The Angel, The Hunter and The Nephilim (Destiel x Daughter)

41. The Search Is Over

It has been six weeks since Leah ran away in Detroit in the middle of the night, and Dean and Cas have scoured the country looking for her, but having no clue what to look for. While gone, they've been working a couple of cases of supernatural things, thanks to the hidden space in the trunk where Dean keeps the weapons he never took out in fear that he would need them again someday. And what he'd rather be doing would be looking for their daughter, but when he has no leads, the whole thing is just very problematic and hard to solve. Gabriel is in the wind again so they have no means of using him to transport to the young girl's location. And all the while, Leah's daughter whom Dean, Cas and Sam, in Leah's absence, have named Mary, grows up without any of her actual family members close by.
Dean has been calling every day to see how she's doing, and she looks like an eight year old and is growing like a weed, Bobby says, and she is aware who her mom is, who her grandparents are, and she's a happy, content kid whom Bobby got a puppy so she wouldn't be lonely.

While Dean and Cas are gone, Sam is doing jobs in Sioux City with Mark, Lucas' father, and they get a call about a djinn nest in the outskirts of town from Jody.

"Alright, silver dipped in lamb's blood," Sam says and gets one from the hidden part of the trunk in his car. He's been married to a werewolf for years, and he promised her that he's stopped hunting, but it's in his blood, he tells himself. Outside a warehouse in a farming community outside of Sioux City, not far from home. He gives Mark a machete in case they're attacked from all sides. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Sam is ready for anything.
But the nest is empty. They work their way through the whole warehouse until they find where the nest was, but all they find are a bunch of rotting corpses.
Sam breathes out. "I think they've left."
But as a stroke of what he can only call luck, they hear a noise in one of the rooms of the forgotten building. He takes his gun and points it in front of him, his silver knife in his belt, ready for action, ready for anything, and with Mark Jones close by, he makes his way into the room where there's nothing left but...
"Oh my God," Sam breathes and looks from left to right before rushing up to the almost skeletal remains of what looks too much like his beloved niece to not be her. Mark rushes up behind him as Sam kneels in front of his brother's teen daughter, cutting the rope she's held up by with his silver knife. What's left of Leah falls into his arms with a groan.
"Call an ambulance," Sam cries to his companion with stress in his voice as he tries to make Leah comfortable in his arms, but he can hold her with not much strain. She's so light.
"Leah?" he asks as Mark takes a few steps back and calls into his walkie. He wipes the hair out of her face and holds her tight. "Leah, open your eyes for me. Come on," he begs and shakes her gently. "Please. Please let there be life left in you."
Leah's bruised all over. She has a black eye and several wounds to the face. Someone's cut open the shirt she was wearing, and her jeans are torn so much they just look like parts of what used to be clothing. He lays her down on the cold concrete floor and rips off his own plaid shirt to tuck her into. It's November and too cold for her to have survived so far when she's so thin and brittle.
"Are they coming?" he asks Mark who kneels by his side. Mark nods and takes off his deputy jacket so Sam can tuck her in to heat her up even more as he holds her tightly to his chest.
"Yeah, they should be here within ten minutes," he says. Then he wrinkles his eyebrows. "What's that?" he asks and points to a blue handmark on Leah's shoulder. Sam groans. "Oh no. It's that kind of djinn."
"What do you mean? I've never seen a kind of djinn that does this."
"This is a kind of djinn that feeds off fear. I've seen it once, when a friend of mine got taken by them years ago when she worked one of her first cases. Dean had to take African dream root to get to her. Her worst fear was a kind of video game where she had to save some patients from zombies or something. One of those patients was her mom who was in a coma. The only way to escape and not die was to give up the game."
"How is she still alive?" Mark asks. "I've never known djinn to leave survivors."
"Maybe something spooked them," Sam replies and shakes his niece again. "Leah? Are you there? Please be awake."
The next moment they hear sirens coming toward the warehouse. Mark and Sam nod to each other and Sam carefully picks up his niece, as if she's made of paper and follows Mark to the entrance where the ambulance parks and come out with a stretcher that he places her on. An ambulance worker immediately asks him if she's been conscious and he shakes his head as someone places a breathing mask on her face and pulling her into the ambulance.
"I need to go with her to Sioux Falls General," Sam explains to his hunter friend, and Mark nods, walking towards the deputy truck. "I'll see you there. Do you wanna call Dean, or should I?"
"I'll do it," Sam shouts and gets into the ambulance just before they close the doors. He gives all the information he knows to the ambulance personnel before they start driving, and then he picks up the phone and dials his brother's number.
"Sam?" Dean answers at once. "Didn't we talk ten minutes ago? I thought you were going to take care of a djinn nest."
"Dean, where are you?" he cries. "I took care of it. And I found her. Leah was there."
"Oh my God, what? Is she there? Are those sirens?"
Sam looks at his niece and the ambulance worker trying to get contact with her. "Yeah, we're in an ambulance on our way to Sioux Falls General. You need to come home. Right now. She's in a pretty bad shape. She has a blue handprint on her shoulder."
"Blue handprint? As in fear kind of djinn?" Dean asks, and Sam can hear that he's stepping on the gas.
"Yeah, that kind," Sam wheezes. "Where are you?"
"We're in Minneapolis, so we're only a few hours out. Oh God, Sam, please stay with her. Please. How is she doing?"
Sam gulps. "She's so thin, she's almost a skeleton. But she's not conscious. Just get home, Dean, she's gonna need you when she wakes up. I'll call Bobby for backup."
"Thank you, Sammy. We're on our way."

Sam and Mark have been joined by Jody in the waiting room of the hospital while Leah has been checked out, but they all know that they won't find anything physically wrong with her, because she was attacked and held hostage by supernatural creatures.
After two hours of waiting, Sam, who is the only family member at hand, is let into Leah's hospital room in the ICU where they haven't been able to wake her up and therefore put her on a breathing tube, and he holds her icy cold hand as she's covered in blankets to treat the hypothermia she's ridden with. And he waits for Leah's dads, he feels like he's been waiting forever when the door opens and a nurse lets in Dean and Cas, who both have rings around their eyes, Cas has a black eye that matches Leah's, and Dean has a severely busted lip. They both look like Hell, and they both rush up to the bed as Dean embraces his little brother.
"God, Sam, thank you for finding her."
"I'm glad I did, too, it was just a normal djinn nest, but they had left, and they left her alive. We were lucky. If we had gotten there a few hours later, maybe we wouldn't have been so lucky."
Cas sits down on a chair on the side of the bed, and Sam gives up his seat for his brother who looks like he needs it more, and he sits down on a chair by the windows overlooking Sioux Falls.
"Was she awake when you found her?" Dean asks and looks at his brother with his daughter's cold little hand in his.
"I don't know, to be honest. She made a noise, that's how we found out she was there. But other than that, there wasn't much of a sign of life."
Dean turns his head back to his daughter. They've put her left arm in a cast, the right arm is covered in needles and IV fluids and everything they could think of. Both her brittle legs are sprained, as well as a black eye and several cuts to her face that he hopes with his heart will heal with time and won't scar so Leah will have to hate herself any more for her appearance than she already does.
And that's when Dean notices.
"Cas," he breathes as he picks up the skinny little arm. Cas looks up, and his heart breaks into a million pieces.
Dean can't believe what he's seeing. As if his precious daughter, the light of his life, hasn't suffered enough, he can see scars on her arm. Long and short, across the arm, several hundred scars that can't be from anything else but self harm, knives or blades or anything she could get her hands on.
"Oh no, Leah," Dean cries. "Oh, honey, I'm so sorry, we didn't know."
Cas sniffles and reaches for Dean's hand. They both look down at their broken, unconscious daughter.
"How do we wake her?" Dean asks, looking at his brother with tears in his eyes.
"I guess with African dream root, like with Charlie," Sam says and shrugs. "I'm gonna call Bobby and ask if he has some."
"Yes, please, get some. We need it. I need it to get to her before it's too late. We can't let her insides turn to mush. We can't let her die. Not without knowing how much she means to us."
Sam nods shortly and pulls up his phone and leaves the room. Bobby lives merely minutes away, and he can get African dream root as soon as they need it. He walks down the hallway to a cafeteria to get a cup of hot water as Bobby tells him he'll be in the ICU waiting room in less than ten minutes.

"Cas, what do we do if she dies? What do we tell Mary?" Dean cries as he looks at his husband, perched over their daughter's sleeping form. He slowly looks up at his husband. "Dean, she's not going to die. You can wake her before it's too late."
"What if I can't? What if she's too far gone and when I get in there I can't get her back? What do we do?"
"You need to be positive. We need to fight for our daughter, that's all we can do for now. I'll try to get a hold of Gabriel so long. We're not gonna let her die, Dean, we're not. She's gonna make it. She has to."
"But look, she doesn't even wanna live, Cas," he cries and strokes the long, red lines all over their daughter's arm. "She's broken. What if we're what's wrong?"
"We're not. We're the ones who tried to fix her. Dean, we need to have faith in ourselves and each other. We'll get her back."
Their desperate conversation is cut short by Sam who comes rushing through the door with a small bag and a paper cup with warm water in his hands. "I told the nurse we were fine in here, just sitting around and supporting Leah. You need to drink this fast, before they come in here and check on her." He hands his brother the paper cup, plops some African dream root into it from the little bag and takes a scissor cutting a small section of hair off his niece's head, dropping it into the cup. Dean immediately drinks it, groans and wipes his mouth before he looks at his brother with pleading eyes. "Sam, you know you need to-"
"Yeah, I get it," Sam says, and without wanting it any more than his brother or his brother-in-law, he punches Dean out.