Timeslides
Another crossover written for comment_fic . This one for morlockiness , who inspired me to this madness in the first place. Does it take place in the same universe as my first fic? Uhh, maybe? I dunno. You decide.
Title: Timeslides
Fandom: Supernatural/Young Wizards
Author: Araine
Characters: Sam Winchester, Nita Callahan
Rating: PG-13-ish?
Warnings: Spoilers for Supernatural season, like... one.
Sam sighed, as he watched the empty park for any signs of life. Like the rest of this crap town, the park looked like it had hardly been maintained for years. Paint had faded on the jungle gym, and what had probably once been grass was now merely a patch of dust.
He sighed. It was the day after his birthday, and he was feeling dumb for getting his hopes up. Of course his dad hadn’t shown up. Dean did his best, of course, but…
It seemed like the only times that he knew his family were when he was hunting, and that was starting to piss him off. Why couldn’t they just… get a house, somewhere? Or at least stay at one school for more than a month.
He looked up sharply, when he heard a soft “oof”, and then a second later a girl fell off the jungle gym. Sam closed his eyes hard, and then opened them again. Had she always been there? No, she hadn’t, the park had been empty a minute ago - or so he’d thought. Where had she come from?
The thought that she could be a monster crossed his mind. But more than one monster in the same town? It just wasn’t likely. Besides, she didn’t look like a monster, and he was sick of hunting, anyways.
“Are you alright?” Sam called to her, getting up from the bench and walking over.
The girl - who was dusting off a battered library book - turned toward him in shock. “Oh,” she said. “I’m fine. You haven’t seen a Hispanic boy around here, have you? Medium height, short hair, kind of shy?”
Sam shook his head. “I haven’t,” he said. He frowned, puzzled. “How did you get here without my noticing?”
“I teleported,” she said, so deadpan that he almost wondered if she was serious for a second. She approached him with an outstretched hand. “Nita Callahan, nice to meet you. What’s your name?”
“Sam Winchester,” Sam said. He shook her hand, finding that her grip was strong and confident. She smiled widely at him, showing off the apples of her cheeks.
“Wait a second,” Nita said, after a short pause. “Your brother wouldn’t happen to be Dean Winchester, would he?”
All of a sudden, Sam felt disoriented. “He… uhh… how did you know?”
Nita frowned. “I think the gating went wrong, and I got timeslid by accident,” she muttered to herself. Sam just waited, wary - there was no way of knowing about Dean, unless Dean had told her, and they had arrived late last night. Sam was pretty sure Dean was still sleeping.
Suddenly Nita looked at him with intense gray eyes. “Look,” she said. “You know when I said I’d teleported here? I wasn’t lying. And I’m pretty sure something went wrong with that, because in the year 2010, I know you, and you’re in your twenties.”
Sam just stared at her for a moment, and then said, “Time travel,” with absolutely no intonation. Well, thank you, captain obvious.
“Yeah,” Nita replied.
He was almost entirely sure she was telling the truth, considering how outright she had stated it. He didn’t even think to reach for the pistol tucked into his waistband.
“You know me, then,” Sam said. “Or at least… sort of. How?”
“We’ve worked together,” she said. “Kind of a lot lately. Where are we? And what’s the date?”
“It’s the third of May,” Sam said. “1998. We’re in Sanderson Texas.”
Nita smiled at him. “Thanks,” she said. She quickly riffled through her book. “An hour,” she said to herself. “That’s how long before the next gate is patent. I’ll have to send a message.”
Sam, who was waiting quite patiently for an answer, he thought, crossed his arms and waited as she spoke a set of mathematical coordinates at her book, and then shut it. Her self-assured manner made him confident - she was either telling the truth, or was the craziest girl he had ever met.
Having finished with her book, Nita smiled at him once again. “I have an hour,” she said. “I guess I can explain a little about what’s going on.”
Sam nodded. “Please do,” he said, in his own bewildered way.
She began an explanation of how they had met and what they were working on in the future, so vague that the only thing Sam could deduce was that he lived to be twenty-seven, and he was still hunting monsters. The thought of that scared him more than he cared to let on. He had - somehow - worked his way through his first year of high school, and he’d heard plenty of those seminars about college. He’d known some kids who knew exactly what school they wanted to go to, what their future career would be.
He didn’t want the rest of his life to be one big unknown - the next town, the next motel, the next monster, unsure whether he would live or die. But instead of mentioning this, he asked her questions about how all of this worked, utterly fascinated. He relayed about his family - though she already knew them, surely - and she told him about her family, her father and her little sister.
And then, abruptly, Nita stopped. She flipped open her book, and Sam caught a quick glimpse of letters he did not know how to read, dressed in curlicues and elegant calligraphy, and somehow faintly glowing even in the early-morning sunlight.
“Oh,” Nita said, surprised. “It was a mix-up with the transport. My precognitive gift tied me into the timestream. Well, that’s an easy enough fix.”
“You’re going, then?” Sam asked. She might be very strange company, but… she was company.
She smiled, a bit wistfully, at him. “Yeah,” she said. “But I’ll see you again.” She smiled, once again, and Sam noticed how pretty her eyes were. Then, suddenly, she hugged him around the shoulders. “Dai stihó.”
“What does that mean?” Sam asked.
“It means ‘go well’,” she said. “Good luck.”
She stepped back, and flipped her book open, to begin talking in a language he did not understand - but, he found, he did, if only barely. She was spelling out a date and a time and a place, and also talking to the flow of time itself, to the part of the flow of time that was connected to her on more levels than one, letting her live in the present moment and also, occasionally, in the future. The world seemed still, and the jungle-gym’s paint seemed suddenly brighter, the dusty patch greener.
And then suddenly a rippling patch of air appeared in the middle of the park, and she stepped through and disappeared. As she did so, he caught a sudden glimpse of a black car - Dean’s - two men in the front seat, one whom he barely recognized as Dean, and then other of the two - himself, he realized - striding across the lawn toward the red-roofed building of a college he had seen before.
Sam stood for a long moment and stared at the park ahead of him, thinking.
Later, he would convince himself it had all been a dream. But that image of the red-bricked college building stayed with him.
When, three months later, he set eyes upon Stanford University for the very first time, it took his breath away. And, making his decision, he said goodbye to the chance of ever meeting Juanita Callahan again.