The Runt of the Litter

Tomorrow's Nightmare

Note: Thank you so much for all the kind words left after last week's chapter, as well as for the votes and reads! I was having a pretty bad day, but the response to the chapter was very positive, and it quite literally turned my day around.

As a side note, I hope nobody has been getting update notifications like mad for this, but I've been going through putting the titles to each chapter above where the text starts, just so that the titles are more visible to everybody reading.

In this chapter, Anna's age bounces around, but for the beginning and end, she is thirteen. This will make more sense when you read it. This one is sort of an opposite to Parodic Tragedies in that I wanted to narrow in on death again, but the deaths of people Anna got to know-- characters we know and miss from the show. I didn't include John, because that's a story for another time. I also didn't include any deaths that turned out not to be permanent.

I should issue a spoiler warning here, too, because there is some brief summarization of plot points from seasons 2, 5, 7, 9, and 10.

Tomorrow's Nightmare

Anna was four years old when she met Bobby Singer. They were not welcomed into his house. In fact, he stepped out onto the porch with a shotgun, and it wasn't until his dark eyes, brightened to the color of whiskey when the sun shone on them, landed on the little girl with her arms wrapped around Dean's neck that he stopped cursing and threatening and set his shotgun aside.

He still wouldn't look at or speak to John, but he passed him, clapped Dean on the shoulder with a look of something like pride and something like sadness. He took his hat off and, for a second, he just stared at the kid, as if trying to discern how she'd come to exist or why she was in front of him now. Then he reached out to carefully take her from Dean's arms, and she'd looked confused and a little upset, but she hadn't cried because Dean had seemed unbothered.

He'd made that mistake that people had been making since her birth and assumed she was Dean's kid. He'd been shocked and then not so shocked, and then John had corrected him and he'd been shocked again.

Anna had no real memory of meeting Bobby for the first time. But she had a hundred memories of life under his roof and in his backyard. The tire swing had seemed so big when she first climbed into it at four years old and begged Dean to push it back and forth, back and forth. It had seemed like home when she was nine years old spending hours waiting for her family to come back for her, spinning herself in circles until she was so dizzy she couldn't stand up straight. It had seemed like a bittersweet memory when she was thirteen and banished to the backyard so she couldn't hear her family talking about all the important, world-ending problems that she believed she was old enough to help solve.

Then, one day, the memory book was closed with one final entry that was just the tone of death, a single beep prolonged and potent. A beast that couldn't be killed with silver, iron, or latin phrases committed to memory back in those days when the tire swing was bigger than her.

()()()

Ellen was, in some ways, like Bobby, but she doted a little more. She smelled almost like John used to: whiskey, smoke, and a little sweat. They met her too soon after their father for that not to hurt, though, and for the first few weeks, Anna hated her.

Then she stayed at the Roadhouse while her brothers worked a case inside of a prison. She tried to make a great escape, stuffing minimal clothes and food into the backpack that usually only held the few toys she owned. Her plan had been to run for Bobby's house, but she didn't know how to get there, so she walked to town. The first words she'd spoken since her father died were to ask a stranger for a bus ticket to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. That request had resulted in her being dragged to a police station where, an hour later, Ellen found her.