Title: bleeding lungs of choir girls
Fandom: Supernatural
Summary: She makes up the most wonderful stories.
Notes: Written for day one of the
Women Fandom Hates - Love Fest comm.
Some days, when her babysitter’s busy and Amy has to work, Anna sits in the church office while Richard consults with the pastor, swinging her legs back and forth on the chair and looking around at paintings and keeping herself occupied by making up stories behind them. Praying men beneath lights, angels descending to flocks, a man on a cross, an army of winged men...
Sometimes the paintings changed out. Sometimes they shifted throughout the church and on those days she grew excited, looking forward to the new tales she’d weave while waiting for her Daddy to take her out for ice cream. It’s not that she doesn’t like the church; no, she enjoys her time there, and every Sunday she makes sure to pray at least five seconds longer than any of the other kids and listen very intently to the sermons that she doesn’t fall asleep during, singing just a hair louder than Sally, who boasts every day about her voice lessons.
There’s just a part of her that gets a bit uncomfortable when she has to sit quietly there for too long, only her thoughts to keep her company and her wandering eyes catching ones of the men and women in the wall decorations. In spite of this, her pretend adventures for the people her father is so devoted to sometimes are the highlight of her day.
One particular day, when looking at a new portrait of dozens-- hundreds-- of angels flocking a giant, glowing, reverent figure, her legs stop swinging and her mouth drops open, eyes stopping as she skims and names each angel.
Slipping out of the chair to the floor, little Anna approaches it, reaching up as far as she can to try and touch one of the celestial beings, one just out of reach and just too far from her fingers. They land on the one just below it, and it’s like she’s touched a plug at home, electricity running down her hand so strong that she almost pulls away.
Mumbles slip past her lips, a name that she can’t remember and suddenly they’re all looking at her, all of the angels, and that being, that kind, reverent, horrible man with more power than she can ever imagine. With a start Anna leaps away from the painting.
Before she realizes it, her father’s holding her, and she’s screaming and sobbing, calling out strained apologies and begging him to make them stop looking at her.
He’s so mad, she cries. Make him stop yelling at me, I didn’t know how to make him stop yelling at me!
Even after they take her home, she won’t stop crying and screaming, can’t even fall asleep because her voice is so strained. The painting is removed from her father’s office, removed from the church, because though all tests came back inconclusive, she probably breathed in some kind of powder or dangerous chemical on it, and Anna finally calms.
But she never spends an afternoon in her father’s office again. She’s put in a daycare where she doesn’t have to look at those lingering eyes or reach for a red-haired angel or touch the ones just below it, the ones that keep asking her why, why, why, a question that she can never answer.