Chapter 1: The Fire Lights
On November 2, 1983, something that shouldn't exist destroys four people by killing one. It uses fire and blood, and its actions have consequences that cascade to the very foundations of the universe for decades to come.
But on that night, there are no thoughts of such terrors. That night, a man grieves for his wife on the trunk of his '67 Impala in Lawrence, Kansas. Flames bathe both his girls' tiny faces in terrible, flickering light, and they leave only ashes in their wake.
Childhood doesn't really exist for either girl. The oldest, Deanna, was given far too much responsibility at far too young an age by a father obsessed with the death of his wife, and obsessed with hunting things he was horrified to realize existed. Deanna was meant to look after her younger sister, Samantha, from the moment her father shoved her in her tiny, pudgy arms the night of the fire. No equivocations, no exceptions. Samantha had to stay alive, and Deanna was expected to do whatever it took to make that happen. So said her father.
There were days, growing up, where Deanna thought her father couldn't possibly mean at the expense of everything. Because he loved her too, and…
It didn't really matter. Deanna would have looked after Samantha, given everything up for her in a heartbeat, regardless of what her father's orders were on the matter.
She just wished she could know for certain that her actions were originating from herself, Deanna's own desires, her own character, rather than an overwhelming sense of duty to her father. Her father, who left her to raise her sister, who constantly placed more responsibility in her infant hands than she was ready to handle. Who she couldn't resent, because how does a child resent the father who acts as if he were the sole vanguard between innocent people and the darkness of the world? Who saves people, and only asks Deanna to take care of herself and Sammy so he can do it?
She couldn't resent him. Not until she was far older and wiser, had literally been to Hell and back, and even then Deanna could only muster the feeling for a few seconds, remember his last words were save Sammy, or you'll have to put her down, before she'd remember the bastard's last act was to save his daughter with his soul.
How, exactly, was she supposed to hate him then?
John Winchester had the uncanny ability to make fast and firm friends with those in the hunter community. It made sense—most hunters had dark pasts filled with unspeakable tragedies and heinous deeds born of bad and worse choices. It made them all-around hard people. John, for all the horror he'd seen in Vietnam and with his wife and on the job, still retained a certain level of charisma that made it easy for him to relate to other hunters. Unfortunately, John's ability to make friends was equaled by his tendency to burn those steadfast bridges with just about everyone, eventually.
Bobby Singer was no exception, but it took a good long while.
Bobby was one of the first hunters John met upon getting into the game—it was about a year and a half after Mary's death, and John was reckless and driven beyond belief. They both tried hunting the same Wendigo that was picking people off the Gunflint Trail up in Northern Minnesota. John didn't really know what he was hunting at the time, and hadn't quite gotten the right collection of books for easy reference packed away in his trunk. Mostly, he knew something was killing people, had been for fifty years or more, and so he went up the trail armed with nothing but his sawed-off, salt, a silver knife and a gallon of holy water.
Long story short, Bobby, who'd been at it for half a decade by then, saved his life and then proceeded to berate John for his idiocy without pause for the entire six-hour trek back to the road.
John was an arrogant sumbitch and didn't take too kindly to that, but he did listen kind of halfheartedly to the other man when he started letting slip information about different creatures. When they got back to the road—and his beloved Impala—John's parting words to Bobby were something along the lines of "my kids and I thank you for the save, I hope I never see you again, you miserable bastard," which, if John had intended to actually never see Bobby again, was the wrong thing to say.
Bobby had a soft spot for kids.
(his wife was three months pregnant when he was forced to kill her.
It was a baby girl.)
So then Bobby, spewing verbal eviscerations all the while, gave John his address and told him to stop by if he wanted to live to see his grandkids.
John mostly thought this was a load of bull, but when he ran into something he didn't really understand a month later, and he was only a state away from Bobby, he decided to cut his losses and see if the other hunter was serious about offering help.
He brought his girls, and the rest was history.
John and Bobby were fast friends with similarly gruff demeanors and generally didn't need much in the way of words to communicate. As for Deanna and Sammy, Bobby loved them instantly, and neither girl was particularly daunted by his rough exterior. Trips to Bobby's house meant, for John, research and a couple of beers with a reliable friend. For his daughters, it meant a week or so of being spoiled by their pseudo-uncle and adventures in the most familiar house and salvage yard they knew.
Other than the Impala, it was the closest thing they had to home.
It was unfortunate that John tended to burn bridges, and do it spectacularly.
The tension between them started when Deanna was seven, and complained to Bobby about how hard hunter training was one afternoon while John was trying to figure out how to kill a pagan god and Sam was taking a nap.
"Daddy's teaching me how to do hunter stuff!" She told him conspiratorially, like she was making sure her sister couldn't hear despite Sam being up a flight of stairs and two bedrooms away.
"That so?" Bobby asked while he checked on the grill. Steaks were coming along well. He had some ribs on too, for the girls. Deanna was in that phase where she hated to see pink in her meat, and Bobby flat-out refused to ruin a perfectly good sirloin like that.
"I'm gonna learn all about ghosts, just like you and Daddy!" She exclaimed excitedly, her legs kicking out from under her and her blonde curls bouncing as she nearly fell off the porch rail with her enthusiasm. Her shoulders hunched in a little then, and her voice was quiet enough that Bobby wouldn'a heard it if he hadn't been listening. "Scary though."
Bobby thought about how John was military, how much he loved his girls, and how he would probably have given them both self-defense lessons at young ages even in some alternate timeline where his wife was never killed. He would have made sure his girls could protect themselves, always.
Still, later, when both the girls were asleep and he and John were nursing their third and fourth beer of the evening, respectively, Bobby asked quietly, "Deanna tells me she's started training."
John took another swig. "Yup."
"Winchester…" Bobby started, "you're not taking those girls hunting, right? You're not letting them get involved in this crap?"
"Do I look stupid to you?" John asked indignantly, and before Bobby could reply with a snarky affirmative, John muttered, "'Course not. Just want them to be able to defend themselves, is all."
"Good." Bobby rocked back in his chair. "Just go easy on 'em. No reason for the girls to be involved in this sort of thing."
John leveled him a look that was half-calculating half-challenging. "You got something to say, Singer?"
Bobby held up a pacifying hand. "Nothin'. Just don't push the girls too far. Moving around so much is hard enough on 'em as it is."
John gave a non-committal shrug. "I know what's best for 'em. I'll keep 'em safe."
Bobby knew that much. That wasn't what he was worried about.
It concerned him, but he left it alone for the time being. Much as he loved those kids, they weren't his girls. He couldn't tell John how to raise them. So he gave John a few more muttered warnings about taking it easy on his kids, and they listened to the cicadas sing in the sweet-smelling grass of the surrounding fields.
He would come to regret that decision.
The Winchesters stopped by every three or four months. They stayed for however long it took to find the research they needed. Most of the time Bobby could convince John to leave the girls at his place when he went off to deal with the monsters.
Every time, Deanna's eyes looked older, and Sammy grew confused and eventually angry about why their Daddy kept disappearing for weeks at a time. Bobby took care of them, and made sure the kids had some kind of stability when they came to his place. It was obvious though, that the girls only really found any kind of safety in each other.
The look in Deanna's eyes grew fierce by the time she was ten, and Bobby wondered each and every time what she learned to make a little girl look like that. He wondered what John put on her to make her look like that.
The answer, apparently, was Sammy.
John never left the two of them alone for more than an hour without telling Deanna to mind her sister. Around Bobby's place, that mostly meant making sure she didn't get lost in the scrapyard or fall down the stairs. Bobby didn't know what it meant when John was on a hunt, but he could guess.
When Sammy started school, it was a disaster. Kid hardly had anything resembling a normal socialization process what with the three of them being constantly on the move, and her only truly stable connection in the world was Deanna. She loved learning though, so she quickly began to love school and hate moving, which was the beginning of a lot of tension between her and John, if what Deanna told him was anything to go by. And she didn't tell him much, just that she wished she could help her sister. Unfortunately for her, there wasn't much Deanna could do about it except disagree with their father about his parenting choices, and that was something John made sure his eldest couldn't do.
"Ya'll could live here," Bobby offered when John came to pick the girls up later. "That way the girls wouldn't get ripped out of school every other week."
John trundled his daughters into the car, and slammed the door behind a six-year-old Sam. "You got a problem with how I raise my girls, Singer?"
Bobby was well past the point of a problem, singular. "As a matter of fact, yeah." Bobby stepped closer. John had a wider frame but they were about the same height. "You're teaching Deanna to hunt, aren't you."
John's lips pursed. "She asked. It's just warding and defense." The for now, was unspoken but present.
Bobby sneered, "And what, if she asks to join a band and dance on stage without clothes you're just gonna let her?"
John's face hardened. "It's stuff they should know."
"Yeah, if they're hunters." Bobby's eyes narrowed further. "They ain't gonna be."
John gave up the staring contest and walked to the drivers' seat. "They'll be safe is what they'll be."
John drove off and Bobby kicked his porch.
They didn't stop by again for over a year. When John finally did show up, it was with the girls in tow, and he said nothing to Bobby except "I'm going on a hunt. They can't come with."
Bobby would have asked more questions, except just then John turned to his daughters and started giving orders, the last of which wasn't look after Sammy, like it always was before. Deanna looked like she was three seconds from flying apart and wanted to keel over and die more than anything. Sammy looked angry and scared, and clung to her sister like a barnacle.
Then John drove off and left Bobby with his daughters.
Bobby looked down at the girls, and noticed Deanna shaking. "You want to tell me what happened?"
Deanna actually did start crying then, which made Sam cry. Bobby moved to shuffle them both inside, and Sammy flinched.
What. The. Hell.
Eventually he did get them inside, and Deanna managed to relate the whole story of the Shtriga while Sammy slept. Apparently, Sam found out about Hunting over Christmas, and had been a bit jumpy ever since.
"She's just scared right now because Dad's—Dad's really angry. And I let her down, and—" Deanna didn't continue, and wept silently until Bobby managed to get an arm around her. Then she gave big heaving sobs into his shirt.
"It's okay, kid. You're only twelve." Your Daddy shoulda gotten the hell out of dodge, soon as he knew it went after kids. He shoulda let you know you could be targets, if he was going to leave you in charge, the rotten bastard.
"Doesn't matter," she gasped, "I let Daddy down. I let Sammy down. Because I wanted to go play basketball." She didn't seem able to speak after that, and just shook while Bobby rubbed her back and tried to explain that it wasn't her fault without disparaging John. Deanna idolized him too much, and it wouldn't help any.
"You should have seen the way he looked at me, Bobby." She whispered later, after she was all cried out. "He hasn't ever looked at me like that. Like I killed someone."
Bobby put her to bed and looked up the number for social services. Ellen, up at the Roadhouse, might know somebody who could fake the adoption papers, if necessary.
But he wasn't sure the girls would actually stay with him. Wasn't sure they wouldn't run right back to their dad the second his back was turned. If he did this he'd force them to choose, and he wouldn't win that fight. It would be better, probably, to try and get John to be a better parent than rip the girls away from their only remaining blood.
He made his decision, regretted it instantly, and downed half a bottle of scotch.
For most of their visit, Deanna comported herself with the kind of stoic determination of a person who well and truly felt she deserved a flogging, and silently did everything asked of her without complaint or comment. She kept a close and careful watch on Sammy, and barely slept. Sammy, for her part, pretty much refused to be apart from her sister for more than twenty minutes at a time. After two days, the youngest Winchester stopped looking at Bobby like he was going to eat her.
John was gone for nearly two weeks. When he came up the driveway, Deanna's already drawn expression grew wan and resigned, and Sammy looked angry.
"Finish your breakfasts," Bobby told them, and scooped another helping of eggs and potatoes on Deanna's plate. Sammy kept stealing from it anyway, since Deanna didn't have the self-respect necessary to tell her off for it.
Bobby met John on the porch, arms crossed.
"Did'ya git it?" He asked, as close to neutral as possible.
John scowled and spit off his porch. "It was gone by the time I got back. Searched everywhere for it, all the surrounding towns too. It's moved on."
Bobby wanted to hit him on principle. "What're you gonna tell the girls?"
"That it's gone. Sam doesn't really know what happened, and Deanna needs to know her actions have consequences."
"That's just about the last thing that girl needs right now," Bobby told him, and John gave him that look again, like he was wondering why Bobby felt he had any say in how he raised his children. "Kid's been beating herself up worse than anything you could do to her. Can't even sleep properly."
A flash of concern crossed John's face. Then it was gone. "Good. That can't happen again."
Bobby decked him.
John, somehow, wasn't expecting it and was knocked flat on his ass. His nose was bloody, and he pinched it tenderly, trying to stem the flow. Bobby hovered over him, shaking, and tried to refrain from kicking the shit out of him.
"You goddamn bastard. Kid ain't no soldier, she's fucking twelve. You can't expect her to act like a fucking adult. You're lucky you made it out of this with both kids intact, and it wasn't Deanna's fault, it was yours, for not taking the girls straight here when you knew it was going after kids."
John stood, and Bobby saw him make a fist, so he ended the argument before it could turn into an all-out brawl. He wasn't sure he wouldn't shoot the miserable sumbitch.
"You can be a father who hunts or a hunter who is a father. You better figure out which one you ought to be before I fucking kill you, John Winchester."
And then Bobby went back inside his house and gave Deanna an extra piece of sausage. She shared it with Sammy, and didn't cry when John came in the house with the blood wiped up and his nose swollen.
They left later that afternoon, and Bobby finished the scotch.
The girls only stayed at Bobby's two times after that. There were a lot of reasons—John was an experienced hunter by now, and he needed Bobby's research less and less, and also the advent of the internet gave faster and more diverse information than Bobby's library had at his disposal, though it was generally less reliable. Then there was the whole cell phone thing—they were clunky, but useful, and so John eventually started calling him rather than showing up in person.
More than anything, Deanna turned thirteen and started going on the hunts with John, rather than staying behind with Sam. Or so he heard through the grapevine—Ellen was a good contact to have, especially after John got her husband killed.
Bobby never would have thought to describe John Winchester as a coward, but he wasn't man enough to admit his own mistakes to people who called him a friend. He never spoke to Ellen again, and Bobby never called John a friend again after their fight. He helped out whenever John reached out—usually through Deanna, now—but it was with the tacit understanding that Bobby was helping for the girls and John himself could go straight to the depths of hell.
Every time he saw the girls, he noticed things. One, the two of them were terribly, unhealthily codependent. Bobby didn't want to know what they would do if something happened to one of them. It was probably a result of not having any consistent friends their age to socialize with. Deanna placed herself like a brick wall between Sammy and the rest of the world, and Sammy seemed to unconsciously track her sister throughout the room. It would be creepy if Bobby didn't know the trauma and conditions that caused it. Considering that, it was just worrying.
As they grew older they seemed to develop opposite responses to their father. Sammy grew more and more resentful, kept talking about college and how hard it would be to submit transcripts considering the number of high schools she'd been enrolled in, and how patchy her education was. This set John off and made Deanna uneasy. Deanna, for her part, barely questioned her father, unless whatever he was saying or ordering would put Sammy in any kind of danger, by her own estimation. She lived and died by his condemnation or lack thereof, and she kept waiting for praise she never received. Bobby wondered if she was still waiting for forgiveness for her twelve-year-old self's brief attempt at childhood.
Bobby told them both they could come by whenever they needed, but from the look in both their eyes, he figured they wouldn't. Deanna out of loyalty to John, and Sammy because she wanted nothing to do with hunting at all, much as she might love Bobby.
It broke him, more than a little, and he would never stop wondering what would have happened if he pushed John when Deanna was eight and whispering about how much training hurt.
John burned bridges, sure. Immolated their foundations with arrogance and wounded pride until the struts were washed away by the river underneath and all that remained was ash in one's mouth and heart. But Bobby knew, would never forget, that he was the one who let him.
Samantha went by Sam from the moment she could speak. Most everyone called her that, except her older sister, who frequently called her Sammy, especially when she was trying to be irritating. It was probably a way of returning the favor since Sam had a lisp until six and couldn't pronounce her name for the longest time and usually just called her Dee. Other people shortened it to Anna, but Sam never did.
Dee tried to give Sam a childhood, but the younger girl was always precocious and frankly too observant for her own good. One Christmas when Sam was eight she figured it out and made Dee tell her about their dad's real job.
Dee saw John Winchester as a hero, as an indominable wall between them and the darkness of the world. Sam had always seen him as something a bit more disappointing—a man who never came home for Christmas, who didn't really care that Sam got the highest score in the class on her math tests, and who never spared a kind word or mercy to her older sister. Dee got the amulet instead.
From that point on, Samantha's childhood was pretty much gone. John never tried to shield Deanna from the realities of the world, and started training her in hand-to-hand and self-defense at the ripe age of seven. Sam got the luxury of waiting until she was eight to start her combat training.
Deanna was always too grateful for words that Sammy was only ever forced to spar against her in the beginning, and not their father. John didn't show much mercy on his daughters in a fight. He justified it by saying no one else would show them mercy, and he wasn't about to let his girls learn bad habits just because their old man went soft on them. Deanna accepted this and fought like hell to make their dad proud. Sam did not accept it, still fought like hell, and slowly but surely began to hate their father's determination to make them soldiers and not people.
It was only several decades later, long after their father died and used his own soul to hold the demon that destroyed their lives at bay, that Deanna started to think there was a difference between preparation and abuse.
Neither of them ever managed to truly hate their father though, deserved as it might be.
The Winchester family knew from Deanna's third birthday that she was going to look very much like Mary when she grew up. This turned out to be an accurate prediction, which made it hard for John Winchester to look at her.
Deanna understood this, she really did. So she did her best to make sure that when John looked at her it was without pain and without recrimination. She followed her father without question. He'd always kept them and everyone else safe, after all, even when Deanna fucked up and nearly let a monster kill her sister. And if he felt anything for them like the near-crippling sense of responsibility she felt toward Sammy, well. Deanna wasn't worried. And she knew he did feel it, because she learned it all from him.
Still, it was hard when she hit twelve and her father started looking at her like he was seeing someone else. And soon enough it was hard to look in the mirror. Not because she looked so much like her mother, but because she usually didn't like what she saw. She wasn't sure what she saw, really.
She knew what other people saw. Mostly because men, boys, and monsters alike were completely shameless about telling her. When her boobs and hips grew in at thirteen Deanna suddenly started getting terrifying comments from the things she and Dad hunted. At least, from the things that were still human enough to feel things like desire. She mostly tried not to think about that though.
She got used to the comments, eventually. Enough that she didn't have a retroactive panic attack afterword, then enough to trade snarky barbs, to give as good as she got.
Never quite enough to simply ignore it and not care though. Never enough to just behead the fucker and feel nothing.
Most infuriating was the fellow hunters that met and dismissed her as a blonde bombshell with nothing between the ears. Those occasions were equally frustrating because even though Deanna never felt much need to correct them, her father did, and so those were some of the only times Deanna heard unrestrained praise from her father about her abilities and character.
"Really, Winchester? You're letting your daughters hunt monsters with you?"
"Deanna can kick your ass seven ways to Sunday, and I'd rather have Sam backing me up than any of you clowns."
It didn't help that in another lifetime, she probably would have looked something like a princess. Deanna had long, curly blonde hair, large green eyes, and a kick-ass figure. She favored fitted denim shorts, combat boots and leather jackets all through high school. On hunts she traded the shorts for jeans. She was charismatic and loud, and drew a lot of attention from people. She turned heads.
Deanna's first experience regarding sex was not a good one.
She was fifteen, and making out with Andrew Jacoby under the bleachers of her school of the month. Then he decided he wanted to do more than grope at her breasts, and kept going even when she said no.
Deanna froze for a solid fifteen seconds, completely unused to fighting off humans, and especially not a boy making his own decisions, who wasn't entirely compelled by death or the supernatural. In that time, he managed to drag her shorts and panties down, use her open jacket and tank top to pin her arms overhead, and unzip his fly. His hand clapped over her mouth, cutting his palm on her teeth as she started to struggle and sobbed.
Then he got real close to her face, using every inch of his body to constrain her, and whispered in her ear, "don't scream."
Deanna flipped her shit.
More importantly, she flipped him. John taught his daughters every and all methods of escape he knew how to teach, and the girls were quick studies. The result was one high school senior concussed with three broken ribs and duct-taped to the struts under the bleachers. They didn't find him until the next morning.
Deanna didn't tell her father, and certainly didn't tell Sammy. She crawled home still tasting his blood on her tongue and washed away the dirt in their motel shower. She couldn't quite get the feel of his hands to go away though, not even when she turned the water up hot enough to burn, and when it ran out the ice water didn't keep her from remembering how he squeezed her breasts, stuck his fingers between her legs. Sam yelled at her when she came out and there was no warm water left.
For whatever reason, Andrew Jacoby never talked about what happened, never filed charges. It wouldn't have mattered, at any rate—the Winchesters were gone inside a week.
Three weeks after that, Deanna lops off all her curls and gives herself a pixie cut, so short she could pass for a boy if it weren't for her breast size. Sammy is shocked and asks her why, pestering her older sister until Deanna finally tells her she just felt like it and was thinking about going goth. Sammy doesn't look like she buys it, but after a week or so she stops asking, and after a month she stops giving Deanna suspicious looks.
John takes one look at it, grunts about how she should have done it a long time ago if she was gonna hunt, and doesn't bring it up again.
Deanna regrets it almost immediately because every time she sees herself in the mirror with her shorn hair she thinks of it, thinks of his hands and how he tangled his fingers in her hair and pulled too hard, how he left fingerprints on her chest. Cutting her hair seems like a horrible brand, a reminder, and she grows it out as quickly as possible, until it's long again and she feels unaffected as she ever will.
Unconsciously, maybe, she wears less and less clothing, dressing in ways that instantly get her labeled things like "whore" and "slut" everywhere she goes. Deanna doesn't give a shit, and just thinks try it mother fuckers.
It was a while before Deanna decided to have sex. She was seventeen and it was with a guy who could barely lift his textbooks. But he was sweet, and let her control the whole affair, which was good because frankly he was too excited for any other arrangement. Neither of them knew what they were doing so it was kind of unpleasant and painfully awkward, but she tried it again with a different guy three states away a month later and wow.
After that, she discovered she liked sex. Even rough sex. Or maybe especially rough sex. It was best when everyone involved didn't make any bones about emotions or sentiment. It was cleaner that way, and Deanna knew exactly what was expected of her and what wasn't, and returned the favor. It was nice, too, to know exactly what the other party saw when they looked at her.
It didn't really help her win any of the staring contests with her mirror, but that wasn't something that was about to change.
Sam grew up constantly in the shadow of her older sister. In most ways, she didn't really resent that—in addition to the attention, Dee also earned most of their father's recrimination, and Sam didn't envy her that. Besides, her older sister was the best, coolest person on the planet, and there was literally nothing anyone could say to the contrary. Dee once kicked a werewolf in the balls just because he made a disparaging comment about Sam's breast size. Dee was smart and impossible to intimidate and took no shit from anyone.
She was also gorgeous, which made Sam's life a little difficult where romance was involved.
It wasn't really her sister's fault. Dee was extremely outgoing and gregarious. She made friends wherever she went, and people just liked her and responded to her in ways they never did for Sam. She also seemed to be pretty content with having a lot of shallow friendships, and few real connections. The younger sibling was quiet, more reserved, and the constant moving made it much more difficult for her to make friends. It didn't help that Sam craved deeper relationships with people than could be made in the two or three months max they spent in any given location.
John, who shared Dee's weird ability to make friends anywhere, really didn't seem to understand this and gave her blank, bewildered, infuriating stares whenever Sam brought it up.
Sam thought, privately, that she must have gotten her personality from her mother, and that Mary would have understood. But that was a thought she would never voice, especially not to her Dad and not even to Dee. They wouldn't get it. They might even say something like that one time, when Dad threw a half-full whisky bottle at the wall and screamed that she was disrespecting her mother's memory.
In any case, the whole situation made it incredibly difficult for Sam to have any kind of romantic relationship with anyone, especially when prospective suitors caught sight of Dee.
It wasn't that Sam had a terrible personality or wasn't pretty—she was just frequently outshone by her vivacious sister. Sam was tall for a girl and skinny, with the athletic build of an Olympic sprinter. She had fine, delicate features and depending on her mood, she had a sense of innocence or steel about her that certain types found intriguing or attractive. She had dark hair she mostly tied into a messy bun behind her head and wide, hazel doe eyes. She liked dark-wash jeans, flannel, and hoodies, but tended to wear all of them a size too large.
It was just—hard to relate to people. Normal people, especially. They didn't know what was out there, didn't know to break someone's elbow with two pounds of pressure, and they never memorized exorcisms so thoroughly that even when her dad woke her in the middle of the night she could scream it in her sleep. Even outside of that, she was also drawn to things most people her age tended not to think about too deeply—philosophy, God, justice. She read books like The Brothers Karamazov and The Epic of Gilgamesh for fun, and in the original manuscripts if it was a Latin text. Her favorite book was a tie between The Great Gatsby and Beowulf. She generally didn't care for politics, but she had opinions on nearly every topic under the sun, be it determinism or colonial institutional legacies or corporate farming practices. Finding fellow children she could talk to and not confuse or be bored by was difficult.
(Weirdly, Pastor Jim was her most constant and relatable friend growing up, besides Dee. He was a surprisingly open-minded man, willing to entertain for discussion all manner of topics which probably should have been considered blasphemous. There was nothing Sam couldn't ask him about, nothing he wouldn't give his opinion on. He was well-educated and highly intelligent, and when Sam finally asked him how it was God could allow His creations to speak against Him or live in opposition to Him, Pastor Jim just smiled and told her, "the origin of faith is free will, and freedom to live as one will. How else could righteous intent exist? How else could it be enacted?"
Dee just rolled her eyes, and said God couldn't be good if he existed at all. Sam made a non-committal sound but she started praying after that, and did so every day until she dragged Lucifer, Adam and Michael into the Pit with her own damned soul.)
Regardless of her introversion and bookish nature, Sam did eventually have a relationship with someone who had a thing for history and enjoyed hypothetical discussions about the consequences of AI technology. She almost had sex with him, but just as she was unclipping her bra he asked if Dee would be up for a threesome. Sam threw him out, cried, and swore off boys for good but then lost her virginity in her second semester of college to a guy she met at a frat party. He was experienced and sweet to her, and her first full experience with sex was both satisfying and pleasant.
Deanna saw Sammy's leaving long before it happened, but chose to ignore it. She never brought it up with their father, figuring he would have seen too. If the increased tension and Sammy's taking the SATs wasn't enough, then the running away and lack of interest in hunting surely was.
Deanna did not expect Sammy to slap a Stanford acceptance letter on the table during dinner and declare she was going, whether Dad liked it or not.
This led to one of the worst nights of Deanna's life. She tried to mediate, reason with them both, but her remaining family members were too far gone and screamed things that should never have been spoken or even thought. Things like how Sam never appreciated all the sacrifices Dad made for her, how he'd protected her and she'd never cared to return that with her loyalty. How Mom never would have died if she hadn't been in Sam's nursery that night. Things like how Dad had tried to forget Mom and how he'd never let Sam learn about her, and how Mom never would have wanted Dad to turn her kids into warriors and martyrs.
Dad was worried, and he always expressed that as anger and tried to intimidate his youngest into compliance. Sam was a stubborn little shit tired of being told what to do, and tired of being asked to throw away her future, and watch her sister do the same. But she was her father's daughter, and so that too expressed itself as anger.
The fight ended when Deanna got between them and John took a swing at her. It was mostly accidental, the action intending to shove her out of the way more than anything, and Deanna took worse hits when they sparred. It was still hard enough to leave a bruise though, and that was the absolute last straw for Sam, because this was Dee, her sistermotherbestfriend, and her fatherdrillseargentwarden. So she stepped around her sister and fractured John Winchester's jaw.
He grunted, staggered back, and Dee gasped, and gave an urgent whisper of "Sam," that was barely audible, but neither of them moved any further, just stared in horror.
"First rule of fighting," Sam Winchester whispered to the dead silent room. "Hit like you mean it."
John Winchester had a lot of flaws. One was that he couldn't stand a challenge to his authority. So even though he'd been crafting an apology without words for his eldest before his youngest attacked in retaliation, he couldn't respond to Sam with anything less than abject fury.
"You go out that door, and you better not come back," he grunted through his shattered jaw.
Deanna finally snapped into action when Sam turned on her heel, grabbed her thrift-store bomber jacket off the hook, and left.
It was one of the few times in her life she truly questioned her father. Where she frankly evaluated all of his choices and found the results wanting. Since before she could remember, her father was the overriding force in her life, in Sam's life, in every decision they made. She always trusted him to know best, even when Sammy voiced her own barely-acknowledged doubts, and hadn't disobeyed one of his orders since she was twelve and nearly killed her sister.
Today, she looked him in the eye, horrified and angry, and for once in her life doesn't buy the idea of John Winchester as the knower of all things right and true, and whispers in horror, "What have you done?"
John didn't answer, and despite her fury, she was forced to take him to the ER. By the time she got back to the motel, Sam and all her meagre belongings were long gone. Deanna hunted her down, but Sam refused to come back and just gave Dee the number for her new cell phone. Dee stayed with her every day for a week, until John called her and told her they were heading out. She replied with a heavy yessir, and didn't look at Sam's face. Too much disappointment and betrayal and accusation there.
For the first month, Deanna called her sister every day. She didn't pick up unless Deanna left a message threatening to visit if she didn't answer the goddamn phone, which usually made Sam at least say "yeah, I'm fine, Dee. I'm glad you're alive," before hanging up again.
Eventually that petered out to every other day, and then once a week, until it was too irregular to really give a pattern. Deanna called for the big events though—Sam's graduation, her first day of class, finals week, etcetera. She teased her sister for being a nerd, and she could usually get Sam to expound on whatever she was learning—from neuro-anatomy to her issues with Kant and Nietzsche—for around twenty minutes before Sam decided it was time to go.
Sam never called her. And other than checking to make sure Deanna was whole and healthy, she never asked about what she was up to. She sent a birthday card and a Christmas present every year, but that was it. Deanna didn't dare mention their father, for fear Sam would stop talking to her entirely.
For the first few months her father radiated fury which he took out on Deanna in increasingly vicious verbal attacks until she had enough and suggested they hunt separately. John responded with a rare and unwelcome bought of chauvinism and claimed that no girl of his would be out on her own.
This was probably born from his worry for Sam, who was all by herself in a world of strangers. Deanna knew that. But it sounded like something else, and it pissed her off so much she pinned her dad on the gravel next to the car and growled I can handle myself just fine.
John could have broken the hold if he were willing to break one of her fingers, but he wasn't so instead he gave her the keys to his beloved Impala and told her to take care of it or else, and that they'd meet up in a couple of weeks, so long as she checked in every day.
So Deanna hunted on her own, sleeping with every attractive and willing guy she felt like and drove cross country twice a month to kill things that wanted to kill people. She did it for years. It was miserable, exhausting, and lonely, and it was the freest she'd ever been or ever would be.
A/N
Seriously, how did Sam even complete the application process for college, much less have a consistent enough record that a school like Stanford would take him in? Even if he had straight A's at every school he'd ever been to, he wasn't at most of them long enough to even receive a grade. I know it's fictional but there is only so far I can suspend my disbelief. The two of them probably would have been better off if they were on a homeschooling regimen. Academically, at least. I assume John was just trying to give them some kind of socialization by putting them in school at all.
Bobby Singer is officially a Winchester because he has an undeserved guilt complex over the girls' childhoods.
So. John Winchester. I, like most of the fandom, agree that the man was a shit father. I do not think, however, that he ever intended to abuse his children. Not even Dean. I do think he was far too obsessive in his determination to get revenge, and ended up placing unfair burdens on both his children, but especially Dean. And in reconciling his need to hunt with his need to protect the kids, he stripped them of their childhoods, and from a larger perspective, their entire lives. This isn't even counting the extended and frequent periods of neglect the kids apparently endured. I mention in the fic that there's a difference between preparation and abuse, and that's especially true when it's coming from a parent. I think John crossed that line. A lot. But the abuse is contextualized as training, and protection, because John really does love his kids. Which is why it's hard for Bobby to get the girls to a better place, why neither of the girls can quite manage to hate him, and why, when he hits Deanna in my fic, everyone is shocked and Sam loses it. Actually, I think the way John treats Dean is probably the catalyst for a lot of the trouble between John and Sam. We all see how much Sam looks up to his brother, and how much he wishes to protect him in return for all the saving Dean does for him. I imagine a young, perceptive Sam probably bottled up a lot of frustration and resentment at John for treating Dean dismissively because Dean is the one Sam idolizes. In Sam's eyes Dean is damn near perfect. And over time that resentment evolved into anger on his own behalf, and frustration with Dean for always going along with their Dad despite his many flaws. So even though a lot of people see Sam's running away as a teenager and to Stanford as selfish, I actually think it's probably the greatest expression of Sam's utter devotion to Dean. It was his chance to be free, and also to show Dean a different path, and get him to defy their father for once. To do something for himself. He got to be the trailblazer, and teach Dean something important. He was probably incredibly frustrated when that didn't work.
This is part 1 of 2. I am not doing another genderbent epic. This is just something that's been sitting on my laptop for a while, so here we are.
Let me know what you thought?
