They stayed in Moab another three days.
That first morning Sam left before the sun came up. He claimed to be getting coffee, but Dean suspected he wanted space to deal with everything that had happened the night before. What with seeing the bruises all over Ji-a and then Ruby's late night taunting, they'd all had a hell of an evening.
Ji-a woke early as usual, pressing her face into Dean's bare chest and groaning.
"Okay," Ji-a muttered, "I officially hate hunting demons. I also officially hate Ruby in particular."
"Don't we all," Dean chuckled, trailing his fingers along her spine.
Ji-a rolled over, pressing her bare back against his side.
"You're not getting up?" Dean was surprised.
"No," Ji-a swatted at his hand when he tried to pull back the blankets.
"We can take a day off before we start researching new cases," Dean offered, "We delayed the apocalypse yesterday then you stabbed a demon in the chest. That deserves some R & R."
Ji-a just put the pillow over her head.
"Hey," Dean's voice softened as he lay a hand between her shoulder blades, "I know you feel like shit. Sam's out. Let's get up, get you some pain meds and then pancakes? There's other petroglyphs around we can go see."
"They won't summon an evil apocalypse-causing pagan deity?" Ji-a asked, face still in the mattress.
"Not that I know of," Dean chuckled.
"Blueberry pancakes," Ji-a said, "And we stay at the petroglyphs as long as I want even if you get bored?"
"Deal," Dean agreed.
With five ibuprofen and three cups of green tea in her system, Ji-a was mostly functional, but Dean was intensely conscious of the dark circles beneath her eyes and the way she flinched sitting down. He grabbed one of Sam's hoodies and Ji-a's hiking fleece before they left for breakfast. The diner here had hard, plastic seats, after all. And he'd made his point. He wasn't going to let her suffer more than necessary.
When the diner waitress asked if she was okay, Ji-a smoothly explained away her evident discomfort with a convincing story about a slip and fall on the Delicate Arch hike. And then spent three and a half hours looking at petroglyphs. Dean understood the stipulation about not leaving when he was bored.
Sam was back at the hotel with dinner when they got back around dusk. The night passed uneventfully, with Ji-a falling asleep early on Dean's chest as they all watched some old western none of them had heard of. Ruby may have been trying to goad him last night, looking for trouble. But she wasn't wrong. There on the couch with Ji-a asleep on his lap, drinking a beer and watching bad TV with Sam, it was domestic. And Dean couldn't bring himself to mind.