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"For the last time, Sam: You will stay here, even if I have to nail your ass to that chair!"
"You can't do this to me, Dean! I have as much right to hunt that thing as you do!"
"I'm not listening to this any longer." And with this her brother walked right out the door; not without locking the thing shut behind him.
"You son of a bitch!", Sam screamed through the shut door, kind of insulting herself with that statement. She gave the door a few random kicks before aiming properly and slamming her foot down in the middle as she'd seen her brother do countless times.
"Fuck!", she cursed after having a sharp pain shoot up her right foot. She limped to her backpack to dig out her picklocks.
By the time Sam stumbled out the door a cloud of dust was all that was left of her brother. Cursing like a sailor she stomped over to the red Suzuki parked next to where their Impala had been and started on hot wiring the damn thing.
Usually Dean wasn't as crazy overprotective of her as he'd been that night. At least he hadn't been in a long time. In fact they had both spent pretty much their whole lives on the road with their dad, who had taught them all about hunting. Until one day dad had just left, leaving behind a message telling them they shouldn't worry about him, he was onto something big. Every couple of months he had let them know he was fine one way or another until one of his very rare calls about two years ago.
He'd called Dean's phone but upon hearing the ringtone they had both saved as their dad's - Daddy Sang Bass by Johnny Cash - she'd snatched up her brother’s phone from his bed and panted "Dad?" into the speaker.
Dean had watched her anxiously while her father had ordered to pass the phone to her brother. John Winchester had sounded breathless as if he was running from something.
"Dad? What's the matter? What's going on?", Sam had shouted instead of following orders. Dean had snatched the phone from her hands putting it to his ear. Sam hadn't heard what her father had told Dean, but she sure as hell had heard the screams, the growling and the ripping of flesh that had followed. Dean had lowered the phone, his face frozen in shock, without pressing the end button, so the sounds had still echoed in the room until he had looked at her with determination in his eyes and told her to pack up. Convinced they were going to save their father, Sam had jumped in the car after Dean, questioning him to what their father had said and were they were going.
But Dean hadn't said a word about what was going on. Not one word on the twelve-hour-drive from Nebraska to the University of Mississippi where Dean just dumped her in front of the dormitory, told her everything was taken care of and drove of.
After a three-hour long fit during which she swore to kill her brother, cut him up and scatter his remains all over the earth, she'd found out that there was a room in this very dormitory rented in her name, that she was enrolled in “Ole Miss” and named Jean Miller (could it get any more obvious?).
After calling Dean a dozen times, all their fellow hunter friends and their dad without getting anywhere, she'd resigned herself to the situation at hand. She'd moved her meager belongings into her dorm room, stashed all her weapons under her bed and started her life as a college student at Ole Miss, fairly certain that Dean would show up at the end of the week.
A year later, on a cool September morning was the first time since then that she had seen her brother again. She was hurrying out of the dorm building, pushing the last bite of a Pop Tart into her mouth, jacket and backpack hanging from one shoulder. She was already late for her Anthropology class and just pulling on the second sleeve of her denim jacket when she spotted Dean and stopped dead in her tracks. The Impala was parked right in front of the building, Dean leaning casually against it and flipping through a sports magazine. She must have stared at him for a solid minute before she'd gotten any words out.
"What the fuck are you doing here?"
He'd looked up and upon seeing her, a smile had lightened up his face. No, actually it was a smirk.
"Woah, watch the language, little sis!" She'd just lifted an eyebrow and looked at him questioningly. "Just came to pick you up. It's a long way to Colorado and I wouldn't want you to waste all your money on a bus ticket."
"And why the hell would I go to Colorado with you? You dumped me here a year ago without letting me know anything! What the hell happened, Dean? What about Dad? Is he alright?"
He sighed, folding his magazine and throwing it through the open window onto the backseat of his car.
"I'll explain everything, I promise - well, most of it, anyway - once we get in the car, okay?"
Sam put her hands on her hips, blew out a heavy breath and looked around as if a grand junk of wisdom would fly at her out of nowhere.
"Well, Dean, I don't know if I wanna get in a car with you. I'm pretty pissed at you at the moment. To be precise I've been pissed at you for this past year. Wanna guess, why?"
Dean lifted his eyebrows. "No idea. Because I ate the last Reesee's cup?"
Sam folded her arms and thought about what to do. "Look, just tell me if Dad's still alive and I might consider your offer."
Dean dropped all his smugness and looked at her earnestly. "He's alive. And alright. Just... hasn't been around in a while."
After the exchange of more snappy comments they'd eventually packed all her stuff ("How the hell did you hoard all this in a mere year?") and loaded it in the Impala.
On the way to Colorado she'd found out that Dean and their Dad had a code for when things got really tense. Which apparently had been the case with that fatal phone call back then. When one of them used the code it meant the other had to immediately drop everything they were doing and get her to safety. Apparently a demon had targeted their family in particular as revenge for them killing his "family". Now they had managed to exorcise the demon and "could carry on as usual". She'd felt treated like an imbecile child after hearing that and hadn't talked to Dean for a whole week.
That had been a year ago and by now things had pretty much returned to normal. Up until now. Somebody on their case had mentioned their best friend's eyes glowing yellow for a second, something they had only ever heard of in connection to their mother's death twenty years ago.
Now she was racing a hundred miles an hour through a small town in Montana, directing the motorcycle beneath her to the given adress while swearing in her mind to make her brother die a slow and painful death (once again).
When she arrived and stopped the machine in front of the house, Dean was sitting on the front steps twirling a silver revolver in his hands. Sam kicked up the stand and swung her leg over the motorcycle.
"What happened?", she demanded to know while marching up to Dean.
"He got away before I could pull the trigger."
"You let him get away?", Sam shouted incredulously.
"Yeah, well, I'm not God, okay? When I got in there the sucker was already halfway to Hawaii!"
"What about the guy?" "Dropped dead the moment the demon was out of his body."
Sam drew out her arms to the side and let them drop to her sides. "So, we failed. Big time."
Dean looked up at her for a moment, the shame visible in his eyes, before lowering them the colt again.
"Yeah. You could say that."
Sam ran her fingers through her hair and put her hands on her hips. Then a thought occurred to her.
"No, you know what? You failed! If you hadn't wasted time arguing with me about how this is too dangerous for me to come along, maybe we would've been here on time to kill the son of a bitch! But no, you had to go all big bro on me, locking me up like a helpless little girl when you know that I'm just as good at this as you are and very capable of looking out for myself!"
Dean jumped to his feet and marched toward her, fury marking his face.
"Stop acting like a spoiled teenager who wants to be all grown up! Dad and I are just looking out for you! You know how hard it is to see you sitting next to me in a car all day long and fighting monsters every night while I want everything for you that is not this? I couldn't bear for you to get hurt so I try everything to avoid it, even at the cost of pissing you off! You should be grateful that someone's looking out for you, Sam! It's not exactly a picnic!"
Sam's gaze grew soft. "Then stop doing it, Dean. I'm not playing grown up by saying that I can watch out for myself. I really can. And I worry about you the exact same way you worry about me. Could you imagine how it would feel for me, if you got hurt protecting me? Let alone if you died? I would hate myself for the rest of my life!"
Dean was looking at her, his face unreadable. Then the corner of his lip lifted. “So you would be sad if I died. Surprising, considering the number of times you’ve threatened to kill me.”
Sam couldn’t hide her own little smile. “Yeah, well. I’d rather you die on my conditions.”
Dean looked back inside the house before giving an exhausted smile and getting up.
“Wanna get breakfast?”, he asked. “I think we have some things to work out.”
Sams’s smile widened. “Pancakes?”, she asked.
“Absolutely.”
Dean made his way to the car, but Sam was rooted to the spot.
“Hey, Dean?”
Dean turned around. “Hm?”
“You think I can keep the bike?”