comment fic meme!
Following the results of the poll we took last month (don't make it easy on us or anything, guys, haha!), we've decided to hold a comment fic meme once every three months. This gives everyone time to write and prompt to their heart's content, and allows us mods to keep up with y'all. And we're starting right now!
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Another Point of View
I've been watching Sam Winchester off and on for his entire life. He was doomed from the moment his mother made that deal -- doomed for something, anyway -- and I can smell that kind of thing.
For much of his life it hasn't been safe to watch very closely. I can usually duck demons, but Sam went up against some very powerful demons, and angels? No. Just, no. Even if I were willing to take the risk, we have a policy about angelic entanglements. (So however much we wanted to, we couldn't tell their prophet he was a hack writer and we were giving his material to someone who would do it justice.)
Also, while Sam and his entire family are tragic as all get-out, they are epically tragic, and epic in general. This means my sister likes to watch them, too, and she doesn't put up with competition, so I was completely crowded out after Dean came back from Hell, apart from the period just after the devil got out when Sam was being very sad in a bar while Dean continued with heroic epic things, and that whole time I was too afraid of getting noticed to appreciate it. After the apocalypse fizzled, my sister lost interest, but while Sam with no soul was arguably tragic, he was also entering into black comedy territory, and-- Well, anyway, Sam with no soul made me want to throw up, and then when he got it back things were less tragic and more epic, and all told it's been years since I had a chance to sit back and drink in the tragedy that is Sam Winchester's lost chances, blighted future, endless losses, pride-before-a-fall, doomed loves, persistence in the face of certain doom, battered faith, guilt and self-loathing, fail and fail again...
Sorry, where was I?
(I would like to make it clear that I did not cause any of it. At all. Ever. Mom saw the potential for abuse, and she made sure I would never profit from any tragedy I influenced. If we're observing, it's nothing but that.)
Anyway, Sam was in a private sanitarium while Dean ran around trying to work out how to stop their possibly-ex-angel possibly-ex-friend from rampaging across the universe. It hadn't been anyone's first choice, but then Sam set fire to Bobby Singer's house trying to fight off zombies that weren't there. The damage wasn't as bad as it could have been, but they did have to conclude the hallucinations were out of control. (Actually, Sam had apparently concluded that after discovering he couldn't sleep at Bobby Singer's house because he kept hearing screaming in the panic room, and Bobby decided that after he found Sam trying to smash pixies with a hammer in the salvage yard. Dean was the hard sell.) It was very peaceful there, compared with everything going on outside, so I was happy to sit and take notes and imagine the Winchesters rendered in soliloquies.
Dean visited, a lot, so I wasn't surprised when the nurse told Sam his brother was here. Sam perked up. He'd spent most of the morning staring out the window and swatting hallucinatory insects. Or possibly pixies. (One advantage of sanitariums over hunters' residences was the reduced probability of finding potential deadly weapons under any newspaper you picked up.)
I wasn't surprised when Dean came in. I was surprised to see him accompanied by a neatly dressed young woman carrying a messenger bag. He just about had her by the elbow, in fact, and her posture was stiff enough it was clear she was not at all happy.
My sister.
(No, my other sister. My other other sister.)
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"Wait," Sam said. His voice was still hoarse. The previous day he'd been screaming at Hell for hours. "She's real? I thought she was like the other girl."
"No, Sammy, this one's real -- really here. A real girl would be stretching it."
My sister coughed. "The other girl is really here, too, although I will note she would have known to clear out if she ever checked her messages."
"What?" said Sam.
"What?!" said Dean.
"What the fuck, Urania!" said I, now an active participant and no longer invisible. Both humans stared at me, and I flushed. Urania wouldn't have looked out of place lecturing on astrology, but I'd been observing, not sharing, and things were really tense, and between everything I was wearing a ratty oversized black sweater and flannel pants with a pattern of little comedy-tragedy masks on them. And I hadn't done my hair.
"Dean -- and Sam -- this is my sister Melpomene. She's been stalking you but has never done anything, so don't get mad. Mel, you already know Dean, but apparently you don't know Polly's gone off the rails--"
"She's been off the rails since we found out angels were trying to end the world."
"I thought you were a hallucination," Sam said. "You looked at me in the shower!"
"You were brooding!"
"Mel, you perv. Polly's been depressed since we found out angels were trying to end the world. Now she's--"
"Killing people," Dean interrupted.
"...To make a long story short, yes, and not being terribly subtle about it," Urania was talking faster and faster, "so of course she got caught, by Dean here and by Euterpe at about the same time, and to keep Polly from getting staked Euterpe volunteered me to come and explain what it is Sam's been seeing the last few months, even though I'm about the only one with no interest in--"
"Polly's killing-- On purpose?" I asked, shocked. "Polyhymnia?" I knew (better than Urania did) Polly'd been more than a little erratic during the not-quite-apocalypse, but--
"You're supposed to be helping Sam," Dean ground out. "Pointing out a hallucination is really a stalker goddess you argue with for ten minutes isn't helping."
"That was never ten minutes," I said, but Urania ignored me.
"The reason Euterpe volunteered me is that Mel has been here a lot, so we are aware that a lot of what Sam has been seeing are not hallucinations in the sense that you usually mean."
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Wondered if anyone would catch that! Thanks for commenting. More is coming.
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"Uh, I think so. I only see them half the time myself--"
"Aether-gnats fly around a plane over and eat natural psychic leakage. They're harmless. Most people get them from time to time. They aren't actually sitting on you, they just think they are, and you aren't supposed to be able see them. They're really there, you just... don't need to swat them. What else--"
"I think he sees Hell every few days..."
Sam glared at me, which I didn't understand until Dean snapped to attention. "Hell? You said you weren't hallucinating Hell--"
"I'm not -- it's different from the flashbacks. Those are..." Sam trailed off, eyes going distant, but snapped back to himself when Dean nudged him. "It's... different."
Urania nodded. "That's what I thought. You're not hallucinating it, you're seeing it."
"...What?"
"Hold on, I brought a visual aid." Urania pulled open her bag.
I groaned, but Urania has extensive experience ignoring people who say they don't want to hear about her physics or metaphysics or Gaia-knows-what. I recognized the folded cloth from, among other things, her attempted lecture on what asteroids in the solar system might become involved in the end of the world. (I couldn't tell you more than that because, to be honest, Thalia and I whispered through the whole thing.) Urania looked around for someplace to unfold it, clearly decided on the bed, and did so, ignoring the way Dean yanked Sam away from her. Sam gave him a bitchface, but actually seemed to be interested in the visual aid.
Instead of the usual solar system, the three-dimensional image which shimmered into view above the cloth was of well over a dozen featureless spheres orbiting one another in a complex system.
Urania touched the sphere in the center. "This one is our reality, but imagine it's a sphere made of curved spacetime instead of a sphere made of curved surface. The things orbiting it are--"
I moaned. "I'm sure they'd rather you explain it with less physics."
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"Yes," Urania confirmed. She shot me a look I couldn't quite read, but which was probably some variant on 'See, they get it, why can't you?' I ignored her. "Among other spheres... this one represents Hell." She tapped one of the smaller spheres, and it turned reddish. "As you can see, the orbit is irregular, leading to Hell and Earth moving closer together and then apart again. The eccentricity isn't supposed to be this extreme, but I'm told after Purgatory emptied, it -- Purgatory, not Hell -- sort of deflated, lost its orbit, and is over here hung up on Yggdrasil, and both Hell and Heaven shifted."
Sam rubbed his eyes. "I'm seeing Hell when it's... close enough?"
"Yes."
"Can it see me?"
"That I can't tell you. But unless the orbits get catastrophically worse, it can't... do anything to you."
"God," Sam said.
"Okay," Dean said, grimly. "Okay. What about the zombies?"
"At your friend's house, right?" Urania barely waited for the confirmation. "And there were zombies there, once. Time. Indiscriminate crossdimensional perception can pick up things which happened in the past. Usually not the future, unless it's seconds ahead."
Sam blinked, startled out of his (beautifully tragic) Hell-contemplating funk. "I think -- I think that might have happened, too. Sometimes it seems like the nurse comes in twice--"
"Routines, yes, that would make it more likely."
Dean nodded. "And the fairies?"
"Probably seeing fairies. Most of them stay in their own plane, so they're more widespread -- um, parallel to Earth -- than you might think."
"What about-- Sometimes I think I hear the staff, in the hall, or -- I think I hear them talking about keeping someone drugged, unconscious, forever." He shivered. Dean looked torn between comforting his brother and not showing vulnerability in front of the big terrible goddesses.
Urania frowned. "I'm not sure about that. I mean, I can't rule out that you are having some hallucinations, just not as many as--"
I straightened. "That? No, that's real." Everyone stared at me with varying expressions of incredulity and/or horror. "What? You've got this room covered floor to ceiling, inclusive, in devil's traps and anti-angel sigils -- some of them in blood -- and salt lines and hex bags and about every other supernatural protective measure known to modern man. At least two-thirds of the staff think you're all Satanists, despite how every time you visit you say 'Christo' to everybody and spritz holy water around. A place that's going to put up with all that because you paid for it is going to be doing some other questionable stuff because someone else pays for it. And Urania, admit it, you made up 'indiscriminate crossdimensional perception' on the spot, didn't you?"
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"Mostly it's more senile former Mafia dons," I said, not sure if that helped. "Uh, the staff really like you -- some of them do, anyway -- because they say that even if you're all dangerously insane, at least they can be sure you're here because someone thought it was the best way to keep you safe--"
"Shut up," Dean snarled, even though I was sort of complimenting him. "Sam, it's all right, we didn't know and you didn't choose here anyway. If you're not really hallucinating we can go back to Bobby's -- or somewhere else--"
"Does it matter if I'm not technically hallucinating? I'm still reacting to things that aren't here here."
It sounded like a good point to me, but I elected not to point that out. Instead, I said, "At least you know not to try anti-psychotic medication." (The hospital staff weren't giving him antipsychotic medication; they'd decided he had a neurowhatsit condition.)
Urania reached into her bag again. "I thought you might say that, so in addition to my explanation, I have a partial solution." She pulled something out with a flourish. "These are, to my knowledge, the first inverse aether-glasses." When there was no applause, she elaborated, "Aether-glasses are used by old-world sorcerers to see things not of this dimension. Inverse aether-glasses are meant to let you see only things which are in this dimension. They work in laboratory conditions, but have not been field-tested."
The 'glasses' looked more like goggles, or eye protective gear. They had to be heavy-duty -- the lens equivalents were made out of lots of faceted crystals fitted together, and were probably at least an inch thick.
Dean snatched them before Urania could give them to Sam, looked through them, and frowned. "I can still see you."
"That's because we actually are all the way here. And no, Mel can't phase out like she was before, not now that you know she's here."
"Thanks for that," I muttered.
Sam took the goggle-glasses from Dean, carefully, and fitted them over his face. "I can't see the tentacle-rat things," he said, sounding relieved.
I flinched. "There are Erebus rats in here?" I felt an urge to jump onto a chair, not that that would help. Dean looked equally disturbed. (Dean and rats. Mmmmm.)
"Interstitial scavengers," Urania said before anyone could ask. "I don't know what they're doing here, but they shouldn't be dangerous to a human. Huh. How many are there?"
Sam took the goggles off, and his eyes flickered around the room. "Four right now. It changes. You can't see them?"
Urania shrugged. "We're not human, but we're from Earth. We're not supposed to be in more than one reality at once any more than you are. So, the glasses work at least partially."
"I can't see the leprechaun, either."
"The lepre--"
"Good. Now, for hearing things that aren't here here -- I don't have a prototype, just a proposal." Back into the bag.
I made a face. "Ew, where did you even get that?" It was a hideous Victorian-esque music box with a creepy Tinkerbell-type fairy figure on top. It probably turned in circles when the music box played.
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"From whom?"
"I'd rather not say. Some very complex harmonics, to amplify sound from one plane of reality and dampen all other sound. It was made for a poet who had a serious thing about fairies--"
As she spoke, Urania had been winding the music box (and avoiding my eyes). She let it play. There was a dull, tinny sort of tune, but also a deeper, outside-human-hearing thrum, and then--
"--what a clever little muse, digging that up."
--we could all hear the leprechaun. Urania demonstrated, by talking and clapping, that it was hard to hear anything but the leprechaun, and there was some confused gesticulation, mostly between Urania and Dean; Sam looked like he was appreciating not hearing some of the other planes he'd probably been eavesdropping on.
"But where did you get it, hmm? Last I heard, after the gentleman died it found its way back to--"
Urania stuffed the music box back into her bag, closed the bag, dumped it on the bed, and sat on it, cutting off the tinny music and the leprechaun. I looked at her for a moment, then turned to Sam.
"What did he say? Name your price."
Sam opened his mouth to tell me, then stopped. "Your history with us. Your family's history with my family."
"Let's not get Clio into this," Urania said hastily.
"My immediate family's history, that I personally know of, with your family going back not further than your grandparents," I countered.
"Mel!"
"He said Taliesin."
"Did he." I glowered at Urania, who put a hand to her face.
(No woman is happy to discover her lover cheated on her with her sister. Taliesin... well. Let's say none of us have inspired any harp music in the last century.)
"I knew he had it, and Polly's life is at-- Is in the balance. Leave it, Mel. So, the music box makes you hear stuff from the fairy world, to the near-exclusion of other things. It should be possible to make a similar one for this world."
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Still enjoying this, and looking forward to the conclusion!
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"That's it?" Dean said.
Sam grimaced. "Dean, I just want to get out of here--"
"Yes, that's it, unless you'd rather give the glasses back." Urania was trying to un-crumple her bag. "You have an explanation, a partial solution, and you can have more of a solution in a while, assuming you call your friend to release Polyhymnia and allow us to leave unhindered."
"Didn't your sister promise Sam a family history?"
Urania shot me a Look. "Yes, I suppose she did. Maybe she can try to handle that while you deal with checking him out and, first, call Mr. Singer." As she spoke, Urania was pulling a phone from her bag. "I'm calling Euterpe."
"Be sure to mention how Taliesin's doing these days," I shot. She -- three guesses -- ignored me.
Dean looked disgruntled, but pulled his phone out as well. If Euterpe and Bobby were standing too close together, we could get a feedback loop going. Sam glanced at me.
"Is she older or younger?"
That's a more complicated question than it would be for a human, but I skipped the explanation and went with how we'd been playing it the last few centuries. "Older."
"I... was expecting that."
"She's not even oldest. That's..." Again, complicated. "Someone else. She's solidly in the middle. I mean, Polyhymnia's older than she is, and obviously she's not... not... It's this whole stupid situation, you know? She'd never hurt anyone normally. She wouldn't even touch the Crusades, all those troubadours had to handle it on their own--" I broke off. "Family history." Best to get it over with. "Nothing with your grandparents, I've been following off and on since your mother's deal, Calliope took notice after your father died and crowded me out completely when Dean came back from Hell, lost interest after you re-caged Lucifer, but took notice again after Echidna got out, and... that's it. Oh, except I think Clio could do something with you on the research front, and Urania could do something with Dean in her role as Muse of Electrical Engineering -- those two got saddled with all the social sciences and hard sciences, respectively -- but you've always been busy and it's not like they're short on prospects." He was staring at me, even paler than before. "What?"
"You've been... watching, all that time, and you never... never..."
"Not constantly. And I don't interfere with situations I'm observing. Not ever." Except on special occasions, as a gift for Thalia, who likes happy endings. Or, say, now. "That's assuming I could have. Minor goddess of theater, has-been pantheon, versus upper-level demons and angels? Squish."
Sam nodded, but he still didn't look happy. "I want you to stop now."
I snorted. "I have to stop now. It doesn't work if you know I'm here, or if I've directly influenced events."
"Good." He turned away from me, pointedly, and started examining Urania's magic glasses.
Trying to pretend I didn't feel rejected, I turned and left, fading into unnoticeability as I left the room. There was a drugged unconscious person down the hall who had to be plenty tragic. Not up to Winchester standards, sure, but if they didn't want my attention...
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Urania had used up her bossing-me-around allowance for the next decade, but I followed anyway, behind Urania and the Winchesters and a flustered hospital administrator wondering why they were leaving so abruptly. The Winchesters departed in the Impala, the administrator went back inside, still flustered, and Urania and I stood in the shrubbery.
"Everything go okay?" asked Thalia, who'd been waiting outside. "Mel, I tried to tell you before they got here--"
"I know. I'm sorry. I'm fine." I leaned against her. "I lost my best tragic people."
"They let Polly go," Urania said, sounding tired. "Now I need to go see about another music box. Warn Calliope the Dvergar may want a really long song in payment, all right? And I may need Euterpe for the harmonics..." She blurred away.
"Talking to Calliope. Just want I want to do," I mumbled into Thalia's shoulder.
"I can call her," Thalia said. "Then I think there's an opera box with our name on it."
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Aaaand that's it. Thanks for hanging in there!
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