely dead, we don't really have much in the way of clues. Their victimology doesn't really give us any clues, and there was no physical evidence at the scene. I hate to say it but unless inspiration strikes, or Bobby's books have something we don't… there's not much we can do until there's another set of victims." Sam concluded, taking his own gloomy bite out of his food.

"What I want to know is what they were hungry for… was it literally each other's flesh? Or was it something else, and eating each other was the best proxy that they could get? It's also close to Valentine's Day, the victims were coming back from what seemed to be a successful date, maybe there could be a connection there? But the eating each other thing doesn't make sense at all from that angle." Anna sighed, picking at her fries. She made a face at the ketchup, and bypassed it entirely. Dean didn't blame her. They're all pretty desensitized to both violence and the weird, gross, creepy, and supernatural ways people get killed. But this case is weird and gross, even by their fucked up standards.

"Ugh, I'm done." Dean dropped his food back into the bag and set it aside. He wasn't hungry anymore. He leaned back on his hands, his shoulder bumping against Anna's. He carefully ignored the warmth that flooded through him at the contact.

"Yeah, me too." Anna agreed, wrinkling her nose. Dean frowned at her uneaten food. She hasn't been eating enough lately either. "Ugh, it just had to be cannibalism didn't it?" Sam snorted as he wrapped his leftovers up too.

"I guess it's research time." His brother commented dryly. Anna laughed at Dean's theatrical groan, accepting Sam's hand to help her up to her feet. The bright sound made him smile as he followed his brother and his friend back into their motel room. It's good to hear her laugh, to see her slowly start to get better. Anna's lucid moments were growing longer and longer.

He still has more than a few pointed questions to ask her. Anna's freaky magic sword is at the top of his list, and her weird connection to Cas and all his weird messed up angel shit a close second, but those questions can wait for now. First they have a case to solve. Then they can worry about the messy personal shit.

They split up for different research materials. Anna goes straight to her trunk, digging through the more obscure books that neither Dean nor Sam know enough about the languages to read. Dean boots up the laptop, and while he waits for the internet to load, he watches as Sam begins to rifle through Anna's notebooks he's kept out.

"Hey Anna, I've been meaning to ask, what the hell is this code?" Anna looks up, a thick green book in her hand, faded gold lettering in some Uralic language that Sam had spent three days attempting to translate before giving up. There wasn't a ton of reference material available to the general public to help translate late 18th century/early 19th century Estonian, the closest guess Sam could make about the language the book was written in.

"Oh, umm. Have you ever heard of a Vigenère square?" Anna took the journal Sam was holding, and flipped through it, scanning its contents.

"No." Anna nods vaguely in Sam's direction, frowning down at the book before tossing it to the side. Dean logs into the local university's research database, and starts trying out different keywords; cannibalism, folklore, sex.

"Vigenère squares are a type of cipher, based on Caesar's Shift. I use a keyword to generate multiple shifts in my journal. It's a fairly simple cipher to use, but without the keyword it's usually pretty time consuming to break. There's a mathematical formula to do it, so it is breakable for anyone who owns a calculator and a bit a spare time. That's why I write the journal itself using a series of different ancient Grecian dialects, each one lining up to a different part of the cipher. But I use modern Québécois French grammar rules, at least that what I use in this journal. I change my codes every so often, different linguistic patterns, grammar structures, they all change every time I make a new keyword." She shrugs, setting the second journal on top of the first, signaling the uselessness of the journal's contents.

"What the hell Anna." Sam breathed, wide eyed as he stared at her. Anna doesn't look up at him, flipping through a third notebook, skimming through her notes with ease.

"Hey, it works. Without me, my codes are practically impossible to decipher. All of my hunters notebooks use different keywords and different grammar structures. Sure they're mostly all written in different Greek dialects, but changing languages for every notebook would be too annoying to keep track of."

"Oh yeah. That's the hard part." Dean rolled his eyes. Anna shot him a sharp look.

"Vigenère square ciphers can be broken. The methods to do it are fairly well known, and can be looked up by anyone with access to a library or an internet connection. The additional layers of complexity are for security. As I recall, having other people finding and reading your hunting journals have cost the two of you more than a few headaches. The cipher on its own might keep regular civilians out of my books, but if they fall into the hands of the police, or government officials with codebreakers on their payroll wouldn't be. And the likelihood of hunters knowing at least some measure of various Ancient Greek dialects is pretty high considering the kind of research we regularly have to do in our line of work. But using more than one dialect, in addition to changing the grammar structure to a completely unrelated language? That's when you'd either need my help, or have to be pretty freaking smart." Sam peers over her shoulder, looking down at the hand drawn diagrams Anna is running her fingers across.

"How do you read this then?"

"Well I wrote the code, and my notebooks are handwritten so I get pretty familiar with each code. And I have a pretty good memory. It… it comes from my mother. So I can almost always read my own code, and if I can't, I use the keyword and break the first page. From there I can read the rest of it." Sam stops trying to read over Anna's shoulder, and looks down at her bowed head in shock.

"Anna… that's more than just a good memory. That level of near perfect recall? That's photographic." Anna ignores Sam, continuing to flip through the journal.

"Photographic memory is a myth. It's never been proven, with zero documented cases. Eidetic memory is incredibly rare, and there is no real consensus about if that actually exists either." Sam tugged the book out her hand, staring down at the incomprehensible, but clearly painstaking work, Anna had put into each one. Dean glanced at the booted up laptop, then decided his brother and Anna were way more interesting than trolling through articles on cannibalism and shoved it to the side.

"Anna, if you showed someone your ciphers and proved that you could read them based on your memories of writing them, I'm pretty sure they'd count that." Anna rolled her eyes, as she reached for the green book she'd originally retrieved from her trunk. Dean picked up one of her discarded notebooks, flipping through the pages that had literally made him shrug at Sam and go "it's all Greek to me" the first time they tried to read through them.

"Could someone crack this?" He asked. Anna looked thoughtful, crossing her arms as she considered his question.

"Depends on the person. Most of my siblings probably could, given enough time. But that's because they all know how I write my codes, and they all know all the same dialects of Greek I know. Plus Annabeth and Malcom helped me develop my system, and they know how I generally hide my keywords in case I forget them. So definitely them. A cryptographer or professional code breaker of some kind could probably break it eventually, if they worked with the right language experts. Maybe a hunter could, if they were a genius."

"Has anyone ever broken your codes?" Sam leaned in, his dumb puppy dog expression in full force. Anna shut down immediately, crumpling in on herself. She snapped the books in front of her shut.

"Once. But I don't want to talk about Luke." She shoved herself away from the table. Dean couldn't help himself.

"Luke?"

"Dean, please." Anna's voice cracked over the please. "Not now. Maybe not ever. Let's- let's just focus on the case." She picked the laptop up from where Dean had abandoned it. She was determinedly not looking at either of them as she tucked an empty notebook and the computer under her arm.

"I'll be outside." The silence she leave behind her is deafening. Sam opens and closes his mouth a few times, trying to formulate a question. Dean shoots him a sharp look, cutting his brother off before he speaks. They both have a laundry list of questions. But it's not like any of them are good at the touchy feely crap anyways, and the least they can do is let Anna handle whatever the fuck this Luke did alone. At least Anna is settling back into herself. Sure it means she's more secretive than ever, and it might be harder for them to get answers. But Anna is recovering. And that's what counts.

For now.