AN: Christ, oh my god, I can't even tell you all how SORRY I am that it took me this long to finish this damn fic. Good lord.

Speaking of, the completion of this chapter was not, bizarrely, due to repetitions of the song that originally inspired it and named all its chapters. You owe all your reviews to Mumford & Sons for making After The Storm, which actually inspired the second half of this chapter. I strongly sugest listening to it when you get to...well...I think you'll know.

Anyway, onwards.

Eleven: Damascus Way

There were no words.

There were just no words to describe what had just happened. To describe what it implied…

"Fuck," Dean wheezed.

Well, there was that word. Which pretty much covered all their bases, really. And it was the only one he could think of.

He levered himself upwards, still fighting off shock and the backlash from whatever those utter, utter fuckers had dosed him with. Sam was already up and carefully lifting Evie from where she had fallen.

The look on Sam's face was awful; crumpled and heartsick, like someone had stabbed him, or someone he cared about had been stabbed in front of him. For one terrible moment Dean thought his brother might lose it and start to cry.

Although all things considered he wouldn't hold it against anyone to shed a few tears.

He'd just struggled to his feet when there was a dull boom from across the room. Both he and Sam started, Sam's arms tightening on their little sister. Dean retrieved his gun and –

Boom.

Shit!

"Goddamn it," he snarled, "what is that?"

Boom – and one of the mortuary cabinet's steel doors rattled on its much-abused hinges.

Dean exchanged a look with Sam then slid the safety off the 1911 and made his way quietly to the cabinet. He held his gun at the ready and mouthed, "One, two, thr –"

"Help," said a familiar voice from the other side of the steel door.

This time, the look he and Sam exchanged was wide-eyed.

Dean hurriedly opened the cabinet door and slid the tray out.

Lying there, limp and exhausted, was Doctor Carson Beckett.

"Doc?" Dean said blankly, staring at the man.

"Are they gone?" asked the doctor. Dean realized the man's knuckles were bloodied… and that there were red smears on the inside of the cabinet door. The man had broken the skin of both hands making noise enough to be noticed and let out.

"Uh, yeah. One got…"

He glanced back at his brother, who still kneeling on the floor, had that cut-up look on his face and Evie cradled in his arms, her head on his shoulder. The doctor followed his gaze, eyes widening.

The distinct, singular noise of liquid hitting tile fell into the pooling silence. All three men looked in its direction, and Carson Fraiser went pale.

Blood and thicker things were leaking from the female ghoul's body where it remained pinned to the mortuary wall. Fluid rained in a kind of viscous slow motion from the tips of its rictused fingers and the instruments that pinned it there.

Dean cleared his throat and tried again to explain.

He managed to. Sort of.

"One got…well, that. The other is…"

…nowhere to be seen.

"Damn it," Dean growled.

Evie dreamed.

At first it was a memory – the diner she and Dad had stopped at on the way home from the concert; one of those places you see in TV shows or in truck stops and little towns that remember the 70's a little more vividly than everywhere else.

The walls were lined with booths cushioned in green vinyl with tables topped in cream Formica. Memorabilia dating back to the 50's was scattered over the walls; framed posters and album covers, black and white photos filled with high drama.

Her bracelet was still there of course. Complete with all the charms she remembered. She turned to the window and, catching her refection, found she was eighteen instead of fourteen again…

"Hey, Baby Bear."

She turned back to him, matching his smile. He was sitting sideways along his side of the booth, which was narrow enough that she could comfortably rest her bare feet in his lap. One warm hand was on her ankle, a reassuring reminder.

"Yeah, Dad?"

John Winchester grinned at his youngest child.

"Kiddo," he said, voice just how she remembered, all warm and smooth with the long open vowels that verged on Southern. "For a second there you looked like you'd seen a ghost."

She her smile got a little wider, but sadder too. "I'm looking at one right now," she told him comfortably. "I'm dreaming, Dad."

"Gives us a chance to talk, though."

She decided to humour him. After all, debating the validity of dream conversations with him would basically be like arguing with another part of her own brain.

Evie nodded. "I met my brothers."

John smiled, light catching in his hair and suddenly reminding her of Dean. "You like them," he said, quietly happy.

"I do," she agreed, "They remind me of you, you know. Dean looks like you, listens to your music, wears you coat…but I get the feeling Sam's the one who really takes after you."

"Yeah?" He was watching her carefully; searching her face for hidden clues. For answers.

"Yeah. He's driven, so focused." She looked away for a moment, touched the charms on her bracelet. "I never noticed you were like that until I saw it in Sam." She looked back up at him. "I think it's because I could never figure out what you were so focused on."

John gazed at her, deeply sad. "When I was with you, you were the be-all and end-all for me. When I was with you, Evie, you were all I could focus on."

She swallowed hard. "And when you went away?"

He shook his head, smiling a little brokenly. "Time to go, Baby Bear. Time to go back."

Somewhere, someone was saying her name.

"Baby Bear," he said, voice low and smooth and with those long, drawn out vowels that she remembered so well… "Baby Bear, come on, it's time to wake up."

"Daddy?" she breathed, eyes still closed.

The warm hand holding hers tightened fractionally. There was a rough drawn in breath and then he said, "No. No, Baby Bear, it's me. It's Dean."

Dean.

Dean.

Her eyes opened reflexively, the light harsh enough to silhouette him for a moment…but when it dimmed as her eyes cleared…

There he was.

Dean was watching her anxiously, face full of fatigue and a kind of resignation that ate at her heart like acid. But he smiled at her when she breathed his name and gently brushed her hair back from her face with the hand that wasn't holding hers.

She was lying on a hospital bed – not the one from her ward, though, and the room they were in was an unfamiliar single. Her graft ached, but if felt like there was a new bandage on it. Her IV was hooked up again and there was a blanket tucked around her. Dean was in a chair beside the bed, and she could see the bandages on his wrists, bruises showing around the edges and already going deep purple. There were bloodstains on his shirt, around the sleeves, and he looked so tired…

"Where are we? Where's Sam?" she rasped.

"We're in a secure ward. Sam's with Doc Fraiser in the ER getting checked out," he said, voice deceptively mild. "Evie…"

She swallowed, her throat dry. "I know. I – I know I should have told you, but…"

"But?"

She couldn't meet his eyes anymore, looking down at their clasped hands instead. "I was scared, Dean."

She heard a second sharp intake of breath. "Scared of what?"

Evie couldn't seem to bring herself to speak above a murmur, and her throat hurt. Her eyes felt hot. She realized that she was about to tell this man – her brother – who she'd known a grand total of three days something that she'd never even told her mother.

"Of being different. Of being a freak. Of…of being found out and being hurt for it. Or used." She drew a shuddering breath and fought the tears. "I…It all started when I was four – I bent one of my mother's silver spoons, after I saw something like it on TV – and after that it was test after test after test. I'd been through twenty-two MRIs by the time I turned five. Mom was terrified, going out of her mind trying to figure out what was wrong with me. The only reason she stayed as calm as she did was my grandpa, but…"

She faltered, breath hitching as she pictured Adam Milligan's face, lined with age and scarred from his time in an RAF cockpit, but warm and solid and strong. If she'd have been a boy, she would have been named after him.

"But he died," Dean finished for her.

She nodded. "Even before then I'd started lying to her about it. I was getting stronger, but I made out like it was fading, like it was going away. I don't know if she believed me or just wanted to believe." A tiny, faintly hysterical laugh found its way out of her mouth. "I just didn't want her to be afraid of me."

Then the tears started pouring down her cheeks in earnest, and Evie was furious with herself for crying – again – but couldn't seem to stop them. She crushed her eyes closed and tried to press her face into the pillow.

"Ah, Christ," she heard Dean say, then the bed dipped and she was wrapped up in his arms again.

She really, really lost it then; clinging to him and burying her face in his shoulder and just letting go, sobs pulled out her like poison lanced from a wound. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," kept pouring out of her mouth like a chant, and Dean held her a little tighter and pressed his face to her hair.

"You don't have to be sorry, Evie," he murmured, and it just killed her because he'd never sounded so much like Dad. "It's over now, Baby Bear. Everything's going to be fine, I promise."

From under wet lashes, she caught a glimpse of Sam standing in the doorway, watching them with heartbroken eyes. She saw the look that passed between her brothers, and wished that Dean were right.

"Ready?"

"…ready."

"Okay. One, two…"

Both men shoved hard and the ghoul's body – wrapped in a bloodied sheet – fell with a whump and a flurry of rising sparks into the mouth of the incinerator. They straightened, watching as it shriveled unnaturally fast under the touch of fiery fingers.

A draft stirred the heavy air, raising goosebumps on Dean's neck. He didn't like it down here in the hospital's subbasement; the half-darkness of it, lit by faltering halogen lamps and the flickering flames from the incinerator, reminded him of other dark places. Places defined by pain. Places he'd rather forget.

Beside him, Carson Fraiser stirred, a frown drawing down his handsome features.

"What'll happen now?" he asked, voice low and somber.

Dean looked up, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. He felt like he'd been put through the ringer, his body one big bruise.

"Now, we wait for my back up to arrive and find the fucker that got way," he said without preamble.

Carson frowned. "How? You said those…things…were hard to track. Even for you. How will you find it?"

"We know where they were holing up," Dean said, sighing as he remembered Kate Milligan's face, rictused with terror. "Me and Bobby'll deal with it, then let the cops deal with the…with the bodies."

Carson looked ill, and it struck Dean as a little funny that scrubbing gore from a morgue didn't bother the surgeon, but the idea of dismembered corpses…

…yeah, okay, not that funny.

"You do this a lot, don't you?" the doctor said softly, and Dean looked up at him.

"This is all I do, dude."

"So you're not… I feel like an idiot for asking, but you're not really a federal agent?"

Dean slowly shook his head. "Still hunt bad guys though."

He watched the doctor digest this for a moment. "Well," he said after a while. "I suppose that's what matters."

Dean raised one eyebrow, a little incredulous. "No offence, Doc, but you're taking all this really well. I mean usually when people find out monsters are real there's a little more hysteria involved."

Carson careful sort of smile. "I'm not," he said. "Coping, I mean. I'm putting it on hold. It's something I learned to do as an intern; be practical now, fall apart later."

"…later?"

Carson shrugged, looking tired and this time his smile was rueful. "At the funeral, I imagine."

Oh.

"Will you be there?" he continued.

Dean paused, then nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, we will."

"A damn fine mess," Bobby muttered.

He'd arrived half an hour ago during the hubbub of the morning shift change, having driven through the night after getting a frantic phone call from Sam. The attack had prompted him to hand his own case over to Rufus and get to Windom ASAP.

Now, he stood outside Evie Milligan's room while her eldest brother wearily filled him in on the situation. Through the small window in the door, he could see Sam, all ten-thousand feet of him, sprawled in a plastic hospital chair next to the girl's bed, one hand holding hers while he listlessly checked his phone with the other.

It was a measure of how over this case Dean was that he simply nodded at Bobby's words. "When do you want to head out and get this thing?"

"After twelve hours of shut-eye?"

Dean snorted. "I wish."

Bobby nodded. "We'll wait for sun-up; catch it when it least expects to be caught." He clapped Dean on the shoulder and steered him to the family room where the younger hunter had set up camp. "C'mon, kiddo. Show me where this thing's resting up and we'll put a trap together."

The end, when it came, was rather anti-climatic.

The trap was relatively simple, but effective. Bobby had brought his new dog with him – a huge, ugly Labrador-Staffordshire Terrier cross with a yellow coat, lopsided ears and a grin like a Great White – which he'd bought from a hunter in Oregon.

"Breeds 'em special," Bobby said, rubbing the beast's raggedy ears. "Trains 'em for our kind of hunting. You want a dog that ain't gonna flinch when it smells monsters, this is the kind you want."

Dean regarded the dog doubtfully. "What's his name?"

"Sharky."

Hearing his name, the dog looked up and grinned that terrible grin.

"Figures," said Dean.

While Bobby took Sharky to the crypt and sent him down the tunnel, Dean loaded the double-barrel shotgun with regular buckshot and settled against a nearby headstone. The elder hunter emerged from the crypt a moment later, his own sawn-off resting in the crook of his arm, and together they waited.

It didn't take long.

Not even five minutes later they could hear raucous barking and snarling from below them, the sound filtering up through the den's ceiling. There were human-sounding yelps of fear and pain before a pale, dirt-streaked hand burst from that thin patch of earth. They watched it flail about looking for purchase, eventually clinging to a knot of grass roots and hauling the rest of itself out of the escape tunnel. Earth crumbled away, widening the tunnel mouth; they could hear it hitting the den's floor below and Sharky's furious barking as his quarry escaped him.

They waited as the ghoul clawed its way, gasping, to the surface. Head, shoulders, hips…

It wriggled around, and just before its eyes found them, Dean took the shot. The crack of the double barrels going off seemed shockingly loud in the early morning quiet. A handful of birds scattered into the pale sky, rising like blown leaves from the old yew trees.

At such close range there was very little left of what had been Joe Barton's face. The body wavered, before its arms collapsed and the whole thing slipped back down through the den's ceiling and landed with a wet thud.

Sharky, who had ceased barking after the shot, began baying excitedly for Bobby to come and see what he'd caught.

Sam's phone was going, Dean's name flashing on the screen.

"Dean?"

Evie looked up at him from her book, expression questioning.

"It's done. Tell Evie it's done."

Something in his face must have given it away, because Evie's eyes immediately welled, and Sam settled on the side of her bed and smiled into her hair when she folded into his arms.

Three days later, she woke late in the morning and panicked for moment as the light slanted across her face.

Then she heard Denise's kitten heels on the linoleum and her murmuring with Sam in the hallway. They were in her room a second later, Denise bearing a drycleaners bag and a backpack. Sam was pushing a wheelchair.

"Time to go?" she murmured.

"Yeah," Sam said softly. "I'll let you get ready."

He turned, slipping out of the door and casting one last worried look over his shoulder.

Evie watched him go, then levered herself upwards and let Denise help her out of bed. She had a sponge bath, and sat in a chair beside the bathroom basin while Denise washed and blow-dried her hair. She put on the dress she wore to her first charity dinner, and the black flats she wore to her university interview, and twisted her hair up with the hairpins her mother had worn to Granddad's funeral…

Then she put her charm bracelet back on, and it was the sound of the silver chiming that broke her for the first time that morning.

The church was small, but crowded. There were lilies, white and green, strewn across the casket at the front, and a woman Denise had said was Kate's boss had put one in Evie's hand as they'd entered the church. Evie had a deathgrip on it, her face distant and fragile.

Music was playing softly, a song Dean didn't know, while at the front of the church a projector poured pictures from Kate Milligan's life across a screen; a laughing baby, a bright-eyed child, a lively teenager, a graceful woman. A mother, gaze full of love and secrets, her arms always around her green-eyed daughter.

When the slide show got through its first rotation there was a pause and then a video clip started, the sound wound down to nothing so there was only that unfamiliar song playing while on the screen…

It was their father.

Dean inhaled hard and sharp. It had been so long since he'd seen his dad like that outside of memory; living, drawing breath. Happy.

John was in the Impala, with Evie in the driver's seat. It was summer, both of them laughing at something as the camera came towards them. The lens looked through the open driver's side window and then moved too quickly as it was passed to John, turned, and there was Kate, leaning against the driver's door and sharing some joke with her then fourteen-year-old daughter. They were bathed in sunlight and Kate's resemblance to Mary was uncanny.

No wonder, Dean thought again, no goddamn wonder…

He heard a soft chime beside him, and saw Evie staring at the video clip, the hand that wasn't holding the lily touching the charm bracelet, pressing her thumb against the tiny silver Impala.

The service began then, and Dean listened to the eulogies made by people he'd never heard of for a woman he'd never met, and kept one arm around Evie the entire time.

When it got to be Evie's turn… Dean wished to an uninterested God that it wasn't. It was cruel, making people – grieving people – get up there and say good things they were never going to have again about a person they would never get to be with again. But she got up, and through her tears, she spoke:

"I asked someone if it gets easier."

She met Dean's eyes and he held her gaze.

"He didn't answer for a moment, but then told me you learn to deal with it better and better each day…"

"Right now, I don't know how I'm going to do that…"

The service came to an end, and they rose as one, Dean lifting Evie into his arms as Sam moved to the casket with Carson and the other pallbearers.

Kate began her last journey.

"How do you even begin to deal with losing the one constant in your life? How do you find a way through that?"

"How do get used to losing all those things that she brought into the world, all those little points of brightness. How do I…how do I wake up each morning and remember all over again that she's not waiting downstairs?"

The casket they lower into the ground was filled with sand, just enough to give its weight the illusion of a body.

Evie still flinched when the first shovel of dirt hit its lid. Denise began to sing Amazing Grace, and Evie put her face into Dean's neck, breathing through the tears.

Just when she'd thought she'd run out…

"How walk down those stairs and remember again and again every beautiful moment that I'm missing? Because there were so many beautiful moments…"

"Mom was…she was one of the world's best people. She had this way of finding a path through troubles. The light at the end of the tunnel was never an oncoming train. I took it for granted, just like everyone does, but she was always there for me, even when I was being a brat."

Carson was at the edge of the woods, waiting for them with Bobby who stood with Sharky at his feet. The dog was silent, his trademark grin missing as though he understood the gravity of the situation.

Sam sat on the Impala's hood with Evie while Dean, Bobby and Carson built the pyre and carefully laid Kate's remains, swathed in dark blue sheets upon its top. The salt sounded like rain as it pattered over the linen and wood. They covered it with gasoline and fragrant oils.

Dean held a matchbook out to Evie. She struck the matches and they sprang to shining life like a star being born. Cupping one hand around the flame, she released the matchbook and it hung in the air over her palms; a manmade firefly that lifted free of her hands and glided over to the pyre. It came to rest there…

Tongues of funerary fire lit the trees.

Evie rested her cheek against Sam's shoulder, while he clasped her hands with one of his and clenched the other to keep it from shaking.

"I'm scared of what's coming for me without Mom here to help me face it. Sometimes I don't know how I'm going to see a way through things without her there to guide me…"

"But I do know that I'll get there. I don't know how, but…but I know she was a great person and she raised me to be the same. I have to live up to that. I'm going to."

Evie was asleep, finally cried out and able to rest in her own bed as long as her brothers were there.

Dean stood in the doorway of her bedroom, watching her breathe just to know that she was real. That it was over for her. Her monsters were gone. She was safe.

He took the picture from his pocket, the one of Evie and their dad sitting on the hood of the Impala, smiling like the sun that bathed them.

He closed his eyes, rubbed the unfallen tears away and took a deep breath.

If nothing else…if nothing they would fix the world so there would be no more monsters for Evie.

"I'm going to get up in the morning and go downstairs and remember all the wonderful things that Mom and I did together. I'm going to remember her making pancakes on Sundays and going driving with me and granddad, and the face she used to make when Dad visited and tried to get her to put bacon grease in the pancakes…"

"I'm going to remember when she'd take me to the park after her shift even though she was tired. I'm going to remember the days she picked me up from school and took me shopping, or helped me on a project, or sat with me while I opened my scholarship letter…"

They spent the next few days helping pack up the house while Evie put together enough for a week away from home.

"You're sure about this?" Dean said. "I mean, you hardly know Bobby…hell, you hardly know us, kid."

Evie looked up from folding a cardigan of her mother's, tucking it into her suitcase.

"I know enough," she murmured, then shook her head. "I can't…I can't stay here by myself."

Dean took a breath. "Yeah. Yeah, okay."

"Carson said I can travel if I'm careful," she added, "and my graft's healing faster than expected, so."

Dean smiled, kissed her forehead. "I know, Baby Bear. I know."

"I'm going to remember her jokes and her laugh and her smile and the way she sang when she thought no one was listening."

"I'm going to remember what she told me, about how when she lost a patient, she always told herself they were going somewhere better."

Evie hugged Denise goodbye, put Windom in the Impala's review mirror and didn't look back.

She fell asleep halfway to Sioux Falls with sunlight on her face, and dreamed…

"And I know, now…I know there must be somewhere better, even if it's just out of fairness…because of all people, Mom deserves somewhere better. Somewhere as beautiful as she was…"

Kate woke with the sun on her skin, filtering though her bedroom window. The sheets still smelt of John…

She smiled and got up, wrapping herself in her favourite dressing gown and padding downstairs towards the sound of Evie chattering away to her father and the scrape of pans over the burners; Evie was teaching John how to make pancakes.

Kate's father was sitting at the kitchen table with a newspaper, watching them over his teacup and trading jokes with…

"Morning, mom," Adam said, smiling sleepily at her.

Kate smiled back, kissing her son's forehead before going and doing the same to Evie. John gave her quick morning kiss, mouth still minty with familiar toothpaste and murmured, "So, how's your morning going?"

She kissed him again and murmured back, "Heavenly…"

THE END

AN2: And clearly, CLEARLY, there are going to be sequels, although they will be one-shots because starting another chapter fic of this size (very nearly 30,000 words what the fuck) might actually kill me; it's my final year of university and I'm so busy I can't even tell you.

BUT, THERE WILL BE SEQUELS. HONEST.

Love and kisses,

Stranger.