"This place is nice," Dean comments as the three look around the rather large and well-kept house.
"Dad did well for himself," Lizzy offhandedly remarks while her eyes wander around the house she hasn't seen in years. After her parents died here, Lizzy couldn't bring herself to step foot inside again. She had Lou pack up her most important items from her room the day after it happened and her uncle helped her sell off the property as soon as possible. But right now everything is just as she remembered it. Same furniture, same wall colors, same everything. It's once more the happy place she used to see it as.
Walking into the kitchen, Lizzy beelines for the calendar on the refrigerator. Any and everything they had going on was always written on it so that her mother could keep track of their lives. Her mother was also slightly neurotic about scheduling.
"Louie and my parents have a double date tonight," Lizzy announces while pointing to the day's date on the calendar that matched the newspaper Sam found earlier. October 24th. "They did this a lot. They'd share a sitter for Lou, Derek, and me and they'd head out for the night together. And then it looks like Mom and Brian are doing their coffee night tomorrow."
"Brian, like Lou's dad, Brian?" Sam asks, the name being very familiar to him.
"Yup. They used to work together a while back, before mom met dad even," Lizzy explains. "They went to the same college and used to work in the student center together. That's how our families became such good friends in the first place. They go grab coffee together about once a month to catch up."
"Your families really were close then," Sam comments while walking into the living room, scanning it for anything helpful when his sights fall on the family portrait on the wall. The people smiling back at him look so damn happy, so carefree. At least Lizzy got to experience this before it all went to shit for her. Then again, is it better to at one point have that good life and know what you're missing once it's gone, or is it better to never experience any of it at all? A whole different kind of blissful ignorance.
"Super close," Lizzy tells him, getting an idea. She opens a drawer under the kitchen counter by the phone and searches through the junk in it for the address book her mother kept there. "I never joked when I said that Lou was like my sister. She really was in all but blood… which might be a good thing at this point."
Dean watches her pull out the small book and flips quickly through the pages.
"What're you doing?" he wonders when she picks up the phone from its cradle on the wall.
"Planning ahead," Lizzy simply explains while dialing. "I'm getting us an in." She smiles up to him before talking to the person on the other line. "Hello, Mrs. Donovan. Is your daughter home? Lovely, could I speak to her please? Thank you."
Dean shrugs his shoulder with a confused face at her and Lizzy holds up her index finger, asking him to wait.
"Hi Christy, it's Cathy. How are you?" Lizzy asks with a slightly deepened version of her own voice. "That's good. So I hate to do this to you, but we have to cancel for tonight. I know it's last minute but something's come up. Oh, no it's nothing bad, just a conflict we can't get out of. I'll call you again soon to reschedule. Ok, that sounds good. Bye, Christy."
"What are you up to?" Dean questions as she returns the phone to its cradle.
"What better way to find more out about myself than babysit myself, right?" Lizzy asks as she walks down the hallway.
"Jesus, a little reckless don't you think?" Dean asks of her, Sam soon following the conversation having heard everything while in the other room.
"How are you gonna get past your parents?" Sam presses. "You look just like your mother… and little you."
"I'll figure it out," Lizzy tells them, plan already in place in her head, while stopping at the bottom of the stairs. She peers up to the second floor, her stomach churning at the sight. She doesn't move for a bit, just looking and contemplating silently.
"L?" Dean calls to her, seeing her conflict, and stands behind her, looking up and seeing what she sees. To him, it's just another staircase, but he knows to her it's much, much more. It's the path right to where her life was ruined, to where her family was destroyed.
"Yeah, I'm here," she tells them, eyes still angled up. "I… I don't think I can… go up there."
Sam and Dean exchange looks, knowing this situation was bound to get too heavy.
"Then don't," Dean tells her. "We'll go. You stay down here, find what you can."
Lizzy nods her agreement and Dean wraps his arms around her shoulders from behind her. He can feel her shaking and he once again worries about her ability to get through everything. "If you need me, I'm just upstairs," Dean whispers into her ear, trying to comfort her as much as he can. "I'm back down here in a second. You just say the word."
"I know," Lizzy whispers back, her hands coming up to grasp briefly on his forearms across her chest as she sighs. "I'm so glad you're here, Hot Shot. I woulda lost my shit by now if you weren't."
"Where else would I be?" Dean returns, kissing her cheek quickly before letting go. He takes absolute solace in her words, happy that he's still the one she needs the most. "Let's get this over with fast, Sammy." Dean starts taking the stairs two at a time and Sam follow him quickly.
Looking around, she takes in the surrounding first floor and thinks about where she should start. The nice living room on the other side of the house is calling to her and her feet are headed in that direction before she could stop them.
Walking into the pristine room that, as a kid, Lizzy was never allowed to play in, she stops at the old armoire her mother found up north at an antique dealer's shop. Taking tentative steps, Lizzy reaches out and slowly opens the top drawer. She knows she should be looking elsewhere for more important things at the moment, but she couldn't stop herself.
Sitting on the floor, Lizzy begins taking out the several large, leather-bound books inside the drawer and spreads them out on the floor, sighing heavily before looking through them.
Distracted completely. The little girl's room has Dean entranced. Surprisingly, the bright lilac colored walls, the massive mountain of stuffed animals on the bed, and the wooden vanity in the corner covered with makeup, specks of glitter, and hair accessories didn't make him run for the hills the second he saw them. They were part of Lizzy, who she is and who she was, and that is more than enough to get him to stick around. He snoops a little, not finding anything helpful at all, but keeps going anyways out of curiosity. It really is a once in a lifetime chance and he's not going to let it pass by.
The more he finds the more he learns about her and the more he learns about her the more he loves her. She was a TV addict even then, as her Alf, The Monkeys, and Punky Brewster posters would let on. She also already loved dance. The ballerina lamp, dance bag hanging off the doorknob, and pictures of her in dance costumes let him in on that fact. And then he spied the boom box in the corner on her desk.
Smiling as he makes his way, Dean presses play on the tape already in it as he takes a seat in the wooden chair draped with a sparkly blue boa. 'Higher Ground' by The Red Hot Chili Peppers plays loudly from the speakers. He proceeds to look through her cassettes piled randomly in a shoebox next to the stereo. Paula Abdul, Van Halen, New Kids on the Block, B52's, Guns N' Roses, Wilson Philips, CSN, Led Zeppelin… she listened to a variety even then. The handwriting on the homemade labels of some of the tapes is too good to be her first grade penmanship. Her father must have made her those. Good man, Dean thinks. If he ever had a kid, the first thing he'd share with him or her would be good music. He can just imagine how fun it'd be to listen to Led Zeppelin with his own child, or let them in on the greatness that is Metallica or AC/DC.
"Dean!" he hears Sam shout out over the music from the room next door. "Come here!"
Stopping the music and standing up to leave, Dean pauses for a quick second. He puts the Led Zeppelin tape in his back jean pocket before leaving. He isn't sure why he had to take it, but he did.
"What'd you find?" he asks while walking over to Sam. He finds his brother sitting with a scattering of pages all over the desk in the corner of Lizzy' parent's bedroom. The filing cabinet to Sam's right has both drawers wide open.
"Something big possibly," Sam explains. "Check this out." He holds out a paper for Dean to read.
"What is this?" Dean asks, not able to make heads or tails of what he's seeing.
"It's a college fund set up for Lizzy," Sam explains. "It's called a U fund. But check out the contributors."
"Catherine Noonan and… Brian Becker?" Dean's eyes grow wide as he shoots his sights over to Sam. "Lou's dad?"
"Yeah," Sam says returning the wide eyed look. "I had to pick the lock on the drawer this was in. Clearly this isn't supposed to be out in the open for some reason."
"Why would Lizzy's mom and Lou's dad set up a college fund together for her? That's weird." Dean's concern is obvious on his face.
"Really weird. But then I remembered what Cas was saying before he zapped our asses here. He mentioned that both Lizzy's parents were highly pumped with Nephelim blood…"
"But he kinda suggested that Paul wasn't," Dean finishes for Sam. "There's no fucking way, dude."
"I don't know, Dean. It doesn't look good."
"Son of a bitch," Dean looks away from the bearer of bad news to look out into the hall at the top of the staircase and washes a hand down his face with a heavy sigh. "As if this wasn't bad enough already."
"I know. This makes everything so much worse."
"Maybe Brian's just a good guy," Dean tries to explain away. "He wants to help a good kid into a bright future."
"You don't really think that," Sam calls him out.
"Not at all," Dean admits, looking back down at the statement in his hand with a heavy sigh. "We can't tell her yet."
"Not until we're a hundred percent sure," Sam tacks on, not wanting to burden Lizzy until absolutely necessary.
"That all you found?"
"Yeah," Sam says, reorganizing everything around him on the desk to put it back so that no one would know they'd been there. "Everything else is just bills and whatnot."
"Alright, you finish up here. I'll go check on L." Dean hands the paper back to Sam and heads down the stairs. He wants so badly to not know what he now knows. Everything is falling into place, why they're here and what it is they needed to discover. More than ever, Dean wishes there was a place to flee, somewhere far away to hide and escape, were no news can reach them and change their lives. No monsters, no contact with anyone else. Especially no revelations about who they were and how fucked their lives are. He'd give anything to protect her from all that keeps piling on top of her, but all he can do is stand by her side while it happens. He can't wash it away and make it disappear. He's never felt more helpless.
"L?" Dean calls out once he's down on the first floor.
"In here," her small, sad voice calls out to him from the other room. He follows the sound to find her on the carpeted floor of the living room surrounded by loose pictures and opened photo albums.
"Crap, L," Dean laments while walking towards her, seeing her tear streaked cheeks and slumped over body. He takes a seat behind her on the floor, a leg to each side of her frame that looks suddenly so small, and wraps his arms around her waist. "You shouldn't have looked at these." He drops his chin on her shoulder while scanning over the photos. Birthday parties, anniversaries, first days of just about everything, every happy moment in her life up until this point in time is displayed all around her on the floor.
"I know," Lizzy's higher than normal pitched voice answers. "Couldn't help it. I threw all this in storage once they died. I couldn't look at them anymore. God, I haven't seen some of these in years."
Dean reaches out in front of Lizzy to take up a photo of her mother and father sitting on a porch. Catherine has a long sundress on, her hair blowing with the breeze on a sunny day and toothy, wide smile in place. She's sitting on Paul's lap, his arms around her middle much like Dean's are to Lizzy's right now and they look beyond happy. They couldn't have been older than twenty-five at the time it was taken.
"She's beautiful," Dean tells Lizzy, holding the picture in front of them both to look at. "You really do look exactly like her."
"I got lucky," Lizzy laughs lightly through the tears.
"Nah,I did," Dean tells her in all honesty. Lizzy turns her head to look at him.
"You aren't scared now?" she asks him. "Of me?"
"Why would I be scared of you?" Dean wonders, taken aback by her question.
"I'm not who you thought I was," she says to him. "I'm not even all human, Dean. That doesn't make you want to run just a little?"
"Hell no," Dean answers back with conviction. "I will never be scared of you."
"I'm a little scared of me," she tells him.
"I know who you are, ok? You aren't some dick angel running around being a dick. You're Lizzy. My Lizzy. That won't ever change."
"Good," Lizzy answers softly while wiping her face. "Because there is no way I am getting through any of this angel shit without you."
His arms tighten around her. "Good thing I'm not going anywhere then."
Lizzy sighs in relief. She never actually thought he'd leave her, but the idea had popped up in her mind. It terrified her, just the thought of being without him when dealing with this.
"L, I hate to do this but we have to get outta here before school gets out," Dean warns quietly, knowing someone would be back sooner or later. "Come on. I'll help you put this all away."
Lizzy nods and starts packing everything up, Dean doing the same, but not before he takes the picture of Lizzy's parents and pockets it. He has no idea why he's become a sudden kleptomaniac, but something keeps pushing him to take things important to her.