Holy wow this one's long. I expect monetary compensation. Also, I cannot be held responsible for brain damage acquired trying to figure out what exactly I was on while I wrote this.

fact of the day: did you know that there's a town in Austria called Fucking?

TIMESTAMP: POST JOHN'S DISSAPPEARANCE

The first few weeks were rough.

She had been trained, of course – trained just as hard as the boys, so she had an equal set of skills. But training is no substitute for experience, and she had close to none of that. Sure, she'd been taken on a couple salt and burns, and every once in a while something bigger would happen and she'd get dragged into it, but for the most part, she got stuck with research duty.

She knew why. Although she only had the tiniest, vaguest, possibly-made-up memory of her mother, she'd seen pictures and she knew that she was the spitting image of Mary. Dean resembled her, too, but he was a boy, so it could be easily overlooked. John looked at her and saw his wife, and he wasn't going to let his wife die twice, and so she was kept out of harm's way as much as humanly possible.

Dean had never understood or even acknowledged this, so the second John had taken off he'd expected Claire to jump right in and get elbow-deep in the supernatural right with him. And she tried, she really did, and she didn't let Dean see that she was struggling, or Sam, either, when they picked him up, but she was. She was constantly sore and tired, and the ghosts started to give her nightmares. They were real now, not something she knew existed but never dealt with – and they scared her.

Hell if she would tell anyone, though.

The term 'laugh in the face of danger' is a popular one, and it's easy to understand why. Once you look at a situation through a more humorous lens, everything becomes more manageable. And so it all changed in the tiny town of Glitter, Idaho.

"What the hell kind of name is Glitter?" Dean grumbled as the car thundered past the sign that read 'Welcome to Glitter! Population: 637'.

"Maybe they manufacture sparkles here," Sam suggested halfheartedly.

"Well, they also manufacture mysterious murder-suicides," Claire said, and she tossed a bundle of newspapers onto the dashboard. "This article makes six in the past two months."

"Found any patterns so far?" Dean asked.

"Yeah, actually – the suicide was always a male in his twenties. No connection with those they took with them, but I figure we should prod a little. Maybe they're all enemies or something," she shrugged.

"It's worth checking out," Sam agreed.

But as they tracked down family and friends of the victims, they could not find a connection between the relationships the suicides had with the murdered. The first was a bartender who poisoned a client and then himself. The second was a police officer who shot a criminal and then ate a bullet himself. The third was a grad student who threw his girlfriend in the trunk and drove off a bridge. The other three had similar such fates.

And so after a day of hoofing it around the entire town – it was small enough that they didn't want to drive everywhere – they found a cute little bed and breakfast to crash in. Sam went to take a shower, and so she and Dean decided they would pop in on the little grocery store down the street.

"Literally everything in this town is adorable," Claire observed as they passed a white picket fence enclosing a pastelly garden and a brick house.

"I don't like it," Dean grumbled.

"Don't be so - "

But suddenly, without warning, he lunged for her and threw her roughly to the side.

"Ow – Dean!" but he was advancing on her now. He grabbed her shoulders and started pushing her backwards into the fence…

"Are you trying to impale me?" she shrieked. No response.

Oh. Oh. She brought her knee up into his solar plexus and as he doubled over, pulled out her gun. Pointing it at him triggered no response, he merely straightened and moved to attack again.

"This is going to hurt me more than it will hurt you!" she said, and as he went to attack her again she whipped the gun around and cracked it across his head. Instantly he dropped like a sack of rocks.

"Or maybe not," she put her gun away and tried to haul him over her shoulder, but he had at least thirty pounds on her and it took several minutes to even sling him across her, let alone start moving. But when she finally managed to, a flicker in the shadows behind the brick house caught her attention. She swiveled her head to get a better look, but what she saw didn't exactly reveal much.

From the way the body was built it was definitely a man, but he wore a hood and a bizarre carved mask so she couldn't see his face. He gave off an I'll-get-you-next-time kind of aura before melting into the fast fading light.

"What happened?" Sam's hair was still sopping when she stumbled in, muscles screaming, and practically threw Dean on the bed.

"Monster of the week," she explained breathlessly. "He must have done some sort of spell or something. Dean went crazy and tried to skewer me with a fence, so I had to take him out."

"Where's the monster?" Sam asked after pulling Dean into a more comfortable position.

"Got away," Claire said. "It was a guy, a big guy, wearing some sort of cloak thing and a freaky mask."

"A mask? A mask…" Sam trailed off thoughtfully and went to his computer, where he then sat for several hours perusing the interwebs for lore.

Dean woke with a groan the next morning

"How's your head?" Claire asked.

"Brilliant," he said. "Did I get in a fight with a wild boar?"

"Me, actually," she responded, with not a little pride. "I'll take that as a compliment."

"Why did you…" he frowned. "Oh. Um, yeah, sorry about that, I don't know what - "

"No biggie," she yawned. "Wasn't your fault, and you ended up with the more grievous injury anyway. I think I'll go grab us breakfast."

"Should you really go out alone?" Sam, who was now immersed in John's journal, said worriedly.

"I may be in my twenties, but I'm not a dude. I don't fit the profile, I'll be fine," she rolled her eyes.

"You could still fill the murder part of the - "

"Stop being so paranoid!"

"Alright, alright!"

She should have been more paranoid.

Not twenty minutes later she was being jumped on the way back from the deli down the street, a sack stuffed over her head, and then knocked out.

When she woke up the sack was off and the masked man was in front of her. If she had to guess, she would say they were in a warehouse of some kind.

"Who are you?" he asked. His voice was not raspy or evil, but sounded like honey.

"Who am I? Who are you?" she managed to say, trying to keep the fear from her voice.

"You expect me to tell you?" he laughed.

"It's fine, I know who you are," Claire said with as much confidence as she could muster.

"And who am I?" he asked.

An idiot, she wanted to say as her hands found the hilt of her still-hidden knife.

"A monster," she replied, and began sawing at her bonds.

"Then you're a monster hunter?" he said. "Fascinating. I've been wanting to meet one of you for many, many years."

"Just hunter, no need for the extra syllables," this time she tried to load it with sass.

He stood and walked towards me. "Your kind are perplexing. I have countless physical and mystical advantages over you. What makes you think you can beat me?"

"The fact that you don't know how to take someone captive properly, brainless," it was so ridiculously easy break through the rope she wondered if it had been rotting outside for ten years. With a flick of her wrist she broke through the last little bit and slashed at the man's mask. He stumbled back and she kicked him in the face. The mask flew off and he crawled back, pressing himself against the wall, weaponless, but, as it turned out, not helpless.

She groaned loudly. "You've got to be kidding me."

His eyes were like flecks of gold, his cheekbones cut from soft butter by Michelangelo himself. His lips were comparable to rose petals, his skin smooth and unmarked. In other words, he was the freaking Adonis.

"You've won," he said. "Congratulations. Now kill me."

She raised the knife, wanting so badly to slash his throat open, but… but…

"This is ridiculous," she said. He smirked infuriatingly.

"Why won't you kill me, sweet hunter girl?" he asked.

Her mouth moved soundlessly, and then she let out an aggravated growl and kicked the nearest crate angrily. Her phone was lying on the ground not two feet away and she picked it up, dialing Dean's number.

"Claire! Where have you been?" he snapped.

"Long story. Look, I'm in some warehouse, and I caught the monster, but I can't kill it," she said.

"Why the hell not?" he was practically shouting.

Because he's ridiculously attractive and this is for sure a spell I mean there is no way I am that useless.

"I can't – you'll see, just get over here!" she hissed.

"Fine, but you had better have a good explanation," he hung up.

During the duration of the phone call the monster had pulled his shirt up to examine his bruised ribs, revealing a freaking eight pack.

I'm going to cry, is what she wanted to say, but "are you photoshopped?" is what came out.

"Pardon?" he asked.

Forty five torturous minutes later she heard a car pull up outside. She whipped out her phone.

"Don't come in!" she said quickly when Dean picked up. "That's you outside, right?"

"Yes, it is! And first it's help me, help me, I can't kill this monster, and now don't come in?"

"He'll only brainwash you again if you get within range, I've been thinking on this," she grit her teeth.

"So why don't you just kill him, you're a female!"

"That's just it!" her voice rose. "This guy's invincible! He doesn't need to be strong or smart because once you get in the vicinity there's no way anyone would want to hurt him! Dudes can't kill him because he can make them kill themselves and those around them, and chicks can't kill him because he's freaking hot!"

"You aren't killing him because he's hot?" Dean yelled.

"I don't think you understand! He is not only hot, he is Brad Pitt multiplied by five hundred thousand million!" Claire shouted back. "And this isn't free will, I am so under a spell right now!"

"I'm coming in there," Dean sounded pissed now.

"No," she said wildly. "No, I've – I've got it. Here, I'm going to stand on this pile of crates, out of the way, and you or Sam, stick your hand through the door, but don't look, and I'll tell you where to point your gun, and then you have to shoot him."

"This is venturing way beyond ridiculous," Dean said.

"Just trust me!"

"Okay, okay."

A second later, an arm appeared in the doorway. The monster's eyes widened.

"This isn't going to work," he said wildly. "I can still reach him from here."

"Can you?" the fear in his voice made me think not. And the lack of fear I felt made me confident. I looked at the arm with the gun at the end.

"Okay, point up," I said into the phone. "Good, now to the right – a little more – okay, that's too much – there! Try that."

Dean pulled the trigger, but the bullet went wide.

"No problem, we'll try again. Move to the left, yeah, good – okay now go," he shot again and the bullet hit the monster in the arm. It cried out and she did her best not to look at his beautiful, crafted-by-the-gods face…

"Closer," she said. "Left again, and up."

Third time's a charm, it seems, because the bullet found the monster's forehead.

"I cannot believe that worked," Claire said breathlessly.

"Holy crap! Did I get it?"

"Yeah, come in."

Sam and Dean stepped into the warehouse to admire their handiwork.

"He's not even that hot!" Dean sounded exasperated. Claire pursed her lips.

"He was hot before he was dead, I swear to God," she said. "Did we ever find out what he was?"

"No," said Sam. "But I seriously hope we never run into one again, because this entire day has been really friggin' weird."

"Preach," Dean agreed.

Claire never had a nightmare about a hunt ever again, but sometimes she dreamed of this monster and woke up with drool on her pillow.