Hunting was a dangerous, thankless job. Deanna had accepted that. Hunting was a dangerous, thankless job whose only payment was a short brutal life and dying alone on the claws of some freak. Fine, Deanna accepted that too. What Deanna did not accept was that she had to die bare-ass naked in a shitty motel in some shitty corner of New Orleans with the cold, dirt encrusted hands of a revenant fresh from its coffin wrapped around her throat.

So she bucked and thrashed, clawed at the creature's wrists and kicked the guy lying next to her in the side as hard as she could to rouse him, clawing ineffectually at the silent deadly fingers sending black spots blooming across her field of vision.

"Bloody hell," groaned the guy.

A beat, and then. "Oh, bloody hell!"

There was a knife underneath her pillow, a gun in the side table. Both basically useless on a revenant and functionally useless to her cause if she gave the inch she needed to grab one she'd pass out and it'd all be over.

There was a clatter and a crash as a lamp when banging to the floor and then, actually, blessedly shockingly enough, boy toy cracked the big dead mother across the side of the face with the ancient dried-puke beige rotary phone from the side table.

Hard enough that the freak actually let go and holy fuck yes, she could breathe.

The rush of air and adrenaline gave her a burst of strength and she kicked the two hundred pounds of solidly built but rotting black man off the bed and onto the floor. She recognized his features from the police report before the guy from last night started pounding his face into cat food. He'd looked like his crazy bitch sister. Go figure.

Deanna coughed and swallowed and rolled off the bed to catch the guy's arm mid swing, "Alright dude, he gets the point."

The corpse twitched. Vengeance and death magic was better than gasoline for keeping the engine hot, but it wasn't going anywhere quickly until it sorted out what it could manage with bits of skull sticking into its brain.

The phone clattered to the floor and the guy leaned back on his haunches breathing heavily and smearing gore on his face when he made an aborted attempt to drag a hand through his hair.

"Alright?" he panted.

"Peachy," Deanna said, arching a brow. "Someone will have heard that, we're gonna need to get gone."

The guy swayed to his feet, "Can't leave this bloke here," he pointed out.

The corpse twitched again. Deanna pulled a face, thinking. The guy was right, leaving tall, dark and hella dead here was a recipe for disaster and dismemberment and other unpleasant d words. She wracked her brains for a second. There was lighter fluid in her bag. It wasn't subtle but they were getting gone anyway so—

"Help me get him in the bathtub."

The two of them managed to get big ugly into the motel's yellowing mildew encrusted tub and Deanna poured the whole bottle of lighter fluid out, just to be thorough and flicked on the fan and opened the window the barest crack that she could manage.

Still, it was telephone boy who remembered to take the shower curtain down so that they didn't accidentally torch the motel. Some enterprising chain-smoker had already dealt with those pesky alarm things.

All of that took about three minutes, another five to get nominally dressed, wash the scuz from their hands and faces and flick a book of matches into the bathtub and then they were sliding back into the Impala and rocketing down the bare black top of the local interstate.

Easy peasy. Just another night in the life of Deanna Winchester.

Only it wasn't just another night in the life, because Deanna Winchester worked alone, and the pretty boy she'd picked up out of the bar line up was no hunter. Not dressed in a suit that probably cost more than her car with an artfully messy head of overlong dark curls. No chance.

Probably.

She cracked her neck and winced as the motion aggravated the abused tissues of her throat. Unfortunately the only cure for an aborted throttling was ibuprofen with an ice cream chaser and a few days in turtlenecks. Yippee.

Her baby purred under her as she flouted all the posted speed limits and then rumbled into the same truck stop she'd eyed longingly rolling into town a week ago.

It was her kind of place, independently owned and attached to a greasy spoon diner with the obligatory red pleather booths and blue-grey formica tabletops. The waitress was a girl with a nose ring and a novel who was pointedly ignoring the dried-sticky spill of grape soda in the middle of the floor and who didn't bat an eyelash when Deanna grabbed two pints of cookie dough ice cream and a pair of extra-large mugs from the tray of clean dishes on the counter, also pointedly not being put away.

The girl didn't even bother to take her feet off the counter, just leaning over and tapping on her till until the price came up and shoving Deanna's crumpled wad of dollars into the register without counting them.

It was Deanna's kind of service, and in her price range, even if they were too early to get the bacon-fried shrimp burrito. Or the strawberry pie. She'd have to remember it for some other time.

The guy—Deanna was really going to have to find out his name—watched the whole interaction with a bemused kind of horror, and joined Deanna in pouring the last of the sludge in the self-serve coffee urns into their mugs and nuking it into something that would actually dissolve the seven packets of sugar needed to make it palatable.

They didn't talk, but the guy nudged her elbow politely when he offered her the cream, and went gratifyingly glassy-eyed when she smirked her thanks around a pair of wooden stir sticks.

Deanna didn't usually go for clean-cut guys—that was more Sammy's schtick—because even the young ones tended to be all style and no substance. Literally. Skin, bones, and a just this side of curved abdomen that promised to grow into a proper paunch when they got older. She'd tapped this one because of his panty melting accent rather than his skinny tie and his pretty-boy good looks, but after watching him beat a revenant in the face with the motel telephone she had the thought that she might have to revise her rules of thumb because damn she could pick 'em.

Back in the fuzzy light of the motel room she'd discovered that if you pealed back the layers of tailoring the guy was all whipcord lean lines of densely packed muscle, long clever fingers, and a crooked grin against her navel—and now was really not the time to be thinking about that.

She shook herself awake and let the guy lead her over to the table in the back corner where they had lines of sight on the whole diner, the parking lot, and were close to the side door that led back into the kitchen. It was the spot she'd've picked if she'd been given the option.

Damn.

"So what's your name again?" she asked, peeling the lid off her pint and licking ice cream residue off the plastic without shame.

"Harry," he answered, his mouth quirked and his eyes laughing as she pulled a face.

"Really? Harry?"

"Tell you what," he offered leaning forward, "You can call me whatever you want as long as you promise to remember it in the morning."

Right. No. Less flirtation, more business. She'd already been throttled once tonight.

"Alright then, stringbean, what's your deal then? Are you a hunter?"

"No. Is that what you are?"

"It's as good a job description as any. If you're not a hunter, what are you?"

"Just someone who's come across this kind of thing before," he answered, rubbing at a stain on the lip of his coffee mug, "Experience suggests that if you don't deal with those sorts of things promptly innocents get hurt. I've been told I have a bit of a hero complex."

Deanna hummed her agreement around a mouthful of ice cream, enjoying the glide of it down her sore throat, and propping her booted feet up on the booth beside him.

"Okay, say I buy that," she offered, and she did kind of buy it, there'd been a few scars on his drool worthy frame that looked more like bite marks than anything else, "What I don't buy is that you walk into some random dive dressed like that and walk out with the only girl who not only has an ass made for short-shorts but also a set of rock salt bullets in the back pocket."

"What do rock salt bullets kill?" he asked, curious.

"Not much but they hurt like a sonofabitch and I am more than willing to demonstrate, so how about you start talking?"

The guy—Harry, and what a sucky name for such a pretty piece—huffed, shaking his dark curls out of his eyes, and gave her a piercing stare over the rims of his douchey hipster glasses. She ignored what that look did to her insides because hello, and instead focussed on the humourless curve of his lips.

"Just bad luck love," he offered, "A gorgeous woman asked me what I was drinking and one thing led to another. If there was a plan beyond that it didn't come from me."

Deanna supposed she deserved the arch look, given the way she was throwing accusations around, but it ruffled her feathers because she'd just been looking to get laid and forget about the sixteen year old bitch who'd been using voodoo to string her even bitchier classmates up like those ducks in the windows of Chinese grocery stores. Which was maybe the point.

She ate another spoonful of ice cream and nudged the second pint towards him.

"Eat. Before it melts."

Warily he peeled back the lid and plastic, declining to lick it, the heathen, and he took a small spoonful off the top.

"It's good," he said, he sounded surprised.

Surprised and delighted like he'd expected it to be the next best thing to giant toad vomit and was excited to be proven wrong. God help her, she thought it was cute.

She turned back to her own ice cream, hunting for a nice big chunk of cookie dough.

"So, I never did ask, what was a guy like you doing in a dive like that?"

"Why didn't you ask?" he countered.

Deanna shrugged, "Didn't care. And it seemed obvious. Stand-up guy in a seedy bar. Cliché's are cliché's for a reason."

He nodded, fiddling with his spoon.

"I had a fight with my best friends. We said some things. Hurtful things. Dragged up bad memories. This whole trip has been an exercise in forgetting and they made me remember. I was angry, I wanted to forget, to lose myself again."

"Yeah, alright. I get that. So why me?"

"A pretty girl swaggered up to the bar, wearing confidence like a cloak and I was lucky enough to catch her eye. She made me laugh," he said with a shrug, "It's a combination that isn't as easy to find as you might think."

"Oh gag me, Romeo," she said, sticking her tongue out to defuse the moment and make him laugh again.

"Next time," he offered, toasting her with his ice cream and leaning back in his seat. "For now you could tell me what it was we just set fire to and why it came after you."

Maybe it was the accent but he had a way of asking that made a flat out order seem like a request and Deanna found herself telling him the whole sordid story.

"So the girl had her brother's corpse bound in a death curse," he muttered.

"That's my guess," said Deanna, "Revenants are summoned to enact vengeance. They're not like zombie slaves they're more like the grandfather of the terminator."

"The terminator?"

"Y'know, 'I'll be back.' Will not stop ever until you are dead? That sort of thing."

"Right."

"Anyway, she wasn't powerful enough to bind more than one of those things, and I was planning on blowing town in the morning."

"So soon?"

"Job's done. And me sticking around would raise some…awkward questions with local law enforcement."

"Where will you go?" he asked, scraping at the sides of his carton and not looking at her.

"California," she answered, "My dad was working a job there, our kind of job, last I heard from him anyway. And that was weeks ago now."

"You're worried."

"Nah," she said, grinning determinedly, "My dad's tough. He can handle himself."

"You're worried," he repeated, not accusing, just insistent, punctuating his knowing look with a slow savouring scoop of his ice cream.

Annoying know-it-all bastard.

"Okay fine, I might be a little worried," she said throwing her hands up, "Is that a crime?"

"Of course not."

"It's probably nothing," she insisted, "He's probably just—working. He gets focussed like that sometimes just, eyes forward doesn't see anything but the job. He probably just forgot to call."

Harry didn't say anything, just squeezed her ankle through her boot briefly.

And Deanna didn't need any of that shit.

"Gotta pee," she said sliding out of the booth abruptly and telling herself that the clack of her boot heels on the laminate flooring didn't sound like running away.

The "ladies room" was around the side of the kitchen, down a treacherously narrow set of stairs. The lock was broken and it was predictably both disgusting and out of toilet paper.

Deanna hopped up onto the countertop and pulled out her cell. She'd call dad. He'd pick up this time and she'd drag the sweet piece of ass she'd collected from New Orleans to the nearest roadside motel and they'd have a filthy sex marathon and when they were both ready to kill each other she'd haul ass to the next job dad threw her way and after that nobody could accuse her of running away.

Nobody.

She swore and flicked on her phone. One new message.

She swore again as she checked the number and realized it had a California area code. Probably a payphone. Probably dad. And if he wasn't using any of his other, other burner phones that meant that he was on to something. And it wasn't just whatever was out ganking dudes on the blacktop in Jericho, he only got like this about the thing that'd killed mom.

She stabbed in the passcode for her voicemail and glared ineffectually at the wad of toilet paper on the floor in front of her, swinging her boots as she listened to the message, a ball of ice and barbed wire worry settling itself in her gut.

Whatever had killed mom. It wasn't a pissed off spirit or some hungry creature feature. It was big league. Old and powerful.

And Deanna had a hard time convincing herself that it wasn't more than her dad could handle. She hit seven on her phone and the message played again in all its staticky EVP laden glory.

"Deanna...something big is starting to happen...I need to try and figure out what's going on. It may..." here dad's voice was almost completely unintelligible, but Deanna could guess what dad was saying, only one thing put that kind of carefully leashed anticipation in his voice these days. "Be very careful, Dee. We're all in danger."

We're all in danger. That meant Sammy too.

Deanna sighed and played the message again, trying to think.

It was tempting to just go get Sammy. Dad was missing, the thing that'd killed mom had maybe resurfaced and Deanna didn't want to deal with this on her own. She didn't want to find dad face down in a ditch somewhere.

Or worse she didn't want to be left at loose ends chasing her tail trying to find a man who didn't want to be found.

She swore and kicked over the trash bin, sending more balls of wadded up tissue scattering across the floor and stomped back upstairs.

Harry was still sitting in their booth picking thoughtfully at the last dregs of his ice cream, and looking up when she stomped over. Hands shoved into her pockets.

"Something wrong?"

"I got a call. I'm headed to Jericho. You wanna tag along?"

She had to give credit where credit was due. He did take half a second to consider all the potential meanings of 'tag along' if the slight frown and the way he searched her eyes like he could actually find answers there was any indicator.

Giving up he gave her a shrug and said: "Okay, but just so you know I'm a little rusty at the whole fighting evil…thing."

"Don't worry you can just stand there and look pretty," she offered, "Unless it looks like whatever this thing is about the kill me, then you should hit it with a telephone."

He laughed again. A surprised little snort that he tried and failed to muffle behind the back of one hand.

"Well alright then," he chuckled, standing, "Lead the way."

AN: So welcome to the start of what promises to be an epic, herein you will find cisswap/sexswap/rule 63ed Winchester sisters, AU from the season one pilot onward. I've spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about Deanna Winchester and this is the result. Please let me know what you think and drop me a review~~