She was Bobby’s daughter, and they had known each other for as long as memory reached — two children growing up beneath the same creaking roof, chasing shadows that would one day grow teeth. When John, worn and wandering, left the boys at their doorstep, it was she who remained — the last island of warmth in a life slowly turning to ash. The only thing he could count on. The only light that never flickered.

To her, he spilled everything — every dark bloom of sorrow that took root in his chest. Every night split open by silence and sobs. The hollow ache for a family he had never truly had. The dreams, fragile and half-formed, that stirred like ghosts in the back of his mind.

And she listened — always. With patience. With quiet, deliberate care. She never looked away, never flinched from the brokenness he offered. She told him he deserved more — more than the road, more than blood and grief and salt. That he was not his scars. That he could still rewrite the ending.

He never forgot her words. He gathered them like fallen feathers, tucking them into the corners of his soul.

He loved her, desperately. Entirely. Without caution or condition. He would have given her the last flicker of his soul, if only it would make her smile once more. He knew her better than he knew himself — and she, in turn, saw the parts of him he kept buried from the rest of the world.

She was his last horizon, his final breath when the tide pulled him under, the one thing that made the darkness feel like it might someday lift.

He told her so — over and over. But she only smiled with that same distant sorrow. Brushed him aside as if his devotion were an inconvenience. A duty to be borne. And it shattered him — quietly, relentlessly.

Still, he came when she called. Always near, always watching. Loyal to the bone.

When they hunted together, he kept one eye on her, always. Ready to die for her, if it came to that — and some nights, he almost hoped it would. He followed her like a shadow follows the flame, knowing she would never return his love — not really, not wholly — and still, he stayed.

And then everything changed. One hunt, one wrong turn — and Dean dragged him bleeding to Bobby’s door, leaving red smears across old wooden floorboards. He had never seen her like that — pale, frantic, shaking.

She stayed by his side through the nights, curled in a chair or sprawled on the floor. A quiet sentinel. She tended to him like something sacred: brewed bitter herbs, changed damp cloths, read to him in the hush of dusk. Sometimes he only half-heard the words — it was the sound of her voice that mattered. The shape of her there, in the dim light.

And though the pain gnawed at him, though his ribs ached with every breath, he would have suffered it all again — and more — for those few, fragile days.

That night was like the ones before. She sat at the foot of his bed, her presence a balm. Fingers tapping softly on her laptop, eyes focused, breath steady. And he watched her — in silence, in reverence — as though looking at a constellation he’d never dare name.

And for the first time in a very long while, he felt it:

He was home.