SPN Fic: Mysterious Ways
Okay, so I've re-written this sucker yet again. (It was originally posted under a different user name, so nobody freak on me about plagerism or anything, K?) I knew there was a story here I wanted to tell, I just couldn't find the little bitch. I think I've got her now though, so hopefully, this will be the last incarnation of this particular tale. Although I'm still not entirely happy with the lack of Dean-ness in the voice. If I figure out how to solve that, I'll change it yet again, but I'm not sure Dean's normal smart-assedness is relevant to this particular story. At least, that's what I'm thinking today. Tomorrow is a whole different day.
Title: Mysterious Ways
Author: dodger_winslow
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: Gen
Spoilers: Faith
Warnings: None
Mysterious Ways
He stood in the cold and stared at her grave. It was fresh, the rich soil newly turned. Flowers left in her memory were only now beginning to wither and die.
Though his eyes were fixed on the grey veined marble of her headstone, he saw only the memory of her that he held in his mind. Her gentle smile. The calm stillness she wore with such grace. The way her hair blew across her face in the cold, Nebraska wind.
He knew someone was behind him before she spoke. He knew who it was; and knowing that, he knew he wouldn’t be staying long enough to find whatever it was he came here to find.
"I knew you’d come eventually," she said. "I’m not sure how I did, but I knew."
When he didn’t turn to face her, Mrs. Roarke came around to face him. She’d aged a dozen years in the seven months since he’d seen her last. She seemed weary now, rather than driven. Exhausted rather than obsessed.
"I’ll leave if you want me to," he said.
It surprised him when she smiled. "No. You can stay. I think she’d like it if you stayed." Mrs. Roarke turned to look at her daughter’s grave. She knelt at the headstone, re-arranged a bouquet of wilting flowers that had tipped to one side.
"She never blamed you, you know," she told him as she worked.
"I know."
The older woman finished and stood again. When she stepped away from the gravestone, she stepped closer to the man who stood nearby, both hands jammed in his pockets, his shoulders hunched against a wind that didn’t exist as if he was cold even though the day was unseasonably warm.
He thought it was unintentional, that she’d move when she realized how close together they were standing. But it wasn’t, and she didn’t. She stayed where she was, sharing a moment with him he knew better than to think she believed he deserved to share.
Her daughter was gone, and he was to blame.
She told him as much when she once again began to speak: "But I did. I blamed you for so long. If you hadn’t been there, if you hadn’t drawn his attention by calling him a charlatan, if you hadn’t been chosen instead of her."
She shook her head, a small, sad gesture of disappointment and memory. "But it wasn’t only you," she went on after a moment. "I blamed Reverend LaGrange, too. And I blamed God. I think I may have even blamed her for a while." She crossed her arms against the cold, or against the memories, or against both. "And, of course, I blamed myself. Maybe I hadn’t prayed hard enough. Maybe I’d done something to deserve what was happening to her. Maybe I’d done something to deserve having to watch what was happening to her."
She looked at Dean, smiled at him again. Her eyes filled with tears. They fell without shame, running down her face, sharing her grief with the earth beneath her feet.
"You look for something to blame when your child is dying. I’m not sure why. But you do."
He wasn’t sure what to say, so he didn’t say anything at all.
Mrs. Roarke turned back to her daughter’s grave. "But in the end," she said quietly, "when Layla was nothing more than spirit and bones and the will to live just one day longer, she taught me what she’d been trying to teach me all along. To accept it. To stop looking for a way to stop it. To stop looking for a way to slow it. To stop looking for a way to explain it. To just accept it."
She wasn’t talking to him any longer. Her voice was so far away and so full of pain it hurt just to hear her speak. "She was in so much pain, but she stayed until I finally accepted it. And when I did, she just let go, and she was gone." She reached up and wiped tears away from her face. Others fell to take their place. She was talking to him again when she said, "She taught me so much in her life. So much more than I ever taught her."
"She was like that," he responded.
The way she looked at him made him wish he hadn’t spoken. He had no right to tell a mother what her daughter was like. He’d known her two days. She’d know Layla her whole life.
"I just mean that she taught me, too," he added quickly. "In just the two days that I knew her, she …." His voice trailed off. He looked away, looked at his feet. "I’m sorry. I should go."
"She never blamed you," Mrs. Roarke said again. "Did I tell you that?"
"Yes."
"Do you blame yourself?"
Dean closed his eyes. For a moment, he didn’t answer. Then he looked up, met her mother's gaze. "Yes."
She reached out, touched his face. Her fingers lingered on his skin, the memory for both of them of a mother comforting her child. "Don’t," she said gently. "She wouldn’t want that. She liked you. She liked you very much."
"I wish I’d known her better."
She shook her head slightly. Her hand dropped away. "No you don’t. If you’d known her better, this would hurt so much more than it does."
He looked away again, looked anywhere but at her. "I wish things could have turned out differently," he said so quietly it came out little more than a whisper.
"I know you do. My daughter was a very good judge of character. What she saw in you exists. I have faith in that, even if I don’t see it myself."
When he could look at her again, he did. "I’ll go now. Let you be alone with her."
"I’ve been alone with her, Dean," Mrs. Roarke said. "I sat with her while she died. I buried her. I wept at her grave until I could weep no more, and then I wept some more." She reached out, squeezed his arm. "You stay with her. For as long as you like. And when you leave, remember her. She deserves to be remembered."
"Yes," he said. "She does. And I will."
Mrs. Roarke walked away. The sound of her footsteps receded to nothing. The distant echo of a car starting and driving away marked her gone.
Marked him alone.
He stood there for another ten minutes, staring into grey marble, considering the finality of her name carved in immutable stone. "I’m so sorry, Layla," he said finally. "I’m so sorry it was you instead of me."
He turned to go. When he stepped away from her grave, he passed through a mist of cold so intense it chilled him to the bone. His heart cramped in his chest. His pulse thundered in his skull.
"Layla?" he asked the silent graveyard.
"She’s right, you know." Layla’s voice was a whisper in his left ear. "I never did blame you." He could feel the heat of her breath on his skin as she spoke. He could smell the scent of her in the still air.
"You should have," he said without turning. "It was because of me that you never got your miracle."
She laughed. In his mind’s eye, he could her eyes sparkling with humor and warmth. "I got my miracle, Dean," she said. "It just came in a form I didn’t recognize at the time."
"What form is that?"
"You."
He turned, tried to see her. She wasn’t anywhere to be seen. "Where are you?" he demanded of the air around him.
"I'm right here." Her voice was still near his ear; the warmth of her breath, still on his skin as she spoke.
"What do you mean, me?"
"I mean you. That you were healed. That was my miracle."
"That wasn’t a miracle," Dean said bitterly. "That was Sue Anne’s take on the master race."
"You’re wrong."
"I’m not wrong. It wasn’t Roy who healed me. That’s what I was trying to tell you in the tent that day. It was Sue Anne, and she did it by taking another man’s life and giving it to me. A man who wasn’t good enough to meet her holy standards. So he died, and I lived. That’s not a miracle; it’s murder, and she made me a part of it, made me the beneficiary of it."
"The miracle wasn’t that you were healed, Dean," she said gently. "It was that you were picked to be healed. I know what Sue Anne did. I know a lot of things now that I didn’t know then. And one of those things is what Roy saw when he spoke to you. I can see that now, too. I think I even saw it then."
"What do you see?"
"Who you are," she said simply. "And that’s what Roy saw. Without sight, without the powers he so believed he possessed, he looked into your heart and saw who you are. That’s why he picked you to heal. Why he picked you to live. That wasn’t Sue Anne’s doing. That was a miracle."
"It was a mistake," Dean argued. "It should have been you. We both know it should have been you."
"God didn’t pick me to save. He picked you."
"God didn’t pick me. Roy picked me."
He could feel her hands on him then, feel the pressure of her fingers on his shoulders, the weight of her palms against his neck. He could smell her again, could see her in his mind, smiling her gentle smile, looking at him with eyes that made him ache.
"Have a little faith," she whispered into his ear. "God works in mysterious ways."
And then she was gone. As suddenly as she was there, he knew she was gone.
"Layla?"
Nothing answered him. Nothing touched him. Nothing smelled the way she smelled, nor breathed warmth against the chill of his skin.
"Layla?" He called again, louder, more urgently.
Nothing.
He turned in circles, looking at her grave, looking to the trees beyond her grave, looking in every corner of the serene cemetery in which Layla Roarke’s mortal remains were buried.
Nothing.
She was gone.
Perhaps she was never really there.
Shoving his hands in his pockets, Dean hunched his shoulders against the day. The car wasn’t parked far away, and it didn’t take him long to get there. When he reached out to open the door, the metal handle burned into him with a cold so intense it registered to his nerves as fire. He snatched his hand back, stumbled awkwardly away.
"What the ...?"
Though the Impala looked normal to the casual glance, it was anything but to the more studied exam. Frozen white with heavy frost, every door handle sparkled like a thousand diamonds in the sun of the temperate day. The car’s body and tires were still coated with a thin veil of grit and road dust, but both windshields and every window was iced opaque with the same coat of pristine, glittering frost.
It began to melt as he stood stun still and watched.
Frost disintegrated. Water ran in rivulets down the glass. It was as if the heat of an oven was being applied from somewhere unseen, scoring lines into ice as it cracked. A tributary basin of a thousand fractures spiderwebbed across the windshield, creating patterns in the chaos, drawing meaning in seemingly random shatters.
Letters began to take shape. A message began to form. He saw it coming, saw it emerge, saw it collapse in on itself, slagging to slush as the last of the frost liquefied to water and drained away. It was only there for a few moments, but those moments were long enough that he couldn't believe them away, that he couldn't disbelieve them away.
Have a little faith.
Standing in the sunshine of the day, staring at the Impala as tears he didn’t even register rolled down his face, he didn’t breathe for fear of losing the moment, didn’t breath for fear of losing the knowing of what this was and what it meant.
He closed his eyes. The memory of a preacher’s hand on the side of his face was as tangible as if it was there now, promising life, promising salvation, promising the kind of miracle he’d known didn’t exist since he was four years old, watching his mother burn on the ceiling of his little brother’s nursery.
The memory of her filled his mind. She was smiling, as she always was when he remembered her. He dropped to his knees, felled by the grace of a moment beyond even his capacity to comprehend.
The memory of his mother changed. Her face softened, became younger, become someone more recently seen, someone more recently lost.
What he saw then wasn’t a spirit or a vision. It was solely in his mind’s eye, and it was a memory that he remembered even as he watched it play again. She looked at him, smiling in that sad way she had of smiling. "Well," she said, her voice soft and husky and speaking to him on every level at which he existed, "there’s a miracle right there."
And then she turned away, and she was gone.
Dean opened his eyes. He was on his knees on the rise of a small access road in the middle of a well-kept cemetery in Hastings, Nebraska. The wet chill of cold grass soaked through his jeans and into the flesh below. His Impala was parked on the road before him, the black body dull with dust gathered from more than two hundred miles of state highway between here and where he’d been when Sam looked up from googling obits on his laptop, his eyes sick with dread and sorrow.
He struggled to his feet with an effort. The metal handle felt normal in his hand when he opened the Impala’s door, perhaps even a little warm from sitting in the afternoon sun. He climbed inside and kicked the engine to life.
The windshield was wet and clean, and he could see through it more clearly than he ever remembered.
"Have a little faith," he said aloud, speaking to himself, speaking to the car, speaking to whomever might be listening. And then he drove away from the cemetery, and he didn’t look back.
-finis-