As discussed in various online forums etc, this is an attempt to see how the show would have worked with female leads; that is to say, if it had always been intended to be about two sisters, not "Sam and Dean with tits".

I haven't included the teaser because it wouldn't really be any different, compared with the rest of it; I've attempted not to just write out the pilot with 'she' instead of 'he' and girl's names. The basic characters are the same, although there are differences, some subtle, some more obvious.

The Winchester Girls

1.

Alexis Winchester finished brushing out her short blonde hair and stared at herself in the mirror, wondering whether she really had to go through with this.

"Lex!" a voice bellowed from the next room; Dylan, her boyfriend of the past year, was getting impatient.

"Lex, get a move on would you? We were supposed to be there like 15 minutes ago. Alex! Are you coming or what?"

There was a laugh in his voice at her reticence, but she knew she couldn't put this off any longer and left the bathroom.

"Do I have to?"

She pulled a pouty face in the hope of putting him off the idea, but he just laughed and cupped her face in his hands.

"Yes. I keep telling you. It. Will. Be. Fun. And where's your costume?"

He looked over her denim skirt, Converse sneakers and star print t-shirt.

Dylan himself was dressed as a Zombie from 'Shaun of the Dead', complete with a vinyl record taped to his neck, as if someone had tried to decapitate him with it and it had gotten stuck. Despite the lashings of fake blood, he looked adorable.

"You know how I feel about Halloween," Alex told him.

"But not why," she thought to herself, and to avoid following up that thought, she let Dylan take her to the party.

It was rammed, like all campus parties she'd ever been to, and Alex found herself talking to a bunch of people she sort-of knew, people she'd shared courses with, friends of Dylan's. This guy, however, she was pretty sure she'd never seen before, but Dylan seemed happy enough to include him in the conversation. Or perhaps it was just that he was so proud of her he wanted to tell everyone, which was sort of cute but more than a little embarrassing.

Right now, he was offering up a toast.

"So here's to Alex and her awesome LSAT victory."

Alex winced a little.

"Alright, alright, it's not that big a deal."

Dylan put his spare arm around her and gave her a squeeze.

"She acts all humble but she scored a 174."

The guy, who'd clearly started partying a whole lot earlier than they had, squinted as he tried to work that out.

"Is that good?"

"Scary good," Dylan informed him, which didn't exactly make Alex any more comfortable. But she loved him, and she'd put up with much worse from people she cared about in the past. She tried to concentrate on the conversation in hand, rather than letting her mind wander.

"Great! So you can go to any law school you want," the guy was saying.

Alex smiled.

"Actually I got an interview here on Monday. If it goes ok, I think I got a shot at a full ride next year."

Dylan gave her another squeeze.

"Hey, it's gonna go great."

"It better."

Alex didn't want to spoil the evening anymore by being negative, but this was important in so many ways. Nameless Friend was still talking in that overly familiar way of drunks.

"How does it feel to be the golden child in your family, then?"

So much for not spoiling the evening.

"Ah, they don't know."

The guy's eyes widened in what was perhaps a bit of an overreaction.

"Don't know? I would be gloating! Why not?"

Alex tried not to give the honest answer to that, which was that she thought her dad and sister would be too busy chasing demons to give a rat's ass about some LSAT score, to put it mildly.

"Cause we're not exactly the Brady's."

The guy snorted.

"And I'm not exactly the Huxtables. More shots?"

Yeah, more vodka, that'd fix it.

"No, thanks."

Dylan put down his beer and gave her a hug, but carefully so as not to spoil his costume or cover her in fake blood.

"Seriously, Lex. I'm proud of you, babe. You're gonna knock 'em dead on Monday and you're gonna get that full ride. I know it."

Alex felt herself relax, wrapping her arms around him, letting her happiness seep in. OK, so it was some stupid Hallowe'en party where people thought it was fun to dress up like the things she knew all too well were real, but it wasn't like she was the only one with family issues. Dylan's dad had died when Dylan was in his teens, and her freshman dorm-mate Rachel had grown up with a violent alcoholic mother. Somehow Alex doubted that the reason for a parent's alcoholism being a little more domestic than demon-related trauma made it any easier to deal with when your mom knocked you about your whole childhood.

And her past was behind her; she was here now, she had her guy, and she had a real chance of the future she'd been dreaming of.

"What would I do without you?" she asked, sighing.

"Crash and burn!" Dylan announced happily, and kissed her.

Later that night, Alex was woken abruptly from a contented sleep by a sudden crash from the room next door. Instantly alert, she rolled out of bed, leaving Dylan sleeping, and snuck out the door.

Was someone trying to break into their apartment? And that was assuming it was 'someone' and not 'something'. Trying to stay calm, keeping her breathing shallow, Alex followed the shadow she glimpsed heading for the kitchen, and pounced.

The shadow fought back. Alex found her limbs responding to a fight situation almost automatically, but despite that, she was rusty after two years or so off the scene and the figure quickly pinned her to the floor.

"Easy there, tiger," her attacker declared, long black hair brushing Alex's face and Alex couldn't believe what she was seeing.

"Tara?"

Her older sister laughed and Alex didn't know whether to be relieved or furious.

"You scared the crap out of me!"

"That's 'cos you're out of practice." Tara sounded smug, and Alex found fury winning. Twisting her hips, she flung her sister off of her, flipping so that she was the one doing the pinning now.

But Tara was still laughing.

"Or not…Get off me, little sister."

Alex got to her feet, adjusting her sleep shorts.

"T, what the hell are you doing here?"

Her sister got up too, and Alex noticed she was dressed in her usual uniform of jeans, tight vest top and shirt, but thankfully not her heavy black boots, which would easily have put the fight in her favour over bare-footed Alex.

"Well," Tara replied, shaking out her hair.

"I was looking for a beer, but you don't seem to have any. Don't tell me the guy you've shacked up with doesn't drink?"

Alex raised her eyebrows.

"I'm not sure what's more offensive – your idea that a guy has to have a fridge full of beer to be a real man or that I wouldn't buy it myself."

"Okay, alright." Tara held up her hands as if surrendering.

"I came here 'cos we gotta talk."

"Uh, heard of the phone?" Alex replied, incredulous.

Tara snorted.

"If I'd have called, would you have picked up?"

They were interrupted from any more sisterly bonding by the light flipping on as a confused Dylan came in, his dark hair rumpled from sleep.

"Alex?"

"Hey, babe."

Alex found she was a little embarrassed by the situation.

"Um, Tara, this is my boyfriend Dylan."

Dylan, squinting without his glasses, blinked unadjusted eyes at the stranger in the room.

"Tara? As in, your sister Tara?"

The sister in question was eyeing bare-chested Dylan in a way that made the fury rise up in Alex again, but she kept a lid on it. For now.

"I love the Smurfs," Tara smirked.

What?

Then Alex realised that Dylan was wearing the novelty boxer shorts his brother had given him for Christmas the previous year. Trust Tara to notice that first of all.

"You know I gotta tell you," Tara continued, still staring at Dylan in a way that suggested, in a Tara turn of phrase, that she wanted to 'bang him like a drum'.

"You are completely out of my sister's league."

This time it took more effort to control the wave of pissed-off-ness. Alex was well aware of what other girls thought of Dylan, who fit nicely into the 'hot geek' category, had gotten used to girls openly flirting with him even when she was right there next to him, but, other than being a guy who breathed, Dylan was so not Tara's type. He was a science nerd working on a chemistry MSc and, well, to say that Tara liked bad boys was an understatement.

"Um, just let me get dressed."

Dylan turned to go back into the bedroom, but Tara, grabbing hold of Alex's arm, stopped him.

"No, no, I wouldn't dream of it…Seriously. Anyway, I gotta borrow your lady here, talk about some private family business, but, uh, nice meeting you."

This didn't help the rage, and Alex found herself saying:

"No, whatever you wanna say you can say it in front of him."

Tara raised her eyebrows and dragged her attention away from Dylan long enough to focus on her younger sister.

"Okay. Um…Dad hasn't been home in a few days."

This was what Tara has come all this way for? Wasn't like that had never happened before, and Alex had worked hard to try and distance herself from her family's problems.

"So he's working over-time on a "Miller Time" shift," she replied, dismissively.

"He'll stumble back in sooner or later."

But Tara was giving her a very direct look.

"Dad's on a hunting trip and he hasn't been home in a few days."

The penny dropped.

"Excuse us, Dylan. We have to go outside."

Alex hustled her sister out the door and down the stairs before her boyfriend could question their exchange, keeping her voice low.

"What the hell, Tara? I mean, come on; you can't just break in, in the middle of the night, and expect me to hit the road with you."

"You're not hearing me, Lexie. Dad's missing; I need you to help me find him."

The underlying anger bubbling in Alex's stomach stopped her noticing the note of definite worry in her sister's voice.

"You remember the poltergeist in Amherst, or the devil's gates in Clifton? He was missing then too, he's always missing and he's always fine."

But Tara persisted, turning back to face her sister on the stairs.

"Not for this long. Now you gonna come with me or not?"

Alex folded her arms, hardening her heart.

"Not."

"Why?"

Alex let out an exasperated sigh; wasn't it obvious?

"When I came out here to college, I swore I was done hunting for good."

"Oh, come on," Tara scoffed. "It wasn't easy, but it wasn't that bad."

Not that bad? Alex thought. Was she remembering the same thing? A hundred or more memories sprang up in her mind and she picked the one she felt most illustrated her point.

"Yeah? When I told Dad when I was scared of the thing in my closet," Alex reminded her sister.

"He gave me a .45!"

Tara didn't rise to this.

"Well, what was he supposed to do?"

"I was nine years old! Dads are supposed to tell their kids not to be afraid of the dark."

Tara rolled her eyes, opening the door to the street.

"Don't be afraid of the dark? What are you kidding me? Of course you should be afraid of the dark! You know what's out there!"

Alex tried not to let in the deluge of memories that accusation released.

"Yeah I know," she admitted.

"But still - the way we grew up after Mom died; Dad's obsession with finding the thing that killed her. We still haven't found the damn thing, so, what we're just supposed to kill everything we can find?"

"Works for me. We save a lot of people doing it, too."

Tara sounded proud of that, which was fair enough; she was a damn good hunter, but that wasn't what Alex meant.

"That's not the point. I want to help people too; that's why I'm working toward being a defence lawyer, not some vigilante with a shotgun full of rock salt."

Tara opened her mouth, no doubt with some smart-assed reply in mind, but Alex overrode her.

"You think Mom would have wanted this for us? Instead of playing with Barbie dolls and braiding each other's hair, we were learning exorcisms in Latin and melting silver into bullets before we'd finished elementary school. We didn't have a childhood; we were raised to be soldiers."

This time it was Tara who got angry; this wasn't going the way she wanted, although she'd known before coming to Stanford Alex wouldn't exactly be thrilled to see her.

"That what you wanted? To be just like everyone else? That why you're pretending you can live some normal, apple-pie life?"

Alex sighed.

"No. Not normal. Just – less crazy. Safe."

Tara still couldn't understand, even after all this time.

"And that's why you ran away?"

Her choice of words was deliberate; another accusation to fling at her sister. Two years wasn't long enough for the bitterness of their parting to have faded.

Alex didn't rise to it; if anything, her anger seemed to be decreasing as Tara's increased.

"I just wanted to go to college, like millions of other kids. It was Dad who said if I was gonna go, I should stay gone, remember? So that's what I'm doing."

Tara did her best to shove aside the emotional baggage associated with that old argument, to focus on the matter in hand.

"Yeah well Dad's in real trouble if he's not dead already, I can feel it."

She couldn't keep the worry from her voice.

"I can't do this alone."

Alex raised her eyebrows.

"Yes you can."

"Yeah. Well, I don't want to," Tara snapped and Alex relented.

"Alright. What was he hunting?"

Tara led her across the parking lot of the apartment block to the black Chevrolet Impala parked rather incongruously there, popping the trunk. Alex felt her past almost physically catching up with her at the sight of the family car and it only got worse as Tara revealed all the guns, knives and associated crap hidden beneath the false floor, searching through them.

"Now, where the hell did I put that thing?"

"So when Dad left, why didn't you go with him?" Alex asked, genuinely curious.

If there was one phrase to sum Tara up, it was 'Daddy's Girl.' Maybe not in the conventional sense - they didn't have the easiest of relationships - but she'd practically been his shadow since she was out of diapers. Tara didn't seem to notice this aspect of Alex's question.

"I was working my own gig," she replied, still rummaging in the trunk, almost dismissive of what she was imparting.

"This voodoo thing down in New Orleans."

Alex was taken aback.

"Dad let you go on a hunting trip by yourself?"

She hadn't thought that would ever happen. Not so much because John Winchester was so protective of his daughters he wouldn't risk them taking on something alone, but because she could practically hear his voice in her head nixing the idea because 'you'd just screw it up without me there.'

No matter how capable the sisters proved themselves to be, how hard they worked, studied, fought; neither could remember their dad ever telling them he was proud of them. Not when Alex made the Honor Roll, or when Tara came first in the sprint event of a State Track and Field competition, or made the gymnastics team only a week into transferring to yet another different school. Not even when they started accompanying their father on hunts, saving his ass on more than one occasion.

The closest Alex had ever gotten to making her father proud was when she'd been suspended from school – she forgot which one – at age fifteen for breaking the jaw of some guy who'd tried to cop a feel.

John had chewed her out, of course, for drawing attention to herself, for the trip he had to make to the Principal's office, but he'd also given her a sideways look that was as close as he ever came to saying she'd done well. Tara had been less subtle, and celebrated Alex's moment by sneaking them both into a bar and teaching her pool; possibly the most normal family moment they'd had in years.

Tara gave her baby sister a look.

"I'm not a kid, Lex. I'm twenty-six."

She finally found what she was looking for, tugging a book out from under a heap of ammo boxes and extracting a newspaper clipping, which she handed to Alex.

"Alright, here we go. So Dad was checking out this two-lane blacktop outside of Jericho, California. About a month ago this girl disappeared. They found her car but she'd vanished, completely M.I.A."

Alex skimmed the article, but couldn't see the touch of anything supernatural in it.

"So? Maybe she was kidnapped."

Tara handed her a second clipping, then a third and Alex felt herself going cold, and not just because she was outside in her pyjamas in the middle of an October night.

"Yeah well, here's another one in April; another one in December '04, '03, '98, '92. Ten of them over the past 20 years, all girls, all same 5-mile stretch of road. Started happening more and more so Dad went to go dig around. That was about three weeks ago. I hadn't heard from him since, which is bad enough."

Tara pulled her cell phone out from a pocket in her travelling bag.

"Then I get this voicemail yesterday."

Alex hadn't heard her father's voice in years, and despite everything, she felt a pang go through her as the voicemail started up.

"Tara, something is starting to happen," John's recorded voice said.

"I think it's serious. I need to try to figure out what's going on."

A wave of static obscured his next sentence.

"Be very careful, Tara, we're all in danger."

The message ended, and Alex realised what the static was.

"There's EVP on that, isn't there?"

Tara grinned.

"Not bad, Lexie. Kind of like riding a bike isn't it? So, I slowed the message down, ran it through a Gold Wave to take out the hiss, and this is what I got."

She replayed the message, but this time a different man's voice could clearly be heard.

"I can never go home."

Alex let this sink in, knowing that now she'd let it get this far she had to see it to the end now. So much for a nice weekend with Dylan.

Tara slammed the trunk shut again, her anger flaring up again.

"You know in almost two years I've never bothered you. Never asked you for a thing."

She'd tried her hardest to keep a lid on her temper, but it was getting more and more difficult. It wasn't like Tara hadn't had ideas of her own about leaving – at age seventeen, she'd voiced the idea to her father of signing up, getting some extra combat experience, but he'd shot that down in an instant, and Tara had, reluctantly, agreed. Hunting was the family business, and she was a part of it.

Why didn't Alex get that?

Alex brushed her hair back from her face and let out a sigh.

"Alright. I'll go. I'll help you find him, as long as I get back by first thing Monday. Just wait here."

She turned to go back inside, but Tara stopped her.

"What's first thing Monday?"

"I have this…I have an interview."

Alex didn't want to elaborate, but Tara kept pushing.

"What, a job interview? Skip it."

"It's not a job interview, it's a law-school interview, and it's my whole future on a plate."

Alex failed to keep the irritation out of her voice, and Tara the scepticism out of hers.

"Law school? You're serious about that?"

"Yeah. So we got a deal or not?"

Tara gave her a hard stare, but she nodded and Alex went back in to pack.

Because old habits really do die hard, Alex had kept a few things hidden around the apartment that Dylan didn't know about, and she retrieved them now, tucking them into pockets of a bag along with the most comfortable, practical clothing she owned and whatever essentials she thought she'd need. Copying Tara's outfit, she dressed quickly in jeans, a shirt and boots, feeling like she was slipping back into her old life far, far too easily. So she snuck one of Dylan's plaid shirts, too, so she could feel a little like he was with her on the trip.

Dylan came into the room quietly to stand behind her.

"So you're taking off? Is this about your Dad? Is he alright?"

Precisely the sort of conversation she didn't want to have with her man.

"You know, just a little family drama," Alex replied, trying to sound dismissive. But Dylan knew her too well, despite all the stuff he had no idea about.

She'd told him her father was an alcoholic who didn't approve of her abandoning her family to go to college, and that her sister had sided with him against Alex, which was mostly true. Just, you know missing out a few details.

"Your sister said he was on some kind of a hunting trip?" Dylan persisted.

"Yeah, he's just deer hunting up at the cabin and he's probably got Jim, Jack, and Jose along with him. Tara and I'll go bring him back."

Alex hated lying to him when he trusted her so much, but she couldn't tell him the truth, she couldn't.

"What about the interview?" Dylan asked and Alex felt her stomach twist with tension.

"I'll make the interview. This is only for a couple of days."

Didn't know if she was trying to convince him or herself. Zipped the bag closed and went to walk out the door, but Dylan caught her by the shoulders, concern radiating out from him.

"Lex, please, just stop for a second. You sure you're okay?"

"I'm fine."

She tried to smile in a carefree manner, but didn't fool him for a second.

"It's just…you won't even talk about your family and now you're taking off in the middle of the night to spend the weekend with them? And with Monday coming up which is a huge deal for you, babe."

Alex shouldered the bag and reached up to put her arms around his neck.

"I know it sounds crazy, but everything's gonna be okay. And I'll be back in time. I promise."

She kissed him goodbye, and then she walked out the door to join her sister.