Chapter 25

You know, the show made a big deal about Dean lying and trying not to ever let out what he felt but even the writers had seen how much it bothered him to lie to his friends and his family. I always thought Jensen took that further than the scripts allowed for as well, never forgetting that if Dean had a secret, he would be showing the strain in every scene, not just the one where he finally lets it out.

In real life, Dean was better at lying, and worse. He was blunter, I guess, about his feelings. I could feel myself getting defensive and I looked away.

"What would you've done?" I asked him.

For about ten seconds, he didn't say anything and I risked a look back at his face. I could see he wanted to say he'd have stayed, but we both knew he wouldn't have done that. Not at the risk to anyone else.

"The same," he finally admitted grudgingly. "Who was the guy?"

"A blind date," I told him, deciding against telling him it'd been the first and only one in the six months.

"Huh." He looked down at his hand, still resting on my knee.

"How was Seattle?" I asked, then wished I hadn't because his gaze shot up to meet mine and I could see he'd thought that I didn't know about that, would never know about it.

I don't know why I raised it, really. I'd seen the episodes, knew how he'd been feeling, although the state of depression had been about Bobby's death in the show. I didn't have a right to feel anything at all about what had happened. I hadn't been around.

"Forget it," I said, and I unhooked my sneakers from the grill and slid down to the ground, taking a step back from him as I landed. "Not my business."

I wasn't being fair and I wasn't being exactly supportive. At the time, I didn't even know what sort of response I'd been expecting so it was hard to say if it was disappointing or not. It felt…fragile, I guess. I know I was feeling that way. Six months is a long time.

"Uh, Bobby said something about going somewhere else?" I said, scrabbling around for a change in topic. He hadn't, actually, although on my way out the door I had overheard him say something about Montana to Sam.

Dean stared at the hood of the Corvette. "Yeah, Rufus had a cabin in Whitefish. It'll be safer."

"Does he think Crowley can see me?"

He looked around then. "No, but he knows this place, and he doesn't know the cabin."

I thought of the panic room and Bobby's library and the workshop down in the basement and all the things that this place was set up for. It would be impossible to replicate those things somewhere else.

"Did you finish the shotgun shells?"

He nodded. "Borax solution, iron pellets. Should do something to the levis."

"So, I guess leaving pretty early tomorrow?" I asked inanely. I could see he was wondering what was going on with the 'business as usual' tone of my voice, but honestly, I couldn't seem to get rid of it.

He gave me a puzzled look and nodded. "Bobby wants to take as much of his library as we can get into the truck but yeah."

"Guess I'll hit the hay then." I know, it was appallingly cheerful and my voice was kind of high by that point.

"Uh –"

I waited, hoping he might be about to call me on being so evasive and peculiar, but he shook his head, tucking it against his chest as he walked out past me. "Never mind."

He slowed down as I started to walk after him and we walked together the rest of the way back to the house, in silence.

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

We did leave early. The cabin was a seventeen hour drive from Sioux Falls, and the truck Bobby'd acquired to carry the bulk of his reference materials and the "tools" of the hunter's trade was probably going to slow that estimate down quite a bit. I lugged boxes from the house to the truck from before dawn to past nine, then went inside to get my stuff, Bobby having providing a large, Army-green canvas duffle bag for the purpose. All the notes, files, clippings, scripts and my two binders were in my backpack. The rest went into the backseat of the little hatchback Dean had swapped the Impala for, with Dean's gear bag. Sam was driving the truck, Lauren riding with him. Bobby told us he'd be along in a few days, since he wanted to get some stuff from his out-of-town storage unit down in Nebraska. I hadn't even known he had an out-of-town storage unit.

It was just past ten when we pulled out of the yard, Dean leading, the truck complaining and blowing black smoke from the exhaust stack as Sam inched his way through the piles of junked cars and just managed to squeeze it under the iron arch of the front gate.

Dean turned onto the on-ramp for the interstate and I frowned, remembering something else from the show that didn't seem to be happening here anymore.

"Did you always use the interstates and highways to get around, or did you used to spend more time on the secondary and back roads?" I asked, turning in the corner to lean against the door as I looked at him.

He glanced at me curiously, and shrugged. "Uh, depends on where we were going, how fast we needed to get there, um…how many warrants I had outstanding…why?"

"Just seemed like, in the show, you were always on the back roads and I didn't realise until now that we've been more on the big roads, the last few times."

He looked at the road and the spaced-out taillights ahead of us. "A lot of what we did, Dad and me, or even when I got Sam from California, they were kind of back country jobs," he said, a frown forming as he tried to remember the details of the cases of they'd worked mostly. "A lot of small towns. Or hard country."

I nodded. "Are you and Sam still on the country's Most Wanted list, or did Agent Henriksen clear your records?"

"No, we're – did you know about the levi's copying us?"

I bit my lip. I'd forgotten about that. "The murder spree?"

He nodded. "The sheriff filed a report with the feds that we were dead, bodies cremated but when I checked back with him, he was gone. His daughter as well."

I sighed. "One of the levis copied a federal agent and he ate them," I told him reluctantly.

"Sonofa–"

"On the show, that report would've kept you out of the papers, but here…" I looked out the window. Here was a real world, not a tv show where stupid things like that could be fudged for expediency's sake. Here the FBI were real and there were way too many hits on the Winchesters in their databases.

"Think I need plastic surgery?" Dean asked frivolously, glancing sideways at me.

"Hope not," I said, trying to match his tone. "But you do need Frank."

"Frank? He's crazy."

"I guess," I half-agreed. "He seems to know enough about enough to get into the databases you need to have wiped clean, though."

"He's charging us more than we could put together in a year," he countered, a bit sourly. "And we're not exactly seeing results."

"Where is he?"

"Well, he was in Tennessee," Dean said slowly. "Then he moved into a trailer."

"Can you get hold of him? Ask him to maybe just check if your name's still up in lights?" I asked, wondering if it could be that easy. Frank on the show was a paranoid, ex-intelligence type with a bucketload of problems. I couldn't help but speculate on what he was like here.

He checked the road and then turned to give me a good look. "You been thinking about this?"

I made a little vague wave with one hand. "Not much else on my plate the last few months."

He made a noise in his throat and I hurried on, "If Frank could erase the records, it would mean that you couldn't be picked up on something minor. And your faces wouldn't be matched with a record even if you do get caught by security cameras."

"Won't stop the levis matching them if they're monitoring those computers," he said, his voice a little unsteady.

"No," I agreed, a bit disheartened. "I couldn't think of any way around that."

"Well, there's not that many of them. Odds are in our favour, at least." He glanced at the mirror, checking his brother's progress behind us. "Next stop, I'll call Frank."

"What happened, here, when Bobby was supposed to go with you and Sam to Jersey?" I asked.

"He – uh – Chet broke his collarbone and he stayed with Sheriff Mills for a few weeks," Dean said. "Why?"

"Didn't you read the scripts?"

"Some of them," he said, turning to look at me again. "Something happened to Bobby on your show?"

"Not 'my' show," I said disapprovingly. "He was killed, Dick Roman shot him."

In retrospect, I definitely could've delivered that bit of news a bit more gently. Dean swore, palm slamming against the small vinyl-covered wheel and the hatchback veering from side to side as he vented his anger on the car. I braced myself against the glove box and door and waited till he calmed down, looking behind to see Sam's frown through the high truck windshield as he closed the gap a bit.

They must've had some kind of signal because Dean looked in the mirror, tapped the brakes a couple of times very quickly and Sam backed off again.

"Goddammit."

"Well, here, it didn't happen," I said mollifyingly. "So that's good."

"Yeah but it still could, right?" he argued. "That's the way this shit goes, doesn't it?"

"I don't know," I admitted. "Sam said he's not having hallucinations."

He focussed again, nodding slowly as that percolated through. "In the first couple of episodes, he was, wasn't he?"

"The writers never explained it," I told him. "It wasn't clear if it was supposed to be his memories of Hell or if it was something else, something like an echo of the possession, or …" I trailed off, having run out of plausible possibilities.

"But you pulled him through his memories," Dean said. "So maybe he dealt with them, having someone else seeing them."

"Maybe." That seemed a little too pat to me, but I didn't argue. Whatever kept him calm while he was driving a car that was much more touchy and lightweight than the Impala was a good trade. I thought it was more likely that hearing that his brother had forgiven him the mistakes of the past, Sam had shouldered those memories as some kind of punishment on himself. I was hoping that Lauren was talking to him about that, but it was hard to tell, the two of them kept whatever was between them pretty private.

"Anything happening with Bobby and Sheriff Mills?" I asked curiously.

Dean grinned and I can't tell you how glad I was to see it.

"Something," he said, his voice much lighter. "Bobby's not sayin' anything about it."

"Where're your tapes?" I asked, looking into the back.

The grin vanished. "No tape deck," he said, waving a frustrated hand at the dash.

"You stole a car without a stereo?"

"I was in a rush!"

I had the distinct feeling he'd had this conversation with someone else. I looked at the radio and he shook his head.

"Nothing but holy rollers, tractor dealerships and the Farm Report," he said, with the air of someone who'd had personal, trying experience. "I'll get something else once we've got the cabin settled."

We talked a little more about what had happened on the show. He was shocked when I told him about Amy, and all the repercussions from that one act. It hadn't seemed very much like him when I'd watched it, either.

"Why'd you keep looking for answers, when you were back there?" he asked after a few moments of silence and the tinny, rattling noise of the hatchback's engine filling the gap. He might just have been trying to ignore that sound, it was annoying enough to me, let alone to him.

"I don't know," I told him, honestly enough. There wasn't any hope of getting any information to him, after all. "It –"

Felt like a way to stay close, I almost said but didn't. There weren't any scabs over a lot of the feelings I'd had back there. I was here, less than three feet from him, but there was definitely a part of me that still didn't believe it. Not entirely. I didn't know why, really. Maybe it was a residual worry about being sent back. Maybe it was some personal insecurity I hadn't looked at real hard. I just didn't think I could say it out loud, not yet, not to him, how that had felt.

Well, at least, I didn't think I could it say out loud without having some kind of emotional reaction that I didn't think would be appropriate in the middle of our exodus to another state. That's what I was telling myself.

He must have picked up a bit of that, anyway, because he changed the subject.

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

Dean drove as far as Bozeman when Sam's lights started flashing and we pulled off a motel that still had a few vacancies. Sam parked the truck around the back of the long, narrow building and we drove back into the town, looking for someplace to get some food. We'd stopped twice on the way, for fuel, food and drinks, and all the precautions of warding car and truck, of taking secondary roads in and out of the towns instead of using the closest exits and entrances seemed to have paid off. At least, there'd been no signs that anyone, demon, leviathan or otherwise, had been following.

Pulling up on Main Street in front of a short stretch of restaurants, Dean leaned forward, peering obliquely through the windshield. I looked at the names.

"Pizza, burgers, grill, Italian," Dean murmured.

"I'll get Italian for Sam and Lauren, if you get us whatever you want?" I suggested diffidently.

"We could get pizza for all of us?" he countered. "Two places, which one?"

"The closest," I said, opening the car door and getting out stiffly.

We picked up three family size to go and the smell just about filled me up on its own on the drive back to the motel, especially when Dean stopped at the small gas station for the usual six-pack. I was almost drowning in the roasted peppers, pepperoni, melted cheese and jalapenos combo.

It wasn't until he'd parked in front of the room, that I realised that Sam had gotten two rooms – two single rooms - tossing Dean one key as we walked in and put the pizza boxes on the table.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, I mean, we'd been together before and I suppose Sam didn't know that it wasn't – I mean, we weren't – well, it wasn't exactly like it'd been then. I told myself to grow a backbone, reminded myself that we'd shared motel rooms on the long haul to Los Angeles without any – or much – awkwardness, added to the fact that all motels include a decently long sofa by some kind of magical motel default.

It wasn't really the sleeping arrangements that were worrying me though. It was the thought of having to talk about the sleeping arrangements that was giving my teeth the Alfoil zing.

"Another three hours in the morning," Dean was saying to Sam, leaning across the table to fish out another gooey piece of pizza. "Bobby call?"

Sam shook his head. "No, but he's on the road and he did say he'd be off the air for a couple of days, at least."

"You read those summaries Terry brought back?" Dean asked, his voice dropping a little. Sam looked glanced at Lauren, who was flicking through the channels on the pretty ancient cathode-tube tv in the corner of the room, and passed over me before he nodded.

"You didn't tell me Bobby died?" Dean pressed him, eyebrows shooting up.

"He didn't," Sam responded shortly to the tacit accusation. "I thought you'd read them anyway."

I concentrated on the pizza. I had no idea why the writers thought it was a good idea to get rid of their last refuge, surrogate father, best friend and researcher. Sera had kept harping on and on about getting back to the beginning, to the way they'd been in first season, but it didn't make sense to me, since in the first season, they'd had backup even though we'd never seen them – hunters they'd known since childhood was the sketched in consensus. Slowly but surely, everyone they'd known and cared about had been systematically removed, and I'd frequently wondered if Sera was planning on having them finish up as delusional psychopaths or if she just hadn't realised what that kind of pressure would do to a person.

"I skimmed through the ones that seemed to be ahead of us," Dean said defensively, taking another slice from the box, holding it high and trying to catch the strings and loops of melted mozzarella first.

Sam turned away as Lauren found a news report on the set and turned up the volume.

"This just in," the newsreader said with a grave face. "More killings in the town of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Another woman has been found by police, her mutilated body the fourth to be discovered in the last two weeks. Police are now thinking that a serial killer may have targeted the town and have called in the FBI for assistance in –"

Sam's head snapped around to me. "Demon in Idaho?"

I nodded, looking at the screen. "It's not a demon though," I said. "Jeffrey was possessed by a demon, who you exorcised in 2008. He hasn't been possessed this time."

Dean frowned. "What d'you mean?"

"He's killing all these women on his own," I said, getting up and picking up my backpack, and carrying it back to the table. "He had a rough time in psychiatric wards over the last four years and he decided he wanted his demon back."

I found the summary and passed it to him, Sam shifting his chair around the table to peer over his shoulder.

"Crap. I told him not to tell anyone what'd happened," Dean muttered, staring at the pages.

"Do we take it or call in an anonymous tip?" Sam asked, leaning back in his chair. "Or call Nora? She could tell the cops what she knows of his breakdown."

"He'll go after her son, or her, if she does," Dean said, waving the papers in his hand at Sam and shaking his head. "We'll have to go." He looked down at the summary again. "When's he go after the next victim?"

"As soon as you two show up asking questions," I told him. "Otherwise, I don't know. The timeline got kind of mushy, since the previous episode you were in Kansas, then you drove to Idaho, then you drove back to Kansas."

"Sounds like us," Dean remarked distractedly. "Alright, we're just going to have to hope we've got enough time to get the cabin's protection up before we go. It's only four hours or so."

"Sam could take Terry and I to the cabin while you go on ahead?" Lauren suggested.

"No," Dean said.

"No!" I burst out at the same moment. All three turned to look at me in surprise. "Dean's the one who got the demon to talk, when he was possessed," I said, remembering the scene. Lotta fake blood for that one. "He's looking for you to come back, he wants revenge for it and something else."

Sam nodded understandingly but Dean's expression was more complicated. He didn't say anything, just looked back at Sam after a moment.

"It's gonna take us about six-seven hours with that truck to get up to Whitefish," he said. "Soon as we've got the wardings done, we'll go. Be there tomorrow night, latest."

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

We left Sam's room when Sam and Lauren cuddled up together on the sofa, settling in to watch the last third of It's A Wonderful Life. Dean's nose wrinkled up as he absorbed about thirty seconds of the scene playing and he got up and picked up the rest of the beers.

"Leave you to it," he said to his brother, then glanced at me. "You comin'?"

I nodded and followed him to the door, walking slowly along the raised concrete walk to the next room and waiting as he caught up and opened the door.

There was a sofa, of course and I dumped my bags next to it and went to investigate the bathroom, giving an involuntary squeal of delight when I saw two big, soft-looking white terry-cloth bath-robes hanging behind the door along with a small stack of what seemed to be decently sized bath towels.

"What?" Dean stuck his head in and looked around suspiciously.

"Robes," I said, pulling one out and showing him. He looked blankly at me for a moment then nodded and withdrew. He might've been shaking his head as he went, I was too excited about the robes to tell.

Normally, I wouldn't actually be going into paroxysms of joy at the sight of a bath-robe, I should say here. But normally, the standard of the motels we stopped at didn't run to robes or decent towels either. I was tired. I figured I was entitled to a tiny portion of girly behaviour.

"I take it that you want the first shower?" he said as I hurried out and started looking for shampoo, combs, toothbrush, toothpaste and all that good bathroom stuff. Looking at him, I hoped my expression adequately conveyed the answer. Aside from that one time in Dearborn, he was a hog when it came to hot water. Said it worked like a massage and he couldn't help himself.

"Don't use all the water," he obviously couldn't resist adding as I stood up, arms full of the personal hygiene essentials.

I ignored that and shut and locked the door.

It was both a delaying tactic and a luxury to take my time in there. I didn't use all the hot water, but I did spend a long time in the fragrantly steamy room afterwards, doing quite a few girly things that I hadn't bothered with for a while.

"Any left for me?"

"Plenty," I assured him, wrapped neck to knee in the plush robe, as bulky as a polar bear and aware that my smile was probably nauseatingly smug.

My bags had been moved to beside the bed and I swung around as he opened the door to the bathroom. "Dean, I'll take the sofa."

He shook his head. "Take the bed, sofa's fine for me."

The bathroom door clicked shut and I looked at the queen-sized bed uncertainly.

Now, before you start thinking that I'd lost my tenuous grip on reality and all the rest of it, I can tell you I wanted to sleep with him, and not just in the restful sense, wanted it in a pretty fierce kind of way. But it felt weird. Really weird. As if things had been rewound somehow. As if I didn't know him that well, yet. Like we weren't there yet. I don't know. I couldn't bring myself to make a single move, not even a teeny-tiny one, and yeah, yeah, post-modern woman and all that crap, but it wasn't just a one-nighter I wanted. And that made it impossible.

By the time, he got out, I was under the covers, eyes closed. I'd made up the sofa with the spare sheets and blankets, and left a lamp going but turned out the main lights, a sort of a implicit request to keep it down, I guess. I listened to him walk across the room, heard the soft crack of a lid coming off a bottle of beer and then more footsteps to the sofa. The lamp went out and the only light in the room came through a thin gap between the curtains covering the front windows. It had a reddish tinge and after a while, I figured out it was the Vacancy sign on the other side of the parking lot. Duh.

A little while later, there was a thunk on the low table and the rustle of bed linen and I started to relax, thinking that would be it.

"Lauren's suggestion got quite a response out of you," he said, his voice low in the darkness. "Were you worried about me?"

I wondered if I could fake sleep, then realised he'd asked because he'd known I was awake. Probably knew how to tell if a person was awake or asleep by their smell or something, I thought, a bit crossly.

"Of course I'm worried about you," I said, the edge carrying in my voice.

From the silence that followed, I got the feeling he hadn't been expecting that answer. Maybe he thought I'd brush it off. Pretend that I didn't.

I waited for him to say something, and heard him clear his throat. Then he rolled onto his side. Slowly it occurred to me that he'd been able to tell I was awake from my breathing, because I could do it too. His wasn't steady and even. It sounded a bit ragged.

But he didn't say anything else.

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

We left just as the sun was coming up and I didn't get that much sleep so within about an hour of starting up through the winding mountain roads, I could feel my eyelids drooping lower and lower.

"Go to sleep," Dean said, glancing over at me as I started to wakefulness for the fourth time. "We'll get there past noon. You got time."

Neither of us had mentioned anything about the previous night. The coffee provided by the room was halfway decent and as soon as I'd given up on the idea of getting any more than the couple of hours I'd had, I got up and made a pot, drinking two cups in quick succession and watching the rare sight of Dean's face in total relaxation. It could've been that that had made my heart beat faster, but I told myself it was the caffeine instead.

Behind us, Sam's truck was belching and coughing black smoke pretty much with every gear change, the engine noise getting deeper as it slowed down more and more. He flashed his lights once or twice, but Dean just put his hand out through the window and waved, staying the same distance in front of it, so I figured that was probably one of their many codes, this one for 'take your time, no rush'.

There was a rush, I thought. The episode had been one of the few I'd found slightly interesting in the season, although there'd been a pretty big outcry from the fans about retrofitting a case into the series instead of making it pre-series. Supposedly, the demon inhabiting Jeffrey Marshall had known something about Lilith, and the brothers had been hunting randomly for demons to interrogate. It was all a bit mushy but it didn't actually break the canon story since no dates were given within the year, just that it was early 2008, before Dean was taken to Hell.

I turned to look at him. "So, sometime in early 2008, you and Sam actually did exorcise the demon in Coeur d'Alene?"

He was watching a Winnebago ahead and he frowned. "Yeah, it was getting down to the wire and we were looking for anything that'd lead us to Lilith. Didn't they show that?"

"Not at the time," I said.

He licked his lips. "The summary just said that the guy blind-sided me and, uh, had me tied to a chair," he said slowly. "What happened?"

"He killed his dog to summon the demon back," I said, feeling my face scrunch up a bit. "He wanted the demon to possess him but it didn't. It was happy to find you there."

"I bet." He frowned. "It possessed Nora's son?"

"Yeah."

"Why'd it have her son again?"

"To get the right spell for the demon," I told him, repressing a yawn. "Also partly why he needed you – the blood of the exorcist was a necessary ingredient."

He saw an opening to get around the RV and took it, the hatchback's little engine screaming as we climbed. My lids dropped again and I gave up trying to fight off the tiredness. The seat was nowhere near as big and comfy as the Impala's and I hunched up in the corner as well as I could.

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

I woke up when the engine stopped, rubbing my eyes and looking around as Dean got out of the car and the suspension bounced up.

The cabin was bigger than the show had envisaged, but not by much. We were parked in front of the porch, trees pressing close and mountains rising above them, snow-capped in a very picturesque way. I wriggled more upright as I heard the labouring of Sam's truck, looking in the side mirror and seeing it come around the curve of the driveway behind the car.

Dean was at the front door when I got out and took a deep breath of clean mountain air. It was nice. And remote, I thought, looking around at nothing but trees and mountain tops in every direction. I wasn't sure if that would make it harder or easier to defend.

"Grab your stuff," he called out, pushing the door open as the truck lurched around the final corner and growled its way to a stop beside the house.

The next twenty minutes were spent going through the cabin, which was simply built and had no real hope of accommodating Bobby's books and stuff without it looking like one of those second-hand stores that the owner runs because he's a hoarder, not because he loves to sell books. There were two bedrooms and a bath up the narrow stairs that led into the high roof space, one on either side of the house and the bathroom in between them. Downstairs, a big area with a kitchen on one side, very open dining and living room in the middle and a smaller, three-sided room of no determinate function on the other side, raised by a couple of steps above the living room. Two doors off that led to a small bedroom and another bath with an adhoc laundry included.

Cobwebs and dust were the most noticeable features. Dean and Sam had mixed up some liquids from the boxes of ingredients we'd brought and were painting doors, thresholds, windows and vents, the hearth of the open fire, the wood-fired range and the freestanding pot-belly wood-stove. The sigils and circles and pentacles provided colour to the otherwise drab décor, at least.

Lauren and I swept off the cobwebs that were impeding progress, wiped down as much of the dusty surfaces as seemed necessary for hygiene and checked the basement for the diesel generator that Bobby swore would be there. It was. A bit cranky, but it started after some low muttering and it was quietly chugging to itself as we fired up the fridge, turned on some lights and started unloading the boxes from the back of the truck.

I looked around three hours later and sighed. It looked like that episode of 'Friends' when Ross moved in with Chandler and Joey. Boxes were stacked along the walls, in towers of varying heights in the centre of the room, across every thoroughfare and were leaning up against the rising banisters of the stairs. We could play 'forts' in here very happily. Catching sight of Dean's slightly appraising expression as he looked around the cabin, I wondered if he was thinking that as well.

Sam walked in through the front and looked around, wiping his hands on his coat. "That's it."

Dean nodded and turned to look at Lauren and I. "So long as you don't leave, no one can see you here. Rufus was a paranoid sonofabitch anyway but the cabin, the phone, everything here is in different names, so the levis can't track it," he said. "You have any problems, you call, straight away."

Sam shook his head. "Text," he said. "If they're listening, our voices'll come up even if yours don't. Text won't ring those bells."

"Geek," Dean told him, half-smiling. Sam shrugged. "Alright – text 'funky town'," he said.

"Funky town," Lauren repeated, one brow lifting as she looked at Sam.

"His idea," Sam said instantly, waving a disclaiming hand at his brother. He took the three steps over to her, hugging her and kissing her lightly and I turned away and picked up a random box, lifting it from the pile next to the stairs and carrying it across the room to set it on a pile next to the wood-stove. I didn't look at Dean while I did it and I was turning around when the door shut behind them.

Lauren looked over the several stacks of boxes at me as the engine of the hatchback started up again.

"Are you going to tell me what you're doing?" she asked.

"Nope," I said as I looked around. "We need more shelves."

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

We'd more or less got most of the boxes sort of unpacked by dusk the next night. At least enough that we could see the furniture in the cabin again and it wasn't too difficult to move from room to room. Sam had insisted that we stock up in Kalispell before we got up here, and the kitchen cupboards and fridge were full of canned, dried, frozen and packaged staples, so we weren't in any danger of running out. Dean hadn't been kidding about Rufus' survival ideas either. There was a big tank behind the house, pipes going to the generator and enough diesel to run the thing for a long, long, long time without having to go out and get more.

It was strangely companionable, working with Lauren and talking about the more inconsequential things that had happened in this world over the past six months. She filled me in on what she knew, and on what she and Bobby had found, the various libraries of reference material the two of them had amassed and brought together.

What the writers in my world had…peeked in on?...was mostly true, about the leviathans, anyway. They'd already infiltrated the business world, giving them enough power and money to do more or less whatever they wanted to do. And they'd already started work on their grand plan of docilisation of the masses. I wondered briefly if finding the prophet was going to happen here. We had the pertinent info from the tablet, but would the demons and angels be alerted to the existence of the tablets if Sam and Dean didn't break it open?

I really hated the question games about the future.

Lauren was cooking tonight because, as it turned out, she liked domestic chores even less than I did, but without being able to take the easy option of take-out we were stuck with our uncooked food and had decided that taking turns was the fairest way of handling an unappealing situation.

I closed and pushed aside the book I'd been reading when she brought two bowls of some unidentifiable and odd-looking mush to the table. It smelled alright. It certainly didn't look any worse than the so-called stew I'd made the previous evening.

"So, you were going to tell me what's going on with you and Dean?" she said, picking up a spoonful and contemplating it without much enthusiasm.

"Actually, I don't believe I was," I told her, closing my eyes as I tried the first mouthful.

"How is it?"

It was hot, and it tasted vaguely of tomatoes and carrots. "It's not too bad," I said, swallowing and spooning up another mouthful.

"Is it because of what happened with the Amazons?" she asked, taking a tentative slurp from her spoon.

I'd thought Dean was stubborn and Sam was persistent, but really, neither of them held a candle to Lauren when she decided she wanted to discuss something. I had a brief mental image of a fight between her and Sam, both pedantically stating their positions, over and over, and repressed the snicker it brought.

"No." I looked up to see her studying me. "I don't know what it is," I told her, filling my spoon.

"You think it changed while you were gone?"

"It feels…awkward," I said, awkwardly funnily enough, not really sure of what I meant by that either.

"You lost a lot of weight," Lauren commented, seemingly apropos of nothing.

Looking down at the bowl of mush blankly, I couldn't disagree with her, but I didn't think I could exactly spill my guts on why either.

"He was…completely devastated, you know," Lauren said quietly. "Drinking and reckless and angry at everything. Sam said he hadn't seen him that bad since their father died."

I kept my gaze on the bowl, not sure I wanted to hear this. In the season, I mean, in the show back in my world, Dean had lost Cas, was freaking out about Sam's hallucinations and the fact that Sam seemed to be dying from them, and then lost Bobby. None of those things had happened here. It might've gone some way to explaining the patched-together storyline of the show.

"Terry, what's going on?"

I looked up at her reluctantly. "It's – it's too hard," I said, probably meaninglessly. "I mean, it means too much…"

I didn't think I was being all that coherent, but she seemed to understand what I was talking about.

"Harder it is, the more it's worth it," she said, shaking her head. "You wouldn't be so scared if it didn't mean everything to you, would you?"

"That's the problem," I said, pushing the bowl away petulantly. "The last six months, I can't do that again."

To my chagrin, she laughed. "You really think you have a choice in this?"

"Sure," I retorted, not sure at all.

"News flash, Terry," she said, shaking her head at me. "I very much doubt it. I knew there was something between Sam and I from the minute I met him and nothing was going to change that." She tilted her head, still smiling, but a bit more compassionately now.

"You can tell yourself whatever you like," she said. "All that will do is confuse you and him and delay the inevitable. Trust me."

Since I couldn't think of anything to say to that, the silence yawned for a moment or three, and then she said, "Alright, I'll stop. You want to convince yourself of a lie, that's your business." She looked down at the bowl. "I can't eat this."

"I can't either," I said. "I'll make dinner from now on, you can manage sandwiches, right?"

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

Bobby showed up the next day, his Nova wheezing a bit and sagging on its suspension, the back and trunk filled with more stuff from his storage places.

"Where're the boys?" he asked me as I hurried down the porch steps to help him unload.

"Demon, uh, serial killer case in Idaho," I said, taking the boxes he passed over.

"Any trouble here?"

I shook my head and turned around, heading back up the steps and passing Lauren.

We got the car unloaded pretty quickly, the three of us and Bobby looked at Lauren and me when the last box was stacked on the others.

"Three bloods of the fallen, right? Angel blood, demon blood and alpha monster blood on a saint's bone?" he asked.

I looked at him. "Yeah, sort of. Why?"

"I got a lead on what I think is the last of the alpha's," he said tersely. "Vamp."

"How?" Lauren asked him.

"Ran into a demon who'd been working on the pick up detail," Bobby said. "Well, ran into him then over him and then tied him to a chair in a devil's trap – that don't matter," he added impatiently. "Said that Crowley never got the alpha vamp but had a good idea of where he was at."

Lauren looked at me worriedly. "You can't summon him here."

"No, 'course not," Bobby said, frowning. "But we should get moving on this. Roman had another press conference today and said he was funding a dig."

"An archaeological dig?" I asked, remembering that bit from the episodes. "He takes ages to find the tablet."

"On your tv show, yeah," Bobby argued. "But maybe not here, if he's got an idea of where he's looking."

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

It was dark when they got back. I went to the stove to pull out the still-warm casserole from the oven while Lauren and Bobby went out on the porch to make sure they were themselves, do the tests. The hatchback had been dumped, I surmised, from the much deeper engine sounds coming through the open cabin door.

"What the hell happened to you?" Lauren asked loudly and I turned around, setting the bowls on the table as Dean and Sam walked in, Dean's face bruised with dried blood on one side and Sam favouring his left arm.

Dean shrugged as he looked at me and walked to the table. "Got a bit rowdier than Terry's summary suggested."

"You walked out of there without a scratch," I corrected him.

He picked up a fork. "Jeffrey wasn't as mild-mannered here."

Sam winced as he sat down and Lauren drew his jacket aside, her expression tight as she looked at the swelling over his shoulder and the dark rainbow colours just starting to develop.

Bobby sat down as well and I went to the fridge and pulled out beers for them, without even thinking about it. I looked at the three bottles I was carrying as I set them one by one on the table and wondered fleetingly if I was becoming more domesticated. Another weird thought in a long line.

"We need to summon Crowley," Bobby said, knocking the top off his beer. We'd eaten about two hours earlier.

"Not here," Dean and Sam said together, and Bobby shook his head tiredly.

"No, Hoople, you said?" He looked at me and I nodded. "Crowley didn't kill the alpha vamp."

"Good," Dean said through a mouthful of food. "We'll get his blood at the same time."

"What happened?" Bobby asked, waving his bottle at Dean's face.

"Jeffrey was pissed that Dean got rid of his demon," Sam supplied, wiping his bowl with a slice of bread. "He didn't take Nora's kid," he added to me. "Took her, direct and she gave him the right summoning spell."

"Wasn't she a Wiccan?"

"No," Sam said. "Neutral witch but specialising in healing. She had a good reference library."

"The demon apparently remembered me too," Dean added, keeping his gaze on his food.

At the time I'd watched it, I'd thought it was a bit funny that both Winchesters had managed to get out without so much as a bump, despite Dean being at the mercy of both Jeffrey and the demon for a while. Now, I wondered if they'd played down the scene to avoid either the makeup costs, or what some of the network powers considered bad taste, repeated torture of characters. It'd been heading toward a more vanilla flavouring the last year anyway.

His eye had been swollen, but was going down as the bruising around the socket and over the bridge of his nose kicked in. The small cuts looked like they'd been made with a ring. He didn't seem all that concerned about it.

Lauren was still tutting as she forced Sam to half disrobe at the table, rubbing an ointment she carried with her that she'd said had come from her angel background. It was pink and looked very festive over Sam's shoulder. Must have worked too, because some of the tension from the pain leeched out of his face slowly.

"Nora gave us something too," Dean said, opening his jacket and pulling out a very creased bundle of notes. He handed them to Bobby. "Binding spell for monsters, which might work on an alpha, and a way to track Crowley, if we do get his blood."

"You're kidding?" Bobby unfolded the notes and spread them out on the table, smoothing them down with his palms. "That'll come in handy."

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

Sam and Lauren had one bedroom. Dean and Bobby had insisted I get the other, both wanting to be downstairs in case of trouble. Bobby had the small bedroom near the back. Dean was sleeping on the single cot under the window in the raised alcove off the living room.

I tossed and turned for about three hours before I finally accepted I wasn't going to be able to sleep and pushed back the covers, getting out of the bed. Opening the bedroom door, I tip-toed down the stairs, wondering if a small, medicinal glass of whiskey would do the trick.

Dean loomed out of the shadows of the living room as I hit the bottom step and I stumbled backwards up the steps, heart jack-hammering in my chest.

"Sorry," he said quietly. "Can't sleep?"

"I've been trying for hours," I admitted, looking around the dim room for the distinctive shape of the bottle that would be sitting somewhere there.

"Looking for?"

"Whiskey."

I caught the slight gleam of his smile. "Thought it made you sick?"

"I worked on acquiring a taste, back in my world," I said, without thinking, looking back at him when he didn't respond. "Nothing major."

"On the table," he said, his gaze cutting away.

I saw it and got a clean glass from the kitchen, pouring myself a small shot and sipping at it. It was horrible. Probably because it was some cheap rotgut that the men had all gotten used to over time. It did seem to be loosening the knots of tension, though, even in micro-sips.

Wandering across the room to the window, I looked out. The woods and mountains were all black and white, the moon having risen somewhere behind the house, painting the whole world in two opposing shades. It looked beautiful, but cold, and I couldn't tell if the shiver that shook me from head to foot was due to the colourless landscape or the nervousness I felt when I heard his soft footsteps cross the floor.

"Did I lose you?" he asked, very, very quietly, from close behind me.

I put the glass down on the window sill and turned around. "No."

"Then why – what –?"

Have you ever put your trust in someone completely? It's not an act that is reassuring or comforting, at least not the first time. My knees were trembling. And my mouth was doing a bang-up job of impersonating Death Valley. But pretending and hiding seemed both cowardly and dumb. And while I could live with my moments of cowardice, who wants to think of themselves as permanently dumb?

I took a deep breath and looked up at him, trying to corral a bunch of totally out-of-control feelings into a coherent explanation. And at the last second I gave up every pretence of trying to play it cool and make it sound less than it was. Maybe Lauren was right. Maybe.

"The last six months, what I felt, what I'm still feeling…for you…it just scares the heck out of me," I ended up saying, giving him a little take-it-or-leave-it shrug at the end.

The silence that followed and filled the room, the house, everything, was like one of those silences that happens in movies when the hero sees the time-bomb but hasn't yet heard it ticking. Somewhere at the back of my brain, I was thinking that if he laughed, or turned away, or looked embarrassed or just said nothing at all, I'd go back upstairs and stay there, forever, if need be. I could live in one room, Lauren would bring up food…

"That's it?" he asked, eyes widening at me. "That's all?"

I opened my mouth to defend my position and he looked at me impatiently, taking the single stride to close the gap between us. His expression was, so far as I could make out in the flat silver light, exasperated.

"Don't do that to me again," he said, his breath brushing over my lips before his mouth did.

It was too much. I don't mean it was unbearable, although I guess in a way that does describe the feelings. I'm not a big fan of need in a relationship, but there isn't another way to put it. It wasn't just need, there was a whole bunch of other stuff in there as well, but it felt like breathing again after nearly suffocating, or finding water in a desert after wandering without it for a long time, until every cell is parched and desiccated. Or…shoot, I don't know. I hadn't had enough near-death experiences to make that many comparisons.

Up till now, physical attraction had mostly stayed physical and an emotional attraction, or reaction might be a better word, had kind of tagged along behind. I hadn't had the double-whammy of both together, both overwhelmingly strong, both creating this chaotic and tangled need to be closer, to be as close as humanly possible. That's what I mean by too much, I guess. It felt like I was burning, from the inside-out, everything twitching and jumping. It felt out of control.

He pulled back, just a little and looked into my eyes, his lips parted, his breathing ragged and I realised that as full on as this all was, I wasn't in it by myself. We both turned together for the stairs.

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

It took a long time for the after-shocks to lessen and gradually stop, a long time for my heart to settle back to a regular beat, my skin to cool from its heated flush. My cheek was resting against the smooth plane of his chest and I could hear his heart, beating under his ribs. It took a long time for his pulse to settle as well.

"You still scared?" he asked me, and I lifted my head, to look up at him.

"Terrified."

I could just see the one-sided grin in the light from the electric clock on the nightstand.

"Thought you got married for the white-hot sex," he said, his tone light.

"In comparison," I told him, my voice a bit dry. "That was a yawn fest."

"Whoa." He sounded pleased anyway.

"Yeah." And I sounded flat.

He eased himself onto his side a bit more and I wriggled with him, propping myself on an elbow.

"What's wrong?"

With hindsight, I really should've mentioned my sense that this was going to have a time-limit to him then. It wasn't a solid sense, just a vague insinuation at the back of my heart somewhere, something dragging me down, something that was scaring me. At the time, I berated myself for being a glass half-empty kind of person and I shook my head and leaned close to him, letting my mouth trail along his jaw and down his neck, taking a load of comfort from the fact that I could, and in the sharpness of his indrawn breath as he shivered a little and his arms tightened around me.

"Nothing," I said, lifting my head and looking at him. "I missed you too much, is all."

The grin was there again, hardly visible but definitely there. "I don't mind making up for lost time."

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