SPN fanfic: “What is and What Could Be”, [PG-13, AU] . [Dean, Sam, Mary, John, Sam/Dean] . Part 1/2
Title: What is and What Could Be
Author: Evalangui
Characters & Pairings: Genfic about Sam, Dean, Mary and a bit of John. Except last excerpt which is also non-graphic Sam/Dean slash.
Category: Alternate Universes
Warnings/Enticements: Incest, AU, genderfuck in the form of Girl!Dean.
Rating: Pg-13.
Spoilers: 4x03 “In the Beginning” (I mean the fact that Mary and her parents were hunters, not her deal with Yellow-Eyes because with Dean’s warning and the knowledge of the YED’s return and what her interruption could cause I would have to believe Mary was a complete retard to enter the nursery and since Mary is the only female character in Supernatural who is not a victim, a slut or a evil I’d rather refrain.)
Length: 8987 words.
Summary: A number of things that never happened to the Winchester family but that could have.
Disclaimer: Transformative work.
What is and What Could Be
Evalangui
Dean it’s not given to think of what is not. He’s a hunter, his mother is dead, his father is dead. He will never have a home beyond his car and his brother is the most important thing in his life. The rest Is Not. And then he fucks up and ends up in this perfect reality in which he has a mother and a really hot girlfriend a normal life with a job and a house and his father is still dead but he didn’t die for him, he died from a heart attack (probably in the middle of watching a baseball game or something totally white-picked-fency like that), without knowing the grief and the evil that haunt the world. His brother kind of hates him but he is still his brother and will follow him anywhere, Dean is sure he can make it up to him because in this universe his brother’s girlfriend is not dead and Dean didn’t have to drag him after their mother’s supernatural killer and how could Sam not forgive that he fucked his prom-date if he could forgive that? So it’s pretty cool, except it’s not real and Dean has always wanted to be happy but he can’t be happy with nothing but the truth.
Still, when he gets back, not all the time because his life is not exactly boring, but, sometimes, when he can’t sleep or when he and Sam are at the library researching and he inevitably gets bored and distracted, or laying in bed with yet another injury… Sometimes Dean thinks about that world and other worlds and all the things that…maybe, are, some other place.
He was happier as he was before but, of course, he had always known wondering didn’t do any good.
*-*-*-*
There’s this one world in which Dean Winchester is never born. It’s something completely stupid for it to happen to a professional like Mary but she’s rusty, the extra weight is hard to balance and she stumbles on the way home and has a bad fall, wakes up in the hospital and there’s no Dean no more. When she gets pregnant again she doesn’t name the child until it’s born and when she does she uses her father’s name, not her mother’s, for her Dean will always be her son. When she’s killed six months later, her husband leaves the baby with his mother. He is dead a year later, Sam can’t be his family, can’t be his life, he doesn’t even know what has happened beyond the fact he misses his mother.
When Sam’s thirteen his grandmother dies, he has uncles, aunts and cousins but not other real family. He doesn’t know anything about his past, he can’t guess his future beyond the next few weeks. He just lost the only person who ever loved him, the only one he ever loved.
His aunt and uncle arrange for him to be sent to a foster home. They explain they can’t afford a third child but that they will always visit and make sure he’s fine. They do, too, for the most part, they show up for his birthdays and invite him over for Christmas. And Sam’s adoptive parents aren’t bad. Sam likes them, with time he grows to love them with the distant affection of most children for the people who pay for their needs. He’s a sweet child, a good student, but he can’t stop fighting his classmates. When asked he just can’t explain the rage that fills him sometimes.
Nobody ever tells him of what hides in the dark, he’s never afraid, and he should be. At twenty-two he’s at Stanford, he meets a girl who looks a lot like his unremembered mother and he falls in love with her. She loves him back and when he dreams of her in fire he tells her about it. Words are no use against a demon, though. Nobody’s called him Sammy in his life without losing some teeth, he has no training, no knowledge and there are no arms to take him out of the burning house, Sam can’t stop staring at Jessica’s face disappearing in the flames.
*-*-*-*
…where Mary doesn’t want a second child and they have a normal life. Too normal for John Winchester, who drinks more and more as time goes on, not for any reason beyond the fact that he hasn’t got a mission, the only interesting thing in his life are his baseball games with his pals. Mary grows colder the more whisky and vodka there’s around. Dean is always out.
When he really gets out at eighteen, gets a job and then a place of his own, he discovers the wonders of independence. He will fuck anything with two legs, he will hustle and lose his pay and drink way too much for his mother’s taste. He’s happy, he’s friends with a few of his workmates. He watches his father play baseball and they watch TV together. He praises his mother’s food and shows up at home often. He feels lonely but he won’t admit it.
There’s no demons, nor monsters in Dean Winchester’s life. There’s no tragedy because his mother is not dead and his father not bent in revenge and he can date and stay and he has a home that doesn’t have wheels. Unhappiness doesn’t require tragedy, though, and the emptiness that somehow fills Dean’s life, the way he can’t never seem to go beyond the friendly into the intimate with anybody. That’s enough to start him drinking any old night, Metallica rattling the ceiling, wishing he knew what he is missing.
Dean never offers his soul to a demon for someone else’s. Problem is, he wishes there was someone he would do that for more than anything.
*-*-*-*
..where Dean Winchester is born a girl, she loves her baby brother, she takes him out the flaming remains of her home on the last day she’s a normal girl and she never looks back. She loves her father too, and forgives him for forgetting she’s a child and a girl and a person too, sometimes.
By the time she’s eighteen she’s a seasoned hunter who begs and widdles to get Sammy, who’s just shot up past her, left out of their more time-consuming cases so he can stay wherever they call home and do normal stuff, because that’s all Sammy seems to crave and that’s all Deanna has to give. John always falls for her Mary-blonde hair and pleading eyes and Deanna is, after all, more than enough back-up. Until she’s not, she’s not fast enough putting a silver bullet through a werewolf, her aim is perfect but her legs are, in this universe, just those few inches too short. John doesn’t die but his right arm is hurt badly enough that while it’s still there, he can barely use it. He tells Deanna it’s not her fault, he even remembers and reminds her she’s just eighteen and that even a grown man could have been a few seconds off time.
“But I’m not a man, I will never be a man, that’s the fucking problem!” - Deanna screams, and then cringes, because he’s hurt and in pain and it’s her fault. Growing up in a world of men, soldiers, Deanna has only been told not to swear by teachers. The teachers also fell for the pretty smile and huge eyes and Deanna has the foulest mouth of all her family even when she hasn’t got a reason to.
And John stares at her, trying to come up with something to say, and Sam swipes into the room, takes a look at them and goes to Deanna and enfolds her in an embrace. She lets him, she allows herself to be weak, a little bit, for a few seconds.
Their father looks at them and announces he’s going to see Jim and will be back in a few days. A few minutes later they hear the front door close and Deanna disentangles herself from her brother.
When he comes back he tells them they are going to be staying at Pastor Jim’s while John recovers, Deanna can start going to the local college in the fall if she wants. Deanna doesn’t want to, Deanna can’t, she’s a hunter, she might not be good enough at it, but she’s certainly worse at school, at anything else. Except… Sammy, Deanna’s good at taking care of Sammy and Sammy is, predictably, ridiculously excited at the idea of some permanence, so she goes with it. She even goes to college, takes classes that are useful for her job. Mythology in Modern Culture and Anthropology 101 and even Intro to Psychology because half the hunting is convincing people they are seeing what they are seeing and you can be trusted to help them.
She wants to go back to her real life, to hunting, but can’t make herself ask her father to take her with him in the easy jobs he’s been taking while he “rests up”. She’s spent all her life following orders like good little soldier and she can’t just stop now. She takes up a part-time job at the grocery store, men keep hitting on her and sometimes she fucks them, for the sex and for the passion that her life is so lacking in. Jim teaches her to cook and her love of food seems to translate well into the kitchen, but she feels homey and girly and stupid. On her nineteen birthday, after Jim and Sammy and her have had cake and done the birthday rituals, she goes out to a bar and hustles pool, for once nobody gets too grabby and she calls it a good night.
She’s settling in, getting to use it, nothing is particularly appealing. A week later she finds something not quite right on her perusal of the local newspaper. It turns out to be a run of the mill ghost with unresolved issues and a problem with her ex, salting and burning it should not be the first time in months she doesn’t feel like she’s wasting her time but things are what they are. Deanna is who she is.
It takes her a couple more months to make enough money to get a truck, the next time her father’s home she asks about getting weapons. He gives her her own, out of the Impala’s trunk. He doesn’t ask. When he leaves again he only says what he always says - “Take care of Sammy.”
Whatever happened the last time they hunted together, Deanna doesn’t wonder if he says it because he thinks she might forget. She asks Jimmy about weaponry next, his explanation is more clear and useful, he asks, though.
She makes a token effort and waits the two weeks until Sammy’s sixteen birthday before she takes him out and tells him what she’s doing.
“But why? We can be normal now, we have everything… I mean, is it because of the grocery store? Because I’m sure you could find something better and…”
“Sam” - She interrupts, tiredly.
“What?”
“I don’t want some other eight to five job, I want my job. This” - She gestures around the cafe - “is nice and all… I know you are happy and I want you to be but I... I can’t stop thinking about what’s happening out there, what I’m letting happen because I’m not there to stop it.”
“You don’t have to save the world. It’s not our job to save it for everybody else.”
Deanna shakes her head - “It’s my job. It’s always been my job and yours too, but…whatever, I have to. That’s why I got the truck.”
Sammy’s eyes widen - “You’re not going with Dad?”
“No”
“But, Di, what if something happens to you?”
Deanna frowns - “I can take care of myself, Sammy.”
Sam is stubborn but he’s not stupid - “Dad always says hunting alone is much more dangerous because…”
“Dad is hunting alone” - Deanna points out. It’s the first time she can remember openly contradicting her father in front of Sam.
So she takes hunts around Minnesota, sometimes she goes a bit farther but never for more than a week. She doesn’t even realize that if she’s covering the zone then their father has no official reason to come by until Sam asks over dinner if she knows where Dad is because he hasn’t heard from him in a month and a half. Dad had called Jim to let him know he was busy but alive a week ago and Deanna had assumed he had told Sam about it. She reassures Sam and she calls her father to ask how things are going: what’s taking so bloody long? When will he be home? And it’s only when John says “I’ll be home when I will be home”, the type of answer he usually gives Sam when he’s pushing it that Deanna realizes she’s being disrespectful.
She misses him but, truth be told, nothing’s been the same since she failed him. She tries to be understanding, Deanna should have a fucking master on understanding but… he keeps being who he’s always been and she has changed. She has chosen him, the hunt, their life and he won’t even bother saying anything to her beyond congratulating her on taking care of Sam. As if all her work, as if her scars and her blood and her sweat mean nothing, as if all those people she saved mean nothing. In the end it’s easier to get angry, to distance himself from his indifference. Maybe she’s picking up Sam’s slack because her brother seems happier than he has ever been, maybe she’s having a very late teenager rebellion but not a year after she starts hunting solo they have a major fight when Sam mentions college and John gives him a betrayed look. For Deanna that look means a lot more than for Sam: For Sam is just their father being obsessive about hunting as ever, for Deanna is proof that he’s waiting for Sam to finish school to take him back to hunting while he won’t ask Deanna back. It’s proof not that he loves her less, Deanna loves Sam more than anything in the world and she expects her father does as well, it’s proof he values her less. That after all this time she’s not good enough and will never be. The girl can go to college, where she will be safe, she can go be normal, she can live the life Mary never got to live (the life she’s never been told Mary wanted for her), the boy has to avenge the mother he can’t remember. When it’s Deanna who understands, Deanna who lost the mother who put her to sleep and hugged her and told her stories. Deanna the one who was strong for all of them when her father was wrecked and slept through Sammy’s crying or got so drunk he couldn’t walk straight.
It took one mistake, one mistake not to make Deanna human as she had often wished John Winchester remembered his children were, but weak and only fit to be protected.
A year later, when Sam gets accepted into Stanford and leaves for California, Deanna piles their bags in the truck and settles in her new hunting grounds. Sam’s always there to patch her up when she needs him to, if she’s in Palo Alto she sleeps in the second room his flat has, she never overstays her welcome. They eat together, he listens to her brag about hunts, she listens to his lectures and college stories and gives him ridiculous advice on banging girls who are nothing like her. It turns out that without it being enforced on him Sam doesn’t mind the hunting so much, if he has time he ends up doing most of her research for her because time it’s vital and he is, like he’s always been, the bookish one.
She has been lying for so long that she never realized she was shit at lying to people who matter, she had imagined her father and Sam just knew her too well. But as she tries to find someone to hang out with it soon becomes evident that her story about being on a road trip(she’s staying) or a truck driver(she doesn’t have a truck) or the usual shit she makes up if she’s not in a case and it’s a social worker (easier to believe of a girl in her early twenties than a cop, strangely)/from the insurance company/a cop(it’s fucking California, people better wake up to the 21rst century). She ends up fucking her drinking buddies, which makes them much less interested in her profession but also much less interesting. Deanna is gorgeous, she can find a fuck by accident most days. She tries girls next, the grocery store clerk, waitresses. It works much better for reasons she can’t fathom, it’s the first time she has a long-term relationship with another woman, even if said long-term relationship consists on staying half an hour after the lunch rush and talking about TV shows (Sam bought a TiVo he never seems to use and Deanna’s addiction to television no longer needs to be interrupted by hunts) and hot actors and what assholes men can be. Deanna loves the last topic, she hadn’t realized she felt those things till now.
She’s happy in a way her father’s grief-fuelled obsession never really allowed. She is keeping the cake and eating it, she has Sam (she’s not stupid, she knew Sam was going to run away to be normal by the time he has fourteen) and she has hunting. She has a home and she has the road. She misses her father but she doesn’t talk to him in four years except through Pastor Jim and, more rarely, Sam, and then Jim calls to tell her he’s been gone for weeks. Deanna rushes back home, forgetting all about the possible spirit haunting a tool shed. She finds Jessica at Sam’s place but not Sam. She’s distraught enough to answer Jessica when she asks what’s wrong. And then Sam’s there and Deanna forgets about Jessica, she turns to Sam and says, for the first time - “I can’t do this alone.”
And Sam nods. Dad’s not in Jericho and when they get back Jessica dies.
With her brother in her arms, once more outside a burning building, Deanna thinks she should have known better than to believe she could have it all.
*-*-*-*
…where John Winchester dies in a car crash when his younger son is three months old or ...where Mary Winchester never hears the yellow-eyed demon in her son’s room and her husband finds the monster and her destiny. She takes her sons out herself before trying to go back to look for her husband, when she enters the living room the upper floor has already completely gone to the fire. She goes back outside. She never forgives herself but she has two boys to take care of.
She doesn’t have to look for the same answers but she finds Missouri anyway because she wants to know if her husband’s spirit is resting in peace. She can’t imagine she will one day need her husband again even in this weakened state. When she gets from the exorcism Sammy is crying, he’s abnormally upset for a couple days for no reason she or the doctors can’t determine. That’s the first time she knows her son didn’t survive that night unscathed, that something is wrong with him, no matter what medicine might say. It takes her a few more years to discover exactly what it can be.
She tells Dean to take of his little brother like every mother but, the difference is, she is there to take care of Sammy, of both of them. Dean loves Sam and wants to please her but without the need to take care of his brother, to do more than it’s his fair share, without the isolation of the road to set him apart from everybody else, he is just Sam’s brother. A good brother. Who teases him but teaches him the stuff he can’t ask his mom, who alternatively makes fun of him and makes sure nobody else does. Sam loves him too, but he is also allowed to have a normal life, with friends and school projects and bikes.
They don’t have any more family, the three of them, but family doesn’t end in blood, family is what you make. There’s plenty of people in Lawrence, Kansas, who want to be part of the Winchesters’.
Mary, who only wished for normalcy herself, never asks them to go on road trips, she teaches them the family business, forces them to study the theory, to practice the shooting. To be prepared without actually doing anything dangerous. She never says hunting is more important than school or dates or friends. She does it with her best intentions at heart, she is, like her younger son, someone who seeks a balance, who thinks there are shades of gray. She doesn’t realize until she’s called to Palo Alto to go visit Sam in intensive care, where he’s recuperating from second and third degree burns from the burning building where his girlfriend died, that it is not enough. Dean drives her there, his expression tight, when he asks her to explain how likely it is that Jessica could die in the same way John did, Mary tells him the truth, all the truth.
Sam recovers from the burns, and soon after the visions start. He cries when he confesses he had seen Jess’ death happen days before, in dreams he never thought could be true.
And it’s then that Dean says what Mary has been trying not to hear for so long - “We have to get that motherfucker.”
*-*-*-*
…where Sam never leaves for Stanford.