Inspired by Charles Bukowski's For Jane. Hope you enjoy!

Summary: Manon was plagued with idiopathic neuropathy – the inability to feel sensations of temperature and touch – for as long as she could remember. But when she returns to Singer's Salvage Yard, Manon comes face to face with the one person whose touch she could feel.

Trudging over the railroad tracks that snaked out of Bellingham, Washington, Manon silently wished she could feel the steely wind cutting at her skin. But even after twenty-five years of living, she couldn't feel a damn thing.

The doctors called it idiopathic neuropathy. Which was just a shit ton of Latin for the inability of the sensory nerves to relay messages from the senses to the brain, disabling the sensations of touch and temperature. It'd be any hunter's wet dream to be unable to feel pain. And where Manon should have considered her unlucky life as having a silver lining, it was quite the opposite.

But it was oftentimes advantageous – even Manon was compelled time and time again to admit – during drunken bar fights and the occasional situations when a fucking Amazon throws you off a five hundred foot cliff into the freezing waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Her bitterness stemmed from the exhausting task of constantly faking moans of ecstasy during sloppy inebriated versions of the vertical tango.

Just thinking about those disappointing series of nights in Bellingham made Manon's pace quicken down the railway tracks. The labored sound of her shallow breaths drowned out the soft melody of the Pacific waters rushing up against the tangled plants on either side of the tracks. She only had a half mile until the tracks delved into the tall forests, dampened by the rain and darkened by the fog, and an added mile to where her eyesore of a car was parked.

Cars thundered across the overpass that ran parallel to the railway tracks, drizzling rain water and mud down to where Manon was walking. Grime splattered along her exposed neck and dripped down her collarbone to where it seeped into the layers of flannel she wore underneath.

"Just my luck," she growled, wiping the specks of mud from her skin. "I gotta get back to South Dakota. I'd take hail the size of my fist over this any day."

"You sure about that?"

Manon craned her neck up to location the source of the familiar gruff voice. Bobby Singer was leaning against the stone parapet lining the overpass.

"Yeah," she grinned up at him, hands on hips. "How'd you know I was here?"

He snorted. "I tracked down your calls after the sixth or seventh drunk voicemail message. Figured I'd make the drive to make sure you were okay."

Manon cocked her head to one side, confused and surprised and incredulous. "Bobby, that doesn't sound like you at all. It was just a few drunken messages. You didn't have to drive all the way here."

"Oh, shut up." Bobby motioned her to keep walking toward the open grass at the edge of the water. "I was on my own hunt a couple of hours east of here."

He held out a hand for her to grab and pulled her up from the muck and mire onto the road. Manon didn't reply immediately, still baffled that he would go to such lengths, and slapped the mud off of her knees from when she had scuffled up the muddied hill toward Bobby. She couldn't feel the warmth of his hand when she took it.

"It's good to see you, Bobby," she warmly smiled and had half a mind to hug him then and there. "I was just about to drive down to see you."

Bobby snorted again, rolling his eyes for added measure. "I bet you were. Where's all your stuff anyway?"

"In my car."

"Where's your car?"

"I parked it out of sight." She pointed into the woods.

"Hmmm," Bobby took a moment to consider and began walking toward his truck which was parked under the darkened eaves of the forest line, "you still driving that ugly '96 Corolla?"

She nodded.

"We're gonna have to change that, girl. Get in the truck. We'll get your stuff, ditch the car, and get you back home."

***SUPERNATURAL***

Aside from the idiopathic neuropathy, the one other thing that Manon cared to remember about her early life were the twelve months of the year that she spent with Bobby at the salvage yard. It wasn't ideal, but she was able to attend school regularly with the false ideals that she'd be able to pursue an education after receiving her GED. She celebrated her high school graduation and her eighteenth birthday at Bobby Singer's but couldn't quite convince herself that she would be doing the right thing when there were hundreds of monsters under little children's beds and not enough hunters to kill them all off.

She came to regret it though. The life of a hunter – with all the perks of the occupational hazards that the job seemed to bring – was boring and lonely when done single-handedly. That's why Manon wanted to go back to South Dakota and see if she could throw her dice in with Bobby Singer.

"You think I can work the weld again?"

Bobby looked over at her from the driver's seat. "Yeah, sure, kid. I got a project I was planning on working on that you can help me with."

"Oh yeah? Like what?"

"Panic room in the basement. Think about this: a cylindrical room completely lined in iron and coated in salt to keep spirits from getting in. In the roof is a large extraction fan, below which has a grill with metal work in the shape of a devil's trap. I'm plannin' on spanning the entire floor with another devil's trap and a devil's trap painted on the ground outside the door, and Enochian sigils on the walls that keep angels from entering."

"Angels? Angels aren't real." Manon laughed but stopped short when Bobby gave her an exasperated face. "Okay, okay. You put your Enochian sigils to keep Travolta out of your panic room. But you were saying something about the grills under the extraction fan? You got the frame for that? I can weld the bars to it in an hour at most."

"I got the frame," he replied, almost nearly thrilled at how her voice got all excited at the suggestion.

Bobby had housed Manon O'Neal for over six years and made sure she knew how to use the tools around her, literally and figuratively. He taught her how to strip and rebuild a car from the ground up, how to perfect stick welding techniques, or how to fix the annoying leaking facets. It was a little more than her daddy was willing to do for her – the man abandoned his only child to follow his wife to their kingdom that was two feet wide and six feet deep.

"You still got that thing?" Bobby began. "That – That idiopathic…"

"Idiopathic neuropathy," she finished, running her hand over the dashboard that had been splayed with the pounding sun but couldn't feel the source of the heat. "Yeah, I still got it."

"Huh."

"Let me ask you something, Bobby. How's, uh, Dean doing? You see him around a lot?"

"Well," Bobby's words came out of his mouth dry, "he's hunting with Sam again. Lost John a couple of years back."

"Yeah, I heard that one through the grapevine," she lamented quietly. "How'd Sam get pulled back in? I thought he was out for good. He got a full ride to Stanford, right? Or was it CalTech?"

"His girlfriend was killed by a demon."

"Oh."

"But you don't care much about what Sam's up to, do ya? It's just Dean you wanna hear about."

Manon shrugged off embarrassment. "He used to be my best friend, Bobby. It always got lonely being the only kid in the yard, and when John brought Sam and Dean by for a couple of weeks it was fun. Remember when Dean and I drowned your liquor stash, filled all the bottles up with water and resealed 'em?"

"Don't remind me." Bobby said as he turned into the dirt road leading up to his home. "Dean was somewhat tolerant to all that booze, but you emptied your stomach everywhere. Came down the next morning and it smelled like your puke took a dump."

Manon didn't withhold the deep, belly-aching laugh that burst from her chest, but her eyes darted back and forth over the landscape that was stacked with busted up cars. She was eager to catch a glimpse of the house she was practically raised in. Excitement built up in her chest, but fell into her empty stomach within a second – rattling through her ribs.

There, parked just beside the back porch, was the all-too familiar '67 Chevy Impala, its driver leaning against the glossy black frame.