Happy New Year Fic: Monster (Supernatural, Gen, PG)
So, Happy New Year guys.This was supposed to be my holiday gift to my wonderful flist but I'm lazy so it's kind of late, written fast and dirty on New Year's Day. Anyway, the Mari Lwyd is a horse skull puppet who visits homes in an old New Year Tradition in some areas of Wales as a symbol of death/rebirth. I didn't think it was too far fetched for the Mari Lwyd to be real in this Supernatural Universe and to traditionally require a sacrifice. Fortunately, the only sacrifice the traditional Welsh version requires is drink and treats. I do hope all my readers got the drinks and treats and fun of New Year without resorting to a zombie horse.
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Title: Monster
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Description: New Year Fic. Monster point of view. When Lydia was five she was scared of the monsters which lurked in the night, when she was eleven she was confronted by one. Pre-series Stanford era and post season 7.
Characters: Dean Winchester, OFC
Wordcount: ~1600 words
Warnings: show level violence
Disclaimer: This is fiction, pure fantasy folks. No characters or part of the show belong to me. The CW gets to keep them all. *sniff*
{image courtesy of wikipedia, By R. fiend - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16960238}
MONSTER
When Lydia was five she was scared of the monsters which lurked in the night.
“Hush,” her parents would say and stroke her thick mane of blonde hair. Her father would read her a story of unicorns and elves and she would blink heavily at her darkly draped windows before drifting into a dreamless sleep. The ring of the midnight bells did not wake her.
When Lydia was nine she knew there were monsters which lurked in the night. “Hush,” her parents would say, as her mother brushed a fingertip over her cheek and reassured her that monsters only came for the evil folk. Her mother would recite stories of old Yule and new beginnings, of laughter, gifts and rhyme. “We are good people, ordinary folk but for one day a year,” she would say. “A Mari Lwyd only asks for feast and entertainment, and we take only a single sacrifice on that single night of the year.
Lydia was still awake when she heard the boom and fizz of fireworks and she hid trembling, cloaked in the black of her covers.
When Lydia was ten she was sure that the monsters wouldn’t get her. On the final eve of the year she pranced beside her parents in frost-stiff air to knock heavily on doors and beg company at homes which spilled music and noise and the heady smell of champagne and ale.
Wel dyma ni’n dwad (Well here we come)
Gy-feillion di-niwad (Innocent friends)
I ofyn am gennad (To ask leave)
I ofyn am gennad (To ask leave)
I ofyn am gennad i ganu (To ask leave to sing)
There were only a few young ones who knew how to rhyme with the Mari Lwyd. The others didn’t know why they invited their strange visitors inside, but they did it without question. In those homes Lydia and her parents feasted on laughter, cold cuts with chutney, and shiny-foiled chocolates.
The old ones turned off their blinking Santas and shiny reindeer when they heard the Mari Lwyd’s song. They clunked a deadbolt, loaded a shotgun and growled threats. Lydia’s mother covered her child’s ears, raised her song and turned them about.
At midnight they feasted by the side of a barn watching a cavalcade of colour in the night sky, and lamb’s blood dripped from Lydia’s cherry pink lips, dribbled down her chin and stained her little heart-motif fleece jacket.
When Lydia was eleven a monster called by asking strange questions. “Hush” her parents said as they kissed her forehead and closed her into her closet. She watched through a crack in the door, heard the anguished plea of her mother as she gave it a name, “Dean Winchester! No, Please, please we haven’t hurt anybody.”
The monster, stood young, tall and muscular, a sawn off shotgun held to Lydia’s mother’s head, his own head tipped in curiosity, as if he were about to ask for more details. Then, suddenly, a sure, cocky grin graced his handsome freckled face and his green eyes seemed bright with laughter. “A half chewed girl found in the snow on New Year’s Morning. You expect me to believe that a Mari Lwyd knows nothing about it? She invited you into her house.”
Lydia's father tried to reason with him, “We called at lots of houses, we didn't eat anybody. We took a lamb, you can check, we buried it by the barn on old Hughes' Farm.”
The thing about monsters, that makes them so monstrous, thinks Lydia, is that it doesn’t matter how their prey beg or plead, it is simply in their nature to kill.
Dean Winchester was just such a monster. With a click and boom, click and boom of a shotgun, her father’s skull shattered into ash and dust and her mother crumpled into silent rags beside him. Shotgun shells clattered and Lydia heard them rolling on the polished wooden floor even as the door protecting her was wrenched open.
He was huge, taller and wider than her parents and she looked up and up, six foot or more, unable to spit any words from her traumatised body. It wouldn’t have made a difference, she wasn’t strong, or brave or evil, she couldn’t have killed anybody, not even a monster. He looked down at Lydia, looking up at him, shook his head a little and smiled with the relish of a kid at the funfair and reloaded his gun. “Seriously! We’ve got freakin’ zombie horse babies now,” was the last thing she heard anybody utter in the real world.
Dying didn’t hurt. Not really. Purgatory though, purgatory hurts every day so when she hears the news that Dean Winchester, the Dean Winchester, is hell-adjacent she does her research, takes her time and hunts him down. Purgatory is a big, dark place and it’s easy to underestimate a small zombie horse - she can kill with a rhyme and flee in the blink of an eye.
When she finds him, he’s older than she remembers him, he's worry-lined and dirty and he's swift with a makeshift blade. She comes to him in a wide, safe clearing with a white flag and an enticing bargain and he paces a short distance from her with a mixture of hope, fear and disgust filling his features.
“I don’t come to kill, I don’t come to kiss, I come in peace to offer you this, an angel feather, a place for certain, I come offering you a bargain.”
“Or I could just kill you, instead of all this crap,”he replies, then adjusts his words quickly as he eyes her up and down. “Er, instead of all this, um... woo woo.” It’s the same cocky smile, but the monster has changed, he needs something from Lydia and he’s prepared to bargain for it.
Dean scratches his head, searching for words to use. “Where’s the angel? What is your price? Will you, er act nice.” He's no poet.
She doesn’t bother with rhyme again, “You can drop the rap battle, Dean. Honestly, it's painful. I only want to know why? I need to understand. Why did you kill us Dean Winchester? We were good folk.”
She sees the moment that recognition dawns and he stares her up and down, as if looking for some identifying mark. She wonders how many of her kind he has killed, how many were children. She thinks there was a time when she would have cared, would have wanted to know but it is of no consequence to her any more. She only wants to hear her own story.
“ An answer? That’s all?” Dean Winchester looks incredulous, side eyes the constant gray of their surroundings, looking for others, looking for a trap.
“That’s all. I came alone.”
Dean laughs, a dark-bellied monster laugh. “Tell me first, where is the angel?” he insists. His muscles are tense, strung ready for action, he’s on his toes ready to run even while his grubby fingers grip the handle of his blade.
“No. You would kill me and leave.”
He licks his lips. “Yeah, well, you’re not wrong about that.”
“You can’t kill all the monsters in purgatory, Dean Winchester. Let us feast together on company and conversation.”
He considers her for a moment, circles around her. She sees the moment when he makes his decision, he breathes deep, looks into the middle distance gathering his memories “Look, it wasn’t personal. I hardly remember you. I killed you because you were a monster,” he pauses, bites his lip, “Look, I was young, inexperienced. Now, if I met you, up there, I would check it out better. Sam...Sammy would…,” Dean’s eyes cloud momentarily, a chink of vulnerability, “My brother would take one look at you, child n’all and give me this puppy dog look and maybe we would turn away, let you walk away but even then we’d most likely return to you. It’s the nature of monsters you see, monsters kill. Sorry kid.” He shrugs his shoulders, a pretence at being relaxed. He’s still coiled ready to strike.
Lydia nods. She does understand. She points, “There was a ghoul swears he saw your angel by the water’s edge, down by the arachne cove. It’s maybe three hundred trees that way.”
He follows the gesture, and there’s a little frown which crinkles his forehead. She turns from him, starts to walk away where shadows gather in the woods.
“What? Is that it?”
“Yes,” she answers.
“You’re not angry? You’re not going to try and kill me?”
“Not this time. You invited me in, we had company and conversation, and besides…”
A horde of shadows surround Lydia. They advance in a slow-shuffle staining the air black around her. She smiles and waits, a small innocent zombie horse, and they fall on her with fangs and claws and fierce determination. She starts a rhyme, sways in rhythm, kicks a hoof and then there's a fountain of blood and monsters gnash and wail. Lydia’s horse jaw chews enthusiastically on the flesh of her foes.
Dean Winchester is gone when she looks up from the last corpse of her attackers, “You were right,” she finishes and the words fall muffled into the thick fog soup of Purgatory.
Lydia thinks there’s a certain peace in Purgatory, it feels somehow clean, a place where monsters can just be monsters. Others have suggested that Dean Winchester is an anomaly in Purgatory but Lydia knows better. He is exactly where he is supposed to be.
**end**
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