Once he accepted there wouldn't be much modesty about the situation and looked Katherine Louise in the eye, he let her into his home. Katherine sat in the kitchen for a while alone and looked around, analyzed everything, looked for...something.

She must have fallen and hit her head. It's the only way this can be explained. The climate change, the scenery...the man, who grumbled to her that his name is Kairoi. 

He comes out from around the corner, in close proximity to Katherine, holding a lump of off-white fabric. "You're about the size of my wife," he says, the dirty brim of his brown hat hiding his eyes. "I think this'll do." Katherine's eyes dart to the fabric once more. "She...this...she didn't get to wear this one before the cough took her."

"What cough?"

"Consumption, last winter." 

"Tuberculosis," Katherine says, getting to her feet. 

"Sure." He hesitates more, still unwilling to look up from the floor. 

"Looking at me isn't gonna make you burst into flames."

He puffs out a laugh and finally focuses his dark eyes on her face before holding the folded dress out to her. 

"I'm fine in what I'm wearing, thank you."

"How'd you get all the way out here by yourself?" He asks. There's an unasked question looming in his face, his eyes studying hers. "You get lost, or...did a man bring you out here? You got away?" He looks to the mud on her jeans, very briefly. 

"I'm fine," Katherine replies. "So let's drop this little charade, all right? I need to go home."

"Home," Kairoi scoffs, setting the dress on the small table. He rests all of his weight through his hands, staring down at the old wood before looking at her again. "Girl, ain't nobody got a home here. Not anymore."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"What do you think it means?" He retorts. "The South is a wasteland, if you haven't noticed. No money...lots of people have no food, neither." Kairoi pats the dress and points to the room he came from. "You go wash up and get decent. Supper's soon."

Katherine grits her teeth, watching the old man hobble back outside. She snatches the dress up and moves for the bedroom.

The heat is starting to get to her. 

Katherine's mind twists itself into knots as she sheds her winter clothing. Each garment that comes off, the less it all makes sense. She stuffs each article into her backpack, almost as if packing away her pretzel thoughts, and sets it in the corner.

This is a case now. 

Katherine looks up at the small, dirty mirror on the wardrobe and sighs. 

Square one, Donovan.

Kairoi is putting more wood on the fire when she emerges from the room. A pot hangs over the controlled blaze, but with the door and windows open, a breeze takes the added heat away. 

The table is big enough to seat three people. Small, round, nice wood. There's a cot in the corner with thin sheets and a small blanket for a pillow. Probably don't need much more than that, since it's so warm during the day, it may not cool off much in the evening. 

It must, though, if it is what Kairoi said it is. 1863. No concrete jungles to trap the heat. Just dirt and grass and many more trees than 2007 has to offer. 

Katherine stands beside Kairoi and peers into the pot he's stirring. Some kind of stew. Goopy...she isn't even sure what it smells like.

"You made that?" She asks, swallowing much of her grimace. 

The older man nods, gripping the mantle with his frail hand. "'S got turkey in there. You like turkey, miss?"

"Turkey's all right," she answers. She can feel his eyes boring into her, and she looks up to meet it. He doesn't look away. Dark eyes become darker. Voids...just staring. "What?"

"You ain't from around here, are you?"

Katherine shifts her shoulders and glances away from the hearth.

"There's a war going on out there, sister," Kairoi grumbles, staring out of the window with narrowed eyes, his elbow resting up on the mantle. "I saw...a riot in the street just the other day, in the town square."

"A riot?"

"Yeah. Two grown men were arguing over a carrot. A rotten carrot. Not everyone gets to be picky with what they eat." Kairoi sighs, stuffing his hands into his pockets. "What was two turned to four, then four turned to eight, then the Grannies came, and soon it was the whole town."

She frowns a bit, staring at the large hourglass sitting on the mantle of the fireplace. "A rotten carrot?"

"Like I said...not everyone gets to be picky with what they eat. 'Specially in times like these. Just the other day, there was a wild fire about ten miles that-a-way." He points outside the window into the setting sun. "Burned all them trees and bushes, scared them deer right along here. Didn't know it 'til I saw 'em, then they were gone by the time I got my shotgun. Then all that was left was a fat turkey just waddlin' this way."

She stands up straight, crossing her arms, and stares at the fire. "If it's all right with you, I think I'll just go to sleep."

"You've got to be starving. Look at you, you're thin!"

"Yeah, well, you're not much better," she hums, glancing to his thin arms. "I don't know how you swing that axe like you do."

"I've been a farmer my whole life, girl." Katherine slowly nods. Doesn't look like it.

"I'll be on my way in the morning," she promises, retreating to her side of the cabin the man showed her to earlier. "Thank you."

Katherine couldn't do anything but wait for the man to go to bed. So she waited. As the sun sank lower, a horrible chill crept though the cabin, stiffening her bones. Nocturnal creatures started their day, and somewhere that sounded particularly close were gunshots. 

Civil war country. The thick of it.

She shivers underneath the thick wool blanket she was provided, curling up into a ball. She's already shed the dead wife's clothes and replaced them with her own. First thing she plans on doing when she gets back is getting a tuberculosis test.

She wonders where Sam and Dean are. What they're doing. How long she's been gone in her time. How she even got to this place. Is this what happened to those people? They went back in time, and...what?

Finally, the old man settles. She waits to pull herself from the bed until he stops groaning about the cot having no support for his bad back. 

There's no sense in going through the front door. He may be a light sleeper, and she doesn't know which boards are creaky. He may be awake and staring at the ceiling. Not that she's worried about any kind of fight with a frail sixty year old man.

Katherine pushes up on the window and ducks outside. When her feet hit the ground, it's freezing. A layer of snow covers the ground, deep enough that her boots sink an inch or so.

It's all she sees...for a long time. Bare trees, spare the snow. Twigs snap underneath her feet as she treks through the thick, dark forest. The word "bullshit" frequently escapes her gritted teeth. The intensity of her walk doesn't matter. She's cold. Angry. Maybe somewhat afraid.

And then a clearing, of sorts. Much smaller trees and shrubbery, a dusting of snow. A tall, rotten wooden post, black lines along the ground...fallen power lines. 

Katherine looks up and analyzes the area, swinging her flashlight arund to look for anything else that may be anything. It's winter, obviously...but when? Is she back to 2007? She begins to reach for her phone in her backpack when the bush behind her rustles. She whirls around flashlight beaming into the darkness. She sees nothing. As a precaution, she draws her gun, adrenaline singing her veins as she moves towards the rustling.

A bunny comes flying out of the snowy bush. A cute little gray one. A very non-threatening kind.

Katherine huffs and lowers her gun, gritting her teeth at the twitchy-nosed creature that thumped right up to the toe of her boot. She holsters her weapon and stoops to pick the little fluff ball up. Staring at its gray ears, she wonders why it didn't run from her. Why it's even awake. With a small rub of its head with her index finger, she sets the rabbit down and stands up.

When Katherine turns, the sun is breaking through the trees, and a small wooden cabin sits in front of her.

There's cold...and then there's fear. Cold is superficial. Raises the hair on your arms and you get a little shiver. Cold goes away. Cold the body adapts to.

Fear...fear starts in the stomach, and it's paralyzing. It's like an ice-cold weight being shoved into your body. It doesn't get warmer. Everything gets colder.

Katherine swallows the fear and starts to look. 

The cabin looks like it's been left alone for a long time. Green blooms around the rotting wood. The windows are broken, jagged, caked in God knows how many layers of what. But there is no doubt in Katherine's mind that this is Kairoi's cabin.

She lowers her flashlight, draws her gun again and creeps towards the back of the cabin. She's met with cobwebs and dust...the cold fear in her belly morphs into something else a little more sinister. It's that weird feeling you get...when you're being watched. 

A little help here would be nice.

Little field mice squeak and run around her feet as the flashlight finds them. She sees a brief flash of bright blue in the darkness.

She wants to run. Whatever is here, watching her, it feels old. It makes every hair on her body stand on end. She turns on her heel and moves back outside.

Still cold.

Over behind some frozen dead saplings is a small shed. Wood, like the cabin, and growing in that green moss.

Why is everything else dead except the moss? Fungus...whatever it is. She isn't sure.

Katherine pulls her cell phone from her back pocket, moving for the shed. No signal still. She snaps the thing shut and soldiers on.

It's impossible to be quiet in this dead forest, no matter how short the journey. Everything crunches and snaps underneath her boots.

The inside of the shed is small and dusty, infested with spiders and their webs and gardening tools. Nothing significant there.

Katherine looks up at the sky with a heavy sigh. The sun is a glaring white in the middle of a baby blue expanse, beaming down on the snow without doing a damn thing to melt it. 

It's been hours, and the stillness, the silence of the forest is eating away at her.

Katherine sits on a rock as she paws through her bag for something to eat. She finds her iPod still has a decent charge...for a little while, she forgets about the task on her shoulders, the weight of it, and shuffles through her music. 

There aren't many places like this. Snowy mountains that overlook valleys. Nothing but nature around. She even paused her music briefly to soak it in. Think about her life ahead.

Dean made his choice. He saved his brother. He saved her. He traded his life for it, and a life he may have had after this one is over. He will spend an eternity in Hell.

If there's an afterlife, there has to be a Heaven. If there's a Heaven, there's a Hell. 

How badly would she get whooped for even thinking there's anything different?

What would Hell be like for Dean? A lot of people think it's a replay of all of the horrible things that happened to you throughout the course of your life. Other people think it's nothing but pitch black and eternal burning. Endless suffering.

Katherine wonders, though...if you get sent to Hell for being so bad...why would the Devil want to punish you for it?

The unstoppable force: the need to save Dean. The instinct. The itch in her legs that had been there for a long time...strike a deal to save him. She'd be worth more. She could broker more time.

The immovable object: The Rest of Her Life. The promise she made to Charlie, to herself. She can't hurt him. To save Dean, that's what she would have to do. 

And around and around the mind fuck carousel goes.

Katherine pushes herself up from the rock and tosses an almond into her mouth before starting back the way she came. As she eats and listens to her music, the more she walks, the more snow melts. There's still a chill in the air, but not like before. There's a breeze on the wind, the sun is warm, the leaves are all different colors of fall. 

But there's no habitation. No life beyond vegetation. No deer. No turkey, or lizards or geckos or fish in the dried up stream. Some bones. No birds.

"What the hell is this place?"

She's staring at the property again. There's a sign in front of it, like a road sign, but with a terrifyingly familiar symbol.

Radioactive.

That would explain the lack of animals. The dead flora. She knew everything looked too dead to be just fall, or even winter.

"Nuclear fallout," she scoffs, shaking her head. "My kids are gonna have fifteen fingers and twelve toes and a third eye. Sorry, Charlie."

Katherine finds the cabin again. It looks the same, but...there's a small wooden edifice just barely peeking out from behind the wall. Different from the shed.

Katherine stows her almonds and draws her gun again, quickly hitting "pause" on her iPod.

Kairoi has just emerged from that little shack. The same white hair and beard, different clothes. A canvas jacket, marked with dirt and old leaves, ripped jeans. Katherine sinks into a crouch, concealing herself with the wall of the cabin, and peers around the corner.

Something isn't right with that man. He's the only one around here for miles. And he looks the same. However many years into the future they are, at least 145, he looks the same. He's clearly behind all of this, but how?

Kairoi locks the shed up and leaves. She moves to go after him, but stops in her stead as the sun hits the padlock. The glistening, too-clean padlock. It screams that whatever is inside that shack is at least moderately important.

Kairoi will have to wait.

Katherine moves quickly for the shed. The lock is a bit advanced, so picking it takes a bit longer than usual. Once inside, she shuts the door behind her and switches on her flashlight.

Shelves upon shelves. Storage, it seems. Old, dusty photographs and frames, camera equipment. Nothing that screams evil...yet.

In the very back of the shed is a tall scythe, the metal glistening like it was just freshly polished. Katherine's hip hits one of the stands and she stumbles. Something shatters on the ground, and she holds still, waiting, listening. When nothing happens, when no one comes, she turns around to do more investigating. Her light finds shards of glass all over the floorboard, small wooden sticks that connect two round pieces of wood. There's purple sand everywhere, slipping through the floorboards and into the dirt below. The more Katherine looks at the glass, the wood, the more it comes together.

It is—was—an hourglass, similar to the one she saw in the cabin.

Katherine reaches down, touching the tips of her fingers to the sand. It puffs up into a small cloud of smoke.

She stands up, inspecting the purple dust on her fingertips, and something else clatters to the ground. She huffs, looking around with her flashlight, and whatever fell crunches underneath the weight of her shoe.

Her iPod. And it's blasting Clearance Clearwater Revival.

She scoops it up quickly, pressed the bent pause/play button as fast as she can to get it to shut up. By then, the door to the shed has swung open, and before her is Kairoi's silhouette. He's not a small, thin old man. He's tall. Old, but able.

And then he's in front of her, lunging towards her. The gun is knocked out of her hand, pulling her fingers with it, and one of them pops.

"Look at what you've done!" The old man bellows.

Katherine pulls one of the knives from around her thighs and swings at the man. He dodges, then leaps at her again, knocking her to the ground. She kicks his hip, pushing him from her body, swings at his face, and only after finding purchase enough to turn his cheek blue on impact, she scrambles to her feet, knees collecting all of the broken glass, and sprints.

Her iPod is still playing. They told me don't go walkin' slow. The devil's on the loose.

Kairoi is right in front of her, old features twisted into something ugly and enraged. He's holding that shiny scythe in his hands. Katherine's silly machete won't hold up against that, but she draws it anyway.

He swings first, throwing it over his shoulder to hurl it at her. Katherine easily ducks, watching the blade lodge into some dead wood behind her. Kairoi charges, yelling the whole while, veins popping out underneath his pitch black eyes and all over his forehead, down his neck. 

He looks like a man possessed.

Katherine drops at the last second and throws her body into him. His boot will definitely leave a mark on her ribs. She might not even feel the pain later. Her move to get him off his feet didn't work the way she intended it to. He tripped forward, not backward, and went right to his scythe.

Kairoi grabs the weapon by the shaft and yanks twice, splitting the wood of the small tree with a deafening crack! And then it starts to fall. Katherine scrambles back, watching the tall, skinny thing come down, down, down.

What surprised her was the tip of the tree, nothing but old, gnarled branch, seemingly disappeared into thin air. The trunk is still there, leading into the leaves, where it just...stops.

She was so distracted by it, she immediately forgot Kairoi charging at her with the scythe. Instinctively, she lifts her legs to kick and arms to defend. The scythe rips into her flesh before her feet stop the old man. With all the power in her muscular legs, she pushes the man back, and is shocked to see him fly back into a tree.

The scythe cut her side wide open. Blood blooms from a gash under her clothes that she can't see. She pushes her hand into it and scrambles to her feet. She looks at the fallen tree, how it disappears into nothing.

A rip in space and time. It's the only explanation of how she got here in the first place. Only one way to test it.

With one look to Kairoi, she bolts, sprinting towards that little iridescence in the air. The same color as that sand in the hourglass. Katherine leaps up into the skinny trunk and keeps running through that rip.

"Katherine Louise!" Sam shouts, cupping his hands around his mouth.

"Katherine!"

"Dean, we've looked everywhere—"

"We're not leaving without her, Sam," Dean grunts.

"What if we don't find Katherine?" Sam asks. "What if we find her body?"

Dean grits his teeth. 

Maybe having Charlie kill him will be a lot easier to face than a demon coming to collect. Hell, he'd even welcome it. He's responsible for Katherine while she's away from Charlie. If anything happened to her, he would deserve it.

"Don't think like that," Dean says.

The trees rustle with a wind neither of the brothers feel, like some sort of supersonic wave, and then there's music.

Better run through the jungle—

Katherine blows past them, a blur of winter clothes and two long blonde braids.

"Katherine!"

Better run through the jungle.

The young woman stops, whirling around, and stares back in the direction she came. There isn't an intention beyond looking in the direction her name was called. 

There's a bush. More trees. No dead ones. Not that she'd remember them, anyway.

Don't look back to see.

"Where the hell have you been?!"

"What happened?" Dean asks, reaching forward to stare at the bleeding wound in her side.

Katherine shakes her head, frowning at the gash. Puzzled. "I—I don't know."

Dean shifts his weight. "Then why don't we start with where the hell you've been for the past two days?"

Katherine's brow furrows. "Two days?" She asks. "Dean, I just—" she scoffs, chuckling a bit. "I just saw you."

✕

"You sure do know how to find trouble."

Katherine grits a groan throgh her teeth and stomps her foot, fingernails digging into her arm as Sam pours whiskey over the gash in her side.

It's deep, but he's done enough suturing that it shouldn't be a problem. Katherine had this practice kit she left in the Impala anyway, and when newspapers would bore him, he would practice his sutures. He's gotten pretty good at it, if he does say so himself. Her legs and knees were all cut up and bloodied, but it was all superficial and wouldn't need anything more than a proper shower light dressing.

Sam glances to the paper towel he used to clean around the wound. Purple sand mingles with dried blood. Katherine had no idea what the dust was. It was too fine to be glitter, not shiny enough to be glitter. Katherine didn't even own glitter anything. 

"I'm telling you, I turned around and you were right there," Katherine says. "That's it."

"You were gone for two days," Sam tells her again, tossing a bloodied cotton swab into the trash can nearby.

Dean frowns down at her smashed iPod. "What'd you do to this poor thing?"

Katherine scoffs and shrugs. "Hey—hold still," Sam chastises, threading the needle with dental floss. They are currently out of the stuff Katherine usually uses. 

"You haven't poked me yet," she says, lifting the handle of whisley, and takes a long pull. She lies flat again with a grimace, a burn in her throat that spreads into her nose. 

"And you don't remember anything?" Sam asks.

Katherine lets out a light sigh. It still hurts her. "No," she says. "Seriously, it was only a few seconds. I remember talking to Dean and when I went a little further ahead..." She trails off, eyebrows knitting together. 

"What?" Sam presses.

"I dunno, I turned around! The next thing I know, I've got a jammed finger and a smashed iPod, I don't have my gun, and I'm bloody."

"Well, we didn't see a bear, so you weren't mauled," Dean says.

"I was really out for two days?" Katherine quietly asks.

"You were gone," Dean corrects. "We've been in that forest every day since, only to find your dumb ass right where I saw you last." Katherine sits up and punches his shoulder. "Ow!"

Sam sighs, slouching a bit. "Can you lie still, please?" She obeys, getting settled with gritted teeth. "Charlie's gonna fucking kill us."