Between S5 E22 & S6 E1
He couldn't look Bobby in the eye. And besides. He'd promised Sam he'd go be normal. So they rented a house in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He got a job with a local contractor. Sophie started picking up data entry work online and got a part time gig at the local bookstore.
She started growing chamomile in their tiny, unimpressive backyard.
She liked the mountains. Or so she told him. Nearly daily it seemed.
She didn't complain. Of course she didn't complain. This was Sophie.
Goodness knows he'd given her enough to complain about.
Dragging her across the country in the final days of the apocalypse. Lucifer killing her. Sure, Cas brought her back. That didn't make it any less traumatic to be strangled with no one touching you.
And the drinking. He was going through three bottles of whiskey a week at this point. And while Dean was proud that he wasn't an angry drunk. While he was still bringing in income. While he was still kissing her goodnight and trying to be home for dinner. He was, technically speaking, still an alcoholic husband. He felt guilty about that when he let himself.
Sophie, being Sophie, hadn't touched a drop of alcohol. Which, Dean figured, was probably a good thing since she'd also been having the worst seizures he'd seen yet. He'd had to put stitches in her lip three times that first month. And she'd cracked her head on the counter at work and ended up in the ER three weeks after they moved. He blamed himself. The nightmares kept waking her. And sleep deprivation had always been a trigger.
But it'd been nearly a year now and things were getting better.
They'd made friends.
They were both, at least relatively, happy at work.
Sophie had gone from one sad little chamomile plant to an entire garden out back. He caught her looking at old pictures of her sheep at least once a week though. And he'd started wondering if he should try and find her somewhere with more land.
Sophie finally got her blackbelt in judo. Dean, at the incessant prompting of their neighbor, took up golf.
He was sleeping through the night and Sophie's seizures were improving.
Hell. In the last month or so they'd even started talking about a baby.
It seemed that maybe, just maybe, they were going to be able to eke out some kind of normal and benign American existence.
At least for a while.