hi! To start, I would like to tell you that I love your fanfics, everything about them. The way you write you characters, the way you put them scenarios into words, everything! I’m actually in love with your fanfics.
I was wondering if you please could write a fanfic about dean and sam teen half-sister (maybe 14? 15?)
My idea was that they had no idea that they had a (half) sister (by john’s side ofc) kinda like what happend with adam, and that they found her in a hunting (she’s also a hunter, probably her mother and john meet during a hunting?), not at the start but they re-search together before they find put (none of the 3 knows) and start noticing small things that they have in common or that it reminds it of them. And when they finally found out (probably bc of a small comment she makes about her father? Her last name? Whatever you think its better) and They don’t believe her or at least try not to, get angry (especially dean) and try to hate her but they end up being very protective of her. (They were protective of her since the start tho, bcs what was a 15 years old doing hunting?)
And at the end something happend to her family (to her mom, wich I think it would be cool if she hunted alone, her mom probably passed out of alcohol most of the times, or being to depressed to actually do something so she hunts alone and provides food and stuff to her and her mother ) and has to end up living with them.
Dean Winchester x half sister!reader
Sam Winchester x half sister!reader
Summary: You had no idea you had brothers until this case and they had no idea they had a sister. It was a rollercoaster when you guys found out, but it turned out well in the end. Kind of.
Warnings: death/absent father/arguing/alcohol programs/implied drinking problems
The forest at night didn't scare you anymore.
It used to, when you were little — maybe eight or nine, before your mom had sat you down at the kitchen table with a glass of milk and a very serious expression and explained, with the particular exhausted bluntness of someone who had been carrying a secret too long, that the things in the dark were real. That monsters existed. That your father — the man who had blown through your mother's life like a storm system, all charm and broad shoulders and whiskey-dark eyes, leaving behind only a phone number that rarely worked and you — had known about them.
You didn't know much about your father. Your mom didn't talk about him often, and when she did it was with this complicated expression you'd never quite been able to read. Not hatred. Not love, exactly. Something worn-down and factual, like she was describing weather.
He was a hunter, she'd said. He knew things most people don't. And now you need to know them too, because whatever's in our blood, it follows us.
That was how it started. You were fifteen now and you'd been hunting for two years, which wasn't something you said out loud to anyone because the few hunters you'd crossed paths with tended to react poorly to it. They got that look on their faces — concerned, patronizing, occasionally angry — and you didn't have the energy for any of it.
You had a black dog to kill.
You'd been tracking it for four days through the Millhaven forest preserve, which was longer than you'd have liked but the thing was smart, smarter than the lore suggested, doubling back on its own trail and moving during the day when you weren't expecting it. You'd lost it twice near the creek bed. You'd found it again both times.
Tonight felt right. The air had that particular quality — charged and heavy, the way it got when something big was moving nearby — and you'd positioned yourself behind a deadfall log near the northeastern bank with your shotgun laid out in front of you and your iron knife in your hand, and you were completely, utterly prepared to handle this alone.
And then you heard footsteps.
Two sets. Heavy. Moving without much care for how much noise they made, which meant either civilians who were about to get themselves killed or hunters who were confident enough not to bother. You had the shotgun up and aimed before they cleared the tree line, and when two men stepped into your sightline you kept it there.
They stopped. Hands went up.
The taller one had shaggy brown hair and an expression that was somehow both startled and apologetic. The other one — older, maybe, or just harder — had a jaw like a closed door and was looking at your shotgun with an expression that wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite annoyance, somewhere in between.
"Whoa," the harder one said. "Easy."
"Who are you?" you asked. Your voice came out steady, which you were grateful for.
"We're hunters," the tall one said carefully. "We're here for a dog."
You looked between them. They had the right boots, the right kind of watchful stillness. The shorter one's jacket hung slightly wrong on the right side, weighted down by something — gun, probably. Still. You'd been wrong before about people who looked safe.
The shorter one blinked. "Prove it?"
He glanced at the tall one, then back at you, and showed off — iron rounds, salt rounds, holy water, silver knife, anti-possession symbol — with the flat efficiency of someone reading off a grocery list they'd memorized years ago. You lowered the shotgun.
"Okay," you said, and turned back to the tree line.
"Okay?" he repeated. "That's it?"
"You knew what iron rounds were without me explaining." You settled back into position behind the log, scanning the shadows near the creek. "And you have the anti-possession symbol. Also your boots are worn the right way." A pause. "You're going to want to be quieter. It moves along the creek bed around dusk. If it hears you coming we lose the trail."
There was a brief silence behind you.
"How old are you?" the tall one asked.
"Old enough," you said. "Are you going to help or not?"
They spread out along the creek bank the way you showed them, covering the approach angles you'd already mapped, and you had to admit — privately, to yourself, in the locked room of your own head — that it was a relief to have backup. You'd never said that to anyone. You wouldn't start now.
The taller one introduced himself as Sam. The other one was Dean. They didn't offer last names and neither did you, which was standard enough in hunting circles that nobody remarked on it.
"You from around here?" Sam asked, low.
"You tracking this thing alone?"
Dean made a sound to your left — not quite a word, more like a word that had decided at the last second not to come out. You looked at him.
"Nothing," he said, in a tone that contained several things.
"Whatever you're thinking about me being out here alone."
He was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke his voice had lost something — some surface-level sharpness, leaving something underneath that felt involuntary. "You're a kid."
"You don't know how old I am."
"I know you're not old enough to be out here by yourself."
You didn't answer that. You turned back to the tree line and adjusted your grip on the knife and tried to ignore the way his voice had sounded when he said it — not mean, not exactly. Something else. Something that made the back of your throat feel strange.
Where's your— Sam started.
The black dog exploded out of the tree line.
It came out of the dark between two oaks like a shadow that had learned to move, enormous and low to the ground, its eyes burning red-gold in the darkness. You were already moving — off the log, angling wide left, drawing its attention and pushing it toward the open ground near the creek where they'd have a clear shot. You'd planned this before they arrived. The plan still worked with three.
The next three minutes were loud and ugly. You took an iron round into the thing's shoulder. Dean put one through its hindquarters. Sam came in from the right with a silver-edged blade and opened a cut along its flank that made it scream — a horrible sound — and then it turned on Sam and you threw yourself at its back with your knife driving down through the dense black fur, finding the space between its shoulder blades, and it collapsed.
The three of you stood there in the sudden silence, breathing hard.
Dean was the first to speak. "Are you hurt?"
You checked yourself. Scratches along your forearm where a branch had caught you. Nothing serious. "No."
He looked at the scratches anyway, jaw tight. "That's from the branch, not the dog?"
He nodded once, slowly, like he was filing something away.
You meant to leave that night. Pack up your kit, drive back to the motel in Clarksville where you'd been staying, check on your mom, move on. That was how it always went.
Instead you ended up in a twenty-four-hour diner off Route 9 at eleven-thirty at night, sitting across from two men you'd met four hours ago, eating the best hot meal you'd had in about two weeks.
You didn't say that last part out loud.
"So," Sam said, wrapping both hands around his coffee mug. "You want to tell us how a teenager ends up hunting a black dog alone in Indiana?"
"Not especially," you said.
You ate a fry. Considered. "My mom taught me. She hunted for a while. We moved around a lot."
"She still hunting?" Dean asked. His eyes were on his plate but his attention wasn't, and you'd gotten good at noticing the difference.
"Not really." You kept your voice neutral, the way you'd learned to keep it. "She's not — she goes through rough patches. I pick up the slack."
The silence that followed had a particular texture to it. Not pity, exactly — or maybe it was, but it was the quiet kind, the kind that didn't announce itself.
"Who taught you to flank like that?" Sam asked, redirecting with the sensitivity of someone who understood when a subject wanted to be left alone. "That was — I mean, that was a good move. Textbook, almost."
Something loosened in your chest slightly. "Books, mostly. And watching. And getting it wrong a few times until I got it right."
"What books?" Sam leaned forward slightly, and there was genuine interest there, the kind that wasn't performance. "Because most hunters I know don't even read the lore, they just go off word of mouth and old journal entries and—"
"You're doing the thing."
"The eager-golden-retriever thing. She just survived a black dog, give her a minute."
Sam looked briefly offended and then looked at you with an expression that said I'm going to pretend he didn't just say that. You almost smiled. Almost.
"I have a journal," you said. "I've been keeping it since I started. Everything I find out about a creature I write down. What worked, what didn't. Lore, sources, what the lore got wrong." You shrugged. "It helps."
Dean had gone still in a way that was different from his normal watchfulness. He was looking at you with an expression you couldn't quite read — something flickering behind his eyes, there and gone.
"Smart," he said, and his voice had gone quieter than usual.
You ate another fry and told yourself the warmth you felt at that was just the diner's heating.
They offered to let you tag along.
Sam was the one who said it, framing it carefully as a mutual benefit, a resource-sharing arrangement, another set of eyes. Dean was looking at the window when Sam said it with an expression that suggested he was trying to find a reason to object and not finding one fast enough.
You said yes before you'd fully decided to, which wasn't like you.
The next case was three towns over — missing persons with a pattern that suggested a nest of something, possibly rawheads, possibly something worse. Sam had a contact at the county sheriff's office who'd sent over files. You spent the drive reading through them in the backseat of the biggest, most aggressively loud car you'd ever been in, and you didn't say anything about the music even though it was rattling the windows, because the car was clearly beloved in a way that made critique feel unkind.
Dean caught you looking at the dashboard at one point in the rearview mirror. "1967," he said, unprompted. "Impala. She was my dad's."
Was. Past tense. You filed that away without comment.
"She's in good shape," you said, because she was.
Something in Dean's expression shifted. It was brief, but you caught it. "Yeah," he said. "She is."
The rawhead case took three days.
You learned things about them in those three days that you couldn't have predicted from two months of sharing a car and a case, small things that accumulated the way small things did.
Sam made a specific sound when he was reading something that contradicted what he'd expected — a short exhale through his nose, almost a laugh but not quite, that he didn't seem aware of making. You made the same sound. You noticed it on the second day and didn't say anything about it.
Dean took his coffee black, no sugar, but he'd doctor it with an obscene amount of cream if he thought nobody was watching, and he'd do it with the particular stealth of someone who considered this a mild personal failing. You'd started doing the same thing around age thirteen, for no reason you could identify, and your mom had teased you about it until you'd both just accepted it as a quirk.
Sam dog-eared the corners of his books when he was done with a page rather than using bookmarks, and he'd argue passionately about the most efficient way to research a creature and then abandon that method entirely the moment something more interesting appeared in front of him. You did both of these things. You noticed this on the first day and thought it was a coincidence.
You thought it was a coincidence for longer than you should have.
The rawhead was in the basement of an abandoned house on the edge of town, which was almost frustratingly predictable, and you killed it on the third night with a coordinated approach that the three of you had sketched out on a diner napkin that afternoon. It went smoothly, or as smoothly as things went when the creature in question was seven feet of nightmare and electricity, and afterward you stood in the parking lot of the motel and Sam bought sodas from the vending machine and Dean sat on the Impala's hood and the three of you just existed together in the quiet for a few minutes.
"Where are you going next?" Sam asked you.
You thought about it. You had a lead on something in Kentucky — possible haunting, family reporting poltergeist activity. Nothing urgent. Nothing that couldn't wait.
"Not sure yet," you said.
"We've got a possible haunting in Harlan," Sam said.
He looked at you. "How did you know that?"
"I have the same lead." You pulled out your journal and showed him the page. He looked at it, then looked at you, then at Dean with an expression you couldn't quite interpret.
"Same source?" Dean asked, reading the page from the hood of the car.
"County records online. Missing death certificate." You shrugged. "It's a good tell."
Dean was looking at the journal with that flickering expression again. "You mind if I—" He gestured at it.
You handed it over. He flipped through it slowly, not reading every page but looking at the structure, the organization, the way you'd cross-referenced creatures and cases with a system of shorthand that had taken you a year to develop. His jaw did something complicated.
"Nothing." He handed it back. "It's good. You're—" He stopped. Started again. "You're a good hunter."
Coming from him, you were already learning, that was not a small thing.
"Thanks," you said quietly.
Sam was watching both of you with an expression you didn't have a name for yet.
The haunting in Harlan was a vengeful spirit — a woman who'd died in the house in 1987, manner of death listed as accidental but the coroner's report suggested otherwise. You found the truth on the second day, buried in old newspaper archives at the county library, and you laid it out for Sam and Dean over coffee with the methodical pleasure you always felt when the pieces clicked into place.
"So the husband," you said, spreading the photocopied articles across the table. "He reported the fall, but look at the timeline. She called her sister at eight-fifteen. He called 911 at eight-forty-seven. That's thirty-two minutes. The sister says the call ended abruptly. And then—" you slid another page across, "—he filed a life insurance claim four days after the funeral."
Sam was nodding, leaning forward. Dean was reading the coroner's report.
"Okay," Dean said. "Good catch. So we find the bones and—"
"She wasn't buried," you said. "She was cremated. I checked." You paused. "But I found a piece in the archives about a locket. It was her mother's. She apparently never took it off. It wasn't with her personal effects after she died, and it wasn't cremated with her because the family specifically asked about it and the husband said he didn't know where it was." You looked up. "He kept it."
The silence was short and satisfying.
"Where is he now?" Sam asked.
"Still in Harlan. Has a house on Ridgeline Road." You closed the folder. "I already looked up the address."
Dean stared at you for a second. Then he looked at Sam. Sam looked back at him with an expression you were starting to recognize — a kind of bewildered, private amusement that passed between them like a shared language.
"Nothing," Sam said, and he was almost smiling. "You just — you remind me of someone."
He glanced at Dean. Dean looked back down at the coroner's report with the focused attention of someone who had decided not to participate in this particular thread of conversation.
"Nobody," Sam said. "Never mind. Good work."
That night you burned the locket in the backyard of a man who'd spent thirty years living with what he'd done, and the spirit went quietly once she had what she needed — not in an angry flash, but in the way candle flames went out, just an absence where something had been. You stood in his driveway afterward while Sam and Dean had a terse and pointed conversation with the man that you weren't included in but could hear from twenty feet away, and you thought about your mom, the way she went absent sometimes, and tried to feel satisfied that the woman in that house was free now.
On the drive back to the motel Dean played Zeppelin loud enough that conversation was impossible, which you were grateful for. You watched the Kentucky dark go past the window and wrote up your notes in your journal and tried not to think about the way Sam had said you remind me of someone and then looked at Dean.
It happened at a gas station outside of Harlan on a Thursday afternoon.
You were standing at the pump while Dean was inside paying, and Sam was leaning against the passenger door reading something on his phone, and a trucker at the adjacent pump made conversation the way truckers sometimes did — easy, passing-time small talk — and asked where you were all headed.
"Not sure yet," you said, which was true.
"You travel with your dad?" he asked, nodding toward the Impala.
Something moved through your chest, strange and quick. "No," you said. "Just friends."
"Huh," the trucker said mildly, and went back to his pump.
Dean came out of the gas station with two coffees and a bottle of water and tossed the water to you without asking, which he'd started doing around day four because you kept forgetting to hydrate, which was apparently something he'd appointed himself to be annoyed about. You caught it automatically.
Sam was watching you with the look again.
You got back in the car and didn't say anything about it.
The thing that broke it open was so small you almost missed it.
You were at another diner — you lived in diners, you were beginning to understand, this was simply what hunters did, they moved through the country from one vinyl booth to the next — and it was late and the case you'd just finished had been draining, one of the ugly ones, and you were tired in the particular way that sat behind your eyes and didn't shift no matter how much coffee you drank.
Dean was telling a story about a hunt gone wrong in New Mexico, one of those stories that had become funny only with distance, and Sam was laughing into his coffee, and you were eating pie because Dean had insisted on pie with a firmness that suggested this was less a preference and more a moral position, and it was good pie, you had to give him that.
"—and Bobby was furious," Dean was saying, "because apparently this particular cursed object had been on his list for six months and I just blew it up—"
"You didn't blow it up by accident," Sam said, still laughing. "You got impatient."
"Bobby always said," you started, and then stopped.
Both of them looked at you.
The specific quality of their attention shifted in a way you felt before you understood it — a sudden sharpening, a stillness that was different from the easy stillness of the last hour.
"You know Bobby Singer?" Sam asked. His voice had gone careful in a way it hadn't been thirty seconds ago.
"I — yeah." You set your fork down slowly. "He's in my mom's phone. Emergency contact. I've called him a couple times when I couldn't identify something. He's—" you paused. "He's helpful. Kind of gruff but helpful."
"How does your mom know Bobby?" Dean asked. Something had changed in his voice too. He was looking at his coffee mug but his attention was entirely somewhere else.
"I don't know exactly. Hunting circles, I think. They go back a while." You shrugged, aware that something was happening but not yet able to name its shape. "She never really explained it."
"What's your mom's name?" Sam asked.
There it was — the too-careful tone of it, the slight increase in stillness across the table, the way Dean hadn't looked up.
You felt something move underfoot. Like the ground making a small sound you weren't supposed to hear.
"Just curious," Sam said, which was a lie, and they both knew you knew it was a lie, and nobody said anything about that.
You told them her name anyway, because four weeks of working together had built something, and you trusted them with small things even when you weren't sure about large ones.
The silence afterward lasted long enough that the waitress came by, refilled the coffee, left, and still neither of them had spoken.
Dean repeated her name. His voice came out strange — thicker than usual, less controlled. Like it had taken a wrong turn somewhere between his chest and the air. "What did you say your last name was?"
You hadn't said. You'd never told them. In four weeks across three states, last names had never come up, because last names didn't matter in hunting unless you needed an alias, and you'd never needed one with them.
"Why do you want to know my last name?" you asked, and you were proud of how steady your voice came out, because the ground was still moving and you weren't sure it was going to stop.
"Humor me," Dean said, and that was Sam's line, Sam's specific phrase, and Dean didn't notice he'd used it because he was somewhere else entirely behind his eyes.
You looked between them. The diner around you felt very loud suddenly — cutlery and voices and a TV in the corner with the sound too low — and the booth felt very small.
"What are your last names?" you asked instead.
Sam looked at Dean. Dean's jaw tightened.
The word landed on the table between the three of you like something dropped from a height.
It was there in the back of your memory, filed in the place where you kept things your mom said when she was trying not to say them — the particular tone she used, the complicated expression that crossed her face when the subject came up, which was rare and always brief. His name was Winchester. He was a hunter. He knew things most people don't. He had a family already. Sons.
Your fork was still in your hand.
"John Winchester," you said. It came out quiet and flat and not quite a question, because you already knew.
Dean made a sound that wasn't a word. Sam closed his eyes for one second.
"He was your father," you said. "Both of you."
"Yeah," Sam said. His voice was very controlled in the way voices got when controlling them took effort.
The table felt very far away. The pie felt irrelevant.
"He was mine too," you said. "I think. I — my mom said his name was Winchester. She said he was a hunter." You heard your own voice as if from a slight distance.
Then Dean pushed back his chair and walked out of the diner.
You watched the door swing shut behind him. The bell above it chimed once, cheerfully, absurdly.
Sam didn't move. He sat with his hands flat on the table and his eyes on the space Dean had occupied, and the expression on his face was something you didn't have a word for yet — not shock exactly, because Sam processed things too fast for pure shock, but something adjacent to it, something that looked like a man quietly revising a large number of assumptions all at once.
"How old are you?" he asked finally. His voice was careful in the way of someone who knew the answer was going to matter. "Actually. Not old enough."
He nodded once, slowly, like he was doing math. "Your mom — she knew he had kids already? When they—"
"She knew he had a family. She didn't know details. She said—" you paused, trying to remember exactly, because exact mattered right now. "She said he was honest about it. That he wasn't hiding it. He told her he had sons and that the life he led didn't leave room for—" you stopped. "For more than he already had. She knew what it was."
Sam absorbed that. His hands pressed flat against the table.
"He never told us," he said. "About you. Like he never—there was someone else, we found out after he died. Adam. He had another—" Sam stopped, and something moved across his face that was old and complicated. "Same kind of thing."
Someone else. You sat with that. Somewhere out there, a third version of this. Another person carrying half of John Winchester's bloodline and none of his attention.
"I didn't know," you said. "When I met you. I swear I didn't know."
"I know." He said it immediately, without hesitation, which meant something. "I know you didn't." He looked at the window, then back at you. His eyes were doing something effortful. "Are you—"
"I never knew him," you said. "I don't — I don't have anything to grieve. It's not like I lost something. I just found out the reason it was missing, and I already knew the reason was something like this. I just didn't know the details." You picked up your fork and put it down again. "I'm fine. I mean it."
Sam was quiet for a moment. "You sound like Dean," he said, softly, more to himself.
You didn't answer that. You looked at the door.
"Go," Sam said. "I'll get the check."
The parking lot was cold and lit by the yellow glow of a single overhead lamp, and Dean was leaning against the Impala with his arms crossed and his eyes on the highway, and you pushed through the diner door and the air hit you and for a second you just stood on the step and looked at him.
He was very still in the way he got when he was holding something that had weight.
You walked over and leaned against the car beside him, leaving deliberate space between you — not because you wanted the distance but because you understood he might need it — and you looked at the same stretch of empty county road.
A truck went by on the highway, lights sweeping the dark.
"I'm not trying to complicate things," you said.
"I know." He exhaled slowly through his nose. "I know what you were going to say. Just—" He pressed his lips together. "Give me a minute."
You gave him a minute. The October air was dry and cold and you zipped your jacket up to your chin and waited, because waiting was something you were good at.
"You knew Bobby," Dean said finally.
"A little. Phone calls, mostly. Twice."
"And your mom knew our dad." He said it like he was laying something down very carefully, testing the ground beneath it.
"She met him on a hunt. That's all I know. Whatever it was, it was — I think it was brief. She never talked about him like it was something big. More like—" you considered. "More like weather. Something that happened and then moved on.
His jaw worked. "He never said anything to us. About you. About anyone like—" He stopped. "He wasn't — our dad wasn't exactly a communicator."
"No," you said. "I figured."
"How long have you been hunting alone?" he asked, and you felt him shift away from the impossible thing toward something he could do more with, and you let him because you understood the impulse.
"A year of fully alone," you said. "Before that my mom came sometimes. When she was having a good stretch. Those got shorter." You chose your words deliberately, the way you always did when you described your mom — honest, but not more exposed than necessary. "She's had a hard time. She does her best."
"She sent a fifteen-year-old to handle black dogs alone," Dean said. His voice was flat, trying to be neutral and not quite making it.
"She didn't send me. I went. There's a difference."
"A significant one." You echoed Sam's words from inside without planning to, and something in Dean's expression flickered.
"Don't do that," he said.
"Be reasonable. I'm trying to be—" He stopped. Rubbed a hand over his face. "I'm trying to be angry. You're making it hard."
"You're being very calm and logical about all of this."
"Would you prefer I wasn't?"
He looked at you directly for the first time since coming outside, and his eyes in the yellow parking lot light were complicated — not angry, despite what he'd said, or not only angry, something layered beneath it that he was clearly not planning to identify out loud.
"I don't know what I'd prefer," he said. "That's the problem."
You held his gaze. "I'm not asking you to be anything," you said. "I know this landed on you. I know this is — I'm not expecting anything from you. Either of you. We can just keep doing what we've been doing and not make it into something you didn't sign up for."
Something crossed his face, sharp and quick.
"Is that what you want?" he asked.
The question surprised you. You'd expected dismissal or relief or redirection, not a direct question asked directly back.
"I don't know," you said honestly. "I didn't have time to figure out what I wanted before it was already happening."
He looked at you for a long moment. You could see him thinking, not the fast tactical thinking he did on jobs but something slower and more reluctant, working something out that he'd been in the process of working out for weeks without knowing what he was solving for.
"When you flanked the black dog," he said. "That first night."
"That's what I do. When something comes out of cover, I go wide, I push it into the open. I've been doing it since I was — I've been doing it a long time." He looked at the highway. "Sam made some comment about it afterward, in the room. He said you moved exactly like me. I told him it was coincidence."
"Maybe it was," you said.
"Yeah," he said, in a tone that meant no.
"Let's go back inside," he said finally, pushing off the car. "Your pie's getting cold."
"So it's getting colder." He moved toward the door without waiting for you, and you understood that as the thing it was — not dismissal but the opposite, the specific Winchester method of saying come with me without having to say it.
The next two days were the strangest of the six weeks.
Not hostile. Not cold. Just recalibrated — the three of you moving through the new shape of things with the careful attention of people who were used to adjusting to difficult terrain. Sam overcorrected slightly toward warmth in a way that was transparently kind and that you couldn't be annoyed about because the intent was so plainly good. He asked more questions, listened more carefully, made small accommodations that he framed as practicality but weren't entirely. You let him. It was easier than making him stop, and besides, you didn't entirely want him to stop.
Dean went the other direction. Quieter than usual. Not the hostile quiet — not the closed-door quiet he could do when he wanted to, the one that kept everyone at arm's length with the efficiency of a professional — but something more internal. Like he was listening to something he hadn't expected to hear and was still working out what it was saying.
You didn't push either of them. You'd learned young that some things needed to be approached sideways.
What you noticed was that the protective quality — which had been there almost from the beginning, from that first night when Dean had looked at the scratches on your arm and asked twice if they were from the branch and not the dog — didn't go away. If anything it settled in deeper, became less provisional. Dean started walking slightly ahead of you in unfamiliar places in a way that he probably didn't notice he was doing. Sam started did it in a manner of speaking on everything — hey there's ice on the steps, hey that diner has a bad review for food safety, hey the county map shows the shortcut doesn't actually connect.
Neither of them commented on any of it.
On the third day you drove to a diner Dean had gone to once before because, he said, they had good onion rings, and you sat in a booth in the midday light and ate onion rings and Sam talked about Celtic mythology and Dean told him he was a nerd and you corrected a factual error in Sam's reasoning and he argued with you about it for twenty minutes and won, but only barely, and you left a tip that was larger than strictly necessary because the waitress had called you hon in a way that reminded you of your mom on good days.
Getting back to the car, Dean held the door open without being asked. He did it absently, automatically, the way you did things that had become habit before you knew they were.
The backseat felt like yours in a way it hadn't when you first got in it six weeks ago, the specific spring on the left you'd learned to avoid, the crack in the far window that sang above sixty, the smell of leather and gun oil that you'd stopped noticing.
Sam got in the passenger side and looked back at you and said, with the studied casualness of someone who had rehearsed this, "So we were thinking about heading toward Missouri. There's a case. But we could also—if you needed to check in. With your mom. We could detour."
You looked at him. Then at the back of Dean's head.
Dean was adjusting the mirror and very deliberately not participating in this conversation.
"I talked to her two days ago," you said. "She's okay."
"Okay," Sam said. "Missouri, then."
"Missouri," Dean confirmed, to the windshield.
The engine turned over. The radio came on. You opened your journal to a clean page and clicked your pen and started writing up notes from the last job, and somewhere around the Illinois state line you looked up and caught Dean's eyes in the rearview mirror — not checking on you, or maybe checking on you, or maybe something that included both of those things and didn't have a clean name — and he looked back at the road and you looked back at your journal and neither of you said anything.
It was fine. It was more than fine.
Sam called Bobby when he thought you couldn't hear.
You were coming back from the vending machine, earlier than expected, and you caught the tail end of it through the half-open motel room door — Sam's voice low and deliberate: 'Yeah, Bobby. Yeah, I know. That's what I said.' A pause, longer. 'No, she knew your number. Her mom had it in her phone.' Another pause. 'Yeah. No, she's—Bobby, she's good. She's really good.' Something that might have been a laugh, soft. 'I know. Dean's Dean. He'll get there. He's already mostly there, he just won't say so.'
You stood in the corridor with a bag of chips and a water bottle and let the words settle.
You went in. Sam looked up and the call ended and he met your eyes and didn't pretend you hadn't heard.
"He wants to meet you," Sam said. "Bobby."
Something caught in your chest, small and unexpected. "Yeah?"
"He said—" Sam paused, choosing words. "He said he should've done more. Over the years. Kept better track."
"It wasn't his job," you said.
"He doesn't see it that way." Sam watched you. "He's been in touch with your mom on and off for years. He knew you existed. He said she called him when you were born, actually. He said—" Sam's voice did something careful. "He said she named you and told him and asked him to keep it between them."
You sat down on the edge of the bed. The chips were still in your hand.
"He kept a lot between a lot of people," Sam said gently. "Bobby. Our dad. Everyone who knew John Winchester kept his secrets whether they meant to or not." He paused. "He's not—he's not saying sorry for himself. He's saying it because he means it."
"Tell him it's okay," you said.
You thought about it. Actually thought about it, turning it over, testing it. "Yeah," you said. "It is."
Sam nodded. He was quiet for a moment. "For what it's worth," he said, "I think you're going to like him. He's gruff and he reads everything and he calls people idiots when he's fond of them."
"Sounds familiar," you said, with a slight look toward the wall behind which Dean was watching TV.
Sam laughed — a real one, unguarded. "Don't tell him I said that."
"I won't," you said. "He'd never admit it anyway."
The case in Missouri was a siren, which you'd suspected from the county records before Sam even pulled up his files, and when you laid your research next to his on the motel table they matched almost perfectly with one discrepancy that turned out to be yours being correct, which Dean found disproportionately funny and Sam found disproportionately important to contextualize.
"The lore source you used is outdated," Sam said.
"I know," you said. "I noted that. But the older source turned out to be right in this case, which is why I cross-referenced instead of just—"
"Okay but methodologically—"
"Sam," Dean said. "She got it right."
"I know she got it right, I'm saying the method—"
"The method got the right answer. That's what methods are for."
Sam looked at Dean with an expression of profound betrayal. "You don't even care about methodology."
"I care about not getting killed by a siren." Dean looked at you. "Good catch."
You felt the warmth of it and filed it away in the place you were increasingly keeping things like that — small and solid, added to a collection you hadn't known you were building.
The siren went down on the second night. It was ugly, as siren cases tended to be — the creature's particular gift for finding what you wanted most and wearing it until you couldn't see straight made the approach complicated, required the three of you to develop a system of check-ins and specific code words so that you could verify each other without falling for a substitution. It was Sam's idea. Dean had implemented it with the brisk practicality he brought to things he thought were important but didn't want to make a production of.
The code word was Zeppelin. Dean had chosen it without explanation and Sam had accepted it without objection.
Afterward, standing in the wet grass by the reservoir with the thing dead behind you, Dean had done a head count without making it look like a head count, accounting for both of you with his eyes before he looked away.
You noticed. You didn't say so.
The call from your mom came on a Tuesday at two in the morning.
Except it wasn't your mom. It was Mrs. Perrelli, whose number you knew even though it had been eight months since you'd seen her face, because your mom had given her your number in a specific tone that Mrs. Perrelli had clearly recognized and catalogued for exactly this use.
She's stable, Mrs. Perrelli said. She's stable, but it was—it took a while for anyone to notice, and I think some things need to be sorted out. The apartment—some things need to be sorted out.
You thanked her. You said you'd be there as soon as you could. You wrote down the hospital name in your journal with your pen pressing harder than it needed to and then you sat on the edge of the bed in the Missouri motel room at two in the morning and looked at the opposite wall.
Your mom was alive. She was stable. These were the facts. You dealt in facts.
The apartment was in a state. Some things needed to be sorted out. You had a car and money and you could be in Illinois by morning and you could sort out whatever needed sorting out because you'd been sorting things out for three years and you knew how to do it.
You'd done it alone before. You'd do it alone now.
You started quietly packing your bag.
The connecting door opened.
Dean stood in the doorway. T-shirt, jeans, clearly awake or unable to sleep — you didn't know which and it didn't matter. He looked at your half-packed bag on the bed. Then at your face.
"What happened," he said.
"My mom. She's fine, she's stable, I just need to go up to Illinois for—"
"What happened," he said again, same tone, and you understood that fine and stable were not going to satisfy this particular line of questioning.
You told him. Flat and factual, the way you'd learned to tell things, getting all the information across without letting any of it spill sideways. His expression did several things during the thirty seconds it took you to explain, none of which he fully managed to contain.
When you finished, he stood there for a moment.
Then he went back to his room and tapped Sam on his foot. "Sam." The wake-up voice. The voice with an edge in it. "Get dressed. We're going to Illinois."
"Dean." Your voice came out sharper than you meant it. "I don't need—"
"I know you don't need it." He said it without looking at you, already pulling his jacket off the chair. "Get your bag."
"I can handle this alone."
"I know." He looked at you then, and his voice had gone quiet in a way that was different from his usual quiet — less guarded, more direct. "You can handle everything alone. You've been doing it for years. I know that." He held your gaze. "I'm not going because you can't handle it. I'm going because you shouldn't have to."
"Get your bag," he said again, not unkindly.
Sam appeared in the doorway, dressed, reading the room in the way he did, immediately and silently. He looked at Dean. Looked at you. Looked at the half-packed bag.
"I'll drive first," Sam said. "Dean, get the map. We'll take 57 north, it'll be faster."
"I know how to get to Illinois, Sam."
"You always go the scenic route."
"Can we not do this right now?" you said.
"Please," you said, which was a word you used rarely.
"Yeah," Dean said. "Yeah. Let's go."
The drive to Illinois was four hours and change.
Sam drove the first half and you sat in the back and watched the highway and didn't sleep, and at some point Dean reached back without looking and put his jacket over your legs, not saying anything about it, looking at the road, and you pulled it around yourself and didn't say anything either.
Sam turned the music down, which was unprecedented.
Around two hours in, Dean said, not turning around, "She's going to be okay."
You looked at the back of his head. "You don't know that."
"No," he said. "But she is."
It wasn't logical. It wasn't a fact. But the certainty in his voice was so plainly real that something in your chest loosened slightly, just slightly, and you held the jacket tighter and watched the Illinois dark come up around the highway.
The hospital was the kind that was too bright at four in the morning, all fluorescent bleach and the particular sounds of a building that never went entirely quiet. A nurse with kind eyes brought you to your mom's room, and you stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at her — smaller than you remembered, which didn't make sense because you'd seen her three weeks ago, but grief and fear had a way of shrinking things — and then you went in.
She was awake. Barely, but awake.
"Hey, baby," she said, and her voice was the middle-distance voice, but underneath it was her — the essential version, the one that had taught you to shoot and to read lore and to always check the exits, the one that had loved you in the uneven, imperfect, entirely real way she'd always loved you.
"Hey, Mom," you said. You sat in the chair beside her bed and took her hand. "I'm here."
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry, I didn't—"
"Mom." You held her hand tighter. "It's okay. We're going to figure out what you need and we're going to get it for you. I just need you to let me do that."
She looked at you for a moment, too tired for full focus. Then her eyes moved to the doorway.
Dean was there. Not in the room — he'd stationed himself just outside, leaning against the corridor wall, giving you space, but close. Visible. When your mom's eyes found him, something moved across her face — recognition, or something like it.
"Winchester," she said softly. It wasn't a question.
Dean looked at her directly. "Yes, ma'am."
Your mom looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at you. Something complicated and exhausted moved across her face, and then settled into something simpler.
"I'm glad," she said quietly, to no one in particular. "I'm glad you found each other."
Dean's jaw did something. He looked at the floor, then back up.
"Get some rest," he said. His voice was rough. "We'll be here."
You hadn't asked him to, but on the second morning he had appeared at your elbow in the corridor where a doctor was trying to explain your mother's condition and the options and what the recommended next steps would be, and Sam had just — been there. Asking the right questions. Taking notes. Speaking with the calm authority of someone who was used to navigating institutions on behalf of people who were too tired to do it for themselves.
The doctor had looked at Sam and said are you family? and Sam had said yes and not looked at you when he said it.
You looked at the floor. Your eyes were doing something inconvenient.
Afterward, in the waiting room, Sam sat next to you and put a cup of coffee in your hands — the right way, the way you took it, which he knew because he'd been watching for weeks — and didn't say anything for a while.
"Thank you," you said finally.
"Yeah," he said, like it wasn't worth mentioning.
Dean had been in the parking lot most of that day, which you'd initially thought was avoidance and then reconsidered. On the second afternoon you came out to get air and found him on the hood of the Impala with two bad vending machine coffees, one already extended toward you before you'd fully cleared the door.
You climbed up and sat beside him and took the coffee.
"She's going to need a program," you said. It came out flat and practical, not because you felt flat and practical but because that was the only register available to you right now for this particular subject. "A real one. Something more than she's had. I've tried to — I can't keep patching it."
"I've been doing it since I was twelve and it's not—" Your voice caught, very slightly, not enough to count. "It's not working. I keep thinking if I just hold it together long enough she'll come back out of it, and she does sometimes, she does, but then—"
"Hey," Dean said. Not loud. Not sharp. Just steady. The same voice he used to center someone on a job, except aimed at you. "Hey. Look at me."
"You did good," he said. "For years, you did everything you could. That's not nothing. That's — that's a lot." His jaw was tight, the way it went when he was feeling something he didn't have language for. "But you're fifteen, and holding your family together is not—" he stopped. "It's not something a fifteen-year-old should have to do alone. Okay?"
"I wasn't completely alone," you said. "I had—"
"You had yourself," he said. "That's not the same thing."
You looked down at the parking lot pavement.
"We're going to find her a good program," Dean said. "A real one. And we're going to make sure it sticks. And while that's happening—" He stopped again, and you could feel him gearing up to something, something he'd been circling for days. "While that's happening, I want you in the car."
"With us," he said, to the hood of the Impala, to the parking lot, to the middle distance. "In the car. Working cases. Not—not alone. Not anymore." He glanced at you sideways. "If you want."
"Sam wants it too." He said it quickly. "Before you say it's just me. It's not just me. We talked about it. Sam's better at this stuff, he'd say it differently—"
"I know," you said. "I know he would."
"Yeah," you said. "I want to."
He exhaled, long and slow. Nodded once. "Okay," he said. "Good."
You sat on the hood of the Impala in the Illinois afternoon and finished the bad coffee and didn't say anything else for a while, and Dean stayed exactly where he was beside you without making a production of it, and that was more than enough.
Your mom went into a program two weeks later.
You'd found it with Sam's help — research conducted the way Sam conducted all research, meticulous and cross-referenced and with three backup options ranked by various criteria. A good program, a real one, in a facility forty minutes from the apartment. The intake coordinator had a calm, no-nonsense manner that your mom had responded to in the way she sometimes responded to people who didn't make her feel managed.
She'd packed her own bag.
You'd stood in the apartment doorway and watched her do it, and she'd looked at you halfway through and said, You should have had better than this, baby, in the voice she used when she was being very honest, and you'd said, You did your best, Mom, and she'd said, That's not the same thing, which was almost exactly what Dean had said in the hospital parking lot, and you'd thought about bloodlines and what got passed down through them.
Dean had driven you to drop her off. Sam had waited at the motel because three people at an intake appointment was probably one too many, but he'd handed you a list of questions to ask the coordinator and a phone number for a support resource and a granola bar with the specific energy of someone who wanted to be useful and had calibrated the form it took.
The drive back from the facility was quiet. You watched the Illinois flat go by and thought about your mom, and the coordinator who had shaken her hand, and the room she'd be sleeping in tonight that was not the apartment where the bad stretches happened.
"She's going to be okay," Dean said.
"You said that in the car to the hospital."
You almost smiled. "You don't know that."
"No," he said. "But I believe it. That counts for something."
You thought about that. Outside, the flat land gave way to the beginning of Iowa, and the highway stretched out in front of the Impala like it always did, like there was always more of it.
"Yeah," you said. "It does."
You packed what you needed that evening.
Not everything — the apartment would be there, Mrs. Perrelli would check on it, your mom would come back to it eventually. You took your journal, your clothes, your hunting kit, the photo of your mom from before the bad years started, the knife she'd given you, handle worn smooth, and one of her scarves that smelled like her, which you put at the bottom of the bag under everything else so you didn't have to explain it.
You put the bag in the trunk of the Impala.
Dean was leaning against the side of the car with his arms crossed. He watched you put the bag in. He watched you close the trunk.
You looked at him. "Are you seriously asking me that?"
He uncrossed his arms. "Get in the car."
You got in the car. The backseat received you the way it always did now — the specific spring you avoided, the familiar smell, the sound the window made. Sam was already in the passenger seat with a road atlas open across his knees because Sam didn't trust GPS in areas with spotty coverage, which was a position Dean agreed with and would never admit to agreeing with.
Sam turned around and looked at you. His eyes were doing the thing they did sometimes — that look you'd come to recognize as something warm and slightly fractured, the look of a person who had wanted something without knowing they wanted it and was now slightly bewildered to have it.
"Yeah," you said. "Okay."
Dean got in last. The engine — the Impala's specific enormous voice, the sound that had become as familiar to you as your own heartbeat over the course of six weeks — turned over, and the car settled into its own weight the way it always did, steady and certain.
He pulled out of the parking lot without ceremony.
Sam said something about the route and Dean said he didn't need the atlas and Sam said that wasn't what he'd asked and Dean said it was basically what he'd asked, and you opened your journal to a clean page and listened to them and thought about your mom in her room forty minutes away, beginning something. You thought about Bobby Singer in Sioux Falls, who had reportedly already bought your favorite soda — a fact Sam had conveyed with great care and a look that suggested Bobby would never forgive him for telling you. You thought about Adam, somewhere, who was part of this inheritance and who you hadn't met and might not meet and thought about anyway.
You thought about your father — John Winchester, weather system, a man who had moved through multiple lives and left behind children who turned out to have the same jaw and the same flanking instinct and the same way of pressing a laugh back into an exhale, children who had found each other eventually, the way things that belonged together sometimes did.
At the top of the page you wrote the date. Below it you wrote up the last case notes, careful and specific, cross-referenced — the method that worked even when it shouldn't. At the bottom of the page, in handwriting that was slightly different from the clinical shorthand above it, a little more deliberate:
Found out I have brothers.
You looked at it for a moment.
Outside, Iowa opened up around the highway, enormous and flat and going on forever in every direction, and the Impala moved through it at a steady seventy-five with Zeppelin too loud on the radio and Sam folding the atlas with the resigned competence of someone who had accepted he wasn't winning this one and Dean's hand easy on the wheel, looking at the road ahead.
Below the first line you wrote:
I think this is what it's supposed to feel like.
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