SEASON 2, EPISODE 1

It was a difficult thing to do, looking at the face of Death.

It required a special sort of strength. To look Death in his cold, lifeless eyes, to stare at the sunken-in pits that held his piercing retinas, you would have to be braver than the greatest heroes humanity had to offer. No mundane soul would be able to look at his rippled skin, painted the color of the wailing souls of hell, and be able to resist withering in cowardice as it hung in scaffolds over his frail body.

It was a kind of strength that Mara didn't possess. Though, that might have been because she'd never expected to see Death in the face of Dean Winchester.

But there he was, lying on a mat in a hospital helicopter, wearing his forthcoming fate like a child's Halloween costume. Mara, like any other being to walk the earth, had wondered what it would feel like to fly. She'd just never imagined it would be like this. Her heart, somewhere between pounding in a breathless staccato and floating lifelessly in her chest, unable to even feel the exhilaration of flight as the helicopter whipped through the sky.

The men who'd shown up after her 9-1-1 call - doctors, paramedics, first responders - had rushed Dean into the airborne contraption. According to one man with deep-set eyebrows and a constant scowl, he'd needed more help than the others. More immediate help. He was in critical condition, they said.

They hadn't wanted to let Mara onto the helicopter with them. There'd hardly been enough room for him, the pilot, and the necessary medical personnel, but she'd persisted. She'd flung her fists in every direction, only wincing once when it came into contact with the noses of countless people. She would not leave Dean's side.

But now, as she stared at the ash-colored skin that used to be vibrantly hued with ivory and beige, she realized she might have no choice. He was much better friends with Death than she'd feared.

'You aren't half bad.'

A violent sob racked through Mara's chest, bulging up her throat as the voice from her past rang through her head. It had only been a couple weeks since Dean had said those few simple words to her. Only a couple weeks, and they still danced around in her mind as clearly as if he was saying them now. She reminisced on other things he'd said to her - his three-step instructions on how to have a 'good Friday night', his laugh when she'd called Rob Lowe 'hot', and 'You should stay around for a little longer, Mara. You make real good company.' She thought of the way a simple touch from him had made her feel, like she was soaring in the night sky, glowing brighter than the most brilliant star, simply because his skin was touching hers.

But he couldn't offer her any of those things now. Not when the impact of the car wreck had sealed the flowering banter of his lips shut. Not when his fingers were like melting ice cubes, leaving residue against Mara's lips as the life, just like water, seeped from them.

Mara allowed herself a glance at Dean's soul. She had to squint to see it through all the tears welling in her eyes, through the hazy bricks of mist that sat in front of it, but there it was - clearer than the crystals of a snowdrop. It was white, with an aura like that of an angel's lingering around it. Mara exhaled a shaky breath. At least, if humanity's inventions couldn't save him, his final destination would bring him joy.

The helicopter shook with a jarring force, and Mara was jostled away from Dean's limp body as doctors struggled to get his cart onto the landing pad. She rushed after them, her sneakered feet pounding against the concrete beneath her, making her ankles groan in protest. She followed the train of doctors through the entrance of the hospital's emergency waiting room, where she was finally forced to a stop by a woman she'd never seen before.

Her rubber-gloved hands pressed themselves to Mara's shoulders. Mara glared at her, stepping to one side and trying to shove her way past the woman.

"Hey!" The woman's cherry lips moved in an interminable pattern of that word, over and over, until Mara stopped wrestling out of her grip. "You can't go back there," the woman - a nurse, judging by the patterned scrubs she wore - said.

Her voice was soothing. A chilly brook trickling over piles of rocks, working its way towards whatever pond it would eventually pool in, just like the nurse's words were working their way into Mara's skull.

"I have to," Mara begged, her voice croaking and cracking with every syllable. "They're my family."

As she said those last words, she realized that, more than anything, they were true. They were the truest words she'd ever spoken. She didn't have the same blood as the Winchesters. In fact, she didn't even belong to the same species as them. But, with every smile they'd given her and every time they'd treated her as a friend, they'd molded themselves a permanent place in Mara's heart. And now the linings of that cavity were writhing at the sight of her family on their deathbeds.

The nurse simply shook her head. "No, ma'am. You just wait here, you can't go where they're going."

"But-"

"No." The woman's voice was firm as she led Mara to a metal chair by the front door. Her eyes capered over the layer of bruises that had sprouted beneath Mara's eye, and along the blossoms of crimson on her jeans. "It looks like you need some help yourself. Just wait right here, I'll go get someone to mend to these."

The nurse walked away, her scrubs swishing between her thighs, and a large man walked towards Mara at a gesture the nurse gave, presumably to watch Mara and make sure she didn't follow the doctors to wherever they were taking the Winchesters. Mara wanted to jump to her feet and scream at the man. She wanted to claw at him, to use every bit of supernatural ability she could muster, to kick at him until he left her alone.

But what would be the point? These people - they were helping the Winchesters. She would have to abide by their ways for just a little longer.

She slumped into the chair behind her, watching as legions of doctors swept away the only beings she cared about on squeaking carts and thin mats. First Dean, then Sam. Kat. John.

And as she sat, staring at the closed eyelids of the humans she held so dear, she wept. She wept because the string of carts reeked of death - a death that was too near and too close, a death so strong that she couldn't pin its future on just one person. She wept because, if she peered closely at the words the Winchesters' actions had etched ever-so-carefully into her heart, she would know that she loved them. She loved the teenage girl whose shirts always smelled of gunpowder and lead. She loved the young boy whose eyes resembled a dog, and whose personality didn't differ much from one either, with his boundless loyalty and soft whines that were too faint to hear. And, perhaps most of all, she loved the oldest Winchester. The man whose tongue was often swollen with sarcasm and backhanded compliments, his brusque demeanor hiding the tenderness of his heart.

She loved the Winchesters. And, just as she was finally allowing herself to believe in that prodigious fact as fiercely as a priest believed in his God, she was about to lose them.

◈◈◈

Mara's feet were silent as she crept through the hallways of the hospital. She was a ghost, invisible to the human eye, intangible to the human touch. Even the mites that crawled in the darkest corners of the storage room wouldn't be able to detect her existence, because she wasn't there. Not really. She was in the In-Between.

She'd felt a slight disconnect with the dismal place as of late. It was like a magnetic field. Her and the In-Between were two magnets - which was the positive attraction and which was the negative, she wasn't sure - drawn toward each other in a way that was unexplainable to most men, other than the fact that it was simply the nature of these things to be pulled toward the other. Recently, however, they both had the same charge. They were both negative. And, when she forced a connection between herself and the In-Between like she was doing then, it pushed back. It wouldn't connect with her, not all the way.

But, if she wanted to see the Winchesters, she had no choice. It hadn't been too much of an obstacle to sneak past the pesky nurse and her brutish henchman. The waiting room had been empty, save for a teenager crying over an episode of Grey's Anatomy and a sleeping elderly woman, so she'd simply had to wait for the henchman to take a bathroom break. Within seconds, she'd turned invisible and fled down the hallway in the direction of the Winchesters.

She'd already visited Dean's room - he'd been her first stop, and the most unbearable by far. He was as pale as the sheets he lied on, his comatose an imperfect picture of what the road to death looked like on a human being, imperfect only because Dean was the center of the portrait. As much as he liked to tease death, it did not suit him. Gashes and bruises peppered his face like a twisted, sadistic altercation of his gentle freckles. But none of those things had truly bothered Mara. At least, not as much as the maze of tubes that extended from every part of his body. His nose, his mouth, his arms. There was even an elastic band wrapped around his mouth to keep his jaws open and to ensure that he would breath.

So she moved on to the room Kat was in, unable to stare at Dean for one moment longer. Yet, upon peering at Kat's sleeping form, her heart began to ache even more. It screamed for a remedy to the sorrow it was plagued with, but Mara knew of no morphine that could cure the ailments of the psyche. Kat was not much better than Dean. She, too, was an octopus of tubes and lifelines, her body starving for machine-fed oxygen like a neglected dog starved for a home.

By the time Mara reached Sam's room, she wasn't sure if she could bear seeing one more purple lump or red abrasion. She definitely couldn't stand to see another set of tubes - the hospital's stark walls would soon be painted a sickly orange if she did. Her stomach flipped when she reached the rumpled sheets of his bed, but the malady she felt ceased when she saw the kind features she knew as well as her own. The injuries Sam had were no worse than he would get from a normal hunt. She soon found out that the same applied to John, though she'd only checked on him for the sake of his children's mental peace.

"Sam?"

The words rang through the halls like a church bell, echoing off the speckled tile floors and raised ceilings. Mara frowned. She knew that voice. She knew who it belonged to, better than she knew any other human being, but at the same time, it was like she didn't know its owner at all. It was difficult for her to understand the mannerisms of the human species. Obviously, she wasn't that familiar with its owner, because the voice couldn't have possibly belonged to him. Could it?

"Dean?" Mara gasped, her heart pounding in her chest.

His voice echoed again, a phantom in the caverns of a haunted building. "Kat? Dad? Anybody?"

"Dean, it's me!" the reaper shouted. She raced toward the sound of his voice, her legs shaking beneath her torso with the force of her stride. It was Dean's voice. There was no doubt about it. But there was something not quite right with it, with the sonata of how his voice carried through the halls. It sounded much too close, much too loud, especially since she was in the In-Between and he should've been strapped to a hospital bed.

"Dean!" she yelled again. The rasps of her voice were shrieking for rest, but she plugged her ears and ignored them like a little girl on a schoolyard. She shouted. Dean. Another shout. Dean! Her breath fluctuated in her throat, up and down, frantic for the satisfaction oxygen would provide. She was a fish out of water, desperate for the one thing that would grant her life. He had to have heard her.

Suddenly, there it was. A disruption in the wavelengths of the In-Between. An intruder. It was as prominent as a storm cloud in the center of a sapphire sky. Something was there that shouldn't have been, something that sent a band of worms crawling down Mara's spine.

Her footsteps came tumbling to a halt. She looked to one side. Her chin was trembling, the tips of her fingers numb with the frigid consternation that was coursing through her body. More than anything, she wished she'd been standing in front of a different room. In front of any other room in the hospital. Just not Dean's room.

But there he was. A spirit, entangled in a shroud of In-Between mist. Not dead, but closer to it than she'd seen in a very long time.

He was leaping across the pathway to death without even knowing it. Though, by now, he should've known. He was standing over the carcass, the empty shell of a body that had just a few minutes prior contained his soul. Now...now his soul was in the In-Between. With her.

Dean was erect beside a hospital bed. The bed of an octopus, tubes and pipes and all sorts of conduits twirling out of his other body, the one that was caught in the webs of the human realm. His torso was hunched over the body that his spirit had just left, his brow furrowed as he tried to determine if he was dreaming or if this, this knockoff horror film, this mangled version of a journey-to-heaven chick flick, was his new reality. But there was no denying it. Mara had seen this happen before. When a human body slipped into a state of medical comatose, their spirit often left their body to prepare for when they left the land of the living.

There were two Deans. One was much closer to her than Mara had known was plausible, and he was staring in dread at the other one. The one that had been diminished to little more than a pile of bones and sinew.

Mara crept toward the Dean that was in the In-Between. She rested her hand on his shoulder, praying that it was the right human thing to do in a situation of such distress. And when he looked at her in response to her touch, his seafoam-tinted irises welling with fear and panic, she could've sworn the painful wrenching of her heart became a yearning.

Even so, when he spoke and the sound of his quivering voice reached her ears, her heart shattered into a million pieces. She had a heart of glass. And Dean, with the wall she'd built around his own chest that were starting to crumble, was the hammer and nail that had made her heart crack.

She stared back into his eyes, her chest flipping when he placed his own hands over hers. She leaned forward, hanging on every breath of air that seeped from between his lips, desperate for a word - any word - to tumble from his lips like a boulder over layers of sedimentary. Though when one finally did, it sent her mind into a whirlwind of agony and stinging fervor.

"Mara?"

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

Okay, first of all...you guys are absolutely amazing!! This book is almost to 10k and never once did I think one of my books would receive that much attention, so thank you all so much!

Secondly, I wanted to clarify what's coming. I will be spending quite a few chapters on this first episode of season 2. This is kind of odd for me, because I've never spent more than two chapters on one episode in the past. However, if you've seen the episode before, you'll know that it has a lot to do with reapers and the In-Between, so there's a lot I can do with that situation and Mara! 

Also, I haven't asked you guys this in a while, but how are you guys feeling about where this story is going? Is there anything you don't like, anything you like a lot? Is there anything you want to see in the future? If so, please please please let me know!