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John Winchester had always wanted sons. A son to carry on the mechanic business, a son who would fix cars and go deer hunting and watch football with him, a son who could grow up with a father like John never did. Mary had always wanted daughters, though, so when their first child was a girl, John smiled at his exhausted wife and the tiny baby in her arms and folded his hand over Mary's, saying, "She's perfect." They named her Deanna, after Mary's mother.
And then Sam was born (named after Mary's father, since John didn't want to name his children after the father who'd abandoned him), and John was satisfied. A beautiful little girl for Mary, and his own son to raise the way he'd always wanted.
Six months later, and John was shoving his little Sammy into four-year-old Deanna's arms, looking his terrified daughter in the eyes as he commanded her to run, run outside as fast as she could. Run and don't look back as John dove into the flames, trying desperately to find Mary, who was already dead.
After that, without Mary, everything changed. Mary had wanted a daughter, but John wanted sons, and now there was only John and his two children – both of them were sons in his eyes. There would be no dresses and makeup and talks about boys, and whatever else Mary had planned to do with a little girl. John didn't know how to fill Mary's shoes, didn't know how to be a mother (he felt barely suited to be a father, now that Mary was gone).
On Deanna's seventh birthday, John left her and Sammy with Uncle Bobby, who went out and bought a cake and plastic Barbie locket on a jelly cord. Deanna, hair cut short, dressed in sneakers and jeans and a Batman t-shirt, dutifully looped the cheap necklace around her neck, but the next time Bobby saw her hovering over her baby brother, it was missing. He found it later at the bottom of the trashcan in the bathroom.
Sammy grew rapidly, and Deanna was always there, always hanging by his side and answering his every call. She could make Sammy calm down from a tantrum when nobody else could. She was the first to know if he was hungry, the first to know if he'd had another nightmare, and she would pad quietly into his room to curl up beside him on the bed, rubbing his back and whispering softly until he fell asleep. When he said his first word, it was "De", and little Deanna's round face glowed with pride every time she heard it.
When John decided to tell Deanna about why he left her and Sammy so often, why they didn't have a house to live in, and what happened to their mother, Deanna's reaction was to look solemnly into her father's face and tell him she wanted to be a hunter too. John smiled at her, but his eyes were sad. Whatever Mary had wanted for her daughter, it wasn't this.
When Deanna was sixteen, she killed her first monster. She felt so good, so alive; she could hardly believe this was what she would be doing for the rest of her life. John's face was split nearly ear-to-ear with a grin so full of pride and joy that Deanna wanted to kill a hundred more monsters right then, just to make him smile at her like that again. They had a drink afterward at a bar where John gave her her first fake ID as a birthday present. The bartender gave them a strange look when Deanna told him she was twenty-one, but he served them anyway, and John laughed when Deanna swallowed down her whole glass without coughing. Deanna lost her virginity soon after that, a carefully planned affair where she returned to the same bar with her fake ID, wearing her tightest jeans slung low on her hips and a tight plaid shirt unbuttoned far enough to draw men's gazes into the dark space between her breasts. The bartender took her to a motel room after buying her a few drinks. Deanna laughed at the look on his face when he found out that she was a virgin, and she slipped out of the room before he woke up the next morning, throwing away the phone number he'd slipped into her jeans pocket. John stared at her hard when she returned in the morning, and Deanna ignored him.
Although Deanna kept her hair short, when she was eighteen she got her ears pierced and began wearing lipstick and occasionally nail polish, explaining to John that information was easier to gather when people treated her like a woman and not an alpha male stuck in a woman's body. John shrugged and let her keep doing it, even though his daughter (who already shared many of Mary's features) now reminded him even more painfully of his wife.
Sam started accompanying John and Deanna on their hunting trips, but he never took to it like Deanna had. He had a knack for research and intel-gathering, and John relegated to his youngest son most of that kind of work while he and Deanna tracked down and killed the monsters. John sometimes thought it strange that Mary's daughter had become the son John had always wanted to have, but he didn't often have these thoughts because they stung too sharply, as if the way he'd raised Deanna was somehow stomping on his wife's memory. He whispered to himself, to Mary's ghost, saying that he didn't know how to raise daughters, that sons was all he could handle without Mary, but he couldn't convince even himself of that.
John gave Deanna the Impala when he was positive that she was old enough and responsible enough to take care of it. Deanna accepted the gift with awe, and the way she ran her hands over the car's hood with a tenderness second only to the way she treated Sam brought a smile to John's face. She was growing up, growing out of his care and into her own. She wouldn't need him around for much longer, and John resolved not to stifle her when that happened.
One weekend when Deanna was twenty-two, she was staying with Sam at a seedy motel, watching old westerns and reading up on nearby jobs while John was out on a solitary hunting trip. John had argued furiously with his youngest son the night before, and Sam had bitten back just as fiercely, while Deanna tried in vain to cool their tempers and stop their yelling. It had lasted all night, the worst fight her father and brother had ever had, and John had left without a word right after that, leaving Deanna and Sam alone. Deanna never let Sam out of her sight, just like she'd never left his side since she ran out of their burning house, clutching him in her arms. She checked up on him out of the corner of her eye, turning halfway around while she took a swig of beer straight from the bottle, making sure he was still where she'd seen him last. It was habit: watch Sammy, take care of Sammy, protect Sammy. So when Sammy ran away that weekend, Deanna went insane. She threw their things in the back of the Impala, cleaned out the motel room in fifteen minutes and hit the highway in search of her little brother. She looked for days, trying even more desperately to find him before John came home, but then John did come home and Sam hadn't been found and Deanna thought she might tear herself apart from the sheer horror of it.
Those were the worst weeks of Deanna's life. When she told John what had happened, forcing down her panic and her tears, trying to keep her voice steady, John flew into a rage like she'd known he would. But John, furious as he was, looked at Deanna's desperate face and remembered Mary, and realized that he could never punish his daughter as much as she was punishing herself right now. In her eyes, losing Sam was the worst thing she had ever done, worse than all the things she'd stolen and the men she'd slept with and the people she'd killed. So John threw on his jacket and started the car and went off in search of Sam, and he found him, in college at Stanford. John wanted to bring Sam home, take him back for Deanna's sake at least, but Sam was studying to be a lawyer and John's children were hunters.
Then it became John and Deanna again, the two of them picking jobs and killing monsters and going for drinks, always hunting down the demon that had killed Mary. John would often leave for long periods following leads that almost always turned out to be false, while Deanna got better at handling jobs on her own and occasionally teaming up with other hunters. The one person she most wanted to hunt with was Sam, her perfect match, her better half, but in four years she couldn't bring herself to go talk to him or even pick up the phone to call him. By letting him run away, she had somehow failed him, even more than she failed John or herself. She knew she owed him in a way she could never repay, even if he didn't realize it. She would owe Sam forever.
One day John didn't come back. Deanna waited for a day longer than when he'd said he'd return, and then she drove to Bobby's. He and John had argued years ago, and then John stopped bringing Sam and Deanna to stay with him, so Deanna hadn't seen Bobby in a few years. The first thing he did when he opened the door was fold her into a bear hug that Deanna thought might break her ribs, but he hadn't seen John. They scoured their contacts together, searching for a clue as to John's whereabouts, and they found nothing. Deanna drove sixteen hours to the place where John's last job had been, posing as an FBI agent looking for her missing partner, but the job was finished and no one could point her in the right direction. Deanna exhausted every option. She wore herself down to the bone searching, and when every lead turned up dry, she had no more options.
No matter what she owed him, no matter how she'd failed him, no matter how he'd react when he saw her again after four years, she was going to find her little brother.
It was dark when she broke into his apartment, close to Halloween, after thoroughly checking the place out the day before when he was in his classes. It was the only way she could conceive of meeting him again after four years' silence, attacking him in the dark instead of knocking on his door. Somehow the silliness of it distracted her from the reality of the fact that John was missing, and that she was finally reaching out to Sam again.
He had a girlfriend. He had a life. That didn't stop Deanna from looking her brother straight in the eye and saying, "Dad hasn't been home in a few days."