From the beginning of time, humans have always had a home. Even the most destitute of humans - men and women and children with neither brick nor mortar to live beneath - would find themselves with a home if they simply looked. If they looked for a hand to hold, perhaps, or for a voice to whisper words of affection in their ear as they closed their eyes at night.

It was strange, then - an idea contrary to all societal realities - that the wealthy who owned many mansions should have no home. But this was a reality that went deeper than societal logic. It was human reality, and so, though it was strange, it was the truest reality Bellona had ever come to know.

This was because, Bellona was sure of it, homes were not houses with archways and vinyl and a skylight that opened the ceiling up to multicolor oblivion. Homes were human. Homes were the hands of a friend wiping away warm tears, and the vulnerability that was offered up freely between lifelong lovers. Home was a tapestry, thread that wove itself among anyone that would risk being punctured by the needle that sewed the home together. It was the very thing that many spent their lives in seclusion from.

Just as Bellona knew the true definition of home, she also knew that she was sprinting down the path to homelessness.

She could see those that chose seclusion in the distance, each one isolated from humanity's majority yet still not unified, standing meters away from one another as if repulsed by the mere idea of companionship. Her hand was reaching out for them. For the vacancy among them, the place in the barren ground that might as well have had her name written on it.

Even as she realized this, she couldn't find it in herself to turn around and head back to where she'd come from. To her home. To Summer.

"He's always so thoughtful," Summer was saying. The words trickled from between her lips among scattered giggles, and Bellona thought she might as well have been melting for all the gushing she was doing over her boyfriend.

Bellona nodded, gaze not on Summer but on the project in front of her. Not on her home but on the fleeting activity she would likely forget in a week.

"Like yesterday," Summer continued. "I was in the library all day, working on that thesis I was telling you about, and...Bell?"

Bell made a humming sound, lazily lifting her gaze to meet Summer's.

The other girl sighed. "You haven't listened to a word I've said, have you?"

"I, uh..." Bell gnawed on her lip, searching for a coherent explanation to give. It wasn't that she didn't care to spend time with Summer; she did. It'd just been difficult to focus over the past few weeks, even on something as simple as a conversation.

She'd thought being with Summer would help. After she'd disappeared for weeks, giving her friend no notice of why or that she was even going to in the first place, she had finally decided to respond to Summer's endless array of text messages. One in particular had caught her eye - an invitation to paint pieces of pottery at an art workshop, an activity the two of them had once participated in on a weekly basis.

She was supposed to love this reunion. It was meant to light the spark in her eye since medical diagnostics had dampened it, and to return an upwards curl to the curvature of her mouth. It completed none of the like.

Rather, it infused her with more anxious thoughts. Should she tell Summer about the diagnosis? She was her closest friend. Not to mention, she'd even told Sam Winchester, a boy she'd met only months before.

A manicured hand landed on her wrist. "Are you okay? It's not your mom, is it?"

Bellona pressed her lips together, focusing on the gradient pattern that had been painted onto her friend's nails. Blues and purples, a hint of gray. Fixating on a point of inconsequentiality often soothed her itching nerves. She'd almost told Summer right then. The girl already knew about her mother's sickness, after all, so what was one more parasitic diagnosis to add to the list?

She felt something welling. She could sense it: her old friend. This creature was the same one that gnawed on the strings in her body when she met new people, making her hands shake and her voice quiver. Then, the creature had been nervous.

Now, it was a beast and it was angry. Furious with the disease in her cells, she'd hoped, as it would kill this thing at the same time that it tore her to shreds. But she could not be sure, not given the hostility it was treating her with. It flapped its hulking wings. Fins maybe. She'd never seen the beast, she didn't know. It flapped and it flapped until her stomach began to rise to her throat, the juices spiraling upwards. Bellona simply swallowed. The welling cooled.

It turned its attention to her eyes. It hammered on her tear ducts with its big, fat fists, latching its teeth on the sphere in hopes that it would push some sort of substance out. It prevailed. Bellona cried. Just one tear, but Summer still noticed.

"Hey." Summer's voice was abrupt, but not harsh. "Hey, what's wrong?"

Bellona shook her head and swatted at the tear. "Just my mom. Like you said. It's fine."

"Oh," her friend breathed.

The girl wrapped her arms around Bellona's shoulders, patting her head in a simple, slow rhythm. "I'm so sorry. I wish they could at least know what's wrong with her, that way..."

Summer trailed off, but Bell still knew. That way they could do something to fix it. Knowledge never promised healing, though.

But how would Summer know that? Her best friend wouldn't even tell her that she was going to die in a matter of months, much less that the doctors knew exactly what was wrong with her, yet could not do a single thing about it. She was too far gone.

Maybe that was why she'd swallowed her boiling anguish and let lies spill out of her mouth instead. Telling Summer would make it real. She would do exactly what she was doing now: press skin to skin and gentle hands to fragile hearts, sobbing and groaning and shouting at the sky for all the evil it ensued. It would force responsibility. Bellona would have to learn how to pronounce the word 'goodbye', but not in her typical dialect, when her tongue would curl into a lighthearted "see you later". Instead she would have to learn to speak with the same dialect as reality - a limp and withered "I will never see you again".

So she'd told Sam instead.

It didn't make sense. She didn't know Sam, not really. She didn't know his favorite brand of potato chips, or the way he preferred to spend his mornings.

She had to tell him, though. Her only other option would have been to ache as she tried to keep her fate sealed behind locked doors, simmering there until it found cracks in the wall and slits in windows that it could slither through. If she had turned the key in the lock, it surely would have been agony, for when she was near Sam she had to fight to keep any secret hidden at all.

She wasn't sure why. Maybe it was the way he kept a respectful space between himself and her grief, only daring to come forward when prodded. Or, maybe, it was the way the warm glimmer in his eyes reminded her of a downtown cafe, the mixing pot where all life-changing secrets were encouraged to dwell.

Whether it was a demanding force or a subservient one, Bellona found herself drawn to the ambience that Sam surrounded himself with, and didn't think the compelling that lived in her would ever cease.

◈◈◈

Bellona could stare at it forever.

She normally hated manipulation. If she were made to bear witness to any other forceful wielding of emotions, she would have curled her upper lip up and turned in the other direction. Yet, this manipulation was beautiful. Harmless in its essence. This manipulation, just this one, she would allow herself to find rest in.

The sun reflected in striped streams of light off of the lake's edges. She was certain she was supposed to notice that - the body of water was, on paper, little more than a device to be used however Stanford deemed necessary, to make the school campus seem indulgent and brimming with pleasure when in reality it was a boot for mental health. It was a black shoe lined with a dagger tread, ready to pierce anything hopeful or financially secure. Anyone deceived into readily enrolling would know that.

But it was so heavenly. And, if nothing else, it nurtured. Bellona would always admire the strength of something that nurtured where it was meant for harm.

"Um...Bell?"

The voice came from behind her, and it, too, was heavenly.

Bellona made a humming sound, a slight smile ornate on her lips. "Is my surprise here already?"

A chuckle emanated from somewhere deep inside Sam's chest as Bellona leaned backwards in her spot on the ground, fingers poised in perfect claws as they dug into the soil. Her head dangled, twisting in an attempt to catch a glimpse of the Winchester boy.

"It is your surprise," Sam answered. A lime green tote hung from his fingers.

"What's that?" Bellona gestured at the bag, causing her companion to move forward and take a seat on the ground next to her.

"I know it's..uh.." Sam paused to laugh once more. Bellona wondered if he might be nervous, with how frequently he'd laughed in such a manner. "I know it's usually supposed to be in a basket or something, but you know. College budget."

Bellona's brows furrowed. What could he possibly have with him that usually came in a basket?

As if Sam had heard her silent curiosity, he set the bag on the ground between them both. He pulled the straps open, and barely visible beneath a tattered-looking white sheet was a variety of snack foods. There were crackers and a handful of different types of cheeses, fruits like grapes and apple slices, and even a cluster of gelatin substances that Bellona couldn't name.

Sam pulled the sheet out of the bag and tossed it towards the ground a few feet from the two of them, the green ivy pattern on the sheet complimenting the green grass. A leaf of shade fell atop the cloth. The rays from the noontime sun were slanting between the tree's branches - Sam and Bellona's tree, from the day before - and were casting swirled patterns of dark spots across the sheet.

Bellona's jaw dropped ever so slightly. "Is this...a picnic?"

"Ah...yes, it is." Sam scratched the nape of his neck, pulling at a few of the curls that rested there. "If that's not weird?"

"No, no, not at all."

It wasn't weird, it was sweet.

Sam sighed. "Well good. I just wanted to do something for you, you know, to show you that you aren't alone." His hand twitched, shifting towards Bellona's own hand by an inch or two, but ultimately returning to thud onto his faded blue jeans. "I'll be here for you through this."

"I..." Bellona's voice faded, words dying in the back of her throat never even making it to her tongue.

Moments passed before Sam spoke again. "It's okay, you don't have to say anything. But I do have one more thing to show you."

His hand jerked into his pocket, cracked fingernails disappearing only to return with a small knife in hand. Bellona's eyes widened, unable to move off of the item that was sure to show its blade in the next couple of moments. She didn't really know this man that well. Was it safe for her to be here with him?

"Don't freak out," Sam said, voice coming out in a rush as if he knew that she was, in fact, beginning to freak out. "It's for the tree."

Bellona scooted backwards despite Sam's encouragement to remain calm. "So, what, you have a vengeance for nature now?"

Another laugh from between Sam's lips. "No, not that. Just watch."

As soon as the words left his mouth, he pulled himself up off of the ground and towards the tree that they'd sat beneath just one day before. With one press of a button, the glinting blade of the knife flipped out, and he forced it into the tree's bark. It wasn't a violent motion, though. It was gentle. Or at least, as gentle as one could be when dragging a knife through a tree.

His knife-wielding hand flew back and forth, a painter of its own qualifications dragging paint across the bark-ridden canvas. He carved with a sort of swiftness, sure movements connecting lines and curves with the exact amount of strength that was required of him.

When he pulled his hand back, wiping the knife on his jeans and slipping it back into his pocket, Bellona frowned. She didn't understand. Where Sam had been carving, there was the letter 'B' engraved in the ridged bark, and beside it was a crescent moon no larger than her thumb.

"A 'b'," Sam spoke. "For Bellona. And the moon, it means 'interlunium'."

The last word brushed roughly across his tongue, and from the vowel sounds and word ending, Bellona knew it to be Latin. Her eyebrows rose. "You know Latin?"

Something shifted in Sam's posture. A quick tense in his shoulders, and then a deflation that came just as swiftly. "Sort of," he began, his voice hardly carrying over the few feet distance that still divided them, his words just managing to graze the outer curves of her ear. The topic had directed his mind away from her and this tree, to somewhere further, it seemed, than Bellona had ever dreamed of being.

She decided to change the subject. "Well, what does it mean?"

"New beginnings," he said, and a smile returned to his face. "It's latin for a new phase of the moon. Not a new moon, exactly, but the time right after when the moon is getting bigger. Growing, I guess, if you're not worried about being scientifically accurate."

"Oh. So you desecrated the tree because of a pretty word?"

Sam laughed, and red heat rushed Bellona's cheeks. He paused a minute before voicing, "Well, yes. But no." His fingers tiptoed atop his carvings. "When the moon is new, the sky is dark. Novilunium. But then, when the moon grows into a crescent, it starts to get light again."

At this, Sam turned his gaze to face her. His eyes were intentional. Not vulnerable in the sense of a child that needed guarding, but vulnerable in the sense that it meant something. It prodded ever so gently at the weavings of Bellona's heart, nudging its way through the threads until her heart's hands forced her eyes to remain on his.

His hand slipped from its spot on the carvings. "You're interlunium, Bell. What you're going through right now is not the end for you."

Bellona's heart hitched, tangled between the mass of innards that lay, compressed, inside her. If she wasn't aware of the intimacy she held with death, she wouldn't have dreamt of doing what she did next.

And yet, the girl with the sickly limbs and soul to match learned something under that tree. Knowing death could be a gift, too, and not merely a curse. She was so starkly aware of what the end of her life - her string - looked like. She could see the threads spiraling out in opposite directions, courtesy of the cut that designated her life to end there, knit with diagnosis-colored yarn.

For she knew now that life didn't end in a box, wrapped neatly for loved ones to open and remember at their leisure. Life ended while it unwound itself into separate pieces. Friendships in this piece, grasping to once more be strung alongside the hopeful dreams of another.

She couldn't help but smirk, then, at the courage that those final threads gave her. She could find no other reaction to give except for laughter, because this vision of death is what made her kiss him.

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

So it's been...over a year since I updated this fic. Yikes. I'm going to skip the super super long explanation and just leave it at this: I simply haven't had it in me to write over the past year.

But!! I'm finally back, and I think it's for good this time! The progress of this story seems to be slow-moving at the moment, I know, but just stick with it. Only a few more chapters until it's in sync with 'Wanted Dead or Alive', and maybe another Supernatural fic that I have up my sleeve ;)...