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.

Her brothers were waiting. She dropped into the backseat of the Impala and looked up to the front where Sam and Dean were sitting quietly. They'd apparently finished with the first aid kit already. Anna wondered how long she'd spent on the porch, listening to those civilians berate her for a job oh-so-poorly done.

No one spoke in the heavy air as Dean started the car and pulled away from the house where this night would be remembered forever as a preventable tragedy caused by a barely turned eighteen year old girl who had no right to count herself as a hero or even a hunter. Anna couldn't think where she'd ever gotten off believing she was good enough to hunt alongside the two men who'd saved the world on more than one occasion.

"You should never have given me a gun," she said dully. Her own words were a surprise when they fell out of her mouth, but they were exactly what she'd been thinking.

"Come on," Dean said in his usual confident, older and wiser voice. Maybe he'd been expecting this reaction. Maybe not. He seemed comfortable handling it, though. "You know better than that. You've been training with that thing your whole life, Anna. The gun has nothing to do with what happened tonight."

Maybe. But if she didn't have a gun, she wasn't expected to use it. And she couldn't be expected to use one, because clearly she wasn't capable of doing what was necessary. Not in time to prevent tragedy.

"I don't want it anymore," she said instead, voice still dull.

Sam looked over his shoulder at her with his eyebrows knit together, and Dean's gaze in the rearview mirror bore a similar look. "You don't mean that."

"I'm not cut out for-"

"Stop," Sam demanded simply. "Anna, you didn't do anything wrong. You're a human being, and a young one, and you have a heart that doesn't let you shoot another person without thinking twice about it. I'd be more concerned if you could kill without blinking. There's nothing wrong with having a conscience."

"My conscience killed two people instead of one tonight, Sam," was Anna's answer. It was sharp and pointed. "What the hell good is morality if all it does is make you hesitate and get everybody killed? I'll tell you what it's good for. Nothing. That guy was a damn lunatic and I practically signed that kid's death warrant letting him live that extra few seconds."

It was quiet. But there were no illusions even in Anna's mind that the silence was a sign of their agreement with her assessment. It just meant there wasn't much of anything to be said.

They had a long drive to get back home. Home where Anna just might stay the next time her brothers found a hunt. She couldn't handle this lifestyle. She'd spent her whole life begging to be trusted and included in it, but now she understood that she wasn't cut out to hold other people's lives in her hands. Who was she to decide which breath was someone's last? Even if that someone had made the same choice for several innocents? She couldn't do it. She couldn't write the stories and pick off the characters like the creator of a fictitious universe where people's deaths were mere plot points. What was worse, she had to be able to. This job meant being able to. She wasn't expected to enjoy it. That would be far worse. But she had to be capable of making the hard choice, and of doing it in a heartbeat. Sam was Mr Moral Conscience, but he never would have made the mistake Anna had tonight. She knew that beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Last year, she spent hours arguing with Sam-- and even a few times with Dean-- about all the reasons she had to be a hunter instead of going to college and pursuing some other picturesque life. Now she wondered how she would be feeling tonight if she were staying in a dorm room at some university in New England. She'd secretly dreamed about going to Yale or Dartmouth and earning a medical degree. But she'd suppressed every fantasy and deleted every college email. College wasn't for her, she'd stubbornly insisted despite every person in her life telling her otherwise-- Sam, Dean, Kate, her teachers. She was destined to be a hunter. She would be the best hunter to ever walk the earth some day, she'd promised herself on those nights when she got awfully tempted to submit an application or two just to see what would happen.

Maybe college would have saved James' life. Maybe it would have saved more lives.

How many times had she messed up over the years and gotten people killed? She didn't even begin trying to tally. She didn't want to know. That fact made her feel worse, though.

She wished with everything she had that she'd chosen another road. She wished with every fiber of her being that she had never learned the tricks of the trade and made up her mind that this was who she was before she had any clue what it meant to know who you were. She wished she could go back a few hours and pull the trigger without faltering. She wished she could go back further and submit an application to Yale. She wished she could go back further and correct all the mistakes she'd unknowingly made as a child that impacted the way her brothers worked their cases. She wished she could go back further and keep herself from every getting in their way or in their father's way. She wished she could go back all the way and somehow steer John away from Chloe back in late January of 1998. She wished she'd never been born. Then she felt guilty for wishing any of it, and she felt worse for thinking she wasn't right to wish all of it, and the cycle was vicious and unrelenting.

The worst thing about all of it, Anna knew, was that tomorrow she would feel a little less miserable. The next day, she would start healing. In a month or so, she would feel herself again. She would never give up her gun. She would never hang her hat on this life, and she wouldn't really go back and change it all if she could, because somehow she'd managed to help a few people, and that damn conscience of hers would make a reappearance if ever she considered truly turning her back on those people.

The worst thing, she knew with every inch of her bruised heart, was that she would keep down this path until the day she was the one she got killed. Because, somehow, it was right. That was the worst thing, the scariest thing, and she was no more ready to face that fact now than she had been ready to kill a man a few hours prior when it was critical that she do so.

Tears burned her eyes. Anna planted her elbows on her knees, held her head in her hands, and didn't move until they reached Lebanon.

La Fin