Chapter 28

"Where are we going?" Charlie asked.

"Montana," Sam said, turning to look over the back of the front seat.

Dean had driven us back to the security company's lot, leaving the borrowed van parked on the street outside and retrieving his piece of crap SUV, then to Charlie's apartment. She'd hastily packed her essentials, giving a massive and regretful sigh as she'd reformatted the desktops there and picked up the laptop and the other irreplaceable tools of a hacker, and we'd headed out of Chicago just as the sun was rising.

I sat beside her in the back, stubbornly refusing to say anything to anyone. I was feeling pissy. And uncomfortable. The short skirt was refusing to stay down, bunching up at the top of my thighs, my feet were aching from the straps and heels and the early morning chill had penetrated through the thin clothes and into my bones.

Two hours later in Iowa, we pulled off the interstate into a gas station, and I grabbed my bag of clothes, following Charlie into the restroom.

"So, what happens next?" she asked me, dragging a pair of jeans from her bag and pulling them on.

I yanked off the heels, and found some thick, warm socks and a clean pair of jeans. "You need to get off the grid," I said, wriggling my toes comfortably inside the socks. "Far, far off the grid."

"Tell me something I don't know."

"Have you got a place to go?" I asked, unzipping my skirt and pulling on jeans. "Somewhere no one knows about?"

"Yeah," she said absently. "I need to get to Omaha, I've got some backup ID there."

"It's on the way." I tucked in my tee shirt and looked in the bathroom mirror. The face that looked back was pale, eye makeup standing out garishly under the bright fluorescent light, making me look a bit like a zombie. Walking undead, I thought sourly. I turned on the taps and squirted some liquid soap into my hands and scrubbed at my face, hoping that the advertised "waterproof" mascara wasn't really waterproof. I rinsed and looked in the mirror, the face that looked back this time much more familiar.

"Can you get into anything?" I asked, turning to her as I pulled my coat on. "I mean, could you get into a federal database?"

She looked at me thoughtfully. "I haven't found anything I couldn't get into yet."

Glancing at the door, I said, "Could you wipe out criminal records? In VICAP or whatever they're calling it now?"

"That depends," Charlie said, turning to the mirror and pulling her hair back, her fingers moving fast as she braided it. "Are the records in just one database or across several?"

I frowned. "I don't know."

"I could run some searches, probably get most of them," she said, fastening the end of the braid and looking back at me. "For those two?"

"There are – the leviathan copied them a few months ago, went on a killing spree to make sure their faces stayed public."

"Oh…wow, yeah," she said, brows rising. "I remember that! Holy sheet, that was really across the board."

"Yeah, well, it would help a lot if those files could be removed, so they can at least not worry about getting picked up for speeding or broken taillights."

She snorted. "Yeah, I can see that."

"Can you do it?"

"We'd need to be moving, but around a city, where I can get through the firewalls and use someone else's wireless," she said slowly, shoving her clothes back into her bag. "Is that a problem?"

"I don't think so," I said, a bit reluctantly, thinking of a day spent in the car with the brothers doing nothing but driving around.

"Actually, I've got a better idea," she said. "If we can find a remote T3 line, I could hook into that and hide myself, we could stay in one place and it can't be tracked."

That did sound better. "How do we find one?"

"Check the 'net," she said breezily, picking up her bag and turning for the door. "Take five minutes."

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

Once a certain amount of time has gone by, it becomes very hard to start a conversation about a problem. From the moment we'd changed vehicles, there hadn't been a single moment where Dean and I had been alone, and nothing would change while Sam and Charlie were sitting right there.

It was another nine hours before we found a T3 line, in the middle of South Dakota. We'd stopped for an hour in Omaha to get Charlie's backup documentation and funds from a locker in the transit centre on Ames Street, and that was followed by a long, mostly silent drive north through the smaller roads, Dean following Charlie's directions as she traced the runs of the big data-dedicated lines across the country. The one she'd chosen was isolated, standing alone in a field about a mile from the nearest road, an ancient and only half standing barn the nearest building. Dean parked next to the barn, and Charlie got out, flicking on a flashlight and taking a small neat toolbox and her laptop as she headed across the field toward the pole. Sam glanced at me and shrugged, following Charlie through the sagging fence and across the grass, his flashlight beam bobbing in her wake. I wasn't sure if he was going to keep watch for her or if he'd gone because he couldn't take the silence between his brother and me any longer.

I got out of the car, walking into what remained of the barn, the moon and the car's headlights giving me enough light that I could at least see where I was going. I had no idea of what to say to Dean, to be honest. I'd done what I'd thought was the right thing – the only thing – to get Charlie the time she'd needed. Bobby had called a few hours ago. He and Lauren had intercepted the tablet and were on their way back to the cabin. It hadn't all been for nothing, after all. And it wasn't like I'd slept with the guard…just one kiss, for pete's sake. Sitting down on a piece of unidentifiable, rusty machinery, I closed my eyes and tried to think of a way to make some kind of move back to where we'd been.

A part of my problem with getting my head around all of this was not really knowing, if our positions had been reversed, he would've done the same thing. I mean, if it'd been a female guard, of course…or if he would've been able to just knock out a guard and truss them up in a cupboard. It wasn't all that helpful since I couldn't have knocked out the guard on my best day. I'm not a total asshat, I know how I would've felt if I'd had to watch him making out with someone else, but at least, I thought self-righteously, I would've trusted that he wasn't doing it for the sake of making out, but for the success of the mission.

"You okay?"

I looked up to see him standing a few feet away, silhouetted against the black and white field through the open doorway behind him.

"No," I said grumpily, getting to my feet and taking a step toward him. "I'm not okay."

He took a step closer and out of the shadow of the barn's doorway, a stray moonbeam through the roof lighting the patch of floor he stood on, his expression a mix of doubt and defensiveness.

"Did you honestly think that I was dying to kiss that guy?" I asked him bluntly. "Or that even if, for some impossible reason, I did want to kiss him, that I would want to do it in front of you?"

"Looked like you didn't mind," he said, looking off to my left.

"Right, because I should've been looking like I hated it," I said sarcastically, warming up. "Because that would've really kept his attention off Dick's office, right?"

"I'm not – I haven't –" he said, waving a hand vaguely back to the east, by which I presumed he meant Chicago. "That wasn't easy, for me, watching you with someone else."

He stopped talking and looked at the ground.

"None of this is easy for me!" I crossed my arms over my chest and stared at him. "Loving you isn't easy!"

Those words fell out without consideration and he looked at me, his eyes widening slightly and I suddenly realised what I'd said, what I'd given away in the heat of the moment and felt my breath catch halfway up my throat.

"Uh…" he said, his expression hard to make out but his voice breaking high in surprise. "You do?"

Isn't it funny, how, when you don't really mean it, it's so easy to tell someone you love them, but when you really do, when it feels like you're gonna break inside because of the feeling, it's nearly impossible to say the words. I said them non-stop to Daniel for nearly a month, never once realising that I didn't, that it wasn't, that at the time I had no idea of what that really meant. Now, I couldn't say it to the man before me, not deliberately.

Except, that I kinda had.

I looked away. I didn't want to retract it, didn't want to lie. I couldn't tell the truth either.

"Terry."

He took another step closer and you know, there was a part of me, obviously not the emotional part, that was rolling its eyes at the fact that here we were, two supposed adults, unable to admit to what we felt, what we wanted. For me, telling him meant surrendering. Everything. If he didn't feel quite the same way, or not the same way at all, it would be an unmitigated disaster. If he did, it would mean that somewhere down the line, sometime soon, we were going to have to have the mother of all talks. I wondered distractedly if he was afraid of that as I was.

"Therese," he said, and this time I looked at him.

He looked like he was struggling with something and I couldn't work out what it was, but the first thing that came into my head was the scene from the episode in season six when Dean had asked Lisa what she wanted from him, and she'd told him that she knew she couldn't have what she wanted and they'd both known that the reason for that was because he couldn't give it to her. Not loving her. Not giving up hunting for her. None of it.

Needless to say, the memory of that scene did not fill me with confidence or optimism.

"Do you?" he asked me and I looked down at the floor.

If I didn't say it, then he didn't have to have that look, that look that said 'I don't', and maybe we could just muddle along back to where we'd been and I could pretend –

"Do you?" He was standing right in front of me, and his hand touched my chin, lifting it so that I had to look at him. I couldn't make out what he was thinking or feeling. He didn't look uncomfortable, exactly. He looked like he was waiting.

"You think I'd be this high-maintenance if I didn't?" I said, a bit breathlessly, deciding on the spur-of-the-moment that some kind of self-mockery was more dignified than tears and hand-wringing.

"I think you work on being high-maintenance," he said, his voice getting deeper. "Just to test me."

I'd like to say I was cool, you know, in control, capable of a quick and witty comeback, but let's face it, when I have ever been cool with him? It took me several seconds to realise two things…the first was that the look I'd been dreading, the one from the episode, had not materialised. The second was that despite the fact that he seemed to be holding it together and not at all worried about anything, I could see his pulse, in that little dip at the bottom of his throat, and it was banging away with the tempo of 'Shoot to Thrill', and I remembered that he was a pretty good poker player when he wanted to be.

"Why would I need to test you, Dean?"

The corner of his mouth lifted a bit, as I think he realised he'd been made. "Because you're in love with me, and you want to know if that's mutual," he said, and there was a casualness to his tone, like he didn't really mean that, or maybe that he didn't really believe it. His eyes were all lit up and reckless, and I think my heart jumped to a faster beat at the same time his did.

"Why wouldn't I just ask you?"

"That's a good question," he said, and the smile disappeared. "Why wouldn't you?"

Occasionally, I have dreams where I step off high buildings, or cliffs, sometimes I step out of a plane. Usually I wake up before I hit the ground. In that second, the feeling was identical to those dreams, like I'd stepped off a cliff, my stomach somewhere blocking my throat, and I was falling, with zero chance of waking up before I hit the ground.

He was waiting for an answer, or a question, and I wanted to know but at the same time I didn't. I didn't think he'd be like this if he didn't…feel…something, but it was Dean, you know? Dean, who'd been burned by Cassie. Dean, who didn't want feel anything ever again. Dean, who'd kept his heart under lock and key for the last six years.

"Do –"

"Done," Charlie said loudly, walking into the barn. "You two now have records as clean as a newborn's behind." She paused for a second as we failed to respond, then shook her head. "Don't everyone thank me at once."

Sam trailed in behind her. Dean turned and I looked past him at the two of them, my teeth chattering suddenly and briefly in a shock reaction, I guess.

I saw Sam's expression change as he caught sight of Dean's face and he sped up behind Charlie, clearing his throat.

"Uh –"

"Anyway, you can lay down your offerings at the altar of me later, bitches," Charlie cut him off, looking around the barn disinterestedly then glancing at her watch. "Are we going? I can get a bus out of Rapid City, should keep anyone – or anything – looking for me. I checked the schedules, there's one going ten minutes after midnight, I think we can make that, right?"

Dean turned to look back at me and I shook my head. The moment, such as it was, was over and we could pick this up later. Getting Charlie off the radar was a higher priority, I thought. He seemed to agree with that, swinging back around to the door and walking out, Sam following him. I couldn't hear what Sam was saying, but he got a shrugged response a couple of times.

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

We got to Rapid City at ten minutes to midnight and Dean parked out the front of the terminal, all of us piling out as Charlie went to get her ticket with her new bonafide alias. I'd caught a glimpse of the name – Carrie Heinlein – and sighed to myself. Sam stayed on the other side of the car, looking at the buses lined up along the kerbside, and I paced in front of the doors while Dean leaned back against his door. When Charlie came out, she stopped and looked sourly at us.

"Well, thanks for ruining my life."

I shook my head. "Your life was ruined the minute you took a job with Roman," I told her bluntly. "Might be a good idea to freelance for a while?"

"Yeah, I think you might be right," she said, looking at Dean. "Can you take them down now?"

Glancing over the car's hood at his brother, Dean shrugged. "We've got what we need. The tablet should confirm what we think is gonna happen."

"Well, don't call me, I'll call you," she said, her attention sharpening on the buses as one started up, its destination window showing Topeka. She took a step toward it and then turned back. "Take care of yourselves, right?"

"Right," Sam and Dean said together and I nodded.

We watched her walk to the bus and climb on, not even glancing backward as she took a seat halfway down. I had her number and she had Dean's. If anything happened, she'd know where to get help, anyway. I couldn't stop thinking about the organisation Roman had set up, the labs and mountains of data he must have built. It wasn't all that unlikely we wouldn't need a true tech-head to figure out how to get rid of it, if the cut-off head didn't exactly cause much floundering with the body.

"You want to keep going?" Sam asked Dean as the bus pulled away with a belch of blue smoke.

"Nah," Dean said, opening the driver's door and getting in. "We'll find a motel, grab some zzz's, head out at first light."

I was relieved to hear it. It felt anticlimactic to be climbing back into the car after the last few days and I desperately wanted some peace and quiet and something to eat.

The motel at the edge of town was open, had several vacancies and was, when we walked into our rooms, clean. It had a nautical theme, which I couldn't quite make sense of, but at least the blues and greens were soothing. Dean dumped the bags on the floor by the bed.

"I'll be back in a few minutes," he said, looking at me. "Gotta check some stuff with Sam. You be okay?"

I snorted to myself. I'd be fine. A hot shower and clean sheets and I'd be asleep before he got back, I wanted to retort. Then I thought about what was going on and I just nodded. Tired or not, I didn't think I could really deal with leaving this up in the air, even for just one more night.

The shower was wonderful and it was only the thought that he might like one as well that prised me out of the cubicle before the hot water had been completely used up.

I was drying my hair when he came back. He locked the door and grabbed a small bag of salt from the black bag, running lines over the door and window sills, and tipping a handful into the vent. When he'd finished, he dropped the empty bag in the trash can and walked over to the bed.

"No interruptions," he told me. His face was totally serious, not even a flicker of humour in his eyes. "I need a shower. Don't fall asleep before I get out."

"Yes, sir."

He swung away before I could see if that had provoked a smile or not, walking into the bathroom and closing the door. I sat on the edge of the bed for a moment longer, using my fingers to comb through my hair.

I thought I was probably kidding myself with all the stuff I'd been telling myself about why I was still afraid of getting too close to him. I was afraid of that, but not as afraid as I was of not being here, not being with him. I kept trying to find comparisons, in what I knew of his life, and in mine, for the way it felt, but I kept falling short and that was kind of scary, that it was completely unknown, I mean. Then it came to me that maybe for him that wasn't an unknown feeling, maybe it was a known one that he might not want to know again. Crazy thoughts, I tell you.

Getting up, I walked around the room a bit aimlessly, turning off the overhead light, pulling down the bed linen, turning on the lamp on the nightstand on the far side of the bed, worrying at my circular logic like a dog with a particularly juicy bone the whole time.

Was it fair that I felt like this, for a man from another world, a world that I still wasn't sure I belonged in or would be allowed to remain in, I asked myself as I fiddled with the digital clock. Was it fair that, being strictly honest with myself about it, I'd been more than halfway here even before I'd met him, that I'd been pre-programmed to fall in love from a tv show that had missed a lot of stuff, but had also gotten a lot of stuff right?

I sat on the edge of the bed, pulling my towel a bit higher and huffing out an exasperated exhale. It might not have been fair, but it was what it was and pretending otherwise was…well, futile.

I thought about the bad feeling I'd had, before we'd gone to Chicago. It hadn't recurred and I wondered if it was a reliable indicator, these feelings I paid attention to in this world that I'd probably have brushed off in my own. The trouble with trying to think through this stuff on your own is that you're never sure if it's a form of paranoia, or if it's real. I mean, just from a personal viewpoint, I probably had a lot of reasons to get bad feelings about loving Dean Winchester. His girls hadn't all died (like Sam's, the thought snuck in and I banished it instantly), but none had remained around long either. On the other hand, I knew that what I was feeling right now, I'd never felt before, for anyone. And I had the idea that feeling like this wasn't really possible unless it was reciprocated. Nothing exists in a vacuum, feelings least of all. They do need something to keep growing, something to feed them.

The water went off and a shiver ran down my back. You can admit it, I thought, trying to convince myself. I couldn't even think of what he might say, if I asked him, the air in my throat drying out and my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth at the thought.

He came out a minute later, a low-slung towel wrapped around his hips, damp hair finger combed by the look of it, and – most surprisingly – clean shaven. I wanted to make some insouciant comment about it, but as usual, the insouciant part of me decided it was a good time to take a nap and I was left with the non-witty, tongue-tied and dry-mouthed me instead.

"I might've overreacted about the guard thing," he said, walking to the side of the bed.

"Might've?"

"A bit," he added with a casual shrug.

"You were jealous."

He dropped his towel and stretched out on the bed, propping his head on his hand and leaning on his elbow. "I wanted to shoot him," he corrected me, reaching over and pulling my towel loose.

"You don't trust me?"

"I didn't trust him."

"That's not really answering the question," I said, trying to ignore his hand's light explorations.

His hand rested on my hip and he moved up the bed a bit, teeth catching the inside of the corner of his lower lip as he looked at me, his breath a soft whisper as he drew it in.

"I met Cassie when my dad and me were working a case in Ohio, in 2002," he said quietly. He didn't seem inclined to say anything else, shaking his head slightly at the memory.

"You loved her," I said, trying not to make it a question, just a prompt.

He lifted a brow sardonically. "I thought I did," he admitted. "I wanted to ask her to marry me."

I don't know why, but I hadn't expected that. At all. It took the air from my lungs in exactly the same way that falling on flat on your face does. He was watching my face and he smiled wryly at what must've been the shock on it.

"You were married," he pointed out.

"I –" I stopped because at the time, I'd thought I was in love too.

He nodded. "Yeah, hormones or chemistry or whatever you want call it," he said. "We were together about three weeks, I think, and I – I didn't want it to end."

"Then you told her." I looked at him, and I saw his expression twitch.

"Yeah, I told her." He inclined his head as he thought about that. "That in the show too?"

"Um…not directly," I said. "When she called and you and Sam went to take care of the ghost-truck, that part came out in the conversation."

He sighed. "It's worse than Chuck's damned books, isn't it?"

"So there really was a ghost-truck?"

"Yeah," he said. "But that's not really what I want to talk about."

"Of course, sure," I said, guiltily unsure if I really wanted to hear about this.

He seemed to be aware of that, looking for the right words. "The thing was, all that time, I thought I'd been hurt, I mean…I thought…it felt like…"

I remembered the moment I'd realised that I didn't love Daniel and in fact, didn't even know what love was. It'd been two months after the divorce. Up till then, I'd been convinced that I was never gonna recover.

"I didn't get a divorce because I knew I wasn't in love," I said abruptly. "I filed because apparently he needed a lot more than just one woman to keep him happy."

His brows drew together and I looked away, not wanting to see sympathy or worse, anger on my behalf. "I thought I was in love, and I thought I'd never love anyone else again. Of course, I was young and pretty dumb."

That'd nearly turned out to be true, but I'd gotten over the not-trusting part a lot sooner than I'd thought I would, at the time. At least, I reconsidered as I stared fixedly at the pattern of anchors and seagulls over the bed's coverlet, I thought I had.

"Yeah," he said, breaking through that uncomfortable thought. "It took seeing her again to work out that mostly it'd been my pride that had gotten hit, and I didn't even get that until a few weeks later."

I looked at him quizzically. "How was that?"

"We were in, uh, New York, looking at the painting case, you know, the one where the little girl was the ghost," he said, eyes half-closed. "And I was watching Sam getting on with this chick, making a mess of it, but still, getting along with her, and I realised I hadn't thought of Cassie in a while." He opened his eyes and looked at me. "I mean, hadn't thought of her at all. I figured that probably wasn't how it worked if it was the real thing."

"No," I agreed, thinking of the six months I'd spent trying not to think about him.

He slid down, his arm curling around me and pulling me closer. I slid my leg over his for balance, seeing the question in his eyes.

"You," he said slowly. "I couldn't get out of my head."

I could see he was well out of his comfort zone with this conversation, and I was too, if I was going to be completely honest about it. Time after time in the show, it was obvious how deeply Dean felt things. He didn't let it out all that often, but it was there, and you couldn't help but feel it, watching him trying to deal with the things that had happened to him, with the things he'd had to do. The idea that some of depth might belong to me was…well, it was a very sobering thought, let's just say.

"Too sexy?" I asked him, as frivolously as I could manage.

He grinned, a wide, open grin, and shook his head. "Too much damned trouble."

"I was not," I protested, not too vehemently.

"You still are," he told me, and he rolled us both over, kissing me before I get out another response.

It was different again. Very slow, and very unrushed, and vaguely, somewhere in the back part of my brain where thought processes were still going on, I wondered if this was his kind of apology. If it was, it was my apology as well, unspoken and maybe unneeded but still wordlessly trying to tell him that there was no possibility of anyone else.

Maybe it was love. Maybe it was a connection that sometimes happens with two people but not for everyone, just a one-in-a-billion shot with no explanation except that it's somehow so right that it seems like temporary insanity to have ever thought otherwise. I don't know. I did know that before, I'd considered monogamy a kind of random choice. You know, the sort of thing that you did because it was expected, not so much because there weren't other people out there who could rock your socks just as effectively as whoever you were with. Here and now, it came to me that I was wrong about that. Anyone else – everyone else – was forgotten, disregarded, not even considered…there was only one person in the entire world and I was right next to him.

When your nervous system is totally engaged, it takes a while for new data to flow in. The first sign I had that something was going on was a tingling on my lower back, but it was lost in the deeper sensations, and I barely noticed it, to be honest. My senses were swimming in touch, in taste and smell and sound, in what I was doing and what he was doing and even when it got stronger, got more like a burning feeling, I couldn't pay attention because I was so close and he was tipping me over.

I think I've said it before, I'm not a screamer in bed, but I screamed when my lower back felt like it exploded into flames. Dean flinched back, his hands lifting instantly.

"What?!"

I couldn't answer him because the fire turned into acid and it was eating right through me.

"Terry! Christ! What!?" he said, staring at me as my back bowed in an attempt to stop the pain. I couldn't tell him, couldn't say anything but the next blast was so intense I rolled over and onto my knees. I knew my mouth was open, but nothing came out, not words, not a scream, not a sound.

"Fuck!"

I couldn't look at him, couldn't see what he was seeing. It felt as if someone had poured molten steel down my mouth and had filled me with it.

"No, shit, no," Dean said, and he was kneeling beside me, his hands holding my shoulders, gripping them tightly. "Don't – fuck – SAM!"

He wasn't a screamer either, but he screamed out his brother's name.

The pain vanished for a second and I opened my eyes. And stared disbelievingly at my hands which were clenched into fists in front of me. I could see the anchors and seagulls of the bed cover through them.

"De–" I managed to get out before the next wave hit, but his name turned into a shriek, and I couldn't control the way my muscles, every single one in my whole body, locked into rigidity. I think the scream was probably cut off at that point, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure I can even describe what happened next because I don't think I was really conscious, and I don't think I was all there. I remember the agony. I don't remember anything else.

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

There was a smell of sulphur, thick and cloyingly stomach-turning and filling my nose and mouth until I started to gag. There was light, sort of, as I opened my eyes, a red light that made the shadows in the room magenta. I was still naked, but not cold. The heat radiating out from the rock walls, from the pocked stone floor, was tremendous and even as I lifted my head, I could feel perspiration rolling down from under my hair and trickling down my sides.

"I'm going to take a wild guess and say that Sam gave you that warding sigil, am I right?"

The demon's rough accent filled the room and I looked around, seeing Crowley standing next to a doorway, smirking as he looked down at me.

"Didn't get it from any book, did he?" the demon continued, his voice cheerful. "That was one of Lucifer's, y'see? Two-way."

I couldn't think of anything to say to that. Two-way? Hiding from demons but providing some kind of a key to the bearer anyway?

"Of course, it doesn't work on anyone else," Crowley said, walking around and crouching down in front of me. "Just demons…and little girls who come from other worlds."

His hand flashed out and grabbed a handful of my hair, yanking my head up. "Now, now, no sulking and pining for impossibilities," he said. "We've got a lot of work to do before my next appointment."

Snapping his fingers, I found myself covered, in sackcloth, I think. I mean, I hadn't actually seen sackcloth outside of a Charlton Heston movie, but I guessed that's what it was, heavy and coarse and itchy and smelling vaguely of animals. The demon stood up and I had to as well, or lose a handful of hair.

"That's better," Crowley said, his gaze flitting down and up me. "Don't want to be inciting the baser instincts of my citizenry," he added, then grinned. "Not yet, anyway."

Hell, I thought tiredly. The smell, the light. I was in Hell.

Well, now you really have something to share with the brothers, I thought uncomfortably.

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

One of the things I'd spent a bit of time reading about, when I'd been back home, had been the effects of torture, on the body and on the mind. It wasn't pleasant reading, but I'd felt compelled to do it, another twisted way of trying to feel like I hadn't lost everything, I guess.

The body's nervous system tends to overload with a lot of severe pain, or a lot of sustained pain. When Dean had been in Hell, he hadn't had a body, just what I thought were the memories of one, nerves, muscles, bones. Nothing that had been done to him could've overloaded those memories, so it'd been a thousand times worse for him, or a million. I mean, how could you really tell?

My body was here and intact and it overloaded on a regular basis. I think Crowley was getting fed up with it. I can't say I took much satisfaction from vexing the demon since the cost was pretty darned high. It took me several sessions to work out what he was trying to do.

Tap into my soul.

I don't know why I didn't think of it, just one of those concepts that doesn't leap immediately into the mind, I guess. He tried all sorts of things. Since there's a limit to how much blood can be lost, and how much damage organs can sustain without giving up completely, he was forced to do a lot of healing in between times, as I didn't seem to be getting the benefits of the twenty-four hour healing time that Hell apparently had on souls.

I looked up as he paced in front of me, the memory of the last set of wounds fading when I realised that all my limbs were still present and accounted for, and the messy spill of stuff from the long slash in my stomach had gone as well.

"Everything has a key," he muttered, staring at the floor. "All I need is one fucking break!"

He'd disappeared for a while, some time earlier, although I couldn't have told you when. Time was funny here. When he came back, he was in a good mood – or at least as good a mood as a demon experiences, I guess. He told me that he'd given Sam his blood, and Dean was looking for me, with no idea of where I'd gone or what'd happened. I suppose that was the idea, that the brothers wouldn't know that Crowley was playing them, pretending to be the good guy, and laughing behind their backs.

I know I sound pretty matter-of-fact about all of this. Trust me, that isn't easy. The truth is, if I thought too long about what happened, I would be in a foetal curl in the corner of a padded room somewhere, unable to do anything but suck my thumb and whimper.

My pain threshold hadn't magically increased and after a while, I couldn't have told you my name or anything about myself, I couldn't remember who I was, what I was doing there. I didn't remember Dean. I didn't remember anything about anything, really. Every single thing I was registering was pain. Big and little, scalding, freezing, burning, stabbing…a whole ocean of pain that had no beginning and had no end and that was all I knew. For what seemed to be a long, long time.

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

Something must have changed, the next time I came out of the black and blinked, looking around the room. Well, I say 'room' but it wasn't. It was like a cave, I suppose would be the most accurate description. An oven-like cave. That stunk.

Crowley was standing a few feet away, staring at me, his fingers drumming impatiently against his arm.

I looked down, seeing the burlap sack I was wearing bright red and heavy with blood, but no cuts or marks on me so far as I could tell. Nothing was hurting at that moment, anyway. I couldn't make much sense of the memories I had, but I was hanging up by my wrists from something above me, and pain was starting to eat at my shoulders.

I flinched back involuntarily as he stepped up to me, and he smiled. Then he gripped my arm.

The room and the demon and the shackles and the heat and the smell all disappeared and I wondered briefly if I was dead. I didn't even the time to ponder that before everything came back, but we weren't in the same place. My feet hit the floor and my legs collapsed under me and I ended up in a sprawl, my nose resting on dirty brown carpet.

"Upsy-daisy," Crowley said, and I staggered to my feet with the vicious pull on my hair. Disorientingly, we were in a motel room and I was once again naked. And it was cold, my skin goose-bumping instantly.

"Your boyfriends have found the prophet," he said, dragging me across to the bed, and shoving me onto it. He switched his grip from my hair to my wrist and there was a click-click noise and a sharp bite of metal around it. I looked up to see my hand cuffed to the bed head.

Things were slowly coming back, and Crowley's affability was only skin-deep, his eyes narrowed and calculating as he looked around the room and back to me. Somewhere, there were memories of what he'd done to me down in the pit, but they were all wrapped up and buried at the moment and the one thing that came back was an image of his face, screwed up in frustration as he'd thrown a book across the cave and screamed at me. I didn't know what he'd said, but it hadn't sounded like 'Happy Birthday'.

"My soul –" I said, or tried to say. The two words came out in a scratchy whisper that hurt like the devil as they got stuck in the dryness of my throat.

"Don't talk to me about your bleeding soul!"

He pulled out a phone and dialled a number and I tried to remember anything else, bumping up against that layer of wrapping. I did remember that he'd wanted me for something to do with my soul. Some power he'd thought he could get from it. Had I ever known the details of that? I couldn't remember.

"Dean, what a pleasure – haven't caught you at a bad time, have I?" he said jovially.

The name was familiar to me but I couldn't quite place it. The demon laughed at something that was said on the other end of the line and I looked up just as he turned and looked down at me.

"Yes, well, haven't got all day to chat, mate," Crowley said, leaning closer. "I've got a proposition for you. All I want is the prophet –" He stopped and listened. "Well, you haven't heard my end of it yet," he continued, a smirk on his face. "I've got something you might want back."

He put the phone next to my mouth, and I said, "Hello?"

"Ter-Terry?"

At the sound of the voice coming from the phone's small speaker, everything came crashing back, a gigantic tidal wave of memories and I think I probably did whimper then.

"Dean?"

The phone was lifted away and Crowley said, "Ah, there now, all sorted out as to the deal then?"

"Yeah, yeah…crucifixion, evisceration…I get it," the demon interrupted in a bored voice. "There's a time limit on this, Dean, I want the prophet here by tonight or your squeeze is going to bleed out."

I didn't see the knife in his hand until it was going into my side and slicing downwards. I screamed as I felt it, though, and Crowley held the phone out so that Dean could hear it. And in that one moment, when I had all my memories, when the pain in my side was matched by another pain, a lot deeper and a lot stronger, feeling what the man on the other end of that phone line was feeling as he listened helplessly, and couldn't do anything, something else happened.

I still wonder at that moment, you know. Wonder if it was some kind of cosmic connection. In my mind, I could see Dean, could feel what he felt, right down to the sharp pain in my palms where his fingernails had dug into his as his hand had curled into a fist. I don't think I'll ever know for certain, but I think it was.

Crowley's hand was still around the knife handle and he jumped back and let go, dropping the phone at the same time as that handle glowed red hot then white hot and the knife itself shot backwards out of the hole it'd made in me and hit the far wall with a clang.

Every part of me felt…super-heated…like a reactor melting down, and my vision sharpened to the point where I could see a strand of blonde hair, caught in the fly-screen on the window across the room, not just the hair and the light catching one side of it, but the scales on the hair strand, somehow. The pain vanished instantly, the cuffs on my left wrist exploded into a puff of ash and there a weird, throbbing, folding sensation, like the walls and the floor and the ceiling had been pushed in for a second, then flexed back out again.

Then I was sitting in a park, a cold grey sky overhead, bare trees all around, and a light fall of snow falling from the sky.

And, unfortunately, still naked.

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

AN: My apologies for the delays on this chapter. I hope it was worth the long wait, and fingers crossed the next one will be more timely. I also want to thank BlackIceWitch for allowing me to use some of the demon and Hell 'canon' from her stories to help me describe what Terry went through.