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.

Ellen had yelled, and, again, Anna had been reminded of her father. John had always yelled when he was scared. She started to cry and went quiet again until her brothers came back for her. The next time they saw Ellen, Anna apologized to her. Something blossomed between them, and Anna thought, secretly in the back of her mind, that Ellen was like the mom she never got to meet.

They hardly saw her or Jo for over a year. They began to work with her brothers to stop the apocalypse when Anna was ten, and a relationship she'd all but forgotten about came back strong when Ellen protected her fiercely from a group of hallucinating townspeople who thought she was a demon.

Anna wasn't there when Ellen and Jo died. She'd been delegated to staying with Bobby, staying safe. When her brothers came back and the others didn't, she knew without a doubt that there'd been sacrifice. She heard a brisk and gentle version of the story, and still she began to associate other smells with Ellen: fire, blood, and sulfur.

()()()

Kevin Tran was seventeen when Anna was thirteen. But he was a mess, more so than she was. She thought, maybe, that he was a mess because seventeen was a lot harder than thirteen. But then she remembered that Bobby was dead and she decided that Kevin just reacted to the hard things differently than she did.

She watched Dean hold a paper bag to the kid's face and wondered if she would have had the patience to do the same. She wouldn't have known what to do, really, because she'd never seen that trick before, and she'd seen people react like Kevin was reacting, but they'd always been older and Dean had never been so nice to them.

"Did they kidnap you?" Kevin had asked her when he first stepped foot in the basement with a tablet clutched to his chest.

Anna had given him a strange look and then looked at Sam, silently asking what the hell he'd done to this kid that he thought they were kidnappers.

Kevin was chaotic, Anna quickly came to understand. But he was intelligent and caring. He was strong but he didn't see how strong he was. He was practical but could be talked into doing crazy things. He wanted his life back and he was willing to live through nightmares to reach it. He valued family. He came to be family. And then that book closed too.

Dean felt responsible because he let the angel into Sam's head. Sam felt responsible because the angel used his hands to kill the prophet. And Anna felt responsible because she'd known Dean's secret, and because she'd been standing two feet from him when it happened, but she hadn't known that the hand reaching for Kevin wasn't under Sam's control.

One day, Kevin went from chaos to silence. And Anna prayed he would have peace, but she secretly knew, even before they saw the signs and found his spirit haunting the bunker, that he couldn't find it. She knew because Kevin reacted to hard things differently.

Kevin panicked and screamed and then figured it out. Kevin clung to his old life, then clung to life even after death.

Anna cried right there in the library, and she didn't look at her brother because it was his fault, it was her fault, and it was Gadreel's crime. She held Kevin's face in her hands and her tears hit his ashen cheeks.

Kevin Tran died when he was nineteen, Anna fifteen. It hurt differently because Kevin always acted, reacted, and thought so much differently.

()()()

Charlie was sunshine and rainbows and pain beyond expression.

She was smiley, jittery, and quick-witted, but she didn't realize how incredible she was. Anna looked up to her from the start. At thirteen, she'd been thrilled to meet a bubbly woman who didn't ignore her existence and, in fact, seemed to take joy in teaching her little hacking tricks and showing her sides of pop culture that her brothers didn't touch. For a while, they didn't see each other because Charlie had gone off to be safe, and Anna told herself that was better even though she felt like she'd been duped. She'd met somebody who she'd let herself think of kind of like an older sister, and then she hadn't gone any real chance to know her. For a week after the case Charlie worked with them, Anna was quiet, lacking her usual thirteen year old energy.

When they saw Charlie again, Anna was fourteen. They began to see her more often, and she sometimes would come for weekends just to visit, or they would visit her and do fun things that they never would have dreamed of before meeting Charlie. Who else would convince her to wear medieval clothing and LARP? Who else could convince either of her brothers to do that? They found out why Charlie was alone, what had happened to her family, and Anna knew Charlie was one of them because all Winchesters knew pain beyond expression.

When she was alone at the bunker, sometimes she would type Charlie's number in and, if she answered, they would talk for an hour about anything and everything.

Charlie went to Oz, with Dorothy, and Anna thought it was the coolest, saddest thing she'd ever seen. Then Charlie came back, and she'd been split in half, the good parts torn from the bad parts. Things got confusing and then they got really bad. One of the worst memories Anna had was seeing Charlie broken in Sam's arms and Dean's fists covered in her blood. If he could hurt Charlie, he could hurt anybody. She'd stopped feeling safe, and she'd shoved her way into Sam's secret mission to save Dean even though the last time she kept a secret for one of her brothers, Kevin Tran had been killed.

She'd joined the mission because of Charlie, and the mission had killed Charlie. Seeing Charlie broken, her blood on Dean's hands... that had been terrifying. Seeing Charlie dead, her blood on Anna's own hands was enough to take her to her knees, a scream wrenched out of her throat. Her hands, dripping with blood that couldn't be seen, covered her eyes so she wouldn't have to look at what was left of the big sister she'd always wanted.

Forever now, the memories of Charlie would be sunshine and rainbows and blood on bathroom walls. They would be pain beyond expression.

()()()

The world crashing and burning around them just couldn't be enough.

Anna took up her place between Sam and Dean and watched as the Zippo lighter's tiny flame slid neatly through the air on its way from Dean Winchester's hand to Bobby Singer's funeral pyre. Even that little lighter knew better than to ruin this.

Never before had she flinched watching a pyre go up into flames. But today, Anna did.

A ritual so deeply ingrained in her from the time she was a child too small to understand it suddenly felt like such a heavy weight. This was a ceremony of respect and sincerity. This was goodbye, I'm sorry, I'll miss you, I should have saved you. This was gratitude, regret, and terror, fashionably late. This was the single moment with which a lifetime of dedication, skill, and subsequent respect had to be upheld. Never before had all of those responsibilities been as apparent to her.

This was Bobby Singer's end. It felt too small and so big. It felt light in it's crushing weight. It felt like a duty and a need fulfilled.

But this had been Bobby Singer, and he had been reduced to dancing flames and the tangy smell of lighter fluid. Anna didn't cry. She stared in numb fascination. She stood paralyzed by everything she should be commemorating.

By the time there was only ash, Anna was shaking inside and out. But this wasn't about her.

When they lost somebody, it couldn't be about them. It was about one more story told, a cold The End stamped in the center of an unfinished paragraph. And they were always responsible for those six letters.

She lived in a family of pythons.

Come close. Let us get to know you. Let us fall for your charming innocence, your quiet intelligence, your giant heart, your relatable loneliness. Let us welcome you into our hearts and make memories with you as if we don't know what's coming. Let us kill you just by loving you. Let our period of mourning be the start of a lifetime of guilt.

As she stood in front of Bobby Singer's funeral pyre, Anna knew she was standing in front of one hundred others. This was the pyre of those she would lose in the future, those she hadn't met yet but whose deaths would rip her heart out of her chest. It was the pyre of her father who'd been killed almost six years ago. It was the pyre on which she was terrified she would one day watch her brothers burn. It was the pyre she would one day melt into.

Yesterday's tragedy lay before her, accompanied by tomorrow's nightmare.

La Fin