Katherine didn't so much as joke about the penny incident when Charlie left. She seemed even more brooding than ever. Sam hated it. It reminded him of Dean more than anything. And he knows what came with that.

The assumption of guilt. The worrying.

Katherine called home even more now. A couple of times a day, at least. Retreated into herself, her thoughts.

"Can we stop taking cases for a little while?" She asked over the radio one day. It had been three weeks since that ghost incident. Four cases they'd solved since. "I want to go home."

So they went to Haley, arrived just past dawn, and didn't hear a word from her the whole way down.

Katherine shuts the door to her car, staring up at the home. It feels like it's been far longer than three months, but it feels the same. Safe. Large and warm. Welcoming.

The brothers follow after Katherine, watching as her blonde hair bounces as she strides across the street and up the pathway to her old home. She hesitates, feeling their presences just behind her back, and she knocks on the door. After a few moments, the locks click, and a tired Sophia Rowe answers the door.

Instantly, she beams and lets out a delighted shriek, throwing her arms around Katherine's shoulders.

"Have your boobs gotten bigger?!"

"Nice to see you, too, Soph," Katherine mutters, cheeks burning pink as she struggles in Sophia's vice-like grip around her arms. It's an uncomfortable thing, makes her muscles scream, rebel against the unusual contact. Restriction of a hunter's upper arms limits much of their range of motion and makes for an uncomfortable experience.

"Seriously, they're softer—"

"'Kay, great, thanks," Katherine says, pushing at Sophia's shoulders, and laughs, holding her at arm's length. "I want you to meet some people."

Sophia's brows wag as she glances over Katherine's shoulder at the Winchester brothers.

"Sophia Rowe, Sam and Dean Winchester."

"Enchanté," Dean greets with his usual sway of confidence. Sophia nearly melts, and Katherine resists the urge to roll her eyes.

"He didn't know that word fifteen hours ago," Katherine says to her friend, and Sophia moves to the side to allow the tall hunters into the home. "Where's the little rascal?"

"Julien's asleep, amazingly, and if you wake him up, I will kill you," Sophia answers, her gaze sweeping over Sam and Dean. "Want anything to drink? Or maybe you're hungry."

"Breakfast sounds amazing," Dean sighs.

Katherine smiles briefly, takes Sophia into the kitchen by the backs of her elbows, and leads her into the kitchen.

"They're even more beautiful in person?" Sophia whispers, her blonde hair tossing as she whips her head around to catch another glimpse at the brothers.

"It's a facade."

"They're inhumanely perfect."

"Another charade," Katherine hums. "We've got more problems than a rom-com. Far from perfect."

"Oh, yeah?" Sophia challenges. "What's not so perfect about them?" She crosses her arms, and Katherine mocks her.

"Fifteen hours ago, they were bickering about who got more ghoul guts on them."

Sophia gawks. "You kill ghouls?"

Katherine casually shrugs. "I told you as much."

"What are they, like, ghosts?"

"Not quite. What's for brekky?"

"Actually..." Sophia rubs her neck. "I...think...my sink is broken. And Dean needs to fix it."

Katherine's brow quirks. "Dean can't fix sinks. He's good with cars."

Sophia nods, eyes wide. "That's what I said, isn't it?"

"No," Katherine hums, eyes narrowing a bit. "Where's Chris?"

"So what's everyone in the mood for?" Sophia calls. The baby monitor on the counter top lights up, registering the smallest sounds of Julien in his room.

"I got 'em," Katherine says, moving quickly for the living room.

"Sometimes I think you love that kid more than you love me!" Sophia calls after her. Katherine's laugh is her only response.

Julien has grown much in the three months Katherine was away. His eye are still green, but his hair has turned darker, a thick mane of tussled brown air. He's babbling when he sees her, smiling widely and reaching up at her with little fists. "Well hello there, fella," Katherine hums, beaming as she pulls Julien into her arms. "Aren't you just the handsomest—that'smyhairowowow." She groans, gritting her teeth as the tot yanks. She gently pulls her long hair from the baby's fist and sighs, holding him at arm's length. "You need a diaper change," she mutters, grimacing.

They're downstairs in no time, where naturally, Sophia is chatting it up with Sam and Dean. She's always been a motor mouth.

"Charlie invited me and Chris for the draft," Sophia tells Katherine with a smile. "Should we bring him here instead? Surprise him?"

Katherine lights up. "Yeah."

Dean leans against the counter, his furtive gaze flitting from Sophia to Katherine and that baby boy on her hip, as to not be found out. It looks so natural, like it's second nature to her. Perhaps it is for all women. Katherine always complained that children never liked her, though. But Julien is enthralled with her, gazing up at her with big eyes and a little smile. He's envious of that baby, how he can show every emotion without hinderance, gaze at Katherine all he wants.

He's jealous. Of a baby.

Breakfast rolls smoothly. Conversation is easy, and Sophia is absolutely enthralled. Katherine is surprised with how easily the brothers discuss their lives. The hunts. Dean describes the time Katherine saved him from getting shot. Her and her silly baseball bat. Sam tells a tale of how she took five vampires down on her own shortly after entering a nest.

Sophia asked if vampires sparkle, like in the Twilight books, to which Katherine scoffed.

Katherine flees upstairs to rest before Charlie arrives, Dean as well. Sam remains downstairs with Sophia.

Dean gently knocks on the door that still houses most of Katherine's things. Her bed and sheets, the furniture, the clothes she didn't take with her. A highly untransportable television resting up on the dresser.

She's at her nightstand, holding a photograph of Charlie and herself. That was taken on one of their first weekends together. He'd invited her to a nearby park and his friends challenged her to play a game of football with them. Keaton was with them. That's when she heard the story. Keaton was the one to tell it to her. He lost his lower left leg to the displacement of the passenger's seat at some point during the wreck.

She made a hell of a running back. More recently, Charlie wanted to see her at receiver.

"Hey," she quietly greets, resting that happy photograph back on the wooden stand. Dean smiles briefly.

"Can I talk to you?"

"I...was actually about to come and talk to you," Katherine hums, sinking down onto her bed with one leg underneath her. She lets out a heavy sigh, ruffling her hair at the roots, and pulls it back into a ponytail. "You can come sit down," she tells him. Dean moves forward, a little uneasy, and sits himself about a foot away from her on the bed. Katherine squares her shoulders and turns her hips towards him, swinging her other leg over the bed to cross them. Her shoulders slump and she fiddles with her rings for a moment.

"What's up?"

"I...want to talk to you about what I dreamt about. What I saw when the djinn attacked me."

Dean chews on his lip for a moment. "Okay." His voice is gruffer than he intended, more questioning. He hoped Katherine didn't pick up on it, but he knows she did. Even if she didn't indicate it.

Physical manifestations of Katherine's anxiety appeared, but not in her usual ways. She rubs her thumb into the center of her palm. Her breathing is a bit heavier than usual. Dean can see her pulse in her neck. Her eyes are a bit wider than usual. Katherine pulls her lower lip between her teeth and gazes pensively at Dean, who is just about as anxious as the younger woman.

"I had a family," Katherine quietly says, and swallows the lump in her throat. "Four kids and a dog. Twins turning eight. A little girl turning three. A child that had only existed for a month or so..." She lightly shrugs, picking at the polish on her nails. Dean was candid with you. Do the same for him.

Dean rubs his fingers together, thinking of something to say to keep her talking. To keep it light. "And how was our favorite quarterback?"

He never did claim subtlety as a dominant characteristic of his.

"He wasn't there," Katherine whispers immediately. Dean glances over to her, a bit shocked, and she shakes her head. "He wasn't their dad." Katherine sucks in a deep breath and lifts her head, eyes wandering to the closed door. "You and I were married for ten years, Dean. We had a house here. You were an Honors Anatomy teacher and I had my own practice. We met at O'Hare airport after some conference I spoke at."

"Pretentious."

"I know," she sighs. Dean chuckles. She rubs circles into her palm with the pad of her thumb. Her voice is soft. "We dated for six months before you showed up at my apartment doorstep. We got married three months later. I was twenty-two when Connor and Grace were born. You were only able to take two weeks to stay at home with us. You were pissed," she chuckles. "And then, four years later came Nora. We got a dog, Duke. A malinois, I think he was. We spent mornings cooking breakfast, and you would always have to fix Connor's hair because he parted it differently, or he would sometimes flat out refuse to do it. Gracie wouldn't leave your side for nothin'."

Katherine rolls her lips into her mouth, staring down at her hands. "They were perfect," she whispers. "Everything was perfect. And I knew something had happened with the djinn, I just...didn't want to leave. I don't think I would have. And I hate admitting that, because it's weak. But..." Katherine shakes her head. "We were the family I never had. That either of us ever had." She sniffs and remains quiet for a fraction of a moment. "So this is why I didn't want to talk about it. Because it's a fantasy, and all of those memories I thought I had, every night I spent with you...saying none of that happened is ten times more painful than last spring." Her voice is shaky. "Because I know it'll never happen. Even if I haven't stopped caring about you for a second, even if you feel the same way, and by some chance, we scrape up enough luck to make it to that point, it's not realistic. And by even thinking about it, the fact that you still have this hold on me...it's not fair to Charlie. But I can't help how I feel about you—how I've always felt about you. My pressure point. Deepest, darkest desire," she murmurs. "And I still can't get them out of my head. Their laughs...their...perfectness. They were mine."

Katherine almost flinches at the warmth of Dean's palm on her hand. His fingers slotting between hers. She almost cries. Dean pulls at her hand, and she slides closer to him. She sniffles, resting her head against the crook of his shoulder, and his arm winds around her shoulders, holding onto her hand still. "We could," he softly tells her. "Make it."

"Sometimes," Katherine murmurs. "I wake up and expect to be in that bedroom, waiting for one of the kids or the dog to come through."

"Tell me about them," Dean encourages. He wants to hear her keep talking.

Katherine stares down at the floor and lowers herself to her back. She crosses her ankles and intertwines her fingers on her stomach. Dean rests on his back as well, staring up at the ceiling with her. "Well...Connor was the oldest by three minutes. He looked the most like me, but I think he loved you the most. He had your smile, your nose...he had some freckles...big blue eyes and light hair. Like me, when I was young. He loved to laugh." An involuntary smile crookedly tugs at the corner of her mouth. "And he inherited my jokes."

"You can't inherit jokes."

"Shut up." Dean does. He watches her face light up as she talks about her dream, her picture-perfect white-picket-fence, apple pie life.

Apple pie. Maybe it wasn't so bad after all.

Dean frowns after a moment. "We had a dog?"

She laughs softly, shaking her head. "After everything I've told you, the strangest thing that's ever happened to me, you are questioning why we had a dog?" Katherine scoffs, grinning.

"Well the other stuff is all feasible."

Katherine's smile fades, and she lets out a soft sigh. "Dean...it's not feasible."

"Why not?" Dean whispers.

Katherine's jaw tightens just a bit. "Because. We're hunters. We know what it was like to grow up the way we did."

"You hunted after class," Dean lightly points out. He succeeds halfway, earning a cross between a laugh and a scoff.

Katherine closes her eyes, and the tip of her finger begins to unconsciously move along her hand. "We made a good team," she whispers.

"Thanks for sharing," Dean says after a moment. "I know transitioning from that must've been hard. I could see it on your face."

Katherine nods. "Expecting one of 'em to pop around the corner and they didn't..." Her head shakes. "It's like...anxiety cranked on full-blast. Constantly worrying about them...that split second of panic..." Katherine sighs deeply, lowly. "And I thought I was just getting over it and then Charlie picked up that stupid ass penny...now I'm worrying about him all the time."

"I think you'd be a great mom," Dean quietly informs her.

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," she mutters.

"Maybe you do deserve someone like Charlie after all."

Katherine lets out a long, low sigh again, rubbing her temples. "Don't do that," she says. "Change your mind a million different times about me. All that does is cause more frustration...especially after we both know what we want."

"Oh, no," Dean says, shaking his head. "You know what I want. I don't know what you want."

Katherine stares at him, wide blue eyes puzzled. "I thought it was fairly obvious. And you...you change your mind like the weather. You say one thing at eight AM and change your mind at eight-oh-five."

Dean chuckles, shaking his head. "Maybe I say different things, but I've never changed my mind about you." Katherine is quiet, her blood pumping furiously through her veins, flushing her skin, coursing through her ears with a thunderous roar, as she awaits Dean's furthered explanation.

He's always enjoyed watching her react to certain things. When she's intrigued, pleased, her chest rises and falls a bit deeper than usual. There's a minutely longer pause between her breaths. But when she's furious, she's breathing heavier than a sprinter after a race. Her nostrils would flare, her eyes would turn steely. Or rarely, she'd be so hot with rage, the'd be molten.

"You have bewitched me," Dean murmurs. "Body and soul."

Katherine smiles, twiddling her thumbs as she racks her brain for an Austen quote. But she can't, at the moment, find something suiting from Pride and Prejudice. So she turns onto her side, one knee bent and resting against the bed to support herself upright, and she props herself up on her elbow. Dean turns his head to look at her, then rolls onto his side to face her. "How do you know Mister Darcy?" Katherine hums, not bothering to hide her smile.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Dean tells her in his usual low voice. Only his hand has crept to the hitch of her knee, fingers snaked round the back, and his palm, warm against the denim on her leg, runs both above and below her knee.

"I have not the pleasure of understanding you."

Dean cracks a smile. "Whaaaat?" He asks. "I'm an open book."

"Except when you're not," Katherine murmurs, carefully reaching over to his hand on her thigh. She rests her hand atop his for a moment before removing the span of his fingers from her leg and places his hand on the comforter.

"Hey, Charlie!" Is heard from downstairs.

"Shit," Katherine mutters, springing to her feet. "He saw the car!" She bounds for the window, but doesn't see his truck anywhere.

She got up so fast...so fast.