FICLETS: 1 DA/SPN x-over & 1 SPN
In the spirit of trying to kick my muse in the butt, I went through my WIP folder to organize and clean stuff out, and found a whole bunch of fic-type miscellany that I will probably never get around to expanding on/finishing. Packrat that I am, actually pushing the delete button has proven painful, so I've decided some of them might work all right as standalone ficlets. For the sake of not spamming my f-list I'll just do a couple at a time.
So! Have some randomness that needed to be purged from my brain (and my hard drive).
Title: This Faint and Shaky Hour
Fandom(s): Supernatural/Dark Angel
Pairings/Characters: Sam, Alec. Gen.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Past major character death.
Summary: Alec is not a hitchhiking apparition. Sam picks him up.
A/N: There was a comment fic meme long, long ago. I used to flock to those things like crazy and I can't remember which comm it was on. Life can be so sad. Anyway, the prompt was: Dean's dead and Sam runs into Alec years later.
The urban legends of hitchhiking apparitions on these dark, lonely stretches of road are plentiful, always have been. Wisps of opaque figures weaving through skeletal treelines. All too solid vagabonds that wink out like shorted circuits when you glance away. A gory mirage laid right across the yellow center line that has you swerving for the nearest ditch. More often than not they're chalked up to exhaustion from the long haul, tricks of the night and solitude. Few know these are very real and dangerous things.
The figure shuffling along the narrow shoulder of this particular two-lane blacktop isn't one of those things, though. Sam knows it, not because it's any kind of intuitive certainty, but because there are possibilities he will allow, and possibilities he absolutely will not tolerate. A ghost dangling itself in front of him wearing that shape, after so much time and loss and an endless war have worn him down to the broken, desperate creature he sees in the mirror and doesn't know, after everything, and it forfeits the right to be anything but what Sam needs.
He slows, hardly breathing, headlights washing brighter and brighter over the man who's obviously more refugee than hitchhiker. The guy's thumbs are firmly tucked into the pockets of his muddied jeans, burdened with nothing but the clothes on his back. His face is dark with soot, but it doesn't matter. Sam would recognize that bowlegged gait and the proud line of those shoulders anywhere.
He's going the opposite direction, away from the same smoking ruin of Seattle's skyline that beckons Sam through the windshield, and that doesn't matter, either. Sam will happily ignore the call of violence and chaos waiting for someone reckless enough to fling themselves in the middle. He needs this more.
He steers the Impala for the wrong side of the road and lets her idle there.
The man stops, suspicion clear in his posture. After a moment's consideration he edges closer, stops a couple of feet from the driver's side window and bends down to peer inside.
Sam gives no outward sign that his heart is flailing around in his chest when he catches sight of those eyes (green, oh fuck, he'd forgotten how green). They're cold and unwelcoming, despite the easy smirk tugging at his mouth.
“You need a ride,” Sam says before the guy can get a word in. He meant it to sound like a question, but it doesn't even come close.
Dean's ghost raises his eyebrows, and Sam holds his breath, trying to convince himself that jumping out to manhandle the guy into the car probably wouldn't go well for either of them.
“Thanks for the offer,” the guy says slowly, and something in Sam's chest wrenches hard as he takes a careful step back. It's wrong, so wrong, not being immediately trusted by that face. “But I'm not really going that way.” He looks back at the horizon, all fat stacks of black smoke and the sky stained muddy orange where the worst of fires are still raging. Something gives, the barest second of shattered composure, but when he looks back at Sam he's all cool indifference again. “No one sane is going that way,” he adds pointedly, and straightens.
“I'm not going that way, either,“ Sam tries.
The guy freezes, brow cocked at the angle of the car, and his smirk has gone harder. Wary.
“I thought there might be someone I could help.” It's a lie, such an outrageous lie. Helping is only a side effect of the things Sam does anymore, but this guy doesn't need to know that. He just needs to get in the goddamn car. “There was someone, a long time ago.” That part's true enough, and the guy's face softens a little. “I just wanted to see if there was something I could do.”
Dean's double clears his throat, hand swiping across the back of his neck as he gives Sam another assessing look, which is so familiar Sam feels it like a sledgehammer to the gut. “So I'm just the first charity case you've run across,” he decides, and he doesn't sound offended so much as relieved.
Sam vaguely recalls random charity is a good excuse for a lot of things. Acceptable, because the world gets all kinds of shady when disaster strikes, and people prefer blanket labels like 'refugee' over being singled out.
The man still isn't making any moves toward the car, though, and Sam's hand itches to grab any one of the weapons concealed on or around him to encourage more prompt cooperation. But there's still a chance he won't have to get scary about it; it's risky, but he really doesn't want to intimidate Dean if he can help it.
“It's okay, I get it,” Sam says. “Things are nuts lately. But I mean.” He looks around at the empty road. “Do you even have a weapon?” Suspicion again-really not what he was going for. “I've got a tire iron I could spare,” he clarifies. “It'd make me feel a lot better if you'd at least take that much.”
The guy regards him for another long, torturous minute. His eyes run along the length of the car again, and there's a shine of appreciation there that makes Sam so giddy inside he feels like he could lose it any second, the madness will just come pouring out of him to expose all his cracks and chasms. But he holds his breath and grinds his teeth and presses hard on his each of his knuckles, snap crackle pop, and somehow that keeps it in check. Mostly. Mostly in check. The guy must catch a flicker of something because he takes another look at Sam, sharp, like he can split Sam all the way open with it, catch him out. Sam endures it and he feels like his teeth might shatter but finally, finally the guy seems satisfied.
“What the hell,” Dean's double mutters, and heads for the passenger's side.
Sam doesn't peel out and try to break the zero-to-sixty record in case his brother's doppelganger changes his mind, but it's a near thing.
-:-
Title: Trip the Final Line
Fandom(s): Supernatural
Pairings/Characters: Jess. Canonical past Sam/Jess.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None that I can think of.
Summary: She'll survive the fire. She'll wish she hadn't.
A/N: Once upon a thousand years ago, I was talking to someone about [Spoiler (click to open)]movies with evil kids, and then I jotted this down. I was going to try to make something longer out of it, but it doesn't seem to want to go anywhere.
If there was some kind of official screening process for dating, this would never have happened to her.
People always joke about them, that potential dates should come complete with background checks and tests to make sure no one's doomed to become a florist no matter what their ambition (Jess never qualified to be a florist and still she will end up here), tests for diseases and compatibility and possible warning signs. Because that's what it boils down to, really: warnings. Jess never got one, and she should have.
Sam Winchester should have come with flashy Vegas-like billboards and obnoxious, skull-splitting music-even the tricky kind where you can make out garbled satanic worship if you play it backwards and stand on your head while watching the Wizard of Oz, or whatever. At least it would have been something.
She got nothing, though.
Their first meeting wasn't even one of those interesting stories she could reminisce over later, jam-packed with romance or hilarity or, more fittingly, any hint of the horror to come. The way it happened was a little boring, honestly. Brady lured them both into a study session that he ducked out on halfway through, and Sam cleared his throat a lot and pulled at his unruly hair like he was trying to fix it but really just messed it up more, while Jess pretended to copy his notes, secretly wishing she could pull his hair, preferably while in the process of finding out if he was that big all over. There was a lot of page-turning and pencil-scratching and very little conversation, and it took him two months of constantly bumbling into her after that day (she was pretty sure he was stalking her, but he did it with such puppy-dog flair she didn't file a restraining order like she should have) to work up the nerve to ask her out.
Later, after it all goes down and the walls are too soft for her to smash her own skull open and her fingertips are sore from trying to claw the infection out-bitten-down nails gouging out deep, ragged lines in her skin, wet and red and closing up too fast, and it won't come, won't fucking come out-Jess will wish for a dozen elsewheres and conjure up these mundane fantasies that might have landed her anywhere but here.
Mundane, because everything that has happened to her in the last eight months can fall under headings like Bizarre, Horrifying, Impossible, and/or Absolutely Fucking Insane. Never Boring, or Everyday, or Normal. Never Safe.
So she will think of those things she can never have again, maddening hindsight inspiring all these little sanity-saving technicalities that it will be far too late to implement, and she'll see it all so clearly. She'll view the map of her life and be able to pinpoint the disastrous right turn where she should have hung a left; the exact second the universe failed her. She'll have these epiphanies daily, and on this day, from her too-small, too-safe room with the high, westward-facing, shatter-proof windows (she doesn't need safe anymore, she needs sharp and messy and one-hundred-percent fatal), she will decide it was a thorough screening process that would have saved her. Guaranteed.
Sam was (she will think of Sam in the past tense because he'll be gone, bon voyage and not coming back) the kind of person who would've enjoyed that type of thing: all the paperwork and percentages and general bureaucracy that promised to spare him a bunch of socially awkward efforts. It would have been easy enough to get him to show up with his sharpened number two pencils, high hopes tucked away behind that anxious frown that creased his forehead in this way that was ridiculously adorable for someone so huge and menacing. (He always got that frown before the important tests. All the tests were important, according to Sam, but this one would have gotten a special rating, Jess is pretty sure.)
She thinks it might have included questions like Are you legal? (Sam was, of course.) Are you an addict? (No, Sam would have filled in, laughing a little awkwardly). Does your family have a history of mental health problems? (Sam would have said no to that, too, but he would've hesitated first, thinking of his father and holding onto his pencil a little too tightly). Are you wanted by the law? (Only on the days I put the wrong driver's license in my wallet, Sam would have thought, but there wouldn't have been a bubble for that on the paper).
Of course, no one would think to ask the really important things, like Are you currently being or have you ever been stalked by demons? (To be fair, it wasn't like Sam really knew about it at the time.) And Is there a special kind of condom to prevent me from being impregnated with your hellspawn or do you think regular ones will work? (Sam would have laughed it off-again, awkwardly-and maybe given the whole thing up and walked away then, which would have been best for everyone.)
If she wants to be honest with herself, she'll admit that Sam was too practiced at hiding the actual truth behind what he wanted to be true, so the written tests probably wouldn't have caught onto anything. But surely the background check would have turned up some red flags, his nomadic history peppered with unsolved ritualistic murders and raining toads in the places that managed to document his presence, maybe. Or the blood tests would have picked up something hinky, like hellfire running through his veins.
Point is: one of these things would have saved her, she won't be convinced otherwise (not until the next day, when she'll have a better, still-useless solution to the past). She'll tell everyone who comes to visit how it should have gone, and they won't hear her, too busy staring at her burn scars or the ravaged mess she's made of her swollen belly, but she'll know. She will have this knowledge and she'll still be powerless to change anything, to pull it all undone or erase what she is, where she is, to reshape herself into someone she can never be. She'll just know, until she doesn't anymore, when it's over.
It's a long road to over, though.
Steadily creeping up to that spot on the map where her split-second debate of right versus left will mean everything, Jess doesn't know anything.
She hasn't made it this far yet.
So! Have some randomness that needed to be purged from my brain (and my hard drive).
Title: This Faint and Shaky Hour
Fandom(s): Supernatural/Dark Angel
Pairings/Characters: Sam, Alec. Gen.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Past major character death.
Summary: Alec is not a hitchhiking apparition. Sam picks him up.
A/N: There was a comment fic meme long, long ago. I used to flock to those things like crazy and I can't remember which comm it was on. Life can be so sad. Anyway, the prompt was: Dean's dead and Sam runs into Alec years later.
The urban legends of hitchhiking apparitions on these dark, lonely stretches of road are plentiful, always have been. Wisps of opaque figures weaving through skeletal treelines. All too solid vagabonds that wink out like shorted circuits when you glance away. A gory mirage laid right across the yellow center line that has you swerving for the nearest ditch. More often than not they're chalked up to exhaustion from the long haul, tricks of the night and solitude. Few know these are very real and dangerous things.
The figure shuffling along the narrow shoulder of this particular two-lane blacktop isn't one of those things, though. Sam knows it, not because it's any kind of intuitive certainty, but because there are possibilities he will allow, and possibilities he absolutely will not tolerate. A ghost dangling itself in front of him wearing that shape, after so much time and loss and an endless war have worn him down to the broken, desperate creature he sees in the mirror and doesn't know, after everything, and it forfeits the right to be anything but what Sam needs.
He slows, hardly breathing, headlights washing brighter and brighter over the man who's obviously more refugee than hitchhiker. The guy's thumbs are firmly tucked into the pockets of his muddied jeans, burdened with nothing but the clothes on his back. His face is dark with soot, but it doesn't matter. Sam would recognize that bowlegged gait and the proud line of those shoulders anywhere.
He's going the opposite direction, away from the same smoking ruin of Seattle's skyline that beckons Sam through the windshield, and that doesn't matter, either. Sam will happily ignore the call of violence and chaos waiting for someone reckless enough to fling themselves in the middle. He needs this more.
He steers the Impala for the wrong side of the road and lets her idle there.
The man stops, suspicion clear in his posture. After a moment's consideration he edges closer, stops a couple of feet from the driver's side window and bends down to peer inside.
Sam gives no outward sign that his heart is flailing around in his chest when he catches sight of those eyes (green, oh fuck, he'd forgotten how green). They're cold and unwelcoming, despite the easy smirk tugging at his mouth.
“You need a ride,” Sam says before the guy can get a word in. He meant it to sound like a question, but it doesn't even come close.
Dean's ghost raises his eyebrows, and Sam holds his breath, trying to convince himself that jumping out to manhandle the guy into the car probably wouldn't go well for either of them.
“Thanks for the offer,” the guy says slowly, and something in Sam's chest wrenches hard as he takes a careful step back. It's wrong, so wrong, not being immediately trusted by that face. “But I'm not really going that way.” He looks back at the horizon, all fat stacks of black smoke and the sky stained muddy orange where the worst of fires are still raging. Something gives, the barest second of shattered composure, but when he looks back at Sam he's all cool indifference again. “No one sane is going that way,” he adds pointedly, and straightens.
“I'm not going that way, either,“ Sam tries.
The guy freezes, brow cocked at the angle of the car, and his smirk has gone harder. Wary.
“I thought there might be someone I could help.” It's a lie, such an outrageous lie. Helping is only a side effect of the things Sam does anymore, but this guy doesn't need to know that. He just needs to get in the goddamn car. “There was someone, a long time ago.” That part's true enough, and the guy's face softens a little. “I just wanted to see if there was something I could do.”
Dean's double clears his throat, hand swiping across the back of his neck as he gives Sam another assessing look, which is so familiar Sam feels it like a sledgehammer to the gut. “So I'm just the first charity case you've run across,” he decides, and he doesn't sound offended so much as relieved.
Sam vaguely recalls random charity is a good excuse for a lot of things. Acceptable, because the world gets all kinds of shady when disaster strikes, and people prefer blanket labels like 'refugee' over being singled out.
The man still isn't making any moves toward the car, though, and Sam's hand itches to grab any one of the weapons concealed on or around him to encourage more prompt cooperation. But there's still a chance he won't have to get scary about it; it's risky, but he really doesn't want to intimidate Dean if he can help it.
“It's okay, I get it,” Sam says. “Things are nuts lately. But I mean.” He looks around at the empty road. “Do you even have a weapon?” Suspicion again-really not what he was going for. “I've got a tire iron I could spare,” he clarifies. “It'd make me feel a lot better if you'd at least take that much.”
The guy regards him for another long, torturous minute. His eyes run along the length of the car again, and there's a shine of appreciation there that makes Sam so giddy inside he feels like he could lose it any second, the madness will just come pouring out of him to expose all his cracks and chasms. But he holds his breath and grinds his teeth and presses hard on his each of his knuckles, snap crackle pop, and somehow that keeps it in check. Mostly. Mostly in check. The guy must catch a flicker of something because he takes another look at Sam, sharp, like he can split Sam all the way open with it, catch him out. Sam endures it and he feels like his teeth might shatter but finally, finally the guy seems satisfied.
“What the hell,” Dean's double mutters, and heads for the passenger's side.
Sam doesn't peel out and try to break the zero-to-sixty record in case his brother's doppelganger changes his mind, but it's a near thing.
-:-
Title: Trip the Final Line
Fandom(s): Supernatural
Pairings/Characters: Jess. Canonical past Sam/Jess.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None that I can think of.
Summary: She'll survive the fire. She'll wish she hadn't.
A/N: Once upon a thousand years ago, I was talking to someone about [Spoiler (click to open)]movies with evil kids, and then I jotted this down. I was going to try to make something longer out of it, but it doesn't seem to want to go anywhere.
If there was some kind of official screening process for dating, this would never have happened to her.
People always joke about them, that potential dates should come complete with background checks and tests to make sure no one's doomed to become a florist no matter what their ambition (Jess never qualified to be a florist and still she will end up here), tests for diseases and compatibility and possible warning signs. Because that's what it boils down to, really: warnings. Jess never got one, and she should have.
Sam Winchester should have come with flashy Vegas-like billboards and obnoxious, skull-splitting music-even the tricky kind where you can make out garbled satanic worship if you play it backwards and stand on your head while watching the Wizard of Oz, or whatever. At least it would have been something.
She got nothing, though.
Their first meeting wasn't even one of those interesting stories she could reminisce over later, jam-packed with romance or hilarity or, more fittingly, any hint of the horror to come. The way it happened was a little boring, honestly. Brady lured them both into a study session that he ducked out on halfway through, and Sam cleared his throat a lot and pulled at his unruly hair like he was trying to fix it but really just messed it up more, while Jess pretended to copy his notes, secretly wishing she could pull his hair, preferably while in the process of finding out if he was that big all over. There was a lot of page-turning and pencil-scratching and very little conversation, and it took him two months of constantly bumbling into her after that day (she was pretty sure he was stalking her, but he did it with such puppy-dog flair she didn't file a restraining order like she should have) to work up the nerve to ask her out.
Later, after it all goes down and the walls are too soft for her to smash her own skull open and her fingertips are sore from trying to claw the infection out-bitten-down nails gouging out deep, ragged lines in her skin, wet and red and closing up too fast, and it won't come, won't fucking come out-Jess will wish for a dozen elsewheres and conjure up these mundane fantasies that might have landed her anywhere but here.
Mundane, because everything that has happened to her in the last eight months can fall under headings like Bizarre, Horrifying, Impossible, and/or Absolutely Fucking Insane. Never Boring, or Everyday, or Normal. Never Safe.
So she will think of those things she can never have again, maddening hindsight inspiring all these little sanity-saving technicalities that it will be far too late to implement, and she'll see it all so clearly. She'll view the map of her life and be able to pinpoint the disastrous right turn where she should have hung a left; the exact second the universe failed her. She'll have these epiphanies daily, and on this day, from her too-small, too-safe room with the high, westward-facing, shatter-proof windows (she doesn't need safe anymore, she needs sharp and messy and one-hundred-percent fatal), she will decide it was a thorough screening process that would have saved her. Guaranteed.
Sam was (she will think of Sam in the past tense because he'll be gone, bon voyage and not coming back) the kind of person who would've enjoyed that type of thing: all the paperwork and percentages and general bureaucracy that promised to spare him a bunch of socially awkward efforts. It would have been easy enough to get him to show up with his sharpened number two pencils, high hopes tucked away behind that anxious frown that creased his forehead in this way that was ridiculously adorable for someone so huge and menacing. (He always got that frown before the important tests. All the tests were important, according to Sam, but this one would have gotten a special rating, Jess is pretty sure.)
She thinks it might have included questions like Are you legal? (Sam was, of course.) Are you an addict? (No, Sam would have filled in, laughing a little awkwardly). Does your family have a history of mental health problems? (Sam would have said no to that, too, but he would've hesitated first, thinking of his father and holding onto his pencil a little too tightly). Are you wanted by the law? (Only on the days I put the wrong driver's license in my wallet, Sam would have thought, but there wouldn't have been a bubble for that on the paper).
Of course, no one would think to ask the really important things, like Are you currently being or have you ever been stalked by demons? (To be fair, it wasn't like Sam really knew about it at the time.) And Is there a special kind of condom to prevent me from being impregnated with your hellspawn or do you think regular ones will work? (Sam would have laughed it off-again, awkwardly-and maybe given the whole thing up and walked away then, which would have been best for everyone.)
If she wants to be honest with herself, she'll admit that Sam was too practiced at hiding the actual truth behind what he wanted to be true, so the written tests probably wouldn't have caught onto anything. But surely the background check would have turned up some red flags, his nomadic history peppered with unsolved ritualistic murders and raining toads in the places that managed to document his presence, maybe. Or the blood tests would have picked up something hinky, like hellfire running through his veins.
Point is: one of these things would have saved her, she won't be convinced otherwise (not until the next day, when she'll have a better, still-useless solution to the past). She'll tell everyone who comes to visit how it should have gone, and they won't hear her, too busy staring at her burn scars or the ravaged mess she's made of her swollen belly, but she'll know. She will have this knowledge and she'll still be powerless to change anything, to pull it all undone or erase what she is, where she is, to reshape herself into someone she can never be. She'll just know, until she doesn't anymore, when it's over.
It's a long road to over, though.
Steadily creeping up to that spot on the map where her split-second debate of right versus left will mean everything, Jess doesn't know anything.
She hasn't made it this far yet.