lt_indigo

Fandom:	Supernatural
Title:	Introspection
	In which Eileen's mind wanders.
Author:	lt_indigo
Pairing(s):	Sam/Eileen
Warning(s):	none
Spoilers:	11x11
Disclamer:	Never mine.
Word count:	676

Lots of people saw her hearing aids and assumed she could hear voices with their help, so they spoke to her like they would any hearing person. Sam hadn’t been like that – he had been careful and considerate from the start, always making sure she was looking at him, and he at her, when they were talking, and he signed where he could. He had been hesitant and kind of inaccurate at first, but he soaked it up like a sponge. He even sometimes surprised her and used a sign she hadn’t taught him – something he had picked up online. She knew he had the Sign ASL app on his phone, and he referred to it quite a lot when she wasn’t around. When she was, he would ask her instead, but she liked that he spent time learning her language so they could converse more easily. Sometimes, when Dean wasn’t around, he would even slip into something resembling ASL grammar, something that made her heart soar all the more.

Occasionally she tried to imagine what Sam’s voice sounded like – how he interacted with other people. He was so tall that she thought it must be deep, but also that he was probably softly spoken because his signs were small, like he was trying to hide his size. He did that a lot, she noticed: he hunched himself over so that he wasn’t as imposing as he could be – as imposing as she would like him to be. Even in the bunker, with just Dean and her around, he stooped slightly to stop himself towering over them.

Eileen understood that: she spent a lot of her time trying to fade into the background, be unnoticed. The way Sam and Dean hunted – posing as the FBI – made that impossible for them, but that was something that was impossible for her to even attempt. So she was a cleaner at the banshee-infested old folks’ home, a student on the vamp-ridden campus, a maid at the haunted motel. She was inconspicuous, which is exactly what Sam could never be.

She wondered what it would be like it be as loud and obnoxiously in people’s faces when gathering intel for a hunt as the Winchesters could be. Would it be easier? It was such a radically different way of hunting to what Eileen was used to – to what she was forced to do by circumstances and society – that she couldn’t help but be a little curious. She knew that Lilian had posed as an FBI agent or a police officer before to gain the trust of victims’ families sometimes, but never since Eileen had been old enough to start learning the ropes.

Maybe it wasn’t ‘better’ or ‘worse’, just ‘different’. Like hunting with a partner would be different, and Eileen found herself wondering about that these days too – whether she would be able to hunt with someone else after so long on her own? Whether Sam would be interested in hunting with her sometimes? Whether he and Dean would be able to adapt to hunting with her? She had been adamant at first that she would continue to hunt alone because it would be too difficult for anyone to adapt to working with her, and for her to adapt to working with anyone else, but she found her mind wandering more and more towards what it would be like with the Winchesters (because Sam would never leave Dean, and Eileen was completely okay with that). She already helped them with the seemingly endless task of cataloguing the library (and the storerooms full of crap) the three of them had inherited as part of their Men of Letters legacy. That inevitably led to her lending a hand with research when some interesting news story crossed their laptops. Maybe she already kind of was hunting with them?

Maybe she would suggest the idea to Sam one day, even if it was just to get that delicious look of complete panic in his eyes that would be replaced by his fabulous, knee-weakening smile.