The boys make a trade: Sam agrees to take the first shift at the hospital and Dean agrees to be the one to call Bobby and tell him the news, that John Winchester is dead. They have to glare and snap at each other to strike that deal, but really, Sam wants to be the one at the hospital and Dean wants to be the one to call Bobby.

Sam knows that Dean thinks that it will take their half sister days to arrive from England, that whoever sits second shift has a better chance of catching her. But he also has a very clear memory of a severe looking woman in black robes and a pointed hat appearing and disappearing in their motel room all within the blink of an eye and Sam is sure that if Hermione is still alive, she'll travel the same way and that she'll show up as soon as the hospital can get in contact with her. Sam's plan is to be the one waiting.

Dean knows that by taking the second watch at the hospital he's giving up the likelihood of a clear shot at Mia. (He knows this, and it makes him so happy he could cry.) He also knows, however, that putting in the call to Bobby is more important than being the first to catch his witch sister (maybe Sam will screw up and she'll get away or maybe she wont come at all because she knows that it'd be suicide to tangle with the famous Winchester brothers, maybe her demon friends have warned her…) because if he puts in the call to Bobby he knows that Bobby will be on his side when it comes to taking out a witch. Bobby will not hesitate, and that's what Dean needs. So Dean lets Sam be the one to pace the halls of Our Lady of Mercy and drink stale cafeteria coffee and take piss breaks at the risk of missing some important detail and he makes the call. Once Bobby's assured him that he's on the way, and bringing what needs to be brought, Dean takes a shower, changes clothes and finds himself a bar (because really, who needs sleep anyway?). Dean goes to a dive bar and drinks just enough to take the edge off of his father's death and Mia's betrayal and Sammy's constant need to talk about feelings. He sits in the corner, slouching and looking disgusting so that he won't be bothered, and tries not to think about what baby Mia will look like after all these years.

She'll still have the whiskey colored eyes, he knows that. Eyes that are too big for her face, that sometimes make her look like a cat, twitching its tail with curiosity. And the hair. He knows that her hair will stay the same un-tamable mass of curls, its own entity. He tries, but fails entirely, to not do the math: nineteen, close to twenty. Mia the spunky eleven year old has become nineteen, near twenty year old Mia, with no adjectives because he knows nothing about her. He hates that lack of adjectives because he knew eleven year old Mia, knew what she loved and hoped and dreamed for. And now he has no idea what Mia has become. The only adjectives that he can think up are horrible, nasty things. Mia the soulless nineteen year old. Mia the demonic nineteen year old. Mia the lost, Mia the evil, Mia the witch. Mia the nineteen year old that he prays bears no resemblance to his once upon a time baby sister.

Dean orders another drink and attempts to shut down the thoughts. His dad's given him one last job to do, after all.

AFTER THE WAR

Sam has a bad habit of getting easily bored on stakeouts. Normally he drinks a lot of coffee and does Sudoku puzzles; the coffee keeps him awake and the puzzles keep him occupied but take up so little brain space that he can still keep his focus. That strategy works fine when staking out a house, or an abandoned farm, or an Indian burial ground, but for a hospital in the middle of nowhere Missouri he has to improvise.

So instead he just wanders restlessly through the hallway. He's afraid that if he stays in one place he won't see Mia until it's too late, and then he'll have to find her in their father's room and it will be weird. (That's not really true. Really he just feels restless and his mind won't let him concentrate on anything but past mistakes. But he likes to think that there's a purpose to his restlessness.)

For a while he manages to watch the evening news, until the international portion comes up and he sees the human horrors, the kinds that are caused by human monsters doing human things. After that he has to go back to wandering the halls.

Sam usually considers himself to be a great thinker, a wonderer, a brooder, but for the next few hours he steadfastly refuses to think about the one thing burning a hole in his subconscious: the letter from his father. He steadfastly refuses to bring it out and read it again. It makes him too angry. (It makes him too sad). Instead he counts backwards from 100 by sevens and when that his done he starts again from 1,000.

He walks for so long that the gun stashed in the waistband of his jeans no longer feels cold.

AFTER THE WAR

When the time comes for Dean to return to Our Lady of Mercy Hospital he is, regrettably, beginning to sober up. Which is too bad really, because he's spent the last few hours drunkenly fantasizing of being incapable of making it to the hospital safely. He'd be forced to call Sam, tell him that he'd have to stay on watch for a while longer, at least until Bobby got there. At the very least he wouldn't be able to responsibly fire a weapon, and it wouldn't be possible for him to carry out his father's wishes. (What did that letter say, anyway?)

But when he stood up from the barstool he doesn't feel the oh so familiar drunken vertigo and his steps are heavy but surprisingly sure. So he pays his tab and leaves. It takes him three minutes in the parking lot to remember that the beloved Impala isn't waiting for him and another ten minutes for the hospital shuttle to arrive.

All in all, Dean is twenty-three minutes late to the hospital. It isn't enough.

AFTER THE WAR

When Sam was a freshman at Stanford (so long ago the memories might as well be draped in sepia) he was accidentally enrolled in an art appreciation class. He'd been forced to attend exactly one lecture before he was able to drop in favor of Political Questions 101, but during that single hour he learned about happenstance. The professor was lecturing on the pull that disasters had on artists and on photographers in particular. Part of her lecture involved speaking on the fact that most great photographers relied largely on happenstance to capture the perfect moment, the perfect scene of disaster. "Disaster is so compelling," she said, "Disaster compels us as humans to stop, to pay attention. A good photographer is merely in the right place at the right time and waiting to capture the moment of disaster so that later, when he shows his work, people will stop and pay attention. Happenstance." Sam hadn't gotten to hear what that particular professor had to say about nice photographs, photographs of trees and mountains and such, but he did get to bond with the girl sitting next to him. Jessica. And he did get to learn about disaster. And happenstance.

That Sam found himself at the opposite end of the hospital when he should have been meeting Dean in the lobby was happenstance. That Dean wasn't actually in the lobby yet was happenstance. That they both missed the arrival of the one person they were waiting on due to happenstance was a disaster.

When Dean doesn't see Sam in the lobby he decides to go to his Dad's room, where the nurses all assured him his father could stay until his sister arrived to retrieve him. After all, if you're going to lie in wait for your evil half-sister to come to a hospital to retrieve your dead father, wouldn't you wait in said dead father's room, the one place she was guaranteed to show up? He remembers the three lefts and a right that he needs to take in order to get there. He remembers the name of the nurse on call, Grace, and he remembers to ask politely if he can go sit with his father's corpse. When he pushes the door open, however, Dean absolutely forgets anything he ever learned about subtlety or stealth.

"What the hell?"

From two lefts and a right away Sam hears his brother's shout and in the moment before he breaks into a sprint, a line from a book he read to Mia once rolls through his head unbidden. To the scene of the disaster, Miss Clavelle ran fast and faster.

When Sam arrives at the room (a hand on the shoulder of Grace the on-call nurse, "I'm sorry about the commotion, let me try to talk to him,") he finds Dean who has obviously found Mia.

"Dean," Sam says, and it is not a question but a command. A muscle in Dean's jaw jumps at the sound.

"Sam," says Dean, with equal amounts of steel.

From through the doorway comes the sound of a plastic chair being scraped across linoleum and it draws the brothers' attention like a magnet.

The girl standing at John Winchester's bedside is short. She is wearing khaki slacks and a black button up sleeveless blouse and her hair is pulled up and out of her face in what appears to be a business-like twist. She is pale and her eyes are too big for her face and her nose is a little too pointy and Sam hazards a guess that if she were to smile she might have buck teeth although he has found that he can't be too sure of anything today. The girl is at once nothing and everything like what he imagined she'd be.

"Sam, Dean." Her voice is soft. She leaves off the hello, or any type of question that one might ask a long lost brother, and instead settles for standing up a little straighter and squaring her shoulders.

"Mia." Sam's not sure which one of them said her name. He suspects it was Dean because his mouth and nose and ears appear to have suddenly filled with cotton. The bottom has dropped out of his stomach. The words of his father's letter are creating black spots across his vision.

From somewhere through the haze he hears a fourth person, an intruder to his own personal heaven and hell. "Why don't we all move inside and shut the door." The suggestion carries a British accent and comes from a red headed stranger that Sam cannot believe he didn't notice until the moment he spoke. Who was he? Sam's confusion only grows.

"Excellent idea," he hears Dean say. "C'mon Sammy, let's stop causing a spectacle." And then he is inside the room with his brother and his sister and the red-headed stranger and the door is closed and all Sam can think is one word: Disaster.