Wanted Dead or Alive | 𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐍 𝐖𝐈𝐍𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑

23 - SO IT GOES...

SEASON 2, EPISODE 1

She could hear the panic clearly.

The hospital had been mostly silent. Before the deal, before the smoke, before Dean disappearing - there had been that eerie calm settling over the gaping holes that made up the inside of the building. It was the sort that settled into your skin. There was little benefit to the television sets and piles of sheer blankets on nearby chairs, both meant to comfort and distract, because this aching shroud would make you remember.

In the silence, your brain would begin to throb. It was trying to tell you, scream at you, there was someone dying in the very same building as you, you knew it. Someone almost dying. Someone not dead that probably should have been, if not for the hands of doctors, wrapped in rubber to disguise the fact that these weren't God's hands. They were only pretending.

Or was it the opposite? Was changing someone's condemned fate a miracle even if you twisted the plans of heaven to make it happen?

Mara wasn't sure. All she'd ever known - all she'd ever been taught - was that you should not try to be near God if you considered your power near His. Especially if you were a reaper.

But she'd also seen Dean close to death. So, now, it made her reconsider.

Of course, anything would be worth it to stop the screaming. The panicked screaming that had burst through the resolved quiet. Her physical body began to reform near Sam, and she realized: the screaming belonged to Sam.

He was screaming for someone to help Dean, whose vital sign monitor had begun to beep. Help came quickly, of course, because the hands of God were attached to feet that never knew leisure.

Mara kept her distance while they worked. Her distance was exactly 6 squares of tile - the distance between Dean's bed and the door to the hallway - and she only knew this because she couldn't bear the thought of watching him right then, so she counted tiles instead. She knew he was okay. She knew what deal had been made. But Dean laying there, with the monitor beeping and men and women in blue scrubs hovering over him, was too close to what had almost been.

Finally, the dark blue silhouettes faded, squirming past her to exit the room. In times like this, when her mind was too occupied with drifting, she forgot she could be seen in her physical form, so she hadn't known to move out of their way.

She wasn't sure that she would have moved even if she had remembered. All she could think about was getting to Dean.

He was back.

All she could think was that he was back and he was here and he would be happy and he would tell Sam and Kat that it was okay to trust her. And they could all have each other again.

In a second, Mara was there beside Dean's hospital bed. In another second, her hands were gripping his arms, his shoulders, and whatever else she could manage to grasp. In this moment, he was her life vest. Though she'd been his in the hours he'd wavered in the uncertainty of the In-Between, but she knew. Because of the gaping cavern that had almost been punctured in her by a loss she'd never imagined, she knew: in every breath she'd spent among humans, he'd been the fortitude to keep her afloat. If she could keep him close to her heart and secure him around her core, she could swim.