The Runt of the Litter

I wish we never learned to fly

Note: This title is a line from a Billie Eilish song. I wrote this after listening to that song because I got to thinking about regret and how it comes in different forms. Hopefully that doesn't sound too moronic but I'm kinda tired right now and I was more tired yesterday writing this. Anna is nineteen.

I wish we never learned to fly

It was incredible, Anna thought, how she could be so sure that she was ready to deliver the news to this poor family and have such a difficult time handling their anger and pain on top of her own. Then there was the guilt that buried her. It had some help piling up, of course. The two grieving parents spitting hateful words in her direction certainly had something to do with her guilt. But she knew she couldn't blame herself for what happened. At least that was what Sam told her.

She had been mere feet away as the teenage civilian who'd been missing for a few days was gutted by a more-than-angry ex-hunter's pet black dog. The case had been a mess from the start, full of dead ends and loose connections, then of convoluted histories and a lot of resentful people. There had been little to go on when they first hit town, and things had gotten complicated quickly once they started picking up clues as to what was going on.

Sam and Dean figured it out, though. Leave it to her brothers to find and put together the pieces to what had to be the most disconnected job she'd ever seen. They'd known that taking down the black dog would be difficult but doable. Where things got tricky? The human behind it all. They didn't kill people. It was like a code they abode by without having to ever really say it aloud.

But sometimes, when push came to shove, there was no avoiding what had to be done. It had happened before. Usually people would get their comeuppance without much Winchester intervention when they used black magic to chain supernatural creatures. But this time, it was Anna who wound up holding all the cards. Her gun trained on the human turned monster had been their key to saving a teenager's life and ending the cycle of violence in town. And she'd hesitated for a second too long.

Of course, she hadn't known he had a second pet. But she couldn't convince herself with certainty that the knowledge would have been enough to make her pull the trigger. Especially considering her stomach still churned painfully at the memory of having fired the gun after James was on the ground, bleeding and choking and pleading.

And coming here, to his family, with his blood still staining her hands, though it had been physically washed away and was no longer visible...

She wasn't ready for their turmoil on top of her own.

But she didn't break. She was too well trained. She swallowed down all the words that wanted to bubble out of her. The arguments that they didn't understand her position, that James should never have been there and they should blame the man who killed him, that she was only a year older than their son had been and how the hell could she be expected to put a bullet through another person's heart without knowing for sure that it was unavoidable. Instead of letting any of her splintered indignance show, Anna stuttered out several apologies, listened to them tell her what she could do with those apologies, and turned away from their house in suburbia.

The walk from James' family's front porch to the Impala seemed to take full minutes rather than just ten seconds. If they hadn't been busy patching each other's wounds from their work taking down that first-- and then, after the moment of harsh truth, that second-- black dog, Anna knew her brothers would have accompanied her to the front door and stood strong beside her while James' parents-- who, she realized with a welling of guilt and sadness, were no longer parents-- confronted the one they held responsible for the death of their beloved son. And James, Anna pondered, at seventeen must have been in his senior year of high school. He'd had friends who would grieve him, acquaintances who had thought they hated him, preferences and fears that no longer existed now that he wasn't here to hold them in his mind-- a favorite teacher, a favorite food, a favorite person, a dislike of high places or clowns or spiders. Anna covered her face with both hands and breathed out noisily. She felt drained, and yet her mind was surely never going to shut off.