Chapter Text
“Are you serious?”
Your mother rolls her eyes and hands you a manila folder that feels too professional for your ten-year-old hands to hold. “Your father won the rights to visit you, despite my wishes.” She crouches down to your eye level, attempting to bond with you, but she doesn’t even try to smile. Her face remains stone-cold as she says, “Remember, honey, your father isn’t a good influence.”
“Then why’d you like him once?”
“Pardon?” Your mother stands up, a thunderous look on her painted face.
“If two people like each other a lot then they have babies,” you say, grinning with one tooth missing in your smile. “I read it in my book. So why don’t you like Daddy anymore?”
“I liked him when I was younger,” your mother responds stiffly. “Thankfully I grew up and realized what he really is.”
“What is he?”
“He’s mean,” your mother says solemnly. Even though you’re ten years old, you know how mean your mom is. If even she thinks this man is mean, then maybe he won’t be the knight in shining armor you’ve been dreaming of for years that will sweep you away from this spotless white house, perfect expectations, and bleached woman.
You nod, sufficiently cowed, and sit down in your chair in front of the TV. “When is he getting here?”
“In thirty minutes, so put on nicer clothes and brush your hair,” your mother says curtly, straightening the cushions on her couch and yanking the remote out of your hands.
“When is he leaving?”
Your mother smiles. “As soon as possible.”
“Mommy—”
“Y/N, call me ‘Mother’. You’re too old to be calling me ‘Mommy’.”
“Mother, what should I wear?”
Thirty-seven minutes filled with cleaning and changing later, you sit on your couch reading another one of the books your mother likes to shove into your hands whenever someone comes over.
“Sit up straight, Y/N,” your mother snaps when the doorbell rings. You look up sharply, itching to pull the hair out of your face, but your mother says it’s prettier down. You don’t really care about all that, but she’ll yell at you if you put it up.
You hold your breath when your dad walks through that door. He’s everything your mother hates now. You can’t imagine them ever liking each other. He’s extremely tanned and not very well groomed, but that’s not the thing that strikes you the most.
He’s smiling. Nobody does that in your house.
“ What are you wearing ?” is the first thing your mother spits to her ex-husband after not seeing him for ten years.
“Something comfortable,” he replies, not taking his eyes off you. “Y/N?”
You nod shyly.
“Go get your shoes on, we’re going to get ice cream,” he says gently, smiling even brighter at you.
You smile hesitantly back at him; surely someone with that kind of smile can’t be mean, can they? Besides, you’d love to go get ice cream. You haven’t had it in months because your mom says the two of you need to lose weight, plus it makes you hyper.
While you’re pulling on your shoes, you hear your parents arguing.
“What’s she wearing? She looks like she already works in an office!”
“She’s professional, which is something you need to learn—”
“Y/N is ten years old!”
“I didn’t agree to let you take her out—”
“If you really think I’m going to kidnap our child, Y/M/N, then stop me.”
You enter the room with your shoes on. Your mother gives you a hug, which has you flinching away from her. “Remember, Y/N, your phone has a tracker on it. Even if Y/F/N tries anything, I’ll find you.”
You nod.
Your father holds out a hand to you. “You ready, Y/N?”
Hesitantly, not sure what to look at, you put your hand in his. You’ve never held someone’s hand before; your mother says it’s immature.
Your father leads you out of the house and right into a cheap motel with a dark color scheme and lumpy beds with too-thin sheets.
“Really?” you ask excitedly, jumping off the bed you’d been watching cartoons on and bounding to meet him.
Your dad nods, grinning at your fourteen-year-old face. He may be smiling, an expression that looks odd on such a leathery face, but you’re beaming, smooth skin unmarred and paler than it would be if you were outside like most of the other kids your age.
Monsters can hunt in the daytime too. Best to stay safe.
“I can hunt with you?” you repeat, still in your pajamas, the styrofoam bowl of cereal you’d been eating long forgotten. Your hair isn’t brushed, your clothes are two sizes too large, and you haven’t brushed your teeth. Your mother would go into cardiac arrest if she saw you.
Your dad doesn’t care. Thank God he’s finally saved you from her. Permanently this time.
“That’s right.”
You squeal and fling your arms around him. “I can’t wait! What are we hunting?”
“We’ll have to figure that out ourselves,” your father replies. “Are you ready to go?”
“Now?” you ask, astonished.
“Yes, now,” he says.
“Give me a second,” you say, still unable to wipe the grin from your face, “I just need to pack my toothbrush, then. And put my pajamas in the bag.” You can’t believe you’re finally going to get to go on a hunt with your dad; the most you’ve ever done was research various monsters (and that one time you’d stabbed a werewolf while walking home from the movie theater; you’d had to lie and tell your mom the blood on your pants was from your period).
“We’re not in a terribly big rush,” your dad says, packing up his phone and laptop from the motel’s clunky wooden desk as he says that. You duck into the bathroom to put your clothes on and brush your teeth. To celebrate, you finally put on that flannel he’d bought for your birthday a few weeks ago. He must have been planning this for a while.
“How long will the drive be?” You toss your clothes into the dirty clothes bag as you exit the bathroom so he can use it. He still smells like beer from his night out.
“Three hours, so make sure you use the toilet.” He’ll never let you live down that one time you’d needed to pee so badly you’d done it on the side of a road because there were no restrooms for a couple hundred miles in any direction.
You grunt as you lean across the bed for the knife you keep under your pillow. You’d forgotten to put it in your pocket after waking up. Your dad leaves the bathroom just in time to see and sighs.
“Y/N…”
“I know, I know,” you grumble, stuffing it into your oversized sweatshirt pocket. “I was on the bed close to it until you walked in.”
“And what if I was a monster?”
“You knew the password.”
Your dad shrugs. “Fair enough.”
You stand up in front of the hotel room’s mirror and quickly put your hair up into a ponytail as he finishes packing. Hopefully no one notices the devil’s trap painted under each bed. Getting people worked up about Devil worship in the small town you’re in would not be good.
“You done primping?” your dad asks, faking annoyance. He even taps his foot for good measure.
You shoot him the bird.
“I’ll get the car ready,” he says, amused. “I’ll be outside.”
“I’m going to take, like, thirty more seconds!” you complain, but he’s already gone.
You tread across the room and open up the bathroom door. As always, you’re on edge; you’ve seen a few too many horror movies to not expect a monster to jump out at you.
Hunters are always the main characters of every horror movie.
You step through the door and into the roadhouse.
“Y/N! Hurry up with the beer!”
You stumble on the uneven dirt floor and almost fall, spilling a tiny bit of beer onto your t-shirt, and you stick your tongue out at Jo. Your hair is slightly lighter and shorter than it was when you were fourteen—well, of course it is. People change, especially after three years.
Seventeen-year-old you steps around the counter and walks the beer over to Jo. Apart from you, only about three other people are allowed behind that counter.
You pass by your father, who’s busily entertaining Ellen and another hunter by telling a glorified story about the one time he almost had sex with a ghoul, and drop the beer in front of Jo. Some of it slops over the side and onto the table. One of the hunters that Jo apparently knows, who’s about your age, snickers when she shoves you.
At the end of the table you’re sitting at, two hunters are armwrestling and five others are egging them on. Ellen hasn’t yet decided whether to yell at them or let them go wild—they’re smiling, and when do hunters normally smile in this life?
The boy that had been flirting with you before you went on your beer run, Dylan, smiles when you sit down. He’s probably the only hunter here that isn’t shouting at other people.
“Took you long enough,” he jokes, nudging your shoulder with his. He flicks his shaggy brown hair out of his eyes and you frown. The action reminds you of someone.
“Well, I got lost,” you reply back and clink your cup against his.
“Maybe I can…” Dylan leans close enough so you’re sharing a breath, eyes half lidded as he glances between your lips and your eyes. “Help you find your way?”
“That line work on a lot of girls?” you breathe, enjoying the momentary closeness. You’ll probably never see him again, but you’d like to have one night with a reasonably attractive boy that understands why you can’t stay.
Besides, it’s nice to get attention. You can’t count how many times you’ve been left alone at a bar because Sam and Dean are busy doing other stuff (Dean flirting with other girls, Sam doing his… reading stuff).
“What’s the right answer?” Dylan brushes a strand of hair behind your eyes.
You shrug and bite your lip. “I don’t know. Either? Neither?”
“Huh.” Dylan watches intently as you lick your lips, eyes shrouded in darkness from the shadows the crappy roadhouse lights create. “Well, do you wanna pretend I said the right one?”
“Sure.”
“Wanna…” he jerks his head outside.
You suddenly remember your father and your mouth drops down into a perfect O. Dylan takes it the wrong way and immediately backtracks.
“Or if you don’t—that’s cool too—my—”
“No, it’s just…” You point to your father knocking back shots with the best of them. “My dad.”
“Oh.” Dylan nods. “Protective dad. I get it.”
“No, it’s just… we can’t use my hotel room. Do you have one?”
“Oh, yeah,” he breathes, dad forgotten. He stands up and extends one hand to you.
“What a gentleman,” you tease, standing up. You tap Jo twice on the shoulder when you walk past her. She lets you go with a knowing look. She doesn’t know who this boy is that you come in here moping about sometimes, but maybe Dylan will be able to get your mind off him.
“M’lady,” he jokes, holding the door open for you. The air outside is crisp, the sky indigo but lit up with the lights of a far away city. If you concentrate hard enough you can make out a few constellations.
“Let’s go in my car,” you suggest. “If Dad sees that I’m gone and my car’s still here, he might go a bit spare.”
“I can always get mine tomorrow morning,” Dylan says, smiling good naturedly at you. He puts his hands in his pockets and leans down just enough to brush his lips against yours. “Lead the way, then. Does this make you the knight in shining armor?”
“Yes, driving my trusty steed,” you say once you regain your breath, rolling your eyes, and unlock the car from a few steps away. You have to step carefully; it rained recently so there are puddles everywhere as well as the usual broken beer bottles and other trash. You can barely see anything and almost twist your ankle when you step on a weirdly large bottle cap.
“This is a small car,” Dylan remarks, watching you carefully as you take the next few steps. It makes you a little flustered to have anyone care about whether or not you fall while walking back to your car. Then Dylan looks up at you and winks. “Intimate.”
You huff, trying to conceal your laughter, and get into the car.
You immediately put the sun visor down. The sun is shining directly into your eyes and it’s annoying, to say the least. You’d lost your sunglasses when you were hightailing it out of some hillbilly town where they were convinced you’d murdered their mayor (you had, but because he was a werewolf). You think you’re in the clear, though. You’ve been driving on this flat country road for the last twenty minutes and there haven’t been any signs of any cars chasing you.
You relax a little bit and roll down the window. It’s unbearably hot in your car. No matter how much Dean tinkers with the AC, it never can fully cool off. You like to joke that him tinkering messes it up even more, which he takes with full offense.
You turn up your music and hum along softly to Wanted Dead or Alive by Bon Jovi. Dean claims to hate this song, but you know he loves it. It’s why it’s on the mixtape that you’re playing. Dean had made it for you, after all.
It can’t get better than this, you think, unbearably happy for some reason. You can’t help the smile that’s on your lips, listening to the music your brother loves enough to give to you, driving the car he hates, doing the job you love.
It can’t get better than this.
You take your eyes off the road for a few seconds to study the multicolored trees, fall just beginning to start. When you look back, a man in a trenchcoat is standing in the middle of the road, watching with no expression as you drive towards him. You scream despite yourself, slamming on your brakes and swerving. The car veers, loses traction, flips. Glass shatters, gears churn, and you’re stuck.
It feels wrong.
(In the end, your mother never calls you back. She’s never even given the chance to realize and save you. In the end, she never even knows that you’re anything but a failure, a high school dropout that’s cruising along on the money earned from odd jobs. She never gets to know that you’re a hero. She never gets to know that you’re a dead hero. She dies alone.
In the end, your father’s throat is cut by your hands. He lies alone, gurgling and choking on his own blood, his phone crushed and broken but still clenched in his hand as he desperately tries to call 911. Gotta save Y/N, is the only thing he can think. In the last second, he prays to a god he doesn’t believe in that Sam and Dean will save you instead.
In the end, a ghost shoves Dylan backwards into a metal rod that bursts through his chest and he dies there, too, screaming for help and shaking with both fear and cold. He had hoped that maybe he would see you again but when do hunters ever get what they want, anyway?
In the end, your brothers murder your Prius and it rots away in that junkyard, seats split open and stuffing bulging like innards, forever hated because of who it drove for years without realizing it wasn’t you.
In the end, nobody notices that you were replaced. You see your friends talking to you like it’s you, but it’s not, and then Sam stabs you and you die.
In the end, everyone dies.)
You wake up in a box feeling like you’re in an oven set to low. It’s not going to kill you, but goddamn is it hot.
“What the hell?” you mutter with a voice that sounds like you’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. The pain brings tears to your eyes and you swallow aggressively until it doesn’t hurt to. “What the hell?” you repeat. Everything is so dark—did you even open your eyes? It’s pitch black.
You reach up and your hands hit a flimsy board. It’s on all sides of you. Something falls into your eye and you blink furiously.
“Am I… I’m in a box.” You huff. “All right. Why am I in a box? Wait. Nevermind. I’ll figure that out after I get out. I can do this. I’ve gotten out of puzzles worse than this before.”
At least this time your prison is physical.
You hit the top of the box weakly and try to scream but all that comes out is a rasp. Guess you’ll be getting out of this yourself. Hopefully you’ll have more luck than when you were possessed by a demon.
Don’t think about that. “Legs are more powerful,” you think aloud. Maybe someone will be close enough to hear you speak. “Kick it.”
It’s so dark. You could go crazy because of how dark and quiet it is.
“Come on, Y/N. Come on.”
You don’t know how you survived, but you’re going to make the most of this. You’re not going to die in a box six feet under.
You’re going to find your family.