Chapter 7

There are definitely days when, with hindsight and in retrospect, it would have been a really, really good idea not to get out of bed at all. Today was one of those days.

The pills knocked me out, which was great. Unfortunately, they left me with a cotton-wool hangover – you know, the ones where your brain takes a vacation and leaves without providing a forwarding address, or any indication of when it might be back – and a taste like I'd been chewing on road-kill all night long in my mouth. I got my feet caught in the sheets – again, and you can bet your bottom dollar I'll be sleeping without a top sheet in the future – when I tried to get out of bed, hitting the floor full-length with a thump that knocked every last bit of breath out of my lungs. Then I stubbed my toe on the dresser leg as I tried to get vertical and dressed before the Three Musketeers charged into my bedroom to see if I was being attacked by demons, and as a result, when the door opened as expected, I was red-faced, swearing and hopping around on one leg with my jeans part of the way on and the free leg caught in the not-quite-properly-closed dresser drawer and as I spun away from them, it yanked me backwards and dropped me on my ass in front of them. Thankfully, this time, they just emitted a collective sigh, turned around, closed the door and went away.

Things went marginally better until I got to the kitchen. By that, I mean I managed to dress myself, complete the washing of face and brushing of teeth without drowning myself. The kitchen, however, was a much more reactive place. I reached for a clean mug, and somehow, do not ask me how, missed the handle completely, swiping ineffectually at the body of the cup and sweeping it off the shelf and onto the floor where it broke into twenty pieces.

Of course.

I got out the dustpan and brush and cleaned that up, banged the back of my head on the cupboard door as I tried to stand up, knocked the trash can over, and I mean, right out of the damned cupboard, spilling crap everywhere, and wished I'd never been born when Dean's sarcastic offer of help came from the dining room.

"You need a seeing-eye dog today, Dorothy?"

I tell you, the temptation to flop down on the floor, burst into tears and just spend the day there was pretty overwhelming. You'll be happy to know I managed to resist it.

"You okay?" Sam said from beside me as I crouched next to the trash spread over the cracked linoleum, my eyes tightly shut. It was the sympathy in his voice that got me going. No way was I gonna break down in front of him, or his brother, while I was still breathing.

"Yep, just a bit clumsy for some reason," I said, swallowing down my self-pity with an ill-timed hiccup. I opened my eyes and swept the trash back into the can, righted it, looked up carefully to make sure I didn't hit my head again, closed the cupboard and got to my feet on very wobbly knees.

Sam put a cup of coffee into my hand and I closed both hands around it to make sure I didn't somehow end up throwing it over him, because, you know, that's definitely the direction the day was going in.

"Thanks."

"Sit down –"

"Before you fall down – again," Dean injected cheerfully, ignoring Sam's warning look.

"And drink your coffee," Sam finished sharply as Bobby came in.

"What do we know about Eve's location?" Bobby asked, walking, I just happened to notice, without any kind of mishap to the counter and pouring himself a coffee. Must just be me, I decided, as I watched him drink from the cup – without spilling a drop – at the same time he walked back to the table.

"Here," I said, reaching for the folder. I bumped my cup, naturally, but it didn't tip over and I eased the script out and passed it to him.

"Grants Pass, Oregon," Bobby read out loud, frowning as he skimmed over the rest. "Not much in here."

"There was a meeting with the writer a few weeks ago," I said, picking up my cup carefully. "The gist was a showdown with Eve and the new hybrid monsters she was creating."

"Come again?" Dean asked, leaning forward and frowning at me. "Hybrid monsters?"

"Cross between a vampire, wraith and ghoul," Bobby read from the notes jotted at the bottom of the draft script. "What the hell does that mean?"

I looked at my notes, which had gone to the production team to prepare for the episode. "Fangs, the wraith spike in the wrist and the desire to eat human flesh," I read out, wishing I'd added a bit more detail.

"Awesome!" Dean leaned back in his chair and looked at his brother. "How do we kill 'em?"

"I think decapitation with a silver blade takes care of it," I said, from the interior of my cup, sadly now almost empty. I was starting to understand why actors liked using props. Something to do with your hands when you were the focus of attention.

"This says … crap, I'm not sure what it says," Bobby grumbled, handing the pages back to me. I looked at the handwritten notes interspersed through the typed paragraphs. My boss' hand-writing, which had often made people wonder why she gave up medical school for television.

"The hybrids aren't successful. There's a mutated virus that kills them after a few days," I read out, more of the discussion on the episode coming back with the words. "The virus, which I think was blood-borne, turns them into copies of the first infected when they do it."

I frowned at that, looking back through the pages of the script. Except that it didn't, I thought. There were supposed to be multiple 'Eds' in the episode, but the sheriff, his deputies, the townsfolk and the people in the diner weren't copies, they were all themselves. Infected personally by Eve, I wondered? What was the point of the scene in the bar then?

"What!?" Dean said, thumping his cup on the table. "So we got shifter crap in there as well?"

I opened my mouth to explain, then closed it again when I realised I couldn't.

"What about Eve?" Sam asked quietly, forcing the conversation back on track.

"According to that," Bobby said, waving a hand at the script. "We pack shotgun shells full of the ashes and just look through the town for her."

"Yeah, but there's a back up plan," I said, pushing aside the illogical story point and trying to fish the exact nature of how they succeed from my muddled, cotton-wool memory, my fingers scrabbling through the bits of paper that seemed to have details of costumes, locations, types of weapons, extra casting, alternative scene storyboards, but no note on what I was looking for. "Dean does something else."

"What something else do I do?" he asked suspiciously.

"Keep looking," Bobby advised me, catching and stabilising my cup as I hit it for the second time with my elbow, and moving it further away from the battle zone. "You wanna drive?"

"Gives us more flexibility," Dean said, his tone almost reasonable if not for the transparent desire of not wanting to go somewhere without the Impala.

"It'll take us two days to drive over," Bobby argued mildly. "Cas could get us there in an eyeblink and we could be done with this by tomorrow night. Think it's time to make a call."

"Why do I always have to make the call?" Dean looked from Bobby to Sam. "Not like he's my angel."

Sam shrugged. "He shows up when you call."

"He shows up for you too," Dean said, scowling at the table top. "He, uh, well, he just didn't when you were flying soulless for a while there."

"Stop bitchin', take one for the team," Bobby growled at him, losing patience. "We should be ready to go when he gets here. You two start packing those ashes, we'll try and get more intel from this –" He looked at the untidy heap of papers I'd made in the centre of the table. "–stuff."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

I leaned back in the armchair, making little circles over my temples with my fingertips as Bobby read the notes on the back of the envelope I'd finally found, squished in between a receipt for ten take-away coffees and two large scale maps of the outskirts of Vancouver. The little circles didn't help much, the headache was obviously gonna be a stayer.

"You sure about this?" he asked me, and I could hear the doubt in his voice.

"They roughed the scene with Eve in a 'round table'," I said, remembering that in vivid detail, six writers, two producers, a half dozen script assistants all sitting around the big table in the writers' room more or less shouting over the top of each other as they came up with more and more outrageous ideas to get the characters out of the impossible situation they'd written themselves into. "Not big on scientific rationale, but they liked the solution, because it meant it could be a surprise."

"Some surprise," Bobby said, shaking his head. "You better go tell Dean about this, and be ready for some yellin'."

I got up slowly and headed for the door to the basement. I don't know why they didn't hear me, I'm not usually that pad-footed on a good day, and today, as we've already seen, was not a good day.

They say eavesdroppers never hear anything good about themselves. Maybe it was the fact that I wasn't trying to deliberately eavesdrop. I mean it wasn't good in the strictest sense of the word anyway. It was personal. And I definitely didn't want to hear it. But by the time I got halfway down the stairs, I knew they'd hear me if I tried to turn around and go back up and that would look so much worse.

"It's not that simple," Sam said to Dean, shoulders hunched over the bench, filling the shells with a dark, grainy powder I guessed was the phoenix ashes.

"Sure it is," Dean said, sitting next to him, setting the plastic shells into the press and pulling down the lever that sealed the cap on. "You got feelings for her, just tell her about it, see what happens."

Sam shook his head. "I have memories of getting married, Dean," he said uncomfortably. "Of living together for two years, o-o-of going to see the doctor, talking about-about-due dates – I don't want to date her, we did all of that."

"Except, that you didn't," Dean pointed out unhelpfully, setting another casing in place, the comment underlined by the clunk of the press.

"Exactly. I didn't," Sam said. "And now …"

"And now, you're stuck."

"Yeah," Sam sighed. "I don't know why I'm talking to you about this – you had a crush on Monica Belmont and didn't tell her about it the whole time we were in Barstow till the day before we left."

"I didn't have a 'crush'," Dean said loftily.

Sam looked at him. "Well, whatever you want to call it."

"You talk to me 'cause I'm your big brother and you're supposed to talk to me about all this shit," Dean said, sealing another shell. "And I'm the first to admit that I'm not all that great on the advice in this arena, dude, but I'll tell you this. Whoever that was, in your memories, in that alternative life, it wasn't Terry."

"What do you mean?" Sam frowned at him.

"I mean, you don't know Terry, we don't know her," Dean said, taking the casing from his brother's fingers and packing it. "She blew in, what three-four weeks ago? Screwed us all to hell with stuff about the future that we can't even work out if it's real or partly real, or completely left field – you don't know her. So those memories, they're like – like watching a movie."

"Yeah, maybe," Sam said, looking down at the bench. "You think I should just forget about it?"

"I think that you should stop worrying about it, an' start worrying about how we're gonna gank the mother of all monsters with five friggin' shells," Dean said, looking down at the completed casings by his elbow. "I think we've got a lot more problems right now than we can deal with and this … stuff … it'll wait."

"Yeah, okay," Sam said, looking at the pile of ashes left on the bench and pushing out the chair he was sitting in.

I backed up the steps as silently as I could and then thumped back down them, both of them turning to look at me as I hit the bottom step.

Sam's ears turned red and I ignored that as best as I could. "Hey!"

"I'll tell Bobby we're just about done," he said, inching past me to the steps.

"Call Cas," Dean called loudly after him. "Not my job to call him all the time."

"Yeah, well, I'll try," Sam's voice drifted down the steps then the basement door opened and closed.

"I found the backup plan," I said to Dean as he looked at me questioningly.

"I can hardly wait," he said, scooping up the finished shells and stuffing in his pocket as he stood.

"You need to take some of the ashes and mix them with something and drink them."

His eyes widened and the effect would've been comical if he hadn't been so obviously gob-smacked.

"What?"

"You figure that if all else fails, and she gets the drop on you and Sam somehow, she'll probably bite you, drink your blood. So you drink the phoenix ashes so they'll be in your bloodstream if she does kill you, and at least it'll kill her," I explained nervously. For the character on the show, that kind of altruistic behaviour was normal. For the real, actual and standing-in-front-of-me Dean Winchester, I wasn't so sure.

"Huh," he said, turning to look at the pile of ash. "Well, that's a Plan B alright."

He looked back at me, eyes narrowing slightly. "And it works?"

"Well, they were going to put it in the script," I hedged. "However this is working, however they can see what you're doing, what's going on here, it seems to be pretty accurate."

"Some of the time," he said, his lip curling up.

"Most of the time," I corrected him. "If the focus is on you and Sam. Which it will be."

"Why would that be?"

"I don't know," I said, turning for the stairs.

"Wait a sec," he said, leaning forward and catching my arm. "Let's run a little ad-hoc test here. What happened in Cicero, when I went looking for Lisa?"

"The first time?" I asked and he nodded.

I looked down at the floor for a moment. "It was Ben's birthday party and Lisa was distracted when you got there, because she thought her friend was going nuts. You saw Ben and did the math and figured he could be your son." I looked up at him, seeing his expression had smoothed out to nothing, his eyes dark and closed-off. "After you and Sam saved all the kids from the changeling mother and the changelings were all killed, you asked Lisa if Ben was your son. She said that she was a hundred percent sure he wasn't, she'd had blood tests done. She asked you to stay with them for a while and you said no. You told her it wasn't your life."

"Fuck," he breathed, letting go of my arm and twisting away. I wasn't sure if I should stay or leave. I also wondered how many more of these memories he wanted to go through before he'd believe that in my world, his life was a tv show.

"I wanted him to be mine," he said a moment later, his back to me and his voice low. "But at the same time, I didn't."

"I know," I said, remembering the road he'd been on then. He'd made the deal and he was going to Hell. "It wasn't fair to any of you."

He turned around then, looking at me, his eyes searching for something. I got the feeling he wanted to say something else, but it didn't come out and I nodded and walked back up the stairs, my legs shaking with the strange sense that I'd just missed out on something, something monumental, without even realising it properly.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"She's hidden to me, invisible to all angels," Cas was saying to Bobby as they stood in the dining room.

"Well, that's great," Dean said, shoving his hands into his pockets. I wasn't sure if he found the time to drink the ashes or not.

"Doesn't matter," Bobby said. "Let's do it."

I was sitting at the table, rearranging the papers in the folder so that at some later date I would be able to find what I was looking for.

"You're coming," I heard the deep voice say and looked up in surprise.

"What? No," Dean and Sam said in perfect unison, glancing at each other.

"She doesn't need to be in the firing line –" Sam said.

"We don't need her tripping over somethin' and wrecking a good stake-out," Dean fired out a half-second later.

It's good to feel appreciated.

"She's coming," Cas said, gesturing at me.

"Why?" Dean stood his ground, staring at the angel.

"Because I'll need her for something," Castiel said evenly to him, his gaze flat.

"Wastin' time," Bobby reminded them and I got up and walked to his side.

The wrenching jolt of angel-assisted travel was a shock, I don't mind telling you. Everything went black and I couldn't hear anything, couldn't see, touch, taste, or smell anything. It was like…heck; I don't know what it was like! Like being dead, maybe? Or buried alive? That little zinger of a thought sent a blast of adrenalin through me.

Then we landed, if you can call it that, with a bone-crunching suddeness on a pavement in a little town with clean, quiet streets that were lined with trees.

"Well," Dean said, looking around critically. "I was expecting more Zombieland, less Pleasantville."

"Just because it looks quiet, don't mean it is," Bobby said dryly. "I need a computer."

We walked across the street to the diner on the other side, and I was a bit surprised that we weren't getting more looks from the locals. I mean, we'd materialised out of thin air on the pavement. No one even glanced at us as we took a booth to the side.

"Might as well eat," Dean said, not needing the excuse as he looked over the menu.

Sam passed Bobby his tablet and Bobby grimaced at it. "I said I needed a computer."

"It is a computer."

"No," he said, looking at it. "A computer's got buttons."

"What can I get you?" The waitress appeared at Dean's elbow and smiled around the table.

Her name tag said "Angela" and I don't know about the rest of them, but something about her sent a deep shiver right down my spine. I felt Cas' gaze turn curiously to me.

"Burger, fries, coffee, pie," Dean rattled off without looking at the menu.

"Ma'am?" Angela looked at me and I dropped my gaze instantly, not wanting to meet her eyes. They were creepy with a capital 'C'.

"The same, thanks."

"The same?" Dean and Sam again harmonised in stereo and I shrugged. I was starving, having missed out on any kind of breakfast for fear of setting the stove on fire.

"I'll have a chicken salad and a diet Coke," Sam told her. Bobby glanced up from the tablet.

"Coffee and toast, thanks."

Cas shook his head and she finished writing the orders and left.

"What is it?" The angel said to me softly enough that Dean, sitting next to me, didn't hear it.

"Anything?" Sam asked Bobby.

"Nickel and dime stuff, nothin' weird," Bobby said distractedly.

I looked at Cas. "I don't know, probably nothing. She just gave me the creeps." I said to him, keeping my voice low as well.

"Basically a dead end," Bobby finished, looking over at me. "You sure about this place?"

"You read the script," I told him.

"I'll search the town," Cas said, frowning.

He stayed where he was and Dean lifted an eyebrow quizzically. "Cas, we can still see you."

"Yes, I am still here."

"Okay, well, you don't have to wait on us –"

"Something's wrong," the angel said after another moment.

"What? Are you stuck?" Dean asked, turning to look at him closely.

"I'm … blocked," Cas said, looking around the diner. "I'm powerless."

"You're joking?"

The angel shook his head uncomfortably. "There's something in the town, that's, uh, affecting me. I would assume it's her."

Dean exchanged a glance with Bobby, who nodded. "So what? Mom's making you limp?"

"Figuratively, yes," Cas admitted.

"Well, that's just great," Dean said, leaning back as the waitress returned to put a plate down in front of him, another in front of me, and Sam.

"I'll be back with your coffees in just a moment," she said, smiling at Dean.

"Right." He smiled back at her automatically, turning back to Cas when she'd left. "'Cause, without your power, you're basically a baby in a trenchcoat."

Cas looked away, his mouth tightening.

"Think you hurt his feelings," Sam said, watching him.

"Grow up," I blurted out, mostly to Dean. "If he's blocked, she's here and –"

"Got something," Bobby interrupted before I could get too worked up. Dean baiting Cas was something that he probably didn't have much control over, Bobby's silent warning look told me. Keeping the knowledge the brothers had of the angel under wraps was a strain.

"What is it?" Sam asked, leaning over Bobby's shoulder to look. "CDC?"

"For the rest of the class," Dean said, his voice clipped. I wasn't going to get away with ticking him off in front of the others.

"Dr Silver of Grants Pass called in an infection he couldn't identify to the CDC last night," Bobby read. "Patient name, Ed Bright."

"Got an address?"

"Yep," Bobby said, wiping the screen as the waitress returned with coffees, Sam's Coke and Bobby's toast.

"Eat fast," Sam said.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The clinic, when we got there, was shut up tight, the Closed sign on the door looking pretty final.

"What kind of doctor calls the CDC and then goes AWOL the very next day?" Dean said, looking disgruntedly at the door. "Let's have a look, shall we?"

He pulled out his picks and I turned away, looking up and down the street since we were kind of exposed standing there.

"What is it?" Cas asked, and I turned back to see Dean looking at something red smeared on his fingertip. His gaze lifted to a door at the end of the porch. More red was smeared around the handle. He walked over to it and pulled out his gun, knocking the butt against the flimsy padlock and breaking it open. Walking behind them, I saw the long, plastic-wrapped shape on the floor and took a step backwards as Dean reached down.

"Dean, don't," I said, my voice squeaking.

"Why not?" He looked up at me, hand poised over the wrapping.

"Because Eve's spreading a mutated virus around here and that's probably one of the victims," I snapped. He pulled his hand back hurriedly and stood up, pulling out his cell.

"You think it's Ed Bright?" Cas asked me as we walked back down to the street.

"Does it matter?" I looked around, glancing at my watch. "It's three-thirty on a week day afternoon and there are no kids playing around here," I told him, waving my hand at the clutter of bikes in the driveway opposite. "No one's driving down to the market or watering their garden or mowing their lawn."

"That indicates that things are not normal?" Cas looked around as well.

"Doesn't look normal to me," I muttered to him as Dean jerked his head.

"Sam's found Ed's house," he said. "Not far."

We followed him down the road and Cas hung back a little, walking beside me.

"Why have you stayed here?" he asked me, the furtive glance he threw at Dean's back telling me he didn't want Dean to hear this.

"I didn't have much of a choice," I said. "Bobby said he couldn't get hold of you and, um, they've been busy."

"Do you want to return to your own world?"

I looked down at the pavement, passing in a slight blur as we walked along it. Did I? It wasn't what I'd thought it'd be, in a lot of ways. They weren't what I thought they'd be. I looked up and watched Dean, walking a few strides ahead of us. He was hard-edged and wired tight, and while I knew he hadn't been having a good year, I was beginning to wonder how long it would be before he broke.

"Can you do that?" I asked the angel, trying to buy some time to think about it.

"After we have resolved the current issue, yes, I would be able to do it."

I felt his gaze, on me, studying me. "It does not seem like a comfortable existence, where you are now," he added, another quick glance at the man in front of us seeming to confirm that he knew that the Winchesters weren't all that thrilled to have me around.

I licked my lips nervously, unsure of what to say. I hadn't leapt at the offer, didn't that tell me something? Something like…I didn't want to leave?

We turned the corner and Sam and Bobby were standing by a car out the front of a big two storey frame house and I swallowed in relief that I didn't have to answer Cas straight away.

"The doc's house is intact, nothin' missin', car's in the drive but the whole family's gone," Bobby said, walking to meet us and handing Dean a photograph, the shine on it blocking my view of the image.

"Oh. So we've got a missing doctor and an oozy patient, huh?"

"Yeah. Plot thickens," Sam said, screwing up his nose.

"Well let's go see what Ed's roommates have to say," Dean suggested, turning for the house.

"Does Ed Bright have a brother?" Cas asked, looking at the windows.

"No, why?" Bobby looked at him.

"Then that's not his twin." Cas pointed at the window at the front.

"This one of the carbon copies the virus makes?"

"I don't know what we're looking at," Bobby said, watching the unsteady progress of the man in the window.

"Alright, Dean and me are gonna go in. You guys stay here and watch the door. If something comes out, shoot it," Sam told us decisively, pulling out the Taurus from under his jacket.

"Yeah. Best guess - silver bullets," Dean added, heading across the pavement to the steps.

"I'm fairly unpractised with firearms," Cas muttered to himself.

"You know who whines? Babies," Dean said over his shoulder.

"Wow, good hearing," Bobby said, tossing a shotgun to the angel and another to me. "Lock and load."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"What's takin' them so long?" Bobby complained after nothing happened for a minute or two.

"They're talking to one of the Eds," Cas said, eyes half-closed as he seemed to concentrate on the rooms.

"One of the Eds?" Bobby asked, glancing at me.

"There are five. Four are dead – now all of them are dead," Cas confirmed, and the front door opened, Dean wiping his hands on his jeans a little obsessively as he came down the stairs, Sam following him, his face thoughtful.

"Girl in white hit the local bar," Dean said shortly, looking around for a car. "Said she kissed him and he doesn't remember much after that."

"Eve. Two bars in town," Bobby said, walking back to the car he'd boosted. It was a station wagon and the brothers got in the front, Bobby, Cas and I squeezing in the back. "One's on the highway heading out, the other's about five blocks down, past the town centre."

"We'll take the one in town," Dean decided, starting the engine.

He drove through the almost empty streets and we all saw the parking lot and neon signs, flashing dispiritedly in the sunshine. Pulling up in the lot outside the front entrance, both Winchesters looked over the vehicles that were still there, exchanging a look.

Lots of people had come here last night. Not many had left. That was clear enough.

The front door was open, and Dean pushed it wide, walking in, slowing a bit to let his eyes adjust to the dimness of the interior after the bright sunshine of the day.

Following him, Bobby's brows lifted as he looked around at the bodies that were, well, everywhere. "Well, the Sheriff's a mook, but still. You'd think he'd notice this many missing folks."

We spread out, looking cautiously at the dead. Most seemed to have died fighting each other, bite marks and puncture wounds were all over them, blood spattered and sprayed over the walls and floor, bodies lying on the bar, on the pool tables and draped untidily over the booths.

"We got a vamp over here," Dean said, using a handkerchief to lift the upper lip of the body in front of him. "Nope. Scratch that. We got a wraith. What the hell?" He looked at me. "These are the hybrids?"

"I think so," I said, looking around. "Ghouls have grey skin, don't they?"

"Grey, green, half-rotted," Dean said with a shrug, getting to his feet. "Why are they all dead?"

"Looks like they all burned up," Bobby said, kneeling beside another body, looking at the skin closely.

"Burned up, like?" Dean prompted him impatiently.

"Like a high fever, like the flu," Bobby said. "We need to check everywhere."

Dean looked around uneasily. "What the hell's going on here? Does every monster in this town have the Motaba virus?"

He waved a hand at me, pointing to the doorway beside the bar. "We'll take the store-rooms."

Sam looked around the room and back to Bobby. "Do we burn them or what?"

I'd just gotten through the doorway to the hall that led behind the bar and kitchen when I heard the doors bang open.

"Hands where I can see 'em!"

The shout resounded in the bar and I half-turned back, Dean suddenly beside me, slamming me into the corner, where the hall met an office, his hand over my mouth as he pressed us both into the shadow between the walls.

"Now this is not what it looks like," Cas said loudly.

"Right, look, we're the Feds." Bobby's voice was even louder.

"Yeah? Well Feds are not allowed to do this. Cuff 'em. Turn around," the first voice said sharply. "Check the back."

Dean looked down into my eyes and I heard the soft click as he eased the hammer back on the gun he held in his free hand. He pushed harder, his gaze cutting to the side and I tried to squeeze further into the corner, where the overhead lights couldn't reach, feeling my heart jack-rabbiting in my chest, my body twitching with the urge to run, as far and as fast as I could.

There was a scrape and rustle behind us, and I nearly jumped out of my skin when one of the monster deputies knocked over a couple of trash cans in the hall, the clanging of the metal bins bouncing from wall to wall. I suddenly realised why Dean had his hand over my mouth, because if it hadn't been there, I'd have screamed my head off, I was pretty darned sure of that.

"It's clean," a voice yelled from the other end of the corridor and the pressure from the man in front of me lessened a bit as we heard the doors close, the hall, then more distantly, the front door.

He could've stepped back then. Maybe nothing that happened later would've happened at all if he'd just taken a half-step back right then.

He didn't.

He lowered his gun hand and I heard him uncock it. His eyes met mine, and I became excruciatingly aware of the fact that I could feel just about every inch of his body, tightly pressed against mine, the outlines of bone and hard muscle through two sets of clothing. The smells of gun oil and more faintly whiskey, and more strongly, the blending of sweat and plain soap and some earthy scent I couldn't exactly define, making up the particular scent of the man against me, filled all the air in the little corner that we were standing in, and under normal circumstances, I might not have found it all that inspiring, but here and now it was the most intoxicating smell I'd ever been immersed in.

He peeled his palm off my mouth and he was still standing there, green eyes dark and filled with something I couldn't readily identify, the huff of his breath against my cheek, his pulse pounding clearly in the little dip at the base of his neck. Mine was doing the same thing.

I told you, I should've stayed in bed that day.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~