SPN FIC - Amalyn (Carol's Top 10)
Okay, so you’re looking at the character list and thinking, "No Sam and Dean. Not worth my time." But I'm hoping you'll overcome that feeling long enough to read this. Out of the almost-300 stories libraried here, I'd pick this one as the one that's the most … well, literary. I love the mood of it, the language, the way it seems like an old Twilight Zone episode. It was going to be the beginning of an entire series of stories, but that idea got the legs shot out from under it. Still, there's this. And I think it's worth reading.
CHARACTERS: Jo Harvelle, OCs
GENRE: Gen
SPOILERS: None
RATING: G
LENGTH: 2024 words
AMALYN
By Carol Davis
Bobby Singer likes to tell people that family don't end with blood.
But he's wrong: sometimes it does.
Sometimes it begins that way, too.
~~~~~~~~~~
"It come down out of the mountains," the old woman says in the thin whisper that's all that's left of her voice. "Thought it were an animal, first time it killed. Old Bill. It got him, tore him to pieces."
Jo cringes at the name.
"Animal," the old woman muses. "Figured only a animal kills like that."
"It is an animal," Jo says softly, and looks around, lips pressed tightly together. There's nothing she can do; the old woman's way past being helped.
She tracked the thing up here: left her bike hidden in the brush down where the paved road gives out, and made her way up the mountain slope by hanging on to roots and saplings, the toes of her boots nipping into the hillside for footholds that crumbled if she put more than a few seconds' worth of weight on them. She never expected to find people up here. How they got up here in the first place, and how they managed to keep themselves alive in a place that's so hard to get to it might as well be on Mars, she can't even imagine.
Three houses. Three small, weather-battered houses.
There's no one alive in any of them, except for the old woman. She's the last survivor. The werewolf would have taken her, too, if Jo hadn't gotten here when she did, if she hadn't known what she was tracking, hadn't had the chambers of the gun loaded with silver.
"Don't fret it, love," the old woman says.
Jo looks down into her face, furrowed so deeply it looks like a creek bed. She could be a hundred years old, or she could be fifty.
"Ssh," Jo says.
There's nothing she can do to help this woman. She dragged a blanket, filthy and smelling of dog, down off the bed and tucked it around her to provide some comfort, a little bit of warmth, and that's all the first aid that's worth bothering with. The were's claws dug deep, and the woman's blood is spreading slowly across the floor beneath her. It was trying for her heart, the heart that's still stubbornly beating but won't be doing that for much longer, but Jo stopped it before it could finish the job. She tried to lift the woman up onto the bed, but the woman moaned from somewhere deep down and begged to lie where she is, on the smooth dirt floor of her ramshackle house.
Living here couldn't have been any easier than it would have been two hundred years ago, Jo thinks, touching the old woman's hand lightly, trying not to give her any more pain. There's no running water here, just a hand-pump that brings water up out of a well. No electricity, of course. And no cell-phone service, for all the good that would do. The nearest hospital's eighty miles away, and even if she could convince someone to come with an ambulance, they'd have to leave it down where her bike is and climb up the side of the mountain, just as she did.
The were's lying dead over in the corner. It was a young man, in his twenties, she thinks.
Son of a bitch, she thinks but doesn't say.
Three small houses. She counted seven bodies. Maybe there are more, out in the woods.
"So pretty," the old woman whispers, and lifts a trembling hand to touch Jo's dirt-streaked cheek. Her fingers move to the trailing ends of Jo's hair, twine into a little bit of it. "What's your name, child?"
"Jo," she says. "I'm Jo."
"Josephine?"
"Joanna."
"I knew a Josephine. Long time ago."
"That's nice," Jo replies, for lack of something else - something more sensible - to say. "You rest now, okay?"
"What would I be restin' up for, child?"
There's so much blood, Jo thinks, and her stomach rolls a little. She smiles down at the old woman, though she isn't sure the woman really sees her, or is terribly worried about whether she's smiling or not.
The situation wouldn't be that much different, she thinks, if it had been an animal. An enraged bear, maybe, or a cougar, or a pack of real wolves. Either way, her conscience - her humanity - would compel her to sit here.
To wait, quietly, for the woman to die.
To bear witness.
"It all come out right," the old woman muses. "Lord works in mysterious ways. Believed that my whole life. That thing took Old Bill two month ago. Then Char, last month."
"You should have gone somewhere safe."
"Where's that?" the woman asks, with a wry twitch of her lips.
"Down -"
"Been here my whole life, child. Was born up here in these woods. All of us. This is where we first drawed breath. Seems right it's where we stop."
Before Jo can respond, the woman struggles to turn her head, seems to focus on the bed. It's not much more than arm's reach away. Maybe she's changed her mind, Jo thinks; maybe she wants to be a little more comfortable.
But…no. She's looking underneath the bed.
Maybe the dog is under there?
"You take her," the old woman whispers, and her voice is firm, a lot firmer than it ought to be. There's so much blood on the floor, and wicked into the old, stinking blanket, that she can't be hanging on by much more than a thread. "You come here - can't have been to save us, way too far gone for that. If there's a reason, then it's her."
There's a desperate plea on that furrowed face, though it seems to come from relief and gratitude rather than sorrow or pain.
"You take her," the woman says again.
If it's a small dog, Jo thinks, she can do that. Tuck it inside her jacket, maybe. Or maybe it'll follow her down the mountain. She can lure it with food. There's got to be a morsel of food around here somewhere.
"All right," she says.
The woman beams and cups Jo's cheek in her trembling palm. Then she turns her head again and murmurs, "Am. You come, now. Come here to me."
Nothing happens.
"Am," the old woman commands, though it isn't much of one. "You come."
They both look at the bed, the old woman and Jo. A little bit of time slides by, marked by nothing, because there are no clocks in this place, no sign that anything ever changes.
Finally, there's a rustle of movement.
"Come," the old woman whispers.
It's not a dog.
If there's a word forming on Jo's lips, it never blossoms. All that comes out is a squeak.
Moving slowly across the damp, dusty floor, caked and matted with gore, wearing something that looks like an old pillowcase with holes cut it in for head and arms, is a small child. Eighteen months old, maybe. Round elfin eyes peer out of a filthy, blood-spattered face and shift from the old woman to Jo and back again.
"Amalyn," the old woman sighs.
The child stops then, attention fixed on the dead werewolf.
"It be time for you to go," the old woman says. "You go on, with this lady. You hear me? You goin' someplace better than this."
"I -" Jo hiccups.
"Meant to be, child. Meant to."
The child moves from hands-and-knees to a sit on the dirt floor. Considers Jo carefully. Jo does the same: guesses from the ease of the child's movements and the lack of distress on her face that she - she's almost positive it's a she - isn't hurt, just worried. Wary. Unsure what's coming next.
There was a young woman in one of the other houses. The mother, Jo thinks.
"Ain't hard to love," the old woman murmurs.
Then the breath whispers softly out of her and the light goes out of her eyes, all at once, like a candle flame extinguished by an otherworldly breath.
Jo and the child sit arm's reach apart, both of them silent.
"Oh, God," Jo says finally, but it's as much an expression of weariness and a wish for the company of her own mother as anything else; a wish for a warm bed and a hot shower and a good meal and the complete and utter absence of death anywhere nearby.
As it is, all she's got is eight dead bodies - nine, if you count the were - the growing patter of a summer rainstorm, and this child.
This child, who ponders her with all the gravity of a bald, brown-habited monk. They sit looking at each other for a long while, and for a piece of it, the child seems mournful, wiping at a trickle of mucus dripping from one nostril with the back of a gore-slimed hand. Then she seems resigned, as if this day is just one more in a long succession of days that suck some serious ass, and she might as well just get on with it.
"Amalyn?" Jo says. "Your name is Amalyn?"
The child's face twitches. Not with recognition, exactly, although it does remind Jo of the way a dog will respond to the sound of its name. She's not stupid, Jo thinks. She's a baby. She shouldn't be here in the first place. Nobody should have given birth in this desolate little cluster of nothing. That's just all kinds of wrong.
And there's only one thing to be done about it.
The thing the old woman tasked her with doing.
The thing she would have done anyway.
It's the wind, she thinks, that makes her shiver. The wind, not the thought that if the old woman had been dead when Jo got here, the child would have stayed huddling under the bed all alone until she…
What? Starved to death?
It's a long way back down that mountain. To the bike. To the main road. To warmth and safety and a cell phone connection and the sound of her mother's voice.
"Hey, Mom?" she imagines herself saying. "You're not gonna believe this."
But her mother will.
She will.
Slowly, Jo rearranges her face into a smile that she hopes is gentle and tender, something like the expression the dead young woman in the other broken-down cabin would have worn as she bent over this child to kiss her good night.
Dear God, it's a long way back down the mountain.
But going back down, she won't be alone.
When she gets back to warmth and light and civilization, she won't be alone.
As if she's heard all that, and understands it at least in some primal way, the child shifts and squirms and finds her feet. Takes the few dusty steps necessary to close the distance between the two of them and wraps her small arms tightly around Jo's neck. She stinks of dog and blood and sweat and heaven knows what all else, but Jo embraces her, holds her close, strokes the child's matted hair with the palm of one hand.
"It's okay," she croons. "It'll be okay."
The child burrows her head into the crook between Jo's neck and her shoulder. It seems odd, that she'd do that with a stranger, but maybe she's just naturally friendly. Maybe, living in this tiny community, she's never had reason to be afraid of anyone.
That won't last long, Jo thinks ruefully. But it is what it is.
"Amalyn," she says softly.
They stay that way for a while, surrounded by death, listening to the patter of the rain on the roof and the drip of it off the eaves, the rustle of the wind in the trees, the distant caw of a crow, the sounds of being alone.
"Amalyn," Jo says again.
"Ama," the child chirps.
Somehow, to Jo's ears, for no reason she can put a name to in this place, in this forgotten, ruined place where nothing lives except her and this child and some birds and squirrels and maybe a scared dog gone to ground,
It sounds like Mama.
* * * * *