When they first walked into her bar, Ellen didn't recognize them.
Two young men, one taller and darker than the other, but the way they moved around each other suggested they were brothers. Her grip on the gun stiffened, and she glared out at them from the darkened closet. Whoever was breaking into her bar, she would give 'em hell.
"Looks empty to me," the taller one said.
The other picked up a shotglass and inspected it, sniffing. "Yeah. Me too."
Thirty seconds later, her fiery, blonde daughter was jabbing Dean in the back with a .45, and she had her gun aimed straight at Sam's head. She didn't know those were their names, then. She learned that later, after she found out more about them, after they started coming more often.
After she realized they were John Winchester's boys.
She'd always figured John Winchester would die before he turned fifty, so it was no surprise that he'd been missing for months. He had been too desperate, too full of the memory of his wife, of that aching, burning desire for revenge. Ellen had only met Mary once, but she would never forget the woman. Graceful and beautiful and funny and smart, Mary had seemed like an angel, like something beyond the mundane trappings of this world. Ellen disliked her for it, but everyone else seemed to love her.
Then again, Ellen hadn't disliked her at the time. At the time, she'd been so caught up in Mary's charm that she felt like she couldn't breathe, like she might float away at any given moment. The hatred came afterward, after John Winchester had come back from a hunt without her husband, and Ellen had lain awake in bed all night thinking black thoughts about how Mary Campbell-Winchester's sacrifice had driven one man to madness, and several more to their deaths.
John Winchester was gone, and she fervently hoped never to see him again.
The boys, though, they were curious creatures. They stood close to each other, guarded, with one hand on their guns, and when they were together she could feel the power thrumming between them. That unspoken connection. If Sam lunged, Dean was at his side; if Dean fingered his knife, Sam was instantly ready to back him up. Ellen thought it was remarkable, the peculiar intensity of their bond. She also thought it was unnatural.
And she resented them, not only because they were Winchesters, but because they were putting her daughter in danger. Wherever any of their kind went, destruction followed. They were like a hurricane, and Ellen hated that they could turn her life upside down so easily. They didn't seem to realize the effect they had on other people, the trail of broken bodies they left behind them, or if they did, they buried it at the bottom of their minds. The same way every other hunter dealt with guilt: by ignoring it.
Sam, more than anything, disturbed her. On the outside, he was all smiles and politeness—he was intelligent and well-meaning and he tried so damn hard, so much harder than his brother to be kind, to be trustworthy, to be normal. That was the worst part; his innocence was entirely without artifice, his compassion terrible in its honesty. His destiny, the horrible darkness lurking inside him that he tried so desperately to fight—he didn't even realize any of it. She pitied him, but she also feared him in a way that she didn't Dean. Dean was normal, for her standards. He was broken, and screwed-up, and traumatized, and had more issues than Playboy and Sports Illustrated combined, but in every respect other than his relationship with his brother he was exactly like all the other hunters she'd ever known. Not safe, necessarily, but familiar. Sam was not familiar, and he certainly wasn't safe.
She didn't like Jo around them. In one way and in one way only was she like Dean, and it was that they had both tried desperately to keep a loved one from ending up a hunter. For Dean it hadn't worked; Ellen still maintained a fleeting hope that one day she would convince Jo that this nightmare was not for her. But her daughter was the stubbornest person she'd ever met, except for maybe John Winchester, and by God if she wanted to run away and hunt with Dean (Ellen hated the chemistry between them, hated the way she wouldn't meet his eyes and he would try to pretend he didn't care about her) then she would.
Ellen is many things. She is a hunter, a mother, a wife, a widow, a sister, a bartender, an innkeeper. She is crazy and desperate and angry and loving and wild and lost. She is bitter, and she hates the Winchesters.
Sam looks up at her, catches her eye. Smiles, because he notices that she isn't talking, and her stomach turns. He's so kind, so unaware of what is coming for him.
She hates the Winchesters, but she used to feel compassion for them. Her heart used to move for them, a long time ago, back when it was still beating, because she recognized the haunted look in their eyes and recognized their last name and recognized their father and knew, deep in her bones, that something evil would come for them.
They were Winchesters, and darkness followed them like a roiling storm cloud on the horizon. Death was perpetually knocking on their door, demons forever trailing them, chaos and destruction always a breath away. Because they were Winchesters, they were trouble.
But she sees the look in each brother's eye, the strange security they find in each other's presence.
And she thinks, with a grim smile, that it's ironic. How the brothers shadowed by devastation have the most uncommon love, the kind of love that shines out of their very souls and blinds those around them, the light in the middle of the darkness that keeps them standing when the nights are long and cold and evil things howl in the shadows.
Ironic, that the fiercest love she has ever seen comes from the two most tragically doomed boys she has ever met.
Ellen tosses back a shot, lets the alcohol burn its way down her throat and numb her so that the only light she's thinking about is coming from the bare, flickering bulb above her head. She needs to be far drunker than this before she can stomach thinking about them for more than five minutes.
She has little love left in her heart. There is some for Jo, some for her son; there is a tender place that she saves for her husband, may he rest in peace (unlikely). But the vast majority of it is consumed with rot, taken over by the bitterness that has gnawed at her ever since she met John Winchester so many years ago.
He killed her husband, and she is bitter. He ruined her life, and she is bitter. His sons stole her daughter, and she is bitter. Their love is unparalleled, and she is bitter because it is not hers.
Ellen takes her last sip and turns off the lights. She won't sleep easy tonight.