A/N: Hey, guys. It's a little shorter this week, and it's coming later in the day than I usually like to post. Sorry! Something came up this morning, and it kept me preoccupied most of the day. Hope you like this chapter, though! It's for a lovely reader who asked to see something with Anna and Jack.

Thanks for all the follows/favorites/reviews. I appreciate you :)

Nature, Nurture, and That Gray Area (Will)

Anna is nineteen

Anna closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. The air felt shallow and warm. Much worse, though, it smelled bad. She wrinkled her nose. There was packed dirt beneath her bare shoulders and old planks of wood a few feet above her. She could sit up, but not straight.

She let out a long sigh and closed her eyes. Her head ached from a hit she'd taken earlier, but she was pretty sure she didn't have a concussion. If she did, it was only mild. She was still able to think straight. Her wrist felt suspiciously like it could be sprained, though. Those demons had not been gentle tossing her and Jack into the cellar. And that was the other thing… Jack.

"You doin' okay?" she called without looking behind her.

Jack had been curled up against the cement wall with his knees pulled to his chest since they landed here. He looked small, but Anna couldn't help thinking of him as dangerous too. He looked young. He looked small. But he was a nephilim, and he was Lucifer's son, and he'd been known to blow up from time to time.

"I think so," came the quiet, timid voice.

Anna nodded to herself and put her hands under her head so she could recline more comfortably in the dirt. She was content with his answer and was prepared to spend another twenty minutes or so in silence before she asked again. Hopefully the boys would find them before too long, but considering that they'd thought they were after an entirely different creature, and considering that they'd thought this family wasn't any real kind of lead- which was the entire reason they'd let Anna and Jack come here alone- odds were good that their rescue would be a bit slow.

"Are you?"

Anna startled a little. Not because Jack scared her, but because she hadn't been expecting him to speak. "Am I what?" she asked, propping herself up on her elbows and craning her neck and shoulders around so she could see him. She wondered if he'd been speaking to her all along, but she'd missed the first part of what he'd said.

Jack looked down at his feet, and Anna's eyes followed his there. He was wearing a pair of shoes that they'd gotten at a thrift store, but they were in decent condition compared with a lot of the shoes she'd worn as a kid. "Are you… okay?" Jack asked again, slow and deliberate, his eyes moving cautiously up to meet hers again.

"I mean… yeah," Anna replied, easing herself back down to recline in the dirt again. Her head was throbbing again just from having raised her upper body, and she hoped the boys would hurry up. "I'm fine."

"Okay," Jack said. He had his arms crossed atop his knees, and Anna tilted her head back so she could see him just in time to watch him rest his forehead on his arms. She'd seen him do the same several times since he'd moved into the bunker with him.

For a while, Dean had been adamant that she stay away from him altogether, so despite that they'd technically known each other for a few months now, Anna still felt like she was only just meeting Jack. It made her feel socially awkward, an experience that was made worse by the fact that he looked and- sometimes- acted her age. She knew on some level that he was actually a baby- a literal infant- but that meant nothing when he looked like he could be a college student. There were parts of the way he spoke, walked, and looked at people, though, that served as helpful reminders of his true age and naivety. And this- his awkward attempt to ask if she was okay- was enough in this moment to remind her that he was inexperienced in the world and, more importantly, that he was trying really hard to be good and say what people were supposed to say.

Normally, Anna would have been content to just lay on the ground and think some more, maybe try to come up with a plan to get herself and Jack out of the cellar in case the boys were somehow kept from them. But she knew Sam and Dean would find them, and she needed a distraction from the pain in her head and leg. So, instead, she crawled on her hands and knees until she was sitting next to Jack with her back to the wall, keeping her sore wrist against her chest despite that using one arm made it much harder to crawl.

"You want to talk?" she offered.

Jack lifted his head and turned to look at her. His eyes were watery. He answered her question with a question that meant yes. "Do you think I'm a bad person?"

Anna swallowed. Somehow, this hadn't been what she'd been expecting. But both her brothers had weighed in on this debate heavily over the past few months, and she'd kept remarkably quiet about the whole thing. She had a stance… sort of. She just hadn't voiced it, because it didn't really matter. She'd known all along where they would end up. Not because she'd known whether Jack would go evil- she still didn't know that for sure; none of them did- but because she'd known that his usefulness would outweigh his potential dangerousness by enough for both her brothers to vote against killing him.

Funny, she'd agreed wholeheartedly that they shouldn't kill Jack as long as Mary was in the other world, and neither of the boys had asked her why despite knowing that Anna held a grudge against their mother.

"I don't think anybody's bad, Jack," she said, rubbing her temples with the fingers of her good hand. She felt tired already, and she'd been the one to start this conversation.

"Even Lucifer?"

"Lucifer doesn't count."

"Because he isn't human…" Jack said, and it sounded like it was halfway between a question and a statement. "But I'm not human."

Anna shrugged. "That's not what I said. Lucifer is literally where the word bad comes from. He's the embodiment of evil. Of course he's the exception to the nobody's bad rule."

"But if he's where my grace comes from, then don't you think that makes me an exception too?"

It was some real food for thought, and it left Anna silent for a minute. She came up with an answer pretty quickly, but she took a little longer to decide whether it was a stupid thing to say or not. She didn't know whether she believed her own reasoning until she started speaking. "I don't think so."

Jack was looking at her with a combination of hope and confusion that Anna found disconcerting. She was usually the one who held that look in her eyes, staring up at Sam or Dean or Cas and begging silently for an answer that would make everything better.

"If we're talkin' genes, I won't lie… everything I learned in Freshman Bio went in one ear and out the other. But, you know, this one seems like basic math to me. You've got some Lucifer in you, sure," she said, and watched Jack flinch at even the name. "But you've got some Kelly Kline in you, too. If that's fifty-fifty, the good's gonna cancel out the bad, and all that's left is you, Jack. Your choices, your actions, your beliefs, your desires."

"What does that mean?"

Anna tilted her head to the side, letting it rest against the cement wall behind them. It was cold all around them, and she shivered. "I haven't figured that out yet. I don't think anyone could know yet. You're too young."

She couldn't believe she'd said those three words that had haunted her since she was a kid. You're too young. How many times had she thrown a fit as a toddler because she wanted to do something grown up? How many times had she snuck out as a teenager because she wanted to do something the boys still deemed her too young for? How many times, even now, would she roll her eyes and bite her tongue when she reached for a beer and was reminded of her age? But she hadn't said the words in that way. She'd said them in a hopeful way, a freeing way, not a constraining one. Or so she hoped, at least.

"I want to be good," Jack said.

The way he spoke was simple, but it was layered the way her own speech had been for most of her life. It was layered with real problems and pain, with the weight of a world too heavy for young shoulders.

Anna lifted her head from where it was resting against the wall and bent it forward so she could look at Jack's face. He was looking at the ground ahead of their feet, concentrating, looking almost stern in his seriousness.

She wondered if he would ever get to be an actual kid. He'd said he'd had to grow up fast, but Anna wondered if he would get to bask in his naivety and feel some real joy sometime, or if he would always look so serious. She felt a hopeful itch in her stomach. She wanted him to get to have fun sometimes. It made her realize what she really thought of him. She thought he was good. Or she thought that he wanted to be good and that that was enough. She thought it was unfair, everything he'd been forced to confront in the first year of his life.

She thought it was an injustice that she was familiar with but had never come to understand.

After all, she'd watched Sam succumb to fear and hope and rage once a long time ago, and that had all stemmed from a place much like this one. But that vague consideration of what her brother had been through was the extent of her memory of what had gone down all those years ago. She'd been too young at the time. Too young in the way that Jack was. Young enough to be scared and curious and hopeful.

That fracture of a memory was enough to make her feel a new hope too, though. A hope that she- and Sam and Dean and Castiel- could change somebody's fate. One more time. That was their thing, right? Team Free Will.

"You said it," she told Jack solemnly but with a sliver of a smile to accompany all the melancholy they were practically drowning in. "You want to be good."

She sighed, tired, and she felt safe enough to reach out and put a hand on Jack's shoulder. It was a little awkward, but it was awkward like making a new friend, not awkward like there was a real possibility that if the person you were touching didn't want to be touched, they would disintegrate you… and that was progress.

"And you haven't done anything wrong yet. Not deliberately," she amended. "So that desire to be good. Right now, that's you. That's who you are."

Jack looked at her, and he put his hand on her shoulder, obviously feeling the need to reciprocate the touch somehow. Their arms crossed in a way that made the contact even more awkward. But Anna just snickered at the clumsiness. Her laugh made Jack grin like he'd been given important approval, and her own smile softened with the appearance of his.

Jack wasn't bad. He couldn't be bad. He was too young.

La Fin