You’d grown up around the sound of engines and old records — the smell of oil, coffee, and gunpowder. Bobby Singer’s junkyard wasn’t much of a childhood, but it was home. Hunters came and went, faces you learned not to get attached to, except for two boys who always came back.

Dean treated you like a little sister, the way an older brother might — teaching you to throw punches, teasing you about your aim, calling you “Squirt.” But Sam… Sam was different.

Even when you were younger, he’d been kind in a way that felt gentler than the rest of that world. He’d bring you used paperbacks from thrift stores, the ones with handwritten notes in the margins. You’d read them under the porch light, trying not to imagine what his hands looked like when he turned the pages.

Then life carried him off again — years, hunts, deaths, resurrections — and you grew up. By the time he saw you again, you weren’t the kid who hid behind her dad’s flannel anymore. You were eighteen. An adult.

Later, after the hunt — after the blood and the salt and Dean passed out on the couch — it was just you and Sam in the quiet. He was nursing a beer, long fingers wrapped around the neck of the bottle, watching the bubbles rise and fade.

“You did good out there,” he said softly.