Gina Watkins-SooHoo | Fic + Art

"I assure you, Dean, I'm an extraordinarily shallow breather."

Dean scoffs. "Yeah, right."

"If we ever get out of here," Toni says, "I am the one who programmed your mother, which means that I am the only one who can undo it. And since I assume you want Mummy back, you need me."

You catch Sam's sleeve, low, pulling him half a step away, just far enough that your voice doesn't carry.

"Sam, I'm an extra person in here breathing the air. I wasn't in here originally. That gives us less time before it runs out." You hesitate. "What if...?"

"Hey." Sam catches your eye before you can finish it. "We're not doing math like that. Not about you. We'll figure it out."

He looks at you for a second, searching, and whatever he finds isn't reassuring enough. You're still holding all of it, tight behind your ribs.

"We will," he says again, and this time it isn't comfort, it's fact, stated plain like something he's already decided is true. Something in his certainty does more than the words themselves.

You nod, not quite believing it, but needing somewhere else to put your hands and your attention. "I'm going to go try to remember something useful," you say, already turning toward the hallway. "Give me a minute."

Sam doesn't stop you.

"You believe her?" Dean asks, once you're gone.

"I don't know," Sam says. "Look, if she's lying, sure, we take her out. But Mom is still out there, brainwashed. If she's telling the truth, then we do need her."

"All right, you're so smart, how do we get out of here?"

"The only way out is to pull the manual override," Toni says.

"Is that a thing?" Sam asks.

"Oh, it is. But it's outside the bunker, where we can't reach it."

"Awesome."

"Wait a second, guys." Sam's already turning toward the shelves. "We're in a giant vault loaded down with occult books and lore. There's gotta be something somewhere in here, an item or a spell, some hoodoo that can reverse the lockdown."

You've come back into the room by then, close enough to catch it.

"There isn't," you say.

Everyone looks at you. "I mean it. Don't waste the time. Magic isn't going to work."

Toni's eyes narrow, sharp, assessing. "And how, precisely, would you know that?"

"I just do."

"That's not an answer."

"It doesn't have to be. Not for you." You hold her gaze. "We're not doing a spell."

Sam's already turning away from the shelves he was about to start pulling books off of.

Toni watches the two of you, turning it over.

"You're that certain," she says slowly. "Certain enough not to even try. Which means you already know it'll fail." Her mouth curves, humorless. "Which means someone's put some kind of mystical dampener on the bunker's lockdown. Ketch, presumably. He'd have thought of that."

Nobody confirms it. Nobody has to.

"How resourceful," she says, and there's something almost like respect buried under the venom. "Pity you won't tell me how you knew."

"You're not exactly on the list of people we owe explanations to," Dean says.

She doesn't push it further.

Dean unrolls a set of blueprints across the war table, jaw set, and points. "Well, if magic won't work, I say we try brute force."

"How?" Sam asks.

"Walls." Dean taps a spot on the paper. "Garage, the Crow's Nest, these are all reinforced steel, right? But right here, that's nothing but concrete. And right there, that's an old sewer pipe. Goes straight up to the surface. To the override."

"So wait a second. We're just gonna—"

"Straight Shawshank this bitch."

By the time you get there, the clatter of pickaxes has been going for a while, dull and unsatisfying, concrete barely giving at all under it. Sam and Dean are trading off, alternating swings, both of them soaked through with sweat and breathing hard.

They stop before you even reach them, Dean's pickaxe scraping down to rest against the wall, both of them sinking down to sit, chests heaving. You cross the room and sit next to Sam, close enough that your shoulder's against his.

"That's not it," you say. "This isn't what's going to get us out. I don't know what does yet. But it isn't this."

"You're right." Sam twists to look up at the shallow gouge they've made, barely a dent against the thickness of it. "We're not gonna hit dirt for three days. Two if we're lucky." He inhales, deeply. "I know you feel it. The air. It's thin. And it's getting thinner."

He's quiet for a moment. Then he looks at you.

"You never said it," he says.

"Said what?"

"I told you so." His mouth twitches, almost a smile. "You knew. You warned me, weeks before any of it happened, and I went anyway, and you never once threw it back at me."

"Well." You tip your head, a sly smile tugging at your mouth. "It was hard. But I'm just that awesome of a person."

That gets a real laugh out of him, short and surprised. Then it fades, and something more serious takes its place.

He lays his hand over yours, just resting there. "I'm sorry," he says. "I should have trusted you."

"Don't apologize for that." You shake your head. "You were making the best decision you could with what you had. That's all any of us ever do."

"You were so right about them," he says, quieter now. "And Mom, what they did to her." He scoffs, something raw underneath it. "I just fell for their company line." His voice catches, and he has to breathe through it. "Man, I saw what they were doing, and I thought, hunters on that scale, working together, how much good we could do. And once I was in, I just followed. 'Cause it was easy."

"Easier than what?" Dean asks.

"Easier than leading."

Dean nods, and both of them hang their heads for a moment. Sam picks up a piece of broken concrete and tosses it aside.

"You say it always works out," Dean says. "In the show."

"It used to." You look down at your hands. "But this isn't the same as the show anymore. Everything that's different because I'm here, and everything that follows from there, can change the outcome. I don't know if it still ends the same way. I don't know if it works out the same way as the episode ended, or if it just ends. For all of us."

Nobody says anything to that.

"I saved us a day," you say, quieter. "Not doing the spell. That's something. But I'm also using up more air so we have less time. I don't know if that evens out. I don't even know how to do that math."

"Hey." Sam's hand is still over yours. "We're not doing that math."

Everyone is quiet for a minute.

"Is this how you pictured it?" Sam asks Dean, changing the subject before you can keep going. "The end?"

"Oh, you know it's not." Dean's mouth curves, faint. "I always thought we'd go out like... Butch and Sundance style."

Sam chuckles. "Yeah. Blaze of glory."

"Blaze of glory." Dean smirks. "Son of a bitch."

You lean forward to see past Sam, and it hits you all at once, sudden and total.

You gasp. "Grenade launcher!"

In the war room.

"You're lunatics," Toni says. "This is a colossally stupid idea."

Dean walks in, grinning, holding up the grenade launcher like a trophy. "Yep. Big, beautiful, and dumb. I've had this thing for so long. Been waiting for the perfect moment to use it."

"He has," you say, nodding.

"The explosion could kill us all," Toni says. "You could bring the whole bloody place crashing down."

Dean chuckles. "Yeah."

Sam chuckles too. "Yeah."

You chuckle along with them. "Yeah." Then, quieter, mostly to yourself, "But it won't."

"You're lunatics," Toni says. "Action movie-loving, cheeseburger-eating, moronic American lunatics."

Sam ushers her out of the room.

"Dean, wait!" You catch his arm before he can raise the launcher. "You're going to hurt your knee. We have to... rig up some kind of shield."

You're already looking around the room, scanning for anything solid enough. You find an old metal table shoved against the wall, and between the two of you, you drag it into position, tipping it up on its side and wedging it in front of where Dean's meant to stand.

"Okay." You step back, checking the angle. "There. You're good."

Then you head out of the room, dropping down onto the floor next to Sam, close against the wall. You clap your hands over your ears and wait.

"Okay, beautiful." Dean's voice carries even through the wall. "Yippee ki-yay, mother—"

The explosion swallows the rest of it. Then debris rains down somewhere close enough to feel through the floor.

When the last of it fades, you and Sam are both already moving, flashlights on, coughing and picking through the settling dust "Dean?" You follow your flashlight beam toward the far wall. "Dean?"

The hole's there, blown clean through, but as you watch, more of it gives way from somewhere inside. There's a groan and then a fresh rush of debris collapsing down into the opening. You both cough again, stumbling back from the dust cloud it kicks up.

"Dean!" Sam's voice cracks on it.

You make your way back toward the war room together, and somewhere along the way your breathing changes, quick and shallow, like each one isn't pulling in enough to matter. Sam's doing the same beside you, both of you moving slower than you should be, neither one falling, just working harder than you should have to just walk.

Then the lights flicker, and the low hum of the ventilation system kicks back on, air pumping into the room in a rush that hits your lungs like relief itself.

The door creaks open. Dean limps in, his knee bloody and torn open, favoring it hard.

He looks between the two of you. "Hey, lunatics."

"Hey, moron," you manage, half laugh, half sob.

Then you see the hole in his jeans at the knee, a bad injury showing through it. "Your knee!" You're already moving toward him.

"Turns out the explosion wasn't the problem, so the shield didn't help." Dean waves you off, wincing as he shifts his weight. "I hurt it on the way out, climbing through the damn hole."

"Oh." Your stomach drops. "I'm so sorry."

"Don't be sorry for not stopping something that was gonna to happen anyway." He says it flat, like it's not up for discussion. "You're not a miracle worker. You tried. Just didn't have the whole picture."

Jody doesn't answer, and that's what sends you toward South Dakota. Her living room's got blood on the carpet by the time you arrive, Alex standing guard, Mary tied to a chair across the room, watching you all like she's been expecting this.

Dean's knee gets patched up while Jody explains how convincing the attack was. Mary needles everyone from her chair, cold and detached, until Sam brings Toni in to reverse the brainwashing.

Toni admits she lied. The programming's permanent. Mary can't be saved.

Dean's gun comes up.

Mary's phone buzzes on the table, Ketch's name lighting up the screen.

"Ketch keeps calling Mom's phone," Sam says.

"Let it go to voicemail," Dean says.

Sam declines the call. Dean shoves Toni toward the back door, done with her either way.

"This isn't going to stop," she warns, walking ahead of him. "If you want my advice, run."

"We're not running," Dean says.

"Then you die."

"Or," Sam says.

"Or what?"

"Or we fight."

By the time the room fills up, it's a full house, Jody handing out beers, telling someone named Jerry to get his feet off the table. Dean takes his with a quiet thanks. When the last knock comes, it's Walt and Roy, the two hunters who once killed Sam and Dean both and got away clean.

"Well, damn," Walt says.

"We haven't seen you guys since—" Roy starts.

"Since you killed us," Dean says. "No hard feelings."

Sam waves them in, gets them settled. Dean leans in close to him for a second, low enough only you catch it. "Sure about this?"

Sam doesn't answer that directly. He just turns to face the room.

"So my brother and I—" Sam stops. Something crosses his face, quick, like he's just caught himself reaching for the wrong sentence, the one he always reaches for. Dean's not standing beside him this time. This one's his alone.

He drops it and starts over.

"I called you here because our people are being slaughtered. And we're next." He looks around the room, meeting eyes. "The British Men of Letters came here because they thought they could do our job better than we could. They hooked us with their flashy gear and their tech. Most of you had the good sense to turn them down. I didn't." His eyes find you.

You hold his gaze and don't look away.

You watch him find his footing as he goes, the words coming faster now.

"They said they wanted the same thing we wanted. A world free of monsters. That's not what they really wanted. They want control. They want to live in a world where they can sit in some office and decide who gets to live and who gets to die. And they've killed people. Innocent people, just because they got in the way. They think the ends justify the means."

He pauses, and the room's gone completely still.

"But we know better. We know hunting isn't just about killing. It's about doing what's right, even when it's hard. So we go by our gut. We play by our own rules, and that scares them. That's why they want us dead. Because we're the one thing they can't control."

"So what do you want from us?" Roy asks.

"I want you to follow me. Take the fight to them. Hit them before they hit us." Sam's voice doesn't waver. "We go in fast and hard, and we fight, and we beat them down until they give up or until they're dead. They're well-trained and well-armed. Some of us might not make it back. But we will win. We will take down the bad guys, because that's what we do."

He looks around the room one more time.

"They're scared of us. Yeah. Good. They should be."

You watch every face in that room, and not one of them looks away from him.

The room's already moving by the time Sam gets to you, hunters checking weapons, Jody handing out ammunition like it's just another Tuesday. He goes to you first, before anyone else.

"Hey." Something almost shy in it, for a man who just talked a room full of hunters into a war. "How'd I do?"

"First," you say, "I'm so proud of you. That was awesome."

"Thanks."

"Second." You crook a finger at him, and he leans down, ear close, obliging. "That was so sexy." You say with a devilish smile. 

He laughs, surprised. "We'll have to talk about that later."

"Don't worry. I'll bring it up again."

You just look at each other for a moment, the noise of the room fading around the edges of it.

"So this is the part where you tell me you don't want me to go, right?"

He looks a little guilty. "Yeah. It's just..."

"I know." You cut him off, gentle. "It's dangerous. It really should only be experienced hunters. And you don't want me to go because you're worried something will happen to me. So you're asking me to let you go, without me, so I have to be the one who stays behind and worries."

He nods, pauses, looks you in the eyes. "Please?"

You sigh. "All right. On one condition."

"Be careful and don't get hurt or die?"

"No. That's a given." You glance over at the other hunters, at Jody specifically, then back at him, tipping your head toward them. "Tell them you asked me not to go. I don't want 'em thinking I just chickened out."

He smiles. "Deal."

You hug him, and the kiss that follows is slower than the room really allows for, but neither of you rushes it. Between breaths, you whisper I love you to each other, quiet enough it belongs only to the two of you.

You pat his arm once. "You got this."

Then you cross to Dean.

"I'm staying with you," you say. "I'll help."

He looks briefly surprised you already know what he's planning, but only for a second, and something in his face settles like he'd expected it anyway.

Behind you, Sam and Dean have their own goodbye, the kind of short, gruff exchange that's mostly about what doesn't get said, Dean waving off any idea of going along on a bad leg, telling Sam this one's his to lead, that he trusts him with it, and that he's going to find a way to save their mom while Sam's gone. It ends the way it usually does between them, brief, physical, more felt than spoken.

Across the room, you find Jody after she finishes with Alex, and wrap her in a hug.

"Be careful, okay?"

"I will."

"And kick their ass."

"I will."

Dean corners Toni once the others have cleared out, asking if she can get him into Mary's head the same way she did before. She hedges, but doesn't refuse, admitting her equipment's back at the compound, out of reach, though with the right scraps of materials, she might be able to cobble something together. 

The three of you head back to the bunker together, Toni in the back seat where you usually sit. You're up front, in the passenger seat, which is a small, strange kind of nice. You don't normally ride in Baby without Sam, and something about it feels wrong in a way you can't quite name, like the seat's the right size but the shape of the drive isn't. 

Back at the bunker, Dean puts Mary in a chair in the war room and handcuffs her, hands moving like he'd rather be doing anything else. 

"All right," he says to Toni. "Where's the stuff you need?"

"Should be in storage. Next to the dungeon."

Toni starts to walk off. Dean catches her arm.

"Ah. Think I'm lettin' you out of my sight?"

"Need I remind you my organization left me to die?" Her voice is flat, tired of the question. "At this point I'm not on anyone's side but my own. So I help you try to save your mother, and when the dust clears—"

"What? I let you go?"

"I'd like to see my son again. I'm not asking for a pass. I'm asking for a head start. "She holds up her cuffed wrists. 

Dean sighs, lowers his head in resignation, and unlocks the cuffs.

"Go with her," he says to you, not looking away from Toni. "Make sure she doesn't get creative."

Toni's mouth curves, thin. "Charming."

You fall into step behind her toward storage, close enough that she can't forget you're there.

Toni attaches electrodes to Mary's forehead, the handcuffs still dangling loose from one wrist.

"These electrodes sync your delta waves with Mary's, forming a psychic link." Dean sits across from Mary, similar electrodes fixed to his own temples. "But to enter her psyche will take a certain measure of concentration and skill." Toni adjusts a set of knobs on the machine between them. "And as there's no time to teach you how to reach the necessary dream state, I'm banking on this instead."

She holds up a large syringe and injects it into Mary's neck.

"Hypnotic agents. Laced with a potent sedative."

Mary gasps, once, and goes under.

"It's enough to knock an elephant on its trunk," Toni says, already turning toward the table.

Dean reaches out and closes the loose handcuff around the table leg before she can straighten up.

Toni scoffs. "Really?"

"Little insurance. You understand."

"This will hurt." Her voice goes dry, almost amused. "You understand."

She injects him next. He's out in seconds.

You settle into the chair beside him and take his hand, because there's nothing else useful for you to do, and because you don't want him to be alone in whatever's happening behind his closed eyes even if you can't follow him there.

You don't see it. You only get the shape of it, secondhand, in what his face does while he's under, and in what you already know from somewhere else, some version of this you watched happen once on a screen that isn't a screen anymore. Somewhere in there he tells his mother he hates her. Somewhere after that, he tells her he loves her too. Tears track down both their faces while they're under, Mary's makeup running dark down her cheeks.

You hold Dean's hand and wait.

It comes on you without warning, the way it always does, except this time it isn't a memory at all. Just an urge, sudden and specific and completely without content, a pull to leave the room so strong you're on your feet before you've decided to be.

No reason. No image. Nothing to hold onto, just the certainty that you need to go.

You settle on the bathroom, even though you don't actually need to, because it's the only excuse that makes sense to give if anyone asks.

You don't argue with the urge itself. You never do anymore.

You're back in a few minutes. The library stretches out in front of you, long tables and shelves between you and the far end of the room where the rig sits.

Ketch rips the electrodes off Dean's temples in one fast, brutal motion.

Your gun's up before you've finished processing any of it. "Freeze!"

Ketch goes still, but his hands are only halfway raised.

You're already moving, closing the distance across the library, gun steady, eyes locked on him the whole way. When you're maybe halfway there you catch it, past the legs of a table, Toni slumped against it in a sitting position, blood soaked dark down the front of her shirt. You don't slow down. It doesn't take more than a glance to know. 

"Ah, there you are." Ketch says, not even turning around. "I rather thought you'd be with Sam."

"Higher!" Your voice doesn't shake, even with the distance still between you. "Keep them up."

He lifts them the rest of the way, slowly and deliberately. Only then does he start to turn, unhurried, like this is an inconvenience rather than a gun closing in on his back.

"You know, I can read people," he says, mid-turn. "And while I don't know how you avoided that hellhound, I do know you're not a killer. You and I both know you're not going to shoot me."

"Stop. Moving." You're close now, close enough that the distance doesn't matter anymore. He stops, hands still raised, facing you fully. "You know, I don't know how you got Crowley to give you a hellhound without even telling him who you were going to sic it on. But I do know what I'm capable of doing to a psychopath like you."

"I'm afraid you've got me all wrong. I'm not a psychopath. I'm just a good company man who follows orders. Loyal to a fault."

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't you just about to beat up an injured, groggy man like a freaking coward? That doesn't sound like company orders."

His voice stays light, almost amused. "Rather more sporting than putting a bullet in an unarmed man, don't you think?"

"Sporting is not what I'd call you."

Dean's already blinking hard against the blur, one hand braced on the arm of his chair, and it clears fast, faster than you'd expect, his eyes sharpening within a breath or two. "Mom" he says when he takes in the situation.

Your eyes don't leave Ketch while Dean limps toward Mary, favoring his bad knee, and starts unlocking the cuffs. She's still out, slumped, unmoving.

Ketch's head turns back toward the two of them, calculating, and something in his posture shifts, subtle, like he's testing the weight of a decision.

"I don't believe you're going to use that."

His hand moves toward the gun at his hip.

You fire before he brings the gun up. The shot catches him high in the shoulder, and he staggers back with a sharp, startled cry, his own gun clattering loose from his grip falling on the floor.

"Not all shots are fatal," you say.

You see Mary's eyes open. She's disoriented for only a second before something sharpens in her face, some old instinct clicking into place, and she's on her feet before Dean's even finished with the cuffs. She quickly moves to where Ketch's gun landed and picks it up.

Ketch, one hand pressed to his bleeding shoulder, looks at her, and something almost fond crosses his face despite everything.

"I knew you were a killer," he says quietly. He looks at Dean and adds, "You both are."

"You're right," Dean says.

A fatal gunshot is Mary's answer, and it's the only one either of them needed to give.

Dean walks in shaking a pill bottle, half a laugh in it. "Found some expired prescription painkillers. So. Lucky me." He watches Mary picking up  a stray phone near where Ketch's body lies under a bloodied sheet. "Mom, you don't have to do that. It's not your job."

"This." Her voice catches. She looks around the room. "All of this. Is because of me."

"It's gonna be okay."

"It's not okay." She sighs, crosses toward him. "Since I've been back, I know I've been distant. Cold, even. Leaving you, working with them. I was trying to make things right. Just from a distance, because being here with you was too hard. Seeing what I'd done to you and Sam, I..."

"Mom." Dean shakes his head. "What you did, the deal, everything that's happened since, it's made us who we are. And who we are? We kick ass. We save the world."

"I'm scared." Her voice breaks. "What...

"What if he can't forgive me?"

You're at the far end of the library, giving them the space they need, close enough to hear, far enough to pretend you're not listening.

Sam comes in.

"Mom." Something raw in his voice. "You don't have to be scared of me."

He crosses the room and pulls her into a hug. Dean's hand lands on his shoulder. "Glad you're back, man." Then he gives Sam a hug too, all three of them together.

You watch with a small smile.

Sam finds your eyes over his mother's head, something soft and full in his own, and lifts his chin toward you. Come on.

You lift a hand, shake your head slightly. "No. That's okay. You're having your family hug. I'm just glad to see it."

Dean turns his head and catches your eye. "Yeah." He almost smiles. "It is a family hug."

Then, after a short pause, he opens his arm out toward you. "Come on."

You step forward.

Dean hooks an arm around your shoulders and pulls you in. Mary wraps an arm around you from the other side. Sam folds his long arms around all of you as best he can.

You turn your face toward the tiny pocket of air in the middle of the hug and let out a muffled, "I'm feeling really short right now."

Everyone laughs. The sound echoes through the library.

And somehow, with all four of you standing there tangled together in the middle of the library, everything feels lighter. 

Thank you to @lelapine on tumblr for the "mouse" nickname idea!

👉Read THIS on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/90430261

If you ❤️ SAM 👉 Read my SPN fanfic: Accidentally a Winchester: A Supernatural Reader Series on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/series/5664826 No use of "Y/N"!

Master List of Fan Fiction: https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/812636749500137472/master-list

List of Sam x Reader Cute Little Fluffs https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/819080920363565056/sam-x-reader-cute-little-fluffs-list

It always did. Like a bruise she bumped into in the dark.

She didn't mean to get serious. She just did. Her voice went smaller. Her chest tightened. She stared at the table like the wood might answer her if she looked hard enough.

Sam noticed right away. He always noticed.

His face shifted. Less joking. More present. "I know it's hard," he said, quiet. "Not knowing. Living with a blank past."

She let out a breath that sounded like defeat. "It's like I'm missing pages. Whole chapters."

Sam nodded once. He thought for a moment, eyes focused like he was hunting a clue. Something in his chest had tightened when her voice went small. It happened every time she hurt and he couldn't fix it fast enough. He wanted to. That was the thing he kept running up against. How much he wanted to fix things for her, and how careful he had to be about what that wanting meant.

"I have an idea," he said. "It might pull something out."

Hope moved across her face so fast it was almost painful to watch. Like she'd forgotten she was allowed to want things and then remembered all at once. "Yes," she said, too quickly. "Whatever it is. Yes."

That eagerness hit him somewhere unguarded. The rawness of it. He had to look away for half a second, reset.

"Okay." He straightened a little. "Close your eyes."

She did.

"Picture waking up," he said. "You get out of bed. You get dressed. It's your day off. Saturday, or any day. You can do anything you want. What do you do?"

His voice stayed steady and low, careful, the tone he used when he was trying to hold space for someone without crowding it. He watched her face while he talked, the small movements of it, her brow softening as she went somewhere inside herself.

At first nothing. He could tell by the stillness.

Then something shifted.

"I think, I walk downstairs," she said.

"Good." He caught the word before she could second-guess it. "That's something. So you go downstairs. Then, what do you do?"

"I'm looking around. I don't know."

"That's okay. Just walk through the house. What do you see?"

Her eyes moved under her lids, tracking something. "A kitchen. And a living room with a couch."

Something warm moved through him. "Nice. Okay. Do you go outside? Do you go somewhere? Or do you stay in? It's your day off. You get to pick."

She didn't hesitate. "I stay in."

"Alright." He let a smile into his voice because he couldn't help it. "So you stay in. You do something at home. Now imagine you have a spot that's yours. Not the couch. Not the kitchen. A space you like to be. What's there?"

A longer pause this time. He waited, not pushing.

"A laptop," she said. "I'm on it a lot."

"Games?"

"No. Work. And other stuff."

"Okay. Look around again. Anything else?"

He watched her face go still. Then something changed in it, a door swinging open somewhere behind her eyes.

"A messy spot," she blurted. "Crafts. No. Art. Paintings. I paint." A breath. "I'm a painter!"

The words came out fast, like they'd been trapped. Her breath caught.

"Bright colors," she added. "I don't know what I paint, but it's bright."

Her eyes opened.

Sam sat very still for a moment, just looking at her. Something had happened in his chest that he wasn't going to examine right now: a complicated collision of relief and pride and something else entirely, something with no business being this strong. She'd just found a piece of herself. A real piece. And the look on her face, stunned and shaky and lit from the inside, made him want to find her a thousand more.

He was aware, dimly, that this was a problem.

"Wow," she whispered. "Sam. Thank you."

He gave her the real smile. Not the deflecting one. "I'm glad it worked."

She stared at him, and he felt the weight of it, the way her gratitude was too big for the table between them. "I wouldn't have figured that out without you."

"You did it," he said. "I just helped."

She blinked hard. He could see her fighting the sting behind her eyes and choosing not to cry, which was so specifically her that it made something in him go fond and aching at the same time.

Then her brain kicked back on and started sprinting. That tracked too.

"Wait. What kind of paint?" she said. "I saw an easel. So not watercolor. Oil or acrylic, maybe."

He tilted his head. Back on solid ground. This he could do. "Oil paint smells. Strong chemicals. Did you smell anything?"

She closed her eyes again, replaying it. "No. I see brushes in water. So acrylic, then."

"That sounds right," he said.

She sat back, dazed. "I need to think about this when I'm not running on fumes. I need to get some sleep."

Sam glanced at the clock and looked mildly horrified. "We did it again."

She yawned so hard her eyes watered. "Yep. Bed."

She stood. He stood too, and he didn't think about it until he was already doing it, already moving alongside her toward the door like it was simply where he belonged. He caught himself and didn't stop. There wasn't a good reason to stop. He was just walking her to her room. People did that.

The hallway felt longer at night. Quieter. Small things felt more significant in it.

At her door she grabbed the handle, then turned back to him.

She was closer than she'd been at the table. The hallway light was dim and it caught in her eyes and he was suddenly, acutely aware of how little space there was between them and how easy it would be to close it. His hand registered the impulse before his brain did, the pull toward the loose strand of hair near her face, the want to tuck it back, to find any excuse to be that close.

He kept his hand where it was.

"Aw," she said, a grin tugging at her mouth. "Thanks for walking me to my room. Such a gentleman."

His lips twitched. "My pleasure, Madame."

She chuckled. "Good night, sir." She curtsied, holding an invisible skirt.

He laughed, soft and real, and the sound surprised him slightly. "Good night."

The moment hung there.

Neither of them moved. He was aware of every inch between them, aware of his own stillness, aware that he was staying in her doorway longer than the situation required and not doing anything about it. His hand twitched at his side.

He turned and headed for his room.

Each step felt deliberate in a way walking usually didn't. He was conscious of leaving. Of walking away from her. He didn't look back, which took more effort than it should have. He knew she was watching him go, and he didn't look back.

He went to his room and sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the floor for a moment.

He was building a case he wasn't going to act on. He'd told himself that for weeks. He was still telling himself that. The case kept getting stronger anyway, detail by detail, her laugh, her brain, the look on her face just now when she remembered she was a painter. Piece by piece, without his permission.

He lay back and looked at the ceiling.

He wasn't going to do anything about it.

He was almost certain.

➡️ Chapter 9 - Cas Makes It Weird and Complicated and Whatever (Coming Soon ETA 8/17/26)

Not In The Script Chapter Master List : https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/822446704695590912/not-in-the-script-master-list

Master List of Fan Fiction: https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/812636749500137472/master-list

List of Sam x Reader Cute Little Fluffs https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/819080920363565056/sam-x-reader-cute-little-fluffs-list

(if you ❤️ SAM):

SAM x Reader Insert Series (No use of "Y/N") Accidentally a Winchester: A Supernatural Reader Series Read on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/series/5664826

You sniff at his shirt. "No beer."

"Nope, I ironed it myself… with water. I didn't trust him not to use beer again."

You laugh.

He offers his hand and you take it.

The drive out is quiet in the good way, windows cracked, some song neither of you bothers to name playing low under the engine noise. No hunts, no British Men of Letters, nothing supernatural. Just a night that happens to have somewhere nice at the end of it.

The restaurant is small, the kind of place that seats maybe thirty people and doesn't bother advertising, tucked between a hardware store and a laundromat on a street that goes dark early. Sam picked it. You didn't ask how he found it, and he didn't offer, which usually means Dean was involved somehow and neither of you wants to examine that.

The hostess seats you near the back, away from the window, an old habit neither of you comments on anymore. Sam orders wine for the table without checking with you first, then catches himself and asks if that's okay, and you tell him it's fine, and he relaxes the way he does when he's more nervous than he's let on.

"So," you say, once the bread's arrived and there's nothing left to fuss with. "No case tonight. No emergency. Just us."

"Just us." He says it like he's testing whether it's true.

"You keep looking at the door."

"No, I'm not."

"You've looked at the door four times since we sat down."

"Force of habit." He picks up his water glass instead of answering further, and you let him have it, because it is force of habit, his and yours both, and pretending otherwise for one dinner isn't going to undo two years of it.

The food comes. It's good, better than the bunker's kitchen ever produces, and for a while you just eat and talk about nothing. A book he's been meaning to finish, whether Dean's going to keep Baby's current paint job or finally deal with the dent from Wichita, a stray joke about whether "Men of Letters" was really the best branding decision a secret society ever made.

"They had, what, four hundred years to come up with something better," you say. "And that's what they landed on."

"To be fair, the British ones aren't exactly winning on branding either."

"Kendricks Academy. Very ominous. Very murder-your-best-friend-for-a-grade."

Sam's smile falters, just slightly, and you realize a half second too late where that joke actually lands these days.

"Sorry," you say.

"No, it's…" He shakes his head. "It's fine. You're not wrong."

You reach over and take his hand on the table, and he turns his over to hold yours properly, and for a minute neither of you says anything, which is its own kind of conversation.

"I like this," you say eventually. "Whatever this is. Normal. Boring, even."

"Boring's good." His thumb moves once over your knuckles. "I could do a lot more boring."

"Don't jinx it."

He laughs a little, and it's real, and for a little while longer the world stays exactly the size of this table.

By the time the check comes, it's fully dark outside, the street is quiet the way small towns go quiet after nine. The check comes and Sam pays, same as always.

"Ready?" he says.

"Ready."

He takes your hand again as you step out into the night air, and the walk to the car is short, half a block, past two closed storefronts and a stretch of parked cars where the streetlight's out.

The car's not far, half a block down, past a laundromat with its lights already off and a stretch of curb where the streetlamp's been dead long enough that nobody's bothered to fix it. Sam's hand is warm around yours. You're not thinking about anything except how nice it is not to be thinking about anything.

The growl comes from your left. Low, wet, and close.

Both of you turn toward it at once, some old instinct expecting eyes to find it the way ears already have. There's nothing there. Just the dark, the quiet street, the closed shopfronts.

"Something's here," Sam says.

It moves. You can hear it circle, and both your heads track with it, uselessly, turning to follow a sound that offers no shape to match it to. Then a rush of motion aimed straight at you. The sound of growling moves toward you.

You feel nothing. It lands somewhere past your other shoulder, a heavy thud of paws hitting pavement, weight and momentum with nowhere to go. You and Sam both turn again, toward the new direction of the sound, still seeing nothing at all.

"Hellhound," Sam says.

It doesn't slow down to process the miss. It turns, and you can hear that too, a scrape of claws pivoting on concrete, and comes again, faster, a low snarl building right up until the moment it should connect and it lands a second time on your other side, the same nothing, the same wasted weight hitting the ground behind you. Your head turns with it again, and so does Sam's, chasing a shape that isn't there to be found.

Sam's the one who stops turning first. He's got it now, the rough position of the thing built from the two impacts, close enough together to draw a line between them. He lunges, blade first, aimed at the space his instincts are building for him.

He misses. You hear it, the scrape of the blade. It couldn't be more than a scratch. The growl that answers isn't pain, it's something closer to anger.

It comes for him instead.

The weight hits his chest and drives him straight down onto his back, air punching out of him in one hard grunt. His shoulders are pinned flat, but his arms are still free, working with visible effort to get the blade up and angled against a hold he can't see, can't predict, can only feel.

"Sam!"

Sam's arms are shaking with the strain of forcing the blade upward against something with all its weight braced down on him.

You're already moving. You can hear it breathing, hear the low continuous growl right where Sam's throat is, and you go in low, blade horizontal, driving it in sideways along where sound and instinct both tell you its body has to be.

Steel finds something that isn't air.

The shriek that answers has no visible mouth behind it. Sam gets his own strike home a half second later, and the weight above him goes slack all at once, then drops, sliding off him sideways, a heavy dead weight settling next to him. Nothing to see. Just the sudden, unmistakable presence of something dead and still there, invisible and undeniable at once.

Somewhere close, behind a parked van someone who was never quite visible to begin with goes very still, watching a fight he can't see either, doing math of his own. It isn't adding up.

Ketch doesn't move. He doesn't approach. Whatever he came here to finish, he isn't finishing it tonight. Not with a Winchester on his feet, blade still in hand, eyes scanning the dark like he already knows there's more out there than one dead dog.

By the time you get Sam into the car, he's already gone.

Sam drives one-handed, the other pressed to his sleeve where the fabric's gone dark and sticky, and neither of you says anything until you're a few blocks clear of the restaurant, the adrenaline draining out in that shaky, hollowed-out way it always does.

"You're not stopping at the ER?" you ask.

"It's not that deep." He flexes his hand around the wheel, testing it. "I've had worse."

"That's not as reassuring as you think it is." You study his profile for a second, weighing whether to push it, then let it go, because you already know how this argument ends and it isn't with him in a waiting room. "Fine. But I'm looking at it the second we're home."

"Damn it, Cas." You drop your head back against the seat. "Where is he?"

Sam doesn't answer. He doesn't have to. You're both thinking it, the same unspoken math. An angel who heals with a touch would've made tonight a lot less complicated, and he's been unreachable for weeks.

"So, what the hell just happened?" you ask, when the silence stretches too long to hold.

"Hellhound."

"Yeah, but what was it doing? And why the hell would it come after us?"

"I think it was going for you. It just… couldn't."

"Like trying to pounce on me …but going through me like a ghost? I didn't feel anything."

"I did. It must be your immunity."

"Maybe it's like ghosts. The whole thing is magic. Like, no real corporeal form, just 100% magic."

"That makes sense."

"Then, when I went for it with the angel blade, it turned on me. That's what they do."

"Ok, but why would it be after either one of us? We didn't make any demon deals."

"I don't know but they're all Crowley's pets."

Dean's at the table when you come down the stairs, boots up, a beer half gone in front of him, and he's got maybe two seconds to register the state of Sam's sleeve before he's on his feet.

"What happened?"

"Hellhound," Sam says, already peeling off his jacket, wincing as the fabric pulls away from the wound.

Dean's face does something complicated, fast, somewhere between alarm and disbelief. "A hellhound just... what, jumped you? In a parking lot? On a date?"

"Pretty much."

"But nobody's after either of you." Dean's already moving, grabbing the first aid kit off the shelf like his hands need something to do. "You didn't make a deal and she can't make one. Demons can't even touch her."

"It couldn't touch me." You sit Sam down at the table, start working his shirt off his shoulder before he can argue about doing it himself. "It went straight through me. Then Sam went at it with his blade, and that's when it turned on him."

Dean sets the kit down harder than it needs to be set down. "It went through you?"

"Like I wasn't even there."

"It couldn't get you." Dean looks at Sam, and something unspoken passes between them, the kind of look that's had a lot of practice. "So Sam engaged it, and it went for the threat instead."

Sam hisses as Dean starts cleaning the gash.

"You're lucky it's shallow." Dean's voice has gone clipped, all business, which is how you know he's actually rattled. "Another inch and we're having a very different conversation right now."

"I know," Sam says.

"A hellhound had to have come from Crowley, right?" you ask.

"Yeah, he's the only one that has them," Dean answers.

"I'm calling him," Sam says, already reaching for his phone.

Sam steps a few feet away, phone to his ear, and you and Dean both watch him wait through several rings before the call connects.

"Crowley."

"Moose. To what do I owe the pleasure of a call this late?"

"Cut the small talk. A hellhound attacked us tonight."

There's a pause on the other end, just long enough to notice. "Attacked 'us'? Are you referring to you and Squirrel or you and your little mouse?"

"Me and my fiancé. It was after her."

"Oh? I hadn't heard." You can practically hear him deciding to be offended by it. "Congrats to the happy couple. I assume my save the date card is in the mail."

"The hellhound, Crowley."

"I don't know what you're talking about, Moose."

"They're your hellhounds. Tell me who's responsible."

"I'm telling you, I don't know anything about it." Even through the phone, tinny and distant, Crowley's voice carries that particular bored contempt he saves just for Sam. "I don't have any reason to go after your little mouse. Not since you destroyed the Last Ledger. And why on earth would I bother sending a hellhound after the one person on this entire planet it can't touch?"

"Only a demon can control a hellhound. Which means one of your people was involved."

"If that were the case, I would know about it. There are no missing hellhounds. I was cuddling with them just last night."

The line goes dead before Sam can answer. He stands there a second longer, phone still at his ear, before he lowers it and turns back to the table.

"Well?" Dean says.

"He's lying about something." Sam sets the phone down harder than it needs to be set down. "But I don't think he knew who the target was."

Later, once Dean's gone quiet in the kitchen and the bunker's settled into that thin, waiting kind of silence, you find Sam in your room, sitting on the edge of the bed with his shirt already off, a large patch of gauze taped across his chest.

You sit down next to him. Run your hand down his arm, softly.

"Oh, Sam. I'm so sorry."

"For this? I've had so much worse."

"But not because of me. This is my fault." You kiss him very lightly around the edge of the gauze, moving to his neck.

"It's not your fault. It's the hellhound's fault. And whoever sent it."

He puts his hand on the side of your face. "I'd take much worse for you."

"Aw, Sam."

You kiss him, slow, and his hand slides from your jaw into your hair, careful even now, even injured, like being gentle with you is the one thing he never has to think about doing. You shift closer, mindful of his chest, and he makes a low sound against your mouth that isn't pain at all.

"You sure you're up for this?" you murmur, lips still against his.

"I'm not that hurt." His mouth curves against yours. "Come here."

His good hand finds the hem of your shirt, patient, asking without asking, and you help him with it. He looks at you for a second like he's memorizing something, then pulls you down to him, careful of the gauze, careless of everything else. His mouth moves along your collarbone, unhurried, and you feel him smile against your skin when your breath catches.

"Sam."

"I've got you." His voice has gone low, rough at the edges. His hands are steady even when the rest of him isn't, mapping familiar ground like he still can't quite believe he's allowed to.

You move slow because of his chest, and it turns the whole thing into something quieter than usual, more deliberate, every touch given time to land before the next one comes. His breath goes ragged against your ear, and yours matches it, and for a long while there's nothing in the room but heat and his hands and the soft, worn sound of your name.

Afterward you lie curled against his uninjured side, his fingers tracing slow, absent circles on your back, and the rest of the night stays exactly where you left it, forgotten, on the other side of the door.

You, Sam, and Dean are at Mary's last motel room. All of her stuff is gone. It looks like she hasn't been there in days. She'd left a message for Dean saying, "Dean, call me. We have a problem," and nothing else. Dean's already tried calling Mick six times, and he hasn't been in contact since he was supposedly sent to London.

So Dean calls Ketch, and it goes about as well as you'd expect, clipped and useless, ending with Ketch claiming he hasn't seen her in over a week.

"But Mom called two days ago," Sam says. "Said she was working a case with him."

"Which means he's lying." Dean pockets the phone.

Nobody says what that probably means. Not yet.

It's been a week since the Mary's motel room, since Ketch's flat lie and nothing about any of it has resolved. You're in the car, running errands, some list of ordinary things none of you has the attention span for today, when you look down at your hands and think about the whole strange math of a night that started with wine and ended with your fiancé bleeding on a kitchen table because someone sent a hellhound to kill you. It couldn't touch you. When Sam tried to defend you, it went for him instead.

It comes without warning, the way it usually does. Not a memory exactly. A flicker. A man's face, calm and precise, a dog whistle, and a treat fed to something invisible.

"It was Ketch. He's the one who sicced the hellhound on me." you say.

Dean and Sam both turn to look at you.

"You saw him?" Dean asks.

"I saw it just now. In a memory flash." You press the heel of your hand against your eye for a second. "In the show. He gets a hellhound to attack Eileen. It kills her."

"But it came after you instead," Sam says slowly. "…and you said it was originally Eileen who accidentally shot Renny."

"Yeah."

"That must be why he sent it after you instead," Sam says. "The Code."

"But it's a hellhound. It still had to have come from Crowley," Dean says.

"Except Crowley knows about her immunity." Sam's voice goes flat. "He wouldn't waste one of them on something he knows can't work." He's working it through. "Unless they didn't tell him who the target was."

"So it's not Crowley's play." You say it slowly.

"But, I don't understand. Mick let it go. He let us walk," Sam says.

"Maybe he still filed a report." Dean looks at you. "They saw he didn't kill you, so they sent Ketch to take care of it."

"So the British Men of Letters must be working with Crowley. They got a hellhound, but didn't tell him who the target was," you say.

"He's not going to be happy that dog's dead, either," Dean says. "They just cost him an asset for nothing."

Nobody says anything for a moment.

"Six," you say quietly. "There are six hunters dead in three weeks. Supposedly all from monsters."

Dean's jaw sets. "Yeah. What, did every last thing out there suddenly decide to start working together?"

"Monsters and demons don't team up." Sam says. "Six hunters gone. Hellhound attack on us. We can't get a signal off Mom's phone. Cas has Kelly Kline somewhere, no idea where. Mick's slipped off the grid. Ketch is lying straight to your face." He exhales, sharp. "I want to punch something."

"Good." Dean's voice goes low. "Hold onto that."

You're still turning it over, the shape of it settling wrong in your chest. "He used a hellhound on me so it would look like a monster killed me.

"Six hunters," you say. "Killed by six different monsters, all with explanations nobody thought twice about because that's just the job. That's just what happens to people who do what we do."

"You think it's all him," Dean says. It's not a question.

"I think it's easy to fake a monster attack when you've got one on a leash." You look between the two of them. "How many of those six weren't monsters at all?"

Nobody answers that, because nobody has a version of the truth that isn't awful.

Outside the post office, Dean's got the mail and Sam has his phone pressed to his ear.

"Yeah. Yeah, no, I appreciate it. Thanks." Sam hangs up. "So I've been calling around about all of the hunters that died. Every one of them had years of experience."

"We got a letter from Eileen," Dean says, already sorting through the stack.

"Eileen?" you say.

"She sent it four days ago. It went snail mail 'cause she thought that her phone and her computer were both hacked." Dean hands it over. "She was scared."

"Scared of what?" Sam asks.

"After she heard about the recent hunter deaths, she started getting paranoid and started watching for tails and searching for bugs."

Dean hands Sam the letter and he reads it out loud, her handwriting cramped and fast across the page. "I know they're following me, watching me. They tapped my phone. I found a microphone in my room."

He looks up. "You think the Brits were watching her?"

"If Eileen says they were…" you say.

"Then maybe that's not the only place they've got ears." Sam's already folding the letter, already moving toward the car.

All three of you go back to the bunker and start searching, methodically, room by room, running hands under tables and along shelf edges and behind picture frames.

Dean's the one who finds it, kneeling by the map table, one hand braced against the underside.

He doesn't say anything at first. He just points so you and Sam can both see it, a small dark cylinder taped to the underside of the table.

You and Sam kneel down next to him.

Dean settles back on his knees, voice pitched normal, easy, like nothing's different. "Those hunters you were talking to. Is one of them Terry Marsh?"

Sam plays along. "Yeah. Terry Marsh, in Missouri. I talked to him. He's also thinking it's not monsters doing the real killing."

"Okay, well, I got a text from him," Dean says. "He's been nosing around. Says he's got a fair idea of what's going on."

"And?" Sam says.

"He doesn't feel safe talking about it on the phone. He wants to meet."

"The old iron works off the interstate. Tomorrow night at 9:00. He says park off the road by the warehouse," Dean continues.

"All right," Sam says.

You just shake your head, small and involuntary, eyes narrowing into something close to a glare, not at either of them, at all of it.

Sam's mouth is twisted into a tight grimace, every muscle in his face taut with the effort of keeping his temper.

You stay with the Impala, parked close to the building, a low bush the only thing between you and the black car British Men of Letters rolled up in. Sam made you promise to stay put before he got out. You didn't like it, but you did it anyway.

You watch him and Dean go around to one of the doors. Then you watch two men getting out following. Toni stays behind in their car.

Sam and Dean disappear inside. The two men from the second car follow a minute later, and the door swings shut behind them.

For a moment nothing happens. The door is around the corner of the building, out of sight from where you're parked, but you catch the scrape of the bolt sliding home, and then, faint, muffled, the sound of someone on the other side realizing too late that it's locked.

Toni's watching the building through the driver's side window, waiting for whatever's about to come out of it. She draws and cocks her weapon.

She doesn't see Sam circling from the other direction then the passenger window shatters behind her.

She twists and fires through the broken glass, fast, no hesitation, and you don't see whether it hits anything, just Sam dropping low, out of the line.

Dean's already at the driver's door, wrenching it open, and he's got her gun before she's finished bringing the gun back around. He grabs it from her hands and throws it on the ground. She's out of the car in the same motion, and her knee catches him in the crotch hard enough that he folds forward with a sound you feel more than hear.

She dives for the gun. Sam gets there first, boot coming down flat on top of it, his own weapon already aimed directly at her. 

She holds his eyes for a moment, then rises slowly, something resigned settling over her face.

"If you keep this up," Dean says, still bent over, "we're gonna have to start dating." 

She looks at Dean, something in her face doing all the work an eye roll would if she bothered, then turns back to Sam and the gun still leveled at her face. 

They walk her back toward the Impala and you open the back door without being asked. Sam guides her in. She sits like she's used to being handled, spine straight, chin up, giving nothing away.

Sam looks at you, then tips his head toward the front. You climb in first, sliding to the middle of the bench seat, and Sam gets in beside you, Dean rounding the hood to take the wheel.

Sam's turned in his seat, arm extended straight over the back of the bench, gun leveled at her face at close range. "Why are you spying on us? And what do you know about a hellhound attacking us?"

Toni's brow draws together, something almost like real confusion crossing her face. "Hellhounds?"

"Did you – did – did your people, send it?" Dean asks.

"Probably. Rule of thumb, if you think we were trying to kill someone, then we probably were." She pauses. "Although we don't often fail." Her eyes flick to you again, brief, recalculating. "Speaking of, you do realize that by attacking me, you invite the retribution of the entire British Men of Letters? Investigation, no trial. Just punishment and ruin. Possibly at the hands of Mary Winchester."

"The hell is that supposed to mean?" Dean's voice has gone hard.

"Your mother. She's our permanent guest."

"She's your prisoner? Why?"

"Prisoner? Who said anything about prisoner?" Toni's mouth curves, thin and pleased with herself. "No, Mary's joined the team. Even has her own super secret decoder ring."

"You're lying."

"You're right. There is no ring." A small, cold laugh. "Oh, boys and their mums. See, you see her as Mummy. We see her as one of our best killers."

"You know," Dean says, "just 'cause she works with Ketch doesn't mean she likes him. Or you."

"Oh, that Oedipal myopia again. And did you really think she was just working with Ketch? All those days and nights?"

"That's enough," Sam says.

"He said it was some of the best sex he'd ever had."

Dean slams on the brakes hard enough that everyone lurches forward. "You wanna rethink that?"

"Fine." Toni doesn't so much as flinch. "He said it was the best sex he'd ever had."

Dean's already reaching back over the seat before Sam gets a hand on his arm.

"Dean. Dean."

Toni makes a small, satisfied sound, like she's won something.

"All right," Sam says, still holding him back.

"Keep it up," Dean mutters, settling back into his seat, jaw tight.

You look at Toni for a long moment, then at Sam. "You know, Sam. She did shoot you in the leg." You look Toni up and down, slow, deliberate. "It wouldn't even kill her."

Sam's mouth twitches, not quite a smile. "Hmm, good point. I'll think about it." He doesn't lower the gun. "Now, what about Mick? Where is he in all of this?"

"Mick?"

"Yes. Mick."

"Oh, Mick's dead."

"He's dead?"

"Quite." Toni says it like she's reading a weather report. "It was determined he was too sentimental for the job. Turns out he was too much like you two, and all the other U.S. hunters. Ergo, soon each and every hunter in this country will join him. Jody Mills, Claire Novak, all your other flannel-wearing, whiskey-swilling friends." She pauses with something almost like relish. "They're dead."

The four of you come down the bunker stairs single file, Dean first, then Toni, Sam right behind her with his gun trained on her back, and you last. 

"So we're clear?" Dean says. "You call Ketch, tell him if he wants to see you alive, he gets his prissy ass over here."

You reach the bottom of the stairs. For a second the room looks empty.

"Interestingly," Ketch says, stepping out from the side, unhurried, "his prissy ass is already here."

Men fall into position around the room as he speaks, guns rising from doorways and behind pillars, one on every side of you.

Sam's gun comes up toward Ketch, fast, and for half a second nobody moves.

"Lady Bevell," Ketch says, pleasant, like he's asking her to pour tea. "Would you mind disarming them?"

Sam's eyes find yours for the briefest second, something sharp and deliberate in the look, a warning dressed up as nothing at all. Get down.

Toni reaches for Sam's gun.

He grabs her arm instead, hard, and in the same motion puts a bullet in the man on his right without so much as looking at him fully.

Dean doesn't even turn. His hand goes to the small of his back, and he draws and fires in one motion, taking the man on his left clean, before even bringing the gun to the front of his body.

You're already moving, dropping low behind the war table, your own gun already in your hand before you've fully processed drawing it. You start to rise, angling for a shot at Ketch yourself.

"Stay down." Sam doesn't even look at you to say it, all his focus on Ketch, but the order lands hard enough that you drop back behind the table without arguing.

Ketch tips his gun toward a side hallway, and the last of his men peels off in that direction, moving fast.

Dean sees him do it. Sam catches Dean's eye and jerks his own gun toward the hall, marking the direction without a word.

Dean's already moving into the same corridor, footsteps fast and quiet. He gets maybe halfway before the hall bends, and he turns the corner gun up, and puts the man down fast.

He doesn't stop. He keeps going, circling back around toward the war room from the library.

Then he's behind Ketch, sliding in, grabbing the gun from his hand and pressing his own against  Ketch's back.

"Get up," Dean says.

"All right, Ketch," Sam says, still holding Toni like a human shield. "How many more guys are in here?"

"Our mom." Dean's voice cracks, just slightly. "Where is she?"

"Don't move."

The voice comes from your right, and you turn to see Mary stepping in from the corridor, gun raised and steady, aimed square at Dean.

"Ah," Ketch says, something almost fond in it. "Speak of the devil."

"Perfect timing, Mom," Sam says.

"Just stay where you are," Mary says.

Ketch starts to bend for his own gun, still lying where it fell when Dean first disarmed him.

"Hey," Dean says, "You heard her."

"I was talking to you." Mary's eyes haven't left Dean once. 

Dean says, "Mom?"

She fires. The shot buries itself in the pillar more than a foot from his head, close enough to feel the spray of stone, clearly never meant to hit him. But it's enough. In the half second everyone flinches, Ketch twists free, grabbing both guns. First, Deans from his hand and then his from the ground. He stands with a gun in each hand. One aimed at each brother. 

"Hey! Ketch, stop!" Sam says.

"I really wouldn't move." Ketch's voice is calm, almost gentle. "She will shoot you."

Mary's gaze cuts to the table. "You. Come out from under there."

There's nothing to do but obey. You rise slowly, hands where she can see them, and she crosses to you first, close enough that you can see nothing behind her eyes at all, and takes your gun from you without a word.

Then she moves to Sam and takes his gun without a word.

"Mummy always was a talented hunter," Toni says, watching Mary work. "Just somewhat confused about obeying orders."

"What did you do to her?" Sam's voice is low, dangerous.

"Lady Bevell cleared up that confusion." Ketch's tone is conversational, easy. "And I suspect she told you the American hunters are a dying breed. Hmm?"

Toni starts to follow as Ketch starts up the stairs.

"Oh." He glances back at her, almost bored. "For heaven's sake, where do you think you're going?"

"Ketch," Tony says.

"Remember at Kendricks, how they taught us we were all expendable?" His eyes don't warm at all. "That wasn't idle chat."

"Mom!" Dean calls. "Look at me." Dean takes a few steps moving toward Mary. 

Mary is already at the top of the stairs, one gun in each hand, still raised, aiming them down at all of you.

"It's us." Dean is pleading now, all the earlier steel gone out of his voice. "Please. What's wrong with you? Mom!"

"Your bunker is an excellent fortress." Ketch surveys the room like he's admiring the architecture. "An even better tomb. So we've rejiggered the locks, we've shut off the water, and once we leave, the pumps that bring in the air shall reverse. Your oxygen should be gone in two days. Maybe three." He smiles, faint and cold. "You dying in here. It's almost poetic, hmm? Come along, Mary."

"Ketch!" Toni's voice cracks with something close to panic.

He doesn't look back. He and Mary go together, and the heavy door slams behind them with a sound that seems to swallow the whole room.

Dean's already moving, taking the stairs two at a time, trying the door then pounding both fists against it. "No!"

The lights go off with only red flashing emergency lights on. After a few seconds, somewhere deep in the walls, something shifts, the sound of air pumps turning on. Going the wrong direction now. 

Thank you to @lelapine on tumblr for the "mouse" nickname idea!

➡️ Read Part 39 - Blaze of Glory - S12 E22 Who We Are

👉Read THIS on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/90095541

If you ❤️ SAM 👉 Read my SPN fanfic: Accidentally a Winchester: A Supernatural Reader Series on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/series/5664826 No use of "Y/N"!

Master List of Fan Fiction: https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/812636749500137472/master-list

List of Sam x Reader Cute Little Fluffs https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/819080920363565056/sam-x-reader-cute-little-fluffs-list

"I need to go somewhere Wednesday and I didn't know if you'd be gone on a hunt by then."

"Where?"

"An appointment."

He tilted his head. "Can you reschedule if we get a job?"

"Probably not. I only got in because someone cancelled. There's usually a long wait."

"What kind of appointment?"

She'd been braced for this. "The important kind."

"Come on."

"A doctor's appointment, Dean."

He sat up a little straighter. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine."

"You're fine, but you have an important appointment with a specialist that you can't reschedule."

"It's a gynecologist." She watched his face cycle through three distinct expressions in about a second and a half. "I didn't think you'd want to hear about it."

"Yeah, no, I don't." He cleared his throat. "You can use the car, but fair warning, it's a manual."

She looked at him.

He looked back.

"...Right," he said. "You don't remember."

"It's not that I don't remember how. It's that I don't remember if I can."

He drummed his fingers once on the table. "Okay. We might not even get a job by then. And if we do, I'll try to sort out something automatic."

"Don't worry about it. If you're gone, I'll figure it out. They have Uber out here, right?"

"What's Uber?"

"Probably not. Cab?"

"Maybe," he said, and he didn't sound convinced.

The next morning, Sam came into the kitchen with his laptop and the kind of expression he got when he'd found something. "I found a job. Probably a day's drive."

Dean looked at Jenny across the table. It was a quick look, apologetic. Sam caught it, glanced between them both.

"What?"

"Nothing," Jenny said, at the same time Dean said, "She's got an appointment tomorrow."

Sam looked at her. "A doctor's appointment? Are you okay?"

She closed her eyes briefly. "I'm fine. Routine."

Sam looked at Dean. "She can take the car."

"It's a manual," Dean said.

Sam looked back at her.

"It's not that I don't remember how," she said, before either of them could ask. "It's that I don't remember if I ever knew how. Don't worry about it. I'll just try. Maybe I'll remember. "

Something in Sam's shoulders dropped, almost imperceptibly. "Dean can take the job. I'll drive you and catch up after if he still needs backup."

"Sam, I don't want to…"

"You don't think I can handle it solo?" Dean said.

"That's not what I meant." She looked at Dean, who was very deliberately looking at his coffee. "I mean, you're both safer with each other. I don't want to be the reason you're down a person."

"Honey," Dean said, without looking up, "I can handle it. Sam's all yours."

Sam was already closing the laptop. "What time's the appointment?"

The drive was about forty minutes through a whole lot of nothing.

Sam kept both hands on the wheel. Jenny had noticed he did that when he was thinking. Some people drummed their fingers, some people got quiet, Sam Winchester put both hands on the wheel and waited until he'd worked something out.

He waited until they were out of the county. "So what's the appointment for? …if you don't mind me asking."

She'd been watching the scrubland go by. "Gynecologist. I didn't think you'd want to talk about it."

"I'm not Dean. I don't mind the subject of women's health."

"Well, my last period was brutal. Like, worse than it should be. So, I went looking online for options and found out there's an IUD that can make them stop, usually completely. No more periods. Which, if you knew what last time was like, you would understand why I made an appointment right away."

Sam was quiet for a second. "I thought IUDs were for birth control."

"They are. But sometimes they use it for period management too, and apparently this one's really good for that. And if it works right, it'll stop PMS too. So." She shrugged. "Seemed worth it. And since I was going in anyway, I figured I'd get checked out. Make sure everything's okay. I don't remember what I was like before, and I don't think I'd be careless, but..."

"Better to know," he said.

"Exactly."

He nodded slowly. "Sounds like a good plan."

"I thought so."

Then, "Good for all of us, really."

She laughed before she could stop herself. He was smiling at the road.

He didn't come in when she checked in. She told him he didn't have to wait, that he could grab coffee, drive around, whatever. He said okay.

When she came back out forty-five minutes later, he was in the waiting room with a two-year-old issue of Field and Stream, still on the first page.

He stood up when he saw her and didn't say anything. He just read her face.

"I'm fine," she said, before he could ask.

He asked anyway, once they were back in the car. How did it go, was she sure she was okay, did they say anything. She told him the insertion had been a lot more painful than she'd expected, but that everything looked fine and the preliminary results were clean. If anything came back different, they'd call.

He was watching the road when she got to the part about the pain.

Something moved through his expression, quick and unguarded, there and gone before he'd decided to put it there. His jaw tightened for just a second. Then he smoothed it out and kept his eyes on the highway, and she looked away and let him have the pretense.

She told herself it didn't mean anything. He'd look like that for anyone. He was just that kind of person.

She was right about one thing: Sam Winchester would not have been glad to hear about anyone's pain. That was simply true of him, some baseline of decency that ran too deep to be a performance. He would have driven anyone to this appointment. He would have sat in that waiting room for anyone, Field and Stream and all.

What Jenny couldn't see, watching the scrubland blur past her window, was that the tightening in his jaw hadn't been a general response. It had been specific. The image of her in that room, in that kind of pain, without anyone there… it had landed somewhere it didn't normally land, and he was still quietly deciding what to do with that.

He hadn't decided anything yet. He wasn't sure he was going to.

She kept looking out the window.

Two weeks in person, she was thinking. Two weeks of hallways and shared coffee and the way he moved through a room, and none of it resembled what she'd watched on a screen. She'd thought she knew him. She was starting to understand that she had known something, a shape, a suggestion, but the actual person kept filling in details the screen had never managed to capture.

He was kind and smart and funny when he wanted to be, and he sat there being all of that without any apparent awareness of what it did to a person standing nearby. She couldn't resent him for it. It wasn't a performance. He wasn't trying to be anything.

He was just like this.

Stop, she told herself. Just stop.

Sam reached over and turned the radio up a little, nothing deliberate about it, just filling the quiet the way you fill quiet when you're comfortable with someone and don't need to talk.

The highway opened up ahead of them, flat and pale under the afternoon sun.

She watched the nothing go by and reminded herself again. He's just like this, she thought. He just is. 

➡️ Chapter 6 - Absolutely Nothing Happened on the Trip

Not In The Script Chapter Master List : https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/822446704695590912/not-in-the-script-master-list

Master List of Fan Fiction: https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/812636749500137472/master-list

List of Sam x Reader Cute Little Fluffs https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/819080920363565056/sam-x-reader-cute-little-fluffs-list

(if you ❤️ SAM):

SAM x Reader Insert Series (No use of "Y/N") Accidentally a Winchester: A Supernatural Reader Series Read on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/series/5664826

"Right," he said.

"It's a research thing."

"Sure it is."

"Dean…"

"No, totally." Dean faced forward, started the engine. "Very logical."

Sam folded himself in beside her.

It took a minute.

On the first attempt his knees were too high, his back crooked against the seat. He shifted. Better, but his shoulder was at a wrong angle. He shifted again, adjusting, the laptop case knocking against the door, and somewhere in the middle of all that repositioning his knee ended up pressed against hers.

He went still.

Settled into it like he'd just found the right configuration.

"Comfortable?" Dean asked, watching in the mirror.

"Fine," Sam said.

Dean faced forward.

Jenny was very aware of the contact. Knee to knee, warm even through denim. She was also very aware that if she shifted two inches to the left there would be no contact at all, and she had absolutely no intention of doing that.

She found a slightly better angle against the seat back.

Her knee stayed exactly where it was.

Sam noticed. He didn't let it show, which took more effort than it should have. He was aware of the contact point, the warmth of it, the fact that she hadn't moved away, and he was doing a very thorough job of not thinking about what that meant.

He opened his laptop and stared at it with great focus.

Dean watched the mirror for exactly three seconds, mouth pressed flat in that way that meant he was enjoying himself enormously, and said nothing, which was somehow worse than if he'd said something.

Dean pulled out of the garage.

The first turn he took normally. The second he took just a little wide, and the shift tipped them both sideways. The contact broke for a second before they resettled.

Jenny adjusted her position. For comfort. Obviously.

Her knee found his again.

Sam cleared his throat.

Dean hummed along to the radio, innocent as anything. He was not innocent. He'd noticed exactly what was happening in his back seat approximately thirty seconds into the drive, and he'd made a series of small, deliberate decisions about it, none of which he planned to acknowledge.

The next stretch of road was straight and smooth and he drove it perfectly, and Jenny almost relaxed, and then he drifted just slightly over a rough patch of asphalt, shifting them again. The contact returned, steadier than before.

Her brain started in. It was cramped. He was tall. It was physics.

Sam's hands had gone still on the keyboard.

A green light ahead. Dean accelerated into it with a touch more enthusiasm than the situation called for. They both rocked back into the seat, knees pressing together before they settled.

"You good up there?" Sam asked.

"Just driving," Dean said.

Another small bump. This one might actually have been the road. The contact broke. The absence was specific and Jenny was not going to think about it.

Sam shifted. His knee found hers again.

Her heart did something she was going to thoroughly ignore.

Outside, streetlights passed. Fascinating. Really doing a great job, those lights.

Dean glanced in the mirror.

His mouth did something that wasn't a smile.

He turned the music up one notch and drove the rest of the way like a man who was absolutely not paying attention to anything happening behind him.

The grocery store sign came into view way too fast.

Dean pulled in and cut the engine.

Nobody moved right away.

"Sometime today," Dean said.

Sam got his door. Jenny got hers. There was a half-second where neither of them moved, each waiting for the other, and then they both went at once, cold air rushing in from both sides.

Nothing happened.

Absolutely nothing.

Dean popped the trunk.

There was a sigil painted on the underside of the trunk lid and foam cutouts shaped like the things that lived in them when they weren't in a grocery store parking lot.

Sam shifted a duffel to make room. In went the bread, the canned stuff, the heavier bags. "Careful with the eggs."

"I know what eggs are," Dean said.

"You put beer on top of bread once."

"It was fine."

"It was not fine."

"The bread was fine."

"The bread was not…" Sam stopped and let it go. The bread argument had a history.

Dean closed the trunk hard enough to mean it. He respected this car. Sam kept the eggs and the bag of apples out, tucking them under his arm.

Jenny took the back seat without discussing it.

Sam hesitated. Then slid in beside her, the eggs and apples settling between and around their feet.

The drive back was quieter. The bags shifted at their feet with every turn.

A pothole. The bag tipped and Sam reached for it the same moment she did, his arm crossing hers in the dark.

They both stopped.

He righted the bag and his knee settled against hers again.

There was a bag of apples between them now, which made it feel more accidental.

Somehow that was worse.

Dean took the next turn a little sharp.

"Hey," Sam said.

"What."

"Eggs."

"I know."

A soft brake and the carton bumped the floor mat. She reached down the same moment he did and her hand found his in the half-dark, one second of contact before they both pulled back like they'd touched something hot.

In that second, Sam's brain did something he hadn't given it permission to do. It noticed the warmth of her hand and filed it away with all the other things he was collecting without meaning to, the weight of her knee against his, the way she'd settled back into position every time the road broke the contact, the fact that she hadn't moved away once.

He was building a case he wasn't going to do anything with.

"Sorry," she told the eggs.

"Yeah," Sam said, lower than a conversation about groceries required.

Dean watched the mirror and turned the music up one notch.

The knee contact stayed. Unannounced. Present the way it had been the whole drive, the way it kept coming back no matter how many times the road broke it.

She shifted to keep the bag from going over again and her knee stayed aligned with his. He didn't say anything about it, and neither did she.

They got to the bunker and Dean cut the engine.

"Don't crush the bread," Sam said.

"Don't exorcise the milk," Dean said, and got out.

Jenny opened her door into cold bunker air.

Nothing happened on the trip.

Absolutely nothing.

➡️ Chapter 7 - Can We Just Pretend It Didn’t Happen?

Not In The Script Chapter Master List : https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/822446704695590912/not-in-the-script-master-list

Master List of Fan Fiction: https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/812636749500137472/master-list

List of Sam x Reader Cute Little Fluffs https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/819080920363565056/sam-x-reader-cute-little-fluffs-list

(if you ❤️ SAM):

SAM x Reader Insert Series (No use of "Y/N") Accidentally a Winchester: A Supernatural Reader Series Read on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/series/5664826

"Just a sec." Her voice came out rougher than she intended, scraped raw.

She swiped at her cheeks, dragged her palms across her eyes, and pulled in breath after breath until her chest stopped shuddering. She smoothed her shirt like that fixed anything, then stood and opened the door.

"Hi," she said.

Dean stood there, swaying just a hair. Not falling-down drunk. Just loose. The good scotch someone had given him after the last hunt still clung to his breath, warm and smoky and dangerous. His hair stuck up in the back like he'd run a hand through it too many times.

She was buzzed too. Not quite drunk, but enough that everything felt too close to the surface.

"Hey," he said, and his voice came out gentler than usual. "Are you okay? I heard…" He trailed off, uncertain, like he hated the part where he admitted he cared. "And Cas usually…" He cut himself off, like saying it made it real. "He got yanked away. Hasn't been around."

Her gaze dropped. Heat crawled up the back of her neck. "Yeah. I just… got a little sad. Probably the alcohol."

His brow furrowed. "Alcohol? You didn't have any scotch."

"I'm a lightweight," she said. "You know that."

"Oh, right." He nodded. "You had the sweet stuff." His frown deepened. "Still. Booze doesn't do that by itself. Something had to… uh…" He gestured vaguely with two fingers, like he was trying to pinch the word out of thin air.

"Trigger it?" she offered.

"Yeah. That." He pointed at her like she'd done him a favor. "Trigger."

She sighed, and once the first word came the rest followed like water through a broken dam.

"It's just… Cas hasn't been here to keep me company at night. And I don't remember anything. I have no past. No anchor. I don't even know what I'm homesick for." Her voice thinned on that, like it hurt to say. "I just feel wrong. Like I don't fit. I'm not a hunter. I'm not a witch. I can't even cast a spell or be touched by an angel."

A bitter laugh slipped out. "Roma Downey couldn't even save me."

Despite himself, Dean snorted. It was quick, but it was real.

"Hey. You're good for us. This place needed a… fem-in-in…" He grimaced, wrestling the word like it was a live snake. "The lady touch."

She almost smiled, but it didn't stick.

"I just feel lost," she said quietly. "And without Cas, nights feel empty and a little scary. I don't belong here. I'm just… a burden."

His expression changed. He looked at her like she wasn't a problem to solve. Just a person.

"No." The word landed firm. "No. We like having you here." He hesitated like the next part cost him. "We like… you."

He cleared his throat and gestured at nothing, trying to hide the softness with motion. "And you help with the…" He waved vaguely. "The thing."

He stepped forward. "Come here."

His arms folded around her, loose, careful, solid, an embrace that said I've got you without needing to put it into words. His flannel rubbed against her cheek. His hand brushed once between her shoulder blades like he was anchoring her to the planet.

"It doesn't matter who you were," he murmured near her ear. "You're one of us now."

The words settled somewhere deep in her chest, warm and heavy in the best way.

She pulled back slightly to catch her breath and stopped.

Their faces hovered inches apart. His eyes were warm, searching, closer than they should have been. She could feel his breath against her lips.

"Thanks," she whispered.

God. He was unfairly good-looking.

His hands came up to frame her face, rough palms careful against her skin. He tilted her head down and pressed a kiss to her forehead. It was soft, protective, achingly tender.

When he started to pull away, something in her panicked at the space opening up.

She tipped her chin up and kissed him.

It took a second for him to process what was happening.

Then it clicked.

He kissed her back.

Breaths caught. Hearts hammered. His hands moved fast and sure and seeking like instinct then slowed for half a beat, checking her face for a stop sign.

She gave him none.

Clothes became obstacles. The room shrank down to warmth and mouths and the desperate relief of being held by someone real. They ended up tangled together on the bed, giving in to everything they shouldn't.

Sleep, or unconsciousness, or some hazy blend of both, claimed her fast.

Hours later, Dean jerked awake.

He sat up too fast, like his body remembered rules his brain had forgotten. The bunker was silent around them. His regret felt loud in it.

She stirred beside him, still half-buried in sleep.

He was already reaching for his clothes, pulling them on with fumbling urgency. "Uh. I should go."

She managed a mumbled, "Mmmm."

And dropped immediately back into darkness.

Morning arrived with a soft knock.

She threw on yesterday's clothes and pulled the door open.

Dean winced at the swing of it. It didn't even creak, but he was clearly hungover, miserable, regretting every choice that had led him here. His eyes looked too bright in his too-pale face.

"Hey," he said carefully, like he was testing the temperature of the water.

She took in his bloodshot eyes. "You look… not great."

"I'm not." He swallowed hard. "I wanted to talk. About last night."

She stepped aside to let him in. They both settled on the edge of the bed with a cautious inch of space between them.

"Do you even remember last night?" she asked, trying for teasing.

"Some of it." His gaze held hers, steady and serious.

Her smile faded. "Oh. Right."

"I didn't mean to…"

"It's okay," she cut in, quick, because she could feel him gearing up to bolt. "You don't have to."

He exhaled slowly, gathering himself. "I like you. But… I do casual. I don't do relationships."

"I know."

"And I usually don't see women again after."

"Yeah. I know." She covered his hand with hers. "I don't want to wreck a good…" She searched for the word and came up short, so she grabbed the closest one. "…friendship."

She paused. "Can we just pretend it didn't happen?"

Relief washed over him like dawn breaking. He grinned. Dean Winchester's escape-hatch smile. "Lady, I have no idea what you're talking about."

She smiled back. "Me neither."

"I don't remember anything," she said, and then realized what that sounded like and added quickly, "Huh …at all." The words came out sad anyway, carrying more weight than she'd meant them to.

He stood, headed for the door, then turned back. "Hey." A hesitation. A rare crack in his armor. "We're… good. Okay? Friends."

"Yeah," she said. "We are."

"Besides," he said, grabbing for humor like it was a railing, "you need a relationship kind of guy."

She nodded, because that was true and safe and easy to agree with.

He pointed down the hall. "A guy like Sam."

She let the idea land, then laughed, genuinely, the surprise of it loosening something in her chest. "Yeah, I'm not his type. Plus, he's way out of my league."

"And I'm…?"

"Also out of my league," she shot back, "but you're not very… selective."

Dean scoffed like he was offended and proud at the same time. "Oh, I am. I just happen to run across a lot of really hot women."

She chuckled and shook her head.

He opened the door, then paused. The humor dropped off his face, just for a second, like he was deciding whether to say something true.

"Look, the truth is…" He stopped. Reconsidered. Settled on a version that was easier to walk away from. "You're out of his league. And he knows it. That's why he…"

He stopped again. Shook his head once.

Dean knew exactly what he'd almost said. He knew what he'd seen in his brother's face over the past weeks. The way Sam's attention caught on her without quite meaning to, the way he talked himself back from things before they started, the way he looked at her when she wasn't looking back. He knew what that was. He'd watched Sam do it his whole life.

He also knew it wasn't his to say.

"Never mind." He reached for the door handle. "I'm going to go get some coffee. Maybe some hair of the dog."

He left.

She sat in the quiet he'd left behind.

A little sad from the rejection, yes, but it was simple, uncomplicated. The kind that didn't have claws. She hadn't wanted more from Dean, not really. She'd wanted to not be alone in the dark, and he'd been there, and it had happened, and now it was over and they were fine. That was the whole of it.

The relief was real, and she was grateful for it. No drama. No wreckage. Just two people who'd made a mistake in the moment and both quietly agreed to forget.

As for Sam, she let the thought finish crossing her mind and then let it go. He was kind, and smart, and she wasn't going to pretend she didn't notice him. But noticing someone and believing something was possible were two entirely different things. He was Sam Winchester. She was a woman from another universe and didn't even remember her last name.

She knew which direction that math went.

She got up, caught her reflection in the mirror long enough to smooth her hair down, and went to find coffee

➡️ Chapter 8 - What do You Do? (COMING SOON ETA 8/13/26)

Not In The Script Chapter Master List : https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/822446704695590912/not-in-the-script-master-list

Master List of Fan Fiction: https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/812636749500137472/master-list

List of Sam x Reader Cute Little Fluffs https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/819080920363565056/sam-x-reader-cute-little-fluffs-list

(if you ❤️ SAM):

SAM x Reader Insert Series (No use of "Y/N") Accidentally a Winchester: A Supernatural Reader Series Read on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/series/5664826

A car that you don't recognize rolls up. Mick gets out first, clasps his hands behind his back, and Renny falls into step beside him as they cross toward you.

"I thought you'd be coming alone," Sam says.

"I thought we'd gotten past our trust issues." Mick nods at the man beside him.

Mick introduces Renny Rawlings, calling him the "new man." Sam introduces you and Eileen, just your names, nothing more.

Renny's eyes land on you first. "Ah, yes. A civilian, until recently. Sam's companion."

"British Men of Letters and their brilliant detective work," you mutter, mostly to yourself.

Renny has already turned his attention to Eileen before you finished speaking. "Ah. The banshee girl. We have a file." A pause, assessing. "From what Mick tells me, none of you have any formal training. Fascinating. I was top of my class at Kendricks."

"No one cares," Eileen says, flat.

You catch Eileen's eye. Something close to a smile moves through her expression before she looks away.

Mick clears his throat. "I, uh, brought the Colt just like you asked. But it's gotta go back to HQ."

"Gee, Mick," Sam says. "I thought we'd gotten past the trust issues."

Mick doesn't answer that one.

It's night by the time the Impala pulls in with Dean and Kelly inside. Dean's out first, rounding the hood.

"This everyone?" he asks.

"Yeah," Sam says. "Still no word from Cas."

"Right. Great," Dean says.

Dean points to Renny. "Who's this?"

"He's with Mick."

"I'm Renny Rawlings. Graduated Kendricks top of my—"

"Right. I don't care." Dean opens the car door. "Come on."

"Don't," Kelly says.

"Okay." Dean's hands come up, palms out, the universal gesture of a man backing off a loaded situation.

Kelly gets out and walks around to stand in front of the car. Dean walks close beside her.

"Kelly," Sam says. "Listen, we all know you're in a really difficult situation, and we just want to help."

"You call this helping?"

"Look," Dean says. "Kelly, that kid — it's Lucifer's."

"Yeah, I know," she says. "You think I wanted this to happen?" Her voice breaks. "He used me. But I love this child."

"You will mean absolutely nothing to that child," Mick says. "That child will kill us all."

"That's not happening," Sam says. "We're going to figure something out. We will—"

Renny reaches for his gun. "This is absurd."

"Don't," Dean says, stepping forward to put himself between Renny and Kelly.

A strong wind picks up.

"She's here," Kelly says.

Guns come up around you, all at once, a ragged chorus of safeties clicking off. Yours included, in your hand before you've fully decided to draw it, some reflex taking over faster than thought.

Lightning cuts the sky, and the air goes electric a half second before the woman is simply there, like she'd always been standing in that spot and you'd all just failed to notice.

"Hey," Dagon says, and raises her hand in the air.

The force of it passes through you the way it always does, weather moving through a place that isn't there to stop it. You don't feel wind. You don't feel anything. But around you, everyone else is in the air at once. Sam skids into a wall of corrugated metal siding, the sound of it rattling out sharp and hollow. Renny goes sailing into the open door of a gutted truck cab, disappearing half inside it with a crunch. Mick, Dean, and Eileen all hit the dirt hard, rolling away.

For a second you're the only one standing.

You fire at Dagon, once, twice, and Dagon doesn't so much as blink.

She looks at you. Just for a second, something flickers behind her eyes, a small recalculation, like she's noticed a detail that doesn't belong in the picture and filed it away without deciding yet if it matters.

Then she's moving again, unhurried, toward Kelly, like she's got all the time in the world and every reason to believe she does.

Dean and Mick are up now, weapons out, adding their own useless rounds to yours. She doesn't slow.

She's a few steps in when both her hands snap up, fast, no warning at all, and Dean and Mick are gone again, thrown hard, guns skittering off into the dark.

That's when you see the Colt. Sam dropped it when he went down, and it's lying a few feet off. Everyone else is still on the ground, scrambling, disoriented. You're the only one standing, the only one who can move.

You let your own gun drop and you run.

You're moving faster than you're thinking, and your foot catches on something. You stumble hard enough that your palm scrapes the ground it before you get yourself back upright. You don't stop. You scoop the Colt up in the same motion, already turning, already bringing it up.

Dagon has Kelly's hand. She's already moving.

You have her in your sights and your finger doesn't move.

Kelly is right there, and Dagon is moving. For one full second you're doing the math instead of pulling the trigger, because if you're wrong about the aim or the timing, you don't kill a Prince of Hell, you kill the pregnant woman you're supposed to be saving.

You fire.

Dagon is gone before the bullet arrives, the air where she stood already empty, Kelly gone with her. A second sooner and it would have found her instead.

The bullet keeps going.

Renny's back on his feet behind where she'd been standing, gun raised, you never saw him get up. The shot takes him in the chest. For a second he just stands there, staring at nothing, like he hasn't caught up to what's happened yet. Then his knees buckle and he goes down onto them, blood welling up and spilling from his mouth, and he pitches forward into the gravel and doesn't move again.

The junkyard gets very quiet.

Mick is crouched next to Renny's body when the world comes back into focus.

You're walking before you've decided to, the Colt still heavy and stupid in your hand.

"I didn't…" Your voice comes out wrong, too thin. "I didn't mean to. I was shooting at Dagon and…"

Sam catches up to you in a couple of steps, his hand landing on your shoulder. You turn.

"No, no. Wait up." His voice is steady, low, meant only for you. "It was an accident. It's all right."

Mick stands. His gun comes up, level, pointed at you.

Dean and Sam are already there, stepped in close, hands raised between you and the barrel like that alone might stop a bullet.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa." Dean's voice cracks across the yard. "What are you doing?"

"Hey!" Sam, right on top of him.

"She killed a Man of Letters." Mick's voice is flat, mechanical, like he's reading it off something. "She has to die."

"It was an accident!" Sam says.

"It doesn't matter. The Code."

"No." Dean's jaw is tight. "Hey, screw the Code."

"Don't make this harder than it already is."

"Mick, you don't have to do this." Dean's gun comes up, level with Mick's chest.

"Yes, I do."

Your voice comes out smaller than you mean it to. "Please don't."

Something in Mick's face changes. His eyes have gone somewhere else. Somewhere that isn't this junkyard.

Please. Please don't.

A boy's voice, or the memory of one, moving behind his face like weather under ice.

The Code demands otherwise.

Please. Please!

His eyes close. Whatever he's seeing, it isn't any of you anymore.

"Mick. Mick, listen to me." Sam takes a step forward, then another, slow, his voice pitched low and careful. "Mick, look, I-I know you guys h-have this Men of Letters Code you blindly answer to, but..." His puts his hand over Dean's, pushing the gun down. "look, you don't have to do that, Mick. You're better than that. You only have to answer to yourself. You only have to do what you know is right. You only have to answer to your own code."

The gun doesn't move for a long moment.

Then Mick lets out a breath and lowers it. "Just go," he says, and his voice has come back from wherever it went, tired now, hollowed out.

"Yeah," Sam says. He takes a couple of steps backward, still watching Mick, before he finally turns.

You all get into the Impala.

The drive back is quiet. Nobody puts music on.

You walk into the bunker and down the stairs into the war room. Dean's the one who breaks first, glancing back at you.

"You okay?"

You shake your head. You don't trust your voice yet, and you're staring at nothing in particular, some fixed point past his shoulder that isn't really there.

You go and sit down on the couch. Nobody says anything about it. Sam sits right next to you, close enough that his leg presses against yours, and his arm comes around your shoulders without either of you deciding it should. Dean and Eileen pull chairs over and sit facing you.

"I hesitated." Your voice comes out thin. "I was worried about Kelly. They were moving, and I was worried that…" You stop. Start again. "One second earlier and…"

Your eyes fill before you can finish the sentence.

He was a human. Your voice breaks. "He…"

You go quiet mid-sentence.

It comes without warning, the way it always does, a flicker rather than a memory, more felt than seen. This already happened. Not to you.

"Oh."

Sam's hand goes still on your shoulder. Dean's watching your face like he's trying to read something off it before you say it out loud, and something in both their expressions shifts at once, some shared recognition passing between them without a word. They know that look. They've seen it before, the specific stillness that means something's arrived that you can't unknow.

"What?" Sam says.

You glance at Eileen. She's watching you too, open, worried, waiting, and there is no version of the next sentence that doesn't involve either lying to her or handing her something she never asked to carry.

Sam's jaw tightens, almost nothing, but you catch it. He's already understood. Not what, not yet, but that whatever it is, it isn't for right now.

"Nothing," you say, and it comes out steadier than you feel. "It was a mistake. I still feel guilty. But I think... maybe it was meant to happen. I still can't stop feeling awful about it, though."

It's not a real answer and you know it. Sam's eyes stay on you a beat too long, that look he gets when he knows there's more and knows better than to ask for it here. Dean doesn't say anything at all, which is its own kind of question.

Eileen doesn't push. She just reaches over and squeezes your hand once, like she understands grief even when she doesn't understand its shape.

You're on your feet before you've fully decided to be. "I think I need to lie down."

Nobody questions it. Eileen offers a small, tired smile, the kind that says I get it without needing more than that.

Sam's up a minute after you. "I'm going to check on her," he says, to Dean more than Eileen, already moving.

Dean just nods, watching the two of you go.

You're sitting on the bed. Sam opens the door a little, a questioning look on his face, giving you time to tell him you don't want to talk right now, just in case. He still always gives you that choice, even though you've never taken it.

"Hey," he says gently.

"Hey," you say, and wave him in. He comes and sits next to you.

"You remembered something." It's not a question.

"Yeah… It was Eileen. She made the mistake. He was going to get shot either way. She felt so guilty about it."

"It's a normal reaction. Does it make you feel any better that without you, it would've happened anyway?"

"A little." You laugh, short and humorless. "Which feels like a terrible thing to say out loud. A human being is still dead either way. I didn't stop anything. I just... redirected whose fault it was. I still feel bad when I don't help. Like, I should've been able to stop it. I mean, what's the point of tonight if I couldn't even do the one thing I might've actually been useful for."

"Hey. You make a big difference. It's just, there are some things that are meant to be. And you always say it works out in the show, so nothing changing here is ultimately a good thing."

"Yeah. I just... I still feel sick about it. Killing a human. Not even some psycho killer, or self-defense. It's hard. I don't think the guilt will ever completely go away."

"Think about this. If it had been Eileen, or anyone else, like me or Dean, what would you think about it then? What would you say? In fact, what did you think about it when it was Eileen?"

You chuckle a little. "Yeah. I guess I might've told the screen it was just an accident and she shouldn't feel guilty about it."

You look Sam in the eyes. "Thanks for giving me a new perspective. Or I guess... an old one."

You lean in and kiss him, slow, and his arms come around you before you've even finished the motion, pulling you in until there's no space left between the two of you at all. When the kiss ends you don't pull back, just turn your face into his shoulder, and he holds on, one hand moving slow against your back, not letting go. Neither of you says anything for a long while. You don't need to. This is the part that actually helps.

➡️ Read Part 38: A Date from Hell(hound) - S12 E21 Something About Mary Rewrite

👉 Read my SPN fanfic (if you ❤️ SAM): Accidentally a Winchester: A Supernatural Reader Series on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/series/5664826 No use of "Y/N"!

👉Read THIS on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/89447846

Master List of Fan Fiction: https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/812636749500137472/master-list

List of Sam x Reader Cute Little Fluffs https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/819080920363565056/sam-x-reader-cute-little-fluffs-list

"You tell me." Metal scraped. A grunt. "You've been different since she got here."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Dean rolled back out and leveled Sam with a look.

"Really? The way you look at her when she's reading? That's nothing?"

Sam dragged a hand through his hair. "Dean, she's been here three days."

"Yeah." Dean tossed the rag onto the bench, stood, brushed his hands off on his jeans. "And you're already acting like a moron."

"It's not like that."

Dean snorted. "You've been mooning over her for three days. Dude, you are so full of it."

Sam grabbed a wrench and turned it in his hands like it was the only thing keeping him in the room.

Dean leaned back against the Impala. His tone shifted. Not softer. Just real. "Look. She's hot and smart. Of course you have a thing for her, Sammy. But this is like… a real thing."

Sam kept his eyes on the wrench. "You're seeing things."

"Am I?" Dean crossed his arms. "You keep finding excuses to be around her. You sound different when you talk to her."

Sam's throat moved. He swallowed. "She's out of my league, Dean. Way out."

Dean looked briefly annoyed, like Sam's brain worked exactly the way he expected and he still didn't love being right about it.

"Yeah," Dean said. "But that's not the point."

Sam finally looked up.

Dean stepped closer. "The point is you're already trying to kill it."

"Because it's a bad idea." Sam's voice came out rough. "She just got here. She doesn't need me complicating things. I mean my history? My baggage? A hunter?"

"Come on, Sam."

"You know what happens to people who get close to us."

Dean went quiet. Then he nodded once, like he hated that Sam was right.

"I'm just saying," he said after a moment. "She knows what we do and she didn't run. She can handle the life. That's huge."

Sam's fingers tightened on the wrench. He set it down too carefully. "Dean, she's not interested."

Dean let out a short laugh. "You're kidding, right? Sam, she looks at you the same way you look at her." He shook his head. "Everyone sees it. Except apparently you two geniuses."

"She doesn't…"

"Yeah," Dean cut in. "She does."

Dean picked up a tool and studied it like it suddenly mattered, giving Sam space without saying he was. "Hey. If you wanna keep pretending you're not into her, that's your call. Just seems like a waste of time to me."

Sam stood still, like he was waiting for the floor to stop moving. "Alright, maybe I am," he said quietly.

Dean looked up. Something warm crossed his face, then it was gone.

"I know."

He clapped Sam on the shoulder. Firm. Grounding. Then he slid back under the Impala. Metal clinked again, like that was all there was to it.

Sam stared at the toolbox for a moment, then put the wrench back.

Dean's voice drifted out, louder than it needed to be. "And for the record? Yeah, she could do better. Like… so much better."

Sam almost smiled at that. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to.

It became a routine faster than either of them said out loud. The next night, she didn't ask, she just walked into the corridor and found Cas already waiting there, like he'd known she'd come. The night after that, neither of them bothered pretending it was a question anymore. 

By the fifth morning, they stepped out of her room together and walked straight into Dean.

Dean's eyes went wide.

Then his face split into a grin that had nothing subtle about it.

"Oh! Cas!"

He punched Cas in the arm, delighted. This was how Dean expressed pride when he refused to say it out loud.

"Way to go, buddy."

Heat flooded Jenny's face so fast it was basically combustion.

"Dean," she said, her voice dropping to a hiss. "He was just keeping me company so I could fall asleep. It's comforting. He just sits there so I don't feel so lonely and weird. I'm still adjusting."

Dean's grin didn't budge. His eyebrows climbed.

"You just sit there," he repeated. "Yeah. Okay."

He punched Cas in the arm again. Another attaboy. Jenny considered the structural integrity of the bunker floor and whether it could open up on request.

"Hey, if it helps you sleep, it's all good."

"Ugh." She rolled her eyes.

Castiel, for his part, looked at Dean with the expression he used when Dean was being Dean and Castiel had accepted that no useful response existed.

Dean, unfortunately, had never met a situation he couldn't make worse with one eyebrow wiggle.

He delivered it now, with the precision he had practiced since childhood.

Then he walked away down the hall, coffee mug in hand, extremely pleased with himself.

She told herself he was kidding. She was mostly sure he was kidding.

➡️ Chapter 5 - He Just Is

Not In The Script Chapter Master List : https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/822446704695590912/not-in-the-script-master-list

Master List of Fan Fiction: https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/812636749500137472/master-list

List of Sam x Reader Cute Little Fluffs https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/819080920363565056/sam-x-reader-cute-little-fluffs-list

(if you ❤️ SAM):

SAM x Reader Insert Series (No use of "Y/N") Accidentally a Winchester: A Supernatural Reader Series Read on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/series/5664826

SAM x Original Female Character Not In The Script Read on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/88578816/ Series Master List on tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/822446704695590912/not-in-the-script-master-list

The room felt too big and too empty. She felt like an ant inside a steel drum, and any sound she made would echo through the bunker and announce her to whatever lived in the dark parts of her own head.

The days crashed down on her again. The bunker. The guns. The monsters. The fact that she might be in an entirely different universe. The fact that she couldn't know for certain she wasn't hallucinating all of it.

Could it actually be real?

She reached for proof the way she'd been reaching for it all day. Sam's warm hand, Dean's calluses, Cas's cool fingers. The solidity of them.

It helped.

Then it didn't.

She exhaled. She was done fighting it, so she threw back the covers.

The hallway felt different at night. It was quieter and heavier. Shadows sat in corners like they owned the place and weren't moving on anyone's account. The lights were dimmed, everything tinted sickly and old.

Her brain offered her a menu of worst-case scenarios, the way it always did when she gave it too much silence to work with.

What if I wake up? What if I don't? What if I wake up somewhere else?

And then the one that hit hardest, the one she kept circling back to: What if I wake up and my real life is horrible? What if my brain built this whole thing to survive it?

She walked anyway, half-aimless, half-hoping the bunker had something like an exit sign.

She turned a corner and nearly walked into Castiel.

He was standing perfectly still in the corridor, which she was going to have to get used to. He didn't fidget to prove he was present, the way humans did. He just occupied space, complete and unbothered.

"Oh… Cas. Hi." She swallowed. "Right. Angels don't sleep."

"That's correct."

Of course he sounded calm. Cas was built for eternity. She was built for naps and snacks and anxiety.

"Do you ever wish you could?" she asked. "Do you miss it? I mean from when you were human?"

He tilted his head, considering her with a focused attention that made her feel like a bug under glass. She was starting to understand that this was just how he looked at things he found interesting.

"It was always strange," he said. "Sometimes it was good. Sometimes it was a waste of time. Sometimes it was a terrible experience." He paused. "I didn't enjoy nightmares."

She leaned her shoulder against the wall, grateful for something solid. For a voice that wasn't her own thoughts.

"Do you ever get bored at night when everyone else is sleeping?"

"I've existed for billions of years." Another pause. "No. Angels don't often get bored. We just… exist."

"Weird," she muttered. "I get bored if I'm not thinking about or doing more than one thing at a time."

Castiel studied her. She had the strange impression he was cataloging her, adding this detail to a file he'd been building since she arrived, along with that small light inside her that didn't match anything in his existing categories.

"Why are you awake?" he asked. "Do you need anything? Can I help?"

She opened her mouth and realized she didn't know how to say it without sounding ridiculous.

"It's kind of overwhelming," she managed. "My brain keeps going where it shouldn't. Then I worry about not sleeping, and that makes it worse. It turns into a spiral."

"Oh." He sounded genuinely regretful, understated about it the same as he was about most things. "I'm not sure I can help with that. Do you want to talk about it?"

"Not really." She hesitated. "Um, Cas? You're not doing anything important right now, right?"

"I'm not what you'd call busy."

"Well…" She swallowed. She felt ridiculous. She asked anyway, because the alternative was going back to that room alone. "I feel unmoored. Like I'm floating in the ocean with no anchor."

Cas's brow furrowed. "Do you need me to moor you? I'm not sure how."

A laugh escaped her, sharp with surprise, echoing down the empty hall in a way that felt almost wrong, like laughter didn't belong down here at this hour.

"No, thanks." She wiped at her face, still half-laughing. "I don't go for being tied up."

"Okay."

He accepted that, completely without commentary.

She forced herself to finish the actual ask. "I was wondering if maybe you could just… keep me company in my room for a little while." Her voice dropped. "Like, just be there until I fall asleep. It would be… comforting."

Castiel watched her for a moment. She'd expected the pause to be awkward. It wasn't, quite. He wasn't deliberating. He was simply processing, the way he processed everything, with the same unhurried attention he gave to things that mattered and things that didn't.

He didn't find the request strange, exactly. She was having difficulty adjusting. That was observable and real. He understood the mechanics of human comfort imperfectly but well enough to understand that presence was part of it. That being alone in an unfamiliar place made the unfamiliar worse.

And she was, he had to admit, an interesting case. Whatever that small light inside her was, whatever she was, he found himself curious in a way that didn't resolve into existing categories. He wasn't sure yet what that meant.

"You want me to be there in your room?"

"Um, yeah. Is that stupid? You don't have to do anything. You could bring a book if you're…" She stopped. "Oh. Right."

"Now?"

"Yeah. If that's okay."

"That's okay," he said. Simple. Certain.

They walked back to her room together, their footsteps echoing in stereo down the corridor.

Inside, Castiel stopped just past the doorway. He stood there, still and silent, like a guard posted at the entrance, too alert for a bedroom.

Jenny climbed into bed and pulled the covers up.

He stayed upright.

It was comforting and awkward at the same time.

"Do you want to come sit here?" she asked, patting the edge of the bed. "You don't have to stand there all night."

"Okay."

He sat on the very edge of the mattress, posture rigid, hands planted on his knees. He looked profoundly uncomfortable, like he understood the concept of sitting but hadn't fully committed to it.

She couldn't help it. She chuckled.

"Here." She grabbed an extra pillow and wedged it against the headboard. "Back here." She patted it. Then drew her hand down toward the foot of the bed. "Legs here."

Cas obediently scooted back, stretched his legs out, and leaned against the pillow. He still looked stiff, but at least he wasn't perched like a statue that might topple.

She studied him. "You're okay? You're comfortable?"

"I'm fine."

She settled down beside him. Her body loosened like it had been holding itself in a fist all day. The room didn't feel so huge with him in it. The silence didn't press as hard when there was another presence sharing it, steady, watchful, real.

"Thanks," she whispered, already drifting.

"You're welcome."

Sleep took her fast.

Castiel didn't mind the quiet. He never did. He listened to her breathing even out. He watched the tension leave her face in degrees, the small crease between her brows smoothing, her hands uncurling from the sheets. Her hair had come loose from its tie sometime in the last hour, dark curls spread across the pillow and over his knee, and he found himself, absurdly, cataloging that too.

He could leave now. That would be the logical conclusion of the task. She was asleep. The immediate problem was resolved.

He didn't leave.

He wasn't entirely sure why, at first. Then he considered it with the same attention he'd given her question about boredom. She might wake again. The fear that had driven her out of bed hadn't gone anywhere. It had only quieted. If she surfaced in the dark and found herself alone, the spiral she'd described would start again.

It was practical. That was sufficient reason.

He also found, sitting here in the quiet of her breathing and the bunker's low hum, that he wasn't in a hurry to go anywhere.

She woke a couple of hours later with the panicked disorientation of someone who'd forgotten, for a moment, where they were.

Her eyes snapped to him immediately.

"Oh." The word came out small, the panic deflating on contact. "You're still here."

Relief moved through her face so plainly that it was almost difficult to look at.

"Cas…" she started.

She didn't finish. She turned onto her side, shifted closer, and eased her head into his lap with a trust so uncomplicated it caught him briefly off guard. Like it was the most natural thing. Like she'd decided he was safe and that was the end of the deliberation.

He sat very still.

After a moment, he looked down at her. She was already going under again, her breathing slowing, her expression smoothing out. Whatever the spiral had been doing to her, it had stopped.

He found this, on reflection, satisfactory.

He stayed until morning.

➡️ Chapter 4 - The Garage

Not In The Script Chapter Master List : https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/822446704695590912/not-in-the-script-master-list

Master List of Fan Fiction: https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/812636749500137472/master-list

List of Sam x Reader Cute Little Fluffs https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/819080920363565056/sam-x-reader-cute-little-fluffs-list

(if you ❤️ SAM):

SAM x Reader Insert Series (No use of "Y/N") Accidentally a Winchester: A Supernatural Reader Series Read on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/series/5664826

SAM x Original Female Character Not In The Script Read on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/88578816/ Series Master List on tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/822446704695590912/not-in-the-script-master-list

Stone silence. Heavy air. A quiet that pressed on your ears until they ached. The lights hummed overhead, turning everything the color of old paper. The place smelled like leather and dust, with a metallic bite underneath that reminded you the room was built to outlast the world.

Jenny moved slow along the shelves. Her footsteps whispered on clean concrete, too small for a place that felt this serious.

Titles glared back from cracked spines. The lettering looked punched in by angry monks with a grudge against legibility. Some of the text wasn't even English. Latin, Greek, symbols that made her eyes sting if she stared too long. Like her brain knew it wasn't supposed to understand and was punishing her for trying.

She pulled one free. It stuck for a beat, like it wanted to argue. She flipped through pages that felt too thick to be real. Some felt warm. Some felt cold.

She slid it back like it might hiss.

The table in the middle was buried under stacks. On top. On the floor. Neat piles. Messy piles. All of them looked like they reproduced when nobody watched. 

"There's… a lot of these," she said, because understatement felt safer than admitting this is terrifying.

Dean leaned against the table with a mug of coffee. Flannel. Jeans. Casual, like he wasn't standing in a museum of cursed paper and forbidden knowledge. The coffee smell cut through the dust. It was the only normal thing in the room.

She stared at the stacks again. "You search through each one every time you research something?"

Dean didn't blink. He sipped his coffee. "Well, yeah. That's how research works."

His tone said this should be obvious. Like she'd just asked if water was wet.

She nodded like she got it.

She didn't.

These books felt too old to be harmless. The bunker suddenly felt less like a sanctuary and more like a prison for things that shouldn't exist, except the door was open and she was the one who'd wandered in.

She swallowed. "I appreciate you letting me stay here. I have nowhere else to go."

Saying it out loud made it real. Made her feel small.

Sam looked up from his laptop at the far end of the table. The screen painted his face blue-white. His eyes caught hers and didn't let go. He heard the words under the words. Thank you, and please don't throw me out.

She pushed on, because she meant it and because she refused to be dead weight.

"I want to help," she added. "I mean it. I want to actually help."

Sam's voice stayed warm. "Okay?"

She ran her fingers lightly over a row of books near her. The spines varied. There were leather, cloth, cracked corners, titles worn down to ghosts. The row felt endless.

"What if we scan all this and make a searchable database?"

Dean blinked once, slow, like his brain buffered. "You want to… computer the books?"

"Yes."

She expected pushback. A lecture about how dangerous everything was. Instead Dean looked like he was trying to picture the bunker with Wi-Fi and was getting mad about it on principle.

Sam sat up straighter. His eyes brightened like she'd just handed him a puzzle.

"We'd need a scanner," she said, warmed by the fact that this was a problem she understood. "Maybe more than one. And OCR software."

"Except this isn't normal text," Sam cut in, already seeing the mess. "And the illustrations are important."

He was right. The diagrams. The sigils. The margins full of notes in a dozen different hands, across centuries. That was the point. The context was half the meaning.

"It would have to be custom," she said. "Fancy scripts. Different languages. Symbols. Illustrations."

"Some of it isn't even human," Sam added, like that was a normal sentence to say in a library.

Dean turned toward Sam. "What's O-C-R?"

"Optical Character Recognition," Sam said, patient like he'd said it a thousand times. "Software reads text and turns it into searchable data."

Dean looked at Jenny like the bunker had just dragged in another stray animal. But something fond sat under the exasperation. Like he was annoyed and relieved at the same time, because this was the first thing she'd said that didn't sound like a threat.

"Great," he muttered. "Another nerd."

She grinned. The word landed like a medal, not an insult.

"I'm not a programmer," she said, "but it's doable. I can research scanning equipment. It would have to be flatbed or those handheld ones, or maybe…"

She pointed at Sam's laptop. It glowed bright and modern, one familiar thing in this underground maze.

"Can I?"

Sam didn't hesitate. He slid it toward her.

"It's all yours," he said. "We can get you your own, too."

The casual generosity tightened her throat. Like they'd already made a place for her and nobody asked if she deserved it. Like they'd just decided she was a person to take care of. That simple.

She sat. Her hands landed on the keyboard like they belonged there. Tabs. Search. Notes. The room faded back a step.

Her breathing steadied.

Her brain found the track it liked: solve.

Then her mouth betrayed her.

"Oh yeah… credit cards. Charlie."

Silence dropped like a trap.

Sam froze mid-breath. Dean froze mid-sip. They turned at the same time, both staring at her with the same shocked face.

Dean's voice went careful. Too careful. "You know Charlie?"

Her finger hovered over the trackpad. The cursor blinked like it was judging her.

"Uh… yeah." She swallowed. "I kind of remember her."

Dean's eyes narrowed. "How?"

She frowned, fishing through fog. The memories didn't come like normal memories. They came like a door she didn't know existed cracking open an inch.

"You met her when she worked for…" She stopped. The name half-clicked. "That Leviathan guy. Dick… Something."

Dean's eyes narrowed. "Roman."

"Right," she said fast, relieved and embarrassed at the same time. "Dick Roman."

Dean exhaled through his nose like: of course she knows that.

Sam's face shifted. That landed hard. Real. Specific. Not trivia, history. The kind you didn't talk about at the table.

"So you do remember some things," he said quietly.

"I just… remembered that I remember," she muttered.

It sounded ridiculous. It was still true.

Dean rubbed his face like he could feel the headache forming. "That is… so weird."

Sam's voice went quieter. "It's weird to think there's a world where people watch us."

She wrinkled her nose. "Yeah. It's creepy when you say it like that." She paused. "But it's not the whole world. It has a cult following, not, like… the highest ratings ever."

She realized how stupid that sounded as she said it, like the universe was ending and she was defending Nielsen numbers.

Still, Sam's mouth twitched like he almost smiled.

She stared at nothing, thinking so hard it almost hurt. Multiverse theory. Fictional realities. Parallel branches. The idea that a story could be real somewhere else. The idea that she was the glitch in the system.

"Since I wasn't part of the story," she said slowly, "this might be a different branch. A different…"

Sam nodded, then ruined her peace with one sentence.

"Unless there's one where you're part of it," he said, "and people watch that."

She stared at him. Her brain tried to fold in on itself. "You're right." Her eyes went wide.

She planted her feet hard on the floor like she could stomp the thought flat. "But I choose not to believe that."

Sam's mouth twitched into a small smile. "Good plan."

Dean threw up both hands in full surrender, coffee mug and all. "What the hell are you eggheads talking about?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Nope. Don't answer that."

She turned back to the laptop and started clicking. Searching. Opening tabs. Making notes. Sliding into the familiar rhythm of research.

The digital kind.

Where things made sense.

Where nothing tried to eat your soul.

She surfaced slowly, the way you surface from deep water, awareness arriving before anything else did.

Her eyes burned. Her neck ached from hunching. Her fingers felt cramped in a way that told her she hadn't moved in a while.

A sandwich sat on a plate near her elbow. Untouched. A glass of water sweated beside it, condensation making a small dark ring on the table. Someone had brought it. Someone had left it quietly, deliberately, while trying not to pull her out of whatever she was doing.

That small kindness hit her late, the way delayed pain does.

She looked up.

The room was too still. The kind of still that made you suddenly aware you were alone underground with people you'd met yesterday, in a place that was real when it shouldn't be.

"Guys?" Her voice came out rough, like she hadn't used it in hours.

Boots hit concrete.

Sam and Dean appeared in the doorway like she'd summoned them. Sam first, always the one who checked. Dean behind him like backup, his eyes going straight to her face, checking if she was about to cry again.

He jerked his chin at her. "Oh. You're back."

She looked at him, confused. "What?"

He waved it off like feelings were a bad smell. "Never mind. What's up?"

She spun the laptop toward them. Energy snapped back into her limbs the way it always did when she had something useful to show.

"This OS is a little different from mine," she said, tapping the trackpad, "but I figured it out."

She glanced at Sam and the words tumbled out before she could polish them. "Sam, can you teach me about hacking into stuff sometime? I think it might be easier here."

Sam's brows lifted. Interested, but cautious. Like half of him loved the puzzle and the other half heard the FBI theme song.

She read his hesitation. "I just mean… information. If we need access to information. For cases."

"So," she said, flipping to her notes, "I found some cool scanning hardware options. But we'll definitely need custom OCR and indexing. I'm good with computers but I'm not a programmer, and the computers are a little different here."

Sam leaned in. His eyes brightened the way they did when he saw a real plan taking shape.

He glanced at Dean. "But we know one."

Dean's mouth kicked into a smirk. "The best."

Jenny's heart jumped hard enough to be annoying. "Charlie?"

Dean lifted a finger, instantly turning parental about it. "Maybe. We can ask. No pressure. And only if she has time."

Her chest tightened with relief and excitement at the same time. She nodded too fast. "Yeah. Totally."

Dean stepped out, phone already in hand. His voice faded down the hall, low and casual, like he wasn't calling the coolest person alive.

Sam stayed. He watched her with a soft, amused look, like he was seeing something in her that was simple and human and not terrifying for once.

"You really like her," he said.

She tried to play it cool. She tried to maintain some dignity.

She failed spectacularly.

"Oh my God, I love her," she blurted. "If I were gay, I'd totally have a crush on her."

Sam's smile turned quiet and warm. Like he got it. Like he'd met Charlie.

Dean came back maybe fifteen minutes later, phone in his pocket, face set to neutral.

"She can't come right away," he said. "And she doesn't know when. But she's in."

Jenny's face lit up before she could stop it. "Cool."

Then it came out louder, because her body was not cooperating with cool.

"Awesome." A tiny squeak escaped. Her shoulders did small bounces like she was physically unable to contain it.

Dean just stared at her.

"Okay," he said. "That was… a lot."

She grinned, unashamed. "I warned you. I'm a fan."

Sam's smile lingered, like he was glad about it even if he'd never admit that out loud.

➡️ Read Next: Chapter 3 - Cas Nights

Not In The Script Chapter Master List : https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/823425917217128448/not-in-the-script-master-list

Master List of Fan Fiction: https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/812636749500137472/master-list

List of Sam x Reader Cute Little Fluffs https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/819080920363565056/sam-x-reader-cute-little-fluffs-list

(if you ❤️ SAM):

SAM x Reader Insert Series (No use of "Y/N") Accidentally a Winchester: A Supernatural Reader Series Read on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/series/5664826

SAM x Original Female Character Not In The Script Read on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/88578816/ Series Master List on tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/823425917217128448/not-in-the-script-master-list

Dean Winchester came through first. He stopped dead at the landing when he saw her.

"Dean!"

It came out of her before she could stop it. Bright and certain, the voice of someone who recognizes a familiar face in a strange place. Dean's hand went to his gun on pure reflex, the weapon out and aimed before the word had finished leaving her mouth. Some deep hunter reflex that had long since bypassed conscious decision. He had it aimed at the woman in the middle of his war room before he'd registered anything about her except wrong and unknown and threat. Long brown curly hair half out of its elastic like she'd slept on it wrong, five-six maybe, dressed like she'd grabbed whatever was closest. Twenty-six, twenty-seven, if he had to guess. He'd be off by half a decade and wouldn't find that out for months.

Sam came in on his heels, already angled toward the stairs on autopilot. Probably case research, and pulled up short two steps down when he saw her.

"Sam!"

His shoulders went tight. He turned to look at her.

Castiel entered last, taking in the angle of Dean's gun, following it down to the woman below.

"Castiel!"

He watched her, still and unhurried, in no rush to reach a conclusion.

The gun registered when her brain caught up and her hands shot up.

Dean's voice came down from the landing like a blade. "Who are you and how did you get in here?"

Her mouth moved. Nothing useful came out. The gun and the man holding it and the sheer impossible wrongness of where she was had created a short circuit somewhere between her brain and her tongue.

Sam looked at her, really looked, and took in the raised hands, the wide eyes. Fear, not danger.

"Put the gun down, Dean. You're scaring her to death."

"No way, man, look at her." Dean didn't lower the weapon a fraction. "She could be a siren or a witch or something." He paused. "No way she's really that hot."

The woman blinked. Sam closed his eyes briefly.

"Uh... I'm just a person," she managed. "A human."

"Dean." Sam's voice had shifted into a register that was part patience, part I will not be having this conversation again. "Look at her. She can barely answer you. Put the gun down."

Dean looked at Castiel instead. "Cas. Is she human or what?"

Castiel was already watching her like he was reading a language he only partially recognized. His head tilted a fraction.

"She seems to be human."

Dean lowered the gun, not all the way, not yet, but enough. His weight stayed balanced, ready.

"Okay. 'Human.' Who are you and how did you get in here?"

She let her hands come down slowly. Took a breath that didn't quite steady her. "I don't know. I… I don't remember." The words came out too fast, like she was trying to outrun her own panic. "But you can spray me with holy water, or silver, or Cas can touch my soul. Whatever you need."

She looked between all three of them, searching their faces like they were a test she hadn't studied for, her eyes snagging on the gun. "I don't remember anything before a few minutes ago. I was just... here. Then you came through the door."

Sam came down the stairs. He moved the way he'd learned to move around things that might bolt or break, deliberate, unhurried, giving her room to track him the whole way.

"What's the last thing you remember? Before that."

She reached for it. The place where her history should have been was smooth and empty, like a room where furniture used to be. "Nothing," she said finally. "I don't remember anything."

Dean's eyes narrowed. "Then how do you know who we are?"

Heat climbed her face because she didn't have an answer that sounded sane. "I… I don't know. I just know you're Sam and Dean and Cas." She looked at Dean, then Sam, then let her gaze land briefly on Castiel. "You two are hunters. And Cas is..." She said the next word carefully, like she was testing whether it would hold her weight. "An angel."

Dean did not like that answer. His jaw set in like he was deciding whether to be angry or just tired.

"Well you know who we are. Tell us who you are."

"My name is Jenny." She said it like she was grateful to have at least that much. "I think I'm from California. Maybe."

The maybe scared her. You could hear it.

She let out a breath that shook slightly on its way out. "This is just really weird. I don't know how I got here, or how I know you, or… anything about myself." She held onto her name like a handhold. "I think I need to sit down."

She turned and took the nearest chair before her legs could register an objection. Her hands gripped the armrests. Her knuckles went pale.

Dean looked at Castiel. "Cas. Go ahead and touch her soul. Just to be sure."

Castiel didn't move.

Dean waited. When obedience didn't arrive on schedule, his eyes narrowed. "Cas." Sharper. "Do it."

Castiel turned to her, and his voice stayed even, clinical, but there was something underneath it that was less indifferent than it sounded. "It might be painful. Possibly significantly so. And there is some risk. I don't know how your soul will respond to being handled."

"It's okay," Jenny said. "Can you put me to sleep first?"

"That won't stop it from hurting."

She set her jaw. Underneath the fear, something steadier. "Do it anyway. I'm okay with it." She wasn't. Not even close. "Just put me to sleep first."

She needed them to trust her. That much was clear in her face, the way she'd already decided the price was acceptable before she'd finished saying the words.

Dean and Cas came down the stairs. Dean and Sam kept a careful distance, wide enough to react if she became something with teeth. Castiel stepped closer, studying her the way he studied things that didn't resolve into any category he already had.

He raised two fingers and touched them to her forehead.

Nothing happened.

She sat there, fully awake, blinking at him. Castiel pulled his hand back. Tried again, this time with a word like a command.

"Sleep."

She blinked. He blinked back, almost offended by reality.

"It's not working."

The cold that moved through her at those words was a different kind of fear than she'd been carrying. Quieter. Worse.

"Okay," she said. Her voice wobbled. "Do it anyway. Really. I can handle it."

She nodded like the nod could make it true, and closed her eyes.

Castiel shifted. He brought his hand near her chest, reaching for the place a soul should be, the place that was always there, always legible, always available to something like him.

He reached.

Nothing.

"That's strange."

Her eyes opened fast. "What?"

Dean stepped forward. "What?"

Castiel looked at her with an expression that was going to take him a while to classify. "I can't…" He paused. Started again. "And she looks a little different."

"You can't what?" Dean said.

"What do you mean, different?" Sam said.

Castiel searched for words with the patience of something that had existed before language and still found it an imperfect tool. "I can't touch it," he said. "It's difficult to explain in human terms."

He looked between them, checking they were following. "When I see someone possessed by a demon, I can see the demon inside them. When I look at an angel in a vessel, I see their true face. Very bright. Like looking into a star." He looked back at Jenny. "Humans look the same to me as they do to you. But I can see a soul inside and feel its presence."

Jenny's hands tightened on the armrests.

"But she…" He hesitated, and the hesitation was its own kind of warning. "She looks human. I can tell she has a human soul." His gaze lifted slightly, focusing on something past her skin. "But there's also a little bit of light."

His brow pulled together. "Almost like an angel's light. But just a little. And it's different."

A cold prickle ran up her arms. Light? In me? That can't be a thing.

"Different how?" Sam's voice was careful and precise, the way it was when he was building something.

"The closest I can describe it…" Castiel paused. "It's like a different color. Very odd. I've never seen this before."

"But she's human?" Dean needed that confirmed.

"Yes. Just a little different. She has a soul, but I can't touch it."

Sam looked between them. "If she's human, why can't you touch it?"

"I don't know. It's just not working."

"But you're sure she's human?"

"Yes."

Dean turned back to Castiel for one more check. "Is she's telling the truth?"

Castiel watched her for a long moment. Whatever he was reading, it was below the surface of anything the other two could access. "I think she is."

The breath left Jenny in one long rush. She put both hands over her face like she could hold herself together by applying pressure.

Okay. They don't think I'm a demon. That's good. Why does it still feel like I'm about to pass out?

When she dropped her hands, they were closer than she'd registered. The three of them were arranged loosely around her chair, watching with varying degrees of concern and suspicion that she was, in spite of everything, fairly certain she recognized.

Sam. Dean. Castiel.

Her brain, which had been processing an extraordinary amount of impossible information at speed, chose this moment to stop filtering.

"Wow," she said. "You guys are even more handsome in person."

The words landed in the room.

Dean's eyes narrowed instantly. "What do you mean in person?"

Sam's head tilted. "As opposed to what?"

She felt her heart hit her ribs. "Um, I can remember seeing you," she said, because it was true and she had nothing better. "But it's not in person. It's like… on a screen." She reached for the memory, the fragments of it, the angles and the details. "Like flashes. But what I remember, it's like... watching."

Sam's expression shifted. She could see him make a connection she couldn't quite follow. "On a monitor? Like security cam footage?"

"No." She shook her head. "There's color and detail and different camera angles. A security camera wouldn't…" She stopped. Started again. "It's more like a movie. Or a TV show."

Sam went still. "A TV show?"

He looked at Dean and Dean could see a memory surface that he clearly wished had stayed sunk.

"Dean. Remember when Balthazar sent us to that place." It came out carefully, like he was handling something that might still be sharp. "We were actors in a TV show. It was like a…" Sam paused. "An alternate universe."

Dean's face went through several things in quick succession. "Yeah." He rubbed at his temple like he could knead the memory out. "That one where the supernatural wasn't real and you were Polish?"

"Right," Sam said, in the voice of a man who would like to stop being right about things like this. "Yeah."

"My brain's still scrambled from that."

Sam looked back at Jenny. The pieces were arranging themselves and he could see the shape they were making. "What if she's from there? From that world?"

Castiel nodded slowly. "Interdimensional travel would explain how she got here. And if she's from another universe, that might explain why she appears human but reads differently."

Something sparked behind Jenny's eyes. The fragments were pulling toward each other, arranging themselves into a shape she recognized. "Wait. I remember that episode."

She leaned forward, suddenly certain of something for the first time since she'd arrived. "Sam and Dean were sent to another reality. It was like real life. They were in the bodies of the actors who played them." She looked at them as she said it, aware of the strangeness of that sentence in this room. "And that dimension was like the real world. No magic or monsters or angels." She almost smiled. "That was one of my favorite episodes. It was so meta."

Dean stared at her. "My brain hurts."

Sam tried to lay it out slow, the way he did when he needed to hear something said in order to believe it. "Okay. So you watched a TV show about us, where we went to a different universe that was like the one you're from. You're from a place where we're a TV show and there's no monsters or magic or anything supernatural?"

She nodded, relieved to have an answer and then stopped.

Because the full weight of it arrived.

Her eyes went wide. Something happened to her face that was hard to watch.

"It's just a TV show," she said quietly. "That stuff doesn't exist."

The sentence sat there for a moment.

Then everything in her chest seemed to drop at once. "Oh." She pressed her hands over her face. "No, no, no no no!"

"What's wrong?" Sam moved closer, alarm moving through his voice.

She looked up at him, eyes wet. "You're characters." It sounded insane. She said it anyway. "This is fantasy. Fake. Make believe." Her throat was tightening. "That means I must be…" She made a small, pained sound. "Wearing a straight jacket somewhere. In a rubber room. This is a hallucination."

For a moment she felt it, the phantom pressure of arms crossed and bound against her chest. The air went briefly wrong.

"Oh God," she whispered. "I'm crazy."

Dean's voice shifted. Something in it that wasn't softness, exactly, but was in the neighborhood of it. Sincere in a way he hadn't planned on being. "No," he said. "We're real. I promise we're real. We're not hallucinations."

She shook her head. Tears fell, fast and humiliating. "That's what a hallucination would say."

The grief in it was messy and helpless, not the clean grief of one sad thing, but the mess of too many impossible things landing at once. She squeezed her eyes shut like if she didn't look at them they'd stop existing.

"You're not real," she whispered. "Go away."

Sam crouched slightly, getting closer to eye level without crowding her. "Hey." His voice was quiet. Steady. The kind of steady that was a choice, not a default. "It's okay. Give me your hand."

He held his out, palm up and waited.

She opened her eyes, looked at his hand and then at his face. Those eyes, that worried crease, the expression she had watched on a screen for years and now couldn't reconcile with the fact of him standing three feet away from her.

If I touch him and it's air…

She reached out.

Her fingers found his.

He closed his hand around them. Warm. Solid. Calluses in places that felt earned. Too detailed for a hallucination, which she knew was not a logically airtight argument, but took anyway.

"Can you feel that?" Sam said. "See? It's real. We're real, and you're really here."

He squeezed once more, deliberate and careful. Like he was trying to pull her back into her own body through the point of contact.

She looked at Dean. She hated that she needed two proofs. She held out her other hand.

Dean looked at it for a moment. He had strong feelings about feelings, specifically that other people should have them somewhere he couldn't see. Then, resigned, because this was apparently what Tuesday looked like now, he took her hand.

She squeezed. Ran her thumb across his skin. She felt the calluses, the warmth, the texture of a real hand. She let go slowly and reached toward Castiel.

Castiel looked at her hand trying to determine whether this was a human ritual he was expected to perform. Then he reached out and touched her, gentle and cool.

Real. Different from Sam's warmth. Still solid.

Something in her loosened.

"Okay," she breathed. "Maybe. Maybe you are real." The shakiness hadn't left her voice but there was something steadier under it now. "I mean, yeah. It feels real." She looked at the three of them, this impossible room, these impossible people. "So you think this is like... another multiverse? I'm in a real Supernatural."

Under her breath, too quiet to be fully heard. Or it's a really good hallucination and I'm really really crazy.

Sam did what Sam did when he couldn't fix the impossible: he aimed at information. "It seems like some things are coming back. What else do you remember?"

"It's like flashes." She looked at Dean. "I remember you coming to get…" her eyes moved to Sam "you at Stanford. You guys were so young-looking. You were supposed to come back after. You were going to law school."

"But then you came back and…"

The memory caught up to her mid-sentence and whatever was in it stopped her cold. Her eyes went to Sam and then quickly away, like she'd looked at something she hadn't meant to see with him in the room.

Her expression shifted, quiet and heavy, something sadder than fear or confusion. "Oh."

Dean's expression did something complicated. "Oh God," he said. "This is worse than the books."

He looked at Sam, the full horror of the situation arriving with clarity. "And now we have a stalker from another dimension with a weird soul in the bunker. They've been watching us." He paused. "I feel violated."

Sam exhaled. It was something between a laugh and acceptance. "It's like that dream where you're walking through campus naked."

Jenny's hands went up. "I'm not a stalker. I'm just a fan of a TV show."

"Well," Dean said, addressing Sam but looking at her, "it feels like we're being stalked. So. What are we going to do with her?"

Sam's answer was immediate and practical and entirely, specifically Sam. "Oh, I don't know, give her a place to sleep? Feed her maybe?"

He looked at her, the question in his voice. "Are you hungry?"

"Not right now." Her stomach was still clenched somewhere around her spine. "Thanks."

Dean set his shoulders. He'd hit his limit for one evening. His limit for weirdness, for feelings, for metaphysics, for all of it combined. "I need a beer," he said. "Or something stronger."

He moved toward the kitchen. His footsteps echoed back as he went.

Sam stayed. "Are you okay?"

She considered the question with the same seriousness it deserved, which was a lot and very little at the same time. "Okay? Not really." She took a breath. "But yeah. I guess."

She looked around the room again at the lamps, the shadows, the map table. The enormity of it pressed in quietly.

"The bunker," she said, awed despite herself, her voice very small. "Wow."

A moment passed. Then, because curiosity was apparently the thing she was made of under everything else: "Can I look around?"

Sam nodded immediately. "I'll give you a tour."

Castiel stood where he was and watched her with patient, puzzled attention. He was still trying to classify what he was looking at. Somewhere behind his eyes, the question was still open, that small, different light, the soul he couldn't touch, the woman who had arrived without warning in the middle of a sealed bunker and somehow, inexplicably, already knew them.

He didn't have a category for her yet.

He suspected it would take a while.

Sam started with the library, since it opened right off the war room with nothing but open space between them. Dust and old paper reached her before they'd even crossed into it. From there the kitchen, which she'd already half-mapped from a distance. A hallway of bedrooms she barely tracked, her brain still catching up to the fact that a bunker needed hallways of bedrooms at all. He kept up a running commentary as they went, half tour guide and half something closer to nerves, pointing out storage rooms and utility closets like any of it could compete with what she'd already seen that day.

Then they were in a hallway that opened into the garage.

Concrete walls. Fluorescent lights humming overhead. Old cars resting under a thin film of dust and time.

Sam was still talking. Saying something about storage capacity, generator access, backup fuel lines… but his voice faded behind her when she saw the car.

The air went out of her in a small, involuntary sound. Not a gasp. Something quieter than that. The kind of sound that happens when recognition moves faster than thought.

"It's Baby." She said it to herself. Not to them.

Dean's head tilted at the tone, not the word, the tone. The way someone says the name of something they already consider sacred.

She moved toward the Impala without deciding to, her hand lifting and settling lightly on the curve of the rear quarter panel. The black paint was cool under her fingers. Solid. Real.

"The most important thing in the universe."

She didn't look back, but she felt it, the shift in the air, both of them watching with a sharpness that hadn't been there a second ago. Dean bracing. Sam listening.

She moved around the car slowly, carefully, like she'd wanted to stand this close to it for a long time and still couldn't quite believe she was allowed.

She went to the rear passenger door and opened it. Stood there. Closed it carefully, with just enough pressure to catch the latch. Not a slam. She would never slam it.

She walked around the back of the car, trailing her fingers just above the trunk without quite touching it, and came around to the driver's side rear.

She opened the door.

"There it is."

The toy soldier sat in the ashtray exactly where it had always been. Green plastic. Rifle in hand. Decades of road and the thing was still holding its ground.

She stood there looking at it for a moment.

"...How'd you know about that?" Dean's voice. Flat in the way that meant he hadn't decided yet if he should be alarmed.

She straightened. Looked at the soldier a moment longer, then turned around.

"I don't remember everything," she said. "Just pieces."

Sam stepped closer. "Pieces like that?"

She nodded. Looked back at the car.

"I remember what mattered," she said quietly. "It was important."

She didn't say the rest of it. That important didn't really cover what the car was, what the soldier meant, what she'd understood about both of them from a distance of another universe entirely. Some things she'd known from watching. Some things she'd understood the way you understand something that isn't yours and never was, but that you'd quietly loved anyway.

She kept that part to herself.

For now.

Jenny went to bed early.

The day had taken everything she had. New world, new rules, the continuous effort of telling herself it was real when every instinct she'd ever built was designed for a reality that didn't have any of this in it. She thanked Sam and Dean, said goodnight in a voice that was trying harder than it was succeeding, and disappeared down the hall.

Sam stood in the corridor a moment longer than he needed to, looking at the closed door.

Dean noticed. He always noticed.

The kitchen was quiet. Dean leaned against the counter with a beer, already halfway through it. Sam had coffee going, too late for coffee, but it gave his hands something to do and his mind something to object to besides everything else.

"So," Sam said. The way he said it made it sound like he was asking about the weather. "Jenny. What do you think?"

Dean didn't look up. "She's hot."

Sam stopped. "What?"

"You asked."

Sam exhaled through his nose. "Dean."

Dean took a drink. Considered. Set the bottle back down, which was either a sign of maturity or of the fact that he was going to need both hands for this.

"I don't know, man," he said, quieter. "She just showed up out of nowhere. That never ends well."

Sam nodded. He knew that much.

"And it's another person to worry about. Another person to protect. Another person who could get killed just by being anywhere near us." Dean picked at the label on the bottle. Then, quieter still: "And what if she's lying?"

"Cas said she wasn't."

"Cas couldn't even read her," Dean said. "Didn't do anything to her. You gotta admit that's weird."

"I can't see her making all that up." Sam was certain about this in the way he was certain about things he hadn't had time to fully examine yet but was going to hold onto anyway. "I just don't."

"Doesn't mean it's impossible."

"I guess." He hesitated. "But I don't think she's as helpless as you're making her out to be. She could actually help us." He said the next part before he'd decided whether to say it. "I like her."

Dean snorted. "Of course you do. You always want to keep the puppy that followed us home."

"She's not a puppy."

"She's a helpless little puppy and you know it."

"No," Sam said. Steady. Certain. "I don't." He paused. "and at least she doesn't have someone after her."

"Not that we know of." Dean shrugged the way he shrugged off things he hadn't ruled out.

Sam ignored it. "She handled today better than most people would've. Remember when we got thrown into that other place? Where we weren't us?"

Dean held up a hand. "Stop. Don't."

"Exactly," Sam said.

Dean was quiet for a moment, thinking something through that he wasn't going to announce. When he spoke again his voice was lower. "She does have that look," he said. "Like she's been through some bad stuff. And survived."

Sam huffed. "You mean she looks like one of us?"

"Pretty much." Dean said. "Just, you know. The hot chick version."

Sam sighed. "It might be nice to have a woman around here."

Dean's expression brightened with the specific optimism of a man who had just thought of something practical. "Yeah. Maybe she can cook."

"That's sexist, Dean."

"What? I'd say the same thing if she was a dude."

Sam didn't buy it, and his face said so.

"She didn't run," Sam said, after a moment. "Even knowing what we do. How dangerous it is."

Dean frowned. "Which is kind of creepy when you think about it. How much she knows about us."

"It's the idea of people watching us that's creepy," Sam said, slightly too quickly. "Not her. She's not the creepy part."

Dean raised an eyebrow. Filed that away.

"She's smart," Sam continued. "Different perspective. She could help with research, computers, maybe." He paused, aware of how this was going to land. "She gets it when I'm talking. She keeps up."

Dean's mouth curved. "She looks at you like you make sense when you talk."

"I mean. Yeah." Sam allowed it, because it was true and he was too tired to pretend it wasn't. "It could be good to have someone else around. Someone who isn't you or a confused angel in a trench coat."

"And she's fun to look at."

Sam's mouth opened. Closed. He had nothing.

Dean's expression settled into something more serious. He put the bottle down, straightened slightly. "Just don't get attached," he said quietly. "We need to watch her. Figure her out. She could be a hellhound in a puppy suit."

"She's not," Sam said without hesitation.

Dean studied him for a long moment. Really studied him, in the way he reserved for things that worried him.

"I'm just saying," he said. "We don't know her, Sam."

Sam's voice dropped. "I kind of feel like I do."

Dean's expression closed over.

Then he said it. Soft. But firm. The word that was sometimes a name and sometimes a warning and sometimes just the purest form of I see you and I'm worried about what I see.

"Sammy."

Sam didn't answer.

He didn't need to. Dean already knew.

➡️ Read next: Chapter 2 - Computer the Books

Not In The Script Chapter Master List : https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/822446704695590912/not-in-the-script-master-list

Master List of Fan Fiction: https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/812636749500137472/master-list

List of Sam x Reader Cute Little Fluffs https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/819080920363565056/sam-x-reader-cute-little-fluffs-list

(if you ❤️ SAM):

SAM x Reader Insert Series (No use of "Y/N") Accidentally a Winchester: A Supernatural Reader Series Read on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/series/5664826

SAM x Original Female Character Not In The Script Read on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/88578816/ Series Master List on tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/823425917217128448/not-in-the-script-master-list

S10 E14 The Executioner's Song (Late March or Early Apr, 2015)

Chapter 1 - Arrival Summary: Jenny just appears in the Men of Letters bunker. She knows that's where she is, but she doesn't know how she got there. Soon Sam, Dean, and Castiel show up. She knows that Sam and Dean are hunters and Cas is an angel, but she can't remember anything about her own life.

Chapter 2 - Computer the Books Summary: Jenny's first full day in the bunker feels almost manageable. She even comes up with a plan to help the Winchesters.

Chapter 3 - Cas Nights Summary: Night drops and the bunker gets too quiet. Jenny can't sleep. But with a little help, she finds a way.

Chapter 4 - The Garage Summary: Dean corners Sam in the garage with a question he already knows the answer to. Sam isn't ready to admit anything, but he's running out of good excuses.

Chapter 5 - He Just Is Summary: It's supposed to be a routine gynecologist appointment. Instead, it becomes one of those small, oddly intimate moments that makes a difference later.

Chapter 6 - Absolutely Nothing Happened on the Trip Summary: A trip to the grocery store turns into a lot of mutual pining.

S10 E15 The Things They Carried

Chapter 7 - Can We Just Pretend It Didn’t Happen? Summary: Night gets too quiet, Jenny breaks, and a drunk Dean Winchester shows up at her door. One soft hug turns into a mistake they both agree to erase.

Chapter 8 - What do You Do? (Coming Soon, ETA 8/13/26) Summary: Sam has one idea for reaching past the blank space where Jenny's memory should be. What shows up surprises them both.

Chapter 9 - Cas Makes It Weird and Complicated and Whatever (Coming Soon, ETA 8/13/26) Summary: Secrets surface, tempers flare, and Jenny clears the air the best she can. The slow burn with Sam keeps moving forward, just not the easy way.

Chapter 10 - Something Here That's Yours (Coming Soon, ETA 8/13/26) Summary: Jenny has one piece of herself back. Sam decides that isn't enough. It needs somewhere to live.

Chapter 11  - The Cup and The Lean (Coming Soon, ETA 8/17/26) Summary: Sam gets too close trying to help. Desire hits hard. They both pretend it didn't. Her head rests on Sam's arm. It's impossible to pretend it doesn't matter. But maybe it can be an accident.

Chapter 12 - The Family Kind (Coming Soon, ETA 8/20/26) Summary: A simple thank-you lands wrong. One sentence brings up a night everyone agreed meant nothing, until it almost does.

Chapter 13 - The Dishes (Coming Soon, ETA 8/20/26) Summary: Helping with a simple chore turns into an "almost" they both have to hide.

Chapter 14 - Not Thinking Straight (When It Comes to Her) Summary: A routine supply run goes sideways. Sam tries to keep her safe. Now he wants to lock her in the bunker. He has to face it: when it comes to her, he's not thinking straight.

Chapter 15 - You’re in So Much Trouble Summary: The "accidental" touches start and the sparks fly. They both assume they're the only one feeling it. By the time the night ends, they're both wondering the same thing: keep denying it, or risk asking what's real.

Chapter 16 - There's Only This Summary: Jenny and Sam want the same thing, but they both assume the feeling isn't returned. Then the truth finally comes out, and one choice changes everything.

Chapter 17 - About Damn Time Summary: After weeks of tension, Jenny and Sam get stuck in a moment neither of them wants to end. It's gentle, real, and overdue… Later, of course, Dean is insufferably smug about it.

Chapter 18 - Can We Be Best Friends Now? Summary: Jenny finally gets to meet Charlie. A shared history hits harder than she could have imagined. By the end of the visit, she may have a new best friend and a new nerd project (or two).

Chapter 19 - A Gap in the System Summary: Saving people and hunting things just got easier. Jenny's idea could save the Winchesters time, effort, and maybe some lives. If Charlie can pull off a nerd heist involving a very dangerous group.

Chapter 20 - Sammy Summary: Jenny wakes from a nightmare. Sam's right there for her.

Chapter 21 - You Said I Was Ready Summary: After weeks of training, things in the bunker start to change. A moment that should feel good takes an unexpected turn, hurt feelings rise to the surface, and one difficult conversation changes everything. By the end of the night, nothing between Jenny and Sam is quite the same. Dean, of course, is way too aware of all of it.

S10 E17 Inside Man

Chapter 22 - Shake It Off Summary: Sam talks to Jenny on the phone, while Dean is driving. Dean starts teasing, but she finds Dean's Kryptonite.

Chapter 23 - If She's a Winchester Summary: Jenny remembers her last name, and Sam helps her search for clues about her past. That search uncovers a shocking record tying her to the Winchester name, sending her into a miserable spiral, complete with an emergency beer.

Chapter 24 - There's No Musical Numbers in Supernatural Summary: Jenny tries to surprise Sam with a whisper in his ear, and he one-ups her. A sweet little moment in the bunker with her boyfriend. Dean included, unfortunately.

Chapter 25 - Wouldn’t Be a Winchester Date Without a Little Near-Death Experience Summary: Sam takes Jenny on her first real date, and for one perfect minute it almost feels normal. Nice clothes, good food, soft looks between them. Then four demons crash the evening, she accidentally changes the rules of the fight, and by the end of the night Sam's even more gone for her than he was before.

Master List of Fan Fiction: https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/812636749500137472/master-list

List of Sam x Reader Cute Little Fluffs https://www.tumblr.com/iamgwinchester/819080920363565056/sam-x-reader-cute-little-fluffs-list