ā°ā⤠Weight of Staying
Dean Winchester x adopted sister!reader
Sam Winchester x adopted sister!reader
Summary: Dean and Sam were on a shapeshifter case that murdered a family. Your family. You were the only survivor.
Warnings: grief over lost ones/death/panic attacks/murder/a lot of angst/descriptions of violence
The knock comes at 9 a.m., three sharp raps, and you're across the room with the fireplace poker in your hand before you've fully processed standing up.
You don't sleep upstairs anymore. You don't sleep in your own bed, in your own room, down the hall from the doors you can't make yourself open. You've been on the living room couch for six nights now, a nest of blankets and the throw pillow that still smells like your mom's laundry detergent, because the living room is the one room in this house the thing didn't touch. It killed your parents in the kitchen. It went after Emmy in the backyard. But nothing happened in the living room, and some animal part of your brain has decided that makes it safe, so this is where you live now ā six feet of couch cushion, a lamp you leave on all night, and a poker you sleep with under the blanket like a kid with a stuffed animal, except this one actually does something if you swing it hard enough.
You check the peephole. Two men. Suits, not sheriff's department, not the two detectives who stopped coming after the file got marked closed. Older one's got a badge up before you even open the door, flipped out like he's done it ten thousand times.
"Agents Page and Plant," he says. "FBI. We'd like to ask you a few questions about your family."
You don't move. "I already told the sheriff everything."
"We know," the taller one says. His voice is different than his partner's ā softer around the edges, careful, like he's talked to scared people standing in doorways before and knows better than to push. "We're not here to make you go through it all again if you don't want to. We just think what happened to your family might be connected to some other cases we're working. We'd like to hear it from you, if you're willing."
You should say no. Every time someone official has shown up at this door in the last six days, something worse has followed ā the first responders who told you your parents were gone in the same breath they told you to sit down, the caseworker who mentioned the word placement like it was nothing, the detective who looked at the claw marks in the drywall and wrote animal, possibly domestic on his clipboard like that was an answer that meant anything.
But there's something about the way the taller one is looking at you ā not through you, not around you, right at you, like you're a person and not a box to check ā and you're so tired, and the house is so quiet, and you open the door.
They don't sit in the kitchen. You don't offer and they don't ask, and you notice ā actually notice, the way you haven't let yourself notice anything in days ā that the taller one clocks the direction you steer them in and follows it without comment. Living room. Your couch nest is still out in the open, blankets shoved into an untidy pile, and you feel your face go hot with something like shame.
"Rough couple nights?" the shorter one asks. Not unkind. Just watching you.
"I don't really sleep upstairs," you say, and then, because you don't know why you're explaining yourself to strangers with fake badges, you shut your mouth.
"That's smart," the tall one says, easy, like it's the most reasonable thing in the world. "Nothing wrong with that."
You sit on the arm of the couch, not the cushions, not where you sleep, like keeping this small distance from your own nest matters. They don't take out notebooks right away. The shorter one ā Dean, you'll learn later, though right now he's still Agent Page ā leans forward with his elbows on his knees.
"We're gonna ask you some things that are gonna be hard to hear," he says. "But I want you to know upfront ā we already think we know what did this. And it's not anything you did wrong. It's not anything your family did wrong. There's something out there that does this, and we've hunted it before."
"It's not a person," you say. It's not a question. You've known that since the second night, when you stopped trying to explain it to anyone who'd only look at you like you were breaking.
Something shifts in both their faces. Recognition, maybe. Relief that they don't have to ease you into it.
"No," the tall one ā Sam ā says quietly. "It's not."
And something in your chest, some door you've had bolted shut since the drywall and the claw marks and your mother's voice coming out of something with her face, cracks open half an inch.
You tell them about the shape-shifting first, carefully, watching their faces for the flicker of disbelief you've been braced for from everyone else. It doesn't come. Dean just nods, like you're confirming something he already suspected. Sam asks quiet, specific questions ā how long did it wear each face, did it seem to know things it shouldn't, was there anything different about the eyes ā and each one lands like he already knows the shape of the answer and is just letting you fill it in.
It's easier than you expect, until it isn't.
"Can you walk us through the house?" Dean asks. "Just ā where things happened. It helps us confirm what we're dealing with."
You should say no. You almost do. But some part of you that's been carrying this alone for six days wants, badly, for someone else to finally know exactly what happened in every room, so it isn't only yours to hold anymore.
You get as far as the kitchen doorway.
The overhead light is off. It's daytime, sun coming in fine through the window over the sink, and none of that matters, because your eyes land on the spot by the stove and your whole body forgets how to be a body that belongs to right now. The dinner that never got eaten. The hum of the refrigerator. Your mother's face doing the thing that faces aren't supposed to do, color bleeding out of it like a photograph left in the sun.
You're safe now, sweetheart. Come here.
Your father's voice, wrong, wrong, wrong ā
Dean's voice, but you're not really hearing it, you're hearing the refrigerator hum and your own heartbeat gone huge and thundering in your ears, and your hands have started shaking so hard you can feel your teeth clicking together, and you can't get air, you're pulling it in and it's not going anywhere, not filling anything, and the kitchen is tilting ā
"Hey ā hey, look at me, not the kitchen, right here." Hands, careful, not grabbing, just present, at your shoulders, turning you gently so your back is to the doorway. Dean's face fills up your narrowing vision. "You're having a panic attack. That's all this is. It's gonna pass. I need you to breathe with me, okay? In for four."
You can't. You try and it comes out as a sob instead.
"That's okay, try again. In for four." He breathes with you, exaggerated, obvious, something to hook your own ragged breath onto. Sam's crouched on your other side now, one broad hand resting flat between your shoulder blades, not rubbing, not patting, just weight, just there. "There you go. Hold it. Now out, slow, count of six."
It takes a long time. Four for in, six for out, over and over, Dean's voice steady through all of it, never once telling you to calm down like that's a switch you forgot to flip, never once looking at you like you're something broken. Somewhere in the middle of it you start crying for real, the ugly kind, and Sam's hand stays exactly where it is.
"I let go of her hand," you say, when you can finally talk again, the words coming out in pieces. "My sister. Emmy. She was seven. I had her hand and I was getting her over the fence and I let go and it ā it got her before I even ā I didn't even see, I just heard ā"
"You didn't let go," Dean says, low and certain. "It took her. That's different. That's not your fault, and I know you don't believe me right now, but it's true, and I'm gonna keep telling you until you do."
"I'm the oldest," you say, like that explains everything, because in your head it does. "I was supposed to get her out."
"You are sixteen," Sam says. "Against something that wears your parents' faces and knows your house better than a stranger would. There is no version of that night where you win that fight by yourself. There's only the version where you survive it. And you did."
You don't believe him. Not yet. But you let yourself lean, just slightly, into the hand still resting between your shoulder blades, and neither of them moves away.
You expect them to, once you've stopped shaking, once the questions are done ā pack up their fake badges and drive off to wherever FBI agents who aren't really FBI agents go. Instead Dean disappears into your kitchen ā the kitchen, the one you can't make yourself walk into ā and comes back forty minutes later with grocery bags from somewhere, and the smell that starts drifting out is real food, not the granola bars you've been eating standing over the sink because sitting at the table feels wrong now.
"You don't have to," you say, when he sets a plate down in front of you on the coffee table. Grilled cheese, tomato soup, nothing fancy, but it's hot and it's real and your stomach twists at the smell of it because you genuinely cannot remember the last time you ate a full meal.
"Eat," Dean says, not unkindly, sitting down across from you like this is the most normal thing in the world. "All of it. I'll know if you're just pushing it around."
You eat all of it. Sam watches with the particular quiet attention of someone counting bites without making it obvious he's counting, and when you finish, he refills your glass of water without being asked and doesn't say anything about it.
The afternoon goes slow and strange. They don't push you to talk anymore. Sam sits on the floor with his laptop doing something you don't ask about; Dean flips through channels on the TV until he finds an old rerun and lets it play low in the background, the kind of noise that fills a house without demanding anything from you. You doze off around four, curled into the corner of the couch, and when you wake up there's a blanket tucked around you that wasn't there before, and Dean's in the armchair with a knife and a whetstone, not really paying attention to either, and Sam's making something in the kitchen that smells like actual dinner.
You eat that too. Pasta, garlic bread, more than you've eaten in one day since before your parents died. Nobody comments on the fact that you finish the whole plate. Nobody comments on the fact that you're crying a little while you do it, either.
Night is worse, the way it always is. You lie down on the couch in your nest of blankets, and Dean drags the armchair over so it's angled toward you, and Sam takes the other end of the couch itself, boots off, laptop closed, like it's the most obvious thing in the world that neither of them is sleeping upstairs either.
"You don't have to stay in here," you say, quiet, into the dark.
For a while nobody talks, either. The lamp stays on ā you asked, half-embarrassed, and Dean just reached over and clicked it to the lowest setting without making you explain why. The house ticks and settles around you the way houses do at night, and every sound makes your whole body go rigid for a second before you remember there are two armed men between you and every door in this house.
"You don't have to sleep either," you say eventually, into the low light. "If it helps. I just ā I don't want to be the only one awake."
"Wasn't planning on it," Dean says. He's got his boots off, jacket slung over the back of the chair, but the knife's still within reach on the side table, close enough that you clocked it the second he set it down and something in you had eased at the sight of it instead of flinching. "Don't sleep great most nights anyway."
"Me neither," Sam says, from the other end of the couch, and there's something in the way he says it ā flat, unbothered, like it's just a fact about him and not a confession ā that makes it easier to be sixteen and lying to your own body about being fine.
You ask them questions you don't really expect answers to, at first, just to fill the dark with something that isn't your own thoughts. How long have you been doing this. Since we were kids, Dean says, and doesn't elaborate, and you don't push, because you recognize the shape of a door someone's not ready to open, having so many of your own. Does it get easier. Sam's quiet for a second too long before he says, some parts do, and you understand that's the most honest answer he has.
Somewhere around midnight your eyes start going heavy despite yourself, the exhaustion of the last six days finally catching up all at once, and you fight it ā you don't want to close your eyes, don't trust what's waiting behind them ā until Dean notices.
"Hey. It's okay to sleep," he says, low. "One of us is up. Always gonna be one of us up. You can put it down for a while."
"Yeah," he says, no hesitation at all. "Promise."
You believe him enough to let your eyes close.
You wake up twice ā once from the sound of the refrigerator hum that isn't there, once from nothing at all, just your own heart slamming for no reason you can name ā and both times, before you can even sit up all the way, Dean's voice is already there in the dark. You're okay. You're here. We got you. The second time, Sam's hand finds your ankle over the blanket, just resting there, grounding, and you fall back asleep faster than you have in a week.
Near dawn you surface once more, only halfway, the kind of waking where the room is grey and soft at the edges and you're not sure yet if you're really awake. Dean's still in the chair, head tipped back, eyes open, watching the door the way you imagine he's watched a thousand doors in a thousand rooms that weren't his. Sam's breathing has finally evened out into something like real sleep at the other end of the couch, one arm slung over his eyes against the lamp light. Neither of them has left. Neither of them is going to.
You let your eyes fall shut again, and this time there's no refrigerator hum waiting for you, no kitchen light, no fence. Just the couch, and the low lamp, and two men who said they'd stay and meant it.
They're gone when you wake up properly, and for one terrible second your chest goes tight all over again ā until you hear voices in the kitchen, low, and smell coffee, and follow it to find both of them at the table with a laptop open between them and a legal pad covered in Dean's cramped handwriting.
"We found it," Sam says, before you can ask. He turns the laptop slightly, not enough to show you anything you don't need to see, just enough that you understand this is real. "Shifter's denned up about two hours from here. We're going after it today."
Your stomach drops and lifts at the same time. "You're sure it's the same one?"
"Same M.O., same territory, same timeline," Dean says. "It's the one that killed your family. It's the one that took your sister." He looks at you steady, the same way he looked at you yesterday in the kitchen doorway, like the truth is something you deserve even when it's ugly. "We're gonna end it."
You don't know what to do with your hands, so you wrap them around the coffee mug someone's already set in front of you. "Can I ā"
"No," Dean says, gentle but immovable, before you finish the question. "Not this part. This part's ours. Your part's staying here, eating something, and being alive when we get back."
"No," Sam agrees. "It's not. But it's what keeps you safe, and that's the only thing that matters to us right now."
You look between them ā two strangers who showed up at your door twenty-four hours ago with fake badges and haven't left since, who made you eat, who sat up counting your breaths in the dark, who are about to walk into a den and end the thing that unmade your entire life ā and something in your chest, some door that's been bolted shut since the drywall and the claw marks, cracks open another inch.
"Okay," you say. "Come back."
Dean's mouth does something that isn't quite a smile but isn't far off either. "Yeah," he says. "We will."
You believe him. You don't entirely know why yet. But sitting there in the kitchen you haven't been able to walk into in six days, coffee warm in your hands, you believe him anyway.
The day is the longest of your life, and you've had some long ones lately.
You try to keep busy the way Sam suggested before they left ā small, stupid tasks, folding the blanket you've been sleeping in, washing the mug you drank the coffee from, anything that keeps your hands moving so your head doesn't spiral out too far past the kitchen table where they left you. You don't turn on the news. You don't let yourself imagine what a shifter's den actually looks like, what two hours away actually means, what could go wrong for two men walking into a fight with the thing that already took everything from you once.
You eat lunch because Dean told you to and some part of you doesn't want to disappoint him, even in his absence. You sit on the couch ā your couch, your nest ā and you watch the door.
The Impala's engine is the best sound you've heard in six days.
You're up off the couch and across the living room before you've decided to move, and you pull the front door open before either of them can even knock. Dean's got a fresh scrape along his jaw and a set of knuckles that are going to bruise ugly by tomorrow, and Sam's limping slightly on the left, but they're both standing, both breathing, both looking at you the second the door swings open like confirming you're still there is the thing they actually drove two hours to do.
"It's done," Dean says, before you can even ask. "It's dead. It's not coming back, not for you, not for anybody else."
You don't remember deciding to cry. You just find yourself doing it, hard, both hands pressed over your mouth like you can hold it in, and Dean crosses the last few feet of porch and doesn't hesitate before pulling you in, one arm banding across your back, careful of nothing because there's nothing careful left to be about it. You feel him breathe out, long and rough, like he's been holding something in for two hours straight and only now lets it go.
"Hey. Hey, you're okay," he says into your hair. "It's over. That part's over."
Sam's hand lands on your shoulder a second later, and you reach out blind and grab a fistful of his sleeve too, needing both of them at once, needing to be sure this is real and not one more thing your mind is doing to you. Neither of them pulls away. They just stand there on the porch of the house where your whole first life ended, letting you shake and cry and hold on as long as you need to, until your knees actually start to give and Dean guides you back inside without ever quite letting go.
That night is different than the one before it.
Not easy ā nothing about any of this is easy yet, and you know somewhere underneath the relief that it's going to take a long time before easy is a word that applies to you again. But it's different. You sleep on the couch again, out of habit more than fear now, and Dean and Sam settle into the same spots without either of you discussing it, like it's already just what the three of you do.
"What happens now?" you ask, somewhere past midnight, staring at the ceiling instead of at either of them, because it's easier to ask hard questions when you're not looking anyone in the eye. "I don't ā there's no one else. No family. It's just me."
The silence that follows isn't the bad kind. You can hear them thinking, feel the weight of a conversation neither of them is having out loud yet, the kind two people have when they've known each other long enough to argue in silence.
"You're not just gonna get handed off to strangers," Dean says finally, careful, like he's picking each word up before he sets it down. "Not while we've got a say in it."
"You don't even know me," you say. "Six days ago you didn't know I existed."
"Six days ago you were sleeping with a fireplace poker under your blanket because nobody else showed up to make sure you were safe," Sam says, quiet. "That's enough to know."
You don't answer right away. You think about the fireplace poker, still tucked against the arm of the couch where you left it, less because you need it tonight and more because you're not ready to admit you don't. You think about the empty rooms upstairs, the kitchen you can walk into now but still don't love standing in, the whole rest of your life stretching out in front of you with no map and no people in it who are supposed to be there.
And you think about a man who told you promise and meant it, and another one who counted your breaths in the dark without being asked, and how neither of them has looked at you once, not one single time in six days, like you were something too broken to bother with.
"Okay," you say, into the dark, and it comes out smaller than you mean it to, but steadier than you expect. "Okay."
Nobody makes you say more than that. Dean reaches over and clicks the lamp down another notch, not off, never all the way off, and Sam's hand finds your ankle again over the blanket, same as the night before, an anchor you didn't know you needed until it was there.
You lie there a long time after that, listening to the two of them breathe, listening to the house that used to only ever sound like grief settle into something quieter. You think about your mother's laugh, the real one, before any of this, and how you can still hear it if you try hard enough, underneath the version that came out of something wearing her face. You think about Emmy's sneaker catching the top rail, and for the first time in six days the memory doesn't flatten you where you lie ā it just aches, the way a scar aches before rain, present and old and yours to carry instead of something trying to carry you under.
You think you understand, a little, what Sam meant when he said some parts get easier. Not all of it. Maybe not even most of it, not for a long time, maybe not ever all the way. But this part ā the part where you're not doing it alone in the dark with a fireplace poker for company ā this part is already easier, and you didn't know until right now how much of the weight was just that. Just being alone in it.
You think about survival. You've hated that word for six days, the way people say it like it's a gift instead of the thing that happened after everyone you loved stopped being able to. You survived, Dean told you during that first panic-stricken hour, like it was an accomplishment and not an accident of a fence and a stranger's porch light. You still don't fully believe him. But lying here now, with two near-strangers standing guard over your sleep like it's something worth guarding, you think maybe survival isn't the opposite of losing everyone. Maybe it's just the first thing that happens before you find out what's left to build.
You don't know yet what the next few months look like ā Bobby Singer's spare room, a duffel bag that never quite gets fully unpacked, the long strange process of two hunters figuring out how to build something like a home around a kid who flinches at kitchens. You don't know yet about the nights that will still be bad, the anniversaries that will flatten you all over again years from now, the moment two years from tonight when you'll finally say Dean and Sam instead of the names on the fake badges and mean family when you say it. You don't know yet that Emmy's name will still catch in your throat a decade from now, that some losses don't get smaller so much as you get bigger around them, learn to carry them without letting them carry you.
You just know that for the first time in six days, when you close your eyes, nothing is waiting behind them. Just the low hum of the lamp, and the weight of a hand on your ankle, and two men who drove two hours into something that could have killed them and drove two hours back, because somewhere in the wreckage of your whole first life, they'd decided you were worth coming back for.
It isn't everything. It isn't your mother's kitchen or Emmy's laugh or the family you should have gotten to keep. It's a couch, and a lamp turned low, and two strangers who stayed.
For tonight, it's enough. And for the first time since the porch light went on and your whole world went out, you let yourself believe that someday, it might be more than that.
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