Chapter 5

Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural. Obviously.

"Dean? Earth to Deeeeaaannn," Kate waved her hand in front of Dean's face with a small smile. He snapped back to attention, his surroundings coming back into focus—the waitress setting down his food in front of him, the diner, the low hum of the lights, the jukebox playing quietly in the corner. It was late, close to closing time; but he'd been absolutely ravenous when they got their room for the night and announced he was going out for food. Sam had waved him off, already half-asleep, but Kate had tagged along, 'for company,' she'd said.

He suspected she was just glad to be back on her feet, had had enough of motel rooms for the last ten days she'd been recovering from the aborted demon possession.

Which still freaked Dean out, if he thought about it hard enough. So he tried not to.

"Sorry," he apologized, flashing a smile at the middle-aged brunette who'd brought his burger and fries. She gave him a warm grin and walked back to the kitchen, looking over her shoulder at him furtively. Dean let his smile widen before turning back to Kate, who was nursing her hot coffee and smirking at him.

"What?" he asked, only a little defensive.

She just laughed. "Nothing. Just marveling at the power of whatever charm it is you possess."

Dean's grin turned wicked. "I'm just that sexy."

"Yeah, whatever."

"You asked."

"No, I didn't. I was simply making an observation."

Dean laughed. "You're obviously not hungry," he motioned to her mug. "So why exactly did you come along?"

Kate shrugged. "Not sleepy, and I wanted some time with my big brother." Then she curled her fingers around the hot mug and pulled it to her lips, muttering something that sounded suspiciously like "freakin' sick of being inside."

Dean hid a smile behind a bite of delicious burger goodness. "Uh huh," Dean answered, noting his sister's gaze shift to the window quickly, as if she saw something. She blinked, then looked back to him, shaking her head a little. "Something on your mind, Katie?"

"Who said—?"

"There's something bothering you, I can tell. Now out with it."

Kate sighed. "You and your damned intuition." She fidgeted with her spoon for a moment. "It's a bit of everything, honestly." She rolled her eyes. "When isn't it?"

Dean nodded—boy, did he ever understand that sentiment—and waited for her to elaborate. Much more willing to talk than he usually was, Kate didn't keep him waiting long.

"The demon thing was terrifying, and my own reaction to it scared me," she confessed, quietly, not looking at him. "And since, I've been…unbelievably jumpy. Even now that I'm feeling better, I keep imagining things, seeing something out of the corner of my eye. And the nightmares…" she petered off, letting out a shaky breath, and Dean clenched his jaw to keep the emotion off his face. Her night terrors had kept him up for the last five nights; soothing, stroking her hair, murmuring nonsense until she fell into a fitful sleep again. He knew she knew it, and knew he was about to get called on it; couldn't let her see how much her agony killed him.

Between her nightmares and Sammy's, he was probably never going to get a full night's sleep again. Not for a while, anyhow.

Kate met his eyes, and he schooled his face carefully.

"I know you know," she said evenly. "You've woken me from every single one, stayed til I fell asleep again." Dean sighed—unlike Sammy, Kate never did get that you just didn't talk about stuff like that. Over the years, he'd learned when to put her off and when she would refuse to be mollified.

Tonight was one of the latter.

"You need rest," she said. "I'm going to get a room of my own for a few nights so you can sleep."

"No."

"Dean—"

"No, Kate. If you think I'll sleep any better with you alone in another room, you're dumber than you look."

Her nostrils flared—irritation, Dean bit back a sigh. His younger siblings just did not get it, what it was like to have take care of Sammy and Kate screaming through his head on repeat all hours of the day, what it meant, how it hurt him to be away from either of them, the near-panic he was fighting twenty-four-seven these days because he could tell something was not right—with either of them—and he had no inkling of how to fix it.

"Fine," she gritted her teeth. "Then let me take the Xanax."

"Kate—"

"Dean, you're going to run yourself into the ground doing this. You need sleep."

"And you need someone to help when you wake up screaming. Sam is fighting his own battles right now, and besides, it's my job." Dean's glare was surprisingly harsh for his words, but he wasn't going to do this with her right now. To his surprise, she didn't snap. Instead, her face softened, and he wondered if maybe he'd just won this one.

"The Xanax will keep me asleep."

Apparently not.

"You know what happened last time we tried that. We're not going there again, Kate."

A doctor had prescribed the alprazolam to Kate after the first demon fiasco, when she was sixteen. They'd had to lie, say she'd been assaulted (okay, not entirely a lie), to explain the night terrors that time; and the doctor had warned them of the side effects. Desperate to get some real sleep, Kate had agreed to the pills even though she—like all of them—despised medication.

The next hunt, Dad had nearly been killed because Kate couldn't react quickly enough to the raging black dog. The meds had also sent her into a dark spiral of depression from which Dean had had no luck pulling her. It had taken months to get her back to normal, and several knock-down, drag-out fights when he first took the pills away—fights severe enough they were still dealing with the fallout.

"I was young and stupid," she reasoned, very nearly pleading with him.

"Kate—"

"—I know better now."

"I'm not giving you the damn pills!" he hissed. "You can forget it!"

His sister slammed her hand on the table and stood. "Then I'm getting a room. Try and stop me, Dean, I'm a grown-ass woman."

"Kate, come on—"

But she was gone, out the door already, slamming it in her wake. Dean sighed, rubbing at his brow in an attempt to ease the headache growing behind his eyes.

God damn it.

Furiously, Kate stalked away from the small diner, headed for their hotel barely a block away. She supposed she should have been pleased.

She wasn't.

That conversation had gone as she feared, but not as she'd hoped. She remembered as well as Dean did what Xanax had done to her as a teenager: remembered the bleak hopelessness she couldn't seem to shake, the loopiness, the slower reflexes almost getting her father killed. Remembered John's barely-concealed disappointment in her training, in her abilities as she lost what edge she'd gained via years of training and a few months as a huntress. She remembered looking in the mirror and not really knowing the lethargic, dull face looking back at her; hadn't forgotten how tired she always was and how colorless, gray the world had seemed. Combined with the lifestyle they had, apathy had quickly become despondency.

At the same time, she hadn't been able to sleep at all without the pills. It was remarkable, to her, how quickly it had happened; one day it was nightmares and trouble sleeping, three days later she'd forgotten to take one at bedtime and been up all night. Xanax had been an unkind master, between the dependence and the depression; and while John just pushed harder when he was around, trying to snap her out of her "funk", Dean had known exactly what was going on. Neither of them ever said the word, neither of them ever would, but she knew as well as he did what she was:

An addict.

It wasn't an experience she was eager to repeat, but she also thought that perhaps the fixation had been a personality flaw, maybe she was strong enough now to beat it.

She was getting desperate for sleep. Real, deep, dreamless sleep. And she knew Dean was too.

Back when Xanax had been an issue, they had tried several different meds to get her what she needed—none of them worked. Somehow her body simply didn't respond to any but the one drug that would ensnare her and not let go.

Figures.

An extra room had been the perfect answer from the get-go, in her mind; but she'd known that convincing Dean of it would be hellish. So she'd presented him with the two options she saw: meds or another room.

Of course, Dean freakin' Winchester, stubborn bastard that he was, didn't want to accept either one. So she chose for him. It was her right, she was her own person as much as she was their sister, and she was using her own money for the room; so he really couldn't do anything.

This she repeated to herself despite the pit in her stomach—she hated fighting with her brothers—all the way to the tiny dingy lobby of their motel. She nodded a greeting to the tired-looking old man behind the counter.

"I need a room, please."

"How many nights?"

"Three, please." That should give Dean enough time to acclimate and get a couple nights of decent sleep.

"Forty a night," the man intoned, pecking something into his computer and reaching for a key behind the desk. Kate laid down six twenties and sighed, signing the paper the man pushed in front of her.

He handed her the key, and mumbled, "Room 105, left corner of the courtyard."

She gave him an ironic salute and left.

She fumed a bit more on the way to Room 105, but her thoughts were interrupted by a flash of blue out of the corner of her right eye. Her head jerked to that side instinctively, but whatever it had been was gone. She froze, every muscle taut as she drew the hunting knife at her waist, intensely aware of the hairs on her skin standing straight up.

She was being watched.

After sixty seconds of complete stillness, the feeling hadn't abated, but Kate's other senses—touch, scent, sight, hearing—told her she was all alone in the parking lot of motel in rural Indiana. Dean would be back from the diner soon; it'd be better if he didn't catch her outside, jumping at shadows. She tucked the knife into its sheath and opened her door.

The room was dark and quiet, cold. The emptiness was almost palpable, and Kate clenched her jaw against the sense of melancholy that assaulted her; she was, as she'd so eloquently told Dean, a grown-ass woman, and could handle a few nights on her own.

She didn't bother going to Dean and Sam's room to get her bag, she wasn't interested in fighting anymore tonight. Instead, she locked the door, loped over to the bed furthest from the door—some habits die hard—and flopped down face first, grateful that she was nearly cross-eyed with exhaustion.

Sleep overtook her fast and hard, and she slipped into dreams more violent than her reality.

He breathed a sigh of frustration as the woman slipped into unconsciousness, lying on her belly in the substandard bed, alone in the room she had not taken precautions to ward against enemies. Her brother was worrying at the other side of the compound, and rightly so, because Katharine's dreams were degenerating into night terrors at a record pace.

His superiors did not like it when their premiere weapon—their untrained weapon, as of yet—was alone and unprotected. He glared at the prone form of the foolish girl, so young and far too reckless for his taste, completely unaware of his presence at her side.

Though he'd had to scramble to keep himself hidden several times in the last few days, and he was wondering if the attempted possession had triggered something in the woman. It was difficult to tell, since she was the only one of her kind in all of history.

In truth, no one really knew what to expect of her.

But his orders had been clear; observe, protect, but never interfere unless there was no other choice. Too much was at stake.

Without hesitation, he reached down and touched her forehead gently. Satisfied, he departed moments later.

Duty waited for no one, after all.

Kate was slammed back into reality on the tail end of a choked scream. White spots danced before her eyes in the darkness; her skin was covered in a cold sweat and she was sucking air into her heaving chest in uneven gasps, pathetic little whimpers sounding with each shallow exhale. It was getting harder to breathe by the second, blood and fire still dancing across her bleary vision. She tried to get up and found she couldn't, her legs restrained by…something? Something thin but strong…

She didn't care, she needed to move. Scrabbling at her legs, she realized it was the bedsheets she was tangled in. The realization did nothing to calm the rising panic in her chest. She was having trouble getting air out of her lungs as Phoebe appeared in the corner of the room—Phoebe as she'd seen her in her mind, all rancid flesh and dark blood and deformed features, further twisted in the moonlight that shone through her window.

"Aw, look, little Katie Winchester is having a nightmare. You forgot to salt the doors and windows, child."

Kate tried to take more air in, but her lungs were full to bursting and she couldn't calm enough to exhale…Oh god, I'm going to suffocate.

Losing what was left of her composure, Kate fell back against the end table and bit her lip til it bled to keep from screaming as Phoebe moved closer, blood dripping from the demon's fingertips, rotted fingers reaching for her.

Miraculously, one of her legs came free from the knotted cotton sheets, and Kate lurched forward, barely managing to pull her still-booted left foot loose from the mess to catch her before she fell and smacked her head on the windowsill. Blindly, Kate wrenched open the door and fell over the threshold, the cold night air dispersing what was left of her nightmare.

There was no fire.

No blood.

No restraints.

No Phoebe.

In, out, in, out, come on Kate, she coached herself. Her breathing was evening out, but her heart still beat a wild tattoo in her chest, thumping painfully against her ribs as if it was trying to escape her entirely—that dream had been the most intense yet, so real she'd been able to feel the burning heat of the flames against her skin. So very convincing, she found herself checking her arms, half-expecting to find blackened, charred limbs.

What was that?

It didn't matter, she needed to get away. To run. To move.

Kate stumbled to her feet and began to run. She didn't pay attention to where, every muscle in her body was screaming for action.

Don't stop.

Escape.

When next she was aware of herself, Kate was standing in front of Sam and Dean's door, her hand raised as if to knock. She blinked hard and stopped.

What?

Bone-deep terror warred with the realization that she hadn't even made it one full night without running to her big brother for help.

One measly night.

She hesitated, her pride bellowing at her not to knock. A flash at the corner of her eye, and when she turned, Phoebe stood there again.

Not real.

It didn't matter.

She banged on the door with her fist. "Dean! Open up, Dean, let me in!" The ugly green door swung inward, and Kate careened over the salt line and collided with a solid, flannel-clad chest. He let out a little 'oof!' of surprise as she latched onto the cotton with a sob. She heard the door slam, and warm arms folded around her tightly.

"Katie, are you all right?" Dean's voice rumbled in her ear, and she shook her head.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I couldn't…I just wanted you to sleep," she rambled, shuddering as the warmth of the room made its way into her bones.

"Hush," Dean murmured, and she felt him kiss the crown of her head—something he would never do in daylight. Kate clenched her jaw to the point of pain to hold back the tears that stung her eyes. "It's all right, Kate, its fine. I've got you."

A/N: Thanks again for reading! Don't forget to leave a review or PM if you're so inclined-feedback is an author's best friend! Special thanks to my partners in crime for their assistance and encouragement!