*FLASHBACK*

Hailee was lightly roused from her sleep by a large and calloused hand slapping against the bare sole of her left foot, that stuck out a way from under her duvet. She mumbled a little before punching her old and distinctly battered and broken pillow into a more supportive shape and turning over, with the hope of fending off the long hours of the day that loomed ahead with ignorance and blissful slumber.
The sounds of life were beginning to start up around her. Xavier's snores were brought to an abrupt end by a belly-trembling snort, that she guessed - from the sound of bare skin on skin - was caused by the same intervention that went against her own sleep; the shower pounded down onto the old mouldy tiles in the adjacent bathroom, attempting to drown out Boaz's howling to the radio - and everyone wondered what was up with his middle name, Beowulf - there was no denying that boy had a pair of lungs on him, regardless that they were tuneless. Mindlessly, she wondered how she had slept through the starting notes of her brother's morning routine.
"Hailee!" Her father's gruff voice cut through her drifting thoughts. "Wake up. We gotta hit the road before sun-up.
She muttered a half-hearted "yeah..." and allowed her fluttering eyelids to close once more. Just another five minutes.
There was the sound of the internal door closing as her father moved into the adjoining motel room, followed closely by the key turning in the lock. The door opened and there was a healthy waft of coffee and bacon. Hailee's stomach growled appreciatively and she heard her oldest brother's throaty chuckle.
"It's good to know that at least part of you is vaguely awake this morning, Hails."
Hailee slit one eye open and glared balefully at Isaac, watching as he closed the motel room door before loping good-naturedly across the room, grinning, his arms laden with breakfast for six. As he reached the edge of her makeshift bed on the floor, he nudged her knee with the toe of his boot, before lowering a polystyrene coffee cup and waving it tantalisingly in range of her nose.
"Come on, Barbie. Sit up."
Joints popping, muscles screaming and an uncomfortable crick in her neck making itself known, Hailee stretched along the thin camping mat that lay under her, yawned, and heaved herself upright. She grabbed the corner of her beloved duvet and pulled it up around her shoulders before the chill of the early morning and the dankness of her surroundings could truly set into her bones.
Gratefully accepting the offered cup from Isaac's grasp, she ran a hand over her face and blinked hard, attempting to wake herself up further before allowing her nerves to be invaded by the pungent, albeit stale, gas station caffeine.
"One day, I swear, I'm going to wake up in a lovely fluffy four-poster bed with not a single ache in my body." She grumbled, rolling her head on her neck a few times before taking a sip of coffee. Grimacing as the bitter liquid hit her tastebuds, she looked up at Isaac, who had taken a seat on the edge of the bed behind her. "And I'll be woken by a smiling servant with an Iced Caramel Macchiato on a silver tray."
Xavier snorted from the bed behind her. "Keep dreaming, princess." He stuck his foot over the edge of the bed and nudged Hailee's cheek with his toes.
She slapped him away with fierce abandon, coming very close to knocking over the tray of coffees in Isaac's hands - he frowned, swiping them away in the nick of time, "Careful, Hails!" - and Xavier sat up slowly, laughing at his sister's antics, incensing her further.
"I'll have a room all to my-fucking-self - at least! - and I won't be surrounded by fucking stupid, stinking boys!"
Xavier raised his eyebrows at Isaac, who was attempting to bury a grin. He opened his mouth but someone got there first.
"Hey!" A deep voice came from through the closed bathroom door. "Don't include me in that category! I'm sparklingly clean!"
Hailee barked out a short laugh. "Yeah, you just deafen everyone in the process!"
When nothing was heard through the aged and battered wooden door but a grunt of disagreement, she fleetingly wondered when exactly the howling from the shower had ceased - and how they had all missed the milestone in the family morning routine.
"Alright," Isaac said, always the pacifier, "how about you finish getting that caffeine into you before you bite anyone else's head off, yeah?" He stood up, ruffled her hair slightly and walked away smiling softly when she slapped his hand away.
"Jeez, is it that time of the month already?" Xavier snarked in what he believed to be a good-natured fashion, as he too stood up and headed towards the bathroom door to force their brother to get a move on.
Anger that she couldn't quite wholly justify bubbled up through her veins from the pit of her stomach in response. Hailee growled before slamming her coffee cup down, causing the lid to split off and the liquid to slosh down the sides and soak into the old moth-eaten carpet. She threw herself across the room and pounced into Xavier's back, forcing him into a wall and pounding once against his shoulders.
"You're such a dick!" She muttered, thrusting his head forward with the heel of her hand.
He began to fight back, grabbing at her calves as she clung on with her arms wrapped around his neck. But before the tussle went much further, two of the three doors leading into the room opened simultaneously.
Hunter Buck, the father figure of this particular clan, loomed in the doorway with the cold early morning sky silhouetting him, whilst Boaz emerged from the bathroom with his dark hair dripping onto the back of his neck, jeans slung low around his hips and a towel over his right shoulder.
Hailee froze as she caught sight of her father in the doorway. He was never best pleased when his children caused a scene, regardless of whether it was in public or not, especially when she was involved - he seemed to hold her to some kind of better standard than her brothers, most likely because she was a girl and didn't have the 'testosterone to run off by play-fighting or soccer'. Personally, Hailee thought of Hunter as a vaguely misogynistic man, who had been raised in a traditional family, and so did not take the abilities of women all too seriously. With the heavy desire to roll her eyes, Hailee loosened her limbs, allowing Xavier more room to breath and move. He would know that it was an unfair win - not that he would really care - but their father would not. Xavier caught a hold of her tank top and used this leverage to whip her around in front of him, slamming her up against the wall that she had previously knocked his head into. The pain that shot through her at the blunt force of contact with the plaster assured that she lost all grip on her brother, hanging like a rag doll a foot or so above the ground.
"What the fuck, Hails?" He yelled, practically spitting with rage, pushing his face right up to within a centimetre or two of hers. "What the fuck was that for?"
Hailee was still attempting to catch her breath after having all the air in her lungs knocked out. Gasping quietly, she looked up to meet his eye.
He shook his head, incredulous, "I swear to God, I will never understand girls. They're fucking nuts."
Hailee simply raised an eyebrow, her gaze meeting his and never faltering, her signature cocky grin sliding easily in to place. "Well, at least you've accepted that."
Xavier snorted, pushing away, and stalked into the bathroom, slamming the door closed so hard that a crack formed in the wall above the doorframe.
Hailee turned back to face the two other people in the room. Her father had moved further away from the door and now stood by the bottom of the first king-sized bed, whilst Boaz had stayed stock-still staring at the altercation between his siblings.
"Well, someone forgot his happy pill this morning," she jested, smirking a little.
Her father continued to eye her up, completely silent. As the seconds ticked by, Hailee's stomach began to turn, her face dropping at each movement of the second hand. It was always easier to handle when he exploded and yelled, screamed, threw things; but this silent side only came out in moments of incredulity or disappointment. Finally she decided to break the silence.
"Dad... Come on, we were just... He..."
Hunter just held up a hand and all the words that were stumbling over each other to find release from Hailee's tongue dried up. She swallowed their remnants, gulping heavily to pass them down her dry throat. It wasn't often that her father managed to assert his authority over his children now that they were grown up, but at times like this, when a number of them were resorting to childish methods, his shadow seemed to overtake their own and they were forced to fall back in line, much like they had when they were younger.
"Hailee Frige Buck." He said in a quiet, even tone. "What exactly do you think you were doing?"
Hailee felt heat rise up in her cheeks at the use of her full name. That card had not been pulled on her in a long time - however, she realised, not long enough - and it still made her feel about two inches tall at best.
"Dad, it wasn't... We were just..."
Her father simply raised his eyebrows and crossed his arms across his chest, waiting for his youngest to finish tripping over her words. Hailee cursed this about herself; get her flustered and all sense and rhythm flew out of her head, leaving her a mumbling, bumbling idiot. She paused, swallowing and taking a breath to collect herself before attempting to explain herself once again.
"It was nothing. Just some...stupid fight."
"What about?" Hunter's tone was clear and very reasonable, much like the man himself.
The fight flared back up in Hailee as she flipped back to the beginning of the fight. "He got me mad, and then tried to blame it on me PMSing! Just like he always does! And it just makes me so fucking mad!" Her eyes flashed, and she made no apologies for her language in front of her father, refusing to back down this time.
He looked at her hard and then quietly asked, "Are you?"
Hailee's face flamed and her jaw nearly dropped in shock. "Dad! I am not going to talk to you about that!"
"Why not?" He interrupted, seemingly unaware of my discomfort. "Wasn't I the one you came to the first time, when you were honestly scared that you were dying?"
Hailee's eyes widened considerably before she hid her face in her hands, whimpering in embarrassment. "Dad..." she muttered.
There was a low chuckle from Boaz's direction that he attempted to smother in a cough, but Hailee caught onto the sound. Her head snapped up, indignation thickly covering her embarrassment. She glared at her brother with such a powerful death stare that had he not watched her grow up and witnessed the developing stages of that look, he would have felt himself quake where he stood. He had the good grace to look vaguely apologetic. "Sorry, Hails." He mumbled, moving to cross the room to rummage unnecessarily noisily through his duffle bag for a shirt.
"What?" Their father continued, refusing to drop this particular vein of conversation. "Why does it bother you so much?"
"You don't get it! They all treat me different because I'm a girl! Not only that, but I'm the emonly/em girl. It's just another fucking thing to make me different, and it's like they think it means I'm not as good as them or something. And you know what? I'm sick of " /emIt looked as though her father was going to step in, but Hailee ploughed on, ignoring his attempt completely, determined to clear her chest of everything that she needed to say. "I'm just as good a hunter, I'm just as good a tracker; I'm better at research. I can fight like hell - I could their asses emany time/em. And yes, maybe I'm more in tune with my emotions, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It actually helps sometimes! You know that. Like the time I had to talk that death echo out of his loop; or when we have to talk to grieving family and friends - you know that they tell me more than they ever would you! And I'm allowed to get mad, it's normal. And it sure as hell does not mean that I'm PMSing. Sometimes that person is just being a dick!"
As she came to the end of her rant, silence fell in the room, leaving only the sound of running water filling the air as Xavier brushed his teeth. It seemed that Hunter had no idea as to how to respond to his daughter's outbreak, still not entirely sure about the motive behind her anger.
Boaz had finished getting dressed and was quietly rolling up his sleeping mat, sleeping bag and pillow, actively ignoring the tension between the other two people in the room.
"Okay," Hunter finally broke the silence. "I'm packed, so I'll go and get Isaac and Bonnie. You guys finish up in here. You've got twenty minutes after Xavier comes out, okay, Hails?"
She nodded numbly and he turned to walk out of the room.

There was a voice from over Hailee's shoulder. She frowned. That wasn't what had happened next. She had sat on the bed and waited in silence with Boaz until Isaac came out of the bathroom, but sure enough when she turned around now, Boaz was facing towards her.
"Hailee." He said, his face expressionless. Hailee was considerably unsettled by the lack of emotion that Boaz was displaying. The two of them had such a close relationship that there was always a semi-hidden smirk, or conversation through eye-contact shared, so to look at his face now and feel no connection to him whatsoever was deeply disturbing.
"Hailee." He repeated, his voice morphing into an unrecognisable but still vaguely familiar tone. His expression had not changed, but this unknown voice had flavours of panic and fear running through it.
"Hailee!" It came again, roaring through her brother's lips. Confusion began to whirl inside her brain, and as it did so, the world around her began to spin as well, leaving her with only the voice to hold onto.