It was with a heavy heart that Dean Winchester returned to hunting.

It had been six long, blissful years that he'd left the life behind. That was a lie. They hadn't been blissful.

After a year and a half, Lisa had had it with the night-terrors and the PTSD and made him go see a therapist. Obviously, he'd had to lie about some things, but he was able to tell her the truth that mattered. And it had helped. A lot. He'd gotten medication too, after a psych evaluation, to help him. And overall, he was better.

But forty years of torture in addition to watching his brother die in front of him (twice—or, he supposed, three times, remembering the time they'd gone to Heaven together) tend to weigh on a person.

Both Dean and Lisa (and Ben) had known he'd never be normal, that he'd never really be okay. But that was okay. He was trying. And he wasn't taking it out on the people around him, as he'd used to do (he wanted to slap his past self for so many of the things he'd done—particularly to Sam).

They'd just sent Ben off to college—at Stanford, of all places—and Dean and Lisa had settled into a happy honeymoon period. After all, they'd never really had one—after two years of living together, they'd had a courthouse wedding and both been back at work by the next day—and things were happy. They were as content as they'd always been.

But of course, all good things had to come to an end, apparently. Lisa had been involved in a serious car crash just a month ago.

After weeks and weeks of fighting, she'd been lost.

And so, in the wake of the funeral, after making sure Ben was all right to go back to college, Dean had finally gotten out the impala, loaded it up, quit his job, and then sold the house. He'd given the money to Ben; he had enough left from his job to last him a couple of months, and then he'd probably start getting fake credit cards again. Ben understood. They were still going to meet up as much as they could—Dean would be driving over to Stanford a lot.

But for now, he was attempting to put his rusty skills to use again.

He'd been a few months on the road now, and he hadn't come across any hunters. He liked it better this way, at least for now, although it did grow lonely when he wasn't talking to Ben, which was practically every day.

A part of him was tempted to go to Bobby, but he didn't want to bother the old man just yet. For now, he wanted to be alone, to process his grief. He did phone sessions with his therapist, and kept taking his medication. He looked for as many plausible cases as he could find, and he drove and he hunted.

He dreamt of Lisa, and he dreamt of Sam, as he always did, and how he'd looked falling backwards into that pit, down into Hell, arms splayed behind him, looking like Christ on the cross. God. He hoped he wasn't getting religious.

The Hell memories weren't as bad as they used to be; Alastair's smile still haunted his nightmares, but they were less frequent. The medication helped.

Sometimes John was there. Sometimes Mary was burning on the ceiling. Those nightmares had been frequent since childhood though, and he'd never expected them to go away. Nothing ever really did. But all the same, he was glad for his therapist, and he was glad for the help he was getting. He wished he'd thought to get some years ago, back when he'd been such a jackass...

He wished to God that Sam were still alive, which was rare, because Dean hated God with a burning passion. He'd fucked up so badly with his little brother so many times, and he wanted nothing more than to apologize. But no. Even as he'd searched, he'd found no possible way to bring Sam back without the Devil in tow, and he respected his little brother too much to do that.

But if Sam were alive, he would apologize for so much. For being so controlling. For punching him so much. For blaming him for so many things. For how he'd handled the demon blood, for calling him a monster. Blaming him for the Apocalypse, blaming him for Ruby, blaming him for his addiction...In his therapist's own words, he'd been "pretty goddamned abusive." But Sam was dead. And all he could do was grieve and try not to dwell on the past.

That became very hard to do on his next hunt.

He'd seen signs of a few suspicious killings in Lawrence, Kansas, (though perhaps he was reaching here—he'd wanted to go by the old house for a long time now) and had figured out the demon's pattern: he (or she. Or they) was going and possessing children and killing their parents and then leaving the children's bodies and finding another to take control of. The whole thing reminded him vaguely of Lilith, but he knew she was gone so it was probably just one of her old lackies, or an imitator.

Anyways, he'd been able to discern a bit of a pattern between the house the demon was going to strike next, and was converging on the house when he heard screams. He ran to the door, surprised to find it was already kicked in, and the sight he saw was almost enough to make him pass out.

Sam was standing in front of the child, palm out, pressing, laser-focused on the demon within the kid. The demon was screaming, howling, its insides glowing. And then both child and demon fell to the ground, dead, and the parents ran to their daughter, sobbing.

And then Sam turned to Dean, yellow eyes bleeding back to hazel, and smiled mildly. "Hello, Dean."