Disclaimer: If it's posted on FF, it's most likely not original. At least not completely…
Also, I would like to say, Pulse does not happen and Papa Winchester does not die. I get tired of reading "re-writes" of the seasons that don't actually change anything expect by adding another character and changing a little bit of the dialogue here and there. So to help you get an idea of how different this will be…well, as I said, John will not be dying. At least, not by trading his life for Dean's.
Los Angeles, California
Max covered her ears, trying to ignore the noises that she was hearing. It was pointless though. The government had created her to pick up footsteps from a hundred feet away, so the sounds of her sister being stabbed to death from ten feet away were absolutely deafening. Even from behind the door she could see absolutely everything that was going on. She could envision his cold, black eyes as he murdered his own daughter.
Lucy.
She had once again taken the fall for Max. It was no different from any other time. Since she had met her on vacation at her aunt's, Lucy had been very protective of her. She invited her back home as a stow-away in Los Angeles. Her mother had found out about Max and decided to cover for the girls, thinking that a friend would be a good thing for Lucy.
It had been. It had given the young girl a new purpose in life when her father started getting progressively worse.
For some reason, Lucy had gone to great lengths to keep Max from getting punished from her dad, as if she was trying to keep something pure in her life. Max was still trying to figure out what was normal in this life. She kept quiet most of the time and observed. One thing she had learned, though, was that she did not respect Lucy's father, Jack.
He stayed at home all day with his wife making the money that he effortlessly drank away day after day. The girls were in charge of the house chores for the most part. Max knew that all males were not like this because she had been raised in the military facility, Manticore. And while she hated her CO, Lydecker, with every fiber of her transgenic being, she also respected him. He was not lazy. He did things with a purpose, though sometimes at the expense of her unit's lives. And though Lydecker had been more deadly of the two men, at least Lydecker had rationality. Jack could be fine one second, and then he could explode for no apparent reason the next.
Like he had done today. He had been taking Lucy into his bedroom to "help her clean." Max knew what he really did to her in there—what with her transgenic hearing. By the way Lucy acted afterwards, Max had been able to pick up that the sort of things he was doing was not normal. She even realized that it was most likely very wrong.
Today, when he had come for Lucy and placed his hand on her shoulder as he looked at Max, Max had been unwilling to hide the hatred in her eyes for this man. She had glared him down, feeling bold from the knowledge that she could take him down without a sweat with nothing more than her thumb and forefinger. She had put up with a lot right after her escape in her desperation to blend in and her lack of knowledge of the "outside world." But she was tired of seeing the way Lucy acted afterwards. She was positive this was wrong.
Jack had seen this defiance in her eyes, as had Lucy. Lucy had shoved Max out of the room, begged her with her eyes to not make things worse, and worked on slamming the door. And in that split second before the door had shut, Max had seen Jack's eyes flash solid black.
The smile that had been on his face was enough to scare her frozen out here, tears rolling down her face.
The horrible sounds of knife slicing through skin, tendon, and bones made her weep like no torture method back at Manticore had been able to do.
She knew her best bet now was to run. She had heard the gurgling sound of her sister's lung being punctured long ago. Any movements aside from the knife had stopped. She was positive Lucy was dead. Mostly likely, she would be next to die.
She just didn't know if she cared any more. This was the life she had nearly died to escape to. Was everyone around her destined to die?
There was the sound of wood breaking downstairs. Max didn't turn to acknowledge it though. She should have been full of pain, but she was empty inside. She didn't want to try anymore.
Thumps sounded as someone ran up the stairs. Max knew they could see her now, standing in the hall with tears running down her face. They had to know that someone was being stabbed behind the door she refused to leave. It could have been Lydecker there to drag her back to Manticore, and she wouldn't have cared a bit.
It wasn't Lydecker though.
Rough hands grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her to face him. She was looking up in the face of a gruff and rugged man. He had the deepest, brown eyes.
"Are you okay," he asked even as his eyes scanned her over to answer the question for himself. He must think she was in shock or something. Maybe she was.
She tried to speak. "My sister," she said but her voice was broken.
His eyes saddened as if he understood her though. "I need you to go outside for me. Can you do that? Run from here and find somewhere safe."
Max nodded her head, and the man pushed her towards the stairs as he turned his attention toward the door. Max watched his movements.
Living with Jack had long ago taken the reaction to immediately obey a command out of her system. He took advantage of her obedience in the beginning, and she had learned from Lucy that all orders did not need to be followed unless necessary.
For some reason, Max did not feel the need to follow these orders either.
She watched as the man held a gun in one hand, and pulled what looked similar to Jack's canteen of whiskey out of a pocket with his other hand. She caught the inscription of a cross on the container as it caught the light. There was no other time for observations though, because the man was raising his foot and kicking Lucy's door open. He entered the room in a familiar fashion. He clearly had had military training, and that was what it took to break Max from her stupor.
She stepped up to the doorway.
She saw the man splashing a clear liquid into Jack's face. She was shocked when it started to vaporize and burn Jack. He thrashed around, faster than what Max believed humans could move. When he stopped thrashing, he focused on the man with a cruel smile and pitch black eyes.
With a jerk of his head, Jack had flung the man into the wall, forcing the man to drop the canteen and his weapon.
Jack smiled and walked up to him. In a voice that was much deeper than Jack's, he said, "John Winchester. I don't believe I've had the pleasure of meeting you personally, though I've heard a lot about you."
The man, John, who couldn't seem to move from the wall spoke back. "If you've heard so much about me, then you know you're about to go straight back to hell where you belong."
Max was unsure about what was going on. She had been living with this family for a few months, and she had never seen things like this before. Jack hadn't been able to move things with his mind, so why could he now? She was confused as to what was normal and what was not. She had read books in the library to try to understand what had to be kept secret and what was not a secret. Even in the books where characters could be telekinetic, it was always a kept secret. She was sure it wasn't an everyday thing for people to be able to move things with their minds. If it was, it was something that Manticore would have trained them for. How could she help this man who had probably saved her life if she couldn't even get close to Jack?
Her best plan of action was a sneak attack. John's gun was laying a few feet from the doorway, but she didn't even think about going for it. She had never liked guns since she had seen one of her sisters shot down the night of their escape from Manticore. That left her with the canteen of liquid.
Jack laughed, startling her and raising goosebumps up and down her spine. It was a very predatory, scary laugh. "That's rich," he said with a chuckle. "You are pinned to a wall. What can you possibly do?"
John smirked. "I have backup on the way."
Even Max could tell that was a lie, but she figured that the two were distracted enough that she could be his backup. She knew that to be able to get past Jack and to the canteen that she would have to run faster than she usually would in front of humans. This could put her identity in jeopardy, but she owed it to the stranger who had saved her.
She blurred into the room, kicking the gun over to the wall near John. She made it to the canteen just as Jack was turning his head away from the sound of the gun sliding across the floor.
She opened the canteen and threw the water at Jack. He hissed as the water seemed to boil off of him. She splashed him again. John fell from the wall, but she now had a problem as Jack was turning his attention on her.
"Well aren't you an interesting little thing," he said as he advanced on her. It was as if he hadn't lived with her for the past three months.
She went to splash more liquid on him but realized it was empty. She looked down and saw that most of it had flowed out on the floor when it landed open on its side.
"What's wrong kitten, all out of juice?" Jack purred.
There was the weird sensation of a jerk from the middle of her stomach, and the next thing she knew, she was flying backwards through the air and colliding hard with a wall. Bits of plaster rained down into her short brunette hair.
"You messed with the wrong demon," Jack said as he advanced on her, his eyes flashing back to black.
Max wondered what he meant by demon.
There was the sound of a gun being cocked just as she had thought she was going to die.
"Obviously not," John said from the side of Jack. Then a blast went off in the small room.
Max slid down the wall and to the floor landing somewhat clumsily. She had a hard time hearing, but what she was seeing was shocking her to the core.
Jack had fallen to his knees as his chest was blossoming red, but he had frozen there as his head tilted back and was letting out an ungodly storm of black smoke.
John was shouting something, she could tell from the way he was gesturing at her, but she couldn't really pull her attention from the black clouds that seemed to be heading towards her.
She wondered, is that what Jack had meant when he had said demon?
And then the furious smoke was slamming into her through her mouth, and she blacked out.
She came to and realized her eyes were already open, staring at John.
He had a gun aimed at her.
This confused her. Had he not seen the way she had tried to help him?
She opened her mouth to ask him so, but was shocked when she laughed instead.
She could feel her lungs moving and air being forced out in a chuckle, and it sounded vaguely like her voice, but it definitely wasn't her.
"What's wrong, Johnny boy? Can't shoot a little girl?" she found herself asking him.
John cocked his gun. "I wouldn't be too sure," he said, but he didn't fire.
It was too late though. Max raised her hand and John was suddenly being slammed back against the wall.
So it really was a demon that had been inside Jack. And now it was inside her. It was in her mind, controlling her actions.
She immediately started compartmentalizing her mind. This was something Manticore had taught her to do with pain, but she figured that if she didn't try, then there really wouldn't be a way out of this situation.
To her surprise, it didn't take her long to find the foreign invasion. It was a putrid, black energy in control of her body, but she was trained heavily on how to control her own body. She threw her mental self against the energy with a great shove.
It heaved her physical body over. She actually made her hand twitch for a split second, but then the black energy hit back and held onto the control with an ironclad grasp.
It righted her body back up. John was giving her a wary stare, but the demon was too busy looking inside now to care what John was seeing on the outside.
"You think you can control me, little girl?" the demon seethed in her voice. "I am older than you by centuries!"
Max ignored that. She could easily read the distraction tactics in his words. He was worried, even if he was centuries older.
Max shoved against the black mass again. It caused them to fall to their knees in the physical world.
No, not their knees. Her knees. And her body.
"What are you?" it croaked with her voice.
Max just let out a small mental smile and slammed into the weakened mass. She had it flailing now, inside her own body. She felt for a second she could trap it, but she didn't want to risk what would happen if she had to fight it back under control again. Now that she had command of her body, she could feel the toll everything had taken on her.
Instead of keeping it trapped, she flung it from her. She dropped to her hands and knees as the smoke poured from her body.
She stayed down on the floor panting until her arms gave way. She fell to her side, staring across the floor at the mangled body of her sister.
She heard a rustle from where John had been before she blacked out completely.
DASDASDASDASDASDASDASDAS
She came to after a nightmare about Lucy, only to remember everything with a startling abruptness and realize that the reality of what had happened was so much worse.
Even as Max thought of the good memories she had of Lucy, images of her last view of her sister, stabbed and mangled, were superimposing their selves over top her thoughts. She couldn't get the horror of losing yet another sibling, albeit an adopted one, out of her head. Surely demons and murder and abuse were not the things Zack had in mind when he came up with the idea of an escape plan. If it was, they had traded one hell for another.
Her one good thing on the outside had been taken away. She felt like she could not get that innocence back if she tried.
Living with Lucy and her parents had been the only thing she had known since her escape from Manticore. She wasn't sure what she would do now.
Max didn't even realize it, but Lucy's mother, Joann Barrett, could very possibly still be alive. She had been at work while all of this had happened. Max could stay with her, after all, she had taken her in once before.
Max thought about having to deal with the emotional damage that a mother would suffer from finding out about her entire family being killed. It would destroy most mothers. When it came to Lucy's mother though, Max wasn't entirely sure. Whenever things got a little tense in the household with Jack's temper spiking, Mrs. Barrett would always seem to have mandatory overtime at work. It seemed to Max that Mrs. Barrett went to a lot of trouble to keep her ignorance about the extent of Jack's temper out of mind and existence—something that made Max respect her almost less than Jack Barrett himself.
The thought of seeing Mrs. Barrett become so upset over her daughter's death, one that would have happened regardless of whether or not Jack was being controlled by a demon and one that could have been prevented by Mrs. Barrett having enough guts to leave her husband would probably incite Max.
After being around Mrs. Barrett, she figured that not having a mother at all was probably better in the long run anyway. She knew how to keep quiet enough that she could get by and blend in now. She had gone to the store with Lucy and her mom many times. She saw how children acted. She may not understand why they acted like they did, but she figured she could mimic a girl her age if she needed to. And sometimes, when Jack would pass out in his room, Max and Lucy would watch television. Surprisingly, cartoons were quite educational to someone who didn't know a thing about normal life and culture. Certainly, the commercials were the biggest clue that Lucy's family was not quite right compared to the numerous clips of happy families and caring parents.
Max often found herself wishing her unit had found families like that to take them in. She couldn't bear the thought of her siblings going through the same things she had to, although she was the youngest of them all and they often felt the need to protect her—hence to why they ran away when they did. Max was beginning to have seizures, and it got progressively worse until she was no longer able to hide it. The guards had seen her and were going to take her away. Zack, the unit leader and brother, had rebelled trying to protect her. If they took you away when you were having seizures, then you were most likely not coming back. Zack didn't agree with that, so the unit broke out and escaped.
"Good, you're awake," a voice said.
Max opened her eyes, wondering how he had known she was awake. She was on a bed in a room that looked similar to what families on vacation stayed in. It was big and open and had two double beds with a door that led to a bathroom and a door that led outside. The quickest and most unobstructed way out, however, would be through the large window next to the front door. It was closer to where John was, but if she risked going to the bathroom, it was possible there wouldn't be a window in there at all. If that was the case, then John would have her cornered in a room and all the advantage of surprise would be gone. No, if push came to shove, Max would be taking the large window and John too, if he got in her way.
Max focused back on the man who had saved her life. He was tall and gruff. He was somewhere in his low forties, but he seemed ages younger than Jack had. He had a hard edge to him, probably from the military training she had seen in his movements as he went to take the demon on. It kept him muscular and fit. He didn't have any obvious weapons on him, but he also was facing her with his arms folded and his legs crossed at the feet. It left many possibilities open. He could have a gun just on the side of his chest, a holster on his ankles, and any number of things strapped to his back—though, from the way he leaned against the wall, it didn't seem likely that he had anything large there or his posture would be different.
"You're a very attentive little girl, you know that," John said with a slight smile.
Max met his eyes squarely. She had already shown her secrets in a way when she had distracted the demon for him. There wasn't much point in pretending with him.
"How did you know to come to Lucy's house?"
His eyes seemed to be just as calculating as hers. "I had been tracking something that led me there."
Max sensed that was a rather evasive answer. "The demon," she said.
The man sighed, as if that had answered one of his questions but that he didn't necessarily like the answer. "Yes, the demon."
Max was glad that he was not talking to her like most adults she had met on the outside did. It was as if he sensed that she was more capable and intelligent than normal. In a way, it reminded her of her old commanding officer, Lydecker. This was definitely a dangerous man. Max knew the less she said, the less he would know about her, but she had so many questions. "That demon could move things with its mind."
"Yes," John said. "They are very dangerous. We are both lucky to be alive."
"I don't believe in luck," Max said almost reflexively.
John's eyes seemed to spark. "Oh really? What do you believe in?"
Max knew that he was amused, but Zack's response was so ingrained into her, that it had been an automatic reply. So, she explained, "I believe in a well-thought out plan executed with precision and skill."
"Sometimes," John said after a moment, "you don't have time to plan."
Max frowned. "Going in without a plan puts the whole team in jeopardy."
"It does," John said with a nod, "But it also saved you."
Max thought about that. Her unit didn't have a plan either when they escaped Manticore.
"So," John said, "That wasn't your family back at the house?"
Max kept her face neutral.
"You called it Lucy's house," John went on explaining. "I'm assuming Lucy was the girl. I'm sorry about your loss."
Max looked down and gave a short, brisk nod.
"Do you have somewhere else to stay?" John asked after a moment of silence.
The moment of truth was here. Max wondered what she should do. This man had burst into Lucy's house without a plan or any backup because he was trying to save lives. He put his life at great risk. Max doubted he would be okay with letting a nine year old girl just go off on her own.
"Perhaps some of your own family," John prompted.
"They died in a house fire when I was a baby," Max said, giving the story she had come up with for Lucy and her family. Usually, everyone seemed to buy it and would react with sympathy and discomfort. John seemed to become even more intense. Max felt the need to offer more information. "I lived with my grandparents after that until I was eight. One died by a drunk driver, and the other died a month later from a heart attack."
There was a heavy silence in the air. Max got the distinct feeling that John wanted to question her but was holding back for some reason.
"I never met my mom's parents; they died before I was born. I don't have any aunts or uncles."
"So you're alone," John concluded.
"Not exactly," Max said. "Lucy had a mother. Joann Barrett. She was at work."
"Oh," he said. "You want to stay with her?"
"Yes, sir," she said. "I think that would be best. I can walk from here if you give me directions."
"Nonsense," he said. "I'll drive you."
Max already guessed he would say that, so she just nodded and got up from the bed. She wasn't physically injured, but she still felt sluggish and slow.
"That was some stunt you pulled back there," John said.
Max was surprised that he hadn't brought it up sooner.
"You're a brave kid."
Max went with a partial truth. "My grandfather was a ranger in the army. When I saw you enter the room, it broke me from my shock."
John looked like he had guessed as much. "I was a marine. Did your grandfather give you training?"
"Yes," Max said, slowly moving her muscles and calculating how slow she was. "He was strict, but he usually had his reasons."
John gave a nod at her. "A lot of people feel that way after a possession."
"What way," Max said, putting a name to what the demon had done to her. She had been possessed by a demon.
"Disoriented, sluggish, out of sync," he said. He paused for a long time before he said, "Were your grandparents hunters?"
Max frowned, put off from the question as it clashed with what she knew about hunting. She tried to keep her answer neutral. "My grandfather liked to eat squirrel and deer. He said it was healthier."
John nodded but didn't say anything more on the subject.
Max wondered what had caused him to ask such a random question. They had been talking about the demon possessing people, and then all of a sudden he asked if her grandparents were hunters.
Then Max remembered what he had said about following the demon, as if he had been tracking it.
"Well come on, short-stop," John said. "We should probably get you back to Mrs. Barrett."
"Max," she said.
"Max," John said with a smile. "Well, come on Max. Daylight is wasting."