Let me establish something first. I DO NOT watch the show Supernatural AT ALL. The reason for the creation and writing of this piece has more to do with my pride and a bet/dare/taunt/whatever it is than anything else. Therefore, I apologize in advance for slip ups and the inclusion of things that may or may not actually exist in the show itself; I have done research, if that is any reassurance, on the show after I started writing this so it's not like I intentionally tried to butcher this.

Disclaimer: Supernatural and its corresponding characters do not belong to me.

Oh. And if the writing style changes, it's because another one of my friends is taking pity on me and helping. Still not sure how she got me to agree to that. She's good at making it seem like I'm doing her a favor instead of the other way around.


ro·bot·ic

(of a person) mechanical, stiff, or unemotional

Her first real memory is that of a nearly bare room. White walls, charcoal grey carpet. The bed, with its high, plastic rails, was shoved up against the wall farthest away from a black door. There were a total of three toys deposited in a corner. They consist of a small, rubber ball the size of an apple, a cube with different shapes (for developing dexterity, she learns later), and a strange contraption made up of black cloth. It's absolutely still in there, interrupted only except when she cried; even then, no one has ever answered, her cries had simply echoed off the walls. A towering thing made up of strips of metal fed her on a set schedule and attended to her physical needs. It came in when the lights flicked on in the room and left as soon as they went off. The first two or three years of her life is spent without contact. Not with warm flesh and blood anyway.

She was barely four when training officially started. It was the first time she realized that she wasn't the only one in the building. There were others of the same age although they shied away from her and she shied away from them when they first laid eyes on each other. Then there were the black shadows with white masks. Guardians, they called themselves; from the beginning of the training to the end, they would be the ones watching over them. All of them moved the same way; she remembers because the guardians' boots clicked against the marble floor of the corridors in one rhythm, and only one rhythm. The sound was the only warning the trainees got before the lights would go out, leaving them in darkness. Good for learning discipline, the guardians had whispered the first time. Once the session started, the room was completely silent although the cold presence of the guardians never left. She remembers sensing them circling around her and others like her. Their bodies had been swallowed by shadow, she recalls, giving the illusion of several disembodied, leering masks floating around freely, always repeating the same things to the still children trapped with them.

You were created for one purpose, they said. Your purpose is to hunt. Your job is to live and die as a hunter.

Two years later, when she was six, they introduced her class to the first exercise outdoors. The activity involved a field, and for a couple minutes, the children had been stunned to silence at the new environment. For all the training they go through to desensitize them, it's still not enough. The sun can be mimicked, but only to some extent; they're unprepared to meet its unsettling power to blind and sting. The rest of the components present in the natural world are just as foreign. One child flinches as a soft breeze makes the grass rustle softly. Another stands rigidly, unsure of what to make of the thousands of colors making up the alien world. She frowns when she picks up what at first sounds like the trilling sounds of whistles. Except the trills can't be whistles. They aren't nearly as harsh and they form patterns; for once in her short lifetime, the sound doesn't make her clench her jaw in irritation. They'd only been allowed seconds to adapt to the new landscape before being called back to business, and it was during this time that she'd been distracted by the shimmering blue of small, delicate wings. The creature was bright, living, changing, a far cry from the static gleam of silver and blinding whiteness she'd come from. One of the guardians had noticed her attention wandering and walked over, catching sight of the fluttering creature. A gloved hand had flicked out with inhuman speed, capturing it in one smooth motion and depositing it in her small hands.

Hold its wings, the guardian had commanded; when she hesitated, the voice raised itself, cracking over her like a whip as the command was repeated.

Hold its wings.

She swallows, stomach turning in an alien response to something she's never felt before, and manipulates the struggling creature with her clumsy fingers until she feels the paper-thin appendages underneath the pads of her fingertips. Her eyes zero in on the powder rubbing off on her skin before focusing on the veins threading through the wings; she can feel her pupils dilate and constrict, bringing the small detail into amazingly sharp clarity. For a moment, she's mesmerized by the intricacy of the lacy patterns webbing the azure expanse. The building has nothing close to this.

Good. Now, tear them off.

She stops, staring up at the artificial face hovering above her before glancing down at the fragile form of the creature in her hands. Her eyes flicker between them a couple times before she sets her jaw in childish defiance.

No.

No?

No.

It is taken away from her the moment the word leaves her mouth. She has enough time to glimpse a helpless flutter of blue before it vanishes behind the gloved hands of the guardian. Then, with the meticulousness of a surgeon, the long fingers begin to dissemble it before her eyes. Her hands twitch in an instinctive motion to stop the action, but she is too young and too slow to do anything; so, she is forced back into position to continue watching the blur of black as the creature is taken apart much the same way she'd seen the guardians take apart a wrecked machine. It's the same cold detachment, the same cool efficiency. When the wings are finally taken, they're viciously torn out with a sickening ripping sound and what's left of the body is crushed in front of her and ground into the dirt underneath a black boot.

You are made to destroy.

She can't cry. Not anymore. Somewhere along the way, the constant drilling and pressure to maintain a blank façade had taken away her brain's ability to connect emotion with tears. But her eyes find the small slits interrupting the plastic plane covering the other's face and hold them in a staring contest. Asking why would produce no answers, and by now, they've all learned to shy away from questions. Hunters didn't need to know things beyond what they're going up against, the guardians reiterated again and again as part of the training, there is no need to analyze things too far if their only reason for existing was to rid the Earth of abominations.

If there is one thing you do not do as a hunter, it's hesitate. If there is one thing you don't ever need, it's emotion. Don't feel. Detach yourself. Those who are crippled by their own minds are completely and utterly useless. Only when killing one creature is the same as destroying another can you even begin to proclaim yourself proficient. Remember that.

The mask turns around and leaves, gliding over the grass with a remarkable grace, to rejoin the other guardians at the front. Her eyes flick back to the destroyed remains of the once lively creature as a container of bright crimson paint is shoved into her hands and a guardian explains their exercise. As she paints the designated sigil on the grass, some of the thick substance spills over onto her fingers, trickling down to her wrists. It looks like blood.

You are made to destroy.

The pace picks up after that first outing. The class progresses from slicing metal contraptions to one on one battles with supernatural creatures the guardians set free for that purpose. Half of the simulated fights simply depend on speed and accuracy of weapon usage; they're difficult, but accomplishable. The other half are impossible to accomplish without multitasking between sigils and weaponry. The students who pause even the slightest bit during those battles are severely injured and never seen again.

Cold efficiency, they tell them after every incident, is the best weapon any hunter can possess. No questions, no second guesses, just kill what needs to be eradicated and leave.

And little by little, those words embed themselves in her soul and become the standard in how she hunts.


An avid fan of this show once commented to me how the love Dean has for Sam makes him relatively useless in situations where his younger brother is in potential danger. I thought that was extremely harsh and I don't know the how much of that was truth and how much was irritation, but that comment is what at least part of this story is based off of.