SEASON 2, EPISODE 1

The aroma of the In-Between made Mara's skin writhe in vehement desire. The gray tincture it embedded in each figure was unnecessarily cruel, depriving the world of its color with a placid look on its face all the while. It was almost as if the hidden land flourished in making creatures of its kingdom believe that its stark apparitions were normal, devout in convincing reapers that reality had been stripped of its luminescent soul. That the lustrous beings that dwelled on Earth were unworthy of admiration.

But Mara knew better. Though the methods had been rather unorthodox, she'd been granted the gift of crossing the translucent barrier into the human world. The taste of human ambience had spoiled her, because now she craved to breathe in the oxygen they did, regardless of the fact that it was not required of her to live. She wanted to bask in the sun's rays, free of the barriers of the In-Between. She needed to know the taste of human flesh. To experience life in the same courageous, reckless way they did.

She was trapped in a fatal romance with humanity, but befitting its toxicity, it wasn't always pleasant.

"Did you think I wouldn't find out?" Sam sneered at John, and Mara winced at the contempt that had been hastily woven in with his words.

It had only been a few minutes since John and Sam had churned up their explosive bickering, Sam snapping out offhand comments and John reprimanding him from the squat hospital bed, but it had felt like hours. Mara and Dean, having been confined of the recesses of the In-Between, were forced to watch regretfully from a distance, and Kat has resigned herself to fidgeting silently every time one of her relatives spoke.

John didn't waste a moment before he lashed out with a comment of his own. This time, Mara noted with some amount of intrigue, his words were riddled with sympathy, but his tone remained quite the opposite. "What are you talking about?"

A hint of disbelief danced in Sam's eyes, a scoff begging to slither out of his throat, but Mara's thoughts drifted away from his and John's thunderous outburst too soon to take note of what John said next.

In fact, she'd been distracted for a while. Never fully focused on the tumultuous events that played out in front of her, her attention diverted by the stinging plucks of her heartstrings as they reverberated songs of her consternation. And she knew exactly why her soul had begun to moan sorrowful melodies - she'd been fretting over Dean ever since the car accident, and she still hadn't mustered up so much as a sliver of a plan about how to draw him out of his coma. About how to save him. The miseries of her predicament only worsened because she knew, from her years of slaving at Death's whim, exactly what would happen if she didn't devise a plan soon.

Many reapers would claim - with a snarl on their lips, no less - that she'd spent too much time in the human world. It had caused her to think like them, to feel like them, to reek like them. To an extent, she agreed with their accusations. She had spent too much time on the other side of the barrier. So much, in fact, that it frightened her to imagine what she'd become. She was no longer a reaper, that was for sure. Not if simply existing in the air of her home realm made her stomach churn. Rather, her blood had begun to mingle with the blood she desired to have, transforming her into an abomination, a mutated deformity among her species: a cyborg. She wasn't sure if she belonged anywhere anymore. What sort of reaper sobbed at the forthcoming death of a human?

Mara didn't even know how to return to her birth-given state. She was stuck this way - a hunchbacked discoloration amidst the perfect white of other reapers.

"That stuff from Bobby." Sam spoke up again, his voice wrought with fervent anger, spitting lashes of fury on his tongue that caused him to ramble. He held his arms out to his sides as if he were challenging John to a fight. "You don't use it to ward off a demon, you use it to summon one! You're planning on bringing the demon here, aren't you? Having some stupid, macho showdown!"

"I have a plan, Sam," John grumbled, low and unbothered by Sam's burst of fury.

The ends of Sam's mouth curled up in an animalistic snarl. "That's exactly my point! Dean is dying, and you have a plan! You know what, you care more about killing this demon than you do your own son."

Mara's shoulders twitched, her compressed lips quivering. She'd never seen Sam like this. He was normally timid and soft-spoken, dealing his anger out to the other Winchesters through passive-aggressive methods. But now...he was a lion. Prowling in circles around John's bed, jabbing his finger at his father's chest and at the door, growling his grievances like he was about to devour John whole. The frenzied look in his eyes sent brisk currents down Mara's spine.

"Alright, cut it out, guys. Dean could be...Dean is almost..."

Katarina had risen to her feet and given her input on the argument. Or, tried to, at least. It appeared that, the moment Dean's name passed her lips, every word following it refused to be spoken. It was as if the name was a curse that had scarred the delicate linings of Kat's esophagus, tearing up the tissue and leaving swollen blemishes in its path, so that every word she spoke afterwards pained her, brushed against the tender blisters, on its way to the earthen atmosphere.

Kat inhaled a long, deep breath, her posture lifting in a forced upheaval, and she said, "Dean is in trouble right now, and all you guys have been doing is arguing about how not to fix it." Her fingers curled around one another in front of her waist, vines spreading in time with her nervousness. "And Mara still hasn't shown up yet. But she will soon, and when she does, she'll get Dean to wake up. She would never let anything bad happen to Dean. To any of us."

"You ever thought that maybe she doesn't care about us anymore? That now that Meg's gone and she's not being forced to stay with us anymore, she abandoned us?" Sam shouted. Not at Kat, and not even at John, but at every particle of oxygen in the ozone, bouncing in buoyant circles around his head as they hissed their dizzying teases. Just one breath of the miniature devils sent his vision into giddy spirals. He couldn't focus, couldn't breathe properly while Dean's fate blew erratically overhead. It was all he could do to suppress the rumbling thunder inside him. He couldn't help that it occasionally leaked from his eggshell grip, escaping in furious spurts of rage to pounce on those who dared poke the gray, stormy mass that was coiled up in his chest.

Mara tried to swallow, but it felt like there was a boulder lodged in her throat, preventing the muscles in her throat from contracting. She glanced at Dean, and regret swelled in her bosom. He was staring at her, too. It was a quiet stare. One that was firm in its consulatory intentions, but too unsure to tilt one way or another and surrender its vulnerable core. He offered a shaky grin, but mere seconds later, it shattered along with the gleam of his intrepid gaze. Uncertainty splintered the glimmer that had blossomed in Dean's eyes, his brilliant, emerald eyes fading as he doubtless pondered the fidelity of Sam's statement.

Sam's words had been a reminder. Impulsive when they flitted from the tip of his tongue, but assertive by the time they reached Dean's ears. Mara worked for Azazel. For Meg. All that time she spent with us, she'd been conspiring towards our demise. Our fates don't concern her.

In his anger, he'd forgotten to include the second part. The true part. The part that formulated the middle of Mara's story, because Sam hadn't remembered that it was the middle, not the beginning, of someone's story that defined them. This part argued that Mara did care for the Winchesters. That, despite her beginnings of demon accompaniment and bearing hell like an emblem on her shoulders, she'd fought back against evil and sided with good. She'd yanked the path to redemption out of the devil's hands and laid it out in front of herself, brick by brick, laying her own mortar so she could travel without her shoes getting stained by the sin of the other path. But Mara couldn't blame Sam. He simply didn't know - who you chose to be mattered more than who you were told to be.

Kat's jaw stiffened, though her eyes quivered - whether with rage or with a more bitter, tear-wrought emotion, Mara couldn't tell. "Don't say that."

"Don't you think she would've shown up by now?" Sam curved the end of his statement with a cruel chuckle. "She was with us when the car crashed. Face it, Kat. Mara left. And now we have to deal with Dad's demon crap on our own."

Dean glanced fervently between his siblings and John, trying to input his own pleas for the trio to stop fighting, but his words were overrun by John's reply to Sam's verbal jab. "Do not tell me how I feel! I am doing this for Dean."

"How? How is revenge going to help him?" Sam asked, but Mara gathered his inquiries were more rhetorical and accusatory than literal. "You're not thinking about anybody but yourself, it's the same selfish obsession!"

Sam's speech had turned John Winchester into a doe. If only for a moment, his broad-shouldered, arrogant demeanor was diminished, and he no longer held the haughty aura he typically did. His eyes were wide, devouring every syllable that slipped from Sam's lips. He was young prey caught in the headlights of a hunter's vehicle. At least, until he spoke again.

John's nostrils flared as he offered a retort of his own, but Mara's thoughts drifted once more. This time, it was because her eyes ambled across the room to land on Dean, and as the outline of his physique filled her line of sight, so did he in her mind. And along with him, his thoughts. His fears, his worries, his vexation at the war of words before him. Everything that worried him suddenly worried her, too.

He raised his hand to press against the skin between his eyebrows, wrinkling the skin around his lips as he shouted, pleading though no one but Mara could hear him, for Sam and John to stop bickering. It was admirable, though it caused her sorrow to think of the anguish their arguing was causing him. As much as Dean reveled in destroying the evil creatures that lurked in the night, more than anything, he desired peace. Perhaps, Mara thought, That is why I feel so greedy when he stands so close to me.

And then, in an instant, her admiration wavered. Her empathy fizzled and slid to the backburner of her mind, because another presence had entered the room. Something familiar. Familiar, but not welcome.

Dean's eye narrowed, then widened. He clutched the gathering of skin that rested over his heart. Fell to his knees. His entire body began to flicker, like a fluorescent bulb when demons were present or like a spirit when it was teleporting, and Mara's heart began to race. Her insides palpitated simultaneously with Dean's frantic sputtering. A thump and then a cough. Over and over, closer to death on both sides, until Mara felt like she was going to die and Dean really was.

"What is it?" Dean breathed, looking to Mara for answers.

And then she really did die.

Though her flesh was still taut and her blood still pumping, everything good inside her shriveled like a plant neglected on a summer's day. The look in Dean's eyes was poison. The moment it had entered her bloodstream, she'd begun to beg for mercy, because she'd never seen him so frightened and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Stop.

Stop.

Stop it.

Of course. She could stop it, purely because she was in the In-Between that she despised so heartily. For the moment, her abhorration for her homeland died, and was replaced with gratitude. She'd been absent from her reaper duties for so long that she'd forgotten what spirits looked like when their souls were fleeing their bodies, but now she realized - that's what was happening to Dean. His soul was being torn from his body by one of her own. A reaper. A reaper that she could stop.

Nurses and doctors alike swarmed in the hallway, all rushing to the room that Dean's fragile human embodiment lied in. Mara followed.