Dean had gone out in search of Sam.

When Sam hadn't returned in an hour, he started to worry. He knew his little brother pretty well and knew that something like this wasn't going to go very well for him.

He found Sam in a park two miles down the road from their motel. He was sitting on a bench, turned away from the kids, arms across his chest. He had his brooding face on, making Dean roll his eyes.

"Heya, Sam." he said, taking a seat by him.

"Don't, Dean," Sam warned. "I don't want to hear anything you have to say."

Dean nodded. "I'm not saying anything, Sam. Only that we need to find Aphrodite and her little posse and gank 'em before anything worse happens."

"What could be worse than what we did, Dean?" Sam shook his head. "We raped her, beat her. We did everything that we told her we wouldn't do."

"Sam, I know. Dammit, I know, but if we ever want to even try to make it up to her, we have to find Aphrodite and kill her to hopefully break Thea of her curse."

"But what if we can't?" Sam said it so quietly, Dean almost couldn't catch it.

"What?"

"What if," he said louder, "we can't break it because it already has been enforced?"

That thought hadn't really occurred to Dean. He just intended to find as many of that bitch's followers as he could and make them bleed. He hadn't thought that there was a possibility of her not getting out of her curse.

He rubbed at his chest as a dull ache began to blossom in it. He looked at his watch. It had been almost two hours since he had seen Thea and now it was starting to get to him.

Sam had kept talking. "We can definitely try, but I just don't know how it'll all work out."

Dean cleared his throat. "We gotta do something, Sammy. To try and make it up to her."

Sam stared at the ground. "Yeah, you're right."

They were quiet for a minute before Sam spoke again. "Have you started to remember yet?"

Dean nodded curtly. "Yeah, a little."

Same tried to swallow the lump in his throat. "I don't know how to even look her in the face. I feel like she'll hate me for the rest of eternity. I deserve it too. I just…" he sighed. "I just hope we can break her curse."

"Yeah, me too, Sam. Me too."

They got up and walked back to the motel to find Cas and Thea in the room. Thea had fallen asleep, curled up into fetal position looking like she was in pain. Cas sat motionless, staring off into nothing, but he knew the exact moment the Winchesters arrived.

"Sam, Dean," he said in greeting.

"Hey, Cas." They replied quietly, not wanting to wake the sleeping girl. Since they had come in she appeared to have relaxed a little. Dean had relaxed too, the weight coming off of his chest.

"I was able to make her sleep," said the angel. "She was having tremendous pain in her chest area, and I could sense her physical exhaustion. Some of it seems to have gone away in the small time that you've been back."

Castiel looked at him, his eyes intense. "You feel it too, don't you Dean?"

Dean blinked in surprise. "How'd you-"

"It radiates from the two of you. This…energy." He hesitated. "It's the same thing as soul mates have, except yours is much stronger. It also is a different color. Gold, instead of white."

"Wait, soul mates?"

"Yes. When two soul mates come in contact, there's a burst of energy. It's usually the cherubim's arrow piercing them, making them fall in love with each other. It stays there for the rest of their lives and starts to fade away once one of the other dies."

"It must be because Aphrodite's magic is more powerful," said Dean, running his hands through his hair. He wanted a drink. Actually, he wanted multiple drinks.

"The cherubim are a thousand times more powerful than the pagan," replied Cas. "There is no way that that is just her magic."

"She said that Aphrodite and her minions cursed her all together. It was her, Eros and two other minor love gods. I forget their names."

Cas's eyebrows came together. "This isn't good, Dean. You didn't tell me that it was all four of them!"

"I didn't think it mattered! The only thing I wanted to do was get her curse lifted before…this happened." Dean muttered. He went over to the bottle of whiskey he hadn't gotten to finish and poured it into a glass. He sipped on it, looking over at the sleeping girl on the bed. He felt a strange feeling, like he would do anything for her, that he couldn't imagine being away from her.

"Dean."

He looked up to see Cas closer. Sam was with him. "What if this is a pairing between both cherubim and Aphrodite's work?"

"What do you mean?"

Sam spoke this time. "This is a really weird theory, but it makes a little more sense. Remember when Thea had said that the whole point of Aphrodite's curse was to make her miserable? It was supposed to tie her to someone she hated or someone who was really bad to her, but it didn't."

"It's because she was with the two of us, Sam. She couldn't have gotten out if she had tried."

"Yeah, but somehow, she always managed to get away from others. What if," he paused, searching for the right words. "What if you guys were actually supposed to have this happen?"

Dean opened his mouth to reply, but no sound came out. He clamped his mouth shut and walked out the door. Sam had seen the absolute fury on his brother's face. He sighed and followed him out the door.

"Dean, Dean wait!"

"No!" he yelled. "How dare you, Sam, how fucking dare you!"

"Calm down, Dean you have to think rationally right now."

Cas had followed them outside. "Sam is right. You must keep a level head right now."

"After he just told me that it was fate that I rape that innocent girl in there! Yeah, I'm going to stay completely fucking calm!"

Dean paced around the parking lot, trying to calm down but he couldn't. How could Sam ever say something like that?

"Look, Dean, I'm just trying to throw out ideas here. Maybe it was supposed-"

Dean whirled on his brother, grabbed the lapels of his jacket, and threw him up against the wall. "How many times have we spit in the face of so called fate, Sam? Do you really think that this sort of thing starts to work out now?"

Sam grabbed his brother's hands and threw him away. "Don't even start on me, Dean!" he yelled back. "I'm just trying to make sense of this whole fucking thing!"

"Guys?" The boys had been ready to go after each other when they heard Thea's tired voice. "What's going on?"

They relaxed slightly, not wanting to upset her further. Dean's gut clenched at the sight of her, as if he was seeing her for the first time.

Her eyelids drooped from just having woken up, shielding those beautiful cerculean blue-green eyes, framed by long, naturally curled eye lashes. Her complection, slightly tanned, was flushed from the cool breeze that graced her skin and lifted her wavy deep chestnut hair off of her shoulders. Her body was small and lush, something that Dean didn't usually go for. He liked his women thin and busty, but Thea had curve in every right area.

He flushed when he thought about how soft she was and remembered how he knew. He tramped down his feelings and walked towards the Impala. "I've gotta go."

Her eyes snapped open and she leaned forward. "Why?"

His jaw clenched. "I just can't be here right now."

He got into the car and turned it on, ready to roll out of the parking lot when the door opened and Thea climbed in. "Dean, please don't go."

He stared at her, surprised that she had gotten into his car with him. "Why?" was all he could say.

She touched her tongue to her full bottom lip, a nervous reaction but one of the sweetest and sexiest things that Dean had ever seen in his life. He had to restrain himself from either closing the distance between them and kissing her senseless or pushing her out the door.

"It just…it hurt real bad when you weren't around." she whispered. "I'm not sure if it was as strong for you, but when I didn't see you for those few hours, my chest felt like it was caving in." she paused. "God, that's so cliché."

A humorless smile touched his mouth. "Yeah, that is pretty cliché."

She looked him dead in the eye, making sure that he could look nowhere but her. "Dean, I know you don't like this, but I'm telling you. If you or I keep running away and not coming back to each other, this curse will kill us. I don't want to die because you're too stubborn to stay in the same vicinity as I am."

He looked straight back at her, his piercing green eyes burning into her. "Thea, I don't know if you really get how I'm feeling right now. All I want to do is be around you and…" he hesitated. "And make you see stars. I want to protect you, and care for you, and always be around you, and that scared the living hell out of me."

She laid her hand over his, a small gesture that almost made him lose control. "Dean, please. Just stay. Once we get all of this figured out, you never have to see me again." She smiled weakly at him. "Please come back inside?"

No! his mind screamed at him as he opened the car door. You'll just keep hurting her! All you know is pain and death!

But suddenly, with this beautiful woman smiling at him, after every god awful thing that he had done to her, his past didn't seem to matter quite as much.