-1Chrystal Elizabeth Maron was born on March 15, 1981. Her mother, Elizabeth, was a piano teacher in Hillsboro, Missouri. Her father, James, carried on the family business. James Maron was the fifth generation of Maron's to become a hunter. Long ago the Maron family was introduced to the world of evil. Long ago they decided they were going to hunt down the things in children's nightmares. James was the fifth in his line and the only Maron not to have a son. Elizabeth's family was also involved in Hunting, but not in an active way. They were resources for hunters, researchers. That was how James and Lizzy met. Three years after they met James asked her to marry him. Two years later their daughter Chrystal was born. Elizabeth lived what seemed to most a normal life. They had a small house in the small town of Hillsboro. Her daughter was a bouncing baby girl, always smiling.
Chrystal lived a normal life in comparison to some hunters. When she was four she started taking dance lessons down the street from her house. Most of her lessons centered in ballet. While Elizabeth encouraged the girl to pursue dance for expressional reasons, her father encouraged her because it built strength and flexibility in her. Chrystal was never sheltered from hunting. She had known for as long as she could remember, what her dad did. He used to tell her stories all the time. Chrystal would pass those stories off to friends at school when she got a little older. Everyone assumed they were just that though, stories. She never included her father in them, or what he did. She simply told the myths and stories behind the things her father hunted.
James Maron usually did his work alone, but there was one man that he turned to often for guidance and for assistance. The man's name was William Harvelle. The two families were quite close. Chrystal spent the entire summer after first grade at the Harvelle's roadhouse. At that time, the Harvelle's had a young daughter, only around a year old. Her name was Joanna. Chrystal was very adamant about helping Ellen take care of the little girl. Her summer at the roadhouse was one of her favorite childhood memories.
Chrystal was popular at school, especially in middle school and high school. When she was six she started taking piano lessons with her mother and at the age of eight she began guitar lessons. Chrystal was a natural with music. She was a natural with almost everything she did. She got straight A's at school and was one of the most advanced students in her dance classes. What the Maron's did not realize until she was around sixteen years old is that Chrystal has an eidetic memory. She is able to see something or hear something once and remember it in detail.
Chrystal Maron led two lives though. At school and with friends she was a normal teenage girl. She was a performer. Chrystal was in all the school productions and active in the music program. She kept her friends at bay though. Her only real friends were the children of other hunters, though somehow Chrystal never became very good friends with Jo Harvelle. She did form a deep attachment to someone who had showed up at the Roadhouse out of the blue one day. He was possibly the strangest man that Chrystal had ever met. She was fifteen years old when she first met Ash. He was six years older than her, straight out of MIT, though he looked more like he just got off a Skynyrd tour. Chrystal and Ash hit it off instantly. They were both intelligent but liked to play dumb. Ash was the one who gifted Chrystal with her beloved nickname, Chrys. No one else had ever called her that before.
Her life was good, it was normal. She had good friends, Ash being one of them. He quickly became the big brother she never had. When she was in high school she spent her summers working at the Roadhouse, mostly so she could hang around with Ash. Everything went to hell when she turned seventeen though. Technically it all started when Chrystal was a baby. When Chrystal was one year old doctors found a tumor in her mother's brain. They were able to remove most of it and for the next sixteen years all seemed fine. James could not bring himself to tell his daughter that her mother had relapsed though, that the cancer was back and spreading. There was nothing doctors could do. So James and Elizabeth kept the information from Chrystal.
Three weeks after Chrys turned seventeen her mother was sent to the hospital. Two days later she lost her battle with cancer. Cancer that Chrys never knew she had. Chrys was devastated. She was out of school by then, graduating one year early. After her mother died she quit her dance lessons, lessons she had taken for thirteen years and moved out of her house. She moved in with Ellen Harvelle, sharing a room with Ash. Chrys plunged herself into the only other thing she knew how to do, hunting. She started her training when she was nine, her dad took her out shooting. Chrys fell in love with it instantly. She took to blade fighting more though.
Two years after her mother died she got a call from a family friend, a hunter. He told Chrys that her father had died on a hunt. Her father was destroyed by the death of his wife. Chrys knew this and begged him to stop hunting until he had healed more. He refused and Chrys knew what led to his death. He was overcome with grief and Chrys could see he was getting careless, sloppy in his hunting. It finally caught up with him. Given what had happened, Chrys took her father's death in stride. She was hurting over it, but she did not let that cripple her. She focused on her hunting.
It became difficult. Her father had made his share of enemies in the hunting world. He showed discretion in his hunting. James Maron saw the gray areas in hunting. It had often cut a few hunters cases short. They were not to happy with him, nor his daughter. Chrys was getting sick of the pressure and the comments from other hunters. She was tired of the glares and snarls when she walked through the Roadhouse. So one night, she came home from a hunt and walked into her room. That night Chrystal Maron died. Ash created a death certificate and a new identity for Chrstal.
Her new name was Christian Cohen. It was Chrys' idea for the name. One of the odd things about her, especially as a hunter is that she never let go of the things from her past, not truly. Chrys still loved to go out to clubs in order to find some way to dance. She would often practice old routines in the Roadhouse. She still carried her toe shoes around with her. Everyone who ever knew Chrys, at least anyone who knew her well, knew how much she loved Jonathan Larson's RENT. When Ash asked her for a new last name the first thing that popped into her mind was Cohen, coming from the character of Mark Cohen in RENT.
Three years after that, when Chrys was twenty-three she met someone that would change her life forever. She was working a hunt in Oklahoma. It was nothing special, vengeful spirit. She showed up at the cemetery to torch the bones and found someone standing at the grave, flames coming from the ground. That was the day Chris Cohen met John Winchester. Her first impression of him was that he was only getting in the way. After running into him again on a much more difficult hunt six months later, tracking a werewolf, she discovered that he was an excellent hunter.
Chris began to ask around and quickly learned that Ellen and Bill had known John. She asked a bit about his history and learned that he was a former marine. For Chris that explained a lot. Ellen also told her that he had two boys. Dean and Sam. Chris would not meet them for three more years. That is when this story truly begins.
//B A D C O M P A N Y\\
New place, this time a little more familiar to her as she was from Missouri. It was a common event every so often with Chris Cohen. She hated staying stuck in one place too long. Chrystal had always had a free spirit. That had not changed in the twenty plus years she had been around. Chris always felt restless, even as a child. She only spent time at home when she had her piano lessons. The rest of the time she spent at school, or down the street at the local dance studio. That was the one things she missed from her childhood. Since her dad died, which she took quite well, she had rarely got a chance to do any sort of dancing.
When she would work a case and get time to go out to a bar or nightclub she enjoyed those times. It was a time when she could lose herself. It was a time when Chris could go back to the way she was in high school. She missed dancing, though her fighting style was greatly influenced by her training. She was incredibly flexible while fighting and moved with a grace one can only get from formal ballet training. Chris had incredibly powerful legs, especially her ankles, for that reason. While she was graceful in a fight, or on a stage, in reality, when she was just being Chris, she was a klutz. Chris was always tripping over things.
Tonight she was restless. She wanted to be out somewhere, outside, out on the town. However, Chrystal Cohen was never that lucky. She had to work tonight. It was not such a bad thing as Chrystal tended to like where she worked. She liked being near the music and on occasion she was able to get out of the floor and dance during her breaks. She was one of the freaks that enjoyed working at a club like Free. She did not necessarily enjoy the way people looked at her as she walked by sometimes. Some of the men would be undressing her with their eyes or worse yet, "eyefucking" her. But she liked the rest of the atmosphere so she would just have to live with the negative.
She took some time to change into her work clothes, which were not too different from her regular clothes.. She had her black leather jacket and under it a black t-shirt that said "Bad Company" in white letters. The back of the t-shirt read "Till the day I die.". Chris pulled on her leather pants. The reason it was so easy for the men there to drool over her was those pants. They were skin tight and very flattering to the slight curves that she did have. She would have preferred her combat boots but those would not fit with what she was wearing. These boots were thigh high black leather boots with a three in heel on them. Hidden, stuffed snugly in her boot was a small knife. She never went anywhere unarmed, for her that could be fatal.
For her knives were easier to conceal than guns. Over the years she had become more proficient with small knives and daggers than other weaponry. Chris rarely ever had to use such objects while working at the club. She had threatened some unruly guests before though. That was what Chris loved about the place. They embraced her fiery personality. Most of the patrons and staff there enjoyed her. She was able to keep some of the more unruly patrons in line. Most of the time though, Chris was happy with just serving drinks and talking to the patrons at the bar. She preferred those times.
Chris walked out of the small motel room she had been staying in for the past two months. She had been in town for two months. Chris got her job at Free a week after arriving. She locked her door behind her and opened the door to her baby. Her beautiful dark midnight blue 1969 Chevy Nova. Chrystal loved this thing more than anything else on the planet. Her father had gone with her to buy it shortly after her mother died. Chris smiled as the engine purred and she pulled out of the parking lot and down the street. The drive to work was eventless and did not take that much time. Often times Chris wondered why she even bothered to drive to work, it was close enough to walk.
She climbed out of her car and locked the door before walking through the back door of the club. She waved to her manager before pulling her long brown hair back and heading out to the bar. Chris smiled at the few that were there, some were regulars, some Chris had never seen before. The hours passed slowly but Chris's energy did not fade. The newer patrons became increasingly more sparse and the regulars began to show up in droves. It was about eleven o'clock when Chris took her break. She sat down at the bar with a beer in her hand and smiled, brushing stray strands of hair out of her face.