This is really short and sweet, and was originally something more like 8,000 words. Somewhere along the way, though, I realized that what I really wanted to say had nothing to do with plot, or monsters, or who was chasing whom. It had to do with a girl who took a photo.

I think a lot about those girls Dean meets and then leaves a few days later. I bet 80% of them know full well that it was just a fling, and another 19% probably catch on when he never, ever calls. But somewhere out there there's a girl or two, that last 1%, to whom it wasn't just a fling, and never will be.

He smelled like gun-cleaning solvent and gasoline. If you got close enough—and she'd gotten close enough—you could catch a whiff of Old Spice, almost pointlessly applied, it was so smothered. And if you laid your head against his jacket, and breathed in deep, you could smell the vague sweetness of leather protectant from all the times he'd sat in his freshly detailed Impala. When his hands touched your face, there was a curious mix of salt and gunpowder just under the freshness of the hand soap.

When she thought about Dean Winchester—when she dreamed about him—it wasn't his voice that came to mind, or his face, or the way his eyes would twinkle right before he made a joke. At least, not at first. It was always the way he'd smelled, so unlike anyone she'd ever met, before or after. She could have picked him out of a line up blindfolded.

Not that she would. She'd lie until the cows came home, if it came to that.

They'd spent all of two days together. That's all—two days. Two days wasn't enough to mean anything, it didn't mean anything, it was diddlysquat in the long run, but when her husband fell asleep at night, she reached into her Bible and pulled out the picture. It was the only picture she'd taken from those two days. That was her thing, pictures. She'd used to dream about doing it for real, as a job, but she hadn't touched her camera since marrying Rick. The picture of Dean was the last real photo she'd taken. It was also her best.

He was sitting on a stone step, where they'd been waiting for his brother. She'd been fiddling with the camera, trying to find a shot amongst the pigeons, but she didn't see anything worthy of film until Sam came out the library doors. Dean's eyes crinkled into a welcoming smile, and just before he raised his hand to wave his brother over, her finger pressed down on the camera's trigger. Click.

It wasn't a real smile, and he wasn't doing anything, but the look in his eyes and the way the light fell across his face, it brought it all back. Every second. She'd pull out that picture and it'd all be real again. She'd see it and think, I was Dean Winchester's girl, once. It was only two days. She'd hopped fences and broken into offices and shot salt at things she still didn't believe in. And she'd taken a photo, almost on accident, that was somehow more than just a picture of a guy sitting on stone steps.

On the back there was an inscription, with the date and Dean's name, but below all that, almost to the bottom, she'd added a title.

"Welcome home, little brother."