Supernatural Fic: Sing to the Sea
Jan. 4th, 2007 03:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xaaraTitle: Sing to the Sea
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
xaara
Rating: PG-13, gen
Timeline: Sometime loosely post-2.03.
Characters: Sam, Dean
Summary: A rash of disappearing babies in northern Wisconsin sends the Winchesters on the trail of an ancient cursed creature.
Disclaimer: Don’t own ‘em, yadda yadda. No small towns in northern Wisconsin were harmed during the writing of this fic, though about eight of them were sort of ground up and pasted back together as “Kewaunee.” It really exists, just not as I wrote it. Also: the beers mentioned in no way reflect the author’s taste, with the exception of Leinenkugel, which manufactures this tasty dark lager. Ahem.
Sing to the Sea
Kewaunee, Wisconsin
Two Days Ago
The thing no one tells you about babies is how much noise they make. They whine and whimper and pluck every maternal instinct you never knew you had. They gurgle when they smile and laugh like windchimes and look up at you with huge eyes and you never saw it coming, never thought you could possibly fall in love with something this ugly and round and new.
Katia lifts James from his crib, hushing his cries of annoyance and frustration by cradling him against her chest. “Shh,” she whispers, walking, rocking. “Shh, come on now, honey, you’ve been up all day and I know you need to sleep as much as I do.”
He snuffles against her, squirming. Three months and he’s a big boy, almost fifteen pounds at his last checkup. With the peculiar dexterity of babies, he arches back, using his feet for leverage, but Katia stays with him, accommodates his contortions without clutching him too tightly. Frustrated, James flexes his hands in the fabric of her shirt, then clasps tight, goes heavy and still, and emits a tiny snore.
Of course, Katia thinks, but doesn’t fight it, just eases him down with her onto the bed and lies back with his gentle weight spread across her. Of course. She traces a finger down his nose and allows herself a moment of wonder at this, at this person who is hers. Hers, from the down of hair swirled across his scalp to the round curve of his toes. Her body, her sweat and pain and blood. Her legacy.
Katia wraps an arm around her son and relaxes. “Night,” she whispers before she flips a blanket over her feet and closes her eyes.
When she wakes up, shivering, the air smells of the ocean and James is gone.
--
Baldwin, Wisconsin
Present Day
“This,” says Sam, “is not exactly what I had in mind.”
“What?” says Dean, jutting his chin forward into the room. “It’s what you said you wanted.”
Sam shrinks from the paisley wallpaper, the blankets crawling with vine patterns, the painted flowers spilling down the front of the wardrobe. The lamp shades cast leaf shadows on the walls. “I didn’t ask for the fucking jungle,” he points out.
“You said, and I quote, ‘Why don’t we stay somewhere homier this time?’”
“Because the last place you chose had pictures of belly dancers on the walls.”
Dean shrugs, drops his bag. “Well, this one calls itself a bed and breakfast,” he says. “That’s as homey as it gets. You do whatever.”
“Fine,” says Sam. “I call the remote.”
“Whatever,” Dean says, adding a “Bitch” as an afterthought, already on his way to the shower. Sam knows his brother will use all the hot water, so he doesn’t bother requesting otherwise. Instead, he flips open the laptop, absently plotting revenge while he checks his email.
Three messages that are probably spam, one from a girl he knew for about ten minutes at Stanford. She sends run-on sentences and exclamation points at least once a month: Hi, how are you, heard you were on a road trip, hope you’re having a good time, stay in touch! Something about the importance of keeping up with acquaintances. Sam just ignores her. Dean would laugh in her face and probably ask the girl next to her whether she wanted a quick fuck, just to prove some sort of point.
Dean, Sam thinks, can be very predictable.
Dangerous, the counselor in high school said. Dangerous to himself and others, irrational, unpredictable. Not to mention the knife. Dean Winchester. Can’t have him. Boy brought a knife to school, for goodness’ sake.
But all Sam can remember about the two weeks they spent at that school is the burn of rope across his wrists and fear like bile and dirty pennies in his mouth and Dean oh god Dean standing over him, knife dripping blood, You’re okay now Sammy, I found you, you’re okay, I got it. Thinking, later, when the counselor frowned at Dean for his knife and called him dangerous and unpredictable: Dangerous only to evil and totally predictable, because he will always, always come for me.
Summer will concede to fall and Dean will find Sam. There are rules older than time.
There will always be something else to hunt. You can sleep when you’re dead. The riches of the world are only important if they can be molded in to crucifixes and silver bullets.
Dad’s immortal.
Sam jerks himself free of the mental list, snaps the laptop closed, stretches his arms above his head. His head aches quietly, a steady throb at his temples. Been that way going on two straight weeks now until he can’t quite remember a time before it.
--
“So what’d you get?”
“Pig mutilations in Arkansas. Couple deaths at an abandoned railroad crossing in Louisiana. Disappearing babies north of here.”
“Disappearing babies?”
“Disappearing babies.”
“Let’s go.”
Dean leaves his wet towel on the back of the desk chair as they sneak out the window.
--
“What do we have on baby-snatching?” Dean asks, his hands draped across the steering wheel, thumbs tapping along to Stormbringer.
Sam shrugs. “Too much to sort through without specifics. A lot of changeling lore, although changelings are usually supposed to grow up with the humans. Some stuff about one baby switched for a fairy that looks like it which disappears after a specific amount of time has passed. Vampires, maybe? Don’t usually hide the bodies that well, though, more a suck ‘em and leave ‘em crowd.”
Dean grins and Sam immediately wishes he had phrased that differently, because three, two, one, “Met plenty of humans like that, man, this one chick in Denver, had a mouth like—”
“On the other hand, it could be just a regular kidnapping,” Sam says loudly. “But it’s the third one over the last two weeks.”
“Huh,” says Dean.
Sam sees the set of Dean’s expression, the flatness of his eyes, and asks, “What?”
“Nothing.”
Which is complete and utter bullshit. Dean communicates with his shoulders, with his eyebrows, with a twist of his mouth or a twitch of his fingers, all of which scream agitation. Sam’s fluency in Dean still has a long way to go, but now he watches his brother and hears, Back the fuck off Sammy, just back the fuck off or I’ll say something we both wish I hadn’t later. Before he can talk himself out of it, Sam presses. “Come on, Dean. What aren’t you telling me?”
Dean shuts down. Sam looks away, can’t stand to see his brother doing this over and over. Isolating himself, creating a vortex of steel and leather and blood black as the new moon and always shutting Sam out, so he gets there just as the door—sometimes literally—slams in his face. It’s been over a month of discussing nothing but the job, watching Dean twist the car into shape as if that will fix everything. Watching Dean destroy his careful work on the car and wanting nothing more than to turn around and snatch the crowbar from his brother’s hands and say listen to me, Dean, you listen to me now. You tell me, because I could never read you like you can read me, I just can’t and I don’t know. I don’t know. I can’t make it right.
“We ever gonna talk again?” Sam asks. He’s written and rewritten that question a hundred times in his head, but when it finally bursts free, it has none of the imperative that he wanted and all of the gentleness that never works with Dean, never.
Dean’s lips tighten along with his jaw. He blinks twice, slowly, and accelerates.
--
Kewaunee unfolds like a pop-up card over the curve of the horizon, mountain and valley folds, straight lines in opposition to logic. As Sam and Dean pull into town, nothing but a sign welcomes them. The sign declares the town’s population 4,672 and mentions that the mayor, whose name has partially worn off, is doing what she can to preserve Wisconsin’s Beautiful North.
“What’s to preserve?” Dean wonders, grimacing.
Sam snorts. The houses lining cracked streets sulk beneath a grey-brown cloud cover; outside of town, miles of tilled-under fields unfurl like patchwork to the horizon. It looks like every other small town in the upper midwest: sequestered, dour, irritable.
They stop at a gas station to ask after a place to stay. The young woman behind the counter (Hi! My name is Mena) looks up from her comic book, assesses them. Her hair, long and tamed into a hundred tiny curling braids, slithers back over her shoulders when she flips it away from her face. She blinks a set of close-set dark eyes, takes another glance at Dean, and returns to reading. Dean doesn’t even pause for his usual I’m still the fairest of them all preening, which worries Sam more than it should, considering.
Dean opens the cooler and grabs a six-pack of local beer, something that comes in dark bottles with a blue-and-red label. For a moment, Sam contemplates asking Dean if they can just get the Rolling Rock or Leinenkugel or hell, the PBR, but no, Dean has to expand his encyclopedic knowledge of local breweries every time they stop. Anyway, this stuff looks like it might not most closely resemble swill, so Sam doesn’t say anything. He figures that leaving some fights that beg to be picked is good karma, and he wants to cash in on as much of that as he can. It can’t hurt.
Sam approaches the register, tries to look as unthreatening as possible. He’s found that bangs draped forward over his eyes, combined with a slight slouch and hands stuffed nervously in front pockets, work wonders. “Hey,” he says. “You know somewhere we could spend the night?”
“Motel 6 ‘bout eight blocks west of here, through town. Follow Main, take a right on Antler, you’ll be right there.” Mena doesn’t remove her eyes from her reading. It’s an old Hellblazer, cover half-ripped and taped back together, held gently beneath her black-tipped fingers.
Sam smiles. “You from here?”
Mena turns a page. On it, John Constantine lights a cigarette. Sam wishes for a moment that he could afford himself the same comedown instead of this humming high-alert, find the demon, fight the bad guys, keep the patches coming as Dean fractures in absolute silence, as inevitable as the tide. “Where the fuck else would I be from?” she demands. “Not like people come here for fun.”
“Just wanted to know. Me and my brother—that’s him, there in the back—we were just passing through and heard about the missing kids. Pretty terrible, things that can happen.”
“Whatever,” says Mena, twisting the snakeskin bracelet that encircles her wrist. “If parents loved their children enough, they wouldn’t just let them go. They’d understand what it means to hold a baby in their arms and protect it. Maybe we can stop telling the people who visit that we’re so safe and fucking cute that we don’t even have to lock our doors at night.”
Sam frowns but doesn’t pursue the point. “So you haven’t heard anything about the incidents, then?”
“Nothing more than was in the paper.” Mena marks her place with a bookmark from which Batman bids the world to go above & beyond and READ. “You two gonna buy something or is this one of those distract-the-cashier scams where you talk to me while he sneaks out with half my chocolate?”
“Your chocolate is safe from me, madam,” Dean says, beer in one hand, chips in the other, nothing containing nutrients within a ten-foot radius. “Have to maintain the physique.”
“Dude,” says Mena, “stow it. Eleven twenty-eight.”
Dean hands her the money while Sam swallows a grin and drops a five in her tip jar. The bill lands inaudibly atop the two dimes, three nickels, and seven pennies in a pile at the bottom.
“We don’t have that much cash, you know,” Dean says once they’re outside, like it’s just a comment, like he’s just making conversation.
“Neither does she,” says Sam.
“Okay.” Dean unloads his purchases into the backseat, plastic bags rustling. “You find us a place to stay?”
“Motel 6.”
“Man,” says Dean, sliding behind the wheel as Sam takes shotgun, “they should have some sort of frequent-flyer program for motels. Like you spend long enough in Scumpit Travel Lodge, you get a few free nights or something, you know?”
“Maybe we could go for a world record, most Stargate marathons watched on motel televisions while waiting for nightfall.”
“Whatever, dude,” Dean says. “It’s all about Passions and you know it.” He puts the car into gear and they rumble up Main, take a right on Antler, and pull into a parking lot familiar as homecoming.
--
Today they’re Federal Agents Osbourne and Ward, here about the babies, yes, there were some guys around earlier, we’re just here to follow up, ask a few more questions, get an independent report. Procedure, you know how bureaucracy works, everything in triplicate.
“I went to sleep with him on my chest,” Katia says. “Literally on my chest, curled up there. Sometimes it is—was?—the only way I could get him to sleep, give him my heartbeat to listen to. Someone, Jesus. Someone stood closer to me than you’re sitting right now and took him while I was asleep. And then I woke up and he was gone.”
Sam knits his eyebrows into Professionally Sympathetic while Dean asks, “Did you notice anything different about the room when you woke up? Strange noises, smells, open windows?”
“No,” says Katia. Her eyes well with tears and Dean retreats as Sam hands her a tissue. When she bends her head, Sam notices that she hasn’t washed her hair in days. Her shirt has the compressed wrinkles he recognizes from having retrieved many of his own from the dirty laundry pile. She picks at her ruined cuticles and presses her lips together, trembling.
“I’m sorry I’m not more help,” she says, her voice cracking. “I just, I can’t stop thinking that maybe if I’d gone to sleep a little later, or if I hadn’t stayed up later than I should have the night before, or checked to make sure the door was locked, or, god, anything different, and I can’t stop it.” Sam extends a hand to her, but it’s Dean she’s looking at, Dean whose eyes she’s captured and won’t let go. “If I’d done anything,” she whispers. “One thing, one person to protect. One. I was supposed to keep him safe, and I failed.”
The air shivers with her grief. Dean stands, nearly tipping his chair backwards in his abruptness, and stalks from the room; Katia bows her head.
“We’re so sorry for your loss,” says Sam hastily, wincing at the slam of the front door. “If you remember anything else, or just need to talk, or anything, really, give us a call.” He slides a piece of paper with his cell number across the table. Katia sniffs, nods, and takes it. She doesn’t rise with him, and looking down on her, Sam feels huge, a useless giant, fingers too large to comfort without crushing. “I mean it about calling,” he says. “It’s not easy to lose family.”
“Thank you,” Katia says. She runs her fingers along the edge of the table, then stands. “I’m sorry, I’m being a terrible hostess. I should have asked if you wanted something to eat or drink or—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Sam says. “We understand. It’s hard to think at times like these.”
“Well, Mama always said it’s better to apologize than just hope everyone understands.” Katia pulls herself up and looses a tiny, wobbling smile. Sam thinks that in better times, she might be pretty, not beautiful, not elegant, but pretty. When she opens the door for him, Sam lingers for a moment.
“We appreciate your cooperation,” he says. “Hang in there. We might find him yet.”
Although she looks like she might say something, Katia bites her lip and nods in silence. Sam has just begun the walk down the stairs from the front porch when she calls him back. “Wait,” she says, and he half-turns, waits for her to continue. “I just remembered something. When I woke up, after, you know, after. The room smelled salty, briny, like the ocean.”
“Thanks.” Sam waves a hand at her and steps onto the sidewalk. “Anything at all, just call.”
--
By the time Sam returns to the car, Dean’s already in the driver’s seat, his suit jacket off, his tie loosened, his cuffs undone and rolled halfway up his forearms. “Let’s go,” he says, voice low and rough. “That was fucking useless.”
“She said the room smelled salty when she woke up. Like the ocean.”
“Okay,” says Dean. He inhales and exhales a few times, his foot tapping. “Okay.”
Sam watches his brother reel himself in, the slight tremor in his hands squeezed white-knuckled and still against the steering wheel. The feverish shine fades from his eyes, and his shoulders furl until he seems much smaller than Sam remembers ever seeing him. Dean takes a deep breath as he turns the key in the ignition, checks over his shoulder and pulls out of the parking spot. His smile, forced and ugly, peels his lips apart and cracks them at the edges until Sam has the sudden, violent urge to rip it from Dean’s face, peel his skin off and see once and for all the machinery that lies beneath. Because no one does this, no one does this.
There were pictures, in one of his high school textbooks, of a monk on fire. Middle of a street in Vietnam, and a man seated, folded into the lotus position, container that had held gasoline behind him and open. He’d stared at the picture while his teacher rambled about television, mass media, awakenings. Studied the lines of the man’s face and thought that maybe the why didn’t matter, maybe it was just important to believe in something strongly enough to sit cross-legged in flames without a sound, without a movement. Burning.
His breath catches raggedly at his throat. The job, Sam reminds himself. We’re on a job. He coughs, sharply. “What do we know that smells like the ocean?”
“Wouldn’t be a demon,” Dean says. “That’d leave the smell of sulfur, if anything.”
“Mermaid?”
“Dude. In Wisconsin? What, she got her legs and decided to walk cross-country instead of sticking with the prince?”
“It is possible not to define your world in terms of Disney.”
“Hans Christian Andersen, jackass.”
Sam looks at Dean, furrows his forehead. “When did you ever read that?”
“Hey man, it’s good stuff.”
“Not arguing that. I just never imagined you as the fairy tale type.”
Dean shrugs, rubbing a hand over his chin. He squirms a little. Sam lets it go.
“So the ocean, huh?” Dean asks after they sit for a moment in silence. “Could it be a water sprite, a nymph?”
“Could be,” Sam says, but he’s not convinced. “I dunno, I haven’t heard of them stealing children, except in direct retaliation for something. Has there been any dam activity or anything around here?”
“Don’t think so,” says Dean. “What else steals babies?”
“Ghoul?”
“Too messy; this was a clean kidnapping. Tammatuyuq?”
“Possible. Don’t they usually take the baby from the mother when she’s awake, though? Pretend to help out and then take off?”
“Yeah. Could be one that changed its MO. Hard to find mothers that’ll let strangers handle their babies anymore.”
“Spriggan?” By now, Sam’s reaching, coming up with everything he can remember that takes children.
“No crop failures.”
“True.” Sam taps his fingers on his knee. Something doesn’t quite add up, doesn’t quite click. “We’re missing something,” he says.
“You want to go back later, scan for EMF?”
“No I mean, we’re missing something in our list of suspects. It’s something that wants babies, and what? Eats them? None of them have been found, right?”
“Right.”
“And it smells like the ocean.”
“Probably a dolphin,” Dean says. “Creepy fuckers. I always knew Flipper had something going on behind that mild-mannered grin.”
Sam throws up his hands. “You’re impossible,” he says.
Dean smirks. “I do my best.”
--
The library’s closed by the time they find it, so they settle into a cafe with free internet and surf for a while, kids and kidnappings, oceans and moon cycles. Dean comes up with a lot of sterling silver charms; Sam with a lot of spells for a happy home. He wonders if any of them work, and where he would cast one to find out. He wonders whether he could chant something tiny each night, leave each morning a new circle of protection with a little bit of himself inside. It’s like dropping bread crumbs, he thinks, a trail that leads back to nothing you want and everything you need.
“I’ve got nothing,” Sam says at last. The waitress stopped being charmed by his smile two hours after he ordered only coffee, black. No refills have come by in at least forty minutes, and the coffee left in his mug has long since turned tepid and bitter.
“Yeah,” says Dean, stretching. The tendons in his neck stand out under his skin.
This time, Dean leaves the tip. Ten dollars, over twice their bill, and a nod to the waitress. She sends an apologetic glance in their direction and wipes the table free of the tiny balls of straw wrapper Dean leaves behind him everywhere they go.
They’re off-balance. They have no leads, no one to talk to. The locals are cold and distant, and there are no funerals for disappearing infants, not when there’s still hope. No rhythm to this hunt, no clues, nothing but the tears of a distraught mother who has had more sympathy and less action forced upon her than anyone should have to accept. The frustration gathers acrid and abrasive in Sam’s belly, worsens the throbbing of his head.
“You okay?” Dean asks on the way back to the car. “Not going to swoon on me, are you?”
“Fuck you,” Sam says.
Dean smiles, wide, bullshit grin, but his eyes catalogue, assess, until Sam looks away.
--
Nearly sunset, now. Quiet as owls, Sam and Dean circle Katia’s house, watching the readout on the EMF reader. Sam’s come up with a half-baked theory about using the frequencies like a trail, following whatever happened here to its origin. Dean shrugged when he suggested it, saying it was better than anything else they’d come up with. Might give them a shot at finding the kids, anyway, or at least some more specific information on whatever the hell was out there.
Dean holds up a hand folded like a child’s pretend pistol, first two fingers extended, then brings his arm down, extends it northwest, towards the edge of the wooded border of Katia’s yard. Sam nods once, slowly, and turns off the EMF meter in his hand. He keeps his center of gravity low to the ground, his balance on the balls of his feet as he follows Dean.
The forest extinguishes the last of the low sunlight. Once Sam is fairly certain he won’t be seen, he pulls the flashlight from his belt and switches it on. In the underbrush, spider eyes glint like fool’s gold. Something scuttles away from them in a flurry of legs and fur.
“What’s the plan once we find the thing?” Dean asks.
“Dunno,” says Sam. He hasn’t thought that part quite through yet. “Shoot it?”
“Right.”
“Or behead it.” Most things don’t react well to being separated from their heads.
“Kids come first, though,” Dean says, like it’s not obvious. “We get a clear shot at the kids without a clear shot at whatever took them, we grab ‘em and run.”
“Yeah.”
“You with me here, Sam?” Dean pauses, looks back. His hand glares white in the circle of light from behind him; his face fades into the shadows.
“I’m here,” Sam says. He’s not answering Dean’s question, but if Dean notices, he doesn’t say anything, just turns back to the trail. He seems to know where he’s going, muttering to himself and pointing the EMF meter in a more or less steady direction, deeper into the woods. As they start to move again, Sam thinks he hears a melody, through the trees. He shakes his head, listens more closely. They keep walking, and Sam hears it again, a lullaby, rippling into the night.
“You hear that?” he asks.
“Hear what?” Dean says.
“Someone’s singing,” says Sam. “Sounds like it’s coming from a little left of dead ahead.”
“I don’t hear anything.”
Sam holds up a hand for silence, cocks his head. The melody comes again, and makes him think of gentle things, things loved and left in motel rooms, at truck stops, remembered a hundred miles too late. Makes him think of fate, and destiny, and forever. He and Dean and Sisyphus, pushing a boulder uphill until it slips and if you’re lucky all you have to do is go down after it and start pushing again. If you’re lucky, the thousand pounds of falling stone miss your family, the flock that follows you up, convinced that moving a piece of the earth is something special.
Then the song changes, rises in pitch and volume until it becomes a wail of desperation. Before he quite knows what he’s doing, Sam has begun running, tracing the sound with his entire body. Dean yells at him, but the words blur together into an unintelligible mash of vowels and consonants. Sam’s world shrinks, and shrinks again, focuses until he feels like he’s running through a tunnel, toward the light at the end.
Other sounds, below the wail, sounds of something crushing grass, the panicked snuffling of a child too terrified to scream. Pacing footsteps, a sharp rattling, a heavy thud, and Sam bursts into a clearing, gun up and ready, points it at the first movement he sees.
A woman kneels in the center of the trampled ground, her back to him. She is half-naked, her back smooth and pale, sloping down to a snakeskin knotted loosely at her waist. Beneath the makeshift belt she wears a garment Sam can’t quite make out, something that shifts and twists in strange shadows. Her shoulders shake in waves that rock her whole body, send her long braided hair swirling in defiance of gravity around her head.
“I can’t,” she chokes, sobbing. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”
Sam clicks the safety off, takes and involuntary step back when she whirls at the sound. Her stare meets his, and he sees his recognition reflected in it. “Mena?”
“She killed them,” Mena says. The filtered moonlight curves white over her breasts, and Sam keeps his eyes firmly on her face, not thinking about her nakedness, or the writhing, unfolding mass that begins just below her waist. “Over and over, I loved him, and it was something you could never understand, something too large, too spectacular. And each time I felt a child move inside me, every time I knew that it was true, and beautiful.” Her eyes go wide and wild as her hair coils below her cheekbones; she makes a small, helpless hiss and comes at him.
Sam doesn’t have time to brace for impact before she’s somehow around and past him, circling. He sees the baby squirming on the grass behind where she was standing. Where’s Dean? he thinks as she makes a sideways movement, her hands writhing before her. She reminds him of a chained dog, aching with tension and restraint. He edges between her and the child, holds the gun at loose attention.
“Every time,” Mena says. “Every time I gave birth, I saw my child. Mine. It would cry and its fingers would curl. Isn’t it amazing, how perfect baby hands are? They’re so fragile. And in her jealously that I slept with her husband, she killed every one. They were mine, and she killed them. Do you know what that’s like?” In a slithering flicker, she approaches to within inches. “Do you?”
“No,” Sam breathes. And in an instant that doubles him to the mangled grass beneath his feet, he sees her, feels her history. There was a man, with eyes like lightning and hands as majestic as thunder, wrapped in robes that only accented his height. He cupped her face and kissed her, and when he did she saw the world spread beneath her.
It took the month of Gamelion for her to know she carried a child, the first time. She tried to secret the infant away, but Hera had spies everywhere and saw everything, knew everything, reached into the world and smudged the child from it. Hermes came to close its eyes, gently, and to take it with him to the underworld while Hera lounged upon her throne and laughed. Zeus turned a blind eye, for his sister-wife was well within her domain.
The second time Zeus descended to her bed, he called her by name.
Lamia, he said, and she knew that she should refuse him, demand his protection. But when he looked down on her, her words deserted her, and she lay with him again, and again her belly rounded with a child.
Sometimes, late at night, she stood at her window, overlooking the Libyan desert, and saw her fate in the contortions of the sand.
The second child cried from the moment of his birth to the moment of his death, one sunrise later.
Sam chokes, feels his chest heave from the effort of bearing this, bearing thousands of years of history compressed into a second of awareness. It keeps coming: birth, and life, and hope, and death. A confrontation with Hera, the grinding, splintering of femur, tibia, fibula into vertebrae. Zeus’s revulsion at her new snake-form, anger so deep it has no origin, no end, and madness, a great vacuum of madness as black as seafloor.
Spending years beneath the ocean, snapping at mermaids and the occasional selkie, until Hera dealt the final hand.
If you so much as touch a child, Hera said, it will die. Your hands will bring death to all they touch, and you will touch thousands, and hate yourself for it. She smiled, a terrible smile of blood and shattered dreams, and placed a hand on Lamia’s head. And none will love you, and in the end you will die.
“No,” Sam says. “No.” He breathes, forces air into his lungs and back out. When he opens his eyes, Mena is still inches from him.
“I can’t look away,” she says. Her words are low, matter-of-fact. “That’s the worst.”
“You could stop yourself,” Sam says. “You could leave, and never come back.”
She tilts her head to one side and regards him. “I could. Or I could hold him for a few seconds, until the life leaves his body. He’ll die soon enough anyway, only seventy, eighty years at the outside. Nothing. This, at least, will be painless and quick.”
“He has a mother.” Sam half-crawls backwards until he’s afraid of stepping on the baby, and pauses. “He has someone who loves him. You don’t have the right to destroy that.”
When Mena rises to her full height, towering above him, Sam wonders whether he’s physically capable of stopping her should she choose to attack. “Don’t I?” she says. She reaches toward him, around him, her fingers weaving through the air as Sam recoils, pulls James into his arms. The gun’s gone, the fucking gun’s gone, where the hell did he leave the gun? “Haven’t I earned that?”
“No,” says Dean from behind her. “You really haven’t.”
Sam barely has time to wrap himself around the baby, to cover its ears, before the shot rips the silence from the clearing.
--
Afterward, they don’t talk. Dean settles James against his side as he scopes out the area, discovers two mounds of fresh-turned earth, hasty burials just north of the clearing. They salt and burn Mena’s body, stick around long enough to make sure they haven’t set the forest on fire.
They leave James in a wriggling heap wrapped in an old flannel shirt, ring Katia’s doorbell and run for cover. She steps onto the porch, rubbing blearily at her eyes, and stiffens at the sight. A moment later, she has her child in her arms, tight against her, and Sam touches Dean’s arm, pulls him away from a scene that is not meant for witnesses.
The next morning, Dean drops an anonymous tip from a pay phone outside of town, tells the cops where they’ll find the tiny graves.
A few hours later, Sam drives while Dean sleeps in the passenger seat, his head lolling against the door. They’ve been on the road for a half-hour or so, radio going from rock to country to static as they remove themselves from civilization, when Sam feels a sudden, irrational need to see Dean’s eyes open. He suppresses his guilt and pokes Dean, who snorts and flails awake, disoriented.
“What?” Dean says. “Something happen?”
“No,” says Sam. “I just wanted you not to be asleep.”
Dean starts to say something, tries to meet Sam’s eyes, but Sam stares straight out the windshield and ignores the attempt. “What is it?” Dean asks at last. “You want some talk, you can turn on NPR.”
“I didn’t want talk.” The more Sam thinks about it, the more stupid he feels. “Whatever. Sorry. Go back to sleep.”
“Okay.”
They sit in silence, and Dean closes his eyes, but Sam can hear him thinking, wondering, calculating.
“I don’t want you to hate me,” Sam murmurs.
“What?”
Sam takes a breath. “I don’t want you to hate me,” he repeats. He sees Dean in his peripheral vision, shaking his head.
“Never gonna happen,” Dean says.
Sam’s gut twists at the ease of the words, the simplicity of them.
Dean crosses his arms and looks out the window. “I just. You know yesterday, when you wanted to know what I wasn’t telling you?”
Someday, Sam thinks, when Dean reaches the social awareness of a ten-year-old, he will stop picking up long-dropped conversations as if they ended two minutes ago. In the meantime, he does his best to keep up. “Sure,” he says. “I remember.”
“When you were two,” Dean says, “you used to wander off all the time. Took my eyes off you for three seconds and you’d be out the door, running through the church garden or catching tadpoles in Caleb’s pond or hell, falling asleep in one of Bobby’s junk cars. Didn't matter; I could always find you. Scared me shitless every time you did it, but it only took ten minutes to find you. I’d yell at you, and you’d cry your way into the ice cream stash, and then two days later, I’d blink and you’d be gone again.”
In Sam’s experience, Dean’s stories usually have a point. It’s never the point Sam’s expecting. “The thing is,” Dean continues, “every time you disappeared, I’d know you were dead. I’d just know it. A spirit had gotten you or you’d pissed off some goblins or you’d decided some possessed human looked friendly enough to hitch a ride with. Every time.”
“Dean,” Sam begins, but his brother cuts him off.
“Let me finish. For most people, it doesn’t mean that much. Most parents, their kids are out playing in the yard, maybe Timmy’ll come back with a bee sting, and you slap some baking soda on it and it’s all right. Shit doesn’t mean anything to them. But me? I’d know you were dead. It’s. No one deserves to know that.”
Sam wants to say something, but he keeps his mouth shut, waiting for Dean to complete the thought. He waits for an agonizing minute before sneaking a glance to his right. Dean’s still watching the scenery out the side window, turned as completely away from Sam as the seat will allow.
“I’m right here,” Sam says. “I’m always right here.”
Another minute passes. Sam adds, “For the record, I’m not too broken up about that.”
Dean smiles, looks down. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” says Sam. And he thinks Yeah.
“Jesus,” says Dean after a comfortable interval, “you drive like an old woman.”
Sam presses the gas pedal and upshifts, feels the acceleration push him back into the upholstery.
“Go granny go granny go granny go,” Dean sings quietly, head tipped back, eyes closed.
“Whatever, man” Sam says, checking his mirrors. No one else out here, no police for at least another two miles unless they’re hidden as well as special ops. With a whoop, he takes their speed up to eighty-five, listens to the engine growl and catch and hurl them along. Beside him, Dean laughs, and they’re flying, here on a back road forgotten by everyone except a handful of farmers.
They’re flying.
Author:
xaaraRating: PG-13, gen
Timeline: Sometime loosely post-2.03.
Characters: Sam, Dean
Summary: A rash of disappearing babies in northern Wisconsin sends the Winchesters on the trail of an ancient cursed creature.
Disclaimer: Don’t own ‘em, yadda yadda. No small towns in northern Wisconsin were harmed during the writing of this fic, though about eight of them were sort of ground up and pasted back together as “Kewaunee.” It really exists, just not as I wrote it. Also: the beers mentioned in no way reflect the author’s taste, with the exception of Leinenkugel, which manufactures this tasty dark lager. Ahem.
Sing to the Sea
Kewaunee, Wisconsin
Two Days Ago
The thing no one tells you about babies is how much noise they make. They whine and whimper and pluck every maternal instinct you never knew you had. They gurgle when they smile and laugh like windchimes and look up at you with huge eyes and you never saw it coming, never thought you could possibly fall in love with something this ugly and round and new.
Katia lifts James from his crib, hushing his cries of annoyance and frustration by cradling him against her chest. “Shh,” she whispers, walking, rocking. “Shh, come on now, honey, you’ve been up all day and I know you need to sleep as much as I do.”
He snuffles against her, squirming. Three months and he’s a big boy, almost fifteen pounds at his last checkup. With the peculiar dexterity of babies, he arches back, using his feet for leverage, but Katia stays with him, accommodates his contortions without clutching him too tightly. Frustrated, James flexes his hands in the fabric of her shirt, then clasps tight, goes heavy and still, and emits a tiny snore.
Of course, Katia thinks, but doesn’t fight it, just eases him down with her onto the bed and lies back with his gentle weight spread across her. Of course. She traces a finger down his nose and allows herself a moment of wonder at this, at this person who is hers. Hers, from the down of hair swirled across his scalp to the round curve of his toes. Her body, her sweat and pain and blood. Her legacy.
Katia wraps an arm around her son and relaxes. “Night,” she whispers before she flips a blanket over her feet and closes her eyes.
When she wakes up, shivering, the air smells of the ocean and James is gone.
--
Baldwin, Wisconsin
Present Day
“This,” says Sam, “is not exactly what I had in mind.”
“What?” says Dean, jutting his chin forward into the room. “It’s what you said you wanted.”
Sam shrinks from the paisley wallpaper, the blankets crawling with vine patterns, the painted flowers spilling down the front of the wardrobe. The lamp shades cast leaf shadows on the walls. “I didn’t ask for the fucking jungle,” he points out.
“You said, and I quote, ‘Why don’t we stay somewhere homier this time?’”
“Because the last place you chose had pictures of belly dancers on the walls.”
Dean shrugs, drops his bag. “Well, this one calls itself a bed and breakfast,” he says. “That’s as homey as it gets. You do whatever.”
“Fine,” says Sam. “I call the remote.”
“Whatever,” Dean says, adding a “Bitch” as an afterthought, already on his way to the shower. Sam knows his brother will use all the hot water, so he doesn’t bother requesting otherwise. Instead, he flips open the laptop, absently plotting revenge while he checks his email.
Three messages that are probably spam, one from a girl he knew for about ten minutes at Stanford. She sends run-on sentences and exclamation points at least once a month: Hi, how are you, heard you were on a road trip, hope you’re having a good time, stay in touch! Something about the importance of keeping up with acquaintances. Sam just ignores her. Dean would laugh in her face and probably ask the girl next to her whether she wanted a quick fuck, just to prove some sort of point.
Dean, Sam thinks, can be very predictable.
Dangerous, the counselor in high school said. Dangerous to himself and others, irrational, unpredictable. Not to mention the knife. Dean Winchester. Can’t have him. Boy brought a knife to school, for goodness’ sake.
But all Sam can remember about the two weeks they spent at that school is the burn of rope across his wrists and fear like bile and dirty pennies in his mouth and Dean oh god Dean standing over him, knife dripping blood, You’re okay now Sammy, I found you, you’re okay, I got it. Thinking, later, when the counselor frowned at Dean for his knife and called him dangerous and unpredictable: Dangerous only to evil and totally predictable, because he will always, always come for me.
Summer will concede to fall and Dean will find Sam. There are rules older than time.
There will always be something else to hunt. You can sleep when you’re dead. The riches of the world are only important if they can be molded in to crucifixes and silver bullets.
Dad’s immortal.
Sam jerks himself free of the mental list, snaps the laptop closed, stretches his arms above his head. His head aches quietly, a steady throb at his temples. Been that way going on two straight weeks now until he can’t quite remember a time before it.
--
“So what’d you get?”
“Pig mutilations in Arkansas. Couple deaths at an abandoned railroad crossing in Louisiana. Disappearing babies north of here.”
“Disappearing babies?”
“Disappearing babies.”
“Let’s go.”
Dean leaves his wet towel on the back of the desk chair as they sneak out the window.
--
“What do we have on baby-snatching?” Dean asks, his hands draped across the steering wheel, thumbs tapping along to Stormbringer.
Sam shrugs. “Too much to sort through without specifics. A lot of changeling lore, although changelings are usually supposed to grow up with the humans. Some stuff about one baby switched for a fairy that looks like it which disappears after a specific amount of time has passed. Vampires, maybe? Don’t usually hide the bodies that well, though, more a suck ‘em and leave ‘em crowd.”
Dean grins and Sam immediately wishes he had phrased that differently, because three, two, one, “Met plenty of humans like that, man, this one chick in Denver, had a mouth like—”
“On the other hand, it could be just a regular kidnapping,” Sam says loudly. “But it’s the third one over the last two weeks.”
“Huh,” says Dean.
Sam sees the set of Dean’s expression, the flatness of his eyes, and asks, “What?”
“Nothing.”
Which is complete and utter bullshit. Dean communicates with his shoulders, with his eyebrows, with a twist of his mouth or a twitch of his fingers, all of which scream agitation. Sam’s fluency in Dean still has a long way to go, but now he watches his brother and hears, Back the fuck off Sammy, just back the fuck off or I’ll say something we both wish I hadn’t later. Before he can talk himself out of it, Sam presses. “Come on, Dean. What aren’t you telling me?”
Dean shuts down. Sam looks away, can’t stand to see his brother doing this over and over. Isolating himself, creating a vortex of steel and leather and blood black as the new moon and always shutting Sam out, so he gets there just as the door—sometimes literally—slams in his face. It’s been over a month of discussing nothing but the job, watching Dean twist the car into shape as if that will fix everything. Watching Dean destroy his careful work on the car and wanting nothing more than to turn around and snatch the crowbar from his brother’s hands and say listen to me, Dean, you listen to me now. You tell me, because I could never read you like you can read me, I just can’t and I don’t know. I don’t know. I can’t make it right.
“We ever gonna talk again?” Sam asks. He’s written and rewritten that question a hundred times in his head, but when it finally bursts free, it has none of the imperative that he wanted and all of the gentleness that never works with Dean, never.
Dean’s lips tighten along with his jaw. He blinks twice, slowly, and accelerates.
--
Kewaunee unfolds like a pop-up card over the curve of the horizon, mountain and valley folds, straight lines in opposition to logic. As Sam and Dean pull into town, nothing but a sign welcomes them. The sign declares the town’s population 4,672 and mentions that the mayor, whose name has partially worn off, is doing what she can to preserve Wisconsin’s Beautiful North.
“What’s to preserve?” Dean wonders, grimacing.
Sam snorts. The houses lining cracked streets sulk beneath a grey-brown cloud cover; outside of town, miles of tilled-under fields unfurl like patchwork to the horizon. It looks like every other small town in the upper midwest: sequestered, dour, irritable.
They stop at a gas station to ask after a place to stay. The young woman behind the counter (Hi! My name is Mena) looks up from her comic book, assesses them. Her hair, long and tamed into a hundred tiny curling braids, slithers back over her shoulders when she flips it away from her face. She blinks a set of close-set dark eyes, takes another glance at Dean, and returns to reading. Dean doesn’t even pause for his usual I’m still the fairest of them all preening, which worries Sam more than it should, considering.
Dean opens the cooler and grabs a six-pack of local beer, something that comes in dark bottles with a blue-and-red label. For a moment, Sam contemplates asking Dean if they can just get the Rolling Rock or Leinenkugel or hell, the PBR, but no, Dean has to expand his encyclopedic knowledge of local breweries every time they stop. Anyway, this stuff looks like it might not most closely resemble swill, so Sam doesn’t say anything. He figures that leaving some fights that beg to be picked is good karma, and he wants to cash in on as much of that as he can. It can’t hurt.
Sam approaches the register, tries to look as unthreatening as possible. He’s found that bangs draped forward over his eyes, combined with a slight slouch and hands stuffed nervously in front pockets, work wonders. “Hey,” he says. “You know somewhere we could spend the night?”
“Motel 6 ‘bout eight blocks west of here, through town. Follow Main, take a right on Antler, you’ll be right there.” Mena doesn’t remove her eyes from her reading. It’s an old Hellblazer, cover half-ripped and taped back together, held gently beneath her black-tipped fingers.
Sam smiles. “You from here?”
Mena turns a page. On it, John Constantine lights a cigarette. Sam wishes for a moment that he could afford himself the same comedown instead of this humming high-alert, find the demon, fight the bad guys, keep the patches coming as Dean fractures in absolute silence, as inevitable as the tide. “Where the fuck else would I be from?” she demands. “Not like people come here for fun.”
“Just wanted to know. Me and my brother—that’s him, there in the back—we were just passing through and heard about the missing kids. Pretty terrible, things that can happen.”
“Whatever,” says Mena, twisting the snakeskin bracelet that encircles her wrist. “If parents loved their children enough, they wouldn’t just let them go. They’d understand what it means to hold a baby in their arms and protect it. Maybe we can stop telling the people who visit that we’re so safe and fucking cute that we don’t even have to lock our doors at night.”
Sam frowns but doesn’t pursue the point. “So you haven’t heard anything about the incidents, then?”
“Nothing more than was in the paper.” Mena marks her place with a bookmark from which Batman bids the world to go above & beyond and READ. “You two gonna buy something or is this one of those distract-the-cashier scams where you talk to me while he sneaks out with half my chocolate?”
“Your chocolate is safe from me, madam,” Dean says, beer in one hand, chips in the other, nothing containing nutrients within a ten-foot radius. “Have to maintain the physique.”
“Dude,” says Mena, “stow it. Eleven twenty-eight.”
Dean hands her the money while Sam swallows a grin and drops a five in her tip jar. The bill lands inaudibly atop the two dimes, three nickels, and seven pennies in a pile at the bottom.
“We don’t have that much cash, you know,” Dean says once they’re outside, like it’s just a comment, like he’s just making conversation.
“Neither does she,” says Sam.
“Okay.” Dean unloads his purchases into the backseat, plastic bags rustling. “You find us a place to stay?”
“Motel 6.”
“Man,” says Dean, sliding behind the wheel as Sam takes shotgun, “they should have some sort of frequent-flyer program for motels. Like you spend long enough in Scumpit Travel Lodge, you get a few free nights or something, you know?”
“Maybe we could go for a world record, most Stargate marathons watched on motel televisions while waiting for nightfall.”
“Whatever, dude,” Dean says. “It’s all about Passions and you know it.” He puts the car into gear and they rumble up Main, take a right on Antler, and pull into a parking lot familiar as homecoming.
--
Today they’re Federal Agents Osbourne and Ward, here about the babies, yes, there were some guys around earlier, we’re just here to follow up, ask a few more questions, get an independent report. Procedure, you know how bureaucracy works, everything in triplicate.
“I went to sleep with him on my chest,” Katia says. “Literally on my chest, curled up there. Sometimes it is—was?—the only way I could get him to sleep, give him my heartbeat to listen to. Someone, Jesus. Someone stood closer to me than you’re sitting right now and took him while I was asleep. And then I woke up and he was gone.”
Sam knits his eyebrows into Professionally Sympathetic while Dean asks, “Did you notice anything different about the room when you woke up? Strange noises, smells, open windows?”
“No,” says Katia. Her eyes well with tears and Dean retreats as Sam hands her a tissue. When she bends her head, Sam notices that she hasn’t washed her hair in days. Her shirt has the compressed wrinkles he recognizes from having retrieved many of his own from the dirty laundry pile. She picks at her ruined cuticles and presses her lips together, trembling.
“I’m sorry I’m not more help,” she says, her voice cracking. “I just, I can’t stop thinking that maybe if I’d gone to sleep a little later, or if I hadn’t stayed up later than I should have the night before, or checked to make sure the door was locked, or, god, anything different, and I can’t stop it.” Sam extends a hand to her, but it’s Dean she’s looking at, Dean whose eyes she’s captured and won’t let go. “If I’d done anything,” she whispers. “One thing, one person to protect. One. I was supposed to keep him safe, and I failed.”
The air shivers with her grief. Dean stands, nearly tipping his chair backwards in his abruptness, and stalks from the room; Katia bows her head.
“We’re so sorry for your loss,” says Sam hastily, wincing at the slam of the front door. “If you remember anything else, or just need to talk, or anything, really, give us a call.” He slides a piece of paper with his cell number across the table. Katia sniffs, nods, and takes it. She doesn’t rise with him, and looking down on her, Sam feels huge, a useless giant, fingers too large to comfort without crushing. “I mean it about calling,” he says. “It’s not easy to lose family.”
“Thank you,” Katia says. She runs her fingers along the edge of the table, then stands. “I’m sorry, I’m being a terrible hostess. I should have asked if you wanted something to eat or drink or—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Sam says. “We understand. It’s hard to think at times like these.”
“Well, Mama always said it’s better to apologize than just hope everyone understands.” Katia pulls herself up and looses a tiny, wobbling smile. Sam thinks that in better times, she might be pretty, not beautiful, not elegant, but pretty. When she opens the door for him, Sam lingers for a moment.
“We appreciate your cooperation,” he says. “Hang in there. We might find him yet.”
Although she looks like she might say something, Katia bites her lip and nods in silence. Sam has just begun the walk down the stairs from the front porch when she calls him back. “Wait,” she says, and he half-turns, waits for her to continue. “I just remembered something. When I woke up, after, you know, after. The room smelled salty, briny, like the ocean.”
“Thanks.” Sam waves a hand at her and steps onto the sidewalk. “Anything at all, just call.”
--
By the time Sam returns to the car, Dean’s already in the driver’s seat, his suit jacket off, his tie loosened, his cuffs undone and rolled halfway up his forearms. “Let’s go,” he says, voice low and rough. “That was fucking useless.”
“She said the room smelled salty when she woke up. Like the ocean.”
“Okay,” says Dean. He inhales and exhales a few times, his foot tapping. “Okay.”
Sam watches his brother reel himself in, the slight tremor in his hands squeezed white-knuckled and still against the steering wheel. The feverish shine fades from his eyes, and his shoulders furl until he seems much smaller than Sam remembers ever seeing him. Dean takes a deep breath as he turns the key in the ignition, checks over his shoulder and pulls out of the parking spot. His smile, forced and ugly, peels his lips apart and cracks them at the edges until Sam has the sudden, violent urge to rip it from Dean’s face, peel his skin off and see once and for all the machinery that lies beneath. Because no one does this, no one does this.
There were pictures, in one of his high school textbooks, of a monk on fire. Middle of a street in Vietnam, and a man seated, folded into the lotus position, container that had held gasoline behind him and open. He’d stared at the picture while his teacher rambled about television, mass media, awakenings. Studied the lines of the man’s face and thought that maybe the why didn’t matter, maybe it was just important to believe in something strongly enough to sit cross-legged in flames without a sound, without a movement. Burning.
His breath catches raggedly at his throat. The job, Sam reminds himself. We’re on a job. He coughs, sharply. “What do we know that smells like the ocean?”
“Wouldn’t be a demon,” Dean says. “That’d leave the smell of sulfur, if anything.”
“Mermaid?”
“Dude. In Wisconsin? What, she got her legs and decided to walk cross-country instead of sticking with the prince?”
“It is possible not to define your world in terms of Disney.”
“Hans Christian Andersen, jackass.”
Sam looks at Dean, furrows his forehead. “When did you ever read that?”
“Hey man, it’s good stuff.”
“Not arguing that. I just never imagined you as the fairy tale type.”
Dean shrugs, rubbing a hand over his chin. He squirms a little. Sam lets it go.
“So the ocean, huh?” Dean asks after they sit for a moment in silence. “Could it be a water sprite, a nymph?”
“Could be,” Sam says, but he’s not convinced. “I dunno, I haven’t heard of them stealing children, except in direct retaliation for something. Has there been any dam activity or anything around here?”
“Don’t think so,” says Dean. “What else steals babies?”
“Ghoul?”
“Too messy; this was a clean kidnapping. Tammatuyuq?”
“Possible. Don’t they usually take the baby from the mother when she’s awake, though? Pretend to help out and then take off?”
“Yeah. Could be one that changed its MO. Hard to find mothers that’ll let strangers handle their babies anymore.”
“Spriggan?” By now, Sam’s reaching, coming up with everything he can remember that takes children.
“No crop failures.”
“True.” Sam taps his fingers on his knee. Something doesn’t quite add up, doesn’t quite click. “We’re missing something,” he says.
“You want to go back later, scan for EMF?”
“No I mean, we’re missing something in our list of suspects. It’s something that wants babies, and what? Eats them? None of them have been found, right?”
“Right.”
“And it smells like the ocean.”
“Probably a dolphin,” Dean says. “Creepy fuckers. I always knew Flipper had something going on behind that mild-mannered grin.”
Sam throws up his hands. “You’re impossible,” he says.
Dean smirks. “I do my best.”
--
The library’s closed by the time they find it, so they settle into a cafe with free internet and surf for a while, kids and kidnappings, oceans and moon cycles. Dean comes up with a lot of sterling silver charms; Sam with a lot of spells for a happy home. He wonders if any of them work, and where he would cast one to find out. He wonders whether he could chant something tiny each night, leave each morning a new circle of protection with a little bit of himself inside. It’s like dropping bread crumbs, he thinks, a trail that leads back to nothing you want and everything you need.
“I’ve got nothing,” Sam says at last. The waitress stopped being charmed by his smile two hours after he ordered only coffee, black. No refills have come by in at least forty minutes, and the coffee left in his mug has long since turned tepid and bitter.
“Yeah,” says Dean, stretching. The tendons in his neck stand out under his skin.
This time, Dean leaves the tip. Ten dollars, over twice their bill, and a nod to the waitress. She sends an apologetic glance in their direction and wipes the table free of the tiny balls of straw wrapper Dean leaves behind him everywhere they go.
They’re off-balance. They have no leads, no one to talk to. The locals are cold and distant, and there are no funerals for disappearing infants, not when there’s still hope. No rhythm to this hunt, no clues, nothing but the tears of a distraught mother who has had more sympathy and less action forced upon her than anyone should have to accept. The frustration gathers acrid and abrasive in Sam’s belly, worsens the throbbing of his head.
“You okay?” Dean asks on the way back to the car. “Not going to swoon on me, are you?”
“Fuck you,” Sam says.
Dean smiles, wide, bullshit grin, but his eyes catalogue, assess, until Sam looks away.
--
Nearly sunset, now. Quiet as owls, Sam and Dean circle Katia’s house, watching the readout on the EMF reader. Sam’s come up with a half-baked theory about using the frequencies like a trail, following whatever happened here to its origin. Dean shrugged when he suggested it, saying it was better than anything else they’d come up with. Might give them a shot at finding the kids, anyway, or at least some more specific information on whatever the hell was out there.
Dean holds up a hand folded like a child’s pretend pistol, first two fingers extended, then brings his arm down, extends it northwest, towards the edge of the wooded border of Katia’s yard. Sam nods once, slowly, and turns off the EMF meter in his hand. He keeps his center of gravity low to the ground, his balance on the balls of his feet as he follows Dean.
The forest extinguishes the last of the low sunlight. Once Sam is fairly certain he won’t be seen, he pulls the flashlight from his belt and switches it on. In the underbrush, spider eyes glint like fool’s gold. Something scuttles away from them in a flurry of legs and fur.
“What’s the plan once we find the thing?” Dean asks.
“Dunno,” says Sam. He hasn’t thought that part quite through yet. “Shoot it?”
“Right.”
“Or behead it.” Most things don’t react well to being separated from their heads.
“Kids come first, though,” Dean says, like it’s not obvious. “We get a clear shot at the kids without a clear shot at whatever took them, we grab ‘em and run.”
“Yeah.”
“You with me here, Sam?” Dean pauses, looks back. His hand glares white in the circle of light from behind him; his face fades into the shadows.
“I’m here,” Sam says. He’s not answering Dean’s question, but if Dean notices, he doesn’t say anything, just turns back to the trail. He seems to know where he’s going, muttering to himself and pointing the EMF meter in a more or less steady direction, deeper into the woods. As they start to move again, Sam thinks he hears a melody, through the trees. He shakes his head, listens more closely. They keep walking, and Sam hears it again, a lullaby, rippling into the night.
“You hear that?” he asks.
“Hear what?” Dean says.
“Someone’s singing,” says Sam. “Sounds like it’s coming from a little left of dead ahead.”
“I don’t hear anything.”
Sam holds up a hand for silence, cocks his head. The melody comes again, and makes him think of gentle things, things loved and left in motel rooms, at truck stops, remembered a hundred miles too late. Makes him think of fate, and destiny, and forever. He and Dean and Sisyphus, pushing a boulder uphill until it slips and if you’re lucky all you have to do is go down after it and start pushing again. If you’re lucky, the thousand pounds of falling stone miss your family, the flock that follows you up, convinced that moving a piece of the earth is something special.
Then the song changes, rises in pitch and volume until it becomes a wail of desperation. Before he quite knows what he’s doing, Sam has begun running, tracing the sound with his entire body. Dean yells at him, but the words blur together into an unintelligible mash of vowels and consonants. Sam’s world shrinks, and shrinks again, focuses until he feels like he’s running through a tunnel, toward the light at the end.
Other sounds, below the wail, sounds of something crushing grass, the panicked snuffling of a child too terrified to scream. Pacing footsteps, a sharp rattling, a heavy thud, and Sam bursts into a clearing, gun up and ready, points it at the first movement he sees.
A woman kneels in the center of the trampled ground, her back to him. She is half-naked, her back smooth and pale, sloping down to a snakeskin knotted loosely at her waist. Beneath the makeshift belt she wears a garment Sam can’t quite make out, something that shifts and twists in strange shadows. Her shoulders shake in waves that rock her whole body, send her long braided hair swirling in defiance of gravity around her head.
“I can’t,” she chokes, sobbing. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”
Sam clicks the safety off, takes and involuntary step back when she whirls at the sound. Her stare meets his, and he sees his recognition reflected in it. “Mena?”
“She killed them,” Mena says. The filtered moonlight curves white over her breasts, and Sam keeps his eyes firmly on her face, not thinking about her nakedness, or the writhing, unfolding mass that begins just below her waist. “Over and over, I loved him, and it was something you could never understand, something too large, too spectacular. And each time I felt a child move inside me, every time I knew that it was true, and beautiful.” Her eyes go wide and wild as her hair coils below her cheekbones; she makes a small, helpless hiss and comes at him.
Sam doesn’t have time to brace for impact before she’s somehow around and past him, circling. He sees the baby squirming on the grass behind where she was standing. Where’s Dean? he thinks as she makes a sideways movement, her hands writhing before her. She reminds him of a chained dog, aching with tension and restraint. He edges between her and the child, holds the gun at loose attention.
“Every time,” Mena says. “Every time I gave birth, I saw my child. Mine. It would cry and its fingers would curl. Isn’t it amazing, how perfect baby hands are? They’re so fragile. And in her jealously that I slept with her husband, she killed every one. They were mine, and she killed them. Do you know what that’s like?” In a slithering flicker, she approaches to within inches. “Do you?”
“No,” Sam breathes. And in an instant that doubles him to the mangled grass beneath his feet, he sees her, feels her history. There was a man, with eyes like lightning and hands as majestic as thunder, wrapped in robes that only accented his height. He cupped her face and kissed her, and when he did she saw the world spread beneath her.
It took the month of Gamelion for her to know she carried a child, the first time. She tried to secret the infant away, but Hera had spies everywhere and saw everything, knew everything, reached into the world and smudged the child from it. Hermes came to close its eyes, gently, and to take it with him to the underworld while Hera lounged upon her throne and laughed. Zeus turned a blind eye, for his sister-wife was well within her domain.
The second time Zeus descended to her bed, he called her by name.
Lamia, he said, and she knew that she should refuse him, demand his protection. But when he looked down on her, her words deserted her, and she lay with him again, and again her belly rounded with a child.
Sometimes, late at night, she stood at her window, overlooking the Libyan desert, and saw her fate in the contortions of the sand.
The second child cried from the moment of his birth to the moment of his death, one sunrise later.
Sam chokes, feels his chest heave from the effort of bearing this, bearing thousands of years of history compressed into a second of awareness. It keeps coming: birth, and life, and hope, and death. A confrontation with Hera, the grinding, splintering of femur, tibia, fibula into vertebrae. Zeus’s revulsion at her new snake-form, anger so deep it has no origin, no end, and madness, a great vacuum of madness as black as seafloor.
Spending years beneath the ocean, snapping at mermaids and the occasional selkie, until Hera dealt the final hand.
If you so much as touch a child, Hera said, it will die. Your hands will bring death to all they touch, and you will touch thousands, and hate yourself for it. She smiled, a terrible smile of blood and shattered dreams, and placed a hand on Lamia’s head. And none will love you, and in the end you will die.
“No,” Sam says. “No.” He breathes, forces air into his lungs and back out. When he opens his eyes, Mena is still inches from him.
“I can’t look away,” she says. Her words are low, matter-of-fact. “That’s the worst.”
“You could stop yourself,” Sam says. “You could leave, and never come back.”
She tilts her head to one side and regards him. “I could. Or I could hold him for a few seconds, until the life leaves his body. He’ll die soon enough anyway, only seventy, eighty years at the outside. Nothing. This, at least, will be painless and quick.”
“He has a mother.” Sam half-crawls backwards until he’s afraid of stepping on the baby, and pauses. “He has someone who loves him. You don’t have the right to destroy that.”
When Mena rises to her full height, towering above him, Sam wonders whether he’s physically capable of stopping her should she choose to attack. “Don’t I?” she says. She reaches toward him, around him, her fingers weaving through the air as Sam recoils, pulls James into his arms. The gun’s gone, the fucking gun’s gone, where the hell did he leave the gun? “Haven’t I earned that?”
“No,” says Dean from behind her. “You really haven’t.”
Sam barely has time to wrap himself around the baby, to cover its ears, before the shot rips the silence from the clearing.
--
Afterward, they don’t talk. Dean settles James against his side as he scopes out the area, discovers two mounds of fresh-turned earth, hasty burials just north of the clearing. They salt and burn Mena’s body, stick around long enough to make sure they haven’t set the forest on fire.
They leave James in a wriggling heap wrapped in an old flannel shirt, ring Katia’s doorbell and run for cover. She steps onto the porch, rubbing blearily at her eyes, and stiffens at the sight. A moment later, she has her child in her arms, tight against her, and Sam touches Dean’s arm, pulls him away from a scene that is not meant for witnesses.
The next morning, Dean drops an anonymous tip from a pay phone outside of town, tells the cops where they’ll find the tiny graves.
A few hours later, Sam drives while Dean sleeps in the passenger seat, his head lolling against the door. They’ve been on the road for a half-hour or so, radio going from rock to country to static as they remove themselves from civilization, when Sam feels a sudden, irrational need to see Dean’s eyes open. He suppresses his guilt and pokes Dean, who snorts and flails awake, disoriented.
“What?” Dean says. “Something happen?”
“No,” says Sam. “I just wanted you not to be asleep.”
Dean starts to say something, tries to meet Sam’s eyes, but Sam stares straight out the windshield and ignores the attempt. “What is it?” Dean asks at last. “You want some talk, you can turn on NPR.”
“I didn’t want talk.” The more Sam thinks about it, the more stupid he feels. “Whatever. Sorry. Go back to sleep.”
“Okay.”
They sit in silence, and Dean closes his eyes, but Sam can hear him thinking, wondering, calculating.
“I don’t want you to hate me,” Sam murmurs.
“What?”
Sam takes a breath. “I don’t want you to hate me,” he repeats. He sees Dean in his peripheral vision, shaking his head.
“Never gonna happen,” Dean says.
Sam’s gut twists at the ease of the words, the simplicity of them.
Dean crosses his arms and looks out the window. “I just. You know yesterday, when you wanted to know what I wasn’t telling you?”
Someday, Sam thinks, when Dean reaches the social awareness of a ten-year-old, he will stop picking up long-dropped conversations as if they ended two minutes ago. In the meantime, he does his best to keep up. “Sure,” he says. “I remember.”
“When you were two,” Dean says, “you used to wander off all the time. Took my eyes off you for three seconds and you’d be out the door, running through the church garden or catching tadpoles in Caleb’s pond or hell, falling asleep in one of Bobby’s junk cars. Didn't matter; I could always find you. Scared me shitless every time you did it, but it only took ten minutes to find you. I’d yell at you, and you’d cry your way into the ice cream stash, and then two days later, I’d blink and you’d be gone again.”
In Sam’s experience, Dean’s stories usually have a point. It’s never the point Sam’s expecting. “The thing is,” Dean continues, “every time you disappeared, I’d know you were dead. I’d just know it. A spirit had gotten you or you’d pissed off some goblins or you’d decided some possessed human looked friendly enough to hitch a ride with. Every time.”
“Dean,” Sam begins, but his brother cuts him off.
“Let me finish. For most people, it doesn’t mean that much. Most parents, their kids are out playing in the yard, maybe Timmy’ll come back with a bee sting, and you slap some baking soda on it and it’s all right. Shit doesn’t mean anything to them. But me? I’d know you were dead. It’s. No one deserves to know that.”
Sam wants to say something, but he keeps his mouth shut, waiting for Dean to complete the thought. He waits for an agonizing minute before sneaking a glance to his right. Dean’s still watching the scenery out the side window, turned as completely away from Sam as the seat will allow.
“I’m right here,” Sam says. “I’m always right here.”
Another minute passes. Sam adds, “For the record, I’m not too broken up about that.”
Dean smiles, looks down. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” says Sam. And he thinks Yeah.
“Jesus,” says Dean after a comfortable interval, “you drive like an old woman.”
Sam presses the gas pedal and upshifts, feels the acceleration push him back into the upholstery.
“Go granny go granny go granny go,” Dean sings quietly, head tipped back, eyes closed.
“Whatever, man” Sam says, checking his mirrors. No one else out here, no police for at least another two miles unless they’re hidden as well as special ops. With a whoop, he takes their speed up to eighty-five, listens to the engine growl and catch and hurl them along. Beside him, Dean laughs, and they’re flying, here on a back road forgotten by everyone except a handful of farmers.
They’re flying.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-04 11:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-05 05:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-04 01:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2007-01-05 06:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-04 03:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-05 06:53 pm (UTC)Hehe, I originally had Sam holding the baby, but then I thought it through and realized that Dean probably has much more practical experience in the field. It wouldn't do to have them rescue him only to drop him the minute he's safe. :P
Thank you.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-04 03:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-05 06:57 pm (UTC)That is always how it seems to turn out, isn't it? Oh, emotionally repressed men. *hearts*
Thank you so much for the comment.
P.S.: Your icon rocks like a rockin' thing.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-04 03:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-05 06:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-04 06:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-05 10:12 pm (UTC)Thanks for the comment--it's always so interesting to see what different people take from any given story.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-04 08:19 pm (UTC)I love them being quiet 'as owls' and flying along with the Impala. Lovely.
:)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-05 10:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-05 07:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-05 10:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-05 07:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-05 10:24 pm (UTC)Thanks for the comment.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-05 09:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-05 10:34 pm (UTC)Feel free to rec it--out of curiosity, what's the community? It sounds interesting, as I've been very interested in episode-like writing lately.
Thank you. :)
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-06 09:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-08 07:28 pm (UTC)Thank you.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-06 02:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2007-01-08 07:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-06 04:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-08 07:31 pm (UTC)Thanks.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-07 07:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-08 07:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-07 01:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2007-01-15 05:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-31 06:23 am (UTC)Thank you so much for your kind comments (and yes, I was on a writing spree--still am, as much as school and work allow), so I hope to be wrapping up some other projects in the near future. In the meantime, my
FB on "Sing to the See"
Date: 2007-01-25 10:57 pm (UTC)I think this fits in well with canon - the way the brothers work together on the hunt, the way they communicate (or don't!) and many other details - Dean sings along to the Beach Boys! Yah!
I liked this line quite a lot:
Dean holds up a hand folded like a child’s pretend pistol, first two fingers extended, then brings his arm down, extends it northwest, towards the edge of the wooded border of Katia’s yard.
There is a tremendous amount of good imagery in this story, but that simple scene with the two boys working together really clicked with me.
- hossgal
Re: FB on "Sing to the See"
Date: 2007-01-31 06:36 am (UTC)I've been looking for an excuse to work in Greek mythology for a while now. It was one of my first loves, and obliquely one of the reasons I got into this show in the first place. It's all about the mythology, the folklore, the traditions and legends. Attractive people who angst attractively and drive an attractive car through attractively shot scenes? Totally a secondary concern. ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-29 07:46 am (UTC)Go granny go, indeed.
Thanks so much.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-31 06:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-17 02:38 pm (UTC)That's so spot-on. Love the small details you put in here about their lifestyle, about the Motel 6, their cash, and the way they talk about the hunt.
He and Dean and Sisyphus, pushing a boulder uphill until it slips and if you’re lucky all you have to do is go down after it and start pushing again.
Loved that, too. I could quote lots more lines from this. The ending was *perfect*.
This is wonderful.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-20 02:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-20 12:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-20 01:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-20 03:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-20 01:35 pm (UTC)well done!
Date: 2007-03-10 08:41 pm (UTC)It's heartbreaking to think of long-ago Dean having had not only the fears of a parent, when he was just a child himself, but also the knowledge that evil things really do go bump in the night. And the ending is simply perfect. Pitch perfect dialogue, and then, go granny go - and they're flying, Sam's driving, and the world waits ahead. Yeah. What a gift you have with words. :-)