She was sitting on the motel steps like it was just another evening, like six years hadn’t passed in silence. A cigarette burned lazily between her fingers, the tip glowing with every slow drag. She looked at them with that gaze—heavy like John’s, but brimming with a tenderness he never managed to show them. A look that knew every inch of their grief.

She had walked away when Sam was sixteen and Dean barely twenty—still more boy than man. Back then, they were just kids pretending to be warriors, thrown into a war they never chose. The world was brutal, uncertain, cold. But she had always been the one sure thing. The constant.

Because when everything else cracked—when John’s orders felt more like exile, when the weight of their lives crushed bone and breath—she was the one who stayed behind to gather what was left of them. Holding them like they mattered. Like they weren’t weapons, but brothers. Her brothers.

And then she left.

Six years. Six birthdays, six Christmases, six times Sam thought he saw her across a street or in a passing car. Six years of her absence being louder than any scream.

They remembered the night she left like a wound that never closed. The shouting. The glass. The way John’s jaw clenched like a vice. And most of all—her eyes. Blazing with rage and heartbreak as she walked down that dark stretch of road, duffel swinging from her shoulder like a flag of surrender.

And now here she was.

Perched on the edge of their lives like a ghost that never really left. As if the years hadn’t carved distance into bone. As if she could just step back into the picture and press "play."

Dean saw her first. His body froze before his mind caught up. Anger flared—sharp, immediate, protective. His mouth twisted with something between disbelief and fury. How dare she? That look on her face—familiar, unshaken, like she’d been here all along.

God, she even wore the same kind of boots.

She looked older now. Lines beneath her eyes. The weight of the world in her shoulders. More dangerous, more composed. But to Dean, she was still his sister. Still the one who used to sing Zeppelin under her breath to lull them to sleep. Still the one who made them feel safe.

And that made it worse.

Sam stood beside him, breath caught somewhere in his throat. He didn’t speak. Couldn’t. His eyes filled with something raw and stunned and childlike, like all the walls he’d built since she left had suddenly collapsed with the sound of gravel under her boots.

He had dreamt of this moment. Over and over. And now it was real—and it hurt.

“What… what are you doing here?”

Dean’s voice broke the silence, rough and low like it had clawed its way out. He stayed back, arms tense, fists buried deep in his jacket pockets. The gravel crunched beneath him like brittle bones.

She didn’t answer right away. Just looked at them like she already knew everything they felt.

And for a moment, it was like resurrection. A piece of them they thought was long gone had returned—bloodied by time, bruised by distance—but alive.

Alive, and theirs.