Once upon a time, she was a girl.
She tries to forget this.
Once upon a time, she was told fairy tales.
Once.
The memories tend to come in epileptic lurches when she least expects it. She'll be looking at a river and remember, quite violently, how she learned to swim. She'll see a blond child and remember the smell of her sister's hair. She'll feel a splattering of rain on her cheeks, and remember how the sky had ripped and burst the night she'd kissed her new found father's mouth, and sworn her soul to him.
On the whole, she tries to forget. It was a life lived when lives were short and brutal, and even without Alastair's rack she would have pressed those memories away. The millennia of pain certainly helped her scrape away the remnants of her former life, but that particular vivisection, that of memories and love, was one should would have deliberately undertaken, if she could.
She resents these flashes, when they come. They make her feel squishy, remind her when she didn't fill out a load of living meat, and was actually connected to the various part of the body she looked out of.
Once she was a girl – not particularly pretty, but with hair bleached from working in the fields, and the kind of wide spreading hips men looked for, back when a woman was little more than a walking sack of ovaries and eggs.
She was fourteen, once upon a time, and her eyes were wide and green and she did as she was told.
So when her father told her to marry the butcher, she did.
These are the most brutal cardiac arrests of memory – the ones which leave her panting, sometimes, in the street.
The messy violence of the marriage bed. The frequent, brutal thumps – the sound of fists on meat. Worse than all her torturings, because when she remembers her life it's not as a demon, not as the abortion of a human soul she has become, but as a child.
The smell of her sister's hair. Daisies – she made her a crown.
A priest with kind blue eyes she watched in church. She used, with her bruised lips, to think of what it would be like to kiss his solemn cheeks.
No. Too, too much, here, too much of an implication that that life has carried remnants into this. That she is still affected by what she was, once upon a time.
Plague. The black death.
Boils on her father, bursting, and her own eyes stone cold, bitter with her marriage and the child swelling out her belly.
Her sister came to live with them.
She was beautiful.
She was adorned with sky blue eyes, with pale lips.
She was twelve.
The demon hits against the mirror when these flashes come, until the meatsuit breaks and blood trickles up from all the cracks.
The night. She'd screamed. Cursed her husband, clutched her sister, been thrown to the floor, all the carnage, her hands breaking with beating against the locked door, Annie screaming, and in the morning her bitterblue eyes all bruised and broken and she clutched at her stomach and was sick and could not sit or lie down for weeping.
The demon remembers the feeling of hopelessness. Of failure.
Her sister dies of something two days later. She did not know what.
But the – lurch. The hole. The tearing of the tendons in her heart. The sky – grey. Grey and her sister dead.
When she felt the labour coming she left the house. Walked and walked and walked until she had to sit, and the soles of her feet were oozing blood and cracked. In a field – in the middle of emptiness. The day gone – night. The sky boiling with rain.
She pushed it out – little alien interloper. Pushed it out and listen to its squalling and, without repentance, without hesitation, picked up a rock and beat and beat and bashed its ugly head in, until it stopped it's shrieking.
She planned what she would do – take it and put it in her husband's bed. Let him see it – the foul, twisted mess of flesh he had created. She picked it up – so much blood. It was everywhere, and even before it started raining her face was wet with water and her eyes leaked appallingly.
The man standing. There, beside her, as the sky sighed open.
A promise- of plague. For her husband. For everyone in the village. For her husband to die in agony and filth.
A new father. One who would undo what the old has done.
She kissed his mouth.
But first this, before her husband died, she had to show him this, this.
So she lay in their wedding bed, and when he came in, slouching from the pub, she'd been naked, and smiled, and drawn back the sheets for him to see the thing she's placed there, in all her mother's love, and she'd laughed as he pummeled her into life with her new father, and the man who broke her body to make her strong and rip away all that horror, and the god she could finally trust would answer her drowning prayers.
So she learned a smile and a mocking voice and ways to get what you want and a cause to fight and bleed for.
She learned black eyes, and how to press away memories of what was, once upon a time.
She took a new name – Meg, because she liked it (and she liked that people called her Meg, even though she wasn't anymore, not really, because she'd changed the meatsuit, but it meant that they remembered).
She pressed back a previous name. And the things that come and claw and go bump in the night. Most of them, anyway. Not all. She was one. Is one. Is one.
He has blue eyes. Very pure, very blue eyes, which light up when they look upon the green eyed man. Even though she can see what he is – who he is – in all his otherworldly, repugnant beauty, the blue eyes remain.
She had green eyes, once (No, no no no no, her eyes are black, and green is just a color she imagined).
The sight of how he looks at Dean Winchester bruises the memory of her heart. He might agree to her advances, return her dilated eyes, but this creature will never raise her up from hell.
Not when she's got her fingers so firmly latched, that is.
The priest. Said once. That love – redeems us. But only love without condition. Which sustains through hatred and repugnance and war.
At first, when this particular shock of memory surfaces, she thinks the remembrance is due to them– the man and the thing of light (which burns her eyes and her throat and hurts her somewhere she's forgotten).
And it's only later.
Later, when her hair is gold again, though this time from burning bleach and one demon's peculiar sense of humour.
Later.
When.
She thinks.
Unconditional love and unrequited. Are not so different. Maybe.
And maybe.
If she had had more time.
That could have let her have –
Something.
Something almost like salvation.
But her long oh so very tragic tale has unwound, and she never did get her fairytale ending, but at least, oh at least she got a stab in and there's no Cas in the back seat and at least. For a moment.
She got to pretend.
Once upon a time, she was a girl.
But, she thinks, as she falls back.
But that was very long ago.