listen, beloved
>> listen, beloved.
TITLE: listen, beloved.
AUTHOR:
ultraviolet9a
SPOILER: Pre-series mostly. No spoilers. Except a couple of references to end of season 1 and Home.
GENRE: Gen.
CHARACTERS: Mary Winchester, John Winchester, the Demon.
SUMMARY: My take on what the Demon has to do with Sam and the rest of the family. Among others. Am kind of hoping the end is…unexpected.
RATING: I’d go with PG-16 or something. Has some disturbing things in it, which I can’t name cuz hey, not spoiling the plot here.
FEEDBACK: Dude…duh.
DISCLAIMER: I don’t own any of it, and I’m not making any profit. So. Don’t sue. Please?
NOTE: The title is taken from a poem by e.e.cummings, that was basically what sparked the whole thing to begin with. Do read it, even if you don’t stop by for the fic. If you do, even better: http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/e-e-cummings/listen-iii/
[e.e.cummings is one of my personal gods along with Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot and a bunch of other people on whose altar I humbly worship.]
****
Mary is a little girl when the Demon first spots her. He wasn’t out on a hunt for her; every twenty years (sometimes more, sometimes less) he wakes up from his flame-wrapped slumber and walks the earth, either in the shape of a man-like creature with dirty yellow eyes, or like a leech, possessing a more suitable shape, but it’s not one of those times. He has plans, oh he has, like all big league players, plans he cultivates over centuries, and tries over and over again, and can’t understand how mankind has it still in itself to thwart them six out of ten. They’re demons and humans are supposed to be weak and evil in their hearts. He knows it, because he can see through them. Be through them.
It’s not those he wants.
Doesn’t matter.
In his slumber, bodily shape suspended and freed in his hellish dimension, awareness dimmed and resting yet to some degree awake, he catches a scent.
It’s a fragrance that, drawing from the memories of the humans he’s possessed, reminds him of fresh grass after a spring rain. It’s clean. It’s young. It’s pure.
At the moment he spots her, Mary, two golden pigtails on each side of her head, hands held by her mom and dad as she heads back from kindergarten, has a collision with a 1964 Plymouth Belvedere driven by Frank Mallone, too drunk to even be disorderly. Her father dies instantly, as his neck snaps at the collision. Her mother dies stuck between the Plymouth and the wall, and Mary? Protected by her parents’ quick reflexes, Mary gets hit sideways and finds herself flying sixteen feet away on the road. Her body is broken, and after the ambulances arrive a quarter of an hour later and they’re taken to the hospital, parents already proclaimed dead, the doctors have a rough time stopping the internal bleeding and helping her heart continue to beat as her body mends. They talk of a miracle when it does and she comes out of the coma, but the Demon knows the truth, because he was the one binding her life back to her body.
All that happens later.
For now, Mary is still lying like a broken doll in the middle of the road, blood soaking the tarmac and making her golden hair red, and a careful supernaturally inclined bystander would have seen something clean and young and pure exploding around her in waves, trying to stay just where it was.
There was no one around at that time.
Mary fought for her life, as it seeped away from her, and in his sleep the Demon caught that scent and woke up to her.
****
Mary grows up with her grandmother. She’s all the family she has, and she loves her fiercely as if to balance out the hollow and pain her parents’ loss left her with. Her grandma’s name is Mary too, but she calls her Nanny. Nanny has blue eyes just like her granddaughter’s, and hair that once had the same glint as Mary’s, except more red. Now it’s white, tied up in a nice comfortable bun when she’s to go to church, or loose on her shoulders when she’s in the house.
Nanny never gets over her daughter’s death, but knows she has no time to mourn, not if she wants the little frail girl to grow up and have a chance at being happy. She stays by the hospital bed for days, placing rhamnos and a laurel branch over the door, and prays, and at times feels shivers crawl over her body, but she’s too consumed in agony and grief to notice it with the sharpness of all women of her line.
Nanny becomes father and mother and blood to little Mary, and Mary grows up healthy and happy. She’ll always remember Nanny teaching her how to do chores, helping her with her homework, narrating fairytales of warriors and princesses and towers and dragons. Sometimes, as she grows up, she remembers Nanny look at her across the dining table with those piercing eyes and there’s worry there, as if Nanny can see something far ahead no one else can.
Nanny carves runes on the windows and door, and has St John’s Wort growing in the garden around the house, and sometimes, when her eyes grow from her usual bright twinkle to a more sombre blue, she has salt strewn around the house too. “For good luck and protection,” Nanny says as Mary helps her cut branches, or brings the salt bags from the shed.
Mary wears a silver medallion of St George around her neck, hung from a chain of steel that her Nanny gives her a year or so after living together, along with the medallion of the Virgin her mother had given her when she was still alive. She spends all of her childhood wrapped up in the smell of the cinnamon, chocolate, butterscotch and ginger cookies Nanny bakes every afternoon, because Nanny, like her granddaughter, has a sweet tooth.
Nanny strokes her hair and tells her stories about her parents because memory is important, sends her to a Catholic school, and loves her with everything she has in her, wondering how much of the shine her granddaughter really carries.
****
After Mary gets her first menses, Nanny starts dreaming. She strews salt every night, and adds St Michael to the steel chain Mary has around her neck.
After Mary gets her first menses, she starts dreaming too. At least she thinks she does. Of a dark shape at her window, but every time she blinks, the glint and the dark are not there, just the streetlamp and the branches of trees. And when they sit around the dining table, it’s her own eyes that pierce through grandmother.
Mary is sixteen years old. This time there are butterscotch cookies in front of her. Grandmother looks older, more hunched, more tired, and it’s not just the lapse of time. Mary touches the medallions of the warrior saints and Virgin around her neck and her fingers draw comfort and safety from them.
“Tell me,” she says, looking at her. “Tell me.”
Nanny doesn’t reply.
“I know about the salt. And St John’s Wort,” Mary says. “I looked it up. It’s supposed to drive away evil spirits and ghosts, isn’t it? That’s why they called it Fuga Daemonum.”
Nanny nods.
“Chaser of devils.”
“And the medallions…and the Catholic school…and your dreams…and my dreams…What’s going on, Nanny?”
Nanny sighs.
“There’s a shadow following you,” Nanny says.
Mary cocks her eyebrows in the universal language of all teenagers.
“Shadow?”
“Shadow,” Nanny says. “Keep your mind open.”
“Right.”
Mary is at the age where what’s more important than the medallions and strewing salt is seeing Billy Dougherty, who is just so handsome it makes her almost want to swoon. Where hanging out with Cathy and Liz and Elspeth is more fun than anything else, because they can talk about Bill and David and Ross and giggle and try out make-up and listen to records and be young, with the world stretching ahead of them.
And Mary loves her Nanny, she does, but she loves sleepovers with the girls, because she’s sixteen, and it’s Saturday, and she doesn’t worry that her dreams are getting more vivid, because she knows them as dreams, and doesn’t think about how she always seems to know when there’s going to be a quiz or an oral exam in school. Lucky, she’s thinking. Lucky. Because being sixteen is being immortal, and shoving down chocolate ice cream while Liz tries to tie her hair up in a complicated chignon she saw in a magazine is fun.
It’s long after midnight when the girls want to settle down, and Mary volunteers to go down the kitchen with Liz and fetch another round of sodas. They don’t turn on the light, not to wake up the rest of the sleeping house. They tiptoe their way down, open the fridge, take out four bottles and the bottle opener, straws, and then tiptoe their way up the corridor again. There are windows overlooking the garden, and in the silence, Mary stops so abruptly Liz almost stumbles into her.
“What’s the matter?” she asks, and Mary, cradling the bottles to her chest points with a trembling finger outside the window. There was a shadow there, moving. There were yellow eyes watching her.
There is nothing there. A cat meows. Liz giggles and tells her she probably saw her own cat Tom walking around, eyes shining. After telling the other girls, and being endlessly teased about it, Mary laughs too, forgetting how Liz’s mother said how they had Tom locked in the basement for the night, because it was warmer and safer for him.
“Oh, those darn cats,” she laughs. “They seem to follow me everywhere.”
But her fingers are still caressing the medallions around her throat.
And the Demon projecting himself from his slumber is thinking Ah…interesting. She wasn’t supposed to be seeing me yet. Then he closes his eyes, and takes air in, and catches her scent again.
Fresh and pure and stronger, richer, faintly smelling of blood and copper.
Good, my pretty, he is thinking. Good, beloved.
****
Nanny dies just before Mary turns eighteen. She dies in a hospital bed and knows the time is right and natural so she doesn’t ask for rhamnos and laurel over her door.
There is a small box she slides into her granddaughter’s hands.
“I wanted to give it to you at your wedding,” she manages to say. Mary opens it.
There’s a gem resting in it, hung from a silver chain. It looks like a beryl. There is a clear pupil in the middle and around it a darker circle.
“Beli oculus,” Nanny whispers. “Ram’s eye.”
“It’s beautiful, Nanny,” Mary says, tears in her eyes, cradling the old papery hand in hers. She doesn’t care about the jewellery. All she cares about is this woman leaving her…her family leaving her all over again.
“Wear it,” Nanny says. “The wearer can never die through an edged tool,” she coughs, “in battle.”
Mary wants to ask battle? What battle? What edged tool? but Nanny looks at her piercingly, tapping the side of her own head with a gnarly finger.
“You’ll know,” she whispers, remembering her dream, with her granddaughter’s belly cut open. “You’ll know.”
The hand slides down.
“Mary.” Her other hand gives a final squeeze. Then Nanny is no more.
Mary passes the chain over her head and starts crying.
****
Mary Winchester (who’s been officially a Winchester only for a few hours) wakes up to the feeling of happiness. She feels like singing, singing like a bird on a tree in the most beautiful sunrise ever. Her husband is by her side, and it’s a good husband, a man she loves, a man who loves her. She likes to think that Nanny would have approved and would have smiled from wherever she was.
She remembers meeting John. It had been a tough couple of years with Nanny gone, feeling alone and desolate in the world, finishing school, getting a secretary’s degree, finding work as such. She still has the shine (though she doesn’t call it such, she thinks of it more as luck) and real life is grey and gritty and takes away all thoughts of the salt and St John’s Wort around the house, and yellow cat’s eyes. There is no margin for that. She wears her medallions because she wants to remember Nanny, and sometimes still draws comfort from them, and the last gift of Nanny is carefully tucked in the back of her drawer with pictures and mementoes. She wants to wear it at her wedding day.
And she knows John is the one for her the minute she sees him, because while with other man she had liked she had thought Oh lord, with him it’s more like I’ll be damned in her mind. He is the most attractive man she’s ever met, and one part of her, the one that is trying to survive the grey zones of the real world whispers something like Time ending…time ending…trouble. She hushes it. Voices are silly and are her fear of loss, and when her fingertips first touch him she gets the same feeling of safety she has of her medallions, though what she visualizes with him is definitely not religious stuff. John is her warrior, her protector, her own personal saint, and her knees go weak when he touches her and the world fades when she’s with him. She knows he’s loved her first, but when she realizes she feels the same way, something in the world seems to click back in place for her.
And in his slumber, the Demon’s thinking, not yet, dear. Not yet.
Mary wants a wedding in church and stretches her tongue at John when he makes fun of her traditionalism, because he’d much rather go for the town hall version, but Mary looks at him with that wink in her eyes, and her hair falling just that way over her shoulders and all John can think of is to cross the space between the one end of the couch to the other and getting lost in his future wife’s taste and smell.
“In a church, huh?” he whispers between kisses, and Mary wants to explain how she feels that their union should be blessed, but knows he’ll make fun of her, and lord he is so good with his hands and his mouth and dear god she can barely think so she says
“Nanny would have wanted that.”
“Whatever my princess wants,” he says and then they stop talking altogether.
And Mary gets her wish, and wears the beli oculi around her neck on her wedding day.
****
Dean is born at the crack of dawn, and John is barely holding his tears as he cradles his newborn son in his hands. And Mary, senses sharpened by motherhood, remembers shadows, but thinks that this son, this man, this family is worth every single ray of light.
She was born to be a mother, she’s thinking. She was born to be John’s wife. Her shine grows stronger, but she thinks it’s only mother instinct. She feels when Dean is sick or hurt, even before it happens. Knows when to find him when he gets lost in the mall.
“Supermom,” John grins when he’s not calling her princess, and she grins back at him, and then runs towards the stairs because she suddenly knows that little Dean has managed to climb down the crib and is about to try tumbling down the stairs too.
This is her home, the one she built with John, and John keeps them safe, and the world can’t be all evil despite news on TV, not when Dean is hiding his face in the crook of her neck, and John has his arms around her shoulders.
And the Demon is scenting gold in her fragrance too, gold and ivory and motherhood and the smell of fresh, strong grass, and he’s thinking, You’ve ripened, beloved. It’s time.
***
There’s a storm outside when John gets home. He kisses his wife, eats the dinner she has prepared, takes Dean in his arms and carries him to his bed and tucks him in.
“Sleep well, Dean,” he says and Dean is a little boy and has clear eye sight.
“Daddy?” he says and looks oddly at him for the first time, and when John kisses the top of his head, for the first time Dean flinches and hides under the covers.
Mary is doing the washing up. John’s hands wrap around her waist, spooning her.
Mary laughs.
“Somebody is in a good mood tonight,” she says as John’s mouth nibbles her throat. She has barely time to turn off the water when John takes her in his arms and carries her to the bedroom, locking the door behind them, and then she’s thrown on the bed, and John’s hands are taking her clothes off, and the chains around her neck.
“Easy, tiger,” she laughs, and it’s not the first time they’ll go roughly at it, yet feels like the first time as she’s pinned to the bed and John enters her hard, saying Mine mine mine over and over again and he pumps into her holding her hands down and she gasps and bites his shoulder to contain her scream as she comes, and her gasp, because it’s the first time pleasure with John is laced with fear.
The next morning she’ll wonder if she dreamt of a sudden glint passing through his eyes, if she dreamt of him whispering Beloved as he came.
The next morning John will remember the night in a haze, and when he gets back from work Dean will jump in his arms and hold him tight and won’t let go for quite some time.
And years later, the Demon will slip into John easily, wearing him familiar and cosy, like a hand slipping in a well worn glove.
For now, the Demon is waiting.
And Sam has been conceived.
****
He’s going to be a strong one, the Demon knows, as he watches the sleeping child. There’s a pure shine in the mother, a strong shine, one the Demon will make sure to pass on only to the boy. If only her own shine prevails in the boy, the Demon will lose him, but that hasn’t happened. After all, when all is done? What can a father do? What can one man do against the Demon?
Years later, he’ll know the answer is A lot.
For now, he waits.
There is an electrical storm and the lights flickering as he stands over the crib watching young Sam. He is six months old, and it’s the right time, and the Demon is thinking Mine. When Mary comes and he hushes her, she leaves, thinking he’s the father. In a small way, the Demon can’t disagree. Mine, he’s thinking again, as he hears Mary’s footsteps running up the stairs in frenzy and then Mary is unable to scream as she recognizes the yellow eyes and she’s thinking John. John. My medallions. He makes her slide up the wall, pins her to the ceiling. There’s a scalding pain as her belly is invisibly cut open and she’s thinking Nanny nanny John Sam Dean help John and the Demon is whispering in her mind Hush. Hush. Your work here is done. She wants to ask why, why, but knows the answer.
John will find a way, she thinks and tries to shoot the thought back at her enemy. He’s the warrior and she’s his princess and John will find a way.
There’s nothing you can do, he says. I got big plans for your boy. Our boy.
The Demon chuckles. Concludes the rite. Leaves.
Time seems endless as she feels her life drain away from her, blood dripping on her son.
Don’t look, Sammy, she’s thinking. Don’t look. Forget. John will find a way. I will find a way. St George did slay the Dragon. Don’t look, Sammy. We’ll find a way.
Then John comes and like a time bomb the fire spreads out and ravishes her and she’s thinking she hears the Demon say Goodbye, beloved, in a sarcastic snarl, but she focuses on John calling her name over and over again, and embraces the fire, lets it claim her, steal her, own her, as she uses her anger and fear and pain and purpose to anchor her to the house.
She’s got the shine, that smelt of fresh grass after a spring rain has fallen, and knows her boys will need her again. Once her family is to safety, she burns up almost serenely. There is light that demands to be followed, and there’s Nanny and mom and dad waiting somewhere, and Nanny always talked about Heaven and Hell.
She’s been through hell already. And heaven…heaven can wait.
Mary Winchester has got other plans.
-The End.
SIDENOTE: My beta said this reminded her of a dark fairy tale. I admit to being curious as to your take on it.