(no subject)
Title: A Bond of Fate 2/4
Author: Mich
Rating: PG-13 for implied violence
Genre: AU, gen
Spoilers: up through episode 1.18 Something Wicked
Summary: Jayme works on a report to her people about the events in Fitchburg WI. But how do you explain a shtriga to people on another world?
Chapter Two
“How’s it going?” Sam sat down next to Jayme, feeling like a tutor coming to check on the progress of a frustrated student.
They’d stopped in Pennsylvania just north of Gettysburg, where interstates 76 and 81 crossed. Finding a motel had not been a problem, one with a Civil War motif that definitely favored the Union. “After all, this is their home ground,” Jayme said, stretching as they got out of the car.
“Hard to think of your mom being around here back then,” Sam said.
“Yeah, certainly not a happy time, but an interesting one, in the full Chinese curse sense of the word.”
Things had been very quiet after that, Jayme frowning and staring at her computer, writing for a few minutes, then pausing, then writing again, her sounds of frustration punctuating the silence. Finally Dean got up, offering to go out and get food for the room “before she drives me nuts,” he muttered to Sam on his way out.
Jayme handed the tablet to Sam. “See for yourself.”
“Very funny. I don’t read Katarinian.”
“Shesh-ketera anghaleteh,” Jayme said, and the script changed to the Romanic alphabet Sam recognized.
“Wait, this thing-”
“Will display information in whatever language I tell it to, yeah.”
“Handy.” He scanned what she had written. “So what’s the problem?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Well, you’ve certainly gone into a lot of detail on what we did but it’s kind of dry.”
“Yeah, I know. I guess I’ve lost my touch.”
“But this is supposed to be a report, so maybe they expect it to be dry. You know, trying to maintain that whole ‘dispassionate observer’ thing.”
~~~
Dean Winchester is one of the more unusual humans I’ve met, and considering my activities in the past fifty years, that’s saying something. He shares with his father a maddening aversion to giving information. He’ll give short, vague answers-for example, when Sam began questioning him about what they were up against, a shtriga-when you’d expect him to share what he knows freely. When he says “That’s all I know” his expression doesn’t match. In this case his insistence that this shtriga-a witch-like creature-had just “gotten away” from their father rang hollow.
We found a motel and checked in, moving into a mode I am fast becoming used to-Research. Sam on his laptop, me on mine, Dean at the counter with paper materials. The pattern with these is the same; what are we dealing with, what are its characteristics and patterns, and how do you kill it? It’s less instinctual than one of our hunts, but they’re going up against beings that are sometimes smarter and usually more powerful than they are.
Shtrigas are witch-like creatures that can literally drain the life force from you; what the lore calls ‘vitae.’ Very similar in description to the Sel’ve’th but without the tendrils. They are a variety from Albania with roots in ancient Rome that can feed on any human, but prefer children. This seemed to strike a particular note with Dean, who takes his job very seriously, but never moreso than when children are involved. Then he takes it personally.
Sam, who is usually the one who knows the pahr menn’fehr (humans call it the A to Z) of the things they hunt, was in this case wrong; shtrigas are vulnerable to consecrated wrought-iron rounds, but only when they are in the middle of feeding. Needless to say, a very risky proposition.
With the who and how taken care of, the question was where. I know that human tracking skills are a source of great amusement to some of us, and for most humans that perception is only too true. But they are just as capable of tracking down prey, and these two are especially adept. They determined that the victims’ locations were all centered around the hospital, and Dean had seen an old woman there, fitting the description of a shtriga’s usual disguise-an elderly human female. This one also had an inverted cross on the wall, a symbol associated with anti-Christian groups (see database entries on Cross of St. Peter).
Since joining the Winchesters they’ve slowly learned how to take advantage of my extra-human abilities, not just limited to my other forms. I’ve learned that monsters can often take on human form in a way that can completely fool the eye and occasionally the nose, but sooner or later they give themselves away.
We returned to the hospital to follow up on this potential lead. I am not an expert in this field so I kept my doubts to myself, but it just seemed too easy and too obvious. My own experience with living incognito has shown me that you don’t put something as obvious as an anti-religious symbol on your wall in the very building where your victims are. I understand that lay humans are unlikely to ascribe supernatural causes to clues the way Sam and Dean do, but you can never assume.
In any case we found her room and entered, the two of them with weapons at the ready. I prefer to leave the firearms to them. I knew right away that this was not a shtriga or anything other than an elderly human. I let Dean figure out that on his own when the old woman startled them both. Then it was back to square one. Or so we thought.
~~~
When Jayme threw her computer Dean was able to snag it in midair; he’d never gotten the chance to hang out with the hippie frisbee players and wouldn’t have even if he did, but it was still a nice catch. He looked at the curved characters on the screen with a frown.
“Shesh-ketera ingalett,” Sam said, frowning when the flat tablet in Dean’s hands beeped in an almost annoyed manner. “What’d I do wrong?”
“It’s anghaleteh,” Jayme said.
“What did I say?”
“Gibberish.”
Sam gave her a bitchface. “Shesh-ketera anghaleteh.”
Dean blinked as the text on the screen changed to English. “Sweet.” He scanned the paragraphs. “This is it? This is what you’re supposed to do?”
Jayme nodded. “When I can get the damn words to come out.”
“Yeah, well, this is just ‘we went here then we did this and then we did’-do your people actually read this crap?” He held up his hand. “What I mean is you could put a meth head to sleep with this.”
“Exactly why I’m having trouble,” Jayme said. “With music it was so much easier-I could show them concert films and stuff. But I have to explain this and let’s face it, your job can get kinda technical and complicated.”
Dean gave Sam an odd look. “Well, that’s a new one.” He walked over to the bed and handed it to her. “What can I say, keep going. Gotta finish it, right?”
~~~
The motel where we were staying was run by a woman with two sons. It did not require any of my keen senses to see that Dean saw himself and Sam in those two boys. When we returned the elder of the boys was sitting outside, radiating sadness. The boy’s younger brother was ill, under the same circumstances as the others. He blamed himself for leaving the window open and causing his sibling’s pneumonia, but by this time we knew better. He said that he felt a responsibility to look after his brother and this situation meant failure to do so.
When Dean was four years old there was a fire at his home. His father handed Sam-who was still an infant-to Dean and ordered him to take his brother out of the house to safety. That was the beginning of a lifelong responsibility Dean feels towards Sam. Over their lives their father drilled this into Dean’s head-his most important job is to watch out for his brother, and it is a responsibility Dean takes more seriously than I can imagine him taking anything.
It makes him understanding when he sees this attitude in others, and it revealed in this case a sense of compassion that drew me quite strongly. The cockiness and ‘I don’t care’ attitude fades, revealing a strength inside that I’ve seen in few humans.
The boys’ mother was understandably frazzled and worried, trying to organize her affairs before heading to the hospital. Dean insisted on driving her with that same expression of calm determination on his face. As she got into her vehicle he turned so that only Sam and I could hear him.
“We’re going to kill this thing. I want it dead, you hear me?”
Never have I seen a human look so much like one of us.
Chapter Three
Author: Mich
Rating: PG-13 for implied violence
Genre: AU, gen
Spoilers: up through episode 1.18 Something Wicked
Summary: Jayme works on a report to her people about the events in Fitchburg WI. But how do you explain a shtriga to people on another world?
Chapter Two
“How’s it going?” Sam sat down next to Jayme, feeling like a tutor coming to check on the progress of a frustrated student.
They’d stopped in Pennsylvania just north of Gettysburg, where interstates 76 and 81 crossed. Finding a motel had not been a problem, one with a Civil War motif that definitely favored the Union. “After all, this is their home ground,” Jayme said, stretching as they got out of the car.
“Hard to think of your mom being around here back then,” Sam said.
“Yeah, certainly not a happy time, but an interesting one, in the full Chinese curse sense of the word.”
Things had been very quiet after that, Jayme frowning and staring at her computer, writing for a few minutes, then pausing, then writing again, her sounds of frustration punctuating the silence. Finally Dean got up, offering to go out and get food for the room “before she drives me nuts,” he muttered to Sam on his way out.
Jayme handed the tablet to Sam. “See for yourself.”
“Very funny. I don’t read Katarinian.”
“Shesh-ketera anghaleteh,” Jayme said, and the script changed to the Romanic alphabet Sam recognized.
“Wait, this thing-”
“Will display information in whatever language I tell it to, yeah.”
“Handy.” He scanned what she had written. “So what’s the problem?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Well, you’ve certainly gone into a lot of detail on what we did but it’s kind of dry.”
“Yeah, I know. I guess I’ve lost my touch.”
“But this is supposed to be a report, so maybe they expect it to be dry. You know, trying to maintain that whole ‘dispassionate observer’ thing.”
~~~
Dean Winchester is one of the more unusual humans I’ve met, and considering my activities in the past fifty years, that’s saying something. He shares with his father a maddening aversion to giving information. He’ll give short, vague answers-for example, when Sam began questioning him about what they were up against, a shtriga-when you’d expect him to share what he knows freely. When he says “That’s all I know” his expression doesn’t match. In this case his insistence that this shtriga-a witch-like creature-had just “gotten away” from their father rang hollow.
We found a motel and checked in, moving into a mode I am fast becoming used to-Research. Sam on his laptop, me on mine, Dean at the counter with paper materials. The pattern with these is the same; what are we dealing with, what are its characteristics and patterns, and how do you kill it? It’s less instinctual than one of our hunts, but they’re going up against beings that are sometimes smarter and usually more powerful than they are.
Shtrigas are witch-like creatures that can literally drain the life force from you; what the lore calls ‘vitae.’ Very similar in description to the Sel’ve’th but without the tendrils. They are a variety from Albania with roots in ancient Rome that can feed on any human, but prefer children. This seemed to strike a particular note with Dean, who takes his job very seriously, but never moreso than when children are involved. Then he takes it personally.
Sam, who is usually the one who knows the pahr menn’fehr (humans call it the A to Z) of the things they hunt, was in this case wrong; shtrigas are vulnerable to consecrated wrought-iron rounds, but only when they are in the middle of feeding. Needless to say, a very risky proposition.
With the who and how taken care of, the question was where. I know that human tracking skills are a source of great amusement to some of us, and for most humans that perception is only too true. But they are just as capable of tracking down prey, and these two are especially adept. They determined that the victims’ locations were all centered around the hospital, and Dean had seen an old woman there, fitting the description of a shtriga’s usual disguise-an elderly human female. This one also had an inverted cross on the wall, a symbol associated with anti-Christian groups (see database entries on Cross of St. Peter).
Since joining the Winchesters they’ve slowly learned how to take advantage of my extra-human abilities, not just limited to my other forms. I’ve learned that monsters can often take on human form in a way that can completely fool the eye and occasionally the nose, but sooner or later they give themselves away.
We returned to the hospital to follow up on this potential lead. I am not an expert in this field so I kept my doubts to myself, but it just seemed too easy and too obvious. My own experience with living incognito has shown me that you don’t put something as obvious as an anti-religious symbol on your wall in the very building where your victims are. I understand that lay humans are unlikely to ascribe supernatural causes to clues the way Sam and Dean do, but you can never assume.
In any case we found her room and entered, the two of them with weapons at the ready. I prefer to leave the firearms to them. I knew right away that this was not a shtriga or anything other than an elderly human. I let Dean figure out that on his own when the old woman startled them both. Then it was back to square one. Or so we thought.
~~~
When Jayme threw her computer Dean was able to snag it in midair; he’d never gotten the chance to hang out with the hippie frisbee players and wouldn’t have even if he did, but it was still a nice catch. He looked at the curved characters on the screen with a frown.
“Shesh-ketera ingalett,” Sam said, frowning when the flat tablet in Dean’s hands beeped in an almost annoyed manner. “What’d I do wrong?”
“It’s anghaleteh,” Jayme said.
“What did I say?”
“Gibberish.”
Sam gave her a bitchface. “Shesh-ketera anghaleteh.”
Dean blinked as the text on the screen changed to English. “Sweet.” He scanned the paragraphs. “This is it? This is what you’re supposed to do?”
Jayme nodded. “When I can get the damn words to come out.”
“Yeah, well, this is just ‘we went here then we did this and then we did’-do your people actually read this crap?” He held up his hand. “What I mean is you could put a meth head to sleep with this.”
“Exactly why I’m having trouble,” Jayme said. “With music it was so much easier-I could show them concert films and stuff. But I have to explain this and let’s face it, your job can get kinda technical and complicated.”
Dean gave Sam an odd look. “Well, that’s a new one.” He walked over to the bed and handed it to her. “What can I say, keep going. Gotta finish it, right?”
~~~
The motel where we were staying was run by a woman with two sons. It did not require any of my keen senses to see that Dean saw himself and Sam in those two boys. When we returned the elder of the boys was sitting outside, radiating sadness. The boy’s younger brother was ill, under the same circumstances as the others. He blamed himself for leaving the window open and causing his sibling’s pneumonia, but by this time we knew better. He said that he felt a responsibility to look after his brother and this situation meant failure to do so.
When Dean was four years old there was a fire at his home. His father handed Sam-who was still an infant-to Dean and ordered him to take his brother out of the house to safety. That was the beginning of a lifelong responsibility Dean feels towards Sam. Over their lives their father drilled this into Dean’s head-his most important job is to watch out for his brother, and it is a responsibility Dean takes more seriously than I can imagine him taking anything.
It makes him understanding when he sees this attitude in others, and it revealed in this case a sense of compassion that drew me quite strongly. The cockiness and ‘I don’t care’ attitude fades, revealing a strength inside that I’ve seen in few humans.
The boys’ mother was understandably frazzled and worried, trying to organize her affairs before heading to the hospital. Dean insisted on driving her with that same expression of calm determination on his face. As she got into her vehicle he turned so that only Sam and I could hear him.
“We’re going to kill this thing. I want it dead, you hear me?”
Never have I seen a human look so much like one of us.
Chapter Three