SPN FIC - Legend (Part Two: Dean, Sam, and Jessica)
This is an AU the Muse handed me a little over a year ago. Maybe you remember the first part:
I'd heard whispered bits of the story since I was a kid. Just after Halloween, back in '83, the demon Azazel had crept into the nursery of a baby boy, intending to drip blood into the child's mouth and turn him into demon spawn.
But Mary Campbell was waiting for him.
She had a gun a stranger had brought to her family ten years before: a gun that could kill anything.
She used it to kill Azazel that night. Saved her child.
Then she disappeared.
The Muse is well known for being unpredictable when it comes to Things Of More Than One Chapter, so we're calling this a continuing AU. Each piece exists on its own, and is not necessarily a "chapter." It's the story of a young man with a lifelong journey, a need to restore the family he loves, an old car, and a lot of things that go bump in the night. It'll eventually include all the characters we know, but they'll be slightly different -- all because, this time, Mary Campbell told the truth.
Here's Part Two.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, Jess
GENRE: Gen (with background Sam/Jess), AU
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2315 words
LEGEND
By Carol Davis
Part Two: Dean, Sam, and Jessica
I've been lucky - I know that. Four months into my first real job, not quite six months after Jess and I relocated to Portland, I Erin Brockovich'ed myself into a case that looked like a lot of nothing to everybody else and turned out to be a gigantic pile of something. Seventeen months and one sympathetic jury later…
It was pure luck.
Things falling into the right places.
A lot of work, yes.
But luck.
I have Jess. I have a nice place to live: a big loft apartment above a bookstore and a Quiznos. Our bank account's in very good shape because of the nine-figure hit that that one particular defendant took, and the fact that my boss decided I deserved a hearty "thank you" in the form of a crazy-fat bonus check to go with the corner office with its wall of windows.
I can walk to work. On long weekends Jess and I drive out to Sunnyside and walk on the beach.
My life is pretty damn good.
I just wish my brother's was.
Dean likes to let himself in - through a window, usually, in spite of the fact that I've told him he can ring the bell like a normal person and I'll come down and open the door. He needs to keep his skill set up, he says, and that apparently includes being able to disable whatever security system is blocking his path. We've got one that cost almost three grand to install, with another hundred-and-some bucks in monthly fees, but it barely slows Dean down.
"You could get a job," I told him once. "Work as a consultant for some security firm. Like Abagnale. He works for the Feds now, you know."
Frank Abagnale is Dean's hero. He says that's not true, and that they could use the DiCaprio movie to induce vomiting, but anybody who could successfully kite two and a half million dollars' worth of checks, convince people that he was a doctor, an attorney, and an airline pilot, and lead the FBI around by the short hairs for years, all before he turned 21 - he's Daniel Boone and Zorro and Elvis Presley all rolled into one, as far as Dean is concerned. He's not a folk hero, he's a folk god.
"And that would accomplish what?" Dean asked me.
"A roof over your head, maybe?"
"Got a perfectly good roof over my head."
He meant the car. My brother is almost 32 years old, and for half of his life he's lived in his car. When he's not freeloading off of somebody, that is, or sleeping in some rat-trap motel.
Last night, apparently, he slept on my couch.
"Hey, Sammy," he said when I found him there, a little after five o'clock this morning.
"Dean."
From the look of him, the last thing he did before he broke into my apartment was chase the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Through the Black Lagoon. He was pretty much covered with dripping slime.
"Dude," I said. "My couch?"
"The fine thing about a leather couch - it's easy to wipe off."
"You could have taken a shower."
"Didn't want to wake you up."
I could trace his path back to the window he'd come in through, by following the slimy footprints that had dried on the hardwood floor. And on the rug in front of the couch. At least he didn't stink; there was that.
"Go take a shower," I told him.
He didn't move.
"What?" I asked.
He spent a couple of seconds looking at the floor. Then he looked at me and shrugged. "Kind of need you to come with me."
"Come where?"
"Few days. That's all."
Something in his voice prompted me to turn on a lamp and sit down on one of the chairs that faces the couch. Dean blinked at the light a couple of times, and grinned, as if he was fully aware of how ridiculous he looked, his clothes and his hair and his face all streaked with mud and drying slime and what was probably gore from some dead thing. When his expression settled down into being solemn, he looked like he was expecting - hell, I don't know what he was expecting.
"I got a lead," he said.
"On what?"
"Mom."
"Dean, man - again?"
"Just a couple days. Huh? We'll go check it out."
"I have to work, Dean."
"You can't take a couple days off? Come on. You're their golden boy. You put that place on the map. They won't let you take a few days?"
"What lead?" I asked.
"I found this guy. Singer. Bobby Singer. He sent me to this other guy."
"And where is Dad in all this?"
"What? I don't know. Last I heard from him, he was in Arizona somewhere."
"And he won't -"
"I'm asking you, Sam."
My brother's 32 years old. When he was 16 - when he was old enough that the government would let him make that particular decision - he dropped out of school. Dropped out of the life the three of us had back in Lawrence, and he hit the road. Said he couldn't sit there waiting any longer, that he needed some answers.
That he needed to find Mom.
He's been looking for her for sixteen years. Half his life.
I don't remember her. I don't even have that kind of vague half-memory people sometimes claim to have: a scent, a touch, the sound of her voice. She bailed on us when I was six months old and she's never been back. She's never made a phone call, or sent a postcard, and we've never found a single person who can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that the woman they saw or talked to was Mary Campbell Winchester. For all I know, she died years ago. It's certainly possible; she hunts things that more often than not, want to kill you, and the odds are pretty good that she came up against something that was stronger than she was. Or smarter. Or maybe just meaner.
She's a folk hero now. Like Frank Abagnale with longer hair.
Something hunters amuse each other with.
"Stay here for a while," I told Dean. "It'll be Thanksgiving soon. Stick around for the holidays."
"You want me to live here for six weeks."
"It's - yeah. It'll be fine."
"What about her?" he asked, and nodded toward the ceiling, toward the loft where Jess was (as far as I knew) still asleep. "It gonna be fine with her?"
I got us coffee from the coffeemaker that had clicked itself on fifteen minutes ago.
"The last time you dragged me away with you, I almost missed my admissions interview for law school," I reminded him.
"Said I'd get you back on time, and I did."
On time. With cuts and scrapes all over me, and a couple of bruised ribs that made me wince my way through the interview. Somebody'd seen Mom down around Jericho, a few hours' drive south of Palo Alto, but when we got there, all we found was a motel room full of old newspaper clippings and notes scribbled in what Dean claimed was her handwriting. The clerk remembered a woman but couldn't tell us what she looked like. That left us with nothing to do but finish what the woman had started: tracking down the spirit of Constance Welch, a little job that had left both of us beat half to hell and no closer to finding Mom than we'd been before we left Palo Alto.
"Take a shower," I told Dean. "I'll make us some breakfast."
"And then what?"
"Where's the lead?"
He shrugged again, and reached down to pick a big chunk of dried gunk off the cuff of his jeans. "Figured we'd head to Arizona first."
"So you have no idea where we'd be going."
"It's a good lead, Sam."
"Then go to Arizona. Get Dad."
It's been tough, with Dad. He and Dean said some things I figure they both regret, in that last couple of weeks before Dean hit the road. The stupidest part of it was, Dad pretty much agreed with everything Dean said. He wanted Mom back, too - but I think he wanted her back so he could make her explain herself, not so they could get back to building somebody's fantasy. We were never a regular family, were never going to be that. But that's what Dean's had in his head all these years, that all he needs to do is get the four of us together in a room somewhere, and poof. Leave It to Beaver-land. I've tried to tell him that what he could end up doing is making things worse, but he doesn't hear me.
Or maybe he does, but it hasn't stopped him.
"I kinda -" he said, and it was so soft I almost didn't hear him.
"Stay here, man. We'll figure something out. You can't keep doing this."
"It's a good lead, Sam."
There was a creak in the third step from the top, heading up to the loft. I think Jess stepped on it deliberately, made it creak so we'd hear her coming down. Maybe she'd been awake since I got out of bed - she was dressed, had brushed her hair, seemed ready to be a part of whatever was going on. She smiled at Dean when she got near the bottom, then moved on past me to get herself a cup of coffee. "Bathroom's free," she said over her shoulder. "You can go ahead and clean up if you want."
Maybe he figured he could plead his case better if he was clean and fed.
"He's like the damn swallows coming back to Capistrano," I said after Dean disappeared into the bathroom. "Every time he shows up here, he wants the same thing."
"To be with his brother?"
"You know what I mean."
I told her the truth the day before I graduated. I figured that was the least I could do for someone who'd stuck with me through all the stress and craziness of law school, doing her bit to keep things calm around me, making me tea, giving me back rubs, cheering me on when I wondered what the hell I was trying to do. She knows all of it now - at least, all of it that I know myself - and it hasn't thrown her. Not out the door, anyway.
She made me promise one thing: no deals. That I'll never do what my mom did, when she was sitting on the ground with my father's corpse in her lap and a demon at her shoulder, telling her she didn't need to be alone.
I promised her.
I just wish she could get Dean to promise the same thing, because I wonder sometimes how far he'll go, trying to grab hold of that fantasy life he thinks we all had before I turned six months old and Azazel walked into my nursery.
"He loves you, Sam," she said. "I think he comes here when he doesn't know where else to go."
"I can't give him what he wants."
"You can give him a few days."
"To do what? Drive around the country in search of a myth?"
She put her hand on my chest. Over my heart, yeah, but also over the ribs that had given me so much grief after I drove Dean's car through the front wall of Constance Welch's house. "Just be his brother," she said.
I'm lucky. I know that. She picked me.
"What would I do without you?" I asked her.
She answered the way she always does. "Crash and burn."
Henry, my boss, agreed to a week off (with the option for two) when I told him I had a family situation. Henry doesn't know much of the truth; doesn't know anything about what's out there in the dark, but he's aware of what my family background is. That my mother took off when I was a baby, that my dad and my brother have had a rough go of it since then, that my dad did a couple of years in state prison.
He's got no idea that my dad went for Dean. That Dean had a choice between saving somebody or taking the time to dot the i's and cross the t's, found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that Dad took the fall for him because there was no frigging way his kid was going to prison when he could do something about it.
Henry's got no idea you can save people on a regular basis, without a uniform or a badge.
My dad gave Dean the old Impala when he turned eighteen, after Dean had managed to go two whole years without getting himself killed - after Dean had come back to Lawrence to visit with almost five hundred dollars in his pocket and bearing the news that he'd rescued a family of five from something that'd been spreading blood around the landscape for the last hundred and fifty years. He was doing okay, he said, but hitching and taking the bus was a serious pain in the ass.
So Dad gave him a home.
When I got into the passenger seat for the first time in six years and creaked the door shut alongside me, I felt like I was getting myself into something that was going to last a lot longer than a week. The last time, I'd forced Dean to bring me back to Palo Alto after just a few days; had sent him on his way with the statement that I'd made my choice and he'd made his, and they were two radically different things.
I wished him well.
I've been lucky since then, and he really hasn't.
But maybe we can turn things around.
* * * * *
I'd heard whispered bits of the story since I was a kid. Just after Halloween, back in '83, the demon Azazel had crept into the nursery of a baby boy, intending to drip blood into the child's mouth and turn him into demon spawn.
But Mary Campbell was waiting for him.
She had a gun a stranger had brought to her family ten years before: a gun that could kill anything.
She used it to kill Azazel that night. Saved her child.
Then she disappeared.
The Muse is well known for being unpredictable when it comes to Things Of More Than One Chapter, so we're calling this a continuing AU. Each piece exists on its own, and is not necessarily a "chapter." It's the story of a young man with a lifelong journey, a need to restore the family he loves, an old car, and a lot of things that go bump in the night. It'll eventually include all the characters we know, but they'll be slightly different -- all because, this time, Mary Campbell told the truth.
Here's Part Two.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, Jess
GENRE: Gen (with background Sam/Jess), AU
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2315 words
LEGEND
By Carol Davis
Part Two: Dean, Sam, and Jessica
I've been lucky - I know that. Four months into my first real job, not quite six months after Jess and I relocated to Portland, I Erin Brockovich'ed myself into a case that looked like a lot of nothing to everybody else and turned out to be a gigantic pile of something. Seventeen months and one sympathetic jury later…
It was pure luck.
Things falling into the right places.
A lot of work, yes.
But luck.
I have Jess. I have a nice place to live: a big loft apartment above a bookstore and a Quiznos. Our bank account's in very good shape because of the nine-figure hit that that one particular defendant took, and the fact that my boss decided I deserved a hearty "thank you" in the form of a crazy-fat bonus check to go with the corner office with its wall of windows.
I can walk to work. On long weekends Jess and I drive out to Sunnyside and walk on the beach.
My life is pretty damn good.
I just wish my brother's was.
Dean likes to let himself in - through a window, usually, in spite of the fact that I've told him he can ring the bell like a normal person and I'll come down and open the door. He needs to keep his skill set up, he says, and that apparently includes being able to disable whatever security system is blocking his path. We've got one that cost almost three grand to install, with another hundred-and-some bucks in monthly fees, but it barely slows Dean down.
"You could get a job," I told him once. "Work as a consultant for some security firm. Like Abagnale. He works for the Feds now, you know."
Frank Abagnale is Dean's hero. He says that's not true, and that they could use the DiCaprio movie to induce vomiting, but anybody who could successfully kite two and a half million dollars' worth of checks, convince people that he was a doctor, an attorney, and an airline pilot, and lead the FBI around by the short hairs for years, all before he turned 21 - he's Daniel Boone and Zorro and Elvis Presley all rolled into one, as far as Dean is concerned. He's not a folk hero, he's a folk god.
"And that would accomplish what?" Dean asked me.
"A roof over your head, maybe?"
"Got a perfectly good roof over my head."
He meant the car. My brother is almost 32 years old, and for half of his life he's lived in his car. When he's not freeloading off of somebody, that is, or sleeping in some rat-trap motel.
Last night, apparently, he slept on my couch.
"Hey, Sammy," he said when I found him there, a little after five o'clock this morning.
"Dean."
From the look of him, the last thing he did before he broke into my apartment was chase the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Through the Black Lagoon. He was pretty much covered with dripping slime.
"Dude," I said. "My couch?"
"The fine thing about a leather couch - it's easy to wipe off."
"You could have taken a shower."
"Didn't want to wake you up."
I could trace his path back to the window he'd come in through, by following the slimy footprints that had dried on the hardwood floor. And on the rug in front of the couch. At least he didn't stink; there was that.
"Go take a shower," I told him.
He didn't move.
"What?" I asked.
He spent a couple of seconds looking at the floor. Then he looked at me and shrugged. "Kind of need you to come with me."
"Come where?"
"Few days. That's all."
Something in his voice prompted me to turn on a lamp and sit down on one of the chairs that faces the couch. Dean blinked at the light a couple of times, and grinned, as if he was fully aware of how ridiculous he looked, his clothes and his hair and his face all streaked with mud and drying slime and what was probably gore from some dead thing. When his expression settled down into being solemn, he looked like he was expecting - hell, I don't know what he was expecting.
"I got a lead," he said.
"On what?"
"Mom."
"Dean, man - again?"
"Just a couple days. Huh? We'll go check it out."
"I have to work, Dean."
"You can't take a couple days off? Come on. You're their golden boy. You put that place on the map. They won't let you take a few days?"
"What lead?" I asked.
"I found this guy. Singer. Bobby Singer. He sent me to this other guy."
"And where is Dad in all this?"
"What? I don't know. Last I heard from him, he was in Arizona somewhere."
"And he won't -"
"I'm asking you, Sam."
My brother's 32 years old. When he was 16 - when he was old enough that the government would let him make that particular decision - he dropped out of school. Dropped out of the life the three of us had back in Lawrence, and he hit the road. Said he couldn't sit there waiting any longer, that he needed some answers.
That he needed to find Mom.
He's been looking for her for sixteen years. Half his life.
I don't remember her. I don't even have that kind of vague half-memory people sometimes claim to have: a scent, a touch, the sound of her voice. She bailed on us when I was six months old and she's never been back. She's never made a phone call, or sent a postcard, and we've never found a single person who can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that the woman they saw or talked to was Mary Campbell Winchester. For all I know, she died years ago. It's certainly possible; she hunts things that more often than not, want to kill you, and the odds are pretty good that she came up against something that was stronger than she was. Or smarter. Or maybe just meaner.
She's a folk hero now. Like Frank Abagnale with longer hair.
Something hunters amuse each other with.
"Stay here for a while," I told Dean. "It'll be Thanksgiving soon. Stick around for the holidays."
"You want me to live here for six weeks."
"It's - yeah. It'll be fine."
"What about her?" he asked, and nodded toward the ceiling, toward the loft where Jess was (as far as I knew) still asleep. "It gonna be fine with her?"
I got us coffee from the coffeemaker that had clicked itself on fifteen minutes ago.
"The last time you dragged me away with you, I almost missed my admissions interview for law school," I reminded him.
"Said I'd get you back on time, and I did."
On time. With cuts and scrapes all over me, and a couple of bruised ribs that made me wince my way through the interview. Somebody'd seen Mom down around Jericho, a few hours' drive south of Palo Alto, but when we got there, all we found was a motel room full of old newspaper clippings and notes scribbled in what Dean claimed was her handwriting. The clerk remembered a woman but couldn't tell us what she looked like. That left us with nothing to do but finish what the woman had started: tracking down the spirit of Constance Welch, a little job that had left both of us beat half to hell and no closer to finding Mom than we'd been before we left Palo Alto.
"Take a shower," I told Dean. "I'll make us some breakfast."
"And then what?"
"Where's the lead?"
He shrugged again, and reached down to pick a big chunk of dried gunk off the cuff of his jeans. "Figured we'd head to Arizona first."
"So you have no idea where we'd be going."
"It's a good lead, Sam."
"Then go to Arizona. Get Dad."
It's been tough, with Dad. He and Dean said some things I figure they both regret, in that last couple of weeks before Dean hit the road. The stupidest part of it was, Dad pretty much agreed with everything Dean said. He wanted Mom back, too - but I think he wanted her back so he could make her explain herself, not so they could get back to building somebody's fantasy. We were never a regular family, were never going to be that. But that's what Dean's had in his head all these years, that all he needs to do is get the four of us together in a room somewhere, and poof. Leave It to Beaver-land. I've tried to tell him that what he could end up doing is making things worse, but he doesn't hear me.
Or maybe he does, but it hasn't stopped him.
"I kinda -" he said, and it was so soft I almost didn't hear him.
"Stay here, man. We'll figure something out. You can't keep doing this."
"It's a good lead, Sam."
There was a creak in the third step from the top, heading up to the loft. I think Jess stepped on it deliberately, made it creak so we'd hear her coming down. Maybe she'd been awake since I got out of bed - she was dressed, had brushed her hair, seemed ready to be a part of whatever was going on. She smiled at Dean when she got near the bottom, then moved on past me to get herself a cup of coffee. "Bathroom's free," she said over her shoulder. "You can go ahead and clean up if you want."
Maybe he figured he could plead his case better if he was clean and fed.
"He's like the damn swallows coming back to Capistrano," I said after Dean disappeared into the bathroom. "Every time he shows up here, he wants the same thing."
"To be with his brother?"
"You know what I mean."
I told her the truth the day before I graduated. I figured that was the least I could do for someone who'd stuck with me through all the stress and craziness of law school, doing her bit to keep things calm around me, making me tea, giving me back rubs, cheering me on when I wondered what the hell I was trying to do. She knows all of it now - at least, all of it that I know myself - and it hasn't thrown her. Not out the door, anyway.
She made me promise one thing: no deals. That I'll never do what my mom did, when she was sitting on the ground with my father's corpse in her lap and a demon at her shoulder, telling her she didn't need to be alone.
I promised her.
I just wish she could get Dean to promise the same thing, because I wonder sometimes how far he'll go, trying to grab hold of that fantasy life he thinks we all had before I turned six months old and Azazel walked into my nursery.
"He loves you, Sam," she said. "I think he comes here when he doesn't know where else to go."
"I can't give him what he wants."
"You can give him a few days."
"To do what? Drive around the country in search of a myth?"
She put her hand on my chest. Over my heart, yeah, but also over the ribs that had given me so much grief after I drove Dean's car through the front wall of Constance Welch's house. "Just be his brother," she said.
I'm lucky. I know that. She picked me.
"What would I do without you?" I asked her.
She answered the way she always does. "Crash and burn."
Henry, my boss, agreed to a week off (with the option for two) when I told him I had a family situation. Henry doesn't know much of the truth; doesn't know anything about what's out there in the dark, but he's aware of what my family background is. That my mother took off when I was a baby, that my dad and my brother have had a rough go of it since then, that my dad did a couple of years in state prison.
He's got no idea that my dad went for Dean. That Dean had a choice between saving somebody or taking the time to dot the i's and cross the t's, found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that Dad took the fall for him because there was no frigging way his kid was going to prison when he could do something about it.
Henry's got no idea you can save people on a regular basis, without a uniform or a badge.
My dad gave Dean the old Impala when he turned eighteen, after Dean had managed to go two whole years without getting himself killed - after Dean had come back to Lawrence to visit with almost five hundred dollars in his pocket and bearing the news that he'd rescued a family of five from something that'd been spreading blood around the landscape for the last hundred and fifty years. He was doing okay, he said, but hitching and taking the bus was a serious pain in the ass.
So Dad gave him a home.
When I got into the passenger seat for the first time in six years and creaked the door shut alongside me, I felt like I was getting myself into something that was going to last a lot longer than a week. The last time, I'd forced Dean to bring me back to Palo Alto after just a few days; had sent him on his way with the statement that I'd made my choice and he'd made his, and they were two radically different things.
I wished him well.
I've been lucky since then, and he really hasn't.
But maybe we can turn things around.
* * * * *