Supernatural Fic: From the Ground (4/4)
Jul. 8th, 2006 12:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xaaraTitle: From the Ground (4/4)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
xaara
Rating: PG-13, gen
Timeline: AU (breaks from canon after Dead Man's Blood)
Summary: People have long since forsaken their belief in God. Only ghost stories remain.
Previous Parts: One | Two | Three
A/N: Apologies for the length of time between the previous part and this one. RL kind of hates me at the moment.
From the Ground
Part Four
--
They find, upon reading his journal, that their father didn’t actually know much about the demon. Some of the basics, sure, its modus operandi. Cattle deaths, brownouts, static on all the local radio stations. EMF off the charts.
But the demon itself? Not much--possibly it can take human shape, but none of the survivors of its attack remember seeing anyone else as they gaped in horror at wives pinned to the ceiling, grabbed their children, and ran. Which brings up a whole new angle, because other survivors?
“Why?” Sam asks. He leafs through the exclusively demon-related journal Dad kept, reading bits of interviews with distraught fathers, newspaper clippings of mysterious arsons, no two in the same town, few in the same state. Always the same, always the mother pinned to the ceiling, a father sure he hadn’t seen what he was sure he’d seen. Stages of grief are bullshit when you can’t get past denial. And so: shot glasses, lined up like strung pearls, or weekends with a gun and deer blood on your hands, or a long flight to Thailand, no forwarding address.
All of it cramped in Dad’s neat handwriting, page after page of accounts and transcriptions and sketches. The same thing, time and time again.
Why?
“Maybe,” Dean says, shrugging, “because it can.”
Sam opens his mouth to protest, then closes it again. It’s just as likely as any of the other thousand scenarios whirling in his head. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t care why, not really, and it’s not like he’s going to be sitting down with the thing over tea and crumpets anytime soon. So why exactly did you pin my mother to the ceiling and burn the house down around her? How about Jess? Cream and sugar?
They’re pretty sure nothing but the Colt has any chance of killing the thing, but Dean cleans and loads all of their guns anyway, polishes the charms and amulets, jams a flask of holy water in one of his back pockets. Sam watches him, watches his brother’s fingers as they flip and turn the weapons, quick and sure and almost unthinking--pick a card, any card.
After a minute, the intensity of his gaze must penetrate Dean’s focus, because he looks up from his work. “What?”
“Nothing,” Sam says. Then, “You think we should try to get them out?”
Click. Wipe. Spin. Repeat. “Might not come if we let it know we’re here.”
Sam snorts. “You really think we scare it?”
“Doubt it.” Snap. “Owfuck.”
“Smooth, man.”
Dean flips a careless middle finger in Sam’s direction and wipes his bleeding hand on his jeans. “You could help out instead of reading Dad’s journal for the tenth time.”
“I just want to know--”
“You already know what’s going to happen.” Dean’s voice is rough but not unkind. “If you aren’t going to do anything useful here, then at least get us some coffee. Long night coming up.”
--
There’s a letter crumpled in the bottom of one of Dean’s bags. After Sam leaves the room, he retrieves it, pulls out some of the wrinkles. Dean: it says across the top. No Dear, no To, just his name and a colon. Yeah, that would be Dad.
Dean:
Stay safe. Keep Sam out of trouble & get him back to Stanford if you can. After you kill the demon, he should go back. If he gets to be a lawyer, he can keep your ass out of jail.
Watch out for him, and for yourself.
-Dad
Dean scans the letter, looking for meaning in the lines Dad scribbled on cheap hotel stationery, the ballpoint wearing through the paper. He wants to believe that his father was a wonderful man full of love for his sons even after losing his wife in a tragic fire after their sixth year of marriage.
Dean knows that his father was a gritty man, a loner, an ex-Marine who never quite made it out of Nam, whose dreams were haunted just as regularly by the memory of his fallen buddies as by creatures who should never have walked to fall. And he knows that John Winchester never loved anything quite so much as he loved his wife, and never hated anything quite so much as he hated the demon that killed her.
Dad, Dean thinks. Dad, I-- Shit, I don’t know. He folds the paper, slowly, his fingers tracing the edges as he lines up the corners and presses down the creases. It catches easily when he holds his lighter to the angle farthest from his fingers, curls and curves into itself until he lets it drop into the ash tray sitting on the desk to smolder and char and feather apart.
When Sam returns, Dean is still staring at the ashtray, his back so tight he can feel it beginning to spasm beneath his skin. “Tell me that stuff is hot,” he says, nodding at the tray of coffee cups--four total--in Sam’s hands.
“Should be,” Sam says, “I just got it.” Pause. “You okay?”
“Yes,” Dean says. “That family. They’re not going to go through--”
“Of course not. That’s not what I’m worried about.”
That pulls him up short for a second, because if not that, then what? But he understands, knows Sam on an intuitive level that no one else has ever quite matched, and nods. “We’ll get it done,” he says. It’ll have to be enough for now.
--
They wait in the Impala, across the street from the Stewart house, for what seems like days. It’s probably more like two hours, because the sun is still high in the sky and Leslie still hasn’t come home from school. Dean drums his fingers against the steering wheel in an ostinato that dances at the edge of Sam’s hearing until he’s sure it echoes his heartbeat. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
Either way, it’s driving him nuts, and he reaches over to swat Dean’s hand into stillness. “That’s not helping,” he says. “I can’t concentrate.”
Dean makes a low sound in his throat but doesn’t answer except by wiping his palms on his jeans and jittering one leg.
They sit.
Leslie arrives on a yellow bus and enters her house without turning to look at Sam and Dean. Once he sees her make it inside safely, Dean drives them to a gas station, buys two packs of cigarettes and six sticks of gum. Sam raises his eyebrows when Dean returns with the cigarettes, but he’s not surprised, not really. Dean props himself against the hood of the car and lights the cigarettes, one after another, though Sam doesn’t think he’s actually inhaling the smoke. Just holding it in his mouth, something to do, an attempt to stay connected to this world. Sam can’t really blame him.
They drive back, park farther down the block this time. More sitting, and very little talking. Mostly just grunts, one ten-second exchange when Sam asks if Dean wants some water and Dean says no Jesus stop yammering and Sam points out that he hasn’t said anything for an hour and a half and Dean says yeah but you were thinking louder than a pack of girls at the mall and Sam says oh and shuts up.
The sun sets in silence.
--
By the time the lights start to flicker, Dean has sunk into a state of near-meditative calm. There are a limited number of ways this evening can play out, and he’s only willing to accept one of them.
Sam will live. The demon will die. The world will keep spinning.
So that’s the way it’s going to work, you hear? One life, one death, and fuck you and your judgment, playing with people like your little cowboys and Indians, plastic figures you lose to the lawn mower and run over with your station wagon, doesn’t matter, there are more where they came from.
And the lights start to flicker. Dean resolutely does not think of it as a sign.
Sam’s out of the car with the Colt in his hand before Dean manages to open his door. “Upstairs,” Dean yells. “Get them out of the house.”
Sam picks the lock to the front door while Dean dances on the balls of his feet, swaying from side to side and chanting under his breath come on Sam, move it, come on we’re going to be late, come on come on come on. The door opens, and they walk straight into the flailing swing of Frank Stewart’s fist. Not terribly dangerous to either of them, but distracting enough that Dean points at the stairwell and uses his presence to occupy the man.
“Get the fuck out of my house,” Frank shouts in Dean’s direction as Dean shoves him out the door. “What the-- Who the hell are you?”
Good question. Dean grins wide, adrenaline and fear and ohmygodthisisactuallyhappening chasing through him. Grins wide, until he knows Frank sees the glinting of his teeth, and says, “Your savior.”
--
Sam bursts into the nursery and notes two things immediately. Evelyn is not bleeding. The baby is safe.
For now.
The figure of a man stands over the crib, one hand touching the baby’s forehead, the other making strange fluid motions in the darkness. And then, before Sam can even raise the gun, the man disappears, and the woman is on the ceiling, screaming about her child, blood pooling and soaking through her nightgown.
No. No, no, nonononono.
Sam stares at her, tries to envision her suspended by a net that he can remove with the right force. Stares at her, and then closes his eyes and pushes.
--
Frank is screaming, and a baby is screaming, and a woman is screaming, and Dean is tempted to join in, since it seems like the thing to do. Except, no. Sam is in that house and it’s going to start burning down any second, and why the hell is he not out the front door yet?
Frank is still out in the middle of the yard having a panic attack, so Dean turns to Leslie, who seems to have it together. “Where’s the nursery?” he asks.
“Upstairs, to the right,” Leslie says. “What’s going on?”
“Not sure myself.” Dean frowns, pulls out a gun that will probably do nothing should he encounter a serial-killer demon, and charges into the house. “Sam!”
“Up here,” Sam says, his voice shaky. Dean takes the stairs two and three at a time, finds Sam at the top struggling to balance the weight of an unconscious Evelyn and cradle an infant at the same time. Evelyn’s nightgown hangs heavy with blood, but it looks like she’s breathing for now.
Shit, Dean thinks. This isn’t how it was supposed to go. He doesn’t have time to think anything else, because he sees a flare of flame in the nursery and holsters his gun in the waistband of his pants. A cocoon of infant and blankets is suddenly squirming and howling in his arms, and every single sense in his body is telling him to get the fuck out right now.
He secures the baby in his left arm as he skims over the stairs and hauls out his cellphone, flips it open, dials 911 as he exits the front door. “There’s a fire,” he tells the woman who answers at the other end. “312 Cheyenne Avenue. And a woman with some sort of stomach injury, big gash across her lower torso. Man who’s having a panic attack and a little kid who’s going to need some serious therapy. And a baby.”
“Excuse me?” says the woman. “Could you slow down and repeat that?”
Dean hands the baby to Leslie, who looks up at him with wide green eyes as she wraps her arms around her sister. “What’s going on?” she asks again.
No time to explain it to her as well as to the emergency response woman, so he holds a finger to his lips and repeats his story at a slower pace with a few more details, trying to block out the sound of the squalling baby. The sound cuts off so quickly that Dean doesn’t process it for a moment.
Then Sam swears, and Dean hears the crack of a gun hammer, and when he turns to look at Leslie, she stares back at him with eyes washed black like oil spills. Something twists in his stomach; he knows without approaching her that the baby is dead. The cell phone drops from his hand as he fumbles for his gun, points it in Leslie’s direction.
Leslie laughs. It’s a beautiful sound, a child’s laugh, like wind or water or happiness come to Earth, and it stops him in his tracks.
“Hello, Dean,” she says. “You’ve grown since the last time we saw each other.”
--
Sam opens his mouth and finds himself flying through the air, finally coming to a stop plastered against a tree. He fights for his hold on the Colt, and somehow maintains it; maybe the demon’s focus on Dean is distracting it.
“You boys don’t know how to avoid even the most half-assed trap, do you?” Leslie asks Dean.
Dean, from his position pressed up against the only other tree in the yard, grunts something that sounds like, “Go to hell.”
Smiling, Leslie says, “Sorry, that sort of human invention is just a little beneath me.”
“Funny, for a demon who’s not above possessing a fucking kid.” And then Dean’s struggling for air, a force pressed against his throat so hard that Sam can almost see it, see Dean’s neck compress on the sides.
“Possession is for amateurs,” says Leslie. “I’m simply borrowing her body.”
“Six of one,” Dean gasps, and Sam glares at him, thinking, you idiot, stop talking. Dean shuts up.
“Oh,” says Leslie, “oh, that’s cute. Little telepathic thing you have going on there.”
Something occurs to Sam, and he thinks, what the fuck, don’t have anything to lose. He closes his eyes, tries to imagine himself tied to the tree with invisible cords. Imagines those cords loosening, fraying, each fiber separating from its counterparts, ashes to ashes. Imagines each one pulling apart, a little uncertain at the edges, wavering, disappearing--
He’s free with a burst of energy that sends him stumbling forward into the yard. He catches himself painfully, his right knee and ankle protesting the resistance, but he rights himself and raises the Colt. The first sirens come within hearing range as Sam levels the gun at a girl, a child, and thinks, I can’t.
Leslie knows. She opens her eyes wide, lets a tear escape. “Sam,” she says, “Sam, where’s Mommy?” Her voice trembles, lace-thin, as fragile as porcelain. “Why won’t you let me go to Mommy?”
Sam grits his teeth and keeps the gun pointed at Leslie’s heart. “You let her go and I’ll let you go,” he says. “It’s the best offer you’re going to get.”
“I want my mommy,” Leslie says, and starts to cry. The windows of the house blow out behind her, raining shards of glass like falling stars onto the grass. Out of the corner of his eye, Sam sees Dean begin to fold in on himself, still fighting for every breath.
Time moves on, as inevitable as the tides. The sirens grow closer. Sam knows that if the police arrive to see him waving a gun at a child they know personally, they will have little doubt as to who is the guilty party. “It’s an even trade,” Sam says. “Her life for yours. It’s not--”
Leslie’s tears evaporate. She cocks her head to one side to blink at Sam, twists one hand, and doesn’t even flinch at Dean’s scream. Sam forces himself not to look. Hold on for just a second, he thinks, please, I can’t deal with everything right now, be okay for just a few seconds.
“Even doesn’t enter into it,” she says. “Your brother means nothing to me; this body means nothing to me. It’s you.”
“It’s me what?”
“You’re the one I’m coming for.” A dark shape collapses into Sam’s line of sight, and the breeze carries the scent of Dean’s blood, a note merging with the acridity of burning wood, of crumbled plaster and lives destroyed. “You’re the one I’ve been waiting for.”
“Could say the same thing about you,” Sam says.
Leslie just shrugs, then takes two steps forward and kneels at Dean’s head, cups his chin in one hand and settles the other in the hair near the nape of his neck. “You’re so delicate,” she whispers. Sam barely hears the words against the rush of the fire behind her.
Her body tenses, and he understands it, in a sudden, elastic moment, can almost taste the snap of Dean’s neck under the artificial strength of Leslie’s child-fat arms, feel his body spasm under the light of a lopsided moon.
Sam points a gun at a million-year-old demon inside an eight-year-old girl, and pulls the trigger.
--
It’s not up to us to decide, he hears a voice say before he’s fully awake. Something warm slips down one side of his face, probably blood, not too much pain, though, has to be good. Probably. He can’t remember whether pain is good or not, whether he’s supposed to be cursing the existence of the world or grateful to it for anchoring him to solid ground.
Dean opens his eyes to see whoever’s talking, and immediately closes them again. Jesus. The...thing, whatever, won’t commit to a form. It’s flickering like a strobelight through thousands of bodies a minute, a constant stream of information, of faces, bodies, expressions.
I know, says a different voice. But I just think that it’s gotten a lot bigger than I thought it would. There are a lot of people involved.
It’s not as if we didn’t know that from the start.
Well, yes. It’s just.... I don’t know. We might want to reconsider taking their souls, wait instead until they just, you know, die. Naturally. We don’t know what taking someone’s soul does to them. I mean, we’ve never tried. Not with a live person.
Woah, Dean thinks. Taking souls? He squints, just enough to allow him to see the pulsating outlines of whatever’s talking above him.
One of them’s awake, says the first voice. The shorter one.
“Hey,” Dean tries to say, but it comes out low and wet and nearly inaudible. He coughs and tries again. “Would you take a shape?” he mutters.
“Oh, sorry.” The voice is back, but this time, it’s attached to a skinny man in grey slacks, a dress shirt, and an argyle sweater-vest. “It’s just when we’re not paying attention, sometimes it’s hard to hold onto one person.”
Anna appears next to the man. “Welcome back,” she says. “Dave here doesn’t walk this plane as often as I do, so he gets confused sometimes.”
“I do not,” Dave says, indignant. “It’s just harder to hold a shape than to let them hold you.”
“Whatever,” Anna says. “Anyway. So you know how I mentioned the other day that the world was going to change on Tuesday? It’s Tuesday.”
“I’d noticed.” Dean struggles to sit up, but the room--room?--smears around him and he elects instead to stare at the ceiling and try to figure out what the fuck is going on.
”The problem is,” Dave says, “we’re having a little trouble deciding what to do with you.”
“Oh,” says Dean. And then, because he can’t possibly turn his head to look at this stage, he asks, “Where’s Sam?”
“Right behind you. Still out. We’re going to have to talk to you both when you wake up. You see, you were supposed to do one of two things, good or evil, but we hadn’t really considered the fact that one of you would do one and one of you the other.”
“Right,” Anna says. She frowns at Dean like it’s his fault. He’s not sure what he’s done in the arena of either good or evil, though he did once steal a book from the library when Dad had to leave town in a hurry and he had only half-finished it, and one time he kissed Jasmine Williams behind a stack of sets for the school play and what came to pass immediately following that could in some circles be considered bad, but was pretty good from his perspective, and earlier today he saved a family, or tried to, jury’s still out on that one.
“It’s just that you defended the entire family from the demon. And then your brother killed, well, a human girl. The messengers won’t take that lightly. Especially considering his history.” Anna folds her arms and manages to look both sympathetic and vaguely disapproving.
History?
“He’s already tried to kill a human. You, actually.” Dave folds his arms and manages to look both sympathetic and vaguely approving.
Dean considers closing his eyes again. It’s too much to process all at once, too much to deal with. All he wants is for Sam to wake up and figure out what the fuck these people are talking about so Dean can go sleep for, oh, a month or so.
“There’s the other issue, too,” says Dave. “We didn’t expect you to live through the confrontation with the demon. We’re not sure if messengers can harvest the souls of the living. We’ve never come across this sort of thing before.”
“It’s fascinating, really,” Anna says. “You’ll have to tell us what it feels like to have your soul removed. Like Dave said, we’ve never had a chance to do this before.”
Dean’s stomach clenches, and he twists to his knees despite the pain in his ribs, dry heaving until the bile sears the back of his throat. Since he’s already halfway up, he takes quick stock of the room. It’s long and rectangular, painted a color that’s probably called Soothing Sand or Tepid Tan, and a conference table takes up much of the floorspace. A large screen covers the wall at one end; a projector juts from the wall opposite it.
As far as he can tell, the walls are uninterrupted by doors or windows. Dean forces down his inherent dislike for places without clear marked exits and turns until he can crawl towards Sam. “Hey,” he murmurs. “Hey, wake up. Come on.”
Sam’s face tightens and relaxes, but Sam doesn’t actually wake up until Dean slips his thumb under his pointer, reaches out, and pinches the fold of skin at Sam’s wrist between the pad of his thumb and side of his middle finger. Hard.
Sam squirms away from the pain and opens his eyes to meet Dean’s. “’m awake,” he says, then twists his head to look to the side. “Where the hell are we?”
A half-second after Dean opens his mouth to answer, Anna interrupts. “We’re just waiting for the messengers to arrive,” she says. “They’re going to judge your souls.”
“Oh,” says Sam, and then, “Oh. Shit. I.... Did I actually shoot--”
“Yeah,” Dean says softly. “Turns out you did.”
Sam’s eyes go wild, open until all Dean can see is a corona of white around his twin eclipsed irises. “She was,” Sam says, “I didn’t...I didn’t mean to, I just--she was going to, and I couldn’t figure out any other way.” He’s begging for something, for forgiveness or justification or someone to tell him that he did the right thing, so Dean does the only thing he knows how and grabs Sam’s hand.
“It’s okay,” he says. He doesn’t know what else to tell him.
It’s very far from okay.
A new voice enters the mix behind him, and Dean turns to see something that reminds him of pictures of nebulae, all rotating, mutating fire, edges inside curves encircling edges, sparks like diamonds at the edges. is this the human? it asks.
“That one, and the one just beyond it,” Dave says. “We need judgment of both their souls.”
they are both still living. we do not know what will happen to a soul harvested from the living.
“Worst comes to worst, we just deal with the outcome.”
very well. The nebula morphs, extends a tendril of smoke and dust and stars and caresses the side of Dean’s face. He expects it to be hot, but instead, it feels like ice, like the first sharp breath of cold air on a winter day. A pinpoint of discomfort blooms for a moment in Dean’s chest, flares, and disappears.
hm. says the nebula. well, human, you have done well for your race, have you not? Something shifts, and Dean receives a feeling of surprise. He’s not sure whether it’s his own or the creature’s until it speaks again. oh. we see. unforseen consequences. And the cold vanishes, leaving him shivering in its wake.
“What do you mean, unforseen consequences?” Dave asks. “Did you kill it?”
not exactly, says the nebula. It reaches out to touch the center of Dean’s forehead, burning a circle of pure cold, then withdraws again. we believe we granted it immortality.
Two sets of eyes and one set of stars turn to glare at Dean. He forces himself to stop shivering and meet their gazes. “What?” he says.
we have judged his soul to be Good. we do not know about the other. The nebula shifts, and Dean somehow senses that it’s frowning. his soul lives. we would very much appreciate the opportunity to transplant it. curiosity as to the effects of such has plagued us for some time.
“Give it to the girl,” Dean says, suddenly. “Leslie.”
ah, says the nebula. interesting idea. we will have to try that.
“What about the Balance?” Anna asks.
The nebula gives a heaving gesture that Dean equates with a shrug. the balance is unimportant to us. we do not serve it. we simply carry out one aspect of its completion.
“But--”
“We’re on a deadline here,” Dave interrupts. “We don’t get this done, we’re going to miss the wormhole.”
very well. Moving towards Sam, the nebula extends its arm and plucks something that looks like a grain of sand from his chest before dropping it to the floor. there you go. It flashes, an explosion, a solar flare, and Dean throws an arm over his eyes, but it’s gone before he can react to its departure.
“Well,” says Anna. “That didn’t quite turn out how we expected.”
Dave’s leaning up against the wall; a cigarette has appeared between his fingers. “So my feeling here,” he says, exhaling smoke with his words, “is that we send them back down, leave them. Call it a draw.”
“How about mostly a win for me? After all, they did a majority of good before tonight. I’ll give you a headstart on the next one. Or...I don’t know. We could switch sides? You could do good and I could do evil next time. Might keep it interesting.”
“I like being evil.”
“Okay, so you can keep evil. We need to get going, though, or it’ll be too late.”
“Fine.”
Anna turns to regard at Dean. He meets her eyes, looks directly into the heart of Good, and says, “Fuck you.”
She smiles.
--
The first thing Sam feels is the grass beneath his palms. He digs in, ignores the dirt lodging behind his fingernails. “Dean?”
“Right here,” Dean says. “I’m right here. Christ, Sammy, you all right?”
“It’s Sam.”
Ten feet away, a baby starts to cry.
And because he doesn’t know what else to do, Sam flops on his back, stares up past the showers of sparks released by the house as the roof collapses, follows the streaks of red and orange to the star-strewn sky.
--
Epilogue
“You have to stop doing that.” Sam sits behind his brother, closing a six-inch gash in his back with a needle and thread.
Dean hisses as the needle pierces his skin. “Stop doing what?” His words stretch taut against the pain.
Sam works quickly, his fingers deft and precise. “Getting hurt. You know I can feel it--it’s distracting as hell to be working on an exorcism while you hold the thing down and then have to stop because you get sliced open.”
“Yeah,” says Dean. “Because I like getting sliced open. Do it for kicks.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Hey,” Dean says. “Would you finish stitching that up? I have things to do.”
“Things of the useful research variety or things of the it’s-alive-and-has-tits-works-for-me variety?”
Dean scowls over his shoulder and winces as the stitches tug. “They’re not always mutually exclusive.”
“Come on, man, the one time you thought that girl had information about the demon we were trying to kill, it turned out she was the demon we were trying to kill.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“She tied you to a bed and took everything you owned. She would have slit your throat if I had gotten there ten seconds later.”
“Ancient history, Sammy. Do I even need to mention that time at the bar in Minnesota?”
Sam pokes the needle a little deeper than necessary in retaliation. “I was sixteen,” he says. “And you were a bad influence. It’s not my fault the bartender had a crush on you and gave you free drinks.”
“He did not have a crush on me,” Dean protests. Sam snorts and finishes his job, then retreats to the bathroom to throw away the bloodied gauze and soak a washcloth. The stitches serve mostly as a formality. It will only take an hour or two for Dean’s back to heal. Once, it would have required a week at least, a week of careful tending and Dean’s bitching about not being able to take a shower, before the stitches could come out.
This time tomorrow, they’ll be back on the road, Dean’s only reminder of the cut a ridge of new skin beside his shoulderblade. He’ll pop in a tape (still tapes, still the same fucking music) and sing along as the Impala skims miles of empty blacktop, and talk about how no one ever drives anymore, how it’s a lost art. He won’t talk about last night’s skirmish. It’s like talking shop at the theater, and some archaic form of manners will preclude the mention of spirits and ghosts. Dean will mutter and slide his upper back across the seat because the healing itches, and he will talk about the weather. Sam will remember, though. Sam will remember the way his back split along an invisible faultline, the way he screamed at the pain before he dampened it. Though Sam’s gotten better at filtering Dean out, he hasn’t tried to cut himself off completely. He’s afraid he won’t be able to get back in, won’t be able to feel it if something happens.
No matter what they say, you don’t get used to stasis. So maybe it’s irrational, but every morning, when Sam wakes up and rolls over, he checks to make sure Dean’s still breathing.
--
Leslie still doesn’t quite know what happened that night. She remembers heat, and a feeling of deep-seated fear. She remembers running into the yard, remembers her father screaming, and a man pushing him and running around and then it goes black.
Until the one day her little sister, in a fit of anger, collapses a bookshelf with the power of her mind.
Three days later, something with claws that sure as hell aren’t a bear’s destroys a tent full of campers just outside of town.
All of a sudden Leslie’s seeing shadows around corners, flashes of dusk-red metal and crescent moon smiles. When he appears in front of her, she’s not surprised.
“I’m Dean,” he says.
“I know,” she says. She’s seventeen. She feels like she’s lived forever.
“You should,” he says. “You’re carrying my soul around.”
“So you’re what? Some sort of psychic?”
“Nah,” he says, his voice a low drawl that makes her think of heat lightning and summer evenings. “The psychic’s my brother.”
“What do you want?” she asks.
He looks at her, and she feels the gaze like a hand on her shoulder. “You ever heard of a barghest?”
She shrugs. “No.”
“Well,” he says, “there’s one just outside of town.”
“So?”
He purses his lips, then appears to come to a silent decision. “Walk with me a minute,” he says.
Author:
xaaraRating: PG-13, gen
Timeline: AU (breaks from canon after Dead Man's Blood)
Summary: People have long since forsaken their belief in God. Only ghost stories remain.
Previous Parts: One | Two | Three
A/N: Apologies for the length of time between the previous part and this one. RL kind of hates me at the moment.
From the Ground
Part Four
--
They find, upon reading his journal, that their father didn’t actually know much about the demon. Some of the basics, sure, its modus operandi. Cattle deaths, brownouts, static on all the local radio stations. EMF off the charts.
But the demon itself? Not much--possibly it can take human shape, but none of the survivors of its attack remember seeing anyone else as they gaped in horror at wives pinned to the ceiling, grabbed their children, and ran. Which brings up a whole new angle, because other survivors?
“Why?” Sam asks. He leafs through the exclusively demon-related journal Dad kept, reading bits of interviews with distraught fathers, newspaper clippings of mysterious arsons, no two in the same town, few in the same state. Always the same, always the mother pinned to the ceiling, a father sure he hadn’t seen what he was sure he’d seen. Stages of grief are bullshit when you can’t get past denial. And so: shot glasses, lined up like strung pearls, or weekends with a gun and deer blood on your hands, or a long flight to Thailand, no forwarding address.
All of it cramped in Dad’s neat handwriting, page after page of accounts and transcriptions and sketches. The same thing, time and time again.
Why?
“Maybe,” Dean says, shrugging, “because it can.”
Sam opens his mouth to protest, then closes it again. It’s just as likely as any of the other thousand scenarios whirling in his head. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t care why, not really, and it’s not like he’s going to be sitting down with the thing over tea and crumpets anytime soon. So why exactly did you pin my mother to the ceiling and burn the house down around her? How about Jess? Cream and sugar?
They’re pretty sure nothing but the Colt has any chance of killing the thing, but Dean cleans and loads all of their guns anyway, polishes the charms and amulets, jams a flask of holy water in one of his back pockets. Sam watches him, watches his brother’s fingers as they flip and turn the weapons, quick and sure and almost unthinking--pick a card, any card.
After a minute, the intensity of his gaze must penetrate Dean’s focus, because he looks up from his work. “What?”
“Nothing,” Sam says. Then, “You think we should try to get them out?”
Click. Wipe. Spin. Repeat. “Might not come if we let it know we’re here.”
Sam snorts. “You really think we scare it?”
“Doubt it.” Snap. “Owfuck.”
“Smooth, man.”
Dean flips a careless middle finger in Sam’s direction and wipes his bleeding hand on his jeans. “You could help out instead of reading Dad’s journal for the tenth time.”
“I just want to know--”
“You already know what’s going to happen.” Dean’s voice is rough but not unkind. “If you aren’t going to do anything useful here, then at least get us some coffee. Long night coming up.”
--
There’s a letter crumpled in the bottom of one of Dean’s bags. After Sam leaves the room, he retrieves it, pulls out some of the wrinkles. Dean: it says across the top. No Dear, no To, just his name and a colon. Yeah, that would be Dad.
Dean:
Stay safe. Keep Sam out of trouble & get him back to Stanford if you can. After you kill the demon, he should go back. If he gets to be a lawyer, he can keep your ass out of jail.
Watch out for him, and for yourself.
-Dad
Dean scans the letter, looking for meaning in the lines Dad scribbled on cheap hotel stationery, the ballpoint wearing through the paper. He wants to believe that his father was a wonderful man full of love for his sons even after losing his wife in a tragic fire after their sixth year of marriage.
Dean knows that his father was a gritty man, a loner, an ex-Marine who never quite made it out of Nam, whose dreams were haunted just as regularly by the memory of his fallen buddies as by creatures who should never have walked to fall. And he knows that John Winchester never loved anything quite so much as he loved his wife, and never hated anything quite so much as he hated the demon that killed her.
Dad, Dean thinks. Dad, I-- Shit, I don’t know. He folds the paper, slowly, his fingers tracing the edges as he lines up the corners and presses down the creases. It catches easily when he holds his lighter to the angle farthest from his fingers, curls and curves into itself until he lets it drop into the ash tray sitting on the desk to smolder and char and feather apart.
When Sam returns, Dean is still staring at the ashtray, his back so tight he can feel it beginning to spasm beneath his skin. “Tell me that stuff is hot,” he says, nodding at the tray of coffee cups--four total--in Sam’s hands.
“Should be,” Sam says, “I just got it.” Pause. “You okay?”
“Yes,” Dean says. “That family. They’re not going to go through--”
“Of course not. That’s not what I’m worried about.”
That pulls him up short for a second, because if not that, then what? But he understands, knows Sam on an intuitive level that no one else has ever quite matched, and nods. “We’ll get it done,” he says. It’ll have to be enough for now.
--
They wait in the Impala, across the street from the Stewart house, for what seems like days. It’s probably more like two hours, because the sun is still high in the sky and Leslie still hasn’t come home from school. Dean drums his fingers against the steering wheel in an ostinato that dances at the edge of Sam’s hearing until he’s sure it echoes his heartbeat. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
Either way, it’s driving him nuts, and he reaches over to swat Dean’s hand into stillness. “That’s not helping,” he says. “I can’t concentrate.”
Dean makes a low sound in his throat but doesn’t answer except by wiping his palms on his jeans and jittering one leg.
They sit.
Leslie arrives on a yellow bus and enters her house without turning to look at Sam and Dean. Once he sees her make it inside safely, Dean drives them to a gas station, buys two packs of cigarettes and six sticks of gum. Sam raises his eyebrows when Dean returns with the cigarettes, but he’s not surprised, not really. Dean props himself against the hood of the car and lights the cigarettes, one after another, though Sam doesn’t think he’s actually inhaling the smoke. Just holding it in his mouth, something to do, an attempt to stay connected to this world. Sam can’t really blame him.
They drive back, park farther down the block this time. More sitting, and very little talking. Mostly just grunts, one ten-second exchange when Sam asks if Dean wants some water and Dean says no Jesus stop yammering and Sam points out that he hasn’t said anything for an hour and a half and Dean says yeah but you were thinking louder than a pack of girls at the mall and Sam says oh and shuts up.
The sun sets in silence.
--
By the time the lights start to flicker, Dean has sunk into a state of near-meditative calm. There are a limited number of ways this evening can play out, and he’s only willing to accept one of them.
Sam will live. The demon will die. The world will keep spinning.
So that’s the way it’s going to work, you hear? One life, one death, and fuck you and your judgment, playing with people like your little cowboys and Indians, plastic figures you lose to the lawn mower and run over with your station wagon, doesn’t matter, there are more where they came from.
And the lights start to flicker. Dean resolutely does not think of it as a sign.
Sam’s out of the car with the Colt in his hand before Dean manages to open his door. “Upstairs,” Dean yells. “Get them out of the house.”
Sam picks the lock to the front door while Dean dances on the balls of his feet, swaying from side to side and chanting under his breath come on Sam, move it, come on we’re going to be late, come on come on come on. The door opens, and they walk straight into the flailing swing of Frank Stewart’s fist. Not terribly dangerous to either of them, but distracting enough that Dean points at the stairwell and uses his presence to occupy the man.
“Get the fuck out of my house,” Frank shouts in Dean’s direction as Dean shoves him out the door. “What the-- Who the hell are you?”
Good question. Dean grins wide, adrenaline and fear and ohmygodthisisactuallyhappening chasing through him. Grins wide, until he knows Frank sees the glinting of his teeth, and says, “Your savior.”
--
Sam bursts into the nursery and notes two things immediately. Evelyn is not bleeding. The baby is safe.
For now.
The figure of a man stands over the crib, one hand touching the baby’s forehead, the other making strange fluid motions in the darkness. And then, before Sam can even raise the gun, the man disappears, and the woman is on the ceiling, screaming about her child, blood pooling and soaking through her nightgown.
No. No, no, nonononono.
Sam stares at her, tries to envision her suspended by a net that he can remove with the right force. Stares at her, and then closes his eyes and pushes.
--
Frank is screaming, and a baby is screaming, and a woman is screaming, and Dean is tempted to join in, since it seems like the thing to do. Except, no. Sam is in that house and it’s going to start burning down any second, and why the hell is he not out the front door yet?
Frank is still out in the middle of the yard having a panic attack, so Dean turns to Leslie, who seems to have it together. “Where’s the nursery?” he asks.
“Upstairs, to the right,” Leslie says. “What’s going on?”
“Not sure myself.” Dean frowns, pulls out a gun that will probably do nothing should he encounter a serial-killer demon, and charges into the house. “Sam!”
“Up here,” Sam says, his voice shaky. Dean takes the stairs two and three at a time, finds Sam at the top struggling to balance the weight of an unconscious Evelyn and cradle an infant at the same time. Evelyn’s nightgown hangs heavy with blood, but it looks like she’s breathing for now.
Shit, Dean thinks. This isn’t how it was supposed to go. He doesn’t have time to think anything else, because he sees a flare of flame in the nursery and holsters his gun in the waistband of his pants. A cocoon of infant and blankets is suddenly squirming and howling in his arms, and every single sense in his body is telling him to get the fuck out right now.
He secures the baby in his left arm as he skims over the stairs and hauls out his cellphone, flips it open, dials 911 as he exits the front door. “There’s a fire,” he tells the woman who answers at the other end. “312 Cheyenne Avenue. And a woman with some sort of stomach injury, big gash across her lower torso. Man who’s having a panic attack and a little kid who’s going to need some serious therapy. And a baby.”
“Excuse me?” says the woman. “Could you slow down and repeat that?”
Dean hands the baby to Leslie, who looks up at him with wide green eyes as she wraps her arms around her sister. “What’s going on?” she asks again.
No time to explain it to her as well as to the emergency response woman, so he holds a finger to his lips and repeats his story at a slower pace with a few more details, trying to block out the sound of the squalling baby. The sound cuts off so quickly that Dean doesn’t process it for a moment.
Then Sam swears, and Dean hears the crack of a gun hammer, and when he turns to look at Leslie, she stares back at him with eyes washed black like oil spills. Something twists in his stomach; he knows without approaching her that the baby is dead. The cell phone drops from his hand as he fumbles for his gun, points it in Leslie’s direction.
Leslie laughs. It’s a beautiful sound, a child’s laugh, like wind or water or happiness come to Earth, and it stops him in his tracks.
“Hello, Dean,” she says. “You’ve grown since the last time we saw each other.”
--
Sam opens his mouth and finds himself flying through the air, finally coming to a stop plastered against a tree. He fights for his hold on the Colt, and somehow maintains it; maybe the demon’s focus on Dean is distracting it.
“You boys don’t know how to avoid even the most half-assed trap, do you?” Leslie asks Dean.
Dean, from his position pressed up against the only other tree in the yard, grunts something that sounds like, “Go to hell.”
Smiling, Leslie says, “Sorry, that sort of human invention is just a little beneath me.”
“Funny, for a demon who’s not above possessing a fucking kid.” And then Dean’s struggling for air, a force pressed against his throat so hard that Sam can almost see it, see Dean’s neck compress on the sides.
“Possession is for amateurs,” says Leslie. “I’m simply borrowing her body.”
“Six of one,” Dean gasps, and Sam glares at him, thinking, you idiot, stop talking. Dean shuts up.
“Oh,” says Leslie, “oh, that’s cute. Little telepathic thing you have going on there.”
Something occurs to Sam, and he thinks, what the fuck, don’t have anything to lose. He closes his eyes, tries to imagine himself tied to the tree with invisible cords. Imagines those cords loosening, fraying, each fiber separating from its counterparts, ashes to ashes. Imagines each one pulling apart, a little uncertain at the edges, wavering, disappearing--
He’s free with a burst of energy that sends him stumbling forward into the yard. He catches himself painfully, his right knee and ankle protesting the resistance, but he rights himself and raises the Colt. The first sirens come within hearing range as Sam levels the gun at a girl, a child, and thinks, I can’t.
Leslie knows. She opens her eyes wide, lets a tear escape. “Sam,” she says, “Sam, where’s Mommy?” Her voice trembles, lace-thin, as fragile as porcelain. “Why won’t you let me go to Mommy?”
Sam grits his teeth and keeps the gun pointed at Leslie’s heart. “You let her go and I’ll let you go,” he says. “It’s the best offer you’re going to get.”
“I want my mommy,” Leslie says, and starts to cry. The windows of the house blow out behind her, raining shards of glass like falling stars onto the grass. Out of the corner of his eye, Sam sees Dean begin to fold in on himself, still fighting for every breath.
Time moves on, as inevitable as the tides. The sirens grow closer. Sam knows that if the police arrive to see him waving a gun at a child they know personally, they will have little doubt as to who is the guilty party. “It’s an even trade,” Sam says. “Her life for yours. It’s not--”
Leslie’s tears evaporate. She cocks her head to one side to blink at Sam, twists one hand, and doesn’t even flinch at Dean’s scream. Sam forces himself not to look. Hold on for just a second, he thinks, please, I can’t deal with everything right now, be okay for just a few seconds.
“Even doesn’t enter into it,” she says. “Your brother means nothing to me; this body means nothing to me. It’s you.”
“It’s me what?”
“You’re the one I’m coming for.” A dark shape collapses into Sam’s line of sight, and the breeze carries the scent of Dean’s blood, a note merging with the acridity of burning wood, of crumbled plaster and lives destroyed. “You’re the one I’ve been waiting for.”
“Could say the same thing about you,” Sam says.
Leslie just shrugs, then takes two steps forward and kneels at Dean’s head, cups his chin in one hand and settles the other in the hair near the nape of his neck. “You’re so delicate,” she whispers. Sam barely hears the words against the rush of the fire behind her.
Her body tenses, and he understands it, in a sudden, elastic moment, can almost taste the snap of Dean’s neck under the artificial strength of Leslie’s child-fat arms, feel his body spasm under the light of a lopsided moon.
Sam points a gun at a million-year-old demon inside an eight-year-old girl, and pulls the trigger.
--
It’s not up to us to decide, he hears a voice say before he’s fully awake. Something warm slips down one side of his face, probably blood, not too much pain, though, has to be good. Probably. He can’t remember whether pain is good or not, whether he’s supposed to be cursing the existence of the world or grateful to it for anchoring him to solid ground.
Dean opens his eyes to see whoever’s talking, and immediately closes them again. Jesus. The...thing, whatever, won’t commit to a form. It’s flickering like a strobelight through thousands of bodies a minute, a constant stream of information, of faces, bodies, expressions.
I know, says a different voice. But I just think that it’s gotten a lot bigger than I thought it would. There are a lot of people involved.
It’s not as if we didn’t know that from the start.
Well, yes. It’s just.... I don’t know. We might want to reconsider taking their souls, wait instead until they just, you know, die. Naturally. We don’t know what taking someone’s soul does to them. I mean, we’ve never tried. Not with a live person.
Woah, Dean thinks. Taking souls? He squints, just enough to allow him to see the pulsating outlines of whatever’s talking above him.
One of them’s awake, says the first voice. The shorter one.
“Hey,” Dean tries to say, but it comes out low and wet and nearly inaudible. He coughs and tries again. “Would you take a shape?” he mutters.
“Oh, sorry.” The voice is back, but this time, it’s attached to a skinny man in grey slacks, a dress shirt, and an argyle sweater-vest. “It’s just when we’re not paying attention, sometimes it’s hard to hold onto one person.”
Anna appears next to the man. “Welcome back,” she says. “Dave here doesn’t walk this plane as often as I do, so he gets confused sometimes.”
“I do not,” Dave says, indignant. “It’s just harder to hold a shape than to let them hold you.”
“Whatever,” Anna says. “Anyway. So you know how I mentioned the other day that the world was going to change on Tuesday? It’s Tuesday.”
“I’d noticed.” Dean struggles to sit up, but the room--room?--smears around him and he elects instead to stare at the ceiling and try to figure out what the fuck is going on.
”The problem is,” Dave says, “we’re having a little trouble deciding what to do with you.”
“Oh,” says Dean. And then, because he can’t possibly turn his head to look at this stage, he asks, “Where’s Sam?”
“Right behind you. Still out. We’re going to have to talk to you both when you wake up. You see, you were supposed to do one of two things, good or evil, but we hadn’t really considered the fact that one of you would do one and one of you the other.”
“Right,” Anna says. She frowns at Dean like it’s his fault. He’s not sure what he’s done in the arena of either good or evil, though he did once steal a book from the library when Dad had to leave town in a hurry and he had only half-finished it, and one time he kissed Jasmine Williams behind a stack of sets for the school play and what came to pass immediately following that could in some circles be considered bad, but was pretty good from his perspective, and earlier today he saved a family, or tried to, jury’s still out on that one.
“It’s just that you defended the entire family from the demon. And then your brother killed, well, a human girl. The messengers won’t take that lightly. Especially considering his history.” Anna folds her arms and manages to look both sympathetic and vaguely disapproving.
History?
“He’s already tried to kill a human. You, actually.” Dave folds his arms and manages to look both sympathetic and vaguely approving.
Dean considers closing his eyes again. It’s too much to process all at once, too much to deal with. All he wants is for Sam to wake up and figure out what the fuck these people are talking about so Dean can go sleep for, oh, a month or so.
“There’s the other issue, too,” says Dave. “We didn’t expect you to live through the confrontation with the demon. We’re not sure if messengers can harvest the souls of the living. We’ve never come across this sort of thing before.”
“It’s fascinating, really,” Anna says. “You’ll have to tell us what it feels like to have your soul removed. Like Dave said, we’ve never had a chance to do this before.”
Dean’s stomach clenches, and he twists to his knees despite the pain in his ribs, dry heaving until the bile sears the back of his throat. Since he’s already halfway up, he takes quick stock of the room. It’s long and rectangular, painted a color that’s probably called Soothing Sand or Tepid Tan, and a conference table takes up much of the floorspace. A large screen covers the wall at one end; a projector juts from the wall opposite it.
As far as he can tell, the walls are uninterrupted by doors or windows. Dean forces down his inherent dislike for places without clear marked exits and turns until he can crawl towards Sam. “Hey,” he murmurs. “Hey, wake up. Come on.”
Sam’s face tightens and relaxes, but Sam doesn’t actually wake up until Dean slips his thumb under his pointer, reaches out, and pinches the fold of skin at Sam’s wrist between the pad of his thumb and side of his middle finger. Hard.
Sam squirms away from the pain and opens his eyes to meet Dean’s. “’m awake,” he says, then twists his head to look to the side. “Where the hell are we?”
A half-second after Dean opens his mouth to answer, Anna interrupts. “We’re just waiting for the messengers to arrive,” she says. “They’re going to judge your souls.”
“Oh,” says Sam, and then, “Oh. Shit. I.... Did I actually shoot--”
“Yeah,” Dean says softly. “Turns out you did.”
Sam’s eyes go wild, open until all Dean can see is a corona of white around his twin eclipsed irises. “She was,” Sam says, “I didn’t...I didn’t mean to, I just--she was going to, and I couldn’t figure out any other way.” He’s begging for something, for forgiveness or justification or someone to tell him that he did the right thing, so Dean does the only thing he knows how and grabs Sam’s hand.
“It’s okay,” he says. He doesn’t know what else to tell him.
It’s very far from okay.
A new voice enters the mix behind him, and Dean turns to see something that reminds him of pictures of nebulae, all rotating, mutating fire, edges inside curves encircling edges, sparks like diamonds at the edges. is this the human? it asks.
“That one, and the one just beyond it,” Dave says. “We need judgment of both their souls.”
they are both still living. we do not know what will happen to a soul harvested from the living.
“Worst comes to worst, we just deal with the outcome.”
very well. The nebula morphs, extends a tendril of smoke and dust and stars and caresses the side of Dean’s face. He expects it to be hot, but instead, it feels like ice, like the first sharp breath of cold air on a winter day. A pinpoint of discomfort blooms for a moment in Dean’s chest, flares, and disappears.
hm. says the nebula. well, human, you have done well for your race, have you not? Something shifts, and Dean receives a feeling of surprise. He’s not sure whether it’s his own or the creature’s until it speaks again. oh. we see. unforseen consequences. And the cold vanishes, leaving him shivering in its wake.
“What do you mean, unforseen consequences?” Dave asks. “Did you kill it?”
not exactly, says the nebula. It reaches out to touch the center of Dean’s forehead, burning a circle of pure cold, then withdraws again. we believe we granted it immortality.
Two sets of eyes and one set of stars turn to glare at Dean. He forces himself to stop shivering and meet their gazes. “What?” he says.
we have judged his soul to be Good. we do not know about the other. The nebula shifts, and Dean somehow senses that it’s frowning. his soul lives. we would very much appreciate the opportunity to transplant it. curiosity as to the effects of such has plagued us for some time.
“Give it to the girl,” Dean says, suddenly. “Leslie.”
ah, says the nebula. interesting idea. we will have to try that.
“What about the Balance?” Anna asks.
The nebula gives a heaving gesture that Dean equates with a shrug. the balance is unimportant to us. we do not serve it. we simply carry out one aspect of its completion.
“But--”
“We’re on a deadline here,” Dave interrupts. “We don’t get this done, we’re going to miss the wormhole.”
very well. Moving towards Sam, the nebula extends its arm and plucks something that looks like a grain of sand from his chest before dropping it to the floor. there you go. It flashes, an explosion, a solar flare, and Dean throws an arm over his eyes, but it’s gone before he can react to its departure.
“Well,” says Anna. “That didn’t quite turn out how we expected.”
Dave’s leaning up against the wall; a cigarette has appeared between his fingers. “So my feeling here,” he says, exhaling smoke with his words, “is that we send them back down, leave them. Call it a draw.”
“How about mostly a win for me? After all, they did a majority of good before tonight. I’ll give you a headstart on the next one. Or...I don’t know. We could switch sides? You could do good and I could do evil next time. Might keep it interesting.”
“I like being evil.”
“Okay, so you can keep evil. We need to get going, though, or it’ll be too late.”
“Fine.”
Anna turns to regard at Dean. He meets her eyes, looks directly into the heart of Good, and says, “Fuck you.”
She smiles.
--
The first thing Sam feels is the grass beneath his palms. He digs in, ignores the dirt lodging behind his fingernails. “Dean?”
“Right here,” Dean says. “I’m right here. Christ, Sammy, you all right?”
“It’s Sam.”
Ten feet away, a baby starts to cry.
And because he doesn’t know what else to do, Sam flops on his back, stares up past the showers of sparks released by the house as the roof collapses, follows the streaks of red and orange to the star-strewn sky.
--
Epilogue
“You have to stop doing that.” Sam sits behind his brother, closing a six-inch gash in his back with a needle and thread.
Dean hisses as the needle pierces his skin. “Stop doing what?” His words stretch taut against the pain.
Sam works quickly, his fingers deft and precise. “Getting hurt. You know I can feel it--it’s distracting as hell to be working on an exorcism while you hold the thing down and then have to stop because you get sliced open.”
“Yeah,” says Dean. “Because I like getting sliced open. Do it for kicks.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Hey,” Dean says. “Would you finish stitching that up? I have things to do.”
“Things of the useful research variety or things of the it’s-alive-and-has-tits-works-for-me variety?”
Dean scowls over his shoulder and winces as the stitches tug. “They’re not always mutually exclusive.”
“Come on, man, the one time you thought that girl had information about the demon we were trying to kill, it turned out she was the demon we were trying to kill.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“She tied you to a bed and took everything you owned. She would have slit your throat if I had gotten there ten seconds later.”
“Ancient history, Sammy. Do I even need to mention that time at the bar in Minnesota?”
Sam pokes the needle a little deeper than necessary in retaliation. “I was sixteen,” he says. “And you were a bad influence. It’s not my fault the bartender had a crush on you and gave you free drinks.”
“He did not have a crush on me,” Dean protests. Sam snorts and finishes his job, then retreats to the bathroom to throw away the bloodied gauze and soak a washcloth. The stitches serve mostly as a formality. It will only take an hour or two for Dean’s back to heal. Once, it would have required a week at least, a week of careful tending and Dean’s bitching about not being able to take a shower, before the stitches could come out.
This time tomorrow, they’ll be back on the road, Dean’s only reminder of the cut a ridge of new skin beside his shoulderblade. He’ll pop in a tape (still tapes, still the same fucking music) and sing along as the Impala skims miles of empty blacktop, and talk about how no one ever drives anymore, how it’s a lost art. He won’t talk about last night’s skirmish. It’s like talking shop at the theater, and some archaic form of manners will preclude the mention of spirits and ghosts. Dean will mutter and slide his upper back across the seat because the healing itches, and he will talk about the weather. Sam will remember, though. Sam will remember the way his back split along an invisible faultline, the way he screamed at the pain before he dampened it. Though Sam’s gotten better at filtering Dean out, he hasn’t tried to cut himself off completely. He’s afraid he won’t be able to get back in, won’t be able to feel it if something happens.
No matter what they say, you don’t get used to stasis. So maybe it’s irrational, but every morning, when Sam wakes up and rolls over, he checks to make sure Dean’s still breathing.
--
Leslie still doesn’t quite know what happened that night. She remembers heat, and a feeling of deep-seated fear. She remembers running into the yard, remembers her father screaming, and a man pushing him and running around and then it goes black.
Until the one day her little sister, in a fit of anger, collapses a bookshelf with the power of her mind.
Three days later, something with claws that sure as hell aren’t a bear’s destroys a tent full of campers just outside of town.
All of a sudden Leslie’s seeing shadows around corners, flashes of dusk-red metal and crescent moon smiles. When he appears in front of her, she’s not surprised.
“I’m Dean,” he says.
“I know,” she says. She’s seventeen. She feels like she’s lived forever.
“You should,” he says. “You’re carrying my soul around.”
“So you’re what? Some sort of psychic?”
“Nah,” he says, his voice a low drawl that makes her think of heat lightning and summer evenings. “The psychic’s my brother.”
“What do you want?” she asks.
He looks at her, and she feels the gaze like a hand on her shoulder. “You ever heard of a barghest?”
She shrugs. “No.”
“Well,” he says, “there’s one just outside of town.”
“So?”
He purses his lips, then appears to come to a silent decision. “Walk with me a minute,” he says.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-08 08:59 pm (UTC)and the end, the boys get to go home and go back to work, and nine years later dean shows up to introduce leslie to the world of demonhunting. fabulous. :>
one did good and one did evil and so they both get to live. i think that's the most interesting way to do it, and interesting that dean, who so often does the illegal thing, gets to be good, and sam's the one who shoots a human and is thus labeled evil.
(oh, and? "Two sets of eyes and one set of stars turn to glare at Dean" - i love that. i love how... nebulous the nebula is, how it speaks in italics without capital letters and seems kind of alien and distant but not entirely uninterested. curious about a transplanted soul and everything.)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-09 12:51 pm (UTC)I tried to incorporate some of the ideas of good and evil that come through in a lot of mythology--most of the time, they both seem rather petty and unable to see shades of grey. (I have to admit, the nebula was one of the original reasons I wrote the story, though it got a much smaller part than I had conceived for it. I want to write, like, a nebula convention. Where they all get together and compare notes. And have an open bar!)
Thanks for the comment, and thanks for staying along for the ride. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-08 09:25 pm (UTC)*points to icon*
Yeah...
*is ded*
xx
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-09 12:51 pm (UTC)Thank you.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-08 09:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-09 12:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-08 09:43 pm (UTC)This was a really well-told, interesting piece, with a great narrative voice and writing style, and I very much enjoyed the ride. :)
Favorite lines:
More sitting, and very little talking. Mostly just grunts, one ten-second exchange when Sam asks if Dean wants some water and Dean says no Jesus stop yammering and Sam points out that he hasn’t said anything for an hour and a half and Dean says yeah but you were thinking louder than a pack of girls at the mall and Sam says oh and shuts up.
So I see a pattern here, of the way these guys gear up for fights. Sam’s mind whirs and whirs and whirs, and Dean’s more calm and quiet. Kind of a reversal of what they’re normally like. Me like. :)
“There’s a fire,” he tells the woman who answers at the other end. “312 Cheyenne Avenue. And a woman with some sort of stomach injury, big gash across her lower torso. Man who’s having a panic attack and a little kid who’s going to need some serious therapy. And a baby.”
This is great, the way Dean’s quickly trying to relay what happened without giving too much detail, but by giving enough info so that this family gets the help it’ll need.
Then Sam swears, and Dean hears the crack of a gun hammer, and when he turns to look at Leslie, she stares back at him with eyes washed black like oil spills. Something twists in his stomach; he knows without approaching her that the baby is dead.
No … the demon in Leslie? The baby dying? No, no, no. *sniffles*
Leslie laughs. It’s a beautiful sound, a child’s laugh, like wind or water or happiness come to Earth, and it stops him in his tracks.
“Hello, Dean,” she says. “You’ve grown since the last time we saw each other.”
Ooh, this was creepy. Great writing there.
The first sirens come within hearing range as Sam levels the gun at a girl, a child, and thinks, I can’t.
I felt so bad for Sam here, because what a sucky thing to have to do. Kill a girl to kill the demon. It feels like a no-win situation.
Leslie’s tears evaporate. She cocks her head to one side to blink at Sam, twists one hand, and doesn’t even flinch at Dean’s scream.
*wrings hands* This is so not going well.
Her body tenses, and he understands it, in a sudden, elastic moment, can almost taste the snap of Dean’s neck under the artificial strength of Leslie’s child-fat arms, feel his body spasm under the light of a lopsided moon.
No! *covers eyes* Not Dean!
“It’s just that you defended the entire family from the demon. And then your brother killed, well, a human girl.”
But … but … what choice did Sam have? The demon would have kept on killing if Sam hadn’t done what he did. Yes, killing Leslie was awful, but … I guess Good and Evil can only see black and white and not shades of grey, eh? Or perhaps it's that Sam's actions were motivated by hate for the demon, rather than doing good for mankind.
“We’re on a deadline here,” Dave interrupts. “We don’t get this done, we’re going to miss the wormhole.”
*snorts* Of course Evil would be kind of impatient about the whole thing. Btw, great idea to have Evil and Good’s human names be so ordinary. I like that.
“Hey,” Dean says. “Would you finish stitching that up? I have things to do.”
“Things of the useful research variety or things of the it’s-alive-and-has-tits-works-for-me variety?”
ROTFLOL! So glad to see Sam and Dean survive judgment day and get to go back to what they do best: brotherly banter and hunting evil. *g*
“Come on, man, the one time you thought that girl had information about the demon we were trying to kill, it turned out she was the demon we were trying to kill.”
*snickers* I can so see this happening to Dean. It’s a wonder his downstairs brain hasn’t gotten him into heaps of trouble on the show.
Thanks for a great read. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-09 01:03 pm (UTC)Definitely--I mean, Sam's a lot more intellectual, analytical. He likes knowing how and why things work, and he tends to overthink. Dean's a lot more intuitive and physical (not to say he can't do the analytical thing, but when he and Sam are together, he usually defers to his brother.)
I guess Good and Evil can only see black and white and not shades of grey, eh?
Yeah, that was one of the things I was going for. Actually, I touch on this in my response to
It’s a wonder his downstairs brain hasn’t gotten him into heaps of trouble on the show.
Seriously.
Thanks so much for the lovely feedback--I'll have to go back and reply to your other posts as soon as I get a minute this evening.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-08 11:56 pm (UTC)Lovely work.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-09 01:10 pm (UTC)There's something wonderfully circular in that.
I'm glad you said that. Somehow, that touches on exactly what I wanted to do with the piece.
Thanks for the comment. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-10 02:43 am (UTC)Gods, this was fabulous. Loved the whole thing, but here are my favorite parts...
Okay, I love all of the beginning so much I can't choose. *grins*
"So that’s the way it’s going to work, you hear? One life, one death, and fuck you and your judgment, playing with people like your little cowboys and Indians, plastic figures you lose to the lawn mower and run over with your station wagon, doesn’t matter, there are more where they came from.
And the lights start to flicker. Dean resolutely does not think of it as a sign."
I love this ultimatum he gives the universe, and immediately senses that the universe doesn't give a fuck what he thinks...
"Frank is screaming, and a baby is screaming, and a woman is screaming, and Dean is tempted to join in, since it seems like the thing to do. Except, no."
Bwah ha ha! I just love how you balance the drama with the funny throughout this whole thing. There's a wonderfully crafted feeling of dread lying beneath the whole thing, but you keep it from slipping into maudlin with little things like this.
and this...killed me dead...
No time to explain it to her as well as to the emergency response woman, so he holds a finger to his lips and repeats his story at a slower pace with a few more details, trying to block out the sound of the squalling baby. The sound cuts off so quickly that Dean doesn’t process it for a moment.
Then Sam swears, and Dean hears the crack of a gun hammer, and when he turns to look at Leslie, she stares back at him with eyes washed black like oil spills. Something twists in his stomach; he knows without approaching her that the baby is dead. The cell phone drops from his hand as he fumbles for his gun, points it in Leslie’s direction.
gut-wrenching and scary as hell. I keep seeing that little scene in BSG where 6 snaps the baby's neck...gah!!
The ending...again, I love the whole freaking thing. I love the descriptions of Good and Evil as they debate, and Dean telling them to take a shape already. I love the whole Nebula/judgement thing, and the little "whoops" when it makes Dean immortal. And giving his soul to Leslie...and (I may be wrong here, but Sam's to the baby?) Truly brilliant.
The epilogue, and the line about not ever getting used to stasis...killed me.
and the kicker...Dean showing up to teach Leslie, and her already recognizing him? Wonderful!!
Can I friend you? I'd like to keep up on anything else you post.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-10 12:05 pm (UTC)I'm glad you think so, because this definitely kept veering from melodrama to crack and back again. (Also: I had originally planned for something around 7-8 thousand words. 15,000 later, it had sort of spun out of control. :P)
I keep seeing that little scene in BSG where 6 snaps the baby's neck...gah!!
You're a BSG fan? Most excellent. That scene was what really got me hooked, because I watched a few of the later episodes and didn't really feel much invested in the show, but then I watched the miniseries and they killed a baby and I knew it was love.
Not that I, y'know, love killing babies. But it was refreshing to see a show willing to do something like that.
Friend away--no need to ask. And thank you very much for your response. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-30 03:46 am (UTC)Just, wow.