Corner of Your Eye (10/14)
Fandom: Supernatural/Stargate
Title: Corner of Your Eye
Author: Maychorian
Characters: Jack O'Neill, Dean Winchester
Category: Action/Adventure, Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Crossover, Angst
Rating: T/PG-13
Spoilers: Pilot for SPN, up to Season 9 for SG-1
Summary: Jack O'Neill is not very good at being retired. Dean Winchester is not very good at staying out of trouble. And there's something lurking in these here woods….
Word Count: 2021
Disclaimer: As soon as I own them, you'll know. Oh yes, yes, the day is coming.
Author’s Note: Ah, finally, a PLOT appears! ::whistles and cheers::
Complete chapter list: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14
The story is also available in one document on my website: Corner of Your Eye
10
Microfiche. Jack blinked and rubbed his eyes, trying to force them to focus, blurry and crossed from staring at the glowing screen for who-knows-how-long. If microfiche still existed anywhere, of course it would be in the offices of small newspapers in tiny towns in the woods of Minnesota. The internet had come here eventually, but apparently scanners hadn’t made it yet.
Jack glanced over to where Dean sat at the table, flipping through archives of physical papers. He’d been an idiot, giving the smart-mouthed kid the easier job. Dean had shown no appreciation for the consideration, merely grumbling about the evils of research and the horrifying fact that it had to be done at all.
As Jack watched, though, Dean absently reached a hand up to touch the back of his head, then jerked his fingers away before they touched down, forehead wrinkling momentarily before he smoothed it away. Oh yeah. That was why Jack had let him have the regular papers. Dumb idea. Now they would both have headaches, instead of just one of them having a really, really bad one.
“Found anything?” Jack asked. As he had been asking every ten minutes or so for, oh, a couple of hours, maybe.
Dean glanced up, lips pursed. “I’m not hiding anything from you, dude. The minute I spot something, I’ll let you know.”
“Yeah, sure.” Jack looked back at the screen, and felt his eyes immediately crossing again, retaliating for the indignity of the past few hours. His brain was throwing in the towel. Enough of this. I’m a retired Air Force Major General. I don’t have to put up with microfiche.
“Um, Dean?”
An exasperated huff at yet one more interruption, and Dean threw his head to the side to look at him, eyes wide and eyebrows so high that they nearly cleared his hairline, though his voice remained perfectly calm and composed. It was the way you would treat a toddler who kept asking why why why. “Yes, Jack?”
“I’m just gonna go stretch my legs for a bit, okay? I’ll be right back.”
“Sure. Do whatever you gotta do.”
Jack exited the back room, through the little news den and into the foyer, where he gave the receptionist a friendly smile and tip of the chin. She blushed, still fully under the spell of the combined Winchester-O’Neill charm. They had probably laid it on a little thick when they came in earlier, claiming to be researching their genealogy, uncle and nephew.
Outside, Jack slipped around a corner and flipped open his cell phone, hitting two familiar buttons with hardly a thought. The phone on the other end rang twice, then again, and he hoped that this wouldn’t be one of those times, when Jack would end up just letting it ring and ring and ring until he got annoyed enough to send an email, even though he far preferred vocal contact. Daniel still hadn’t gotten around to setting up voice mail, darn him, and how hard was that, anyway?
But he picked up on the third ring, a little out of breath, voice bright with curiosity, words tumbling over each other. “Jack? Hey, I was hoping you would call back. I wasn’t really paying attention last time-was in the middle of translating something for SG-11, high priority, they’re heading back tomorrow-so it didn’t occur to me till later, but did you ask me something about monsters? Monsters and salt? That’s weird, even for you. Did I actually answer your question? I don’t really remember. I was busy.”
Jack grinned. He could see Daniel in his mind’s eye, leaning forward in his chair, expressive eyes sharply focused, fully engaged in this new puzzle. “Yeah, I kinda got that impression. You answered. You were right, too.”
“I was? Oh, that’s good. Wait, how do you know? What’s going on, Jack? Are you in some kind of trouble?” Daniel’s voice went stern. “Do I need to send some marines to help you out? I will, you know. Landry listens to me.”
“Good for him. And I’m fine, thanks. Listen, I was hoping you’d be able to help out with a little research. You’re at your computer, right? You still have access to all those databases and stuff?”
“Yes, yes, top secret, hush hush, the combined knowledge of the United States government ready at my fingertips. You’re going to have to convince me that I ought to help you, though. What’s this about?”
Jack reeled for a moment, barely able to think. What’s this about? It’s about the whole world being turned on its ear, Daniel, it’s about monsters in the closet and ghosts in the graveyard and poor helpless kids being killed before their time, and I can’t stand by, I can’t, so don’t even think about asking it. Oh, and there’s this boy, this young man, and we’re kind of working together now. I think he’s just as cut off from the world as you were when you came back from Abydos, missing family like missing a limb, and he trusts me now, sort of, and I can’t betray that.
“I’m just looking into something that I think the local authorities might have missed, that’s all. It’s probably nothing. I just want to make sure.”
He could hear the exhaled breath, the touch of relaxation in Daniel’s voice. “Well, if it turns out not to be nothing, you’ll get backup, right?”
“Yeah, I promise. This is just…curiosity. Saw a story in the newspaper that got my hackles up.”
“What about the monsters and the salt?”
“Oh, that. It was this stupid cable movie about some myth, can’t even remember the title, but I remembered how much you like to pick those apart. You were busy, though, so I figured I should leave you alone.”
“Oh. Okay.” Jack could almost hear the wheels turning in Daniel’s lightning-flash mind, could almost see the little nod of acceptance. “All right. What do you need to know?”
Fifteen minutes later Jack tucked a page of notes into his jacket’s breast pocket, then walked back into the archive room. He found Dean still buried in paper, fingers digging through his hair as he held his head in his hands. That little frown of concentration looked positively painful.
“Hey, kid, let’s take a break. The diner across the street serves the best pie in three states. Worth the trip.”
Dean’s head shot up, eyes bright and eager. “Pie? Oh, man, I love pie.”
Jack smiled. “Yeah, I kinda figured you did.”
X
Jack was right. The pie was awesome. Dean dug his fork through flaky crust, into succulent, tender apple slices glazed with sugar and spices, and didn’t even care that Jack had ordered for them both, and gotten him milk instead of the soda Dean wanted. Milk was worth it when it came with this kind of pie.
“Did I tell ya or did I tell ya?” Jack asked, lifting his own glass of milk in a half-assed toast. “Best pie in three states.”
Dean did not dignify this rhetorical question with a response, merely rolled his eyes heavenward in mute appreciation and scooped up another gigantic bite. He almost didn’t care that he’d only managed to find a whole load of nothing in the newspaper office. No deaths that fit the pattern besides those first three, no obits that indicated a life cut short, a spirit left angry and wandering. They had gone back twenty years in the past few hours, and nothing to show for it. God, his head was killing him.
They would just have to dig deeper, that was all. And in the meantime, Dean dug into his pie.
Jack chose that moment to casually draw a folded-up notebook page from his breast pocket and slide it across the table. Dean froze, staring. “What’s that?”
“My notes.” Jack reached over to unfold the page, and turned it so it was right-side-up for Dean. “Deaths in the woods over the past, um, couple hundred years or something.”
Dean narrowed his eyes at the crabbed scrawl. The names and dates and brief descriptions had been written hastily, all in a rush, one word bleeding into the next. “You didn’t get this from the microfiche. I never saw you write anything down.”
“Sure I did. You just didn’t notice.”
He looked up and did his best to stab the old guy through with his eyes, tapping the fork irritably on the plate. “You stepped out to stretch your legs. What else did you do?”
Jack shrugged, a short rise and fall of the shoulders, insolent and obtuse. “Had a chat with Babe the Blue Ox. He was just hanging around, waiting for Paul.”
Dean felt an involuntary little laugh shake through his chest, but he didn’t let it escape his mouth. “You’re keeping secrets.”
“Why, hello there, Mr. Pot. I’m Mr. Kettle, also known as ‘old guy’. Nice to meetcha. Is it okay if I call you ‘kid’ from now till the end of eternity? Or how about ‘stupid kid’? That seems slightly more appropriate.”
Okay, he had deserved that. Dean looked back to the notes, feeling his irritation dissipate. “All right, fine, you called some government weasel who used to help you out before you retired. That smart guy you mentioned earlier? Never mind. Doesn’t matter.” He flapped a hand in dismissal, then ran a finger down the descriptions of deaths, discarding the ones caused by hunting accidents, fights, floods, things like that. “These all happened in the same patch of woods?”
“Near enough. You go back too far and they’re just describing ‘that stand of hickory trees out near Henderson’s place,’ but I figure it counts.”
“Huh.” Dean looked at the dates of the deaths he’d weeded out from the list. There didn’t seem to be much of a pattern. People died mysteriously in clusters of five to ten, and then the woods were silent for a time. Decades, even, but even then there were sometimes single anomalous deaths scattered with years between them. So no clear cycle, no dormancy of exactly twenty-one years or anything simple like that. This spirit was a little more chaotic than some. That was okay. Dean could deal with that.
He scanned back up to the first name, the first death before the mysterious ones started. Susanna Milner, 1853. Died of exposure. Daughter of a pioneer family, lost and wandering till she died? That would be impetus enough for a spirit to hold on to the world, to drag others in to try to fill her loneliness. The first mysterious death happened in the same year.
“We have to find out more about this chick.” Dean pulled a pen from his pocket and underlined the name, then gave the page back to Jack. “Think your buddy can help us out again?”
Jack grimaced, studying the page. “Probably. But there’s also the library, you lazy bum.”
“Hey, you’re the one who took this shortcut in the first place.” Dean carved out a forkful of pie and swallowed it down with a gulp of milk. “Don’t want to raise suspicions with another request, huh? I get it.”
“The library will also be better for local stuff, stupid kid.”
Dean paused with a mouthful of pastry and pointed a fork at the old guy. “Hey, I let that go. You could show the same courtesy.”
The corner of Jack’s mouth twitched. “Don’t talk with your mouth full, buddy.”
“Yeah, that’s much less condescending.” Still, Dean swallowed his mouthful, then stared mournfully down at his plate, which was now empty. “Does this town even have a library?”
“No, but the next one over does. About half an hour, not too bad.”
“Great.” Dean clapped his hands and stood, pausing to chug the rest of his milk. “Road trip! That means I get to introduce you to the magic that is Metallica.”
Jack groaned as he rose to his feet, and Dean knew it wasn’t because of his knees. His face was already pained just at the prospect. “I take it back. Half an hour is bad. Very bad.”
Part 11
Title: Corner of Your Eye
Author: Maychorian
Characters: Jack O'Neill, Dean Winchester
Category: Action/Adventure, Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Crossover, Angst
Rating: T/PG-13
Spoilers: Pilot for SPN, up to Season 9 for SG-1
Summary: Jack O'Neill is not very good at being retired. Dean Winchester is not very good at staying out of trouble. And there's something lurking in these here woods….
Word Count: 2021
Disclaimer: As soon as I own them, you'll know. Oh yes, yes, the day is coming.
Author’s Note: Ah, finally, a PLOT appears! ::whistles and cheers::
Complete chapter list: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14
The story is also available in one document on my website: Corner of Your Eye
10
Microfiche. Jack blinked and rubbed his eyes, trying to force them to focus, blurry and crossed from staring at the glowing screen for who-knows-how-long. If microfiche still existed anywhere, of course it would be in the offices of small newspapers in tiny towns in the woods of Minnesota. The internet had come here eventually, but apparently scanners hadn’t made it yet.
Jack glanced over to where Dean sat at the table, flipping through archives of physical papers. He’d been an idiot, giving the smart-mouthed kid the easier job. Dean had shown no appreciation for the consideration, merely grumbling about the evils of research and the horrifying fact that it had to be done at all.
As Jack watched, though, Dean absently reached a hand up to touch the back of his head, then jerked his fingers away before they touched down, forehead wrinkling momentarily before he smoothed it away. Oh yeah. That was why Jack had let him have the regular papers. Dumb idea. Now they would both have headaches, instead of just one of them having a really, really bad one.
“Found anything?” Jack asked. As he had been asking every ten minutes or so for, oh, a couple of hours, maybe.
Dean glanced up, lips pursed. “I’m not hiding anything from you, dude. The minute I spot something, I’ll let you know.”
“Yeah, sure.” Jack looked back at the screen, and felt his eyes immediately crossing again, retaliating for the indignity of the past few hours. His brain was throwing in the towel. Enough of this. I’m a retired Air Force Major General. I don’t have to put up with microfiche.
“Um, Dean?”
An exasperated huff at yet one more interruption, and Dean threw his head to the side to look at him, eyes wide and eyebrows so high that they nearly cleared his hairline, though his voice remained perfectly calm and composed. It was the way you would treat a toddler who kept asking why why why. “Yes, Jack?”
“I’m just gonna go stretch my legs for a bit, okay? I’ll be right back.”
“Sure. Do whatever you gotta do.”
Jack exited the back room, through the little news den and into the foyer, where he gave the receptionist a friendly smile and tip of the chin. She blushed, still fully under the spell of the combined Winchester-O’Neill charm. They had probably laid it on a little thick when they came in earlier, claiming to be researching their genealogy, uncle and nephew.
Outside, Jack slipped around a corner and flipped open his cell phone, hitting two familiar buttons with hardly a thought. The phone on the other end rang twice, then again, and he hoped that this wouldn’t be one of those times, when Jack would end up just letting it ring and ring and ring until he got annoyed enough to send an email, even though he far preferred vocal contact. Daniel still hadn’t gotten around to setting up voice mail, darn him, and how hard was that, anyway?
But he picked up on the third ring, a little out of breath, voice bright with curiosity, words tumbling over each other. “Jack? Hey, I was hoping you would call back. I wasn’t really paying attention last time-was in the middle of translating something for SG-11, high priority, they’re heading back tomorrow-so it didn’t occur to me till later, but did you ask me something about monsters? Monsters and salt? That’s weird, even for you. Did I actually answer your question? I don’t really remember. I was busy.”
Jack grinned. He could see Daniel in his mind’s eye, leaning forward in his chair, expressive eyes sharply focused, fully engaged in this new puzzle. “Yeah, I kinda got that impression. You answered. You were right, too.”
“I was? Oh, that’s good. Wait, how do you know? What’s going on, Jack? Are you in some kind of trouble?” Daniel’s voice went stern. “Do I need to send some marines to help you out? I will, you know. Landry listens to me.”
“Good for him. And I’m fine, thanks. Listen, I was hoping you’d be able to help out with a little research. You’re at your computer, right? You still have access to all those databases and stuff?”
“Yes, yes, top secret, hush hush, the combined knowledge of the United States government ready at my fingertips. You’re going to have to convince me that I ought to help you, though. What’s this about?”
Jack reeled for a moment, barely able to think. What’s this about? It’s about the whole world being turned on its ear, Daniel, it’s about monsters in the closet and ghosts in the graveyard and poor helpless kids being killed before their time, and I can’t stand by, I can’t, so don’t even think about asking it. Oh, and there’s this boy, this young man, and we’re kind of working together now. I think he’s just as cut off from the world as you were when you came back from Abydos, missing family like missing a limb, and he trusts me now, sort of, and I can’t betray that.
“I’m just looking into something that I think the local authorities might have missed, that’s all. It’s probably nothing. I just want to make sure.”
He could hear the exhaled breath, the touch of relaxation in Daniel’s voice. “Well, if it turns out not to be nothing, you’ll get backup, right?”
“Yeah, I promise. This is just…curiosity. Saw a story in the newspaper that got my hackles up.”
“What about the monsters and the salt?”
“Oh, that. It was this stupid cable movie about some myth, can’t even remember the title, but I remembered how much you like to pick those apart. You were busy, though, so I figured I should leave you alone.”
“Oh. Okay.” Jack could almost hear the wheels turning in Daniel’s lightning-flash mind, could almost see the little nod of acceptance. “All right. What do you need to know?”
Fifteen minutes later Jack tucked a page of notes into his jacket’s breast pocket, then walked back into the archive room. He found Dean still buried in paper, fingers digging through his hair as he held his head in his hands. That little frown of concentration looked positively painful.
“Hey, kid, let’s take a break. The diner across the street serves the best pie in three states. Worth the trip.”
Dean’s head shot up, eyes bright and eager. “Pie? Oh, man, I love pie.”
Jack smiled. “Yeah, I kinda figured you did.”
X
Jack was right. The pie was awesome. Dean dug his fork through flaky crust, into succulent, tender apple slices glazed with sugar and spices, and didn’t even care that Jack had ordered for them both, and gotten him milk instead of the soda Dean wanted. Milk was worth it when it came with this kind of pie.
“Did I tell ya or did I tell ya?” Jack asked, lifting his own glass of milk in a half-assed toast. “Best pie in three states.”
Dean did not dignify this rhetorical question with a response, merely rolled his eyes heavenward in mute appreciation and scooped up another gigantic bite. He almost didn’t care that he’d only managed to find a whole load of nothing in the newspaper office. No deaths that fit the pattern besides those first three, no obits that indicated a life cut short, a spirit left angry and wandering. They had gone back twenty years in the past few hours, and nothing to show for it. God, his head was killing him.
They would just have to dig deeper, that was all. And in the meantime, Dean dug into his pie.
Jack chose that moment to casually draw a folded-up notebook page from his breast pocket and slide it across the table. Dean froze, staring. “What’s that?”
“My notes.” Jack reached over to unfold the page, and turned it so it was right-side-up for Dean. “Deaths in the woods over the past, um, couple hundred years or something.”
Dean narrowed his eyes at the crabbed scrawl. The names and dates and brief descriptions had been written hastily, all in a rush, one word bleeding into the next. “You didn’t get this from the microfiche. I never saw you write anything down.”
“Sure I did. You just didn’t notice.”
He looked up and did his best to stab the old guy through with his eyes, tapping the fork irritably on the plate. “You stepped out to stretch your legs. What else did you do?”
Jack shrugged, a short rise and fall of the shoulders, insolent and obtuse. “Had a chat with Babe the Blue Ox. He was just hanging around, waiting for Paul.”
Dean felt an involuntary little laugh shake through his chest, but he didn’t let it escape his mouth. “You’re keeping secrets.”
“Why, hello there, Mr. Pot. I’m Mr. Kettle, also known as ‘old guy’. Nice to meetcha. Is it okay if I call you ‘kid’ from now till the end of eternity? Or how about ‘stupid kid’? That seems slightly more appropriate.”
Okay, he had deserved that. Dean looked back to the notes, feeling his irritation dissipate. “All right, fine, you called some government weasel who used to help you out before you retired. That smart guy you mentioned earlier? Never mind. Doesn’t matter.” He flapped a hand in dismissal, then ran a finger down the descriptions of deaths, discarding the ones caused by hunting accidents, fights, floods, things like that. “These all happened in the same patch of woods?”
“Near enough. You go back too far and they’re just describing ‘that stand of hickory trees out near Henderson’s place,’ but I figure it counts.”
“Huh.” Dean looked at the dates of the deaths he’d weeded out from the list. There didn’t seem to be much of a pattern. People died mysteriously in clusters of five to ten, and then the woods were silent for a time. Decades, even, but even then there were sometimes single anomalous deaths scattered with years between them. So no clear cycle, no dormancy of exactly twenty-one years or anything simple like that. This spirit was a little more chaotic than some. That was okay. Dean could deal with that.
He scanned back up to the first name, the first death before the mysterious ones started. Susanna Milner, 1853. Died of exposure. Daughter of a pioneer family, lost and wandering till she died? That would be impetus enough for a spirit to hold on to the world, to drag others in to try to fill her loneliness. The first mysterious death happened in the same year.
“We have to find out more about this chick.” Dean pulled a pen from his pocket and underlined the name, then gave the page back to Jack. “Think your buddy can help us out again?”
Jack grimaced, studying the page. “Probably. But there’s also the library, you lazy bum.”
“Hey, you’re the one who took this shortcut in the first place.” Dean carved out a forkful of pie and swallowed it down with a gulp of milk. “Don’t want to raise suspicions with another request, huh? I get it.”
“The library will also be better for local stuff, stupid kid.”
Dean paused with a mouthful of pastry and pointed a fork at the old guy. “Hey, I let that go. You could show the same courtesy.”
The corner of Jack’s mouth twitched. “Don’t talk with your mouth full, buddy.”
“Yeah, that’s much less condescending.” Still, Dean swallowed his mouthful, then stared mournfully down at his plate, which was now empty. “Does this town even have a library?”
“No, but the next one over does. About half an hour, not too bad.”
“Great.” Dean clapped his hands and stood, pausing to chug the rest of his milk. “Road trip! That means I get to introduce you to the magic that is Metallica.”
Jack groaned as he rose to his feet, and Dean knew it wasn’t because of his knees. His face was already pained just at the prospect. “I take it back. Half an hour is bad. Very bad.”
Part 11