SPN Fic: A Girl Who Sang The Blues
Good Lord, I'm done. Hurrah, hurrah, rejoice etc. I wonder if the School of Last-Minute Fic-Writing hands out degrees...? (And please ignore my lack of a suitable Bela!icon.)
Title: A Girl Who Sang The Blues (2,236 words)
Fandom/Characters: Supernatural, Bela Talbot-centric with brief mentions of Sam, Dean, and Crowley.
Rating/Warnings: PG13-ish, gen. Implied child sexual abuse, implied character death (everything which was implied in canon, really). Use of Britishisms.
Summary: In which the origins of one Bela Talbot are explored.
Disclaimer: Characters used are not mine etc.
Author's Note: Written for lavendergaia's prompt - I just want Bela being badass. Maybe something origin-y? - in the spn_women ficathon. Title taken from Don McLean's song, American Pie. My thanks to the ever-brilliant ambientlight, who beta'd for me and who's an absolute star.
Four o’clock in the afternoon brings with it memories of a funeral.
She fancies now and then that she remembers the mourners, dark and somber in perfect contrast to the waxy white lilies they clutched in their hands. She remembers the raspy boom of the pastor’s voice in the nave, the fingerprint-smears she’d left half-formed on the shiny wood of her sister’s coffin, the tired thud-thud-thud of loose earth being shoveled down-down-down back into the ground. She remembers the black-clad adults who thronged their living room afterwards like so many black crows, sympathetic murmur of voices a poor substitute for the rustle-startle of absent wings, and she remembers sitting silently in the corner, huddled by the fake potted plant which always gathers dust, watching them.
Her mother remembers it differently; she knows this because she’s heard her mother mention it often enough, about how she’d run through the house, screaming that she’d seen Little Annie outside in the garden and could she go out and play please Mummy please please please, and Really, Abby, how could you, telling lies like that, the Lord would have wanted you to be a better girl, Abby Talbot.
She doesn’t mind too much. She knows that six-year-olds aren’t particularly known for their memories, especially after watching the death of two-year-old siblings happen before their eyes. Instead she turns the knob for volume on her cassette player two careful silver ridges clockwise, and does her best not to listen to the rise and fall of her mother’s voice while the latter reads the bible to a child now eight years gone, Let the little children come to me.
It’s even better when she presses her ear up against the rough metal cross-hatch of the speakers, she discovers as she works her way through a roll of Hobnobs. The thump of bass through her bones is infinitely better than the whispered cadence just down the hall of a distant Amen.
=-=-=
At eleven her door will click open, clockwork-like, the faint ticks of her watch echoed by the rhythm of three careful footsteps past the threshold and the snick of a lock. It’ll be a game that has grown old and stale with the familiarity of years, and when she closes her eyes she’ll re-paint the room in Technicolor to compensate for the ugliness of its wood-planked floors and red-papered walls. These, then, will be the things with which she marks solitary afternoons after school by: biscuit crumbs hidden in the folds of half-made covers, butterfly-folded paperbacks creased down the spine, half-drunk cups of now-cold tea. And these will be the things only she knows about: one leather-bound diary and five stolen library books snuck beneath the loosened floorboards below the bed, sixteen different candles of black and white and red slipped into the knife-slit on the underside of the mattress, seven packets of herbs with labels neatly printed at the bottom of a navy pile of school sweaters.
(These will be the things she tries to ignore: the clumsy brailing of fingers down her back, the flutter of hot breath across her breasts, the slick wet of saliva between her thighs, Our Father who art in heaven and the warm spill on her knees, Forgive us our trespasses.)
Afterwards the yellow glare of the lamp will have stamped itself across the backs of her eyelids, white bursts which linger when she finally dares shower at two. In the morning there will be orange juice, toast, jam and butter and honey, milk. There will be porridge eaten after her father recites the Lord’s Prayer, lukewarm tea drunk just as her mother begins another prayer for a long-dead daughter.
=-=-=
The talking board is barely visible, obscured by a ghastly pair of porcelain shepherdesses and faded from months of sun in the smeary London shop window. That afternoon she sits on the three o’clock train home from Paddington with a newspaper-wrapped rectangle tucked firmly under her arm, a planchette (thrown in for free) that she fiddles between four fingers and a thumb, and a pocket which is nineteen pounds and ninety-nine pence lighter.
=-=-=
She was thirteen when she first told someone.
Miss Holly was new to the school, bright and smart in her sharp blazers and skirts and shoes, and that afternoon she’d smiled, nodded, mmm’d and aaah’d and made sympathetic noises at the right moments over steepled fingers, It was brave of you to come to me, Abby and I’ll see what I can do.
The next day there’d been a call, her mother’s knuckles clenched white against the bright green Bakelite of the telephone receiver. It’d been the principal, she would learn, in between the How-could-you’s and Annie-would-never-have’s, and it would be eight before she would be allowed (be made) to apologize, whisper barely audible through lips numb with the repetition of Proverbs 12:22.
She was thirteen when she decided that she would never tell anyone.
=-=-=
On Tuesday the house is alive where it’d been still before, raised voices stirring sunlight and dust and frantic hands gesticulating themselves into a frenzy. She pushes the front door open to the hollow thump-a-thump-a-thump-a-thump of someone pacing upstairs (pacing in her room, seven steps forward and seven steps back, listen and count), and when she sees the talking board in her father’s hands (snapped and snapped again, edges jagged and strips of sticky tape trailing limp on the four original corners) she winces, winces (Your mother had found it stuck under your desk whilst cleaning how dare you Abby how dare you).
In the evening she carefully lies on her stomach because it hurts to sit and hurts even more to sprawl, welts marching across her back in a curious parody of a military parade, red-purple-black, bars of regimental colors. Eventually she tires of her bed, and elusive splinters dig into her heels when she makes her way to the open window. Outside is a strange mix of muggy and crisp, the sunset perched precarious and indecisive between late summer and early autumn, and when she closes her eyes she imagines she can still smell the last of the cheap wood burning, chemical-like and pungent, the ash soft and grey.
(He is harsher that night, too, fingers pinching where they’d previously stroked, mouth biting where it’d previously only breathed, Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live against the soft mound of her belly, Abby, you know the bible tells us so.)
On Wednesday she scavenges a felt-tip pen left unwanted at the end of art class and buys a suitable sheet of cardboard on her way home from school. The skid-stutter-stop of the nib as it slides across the rough papery surface is strangely satisfying, alphabets and numbers and YES and NO and GOODBYE written in broad sloping script, curlicues traced into the corners. The glide of the planchette is whisper-rasp-quiet beneath the studied murmur of her question, and when she leaves the house the next morning it is with a tiny bottle in her pocket for graveyard dirt and a frown between her brows as she ponders the acquisition of a black cat’s bones.
=-=-=
This is how it happens:
There is a crossroads conveniently located a little more than a mile from the house, and its surface is conveniently of packed earth and scattered gravel and not of asphalt.
When she slips out of her window it’s a quarter to midnight, and she discovers that oak trees are harder to climb when you’re fourteen and six years out of practice than when you’re eight.
She has a spoon in her pocket, stolen from the school cafeteria during lunch, and she uses it now to help her dig. It’s not terribly effective: four nails are split to the quick by the time she deems the small hole deep enough, and she’s vaguely aware that the latticework of cuts her hands have acquired will sting in the shower.
It takes her three tries before she finally manages to pry the lid of the box (rough wood pieces held together at the corners by rusted metal staples and girlish hope) open; her fingers leave ghostly whorls on the glossy surface of the photograph she slips in.
The hole is filled quickly and neatly, nervous palms patting the last of the grainy soil down and scattering gravel back into place.
One o’clock passes without incident.
At two o’clock she leaves, with nothing to show of the night but a pair of dirt-stained knees.
Seven in the morning finds her eating butter with her toast instead of marmalade, milk with her porridge instead of honey. The Lord’s Prayer is uttered over a plate of scrambled eggs - lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil - and she leaves before questions may be asked about the stubborn black of dirt trapped beneath her fingernails, the skitter-skritch of chair-legs across the floor neatly cutting her mother’s inevitable prayer into two.
=-=-=
Lunch that day begins with a scuffle outside the girl’s loo. Words are exchanged, hair pulled, and the fight only ends after a blouse-collar is torn (not hers; it hasn’t been hers for a couple of years, regardless of the odds against her) and a teacher is sighted in a neighboring corridor. Then the other girls run, feet thudding past poster-lined walls and identical smirks thrown over sweater-clad shoulders, Witch.
The decision to sneak out early comes easy enough, after. No one pays her any mind as she leaves the school grounds.
There’s another girl at the swings by the time she arrives, younger than her, eight or ten, all fine blond hair and chubby cheeks and mischief in her smile. The girl also looks exactly as she imagines Annie would have looked like had the latter not died, and later she will suspect this to be the reason why she lets the other stay. For now, however, she digs her fingertips into sun-warmed links of chain and her heels into the sole-worn bit of sandy soil at her feet, up, up, up, legs stretched out into the air and the creak of the frame a strange sort of lullaby.
She isn’t surprised to find that she still has company when the swing finally slows down.
“I can take care of them for you,” the other girl has started to say, and she listens because there isn’t much else she can do, hears the grin in the younger girl’s throat. “And it won’t even cost you anything for ten, whole, years.”
Theirs isn’t so much a kiss as the bump of dry lips on chapped, a child’s careless nuzzle of affection, but it’s enough.
=-=-=
It’s a while (twenty-four months, two years) before she remembers what had been said about ten, whole, years, and when she does she breaks a cup.
The cup’s still there when she returns from London a week later with library-found knowledge and a bottle of coarse-powdered lye, broken pieces of teal eggshell accusing against the milky-brown puddle-stain of forgotten breakfast tea. She pauses at the doorway of the kitchen for all of twenty-three seconds before she carefully steps over the mess. She figures that the fruit knife she retrieves is sharp enough to part the skin on her fingertips, though the cuts make picking up the tiny pellets with a pair of tweezers to slot into the pinkish-red slits a little more difficult than she likes.
It certainly hurts far more than she’d thought it would.
=-=-=
She celebrates her second day in America by picking ‘Bela’ on a whim.
(Dracula had played on the hotel television the night before, flickering and splendid in its black-and-white grainy glory.)
=-=-=
Crowley is dark-suited and unctuous, and she gratefully embraces how much of a relief he is after the enigma that is Sam and Dean Winchester, falls into the familiar pattern of bargain and offer with relish. She supposes she likes John Winchester’s boys well enough: Dean looks good in a suit, Sam looks better (she’s always been partial to taller men), and she’d gladly have angry sex with either or even both of them. They just puzzle her, leave her rattled with their unsettling questions and their inexplicable desire to help, and every encounter with them these days has her feeling insubstantial and over-exposed, taffy pulled out beneath too-bright kitchen lights and stretched thin.
Still, she likes to think that they’ll understand - Dean and his increasingly frantic terror as his deal draws to an end, Sam and his desperate determination to beat the odds and to win - when she strikes a deal with the demon on the price of Sam’s head.
=-=-=
The hounds are everything she has come to expect from their nightly howling, and for an unpleasant moment she is reminded of all she had ever read as a child. She thinks of Fenrir with his dripping jaws as he waits impatiently for Ragnarok, of Geri and Freki riding into battle with Odin and feasting on flesh in Valhalla. She thinks of Cerberus guarding the gates of Hades, of the Black Dogs said to roam the British Isles. She even thinks wildly of Harry Potter, and of the Devil’s Shoestring she’d left hanging above the door in her hotel room two states away.
Her gun is heavier than she remembers when she picks it up again, but it doesn’t hurt as much as she thinks it should.
Title: A Girl Who Sang The Blues (2,236 words)
Fandom/Characters: Supernatural, Bela Talbot-centric with brief mentions of Sam, Dean, and Crowley.
Rating/Warnings: PG13-ish, gen. Implied child sexual abuse, implied character death (everything which was implied in canon, really). Use of Britishisms.
Summary: In which the origins of one Bela Talbot are explored.
Disclaimer: Characters used are not mine etc.
Author's Note: Written for lavendergaia's prompt - I just want Bela being badass. Maybe something origin-y? - in the spn_women ficathon. Title taken from Don McLean's song, American Pie. My thanks to the ever-brilliant ambientlight, who beta'd for me and who's an absolute star.
Four o’clock in the afternoon brings with it memories of a funeral.
She fancies now and then that she remembers the mourners, dark and somber in perfect contrast to the waxy white lilies they clutched in their hands. She remembers the raspy boom of the pastor’s voice in the nave, the fingerprint-smears she’d left half-formed on the shiny wood of her sister’s coffin, the tired thud-thud-thud of loose earth being shoveled down-down-down back into the ground. She remembers the black-clad adults who thronged their living room afterwards like so many black crows, sympathetic murmur of voices a poor substitute for the rustle-startle of absent wings, and she remembers sitting silently in the corner, huddled by the fake potted plant which always gathers dust, watching them.
Her mother remembers it differently; she knows this because she’s heard her mother mention it often enough, about how she’d run through the house, screaming that she’d seen Little Annie outside in the garden and could she go out and play please Mummy please please please, and Really, Abby, how could you, telling lies like that, the Lord would have wanted you to be a better girl, Abby Talbot.
She doesn’t mind too much. She knows that six-year-olds aren’t particularly known for their memories, especially after watching the death of two-year-old siblings happen before their eyes. Instead she turns the knob for volume on her cassette player two careful silver ridges clockwise, and does her best not to listen to the rise and fall of her mother’s voice while the latter reads the bible to a child now eight years gone, Let the little children come to me.
It’s even better when she presses her ear up against the rough metal cross-hatch of the speakers, she discovers as she works her way through a roll of Hobnobs. The thump of bass through her bones is infinitely better than the whispered cadence just down the hall of a distant Amen.
=-=-=
At eleven her door will click open, clockwork-like, the faint ticks of her watch echoed by the rhythm of three careful footsteps past the threshold and the snick of a lock. It’ll be a game that has grown old and stale with the familiarity of years, and when she closes her eyes she’ll re-paint the room in Technicolor to compensate for the ugliness of its wood-planked floors and red-papered walls. These, then, will be the things with which she marks solitary afternoons after school by: biscuit crumbs hidden in the folds of half-made covers, butterfly-folded paperbacks creased down the spine, half-drunk cups of now-cold tea. And these will be the things only she knows about: one leather-bound diary and five stolen library books snuck beneath the loosened floorboards below the bed, sixteen different candles of black and white and red slipped into the knife-slit on the underside of the mattress, seven packets of herbs with labels neatly printed at the bottom of a navy pile of school sweaters.
(These will be the things she tries to ignore: the clumsy brailing of fingers down her back, the flutter of hot breath across her breasts, the slick wet of saliva between her thighs, Our Father who art in heaven and the warm spill on her knees, Forgive us our trespasses.)
Afterwards the yellow glare of the lamp will have stamped itself across the backs of her eyelids, white bursts which linger when she finally dares shower at two. In the morning there will be orange juice, toast, jam and butter and honey, milk. There will be porridge eaten after her father recites the Lord’s Prayer, lukewarm tea drunk just as her mother begins another prayer for a long-dead daughter.
=-=-=
The talking board is barely visible, obscured by a ghastly pair of porcelain shepherdesses and faded from months of sun in the smeary London shop window. That afternoon she sits on the three o’clock train home from Paddington with a newspaper-wrapped rectangle tucked firmly under her arm, a planchette (thrown in for free) that she fiddles between four fingers and a thumb, and a pocket which is nineteen pounds and ninety-nine pence lighter.
=-=-=
She was thirteen when she first told someone.
Miss Holly was new to the school, bright and smart in her sharp blazers and skirts and shoes, and that afternoon she’d smiled, nodded, mmm’d and aaah’d and made sympathetic noises at the right moments over steepled fingers, It was brave of you to come to me, Abby and I’ll see what I can do.
The next day there’d been a call, her mother’s knuckles clenched white against the bright green Bakelite of the telephone receiver. It’d been the principal, she would learn, in between the How-could-you’s and Annie-would-never-have’s, and it would be eight before she would be allowed (be made) to apologize, whisper barely audible through lips numb with the repetition of Proverbs 12:22.
She was thirteen when she decided that she would never tell anyone.
=-=-=
On Tuesday the house is alive where it’d been still before, raised voices stirring sunlight and dust and frantic hands gesticulating themselves into a frenzy. She pushes the front door open to the hollow thump-a-thump-a-thump-a-thump of someone pacing upstairs (pacing in her room, seven steps forward and seven steps back, listen and count), and when she sees the talking board in her father’s hands (snapped and snapped again, edges jagged and strips of sticky tape trailing limp on the four original corners) she winces, winces (Your mother had found it stuck under your desk whilst cleaning how dare you Abby how dare you).
In the evening she carefully lies on her stomach because it hurts to sit and hurts even more to sprawl, welts marching across her back in a curious parody of a military parade, red-purple-black, bars of regimental colors. Eventually she tires of her bed, and elusive splinters dig into her heels when she makes her way to the open window. Outside is a strange mix of muggy and crisp, the sunset perched precarious and indecisive between late summer and early autumn, and when she closes her eyes she imagines she can still smell the last of the cheap wood burning, chemical-like and pungent, the ash soft and grey.
(He is harsher that night, too, fingers pinching where they’d previously stroked, mouth biting where it’d previously only breathed, Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live against the soft mound of her belly, Abby, you know the bible tells us so.)
On Wednesday she scavenges a felt-tip pen left unwanted at the end of art class and buys a suitable sheet of cardboard on her way home from school. The skid-stutter-stop of the nib as it slides across the rough papery surface is strangely satisfying, alphabets and numbers and YES and NO and GOODBYE written in broad sloping script, curlicues traced into the corners. The glide of the planchette is whisper-rasp-quiet beneath the studied murmur of her question, and when she leaves the house the next morning it is with a tiny bottle in her pocket for graveyard dirt and a frown between her brows as she ponders the acquisition of a black cat’s bones.
=-=-=
This is how it happens:
There is a crossroads conveniently located a little more than a mile from the house, and its surface is conveniently of packed earth and scattered gravel and not of asphalt.
When she slips out of her window it’s a quarter to midnight, and she discovers that oak trees are harder to climb when you’re fourteen and six years out of practice than when you’re eight.
She has a spoon in her pocket, stolen from the school cafeteria during lunch, and she uses it now to help her dig. It’s not terribly effective: four nails are split to the quick by the time she deems the small hole deep enough, and she’s vaguely aware that the latticework of cuts her hands have acquired will sting in the shower.
It takes her three tries before she finally manages to pry the lid of the box (rough wood pieces held together at the corners by rusted metal staples and girlish hope) open; her fingers leave ghostly whorls on the glossy surface of the photograph she slips in.
The hole is filled quickly and neatly, nervous palms patting the last of the grainy soil down and scattering gravel back into place.
One o’clock passes without incident.
At two o’clock she leaves, with nothing to show of the night but a pair of dirt-stained knees.
Seven in the morning finds her eating butter with her toast instead of marmalade, milk with her porridge instead of honey. The Lord’s Prayer is uttered over a plate of scrambled eggs - lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil - and she leaves before questions may be asked about the stubborn black of dirt trapped beneath her fingernails, the skitter-skritch of chair-legs across the floor neatly cutting her mother’s inevitable prayer into two.
=-=-=
Lunch that day begins with a scuffle outside the girl’s loo. Words are exchanged, hair pulled, and the fight only ends after a blouse-collar is torn (not hers; it hasn’t been hers for a couple of years, regardless of the odds against her) and a teacher is sighted in a neighboring corridor. Then the other girls run, feet thudding past poster-lined walls and identical smirks thrown over sweater-clad shoulders, Witch.
The decision to sneak out early comes easy enough, after. No one pays her any mind as she leaves the school grounds.
There’s another girl at the swings by the time she arrives, younger than her, eight or ten, all fine blond hair and chubby cheeks and mischief in her smile. The girl also looks exactly as she imagines Annie would have looked like had the latter not died, and later she will suspect this to be the reason why she lets the other stay. For now, however, she digs her fingertips into sun-warmed links of chain and her heels into the sole-worn bit of sandy soil at her feet, up, up, up, legs stretched out into the air and the creak of the frame a strange sort of lullaby.
She isn’t surprised to find that she still has company when the swing finally slows down.
“I can take care of them for you,” the other girl has started to say, and she listens because there isn’t much else she can do, hears the grin in the younger girl’s throat. “And it won’t even cost you anything for ten, whole, years.”
Theirs isn’t so much a kiss as the bump of dry lips on chapped, a child’s careless nuzzle of affection, but it’s enough.
=-=-=
It’s a while (twenty-four months, two years) before she remembers what had been said about ten, whole, years, and when she does she breaks a cup.
The cup’s still there when she returns from London a week later with library-found knowledge and a bottle of coarse-powdered lye, broken pieces of teal eggshell accusing against the milky-brown puddle-stain of forgotten breakfast tea. She pauses at the doorway of the kitchen for all of twenty-three seconds before she carefully steps over the mess. She figures that the fruit knife she retrieves is sharp enough to part the skin on her fingertips, though the cuts make picking up the tiny pellets with a pair of tweezers to slot into the pinkish-red slits a little more difficult than she likes.
It certainly hurts far more than she’d thought it would.
=-=-=
She celebrates her second day in America by picking ‘Bela’ on a whim.
(Dracula had played on the hotel television the night before, flickering and splendid in its black-and-white grainy glory.)
=-=-=
Crowley is dark-suited and unctuous, and she gratefully embraces how much of a relief he is after the enigma that is Sam and Dean Winchester, falls into the familiar pattern of bargain and offer with relish. She supposes she likes John Winchester’s boys well enough: Dean looks good in a suit, Sam looks better (she’s always been partial to taller men), and she’d gladly have angry sex with either or even both of them. They just puzzle her, leave her rattled with their unsettling questions and their inexplicable desire to help, and every encounter with them these days has her feeling insubstantial and over-exposed, taffy pulled out beneath too-bright kitchen lights and stretched thin.
Still, she likes to think that they’ll understand - Dean and his increasingly frantic terror as his deal draws to an end, Sam and his desperate determination to beat the odds and to win - when she strikes a deal with the demon on the price of Sam’s head.
=-=-=
The hounds are everything she has come to expect from their nightly howling, and for an unpleasant moment she is reminded of all she had ever read as a child. She thinks of Fenrir with his dripping jaws as he waits impatiently for Ragnarok, of Geri and Freki riding into battle with Odin and feasting on flesh in Valhalla. She thinks of Cerberus guarding the gates of Hades, of the Black Dogs said to roam the British Isles. She even thinks wildly of Harry Potter, and of the Devil’s Shoestring she’d left hanging above the door in her hotel room two states away.
Her gun is heavier than she remembers when she picks it up again, but it doesn’t hurt as much as she thinks it should.