"Katherine, your jokes are the worst," Dean proclaims. "Literally, the worst."

Katherine squawks in protest. "The worst?!" She cries. "The worse the puns are, the better! That's what makes them so great!" She takes a violent bite of her burger, glowering playfully out the window. "Just say you're uncultured and move on."

Dean laughs. 

They're having fun for the first time since deperation shoved him towards her. He still doesn't know if enlisting her to help him find Sam was a moment of weakness or not. Whatever the reason, whatever the rhyme, in this moment, he's glad he did.

And probably all other moments, too. He'll take the long, sappy phone calls to Charlie. He'll take the short replies and the quick temper. He'll take it all if it means he can sleep at night knowing she's here, knowing she's safe.

Even if it means she's back in the Winchester Family Mess. 

It was a constant internal war. Does he want her in all of this? Does he want her fighting all of this nastiness? Doesn't she deserve happiness, normalcy?

She seems happy now, though. They've been laying low for a little over a week now, using new aliases and burners, keeping their noses out of hunts. Katherine fielded them to other hunters in the area, something she's becoming a little too good at doing. It makes her itch. Her legs are restless and she has too much energy, even after going for a run in whatever town they're in.

Naturally, Dean was all too happy to jump in the car with her when she found a potential lead for the first case they've taken since the prison. Somehow, between crawling all over town and looking into persons of interest, they've managed to laugh it up. Blow off steam. Talk. Be humans.

Friends. Happy.

Katherine barely hears Dean's cellphone ringing over the music. She reaches over to crank the radio down and hands Dean his phone before picking up a small handful of fries and dropping them into her mouth. She lets out a content sigh, leaning against the framework of the Impala with closed eyes. Dean smiles and answers his phone.

"Yeah?"

Sam replies softly, paranoid. Worried. "There's a cop car outside."

Dean's heart constricts, and his grip tightens on the steering wheel. He shoots a side-eyed glance to Katherine. She's oblivious. "You think it's for us?"

"I don't know."

"I don't see how," Dean tells him. "We ditched the plates, the credit cards, got new burners."

Silence looms between the two for a moment. Then Sam lets out a sigh when the patrol car rolls down the street. "False alarm," he murmurs, moving away from the window. His chest hurts with the sudden decrease in blood volume his heart is pumping.

"See?" Dean chirps, cheerfullness coloring his tone. "Nothin' to worry about."

"Yeah," Sam quips, sitting at the desk with a heavy sigh. He stares at the book on the surface, opened up to a page about djinns. "Being fugitives is a damn dance party."

"Hey, man," Dean chukles. "Chicks dig the danger vibe." Katherine glances over to him with a raised brow.

"Did you get anything?" Sam asks.

"How could we?" Dean scoffs. "You sent us to scour through, like, fifty square miles of real estate."

"Well that's where all the victims disappeared," Sam points out.

"Yeah, well, we got diddly-squat," Dean tells him.

"Well, we also took a break," Katherine hums.

Dean shoots her a look and she smirks, eyes glinting mischievously.

"Well, we know one thing," Sam says. "We're hunting a djinn."

Dean frowns, looking away from Katherine. "A genie?"

"What?" She asks. Dean puts the call on speaker and Katherine carefully listens.

"You think these suckers can really grant wishes?"

"I would love to know," Katherine drawls.

"Well, if they're powerful enough," Sam replies. "I mean, they're not exactly like Barbara Eden in harem pants. Djinn have been feeding off of people for centuries. They're all over the Quran."

Dean lets out a heavy, contemplative sigh. "Barbara Eden was hot, wasn't she? Way hotter than that Bewitched chick."

Katherine slowly looks to Dean. "You did not watch Bewitched," she says. Dean shrugs, and she laughs.

"Where do the djinns lair up?" Dean asks.

"Ruins, usually," Sam answers. "The bigger, the better. More places to hide."

Katherine frowns. "There was that old warehouse a couple streets down from that burger joint," she says. Dean nods.

"Yeah, KD's saying there could be a place a couple miles back," he tells Sam. "We're gonna go check it out."

"Wait, no, no, no," Sam interjects. "Come get me first."

"I've got Kat. And it's probably nothing." Before Sam can protest, Dean hangs up.

"A hunt we have," Katherine hums, staring at the remains of her burger. After a moment of generosity, she offers, "You wanna bite?"

"Thought you'd never ask," Dean says. She hands the wrapped patty to him and watches, in horror, as he devours most of it.

"Dean!" She cries. "Not half of it!"

"That's a bite!" He defends.

"When I say bite, I mean my bite, not yours!" She groans, taking the last tiny bite of burger back from him. "And you took the bacon and the avocado."

"It was gonna fall out," he says around his food. "I'm not getting my car dirty." Katherine sighs and pops the last bit of burger into her mouth. "Damn, that was a good burger."

"I told you," she sings. Dean doesn't respond, he just continues down the slick blacktop until they get closer to the bulding. He cuts the engine and looks over to Katherine. 

Moonlight glints off her wheat hair, emphasizes the bone structure in her face, casts shadows in the valleys and highlights the hills. Her sharp focus is entirely on the building as she shrugs on her jacket.

Dean wants to get his hands on her. She looks absolutely delicious. The unbuttoned henley feeding into her cleavage, the low collar of her jacket. He always liked her in leather, and the cut of it gives him the opportunity to linger around her neck and shoulders, two of his favorite landmarks of Katherine Donovan. The jacket is quite the spectacle, and he might even love it more than her jeans, or maybe those leggings she wears.

The low collar goes well with the hard lines of her body. Compliments it. Her jaw, her long neck, her collarbones. It highlights the depth between her waist and the curve of her hips, fitted even when not zipped...

It fits her like a glove, and he's never been so ravenous.Then, as if she's finally realizing Dean's staring, she looks at him.

Still totally oblivious.

"Comin'?"

Katherine throws the door open and steps out into the chill of the night. Dean presses his lips together, doing the same thing to get his eyes off her full posterior, if not to look normal.

If she were still his, he knows exactly what he'd do with her once this little field trip was over. Maybe he wouldn't even make it to another motel room...

"Dude," Katherine chuckles, pushing on her gun and pulling on the slide. "You're freaking me out. Are you good to go inside?" 

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine." He reaches for his flashlight and clicks it on.

Her eyebrows furrow, and she pats the side of her gun against her leg. A nervous tic. "Stop...being so introspective." She turns on her toes and heads for the building.

She's silent as she opens up the door, but the heavy metal creaks at the last second. Dean quickly slips in behind her, and Katherine leads the door to shut in silence. Dean leads the surge forward. He barely hears her knife get pulled from its holster. With that in her left hand and her gun in her right, she follows behind Dean and his flashlight.

Even tipsy, Donovan was silent as a cat. Quiet like the shadows.

Left.

She hears the voice so clearly she has to stop to make sure no one actually said it. But it's that same voice she's heard in times of peril. She recognizes it immediately, as if Dean himself said it.

She looks to her left, eyes darting across the frosted glass panel. But there's nothing except that nagging suspicion, the feeling of being watched, and the hair on the back of her neck rising. Dean feels it, too, and glances over his shoulder to check with her by silent means. She barely nods, and her grip on her weapons tightens. Dean quickly turns around the corner, shining his light down the corridor, and Katherine joins him around the divide. And then Dean starts forward.

Right!

Katherine swings, but her wrist was deflected and her knife clattered to the ground. So easily, the djinn, pale with vivid blue eyes and dark swells of ink, held her up against that wall, fended off Dean. She kicked and thrashed, but the grip around her throat tightened, and the creatures' fingertips tug into either side of her trachea. Deep blue light coursed around the djinn's hand, like electricity, and purple smoke drifted from its palm. She struggled, throwing her head back into the glass as the djinn reached forward and touched a hand to her head.

━━━━━━━━✦✗✦━━━━━━━━

A crash of thunder pulls her from the depths of unconsciousness, and she shoots up as if she'd been shocked. Heavy weight rolled off of her back and fell onto the sheets beside her.

Sheets.

She'd been sleeping on her stomach, like she always does. And sure, she sleeps without pants on occasion, but there have been very few things to make her sleep eniterly naked, as she is now. Sex, firstly. And that horrible heatwave in August when, surprise, her AC broke.

But Dean is beside her, face-down in his pillow, and his back is bare. She can see all of those moles and spots on his back that she'd seen multiple times before.

But something is unsettling. She doesn't remember how she got here. Jesus, how much did I have to drink?

He moans quietly, his fingers reaching out to her. Katherine turns onto her back, gathering the sheets around her chest as her cheeks flush. His fingertips hook around her lower thigh and her heart jumps in her throat. "Dean," she hisses.

"What's the matter?" He quietly asks.

Oh, this is a nightmare. It has to be. But what is this place? She doesn't recognize the room. Actually, the room is very nice. The ceiling is stain-free, so are the sheets.

What on God's green earth...

She slips from the bed and pulls the nearest article of clothing over her head—a tank top, then a pair of shorts. Pajamas in her size. Katherine explores the room in the dark, the brief lightning strike illuminating the shadows every once in a while. When she looked over at Dean, sleeping again, she caught sight of something strange and moved over to investigate.

It's a picture of her and Dean, sure enough. He's standing behind her with one arm across her front and fingers wrapped around her shoulders, his head level with hers. They're laughing. They're happy. Dean seems older, at least now, as she glances between his features now and those in the photograph.

You're dreaming, she tells herself, setting the happy photo down, and quickly exits the bedroom.

It's a strange place. There are many doors in the hallway she's standing in, and more pictures on the wall. But there are more people in them. Children, three of them. Two girls and a boy. The boy seems older, but not by much. He doesn't seem very old, either. Five or six, perhaps. Dark blond hair and big blue eyes, a dimple in one of his cheeks, and freckles on his nose. He's beautiful. Connor. 

It's screamed at her, so deep that it must be the child's name.

The oldest girl has dark brown hair, braided back into two long twists. Her eyes are big and blue, too, with the same freckles and big smile that Katherine has. They look like her. Grace. And the smallest girl. Oh, isn't she precious. Dark hair and hazel eyes, a round face and little body. This is Nora.

"Momma?"

Katherine nearly drops the photograph and twists to her right. The little boy stands at the end of the hallway, rubbing his eyes. "Hi," she whispers after a moment. "What...what are you doing out of bed?" She asks, glancing to the dark sky out of the windows in the hall, and hangs the frame back on the wall.

"The storm woke me up," he answers. Katherine starts towards him and lifts him off of the floor. He's not wearing a shirt, but he is wearing a bright red pair of boxers. Katherine chuckles.

"Where are your pajamas?" She asks, glancing to the door he must've walked out from. His name is spelled on it in one-sided sticky plastic, shaped from all different kinds of cars.

"It's too hot for jammies," Connor replies, resting his head on her shoulder. Katherine's reflex is to kiss his head. His hair smells like apples.

His room looks like a normal little boys' room. There's the rug with the racetrack on it. A bed in the shape of a car. A giraffe nightlight. There's a little fishbowl with a swimming beta in it on the nightstand. A few books on the shelf built into the wall.

"I suppose it is," Katherine hums, walking over to his bed. She puts him down over the sheets. "You want the covers on or off?"

"Won't the monsters get me?"

Katherine's brow furrows and her heart stops. "Oh, honey," she murmurs, pulling just one blue sheet over his body. Then she reaches for the stuffed dog at the corner of the bed. "Eddie's not gonna let any monster get you."

"Because he turns into a real dog when I'm asleep, right?" He asks. Katherine smiles and nods, resting the little dog in Connor's arms. She leans over and kisses his forehead.

"Get some rest, all right?" She hums. After a moment, she starts out of his room and hesitates.

"You can leave the door open," the little boy says. "Eddie's gonna protect me." She smiles and obliges, and continues down the hall to stare at those photographs some more.

What in God's name.

She opens Grace's door. The girl is fast asleep, curled up on her side with those two braids Katherine always wears. And then she peeks in Nora's open room.

The family dog rests on the side of the infant's crib. But perhaps "dog" is a bit of a reach...it's a puppy, with big floppy black ears, a black snout and a tan body. He's a beautiful puppy. And then she really knows she's dreaming, because Dean doesn't like animals. Rather, he doesn't like to keep them around.

She recalls once in Tucson, she found a dog and spent a few hours with it outside the motel, gave it food and water. Of course, Dean said they weren't bringing a dog on the road.

Katherine didn't have dark hair as a child. Her youngest brother did, though. Little Nora looks like him. Her hair is dark and short and there's barely a curl there. Her head is round and so are her cheeks. Katherine reaches into the crib and touches her fingertip to that chubby cheek. The infant stirs just a bit, and her eyes open after a yawn. "Oh, no, no, no," Katherine whispers, and shushes the baby before she makes any noise. She's smiling, though. "Hi, sweet girl," she murmurs.

Oh, thank God she falls asleep fast.

Duke, the puppy, rests his head in his paws and closes his eyes as Katherine pats his head. She exits the room quietly and continues her exploratory expedition, down the stairs, around the landing.

The stairs lead into an open floor plan. The kitchen is directly in front of her with white marbled counter tops and silver, modern appliances. A wine rack is built underneath the dark wood cupboards. Directly right, there's a mudroom with white panel walls and jackets hanging on pegs and shoes in named cubbies. Katherine's brain tells her the door at the end of the mudroom leads to the garage. She doesn't test her knowledge, in case there's an alarm. She crosses her arms, chilled from the tile, and turns to examine the family room.

There isn't any real wall there. A wall of windows, sure. The drapes are pulled, so she can't see outside. She flips on the light to get a better feel for the environment. There's a large sofa, L-shaped, gray with a light blue and white throw over the back, with matching pillows in either corner of the couch. A dark wood coffee table with a glass panel in the center, a nice floral arrangement amongst cork coasters and the TV remote. The TV is mounted on the wall above a gray stone hearth.

In the hallway leading out of the kitchen, parallel to the mudroom, is the foyer. The walls are the same neutral light gray. There's a decent-sized office to her left with a large window, blue curtains.

There are many windows in this place, perhaps contributing to the feeling of openness. Like some sort of hidden meaning in them. No secrets. And she supposes when the sun is out, the whole house is warm. Just how she likes it.

This can't be real.

With a renewed sense of panic, Katherine rushes to the countertop to stare at the pile of mail. Disregarding the family photos that she is somehow in, she sifts through the mail.

Dean...Dean...Dean...Katherine Louise Winchester.

Haley, Florida.

Oh, hell.

She drops the envelope with a quiet sigh and rubs her eyes, pressing her face into her hands and shaking her head. You've outdone yourself this time, Donovan.

What a strange dream to have. Kids, with Dean. Sex with Dean. They aren't even together—

Charlie.

Her cheeks burn. But then, she reasons, it isn't entirely my fault for what my brain conjures up.

It's a dream. A dream.

Wait. Why is she dreaming? Why is she asleep?

I've never had a dream that I knew I was dreaming.

Katherine sinks down into the corner of the sofa, drawing her knees to her chest, tapping into that panic she felt when she first woke up. The concerns of where she was, because some part of her brain, no matter how dormant, recognized just how wrong the situation was—and not because she woke up next to a naked Dean. Charlie, I'm so sorry— stop it. Think.

She and Dean were caught up with the djinn. And now...she's...dreaming?

Katherine pinches herself. It doesn't feel like a dream. Her racing heart is real enough. Her forced calm breaths. Something isn't right.

Maybe if she goes back to "sleep," she'll snap out of it. Maybe she and Dean already killed the djinn—how?—and she actually is dreaming.

But a family? With Dean?

Katherine jumps as a pair of lips press to her shoulder. "What are you doing?" Dean quietly asks, his arms moving over the top of the sofa to wind around her waist. She's not very surprised when he pulls her up and sets her on her feet with seemingly very little effort. Like he's done it before.

The planes of his chest all seem familiar. He's warm. The gravel in his voice is accurate.

Everything about this is so simultaneously familiar and alien.

"Can't sleep?"

Katherine silently shakes her head, perplexed.

"Well, Miss, I do believe I have a remedy for that," he murmurs, sponging kisses to her throat.

She's goldfishing, her mouth opening and closing as she struggles to find something to say. Of course he would say that.

Dean pulls away from her to his full height brows furrowed. "Are you having a stroke? Are you choking?"

"No," she finally says with a light laugh.

Dean chuckles and kisses her cheek. "Your work days are too long," he tells her, his hands slipping to her hips, and he pulls her towards the stairs. "It's frying your brain."

"Work," she says. Dean glances to her, brows knitted, but he's smiling.

"Are you drunk?"

"Huh? No."

Wake up!

Katherine follows him into the bedroom and rests at his side. She closes her eyes and presses her face into Dean's warm side. After a few moments, she notices her thumb is lightly rubbing back and forth over his ribs.

"Daddy?"

Both Dean and Katherine tilt their heads to the door. The oldest girl stands in the doorway, only her silhouette visible.

"Yeah, baby?" Dean calls out.

"Is mommy here?"

"Yeah, mommy's here."

"What's wrong, Grace?" Katherine asks, propping herself up onto her elbows. The little girl sniffles and runs forward, stopping on her side of the bed, and throws her arms around Katherine's neck. "Oh." Katherine's arm wraps around the little girl's back and she lifts Grace up onto the bed like it's second nature, between herself and Dean.

There's no hesitation in it.

"What's wrong, Gracie?" Dean asks.

"I had a dream that mommy left," the little girl wails. Katherine's heart plummets, gnarling into the deepest pit of her stomach.

"Well it was only a dream. See? I'm right here, and I'm not goin' anywhere." Katherine kisses her forehead. "Why don't you stay with mommy and daddy tonight, huh?" After a moment, Grace nods, and in a joint effort, Katherine and Dean pull the sheet and comforter over the little girl. She snuggles into Katherine first, pushing her tear-stained face up against her mother's collarbones. "I'm not goin' anywhere."