Note: I meant to post more now that I'm home all the time-- by the way, being a senior in high school in 2020 is weird, guys-- but I keep starting stories that are gonna end up excessively long so I haven't finished any more. I did find this one that I wrote a little while ago. Let me know what you think. Anna is thirteen, and kind of having an existential crisis.

I renamed this chapter today, so anybody who got an update, my apologies.

sink v.

One OSIRIS sneaker dug heel-down into sloppy mud, thick brown painting over the shoe's once-clean blue lettering. Two hands gripped a blood-slick shirt and pulled as if willing away the wound the blood flowed from. Blonde hair grew heavy with muddy water and movement slowed. Water the color of sandalwood rippled as Anna Winchester stopped moving and fell limply, exhausted into it. Her eyelids slipped down, covering dulled green.

Gunshots echoed from someplace nearby, and their sound reverberated off the trees as the world struggled to turn beneath the sluggish fog of Anna's mind. Her lips moved, her eyelids fluttered, but life was impossible to summon as it was busy flowing out of three gashes made in her stomach.

It only took one second for those fatal wounds to appear. How could a life as complete, as fully rounded as hers, end in one second? One second was barely long enough for a person to twitch a finger, blink an eye, or smile. One second wasn't even long enough to take a breath in or let one out. Thirteen years of laughing, crying, fearing, hoping, loving, and, occasionally, hating could all be destroyed and disintegrated in less time than it took to inhale one time.

Fear discolored the pain and seized her into a sitting position against all odds. Anna Winchester would not die in the space of a second. But it wasn't determination that pushed her upward from the muddy ground. It was a dead panic. Death was no foreign concept to her. The daughter and sister of the world's best hunters had no choice but to be familiar with endings, with losses, with goodbyes and missed opportunities for them. But being the one on the ground, being the one whose blood diluted the water in the backwoods of some shit-ass town that she couldn't even remember the name of because it was nothing to her... That was so completely different from being the one looking on in horror and wondering whether it could one day be her. Because dying felt so much different than it looked.

Even with her eyes open, the world looked like one disfigured mass of colors and shapes. And the only sense she could trust was touch when the shouting and the fog grew too much and she fell again, her mind no longer willing to focus on anything. Even her approaching demise escaped her realm of thought. But the hands that found her shoulders and then her face, moving cold, wet hair away from her forehead and then tugging her hands away from the pool of her own blood forming on her stomach... Those hands were real. They were trustworthy.

Beyond the chaotic and elusive world of sound that had overwhelmed her moments before, Anna could now detect one sound that was calm and consistent, ever present and stable. It was difficult, but Anna did manage to focus on that continuous drone and make out just what it meant. A voice, sharing words that didn't ring true, but did everything to comfort. A voice that was familiar and low and caring and maybe just a little bit scared. Sammy.

"You're alright, Anna. Slow down a little bit." Was she breathing too quickly? "Can you open your eyes for me?" Were her eyes still closed? "Anna, please. Hey, come on. Can you hear me? Everything's gonna be alright." But was it? If everything was really going to be alright, then why did Sam sound like she was dying? Why did she feel like she was dying?

"Hey, how's she doin'?" The words came out in a rush as knees hit mud on Anna's other side.

"It's pretty bad, Dean." If only speaking words in hushed tones could make them less terrifying.

Anna clenched her eyes shut more tightly. She really was dying. This wasn't one of those teenage nightmares anymore. This wasn't her being dramatic because she didn't understand but she thought she did. This wasn't unjustified fear over something that could be fixed with a Band-Aid and a repeated crash-course in hunting etiquette. This was the end.

Then there was pressure on her stomach, and the pain flared, burned, skyrocketed. An OSIRIS sneaker sunk lower into the mud as Anna's back arched off the ground and she breathed deep and held it.

"Whoa. Whoa," Dean's voice eased her panic only slightly. "Take it easy, Rugrat. You're okay. Keep pressure on it, Sammy." Fabric was ripped, folded, placed against wounds that still gushed blood. "Breathe with me, kiddo, come on. Focus on me, Anna. Focus on my voice and breathe with me."

Anna tried, she really did. She counted through some deep breaths in her head. But the pain was all-encompassing now that the wound was being tampered with, and it became too much to bear before long. The fear was back. The fear of death. The fear, more importantly, that this might happen again even if she could find a way to survive. Because hunting was suicide. It was death, grief, guilt, and constant fear.

Breathing, relaxing, it was all too much effort. And when she finally spoke, it came out like gasping. She was a fish out of water. A kid out of her element. "I can't- I can't. De please. I can't-"

"Hey, hey, hey, you're alright. I promise. I promise, Anna. You hear me?"

Anna didn't care for promises. They were always empty anyhow. But now she needed them. What else was she supposed to hang onto when every voice inside her head was reminding her that they were all only putting off the inevitable?

"I'm right here, kiddo. I'm right here. Hang on another minute, alright? We're gonna get you outta here, find a real doctor. You're gonna be fine."

"That's all we can do here, Dean."

"Let's get her to the car then."

Two OSIRIS sneakers dangled, mud-stained and limp. There was hardly any color visible anymore. But it was still there someplace, and that was important in a world as unforgiving as this.

()()()

When she woke, the world was devoid of color and her mind devoid of complex thought. The only complete thought she could come up with at all was a mantra of I'm alive. But she was alone, too. The room was white-washed and simple, the bed she was in just as basic, white sheets and one thin gray blanket covering her up to her waist. But there was no one there with her, which was strange to say the least. Every time she'd ever woken away from their home of the week, at least one of her brothers had been there.

It was nothing short of terrifying to wake completely alone.

A monitor started beeping high-pitched and fast. She hadn't noticed it before, but now it was too loud to ignore. Anna shifted to get a look at whatever machine was making that noise, maybe pull the damn plug so she could hear herself think and figure out what could have happened that her brothers weren't with her. The small shift made a forgotten pain flare in her abdomen and both her arms flew in that direction protectively.

In a hurry, three people entered, two dressed in white, one in blue. None of them were Winchesters.

Involuntary tears of pain in her eyes, Anna gripped the sheet tightly with one hand and kept the other arm protectively around her middle. "M-my fa-" she cut off and her whole face scrunched with effort as she fought to control the pain.

"Lie back," a male voice ordered her while several hands pushed her down against the mattress.

"De-"

"Lie back, I said."

"Did somebody catch her name?"

"Sam-"

"Ann, I think."

"Ann, keep still while I take a look at the wound, alright?"

Anna whimpered and tried to shove away the hands on her shoulders, but only succeeded in getting her arms held in an unyielding grip. "My f-family," she whispered, her own struggles making the pain in her stomach worse. "W-Where?"

"Family, yeah. Uh, visiting hours were already over when they got here. Hold still, Ann."

"Anna," she managed to correct, working hard to do as the doctor had told her.

"Oh, I apologize," the nurse beside the bed said, removing her hands from Anna's arms. The other nurse had gone, apparently no longer needed.

"Can- can you get 'em?" Anna requested, biting her lip as the doctor taped the bandage on her wound back into place and fixed her hospital issued shirt.

"Like I say, visiting hours are-"

"What in the world are you doing?!" the nurse demanded when Anna started shifting her way toward a sitting position.

"M-my f-"

"Say no more," the doctor said with a huff and an eye roll. He pointed back at the bed in a silent demand that Anna lie back down. "Elle, do you mind telling Gray it's alright to let them pass?" He waited for the nurse to leave before smiling at Anna, and she wondered if the negative opinion she'd been developing of him wasn't wrong after all. "Gray's security for this wing. He had a hard time holding your fathers back."

"My-?" Anna couldn't help it. She started laughing, hugging her arms around her stomach and wincing at the pain it caused. "Th-they're my brothers," she corrected through giggles, then through gasps. "Not- They're not-" She giggled again.

The doctor had gone a little red. "Be careful," he chastised when she curled in on herself. "Don't want to open that wound any more."

Anna didn't answer him. There was no need as she'd already stopped the movement. It hurt far too much.

"Move," and in burst Sam and Dean.

Just like that, any ounce of optimism disappeared. Because her life had come back, knocking at the door and demanding to be let in. This wound might heal, but the next one would take her out of this world. And these two men may not be the perpetrators, but they sure were reminders. And it was worse because Anna needed them enough not to care that they signed her death warrant every time they let her load a gun. Except that wasn't fair, and she knew it. They were raised the same way she was, and the same single father had done this to all three of them. Sam and Dean were innocent in this, and it was only cold, dead fear that could make Anna think, for even a split second, that they were responsible for any aspect of her current immobility.

There was no smile on her face when they both grinned and sat on either side of her, though.

"How do you feel, Ladybug?" Sam asked her, grabbing her hand in both of his large ones. He was mindful of the IV line and his smile was shallow, fragile.

The dark rings around her eyes stood stark against her pale face as Anna answered bleakly. "I didn't die."

"Of course not," Dean said, putting on that same confident, take on the world and win attitude he always had when his family was losing hope. Always his job to be the grounding force, wasn't it?

Anna felt bad for thinking for the briefest moment that he played a hand in her position. How could he be blamed for the kind of damage he spent his whole life trying to prevent? And Sam? Sam spent years running far and fast away from this life, and for the first time, Anna really understood why. More than that, she knew exactly why Dad and Dean had never been able to reach that same understanding. Because Sam was never running from their family. He was running from his own fear. His fear of dying from three precisely spaced claw wounds that could appear in less time than it took to gasp in one single breath of pain and shock when you realized you'd been hurt. But more than that, his fear of bearing witness when the same thing happened to someone he loved and he couldn't stop that single, fatal second from coming to pass. Perhaps it was worse for him when he realized there was no escape from this life once you were in the thick of it.

Anna could say for damn sure that thinking about that inevitable return, again and again, to this wretched, terrifying lifestyle... thinking about that right now was what broke the dam that made her start crying, seemingly without precipice, right there in the middle of the hospital room.

"Anna?"

Yeah, they had every right to be confused. She'd given no warning signs of the avalanche inside her mind. And who could be bothered with that anyhow, when she was in danger of bleeding out on the outside. Her fear had merely been another symptom to manage when they were out there in the midst of a dangerous hunt that nearly became one to be remembered forever in the most guilt and sadness-ridden filing cabinets her brothers held in the backs of their minds. In those same trunks lay the Hellhounds that Ellen and Jo died to exterminate, the leviathan that put that bullet in Bobby's brain just a few months ago, those white-washed walls that stood tall and unshaken the day John Winchester made a demon deal with little regard to what his family would feel in its aftermath, in his aftermath.

"I'm sorry," Anna choked, and forced the tears away. What little she could feel these days was forbidden, taboo, never to be spoken aloud because the world was so delicately balanced on the shotgun Dean always used to prop open the trunk's secret compartment. The compartment where every darkness of Anna's existence was hidden away, behind a lock with no key, where the world could never find it because what was so conspicuous about a little girl riding in the backseat of a '67 Chevrolet Impala with two good Midwestern boys who nobody knew had saved the world at the expense of their very souls? How had she reached a point where she felt like the universe had wronged her when all her life had been spent trying to help the people whose lives had gone sour, or avenging those whose lives had been taken?

She could see it sometimes when they walked into diners, the way people looked at them like they were lost children or escaped criminals and no one could ever puzzle out just which conclusion was the right one. What a shame it was that the people who did the most to help the world spent the least time in comfort and were never to be recognized for the good they'd done. What a shame that children had to turn into soldiers when tragedy struck. What a tragic, damned shame that people had to be exactly what the world willed them to be, never making any choices except to go willingly and accept their fate, or to fight it with everything and end up covered in more scars than they might have borne had they chosen the former path.

"It's probably the pain," the doctor said, empathy coloring his voice. But empathy didn't mean anything coming from strangers unless they knew why you were upset. And it wasn't the pain of three red lines in her stomach that Anna was crying for. That pain would go away. She was crying because of the pain inside her stomach that she knew would always be there, the pain she was born with because her last name was like the rifle and that meant she was raised with one in her hands.

A medication pumped into her IV line put her to sleep, and Anna didn't dream. There were none left to dream now that she knew where she stood. There were two ways to go now. Embrace the life or take a page out of Sammy's book and kill your spirit trying to get out.

For now the dark was better anyway. And tomorrow, she would find some spark of light deep down inside herself, and she would use it to make herself smile.

La Fin