SEASON 2, EPISODE 1

When she entered the room and saw the events that were developing before her, she knew she had no choice. If she wanted to save Dean, she had to act immediately. She couldn't comfort Sam and Kat. She couldn't waste a moment on wiping away their tears, wrapping her arms around their shoulders as they clung to a doorframe, hardly able to stay on their feet while their knees shook at the sight of their brother.

Dean's life force was waning. It was tingling at the tip of his skin, searching for ways to escape through his pores, nostrils, ear canals - any opening that would allow it to elude the jail cell that was the human body. It fulfilled its sentence, received as a penalty for giving life and obligated by chains - lungs and other organs - to bestow the curse of living for years, and now it had its freedom. It was their time to go. It was Dean's time to go.

She couldn't spare a second to debate what method of stopping Dean's reaper would allow her to live. If she even could live. Dean was too close to death, and she was too far from him. Too far to sit idle and promote the forthcoming guillotine that had the eldest Winchester's name engraved on it.

Doctors were pressing the handles of a defibrillator to Dean's bare chest, sounding out the word 'clear' repeatedly, hoping the electric shocks from the machine would revive Dean's heart. Mara knew better. She could see the reaper that hovered over Dean's limp body, its translucent form reaching out to touch his sternum. The reaper had orders saying it was Dean's time to go. To move on.

Mara wouldn't let that happen.

She leapt forward, clawing at the gaunt figure that was stealing Dean's life essence. Its hair dangled in mangy knots around its face, its lack of skin revealing its warped bone structure, making the cavernous eyes that much more haunting. But the reaper didn't need a face for Mara to gather fragments of its identity. It was in its true form - not a rarity to a reaper like herself, and not so much of an enigma that Mara would have to peer to realize the reaper was a woman.

Unfortunately, in order to make substantial contact with the creature, Mara would have to get on its level. She would have to resort to her true form, too.

She looked back at Dean. He was glaring at the other reaper, his fear now replaced with fury. And, when he met Mara's gaze, she hesitated. Despite all the hours she'd spent by his side, all the time she'd spent doting on him, she was still resistant to showing him her true form. To peel off her layer of false skin, to strip away her guise and show her who she truly was. She didn't want to frighten him.

She only hesitated for a moment, but it was long enough. He stepped forward and wrapped his hands - both of them - around one of the reaper's arms, and it flung him across the room. He slammed into the wall with a jarring impact, his head ricocheting against the plaster and propelling the lids of his eyes upward, so that he was gaping wide-eyed when Mara finally found the resolve to do what she had to.

Mara closed her eyes. At first, she saw nothing but an ebony background. Lackluster in its design, destitute but for a yawning black hole that threatened to swallow anything in its path. Then, she saw herself. Her blond hair trickled over her shoulders in a twisted stream, coming to a halt at the tip of her breastbone, where the highest button on her leather jacket rested, cool against her warm skin. Suddenly, with a blast of white radiance, her hair shriveled until it resembled that of the other reaper's. Her eyes grew depressed, falling into her skull until they were gone. And her clothes - a tight black shirt, a jacket, and a used pair of Kat's jeans - shot into a blinding rocket of fire until all that was left were their ashes, scarred by Mara's incineration. It was her truest form. It was what Dean was seeing, for the first and perhaps the last time, if her confrontation with the other reaper turned sour.

Her eyes shot open. Everything was monochrome.

Every person, object, and speck of dust had been bled of their color, and though Mara felt sorrow at its farewell, she also felt joy at what was surging through her veins. Allowing her true form to take hold had restored her power. She looked down at her hands, at the white liquid that seemed to be running across her bony fingers. A hazy mist floated like an aura around every inch of her body, and she grinned. She was back. She'd returned to the woman she used to be.

And she feasted on the power it gave her.

She shot forward, grasping the reaper's neck between her hands, propelling it through the air until it was pressed against a wall, cornered by Mara. Mara's eyes were ablaze with white flame, and when she leaned forward, it licked at the skin on the other reaper's face. It festered there. Mara's flame ate at the reaper's cheeks first, then its forehead, then its nose. Eating at its essence until it let out a screech of anguish. The shrill sound scarred Mara's ears, but she kept pushing.

The other reaper's eyes suddenly burst into flame as well, and when the white-hot gas reached Mara's skin, she winced. Her hands recoiled, and the reaper flipped around so that Mara was the one pinned against the wall.

Mara glared. Her teeth gritted, she slapped the palms of her hands onto the other creature's forearms, her fire now leaping from the creases in her palm and singing its skin. With one last, inhuman scream of defiance, it fled. Mara let out a sigh of relief. Only when it fled past Dean and into the halls beyond did she let herself fall to the ground.

She heard footsteps in the distance. Pounding against the linoleum flooring, they screeched to a halt beside her cowering form. Mara looked up - it was Dean. He was crouched down, his back curving in a downward slope, one of his hands reaching out to her face. Not touching her, but hovering inches away, as if the shaking of his hand was a direct effect of the terror in his eyes.

Mara flinched, shielding her face with her hand.

"Don't look," she said, and when she spoke, her voice was ominous. It was a deep, trembling growl, accompanied by the translucent blood that dripped from her gaping lips.

She hurriedly shifted back to her blonde form. To her human form, the one that would not scare Dean. But she could see herself in the reflection of the doctor's table stand, and upon the view of her face, she knew she would never be human. Though she'd tried to transform into one, a white ring still lined the insides of her human pupil, a remnant of her true form that would only fade with time. An array of scars painted one of her cheeks. It was ugly and bright red, blistering in scattered pieces along the left side of her face. It was an assurance that she could never be like the Winchesters. That she could never stand beside one without registering bile in another person's throat, because surely her costume would not resist deterioration when she stood next to a real human. She whimpered.

"No, no, no," Dean stuttered, dropping to his knees at her side. He turned her face to his, gently caressing the bubbles of red that disfigured her milky skin.

Mara's face scrunched in despair. "It won't go away. I can't...I can't make it go away. I'm trying, I really am, but I-"

Dean shook his head. "Mara." He tilted his head forward, eyes tracing her scar as the tips of his fingers danced lightly across it.

"It hurts, Dean," Mara sobbed.

"I know," he whispered, voice a low rumble. "It's...it's okay. I have one too, see?"

He rubbed his hand roughly across his own forehead, where a red lesion remained from the car crash, and a corner of his mouth raised in a half-hearted grin. When tears still welled in Mara's eyes and her bottom lip still shook, he took his hands in hers. His fingers intertwined themselves in her grip, encasing her knuckles in the bed of his palms. He slowly extended one of her fingers for her. Drug it to rest on his scar, and let it slide across the broken tissue until it collapsed in her lap once more.

He pressed his lips together, forcing himself to swallow despite the lump in his throat. "It's not as bad as you think it is. And yours...just don't be ashamed of it, okay? You didn't get it for a shameful reason. You got it because you risked your life saving me."

Mara nodded, though she wasn't quite sure she believed the whispered assurances that were floating from between Dean's swollen lips. The things he uttered were too good to be true. His words were encased in a gold too polished, wrapped in a linen too soft, to be able to deny the temptation of stealing it. Of snatching it from its owner and pressing it close to your chest, praying fervently that they would not want it back. That Dean would let her keep these words for herself and would not deny he'd said them, because they painted a picture of her that was immeasurably better than what she was. Still, she couldn't help but think that every time his stare washed over the bulging pupils of her own, he lingered on the white ring that had been left there. He lingered on the tangible epitome of what she was, and what she never could be.

"So, uh..." Dean rocked back on his heels, adjusting his positioning until his legs were crossed. His fingers detached themselves from Mara's. "What was that?"

"A reaper. It was trying to ferry your soul." Mara furrowed her brows. Shouldn't Dean have gathered that by now, given all the clues that had practically been handed to him on a platter?

Dean shook his head once, eyebrow cocked and lips slightly pursed. Mara noted the expression he wore was one he always clothed himself in when he was confused or on the verge of deciphering a case, so she tried to be attentive when he spoke. That way, she would be able to offer an understandable, more explanatory answer.

"No, I mean what was..." He paused, biting his bottom lip as he searched for the right finish to his sentence, perhaps hoping the words would leap off of his tongue for him. Unsatisfied with all of his conjectures, he gestured to Mara's body instead. "That," he finished.

Mara wrapped her arms around her chest, a blanket over her insecurities. When she'd shed her human skin to allow her true form to flourish, spreading its roots until it curled around her recess of power, she'd allowed Dean to see who she truly was. And it was ugly. The jagged curves of her skeletal physique would make any creature desire her molted skin, soft to the touch and soothing even to the worstof hell's minions, and the corpse-like stench mutilated any remnants of her prior rose complexion. Even so, the malformities wandered deeper than the layers of her integument. Inside, beneath the layers she'd born from the moment she'd met Dean, she was selfish. She had risked her life for Dean. She had shoved him aside, only to test the chance that the guillotine's blade would carve a death sentence onto her neck rather than his. But she'd done it for herself. She'd turned against the procedures that had been written into the manual of existence at the moment of her creation, and had upset the balance of nature to save Dean, simply because she couldn't let him go.

Only, it wasn't so simple. Dean was an indescribable being. The vines of his heart recoiled at the first sign of attachment, but was easily fooled into a dance of commitment if a person's sunlight shined on him brightly enough. Alas, Mara's sunlight had been false when it had tricked him. At first, she hadn't really wanted him to grow in the nourishment of her presence. She'd worked against him to further her own yearnings for freedom from a certain pair of demons. Now, when she wanted to bestow her light upon him all hours of the day that he may mature alongside her, and when his leaves had become too attached to their precious sun to be able to live without it, she couldn't wrestle with the rain that threatened to shield Dean from her. Storm clouds fermented behind her like she dragged them on a leash, and she wasn't sure Dean could survive the horrors that accompanied her good intentions.

"That," Mara began, coughing to force the uncertainty from her voice. "Was my true form. It's what I normally look like. But when we reap souls, that form can be frightening to some humans, so we often choose other appearances to adopt. We're easier to converse with that way. The Mara you know...what I look like right now...it's not really me."

Dean smiled, mild and subdued, a mere seed compared to the vibrant grins he usually bore. "The Mara I know is really you. Maybe you've never thought of this before because you weren't around for the whole 'it's what's inside that counts' Disney Channel crap, but I think we'd still be having this conversation if you looked more like a Halloween decoration than a supermodel."

Mara's eyebrows shot up, and the corners of Dean's lips pulled back in a grimace. He rushed to mend his impetuous metaphors, saying, "What I mean is I don't care what you look like, alright? You're still Mara, and you're still one of us."

"A Winchester?" Mara asked, head tilted forward as a request for clarification in itself.

Dean nodded, and though his lips were pressed against one another, a grin wavered on his face, his fingers barely brushing the top of Mara's hand. It was an action that would normally be absent of intention, but the woman in front of him had given it an abundance of intent. He was all too aware of the movements he was making.

"A Winchester," he assured.

Mara didn't understand it. The other reaper had hardly touched her, aside from the attack that left the throbbing scar riddled along her cheek, but she still couldn't breath. She felt like something had struck her chest, cracking her clavicle and flattening her lungs. Now, all she could manage were short, harried breaths, never sucking in too much air for fear that her exhale would blow Dean away. And she just wanted him to be closer.

That was why she said it - the next words that bounced off her tongue. She wanted to find a way to save him so maybe he could be closer to her, for longer than a single fleeting moment. She hadn't meant for Dean to rise to his feet, to wedge an aching in her sternum, to further compress her breathing routine. She certainly hadn't expected it to anger him so deeply.

But it was like he'd morphed under a full moon - a revered gift from the divine into a ravenous creature of the night, searching, begging, for something to feast on. He was wounded, though. She saw in beneath the glistening sheen of his eyes: a reopened cut in the strokes of his deep green sea. He was jaded. Robbed of his vigorous aura, of the amorous glint in his eye. And her words had done it to him.

"You have to let me talk to Kat and Sam," she'd pleaded. "I can explain what's going on, and they can find a way to fix this and save you."

That was when Dean had left her. He'd risen to his feet, an action soon mimicked by Mara, and he waited for the doctors, nurses, and other Winchesters to leave before he said, back turned, "You can't. Mara, I know I said you're one of us, but what you did...Kat and Sam still need time away from you, to heal, before things go back to the way they were. Things don't fix that easy."

"I said I was sorry. I don't know what else you want me to do." Mara's brow creased, head tilting as she met Dean's volatile gaze. Was this the way of human emotions? Were people always calm, beautiful, and exquisite beings to admire, only to erupt and spew lava when they heard something that didn't please them?

All of a sudden, Mara hated the quietude of the room they stood in. The absence of onlookers shifted the atmosphere to just her and Dean and the bits of tangled string that were woven between them. The string was tense, drawing itself taut when Dean turned to face Mara, stretching itself across the ten-foot distance between them. It spawned ridges across Mara's arms. She hadn't yet learned how to handle the sudden shift in Dean's emotions, hadn't learned how to diffuse the arising conflict she sensed. So she waited, fingers curled around one another, for the spark to reach the end of the fuse.

"Yeah, well." Dean shrugged, an overexaggerated movement as he flung his hands into the air and they fell back at his sides, slapping against his upper thighs. "Sorry don't pay the bills."

Dean strode for the door, feet thudding against the floor in a furious rhythm. His eyes refused to meet Mara's as he left, and the reaper's shoulders bristled.

She despised herself for what she was about to do. She'd seen the anguish Sam and John's fighting had caused Dean. She'd seen the way the arguing had made his blood boil, and it was a curious thing: a warrior, upset by a war of words. Though curious as it might have been, she would never have inflicted that same torment upon him unless it was absolutely necessary. And it was. In that moment, as he was about to walk out the door and leave her stranded, it was incumbent that she make him stay and listen to her. If she wanted to save Dean, she would have to risk facing his wrath.

Mara knew she had to pick and choose her battles. She was choosing this one.

"Dean!" she shouted, her legs a thundering storm as they hurried in his direction, her hand a bolt of lightning as she grabbed hold of his wrist, demanding that he stay. The sizzling anger in her voice had given one last pop when she'd shouted his name, and now it dulled to a subdued rumble. "Listen to me. I get it. If I were you, I would be angry, too. But if there's one thing you Winchesters have taught me, it's when anger is justified. And the anger I feel right now - towards Azazel, towards you..." Dean's eyes widened as if he were shocked at the prospect that she could be angry with him, and though it warmed the blood at her temples, she ignored it to continue her speech. "It's more than justified. Azazel and Meg made me do terrible, terrible things, Dean. And you won't even tell me what happened when you guys fought him, much less get someone's help so you won't die!"

It was grossly selfish of him to deny her what she was asking for. She wanted to save him, and he was refusing because of a grudge. A grudge that any normal person would have let wash away when faced with the current situation's overwhelming waves, because if they didn't, they could very well drown.

Silence settled over the pair, the eye in the center of the storm. The flashes of lightning and ferocious winds were not yet at ease. Rather, they were only in a phase of respite, terminated by the balling of Mara's fists and a subsequent "What happened with Azazel, Dean?"

Silence.

"Dean!"

"We lost!" Dean erupted. The ends of his mouth were downturned, his jaw clenched, and his voice was in freefall until it was multiple octaves lower - a deep growl, rooted in the back of his throat. "He got away and he beat the crap out of us while he was at it, if that wasn't obvious enough already. Is that what you wanted to hear?"

Dean's emission of indignation subsided while he looked to the floor and ran a hand through his hair, only to be reignited when he grunted, "God, you make me so angry sometimes."

Mara scoffed, mostly in disbelief, but in part to camouflage the handful of needles Dean had just thrown at her heart. "I make you angry? All I did was ask what happened to the demon who wants my head on a plate, and you're acting like I threw a knife at your chest!"

Mara pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth, a dam blocking the path of a tempestuous deluge. She was shocked at the presence of the tears, They welled in her eyes, swelling in a bulb at the corner of her eyelid, threatening to spill over the edge and soak her resolved countenance. She'd been begging at the feet of freedom for months. Pleading with it to offer the slightest bit of its essence to her, even if it was only the sweat on his brow. But liberty was a covetous dictator. He had no intention of sharing his riches. Not when Mara had been caged with domineering devils, and certainly not when she induced a sore contusion in Dean's chest. He'd yet to forgive her for the things she'd done. And, until he did, freedom would not spare so much as his discarded toenail clippings.

The waterfall in Mara's eyes spilled. Once, and then twice, and a third time, only stopping when she raised her hand to wipe the manifests of sorrow and salt aside. The tension in Dean's features faltered at the sight, the lines on his forehead relaxing and the sodden glaze over his eyes spreading.

Dean shook his head, hand stretching out only to float in midair. "Listen, that's not exactly-"

"No, you listen," Mara said. Instead of weakening her posture and diffusing the bonds that held her together, her tears had strengthened the welded joints of her voice and wrought it with lengths of iron. "Do you even realize the whole time I was under Azazel's control, I fought against it for you? I could've done what he asked and gone back to my normal life as soon as the deed was done. But I didn't. Even when you locked me in a cage and gave Kat the key, I disobeyed direct orders for you, because I..."

Mara's words trailed off, dying in the back of her aching throat. She'd almost said it - the word she'd been thinking for days, every time her gaze lingered on Dean's features and the sharp curves of his face. In that moment, while she'd been cleaning the aftermath of their warring hurricanes, sweeping up fallen trees and patching up the holes of her sheltered chest, she'd almost told him how she felt. That she loved him.

Dean was staring at her now. Studying her. He was a doe, having strayed too far from his guardian's path and he was scared of the hunter that had a gun aimed at his temple - a gun that was loaded with bullets labeled danger, the gunpowder inside sprinkled with intimacy - but he was holding his ground. He was too frightened to flee, too frightened to attack. So he stood still. Expression hardened into an expression that was distant, but yearning.

"Because you what?" he breathed.

Mara bit her lip, shrugged, and wrapped her arms around her upper body. "Nothing."

Dean stepped towards Mara, hand gripping her shoulder - tender but firm. He tilted his head, and she could feel his breath on the bridge of her nose. It stung when it brushed across her scar - huffs of oxygen were to mutilated skin like huffs of carbon dioxide were to the earth's atmosphere - but she would not be the one to tell him that. She craved him too deeply, too fervently, to say no.

She craved him like a serial killer hungered for its next victim, like - far too much and far too dangerously. She wasn't meant to have him. Nature had never intended it to happen, had never intended for the beauty to meet his beast and fall in love with the daggers in her smile, but it had happened anyway. And, oh how she needed him. For once, she wasn't frightened. She was not tempted in the least to shiver under the cover of clouds and pray her passion did not anger the stars. For once, she was bold. She would glare fearlessly at the celestial bodies that ruled the skies, snarl at their elongated lashes of fire and molten, and hold onto Dean's hand all the while.

A line of goosebumps raced across her shoulders. He was so close, closer than she'd ever anticipated, and yet...when he traced the outline of her jaw, eyes loitering on the dips and elevations of her lips, she went numb. She didn't know how to act, how to feel when the embodiment of each of her wicked desires was so near. Centimeters away. Her fingers trailed the length of his arms, and her breath hitched in her throat.

"Can't you see me?" an unknown voice resonated in Mara's ears, beating against her eardrums with a mallet despite being dim in reality. She leaped back from Dean's touch, her skin squirming like someone had interrupted something sacred.

"What's that?" Dean wondered aloud, now alert and in tune with his surroundings. But he'd been so lost before.

"Why won't you look at me?" the voice repeated. It was feminine, desperate, ringing with notes of fear and disorientation.

The mellow but shrill pitch of the girl's phrases held a clarity that could only mean one thing - she was in the In-Between. Mara and Dean were not alone.

"I'll go check it out," Mara offered, shoulder brushing past Dean as she headed for the door. The impact of her shoulder ramming into his knocked her off-balance, and she winced as her feet engrossed themselves in one another and she fell into Dean's outstretched arm.

"No, I'll go," Dean assured, hand lingering on Mara's arm even after she'd regained her balance. "You're still too weak from earlier."

Mara chewed at her bottom lip, eyes tracing the lines and curves that were etched into Dean's face. She was trying to read him, his intentions, but she hadn't known the human species long enough to be able to decrypt the codes of his aspirations well enough. So she nodded.

And Dean left.

◈◈◈

When Dean came back, his face was streaked with agony. His idyllic porcelain skin, defaced by striations of misery, rivers of a sunken heart drizzling from the openings in his optic cavities.

"Dean?" Mara breathed. She didn't know what else to say. He'd never allowed himself to appear this way before - he was lying on an operating table with both sides of his torso pinned open, vulnerable for anyone to prod at his insides. His fortress had fallen down.

What had he seen? What sort of flaming arrows had done this to him, what horrors had he seen in the hallways of the hospital?

A sob racked his chest, and Mara rushed to his side. Arms wrapped around his shoulders, they sunk to the floor as one, legs folded beneath them and pressed against each other's. Mara's voice trembled for Dean's sake as she asked, "What's wrong? Are you okay? What happened out there?"

Another noise escaped Dean's lips - half-gasp and half-groan - and he tucked his head into the crevice between Mara's neck and head. She could feel the residue of his tears as they stained her skin. Mara scrunched her nose, choking back a sob of her own. She didn't know what she was crying for, only that she should. That, finally, her mind and soul were agreeing on one thing: her and Dean were one. At least in that moment, her heart was his and his heart was hers. She didn't have to know why he was upset. Whatever it may be, the silent enigma that only presented itself in hushed sobs and might never reach her ears...it was enough to wreak havoc in her chest, too.

"Mara," Dean cried, hands curling into a ball around the sleeve of her shirt. "He doesn't even care."

"Who doesn't care?"

Dean's hair rustled against the nerve endings on Mara's neck, coaxing her to press her lips against it, the soft fibers cool against her pursed mouth. Dean gulped before he continued, saying, "Dad. He isn't even trying to save me, he's just sitting there and watching me die. All he cares about is that stupid demon."

Mara pulled Dean in closer to her chest. She didn't have anything else to offer. She had nothing to give the boy, wrought with currents of abandonment and neglect and an overflow of fear. Nothing but the companionship of her lifeless, frail arms, a promise in itself that teased the end that was to come.

Because it was her kind that would bring his death. Everything that she was, every fragment of bone and blood that ran through her body, screamed of her true identity. Her true species. Her true duty. Everything she was, was the end of Dean Winchester.