Chapter Text
Flashes of flame and screams haunted Molly Winchester’s dreams, though she had been nothing more than a helpless baby when her mother was murdered. She wasn’t sure if she grieved over her mother or the potential of a “normal life” more.
Instead of making friends and learning algebra and Shakespeare, she’d learned how to salt and burn corpses and how to hold a shotgun correctly. She’d never experienced the childhood rite of passages: having sleepovers with friends or trading secrets in the hallway between third and fourth period. Even when she went to school (though never longer than a month at a time) and tried her best to be… normal, other children could always sense the strangeness in her.
When she got older, she stopped trying to appear as anything that she wasn’t. She sneered at other kids in the hallway instead of smiling. She rolled her eyes when the teacher called her name instead of replying.
When she graduated, she did so by the skin of her teeth. Her twin brother Sam did so with honors. She didn’t mind that he got all the attention that summer, because it meant that she didn’t have to explain to her father why she was the opposite of him.
Sam decided shortly after that he wanted to go to college. What resulted was a big fight between Sam, their father, and Dean (who always took their father’s side anyway). Molly stayed on the road hunting with her father and Dean after that for four more years, but nothing was the same. Dean and her dad were so serious about hunting and finding the demon that killed Mary that Molly feared it was slowly consuming them.
Molly loved her family, but she couldn’t let herself turn into her father like Dean had. So, she left. Her father had grown complacent at that point, and simply nodded when she told them. Dean was more upset, but he couldn’t say or do anything to make her stay. She assured them she would still call, but she hadn’t touched the phone since she left.
Really, she had barely thought about them. It sounded awful, but for the first time in her 20-something years of life, Molly Winchester would be her own person. She could go anywhere, be anyone. She wasn’t tied in place like most were by family or obligations. She was free.
Or so she thought. Weeks after leaving, she felt a gnawing sensation in the pit of her stomach. The feeling that she wasn’t doing enough with her time–that there were people that needed her help and that she was failing them by trying to leave this terrible business. She couldn’t go back to her father or Dean, though. Then they would really know she was completely reliant on them and this business–an addict needing a fix.
So she did what her father always did when he was bored. She opened up the newspaper periodicals and started looking.
– – –
Vicki Donovan. Molly traced over the name printed in the newspaper with a heavy heart. The picture next to the name was somehow even more heartbreaking. She was nothing more than a child, though the papers tried to depict her as something lesser. She lived in a trailer home with her younger brother, a boy named Matt. The papers showed the ugly parts of her life at the forefront; her deadbeat dad and her drug addiction.
She put a star next to the story, and moved onto the next paper she grabbed. There were at least four more deaths she found while searching. For a town so small, that was a lot of unexplained occurrences. Molly worried her bottom lip between her teeth.
“Here’s your coffee, sweetheart.”
Molly’s eyes shot up to the older woman who’d come over to her table. The diner was quiet, filled with long-haul truckers and families eating after long roadtrips. She stuck out like a sore thumb in this demographic, and she didn’t like that. It made her a target.
“Oh, thank you,” Molly murmured, “but, uhm, I didn’t order anything?”
The older woman smiled gently like she pitied her. She didn’t mind it, in all honesty. It felt good to be seen for once–even if the woman was looking at her like she thought she was a teenage runaway. She probably looked like one.
“It’s on the house,” the woman said with a wink. She scuttled away after that, going to talk to someone who’d just walked in.
Molly looked at the coffee skeptically, halfway expecting something to pop out of it. She grabbed two sugar packets that were sitting on the table and poured them in. She took a sip of the coffee and shrugged. It was very much a rural diner-type coffee, but something else lingered in her palette even as she swallowed. Was it a bit of chocolate?
She put the coffee down on the table and turned away from the newspapers to her laptop. It was a rickety thing that Dean had “rented” from a library when she was a teenager. They never returned it and Dean claimed that he couldn’t remember where he’d gotten it from. Molly knew he had stolen it as a gift for her, but she didn’t mind.
The death she was on now was of a young man named Dennis. He had lived in a wealthy suburban neighborhood just outside of the Mystic Falls city limits. He was about twenty, attended a local community college, and volunteered at an animal shelter in his free time. He had been found in the woods with less than two liters of blood left in his body. The local cops hadn’t known what to think of it. Since he had come from an affluent family, the cops had even called in the FBI to investigate. They couldn’t find anything, really. All the autopsy said was that he had two small teeth marks on his neck.
Molly swallowed thickly, and tried to remember the last time she’d seen something similar to this. Her mind was blank, which was never a good sign.
Molly sighed as she looked back at the young man who stared back at her on the site. She imagined his horror at whatever creature had attacked him as it crept forward from the night. She clenched her fists and steeled her nerves.
“Mystic Falls, here I come,” she murmured.
– – –
The last time Molly had set foot in Virginia, it had been for a typical salt-and-burn case with her dad and Dean. She certainly had never been to Mystic Falls before, but something about the name made her skin erupt in goosebumps. Had she heard that name before? Certainly not, but something about it made her think she had.
The town itself wasn’t anything especially novel to her. It was very historic looking, and it made her remember learning about pilgrims and colonialism in school. As she drove down the road of the town in her rented car (but not really rented anymore… she stole it), she felt on-edge, like everyone and everything was watching her, from the people walking down the street to the crows circling the buildings overhead. She pulled up beside a large building whose sign read “The Mystic Grill.”
After six hours on the road with little to no breaks, her ass felt numb and her stomach a bottomless pit. She grabbed her bag and headed inside.
The Grill itself was quite nice on the inside. It resembled a sports bar and a historical artifact combined into one. As she walked in, the few people who were in there at 10am (yes, it was early for lunch, but she was hungry) turned to look at her with equally surprised expressions. Did everyone here know each other or something?
“Hello!” A young man’s voice greeted her as she walked in.
She jumped and spun around to see bright blue eyes and blonde hair. Immediately, she felt like she recognized him, but the nametag reminded her. Matt, as in Matt Donovan–the brother of the girl who’d died. Her throat bobbed as she met his eyes then, trying to gauge his emotion.
Molly decided he seemed surprisingly put-together for someone whose sister had died in such a way, but it had been a while since the incident, so who was she to know?
“Did you want a table?” He asked.
Molly nodded silently, and followed him as he led her to a seat near the front of the restaurant. It was a four seat table, and she purposefully chose a seat that would grant her full sight to the front door. Her father had taught her that.
“So, I’m Matt and I’ll be your server today. Would you like a drink to get started?”
Molly had almost forgotten she had to actually interact with people to do this job. She usually had Dean, with all his charisma and general… friendliness to lean on in these scenarios. With Matt right here, she knew he would be trying to get and hold his attention with everything he had. Molly’s hand slid off the table to dig around in her bag for a moment, before she brandished her leather wallet.
She opened it and showed it to the young man as he stood there. The picture was of her a bit younger, with shorter hair and a big smile. It said “Samantha Baker, FBI.” Yes, she had picked that name after her favorite movie from her childhood, Sixteen Candles.
Matt went pale, but he hid his surprise well, and gave to her probably his best attempt at a questioning look.
“Matt Donovan,” Molly said. He flinched. “Could I… talk to you about Vicki?”
Matt looked close to passing out. Either that, or running away.
She paused. “Oh, and I’ll take a Diet Coke please, thank you.”
Matt didn’t end up running away, but he did look at her like she was an alien as she stuffed fry after fry into her mouth. After a moment, she realized how improper it must seem for her to be eating like a woman starved when she should have been trying to talk to him.
“Do you all make your sauce here?” Molly asked, pointing at the stack of ribs Matt had procured for her. “Because it’s fuck–sorry, I forgot you were a child. It’s really good.”
Matt sat in the chair across from her so tense she thought he might be a marble statue.
His lips finally parted to reply. “W-we import it.”
Molly swallowed the last bit of fry left in her mouth and wiped her face with a napkin. God, Dean was so much better at this conversation stuff than she was. Here she was, stuffing her face while this poor boy was traumatized out of his mind.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Matt,” she finally said. “I– can’t imagine what that is like.”
Matt nodded like he’d heard those exact words countless times before. He stared at the table as he spoke, “she was just so young, y'know? And I mean she wasn’t the best sister – often high and hanging out with people she wasn’t supposed to. But she was my sister. A-And all of these people… t-they just don’t understand.”
Molly placed her hand on top of his gently. His eyes shot back to hers.
“The coroner’s report said she overdosed. I have a feeling there’s more to the story.”
Matt’s eyes widened. He looked across her face like she was looking for any sign that she was fibbing. “Are you serious? The last I heard the police weren’t going to be looking at her death anymore.”
Ah shit, Molly thought.
“I’m in a special unit,” Molly lied smoothly, “I take on cases that others have given up on.”
Matt nodded, but his eyes told her he wasn’t completely sure about that.
Molly withdrew her hand, and took another bite of a fry. “Was there anything unusual that you remember in the days leading up to her death?”
He shrugged. “I already told the police all I know. I hadn’t seen her much in those days. She was pretty irritable though, and her phone was always on silent–and she never kept it on silent before.”
“Why do you think that is?”
Matt shook his head.
“Do you remember any strange people hanging around, people that stick out in your memory?”
Matt looked like he was about to shake his head, but he stopped short. “Well, she had started hanging around Jeremy Gilbert a lot in the last few months. And Jeremy… well, he’s not exactly popular in school. It was weird to see my sister hanging out with him.”
Molly wrote the name down on her notepad, but Matt interjected.
“But I don’t think Jeremy could have done something like this. Really! I mean, he’s harmless. And Elena’s my friend.”
“Elena?” Molly asked.
“His older sister.”
Molly nodded and wrote it down under her brother’s name. “Hm. And what’s she like?”
Matt shrugged. Molly cocked a brow.
“Well, her parents died pretty recently, and she had to move in with her aunt here. She’s nice, but recently she’s been hanging around a lot of strange people–like those two Salvatore Brothers.”
“Salvatore?” Molly parroted. Where had she heard that name before?
Matt nodded. “Yeah, they always gave me the creeps, but I’ve met them and they’re nice enough.”
Molly wrote the two names down and then finished the last few fries that were left on her plate with a satisfied hum. Matt watched her awkwardly.
“Well, thank you, Matt. This has been enlightening,” Molly said.
“It has?”
“I’ll let you know if I find out anything more, alright?” Molly said.
Matt nodded a bit dumbly, mouth agape at the strange woman.
She got up and thrust her bag over her arm. Within minutes, she was gone like she had never been there in the first place. Matt glanced back over to her food and jolted to his feet.
“Hey, wait! You didn’t pay!”