Chapter 29

Well, I bet you're dying to know where the heck I was and how on earth I got there? It's a good question alright.

My first problem was that I seemed to be sitting naked in a public park with absolutely no way of getting any help. I got up and looked around, the relief at seeing no one else there competing with needing some kind of help as soon as possible. I was lucky, though, the park's janitors or gardeners or care-takers, or whatever you called them had been through recently and the closest trash can had a clean(ish) black plastic trash bag without a scrap of trash in it. I whipped it out, tore some holes in the bottom and gave myself a highly-fashionable and thankfully not-at-all-smelly black plastic dress. Well, I use the word advisedly because it had the same stylish cut as the sackcloth I'd been wearing before, but what the hell, it came down to my knees, meant I wasn't going to be arrested for indecent exposure and the next thing I needed was a phone.

When I got out of the park and onto a street, I blinked in surprise as I recognised it. I was in Vancouver, which certainly explained the cold, damp and snow, although not how I'd gotten here. The next thought that hit me was more frightening. Was this the Vancouver of their world or mine? For a minute or two, I stood frozen on the sidewalk, unable to think of how I could verify that.

The public phone on the corner of the next cross-street gave me the glimmer of an idea and I headed toward it, ignoring the looks of the people I passed as my bag flapped in the freshening breeze. Being a modern phone, it did not, of course, have a fully enclosed booth to stand in, just one of those plastic bubbles that barely cuts out the street noise, let alone a chilly wind. I picked up the handset and followed the instructions glued to the inside of the bubble beside the phone on making a collect call.

I could probably bore you for a while with the detail of what happened over the next couple of days, but I think I'll just cut to the chase. Thankfully, Bobby was answering his phone and he accepted the charges. His voice on the end of the line confirmed that at least I hadn't been zapped out of this world, and I stood there for a moment, chest heaving and nose running as I tried to control the tears that wanted to flow the second I heard him. To say I didn't have a plan was the understatement of the century.

He had it all together, though, and gave me an address on East Hastings for a Western Union agent, the details of the cash pickup and the address of a hotel he was going to book me into. I blinked at the information, repeating it over and over to myself when I'd hung up and started down the street.

It took me fifteen minutes to get to the agent, who looked askance at my attire but handed over the money as soon as I signed the form. The lack of identification had been explained to them, and was, I guess, backed up by my outfit, and I walked into the small import clothing store two doors up and picked out jeans, tee shirts, a sweater and a winter coat, getting changed in the cubicle and leaving my trash bag behind when I paid for them.

Bobby'd said that all hell had broken loose when I'd disappeared, some kid called Kevin had turned up, followed by a couple of angels who'd called the kid a prophet. Meg and Crowley had both arrived separately and Meg'd tried to kill Crowley, saved by Cas at the last second. There was more, he'd told me sourly, but it could wait until I was somewhere stable and safe and clothed again.

I walked along East Hastings heading west. The Empress Hotel was a fleabag hotel in the mostly Asian area of the city, with a bar at street level and bed-sheets hanging over the front windows, about six blocks from the Western Union office. There was a convenience store a couple of doors down and a number of take-out restaurants and cafes nearby and I swallowed my feelings about insect room-mates as I checked in.

The woman who stood behind the counter smiled as she saw my name. "Friend of Bobby Singer's?"

"Yeah," I told her nervously.

"I'll give you the honeymoon suite," she said, taking a set of keys from the board behind her and jerking her head in an invitation to follow her up the stairs. "How is the old bastard?"

"Uh, still kicking," I told her. The stairwell smelled of old, damp carpet and liberal quantities of lemon-scented disinfectant and I wondered uneasily if there were bloodstains under the dark, floral pattern that was all I could make out in the dim lighting.

"Worked with him a few times 'fore we moved up here," she said, turning to look at me over her shoulder. "You see him, tell him Pattie sends her regards," she added, and I realised that Bobby had sent me here for a reason. I nodded.

"I'll do that."

"There's a phone in the suite, Bobby's expecting your call," she said as we reached the top of the stairs and she pulled out the keys for the solitary door at the end of the hallway. "Don't worry about the cost, I know he's good for it," she added as she pushed the door open and gestured inside.

"Thanks," I said, taking the keys as I walked in.

It was a suite, after a fashion anyway. A largish room with a sofa and a couple of armchairs that'd seen better days, a tv set sitting on a bureau on one wall and a kitchenette running down the length of another. Two doors set into the far wall leading, I guessed to a bathroom and a separate bedroom. How long did Bobby think I'd be staying here, I wondered?

"The pizza place downstairs isn't bad," the manager said, lingering in the doorway. "They'll bring it up as well."

"Uh, thanks, thank you," I said, turning around to close the door. She nodded and moved away and I shut the door and wandered over to the sofa, dropping on it with a sudden feeling of tiredness.

To be expected, I told myself. I'd been kidnapped, tortured, zapped interdimensionally from pillar to post, frozen in a trash bag and walked several of the city's larger blocks. A little bit more than my usual daily workout.

Looking around, I saw the phone and got up and walked over to it. I dialled Bobby's number and it was answered on the first ring, by Lauren.

"Hi," I said, not expecting to hear her voice.

"Terry? Are you okay?"

"Uh, well, I'm in Vancouver, but yeah, I'm still in one piece," I told her. "What's going on?"

"There are some complications," she said, and I could hear a voice rising in the background. "Uh, would you like to talk to Dean?"

There was a scuffle and heavy breathing over the line and then he said, "Terry?"

"Hi."

A slight hesitation, then, "What the hell happened?!"

"I don't know," I said, frowning as I tried to remember some of the details of the last however-long-it'd-been. "Uh, Crowley said something about the ward – on my back," I added on.

"Y-you dissolved, in front of me," he said, and in his voice I heard disbelief, mixed up with anger, relief, and some other things I couldn't quite decipher on an international phone line.

"I was –" I stopped, suddenly not wanting to say it, not now, not out loud and not to him. "I don't know, I don't remember all that much. Just waking up here," I continued, looking around. "Well, not here-here, but here in Vancouver."

For a couple of moments there was that weird, echoey silence that sometimes afflicts international calls and I thought the line might've dropped out. "Dean?"

"Yeah, Terry, you're gonna have to stay there, for a little while," he said, his voice getting deeper. "We've got the blood and the bone and we've got to take out Roman."

I understood that. It didn't really do much for the pang somewhere in my chest that I would be sitting all of it out in another country, but I did understand that the job came first. "Uh, of course."

"The second he's gone, I'm coming to get you –"

"I could take a bus," I offered. "Or a plane," I added, remembering suddenly that I wasn't afraid of flying, that was just him.

"No!" The vehemence in the single word shocked me. "No, I mean, you're safe there, just stay in the hotel, okay? Until I get there. Promise me, you won't try to do anything else."

If the weirdness of the phone call hadn't set off my alarm bells, that certainly did. "Dean, what's going on?"

"Nothing," he said, horribly unconvincing. "It's complicated, alright? We got angels and levis and Crowley lurking around and I want you out of it, I can't afford to worry about you and get this done."

That made a bit more sense, and gave me a little warm glow as well. "Alright, I'll stay."

"Look, are you alright?" he asked again, his voice dropping. "Did – are you hurt?"

"No," I said, truthfully enough in this moment. "No, I'm fine."

I could almost see the frown on his face as he digested that. "Uh, okay, sit tight, it won't be that long."

"Dean, you remember what happened in that episode, don't you?" I said, suddenly more worried about him getting sucked back to Purgatory. "You'll stab and run, right?"

"Yeah," he told me. "I'll be stabbing and running. I'll see you soon."

"Okay." I didn't want to end the call like this, but I couldn't think of anything I could say that wouldn't be distracting, or annoying, or just plain inappropriate. "Bye."

The line cut out with a dull click and a humming noise and I set the receiver down, staring at it for a few moments.

So, there you have it, I was out of the game for an indefinite period of time.

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

Time crawled, as it usually does when you have to sit around waiting for something with nothing to do. The first day wasn't too bad. I showered twice, went out and bought a change of clothing and went to the small store and bought enough food and beverages to last a week. I slept deeply that first night, no dreams, no waking up and when I finally did come out of it, it was eleven the next morning, so half the second day was gone already, something I felt quite pleased about. I checked out the channels on the tv and that's when it came home to me that a couple more days and I'd probably be climbing the walls.

By the fourth day, I was arguing with myself over what possible danger I could be in getting a plane to Missoula and getting the bus up to Kalispell. I was aware that arguing with myself over something I wasn't going to do was just a specious waste of time to begin with, but the more I indulged in it, the more cogent my arguments (for) became. I finally had to give it up because I couldn't think of a good reason not to go except that I'd promised Dean and I wasn't going to break that promise.

I rang the cabin at Whitefish on the fifth day and the phone rang out completely.

I tried again on the sixth day and the same thing happened. Then I started to get worried.

Another part of the problem was that after that first night of perfect sleep, I didn't have another. I was dreaming by the second night, not pleasant dreams either. By the fourth night, I wasn't sleeping more than about half an hour in snatches of bone-deep tiredness between nightmares. And the memories I'd thought were all packed away and buried deep turned out to be not all that deep at all. They began to pop up in the daytime on the sixth day, which is why, of course, I'd rung Bobby's place, just to talk to someone not myself.

I started trying to distract myself by asking why I hadn't told Dean where I'd been. As a diversionary tactic, it worked excellently. As a mental health strategy, it wasn't so good. What had happened to me hadn't had a good effect on my self-esteem, or on the way I saw myself. Thinking about it, in any kind of detail, brought quite a lot of those feelings back, along with the usual baggage of doubt, shame and guilt. Not great feelings on a good day, and definitely not wanted here while I was waiting around with nothing at all to do, worries about Dean and Sam taking on the king daddy of the levis and no one answering at the cabin, where – at least! – Lauren should have been.

Anyway, I hadn't told him because I hadn't wanted him to worry about it. Which I thought was a good idea, given, you know, everything that was going on and all.

Over that next few days, however, my good reason somehow morphed into something else, and by the time he turned up, sporting a limp and some yellowing bruises down the side of his face, it'd turned into something I couldn't tell him.

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

The knock on the door was surprising and alarming and I checked the peephole twice before I took off the chain and opened the door. He looked tired, I thought, before he stepped out of the hall's dimness into the slightly brighter interior of the room and I saw the bruising and the limp.

"What happened?" Why was that first question either of us ever asked the other, I wondered, a bit morosely?

He smiled, just on one side, where the bruising wasn't. "Looks worse than it is."

"I hope so," I retorted. "Because it looks horrible."

"Thanks."

"Anytime," I said, softening a little. "So … what happened?" I asked it again, in a less accusing kind of way. "Is Roman gone? Did the body flounder? What about Crowley?"

I nearly froze on the demon's name and turned it into a kind of cough instead, turning away so that he wouldn't see the expression on my face. I'd been carefully trying not to even think of the demon, which had probably made my aversion to him worse.

"Slow down," Dean said, following me into the room and closing the door and locking it. "Come here."

I turned around and walked straight into him, wrapping my arms around him and standing still and just … being for awhile. I could've stayed there forever, truth be told, because he felt solid and real and safe. Of course, when I do ever get much of that? He was warm and all I could hear was the sound of our breathing, slightly out of sync, and deeper, I could feel the beat of his heart, under my cheek and then I don't know what happened, my walls and soundproofing and what-have-yous came down and I starting shaking and then I couldn't stop.

"Hey," he said, feeling it, I guess, against him.

"J-j-just reaction," I hiccuped. "Tha's all."

I don't think he believed me, but he didn't say anything, just held me a bit more tightly and let me get it out. Which, as you can probably guess, didn't make me feel any more confident in myself.

"A-are you o-okay?" I asked, mainly to try and get myself under control. "Why are you limping?"

"All that running," he said facetiously into my hair. "Pulled a muscle."

"That's all?" I could feel him trying to ease back a bit, maybe get a look at my expression and I buried in deeper. "Why is your face multi-coloured?"

"Uh, well, I ran into a door, wasn't looking where I was going," he told me, clearly pleased with the theme. I couldn't help it, I snorted into his shirt.

"You're a bad liar."

"I'm a great liar," he countered mildly. "What going on?"

"I rang the cabin, twice," I told him, the first thing that came to mind that sounded reasonable. I'm not a bad liar myself, when needs must. "The phone rang out and I've been – worried – sitting here – not knowing …"

A bit of self-pity helps to explain most emotional breakdowns, and it worked this time too. I started crying and he got all sympathetic and caring and we shuffled awkwardly to the sofa and sat down in a tangle because I didn't want to let go and I had a good cry, while he tried to explain what had been going on for the three weeks I'd been gone.

Apparently, they broke the tablet open after I disappeared and the teenage prophet showed up. Kevin Tran. He'd managed to decipher enough of the Purgatory tablet to confirm that the blood and bone would kill Dick, but wouldn't necessarily leave the remaining Leviathan in a state of chaos. So, after they'd been to the lab and dispatched the leader, they'd spent a few days with Charlie and Lauren and Bobby, hitting the various buildings of Roman's empire and blowing them up, destroying the databases and killing the now-vulnerable levis wherever they'd found them.

That'd worked out okay, according to Dean. They'd gotten about ninety percent of the levis, then two angels had shown up to grab Kevin when they'd stopped moving around and Meg had killed one of them. The other one had managed to take Kevin and disappear, and they had no idea where they'd gone. Then Crowley had called Dean and told him about me.

He stopped talking at that point, and I felt his muscles tense a bit. "What'd he do to you, Terry?" he asked a minute later.

"He was, uh, trying to figure out how to get power from my soul, I think," I told him, conscious of the fact that I hadn't answered the question exactly. I hurried on, "In Necronomicon, there's a speculative section about the way souls of different worlds – or dimensions – or universes – can be, um, harvested for different power. It was supposed to be accessible by spells, or … um … emotions, but he couldn't get it to work."

"Where were you?" I felt his breath on my hair, a soft exhale. "We had a shitload of spells going to look for you."

"I don't know," I said. "I don't remember much until I was in the motel room where he called you."

I felt him recall that memory, his arms twitching around me. "What'd he do? To make you scream?"

I shook my head. "I don't remember. I looked, but there's nothing on me."

I shifted my position against him, moving away and lifted up my shirt. Every scar had gone, even the sigils. I had no idea how that'd happened or even when, I hadn't been able to look at myself in Hell, and I'd only noticed when I was in the park. Not even my old-life scars had remained.

He stared at my stomach for a moment, eyes narrowed. "He healed you? From what – else?"

I shrugged. "Does it matter? I mean, what happened? It's gone now."

"How'd you get here?"

That I really didn't know. "I remember feeling hot," I told him slowly. "Then I wasn't in the motel room, I was here, in a park."

I didn't think he needed to know any other details. You know, the trash bag and that stuff. It seemed a bit trivial considering what he'd spent his time doing and it didn't seem to have that much relevance to what had happened to me.

Lifting his head, his eyes met mine. "Maybe I should take a look at the rest of you? Just to be sure," he said softly.

I thought it was a good idea.

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

Thunder and lightning, tempests and storm-tossed seas, forces of Nature and all those clichés flickered through my thoughts but they weren't all there was – they didn't encompass the wild hunger, or the desperation that edged everything, that uncomfortable knowledge that everything seemed so fragile, could be lost at any moment, had to be savoured and tasted and revered. Or the violence of reaction, when a touch seemed to ignite the whole body. Or the feeling of wave after wave of building need, getting closer and closer. Or the depth of an emotional yearning, to be…I don't know…soul to soul?

Really, language is pretty darned inadequate for the most important things.

"Don't move," I whispered to him, holding him tightly as the quaking after-effects kept shaking me.

He shook his head, droplets of sweat flying off in all directions.

"Not going anywhere," he promised, his forehead resting against my shoulder and his weight comfortably heavy over me. I could feel the panting of his breath on my skin, and while I'm not a big fan of someone breathing heavily on me in most aspects of life, this was an exception. Maybe it was just Dean that was the exception?

Minutes or hours later, he said, "That was…uh…memorable."

I started to giggle, and for a horrifying moment, I couldn't stop, then it petered out as he lifted his head and looked down at me, one brow cocked quizzically.

"Um, memorable as in a good steak dinner?" I asked, swallowing an urge to burst into giggles again. "Or memorable as in looking at the Grand Canyon at sunset?"

Honestly, I don't know where these things come from. Every emotion I had, it felt like, was right under the surface of my skin and I was a hair's breadth from collapsing into hysteria, so maybe it was just a defence mechanism? He shifted his weight further to one side and brushed some sweaty hair back from my face.

"Memorable as in…unforgettable," he said quietly, leaning in and kissing me lightly.

Well, that stopped the near-hysteria, but it made the deeper stuff churn around a lot more. For a moment, I felt a rushing and overwhelming need to tell him everything, everything that'd had happened, every thought and feeling I'd had and still had, just…everything. I bit my lip in an effort not to do it, because, you know, after mind-blowing sex there is a tendency to get emotional about things that are probably better left unsaid for a bit. At least, that's what I told myself as I closed my eyes and tried to control those impulses.

When I opened them again, I could see a question in his eyes, and I shook my head.

"Is there any possibility of us just staying here, you know, living here and not going anywhere else ever again?" I asked hopefully, more to dig myself out of the conversational hole I'd fallen into than as a real question. It worked though…he smiled lazily and propped himself on an elbow.

"Possibility, sure," he said. "Doing it? Not so much."

"When do we have to go?"

He looked down at his watch. "We should go now."

Of course, I thought, a bit disgruntedly. This was the life, I reminded myself. His life. There was no time off for good behaviour, no parley where the monsters and demons and bad guys would turn aside to give anyone a vacation. It was what you wanted, I added caustically. A life of meaning and danger and all that good stuff.

I rolled over, pushing my feet off the edge of the bed, and his arm snaked around me and pulled me back against him.

"We can go in the morning," he said into the back of my neck.

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

I looked at the black car and felt my heart lift. She had some minor damage around the nose, a broken headlight and bent-in grille, and a crimp in the hood, but she looked good and she looked familiar and loved and I was smiling at her when I caught Dean's grin from the corner of my eye.

"I forgot she went with you to Roman's," I said, waving a hand around vaguely to disguise the fact that I was smiling fondly at a car.

"Never going into hiding again," he said, opening the passenger door for me then trapping me against the side of the car. "I liked the way you smiled at her."

I looked at him for a moment, then shrugged. "She's a part of you."

He blinked at that and stepped back, letting me get in and closing the door as I settled myself on the wide seat. Watching him walk around the front and get in the other side, I realised that he was surprised, although whether it was the fact that I knew that about him, or just hearing someone say it out loud, I wasn't sure.

Dean turned off the interstate at Everett, and we headed into the mountains on US-2, a longer, winding and infinitely more scenic route across the Rockies that bypassed Seattle and took us nearly directly to Spokane. He said it'd take about twelve hours to get to Whitefish and I made myself comfortable, wedged into the corner between the door and the back of the seat.

"Do you remember the djinn's dream-world, Dean?" I asked, my curiosity barely leashed with a long drive and no other distractions.

He glanced at me and nodded. "Yeah."

"You remember Carmen and what you said to her?" I asked, tucking one leg under me as I leaned closer to him. "You were sitting on the couch and she brought you your favourite beer?"

He frowned at that. "Uh, that was a while ago."

"You said you "got it", why she was the one," I told him, wincing inwardly at the fact that I knew that bit of dialogue by heart. It'd never made sense to me, and I wanted an answer.

"What?" He stared at the road. "I didn't say that to her – hell, to anyone."

"You didn't?"

"No," he said, shaking his head. "Why the hell would I say that when I hardly knew her?"

"I don't know, that's why I was asking," I said, a little miffed. Another instance of the writer just throwing in whatever they wanted? I reconsidered that. Of course, to the writers, it was just fiction. I guess they could throw in whatever they wanted.

"Does it sound like something I'd say?" Dean asked, obviously a bit affronted at the thought of saying it to someone, even the woman he was supposed to be living with.

"Well, no, that's why I thought it seemed…you know, off," I said placatingly.

"Damn right, it's off," he muttered, throwing another glance at me. "Aside from the fact that she was off a beer advertisement, didn't it seem a bit easy to you, that, uh, relationship, I mean?"

"It seemed weird," I agreed. "I didn't think you liked your ego stroked that much."

He snorted. "Well, I don't get that from you, do I?"

"Huh," I said, hiding a smile. "You want me to tell how wonderful you are, what a stud –"

Laughing, – a bit self-consciously, I thought – he shook his head. "Nah, I know all that shit."

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

I looked out at the forests, clinging to the high mountainsides as we roared along the interstate. In those forests there were monsters, I thought, forcing myself to believe it. Sometimes it wasn't all that easy to separate this world from mine, although I only had to turn my head to see the difference.

We'd talked a little about what was going to happen next, finding Kevin before Crowley did, figuring out what to do with Monty, if the other tablets might really hold answers on how to deal with demons and even angels. Dean had changed the subject after a little while, telling me it was too energy-consuming to speculate on things they had no shape for yet and he'd asked me about my music preferences instead, the conversation covering a couple of hours of discussion on the relative merits of the founding rock bands versus the later metal ones.

It was, in the old-fashioned sense, I guess, time out of time. The real world was out there, but not in here. He talked about his childhood, mostly the good things he remembered, with his father and brother, with Jim and Caleb and Bobby, and some of the not-so-good things. He and Sam and their father had spent a lot of time in hospitals.

"Sam was about eight or nine, I think," he said, and I saw his fingers grip the wheel, his knuckles whitening slightly with whatever that memory was showing him. "He was standing next to the bed, looking at all the crap that I was plugged into, and he told me we were gonna die bloody."

He rubbed a hand over his face. "I didn't think about it at the time, you know, but I think he knew then that he was going to lose his family and he, uh, couldn't deal with it."

"So he pretended he didn't care?" I guessed, looking at his expression.

Shrugging, his mouth twisted up to one side. "Sort of, I guess. He tried to focus on what he wanted, like he didn't have a family."

"He doesn't feel like that now," I said, and he turned his head, one brow lifting slightly.

"Now, he's got Lauren and things are different," he said, a little dryly.

"But that's a good thing," I argued. "Isn't it? That he doesn't feel like if he loses you, he loses everything?"

He nodded. "Yeah, it's a good thing."

There was something in his voice, something behind what he was saying and I felt a little trickle of worry, somewhere at the back of my mind. I wanted to ask if he felt that things were different now. I think he was waiting for me to ask that, as well, because when I couldn't make the words come out, the silence in the car just kept stretching out. After a while, I turned and looked at the passing scenery, leaning against the door. After a while, he pushed the tape into the stereo and Rodgers voice came out of the speakers mid-song. I had the feeling that Dean hadn't wanted that particular song to play right then, but he didn't stop it or fast-forward it, just let it play out.

– time's never right, when will we be together, oh no

If I could make you understand, what you're doing to me
Maybe there will come a time, when sooner or later I will make you see, baby
If you need somebody, the way that I need you
If you wanted somebody, the way that I want you
Ooh, if I could tell you now, the way you make me feel
Ooh, if I could show you somehow, don't you know my lovin' is – oh, so real

It's a bit of a melancholy song, and it was far too close to home, and I tuned it out as best as I could, closing my eyes and curling up.

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

Complicated, right? Needlessly so? Probably.

We pulled up in front of the cabin just after dark, the headlights washing the house and then going off, followed by the engine. For a second, I just sat there. In some ways, it was wonderful to be here, to be back, and I desperately wanted to see Sam and Lauren and Bobby, and make sure they were all okay. In another way, though, I hadn't wanted the drive to end and I hadn't wanted real life to intrude again, and I felt a bit blue as Dean got out and went back to the trunk for his stuff.

I got out and walked up the steps with my plastic carrier bag of clothing and Bobby appeared on the porch, looking at me with his hands shoved his pockets, Sam and Lauren towering behind him.

"Didn't I tell ya to stop doing this stuff?" Bobby growled at me. "You look okay."

I nodded. "I'm okay," I told them. "Starving, though."

Oddly, it felt as if I'd been gone longer than the last time, maybe because it was all so darned inexplicable, maybe because we were all kind of over the worrying-about-each-other thing so much after so many near-misses. I didn't know. Lauren walked around Bobby and tucked her arm through mine, looking curiously at my clothes but not saying anything and I suddenly realised that of all of them, she would probably recognise that they were new. I'd been snatched without a stitch on, but Dean hadn't seemed to remember that either. Or at least, he hadn't commented on it.

"Food first," she said in a low voice. "Then the story."

"Any word on Kevin?" Dean said from behind us, and Sam answered.

"Cas says the angels have got him, somewhere in a desert."

"Which we might be able to do somethin' about if it's the Mojave," Bobby added sourly. "But not so much if it's the Sahara."

"What the hell's he in a desert for?"

"To study the Word, apparently," Bobby said.

"But the Levis are taken care of!"

"Why're you arguin' 'bout this with me?" Bobby snapped back at him. "I look like I got wings?"

He turned around as we came into the dining room and wave his hand at the chairs at the table. "Siddown, food's still hot, we were waitin' on ya."

When the first few mouthfuls had been consumed, Bobby looked over at me. "That last outline said that when Dean and Cas got sucked back to Purgatory, Crowley showed up and took Kevin."

I nodded, tucking the masticated food into one cheek as I answered. "The new show-runner had already decided that Dean would be gone for a year, in the show's time," I said. "Sam doesn't look for him and doesn't look for Kevin who's been working on the demon tablet for Crowley."

"So Crowley only got him because he was at Roman's labs?" Dean asked around a mouthful of bread.

"Yeah."

"But he wasn't. This time. Here," Sam said, looking at Bobby. "Should we even be trying to find him if the angels are keeping him safe?"

"He wasn't interested in Kevin until he couldn't get what he wanted from Terry," Lauren pointed out, waving her fork for emphasis. "He kept her for two weeks before he called."

I kept my eyes on my plate because I could feel Bobby's speculative look, and Sam's, burning into the top of my head.

"Yeah, well, he's interested in him now," Bobby said after a moment's heavy silence.

"Because of this demon tablet," Dean said. "Which we still haven't found a damned bit of information on."

"Cas said –" Sam started and Dean scowled at him.

"Cas said a lot of things," he cut him off abruptly. "And he kept quiet on a lotta things."

I wondered if the angel had done something else to annoy Dean while I'd been gone.

"Doesn't matter," he continued when no one responded. "Terry got no protection now and we can't use that sigil on her again, so maybe it's time we figured out what the hell he wanted with her and if that's gonna appear on the agenda again?'

"No protection?" Bobby frowned at me. "What's that mean?"

"Means," Dean said, not even giving me a chance to answer. "Whatever he did to her, he healed it all up again."

I quickly lowered my gaze again, when I realised that he'd been thinking about that, probably on the last part of the drive, and had figured out that the demon wouldn't have been making it all better if it hadn't been bad to begin with. The silence around the table told me that Bobby, Sam and Lauren were all coming to the same conclusion a lot more quickly.

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

I sat curled up in one corner of the sofa, reading through Lauren's notes, vaguely aware of Dean and Sam arguing quietly in a corner of the big, open-plan room and Bobby hunched over his computer in another corner. Lauren was sitting in the armchair across from me, going through the outlines I'd brought back from my world and frowning.

In addition to the library of Dr Visyak and Monty's information, she'd been through every single book of Bobby's and Rufus' libraries and her own and the notes were extensive, clearly connected but still not conclusive, I thought.

"You know, there's nothing in these that even gives a hint of what Crowley wants with Kevin?"

"I know," I said absently, turning another page.

"Had they not seen that far ahead?"

I looked up at her and shrugged. "I don't know."

To tell you the truth, I was getting the feeling that as the original writers left and different ones had come on board, there was less and less of what was happening here, and definitely less and less of the knowledge and clear vision of the characters, being passed in whatever fashion it was between my world and this one.

She put down the outlines with a frustrated huff and looked at the notes I was holding.

"What do you think?"

"I think this is scary stuff," I told her, honestly enough. "If this…power…isn't supposed to be able to be accessed, why am I here? This wasn't supposed to happen –"

"Don't," Lauren cut me off gently, her voice quiet but firm. "You know the nephilim were never supposed to happen? Angels have no souls, no Divine Spark and in Heaven, they're asexual. Completely. No children."

"But –"

"Right. But." She glanced across at Sam and I followed her gaze. Sam was gesticulating in a subdued manner at his brother, who was looking at the fridge just past him, his expression stubborn. "But it did happen. When they fell to Earth, they had bodies and they felt emotions and they had children. It's the same with the cambion," she continued, looking back at me. "Not supposed to be possible. Demons have no bodies, and when they possess a person, it's just their souls, twisted and deadened, but just souls. No DNA to pass on. So – if it's not supposed to happen, but it somehow does…"

"Don't start talking about the mysterious ways of God, okay?" I said, looking down at the notes. "I'm nobody, literally. Not in my world and not in this one."

"Well," she said with a smile. "Apparently that's not entirely true. It might be coincidence, Terry. I mean, there are some things that just are coincidence, after all. But it might not."

She looked back at the brothers. "I don't think it's coincidence for Dean."

I pulled in a deep breath and decided to change the subject. "I keep meaning to ask you, and then other things kept getting in the way, but why were you all excited about that publishing company, Lauren? The, um…Men…one?"

"The Men of Letters," she corrected me, getting up and walking over to the shelves near Bobby's desk. She pulled out two books and brought them back, sitting down on the sofa next to me. "The Men of Letters was a society of scholars," she said, putting both into my lap.

One of them was the book I'd been reading from when we were going after Charlie. The other one was older, by the look of it, and the publication date, when I opened it up. The title was "The Werewolf. In Global Culture and in Mythology."

I looked at her. "Light bedtime reading?"

"They wrote those books, from their own researchers' accounts," she said. "They were undoubtedly the world's foremost authorities on the Shadow-world and on Hell and Heaven."

"Going too fast," I said, wriggling higher on the sofa. "What do you mean – the Shadow-world?"

She shrugged. "That's what my family used to call it," she said. "The world that the humans hardly ever saw. Their world," she added, looking back at Sam and Dean.

"And were?" I asked. "This, um, group not around any more? What happened to them?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "They used to come, to talk to my mother and father, about a lot of things, a long time ago. They stopped coming, and I stopped seeing their publications and no one seems to know what happened to the order, or to the legacies. I asked Cas, when he was here last, and he say he didn't know either."

"Speaking of Cas," I said, thinking of Dean's sour demeanour over the angel. "Did anything else happen to cause a rift between him and Dean?"

"Uh, well, you know, Dean asked him to find you, and he couldn't," Lauren said uncomfortably. "He said he couldn't see you anywhere, and Dean found that hard to believe."

I dropped my gaze guiltily at that. Could angels see into Hell? I couldn't remember if it was ever mentioned on the show.

"New clothes…" she mused, looking at me. "What do you remember?"

"Not much," I said, lying through my teeth. "I didn't realise I'd been gone for three weeks," I added, still trying to get my head around that. It'd felt more like years. A lot of years.

She nodded. "Felt like a long time for us too. Is every scar gone?"

"Even the ones I got in childhood," I confirmed. "I don't know how that happened."

"Demons don't usually have the capacity to regenerate the body," she said with a frown. "Healing individual wounds, yes, there's no problem with that, but an entirely new epidermis? No."

"Well," I prevaricated. "He is the King of Hell."

"Wouldn't matter," she told me decisively, and I wondered what Dean and Sam and Bobby would say when she told them as well. "Angels, yes, they can heal from the cellular level, but that's because they're drawing on the massed divine power of the souls in Heaven."

She stopped abruptly and looked at me. "Your soul could that."

"He couldn't access it," I objected. "He –"

I stopped myself from saying anything else, because that would've made a mockery of my lies to date. Perfect, I thought, bowing my head to hide that exasperation. Really managed to work yourself into a tight corner this time!

"He – what?"

"Um, I remember he was angry, that's when he called Dean," I said, hoping that didn't contradict anything I'd said before. This is the real trouble with lying, y'see. You can't quite remember all the nit-picky details as easily as the truth.

"Well, I don't know how this works," she said, glancing at the notes on my lap. "There were hints that it needed a powerful emotion but nothing more concrete than that." She looked at me thoughtfully. "I'd have thought he would try torture, dig down to the base levels."

The memory came back complete with all the sensory input and for some time, could've been seconds or minutes or hours, I was back there.

"Terry?"

"Uh, yeah?" I blinked as it vanished. I put my hand over my stomach. It was aching.

"Are you alright?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," I said, forcing a smile. "So, uh…" I cast around for a topic that wasn't going to throw up memories or put me at risk of tripping over my own lies. "This order, the Men of Letters…it would probably be pretty helpful if we could find them?"

She laughed, and the whole Crowley-torture-Hell thing seemed to have been swept away.

"It would be amazing, but I don't know that we can," she said. "My father could've helped, but he died a long time ago. I don't know any other angels – or hunters, for that matter, who might know about them."

"Another dead end?"

"For the moment," she said, ever optimistic. "I was looking into their publishing company. I'll keep on with that."

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

I stood by the side of the bed, debating if it wasn't safer to go to sleep wearing something, and finally deciding that it was paranoid to think about things like that, even given my history.

Rufus had obviously not had a vain streak, since the only mirror in the cabin was a twelve-by-ten inch in the bathroom. Useful for shaving, no doubt, but not much else. I was combing through my hair and trying to decide how much longer it was when Dean came in, the thonk-thonk of his boots hitting the floor and the quieter rustle of clothing being shed clear behind me.

I felt the mattress sink as he sat on it and looked at him over my shoulder. He was staring at my back and he lifted his gaze to mine with a rueful shake of his head.

"It's weird, not seeing them there."

Being kind of happy with the thought that I could – if I wanted to, or for some unforeseeable reason had the occasion to – wear a bikini or a backless evening gown again, I let that go.

He got closer and I felt his lips, trailing lightly up my back. "It is different, with you," he said, very softly, when he reached my neck. "It's…it's everyone leaves, sooner or later, and I – I –"

I knew what memory was hurting him. "That wasn't your mom, Dean, that was Zachariah, and you know that," I said, half-turning to see his face. "It wasn't true, that's never been true, no matter how much it might seem that way."

I don't know if you've seen him, or at least the way the actor plays him, in the show, completely vulnerable and everything he's feeling visible and so full of pain. He looked that way now, and the only thing I wanted to do was somehow convince him that those few words that the angel had manipulated him with weren't true, weren't close to true.

He swallowed and looked away, and I reached out, my palm against his cheek and made him look at me. "No one ever left by choice, not theirs and not yours," I told him as firmly as I could. It was, I realised, time to put my money where my mouth was and tell him what he needed to hear, tell him what I needed to say, I guess, as heart-thumpingly terrifying as that was. "I love you, Dean, so much that sometimes I can't even breathe from it. I came back here because of you, only for you."

His eyes closed and I leaned into him, wrapping my arms around him. He shuddered once, just once, as if he didn't believe it, or as if I'd somehow thrown out a challenge to everything that wanted him dead. I don't know. Maybe I had. Maybe it'd been a dumb thing to say out loud. I was just relieved I could tell him something that was true.

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