It had been two weeks since Shawn's decision to leave Santa Barbara, and already he could tell that it was going to be an educational adventure.

There was a routine for him to follow that he designed himself (while eating pretzels in a barber shop somewhere in Arizona) specifically so he could learn as much as he could in as little time as he could.

As soon as he reached a town, step one would be to steal a local officer's police scanner. Then get a motel room exactly two rooms away from the one the Winchesters would be staying at. He said 'would' because sometimes Shawn gets there with his bike faster than the Impala.

Step three, and this was a recent one – salt the doors, windows, lie the demon trap under a mat in front of the door. Search for hex bags, clean and load some guns with consecrated iron, sharpen silver knife, and then figure out how John Winchester figured out there was something in town. And then play the man at the game of guessing what creature was killing the locals.

This was where the learning part comes in. Shawn had currently no way of telling apart the fake lore and the real one.

He was slowly catching on more and more every day.

"Werewolf," he decided out loud after a while, after thinking for a while about the latest radio in from the closest town where the Winchesters happened to be lodging that night. "Definitely."

While he prepared his special silver knife – probably the most expensive thing he had ever owned, including his mother's locket containing their family's picture taken when Shawn was seven and things had been happy – Shawn looked through his notes again, closing his eyes and remembering, just to make sure.

"Just a simple wolf," John's voice crackled in from Shawn's other radio. His personal one – the one that he'd designed to automatically hack on to the transmitting device that can pick up sound, and a few that technically couldn't, nearest a tracking chip he'd planted between the seams located under the collar of Dean's leather jacket. "You don't need to come. One bullet, and I'll be home. Won't take long, but –"

"Best be careful," Dean interjected, the accompanying impatient nod practically audible. His voice was fainter as he was probably standing farther from whatever it was that was letting Shawn basically spy on the family. "Check the doors, windows, keep the shotgun close, and above all."

"Watch out for Sammy." Shawn mouthed along with John and Dean's simultaneous words. The youngest Winchester hadn't said a word throughout. Shawn guessed he was in the shower or something.

His grip tightened on his knife. Really, he was being modest. The weapon he'd stolen from an odd ancient-family-tribute museum and probably wouldn't get missed much except by bankrupt and desperate future generations, but it still felt wrong to use it somehow. Shawn justified the thievery by giving the priceless artifact a better fate of being used to slay lycanthropes, to prevent them from harming any innocent civilians (or cattle), rather than leaving it to sit in a dusty wooden pedestal for all its useful days.

And it really was beautiful. A knife was probably not the right word to call it. The blade itself, straight and strangely triangular, was as long as his forearm, and wickedly sharp at all times even before further sharpening. On the oddly shining metal were intricate designs better suited for fine art than slaughtering, trailing all the way to the leather-wrapped handle. There was no guard, but Shawn didn't mind. The possibility of him cutting his own hand by accident hadn't even crossed his head before Shawn had grabbed the blade off the rotted wooden pedestal and took the whole thing back with him.

And now was going to be its second job. Shawn felt like he should be taking pictures. Make a scrapbook. Knife's first kill outside California! Or something.

The faint sound of a door closing alerted Shawn that he should probably start moving as well. After a few seconds of making sure he wasn't being too obvious, of course.

There was a rust-stained full-body mirror behind the door, barely hanging onto the walls by a few nails. This must be one of the nicer motels. Shawn took another good look at himself - counting one mississippi, two mississippi, three mississippi under his breath - and was assured that he looked, once again, nothing like his old self. Or his new self. He looked every bit like a local kid, though, which he guessed was alright.

The bags under his eyes probably did the trick. And the frays tugging at the edges and corners of his dark green hoodie (more for the sake of camouflage that fashion), and the acid-washed jeans he had thought to bring along because they were baggy enough to run in, thankfully. Every normal person that walked by would immediately feel the urge to grip their bags and check their pockets, but John Winchester would take one look and dismiss him without another thought, and to Shawn, that was all that mattered.

Nothing to see here, folks, Shawn thought as he stepped out the door and locked it behind him, patting his silver knife under his overcoat with one hand.

Absently, he turned and began following John Winchester's trail.

XXX

It wasn't a question of paranoia more than mostly justified caution. People didn't come back from the navy dimmer, after all. John could feel it, like an itch at the back of his neck. Every time he turned a corner, there would be an urge to look back, double-check, make sure there wasn't actually someone there following him down the road.

John didn't want to have to cut down (just an expression, of course) a kid looking for money, especially not while he was on a hunt. Or watch him get torn up by the hunt. Or actually have the hunt in the middle of the town.

No, thank you.

"Listen, kid," he finally called out, skidding the pavement with the bottom of his boots. "Stay in school! Or, if you're not going to go back to school, find someone else to mug for Pete's sake. I don't have anything you want."

There was no answering shuffle. No beat-up thug dejectedly stomping out an alley. This is stupid, John thought, just before he did some stomping himself, letting his feet take him to the mouth of the second alleyway to the right. His hand was outstretched, ready to grab the collar of a jacket or a leather jacket maybe.

He was not expecting to see thin air.

"Hey - Hey, old man! Yeah, you!" a disheveled-looking face poked out of a window, two stories up. Well, there was a hoodie on the boy, and dark, messy-hair sticking out behind his head where they've been lying on a pillow for the last few hours. Dark shadows underneath bleary eyes. "Holler somewhere else would ya? Some people are trying to get some sleep here!"

The guy fit every detail of John's mental image of what his stalker looked like - the sounds of sneakers scuffing pavement twenty feet away, ragged breathing when John increased his pace, even the flash of green in his memory he could've sworn he'd seen. But… that wasn't right. The kid looked like he had been where he was supposed to be the whole night - like he lived in that room, went to sleep in that room, and didn't leave anywhere to go stalking hunters with silver bullets in their guns.

He frowned and craned his neck, staring intensely at the kid - in college, maybe - studying late into the night. John waved at him in a sorry-okay-bye sort of gesture.

He shook his head and continued walking down the street, towards the forest.

XXX

That was a close call, Shawn breathed a sigh of relief.

There was another lesson he had to re-learn from Papa Winchester: Never underestimate. Anyone. Ever.

Even if they were a seven-foot-tall hybrid supernatural being that could only be killed with a stab to the heart. Even if you thought there was no possible way it could do something. Even if you know something you thought they didn't. You were always wrong.

Shawn's Dad's voice lectured inside his head, while the real one slept safely and soundly in his own bed some fifty miles away.

At least he won't know how I die, when I do, Shawn thought, which provided some comfort, even as he lined up for the kill, tensing his crouching legs as much as he could to jump. In 3… 2… 1…

John was splayed out on the forest floor, arms braced against his back. His own silver dagger was lying approximately three feet away from the creature, who was standing hunched and blood-matted, claws sharp preparing to rip through skin, shift back the ribcage to get to its prize.

Shawn would have to risk it. He didn't want this to be the first night he would have to go back to the motel without having to wait for John to go in first.

He pounced.

Fingers dragged past the foliage of sharp branches and broken twigs on the ground, getting decently cut up in the process. Shawn barely noticed the pain. As soon as the tips of his digits brushed up against the cool metallic surface of the knife handle, he curled his palm around it and leapt.

The wolf roared in surprise and fury as blood suddenly gushed out from among the fur on its chest. The stab was a bulls-eye, hitting its target right in the middle of the heart.

"Bingo," Shawn smirked, landing on all fours as the werewolf began to lose its footing and fall. It settled roughly in front of him with a thud. "Or maybe it's supposed to be 'Hallelujah!' or something. 'Violá'? No… Oh, ooh!" he jumped up to full height and clapped his hands together, biting his lower lip in excitement. "'Ta-da!' …Hmm, maybe not…"

"Wha – who?" John was sure he was hallucinating. He squinted and looked around for a bright light, wondering perhaps he was closer to death than he thought if near-death was this delusional.

"Papa Winchester!" Shawn yelped, and immediately all traces of his joking demeanor was gone. He dropped down on his knees in front of the older man, poking and prodding at the three deep gashes running down John's front. "This looks bad… think you can walk back?"

"No?" John replied bluntly, slapping the curious hands away as he swallowed his grunts of pain. "And… did you just call me 'Papa Winchester'?

"Alright, Papa Winchester," Shawn stood up, grimacing apologetically. Before John could ask, the younger man - boy, really, couldn't have been any older than Dean - was taking off his sweatshirt, revealing his almost concave stomach and the bottom part of a set of too-prominent ribs before his plain black shirt succumbed to gravity and straightened down. He took his knife to the garment and reduced it to strips of tight weave cotton. Tugging one end between his hands experimentally, he nodded his satisfaction and turned to John. His shrug was most apologetic. "This might hurt."

XXX

They were both quiet the whole way home. John more so, as despite the makeshift bandage he was actually still bleeding a lot.

He drifted in and out of consciousness, progressively feeling more and more tired as the second ticked by. He thought at one point the car stopped in front of a drug store and the kid walked out, and a few minutes later, following the sound of the car door closing, slid back into the driver's seat as he casually threw an armload of bandages, bottles of disinfectant, surgical tape and an assortment of pills at the backseat. Then the Impala roared to life and pulled out, and John was dazedly amazed that no alarms or angrily yelling store clerk chased after.

He didn't even protest much at the fact that a total stranger was now driving the car next to him, or that he knew which motel they were staying in. Everything made sense, right now, in that sleepy way that dreams often came with.

"Just focus on taking the next breath," the kid murmured. Or the voice might had originated from John's mind. "We'll be there soon."

They arrived. John was hauled, none-all-too-gently, favouring speed over comfort, to the door. They knocked.

A few moments later, the door swung open and John could feel his saviour's arm tense under him as he was forced to look down the barrel of a shotgun.

"Stand down, Dean," he grouched begrudgingly.

"Yeah, stand down," the stranger parroted, almost jokingly, and John regretted that he was too tired to snap back at him. So instead he made himself heavier.

The two faltered, Dean obviously in worry.

"Well, don't just stand there," the stranger called. "Help me get your old man inside."

XXX

Shawn dumped the contents of his arms onto Dean's bed unceremoniously. It was a seemingly random assortment of medical supplies - everything from cold medicine to hydrogen peroxide to rolls of surgical sutures - that he retrieved somehow from the Impala's backseat. The noise of bottles and whatnot clattering against each other made Sam twitch, shuffle a little under his sheets, but he stayed asleep, thankfully.

"It's you," Dean said was something non-recognisable in his voice.

"It is moi," Shawn repeated without thinking, as he poured out rubbing alcohol to an empty styrofoam coffee cup and dropped a hooked needle into it. He paused, genuine surprise colouring his features. "Wait, you remember me?"

"Uh, yeah," the other boy scoffed, the 'Duh' remaining unsaid but obvious in the air between them. "Sam talked about you for days, even after we left Santa Barbara. Dad never believed him though."

He frowned at the increasingly unconscious man. Shawn followed his line of sight and with a hushed curse, shook his head and finished prepping for stitches. He might or might not be glad for the excuse to not answer. A few seconds later, thick, clean thread was through one end of the needle.

"So, one of us expose the wounds and hold him down in case he gets… skittish," his eyebrows twitched at the unsatisfactory choice of wording, "while the other sews him up. Your choice, bud."

"I'll… Have you ever done stitches before?"

"Eh, no. But I've seen people on TV do it, so how hard can it be, right?"

Dean looked very much alarmed. "Not right. I'll do the stitching up, thank you."

"Wash your hands first, darn it. And you're welcome!"

When he was back, the wound had been carefully exposed by way of snipping al offending cloth out of the general vicinity, and cleaned out with wet wipes and alcohol - the kind you can't drink. The gashes were of medium depth, but pulled wide open as a result of being the work of animalistic claws.

Dad was completely knocked out for the count by blood loss by this time, which the two took as a good thing. Instead of cautiously holding the entire of the older man down, Shawn instead helped Dean hold the cuts together. The silence they lapsed into from concentrating far from being comfortable in the least, but it wasn't awkward or empty, either. Neither had the urge to break the night's hush.

After they were done bandaging the new stitches up, both worked together to haul the older man to a bed, then collapsed simultaneously on the motel couch.

The silence persisted. And yet neither developed motivation to talk yet.

Finally, it was Dean who opened his mouth first. He parted his lips a couple of time, doing his best impression of a fish out of water as he scrambled internaly for something to keep the air occupied. But when he did speak, words too slow and awkward and hesitant, like his voice was still testing out the dingy motel atmosphere, he wasn't sure if maybe it would have been better if he had stayed silent.

"Sam told me your eyes glowed. And you healed me. So you're some kind of -" He gestured halfheartedly with his hands. "...Not-human."

There was a pregnant pause. Dean's expression tightened involuntarily. He didn't want to gut any one tonight. Not someone who just saved his father life and, if Sam was right, their lives as well.

Actually, he was pretty sure he didn't want to gut Shawn. Period.

Said stranger shrugged, trying to break the ice hanging between them. There was a stillness at his shoulders though, one that Dean supposed he couldn't blame the other boy for having. "Not sure," he murmured. "Are you going to kill me if I say yes?"

"That's not exactly a vote of confidence."

Neither laughed. Eventually, Dean sighed, and he turned to Shawn with tired eyes.

"What are you doing here, man? This is way too far from home. What happened? You hadn't been a hunter two weeks ago, had you?"

"No," Shawn answered honestly, before he could tell himself to lie. "You came and something happened and I decided this for myself." He didn't even need to look at Dean to tell what he was thinking. Damned martyr shtick, always blaming himself for all possible things going wrong - "It's not your fault," he said lamely. There was more he could say, but it was more that just wouldn't come to his head. "It's not. Really. Believe me."

"Believe you? Like hell I will!"

For whatever reason, Shawn couldn't take his eyes off of Dean's face. His brows were knitted together. His nostrils were flared. He was worried. True, genuine worry from one Dean Winchester, and Shawn didn't think that that happened a lot with him outside of family.

There was a rustle of sheets as Sam turned in his sleep; Dean's voice lowered unbelievably quickly. Shawn blinked and broke eye contact, clearing his throat awkwardly.

"Listen man. I know, it looks like fun, sounds like one of those crazy paranormal things you'd see on reality TV or something, you think it's all interesting. I bet it'd make you sound real cool when you go off telling it to get girls and stuff, but I'll tell you right now that its not -"

One and a half seconds were filled with Shawn's high pitched, unmanly peals of laughter that weren't so much from genuine amusement as they were disbelieving. "Dude, I stabbed a creature of the night that ate out humans' hearts for dinner and am now covered in its blood. I just helped you sew a man back together and you still think I'm here cause I wanna be cool?" He paused and leaned back in his seat, considering. "Though, okay, yeah, this hunter thing is way cooler than being goth."

"You don't understand!" Dean hissed, like a heated metal can just barely keeping itself from exploding. "This is what I was afraid of! I should never have answered you in that hallway, never should have - never should have even said anything about being a goddamned - hero -!"

"And this is exactly what I was afraid of," Shawn countered quietly. "This is what you do all the time, isn't it? Find ways to somehow blame yourself? Jebus, isn't that tiring."

A pause.

Dean ran the flat of his tongue against his front teeth, expression telling Shawn just how much he appreciated being interrupted, before closing his mouth and sighing.

"Besides, you said it yourself. I'm a kind of… not-human." And at that point Shawn wasn't quite sure what kind of face either of them were making anymore.

"Look," he said then, almost growling, almost nervous and scared but maybe it was only like that to Shawn because that was how he was feeling at that moment. It suddenly occurred to him that the Winchesters knew he was there now. They were aware of his presence (and a part of him so desperately wanted to just continue on tailing them, whether they knew about it or not) and they were sure to not be happy about it when they put together his little method for getting started in the hunter business. "I-I'm not ganking you, alright?"

Shawn made a vaguely disgusted face as he mouthed the word 'ganking' to himself, as if he had just bitten into a lemon. Dean either ignored this or pretended he didn't see.

"And I'm not kicking you out, either. It's not like you have anywhere else to go, right?"

"...Right," Shawn relented, deciding not to mention that he had that 'borrowed' empty motel room on the other side of the building, still with his stuff in it. The Winchesters used stolen credit cards and killed on a daily basis, but he still wasn't quite sure he knew where they stood on moral grounds. "So you're gonna let me stay on the couch for the night. Right. Are," he made a gesture in the general direction of the door, as if he was gonna get up, but then decided against it. "Are you sure?"

"Shut up and go to bed, pretty boy." Dean got up and threw his leather jacket at Shawn. The latter was thankful the blood on his own now half-sleeveless jacket was all dry. It would flake, but at least it wouldn't rub off on the other's… huh. Since when did he care?

"Speak for yourself," was what he said out loud instead. "And shouldn't it be 'go to couch'?"

The only response he got was a spare pillow to the face. Dean would be sharing Sam's on his bed.

Shawn chuckled quietly and waved a hand at the guy before letting it curl up and fall to his side. The lights went out. Aw. He trusted him.

"Goodnight, Winchester," he whispered quietly.

XXX

I'LL LEAVE NOW

The note was the only sign that Shawn was ever there in the first place, hastily scrawled in block letters on cheap motel stationary that Dean hadn't even realised they had.

Well, that, and the sudden stock of medical supplies that were on their hands. John begrudgingly kept them when no reports of theft were called in on the police monitor despite it being well after opening time.

They left the little town, and though Sam was hopeful enough (after he was done being mad when he realised he had slept through the entire encounter) to think that the three words were only meant as a parting message as he left their motel room, Dean wasn't so sure. And when he noticed the lack of a tiny speck - a motorcycle, now he realised - in the distance that had always just followed them in their rearview mirror, well. He just shook his head and muttered luck.

He never said goodbye.