#dean protector

He had met (Y/N) on one of those nights that seemed to never end, under a flickering neon sign and the sound of a distant storm. She served coffee in a roadside diner, her hands stained with tobacco and exhaustion, and a smile that reminded Dean what calm felt like.

Dean Winchester’s secret wasn’t in the demons he had killed, nor in the sins he carried like scars beneath his skin. His real secret had a human shape: a woman who breathed softly between cheap sheets and the yellow light of a motel room.

Dean touched her as if the world could shatter from a single touch.

From that moment on, whenever the road allowed it, he quietly detoured toward her. Without warning. Without speaking of it to anyone.

When he arrived, the air seemed to stop. He would push the door open carefully, letting in only a thread of wind, and there she was: turned away, making tea or trying to tune the old radio that never quite found a station. She would turn at the sound of him, and in that instant, he ceased to be a hunter, a soldier, or a martyr; he became simply a man who needed rest.

There were no promises between them, only one certainty: as long as no one knew she existed, she would be safe.

She would take off his jacket, unbutton his rain soaked shirt, and kiss his wounds with a patience he never fully understood. The only sounds in the room were the wind against the window and their uneven breathing. Each encounter was brief, urgent, a temporary refuge before returning to the hell of the open road.

He said nothing, but the next day he followed him.

Dean clung to that belief like a creed, convincing himself that silence was a form of love.

But secrets, like ghosts, always find a way to come to light.

Sam began to suspect. At first, it was the silences during the drive, the calls cut short, the unexplained disappearances. Then, one night, he found his brother’s trench coat hanging in the back of the Impala, with something tucked in the pocket: a crumpled piece of paper, an address written by hand.

That night he didn’t confront his brother. He waited until dawn, when Dean returned with sunken eyes and trembling hands, as if he had just fought a battle.

Dean drove for hours, his face tense, until he reached the outskirts of a nameless town where asphalt faded into fog. He stopped in front of an old motel, the kind of place that didn’t even appear on maps. Sam turned off the engine and watched.

Dean knocked on door number seven. Twice. The light inside turned on, and a woman’s silhouette appeared in the doorway. There were no words, only a hug that lasted longer than it should have, a shared breath that Sam recognized even though he didn’t want to: it was love.

“Where were you?” Sam asked, though he already knew.

Dean stayed silent, staring at the empty road.

Every time Dean watched her sleep, he thought about the end of the world.

“Nowhere,” he finally said, his voice low, as if the echo itself might betray him.

Sam watched him for a few more seconds, without pressing further. There was something in Dean’s eyes, a mix of sadness and tenderness, that needed no explanation.

In the following days, the secret hung between them, invisible but tangible, like a crack in the air. Dean kept disappearing from time to time, and Sam, though he noticed, pretended not to. He knew there were things his brother couldn’t let go of without breaking, and that woman was one of them.

And so they went on: hunting monsters by night, lying by day, holding between them a silence made of love and guilt.

He thought that if one day everything burned, heaven, earth, himself, it would be enough for her to keep breathing for something in the universe to be saved.