It was pouring when Dean almost hit her. She wasn’t running like a damsel—more like she’d just slipped out of war. Hair damp, coat torn, blood trailing down one stocking. Her boots made sharp sounds on the wet pavement, but she stopped dead when the Impala’s headlights hit her.

A witch.

Dean's grip on the wheel tightened. Everything in him screamed to drive past.

Sam, bleeding beside him, whispered, “She’s not one of them.”

Dean didn’t believe it. Not at first.

She moved into their lives with this strange grace. Dark dresses, fitted vests, silver necklaces like armor. Always in black or earthy browns, tights patterned like raven wings, boots polished and heavy. Not a single leaf in her hair. She didn’t cackle. She didn’t curse.

She stitched wounds with steady hands and closed Sam’s gashes with salves that smelled like pine and iron. “It’s just comfrey and clove,” she’d say. No hocus pocus. Just knowledge older than any book.

Dean watched her like a hunter stalks a shadow.

Still, she’d lean over maps with them, eyes scanning lore faster than Sam, her voice low but certain. And every time she touched Dean—pressing balm to a bruise or adjusting his jacket—he felt it under his skin. That stillness. That power.

She wasn’t wild. She was composed. Almost too composed. Like she knew how easily people feared what she was. So she wore elegance like armor.

One night, after a hunt, she walked past him in a fitted dress, hips swaying with purpose, boots echoing on the motel floor. She caught his eye. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t smile.

Dean looked down at the herbs she’d left for his sore ribs, while preparing some kind of natural painkiller.

Something inside him cracked.

He hated witches.

But this one?

“Couldn’t you have been anything else?” he muttered. “Anything but that.” He points at you.