Owl to John Winchester

[my_soul_itches]

Dear Mr. Winchester,

Hi! I'm Megan Gwynn. I don't know if you remember me, we met in your Sorting. I'm the one with wings. (And if you met more than one person with wings, I'm the one with pink hair.) I think you must be settled by now, so I was hoping to get some lessons on those Devil Trap things you were talking about for your bribe. I

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[sgt_hunter]

He read over the letter and grinned to himself. It wasn't easy to forget a teenager with pink hair and wings, much less the fact that she all but yelled at him about talking to Sammy. Now that his family and extended family were all back to their normal ages and speaking to each other, he could spare the time. Besides, a deal was a deal.

John collected a few additional supplies before owling her back and heading out.

Meet me in the common room if you're free now. It shouldn't take long. Just bring the chalk, you won't need any equipment.
JW

[my_soul_itches]

Oh good, he must have gotten into Gryffindor after all. Or else he was in some other House and she was going to feel silly waiting in the Gryffindor common room with a bag of chalk. She debated flying versus teleporting: on the one hand, it was a relatively short distance and flying would probably be more polite in terms of giving him time to walk down. And on the other, she was an impatient teenager.

Impatience won out. "Sihal novarum chinoth!" The familiar smokey pinkish aura eveloped Megan and deposited her in the Common room.

[sgt_hunter]

The hunter had been setting out the few supplies he brought with him when he caught the pink flash out of the corner of his eye. He dropped into a half crouch, holding a silver blade in one hand. When he saw who it was, John straightened with an apologetic smile.

"Sorry. Force of habit," he said, slipping the knife back into a hidden sheath on his belt. "Got the chalk?"

[my_soul_itches]

Megan saw the glint of the knife, shrieked, and flew backwards, pink dust puffing out around her instinctively. She dropped the chalk, her hand flying to her chest and pulling out her Souldagger, the light of it pulsing reddish, freezing cold in her hand. She held it defensively in front of her, though her eyes widened when she recognized Sam's dad and with some effort she forced the dagger to vanish back to wherever it went when she didn't call it. "Ohmygod I'm so sorry I thought you were gonna try and kill me and I do this thing where I have dust that makes people see things and usually they don't want to fight anymore but it's been kind of off lately and I really hope you didn't get any of it and I didn't mean it and that knife wasn't really so much a knife and I wasn't trying to kill you or anything and--" She stopped and gasped for air. "Are you okay?"

[sgt_hunter]

John was already in motion when she reached for her Souldagger, the pink dust puffing harmlessly where he had been standing just a few moments before. "I'm fine, I'm fine. It's ok. I think we just managed to scare the hell out of each other," he said with a half-smile. Maybe along with the Devil's Trap lessons, he could work in 'Don't teleport in on a hunter without warning, we can be a little jumpy'.

"That was one hell of a mystical blade," he observed, reaching for the chalk she had dropped. The power emanating off it had made his skin want to crawl right off.

"Ready?" He had cleared a small circle on the floor and set a few things on the table in preparation.

[my_soul_itches]

She landed, picking up the bag of chalk from where she had dropped it, and dusted herself off. "You're telling me," she said quietly. Ha.

"Very ready," she said, more jumpy than excited now. "Really, really ready. Um... I brought a few different colors. Does it matter which you use?" Megan was of the firm belief that if it could be prettier, it should be. At the very least, the option made her feel a little better.

[sgt_hunter]

The thought of trapping a demon with pink chalk was certainly an amusing one. John shook his head. "Doesn't matter what the color is. This is very very old magic, Enochian in nature. The runes are the language of Heaven, which is why you can contain a demon with it. Here are the basics you need to contain one, drive it off, or if you have to, exorcise it."

He pointed at the table, "Rock salt. Make a salt circle or pour it across the threshold of a door. Good for protection and forcing ghosts to disappear. And there's holy water. If you can find a silver flask for it, even better. It drives the demon back like you hit it with acid."

The hunter held up a small, well worn book. "And this, you keep on you at all times. Basic exorcisms. They're sorted in order, from the run of the mill to the big guns at the back. Read 'em over. The pronounciation is vital."

[my_soul_itches]

Oh, good. She picked yellow. Bright, cheery yellow.

Megan nodded until he got to the book, which she eyed with wariness. "I'm not going to have to hang upside-down while chanting, am I? Because I've done that before, and the pronunciation thing was hard enough without that. It wasn't even in English." She'd gotten good at the teleportation spell, though, even if she wouldn't exactly thank Illyana for it.

[sgt_hunter]

His brow furrowed and he looked at her for a moment. She wasn't joking. John chuckled and shook his head. "No, no. I meant just flip through it and get to know the rituals. If you can get to the point you can recite them from memory, so much the better. Like this."

A shiver of power passed through the room as he spoke the words he had committed to memory years ago. "Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus, omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii, omnis legio, et secta diabolica, Ergo draco maledicte et sectio
Ergo draco maledicte et legio secta diabolica, Ut Ecclésiam tuam secúra tibi fácias servire libertáte, te rogámus, audi nos."

John gave her a little wink, hoping he didn't frighten her. "That one always gets their attention."

[my_soul_itches]

She was, in fact, not joking. It hadn't really been a good day for her.

Her face fell a little more with every weird word that he read. At first thought, learning to work without leaning on her Souldagger had seemed like a really good idea, because she fully intended on getting the stolen parts of her soul back if at all possible and when that happened, she had no clue what would happen to the weapon. And on the other... she had a hard enough time with three words, much less however many those had been.

"Um. Can I take notes?" she asked in a small voice.

[sgt_hunter]

It wasn't the first time that John wondered what had happened to the poor kid. She was so young, too young to be worrying about things like demons. He decided to show her everything he could. It wouldn't make up for the mistakes he had made in the past, but she was a friend of Sammy's, which meant he'd try.

"Keep the book, kid. I've got em all up here," he said, tapping his temple sagely. "It's all about pratice. Until you get them down, keep that book close, even if you don't think a demon's around. They're sneaky bastards like that."

[my_soul_itches]

"Okay. I can do that." She tried to picture Cyclops' face if she showed up at Utopia with a book on how to do exorcisms. No, better not wonder; he'd probably just think it was a great opportunity to send her back to Limbo. Ms. Frost's face, then--picturing her rolling her eyes in exasperation made Megan smile a little.

"So what happens if you say it wrong? Does it just not work, or does something blow up, or... what? Also, if you say it wrong, does hitting them work at all after, or only before?" Not that she hit very hard, but with Wolverine as a teacher, she wasn't completely useless. Mostly. Kind of. She tried, and that was the important part. "Also, does it make them grow more teeth and claws and tentacles and whatsits if you say it wrong? It's kind of important."

[sgt_hunter]

"We might be talking about different types of demons," he said. "The demons we're used to dealing with are non-corporeal. They appear like black, oily smoke and will possess people when it suits them. The exorcism rituals in that book are for casting them back out of the bodies they've taken over."

The hunter frowned and thought. "The Devil's Trap will still bind anything that ventures out of the Pit. If the ritual doesn't work, then start running through the weapons. Salt, silver, holy water, even blessed iron. As long as you keep the runes clear in the circle and don't break it, it'll hold anything you need it to."

[my_soul_itches]

Megan shook her head slowly. "Yeah, no, the ones that got me are big, nasty, smelly things. Most of them don't really look like people. It's like... monsters from dreams, only they're right there, grabbing at you." She shuddered, hugging herself.

She brightened up, though. "Really? It's that simple, then? Doesn't sound so hard."

[sgt_hunter]

John's expression shut down quickly. He turned away from Megan and fought to keep himself under control. "I know the type," he said in a strangled voice. He had spent more than a century in Hell and knew every Pit dweller that came by to take him apart, piece by piece.

The hunter dragged a hand across his face and forced himself to turn back. "Yeah. It's simple. You don't let your guard down for an instant though. The slightest slip and..just don't. If they ever slip that circle, you pull that teleporting thing and get the hell out, you hear?"

[my_soul_itches]

Her hands clapped across her mouth. "Oh no, I didn't--I'm so sorry, forget I said anything, I'll just go somewhere else for a while unless you want to talk about it but you kind of don't look like you want to so you don't have to, but we don't have to do this now and I can come back later and I'm really sorry and I can go now if it's a problem." It came out a stifled mumble with her hand still over her mouth, but the tone was apologetic and panicked, and she backed away a few steps before taking to the air again, just off the ground.