[fic] all and nothing
Title: all and nothing
Characters: Linda Tran, Kevin Tran; mentions of Sam, Dean, Crowley, OCs
Word count: 2,679
Warnings: implied past rape, racist language
Notes: Was originally intended to be posted on Mother's Day, but the title took about three times as long to think up as did the rest of the fic... whoops. "Impressionism," "second-person POV," and "non-linearity" on my spnspiration bingo card.
Summary: Some nights you dream of shackles, and when you wake up it takes an extra minute to remind yourself that you aren’t with the demons anymore. You are whole. You are safe. You are free. You have your son, incorporeal as he is, and that is all you need. (Post-season 9.)
Read below, or on ao3.
Kevin makes you coffee for Mother’s Day. It’s the most he can manage now, and he’s so exhausted when he’s done that he flits in and out of sight for the next two hours while you drink it and pick at the dry toast that you can’t be bothered to butter up. You try your hardest not to think about the breakfasts you used to cook together back in Michigan, or about the cheese danish that he brought to you on Garth’s boat last December to make up for the Mother’s Day he missed while he was on the run. He can pick up on your emotions - has always been able to, even before - and it makes him upset when you’re upset.
Only now, when he’s upset the glasses fly off the drying rack and shatter on the floor, and it takes you hours to coax him out of the walls afterwards.
---
Your official documents all say Linda T. Kaplan. Your parents tell you that the T stands for Tran, because that was what was on the birth certificate that the G.I.s pinned to your blanket when they loaded you onto the cargo plane that flew you out of Saigon. In elementary school you are embarrassed to have such a strange middle name, when everyone else is Mary Elizabeth, or Hannah Christina. Sometimes you just tell your classmates you don’t have one at all, rather than bear witness to their confusion.
---
Every now and then, Kevin asks you about his father: who he was and what he was like and why you have no pictures of him anywhere in the house. You weave together some fantasy about star-crossed lovers on the shores of Lake Michigan, and don’t mention a single thing about frat parties and waking up cold and alone and bruised all over. Because he died before you were born sounds a hell of a lot better than he slipped something into my drink before he walked me home.
You let him carry on with his paternal fantasies, adding or correcting a few details here and there to keep the story straight, and after a few years of pretending you can almost believe it, too.
---
There’s a five-pointed star inked between your shoulder blades and you think it’s somewhat ironic. It was still stripes, three red on a field of gold, back when you were born. You skim through one of Kevin’s history textbooks on a whim when he’s out for his cello lesson one day, just to make sure. But there’s nothing there about the flags, and why would there be? It’s AP US History, not Vietnam 101.
Wikipedia tells a long and storied history of many different flags, and your eyes start to glaze over with all these names and dates and design schemes. You decide it’s a pointless investigation and exit out of the browser. Kevin comes home and you manage to get him to sit still for fifteen whole minutes while he scarfs down leftover pizza and a can of Sprite before disappearing into his room to Skype-study with his girlfriend.
You’re unspeakably proud of him and all that he’s accomplished and all that he will accomplish in the years to come, but you hope that between Channing and Princeton (which he won’t hear back from for another few months, technically - but they would be monumentally stupid not to accept him), Kevin can learn to have a little fun, too.
---
The mean kids on the playground call you Chopsticks. Sometimes they forget that your parents have curly brown hair and green eyes. Sometimes you forget that you don’t.
---
The look on Kevin’s face when you tell him that this - devil’s trap? anti-possession ward? - isn’t your first tattoo would be downright laughable, if only you hadn’t witnessed black smoke billowing out of your neighbor’s mouth two hours ago. You can still smell the sulfur and hear the thud of her body as it hit your hardwood floor.
---
In high school, you meet another Tran. Her parents came over to America on a boat, and she was born in Oakland, California before they all made the move to Boston. They live above the convenience store that the family has owned for the last ten years, and her mom makes the most delicious pho you’ve ever tasted. (You are acutely aware that you’ve never actually tasted any other pho.) They invite you to their house for Lunar New Year, and welcome you as part of the family.
Your parents don’t bat an eye when you start calling yourself by your middle name, and when you turn eighteen they help you make it even more official, and send you off to college as Linda Tran. You are endlessly grateful for their support through the whole process, and you make sure that they know it - but every time you sign your new name (your true name, you have to remind yourself), you can’t shake the feeling that you’re betraying the only family you will ever know.
---
The pawn shop owner calls you Mail-Order when you raise your voice at him, like that’s somehow supposed to teach you a lesson in humility. Kevin, Sam, and Dean all bristle in unison, but you have to bite the inside of your cheek to keep from laughing aloud. Mail-Order, Chopsticks, Miss Saigon, dirty gook, stupid chink, Oriental, slit-eyes, Mama-san. You’ve heard them all, and they lost their sting long ago.
You are all of the above.
You are none of the above.
---
Once upon a time, you and Kevin had been planning to visit Vietnam. He’d gotten the idea after reading The Things They Carried in AP English Literature. You figure it’s as good a high school graduation present as any, and it’ll be good for both of you to finally see the motherland. He’s surprised that you’ve never once been back, even as you explain to him that your life is here. There is nothing for you back there. He gives you a funny look, like he knows that you were - are - scared of feeling as out of place there as you did in college when you were the only person in the Asian-American Students’ Association who didn’t speak her (biological) parents’ native tongue. He always was perceptive.
Once upon a time, you had round-trip plane tickets booked for the two of you, three weeks’ worth of hostels in Hanoi and Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City with half a dozen hiking trails and boat tours and tourist sites between. Kevin was piecing together an itinerary on Google Docs, and your browser was full of bookmarks to travel review sites and advice columns and Flickr albums. You’d gone down to the Post Office to renew both your passports, the day he disappeared.
---
Some nights you dream of shackles, and when you wake up it takes an extra minute to remind yourself that you aren’t with the demons anymore. You are whole. You are safe. You are free. You have your son, incorporeal as he is, and that is all you need.
---
You receive your diploma with a thin-lipped smile and a baby in your belly. It’s still early on, so nobody suspects a thing - least of all him. Your parents help you move out of your apartment after the ceremony, and you find his varsity ring where he must have accidentally dropped it behind your bedside table that night. You don’t give it back, and in less than twenty-four hours you’re on a plane back to Boston, his ring in your backpack and his baby in your belly.
It’s not for you. You couldn’t care less. But you want your son to have something of his biological father as he grows up. To be able to hold an object that belonged to him, and to know with certainty that he was, in fact, a real person. It’s more than you had.
---
The bunker door slides shut with a resounding thud behind you, and you wonder through the dim television static of your mind what the hell you’re going to do now. You’ve been missing for over a year, your son is trapped on earth as a ghost, and you just want to have someone you can lean on, who can tell you exactly what to do. But if there’s one thing you’ve learned from the Winchesters it’s that once the supernatural gets latches on to you, there’s no going back to what you had before - not without bringing it all with you.
You think briefly of cozy winter nights at your parents’ place, huddled warm and safe against the Boston winter. You think of your mother’s chicken parm, and the other Mrs. Tran’s pho, then pull the car onto the highway and resolutely turn west. The last place you can be now is anywhere close to anyone else you care about. Mile markers fly by, and you don’t read a single one of them.
Kevin has vanished from sight again, but you can still feel him next to you, small and scared and cold. Instead of turning up the heat, you fiddle with the radio dials until you find a classical music station. It’s playing the prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, which makes you think of his sophomore year recital, which makes you smile. The air inside the car warms, just a little.
Halfway between Lebanon and Portland, you refill on gas and purchase a roll of twine, which you thread through Kevin’s father’s ring. Then you get back in the car and keep heading west. You don’t want to stop until you see the Pacific Ocean.
After another half hour Kevin blinks into view again, flickering ever so slightly in the passenger seat before settling in. His hand goes right through the seat belt, and after a couple of tries he finally shrugs and sits back as best he can. It’s not like he needs it anymore, but old habits die hard. You keep your eyes fixed on the road, one hand on the wheel while the other plays absently with the ring hanging heavily from your neck.
Kevin calls you Frodo, and you laugh together.
---
There’s a five-pointed star inked between your shoulder blades and most days you forget it’s even there. Your skin doesn’t feel any different when you run your fingers over the inked areas, though you remember brushing off little black flecks of scab, the slight raise and swelling that accompanied the first week or so post-tattoo. You have to twist yourself around to even see it, and then it’s flipped in the reflection of the bathroom mirror and distorted by the contortion of your spine. Others can see it easily, straight-on and unskewed, but you never will.
Back in college, you thought it was symbolic. Powerful. You told yourself you were reclaiming the heritage that had shrunk to nothingness in a cargo plane window when you were three months old. Now you don’t think about it much at all. It wasn’t until later that you found out that Saigon hadn’t even flown the star until well after they’d shipped you across the Pacific with a hundred other screaming babies. And by that point it wasn’t Saigon anymore, but Ho Chi Minh City, and there was no North Vietnam or South Vietnam - just one long, blood-soaked country weary of a war that your son writes Document-Based Questions about on his Advanced Placement tests.
You think that your birth parents would recoil in shame if they knew their daughter bore the mark of what used to be their mortal enemy. The star came from the North, and decorated the men that had come to burn their cities and slaughter their neighbors. But it’s a moot point. Someone had made the decision, years ago on your behalf, to swap out the red and gold of your ancestors for a future in red, white, and blue. You live under stars and stripes now, and one day your son will become the first Asian-American President of the United States.
---
Your forearm stings where the demons burned off the anti-possession tattoo you’d only just gotten a day ago. You can still feel Crowley’s smoke inside you, red and putrid, and Kevin is shaking you frantically, all wild-eyed desperation like that time he got lost at the grocery store, and you can’t bring yourself to move. Your insides feel raw and tacky, like maybe Crowley had left something of him behind. You wish you could reach inside and tear it all out, but this isn’t the first time you’ve been carved open and laid bare, and you emerged from that first ordeal with a beautiful, brilliant little boy. If you had a thousand souls you would sell them all again, each and every one, to keep him safe. Kevin shakes you again, and this time you force yourself to blink, to smile wearily, to let him know you’re alright.
You heard every single thing Crowley said to him using your mouth, and you can tell he’s bursting with curiosity about his father. But he doesn’t ask, and you are grateful.
When the burn on your forearm heals, you get the same tattoo right over it. Let the demons come, you think. You don’t go down that easy.
---
A few weeks after Mother’s Day, you come home from your shift at Biggerson’s to find Kevin standing tall and nearly-solid in the middle of your dingy little living room. His smile is sad and wistful when he tells you that the veil has parted, that Heaven is open once again. You want to cry. You want to scream. You want to pull him close and kiss his forehead and rock him to sleep like you did when he was a baby, but your arms pass right through him now and whatever’s left of him leaves a chill when it brushes against your heart.
He begs you to burn his father’s ring. He’s terrified that he’ll lose control one day. All the other ghosts do, he tells you. But you know better. He’s not just any other ghost. He’s your son, and he won’t hurt you.
You call the Winchesters, because you don’t know what else to do. Plus, they owe you big time for not skinning them alive after all that they’ve put Kevin through. Kevin jumps to their defense as he always does, but he will never understand a mother’s rage, the random spasms of grief that smack you right in the face when you see other children walking down the street with their parents and wonder morbidly if they’ll survive into adulthood. On your third attempt, Sam finally picks up. His voice is hoarse, like he’s been screaming or sobbing or chugging whiskey.
(Dean’s the one with the whiskey, Kevin says. Sam just buries himself in research. You don’t quite care either way.)
You write down the name that Sam gives you, Sheriff Jody Mills. He sounds earnest when he apologizes for not checking in sooner, explains things have gotten a bit hectic on his end yet again. Kevin asks Sam to tell Dean he says hi. Sam makes a sound like whatever he’s drinking has just gone down the wrong pipe, and hangs up the phone.
You gather your things, punch Sheriff Mills’ address into your phone GPS, and point your car in the direction of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. There’s a five-pointed star inked between your shoulder blades and three years ago you were on the verge of setting foot in your birthplace for the first time in your life, your son at your side. Now he’s a ghost riding shotgun in a hotwired sedan, and you have another star wreathed in flames on your forearm. The Pacific Ocean disappears in your rear-view mirror, and for the first time in a long, long time it feels like you’re finally going home.
Characters: Linda Tran, Kevin Tran; mentions of Sam, Dean, Crowley, OCs
Word count: 2,679
Warnings: implied past rape, racist language
Notes: Was originally intended to be posted on Mother's Day, but the title took about three times as long to think up as did the rest of the fic... whoops. "Impressionism," "second-person POV," and "non-linearity" on my spnspiration bingo card.
Summary: Some nights you dream of shackles, and when you wake up it takes an extra minute to remind yourself that you aren’t with the demons anymore. You are whole. You are safe. You are free. You have your son, incorporeal as he is, and that is all you need. (Post-season 9.)
Read below, or on ao3.
Kevin makes you coffee for Mother’s Day. It’s the most he can manage now, and he’s so exhausted when he’s done that he flits in and out of sight for the next two hours while you drink it and pick at the dry toast that you can’t be bothered to butter up. You try your hardest not to think about the breakfasts you used to cook together back in Michigan, or about the cheese danish that he brought to you on Garth’s boat last December to make up for the Mother’s Day he missed while he was on the run. He can pick up on your emotions - has always been able to, even before - and it makes him upset when you’re upset.
Only now, when he’s upset the glasses fly off the drying rack and shatter on the floor, and it takes you hours to coax him out of the walls afterwards.
---
Your official documents all say Linda T. Kaplan. Your parents tell you that the T stands for Tran, because that was what was on the birth certificate that the G.I.s pinned to your blanket when they loaded you onto the cargo plane that flew you out of Saigon. In elementary school you are embarrassed to have such a strange middle name, when everyone else is Mary Elizabeth, or Hannah Christina. Sometimes you just tell your classmates you don’t have one at all, rather than bear witness to their confusion.
---
Every now and then, Kevin asks you about his father: who he was and what he was like and why you have no pictures of him anywhere in the house. You weave together some fantasy about star-crossed lovers on the shores of Lake Michigan, and don’t mention a single thing about frat parties and waking up cold and alone and bruised all over. Because he died before you were born sounds a hell of a lot better than he slipped something into my drink before he walked me home.
You let him carry on with his paternal fantasies, adding or correcting a few details here and there to keep the story straight, and after a few years of pretending you can almost believe it, too.
---
There’s a five-pointed star inked between your shoulder blades and you think it’s somewhat ironic. It was still stripes, three red on a field of gold, back when you were born. You skim through one of Kevin’s history textbooks on a whim when he’s out for his cello lesson one day, just to make sure. But there’s nothing there about the flags, and why would there be? It’s AP US History, not Vietnam 101.
Wikipedia tells a long and storied history of many different flags, and your eyes start to glaze over with all these names and dates and design schemes. You decide it’s a pointless investigation and exit out of the browser. Kevin comes home and you manage to get him to sit still for fifteen whole minutes while he scarfs down leftover pizza and a can of Sprite before disappearing into his room to Skype-study with his girlfriend.
You’re unspeakably proud of him and all that he’s accomplished and all that he will accomplish in the years to come, but you hope that between Channing and Princeton (which he won’t hear back from for another few months, technically - but they would be monumentally stupid not to accept him), Kevin can learn to have a little fun, too.
---
The mean kids on the playground call you Chopsticks. Sometimes they forget that your parents have curly brown hair and green eyes. Sometimes you forget that you don’t.
---
The look on Kevin’s face when you tell him that this - devil’s trap? anti-possession ward? - isn’t your first tattoo would be downright laughable, if only you hadn’t witnessed black smoke billowing out of your neighbor’s mouth two hours ago. You can still smell the sulfur and hear the thud of her body as it hit your hardwood floor.
---
In high school, you meet another Tran. Her parents came over to America on a boat, and she was born in Oakland, California before they all made the move to Boston. They live above the convenience store that the family has owned for the last ten years, and her mom makes the most delicious pho you’ve ever tasted. (You are acutely aware that you’ve never actually tasted any other pho.) They invite you to their house for Lunar New Year, and welcome you as part of the family.
Your parents don’t bat an eye when you start calling yourself by your middle name, and when you turn eighteen they help you make it even more official, and send you off to college as Linda Tran. You are endlessly grateful for their support through the whole process, and you make sure that they know it - but every time you sign your new name (your true name, you have to remind yourself), you can’t shake the feeling that you’re betraying the only family you will ever know.
---
The pawn shop owner calls you Mail-Order when you raise your voice at him, like that’s somehow supposed to teach you a lesson in humility. Kevin, Sam, and Dean all bristle in unison, but you have to bite the inside of your cheek to keep from laughing aloud. Mail-Order, Chopsticks, Miss Saigon, dirty gook, stupid chink, Oriental, slit-eyes, Mama-san. You’ve heard them all, and they lost their sting long ago.
You are all of the above.
You are none of the above.
---
Once upon a time, you and Kevin had been planning to visit Vietnam. He’d gotten the idea after reading The Things They Carried in AP English Literature. You figure it’s as good a high school graduation present as any, and it’ll be good for both of you to finally see the motherland. He’s surprised that you’ve never once been back, even as you explain to him that your life is here. There is nothing for you back there. He gives you a funny look, like he knows that you were - are - scared of feeling as out of place there as you did in college when you were the only person in the Asian-American Students’ Association who didn’t speak her (biological) parents’ native tongue. He always was perceptive.
Once upon a time, you had round-trip plane tickets booked for the two of you, three weeks’ worth of hostels in Hanoi and Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City with half a dozen hiking trails and boat tours and tourist sites between. Kevin was piecing together an itinerary on Google Docs, and your browser was full of bookmarks to travel review sites and advice columns and Flickr albums. You’d gone down to the Post Office to renew both your passports, the day he disappeared.
---
Some nights you dream of shackles, and when you wake up it takes an extra minute to remind yourself that you aren’t with the demons anymore. You are whole. You are safe. You are free. You have your son, incorporeal as he is, and that is all you need.
---
You receive your diploma with a thin-lipped smile and a baby in your belly. It’s still early on, so nobody suspects a thing - least of all him. Your parents help you move out of your apartment after the ceremony, and you find his varsity ring where he must have accidentally dropped it behind your bedside table that night. You don’t give it back, and in less than twenty-four hours you’re on a plane back to Boston, his ring in your backpack and his baby in your belly.
It’s not for you. You couldn’t care less. But you want your son to have something of his biological father as he grows up. To be able to hold an object that belonged to him, and to know with certainty that he was, in fact, a real person. It’s more than you had.
---
The bunker door slides shut with a resounding thud behind you, and you wonder through the dim television static of your mind what the hell you’re going to do now. You’ve been missing for over a year, your son is trapped on earth as a ghost, and you just want to have someone you can lean on, who can tell you exactly what to do. But if there’s one thing you’ve learned from the Winchesters it’s that once the supernatural gets latches on to you, there’s no going back to what you had before - not without bringing it all with you.
You think briefly of cozy winter nights at your parents’ place, huddled warm and safe against the Boston winter. You think of your mother’s chicken parm, and the other Mrs. Tran’s pho, then pull the car onto the highway and resolutely turn west. The last place you can be now is anywhere close to anyone else you care about. Mile markers fly by, and you don’t read a single one of them.
Kevin has vanished from sight again, but you can still feel him next to you, small and scared and cold. Instead of turning up the heat, you fiddle with the radio dials until you find a classical music station. It’s playing the prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, which makes you think of his sophomore year recital, which makes you smile. The air inside the car warms, just a little.
Halfway between Lebanon and Portland, you refill on gas and purchase a roll of twine, which you thread through Kevin’s father’s ring. Then you get back in the car and keep heading west. You don’t want to stop until you see the Pacific Ocean.
After another half hour Kevin blinks into view again, flickering ever so slightly in the passenger seat before settling in. His hand goes right through the seat belt, and after a couple of tries he finally shrugs and sits back as best he can. It’s not like he needs it anymore, but old habits die hard. You keep your eyes fixed on the road, one hand on the wheel while the other plays absently with the ring hanging heavily from your neck.
Kevin calls you Frodo, and you laugh together.
---
There’s a five-pointed star inked between your shoulder blades and most days you forget it’s even there. Your skin doesn’t feel any different when you run your fingers over the inked areas, though you remember brushing off little black flecks of scab, the slight raise and swelling that accompanied the first week or so post-tattoo. You have to twist yourself around to even see it, and then it’s flipped in the reflection of the bathroom mirror and distorted by the contortion of your spine. Others can see it easily, straight-on and unskewed, but you never will.
Back in college, you thought it was symbolic. Powerful. You told yourself you were reclaiming the heritage that had shrunk to nothingness in a cargo plane window when you were three months old. Now you don’t think about it much at all. It wasn’t until later that you found out that Saigon hadn’t even flown the star until well after they’d shipped you across the Pacific with a hundred other screaming babies. And by that point it wasn’t Saigon anymore, but Ho Chi Minh City, and there was no North Vietnam or South Vietnam - just one long, blood-soaked country weary of a war that your son writes Document-Based Questions about on his Advanced Placement tests.
You think that your birth parents would recoil in shame if they knew their daughter bore the mark of what used to be their mortal enemy. The star came from the North, and decorated the men that had come to burn their cities and slaughter their neighbors. But it’s a moot point. Someone had made the decision, years ago on your behalf, to swap out the red and gold of your ancestors for a future in red, white, and blue. You live under stars and stripes now, and one day your son will become the first Asian-American President of the United States.
---
Your forearm stings where the demons burned off the anti-possession tattoo you’d only just gotten a day ago. You can still feel Crowley’s smoke inside you, red and putrid, and Kevin is shaking you frantically, all wild-eyed desperation like that time he got lost at the grocery store, and you can’t bring yourself to move. Your insides feel raw and tacky, like maybe Crowley had left something of him behind. You wish you could reach inside and tear it all out, but this isn’t the first time you’ve been carved open and laid bare, and you emerged from that first ordeal with a beautiful, brilliant little boy. If you had a thousand souls you would sell them all again, each and every one, to keep him safe. Kevin shakes you again, and this time you force yourself to blink, to smile wearily, to let him know you’re alright.
You heard every single thing Crowley said to him using your mouth, and you can tell he’s bursting with curiosity about his father. But he doesn’t ask, and you are grateful.
When the burn on your forearm heals, you get the same tattoo right over it. Let the demons come, you think. You don’t go down that easy.
---
A few weeks after Mother’s Day, you come home from your shift at Biggerson’s to find Kevin standing tall and nearly-solid in the middle of your dingy little living room. His smile is sad and wistful when he tells you that the veil has parted, that Heaven is open once again. You want to cry. You want to scream. You want to pull him close and kiss his forehead and rock him to sleep like you did when he was a baby, but your arms pass right through him now and whatever’s left of him leaves a chill when it brushes against your heart.
He begs you to burn his father’s ring. He’s terrified that he’ll lose control one day. All the other ghosts do, he tells you. But you know better. He’s not just any other ghost. He’s your son, and he won’t hurt you.
You call the Winchesters, because you don’t know what else to do. Plus, they owe you big time for not skinning them alive after all that they’ve put Kevin through. Kevin jumps to their defense as he always does, but he will never understand a mother’s rage, the random spasms of grief that smack you right in the face when you see other children walking down the street with their parents and wonder morbidly if they’ll survive into adulthood. On your third attempt, Sam finally picks up. His voice is hoarse, like he’s been screaming or sobbing or chugging whiskey.
(Dean’s the one with the whiskey, Kevin says. Sam just buries himself in research. You don’t quite care either way.)
You write down the name that Sam gives you, Sheriff Jody Mills. He sounds earnest when he apologizes for not checking in sooner, explains things have gotten a bit hectic on his end yet again. Kevin asks Sam to tell Dean he says hi. Sam makes a sound like whatever he’s drinking has just gone down the wrong pipe, and hangs up the phone.
You gather your things, punch Sheriff Mills’ address into your phone GPS, and point your car in the direction of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. There’s a five-pointed star inked between your shoulder blades and three years ago you were on the verge of setting foot in your birthplace for the first time in your life, your son at your side. Now he’s a ghost riding shotgun in a hotwired sedan, and you have another star wreathed in flames on your forearm. The Pacific Ocean disappears in your rear-view mirror, and for the first time in a long, long time it feels like you’re finally going home.