Chapter Text
Emma has a knife in her hand and it looks like it belongs there.
She tells Dean, in a wry voice, that so far, her childhood has been kind of disappointing. He doesn't want to imagine what the Amazons did to her, but they definitely did something, because the last time he saw her she was a pint-sized kid, skipping out of her house with a toothy smile, and now she's a teenager with cold eyes and a vicious brand peeking out of her sleeve. It must be a lonely world that she sees. She tells him that this is what she has to do. It’s what she is. But she’s not a killer, just a kid. His kid, actually, which makes her his responsibility, no matter which way this goes.
And although his handgun is pointed at her face, they both know the truth.
He isn’t going to shoot her.
In a blur of golden hair and monstrous, yellow eyes, she leaps at him, grabs him by the arms and throws him across the room. He goes flying. He smashes through the motel room’s glass partition and lands hard on the floor. It hurts. God, it hurts, and he should’ve seen it coming a mile off, because it’s the Amazons’ M.O. to throw their victims across the room before cutting off hands and feet.
Shit. That’s him. He jumps to his feet - because he's not going down, not yet - and sees her expression flicker, dark and uncertain. Her grip on the knife tightens.
She runs at him, knife raised, poised to slash across his wrists, but now that he’s got a handle on just how strong she is, he won’t be going easy. He boots her in the chest. It squashes the air from her lungs - she heaves a painful, unsteady breath as she hits the floor - and her knife clatters on the floor. He steps on it, kicking it far away. She gasps again for air.
“You don’t need to do this,” he implores her, “we can stop right here.”
Slowly, with glass shards under her palms, she pushes herself upright, hair falling aside, raising her face to him - fear and fury - and he knows it’s far from over.
They fight properly - no gun, no knife - the way Dean likes best.
Mostly, she beats the crap out of him and he scrapes by, deflecting the life-threatening injuries. He does get a few hits in - a solid punch to her jaw and a strong shove that makes her lose her balance, stumble backwards into the counter. For one second it seems like a victory. Of course, she then grabs the hefty coffee pot from the counter and lobs it at his head like she’s a pitcher for the Mariners.
She’s impossible strong, but she isn’t used to fights like this - two days old, remember - and starts making sloppy, desperate, predictable moves. When she spots the knife on the floor behind him, glinting, unused, he winces internally. No, don’t do that - but she dives for it. He dives after her and they go down together in a tangle of flailing, scratching limbs. Her dark, brown irises glow yellow - the whites and the surrounding skin stained red - and a low growl escapes her throat. She kicks him off her, easily, and he’s fairly sure he feels a rib break. Groaning on the floor, he can feel the hot blood pooling around his various open wounds. His shirt sleeve is cut to shreds. The adrenaline is wearing off.
Emma picks herself off the floor. She looks unsteady.
She gazes down at him, expression unreadable, her eyes returned to their natural brown - he saw those eyes on a baby once, once a long time ago, a long time ago yesterday - then calmly steps around him to find the knife. Dean’s head is throbbing and his back hurts like a senior citizen’s, but he summons the last of his strength and grabs his daughter’s ankle mid-step, tripping her.
She hits the ground face-first.
He doubts anyone has pulled that trick on her before.
He finds his way to his feet. “Enough, Emma. It’s over.”
She lies still on the floor. For a moment, he thinks he’s seriously hurt her, but then he hears the quiet sniffles and sees how her shoulders shudder. She’s crying. She’s sobbing her heart out because her dad’s alive instead of dead and carved up on the floor. Dean shakes his head; the poor girl is as crazy and damaged as him, about thirty years too early.
“Alright,” he grumbles, as nicely as he can with broken ribs, “it’ll be alright now.”
Emma doesn’t respond and he wonders if this is a trick, if she’s going to stab him as soon as he turns his back. What would he do then? What do they always do to monsters who try to kill him? The thought lingers for a moment before Dean decides, there and then, no. If she tries to kill him again, he’ll deal with it. Like he always does. Another bridge to cross another time, as they say. His life seems to be made of rivers and bridges.
Doesn’t matter now. Emma doesn’t look like she’s getting up and Dean need stitches and an advil. He needs to clean the motel floor, smeared with blood and glass and a broken coffee pot. And Sammy’ll be back any second, wondering why his brand new niece is face-down on the floor crying.
His hip flask is empty. He needs a goddamn drink.
Advil, stitches, cleaning. He works quietly, letting Emma stew in her mess of emotions. Even when the tears stop and she goes ominously quiet, he doesn’t disturb her. He’s weighed it up in his head and made the decision that, yeah, she can plot about his bloody murder so long as she does it quietly. It’s another half hour later - when he’s sitting at the shoddy table, drinking a hard-earned beer - that she finally drags herself upright.
There’s blood smeared over her face and her pink top. It must’ve come from the fight. It’s probably his. He throws her a box of tissues and she catches it, then looks down like she’s never seen a thing like it before.
“For the blood,” he says, but doesn’t comment when she wipes her tear-stained cheeks.
He looks away for a moment - to the door - and when he looks back, she’s staring intensely at the knife and gun, which rest by his elbow on the table. He doesn’t dare imagine what she’s thinking. Her eyes wander back to him, watchful and wary.
“What now?” she asks hollowly.
Good question. He doesn’t know, but figures he has to say something. “There’s food in the fridge, if you want.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Her eyes narrow, morphing to their yellow and red state, and he can’t tell if she’s doing it on purpose, to freak him out, or if it’s the natural state, or if it’s an involuntary response to thinking about violence, about stabbing him. He doesn’t know anything about her.
“What do you want to happen?”
It’s not really the question he wants to ask. How much of what you said was true? Were you lying? Are you a monster? Are you a killer? Are you just a girl? Do you want your mom? Do you want me to be your dad? I don’t know if I can be that for you.
She doesn’t respond, just keeps that stony glare pinned on him.
His phone rings, vibrating loud on the table, making them both jump.
He glances over - SAMMY CALLING - and answers. His brother’s frantic, panicked voice comes through immediately, telling Dean that he’s been calling and calling and Emma is dangerous and is coming to kill him and he must not trust her!
“Sam, Sam, I’m fine--” he yells down the phone, “--she already came to the motel.”
Emma stands quite suddenly and Dean tries not to suspiciously track her footsteps around the room; he tries to concentrate on Sam’s explanation of why he’s late - a run in with an Amazon and then a broken-down car on the side of the road. He makes a silent prayer of thanks that it’s not Baby, safely hidden in a storage container. His silence doesn’t go unnoticed on the other end of the line.
“Dean? What happened over there?”
“Everything’s fine,” he grits out, “just get your ass back here.”
He hangs up. Once again, he and his daughter are left in a steady silence.
She steps a little to the left, towards the door, and then two steps to the right. Never closer towards him, just edging around the room, inspecting its walls and flaws for something he can’t see. She’s superhuman, he remembers, and able to throw him across the room without breaking a sweat. But she won’t look him in the eyes now. Dean is not made for stuff like this. What would Sam do right now? Good God, he thinks, what would his dad do? Nothing good, probably.
“Are you gonna try somethin stupid?” he asks “because we’ve been down that road.”
They regard each other, still ten feet of distance between them.
“Or,” he continues, “are you gonna grab that burrito from the fridge and sit down?”
And that’s how Sam finds them, sitting opposite each other at the motel table, bruises and cuts all over, with a gun and a bloody knife between them. Dean’s drinking a beer and Emma is quietly picking at the leftover burrito. Sam doesn’t even seem to register her until he’s a couple steps into the room and freezes. His face falls. He pulls the gun at his hip, swings it in the direction of the girl - the monster - and pulls the trigger.
The bullet explodes across the motel room.
It misses - barely - and hits the wall by her forehead.
Both are on their feet in seconds. Emma’s backed up against the wall, knife in hand, ready to slice her way out. Dean crosses the room in four strides and snatches the gun from his hand.
“What the hell d’you think you’re doing?!”
“Saving your life!”
He shoves at his brother’s shoulder. “We had a deposit for this room - look at the wall, dumbass!”
“You said everything was fine, what the hell is she doing here?!”
“She was eating a burrito! Now you’ve scared her!”
“She’s a killer!”
“In case you haven’t noticed, genius, I’m alive!”
Sam’s righteous anger shifts into pure disbelief. They both look back at Emma; no longer a skittish, startled deer, but a girl prepared to strike. Dean can see it all playing out behind her eyes, considering attacking again, ready to go down in a terrified blaze of glory, and all that progress they made, down the drain. That nagging voice in her head is probably warning her that this is her last chance. He feels his brother tense beside him.
But she doesn’t look like a monster; she looks like a kid who lost her way.
He steps forward. “Hand the knife over.”
She shakes her head.
He puts his hand out anyway, palm up, with the sternest expression on his face. She hesitates, but inches forward, close enough in range to push the blade into his palm, hard enough to cut the skin. She lets go of the handle and steps back. His palm fills with blood. Even wincing at the cut, Dean has to admit that she did as she was told.
She sits again, shoving away the plate of half-eaten, leftover burrito, looking more furious than ever. When Dean looks back at Sam, he sees the fury mirrored. This is not over, his face says, we’re going to talk about it later. When he looks back at Emma, he finds her staring at the hole in the wall. The bullet that barely missed her.
“Sit down, Sammy,” he orders.
Dean takes a lengthy swig of beer, but he wishes it was whiskey.