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To John, Deanna is both the Madonna and the whore. It doesn’t matter what she does; she’s either her mother or her mother’s worst nightmare.
Deanna knows her father hates that she’s a girl because every father wants a boy no matter what they tell their wives or kids, but when she started going by “Dean” he told her to stop acting like such a dyke, a phrase she’s taken to throwing around constantly whenever she meets a girl who gets to be less of a myth than she is. When her dad is drunk, he puts a heavy, ugly hand on her hair, and when he’s drunker, he’ll tug on it until her scalp burns and tell her that she looks just like her mama. The one and only time she’d tried to cut it, though, her dad found her with the scissors and tore them out of her hands so fast he almost stabbed her.
“Take it off,” John barks the first time she smears lipstick on her mouth, cherry red and ready to be popped. “You look like a slut. I don’t need you getting attention from the school when every guy in town thinks you’ll say yes.”
“Uptight bitch,” he says under his breath when the waitress at the diner tells him to fuck off. So a bitch is a woman who says no, Dean thinks to herself. A dog that hasn’t been trained right. And a slut is a woman who says yes. And a daughter is…?
A Winchester, she decides. She’s Deanna or Dean or Mary or Mother Mary or a dyke or a slut but she is always, always a Winchester.
She is four years old when she becomes a mother. Carrying Sammy in her arms, she runs out of the house like she was a bat out of hell (that’s what her ma always says), and Sam doesn't even cry. She remembers feeling relieved. She remembers looking at him, drops of blood trickling from his mouth, and thinking, this will be okay. My baby isn’t even crying.
When her dad sits her in the backseat without a carseat, she knows this is good and right because she can watch out for Sammy. And when she gets promoted to the front seat and reads directions and passes the snacks out, she knows this is good and right because that’s what moms on TV do.
In tenth grade health class they tell her that sex is a sin and she wears her skirts short enough that her dad tells her she’s asking for it, twirling her hair so the boys look at her and fantasize about pulling it. While half the class is thinking about what disgusting things babies are and the fucking terror of raising one, she’s already lived through it and the only thing she took from it was that a mother can never live up to her son and to always wear a condom before an accident becomes a lifelong committment. Responsibility is one thing—being trapped by a man is another. She’s already got one who breathes liquor down her neck and tells her she’s ugly and fuckable all at once.
“This is so Puritanical,” the girl next to her mutters under her breath, and Dean rolls her eyes. Everything’s politics with girls like that. Sex isn’t about politics (well, not always). It’s about power. It’s about winning. The only problem with teaching girls their bodies are precious is some of them will really believe it and never get anywhere in life except a marriage bed.
If she gets “WHORE” written on her locker in sharpie, then that’s really not that big of a deal. She knows it’s not a sliding scale, there is no middle ground, you’re either a slut or a prude and men may respect prudes but they want sluts and that’s what everything comes down to in the end.
When the girls down the hallway snicker at her, she rolls her eyes and applies another coat of lip gloss before walking right up to them and saying, “At least my boyfriend’s not gonna leave me for someone who puts out.”
Bobby’s weird, Dean decides. Because first of all, her name is Bobby. And sure, Dean’s got a boy’s name, but that’s because she’s a tryhard who hasn’t figured out how to make her father happy or if he ever even gets happy at all. Bobby, she’s a grown adult who has a real name—Rebecca—that somehow over the decades got whittled down to Bobby and she kept it. And even worse, she cut off all her hair and doesn’t believe in shaving or eyeshadow.
Dyke, Dean thinks in her head, but that’s rude because Bobby is taking care of them while her dad runs away and plays a psychotic game of house with their mother’s ghost. So out loud, she says, “Thanks for the food, ma’am.”
“It’s Bobby. And it’s just microwave ravioli,” Bobby says back because she’s weird, like Dean said. But it’s the first hot meal Sammy’s had in over a month and a half, so she stays quiet.
Their dad hadn’t wanted to leave them with Bobby, but even though she had her flaws and habits, she had saved dad’s ass on a hunting trip back in the day, and John didn’t exactly have many friends, and their new IDs were one strike away from CPS coming for them.
When Sam finishes eating, he goes into Bobby’s library (or at least the room with the most books in it, considering the whole house is a library) and works on homework. Dean awkwardly sits next to him, dangling her feet in a way she finds childish but most boys find endearing, and watches Sam work on his math. She doesn’t get it—she’s just not wired that way—but it’s nice to pretend she could help if he needed it. Eventually, though, he gets tired of her sisterhenning, as he calls it, and tells her to go away and write in her diary. It’s a journal, like her dad’s, but no one ever listens to her when she corrects them.
“Hey, kid,” Bobby calls when she starts up the stairs. She stops and turns around, trying not to roll her eyes at the “kid.” Like she’s ever been a kid.
“I know life on the road’s kinda… busy. So if you ever need extra clothes when you grow out of your old ones—”
Now Dean does roll her eyes because she gets the message, her stomach hangs out just a little too much and her skirts ride up just a little too high, but Bobby would never in a million years understand that it’s just how girls dress because she’s barely a girl herself. And even if Dean was going to accept some dyke’s hand-me-downs, it wouldn’t be from one who shopped in the men’s section.
“I’m good, thanks,” she says, sugar and spice and everything she’s meant to be. She turns around to head to the spare room, where Bobby lets her and Sam camp out in, but before she disappears, Bobby says,
“You got nothing to prove to no one, Dean.”
In the second high school of her senior year, Dean’s required to take a gym class. She doesn’t really mind it, thinks of it as training, one less thing her dad has to make sure she does right. And because she has it during the last hour of the day, it happens to coincide with the volleyball team leaving for their games or tournaments or whatever they’re called (it’s not football or baseball or boxing so she never really cared to learn), which means her changing coincides with their changing.
She’s not ashamed of her body. She can’t be ashamed of the only thing she’s got going for her. Some girls will hog the bathrooms to change their clothes, but Dean is fine stripping naked right there in the locker room when she needs to.
But she’s used to being one of the only girls who doesn’t try to hide, and all of these volleyball players have grown up changing around each other and are just as comfortable as she is. Dean doesn’t know why it’s such a problem, but she hates it. The absolute shamelessness makes her want to duck her head in her locker and change behind a curtain, and whenever she catches one of them looking her way her cheeks turn red and she feels like she could be sick.
And the one she hates the most is Erin. Erin, with her hair cut short and her nails cut short and everything else about her that is most certainly not short. She stands two inches taller than Dean and she waltzes around the locker room like she has nothing to hide, and from the few times Dean has looked her way, she knows she doesn’t.
She’s so much better looking than me, Dean thinks to herself, slamming her locker shut. And she’s no fucking nice, and she could get any guy she wants because she’s mysterious and I’m supposed to be the mysterious one, the one who makes everyone want to dig into me until I spill my guts, and now I want to do it to her. And she doesn’t even have a boyfriend, even though she knows she could get one. She’s probably a—
“Hey, Deanna,” a high and perfect and obnoxious voice says behind her. Dean turns around, covering her chest instinctively even though she’s got a sports bra on.
“It’s Dean,” she says to Erin herself, standing in front of her in the girls’ locker room.
“Oh! Okay.” She leans against her locker like a dozen guys have to Baby, and she grins. “You’ve been here like, two months, right? I never see you around anywhere.”
“Well, my dad’s kinda busy,” Dean explains. “I’m usually watching my little brother.”
“Are you watching him this Saturday?”
Dean tenses like she wants to reach for her pistol, but she forces her voice to stay even. “I don’t know. Why?”
“There’s a party over at Alex Mitchell’s house and I was wondering if maybe you wanted—”
“Yeah,” Dean rushes out embarrassingly fast. “Yeah, that sounds… cool.”
And then Erin leaves and Dean watches her walk away and she thinks, I want to tell Bobby about this, and she has no idea why.
“Turn that off,” John snaps, cuffing Dean on the back of her head. She flinches, but she can’t. She can’t take her eyes off of the screen.
She doesn’t often watch the news because politics don’t matter to people living off the grid and local gossip doesn’t matter to nomads and the economy doesn’t make sense to her because she’s just not wired that way, but she feels sick. She feels sick and compelled and she has to watch because Jesus, this story deserves the dignity of disgust.
“Matthew Shepard is only 21, and is in critical condition at Poudre Valley Hospital. His attackers have yet to be identified—”
“I said,” John growls, yanking the remote out of Dean’s hands, “turn it off.” He gestures to Sam, who’s doing homework, while the TV goes black. “He doesn’t need to be exposed to that pervert shit. He’s a kid.”
Matthew Shepard is a kid, Dean thinks to herself. He is a kid. He is a kid. I’m a kid.
Even on the blank screen, she can still see Logan Shepard’s face. She doesn’t think she’ll ever unsee Logan Shepard’s face. And she wonders what John would look like if he ever came home to news like that.
Sam and her still share a bed, but they’ve started to divide down the middle when they sleep, just like they have when they’re awake. That night, she clings to him and doesn’t sleep a wink, and as soon as he starts to stir she rolls away and squeezes her eyes shut.
“Oh my God,” Erin exclaims when she sees her like they’re in a chick flick. “I’m so glad you could make it!”
She tugs Dean into a hug and Dean hates hugs, and she continues to hate hugs even as she wraps her arms tightly around Erin and takes in a hint of the best perfume she’s ever smelled.
“You smell nice,” Dean says over the sound of the music because she’s a fucking idiot.
“Thanks! It’s cologne!” Erin says back like Dean is a sane person who just said a sane thing. “There are drinks in the kitchen, do you want anything?”
“Beer?”
“I think it’s mostly vodka. Alex’s parents are super prissy. But I bet I can find you something!”
She disappears into the crowd and Dean desperately wants to follow her, thinks she’d follow her out the back door and to the ends of the earth just to catch that cologne again, but she doesn’t because she’s not a dork who doesn’t know how to act at a party. She’s already getting eyes from half the guys in the room, so she runs a hand through her hair and laughs like everything they say is funny, even though it never is.
“Women can never take a joke,” John says in her head, and she’s not like that, she’s a cool girl, see, she’s the girl who laughs at everything. The girl who doesn’t mind letting a guy get to second base on the first date, or to third at a party where she doesn’t even know the host.
As she’s deciding between which of the people talking to her she hates the least, Erin reappears with a Heineken and presses it, still cold, into Dean’s hand.
“Jamie brought a couple of six packs,” she says directly into Dean’s ear, and she shivers like it’s the coldest goddamn Heineken she’s ever had even though Erin’s mouth is hotter than a branding iron. She nods along like she knows who Jamie is, and Erin drags her away from the guys who were talking her up.
“You don’t want any of those douchebags. They’re the kind of guys you have to watch your drinks around.”
Dean subconsciously covers her bare midriff, her stomach roiling, and she nods at Erin.
“I’m not that kind of girl. I’m more careful than that,” Dean assures her, and for a single moment the whole world stops around her because Erin places a hand on her arm, and the music stops and the dancing stops and it’s just the two of them as Erin gives her the saddest look she’s ever seen in her life.
“You really think so?”
Dean for the first time in her life wants to say no. Say she’s not sure what kind of girl she is. Say she’s not even sure what “that kind of girl” is.
But then the moment’s broken when someone calls out, “Erin! Get your ass over here, we’re playing seven minutes in heaven. And bring the new girl!”
Sitting at Bobby’s table is a sort of Pavlovian thing nowadays. They’ve been half-living in her house on-and-off against their father’s will for a little over a year now, and Dean slides herself into the worn wooden chair and her stomach gnashes its angry teeth until she’s fed.
Sam’s already eaten and is working his way through the titles in Bobby’s library. “You have like, every book in the world,” he declares in wonder. “Not just lore stuff, either. Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Fitzgerald…”
Dean smiles into her pizza, watching as Sam keeps listing names she’s never heard of and probably never will.
“You can borrow anything you want,” Bobby tells him, and Sam decides that ten-years-old is the perfect time to read The Great Gatsby, so he pulls it down from the shelf and disappears. Dean thinks that for the rest of her life, she might be watching her brother walk away from her carrying books in his hands, and she’s proud and empty because of it.
“He’s a real smart kid,” she murmurs out loud.
“You too, you know,” Bobby says, and Dean turns to face her.
“What?”
“The books. You can borrow anything, too. I don’t even care if you return it. The road’s gotta get boring sometimes, right?”
Well, that’s a confession she never made and never will make, so she waves Bobby off. “I’m not exactly the reading type.”
“Bullshit. How many times you read Sam to sleep as a kid?”
Dean squints. She hates how much Bobby knows about their childhood just from taking shots in the dark. “It’s not the same,” she snaps, unsure why she’s getting so defensive about it.
“You’re the kind of person who does voices for all the characters, right? Accents and hand gestures?”
The statement brings back memories to Dean so vivid they nearly drown her, and she clutches the kitchen table to keep afloat. It’s what her mom had done for her. It’s what she’d done for Sam.
“You ever have kids?” she asks.
Bobby tenses, but she doesn’t lean away or close off. “No.”
“You ever want any?” Dean presses.
“Yeah.”
They fall silent for a moment, Dean’s heartbeat thrumming in her fingertips. She can’t meet Bobby’s eyes, even when she speaks, quiet as a whisper.
“You can ask why.”
Dean swallows thickly. “I know why.”
“You can ask anyway.”
Deep breath in. Deep breath out. “Why didn’t you have kids?”
“State wouldn’t let homosexuals adopt.”
“And you’re…”
“A homosexual.”
Dean nods.
“Does that bother you?”
“I don’t know,” Dean says honestly, confessionally.
“That’s alright.”
They sit at the table for a long time in silence until Bobby stands up, her shoulders back like she’s made a decision. She’s going to hit me, Dean thinks. She’s going to leave me, Dean thinks.
“Have you ever heard of Slaughterhouse-Five?” she asks instead.
Dean’s played seven minutes in heaven before because she doesn’t have to stick around one town long enough to worry about her reputation, no matter what her dad says. There’s a familiarity across state lines of party games like this—an empty bottle, a circle of kids, nervous energy in the air.
The group goes through two rounds before it’s Dean’s turn.
She reaches for the bottle and to spin it, and for a heart-wrenching moment she thinks, what if lands on Erin, and then the bottle lands on Erin and her stomach drops like a stone.
She laughs nervously and reaches for the bottle again, but Erin stops her as the people around them hoot.
“Don’t I need to spin again?” Dean asks, and it turns out state lines do make a difference in rules.
Erin rolls her eyes. “Don’t be such a prude.”
And Deanna Winchester is not a prude, so she stands up with shaky legs and walks into the closet with Erin.
There’s not anyone watching, so they’ve got nothing to prove. Dean half expects Erin to close the door and immediately drop the heavy-lidded look she’s giving her and talk about the latest volleyball game or something. They’d both muss up their hair before walking out and the guys would ask what it was like and Erin would lick her lips while Dean purred, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
But the door shuts and Erin has Dean pressed against it in seconds. Dean’s strong, but she’s also compact, and Erin gets her feet a few inches off the ground, lifting her up with both her arms and then there’s tongue, Jesus Christ she has Erin Walker’s tongue down her throat and Dean’s hands are shaking while they cling to her back.
The best part, she half-thinks because her brain isn’t fully working at the moment, is that the lights are off. The best part is no one is looking at me.
And that thought is why she lets herself drown. Lets Erin keep her afloat while she drifts and yeah, maybe she likes this too much, but god that’s not a problem for now because there are no problems for now.
When Erin pulls away, Dean gasps for air, and it comes out as more of a whimper than anything while Erin gives her the most stunning, kind smile she’s ever seen in her life. She laughs, lighthearted, hands still wrapped around Dean’s hips when she says, “Thank God that’s over, right?”
Dean forgets how to swim.
The day her father dies she walks into the women’s bathroom numbly, Sammy’s backpack in her hands. She hasn’t cried yet. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever cry again. She stands in front of the mirror and thinks about secrets, and she half expects her eyes to bleed from the weight of her father’s last words to her, but they don’t. She’s out of blood to give.
Dean digs into Sam’s bag and pulls out a knife. Her hair is loosely braided, and she wonders if the nurse did it while she was unconscious, trying to make her pretty, fuckable even, while she was fighting for her life. She tugs the hair taught like her dad used to do and she yanks the knife through it, clean and sharp.
It’s choppy and ugly and she doesn’t bother cleaning up the pile of hair beneath her.
Dean doesn’t really get the appeal of being read to. She’d done it for Sam as a kid, and she knows her mom did it for her, though she doesn’t remember what books they were or even what voices her mom had used for the characters, or if she’d used any voices at all. But there’d never been another person’s voice that could capture her attention like that, and she wasn’t used to not being the mother.
She loves her baby brother, though, so when he finishes his homework and begins to read The Great Gatsby aloud, she mutes the TV and lays on the bed next to him.
“In my younger and more vulnerable years,” he begins dramatically, his mouth slow and full of cotton like all little kids’ are, “my father gave me some advice I’ve been turning over in my head ever since.”
“Fuck you!” she screams, kicking Baby’s tires. “Fuck you! You don’t get to live like that and die a good person! You don’t get to ruin me and then get credit for saving me! You don’t get to fucking do this, Dad!”
“You didn’t complain, not once,” John cries in her ears.
“If I complained you beat me,” she howls. “You fucking bastard! If I complained I was a bitch, if I complained I was a cunt, if I complained I was the disappointing shadow of your dead wife and I don’t even know my mother anymore because I am her!”
When Dean and Erin leave the closet, she can barely hear the wolf-whistles over the crashing waves in her ears. And then Erin tugs her back into the circle as a new guy appears, holding an unopened six pack, and Dean distantly thinks, This must be Jamie. Erin waves him over and turns to Dean and her mouth might be inches away now but Dean knows that mouth, and she doesn’t have to picture its warmth. “This my boyfriend!” she tells Dean, and the rest of the night is kind of a blur.
She walks back to the motel because if she gets into a car accident then Sam will be all alone with dad and she can’t bear to think about that, can’t bear to think about Logan Shepard and if her dad would even care. Her hair is in knots and her shoes are in her hand and she hopes everyone looks at her and thinks she’s a whore, thinks this is a walk of shame in a different way than it really is, because all she can think is, I didn’t even fuck anyone tonight. All she can think is, There was no goddamn use for that party. All she can think is, Dad was right. I’m a dyke.
When she stumbles into the room, her dad is still gone and Sam is asleep, his school books scattered around him. She quietly shuts the door, dropping her shoes, and pads over to their bed, collecting Sam’s things to tuck into his backpack. She knows his meticulous organization system and follows it perfectly. Once she’s done with her sisterhenning that long ago turned to motherhenning, she glances into the mirror hung up on the far wall above the TV. Her makeup is tearproof—not a track of sadness on her face. She wishes her mascara was bleeding down her cheeks. She wishes she could look as destroyed as she feels.
She takes a pen from Sam’s bag and writes on her forearm in thick, heavy letters, “EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT.”
Turns out, Bobby was right. Dean is a reader. She’s been starving for it. She devours Bobby’s library like a child who knows what hunger is, savoring every word.
After she’s read three different books by Vonnegut, she decides to try something new. She stands on a kitchen chair, reaching for the highest shelves, and blindly picks the first book she can reach but can’t see. She pulls out a short, stubby book called AIDS And Its Metaphors by Susan Sontag, and her hand tightens like a fist around it.
“What’d you find?” Bobby asks, and Dean flinches hard enough that she has to steady herself on the chair. She turns to face Bobby as she clambers down to the floor and shows her the title. She waits for the “don’t you think you’re a little young for that” or just a “no,” but Bobby nods solemnly.
“That’s a good one. Sontag’s a great writer.”
“I’ve never heard of her,” Dean admits.
“Well, you picked a good introduction.”
“You’re gonna let me read it?”
Bobby adjusts the beaten hat on her head. “I’m not in the business of telling you what you can or can’t do. And I’m not an idjit—if you get ahold of a book, there’s no tuggin’ it out of your hands until you finish it.”
Dean smiles because she knows Bobby means it as a compliment, and it might just be the highest one she’s ever been paid.
“Before you read it though,” Bobby starts, her voice gruff, and Dean tenses, “I gotta give you a little history lesson.”
Dean plays with her jeans, sitting cross-legged at the kitchen table while Bobby serves three cups of hot chocolate. She hands one to Dean, takes one upstairs to Sam, who’s reading up on his latest interest, American law, and then comes back down to sit next to Dean with her own cup.
“Do you know what AIDS is, Dean?”
“It’s a disease you get from sex. It kills you.”
Bobby nods. “That’s true. It starts as HIV, which sometimes people can live with. And then it develops into AIDS. And AIDS… you can’t live with AIDS. You just don’t.”
“Okay.”
“And in the 1980s, there was an AIDS crisis. You ever heard of this?”
Dean shakes her head.
“Alright. Well, AIDS started up in 1980. Or maybe it was ‘81, I’m not quite sure, but it was the early 80s. A lot of people will talk about the hair and the music and Reaganomics when they think about the 80s, but all I remember is death. I watched a lot of good men die. I donated my weight in blood, but it didn’t matter because no one was doing shit, not as fast as they needed to, anyway. Do you know why?”
Dean has a sick feeling in her stomach, and she thinks she does because she’s heard the things her dad spits out sometimes, but she doesn’t want to say it.
“Well, it wasn’t called AIDS at first. The newspapers got ahold of it and called it GRID. Gay-related immune deficiency.”
“Because it was gay men who got it,” Dean says, her voice choked.
“Yes. It wasn’t just gay men, but a lot of them were. It affected poor people, it affected people who weren’t white, and it affected gay and bisexual men--”
“Bisexual?”
Bobby’s jaw tightens and for the first time in her entire life, Dean thinks she might know what pity looks like on Bobby Singer’s face.
“Bisexual,” she repeats, giving Dean no trouble for not knowing the word. “People who like men and women.”
Dean swallows, heavy, and sets down her hot chocolate. The floor is spinning, and she can’t look Bobby in the eyes as she says, “Keep going.”
“And the government didn’t care about the people who were getting AIDS. They let it get worse and worse. Reagan, he was president at the time, he let it go on for years and never lifted a goddamn finger.”
“You knew a lot of people who… had it?”
“Sometimes it feels like I knew every one of them.”
Dean nods, and the two of them sit in a dense silence as they finish their hot chocolate on empty, churning stomachs. Eventually, Bobby takes both of their cups and rinses them in the sink.
“I’m going to read it,” Dean declares.
“I thought you would.”
She opens the book, folding the paperback cover in a way that left it curled and stressed Sam out to no end.
“You ever miss getting read to?” Bobby asks her, gesturing at the book.
Dean laughs and shakes her head. Bobby glances at the direction of the stairs and then nods, mostly to herself.
“You ever miss reading to somebody?”
“Yeah,” Dean admits without meaning to.
Bobby sits down, propping her feet up on the table. “I’ll listen to you.”
A sense of purpose fills Dean at that, and a flood of relief. She stiffens her back and begins.
“By metaphor I meant nothing more or less than the earliest and most succinct definition I know, which is Aristotle’s, in his Poetics (1457b). ‘Metaphor,’ Aristotle wrote, ‘consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.’”
As much as she likes to reassure her dad and Sam that memories of Mary still live inside her, there’s only so much a four-year-old can recall about her life in detail. There’s the fire, of course, the most vivid memory she has, the smell of smoke still able to bring it back with violent clarity. She remembers her mom’s hair, the way she’d leave it down so Dean could play with it. Sometimes when she wakes up, she can even hear her mom’s voice, a sound she had stopped begging to forget a long time ago.
Mary had loved photos of dead people. Pictures of her parents and her grandparents lined the house, people Dean would never meet and some of them old enough that Dean would never even visit their grave. One of the memories that Dean knows will stick with her even after she’s old and forgetful, or more realistically, six-feet-under at twenty-two, is of her mom telling her about Deanna and Samuel Campbell.
“I loved them so much,” Mary had whispered in a heavy, haunted voice. “That’s why you and Sammy have your names, did you know that? I wanted to give that love to you.”
She pointed at a photo of her mother, Dean’s grandmother, and said, “That’s my mommy. Her name was Deanna, too.”
And Dean, a child who was far too quiet for her own good, looked up at Mary Winchester and thought, How can you be my mother if I’m yours?
She steals her father’s jacket for the walk because she needs something to protect her and it feels bulletproof most days. And besides, John’s too drunk to notice it missing.
She’s lucky she’s eighteen so she can do this on her own. It’s one of the only lucky things about her right now. The unlucky things that have happened lately have included Erin Walker finding out Dean had fucked her boyfriend, said boyfriend using an expired condom when they did it, and the two little pink lines that had emerged from the pissing stick she’d used.
Surreally, the thing she hates the most about all of this is that the lines were pink.
It is surprisingly quiet when she gets there. From her understanding, there are supposed to be picketers lined down the street to call her a whore and murderer, two things she’d been but neither of them are related to this, but instead it's just her, alone, walking down the empty concrete with her hands shoved into her jeans.
“My name is Deanna Winchester,” she murmurs to the woman at the front desk.
“Do you have an appointment?” the woman asks in a strangely kind voice that reminds her of Bobby.
“No. I didn’t have the number.”
“Not a problem.” She pulls out a clipboard from her desk and hands it to Dean, along with a form and a pen.
She sits down on a cold plastic chair and listens to the hum of the lights above her. The place is warm and inviting, but the very idea of being in a hospital makes her hands shake as she tries to write her name. She takes a deep breath in and a deep breath out, trying to steady herself. This is fine, Dean, she thinks. This is your journal. The monster of the week is your own body.
Strangely enough, it calms her down. She just finishes writing Bobby’s phone number for her emergency contact when a new woman comes out from the back and calls her name.
“I need a pregnancy test,” she says confidently, a statement she’s been practicing on her way to school for two weeks now.
The nurse nods, glancing over her chart. “Well, that we can do for you.” She smiles. “How late is your period?”
“It should say on my form,” she snaps defensively before backing down. “Sorry. Just… nervous. My period is three weeks late.”
“Have you done an at-home pregnancy test?”
Dean grits her teeth and nods, and the woman’s face drops just a little.
“And?”
“It was positive.”
The nurse makes a note. “You know, false negatives happen, but… false positives are a lot more rare, honey.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a one-in-a-million kind of girl so could you please just run the test?”
“Of course. Stay here for just a moment, would you?”
Dean is fully aware she doesn’t actually have a choice, but she stops herself from rolling her eyes until the woman leaves.
They take her blood, and she closes her eyes when they do and thinks of Bobby telling her about donating her blood and tries to convince herself this is for the cause, whatever that cause may be. And then it’s over and the nurse pats the arm that doesn’t have a hole in it and says they’ll get the results as quick as possible. She’s lucky again because this place has everything on-site, so she can leave and get a call with her results in a couple hours, or she’s welcome to use the waiting area until the test is finished. She’s got nowhere else to be, so she tugs her jacket around herself and waits the painstaking three and a half hours before she gets called back again.
“I guess you were right to have us run the test,” the nurse tells her. “A woman’s intuition, huh?”
Dean stares at the results for a long time, a grin ripping across her face. “My own little miracle,” she murmurs to the negative result.
“Did mom vote for Reagan?” she asks out of the blue one day, her Susan Sontag buried deep in her hunting bag beneath her bras so no one in her family would touch it.
John gives her a dirty look like she’s taken god’s name in vain before saying, “Yes.”
“You John Winchester’s kids?” the woman demands, gun still pointed at the back of Sam’s head.
“Last time I checked,” Dean says.
“No shit.” She lowers her gun, and Dean hears the girl behind her follow suit. “I’m Ellen. That’s my daughter Jo.”
Ellen offers Dean ice for her throbbing nose, and Sam keeps glancing over like he’s never seen Dean hurt before, so Dean makes a show of only applying the old towel once before setting it down on the bar.
“Your daddy send you down? Finally ready to admit he needs help with that demon?”
Sam chokes out a small, “Not quite—” as Dean says,
“He’s dead.”
It takes a moment of awful silence for Dean to realize she didn’t even sound sad.
When Dean is first pulled out of Hell, she doesn’t realize she’s free. With dirt clogging her mouth and agony running through every nerve ending in her body, she thinks she fucked up in some way she doesn’t remember and is being tortured again.
She’s always had a fear of being buried alive ever since her dad had done exactly that to train her. Hell isn’t all that big on psychological torture because despite what people think, there really are enough nerves and veins and cells in your body to dissect until your throat starts bleeding from screaming that the more sophisticated tortures of the mind aren’t necessary. She knows.
It takes until she reaches the surface, gasping for breath and spitting dirt out of her mouth, to realize she’s really back. The haphazard cross stitched together for her haphazard body would have been in flames by now.
Dean doesn’t move for three hours, her knees digging into the grass, staring at the circle of collapsed trees around her. She can’t breathe through the relief. She keeps touching her chest, her gut, her legs, the things that should be torn to shreds from hellhound claws, but she’s intact and whole for the first time in her life, and the absence of pain for the first time in forty years makes her cry and cry and cry and not even care what her reddened and relieved face might look like. For the first time in her life, she really and truly thinks, everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.
“Do you believe in God?” Sam asks Bobby over dinner one day.
“Nope,” she says. “Do you?”
“Yes. Why don’t you?”
“Sam,” Dean hisses. “You’re being rude.”
“No, he ain’t. He’s being curious.” Bobby turns back to Sam. “It gets a hell of a lot harder the older you get.”
“So I won’t believe in God when I grow up?”
“Well, I can’t speak for you, kid. Only grown-up-you knows that.”
“Dean doesn’t believe in God.”
“If God was real, He’d get us separate beds in motel rooms,” Dean snaps.
“That’s not how he works,” Sam sighs because they’ve had this debate before. “God works in—”
“Do not say mysterious ways—”
“Okay, let’s save the theology for after dinner,” Bobby interrupts, waving her hands in the air. “Philosophical debates will still be there after burgers.”
But Sam is a curious kid who doesn’t like silence because it reminds him of the car, so after a few agonizing moments of chewing sounds he asks, “Bobby, how did your husband die?”
“Sam,” Dean barks. Bobby’s entire body has tightened.
“I never had a husband.”
“You wear a ring.”
“Yes I do.”
“Then you had a fiancé?”
“Yeah,” Bobby murmurs. “Let’s say that.”
The first thing Dean thinks when she sees Castiel is, God. She’s gorgeous. And then she lifts her shotgun and fires.
“Your jacket’s nice,” Jo tells her, running a hand down the leather on her arm. Dean frowns, turning away as she takes a sip of her beer.
“Thanks.”
“It feels like real leather.”
“It is.”
Dean’s not blind. Or deaf. She knows that Jo Harvelle has more than a thing for her, but Jesus Christ the kid’s younger than Sam and she’s got no interest in letting this puppy crush go on longer than it needs to, so she thinks about the worst kiss of her life and knows it’s a foolproof way to stop this.
“I don’t swing that way, kid,” she says, because she’s an asshole, and she watches Jo’s face crumple and she thinks that this is a cycle of some kind, a sick cycle where every woman hurts every woman, and Jo leaves and doesn’t talk to her for weeks.
Castiel wears men’s clothes. Poorly fitting men’s clothes that Dean’s pretty sure didn’t come with the “devout” Christian vessel.
“You’re drowning in that jacket,” Dean says, poking at the trench coat. They’ve known each other all of a handful of weeks, and now they’re sitting at a children’s playground the day after Halloween and she’s making fun of the angel of the Lord’s clothes while her praying brother stays back at the motel.
“The jacket isn’t made of water.”
Dean laughs. “Where’d you get it?”
“This woman wore inconvenient clothes. A dress, in fact, the night she welcomed me in. Difficult to fight in. I took one of her husband’s suits.”
Possessed by an angel and trapped in a holy war, Dean thinks the woman Castiel resides in is probably the freest she’s ever been.
Dean stands beneath the Impala’s open hood, hands on her hips and a heavy hunting knife tucked underneath her skirt’s waistband. Her shirt is cut lower than usual and she’s in the middle of bum-fucking-nowhere waiting for “help,” which doesn’t take all that long to get there because she doesn’t just know how to play the game, she knows how to win. He pulls up on a motorcycle because of course he does, and he leans over the handles and looks her up and down like she isn’t illegal in all 50 states and he isn’t twice her age.
“You need help there, sweetheart?” he asks, his voice gruff from at least twenty years of smoking.
“If you wouldn’t mind, sir.” She steps back and gestures helplessly at Baby. “I just don’t know what went wrong.”
He gets off his bike and walks over to her and she lets him stick his head under the hood before she brings it down fast and hard, smashing his vampiric skull clean through and beheading him as an extra bonus.
“Like I don’t know how to fix my own fucking house,” she hisses as she kicks his body to the ground and begins to clean up.
“Bobby, we gotta talk,” she announces. She swings herself up on the counter where Bobby is chopping up vegetables, keeping her voice steady like she’s casual and this isn’t planned and her heart isn’t in her throat.
“Shoot.”
She begins, opening her mouth to start, but the words stick in her throat. Her cheeks flush red and she hopes Bobby isn’t looking at her, hopes Bobby isn’t seeing her like this, but she knows she’s being watched because she can feel her skin prickle. Bobby doesn’t say a word while Dean struggles, and doesn’t make a move when Dean starts to cry. She just listens.
“Back when… back in high school,” Dean gasps. “Fuck, Bobby, I’m sorry. I’m… I’m real fucking sorry for the way I acted, alright? I—”
“Hey, kid, you got nothing to be—”
“I called you the d-word. Like, the d-y-k-e word. Behind your back. A lot.” She wipes a hand at her eyes aggressively, shame heavy on her bones. “Which was fucked up. Because you don’t deserve that. You are the kindest person I’ve ever known. And I want to apologize for what I did. And I want to thank you for making me better.”
Before Dean can finish her last word, Bobby pulls her in for a hug, and Dean loves hugs, fuck she loves them, and the two of them cling to each other for a long time.
She starts borrowing Bobby’s clothes instead of stealing John’s.
Cas appears one day in their motel room and walks directly into the bathroom without saying a word. Dean and Sam exchange a look before Dean stands and follows her, the door not even closed.
Cas has a knife in one hand and the mirror in front of her and for a moment Dean is looking at herself. She reaches out for the hand holding the blade. “Cas, what the fuck are you doing?” she asks.
“My hair. It gets caught during fights. I’m cutting it off.” She shrugs Dean’s hand away and lifts the knife, but Dean stops her again.
“Woah, slow down for a second. Why don’t you let me buy a razor? It won’t look like you hacked at it, at least.”
“I don’t care what it looks like, and I don’t know how to use a razor.”
“I can do it,” Dean offers because Dean even decades into her life is a fucking idiot. “Let me do it.”
“...he didn’t care one way or the other, ‘so long’s I can get that lil ole gal with that lil sumpin down there tween her legs, boy,’ and ‘so long’s we can eat, son, y’ear me? I’m hungry, I’m starving, let’s eat right now!’ - and off we’d rush to eat, whereof, as saith Ecclesiastes, ‘It is your portion under the sun.’”
Dean stops her reading of On the Road abruptly, staring at the words on the page. The description of the American Western idol that bears her name.
“What’s wrong?” Bobby asks from beneath the car she’s working on.
Dean doesn’t answer right away, pursing her lips as she tries to articulate what’s running through her mind. Bobby slides out and raises an eyebrow in her direction.
“There’s… there’s no such thing as a slut, is there?” she finally says, glaring at Bobby without meaning to. Bobby waits for her to keep going. “It’s just… I mean… listen to this! He’s talking about ‘that lil sumpin down there tween her legs,’ he can just throw that around. It’s so fucking… it’s so easy for men. They can just fuck anything they want, huh? But girls are the ones who get shit for it. Girls are the whores and the sluts and whatever else they want to come up with, and they can just… you know?”
Her words pitter off unceremoniously, even as her anger burns so hot she could cause a drought.
Bobby hands her a wrench. “Well, if you’re puttin’ shit together…”
Cas sits plainly in front of that week’s second motel room’s mirror. Sam is out and the lights are dim and Dean’s hands are shaking as she plugs in the electric razor. Cas’s back is straight, and Dean’s wrapped a towel around her neck to protect the angel of Lord from hair slivers.
“You sure you don’t... have an idea in mind of what you want?”
“I don’t care about my appearance, Dean,” Cas assures her. Meeting eyes in the mirror, she drops her voice an octave when she says, “I trust you.”
Dean almost wants a shot of whiskey to steady her hands after a statement like that. Instead she takes a deep breath in and deep breath out and runs the razor through Cas’s long hair.
It falls in chunks, and Dean watches time overlap, both now and the moment she took a knife to her braid after her father’s death. Millennia-old inhuman Castiel, angel of Thursday, lets her eyes fall shut and her shoulders slump at the feeling of Dean’s hands in her hair. There is the soft hum of the electric razor and the lights and the shower in the next room and the sweet still silence that the two of them keep sinking into around each other. Dean thinks she’s been in this bathroom with this woman for her entire life and would content to live out her days like this.
When she shaves the sides of her head clean, she begins trimming the top until it’s shorter than even Bobby’s, who lets hers grow shaggy over the ears. And then she says, “It’s time to wash it,” though she’s not sure she says it aloud.
Cas could probably snap her fingers and clean herself up, but she moves malleably under Dean’s hands and ducks her head under the faucet of the sink when Dean begins to run the water.
She washes Cas’s hair slowly, two rounds of shampoo and then conditioner, humming softly to herself without thinking about it.
“You have immaculate pitch,” Cas tells her, her voice echoing in the sink.
“Thank you,” Dean says, she means it. Slowly, she pulls Cas’s head from the water, and when their faces end up millimeters apart, she doesn’t hurl words at herself, and she doesn’t bring up personal space. Cas’s hair is still dripping, but it’s Dean who feels baptized. Cas lifts her hands to Dean’s cheeks, and Dean stops humming what she realizes was k.d. lang’s cover of “Hallelujah.”
Cas must have been a witness to a thousand baptisms, must recognize this holy feeling they’ve created between themselves, and as she leans forward to empty the space between them she declares, “Dean Delilah Campbell.”
And Dean is absolved.