A thought occurred to Dean as he was sitting, sleepless, on the bed of his Seattle hotel room that night. Seventh day is supposed to be the day of rest... he thought blandly, eyeing the bible all hotels had somewhere in the room. This one was lying on the nightstand, in his line of vision as he looked over to Sam, peacefully asleep on the second bed. Thank god for that at least. Somehow I don't think the word of god is going to get her to stop tailing Sammy, though.

Dawn was breaking on the horizon far below their room, high up on the skyscraper, as a couple things came together for him…

-

'So tell me why she's important again?' he'd asked his brother on the long drive from Moesko Island to Rachael's house.

'She found the girl's body.' Sam replied, 'At the bottom of the well. She notified the authorities, and they came to check it out. That's why we found police tape around that cabin.'

-

She found the body... he thought, looking over at Sam, ...that means... he reached over, and slid the thin little laptop off of Sam's bed, and onto his own, flipping it open, and beginning to tap away on the keys. He didn't like laptops much. It wasn't that he didn't know how to use him... he just didn't know how to use them well.

"Gotcha..." he triumphantly breathed.

"What are you doing?" came a tired tone from Sam's bed, and Dean looked over to see his bleary-eyed, bed-headed brother sitting up from where he'd been silently laying. A wicked grin was plastered over the elder's face, which made Sam blink a few times, before shaking his head in confusion, and pressing, "What?"

"Burn the bitch!" Dean said happily. "Sammy, you never told me this article mentioned where they buried the girl..." he turned the screen around so his brother could see the saved document he had, clearly listing the cemetery and lot the girl had been placed in. "She may be using a tape to do her haunting, but she can't haunt unless she actually exists. So this is as standard as anything! We just need to toast her!"

Sam blinked once, twice, then looked down at himself, apparently pondering the concept, before he turned his face back up towards Dean, asking quizzically, "Why didn't we think of that earlier?"

-

A short amount of driving, and alot of hard labor later, they'd unearthed the unnaturally marshy and wet grave of Samara Morgan. The body was, admittedly, one of the grossest things Dean had ever seen in all his years of hunting. A haunting grey skeleton, small, and robed in tattered white, with long dark hair still clinging vainly to the skull. And despite all of the skin being long since gone, a cloud of buzzing black flies would not leave them alone throughout their entire task.

"So. Now that the worst is over..." Said a disheveled, mud-coated, and very tired looking Dean, leaning on his dirty shovel for support, "Time for a little celebration. You got the gas?" he asked Sam with a weary grin.

"Yup." came the response, as his brother lugged a huge container of kerosene over from the trunk of the Impala. He half-spilled, half-poured it over the wet body. Water or no, with this stuff on it, it couldn't help but burn.

Dean reached into a pocket and pulled out a match, lighting it along the coarse wood of the shovel's long handle. "Say bye-bye..." he leered over the little girl's body, dropping the match, and the thing was almost instantly engulfed in flames. "We've had enough trouble from you. I'm an inch away from starting to roast marshmallows."

Sam only gave a weak smirk to that, as always sarcastic remark. Something about this just didn't feel right. Something in his mind... it felt... silent. Empty. But as if it shouldn't feel that way. It was silence like the sound was being blocked, not like there was no sound at all.

"Hey. Hey, c'mon man. Chin up, we won." Dean said, drawing closer, and looking at Sam a little worriedly. He grinned then, trying to get the man off-guard, "Let's go celebrate."

-

Dean's idea of celebrate, and Sam's idea of celebrate were both quite different. Dean meant go to a bar and get drunk. Sam meant go to the hotel room and get some sleep. In the end, it wound up being Sam's idea that prevailed. He'd been sleeping unnaturally deep and long lately... and being tired so often...

...though for now it was natural, Dean thought. After the long day of work... no wonder he was exhausted. But he himself had been up all night before, and done the gravedigging work, and still found no rest.

It was the seventh day... night had settled. It was growing late... He had no doubt that they had succeeded in banishing Samara, but still... Sam's chosen time was nearing, and Dean wasn't about to doze off during it. He'd be up beside him, with a rocksalt gun in hand, waiting to fight off whatever might try and jump him... if in fact something did.

It was two-o-clock in the morning. The man had been growing drowsy ever since midnight, and mentally slapped himself every time he felt himself drifting into sleep. His hand tensed on the metal trigger of the gun. His eyes darted constantly between the green-numbered clock, and the ominous black form of the TV, looming and reflecting the room in the dim light.

At three-o-clock he'd gotten over the hump, and was once again slightly more awake. That didn't keep him from jumping practically through the roof when a cellphone rang. He looked wildly over to the desk, now aware that his body was shivering.

Hold it together. he urged himself, reaching for the device. It was Sam's making the noise, not his... that made him more nervous still. Slowly, he opened it, a gun pointed at the television as he did so, keeping his face a good distance away from the earpiece and speaker, just in case something decided to reach out of it and grab his head or something.

"Hello?" he asked, speaking loud enough so the faraway censors could pick up his speech, but softly enough that he did not wake up his sleeping brother.

"...Hello... Sam?" came a familiar voice.

"No. Dean." he responded, bringing the phone closer to his ear, but not dropping the gun an inch, "Look, whoever you are, and why ever you were calling my brother this early in the morning, this really isn't a good time, so I'm sure you could leave a message..."

"It's Rachael!" the person on the other side hissed. "I need to talk to him."

"Well why can't you talk to me?" Dean tried the whole charm thing again, though he was beginning to seriously not like this chick.

"Why can't I talk to him?" she demanded.

"Because he's asleep." Dean frowned.

"Well wake him up, this is urgent." she ordered.

"I'm sure you can tell it to me, and I'll deal with the problem." he said through gritted teeth.

There was a short silence, then she sighed, "Look, what time did your brother watch the tape?" she asked. "It was a week ago today, right? Sometime really late?"

Dean nodded, then realized she didn't know that, "Uh, yes."

"Did you guys copy the tape?"

"Why would we need to do that?"

"Because copying it stops the curse."

"We already stopped the curse." he reported, "Forever. For everyone."

Another short silence. "How did you do that?"

"We burned the body." Dean explained.

"How could that possibly help anything?" she sounded angry, or at the very least offended.

"Lady, the way we do things, it does."

She sighed, "But you should've still copied it as a failsafe..." she murmured. "How's Sam? Does he seem okay?"

"Yeah..." Dean looked across at his brother again, glimpsing the clock, 3:03, as he did so. "Yeah, he's fine."

"I'm sorry to call so late, I just... I couldn't sleep. I was worried about him."

That made Dean smirk. "He's fine." he assured.

Silence yet again, "What time did you say he watched the tape?"

"3:12 in the morning." Dean said, "If dreaming it counts as watching it."

A pause, "...allright. I still think you should have copied it." she mumbled, "Just to be sure... I'd better go now."

"Yeah..." Dean muttered absently.

"Just, do one thing for me, just to check..." Rachael began, "...take a picture of him. You probably have a camera on your phone..."

Dean nodded to himself. He did.

"Take a picture of him." she repeated, "If his face is blurry, that means the curse is still on..." silence once more. Dean, personally, was confused... and about to speak up and ask a question, before she quickly cut him off, "Goodbye." A click, and the phone was blinking to signify the end of the conversation.

He frowned, and held it in front of his face again, looking down at it a moment, as the call-screen went away, and the main-screen returned, showing the time, 3:05. He looked at Sam, and sighed. Couldn't hurt... Flicking through a few menu screens, he came upon the camera, and held it up. He smiled vaguely at Sam's sleeping face, as innocent as a child's as he dreamed...

Click, flash, snap. After a moment of the picture loading, it appeared.

"God, no..." The peaceful image of Sam's dreaming face was a warped, twisted mess, the closed eyes dark black caves, the lips swollen and bulging. And worse yet, lightly superimposed over this image was another. Translucent, and barely visible in the dim quality of the picture, was stringy dark hair falling all over the actually bare white pillow, and the grey-tinged curves of a female's face settling in over his own. And staring out accusingly at Dean from the screen of his phone, piercingly cold blue eyes.

---

Author's Ending Note Thingy: Oh, good to be back! I had a bit of trouble getting into the swing of things with this story. I had to lookup and doublecheck things so that I knew where I was in writing this. I had alot of ideas for other fics that I also wrote first. There's a Supernatural songfic I wrote called 'Hunter' which you should all check out. Nobody will know the song, the artist who wrote it is not very well known, but the song fits so, so well. Anyway. Yeah, review, and I shall update soon.