Dean x Reader One Shots

Midnight Man (Angst) (Imagine Dean coming back after leaving two years ago)

Summary: Imagine Dean dumping you (despite knowing your fear of being alone) with hopes that you'd find someone better than him. But when you meet 3 years later, he's hit by guilt and regret when he discovers you'd remained single since he left you.

Word Count: 7,973

You hadn't forgotten much from the times you were dating him and you didn't really expect to, but you still patted yourself on the back after realizing you had managed to keep vital information. He tried to keep you away from that side of his life and you understood it, but it was inevitable that you would pick up on tidbits here and there. Silver is bad for damn near everything, vamps aren't actually killed by a wooden stake, yes, demons are real. Lore became your new favorite thing and you remembered taking your lunch away from the office to go to the library and pick up some new books. Reading became your pass time and you wanted nothing more than to be able to help him, to be able to bring some information forward if he wasn't willing to let you help him in any other way.

You understood that, too. You knew he wouldn't have wanted an inexperienced office worker going out and running hunts when you didn't know the first thing about fighting. He was only protecting you, then.

But now that he was gone, three years to the day, you had prepared yourself.

You knew waiting for him to come back was hopeless; he made it clear that he wanted you to move on, to be with someone that wouldn't constantly put you in danger, but there was that pesky part of you that wouldn't give up on the dream. For the first few months you slept with the phone at the edge of your nightstand, waiting, expecting it to ring and to hear his gruff voice asking for help, for you, for anything. After you finally found the will to keep the phone charging over night, you still checked your voicemail; every night when you got home from work, just prior to your fighting class, you would play your voicemail only to hear the monotonous drone of everyday acquaintances. But never him.

So you slept with a gun under your pillow—which you had taken special classes to get registered and were quite impressed with the aim you'd managed to acquire—and a bat under your bed, a vile of holy water in your drawer and a silver stake tucked away in the back. You had learned to fight because you knew he wasn't going to be there for you if you needed him, had taken every ounce of what was left over after he was gone and invested it into making yourself better; you were going to be able to fight, to defend yourself. Now that you knew what was out there, now that you knew there was no one to protect you, you realized you had to protect yourself.

When the headline of your local newspaper was about a rough murder that left the corpse bare to the bone, you couldn't help but doubt that it was an animal attack. That was, after all, what had brought the Winchesters to your neck of the woods in the first place.

You had only been taking smaller cases around the state in order to get yourself up to par; a single vamp here, a ghost there, even a skin walker one time, which was pretty fun, but nothing was in your hometown. That was way too close for comfort, so you didn't even bother finish your orange juice before you grabbed your duffle from the back corner of your closet, threw your green army jacket over your shoulders and headed out the door of your apartment.

You accepted that yes, maybe it was true that this had been an animal attack. Maybe there was an especially hungry dog running around. But there was still the fear that you felt in your bones, in your stomach, that there might truly be a creature out there in your hometown. You may not have had any family, but you had friends and even the thought that there might be something out there that could hurt them made you cringe.

Unwilling to see anyone else die at the hands of this potential predator, you went directly to the police department and smiled your way through, using your connections with the newspaper to get you through directly to the coroner. It didn't hurt that the man at the front desk had been asking you to go out with him for the last year, year and a half, of course, but you liked to keep your work life separate from your personal life. Yes, it was certainly your link to the newspaper that got you access. Nothing more.