SPN FIC - Legend (Part Nine: Sam and Missouri)
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.
Legends are told in bits and pieces, spread by word of mouth over the years. This is the story of Mary Campbell's family: the husband to whom she told the truth of who she was. The son who grieved the loss of her so deeply that he spent half his life on the road alone, searching for her. And the son who found success, and love, and peace ... until things went a little bit sideways.
Part One: Dean and Jo
Part Two: Dean, Sam, and Jessica
Part Three: John and Deacon
Part Four: Missouri and Pamela
Part Five: Sam and Dean
Part Six: John, Mary, Dean and Sam
Part Seven: Dean and Pamela
Part Eight: Deanna and Samuel
CHARACTERS: Sam and Missouri Mosely
GENRE: Gen (AU)
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2327 words
LEGEND
By Carol Davis
Nine: Sam and Missouri
Missouri made her living lying to people. Yes, all right, she called it "Giving them what they needed," but it was still lying. Leaving out pertinent pieces of the truth, or leaving the truth in the rearview mirror - it's pretty much the same thing.
Which doesn't mean I don't agree with what she did.
Most of the time.
I followed her upstairs after we finished our Thanksgiving dinner. Not the Chinese food Dad would have shared with Deacon out in Little Rock, or the turkey-and-fixins I would have had with Jess, if the two of us had stayed home in Portland. Instead, we had meat loaf sandwiches and soup. Maybe that's some sort of Southern tradition, but I doubt it. Either way, somehow, Missouri had enough leftover meat loaf hanging around to feed the Green Bay Packers. The soup came out of cans, a different variety for each of us. So Thanksgiving dinner wasn't traditional. Neither was Missouri telling us that the ghosts of Mom's parents had decided to join us.
When we got to my old bedroom (which, once upon a time, had been Mom's room), Missouri winked at me like she'd known I was going to follow her even before she got up out of her chair. Then she wandered around the room a little bit. Picking up impressions, I supposed, even though she'd lived in this house for years and if there were impressions to be found, they were probably as familiar to her as an old sweater.
"Your mama dreamed about your daddy in this room," she said after a while.
"That's - enough information, I think."
"Of course, if Paul McCartney had showed up at the front door, your daddy wouldn't have stood much of a chance."
"You figure Paul McCartney might have shown up in Lawrence."
"Doesn't matter if I think it. If she could have wished it so, she would have."
I knew about the whole Mom's-crush-on-the-Beatles thing. From Dad, and from the old scrapbook we'd found in a box in the attic. Lots of pictures of McCartney clipped out of magazines and decorated with little pink hearts. Mom had put it together when she was eleven or twelve, I think; it's one of the few things we have that show she was a normal girl once. Not a hunter. Not a demon-killer who bailed on her family in the middle of the night.
"Rufus Turner told Dean there was a lead," I said. "Is there, or isn't there?"
"If Rufus said so, then I suppose there is."
"Missouri -"
I'd known this woman my entire life. She took care of me and Dean for a couple of long stretches while we were kids, so Dad could go off and meet with somebody who might know somebody who'd seen Mom. Dad still loved Mom desperately, then, people tell me, and would have done anything to find her, so he could convince her to come back. After a dozen years of finding nothing, he gave up trying, just in time for Dean to pick up the ball.
Me? I had Missouri.
"He's been following this wild goose chase half his life," I said, keeping my voice low. "He can't keep doing this."
"I know that, baby."
"Then can't you -"
She made her living by lying to people. She was damn good at it. She could have told Dean some kind of fish story, and he would have bought it.
She watched me sit down on the edge of my old bed and drop my head into my hands. "If there was a way I could give your brother some peace, Sam, I would have done it a long time ago. You were just a baby - you didn't see. But all the nights I tucked that little boy into bed so he could cry himself to sleep - it's enough to break your heart."
"Is there a lead?" I asked her.
"Maybe Rufus sent him back to his family."
"That won't be good enough, Missouri. You know that. I offered to help him find a job and a place to live near me and Jess. Dad offered to move out there so we could all be together. It's not Dad's first choice, but he said he'd do it if it would let Dean have some kind of a life. But Dean won't even consider it. He says he's not the kind to settle down. He says he's got a job to do. All it boils down to is, he won't rest until he finds Mom. Or until he's dead. So I'm asking you: is there a legitimate lead, or isn't there? I've heard about Rufus Turner, and I find it hard to believe he's worried enough about Dean's welfare to send him home for Thanksgiving, like this whole thing is some Lifetime TV movie."
There was something in her expression I couldn't figure out. She seemed to be listening to someone, or something, that wasn't me.
"Missouri?"
"Hush a minute," she said.
I gave her her minute, and it made me think of that stretch of time when I was eleven, starting the sixth grade, playing soccer and thinking about Maryann Dominski. I started having dreams back then. You'd think they were about Maryann (after all, I was sleeping in the room where my twelve-year-old mother had lusted over a Beatle), but they weren't. I dreamed about winning lottery numbers. About my history teacher getting sick the night before he was supposed to give us a big test. About the location of the keyring my dad had misplaced.
Dean started calling me "psychic boy," but I didn't think it was funny, and I don't think he did either.
One night I dreamed about Mom.
It was just a dream, I told Dean in the morning, when he - as he always did - started dogging me about what had gone on between my ears during the night. He'd started telling me I should dream about the lottery tickets before it was too late to buy one, so we could strike it rich. Or that we should go into business finding lost things that had a reward attached to them. That was fine (if a little annoying) - indulging Dean while he put together his get-rich-quick schemes. Then I had to go and dream about Mom. And make the mistake of telling Dean.
I dreamed that she was out there somewhere. Hunting.
Of course she was out there somewhere; I don't think any of us believed at that point that she'd been killed. What Dad had begun to stop believing by then was that looking for her was a good use of anybody's time and energy. She'd been gone for eleven years and had made no attempt to contact any of us. She was long gone, she obviously wanted to stay gone, and that was all there was to it. Dad, to his great regret, was going to move on.
"Where?" Dean demanded. "Where was she? What was she doing?"
It was a dream, I told him. Just a stupid dream.
He badgered me for hours.
I was "psychic" just long enough to predict three lottery winners, find a keyring for Dad, know that Maryann Dominski was going to show up at school wearing a new pink sweater - and drive my brother out of the house.
"It's all my fault," I told Missouri.
I'd told her the same thing, back when I was eleven-going-on-twelve. I was sitting in the same place, on the edge of the bed I'd had all those dreams in, and she was standing close by, with a look of pity and understanding on her face. Then, as now, she took the few steps that brought her close to the bed and rested a warm, gentle hand on my cheek.
"I ruined Dean's life," I said. "I had a stupid dream, and I ruined my brother's life."
"It wasn't you, Sam."
"Then who was it? He was…he went to school. He worked on the car. He went to the movies. He went out on dates. Everything was normal. Everything was perfectly fine, until I had that stupid dream. I never should have said anything."
"You were just a child, baby."
"I was old enough to know better."
What was I thinking then? The kid who lived in this room. The one who helped win a Division soccer tournament and kept the trophy over there on the dresser until Dad asked to keep it in his room. The one who wondered about kissing Maryann Dominski. The one who scribbled short stories in a spiral notebook and thought about becoming a science fiction writer.
Maybe it was just a random dream, about the woman I knew only from old pictures.
Maybe it was something else.
Either way, the dreams stopped after Dean left. No more lottery winners, no more found objects.
"I'd do anything to give him some peace," I told Missouri.
"He knows that."
There was one other thing that happened while I was living in this house, in the years before puberty kicked in and I stopped being in any way psychic. For a period of time when I was about four years old, I kept telling Dad that I'd seen a couple of strangers walking around our house. A balding man with big ears, and a woman with short hair and a nice smile. Most often, I saw them when I was just beginning to wake up in the morning; other times, I glimpsed them when I looked up from playing or drawing. Missouri says it happened when my mind was "loose." Sometimes the two of them were together, sometimes I saw them separately. The woman seemed to be aware that I was seeing her, but the man never did. It wasn't until some time later that someone told me the people I'd seen were my grandparents, the ones who'd died in this house.
"You mean it's haunted?" I'd said, thinking that was enormously cool, that it would make an impressive story to tell my classmates.
Missouri had told me it wasn't. That something had drawn my grandparents back.
Apparently, it was drawing them back again.
"We're all here, then," I said. "We're all home for Thanksgiving. Except that we're missing one. And we've got a substitute."
Missouri nodded.
It wasn't an encouraging nod.
"You knew we were coming," I went on. "You had enough meat loaf down there for an army. Unless you're going to tell me you're addicted to meat loaf. That you're running around moaning, 'I gotta have my fix. Oh my lord, I gotta have it.'"
She raised an eyebrow at me.
This room was always a kid's room, we think. It belonged to one of Emily Burnley's daughters back in the Twenties, when the house was new; her name is scratched into the back of the closet door, down near the floor. Forty years later it was my mom's room. When I came along, it was turned into my nursery - and it was in this room that my mom took aim with a hundred-and-fifty-year-old Colt revolver and killed a yellow-eyed demon named Azazel.
You'd think something like that would be cause enough to wall off this room and pretend it wasn't here. Instead, my mom pulled everything out of it, scrubbed it down, repainted it, then had somebody come in and bless it: a strange guy in an old, beat-up duster who would say nothing whatsoever to my dad and called my mother "Mariah."
After that, it was just a room. Again.
When I stopped looking around, smiling at little at some of the memories being here brought back and cringing a little at some of the others, I turned back to look at Missouri.
As I did, I caught a glimpse of something reflected in the window. That side of the house faced the back yard, and since it was full dark outside, the glass was as good as a mirror.
I saw my grandfather.
Anyone else - anyone who didn't have our family history - would have been startled. Spooked. Anyone else would have been frozen in place, or would have gone running out of the room. Maybe, out of the house. I just sat there looking at him. As had happened when I was four, he paid no attention to me. He seemed to be looking for something, or maybe, checking to see if everything was where he thought it should be.
"When did he come back?" I asked Missouri.
"A few days ago."
"And…my grandmother? At the same time?"
"Give or take."
I watched him for a minute, reflected in the dark glass of the window, and realized what he was doing was checking salt lines and the sigils carved into the woodwork. Back when he'd lived here, as they were now, the sigils were covered with curtains. The salt lines were laid into grooves between the floorboards. I was accustomed to all of that throughout my childhood; had to make do with a lesser version of it while I was living in a dorm at college. Once I had my own place, I went back to setting it all in place full strength.
Maybe it's helped. Maybe it hasn't. Who knows.
"Taking care of us," Missouri said softly.
"You think? He's not just recreating something he did when he was alive?"
She looked at me long and hard. The psychic stuff was long gone by the time I got to high school, but I didn't need to read minds to know what she was thinking.
"It's Pamela, isn't it?" I asked. "It should be Mom here, not her. And she's the one Rufus said Dean should go to."
I could see my grandmother in the window now. She was standing in the bedroom doorway, watching my grandfather go about his work.
Protecting us.
"I think we'd better go tell Dad what's going on," I said.
* * * * *
Legends are told in bits and pieces, spread by word of mouth over the years. This is the story of Mary Campbell's family: the husband to whom she told the truth of who she was. The son who grieved the loss of her so deeply that he spent half his life on the road alone, searching for her. And the son who found success, and love, and peace ... until things went a little bit sideways.
Part One: Dean and Jo
Part Two: Dean, Sam, and Jessica
Part Three: John and Deacon
Part Four: Missouri and Pamela
Part Five: Sam and Dean
Part Six: John, Mary, Dean and Sam
Part Seven: Dean and Pamela
Part Eight: Deanna and Samuel
CHARACTERS: Sam and Missouri Mosely
GENRE: Gen (AU)
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2327 words
LEGEND
By Carol Davis
Nine: Sam and Missouri
Missouri made her living lying to people. Yes, all right, she called it "Giving them what they needed," but it was still lying. Leaving out pertinent pieces of the truth, or leaving the truth in the rearview mirror - it's pretty much the same thing.
Which doesn't mean I don't agree with what she did.
Most of the time.
I followed her upstairs after we finished our Thanksgiving dinner. Not the Chinese food Dad would have shared with Deacon out in Little Rock, or the turkey-and-fixins I would have had with Jess, if the two of us had stayed home in Portland. Instead, we had meat loaf sandwiches and soup. Maybe that's some sort of Southern tradition, but I doubt it. Either way, somehow, Missouri had enough leftover meat loaf hanging around to feed the Green Bay Packers. The soup came out of cans, a different variety for each of us. So Thanksgiving dinner wasn't traditional. Neither was Missouri telling us that the ghosts of Mom's parents had decided to join us.
When we got to my old bedroom (which, once upon a time, had been Mom's room), Missouri winked at me like she'd known I was going to follow her even before she got up out of her chair. Then she wandered around the room a little bit. Picking up impressions, I supposed, even though she'd lived in this house for years and if there were impressions to be found, they were probably as familiar to her as an old sweater.
"Your mama dreamed about your daddy in this room," she said after a while.
"That's - enough information, I think."
"Of course, if Paul McCartney had showed up at the front door, your daddy wouldn't have stood much of a chance."
"You figure Paul McCartney might have shown up in Lawrence."
"Doesn't matter if I think it. If she could have wished it so, she would have."
I knew about the whole Mom's-crush-on-the-Beatles thing. From Dad, and from the old scrapbook we'd found in a box in the attic. Lots of pictures of McCartney clipped out of magazines and decorated with little pink hearts. Mom had put it together when she was eleven or twelve, I think; it's one of the few things we have that show she was a normal girl once. Not a hunter. Not a demon-killer who bailed on her family in the middle of the night.
"Rufus Turner told Dean there was a lead," I said. "Is there, or isn't there?"
"If Rufus said so, then I suppose there is."
"Missouri -"
I'd known this woman my entire life. She took care of me and Dean for a couple of long stretches while we were kids, so Dad could go off and meet with somebody who might know somebody who'd seen Mom. Dad still loved Mom desperately, then, people tell me, and would have done anything to find her, so he could convince her to come back. After a dozen years of finding nothing, he gave up trying, just in time for Dean to pick up the ball.
Me? I had Missouri.
"He's been following this wild goose chase half his life," I said, keeping my voice low. "He can't keep doing this."
"I know that, baby."
"Then can't you -"
She made her living by lying to people. She was damn good at it. She could have told Dean some kind of fish story, and he would have bought it.
She watched me sit down on the edge of my old bed and drop my head into my hands. "If there was a way I could give your brother some peace, Sam, I would have done it a long time ago. You were just a baby - you didn't see. But all the nights I tucked that little boy into bed so he could cry himself to sleep - it's enough to break your heart."
"Is there a lead?" I asked her.
"Maybe Rufus sent him back to his family."
"That won't be good enough, Missouri. You know that. I offered to help him find a job and a place to live near me and Jess. Dad offered to move out there so we could all be together. It's not Dad's first choice, but he said he'd do it if it would let Dean have some kind of a life. But Dean won't even consider it. He says he's not the kind to settle down. He says he's got a job to do. All it boils down to is, he won't rest until he finds Mom. Or until he's dead. So I'm asking you: is there a legitimate lead, or isn't there? I've heard about Rufus Turner, and I find it hard to believe he's worried enough about Dean's welfare to send him home for Thanksgiving, like this whole thing is some Lifetime TV movie."
There was something in her expression I couldn't figure out. She seemed to be listening to someone, or something, that wasn't me.
"Missouri?"
"Hush a minute," she said.
I gave her her minute, and it made me think of that stretch of time when I was eleven, starting the sixth grade, playing soccer and thinking about Maryann Dominski. I started having dreams back then. You'd think they were about Maryann (after all, I was sleeping in the room where my twelve-year-old mother had lusted over a Beatle), but they weren't. I dreamed about winning lottery numbers. About my history teacher getting sick the night before he was supposed to give us a big test. About the location of the keyring my dad had misplaced.
Dean started calling me "psychic boy," but I didn't think it was funny, and I don't think he did either.
One night I dreamed about Mom.
It was just a dream, I told Dean in the morning, when he - as he always did - started dogging me about what had gone on between my ears during the night. He'd started telling me I should dream about the lottery tickets before it was too late to buy one, so we could strike it rich. Or that we should go into business finding lost things that had a reward attached to them. That was fine (if a little annoying) - indulging Dean while he put together his get-rich-quick schemes. Then I had to go and dream about Mom. And make the mistake of telling Dean.
I dreamed that she was out there somewhere. Hunting.
Of course she was out there somewhere; I don't think any of us believed at that point that she'd been killed. What Dad had begun to stop believing by then was that looking for her was a good use of anybody's time and energy. She'd been gone for eleven years and had made no attempt to contact any of us. She was long gone, she obviously wanted to stay gone, and that was all there was to it. Dad, to his great regret, was going to move on.
"Where?" Dean demanded. "Where was she? What was she doing?"
It was a dream, I told him. Just a stupid dream.
He badgered me for hours.
I was "psychic" just long enough to predict three lottery winners, find a keyring for Dad, know that Maryann Dominski was going to show up at school wearing a new pink sweater - and drive my brother out of the house.
"It's all my fault," I told Missouri.
I'd told her the same thing, back when I was eleven-going-on-twelve. I was sitting in the same place, on the edge of the bed I'd had all those dreams in, and she was standing close by, with a look of pity and understanding on her face. Then, as now, she took the few steps that brought her close to the bed and rested a warm, gentle hand on my cheek.
"I ruined Dean's life," I said. "I had a stupid dream, and I ruined my brother's life."
"It wasn't you, Sam."
"Then who was it? He was…he went to school. He worked on the car. He went to the movies. He went out on dates. Everything was normal. Everything was perfectly fine, until I had that stupid dream. I never should have said anything."
"You were just a child, baby."
"I was old enough to know better."
What was I thinking then? The kid who lived in this room. The one who helped win a Division soccer tournament and kept the trophy over there on the dresser until Dad asked to keep it in his room. The one who wondered about kissing Maryann Dominski. The one who scribbled short stories in a spiral notebook and thought about becoming a science fiction writer.
Maybe it was just a random dream, about the woman I knew only from old pictures.
Maybe it was something else.
Either way, the dreams stopped after Dean left. No more lottery winners, no more found objects.
"I'd do anything to give him some peace," I told Missouri.
"He knows that."
There was one other thing that happened while I was living in this house, in the years before puberty kicked in and I stopped being in any way psychic. For a period of time when I was about four years old, I kept telling Dad that I'd seen a couple of strangers walking around our house. A balding man with big ears, and a woman with short hair and a nice smile. Most often, I saw them when I was just beginning to wake up in the morning; other times, I glimpsed them when I looked up from playing or drawing. Missouri says it happened when my mind was "loose." Sometimes the two of them were together, sometimes I saw them separately. The woman seemed to be aware that I was seeing her, but the man never did. It wasn't until some time later that someone told me the people I'd seen were my grandparents, the ones who'd died in this house.
"You mean it's haunted?" I'd said, thinking that was enormously cool, that it would make an impressive story to tell my classmates.
Missouri had told me it wasn't. That something had drawn my grandparents back.
Apparently, it was drawing them back again.
"We're all here, then," I said. "We're all home for Thanksgiving. Except that we're missing one. And we've got a substitute."
Missouri nodded.
It wasn't an encouraging nod.
"You knew we were coming," I went on. "You had enough meat loaf down there for an army. Unless you're going to tell me you're addicted to meat loaf. That you're running around moaning, 'I gotta have my fix. Oh my lord, I gotta have it.'"
She raised an eyebrow at me.
This room was always a kid's room, we think. It belonged to one of Emily Burnley's daughters back in the Twenties, when the house was new; her name is scratched into the back of the closet door, down near the floor. Forty years later it was my mom's room. When I came along, it was turned into my nursery - and it was in this room that my mom took aim with a hundred-and-fifty-year-old Colt revolver and killed a yellow-eyed demon named Azazel.
You'd think something like that would be cause enough to wall off this room and pretend it wasn't here. Instead, my mom pulled everything out of it, scrubbed it down, repainted it, then had somebody come in and bless it: a strange guy in an old, beat-up duster who would say nothing whatsoever to my dad and called my mother "Mariah."
After that, it was just a room. Again.
When I stopped looking around, smiling at little at some of the memories being here brought back and cringing a little at some of the others, I turned back to look at Missouri.
As I did, I caught a glimpse of something reflected in the window. That side of the house faced the back yard, and since it was full dark outside, the glass was as good as a mirror.
I saw my grandfather.
Anyone else - anyone who didn't have our family history - would have been startled. Spooked. Anyone else would have been frozen in place, or would have gone running out of the room. Maybe, out of the house. I just sat there looking at him. As had happened when I was four, he paid no attention to me. He seemed to be looking for something, or maybe, checking to see if everything was where he thought it should be.
"When did he come back?" I asked Missouri.
"A few days ago."
"And…my grandmother? At the same time?"
"Give or take."
I watched him for a minute, reflected in the dark glass of the window, and realized what he was doing was checking salt lines and the sigils carved into the woodwork. Back when he'd lived here, as they were now, the sigils were covered with curtains. The salt lines were laid into grooves between the floorboards. I was accustomed to all of that throughout my childhood; had to make do with a lesser version of it while I was living in a dorm at college. Once I had my own place, I went back to setting it all in place full strength.
Maybe it's helped. Maybe it hasn't. Who knows.
"Taking care of us," Missouri said softly.
"You think? He's not just recreating something he did when he was alive?"
She looked at me long and hard. The psychic stuff was long gone by the time I got to high school, but I didn't need to read minds to know what she was thinking.
"It's Pamela, isn't it?" I asked. "It should be Mom here, not her. And she's the one Rufus said Dean should go to."
I could see my grandmother in the window now. She was standing in the bedroom doorway, watching my grandfather go about his work.
Protecting us.
"I think we'd better go tell Dad what's going on," I said.
* * * * *