Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s never been clean. How could it be? When the whole matter is centred around death — in which there is rot, and filth, and flesh.
Horrific things can fester under a hunter’s skin, but they’re tameable. You’ve seen many wounds on your brothers’ skin fester. Rashes, lumps, pimples. Once, after sweating in the same clothes for days on end, Sam’d had a boil the size of a golfball on his back, just by the upper point of his left shoulder blade. He’d worn his plaid shirt backwards and bit into the crummy leather of his belt as you slid a scalpel over the yellowing bump. Through a hair-thin line, pus oozed and trickled over your squeezing thumbs. The bacteria had built up and was now stinking up the motel room. But you hadn’t minded much, it wasn’t as bad as the one Dean had hidden in his armpit — you weren’t sure what was more sore, the boil he sported or the amount he complained.

The sweat accumulated on a hunter’s scalp turns hair greasy beyond compare. You constantly look drenched, unclean all the time. Like an unkempt dog. When drunk women run their fingers through your hair under dim bar lighting, you’d pry them away. Embarrassed by the utter sheen of neglect built up, coiling behind your ears and sticking flat to your neck, the sides of your cheek. Other women— proper women, were clean. They didn’t have to fight their brothers for first wash in a motel room. They had their own racks of shampoos and conditioners— hair routines, that’s what magazines encouraged. To help replenish what was atop your head, framing your battered face. What your hair saw was flimsy soap suds, dish washing liquid if you were feeling fancy.

Autopsies, corpses, slabs of meat lain atop slabs of metal. You saw your first dead body in a morgue on your eighteenth birthday. Dad had blessed you with a fake ID and a visit to the local memorial hospital. You remember — it was a man, attacked by a ‘wild animal.’ A werewolf. The man’s stomach was bloated by air, his eyeballs sunken beyond the rims of his skull. His skin was greyer than tarmac and cold like marble. Dean had laughed when you stumbled outside — green in the face and puking in a bush. Your dad had rolled his eyes, patted you roughly on the back to get the chunks out of your quivering mouth.

Nowadays, dead people were the norm. You often found yourself in long, white coats, prodding at limbs that dented at the faintest touch. You’d handled a human brain, a human’s pair of lungs, a heart. They’re bigger than you’d think. In the palm of your hand, a mass of veins and sinew, browned from a lack of oxygen. They’re squishy, yet firm. And heavy. A dead person’s heart in your hand. A child’s is lighter in comparison, but the weight is unbearable.

What’s inside a body, the bones, they stink too. Like musty paper, or soiled napkins. You’d been digging up graves since you could hold a shovel, practising in the back of Bobby’s scrap yard. You’d be bent over, breathing haggardly, as Sam held a torch to beam over the seams of a coffin. You’d be coated in dirt, have a few pale worms flung at you by Dean. And then coarse salt is poured over a ribcage, and squirted with lighter fluid. A match struck, a flame igniting over those bastard, smelly bones. Knee deep in someone’s coffin, rustling over femurs, spinal cords and jaw bones, knocking a couple teeth loose. You think to yourself — that’s inside me too. Compacted beneath muscle and tendons, I have a skeleton too that one day will be seasoned by my brother’s salt and purified by his open fire. One day, you know, my skin will be cold, and a fire will not bring me back to life, I will be surrendered to smoke, and drift into my brothers’ flaring nostrils. One day, I will be a limp hand strewn by the side of the road. Hunters are roadkill waiting be chucked off the back of God’s pick-up truck.

Chapter Text

Most days it feels like the rest of the world is happening inside a room you can’t get into. A big party you weren’t invited to. People have favourite sports teams, you know this to be true. Most bars you and your brothers stop in have a game playing on a crackling television above the bottles of liquor. Men gather around tiny tables and pound their fists, cheer like pack animals, howling at the scores displayed on screen. You laugh at their enthusiasm with Dean, who makes fun of their fan behaviour. But inside, you’re astounded. These fans, they have time dedicated to unravelling a sport’s team history, have enough faith in certain players to make bets. They know the managers’ names, the rules of the field, the logos, the right terms to use, the right chants to screech. And you know nothing. Nothing to cheer for.

Drifting apart after fights was common to you Winchesters. You were the peacemaker once, getting in the middle of three very angry men, but you were their blood, and when they went low, you would go lower. When Sam went to college, escaped the clutch of your dad, you were stuck with him and Dean, now the only occupant of the backseat. The door had been left wide open after your little brother’s departure, and yet…you were glued to these angry men, glued inside the frame of that car.

When Michael, Lucifer and Raphael were reigning terror upon your lives, that’s when the fighting got rough. Dad was dead, it was just the three of you. Neither one of you wanted to say yes to the archangels looming over your shoulders, but none of you could say yes to making someone a sacrifice. You’d fought with your older brother before — about responsibly, about Sam, about your father, about mistakes. You’d called him a bastard, a clone of John. He’d called you a bitch, another clone of John. Punches were thrown — Dean won’t hit a woman, a human one at least, but you, his sister, you’re fair game. And you punched back, head butted him too.
And with one black eye you stole a car and drove off, watching your brothers get smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror.
Raphael, whom was to take you as his vessel, wanted to isolate you. Wanted you separated from the hairless apes you were bound to.
You went back, of course, after giving them the cold shoulder. Yet, even betwixt their tall, familiar frames, you were still tied together by grief. For what exactly? A life away from this hefty weight upon your shoulders? You’re a Winchester, you are the epitome of an epic Gospel. There is nothing for you outside this car, these men, this fate. Don’t be so silly. As your friend Castiel had once said: ‘Freedom is a length of rope. God wants you to hang yourself with it.’

But hunters, they are inbuilt with longing. For connections, proper educations. Opportunities to flee whatever mess the Winchesters cast upon the Earth. You’d sought all those things once — as a young girl, swapped between a mix of schools across the country. Always the new kid with the worst grades. No favourite subject, always a lack of homework, always a mountain of detentions.

Romantic connections — it’d happened, once. A girl you bonded with whilst living in a scabby motel. She claimed you were dating, that you’d be her wife. You were fourteen and the world felt so big, and her love made it seem only brighter. But she was rich, or at least, richer than you. She had a porch, a couple of dogs, and competed in ballet. Shame gobbled you up when she asked ‘Where do you live?’ Because you didn’t live anywhere, and yet you had stayed in every motel in Northern America. Traces of you lingered in empty motel pools and the insides of housekeepers' vacuums. That girl found your stagnant rebuttal to share yourself ignorant. A waste of her time.
She became just another good thing turned sour by your dad’s existence. You were whisked away to another town, another case, and never saw that girl again.

Bobby thought he had seen you at your worst — ravaged by claws, ripped by bullets, bruised by your dad’s fists. But on one of the worst days of your life (or, second life? After Castiel had hauled you from Hell, you weren’t sure if it was regeneration or simply the hamster wheel being readjusted) he found you, not injured, but empty.
Both your brothers were dead. Michael and Lucifer had obliterated them in a pissing contest, and left you with two bodies to stare at and apologise to.
On that day, after you had buried them, Bobby found his girl in her most harrowing state of being. Her final chapter.
Bobby found you out in his scrap yard with the barrel of a rifle under your chin.
You were calm, stood straight, looking ahead at nothing through the shell of the Impala.
You simply didn’t know how to carry on. Without them, you didn’t think you were very much.

The rifle was ripped from your hands. Bobby liked to believe you gave it to him, but your grip had been solid, and the yank had shot a bullet into the sky.
He wrapped you in a blanket and heated up a pot of soup from his pantry.
‘You should have let me do it.’ You had said through chattering teeth, your actions finally catching up to you.
‘The world needs you.’ He’d said. ‘I need you.’
‘They needed me too, look where that got them.’
Bobby then yelled in your face, stricken with absolute grief that he could have lost you too. John’s second eldest, Dean’s little sister, Sam’s big sister. His surrogate daughter. Bobby berated you, cursed you relentlessly.
Loneliness in a hunter will turn love into anger, make them sink their teeth into anyone that comes close enough to being family.

When Sam and Dean came back, thanks to whoever was on your side, you didn’t mention what you had done that night after burying them. Bobby didn’t tell them either. It would’ve only made everyone feel awkward.