It might be a tad bit melodramatic and it absolutely isn't the same thing at all, but Sam lives in hyperbole.

The way Quinn is looking now—in reaction to the "monsters are real" talk—is how Sam felt when she told him "Quinn" isn't even her real name. 

She brought it up so casually. It was finals week. She and Sam were sitting in their reserved library room with Claire and Kelly, waiting for Rebecca, Nicole, and Tyler to show up. There is a biology lab exam in three days, and the mounting annoyance in the room could be compared to a pressure cooker just waiting for someone to open the lid.

"You know, Quinn isn't really my first name," she said.

Sam gawked at her as she flipped a page in her notes. Kelly was staring at the ceiling, but his dark eyes slowly moved to Quinn in suspicion. "Uh..."

"It's Virginia," Quinn continued, reaching for a marker along the whiteboard tray to continue her drawing from the textbook. "My mom's favorite author is Virginia Woolf—you know, the feminist—and she kind of named me after her, but I think that name makes me sound old." Quinn shrugged. "So I started going by 'Quinn' in middle school because I absolutely hated everything Virginia Woolf ever wrote."

Sam blinked at her. "I feel like I don't even know you."

"I don't even know who Virginia Woolf is," Kelly muttered. 

Claire's cat-like eyes moved right to him. "A Room of One's Own?" Kelly shook his head. "Three Guineas? Kel, we literally just read it in literature."

Kelly blinked and sat up in realization. "Oh yeah! Yeah, it was the one I didn't understand."

"Yeah. I mean, if we're also discounting everything else we've read thus far," Claire quipped, raising an eyebrow, and Sam grinned.

"Kel, you need a tutor?"

"Shut up, Winchester," he grumbled. "I'm a numbers guy, okay? I don't...I don't like words from the eighteenth century."

"I will write your daily journal responses for British Lit if you help me with my physics homework," Quinn declared with the urgency and desperation only an exhausted college student possessed.

"Done," Kelly nodded once. 

Rebecca was the only other soul who showed. And the more time that passed, Kelly was beginning to look like Quinn does now, years later.

Blank stare, maybe a little sick-looking, anxious and uncertain.

After a moment, Dean pulls his flask from the inside of his jacket and tentatively slides it over the top of the seat. Chest heaving, Quinn stares at it like it has teeth before taking it, swiftly unscrewing the cap, and knocks one back. She makes a face, squinting as she hands it back to him.

"So all those times you were acting so sketchy," she begins, not looking at Sam, but the brothers know it's who she's referring to. "It was probably because of some...some monster." Wordlessly, Sam nods. "So did you...go after 'em? When you were..."

"At first," Sam admits. "But eventually, I just...stopped."

"Because..."

"Because it's why I left in the first place," Sam quietly tells her, finding the skin of his palm far more interesting than anything else in the car. 

Quinn stares ahead with that same sick, distant gaze, lips subconsciously pressed like she might hurl. "So you're here about those bodies," she murmurs.

"The ones without hearts," Dean confirms. "You've got a serial killing werewolf on your hands, Inspector." Quinn's hazel eyes shoot to him, and he offers her a tight smile. "I'm just surprised none of our kind have been here to clean it up yet."

"A lot happens in San Francisco's homicide unit," Quinn heaves in a sigh. "So you...who went on a cross-country killing spree a couple years ago—except it wasn't really you—want to walk into my precinct and...look at my bodies...to..."

"Find a werewolf," Dean nods once. "And, uh, we'll need your notes, too."

Quinn blinks at him. "Well what if someone asks questions?" He pulls a good-looking fake federal badge from his coat, and she lets out a whimper, holding her fingers to her lips.

"No one ever asks," he assures her. "Plus we got you, so." Dean shrugs once. 

Quinn puts her head in her hands. "How...did my life...get so fucked? I could get fired. I could get worse than fired, I could get thrown in jail!"

"You're not gonna get thrown in jail," Dean protests. "Melodramatic."

Quinn makes a noise, scratching at her forehead. "I can't believe this," she mutters before quickly ducking out of the Impala. Sam and Dean follow after her. 

The second she gets inside, she's inundated with questions and leads and follow-ups.

"Can no one delegate around here?" She cries, looking at a variety of papers with a frown furrowing between her brows. "Hopkins!" She slaps a sticky note onto Hopkins' desk. "Finch!" Yellow paper. "Why is there a parking citation in my paperwork?" She slides that into a bin on her desk as she shakes her head. "This is for special victims! We are homicide!"

"SV gave it back to us," a young officer chirps at her. Quinn frowns at the file before handing it off to him and waving the Winchesters forward. "The latest investigation is a shit show. Everyone's in a pissing contest over who gets the case," she mutters. "It's all going to the M.E. anyway." She sits down at her desk and slides her ID card into her keyboard. "Bayview and Ingleside are the worst. Everyone's just chomping at the bit." The case files are all online, stored in their database.

When Dean said "serial killing werewolf," he wasn't kidding. Three murders have occurred around the time of a full moon every month for two years.

"We just thought it was some sicko playing games," Quinn mutters. "Since it started around Valentine's, you know? Not...an actual werewolf."

"Oh, yeah," Dean nods. "Because every homicide detective's first thought when a heart goes missing is "werewolf." Shame on you, Quinn."

Quinn stares at him. It could almost be comedic. "Well now that you say it, it was around full moons..."

"Can we see the bodies?"

"Yeah," she sighs, and collects her keys and identification card. 

"Any similarities between the victims?" Dean asks.

This is easy. This is work. Quinn can do work. It makes it easier that Dean is doing all of the talking, too, instead of Sam. It's factual, puzzling.

"—I mean, we've had several stakeouts from all the previous locations across the city through all of our offices," Quinn barrels on as she leads them through the examiner's office near the bay. "It's just so totally random. I don't know how we're gonna catch this guy."

"What makes you think it's a guy?" Dean asks.

"Well, all of the victims are women," Quinn hums, tucking the killer's profile underneath her arm as she pushes a door open. Dean is walking in stride with her, so he doesn't get the noseful of hypnotizing lemongrass that Sam does. "White women, so we think the killer is a white man. And the bodies are almost always mutilated and it was very disorganized, so we were thinking he's a schizophrenic, likely to be very thin and generally unkempt." Quinn looks to her left, hazel eyes scanning over Dean. His face seems very different. Older, yes, but it's something about his eyes. "Of course," she hums. "This was a profile made about a human man, and not a werewolf, so therefore, it's safe to assume this profile may be completely inaccurate."

Dean chuckles a little. "Well, in our experience, werewolves can go either way," he hums, pulling the door open for her. "Go after the people they know the most, or...go at them totally random. I'm thinking since this has been going on for so long, they've got it under control a little—"

"Oh, really?" Quinn quirks an eyebrow.

"So their bloodlust isn't so crazy, so maybe it's more likely to be people they know," Dean finishes. 

Quinn waves as they pass the examiner's office. 

"Quinn," the woman boasts with a smile, popping her head out of the doorway. 

"Hey, Rach," Quinn hums, and gestures over her shoulder. "The feeb decided our Saint Valentine has finally ratcheted up the body count enough to warrant an investigation."

"About time," Rachel grumbles, leaning against the doorway. Sharp, fox-like brown eyes sweep to the hunters and a little smirk tugs at her full lips. "So you wanna see the bodies," she sighs.

"Yes." Quinn nods once. "We've still got the ones from Monday and yesterday," she says to Dean. 

"You call this guy 'Saint Valentine'?" he grumbles to Quinn.

She smiles a little, a simple tug at the corner of her mouth. "Dark humor," she hums.

The body from Monday is in the refrigerator. The body from the early hours of this morning is still on the table, draped. Only the hearts are missing. The woman on the table was Francine Baker, a thirty-year-old publicist, and the one in the fridge was Carly Morgan, a twenty-three-year-old waitress at a pub near the bay.

"There was a barback from the pub who said he saw a guy head outside a few minutes after Carly did when her shift ended," Quinn tells them on the way back to the car. "We brought him in this morning for questioning and sat him with a sketch artist. We've got it circulating, all the news outlets are running it."

"Did you run the sketch through facial recognition?" Sam asks.

"No," Quinn shakes her head. "No, here in San Francisco when we have a serial killer, we tend to do the shittiest police work and totally not follow protocol." She flashes him a tight smile. "We've ran it three times, to my knowledge, and there are no matches." Quinn shrugs. "So whoever the guy is, he's clean. Well, was." She sits in the back seat and leafs through her file again. "So...werewolves," Quinn muses. "We talking Michael J. Fox or, uh...Twilight?"

"Michael J. Fox," Dean nods once. 

Quinn raises her eyebrows. "Terrifying."

Dean shoots her an amused, skeptical look, tone almost dubious. "You'd rather deal with a horse-sized wolf?" 

"Uh, no, actually, I'd rather monsters not exist." Quinn's smile is prim and acidic at the same time. Dean smiles a little, genuinely. 

"Silver does kill them, though," he tells her. "Silver bullet, silver knife..."

"And they eat hearts," Quinn sighs. "How are they turned?"

"They get bitten or they're born into it." Slowly, Quinn nods. "Are you coming with us to the murder spots, or do you need to get back to the station?"

"I probably should head back," Quinn hums. "I can give you a list of them all, though, and you can see what you find with your outside knowledge. Your fake federal knowledge." Quinn nods once. "Your...supernatural knowledge." She scratches the back of her head, and Dean glances to her in the rearview mirror.

"You okay?"

"I think I'm gonna puke."

Immediate pull over. She did, in fact, puke. And when she got to the station, she went right for the bathroom and she cried. 

Monsters. Ex-boyfriend/father-of-her-whole-world is not dead, and is not a serial killer, he just hunts monsters. 

Maybe, technically, still serial killer, just not of totally undeserving citizens.

This morning was not at all an end of The Conversation, and she knew that. They both knew that. The terrifying thing is how long of a conversation would this be? How many branches would it have? How many boxes did they need to unpack?

It's the end of the day. No one has called her desk. It's been unusually quiet for the day after a murder. Having been working, technically, starting at four this morning, she's exhausted and still has a seven year old's party to get ready for.

And here's Sam Winchester, hesitating by the office archway, still in his suit and tie.

Quinn stops at the corner, staring down at her shoes. "Hey."

"Hi."

Sam watches her lips purse, probably chewing on the inside corner of her mouth. He thought coming inside, the words might come to him, but there are none. It's just a blank mind as he stares at someone he once knew better than himself. 

"You off?"

"Yeah, special permission," Quinn hums. "Got a party to decorate for." Another moment passes.

"Can I come?"

Quinn's eyes snap up to his, and he can't breathe. He seems sincere. Soft eyes and the uncertainty in his features.

"I know it's...it's been a long time. A really long time, but..." But what?

"Yeah." Quinn nods. "Yeah, you can come. I have to get her from...from Mom's..." She seems to be putting a sentence together in her mind. "Just...I don't want to tell her yet. About you."

It hurts, but he understands why.