Carmen and the Devil
Title: Carmen and the Devil
Pairings: Gen
Warnings: Alcoholism, canon character death.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: John raises his daughters in the life. Girl!Dean, girl!Sam AU, written for capthollywood 's prompt on spn_rambleon :
AU Always a girl!Deanna and John Winchester's relationship, how it changed from canon because of Dean being a woman, from her as a child to her adulthood and how she remembers him.
Title from The Weight. John POV.
***
"Sam, get his other arm--damn it, Sam! Get your ass over here and give me a hand already."
"Dee--"
"Not now."
"Dee, there are freaking police, okay, and you just shot that guy--" Sammy's voice--Sam's voice, she goes by Sam now 'cause she's all grown up, he remembers that now--she sounds angry. Or scared. Maybe scared. Sharp, cracking like a whiplash, and Dee steadies under the sound of it. She's always been at her best when she's taking care of her sister. When she's taking care of both of them.
"Sammy, come on. I can't get him to the Impala by myself. Come on, give me a hand, okay?" The smell of smoke and sulfur and Dee's voice in his ear, a layer of calm over the panic that John can still hear. "Dad, it's gonna be okay. We got you. It's gonna be okay."
Trap, John wants to tell her, it's a trap, but the demon in his head is laughing and as he sinks back down into blackness he can feel it dragging itself to the fore, sharp claws like broken glass on the skin of his mind.
***
1984
The week before Dee starts kindergarten, John takes clippers to the knotted mess of hair that's been turning into a rat's nest since the last time she cried when he tried to comb it.
They're still in Blue Earth, staying in the tiny apartment off the back of the rectory. Jim comes into the kitchen when he's almost finished, Dee perched on the edge of the table and sucking her thumb, indifferent to the buzzing clippers, shorn hair scattered across the floor as pale and fine as cornsilk.
"John," Jim says, and John ignores him for the time being, tilts Dee's head forward with gentle fingers so that he can shave the nape of her neck. It's not an altogether bad job; he's done this before, back in the Corps, although the fragile curve of his daughter's skull without its cap of blonde hair is about a dozen worlds away from the scar-faced devil dogs he served with.
"All finished," he says quietly when he's done, and Dee takes her thumb out of her mouth to brace her small hands against the edge of the table and hop down onto the floor. She's growing like a weed, pale slender wrists poking well past the sleeves of her faded pink shirt. It's one that Mary picked out, John notices with the pang that still hasn't gone away. One of Dee's favorites, back when she had favorites about things like clothes, which is why it was in the back of the car and didn't go up in smoke along with everything else.
He'll have to get her some new clothes before she starts school. One more thing to deal with in the tide of responsibility that keeps feeling like it's gonna rise up and choke him one of these days.
Jim and Dee are both looking at him now. He avoids Jim's eyes but meets Dee's, wide and green and solemn. She looks like an elf-child under the soft cropped spikes of pale hair.
"Go grab me the broom, okay?" John says, and she nods, puts her thumb back in her mouth, and crosses into the other room, threadbare socks quiet on the faded linoleum.
"John," Jim says again, still quiet, but forceful. He's got a preacher's voice even when he's not on the pulpit.
"Hair was a goddamn mess," John says, kicking at the soft pile of it and not thinking about Mary sitting in their bright clean little kitchen with Dee in her lap, patiently untangling the knots. Dee would have been laughing then, talking about a mile a minute, and she quit sucking her thumb when she was three. Before. "Can't let her go in looking like that."
"She looks like a boy." Jim sounds disapproving, and John snorts his indifference to the notion. "The other kids will tease her."
"Easier to manage this way," John says, hears the finality in his own tone. Jim's a good man and John owes him for taking in the ruin of his family when Missouri passed them on, for showing him the ropes, but he doesn't need any more commentary on how he parents his daughters. Got enough of that from Kate Guenther, back when he was staying with her and Mike.
Jim shakes his head, but lets it go. Dee comes back into the room with the cracked plastic dustpan and the broom that's a foot taller than she is, and begins carefully sweeping the floor clean.
She doesn't look up at either of them, and she doesn't speak.
***
John puts her on the bus in a new t-shirt, faded jeans, and a backpack that Jim scrounged from the donation box. He watches her climb inside, listens to the rumble of the engine and the creak of the doors; his throat is tight and he wants to punch something.
When Dee gets back that afternoon, he's managed to bury the worst of it beneath an hour of target practice and three shots of cheap whiskey, and he manages not to snap at her when the slamming of the door sends his head shooting up and his heart pounding.
"How was it?" he asks, and gets a shrug in return. He remembers Dee coming home from daycare and chattering about school, begging Mary to let her get on the school bus just once, Mommy, just this once, but those days are gone and now Dee doesn't seem to care much about anything other than what's left of her family.
It hurts something deep down in John, something buried underneath the horror of grief and anger that he's just now managing to stop poking at, but her understands the impulse. He has that much in common with this quiet ghost of his chatterbox daughter.
Even now, she's making a beeline for Sammy's crib, as if to make sure that her sister hasn't sustained any permanent damage from an entire day in John's ham-handed care. John bites down the snide remark that wants to rise to his lips. Dee is five, and doesn't deserve to bear the brunt of John's own sore spots.
"School was okay, Daddy," she says finally, absently. She's been talking more lately, but the normal rhythms of conversation still seem to be lost on her.
It's better, though. Better than months of silence and Dee's strange frightened eyes, and it still feels like a victory every time she speaks.
"Good," John says, looking down at the gun he's cleaning, disassembled on the scratched tabletop. "That's good."
***
His mind is like a bubble that rises and sinks without ever really breaking the surface of consciousness. Sometimes he's aware enough to hear scraps of conversation between the girls--
"...radar, Dee, the last thing we need right now is to get pulled..."
"...talk to Bobby?"
"At this rate it's gonna be..."
"...Elkins' place, we're like five miles out, call him again..."
--sometimes his own voice answering one question or another, the sound of it echoing weirdly in his ears as the demon manupulates his mouth and tongue and voice to reassure his daughters that everything is okay. That they got him out, and everything is gonna be okay.
In a corner of his mind, John is screaming his throat bloody, clawing at the confines of his own skull, but his body is not his own and no one can hear him anyway.
***
1988
Bobby Singer is a goddamn pain in the ass, a know-it-all drunk who speaks six languages fluently and still can hardly manage to carry on a civil conversation with his own damn customers. John's not any great shakes at interpersonal relationships himself, but Singer's attitude grates on his nerves like nothing else.
Still, the man has the best library of demon lore to be found in the continental US, and he's usually willing to trade a favor or two with John for the privilege of parking his errant family at the farmhouse for a few days and poring over the books.
Helps that he's got a bit of a soft spot for the girls, though John doubts he'd admit that straight on. He doesn't approve of John's parenting any more than Jim but he's a little better at keeping his mouth shut about it, and the Impala has a mangled set of brakes courtesy of the last monster John tangled with, so they're stuck here for the duration regardless.
He wanders out onto the porch mid-afternoon of the second day, hands wrapped around a mug of Irish coffee and squinting like a cave-dweller suddenly exposed to sunlight. It's Sunday, so the yard is closed; the Impala is up on blocks and Singer's flat on his back underneath her, bleeding out the brake lines. Dee is crouched down next to him, the sun glinting in her hair and an expression of rapt fascination on her face.
As John shifts closer, he can hear Singer's voice, an easy patient tone that he's never heard before. "Alright, now climb on up there and give the brakes a pump. You know which one's the brake, right?"
"The big flat one," Dee says, with all the weary patience that a nine year old can muster. "Duh."
"Watch your mouth," Singer says, but it's mild, and Dee's scrambling up into the driver's seat.
She has to stretch to reach the pedals, but not all that much. She's tall for her age and getting taller, a half-wild imp of a girl in second-hand clothes and rough-cut hair. Even from here, John can see that her hands are black with grease; there are smudges of it on her shirt and face.
Her voice is clear, cheerful, as she peppers Bobby Singer with questions about brake lines and compression fittings and how do calipers work and will he show her please please please--
John rubs a hand over his face, swallows a gulp of whiskey-sweet coffee, and heads back into the dark house.
***
"Find everything you needed?" Singer asks later on over a moderately civil couple of beers.
"Yeah," John says.
"Reckon I took care of that mess you made of your car," Singer says. "Next time, try shooting the ghoul before you drive over it."
"Appreciate it," John says. The gratitude burns his tongue to voice, and Singer nods like it's just his due. Dee is out on the porch reading to her sister, even though Sammy's been puzzling out whole words for almost a year now; it's their ritual, just one more thing in his daughters' lives that John has to watch from the outside. "Saw you out there with Dee."
"Girl's got a good eye for machines," Singer says approvingly. "Ain't a bad idea to teach her the basics, with you out on the road so often."
John rolls his beer bottle between his palms, nods. He can hear Dee's voice out on the porch, the sing-song cadence of her reading interrupted here and there by a stumble over a word she doesn't know. He can't quite make out the words, which might be just as well; last time he was here, Dee got her hands on a couple of the old bodice-rippers Singer's wife left in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and John was blushing for a week after listening to that kind of talk coming out of his daughter's mouth.
"Always figured we'd have a boy," he murmurs. He's not really speaking to Singer, or maybe he is; these things have to come out one way or another, and Singer's as close to a confessor as he's got handy. "Me and Mary."
He hasn't thought about it in years. It was too soon after Sammy was born, but they talked about it, all the same. They had the space, a spare guest bedroom that could have been converted into a nursery. They had the money. And the part John never quite admitted to Mary: he'd wanted a son, someone to teach baseball and car maintenance, a little brother for Dee and Sammy to boss around, a boy to carry on the Winchester family name.
None of that makes it out of his mouth, of course. Him and Singer aren't close enough for that kind of talk. But still, he thinks he sees something in the other man's face that looks an awful lot like understanding.
Bobby Singer lost his wife, too, after all.
Neither of them speak for a while, and then Singer nods, sets his beer down. "Well, you got yourself two fine girls, anyway."
"That I do," John murmurs. "I guess I do."
***
They head out early the next day, the low morning sun drawing shadows across the road. Dee sticks her whole upper body out the window to wave, and John yanks her back into her seat, one-handed, without looking. "Sit your ass down."
The grin she turns on him is bright and unapologetic. "Sorry, Dad."
John grunts, glances over his shoulder to back out into the road. In the backseat, Sammy is sleeping like a little blonde-haired angel, sweet as a doll and no sign of the unholy terror she is when she's awake.
In the front seat, Dee is bobbing her head to the tune of one of his old Zeppelin tapes, sneakered feet kicking against the underside of the dash. "So," John says finally. "You helped Bobby out with the car?"
Dee nods. She's still got grease under her fingernails, John notices. "I helped him bleed the lines. That's so there aren't air bubbles in it to screw up the compression."
"That's right. You have fun?"
"Yeah," Dee says carefully, like she's not sure it's allowed. "I like cars."
John's not honestly all that sure about it himself. Mike Guenther always had a thing or two to say about women mechanics, and most of it wasn't all that flattering; even Mary, who wasn't any kind of delicate flower, never cared much for machines.
All the same, Singer was right. He might not have a son, but he's got two fine girls. They're all he has left to pass this on to. And Dee's nine years old now. Old enough to start pulling some of the weight; old enough to be left alone with Sammy now and then. She needs to be able to take care of herself, and John's not doing either of them any favors by pretending otherwise.
Like it or not, this is the life they're living and it's high time he started teaching her to survive it.
Three states out, he buys a little .22 that fits her small hands. When he sets up a row of cans for her outside the motel that night, she bullseyes every single one.
***
Maybe all his kicking and screaming has distracted the demon--Azazel, its name is Azazel, finally his wife's murderer has a name--into making a fatal error. Maybe for all its care, it still doesn't know him and his girls as well as it thinks it does.
John feels his lips and tongue shaping the words, the 'well done' that's the last thing Dee's gonna be expecting to hear from him after the shit she just pulled with the Colt. He sees the surprise, the beginnings of a startled smile before suspicion clamps down over her face.
She knows him better than that. There's a surge of fierce pride, and underneath something that feels more than a little bit like heartbreak.
***
1995
At some point--John's still not sure when it happened, how the hell he could have missed it--Dee has turned from a scruffy tomboy who likes guns and cars and rock 'n roll more than any girl should into a woman grown. Half-grown, anyway. Grown enough for men John's age to start giving her appreciative once-overs in bars, although John's scowling presence is usually enough to keep their comments behind their teeth.
Dee is beautiful, and she knows it. John figures that out the third time he sees her leaning just a little too far over the pool table, smiling coquettishly at the drunk scumbag who's standing way too close while he explains the rudiments of billiards.
"Here, honey," he says, plucking the cue out of her hands. "Let me show you. It's real simple."
Dee smiles at him, and she keeps smiling when he puts his hands on her hips and maneuvers her around the table, standing so close that John can't see any light between their bodies, and really, that's enough. He drains his beer, slams it down on the bar, rises to cross over in three long steps and yank the guy away with one ungentle hand.
"Lesson's over," he growls.
The guy's mouth drops open, angry color rising in his cheeks, and then he takes a good look at John and shuts up. Raises his hands, shakes his head, wide-eyed. "Sorry, man. Didn't know she was here with someone."
John knows what he's thinking, which makes it harder to resist the urge to deck him. His fingers let go reluctantly and the guy pulls out of his grip as soon as he's able, backs away and doesn't turn around until he's well into the crowd. John watches him go, then turns his glare on Dee. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"
She shrugs. Like she doesn't even goddamn know what he's talking about, like she doesn't have any idea how the men in here are looking at her. "He was an easy mark. Already made fifty bucks off of him."
She displays the money, two crumpled twenties and a ten, and John plucks it out of her hands, impatient. "You better just watch yourself. I'm not always gonna be around to step in."
Sammy would roll her eyes, but Dee doesn't. Sammy would point out that they get themselves in the middle of situations way more dangerous than a bar full of liquored-up roughnecks, but Dee doesn't do that either. She doesn't point out that she had the situation well in hand, more in hand than John's really comfortable with. He doesn't even want to know where the hell she learned how to act like that.
She just shrugs again, wearing that mildly apologetic expression that she gets when she thinks John is acting like a lunatic but is willing to humor him. "Sorry, sir."
There's plenty more he'd like to say. He knows exactly what men say and think about pretty girls who act the way Dee does. He's the one who brought her into the bar, though, and the fifty dollars he's holding will pay for groceries until he can find himself some part-time work in this one-horse town. His hand clenches into a fist, crumpling the money, and he forces himself to relax, bites back the words that want to come spilling out and repeats, "Just watch yourself, you understand?"
Dee's expression says clearer than words that she doesn't, but she nods anyway. "Sure, Dad. We should probably be getting back, though, don't you think? Sammy's gonna worry."
John scans the crowd again blindly but all he can see is his daughter, his little girl standing there in a low-cut shirt and too-tight jeans, smiling the same hopeful smile she's had since she was a toddler. "Yeah," he manages finally. "Let's go."
***
Dee's hand is steady on the gun, and she gestures to stop her sister's confused step forward without looking away. "It's not him, Sammy. It's not Dad."
"Dee, are you nuts?"
"Sneaky son of a bitch, aren't you?" Dee says. She's staring right at him, and her eyes are a hard and furious green. John can feel the creature sifting through, weighing its options, before finally stretching his mouth into a parody of a smile.
"Well done, girls. Well done indeed."
There are more words after that, ugly words coming out of his mouth; he can see the wounds they leave in Sam's hurt stare and Dee's flinch, but John can't pay attention to that. In a deep, dark part of his own mind he waits, gathering his strength. He's not gonna get another chance at this.
***
2001
It's after three in the morning by the time John hears the low rumble of the Impala, sees the beam of the headlights slide up the living room wall of the dump they've been staying in and disappear. He's been drinking steadily since Sammy threw her college pamphlets in his face, screamed fuck you, Dad, this is my life and you're not taking this away from me too, since she stormed out with a duffel bag full of clothes and Dee ran out after her. He's nearing the dregs of the bottle, and the sound of footsteps on the gravel walkway seems distant, echoing.
There's a part of him that's ashamed, but it's not the part that's in charge of pouring drinks, thank God.
The door creaks open, and there's Dee framed in the faint light from the streetlamp outside. No Sammy. He wasn't really expecting her to be there, but her absence still twists like a knife.
"I took Sammy to the bus station," Dee says, and lets the door swing shut behind her, throwing the room into darkness. There's the clink and jingle of keys as she sets them down, the soft thwump of her boots hitting the floor. "I gave her some money for food. Made sure she's got her knives with her."
John manages a grunt, nothing even remotely coherent.
"I think she'll be okay. She's just mad. You know how she gets--"
How Sammy gets is no longer Dee's goddamn problem. Or his, either. She made damn sure they both knew she didn't want any part of this family anymore. John wants to say that, but the words seem caught in his throat. He slams the glass down instead--tries to, anyway, but his fingers feel numb and thick and it ends up on its side, rolling away from his clumsy grasp and leaving drips of whiskey behind as it goes.
"Dad?" The small lamp by the door flickers on. John squeezes his eyes shut and turns his face away, but he can still hear Dee's sigh. She sounds tired. "Goddamn it."
There are footsteps, then Dee's small, strong hands on his shoulders, hauling him up to his feet. He tilts against her as they start to move, awkwardly. She's strong, but not tall. Not like him and Mary. Not like Sammy.
There's the creak of another door, more shuffling footsteps, and then he's tumbling into bed. He lays there with the world spinning gently around him as Dee tugs off his boots. It's some indefinable time later when he feels his head tilted up, a glass pressed to his mouth.
"You better drink, or you're gonna be sorry tomorrow." Her voice is cajoling, quiet. "Come on, Dad. Please?"
He drinks. Eventually, the glass is pulled away, set down on some hard surface. A cool hand tests his forehead, the feel of it both familiar and strange in a way that makes John ache. "Mary," he whispers. Mary, I'm so sorry. So sorry.
The hand pauses. "No, Dad. It's Deanna, remember?"
Dee. Right. Dee taking care of her drunken old slob of a father. It's not the first time, and it probably won't be the last. She begins to pull back, and he catches at her hand, clumsily. "Fucked up. 'M sorry."
The pause is longer this time, and then she squeezes his fingers before pulling away entirely. "It's cool, Dad. Go to sleep, okay? I'll see you tomorrow."
***
The pressure of his bladder wakes him a few hours later. He stumbles to the bathroom in the gray half-light of dawn, pauses on the way back.
The door to the room Dee was sharing with Sammy is open, just a little. There's a hoarse, muffled sound emanating from it, and it takes him a few moments to identify it as crying. Dee. Dee is crying; sobbing, harsh and ugly and desperate.
John stands frozen, hand on the door frame, for several moments.
Dee is his soldier, his one-woman army. Whatever softness there is in her has always been for Sammy, but now Sammy's gone. This feels like stumbling into a foreign land where he doesn't speak a single word of the language, where nothing he could possibly say would come out right.
He's just about ready to push the door open anyway when the sobs begin to hitch and fade into snuffling heavy snores. He listens for a moment, then lets go of the door frame and turns away.
It's almost entirely light out, but he stumbles back to bed and sleeps like a corpse for another four hours.
***
Over coffee and newspaper clippings that afternoon, John doesn't comment on Dee's red eyes and puffy face, and Dee doesn't comment on the quarter-bottle of whiskey he dumps down the kitchen sink before pouring his cup full.
"Looked like a skinwalker up Maryland way," he says, like he's remarking on the weather. "Be a bit of a drive, though. We oughta hit the road early tomorrow."
Part of him is expecting an objection, maybe even an argument, but he doesn't get one. That was always Sammy's line, and it doesn't look like Dee is interested in stepping in to fill her sister's shoes. She just takes a sip of her coffee and nods. "Sounds like a good bet. Might be able to do it in two days, if we head out early enough."
John nods. "That's the plan, then. Get the Impala packed up, then run down to the store and get some food. Something easy. I want to eat on the road."
Dee nods again without looking up. "Yessir."
***
The rasp of the ventilator sounds like nails on a chalkboard and even with three broken knuckles his hands keep curling into fists.
Sammy will be back with the herbs and the chalk and the other supplies he requested from Bobby Singer. She'll probably be bringing a sizable temper tantrum along too; Sam is anything but stupid, and if she doesn't figure it out on her own it's a good bet Singer will just tell her. John's already bracing for a fight he doesn't want to have, but that doesn't matter. Sam will understand, in time.
Dee looks small and fragile in the narrow bed, younger than she actually is. Her skin is pale and he can see bandages showing though where her hospital gown gaps in the front; the memory of the demon's claws sinking beneath her skin to twist and tear is sickeningly vivid.
It's like every goddamn mistake John has ever made in his life is writ large on his daughter's body, but this is one thing he can fix. He has to.
***
2006
Dee's on her back under the Impala, a boom-box blasting out staticky classic rock a few yards away. The Band. However the hell a band named The Band ever made it at all, but Dad was always--
She yanks on the socket wrench, hard enough to dig the handle painfully into her still-healing palms. She isn't thinking about Dad. Dad's dead, and she and Sammy are alive, and her job now is to keep both of them that way. It's not to sit on her ass crying into her Cheerios, no matter what Sammy thinks.
It's a good song, though, and Dad liked it. She's singing along, belting out the lyrics through the lingering soreness of her throat, missing half the words and defiantly out of key, when the crunching sound of footsteps alerts her to Sam's approach.
They stop next to the boom-box, and Dee rolls her head to one side in time to see Sam lean down, hand hesitating for a moment on the volume knob before pulling away without turning it down. "Dee?"
"--Crazy Chester followed me, caught me in the fog--"
Louder this time, less hesitant. "Deanna?"
Fucking Sammy. She sets the wrench down and shimmies out from under the chassis, stands, wiping her hands off on the front of her jeans. "What?"
"I just--" Sam looks away. The bruise on her face is painfully mottled, and her dark hair is braided into two long pigtails that hang down past her shoulders and make her look like some kind of throwback hippie-chick from the sixties. A joke rises to Dee's lips, but dies before it can make it out. "I just wanted to make sure you were okay."
Dee thinks about Dad leaning over her in that hospital bed, his intense eyes and his hoarse voice and the words she's been trying to push out of her head ever since; thinks about the clearing where they burned him, a dark shape in the flames and the sparks rising up before her eyes, the smoke rising up to choke her; she thinks she can still taste it. She shakes her head. "I'm fine."
Sam clears her throat again, and seriously, if she starts on this shit again Dee is gonna start an honest-to-god bitch-fight right here and now. "Okay. I just--there's food inside. If you want it. You didn't eat lunch."
It's on the tip of Dee's tongue to say that she's not hungry, but her stomach is rumbling and it's not like starving herself is gonna do anybody any good. She tries out a smile. "You didn't cook it, did you?"
Sam's answering smile is just as wavering as the one Dee is wearing, but at least it's there. "Bobby ordered pizza and wings. Don't worry. I'm not going to poison you."
"Okay," Dee says, and when she nods the movement pulls at the sore muscles in her neck. She still feels stupid and strange in her own body, like whatever dragged her back from the brink didn't quite fit her in right--and that's something else she's not thinking about. There's a connection there, a really simple connection that she's just not gonna make, and it makes her panicky and sick whenever her mind goes near it.
Sam's smile gets a little more genuine. She's trying, even though she doesn't know the half of what's wrong. She's doing the best she can. "Come on. It's getting cold."
"Okay," Dee says again. The song's almost over anyway. She reaches down to turn off the boom-box off, then follows her sister back into the house.
Pairings: Gen
Warnings: Alcoholism, canon character death.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: John raises his daughters in the life. Girl!Dean, girl!Sam AU, written for capthollywood 's prompt on spn_rambleon :
AU Always a girl!Deanna and John Winchester's relationship, how it changed from canon because of Dean being a woman, from her as a child to her adulthood and how she remembers him.
Title from The Weight. John POV.
***
"Sam, get his other arm--damn it, Sam! Get your ass over here and give me a hand already."
"Dee--"
"Not now."
"Dee, there are freaking police, okay, and you just shot that guy--" Sammy's voice--Sam's voice, she goes by Sam now 'cause she's all grown up, he remembers that now--she sounds angry. Or scared. Maybe scared. Sharp, cracking like a whiplash, and Dee steadies under the sound of it. She's always been at her best when she's taking care of her sister. When she's taking care of both of them.
"Sammy, come on. I can't get him to the Impala by myself. Come on, give me a hand, okay?" The smell of smoke and sulfur and Dee's voice in his ear, a layer of calm over the panic that John can still hear. "Dad, it's gonna be okay. We got you. It's gonna be okay."
Trap, John wants to tell her, it's a trap, but the demon in his head is laughing and as he sinks back down into blackness he can feel it dragging itself to the fore, sharp claws like broken glass on the skin of his mind.
***
1984
The week before Dee starts kindergarten, John takes clippers to the knotted mess of hair that's been turning into a rat's nest since the last time she cried when he tried to comb it.
They're still in Blue Earth, staying in the tiny apartment off the back of the rectory. Jim comes into the kitchen when he's almost finished, Dee perched on the edge of the table and sucking her thumb, indifferent to the buzzing clippers, shorn hair scattered across the floor as pale and fine as cornsilk.
"John," Jim says, and John ignores him for the time being, tilts Dee's head forward with gentle fingers so that he can shave the nape of her neck. It's not an altogether bad job; he's done this before, back in the Corps, although the fragile curve of his daughter's skull without its cap of blonde hair is about a dozen worlds away from the scar-faced devil dogs he served with.
"All finished," he says quietly when he's done, and Dee takes her thumb out of her mouth to brace her small hands against the edge of the table and hop down onto the floor. She's growing like a weed, pale slender wrists poking well past the sleeves of her faded pink shirt. It's one that Mary picked out, John notices with the pang that still hasn't gone away. One of Dee's favorites, back when she had favorites about things like clothes, which is why it was in the back of the car and didn't go up in smoke along with everything else.
He'll have to get her some new clothes before she starts school. One more thing to deal with in the tide of responsibility that keeps feeling like it's gonna rise up and choke him one of these days.
Jim and Dee are both looking at him now. He avoids Jim's eyes but meets Dee's, wide and green and solemn. She looks like an elf-child under the soft cropped spikes of pale hair.
"Go grab me the broom, okay?" John says, and she nods, puts her thumb back in her mouth, and crosses into the other room, threadbare socks quiet on the faded linoleum.
"John," Jim says again, still quiet, but forceful. He's got a preacher's voice even when he's not on the pulpit.
"Hair was a goddamn mess," John says, kicking at the soft pile of it and not thinking about Mary sitting in their bright clean little kitchen with Dee in her lap, patiently untangling the knots. Dee would have been laughing then, talking about a mile a minute, and she quit sucking her thumb when she was three. Before. "Can't let her go in looking like that."
"She looks like a boy." Jim sounds disapproving, and John snorts his indifference to the notion. "The other kids will tease her."
"Easier to manage this way," John says, hears the finality in his own tone. Jim's a good man and John owes him for taking in the ruin of his family when Missouri passed them on, for showing him the ropes, but he doesn't need any more commentary on how he parents his daughters. Got enough of that from Kate Guenther, back when he was staying with her and Mike.
Jim shakes his head, but lets it go. Dee comes back into the room with the cracked plastic dustpan and the broom that's a foot taller than she is, and begins carefully sweeping the floor clean.
She doesn't look up at either of them, and she doesn't speak.
***
John puts her on the bus in a new t-shirt, faded jeans, and a backpack that Jim scrounged from the donation box. He watches her climb inside, listens to the rumble of the engine and the creak of the doors; his throat is tight and he wants to punch something.
When Dee gets back that afternoon, he's managed to bury the worst of it beneath an hour of target practice and three shots of cheap whiskey, and he manages not to snap at her when the slamming of the door sends his head shooting up and his heart pounding.
"How was it?" he asks, and gets a shrug in return. He remembers Dee coming home from daycare and chattering about school, begging Mary to let her get on the school bus just once, Mommy, just this once, but those days are gone and now Dee doesn't seem to care much about anything other than what's left of her family.
It hurts something deep down in John, something buried underneath the horror of grief and anger that he's just now managing to stop poking at, but her understands the impulse. He has that much in common with this quiet ghost of his chatterbox daughter.
Even now, she's making a beeline for Sammy's crib, as if to make sure that her sister hasn't sustained any permanent damage from an entire day in John's ham-handed care. John bites down the snide remark that wants to rise to his lips. Dee is five, and doesn't deserve to bear the brunt of John's own sore spots.
"School was okay, Daddy," she says finally, absently. She's been talking more lately, but the normal rhythms of conversation still seem to be lost on her.
It's better, though. Better than months of silence and Dee's strange frightened eyes, and it still feels like a victory every time she speaks.
"Good," John says, looking down at the gun he's cleaning, disassembled on the scratched tabletop. "That's good."
***
His mind is like a bubble that rises and sinks without ever really breaking the surface of consciousness. Sometimes he's aware enough to hear scraps of conversation between the girls--
"...radar, Dee, the last thing we need right now is to get pulled..."
"...talk to Bobby?"
"At this rate it's gonna be..."
"...Elkins' place, we're like five miles out, call him again..."
--sometimes his own voice answering one question or another, the sound of it echoing weirdly in his ears as the demon manupulates his mouth and tongue and voice to reassure his daughters that everything is okay. That they got him out, and everything is gonna be okay.
In a corner of his mind, John is screaming his throat bloody, clawing at the confines of his own skull, but his body is not his own and no one can hear him anyway.
***
1988
Bobby Singer is a goddamn pain in the ass, a know-it-all drunk who speaks six languages fluently and still can hardly manage to carry on a civil conversation with his own damn customers. John's not any great shakes at interpersonal relationships himself, but Singer's attitude grates on his nerves like nothing else.
Still, the man has the best library of demon lore to be found in the continental US, and he's usually willing to trade a favor or two with John for the privilege of parking his errant family at the farmhouse for a few days and poring over the books.
Helps that he's got a bit of a soft spot for the girls, though John doubts he'd admit that straight on. He doesn't approve of John's parenting any more than Jim but he's a little better at keeping his mouth shut about it, and the Impala has a mangled set of brakes courtesy of the last monster John tangled with, so they're stuck here for the duration regardless.
He wanders out onto the porch mid-afternoon of the second day, hands wrapped around a mug of Irish coffee and squinting like a cave-dweller suddenly exposed to sunlight. It's Sunday, so the yard is closed; the Impala is up on blocks and Singer's flat on his back underneath her, bleeding out the brake lines. Dee is crouched down next to him, the sun glinting in her hair and an expression of rapt fascination on her face.
As John shifts closer, he can hear Singer's voice, an easy patient tone that he's never heard before. "Alright, now climb on up there and give the brakes a pump. You know which one's the brake, right?"
"The big flat one," Dee says, with all the weary patience that a nine year old can muster. "Duh."
"Watch your mouth," Singer says, but it's mild, and Dee's scrambling up into the driver's seat.
She has to stretch to reach the pedals, but not all that much. She's tall for her age and getting taller, a half-wild imp of a girl in second-hand clothes and rough-cut hair. Even from here, John can see that her hands are black with grease; there are smudges of it on her shirt and face.
Her voice is clear, cheerful, as she peppers Bobby Singer with questions about brake lines and compression fittings and how do calipers work and will he show her please please please--
John rubs a hand over his face, swallows a gulp of whiskey-sweet coffee, and heads back into the dark house.
***
"Find everything you needed?" Singer asks later on over a moderately civil couple of beers.
"Yeah," John says.
"Reckon I took care of that mess you made of your car," Singer says. "Next time, try shooting the ghoul before you drive over it."
"Appreciate it," John says. The gratitude burns his tongue to voice, and Singer nods like it's just his due. Dee is out on the porch reading to her sister, even though Sammy's been puzzling out whole words for almost a year now; it's their ritual, just one more thing in his daughters' lives that John has to watch from the outside. "Saw you out there with Dee."
"Girl's got a good eye for machines," Singer says approvingly. "Ain't a bad idea to teach her the basics, with you out on the road so often."
John rolls his beer bottle between his palms, nods. He can hear Dee's voice out on the porch, the sing-song cadence of her reading interrupted here and there by a stumble over a word she doesn't know. He can't quite make out the words, which might be just as well; last time he was here, Dee got her hands on a couple of the old bodice-rippers Singer's wife left in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and John was blushing for a week after listening to that kind of talk coming out of his daughter's mouth.
"Always figured we'd have a boy," he murmurs. He's not really speaking to Singer, or maybe he is; these things have to come out one way or another, and Singer's as close to a confessor as he's got handy. "Me and Mary."
He hasn't thought about it in years. It was too soon after Sammy was born, but they talked about it, all the same. They had the space, a spare guest bedroom that could have been converted into a nursery. They had the money. And the part John never quite admitted to Mary: he'd wanted a son, someone to teach baseball and car maintenance, a little brother for Dee and Sammy to boss around, a boy to carry on the Winchester family name.
None of that makes it out of his mouth, of course. Him and Singer aren't close enough for that kind of talk. But still, he thinks he sees something in the other man's face that looks an awful lot like understanding.
Bobby Singer lost his wife, too, after all.
Neither of them speak for a while, and then Singer nods, sets his beer down. "Well, you got yourself two fine girls, anyway."
"That I do," John murmurs. "I guess I do."
***
They head out early the next day, the low morning sun drawing shadows across the road. Dee sticks her whole upper body out the window to wave, and John yanks her back into her seat, one-handed, without looking. "Sit your ass down."
The grin she turns on him is bright and unapologetic. "Sorry, Dad."
John grunts, glances over his shoulder to back out into the road. In the backseat, Sammy is sleeping like a little blonde-haired angel, sweet as a doll and no sign of the unholy terror she is when she's awake.
In the front seat, Dee is bobbing her head to the tune of one of his old Zeppelin tapes, sneakered feet kicking against the underside of the dash. "So," John says finally. "You helped Bobby out with the car?"
Dee nods. She's still got grease under her fingernails, John notices. "I helped him bleed the lines. That's so there aren't air bubbles in it to screw up the compression."
"That's right. You have fun?"
"Yeah," Dee says carefully, like she's not sure it's allowed. "I like cars."
John's not honestly all that sure about it himself. Mike Guenther always had a thing or two to say about women mechanics, and most of it wasn't all that flattering; even Mary, who wasn't any kind of delicate flower, never cared much for machines.
All the same, Singer was right. He might not have a son, but he's got two fine girls. They're all he has left to pass this on to. And Dee's nine years old now. Old enough to start pulling some of the weight; old enough to be left alone with Sammy now and then. She needs to be able to take care of herself, and John's not doing either of them any favors by pretending otherwise.
Like it or not, this is the life they're living and it's high time he started teaching her to survive it.
Three states out, he buys a little .22 that fits her small hands. When he sets up a row of cans for her outside the motel that night, she bullseyes every single one.
***
Maybe all his kicking and screaming has distracted the demon--Azazel, its name is Azazel, finally his wife's murderer has a name--into making a fatal error. Maybe for all its care, it still doesn't know him and his girls as well as it thinks it does.
John feels his lips and tongue shaping the words, the 'well done' that's the last thing Dee's gonna be expecting to hear from him after the shit she just pulled with the Colt. He sees the surprise, the beginnings of a startled smile before suspicion clamps down over her face.
She knows him better than that. There's a surge of fierce pride, and underneath something that feels more than a little bit like heartbreak.
***
1995
At some point--John's still not sure when it happened, how the hell he could have missed it--Dee has turned from a scruffy tomboy who likes guns and cars and rock 'n roll more than any girl should into a woman grown. Half-grown, anyway. Grown enough for men John's age to start giving her appreciative once-overs in bars, although John's scowling presence is usually enough to keep their comments behind their teeth.
Dee is beautiful, and she knows it. John figures that out the third time he sees her leaning just a little too far over the pool table, smiling coquettishly at the drunk scumbag who's standing way too close while he explains the rudiments of billiards.
"Here, honey," he says, plucking the cue out of her hands. "Let me show you. It's real simple."
Dee smiles at him, and she keeps smiling when he puts his hands on her hips and maneuvers her around the table, standing so close that John can't see any light between their bodies, and really, that's enough. He drains his beer, slams it down on the bar, rises to cross over in three long steps and yank the guy away with one ungentle hand.
"Lesson's over," he growls.
The guy's mouth drops open, angry color rising in his cheeks, and then he takes a good look at John and shuts up. Raises his hands, shakes his head, wide-eyed. "Sorry, man. Didn't know she was here with someone."
John knows what he's thinking, which makes it harder to resist the urge to deck him. His fingers let go reluctantly and the guy pulls out of his grip as soon as he's able, backs away and doesn't turn around until he's well into the crowd. John watches him go, then turns his glare on Dee. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"
She shrugs. Like she doesn't even goddamn know what he's talking about, like she doesn't have any idea how the men in here are looking at her. "He was an easy mark. Already made fifty bucks off of him."
She displays the money, two crumpled twenties and a ten, and John plucks it out of her hands, impatient. "You better just watch yourself. I'm not always gonna be around to step in."
Sammy would roll her eyes, but Dee doesn't. Sammy would point out that they get themselves in the middle of situations way more dangerous than a bar full of liquored-up roughnecks, but Dee doesn't do that either. She doesn't point out that she had the situation well in hand, more in hand than John's really comfortable with. He doesn't even want to know where the hell she learned how to act like that.
She just shrugs again, wearing that mildly apologetic expression that she gets when she thinks John is acting like a lunatic but is willing to humor him. "Sorry, sir."
There's plenty more he'd like to say. He knows exactly what men say and think about pretty girls who act the way Dee does. He's the one who brought her into the bar, though, and the fifty dollars he's holding will pay for groceries until he can find himself some part-time work in this one-horse town. His hand clenches into a fist, crumpling the money, and he forces himself to relax, bites back the words that want to come spilling out and repeats, "Just watch yourself, you understand?"
Dee's expression says clearer than words that she doesn't, but she nods anyway. "Sure, Dad. We should probably be getting back, though, don't you think? Sammy's gonna worry."
John scans the crowd again blindly but all he can see is his daughter, his little girl standing there in a low-cut shirt and too-tight jeans, smiling the same hopeful smile she's had since she was a toddler. "Yeah," he manages finally. "Let's go."
***
Dee's hand is steady on the gun, and she gestures to stop her sister's confused step forward without looking away. "It's not him, Sammy. It's not Dad."
"Dee, are you nuts?"
"Sneaky son of a bitch, aren't you?" Dee says. She's staring right at him, and her eyes are a hard and furious green. John can feel the creature sifting through, weighing its options, before finally stretching his mouth into a parody of a smile.
"Well done, girls. Well done indeed."
There are more words after that, ugly words coming out of his mouth; he can see the wounds they leave in Sam's hurt stare and Dee's flinch, but John can't pay attention to that. In a deep, dark part of his own mind he waits, gathering his strength. He's not gonna get another chance at this.
***
2001
It's after three in the morning by the time John hears the low rumble of the Impala, sees the beam of the headlights slide up the living room wall of the dump they've been staying in and disappear. He's been drinking steadily since Sammy threw her college pamphlets in his face, screamed fuck you, Dad, this is my life and you're not taking this away from me too, since she stormed out with a duffel bag full of clothes and Dee ran out after her. He's nearing the dregs of the bottle, and the sound of footsteps on the gravel walkway seems distant, echoing.
There's a part of him that's ashamed, but it's not the part that's in charge of pouring drinks, thank God.
The door creaks open, and there's Dee framed in the faint light from the streetlamp outside. No Sammy. He wasn't really expecting her to be there, but her absence still twists like a knife.
"I took Sammy to the bus station," Dee says, and lets the door swing shut behind her, throwing the room into darkness. There's the clink and jingle of keys as she sets them down, the soft thwump of her boots hitting the floor. "I gave her some money for food. Made sure she's got her knives with her."
John manages a grunt, nothing even remotely coherent.
"I think she'll be okay. She's just mad. You know how she gets--"
How Sammy gets is no longer Dee's goddamn problem. Or his, either. She made damn sure they both knew she didn't want any part of this family anymore. John wants to say that, but the words seem caught in his throat. He slams the glass down instead--tries to, anyway, but his fingers feel numb and thick and it ends up on its side, rolling away from his clumsy grasp and leaving drips of whiskey behind as it goes.
"Dad?" The small lamp by the door flickers on. John squeezes his eyes shut and turns his face away, but he can still hear Dee's sigh. She sounds tired. "Goddamn it."
There are footsteps, then Dee's small, strong hands on his shoulders, hauling him up to his feet. He tilts against her as they start to move, awkwardly. She's strong, but not tall. Not like him and Mary. Not like Sammy.
There's the creak of another door, more shuffling footsteps, and then he's tumbling into bed. He lays there with the world spinning gently around him as Dee tugs off his boots. It's some indefinable time later when he feels his head tilted up, a glass pressed to his mouth.
"You better drink, or you're gonna be sorry tomorrow." Her voice is cajoling, quiet. "Come on, Dad. Please?"
He drinks. Eventually, the glass is pulled away, set down on some hard surface. A cool hand tests his forehead, the feel of it both familiar and strange in a way that makes John ache. "Mary," he whispers. Mary, I'm so sorry. So sorry.
The hand pauses. "No, Dad. It's Deanna, remember?"
Dee. Right. Dee taking care of her drunken old slob of a father. It's not the first time, and it probably won't be the last. She begins to pull back, and he catches at her hand, clumsily. "Fucked up. 'M sorry."
The pause is longer this time, and then she squeezes his fingers before pulling away entirely. "It's cool, Dad. Go to sleep, okay? I'll see you tomorrow."
***
The pressure of his bladder wakes him a few hours later. He stumbles to the bathroom in the gray half-light of dawn, pauses on the way back.
The door to the room Dee was sharing with Sammy is open, just a little. There's a hoarse, muffled sound emanating from it, and it takes him a few moments to identify it as crying. Dee. Dee is crying; sobbing, harsh and ugly and desperate.
John stands frozen, hand on the door frame, for several moments.
Dee is his soldier, his one-woman army. Whatever softness there is in her has always been for Sammy, but now Sammy's gone. This feels like stumbling into a foreign land where he doesn't speak a single word of the language, where nothing he could possibly say would come out right.
He's just about ready to push the door open anyway when the sobs begin to hitch and fade into snuffling heavy snores. He listens for a moment, then lets go of the door frame and turns away.
It's almost entirely light out, but he stumbles back to bed and sleeps like a corpse for another four hours.
***
Over coffee and newspaper clippings that afternoon, John doesn't comment on Dee's red eyes and puffy face, and Dee doesn't comment on the quarter-bottle of whiskey he dumps down the kitchen sink before pouring his cup full.
"Looked like a skinwalker up Maryland way," he says, like he's remarking on the weather. "Be a bit of a drive, though. We oughta hit the road early tomorrow."
Part of him is expecting an objection, maybe even an argument, but he doesn't get one. That was always Sammy's line, and it doesn't look like Dee is interested in stepping in to fill her sister's shoes. She just takes a sip of her coffee and nods. "Sounds like a good bet. Might be able to do it in two days, if we head out early enough."
John nods. "That's the plan, then. Get the Impala packed up, then run down to the store and get some food. Something easy. I want to eat on the road."
Dee nods again without looking up. "Yessir."
***
The rasp of the ventilator sounds like nails on a chalkboard and even with three broken knuckles his hands keep curling into fists.
Sammy will be back with the herbs and the chalk and the other supplies he requested from Bobby Singer. She'll probably be bringing a sizable temper tantrum along too; Sam is anything but stupid, and if she doesn't figure it out on her own it's a good bet Singer will just tell her. John's already bracing for a fight he doesn't want to have, but that doesn't matter. Sam will understand, in time.
Dee looks small and fragile in the narrow bed, younger than she actually is. Her skin is pale and he can see bandages showing though where her hospital gown gaps in the front; the memory of the demon's claws sinking beneath her skin to twist and tear is sickeningly vivid.
It's like every goddamn mistake John has ever made in his life is writ large on his daughter's body, but this is one thing he can fix. He has to.
***
2006
Dee's on her back under the Impala, a boom-box blasting out staticky classic rock a few yards away. The Band. However the hell a band named The Band ever made it at all, but Dad was always--
She yanks on the socket wrench, hard enough to dig the handle painfully into her still-healing palms. She isn't thinking about Dad. Dad's dead, and she and Sammy are alive, and her job now is to keep both of them that way. It's not to sit on her ass crying into her Cheerios, no matter what Sammy thinks.
It's a good song, though, and Dad liked it. She's singing along, belting out the lyrics through the lingering soreness of her throat, missing half the words and defiantly out of key, when the crunching sound of footsteps alerts her to Sam's approach.
They stop next to the boom-box, and Dee rolls her head to one side in time to see Sam lean down, hand hesitating for a moment on the volume knob before pulling away without turning it down. "Dee?"
"--Crazy Chester followed me, caught me in the fog--"
Louder this time, less hesitant. "Deanna?"
Fucking Sammy. She sets the wrench down and shimmies out from under the chassis, stands, wiping her hands off on the front of her jeans. "What?"
"I just--" Sam looks away. The bruise on her face is painfully mottled, and her dark hair is braided into two long pigtails that hang down past her shoulders and make her look like some kind of throwback hippie-chick from the sixties. A joke rises to Dee's lips, but dies before it can make it out. "I just wanted to make sure you were okay."
Dee thinks about Dad leaning over her in that hospital bed, his intense eyes and his hoarse voice and the words she's been trying to push out of her head ever since; thinks about the clearing where they burned him, a dark shape in the flames and the sparks rising up before her eyes, the smoke rising up to choke her; she thinks she can still taste it. She shakes her head. "I'm fine."
Sam clears her throat again, and seriously, if she starts on this shit again Dee is gonna start an honest-to-god bitch-fight right here and now. "Okay. I just--there's food inside. If you want it. You didn't eat lunch."
It's on the tip of Dee's tongue to say that she's not hungry, but her stomach is rumbling and it's not like starving herself is gonna do anybody any good. She tries out a smile. "You didn't cook it, did you?"
Sam's answering smile is just as wavering as the one Dee is wearing, but at least it's there. "Bobby ordered pizza and wings. Don't worry. I'm not going to poison you."
"Okay," Dee says, and when she nods the movement pulls at the sore muscles in her neck. She still feels stupid and strange in her own body, like whatever dragged her back from the brink didn't quite fit her in right--and that's something else she's not thinking about. There's a connection there, a really simple connection that she's just not gonna make, and it makes her panicky and sick whenever her mind goes near it.
Sam's smile gets a little more genuine. She's trying, even though she doesn't know the half of what's wrong. She's doing the best she can. "Come on. It's getting cold."
"Okay," Dee says again. The song's almost over anyway. She reaches down to turn off the boom-box off, then follows her sister back into the house.