Title: Can't Go Back

Fandom: Smallville/Supernatural

Genre: Short Story/General

Pairing: hints of Chloe/Dean

Rating: T

Summary: Short Story. A blonde and a hunter meet in a bar…

Author Note: All comments and reviews are appreciated.

Dean put the unconscious blonde on the bed. There was zero chance of any action tonight, and normally that would have him walking straight out of the door.

Maybe he felt obliged to do his good deed of the day, or maybe he simply recognised someone else just as broken as him, but he didn't want to just leave her like this.

He grabbed her purse and looked through her wallet. There were three driving licences,and about four different credit cards. Not a single name matched.

Picking up her phone, he noticed that it was a disposable, much like his own, and there wasn't a single number saved to the memory.

"Who are you?" Dean whispered more to himself than the inebriated woman three feet away from him.

He looked through the bedside drawers, and was mildly surprised to find a handgun wedged between the unit and the mattress.

She wasn't a hunter, that much he could guess. There were very few belongings in the motel room, and everything was positioned for a quick exit. She was either trouble, or she was running away from it.

Either way, it wasn't his problem. He got her back to her room, she was safe, and he had performed his duty as a knight in shining armour.

That niggling feeling wouldn't leave him. It was like an itch at the back of his mind that wouldn't go away.

"Just walk away." He muttered to himself, but his feet just wouldn't move.

Instead, he sat on the edge of the bed and began to pull off her boots. He helped to remove her jacket and the long sleeved shirt she wore underneath. It was then that he saw the barely healed scars.

They were angry and red, running from her throat to random places across her upper body. His curiosity getting the better of him, he helped to remove her jeans. More scars covered her upper legs.

They were knife wounds; he had seen enough of them to recognise the clean lines of a sharp blade. As he helped her under the sheets, the sight of the deeper wounds turned his stomach.

Torture had been a forte of his once, in another time and place. Someone had worked her over well, and yet here she was alive and well.

"It's not your problem." Dean said, trying to make himself move towards the door. Instead, he pulled up a chair and watched the steady rise and fall of her chest.

"He'll possess you all." She mumbled in her sleep.

It was like flicking a light switch, Dean was suddenly alert and poised to jump to his feet. His spider sense told him that she wasn't talking about some possessive jerk, or an overbearing boss.

Reaching inside his jacket pocket, he pulled out a small vial of holy water and unscrewed the lid. From his chair he flicked some of it on the blonde. Apart from an irritated scrunch of her nose, there was no other reaction. That was something, at least.

Pulling his phone from the other pocket, he took a picture of the sleeping beauty. That feeling in his gut told him she wasn't an average girl running away from average problems. It was just his luck he would go into a bar looking for a good time, and find the most complicated woman available.

"I can't go back."

There was something very sad about the woman in front of him. He found a pen and pad next to the television, and wrote down his number.

He figured he should write something; let her know that he could help with the freaky and unexplained. He just couldn't find the words to make him sound less of a lunatic.

Eventually, he settled on simple, to the point.

'If you need help, no questions asked.'

Fighting the strong urge to hang around until morning, he slipped his phone back into his jacket, and headed to the door.

Dean took a last look at the sleeping blonde, and with a heavy feeling in his gut, he knew this was probably the last time he would see her. He just hoped that she was as smart and quick witted as she'd seemed tonight.

"Good luck, Blondie."