Dani used to feel safe in the bunker, but now it didn't feel safe. It just felt weird—thanks to the fact that they had Dean locked in the dungeon. The whole situation was beyond strange. Beyond frightening.

She sat in the library and looked around at everything she used to see every single day. It had been so long since she'd been there, but everything looked the same.

Of course it would look the same, she thought to herself and rolled her eyes. Sam and Dean weren't much for decorating and Dean wasn't big on change. As she sat in the library, smoking a cigarette, which after the past few hours was long overdue, she couldn't help but remember all the time she had spent in the library, all the research she would do with Sam by her side and Dean across the table, trying his hardest to try and get out of doing the research.

A small smile pulled at her lips. She missed the bunker, but even more she missed Sam and Dean. Even before she and Sam started dating, they had been good friends. They were able to talk with each other for hours, keeping each other going by making the other one laugh.

It was easy to laugh around Sam, because unlike Dean, he didn't let a lot of stuff weigh him down. Sam was able to stay mostly positive, despite some of the horrible things he had been through. That was one of the things she admired most about Sam. She wished that she could be more like him in that aspect, but she was so different from him. Sam was stronger than her, both physically and emotionally.

That's why he was down in the dungeon with Dean, while she was in the library, away from any form of danger. She couldn't help but feel bad. She was at the bunker, but Sam was still the one doing all the heavy lifting. If anything, she was just an observer.

Why did Sam come get her in the first place? Did he think she would actually be of any real help? What could she do?

She'd been sitting for a couple of hours, and the whole time she had a knot in her stomach. She hated the thought of Sam being down there with Dean all by himself. Dean said some fucked up things to her; she could only imagine what he was saying to Sam and how much of it Sam was taking to heart.

Dani's attention was thwarted when her phone buzzed on the table in front of her. She stared at it for a moment, unsure of who could be calling her. She had only stayed in contact with two people since quitting hunting. She looked at her phone and sighed when she didn't recognize the number, but decided to answer so she had something to do.

She cleared her throat before answering. "Hello?"

"Dani?"

"Yeah. Who is this?"

"It's me, Chris."

She stared at the wood of the table in front of her, trying to remember who the man was, but nothing came to mind. "I'm sorry, who?"

"Chris. We met last week at Shooters; we talked all night?"

Her mind swam. She definitely remembered the place, but she didn't remember him. How drunk was she when they started talking? Why would she give him her number? She never did that. She would never give a guy her number when she was still hung up over Sam, or at least she would never do that when she was sober.

"Oh, I'm sorry, but I don't remember you. I must have been pretty drunk at the time. Hope you understand," she explained, hoping he would take the hint that she wasn't interested and move on.

"Are you sure you don't remember me? The aspiring actor, tall, blue eyes, blonde hair?"

She made a face. He didn't sound like her type at all. What had she been thinking when she gave him her number?

"Again, I had a lot to drink that night. Sorry if I gave you some kind of false hope."

"What's the problem? You are single, aren't you?"

Maybe if she told him that she wasn't, he would finally back off.

"Actually, I'm not single. You met me on a very alcohol-induced night. Again, I'm sorry for the misunderstanding."

"So your boyfriend let you go to a bar all by yourself and get sloppy drunk?"

Who the hell was this guy? Was he incapable of taking a hint? And what made him think that she was the kind of woman who let her boyfriend tell her where she could go and what she could do all by herself? She was so tired of this guy.

"Again, sorry for the misunderstanding, Chris. Have a good night," she said into the receiver, no real emotion in her words. She hung up as he started talking again and took a deep breath.

She shook her head, a little at the guy, but more to herself. How could she spend her time with men like that? How could she spent her time just drinking every single night? She was lucky she didn't give out her number to any more men or do anything she would have regretted with them.

Was Dean right? Was she really that pathetic?

"Who's Chris?"

Sam's voice pulled her from her thoughts and she looked at him wide-eyed, not sure how to answer his question.

Sam walked over to the table a seat on the edge of it, a few feet away from her. She wasn't sure what she could say. Would he think bad of her if she told him the truth? Of course he would, she thought to herself.

"Nobody memorable." she said, before quickly changing the subject. "How's it going down there?"

Sam stared at her for a moment, before running a hand through his hair. She took a moment, just to look at him. He looked exhausted. The only other time she had seen him look worse was when he was going through the trails. A frown pulled at her lips. She wanted to help, him but she couldn't. It wasn't fair to Sam that he had only her and she couldn't do a damn thing, not that he would let her anyway.

His hair fell over his face when he put his head down and she couldn't help but stare at the long locks. How she missed running her hands through his hair. Quickly she stopped herself from thinking about the many other things she missed about Sam.

"It's going as good as can be expected, but it still sucks, you know?"

She nodded to him. "I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"That you have to go through this, Sam. That it rests on your shoulders. That I can't help you."

"You are helping me."

"I am? How?"

"Just by being here. I don't feel so alone." He sighed and looked at her for a moment. "Don't feel bad about anything, Dani. It was never your responsibility to find Dean and cure him. I was just selfish and didn't want to do it alone."

"Sam, you're not selfish."

Sam shook his head, clearly disagreeing with her and just when she was about to stop him from disagreeing, her phone rang again. Her heart sank as she looked down to see the same number from her previous caller.

What the hell was that guy's problem?

"You gonna answer that?" Sam asked and she shook her head.

"Not important," she told him pushing her phone away.

"That wouldn't be a call from a guy named Chris, would it?" Sam asked, moving closer and she grabbed her phone.

"Sam-"

"Is he a hunter?"

She shook her head, still not wanting the whole truth to come out. The phone kept ringing until Sam snatched it out of her hands.

"Sam!"

He held a finger up to his lips and answered the phone. Dani stood up, directly in front of Sam, wondering just what he was planning to do.

"Hello?" Sam answered, his eyes on hers. She quickly looked away, feeling ashamed of herself.

"No, she isn't available right now. This is her boyfriend, though. Can I take a message or are you finally going to accept that she's not interested in talking to you?" She couldn't believe how calm his voice was.

She couldn't understand why Sam was doing it. Why was he helping her, when for all he knew she had slept with that guy? She wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear.

Sam handed her back her phone. "I think he'll stop calling now," he told her, walking away from her. She couldn't let Sam walk away without knowing what had really happened, so she quickly followed him, grabbing his uninjured arm and tugging on it.

Sam stopped, but didn't look at her.

"That guy on the phone was a nobody, Sam. I met him in a bar and gave him my number when I was extremely drunk. Nothing happened between me and him. I just got drunk and made the dumb mistake of giving him my number, that's all," she told him, hoping that by some miracle Sam would believe her.

"Okay," he said, as if that was all he needed to hear.

"You believe me, don't you?" she asked, needing to know, because even though they weren't together, she couldn't bear the thought of him thinking that she'd spent the last few months hooking up with random guys.

"Does it matter?" he asked, still with his back to her.

"Yes, it matters to me." Sam turned and looked at her, but didn't say anything, he just looked into her eyes. She could see it, see that he was trying to decide whether or not he believed what she had told him.

"I broke up with you, Dani. I have no right to know what you've done since then. It doesn't really matter what I think."

She couldn't let him do that. She needed him to know the truth. She couldn't stand to see that hurt that was definitely in his eyes. She didn't want to be the reason he looked that way.

"I didn't do anything Sam! I didn't. I just gave him my number. Hell, I don't even remember giving him my number. I didn't do anything with him. I didn't do anything with anyone, I swear."

"Dani, it's not my-"

"Believe me, Sam. I didn't do anything with anyone, not since you. I would never do that. I couldn't do that."

"Why not? We aren't together. You'd have nothing to feel guilty about if you did."

"But I didn't and you know why I didn't." She couldn't say the words, but she knew he understood what she meant.

Sam let out a sigh and nodded, patting her on her shoulder. "Are you thirsty or hungry?" he asked her with a warm smile, one that made her almost melt.

"Not really."

"Well, then I guess we'll need to find something else to do to kill time for the next fifty minutes or so."

She took a deep breath and bit her bottom lip. That was a good sign. Maybe Sam did believe her.

Poker was how they had spent the forty minutes until Sam had to go doing another injection. She mentioned to Sam that she could go with him, but he shook his head, telling her that if she went down there it would be like feeding the demon part of Dean. He'd just see her as fresh meat.

Dani agreed, wanting to be more helpful than anything else.

While playing poker, which Dani wasn't the best at, seeing as how it had been over a year since she last played, Sam filled her in on some of the cases he and Dean last worked before Dean turned. He filled her in on some of the hunters that she had disconnected herself from, like Garth and Jody.

The more she heard about them, the more guilty she felt for pushing them out of her life as if they meant nothing to her. She couldn't help but get misty eyed, thinking about all the friends that she could have been helping if she hadn't put her life on a break because she wanted to be selfish and throw herself a pity party.

Sam seemed to sense her discomfort and turned the topic towards something else. She appreciated the gesture, but it felt awkward no matter what they talked about, because there was a huge cloud of tension hovering over them. She knew that Sam wanted to talk about why she quit hunting, wanted to talk about everything that had happened between them, but he seemed to be biting his tongue.

She didn't want to ignore the topic; it was just that she didn't have a good explanation for why she gave up everything. She thought she did at one point, but she knew better now. She gave up because she felt like it was more important for her whine about how things didn't go the way she wanted them. She couldn't tell Sam that she had been weak and couldn't deal with her problems head on, like he and Dean always did.

It was embarrassing to her that she let one man change her world for so long. It wasn't right. She should have been more mature about the whole thing, but she hadn't been, and sooner or later she'd have to admit that to Sam.

Sam was in the middle of filling her in one what she had missed on Game of Thrones. She wasn't really interested, but she let Sam talk because that was better than the silence.

The alarm on Sam's phone went off, signaling that it was time for Dean's next injection. Sam turned off the alarm and gave Dani a sad smile as he stood up and made his way towards the dungeon.

She tapped on the table top and reached for her phone. She couldn't do anything while Sam was down there. She couldn't help him in anyway, so she needed to find something to distract herself, which came in the form of making herself a list—A list of all the things, she was going to change.

Her life was a mess and she could only blame herself. She needed a plan, a plan to get her life back in order and she was going to do it no matter how she felt about Sam. She couldn't let her heart run her life, not anymore.

The first thing that she needed to change was going to the bar to stop herself from feeling anything. She needed to be able to be sad and deal with it in a healthier way, and what was healthier than hunting? She could deal with her aggression and help people in the process. She missed hunting. She told herself that she didn't really like hunting, she did that because it made it easier to give it up, but the truth was that she loved hunting. She loved that she was doing something that helped not just a few people, but many, many more. She loved the purpose it gave her. Without it, she didn't know what her purpose in life could possibly be. It wasn't as if she was trained or even good at anything but hunting.

She was going to get back into hunting, she was going to get back in contact with all the hunters that she had missed over the last months. She was going to get back to being herself and she was going to do it as soon as she could.

The other big thing she wanted to change was how she reacted to her feelings for Sam. They scared her before, made it hard for her to be around him, but now she knew she could be around him without feeling a lot of pain. She needed to get used to being around him and treating him like she treated everyone else, even if she still loved him.

She needed to understand that just because she loved him and he seemed to feel the same way, or did at one point, that it didn't mean they had to be together. Sam didn't want to be with her and as much as that hurt her, she needed to accept it or else she would fall back into old patterns. Ones that she didn't want to go near again. They hadn't helped her get over Sam, so what was the point in starting it all up again?

She looked at the table and sighed at the pack of cigarettes in front of her. She shook her head at herself. She wasn't thrilled that she had picked up the habit again after Sam helped her kick it, but when she was weak and stressed, cigarettes called out her name and she always answered. She thought about picking them up and throwing them out, but she knew that quitting cold turkey didn't work for her. It would just be a symbolic gesture, one she wasn't ready to make.

Baby steps. That's the pace she would have to work at and she was oddly okay with taking her time to get her life back. She knew the time and hard work would be worth it in the end. Putting too much pressure on herself would just be a recipe for disaster.

She was going to go slow. One baby step at a time.

When Sam emerged into the library, her heart started racing, just like it always had when she saw him, but as soon as she saw the expression on his face, she frowned, wanting nothing more than to stand up and walk over to him and give him a hug, but she didn't do that and she hated herself from being such a coward.

Upon seeing her frown, Sam seemed to make himself smile, but she wasn't buying it for a second. It wasn't the genuine smile he used to make, the one that would make his whole face light up.

"Is he doing any better?"

The fake smile left his face. "He's talking less, so that's a plus in my book," Sam told her sitting down. "It's so strange being around him now, hearing him say that he doesn't want to be saved."

"Actually..." She shrugged. "That sounds a lot like him, Sam. He's the most stubborn and self-sacrificing man on the planet, apart from you, so it shouldn't be too surprising."

Sam nodded. "Maybe. I just thought things would be different. That he wouldn't like being a demon, but I guess that was stupid."

"Not stupid." She disagreed. "Just hopeful."

"Lot of good that's doing me, huh?"

She frowned. "Don't do that." she told him. "You aren't stupid, Sam. Dean's your brother. Of course you're going to go hope for the best. Nobody can blame you for that."

He looked at her for a moment and then shrugged. "Enough about all that. It's giving me a headache. Tell me about you."

"Me?"

"Yeah, I mean, you know how my life's going. How's yours?" He asked, but then held up a finger. "I'm getting a beer first. Want one?"

"If you're going to make me talk about myself, you bet your ass I want a beer."

He smiled and it looked like an authentic Sam smile. "I'll be back."

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