#there’s an undercurrent of anger and jealousy and fear that their familial footing isnt what they thought it was when they fight about this

[quietwingsinthesky]

thinking about millie & john’s journal. thinking about. john doesn’t know how to raise her. once upon a time he used to say he wanted daughters, but he has one, and he doesn’t know what to do with her. sometimes he looks at dean in the right light and sees mary, and sam has always had her eyes. but millie’s eyes are john’s eyes and if the tilt of her chin is her mother’s, then he never knew her well enough to remember that detail. and he let her into this life too fast, he thinks sometimes, because sam had to be old enough so he forgot that millie wasn’t. she was a child, and then she was a young woman, and if there was an in-between, he doesn’t recall it clearly enough, it can’t have lasted long.

so. millie and john’s journal. how exactly do you bond with this girl who is your but not your wife’s. how do you make sure she understands this war, because she isn’t like your boys and she didn’t lose what they did. and maybe most importantly, how do you make sure she knows how to spell right, because you gave up hitching her from school to school and told yourself she had two older brothers who’d done enough to fill in whatever blanks she needed.

(and maybe just maybe you were only keeping sam and dean in school cause you were still delusional enough to think this would all end one day. that isn’t happening.)

see what i think happens is that john lets her write in it. not whatever she wants, mind you. the words are all still his. but it’s in her handwriting. he lives and learns and hunts, and she chronicles, quite diligently, whenever he can’t, either cause he’s too tired to write or he’s injured his hands or because she’s bloody and shivering off the adrenaline comedown and he’s got to put something in her hands to do before she starts lashing out like a scared animal.

the start of john’s journal is all his own, but somewhere in the middle, she starts popping in. they’ve got way different penmanship, he prints it neat and quick like he’s been doing for years, she gets it down jagged and full of crossed out words, misplaced punctuation. gets better as the years go on, but it’s clearly two different people keeping notes.

(she’s better in shorthand. she knows it. sam and dean don’t. never really came up for them. if john leaves them coordinates, he leaves her a scrawl only she even recognizes is meant to be a word.)

by the end of the journal, it’s just her left writing in it. even before john leaves, before he dies, she’s the one doing upkeep on his life’s work. which is the source of the worst of her and dean’s arguments. her brothers treat the journal like a religious text. millie’s convinced it needs to be a living document, corrected and added to, and besides, ‘i have a right to do so, Dean, dad let me write in it!’

i think she likes having those secrets. this little thing that is just for her and john. because sam and dean get to have secrets, they get to have parts of their father all to themselves. she’s special, to have this shared with her, entrusted to her. (it means she knows him best. she must. she was the one he let know everything in the journal, in his head, long before he left it for the boys. she knew him best. he wanted her to know him best. wonder how many times she repeats that to herself after he’s dead and all that’s left to do is debate his memory.)