One-Shot: Declared Dead
Title: Declared Dead
Author: annabeth_gray
Pairing/Character(s): OFC, Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester
Rating: R
Warning(s): torture (off-stage, non-graphic description), character death (off stage), brief nakedness
Word count: 1.326
Disclaimer: Characters are the property of Eric Kripke, et al. This drabble/fic was written for fun, not for profit.
Summary: "Nineteen-year-old Wendy Jansen has been declared dead six months after her disappearance and the brutal murders of her parents and five younger sisters. No bodies were ever recovered." They found her before the fuckers killed her.
AN: Originally posted on ff.net. Set sometime during Season One, after Bloody Mary. This makes them 22 and 26. My OFC has only just turned twenty, not that anyone's noticed, seeing as she was being tortured by demons at the time.
I wrote this because I couldn't stop wondering about what would drive me to become a hunter. I'm totally not the sort of person who'd go off hunting demons even if they killed someone I love. It was extremely difficult to imagine me with a gun in my hands that does something more than squirt water. (Although those could be useful for the Winchesters, provided the water was holy water. Hmm, there's an idea...)
Anyway, enjoy the ride...
They get her out before the fuckers kill her. Not that there’s any hurry if that’s the deadline (pardon the pun), seeing as they were being very careful not to break their new toy beyond repair.
Because she doesn’t have anyone left and when they find her they’re three states away from her home, and besides, she’s been declared dead, she gets to travel with them for a while.
Much, much later she’ll think she was really fucking lucky to have known them, but for the first few days she hates them. Hates them for not getting her out quicker, hates them for not saving her family, hates them for not letting her die. Hates them for not having gone through the same torture.
After the first week she calms a little and, selfish as it sounds, when she sees the way they torture themselves, she feels a hell of a lot better.
The first time she witnesses one of Sam’s nightmares they’ve been on the road for five days. Dean’s driving and she and Sam both doze off after a few hours. She’s not completely out, just listening to the music and the steady rumble of the car and the way Dean sometimes mumbles things to himself, and when Sam kind of whimpers in his sleep and sobs a name, it doesn’t really register.
Then Dean says “Fuck,” and suddenly she’s a lot more awake.
“Sam? Come one, man, wake up. Sammy, come on!” His voice grows louder by the second but Sam doesn’t react so she leans forward and pinches Sam’s shoulder, hard, and then sits back feeling smug and satisfied at the loud (and most definitely awake) yelp from Sam.
She grins at Dean in the rearview mirror and knows it’s ugly and doesn’t care. “Nice to know I’m not the only one with bad dreams. So, what’s your story, Sammy?”
The look Sam shoots her is withering and her grin widens, lips stretching over teeth. “Oh, come on. You’ve seen mine, all up close and personal. Why not show me yours?”
He keeps the glare up for a moment, then he nods, ignoring the way his brother’s looking at him. He turns in his seat to look out the window. “Alright, fine. My girlfriend, Jessica, was killed the same way my mom was. Pinned to the ceiling, bleeding, and then going up in flames. And I saw everything.”
She nods. Considers her next words for a long time. Nods again. Isn’t surprised to find that two hours have gone by. “When you found me, they’d just gotten started with the day’s program.” The tiny ever-observant part of her not occupied with the memories and the emotions that come with them, that part notices the horror on their faces. “They’d done something to heal me up, but only about halfway because it hurts worse, reopening a wound, than making a new one. The Goons were wearing mom and dad, and the leader was wearing Barbara that day. I hadn’t seen her until then, and I guess I was sort of hoping she’d gotten away. It came in acting like it was her. And it was doing pretty good until it told the Goons to take off the bindings and they obeyed. That was kind of a dead give-away. I mean, what demon, no matter how dumb, would follow the orders of an eight-year-old human child? I have no idea how much time passed until you guys showed up. It made me fight them. It made me hurt them so they wouldn’t hurt me. As long as I don’t sleep, not thinking about it works. Not thinking about hurting them, about seeing them die, about how fucking long it’s been since I last saw them alive.” She blinks, comes back to the present. Tries to ignore the familiar screams in her head. Dean’s face, what she can see, since he’s determinedly staring out the windshield and she’s in the back seat, is expressionless, but his grip on the steering wheel is turning his knuckles as white as his face. Beside him, Sam is turned around in his seat, staring at her and very obviously horrified.
“What do you mean, they’d only just gotten started?”
She stares right back at him, raises an eyebrow when she realizes he’s expecting an answer, fills her voice with the most blistering sarcasm she can muster. “Sammy, they learned how to torture someone in fucking hell. They spent a couple centuries down there, each of them, torturing, getting tortured. They know all the tricks. Believe me, what you saw wasn’t the worst of it. Not nearly.”
“Dean, pull over.” Sam’s voice is calm.
Dean starts, glances at Sam, pulls over. When the car comes to a stop, Sam finally looks away from her and bolts out the car so fast he gets tangled in the seatbelt.
She watches him through the closed window as he bends over and starts retching. He’s not eaten a whole lot today so his stomach is empty pretty quickly and he spends a minute or so dry-heaving. Then he wipes his mouth on the tissue she hands him and rinses his mouth with the bottle of water she keeps within reach at all times.
They don’t speak again until they say goodnight at the motel that evening.
She falls asleep immediately, and when Dean comes into her room to wake her, she is well rested and if she dreamed she retains no memory. There are perks to travelling with the Winchesters, and she enjoys that, but it doesn’t make her like them any more.
The way Dean stares, open-mouthed, when he walks in on her naked except for her socks, now that’s a damn good reason to like him.
He wasn’t, she thinks, at all put off by the scars and the bruises and the healing wounds. She could get used to that.
She has been travelling with Sam and Dean for three weeks now, salting her own doors and windows for two, and just a few days ago she dug up her first corpse to salt and burn. Cleaning up all the salt when they leave annoys her so she decides to test some theories.
They stay in a tiny town somewhere in Colorado for longer than planned because the job turns out not to be as simple as they’d thought, so when one of the waitresses at the local diner calls in sick because of a broken leg, while the other one is on maternity leave, she offers to help out for a while. The owner and the cook are more grateful than she thinks is reasonable, but she doesn’t mind the extra cash and so long as she’s friendly and smiles a lot the locals tip pretty well.
She buys the cheapest hardcover notebook she can find, because the tattered old thing Dean’s always carrying around has been pretty useful. She also gets some climbing rope with a core of rubber tubing and a lot of salt, and spends her first day off cutting the rope into pieces about a yard and a half long and stuffing them full of salt. From then on she uses the salt-rope to cover the doors and windows.
At some point she starts carrying a length of rope around with her wherever she goes. When the make-shift whip proves effective in warding off a nasty spirit a few weeks later, Sam and Dean make their own salt-rope.
When she mentions finding a way to braid iron into the rope, the brothers share a long look, grin at her and start working out the logistics. Two weeks later there is a new note written beneath the first draft of the iron-rope.
It says SUCCESS!! thickly underlined. Years later she will realize that the date scrawled beside the word was her twenty-first birthday. It also marks the first anniversary of the day she met Sam and Dean.
AN: Currently a one-shot. I may change my mind about that later, provided I get the inspiration.
I have one and a half extra chapters, but I'm not actually promising anything beyond posting what I finish, when I finish it.
Love, Annabeth
Challenge: Write your own 'How I became a Hunter' fic. Post a link in a comment.