Note: Happy Saturday! This makes chapter thirty. That's pretty cool. Thank you to everyone who's read, voted, and commented. Your support of this story is motivating on my worse days and heart-warming on my better ones. Thank you!

This chapter is quite bittersweet, so I hope you're ready for it. Quick warnings: There's not much Dean in it, and it has a lot to do with John (though he's not in it either). In this chapter, Anna is fourteen years old.




Nobody's Daughter

"You gonna go?" Kate asked, stuffing the little flyer a student council member had handed her into Anna's hand.

Anna glanced up at her in surprise and then looked down at the flyer in her hands. It took her all of three seconds to scan the flyer and make up her mind. "Nope," she answered grumpily and crumpled the flyer up in both hands.

"Oh, come on, Anna. I know you don't... Look, I don't want to, like, overstep or anything," Kate said delicately, and without her even finishing the sentence, Anna knew where this was going. "Because I don't know what it's like to not have parents but... You need to have some fun, and I guarantee you that Dean would take you to this."

"It's a father, daughter dance, Kate," Anna pointed out distinctly. She opened her locker to pull out her backpack and stuff the books she'd used for last period inside her bag. "I don't have a father. I'm disqualified. It's that simple."

The look that appeared on Kate's face was crushingly sad and sympathetic, but it morphed into careful frustration after the air had time to clear. "No, it isn't," Kate argued. When Anna glared sharply at her for debating something so personal, she raised her hands in surrender and took a physical step backward to indicate that she was backing off. "I'm not trying to push you into anything. I'm just saying that I don't think you should write it off like that, because it could be really fun and, again, I guarantee that Dean would take you."

Anna wanted to continue making the same argument-- without a father, she could hardly attend a father daughter dance. Instead, she tried another angle. "Dean is... Dean's not home right now. He won't be back by Saturday."

"Well, then ask Sam." Anna didn't answer, because she had no answer. "Unless he's gone too?" Kate challenged, looking like she thought she'd won the argument.

Instead, Anna grew irritated at her friend's suggestion. "What is this, a lost puppy ad? Somebody please adopt me," she mimicked pitifully. Anna hadn't meant to sound so harsh, but there was a sharp pain that appeared deep inside of her whenever she was confronted with the fact that she was an orphan. It was even worse when she was directly confronted with the fact that her father was dead. But Kate hadn't meant to hurt her, and anyway, Anna knew she should be over that pain by now. It had been almost seven years since her father was killed. She blew out a heavy breath. "Kate, I'm sorry. It's just, I don't... I don't know how to ask either one of them about something like this. I mean, we don't talk about our Dad. It's been... It's been years and we don't talk about him. We just don't."

"You don't have to talk about him," Kate said gently. "This is about you and them. Not your Dad. It's a chance for you to do something normal and fun. I mean, I don't do hunting and stuff, but I can see how stressed you get sometimes because of it and I really want you to feel good. This could be positive for you and Sam. Don't pretend he doesn't mother hen you all the time anyway."

Anna actually laughed at that as she closed her locker and slung her backpack over her shoulder. "Come on. If I miss the bus again, I'll probably get my ass kicked."

()()()

"Hey," Anna greeted and dropped her backpack by the island in the kitchen.

"Hey," Sam said, glancing over his shoulder at her.

"Are you... cooking? You remember how well that usually turns out, right?"

Sam shot her a bitchface. And went back to stirring whatever was in the saucepan on the stove. "I know how to cook. I just... the eggs thing was new to me."

"Mhm," Anna murmured, disbelieving but willing to humor him. "Whatcha makin'? Should I order pizza just in case?"

"You're hilarious," Sam deadpanned. "I think it'll be edible, though."

"Whatever you say," Anna allowed and reached into the candy bowl on the kitchen table for a handful of M&Ms. She tossed one up and caught it in her mouth as if it took no effort, and sauntered toward the stove feeling like an accomplished Olympic athlete. She didn't know why catching food like that made her feel so cool, but she was walking on air.

"Dean call today?"

"Uh, yeah. Sounds like he and Cas are still having trouble tracking down whatever took those men, so..."

Anna couldn't ignore the slight hint of bitterness in Sam's voice. She knew it well because she often heard it in her own voice. It was that I should be helping with that hunt, but I'm not because I got benched by one Dean Winchester. "Don't feel bad, Sammy," she said, a bit patronizingly because she just couldn't help herself. "Dean benches me all the time."

"It's Sam," was the immediate response. "You're fourteen and you have school," Sam added almost immediately. "I should've gone with them."

"Well, your busted shoulder said otherwise."

"It's fine now!"

"I'm not the one who benched you," Anna pointed out, eyebrows raised in challenge. She tossed another M&M up, realized quickly that it'd been a terrible throw, and let the thing fall without even trying to catch it or acknowledge that she'd thrown it up in the air. She just threw another one and caught this one with ease.

"You're unbelievable sometimes. You know that?"

If not for the fondness in Sam's tone, Anna might have been offended. But as it were, she just grinned in a way that echoed their absent older brother and caught another M&M in her mouth.

"I was thinkin' maybe I should meet them up there now that my shoulder's back in order," he spitballed.

The smile fell right off Anna's face, and she turned away from him and toward the kitchen table specifically so she could hide the disappointment in her expression.

"It's been over a week already. A third set of eyes might help."

"You can do research for them from here," Anna reminded him, trying not to sound as frustrated as she felt. There was a pause that lasted just long enough to let Anna know she'd been unsuccessful at hiding her frustrated disappointment.

"Yeah," Sam said after a minute, and Anna could feel him watching her. "You're right. No reason to drive all the way to Washington."

Anna smiled a little, but she sucked her lips into her mouth and bit down to hide the expression from sight. She knew damn well that Sam had agreed to stay because he'd heard the disappointment in her voice. Maybe that should have made her feel smothered or childish but Anna didn't feel anything but gratitude toward Sam for it.

"I think this is done, but I, uh, I'm not really sure," Sam admitted then of the pan on the stove.

Anna abandoned her post by the kitchen table where she'd been pretending to occupy herself with the newspaper left there from this morning. She peered over Sam's arm at the food on the stove. "Kraft mac n' cheese?"

"I know I always say not to eat this crap-" Anna opened her mouth with a delighted look in her eyes, ready to start giving her brother a hard time, but Sam cut her off. "And I stand by that. But this is the one thing I remember how to make and I got hungry."

"It's weird without Dean, right?"

"Tell me about it," Sam said emphatically. He released a little sigh and stirred the food on the stove which, Anna noticed, was lumpier than she'd ever seen Kraft cheese sauce. Sam was truly a wreck in the kitchen, but she was stuck on the way he'd sighed.

Anna realized vaguely that he'd been at the bunker alone all day for most of the past week and a half. She wasn't unfamiliar with that situation. She'd spent plenty of weekends here by herself since they moved in six or seven months ago. She wasn't supposed to leave the bunker when they weren't around, a rule which she hoped would change before long, so she often killed hours in this place bingeing Netflix shows, reading novels, baking when the mood hit her, or studying up on lore and training as much as she could without a pushy older brother there to coach her. She wasn't allowed to do any kind of target practice without them there either, another rule she wanted to be free of, because if she tried to improve her skills with any kind of weapon and wound up hurt, there would be nobody there to help her.

Needless to say, Anna got bored. But she'd been at school for a lot of the time since Dean and Cas left for Washington, and in that time she hadn't really thought about the fact that Sam was spending the days by himself in the bunker, probably going stir crazy.

"What  do you eat when we're gone?"

"PB&J mostly. And I make cookies almost daily."

Sam looked affronted at hearing of her diet.

Anna snickered and shook her head. "I'm just kidding. Dean usually makes a batch of spaghetti or chicken and rice or something before you guys go. I eat the leftovers, and I do know how to put together a salad. I eat PB&J and cookies, but it's not my full regimen."

Sam looked relieved and he stared down into the pan of mac n' cheese. It didn't seem to appeal to him. "Tomorrow, pizza might be a good idea."

()()()

She finished her homework remarkably quickly and then Anna found their father's journal tucked on top of the liquor cabinet in the library. She settled at one of the library tables with it and flipped it open, breathing in the scent for a second before flipping to a specific page that she often revisited. She scanned the page with her eyes until she reached the bottom where her sought-out line was.

I would have liked having a daughter.

The same reply would work its way into her mind every time she read his words. I would have liked having a father. Past my eighth birthday.

"Hey," Sam greeted and settled across the table from her with his laptop and a beer. "Looking for something in particular?" he asked when he noticed she had her nose buried in their father's journal

"No, just... lookin'," Anna answered. She stopped reading as he opened his laptop, and her gaze moved from the journal page to her brother's face. Kate had seemed sure of what Sam's response would be if she asked about the dance but... Anna was anything but sure.

True as it may be that this dance didn't implicate John Winchester directly, Anna knew better than to think that it wouldn't bring up painful memories even briefly. Ironic as it was, Anna felt a pang of hurt in her stomach just thinking about how her real father would have reacted if she asked him to take her to this dance. She had no clue what his answer would be, and that hurt more than she cared to admit. Over the years, she'd forgotten details about John. She couldn't remember his voice so well these days.

On Father's Day last year, she'd woken up and realized she couldn't remember the color of his eyes. She'd raided the photos in the trunk until she had satisfactory evidence that her father's eyes had been brown, and then she'd taken a shower just to cry it out because she should have known. She should have remembered the way he would get those crow's feet around his deep brown eyes when he grinned at her and captured her in a bear hug after a long hunt. She should have remembered the way those eyes flared with anger when he fought something that had threatened his children. She should have remembered his brown eyes because those eyes had been where all John's secrets were kept. Everything he didn't talk about had lived there and those things he never talked about were Anna's favorite parts of him because they were the most sincere parts of him.

Knowing how much disquieting grief this dance had already brought up for her, Anna didn't even want to dare to mention it to Sam. His relationship with John Winchester had been rocky at best, and Anna had no desire to get into that.

"You okay, Ladybug?"

Anna flinched a little, startled from her derailing train of thought. "Oh. Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine. Why- Why do you ask?"

Sam snorted. "You've been staring at me for, like, five minutes."

"Sorry," Anna offered and blushed a little in embarrassment. "Just thinking. I guess I spaced out."

Sam didn't say anything, just gave her a strange look and went back to whatever he was doing on his laptop.

Anna looked intently down at the journal in front of her and made a rapid-fire decision. If she could find anything in this journal that implied that John Winchester would have taken his daughter to the Lebanon High father daughter dance, Anna would ask Sam to take her. That way, she would at least feel more justified in wanting to go, knowing that, were John alive, she would have been able to.

I like having a little girl to come home to, her father had written years after the first entry. Anna checked the date and realized she would have been two years old at the time John wrote the words.

Would you have liked having a teenage daughter to come home to? She wondered. She was under no illusion that she was easy to handle. She'd broken curfew twice already since starting high school and making actual friends her own age. God, but it never failed to piss her brothers off. To her, that was half the fun, which was why Anna knew she was not easy to parent-- or watch out for, since parent might be the wrong term when you had siblings instead of parents.

That entry hardly seemed like evidence enough to make her ask Sam anything, so she kept flipping through to the few entries she knew existed about her. She skipped the one about John meeting Chloe, skipped the one about her birth, and skipped the one that said simply, Anna's mother died today. She landed on the entry about her first steps.

Anna started walking today. I walked in halfway through and she fell. I thought by the time she started walking this mess would be over and we would have bagged the damn thing that killed Mary. But her first steps were toward the boys.

Bittersweet and short. It was the way John wrote. Many of his entries were just a few lines, including the one about her first words.

Dean finally got Anna to say his name. That was Sam's first word too.

Neither of them were proof that he would've taken her to the dance. They both just felt a little raw, like John was admitting right there in black ink that he knew he'd failed as a parent in a lot of places. Maybe, if he were still alive, he would be taking advantage of opportunities like this to prove that he cared about his kids. Maybe that would be his reason if he took Anna to the dance. But she still didn't feel sure that he would have.

Anna loved her father, and she liked to think of him as only good, a family man despite his known dedication to hunting, the culmination of her brothers' intelligence, strength, and rounded skill as hunters. She didn't want to question this, but she didn't want to blindly believe it either. She wanted to believe it because it was true and because it was her job to uphold his memory, as one of his children. But she also wanted to know if John Winchester was really the family man she worshipped him as. She'd never dare to ask. Their father was still a touchy subject unless both boys were drunk and feeling synchronously nostalgic, and it was rare that Anna be with them when they were out drinking together long enough to reach that place of melancholy memoriam.

Anna flipped back to and stared at her favorite line in his journal. I would have liked having a daughter, John had written shortly after Mary died, when Sam and Dean were still small children. His daughter smiled every time she read the line. Would John still like to have a daughter now that she was fourteen years old, stubborn as a bull, and resembled her mother more with every passing day? She liked to think so, but sometimes the question brought her up short. Now, it was crucial.

But this line that made her question so much also told her everything she needed to know. John had written this line as if the possibility of having a daughter had been snatched away when Mary was killed. Then Anna had been born. Wouldn't he, then, have wanted to be involved in her life?

He'd written in the entry about her first steps that he'd been hoping to have killed Azazel before Anna began to walk, but because he hadn't yet gotten his revenge, Anna had walked toward Sam and Dean. All of it added up to mean one thing. Once Yellow Eyes was out of the picture, John would have made every effort to be involved in his childrens' lives as deeply and sincerely as possible. Maybe it was a generous way of looking at John Winchester to believe he would really have made that effort instead of just jumping into the next hunt-- because nobody just quits hunting once they've gotten their revenge-- but if anybody should be allowed to believe the most generous thing about John Winchester, it was his daughter who lost him just a few days before she turned eight.

"Sam?"

Sam hummed a response.

"Can I ask you something?"

Sam glanced up from the article he was reading with just his eyes, not moving his head. "What's up?"

Anna bit her lip and reached under leg where she'd tucked the folded up flyer from earlier that day. "Can we go to this?" she asked, and she handed the flyer to Sam.

He opened it efficiently and scanned it, then frowned as if he thought he'd read it wrong. Anna waited with bated breath as he read over the flyer a second time. Finally, Sam looked up at her. "You... want to go to this?"

Anna shrugged one shoulder evasively. She didn't want to say yes because the question sounded a little bit like he didn't think she should want to go, but Anna did want to go, dammit. She wanted to go because she didn't want to stay home and think about John while the dance went on Saturday night, and she wanted to go because she believed Sam and Dean did things for her that fathers were supposed to do for their children. She wanted to go because she wasn't anybody's daughter, but she wasn't fatherless and she had as much a right to go to this father, daughter dance as anybody at Lebanon High.

"You want me to take you to this?" Sam clarified a second time. This time, Anna recognized the almost hopeful shine to his voice and his eyes.

"I... yeah," she answered honestly. "Is... that okay?"

"Sure, Ladybug, if it's what you want," Sam agreed. He had an almost amused smile on his face.

"What?" Anna asked self-consciously, maybe a little defensively.

"Nothing. I just... Anna, you're staring at Dad's journal and then asking me to take you to a father, daughter dance. I'll go if you want me to, but if you want to talk about something, then-"

In fact, though, the last thing Anna wanted to do was talk about their father. She could feel a little pain over this, because that was healthy. But she didn't want to bring up that pain for Sam too. She didn't even want to dwell on it herself, though she had a feeling she would dwell on it whether she intended to or not."I just want to go to the dance, Sam. But only if you want to go too."

Sam smiled, and it was almost timid at first, but then it softened. "You really want me to take you to this?"

Anna was the one to laugh this time as she realized Sam was just surprised that she considered him enough of a father-figure to take her to the dance. "Yeah, Sam, I want you to take me."

His smile had spread a little, and he straightened in his chair. "Do you want to go shopping first?"

"Somebody alert the media," Anna quipped, eyes wide in shock. "I do believe a Winchester male just offered to go shopping." Sam swatted at her hand on the table, and Anna chuckled proudly. "I will never turn down an offer to go shopping," she informed her brother. "Does this mean I can ditch tomorrow?"

Sam gave her a bitchface for the second time since she'd gotten home from school. "The dance is Saturday night, Anna. We can go shopping Saturday morning. There's no reason for you to miss school."

Anna shrugged one shoulder. "You know I had to try."

Sam smiled fondly and shook his head, setting the flyer on the table and turning back to his computer. A moment passed before he began typing again, though.

Anna looked back down at the page of John's journal, and she felt a little sick but a little happy. I would have liked having a daughter, he'd written. Anna would have liked to have a father, and she didn't have one. But she did have a couple of pretty awesome brothers who knew how to act the part, and... she hoped it was alright that she ask them to do things that she would have asked John to do had he survived the hunt for Azazel.

With a smile, Anna closed her father's journal. Just like always, she kissed her fingers and tapped the journal's cover with them. Miss you, Dad, she thought mournfully.

()()()

"Are you sure it looks okay? I mean, they said semi-formal, but-"

"The dress is perfect, Anna. Promise. And don't even think about second-guessing yourself now because that thing was forty dollars."

The bathroom door swung open, and Anna walked out in her blue skater dress, black flats, and black denim jacket. She'd pulled her hair up into a pale curly ponytail that ended between her shoulder blades, and she was practically wringing her hands as she stood in front of her brother. She put aside her worry long enough to compliment Sam's own outfit. He wasn't wearing a full suit, but he had a formal dress shirt and tie situation going.

"Ready? Because it started five minutes ago, and fashionably late doesn't mean waiting til five minutes before it ends."

Anna rolled her eyes. "I didn't take that long," she bemoaned. Thing was, she'd really only taken about half an hour to get ready. The next half hour had been spent second-guessing herself. Could she really take her brother to a father, daughter dance and not get grief for it? There were people at the school that could be downright mean, and Anna wasn't sure this was a subject she could handle being teased over. Then again, with a 6'4" Sam Winchester next to her, who would dare make Anna upset?

"Dean wants pictures," Sam admitted as they entered the war room on their way out of the bunker. "Stand over there."

Anna rolled her eyes. "That's ridiculous," she said. "It's not prom."

"Well, of course not, considering I'm your date." Sam grinned. "I'll only have to take you to prom if we can't stop Dean from murdering your real date," he joked, iPhone camera held at the ready. As planned, the remark made Anna laugh, and he snapped a few pictures of her genuinely smiling, then tapped on the video button. "Say cheese," he goaded.

"What am I, four? No." Anna griped and then started walking, irritated, toward the camera. Sam ended the video just as Anna's hand came up to cover the lens and sent it and the pictures to Dean, who he knew was sad to be missing this. "Can we go now?"

()()()

When they stepped inside the auditorium where the dance was being held, the first thing they heard was the music. It was an old Taylor Swift song called The Best Day, and nobody was really dancing to it, but there were a lot of people on what could be called the dance floor. The room was crowded, like every girl in school had made time for the dance.

"I did not expect this many people," Anna admitted as they walked in. "Think someone'll take advantage of the invisibility and spike the punch?"

"With more chaperones than any other dance of the year?" Sam scoffed. "I'm sorry, Anna, but I doubt it."

Anna shrugged. "Who needs to get drunk when there's music and chocolate?"

"And A+ company," a familiar voice chimed from behind her. Anna turned around and attack-hugged Kate.

"They see each other every day, but they always hug like it's been weeks," Kate's father said to Sam and reached out to shake his hand.

"Nevermind the near-constant texting in between," Sam smiled and returned the handshake.

"Not fair," Anna said, shaking her index finger at Sam. "It's been more than twenty four hours, and we were busy all day so we haven't texted since last night." It was mostly a joke. They didn't text quite that often. On the weekends, maybe, but not so much on school nights when they'd seen each other during the day.

"Hey, Mila's here," Kate said, and she nodded toward the middle of the dance floor. Mila was talking animatedly to her father, a six foot nothing brown-haired man with five o'clock shadow and a blue suit, no tie.

"Yippee," Anna deadpanned. "Good to know I'll be getting not so subtly insulted for something before the night's up."

"She's not that bad," Kate insisted, and then she noticed Sam and her father looking at the both of them. "You just have to get to know her," she added more quietly, just to Anna. "Come talk to her for a minute?"

Anna shook her head and stepped back against her brother. "Maybe later. I'm gonna stay here for now."

Kate shrugged. "Okay. I'll find you later."

"Preferably not with Mila in tow," Anna grumbled as Kate walked away with her father.

"Mila?" Sam asked predictably.

"Unbearable at best," Anna said tersely.

"Maybe you just need to get to know her better."

"Maybe," Anna granted sincerely. After all, that was often the case, especially among teenagers. "But I'd rather avoid her like the plague," and that was true too.

Sam sighed a little and looked around as the song changed to All Star by Smash Mouth. "So, what do we do? I've never been to one of these things before."

"Me neither," Anna admitted. She looked around until she spotted the food table on the far side of the room. "Let's raid the food table!"

"You sound like Dean," Sam complained, but he let her lead him in that direction.

Anna took two brownies and offered one to Sam, but he shook his head so she just shrugged and resigned herself to eating both of them. There were certainly worse fates.

"Go easy on that crap, huh? You're gonna make yourself sick."

"Two brownies is not gonna make me sick, Sammy. Anyway, chocolate is basically a vegetable."

"What-? No," Sam said, shaking his head and squinting at her. "It's really not."

"Uh, cocoa is a bean and beans are vegetables."

Sam just shook his head again and didn't bother arguing. For the second time in five minutes, though, she was reminding him of Dean. He could picture the grin that would be on their brother's face if he could see her now. He would probably wait for Sam to look away and then lean in to say That's my girl or something of the like, as if Sam couldn't hear him encouraging her behavior.

"So," Anna said and brushed her hands off. "You know how to dance?"

Sam laughed nervously, looking as if he hoped she wasn't serious. "Maybe when I was twenty-two."

"Me neither," Anna admitted for the second time that night. "And All Star is not a sway and pretend it's dancing song."

"Well, I guess that's out of the question then, huh?"

Anna grinned. "Yeah, but that's okay. We can just talk lookin' fancy. That's what dances are really for anyway, right?"

Sam smiled and slung an arm over his sister's shoulder. They started to walk aimlessly, and he cleared his throat like he always did when about to say something serious. Anna braced herself but gave no indication that she'd noticed his tell. "Can I ask you something?" Sam began.

Anna glanced up at him as if she hadn't seen that coming. "Sure."

"Why'd you wanna come?"

"To this?" Anna clarified even though there was nothing else he could have meant.

"Yeah."

Anna shrugged as if she didn't know the answer to his question. Slowly, cautiously, she composed an answer. "I guess, I don't really know. Kate brought it up. She said it would be good for me. But... I mean, I thought... Dad's been dead half my life," she said more quietly and swallowed hard. They stopped walking and Sam turned to face her. He looked patient, his eyes telling her to take her time. Her mind was a little too chaotic, though, for her to draw a straight line between the beginning and the end of her decision-making process. "I thought that kinda meant I couldn't go but then... I don't know." She wasn't making sense, but Anna thought Sam might understand anyway. If anyone could, it would be him. "I mean, I don't know if Dad would've even taken me if he was alive."

Sam looked thoughtful for a second, and Anna looked up at him. Her eyes begged for an answer. She'd asked him to take her because she'd decided that John might have. She wanted confirmation, and she wanted Sam to give it to her. He seemed to realize after a moment what she was waiting for. "I think he would have," he said honestly. "I mean, not the version of Dad that we grew up with, but... by now... he would've been different. I know he would've. Priorities change and... even before, in ways I couldn't see, he put family first, put his kids first." There was a soccer trophy, a sawed of shotgun, and a resting safely in a storage facility in Black Rock, New York to prove it.

Anna looked down at her shoes, unspeakably relieved, though she didn't know why.

"Why does it matter?" Sam asked. "I mean, like you said, Dad's been dead for years. What he would've done..." It shouldn't matter.

Anna shrugged evasively and bit her lip as tears suddenly threatened. She didn't even know why she felt like crying, but she did. Something about John Winchester and the absence of him just hit her like a freight train every time she let her mind wander there. She took a deep breath and pushed it all down, or tried to anyway. "I don't know," she admitted in a weighted voice.

Sam was looking at her with a strange expression, and Anna disliked the attention, so she turned her head to see if she could spot Kate or, hell, even Mila. She just wanted an excuse to end this conversation. Before she could find either of them, though, Sam put a finger under her chin and lifted it. Anna met his eyes, and saw compassion there. This conversation wasn't over yet. "Is that what this is about? Dad?"

She should have evaded the question because it wasn't anything Anna wanted to talk about, but she found herself speaking nonetheless. Maybe she just needed to get some shit off her chest. She wasn't surprised when the words that fell out of her mouth turned out to be both acutely forlorn and indisputably true. "Sometimes I look at his journal and I feel like everything I remember about him is wrong."

She felt her eyes sting a little at the thought, tears threatening again. But she didn't cry. It had been too long. It shouldn't still hurt. But instead of going away, it was like the pain of losing her father took on a different shape with every passing year.

"What do you mean?" Sam asked gently.

Anna looked around them and was grateful that nobody was standing within two yards of them. My Wish was playing on the speakers. She hated that song. She hated country music. She hated this dance. She hated it because it wasn't fair because it wasn't for her because she didn't have a father. Why was the world always rubbing that right in her face? Worse, why wasn't it enough that she didn't have a father? Why did she have to always be wondering if her father had been as good as she wanted to believe back when he was alive and seemingly invincible?

"I just mean... I want to..." She couldn't figure out how to say any of what she felt even as it paraded through her, and that was frustrating. It was so frustrating, because there was no way to make the feeling go away if she couldn't even identify it. "I want him to be perfect."

Sam shook his head once, clearly not understanding but trying to. "Anna, nobody's perfect." That was far from the answer Anna had been hoping for, and it must have shown on her face because Sam put a hand on her shoulder. When her eyes caught his, he spoke again, "That doesn't mean he wasn't good."

That was a little closer to what she wanted, but it didn't satisfy her agitated and ambiguously distraught mind. "I know but... I mean, he- he wrote like he wanted to be better than he was and I always thought he was better than he was but... but I remember bad things too. I just... try not to remember them because I want him to be perfect and that's stupid and then every time I think something good about him, I second guess myself because I don't know if I'm just being naive and-" Her words started haltingly and ended breathlessly scrambled together.

"Anna, stop." She did. She cut herself right off and blew out a heavy, emotional breath. But she didn't cry. It was too late to cry. "Just stop," Sam said again. "It's completely normal for you to want to remember the good things about Dad and that's... that's healthy."

"But it's stupid."

"No, it's not."

"Sam, I don't want to be blind. I want to know. I want to know what he would've thought of me. I want to know if he would've taken me to this. And I can't. I can't know any of it because maybe he would've been different by now or maybe he would've been the same. But either way it doesn't matter, because I can't remember him right."

"Okay, shh," Sam urged, looking around to make sure nobody was staring. The last thing he wanted to do was censor his little sister when she was talking about something important that he'd urged her to talk about. But Anna didn't like attention, and Sam didn't like attention, and if she kept freaking out verbally, they would get nowhere but gain lots of that hated attention. "Anna... You're right. You can't know what he would've done."

"That helps so much," Anna snorted sarcastically and looked down at her foot, scuffing the spotless black toe of her shoe on the floor. She quickly felt bad for being so difficult when Sam was just trying to help with something he shouldn't have had to deal with at all, but she didn't know what to say to fix anything, so she just kept looking at her shoes.

Sam didn't say anything for a minute, and when he did, he sounded a little reluctant, like he was stepping into a mess of thoughts he hadn't even looked at in years. "I used to think the same thing about my mom. I would wonder about the pedestal Dad and Dean used to put her on and..." He swallowed and Anna realized how much it hurt him to talk about his mother. She almost told him not to get into it if it hurt, but... she wanted to know what he was going to say. She wanted him to help her. She was selfish like that. "I used to wish she was there when Dad and Dean were gone on hunts or when I was sick sometimes or... sometimes when there wasn't really any reason at all. I just wanted her to be there. I had it in my head that if she was there, she could help. But sometimes I still wondered if she was as perfect as they always painted her."

"You couldn't know either."

"No. But it still made me feel better, thinking about her. We both know, my mom wasn't perfect either. But that's not what I think about when I think of her. I think about the good things, because that's how we want to remember people. And, you know, maybe that's how we should remember people. They always say you shouldn't speak ill of the dead."

Anna huffed a little laugh. "So I'm not just insane?"

Sam smiled back. "You're not insane."

It was quiet for just long enough that Sam probably assumed the conversation had ended before: "You think he... You think he would've liked me?" Anna asked self-consciously, vulnerably. "Even as a teenager?"

Sam's heart broke inside his eyes before he pulled her in for a hug. "He would've loved you," he promised.

"But would he have liked me?" Anna asked, looking up at her brother. She had an insatiable appetite for specific and immeasurable truth tonight.

"Yeah," Sam answered sincerely, and Anna hugged him back nice and tight. "You're a good kid," he told her quietly.

Anna hugged him a little tighter. She wanted to believe the best about John, and somewhere in that, she also wanted to believe the best about herself. She wanted to believe she was still his daughter without him here. She never could believe that, though, and hearing any sort of general praise about her as a person felt... disburdening. "Chick flick moment in public," Anna said and laughed. "What would Dean think?"

"He'd probably disown us both," Sam smirked.

"So maybe let's not tell him?" Anna requested. But it wasn't because he would be disgusted. It was because he would care. And Anna couldn't do a repeat of this conversation with their older brother.

"Good call," Sam said, and Anna knew he knew her real reasoning. But he didn't call her on it, and she was glad for the out.

"They really went all in on the father daughter music, huh?" Anna asked, nose wrinkled in half-disgust as Butterfly Kisses came on.

Sam bobbed his eyebrows in agreement. "Might as well dance, though, right?" he asked.

Anna shrugged, but she followed him a little ways onto the dance floor and they swayed, pretending it was real dancing.

They stayed until the end of the dance, soaking up every minute, bantering and dancing and occasionally singing along to the less gushy songs. They stayed until Anna was half-asleep against Sam and a bunch of the seniors were starting to pick things up, and Kate and Mila and almost everybody else had already gone.

Then they went home, and Anna picked up John's journal to take to her room with her. Inside, she found the line that said I would have liked having a daughter, and she smiled so deep she almost cried. What would tonight have looked like if John still had a daughter and Anna still had a father? Did it matter?

Anna closed the journal, kissed her fingers, and tapped them against the cover. She still missed her father. She still loved him. But her first steps were toward Sam and Dean. Her first word was Dean's name. Even if John were still alive... what were the odds Sam would've been the one to take her to the dance anyway?

She closed her eyes, still wearing her blue dress and black flats. Maybe it was the exhaustion, but her mind seemed at peace for the first time since Kate handed her the flyer. It didn't matter what might've been if John were here. It mattered that Anna had somebody to lean on, half-asleep, at the end of the dance, when the playlist was starting over, the food table was empty and the auditorium was becoming roomier with every passing minute. It mattered that after she fell asleep, finally relaxed in the present after a week of what ifs, Sam came in, pulled her shoes off her feet, and covered her up with the blankets on her bed.

La Fin