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Anna's first time in front of a funeral pyre was too early to live on in her memory. She was just seven months old, held tight in her father's arms in the warm May morning. She cried because beside them Sam was crying, pressed against Dean's side. She cried because the fire was scary and Daddy was too quiet and still. She cried because Dean wasn't smiling like usual, but was holding Sam against him in an iron grip and mumbling something to his brother that was supposed to be comforting but just sounded pained. Her first brush with death hurt her by hurting her family.
()()()
Dean was holding her tight enough to make her side ache, but Anna didn't dare move. She was afraid of breaking him. Her brave, fun-loving older brother had never looked so fragilely stoic before. Worse, Dean looked close to breaking and yet he was still the more put together of her two caretakers at the moment. As Anna looked over Dean's shoulder at their father, standing a few feet behind and to their left, she felt a pain in her stomach. Her Daddy was crying. John Winchester. Crying.
How they had arrived here, she couldn't fathom. The day had started so easy and happy. She'd played Tag and Hide and Go Seek with Dean for almost an hour that morning while John pored over research with his new hunting friend whose name was Nick. Nick liked to play Tag and Hide and Go Seek, too, he'd told her, but he liked hunting more. With their father's friend helping out, Dean was free to play with Anna for most of the day, even taking her to the playground in town-- a treat Anna always secretly hoped for but never asked for because there was just never time, according to her family. She'd gotten onion rings at lunch without being scolded about money. It had been more than an easy day; it had been a good one.
But when they'd gone out on the hunt, they'd all gotten really serious, a little graver and more somber than usual even. When they'd left her in the car with a salt gun, John had given her strict instructions not to move from her spot no matter what she heard or saw.
As per usual, Anna had tried her best to stay awake and alert as she knew she should, and as per usual, she'd lost the battle shortly after night fell. She'd slipped into dreamland expecting the hunt to end as most did-- before she woke up. But instead of waking to the starting of the Impala's engine to find her Dad and older brother both exhausted but content, she'd woken being jostled and pulled out of the Impala.
On a brief, tense walk toward a big wooden structure that certainly hadn't been in the clearing when they pulled in, Anna got an immediate sense of the heaviness in the air. Something had gone wrong. That much was abundantly clear. But it wasn't until they grew nearer and she saw the body, covered in some kind of white fabric with blood showing through where the head was, that Anna realized just what had gone wrong. She was only four years old, but death was a familiar concept.
"Dean," she whispered, voice wobbling as she realized that Nick was nowhere to be seen. "Did Nick-?"
"Nick's gone," Dean cut her off in a rough, quiet voice.
As they stood in front of the pyre, Anna watched their father toss the matchbook. When the small flame landed and created an inferno, her face crumpled. She'd been here a few times before. That fire meant terrible, terrible things. It meant someone was never coming back. It meant Nick was never coming back.
She felt far worse when she saw their father, though. "Daddy's cryi-"
Dean hushed her before she could finish whispering the words. This means of putting Nick to rest was a sacred, sleeping beast, not to be disturbed. So Anna kept quiet, tangling her hands tightly in the leather of Dean's jacket and listening to his barely audible murmur that everything would be okay. It was as if he could sense her fear and confusion.
Yes, death was familiar to Anna. But she knew little about it, just that it was final and frightening. That night, she learned that it was an imminent threat. All it had to do was knock one time, and they would be left scrambling for purchase, no rug beneath their feet, no faith left in the cavities of their chests.
()()()
It was a source of warmth even as it chilled her to her core. It was very wrong, very paradoxical in that way her whole life tended to be. And it didn't escape her. Even at eleven years old, Anna knew just how impossibly and absurdly anomalous it was, in its brilliant and angry orange. Inside rested a secret, terrible tragedy that might once have been considered preventable. But considering what's been done preventable is only cause for terror, so she stopped that thought right there. She did let herself think, though, that it was warm in the coldest way.
On a burning mass of wood arranged into a funeral pyre lay the body of Benjamin Rhodes. He was in his early thirties, just a couple years older than Dean. Then he died. If the flames didn't cover him like a fragile boundary and a smothering light, it would have been more obvious how he'd died. His chest, after all, had been torn to ribbons by the beast in the woods-- the best whose funeral had been quick and dirty inside of the cave where they killed it after it killed Benjamin.
Around them, the air was crisp and cold, and they huddled inside of their jackets. Benjamin Rhodes had no family except for other hunters. He had a decent reputation, a handful of great stories, and a go get 'em attitude. Then he died, and his pyre was the warmest, coldest thing on this tainted November morning.
Anna's fingers twitched at her side, and she tucked her frigid hands into her jacket pockets to warm them and to restrain them. She wanted, in some desperate and inexplicable way, to reach out and touch that pyre. She wanted to steal its magic, snatch away its power, and demolish it. It felt so warm on their faces. If she touched it, it would singe her fingers. Yet it was a symbol of death, a promise of mercilessness, a whisper of something so terribly sorrowful. It was cold, indifferent, unforgiving. It was a deathbed come too late for goodbyes. It was a paradox of physical warmth and metaphorical cold and it was entrancing in the most frightening way.
Nobody came to watch him burn and so it was just them. But they were the ones to burn them because they were the ones to watch him die. If Bobby and Rufus had been hunting with Benjamin Rhodes on the night of his death, Bobby and Rufus would have burned him in a similar solitary setting. In the same way as the Winchesters' now, though, their mourning would have been distant. The pyre, the solemnity, the biting November cold against their reddening faces. It made up a scene that was a mere caricature of their own afflictions. They were sad because they knew what it was like to be sad. They were sad because before them lay a fallen soldier, a life of fears, loves, and losses, a man they hadn't known well enough, a man who nobody but them would bury, burn, or cry over.
With a sudden hitched breath, Anna buried her face against Sam's stomach and started to sniffle quietly. Before long, the sniffling turned to sobbing and she found herself unable to stop. They might think she was scared or traumatized or had any number of other reasons for starting to cry over the death of a relative stranger. But Anna wasn't crying because she was scared. She wasn't scared. But it was just so hot and cold, this pyre. It was just so righteously wrong.
()()()
Anna stood close enough to Marina Wade's funeral pyre for the heat to tinge her face pink. The slight burns that would likely remain on her cheeks after Marina had turned to ash wouldn't mean Anna had successfully replaced her on the pyre, but Anna needed them anyway. When Sam tried to gently guide her back to stand a safer distance from the flames, she shrugged him off and pushed him away until he finally gave up and just stood close behind her, in case. But he needn't have. The pyre would roast her outside. The guilt burned hotter than the flames before her, and that would take care of her insides.
Fourteen years old and a murderer. What would Dad have thought?
Inside her head, Marina still sobbed and begged to see her father one last time. Before her, Marina burned, and beside her, Marina's father cried quiet, raw tears.
Anna's stomach clenched and her face burned with shame and furious physical heat. One changed move and things might have been different. But what then? She burned, Sam and Dean grieved, and Marina stood in her place overwhelmed by guilt? Or maybe Sam or Dean burned and her guilt became more personal.
As it were, Marina's death would rest heavy on their shoulders. But it was heavy in that they'd failed as soldiers, not as siblings or children. This guilt was nothing compared to that she'd felt when Sam had fallen deep into Hell, or when Dean disappeared in the final fight with Dick Roman. This guilt was nonpartisan, dispassionate, almost obligatory. That made it a little worse, Anna thought.
But that's how life is when you're a hunter. You mourn in the strangest way, and you have a lost parent, friend, or lover to compare to every stranger's death you respectfully acknowledge. By this time, Anna had lost so many people-- from a mother she'd never known to a father she'd worshipped to Bobby Singer and a handful of dear friends to hunters she'd met only once or twice-- that deaths like Marina's rarely made her feel anything close to what she was now.
She often felt guilt over the passing of strangers. Call it the curse of being a hunter, or maybe of being a Winchester. But Marina had been just two years older than Anna. Sixteen. She'd excitedly told Anna before they all ventured into the woods that she was learning to drive and would have her license next month.
There would be no next month for Marina Wade, and again, Anna felt the urge to reach out, burn her hand in the fire, carry a scar to remind her of her failure. But there were worse failures to think about. There was Dad. Bobby. Cas. So she stood close until the pyre was ash, let herself be pulled away from what remained of Marina, and didn't cry until they got back to the bunker where she broke down in the bathroom where no one could hear and heaved into the toilet until she couldn't breathe.
You don't mourn loudly if it isn't your loss, Dad used to say. It's not about you unless it is.
Marina wasn't about her. Marina was about never getting her driver's license. Marina was about never getting to say goodbye to her father.
It was a familiar song.
John dead. And Anna never said goodbye.
But the tune was a little different. The roles had been reversed, the lyrics slightly changed. It was a parody, not a cover. It was a different sort of heartbreak, a twisted sort of casualty, a grievous blow that didn't quite align with the grief the Winchesters knew.
Marina Wade was a visceral reminder of the pain waiting in their future. She was the story they'd never lived through: The one where Anna didn't make it.
Anna dry heaved in the bathroom of the bunker and hoped no one outside could hear. The image of Marina's pyre flashed through her mind and evoked memories of a day last year when she woke up in the hospital and cried for fear of death or endless life. She begged herself to believe the tears that soaked her pillow were for Marina instead of herself.
But she didn't know how to cry for the stranger on the funeral pyre. Anna was selfish like that.
la fin