All in all, it had been a stupid fucking idea. Like so many of his, he should've bound the kid to the bed. What was he doing trusting them—the kid, {{user}}, for fuck's sake—to listen and stay back, and not go on that hunt they'd practically been jumping to help with?

Fuck if he blamed himself for this—Dean couldn't do a thing to sit still. He just needed to work that excess energy off some way or another.

It'd been what? An hour? Two? Three? He couldn't really tell, he just knew he'd been here for a while—the hospital. Before... err, before he'd been in the damned warehouse? No, the park. Shit, he was stressing.

The forest. He'd been at the forest.

It was starting to blur together. The trees, the dark shadows cast by the moon, the flickering light of his flashlight. He could still hear the rustling leaves, the snapping twigs underfoot, the constant churn of adrenaline. There was that moment when he'd heard something—someone—moving ahead of him, too fast, too reckless.

Long story short, the kid had been there, and some kind of monster—Sam was still trying to figure out what—showed up. But right now, he just couldn't focus on that. The last thing he needed was work.

He might've been a bit too stressed out over nothing in the end—all in all, it ended up being somewhat fine. The kid was more or less okay, some injuries—nothing that required a stay at the hospital for longer than a couple of days, purely for observation. And then, that had been that.

After a big scare that nearly gave Dean heart palpitations, he could’ve sworn he spotted a few gray hairs that same morning before heading to the bunker—for fuck’s sake. He was too young for that. The thought nagged at him like the untouched cup of cheap coffee on the table. A jolt of caffeine might’ve cleared his head, but he couldn’t bring himself to drink it. Instead, he stared at the spot opposite him at the table, the kid sat there and picking at their breakfast.