Happy Monday! Meant to get this up yesterday but I had to rework a scene, so now it's a longer chapter, yay! While the holiday stuff was fun, it's back to business for now, and yes, this chapter does eventually lead up to some more ideas and plans, so stay tuned ;) Heads up, if the next update is a week late, it's because I have senior activities and graduation this week, so I'll be much busier than usual, and I apologize in advance. Massive thank yous as always to BaldiDaughterChevy, VegasGranny, bagelcat1, Celtic Knot, TXKimsonFan, and ThornsHaveRoses for your reviews! As you know they mean the world to me, and reviews are always a wonderful present in my inbox, especially on a Monday. Hope you all enjoy the angst-fest that's coming up!

While I've been rewatching season 13, I still don't own the show as a whole, I just mess with the characters on a weekly basis.

Dean woke up slowly, only vaguely registering that it wasn't yet light outside. The clock on the bedside table said that it was just past two in the morning, and Dean had to wonder why he was up in the first place. A quick check showed that the holy water and shotgun were still under the bed, the other side of which was cold. That wasn't odd precisely, sometimes Lisa fell asleep downstairs while watching one of her television shows. Sometimes Dean tried to fall asleep down there when the nightmares got too bad. Normally they were together, but this wasn't any cause for concern.

The house was safe. He'd put up all the wards he could think of, and salted the perimeter each night, and had done so for the past few months. Lisa was downstairs, Ben was in his room, and Dean needed to get his head to shut up. Ben had baseball practice in the morning, and Dean had promised to take him. It wouldn't do either of them any good if he showed up more sleep-deprived than usual.

Dean rolled over, still pretty much half asleep, and sighed, his bleary gaze focused on the cracked open door.

Cracked open…

That had Dean immediately pausing to open his eyes further. Whenever Lisa slept downstairs, he always left the door completely open, always. They didn't just mostly shut by themselves, and he'd gotten into a routine enough to where he never almost shut it. Never.

He slowly got up out of the bed, bare feet sticking ever so slightly to the floor of the bedroom as he reached over to grab his handgun from the nightstand, which would probably be more effective in any given encounter he was about to face. Dean picked up the flashlight next to it and held it in his other hand, ready to turn it on at a moment's notice, but not unless he had to, for fear of waking Ben up for no reason. He crept out of bed, the floorboards not even creaking as he made his way towards the door and nudged it open.

A quick glance down both sides of the hallway showed nothing out of the ordinary, just a dark, safe, quiet house and the paranoid hunter that had just started calling it a home. He took a few slow steps into the hallway towards Ben's room, gun and flashlight on opposite sides of his body. That's all he was, paranoid. Every little creak reminded him of a monster coming to get him, and every shift in the windows made him imagine a hand dragging itself along the glass panes, wanting to be let in.

He silently nudged open Ben's door when he got to it, and after a few seconds of observing the sleeping kid's form, he nodded to himself and drew the door back so it was almost closed, not wanting to disturb him.

The stairs squeaked ever so slightly as he descended, still on alert, but beginning to realize that he was just playing games with himself. They were safe here, all of them. Lisa and Ben were safe because he was there, and he was more or less safe because he had them.

When he got down to the bottom, the changing glow of colors on the television screen bounced off the far wall, confirming Dean's suspicion that Lisa had fallen asleep while watching a show. It was so ordinary, so normal, so mundane, and he chided himself for having thought differently.

He left the flashlight on the kitchen counter, since the television gave him more than enough light to see by, and made his way into the next room to carry Lisa to bed. Maybe she'd sleepily protest, or stay fast asleep, or mutter about him being a strong hero, Dean had gotten all different reactions before, and he smiled a bit at trying to imagine which one he'd get this time.

Dean rounded the corner of the couch, about to bend down to scoop her up, when his foot came into contact with something slippery that coated the floor. Surely, she'd just spilled a drink, maybe when she fell asleep.

But in his chest, he knew that wasn't it, and his heart began pounding.

He slowly looked down, and in the mostly blue emanating light, the liquid on the floor looked almost black. Dean immediately backed up, knocking his hip against the table as he did so, but he didn't even feel it. He scrambled for the light switch, and when the room finally got too bright, his mouth opened in horror.

Lisa was on the couch, eyes open and transfixed on the television, her mouth open in a silent scream. Blood from a gash across her throat had coated her blue sleep shirt and was lazily dripping under the couch.

"No, no, no, no, no," Dean whispered under his breath. This couldn't be happening, it couldn't be, they were safe. And even though he knew a person couldn't survive with that much blood outside their body rather than in, he still walked back over with shaky steps and knelt down next to the couch, blood soaking into his sweatpants.

"Lis-" he started, begging for some sort of life, a breath, a twitch, anything, something. His hand, extremely carefully, came to rest on her cheek, which was cold beneath his fingers. There was no ounce of warmth to be had, which meant she had been dead a while, in the same house as him, and he had taken no notice.

His view of the horrific scene in front of him clouded as tears crossed his vision and he rubbed a thumb softly over her cheek. "Come on," he pleaded, as if she could hear him. But her brown eyes didn't close, she didn't smile into his touch, and she didn't wrap her arms around his neck so he could pick her up easier. She didn't move or breathe or laugh or question why he was suddenly crying. She didn't do any of it because she was dead, and had been for a while, and Dean hadn't done anything about it.

Dean wasn't sure how long he sat like that, staring at her, but eventually he wiped a hand across his eyes and stood up, gun in hand, and ran back towards the stairs. His feet left bloody marks as he ran up, taking them two at a time, before he reached Ben's room and turned on the light before he did anything else.

"Ben," he said desperately, and waited for Ben to question why the hell he had thrown on the lights at two in the freaking morning. Gradually, his gun came to rest by his thigh, shaking as tremors worked their way down to his hands.

Dean spotted the red that had soaked through the white bedsheets, which had been hidden in the darkness before, and he was out in the hallway at the next second. He couldn't bring himself to go inside any further to see what he knew awaited him.

His knees gave out in the next moment, and deposited him on the floor, leaning up against the wall outside the room where his family had been killed and he hadn't known about it.

The gun clattered to the floor, shattering the silence that was slowly being filled up with his own desperate gasps for air. This couldn't be real, it couldn't be happening. He brought a hand up to run it through his hair, down his face, anything that could serve to wake him up, but stopped when he noticed the blood on it. Lisa's blood. He'd never be able to get it clean. It shouldn't have happened in the first place, it shouldn't have-

"You're right, Dean."

Lisa's voice came suddenly, breaking up his harsh breathing. His head immediately turned upwards, finding her standing there in her bloodied shirt, but a grotesque wound missing from her neck.

"None of this should have happened. But you came back, and you dragged us into this mess with you." Her tone was accusatory and angry, but Dean still found himself not able to look away.

"You had an angel wipe our minds and you left, Dean, you left both of us because you thought it would be safer. Does this look safer?" she gestured to her clothing, and Dean visibly winced.

"Maybe you could have done something if you were here. Or maybe we would have died anyways because you went soft while taking a break from saving lives. You don't get a break with this life, Dean, and you know it, and now a child has paid the price."

"Stop," Dean bit out through gritted teeth. "Whatever this is, stop, please."

"A demon waltzed in here and slit out throats. It's over, and you didn't notice. Not much to stop." Lisa tilted her head, as if it should have been obvious.

"Salt and and and the…sigils…the protections…they can't get in here," Dean tried to reason, another tear cascading down his cheek. This couldn't be real.

"Oh, but it is, Dean. You stop hunting and people die, it's as simple as that," she answered his unspoken question. "You didn't protect us, and this, this is the outcome. You can save the world but not your own family? What kind of sense does that make?"

And that was the point, it didn't make any sense. None of it did. But she was there, in front of him, staring him down with her dead kid in the next room and…Dean couldn't take it.

"I'm sorry," he whispered in a broken tone. It bounced off the hallway and rang in his ears as he wiped at his eyes again and shook his head. "Lisa…this wasn't meant to happen, I'm so sorry."

"Yeah, a lot of good that does us." It was cold and unfeeling and shut him out completely. And then, she was just…gone, a small pool of blood left where she had been standing.

Dean was left alone, head in his hands, in the place that should have been a home, but without the people in it, was nothing more than an empty, heartless structure.

Dean was unsurprised to find that when he actually came around, the pillow beneath his face was wet. The clock read three in the morning instead of two, but that didn't do anything to ease the feeling of waking again. He turned on the light the second he made it to the bathroom, not even wincing at the sudden brightness.

It wasn't real, none of it was real. Lisa and Ben were alive and safe, Sam had told him so. It was just the exhaustion of the last few days finally settling in and messing with his head. He had overdone it, that was all, that was all.

He kept repeating it to himself as he washed his face off with water, and his hands for good measure, though there was no blood present to stain the sink pink. When he toweled off his face and looked in the mirror, for a split second he could have sworn he saw Lisa behind him, watching him, wondering why he hadn't done more.

He washed his face again, and then she was gone.

Dean's steps back into his room were shaky at best, and he knew within a minute that he couldn't stay there. The nightmare and the brutal, vivid reality of it hung in the air like a physical darkness he couldn't escape, and there was no way in hell he was getting back to sleep.

You stop hunting and people die, it's as simple as that.

It rang over and over and over in his ears in a tone that Dean knew Lisa had never used, but that didn't help anything. He ran a hand over his face and tried to think of where he could go. Cas was always up, either in the library or in his room, so those spots were out. The garage was too far and there was a chance of running into Cas in the halls.

It took a minute, but eventually he got an idea in mind, and silently left the room. Out in the hallway, he looked left and saw Lisa watching him, and right, and watched Ben disappear around a corner.

He checked Sam's room, and even took a step inside to make sure his little brother was actually breathing and that the sheets were still white before he left. His family was still alive, they were fine, and with that, he left and headed down another long hallway towards the more secluded area of the bunker, where no one would be able to hear him.

Sam had a seventh sense beyond his previous psychic abilities, and that was the ability to feel when someone had their eyes on him. It came in handy when hunting, and more often than not, made him uneasy when he was eating a bowl of cereal when no one else was present. There were definite pros and cons to having been looking over his shoulder all his life. Sam couldn't decide if it was a pro or con that he had slightly woken up when he felt eyes on him. He was on his side facing the door, arm beneath his head and pillow. Through barely cracked open eyes, he noticed Dean's silhouette standing in the doorway. He even took a step forward and then paused before he headed out and shut the door a little bit more behind him.

Sam glanced towards the clock, which was just barely past three in the morning. What the hell Dean was doing up checking on him that early in the morning, Sam had no idea, but he could guess it wasn't good.

Was there any way it could wait until morning?

Sam shifted and tried to close his eyes to go back to sleep. A few minutes later, however, he noticed almost silent, muffled pangs at regular intervals that echoed down the bunker's long cement hallways. Sam was all too familiar with the sound, and it meant that indeed whatever reason Dean had been checking up on him wasn't a good one.

But Sam also knew from experience that when Dean got like this, he needed space to think things through. Sam wasn't about to intrude on that space, but after twenty minutes and continued slowing pangs, Sam rubbed a hand over his face and swung his legs out of bed. They would both definitely be tired come actual morning, but it wasn't like they had any plans.

He didn't run into Cas in the hallways, so the angel was probably in the library or in his own room, and Sam continued down to the lower levels of the bunker where the especially old archives were stored.

He stopped at the door that lead to the shooting range, affirming his memory of what shots sounded like when they echoed through the bunker. Sam waited for the shots to pass, and a few seconds of silence, which meant Dean had taken a break or was reloading, until he slowly opened the door.

Dean was standing in the shooting area closest to the far end of the wall, clad in sweatpants and a black sleeping t-shirt. It looked normal, and Sam didn't notice anything immediately amiss until he took a few steps closer and noticed the red around Dean's eyes. It stood out from his pale face and as he looked down, his brother's hands were shaking almost imperceptibly as he paused at loading the next magazine.

When he finally turned and lifted his eyes to Sam, placing the gun on the counter in front of him, Sam could tell his brother wasn't getting any more sleep during the night.

"Bit early for a run, isn't it?" Dean asked, his tone of voice betraying the fact that he was trying too hard to have a normal conversation.

"Could say the same to you and your target practice," Sam replied, continuing with the fake amount of normality as he made his way over.

"Shots didn't wake you up, did they?"

Sam shook his head. "Got up to get some water, noticed your door was more open than usual, figured I'd find out where you wandered off to," he explained easily. Because of course he hadn't woken up to the fact that Dean had been checking on him at three in the morning, and judging by his state, was probably due to the fact that something in his head hadn't been letting him sleep.

Dean seemed to take that as an answer, but Sam couldn't pinpoint if he believed it or not. Probably not. "Go on back to bed, Sam, I'm finishing up," he tried to brush off.

But with Dean looking the way he did, Sam wasn't about to let him do so. "I'm up anyways," he said with a nonchalant shrug before he leaned back against the counter, arms folded over his chest. He regarded Dean with a slight tilt of his head, the 'you gonna drop the charade?' unsaid but understood by both of them.

Dean held his gaze for a moment longer before he dropped it, clipped another magazine in, and fired it off. The sound was fairly deafening, but nothing Sam wasn't used to, and he again waited until the clip was empty before he tried anything. Looking at the paper target, Dean's usually expert marksmanship was off by a few centimeters here or there, which shouldn't have been a big deal, but to an experienced shooter like Dean, it said a lot about his shaking hands.

"Dean," he started in a low tone.

Dean just unclipped the magazine and fiddled around with a few bullets. "Nothing to talk about, Sam," came Dean's gruff reply.

"Nothing to…? Dean, your face is a dead give away, let alone your shooting escapades before the sun's even up," Sam said back.

Dean looked up, face hardening ever so slightly. "So I shoot instead of read lore books when I can't sleep, sue me, not everyone's an expert in quiet activities." He hadn't yet started reloading the gun.

"Any reason you want to clear up?" Sam eventually prompted, and the question hung in the air around them. Again, the weight of the situation sat like a bullet on the counter that Dean hadn't yet put into the gun, waiting to be fired at Sam along with more painful memories for him to go through in explaining the situation.

Dean took his time in replying, and when he did, it wasn't in a way Sam appreciated. "Yeah, sometimes my head doesn't shut up, and it makes it hard to go to sleep. Things everyday people deal with, no need to make a big thing out of it."

"Dean, it's obviously more than a normal, everyday thing and that's alright it's-"

"Drop it, Sam." It came with a note of warning and Dean shook his head.

"We've been over this, it's better to not keep these kinds of things to yourself," Sam tried because they had been over it many, many times, and he had hoped that they were making headway, but Dean kept shaking his head.

"It's the same old thing, alright? Nothing new to see here, no new horror flics playing on the unseen memory reel, it's fine." Dean checked to make sure the gun was in fact unloaded before he pulled out the magazine and refilled it with a bit more force than was necessary, but didn't put it back into the gun. Instead, he set both on the counter in front of him and stared at the target down the long cement hall.

"It doesn't have to be something new, if something's bugging you and I can help you get it off your chest, or if Cas would help," Sam said and eyed him carefully.

"You can't, alright?" Dean looked back at him, eyes a twinge less red but no less haunted. "It's a nightmare, everyone gets 'em, they're not real, no use in beating a dead horse to find some meaning in them. It happened, I woke up, I shot some targets, I'm fine," he made a hand motion as if physically moving the nightmare out of the air and away from himself.

Sam, of course, could see right through it, and Dean probably knew it, but he was still rebuilding the wall around himself, for what purpose Sam had no idea.

"Maybe I can and neither of us will know unless you clue me in," he tried again, but Dean was still shaking his head.

"I'm not putting this on you, Sam, there's no point to it. It's not serious, it's fine, end of story." He picked up the gun and magazine separately and began walking towards Sam, who got out from the counter by a step, blocking Dean's approach in the slightest. Just when he had thought they were making some headway…"If it gets bad I'll come to your room with kleenex and chocolate, alright? But some stuff belongs here and nowhere else," he tapped his head, having stopped walking as he kept looking at Sam.

Dean's tone of voice had changed, he wasn't about to talk this through any more, and if Sam kept pressing, he was likely to have Dean deny it further and be less willing to talk it through in the future. He clenched his jaw, but took a step back and Dean continued out of the range. Sam expected him to go all the way to the door and disappear down the hall, but he paused as he was going up the few steps.

His fingers drummed against the gun once, and without turning around, he asked in a very different tone, "Lisa and Ben, you're sure they're alright?"

Sam nodded even though his brother couldn't see him. "Checked in remotely as soon as you got back to the bunker. They're in the same place, come and go, it's all normal."

Dean seemed to take a second to process that before he continued up the stairs and into the hall, his footsteps not making a sound as they did so.

Sam let out the breath he had subconsciously been holding in waiting for his brother's answer. If it was this bad and Dean was reverting back to his normal tactics, it wouldn't do anyone any good. Maybe come morning his ideas would change? Probably not.

But he was asking about Lisa and Ben, and given the look in his eyes, Sam knew it was a very high level of bad his brother was shouldering alone. The only thing Sam could remotely hope for was that it didn't get any worse.