i swallow that sound and it swallows me whole
Who: Mary Winchester and Axel
When: Thursday night
Where: Outside then in Axel's basement
Summary: Mary kills Darkness!Dean then, with the help of her new friend Axel, discovers that she's a wizard, Harry has a new superpower.
Warnings: Descriptions of awfulness, Winchesters, thematic content.
[It starts with running late, as many less-than-ideal stories do. Mary winds up running late at work, running late at home, running late with her errands around town. Maybe she runs late a little on purpose, takes a little longer with her grocery shopping, dallies a little more on the street than she would without the heavy weight of the sadness and difficulty awaiting her at home looming over her head. John is so hard to deal with these days.
So she's running late. It's what has her stepping out of the apartments just a few minutes before sirens, Darkness be damned. Yeah, okay, so she should turn around and go back inside, if she doesn't want to meet the same fate Dean did less than 24 hours ago, but she doesn't care. She can't care. Her skin is itching and crawling off of her with restless energy that she has to work off, has to burn, has to get rid of before she goes completely insane.
So fuck it. She keeps going.
Sirens go off, the Seep devours all, Darkness takes its nightly hold. Business as usual. That is, until something slams her face-first into the wall and she feels the cold press of a gun barrel to the back of her head. A familiar voice growls something hateful and threatening in her ear, and Mary's stomach drops through her shoes. "Oh, Dean," she says softly against the dirty brick, heart breaking quietly. "I'm so sorry."
The monster backhands her onto the hard ground and snarls at her to shut the hell up, you stupid bitch. Mary scrambles backwards away from the creature that isn't Dean and, once she has her gun out, takes a moment to just look at it while it approaches. The leather (rotting and eaten away), the stubble (on skin papery and necrotic like living Seep), the professional handling with his guns, the soulless anger in those empty, inhuman eyes. It's so screamingly disturbing, so much worse than seeing someone possessed, that her all her skin feels like it's trying to crawl off and she wants to throw up. It says something else, something hideous and hateful that she immediately dismisses (because this isn't Dean), and she speaks sternly. "Stop it." Her voice breaks, betraying the well of horrified emotion just below the surface, threatening to burst. "You can't be here. We burned you."
It responds by telling her off and aiming what could have been a deadly-perfect punch at her head. Mary dodges well enough, and in the moment that it looks up and snarls at her, pupils burning red, she can imagine Sam or John encountering this. Bobby, professionally putting a bullet in its head (that's the kind of person he is), but going home to drink until he can't feel. Cas, giving it that look like a heartbroken cat as he kills it or runs, like a shell-shocked soldier or an abused child unsure of how to feel. Sam. Sam, emptying his gun into it and stopping to reload just to really make a point against this senseless, uncaring Darkness, drinking himself to oblivion, John coming home hollow-eyed and wavering.
She can't run. In every second Mary can see a thousand ways to escape the situation and put the monster behind her, but it's not an option. She can't leave this thing for someone else to find and keep on, she can't sleep or do anything knowing that somewhere is a haunted, restless Darkness spectre of her son.
The not-Dean is stopping to crack its knuckles, and growl something about her head and the pavement. It reminds her eerily of the man she knew in 1973, who stared down the demon with yellow eyes with a hatred that scared her then and still does now. The day her parents died, the day she made that deal that ended her life and ruined theirs. Her choices made him the person he was, the person that apparently cracked and tortured Tom, who she rejected thoughtlessly and that, that is why Dean Winchester is dead. She grits her teeth and raises her gun, wondering if any of them could still be saved.
Emptying her gun into Dean's hollow face isn't fun, but it's a kind of acceptance and a kind of responsibility. It's dead. Her family won't have to face it now. If she can do nothing, she can at least do this. Her small contribution to a family that is so completely beyond her ability to help. She almost laughs in the cold night air at the irony and sheer fucking uselessness of it all. Mother Mary's finally pulling her damn weight, and all she had to do was become a hardened hunter like her boys.
By the time she gets to Axel's place, there's a kind of recklessness to her, a twitching, jangled energy that begs to be burned. She rings the doorbell impatiently, then again, then a third time, like the rude little Kansas girl she isn't and never has been.
When: Thursday night
Where: Outside then in Axel's basement
Summary: Mary kills Darkness!Dean then, with the help of her new friend Axel, discovers that she's a wizard, Harry has a new superpower.
Warnings: Descriptions of awfulness, Winchesters, thematic content.
[It starts with running late, as many less-than-ideal stories do. Mary winds up running late at work, running late at home, running late with her errands around town. Maybe she runs late a little on purpose, takes a little longer with her grocery shopping, dallies a little more on the street than she would without the heavy weight of the sadness and difficulty awaiting her at home looming over her head. John is so hard to deal with these days.
So she's running late. It's what has her stepping out of the apartments just a few minutes before sirens, Darkness be damned. Yeah, okay, so she should turn around and go back inside, if she doesn't want to meet the same fate Dean did less than 24 hours ago, but she doesn't care. She can't care. Her skin is itching and crawling off of her with restless energy that she has to work off, has to burn, has to get rid of before she goes completely insane.
So fuck it. She keeps going.
Sirens go off, the Seep devours all, Darkness takes its nightly hold. Business as usual. That is, until something slams her face-first into the wall and she feels the cold press of a gun barrel to the back of her head. A familiar voice growls something hateful and threatening in her ear, and Mary's stomach drops through her shoes. "Oh, Dean," she says softly against the dirty brick, heart breaking quietly. "I'm so sorry."
The monster backhands her onto the hard ground and snarls at her to shut the hell up, you stupid bitch. Mary scrambles backwards away from the creature that isn't Dean and, once she has her gun out, takes a moment to just look at it while it approaches. The leather (rotting and eaten away), the stubble (on skin papery and necrotic like living Seep), the professional handling with his guns, the soulless anger in those empty, inhuman eyes. It's so screamingly disturbing, so much worse than seeing someone possessed, that her all her skin feels like it's trying to crawl off and she wants to throw up. It says something else, something hideous and hateful that she immediately dismisses (because this isn't Dean), and she speaks sternly. "Stop it." Her voice breaks, betraying the well of horrified emotion just below the surface, threatening to burst. "You can't be here. We burned you."
It responds by telling her off and aiming what could have been a deadly-perfect punch at her head. Mary dodges well enough, and in the moment that it looks up and snarls at her, pupils burning red, she can imagine Sam or John encountering this. Bobby, professionally putting a bullet in its head (that's the kind of person he is), but going home to drink until he can't feel. Cas, giving it that look like a heartbroken cat as he kills it or runs, like a shell-shocked soldier or an abused child unsure of how to feel. Sam. Sam, emptying his gun into it and stopping to reload just to really make a point against this senseless, uncaring Darkness, drinking himself to oblivion, John coming home hollow-eyed and wavering.
She can't run. In every second Mary can see a thousand ways to escape the situation and put the monster behind her, but it's not an option. She can't leave this thing for someone else to find and keep on, she can't sleep or do anything knowing that somewhere is a haunted, restless Darkness spectre of her son.
The not-Dean is stopping to crack its knuckles, and growl something about her head and the pavement. It reminds her eerily of the man she knew in 1973, who stared down the demon with yellow eyes with a hatred that scared her then and still does now. The day her parents died, the day she made that deal that ended her life and ruined theirs. Her choices made him the person he was, the person that apparently cracked and tortured Tom, who she rejected thoughtlessly and that, that is why Dean Winchester is dead. She grits her teeth and raises her gun, wondering if any of them could still be saved.
Emptying her gun into Dean's hollow face isn't fun, but it's a kind of acceptance and a kind of responsibility. It's dead. Her family won't have to face it now. If she can do nothing, she can at least do this. Her small contribution to a family that is so completely beyond her ability to help. She almost laughs in the cold night air at the irony and sheer fucking uselessness of it all. Mother Mary's finally pulling her damn weight, and all she had to do was become a hardened hunter like her boys.
By the time she gets to Axel's place, there's a kind of recklessness to her, a twitching, jangled energy that begs to be burned. She rings the doorbell impatiently, then again, then a third time, like the rude little Kansas girl she isn't and never has been.