Notes: Update delay, apologies! Writer's block on this chapter since it never quite was planned. Had a bunch of issues with how it flowed and the dialogue between Sam and Dean. So many issues with dialogue that has been cut from here and will be happening in the next chapter.

This one is a little shorter than I wanted it to be, but with all the editing, rewriting, deleting, and fussing over it while being frustrated by it – the end result is this chapter. Not entirely happy with it either, but it will have to do because it didn't quite go where it was supposed to no matter what I tried to do with it. So hopefully it makes sense, and hopefully it works. There was just a few tiny swearing edit outs for this site, but is intact over on ao3 if you prefer to read it that way.

Now anyone looking for an update has been waiting for over a month, so here it is...

Still not having any idea where she had been before disappearing or where she might be now, Sam started another round of searches for Manda and her most used alias in as many different states as he could before him and Dean went through her house a little more thoroughly.

Going on what Dean remembered about being told where the hiding spots were, it still took them half an hour to narrow those few spots down. They came across nothing much in any of them until getting behind a false panel in the library that led to a hidden room.

Inside that room were the typical weapons and gear most hunters had, a lot of ingredients and tools that were required in a number of rituals or used for protection against supernatural beings, and some other odds and ends that weren't left out in the open. It quickly became clear to both brothers that the Chambers family had definitely been well stocked and well prepared hunters, and that while Manda never really spent much time at home, there was still way more here than she needed on her own these days.

Spending some time looking around at everything, Dean was practically drooling over the fact that there were throwing stars out in the open and a target to practice on while Sam was trying to figure out what weapons seemed to be missing and taking note of everything else that had also been hidden away.

"Dude, really?" Sam asked with an irritated tone, turning around from a shelf stocked with ritual supplies to see his brother with a throwing star in his hand while eyeing the dummy target. They were here to see if they could find something that would lead them to her or now explained why her house was covered in angel warding, not to play with the weapons left behind. Although, Sam had to admit that the stockpile was a little impressive, but he wasn't about to tell Dean he thought so.

Dean shrugged nonchalantly. "What? Manda said to treat it like it's our house when we're here. She's not gonna get mad about it," he replied, his expression now annoyed as he put the stars back where they'd been. Sam had busted him as usual. He was hoping to throw one or two just for the hell of it. "Unlike you, she's fun," he mumbled quietly.

Hearing Dean's words, Sam ignored the remark. He started leafing through some of the books in one of a couple piles, wondering why they weren't with the rest of the books in the library but in here where anyone probably wouldn't find them. They almost hadn't found this room themselves. The panel between the book cases in the library sounded solid, and neither had been sure it was actually the right spot, but both had noticed the small mark in one corner that someone else without their eyes probably wouldn't have seen. "Photo albums, notebooks, journals… we saw her parents' journals before and those are here. So these other ones must belong to Eliot or the rest of her family."

Dean wandered over and flipped through a different pile of books then, finding a few more photo albums, and some old tomes in numerous languages. "Take 'em. Might be some mention of who put the angel proofing on this place and why in one of them."

Sam was now flipping through a photo album, wondering what it might have been like to grow up more like Manda had. To have all that family, a proper home, and still be a hunter. He felt a little odd about poking around in her stuff now. "I know you and her are… well, you and her, and she's fine with us being here, but you're sure this is okay? That it's not off limits? We're kinda in her family's secret lair and going through what she still keeps hidden."

"Sammy, Manda gave me a key to this castle," Dean said with a bit of a smile as he flipped through a photo album. "You still think she's my soul mate, so trust me – it's fine. Cass reading her mind was off limits, but she did that for me anyway." He knew why these photo albums were in here, it hurt her too much to keep them out. He closed the photo album not wanting to wonder more about what the rest of the Chambers family had actually been like since he had never and would never get to meet them, and flashed a reassuring grin at his brother then. "This ain't gonna bother her. I know my girl, and she knew I'd search this place once I found out she was missing. If there's anything here she didn't want me to see, she came for it first or it was never here, because she wouldn't have told me where the hiding spots were otherwise."

Sam grinned at his brother for a second, and not just because he knew Dean was right. "Your girl, Dean?" he asked, raising his brows at the choice of words.

"Oh, shut up," Dean answered with a hint of annoyance. Of course that was the one thing Sam had picked out and had to give him crap about. "You know what I meant." He picked up the pile of books he was looking at, left the hidden room with them, and then kept going right out of the library towards the living room.

"Yeah, think I heard you loud and clear the first time." Sam picked up the journals he had quickly glanced through and took them with him as he followed. He knew Dean meant that he knew her that well, but he also knew the slip was because his brother still considered Manda to be his girl. Truth was, she always would be in the younger Winchester's mind just like she obviously would always be in the older one's heart. "So, do you want to see if we got a hit on her somewhere yet or be the one to start going through these books?"

"You take the books. I'll check if there's a hit, run her through more places we didn't yet, and then I need to search her bedroom. And I'm doing that alone. Sorry, Sammy, but it's my hands, not yours, she trusts with her, uh… delicates, and other things." His grin was a little naughty as he joked to hide how he felt again. That small slip had come out and even if Sam knew everything he still didn't need to know that to him, no matter what happened or how much time passed or who else came and went, Manda would always be his girl.

[ - ]

Hitting the road half an hour after listening in on her lawyer's call with Dean, Manda was struggling with her emotions as she drove away. The guilt over what she was doing and the pain it would cause Dean was stinging hard and deep.

Part of her wanted to see him, to tell him, and the other part of her didn't know if she could. She didn't know if she could face him and give the unexpected news he really wouldn't be thrilled about at all, and it's not like she could blame him when she hadn't exactly been thrilled herself.

There was just no way she could ask him to be a dad during the Apocalypse, no way she could let him worry about a child she may not live long enough to even have, and there was no way she could stand to have him do whatever it took, like probably playing host to Michael just like the angels wanted, in order to protect her and their unborn baby.

It wasn't fair to lay all of that on him with everything else he had to deal with, but she also knew not telling him wasn't fair to him either. Dean deserved to know he was going to be a father and to be a dad to his child if that's what he wanted. He also deserved to know why else she was running, and why she had already taken some measures to erase traces between her and him not just for the safety of her and their child, but also for his.

There was something else Manda knew that Dean probably didn't just yet. It was no longer only worrying about angels coming after her to get to him, or even demons for that matter. Hunters talked, and just a few days before learning she was pregnant, she had run into a few she barely knew that were looking for the Winchester brothers for nothing good.

It seemed some other hunters out there had got it in their heads that permanently taking out Sam and Dean was the sure-fire way to stop the Apocalypse. Having heard it around that she had dated the older Winchester, they asked her if she knew how to find him. Lying her ass off perfectly at the time, and thankful that Chuck's stories about them had never actually been published, she claimed dated was a huge exaggeration. That while Dean Winchester was good in bed, he really was just another asshole in the long line of ones she'd slept with once or twice and never wanted to see again. Knowing she should have called him right away and given him a head's up, she had held off not wanting to possibly tip off those other hunters that night, and then it was merely days later that she discovered she was pregnant and a couple of demons had ambushed and nearly killed her. From then on it had become just another reason to hide. Hunters that wanted Sam and Dean dead would only use her to lure Dean in the same manner the angels or the demons would if they knew the extent of everything. The price on her head would only further increase once word got out she was having his kid.

So, if it helped keep her safe or alive, Manda's plan was to go on the run in the way she had been taught – to hide as much as she could wherever she could. Knowing it wasn't safe to stay in one spot for more than a few days, that she had to cut herself off from everyone she kept in contact with and simply disappear on everyone and everything, there wasn't much other choice that she could see. That much had become very clear to her the moment once she'd been conscious again and a doctor had told her that despite the shape she had been in when she stumbled into the hospital she hadn't lost her baby.

And how she actually hadn't lost it was something Manda couldn't believe because she knew probably should have.

The day after she'd taken those home pregnancy tests, three demons had gotten a hold of her and spent awhile having their usual fun of subjecting a hunter to some pain and suffering before finishing that hunter off. They knew who she was, that another demon with some nasty tricks hadn't succeeded in killing her despite its best efforts, and they wanted to see for themselves what she was made of.

She wasn't sure how many times she had hit a wall, been invisibly pinned and squeezed internally with pain, or punched and kicked that day, but it was being thrown at and hitting the corner of a table hard with her stomach that made up her mind and caused her to scream a silent prayer she wouldn't miscarry in spite of whatever injuries she suffered. When a demon had once taken everything from her and then came back years later to almost take her life, it wasn't like she was just going to let another one or three take her and her unborn baby's lives without one hell of a fight. Maternal instinct to protect the child inside her and do whatever it took for them both to survive had kicked in then.

Fighting back with everything Manda had in her when one of them decided to torture her alone, she had basically used her mother's iron ring shoved against its face and force fed it a crap load of salt to make it flee the body it was in. The other two demons she managed to draw traps for before they came back and had a little help getting them in those traps with an iron pipe before exorcising them as quickly as she could.

When it was all over, one of her shoulders was dislocated to the point where she hadn't been able to pop it back in herself and the pain told her something was obviously wrong. Not caring much about the majority of her injuries – which she later learned included bruised ribs, a serious concussion, fractured bones in her shoulder and elbow on that same arm, some internal bleeding, and the standard round of cuts and bruises – it was the pain low in her stomach that made her hold on as she drove to the nearest hospital. How she drove herself there was blurry because she only thought of the child growing in her womb she hadn't quite wanted upon learning about but now couldn't bear to lose right up until she passed out just inside the hospital doors.

Not nearly recovered from that ordeal, the next strike happened five days later on the night before Manda was getting out of the hospital.

She had been asleep and having a strange dream in which a man she'd never seen before appeared and asked if she would call Dean Winchester to find out where he was for him. She remembered telling him to go screw himself just as a nurse accidently woke her up as she checked in on her.

Knowing instantly it was no coincidence but that the man was probably an angel, and most likely Zachariah, poking around in her dreams, she checked out of that hospital early and went straight to her motel room for her belongings that were still there.

Manda's injured arm had barely handled it, and in no condition to do over a day's worth of driving, she called Spence for help. Within a few hours she and her car were being towed all the way out to him by a contact he could trust in order for her to hide out while she gave her arm at least another week to heal.

Once safely at Spence's place, she set about killing and covering her tracks. Her cell phones had been a bit more difficult to erase the way she wanted, but it was done. There could be no traces left on them, not just for her sake but also for Dean's.

Each night for the past week that same angel appeared in one of her dreams trying to coax her into giving up Dean's location and promised to leave her alone if she did it. Each night Manda creatively told that bastard to stick his request up his ass and fly it back beyond the clouds because she wouldn't do it no matter what. But just two nights ago he started pressing harder, revealed he was in fact Zachariah, that he knew all about her and Dean being soul mates and that he no longer had time for games or being somewhat polite in allowing her live. He demanded to know where she was, why he couldn't find her, and what she was hiding from. She knew then it was only a matter of time. It didn't matter Dean had taught her how to blast those angels back home with an Enochian sigil either. Soon enough Zachariah would just read her mind and her pregnancy would no longer be a secret only she knew. She started researching techniques on how to wake up from unwanted dreams and looking for a way to sleep without dreaming the next morning as her plan to run was further cemented.

So, if it wasn't the angels to worry about it would be the demons, and if it wasn't the demons it would be hunters. It was a fine mess to be in no matter which Manda looked at it, and even if she felt like this was now down to fate, she couldn't help but wonder why she thought she could somehow outrun angels, demons, and pissed off hunters while carrying a Winchester's child. And just how long did she think could she run for anyway before her pregnancy demanded she stop even if the danger she would be in wouldn't?

Lost in her thoughts, struggling with emotions and hormones, and no longer sure she was actually doing the right thing, Manda made it forty minutes in the opposite direction before she turned her Chevelle around and headed for home.

With Sam and Dean currently at her house, Dean wasn't likely to refuse spending the night and Sam wouldn't have had much say about it. She knew they would search the house and look for a clue as to where she'd gone or how to find her. The older Winchester basically knew where all the hiding spots were too. But Manda also knew they weren't going to find much.

She hadn't been home in months except for a quick stop in between her last two jobs to pick up some things and sleep for a few hours. All Dean would find were the pictures of them from the last job they had worked together that she had left out to remind him of the fun they'd had and a note with the whiskey she'd left for him if he stopped in. She'd left that for him not knowing at the time if or when she might see him next.

Pressing her foot a little more to the floor then, the five hours it would take to get there could be cut down to three. That had to be enough time to figure out what to say to him, or at least she hoped it was.

With everything else there was to worry about, telling Dean should have been the least of her worries, but it actually was the biggest. Manda felt like she had already made the choice she had been warned about, and was almost certain that once Dean knew what was going on she'd lose him for good. She had chosen to have their kid, and if things worked the way they usually did not just in her life but also in his, she knew there was just no way she would get to keep both her child and his or her father even though both were a Winchester she wouldn't survive losing.

[ - ]

Dean checked to see if one of the online searches for Manda had resulted in a hit anywhere. When he saw nothing had popped up in any of the places Sam tried, he wasn't all that surprised. He didn't think it would be that easy to find her. Disappointment still settled in as he started searching more areas they hadn't yet tried.

If he could just find out what town or city or even the state her last job had been in then maybe there would be a breadcrumb he could pick up on to follow. But even her lawyer who monitored her trust and could use it to track her hadn't been able to give him much to work. Beyond an assurance that she must still be alive and that a motel had rented her a room and a hospital had treated her a few weeks ago, he'd gotten no other information. And tracking either of those leads down would be a long shot since he didn't even know what part of the country she'd been in.

Dean took a deep breath, left his and Sam's laptops running searches for her, and went to collect a few items. Leaving his brother downstairs to start reading through what the Chambers family had recorded in journals and going up to search Manda's bedroom, he picked up his duffel bag, the bottle of whiskey she had left for him, and a glass before heading up the two sets of stairs.

Once in her room, he set the bottle and glass down on a night table, and sighed deeply as he dropped his bag on the bed thinking about spending the night alone in it. Sleeping alone here wasn't his first choice, and it wasn't going to feel right without her next to him once he finally crashed for the night, but there wasn't much he could do about it since she wasn't around.

Pouring himself a nearly full glass then, he knew the alcohol wasn't going to make anything better but it would help wash down some of the worry he still couldn't shake. Still not any closer to finding out where she was or what had made her disappear, being in her house was doing nothing to quash that worry and only seemed to rub it in that she had vanished on him for some unknown reason.

Digging through his duffel for a moment now, he found what he was looking for quickly – her dad's ring. Having it out wouldn't make her suddenly appear, but he just wanted some solid reassurance of her now, to feel like she hadn't ditched him completely. And somewhere out there, he'd bet his life on it, Manda was still wearing her mom's matching ring just as she had taken to after giving him this one.

Holding the ring and downing a healthy gulp of whiskey, he thought for a moment that maybe they should have humoured Bobby and Sam that last morning together at Bobby's. Maybe if they had gotten hitched he would at least know where she was right now because there was no way in hell she would have been off on her own and whatever had happened to make her hide like this wouldn't have gone down on his watch. Though, as much as Dean hated to admit it to himself, with everything going on, the truth was something worse would have happened if they'd been together – she would probably already be dead instead of just missing.

This already felt like one of those damned if he did and just as damned if he didn't catches he usually found himself in, but right now he just felt like he was damned to miss her and damned to still lose her.

Dean slipped the ring on his finger on his right hand and walked over to the dresser. He stood in front of it, looking at the picture of them again, but mostly just looking at Manda's face.

Where are you, you super stubborn, gorgeous pain in the ass? he silently asked. I just-I need… when all this crap is over with you need to be here, okay? That's our deal. Because how else do I make it through friggin' Armageddon? If I save the world or I'm still kicking at the end of it, I gotta be owed something good, right? Like getting to be with my girl after everything else I've been through, given up and sacrificed for my whole life… including you, Chambers. Goddamn it, I let you go to keep you safe, Manda, but you're still who the hell knows where, hiding from who the hell knows what.

Taking another drink as he took another glance at their smiling faces together, Dean decided it was time to find the hiding spot Manda kept stuff in and search the rest of her room for anything that would give him even a hint of where she might be now.

Going back to the bed, he slammed the now mostly empty glass back on the night table, and then crouched down. Looking under the bed for a brief moment, he swept his hand along the floor boards to feel the notch she claimed was there. Almost missing it, but then feeling that notch slightly under his fingers a few boards down and a little further under the bed than he realized, he smirked. "Bingo, sweetheart. Found every hiding spot now," he uttered out loud to himself. And there damn well better be something in here or else you don't plan on coming back anytime soon… and you know I can't lose you for good.

Notes: There will be more to come.
Sam and Dean haven't found out much, but it can't be that easy for them to just be able to find a clue and figure out where she is or what's wrong.
You now know a little more about what's going on with Manda and her reasons for running and not wanting to tell Dean.
I hope this is all still making sense, and that this chapter wasn't too painful of a read for anyone.

The next one is half written thanks to all my troubles with this one, so I will try to get that up soon. What might Sam and Dean find out? Will Manda show up and break the news? Maybe... maybe not, you'll have to check back to find out.
Thanks for reading! Feedback always welcome. Please let me know what you think, or what you might hope to see next.