i will turn myself into a gun [spn][one-shot]
Title: I Will Turn Myself into a Gun
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters: Risa (from 5.04 The End)
Word Count: 7400
Rating: R
Warnings: Graphic imagery.
Summary: “Nothing ends, Adrian,” Risa says, without really knowing why. “Nothing ever ends.”
Notes: Extremely belated fic written for roque_clasique's birthday and the prompt: The End 'verse. How did Dean find out that Sam had said yes? How did he react? Dialog in summary belongs to Alan Moore. Title from Richard Siken.
1.
There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse is often closer to the truth. - Alan Moore
2.
A year and a half from now, they’ll find a bunch of dead bodies in an old dried-out swimming pool. The bodies will be rotting, flesh melting away from bone, but it’ll be obvious that all of them - every last one - drowned.
They’ll stare down at the open grave, at the bloated remnants of some teenager’s stomach, the partially revealed alien smile of a child’s skull.
Lisa will wonder if they were killed or if they did it to themselves, and no one will answer.
Dean will un-cock his pistol, slide it into his waistband, and set a hand on the rifle strapped to his shoulder. “Let’s go,” he’ll say.
They’ll be two miles away before Risa will say, with completely nonchalance, “I used to love swimming.” Her voice floats through the muggy air, hangs heavily around their ears. No one says a word, but a couple of people twitch, shrug their shoulders a little, like they’re trying to get kinks out of their muscles.
Rubber soles will crunch over dried grass and dead leaves.
They’ll find a nest of Croats twenty minutes later. Dean will end up with a concussion, Robert with three broken ribs and Megan with a five inch gash down her back, but aside from that, they’ll be fine.
They’re all dying - every last one of them - but they’ll be fine.
3.
Her second or third boyfriend - she can’t really remember which now - was a comic book geek. Saga of the Swamp Thing, Watchmen, V for Vendetta - a real Alan Moore fan. He’d walk around quoting him all day, which, depending on her mood, Risa either found completely endearing or utterly annoying.
His name was Michael and he had a great smile. She was sixteen then. They were together for years and years. Long enough for her to think they were it.
Risa brushes the dirt next to her sleeping bag to smoothness with her palm and wonders where Michael is now.
She hopes he’s dead. She hopes anyone she ever cared about died quickly, before things got bad. She hopes they never had to see what she’s seen. Find out what she’s found out.
Sam walks past, holding his gun out. He’d taken first watch. He always takes first watch, Risa thinks. Has as long as she’s known him, anyway. He looks down as she turns her lantern’s burner down.
“Rest up,” he says quietly, before moving on, stepping carefully over Mai’s sleeping bag.
Risa watches his back until it disappears into the darkness.
4.
A few hours later she wakes from a nightmare and takes it back.
Who fucking wishes people dead, anyway?
Like she needs that kind of karma.
5.
Richard, Devon and Michelle are walking, up ahead. Their voices carry back to Risa, something about what they’d like to be doing right now and what they’ll do when all of this ends.
“Nothing ends, Adrian,” Risa says, without really knowing why. “Nothing ever ends.”
Michelle shoots her a weird look over her shoulder.
Sam’s watching out of the corner of his eye, walking a few feet to the left.
“Watchmen,” she says. Laughs a little. Hitches her pack higher up her shoulders. “One of my boyfriends from high school, he’d had a thing for comics… dunno, I guess. I guess I’ve been thinking about him lately.”
Sam doesn’t say anything much, as usual.
“The weirdest stuff gets stuck in your head, you know?” she goes on.
“I swear,” says Gavin from behind and the group launches into a discussion about the kind of weird things they have stuck in their heads.
Sam’s eyes are grazing the horizon. Risa’s eyes are grazing Sam.
6.
She thinks that maybe she’s fallen a little in love with him. The way you’re always going to fall for those sorts of men. The ones you look up to and admire. The ones who save your life every day, for no reason that you can figure. The ones who are quiet and enigmatic and beautiful all at once.
It’s not going to go anywhere though. She’s not stupid.
But, compared to the other tortures of today, this one’s not so bad. It’s got a lulling rhythm, the fantasy that someday, she’ll be in the right place at the right time and he’ll decide to open up to her. Decide to tell her who he is and why he’s here.
It’s the daydream she falls asleep to, and it’s better than imagining exactly how she’ll die or when. It makes her feel a little less lonely. Even if it’s only in her head.
7.
They pass through a government camp in Minnesota. Sam seems agitated the whole time, even though it was his decision to go through here. They’ve been killing Croats nonstop for three days, met six demons just last night. They’re all tired and hungry and this is a safe route.
People peer out of their tents to watch them pass.
A wizened old woman with brilliant blue eyes stops Sam with her hand. “You a dead man,” she says to him, eyes narrowing. She looks at the rest of the group. “You all dead. Can see it in your bones.”
Sam waits until she lets go of him to walk away but doesn’t say a word. The others exchange looks.
Risa can’t stop looking over her shoulder at the woman as they walk away.
“She’s full of shit,” someone says. Matt, maybe, because the words are followed by a nervous laugh. High-pitched.
“Full of shit,” he says again, quietly and no one else says anything.
8.
That night Sam pops aspirin like they’re pieces of candy.
He ignores Carter, who keeps track of their supplies and is twitching with each crackle of foil.
He skips dinner too.
9.
Most towns they pass through now, abandoned are not, have walls plastered with fliers. Black-and-white photos, grainy smiles and eyes full of shadows.
Missing: Annie Walker, Age 15, Last Seen July 2nd, 2010
Missing: Robbie Downs, Age 3, Last Seen March 23rd, 2012
Missing: Eli Roberts, Age 67, Last Seen October 19th, 2012
Risa reads as they walk.
She searches for her name. For some sign that there’s still someone out there, searching for her. It would be nice, you know? Some meaning now, when the world’s going to hell around them. Something to hold onto and someone to fight for.
There’s something inherently selfish in fighting only to survive, only for yourself.
Even if you’re all you’ve got.
10.
Her name is actually Sonrisa. It’s a strange name. Gets lots of questions, so she started introducing herself as Risa when she was fifteen.
It bothers her now, that she’s the only one who knows that. Full name Sonrisa. It means smile.
She wouldn’t mind if someone asked, now. But no one does.
11.
There are bodies lined up along the Mississippi River.
They’ve all got pennies on their eyes, glinting in the afternoon sunlight.
“Who would do that?” Mai whispers. “Who would do that?” Her voice is getting shriller, louder. “Who the fuck would do that?!”
Everyone’s sort of watching her. Maybe because it’s distracting. Keeps their own fear at bay, their own urge to just breakdown.
Sam fiddles with his gun, so the strap is across his chest, and goes over to Mai. Pulls her into a hug, one arm around her back and a hand against her head. He lets her cry and rests his cheek against her hair.
Risa stares. She can’t help it.
Just when you think you’ve seen all there is to see about a man, he goes and surprises you.
Acid burns in her chest and she looks away.
Ridiculous. She’s like a teenager. You’d think there weren’t more important things going to worry about.
12.
It’s been a quiet day. They’re taking a break. They’ve got a few tents set up, enough for everyone to be in one without too much discomfort. But right now they’re all sitting outside. Gavin and Matt are playing with a ratty deck of cards. Mai is braiding her own hair and humming under her breath, eyes on the sky. It’s drizzling lightly.
Sam’s cleaning guns with Richard, nearby. They’re talking quietly. Risa wonders what about.
Carter stumbles out of a tent. He’s got a bottle of liquor in his hands.
“Dude, where they hell’d you get the alcohol?” Alex says, sounding peeved. Carter just shrugs. Plops down on the dirt, raising dust.
“Guess what?” he slurs loudly. Heads come up all around. “Guess. What. My parents? My parents are dead. My sister is dead. My brother is dead. My wife and my daughter are… wait for it, wait for it - dead!” He laughs, explosively. Laughs and laughs until he’s sobbing. Ugly, loud sobbing.
“Christ,” someone says under their breath. No judgment in their voice, just shock. Realization perhaps. “Jesus Christ.”
Jenny goes over to Carter and pulls him into a hug.
It’s a long time before he stops wailing, and by the time he does, a bunch of others have joined him, tears dripping silently down their faces.
13.
In the beginning they called it rabies.
Risa can still remember the headline, a single word splashed across the New York Times.
They tried decontamination at first, with their hazmat suits and burning chemicals. It was still ‘cure’ at that point instead of ‘kill’.
Everyone thought it was beatable.
No, actually, everyone thought it was a joke. That’s more accurate. Harsh maybe, because no one could have known what it actually was. Except for psycho cult people.
Religious extremists.
Those crazy preachers you see on television, the ones who demand you pray for forgiveness before you are damned.
Maybe even Scientologists.
Oh. Hunters too.
Not that anyone would have believed them, since one, demons are supposed to be a figment of your imagination, and two, even if they’re real, who’s ever heard of a demonic virus? It’s like something from the 15th century when people would blame illness on witchcraft. It sounds ridiculous, really.
Risa hadn’t been around when the news first went public. She used to be a relief worker, once upon a time and you don’t really expect much news from home to reach Cambodia. And when she’d finally gotten home, she’d been stuck in quarantine, so… anyway.
She watched recordings afterwards, of news bulletins and stuff. Whatever came out after the first announcement from the White House. Typically, those bastards had been suspicious for months before they let the cat out of the bag.
She spent hours and hours going through YouTube when she finally got home, like it was somehow going to help her survive if she knew what everyone was saying.
That was always one of her failings, she supposes. Thinking knowledge would get her everywhere.
Some douche on CNN blamed North Korea, interfamily marriages and HBO all at once. The president went on pretending nothing was going on at all and then snuck out to his family home when he thought no one was looking. Oprah did a special and those ladies on The View went on and on comparing the virus to the stuff you see in horror movies (“Maybe it’s actually zombies. Night of the Living Dead, you know? Or - or - or - like 28 Days Later! Bacteria, right?”).
See? Joke.
Maybe there had been too many similar things going around just beforehand - bird flu, swine flu - that people were more likely to take seriously. Who knows? For some reason, folks let their guard down. Or, well - didn’t have it up all the way, at the very least. So when it came, really came, no one was ready. No one could protect themselves.
And it ate right through all of them, until people figured it out: for once, this really was a matter of life or death.
14.
Rachel’s bait.
She’s standing out in the clearing, a bunch of decomposing corpses for company.
Richard’s fidgeting next to Risa, behind the bushes. Risa knows he and Rachel have been sleeping together for a couple of months now. She hopes Rachel gets out okay. The fewer people you have to hold onto, the harder each loss becomes.
Not that Sam sends people out to play bait unless he’s sure he can get them out safely. But then, there’s a first time for everything.
Last time they did this the Croats snuck up on them quietly. This time, they come screaming.
“Go!” Sam shouts, and he’s up and running himself, towards Rachel, who’s shooting for her life. Literally.
It’s a bloodbath, like these things usually are. Mostly one-sided. Croat pieces scattered about like flowers. Risa stares at one from a safe distance.
Once, they were human, just like her. She wonders how it feels. If it feels like anything. If it happened to her, could she blow her own brains out?
She turns around, walks back to the rest of the group. They have cairns to build.
Alex, Michelle and Jenny are spread wide across the bloody earth, their insides on the outside.
15.
Six days in quarantine. It was 2010 and she was coming back from Cambodia. They attached a staircase to the plane, instead of the usual tunnel thing, deposited them outside in the open air where they were met by a bunch of suited officials, walkie-talkies humming. They lined them all up and walked them down to a unit they’d set up outside, sterilized showers and blue tiles everywhere and the kind of uniforms you might see on people dealing with nuclear chemicals. They were told to strip. None of them really knew what was happening. Eric said something about rights and a couple others followed his lead, demanding information.
What they found out was this: there was a virus. Some strain of rabies, maybe. There was something about how the disease incites violence. How Beach City, Texas had been wiped off all sentient life, how they’d stopped answering radio calls and when a team was sent out, the city was just… empty. How there was a massacre in Odell, Oregon. How the government finally decided to take action.
Megan laughed. “You’re kidding me, right? You’re fucking kidding, you - you can’t be serious. How can a damn virus do that? It sounds like mass murder, it sounds like some fucked up cult’s decided to purify the earth!”
It did sound like that. It wasn’t that. They’d done tests on live subjects from Odell. That’s what they called them: ‘live subjects’. Like monkeys or mice or something to be experimented on.
People’s eyes went panicky, wide. Risa felt a shiver run up her spine, shifted a little. Her fingers were still on the buttons of her jacket.
16.
They appear out of thin air. This tends to happen every few months, maybe a little longer, but Mai still jumps sixteen feet and shouts, “Shit! Holy shit! Motherfucking goddamn son of a bitch, shit!”
Gavin and Matt are falling over themselves laughing until Mai turns around and punches Matt square in the eye.
“Guys,” Sam says, coming up to the visitors.
It’s a little hard to believe but one of them is an angel. Demonic virus? Fine. Demons? Okie-dokie. Crazy rabid people? Great!
But angels? It’s a little ridiculous. ‘Cause angels sort of imply God and if God’s really out there, why is any of this happening, right? Risa stopped trying to figure it out ages ago. She also stopped trying to figure out how someone could just fucking… Apparate or whatever. Sometimes you’ve just got to go with the flow. There are worse sacrifices you can make.
The angel’s name is Castiel. Sometimes they get Gabriel - yes, the Gabriel - but this one’s Castiel and with him is his trusty sidekick prophet, Chuck.
Seriously.
Risa doesn’t really know where they come from or where they go afterwards. It’s like someone’s keeping tabs on Sam or something. Or he’s keeping tabs on someone, because he definitely knows them.
It’s weird, running into people Sam actually knows. It means that once upon a time, he had a life and it wasn’t this - commanding a straggly bunch of survivors and trying to save the world one Croat at a time. There had been a man named Bobby who they’d come across once. Sam spent that entire night stuck to his side, not even talking really, just being there like he needed it or something, like he couldn’t bear to leave. It was the first sign of weakness she’d ever seen him show.
That was when it started. This whole infatuation thing.
They never saw Bobby again, now that she thinks of it.
The angel, the prophet and Sam conference for a while.
17.
Michael asked her to elope.
She said yes. They were supposed to meet up. She never went.
If you’d asked her two years ago what her biggest regret was, leaving him hanging would never have been it. Not by a long shot.
The end of the world sort of has a way of reorganizing your priorities, though.
She should have said yes. She should have just said yes, instead of worrying about how he’d hold her back, bog her down. She loved him, she did, and he loved her, no lie. He loved her. They’d had something Risa’s never found in anyone else, and it never seemed to matter before. She had her education and her job and a few dates here and there. She was stable and happy and just… okay. And then, suddenly, none of that mattered, and she’s sitting here having fantasies about some guy she hardly knows opening up to her, just so she can feel something aside from fear and anticipation and her heart, beating like a countdown.
And she could have had it. She could have had him.
That’s what you hold onto, in the end. Right? That’s what matters - the people you love, who love you. Not how many degrees you have or that you went to Wellesley or how much money’s sitting in your bank account. Not really. Because you’re going to die, someday, here one second and gone the next - bullet to the gut or a head wound that doesn’t stop bleeding or your own mind turning against you - and all you can really hope for is someone to be there to hold your hand when it happens and tell you it’s going to be okay. All you can hope for is to leave someone behind who cares enough to mourn.
If only.
Those two words seem to pop up a lot these days.
18.
It goes on forever. They trek across continental America as if few years ago, the streets weren’t jam-packed with cars. From town to, city to city, state to state.
If a Croat doesn’t get her first, Risa knows how she’s going to die. One day, just like this, they’ll be walking. Walking, walking, walking. And she’ll just lie down. In a puddle of orange light on the black asphalt of just one of America’s endless back roads, she’ll lie down and she’ll never get up.
That’s where she’ll wait.
For whatever’s out there to come and get her too, yes. But mostly, just for death.
Mostly just for the end.
19.
After people started realizing the virus wasn’t rabies, started believing the people who stood up, calling themselves ‘hunters’ of the supernatural, well. After that there was anger.
A lot of it.
Why didn’t they say anything before this happened?
Why didn’t they protect us?
Why did they let this happen, shouldn’t they have been able to stop it?
There was talk of repercussions. People saying the hunters should answer for their mistakes. It all fizzled out pretty quickly, because things got bad fast.
Sometimes, they’ll come across a malevolent spirit and Sam will try his best to find their graves and bones. He’ll gather some of them, spend a couple of hours in deserted, half-destroyed libraries. If that doesn’t work he tries to speak to them, to tell them to leave. Some of them actually do.
Who’da thunk? Ghosts, demons, witches. Even more than that - demi-gods, werewolves, vampires. They’ve met a bunch, but probably haven’t met anywhere close to everything there is out there.
It must be a lonely life. Knowing these things, these nightmare things, are actually real, and having to fight them, all alone.
If you ask Risa, these people, these hunters - they’ve already been punished for crimes they didn’t commit. Just by living. Just by doing what they do every day. They don’t even ask for thanks. How do you live like that?
It still boggles her mind, the kinds of things that have been happening right under her nose, right under most of humanities nose.
Really, how blind can you be?
20.
The Croatoan virus is transmitted by blood. If the Croats can get a hand on you and they want to turn you, all they have to do is press one of your bleeding cuts with one of their own.
Game over.
Sam says the virus originates from demons. There are traces of sulfur in Croat blood, and that means demons. He thinks a demon infects someone with their blood, and it poisons the person. Makes them lose their mind.
It’s just a theory.
There’s a town in Wisconsin. Small and quiet and empty. There are a couple of cars on the main street, parked in front of the shops like their owners have just ducked inside to buy some bread.
The group splits up, to clear the town. Make sure there are no Croats around. When that’s done, they raid the stores for supplies, and then head towards the houses.
They’re modest, but picturesque. Maybe the kind home Risa would have liked to have. Not outrageous, but not shabby either.
Risa’s just brought out a first aid kit onto the street, where they’re collecting everything they find when Gavin comes running out of one of the houses, red-faced.
“There’s a baby in the house,” he says, pointing behind him. He’s talking to Sam.
“A dead baby?” Rachel squeaks. The others turn to their closer friends to discuss this new development.
“No, fuck it,” Gavin says. “Alive! It’s - it’s - it’s crying.”
Matt comes running out of the same house just then. “It’s a she,” he announces. “She’s been cut; I’m pretty sure the Croats turned her.”
“That’s impossible,” Risa says, above everyone’s muttering. “She should be dead.”
“No,” Sam says then. His voice is hard as rock. He’s not looking at any of them, just opening up all the first aid kits they’ve found and rummaging through them. Everyone’s fallen completely silent, and now they can all here the infant’s wailing cries.
Risa’s heart is trying to choke her.
“No,” Sam says again, quieter. “She wouldn’t be. Can you tell her age?”
“I - um - I - um,” says Matt. He and Gavin exchange unsure looks.
Men.
“She’s probably six months or younger,” Sam mutters and now it’s more like he’s talking to himself. “Maybe, I don’t know. Maybe at that age, the DNA changes to incorporate the new blood. It makes sense.”
“How does it make sense?” Risa asks incredulously. Her pistol is slippery in her hand.
The baby’s cries have grown louder, more affecting. Mai says, “I’m going to go get her,” and makes to head to the house.
“No,” says Sam loudly. He looks up finally. “No. Leave her.”
“Excuse me?” Risa exclaims while Mai snorts incredulously, says, “Fuck that,” and heads towards the house.
“What - the fuck - why?” asks Richard.
“She’s been infected,” Sam says, watching the door Mai disappeared into.
“No, she hasn’t,” Devon says slowly. “She’s not dead. And she didn’t go all kamikaze on Gav and Matt.”
“That’s not-” Sam shakes his head, gets to his feet and brushes his hands off. “The Croatoan virus is demonic in origin. She hasn’t been turned into a Croat, but she has been infected with demon blood.”
Risa doesn’t know what that has to do with fucking anything, but she does know what it sounds like Sam’s suggesting.
“So what, you want to leave her here? She’s an infant!”
Mai comes back out. The baby’s in her arms now, her clothes bloody and ripped. She’s thin. Too thin. Her skin is yellow around the eyes and her cries are so fucking painful that Risa can hardly keep her own tears at bay.
“You don’t think I know that?” Sam says harshly, his eyes on Risa now. There’s a fire in them, a deep anger. He’s not looking at the baby. Neither are many of the others. “You think I - you think I want to do this? We don’t even - she’ll live if we take her, fine, but she’s going to grow up cursed. You don’t even - you don’t understand.”
“Then fucking make me understand!” Risa shouts. They are not going to leave a baby, no way.
“I can’t,” Sam snarls.
“Then what’re we gonna do?” Mai asks. She’s jiggling the baby up and down.
Sam swallows hard. Presses his hand over his eyes. “I don’t - I need to-” His hand moves away and his eyes are stormy. He looks… destroyed, though. He looks shattered. He looks like a boy.
For the first time, Risa realizes, this man, her leader - he’s probably younger than she is. Twenty-five maybe. Twenty-six. Less than thirty.
“I need to think,” Sam says, and he walks up to Mai then. Takes the baby from her, gently, so gently, like he wasn’t talking about leaving her to die a minute ago. He walks back into the house Mai brought her from.
Everyone stands stock still in his absence, looking at each other.
They’re all waiting for that sound. The final gunshot.
It doesn’t come, but the baby’s cries do soften. After awhile, silence has been restored.
Everyone shuffles around a little before going back to work.
21.
They leave without the baby. Risa doesn’t know what happened to her. Doesn’t want to ask.
She watches Sam’s back as they leave the town. It’s the first time he’s ever been ugly to her.
22.
Sam and a few of the other guys are poring over a map.
Something big’s coming to Detroit.
The people are talking. The angels are talking. The demons are talking.
Everyone is talking.
Something big’s coming to Detroit.
23.
Sounds like a warning, doesn’t it?
The kinda thing that would make you stay away from Detroit. The kinda thing that would make you stay away from anywhere 100 miles of Detroit.
Yeah.
24.
Short and sweet?
It ends like this:
Gavin’s body lying two feet away. Just his body, though. His head’s a couple of yards further than that, where the demon threw it. Mai over by the gutted bookshop, her eyes wide and unseeing. Matt blown to pieces.
Richard and Rachel went down back to back. They took out about twenty Croats before it happened. Risa can still see them, over to the left. Half of Rachel’s face is gone. Some demon’s slit Richard’s stomach. His intestines are hanging like jewelry around his neck.
Devon and Carter, well, Risa doesn’t know where they are. Can’t see them. Dead, probably. Dead, of course.
The whole world is reduced, in a single moment, to the time between one trigger-pull and the next. There’s you and there’s me and there’s a thin line between life and death that’s just itching to snap.
It’s shoot, feel the kick-back jar your arm and check: still alive, right? Still breathing? Limbs all attached? Head on?
In the end, it all comes down to sheer dumb luck, and Risa can hear every single fucking cliché on the planet gloating.
In the end, it’s just her. Just her and Sam, separated by a half a mile of cracked tarmac and the noxious spray of blood and bile.
25.
It came out of nowhere. A fucking ambush. Demons and Croats and every fucking thing they could throw at them.
They weren’t ready for it, weren’t ready for anything like it.
It was a trap. Someone lured them, spread that bullshit story. Said the Croats were going to gather. Said you could wait there, surprise them. Sends those freaks to hell once and for all.
They met up with two other camps for it. It’s about seventy people in total.
It took fifteen minutes for most of them to be taken down.
Even months afterwards, Risa won’t really understand what happened or why.
All she knows is that it was planned.
Surprise, surprise.
26.
She runs away. The dead are settling into rigor mortis and the living, well, most of them are screaming their last breaths.
She runs. Sue her. Call her a coward. What the fuck ever you want to say, say it. Her friends, the only family she had left, were disemboweled before her eyes, so she fucking runs, okay?
She goes back, using cars and tables and all the rest of the junk on the street as a shield, and finds a shop on the long street that doesn’t have corpses for a welcome mat. That’s where she hides. Occasionally a Croat or two will sneak up and she’ll shoot their brains out.
Funny thing? A few demons see her too, their eyes black as pitch. They don’t touch her. Don’t do a thing.
It takes an hour, at most, for things to get quiet. Her gun still has ammo so she’s rises from behind the counter, slowly. Maybe someone’s still out there. Maybe someone survived. They might need help.
She creeps out of the store, debris cracking and crunching under her boots. The wind is blowing outside. It billows her hair around and she pushes it out of her eyes.
It’s like a bomb fell outside.
Bodies everywhere, unmoving. Silence so thick it’s suffocating. The sun is rising, the sky brightening in the east.
She steps further out into the street.
Croats are gone. Demons are gone. The road’s steaming, but empty.
How can every single one of them be dead? How?
She turns full circle, and that’s when she spots them. Two figures, half a mile down the road, directly to the east where the sky is palest. They barely look like shadows at this distance. Risa quickly ducks behind someone’s scarred Toyota.
Curiosity fucking kills. A voice in her head is yelling that, in her mother’s voice. Curiosity fucking kills, Risa! Are you listening to me? She moves forward in spite of it, trying her best to remain unseen. Jumps over rabble, keeps her gun squeezed tight. She can’t feel her fingers.
She looks over her shoulder and sees that she’s trailing blood. Ignores it. Nothing’s hurting. She’ll check it out later.
She stops a good thirty feet away, too far to hear anything above a murmur, but close enough to see.
There’s a man she doesn’t know standing with his back to her. And right in front of him, on his knees, is Sam. Risa has to cover her mouth to keep a gasp in. A chunk of skin is missing from his temple, blood flowing sluggishly down his face. He’s sucking in air through his mouth. There’s something sticking out of his ribs, like - like a tree branch, Risa can't tell. His right arm is gone. Just - gone. And for some reason, what she notices? What really hits her? Not that there’s blood spurting from a hole in his body, no, but that his shirt is all frayed at the arm, where it was ripped away. His stupid shirt is stupid frayed.
Risa swallows back bile with difficulty, can’t keep the burning tears in control though. Her hand is still pressed tight over her mouth.
Sam lists to the left like he’s going to fall, but the man bends a little. Puts a hand on his shoulder to keep him upright and touches a finger under Sam's chin. Raises his head until Sam's looking him in the eyes.
Blood trickles down Sam's chin, down his neck, into his torn shirt. His eyes are dead.
The man’s talking. Low murmur.
Risa thinks, Please God, oh please, please, please. She doesn’t even know what she’s praying for.
It’s like a bad horror movie, but in 3-D and more than Technicolor and those noises she can hear coming out of Sam’s mouth aren’t good acting, they’re fucking real.
Oh. There’s Sam’s arm. A couple of inches away from his knees. It’s still holding his gun.
This time it rushes up her throat faster than she can push it down, and she bends over and vomits all over her shoes. And fuck, it’s loud in the emptiness, and she’s caught, this is it. She’s going to die because she couldn’t keep from upchucking.
She finishes retching. Looks up slowly, expecting the man to be standing over her.
But he’s not.
Instead, he’s still standing in front of Sam, hand fisted in the cloth of Sam's shirt, keeping him upright. Sam’s eyes are closed now and his head is hanging back, neck bared, but Risa can’t - she doesn’t know if he’s dead, doesn’t really care at this point because he’s staring at her. That man. And he’s no man, oh no, oh fuck no, Risa doesn’t have a clue how she knows but she does, he's no man.
This is the thing they’ve been running from. This is the thing that’s destroying the world.
It’s Lucifer, and he’s right there, staring at her.
It’s animalistic fear that runs through her. Her brain takes full control. She’s up and running before she can even think about it, running back the way she came, like she can fucking outrun the fucking Devil.
She trips twice, skins her knees bloody. Gets right back up again.
It’s not until she’s a good two miles away that she realizes: she’s alive.
He let her go.
She’s gasping hard, hands on her knees. They're red and white, her hands, from their death grip on her gun. She swallows hard, spits onto the tarmac. Looks over her shoulder. The figures have disappeared behind an incline in the road.
There’s a bright light on the horizon, though. Pulsating and white.
It doesn’t look anything like the sun.
27.
She walks alone in that great vapid void that follows every battle.
She’s numb. She only has her gun for company. It’s got a few rounds left. Her pistol’s still full of bullets.
Her leg’s burning. She drags it along behind her and keeps walking.
28.
My name’s Sonrisa. It means smile.
My name’s Sonrisa. It means smile.
When the sun rises it’s quickly smothered by clouds. That’s what happens after a massacre. There has to be cleansing.
Thunder rumbles.
When the rain finally starts to fall, it’s like acid against her skin.
29.
It pours.
She can’t see more than ten feet in front of her because of the rain.
There it goes, washing it all away. Any sign that Gavin and Matt and Richard existed. That Rachel, Devon, Carter and Mai lived. Fought. Died. That there was a man named Sam Winchester who Risa had maybe loved and who she knew next to fucking nothing about.
Any sign that only six hours ago she’d been asleep, surrounded by each and every one of them, breathing and dreaming and not even thinking that in a few hours they’d be deader than dead.
If she cries, well, who’s to say?
There’s too much water as it is. She can hardly tell herself.
30.
A truck’s coming. No - not a truck. More like one of those army vehicles. Whatever the fuck they’re called. If they’re called anything.
Risa can’t think properly. Can’t really see properly. The rain, you see.
No, wait. It stopped raining a while ago.
Risa stops walking and blinks. The truck thing stops.
“Hey - hey you! Lady! Whoa, whoa, whoa, Chuck - get out and check.”
“What? Why - why me? You go, you’re authorized.”
“No one’s authorized anymore you moron, now go out there and check on her!”
Risa decides this is as good a time as any to pass out.
31.
She wakes up.
She’s lying in a bed.
There’s a man in a chair two feet away with a gun pointed at her head. She thinks he’s the man from the jeep, too, but she can’t be sure.
“What’re you doing?” she gets out hoarsely.
The man smiles. It would be a nice smile if it wasn’t so… psychopathic.
“I get to sit here and make sure you’re not a Croat,” he says levelly.
Risa swallows hard. Not enough spit. She sure would like some water. “And what if I am?”
“Then I get to shoot you in the head,” he says. “That’s the fun part. The not-so-fun part will be cleaning your brains off my wall.”
“Well,” Risa mumbles. “Good luck.”
She tries to go back to sleep but her leg is hurting like a bitch now. She moves it around a bit. It’s wrapped.
“Stitched you up,” the man said. Risa knows exactly where the wound was going. Despite that, the jerk pointing a gun in her face doesn’t leer. Not even a little.
Man, and she thought Sam had stoic down. This guy’s made it a religion or something.
It comes back then, suddenly, and hurts more than her leg and a gut shot combined. She can’t stop the cry. Her face just crumples together hard, doesn’t give her a choice in the matter.
She feels, instead of sees, the man sit up a little straighter. He doesn’t say anything though, and fuck it. Fuck it all. She lets go. Sobs loud and hard. Wailing. She used to mock those women on television, years ago, the ones who keened right in public without a shred of self-respect.
She shouldn’t have.
She gets it now, how it is, when there’s something inside you too big to be there and just too painful to keep in.
32.
“You’re not a Croat,” the guy says, after a while. She cried, slept, drank some water and cried some more.
Now she’s hungry.
“Thanks for the update,” she mutters.
“Yeah,” the man says. Swings his pistol on his finger, looks at the wooden floor between his spread legs. “What’s your name?”
“Sonrisa,” she says, before she can stop herself.
“Sonrisa. What’s it mean?”
“Smile,” she says. “In Spanish.” It’s like a weight lifting off her shoulders, the fact that someone else knows now.
“Well, I’m Dean,” the man says. “Dean Winchester.”
“What?” Risa breathes. Shit, the tears are back, thick in her voice, but seriously, what the hell? What the hell?
“Dean Winchester,” he repeats, and that’s when Risa looks. There’s no resemblance, really. Maybe the slight cleft in the chin. Not much else. It’s just really big coincidence.
“You have family?” she asks, anyway.
The word ‘family’ is like a trigger. Something spreads over his face, lightning fast, is gone just as quickly and there it fucking is. That one expression, that brief show of pain - it was like looking at Sam all over again.
“You have family,” she repeats. “Oh fuck. Fuck.”
He’s watching her with eyes like his brother’s - not the color, no, but… it’s like they had the same soul or some fucked up thing like that.
Jesus. Okay, that was the painkillers talking.
“What?” Dean says, and that’s when she tells him.
It just comes spilling out. Whose camp she’s been in for two years. Which man she chose to follow. What happened this morning - yesterday morning.
Whenever.
She talks until she’s hoarse and instead of seeing Dean’s face, sees yesterday happening inside her head like a movie.
Mai laughing as they headed to Detroit. Gavin, Matt and Richard flexing their muscles and saying they couldn’t wait to get rid of the nest.
See? You and me and that thin line between life and death that’s just itching to snap.
33.
Dean leaves when she’s done. Just gets up and leaves.
She doesn’t see him for days.
34.
It’s a settled camp. They just stay in one place, send missions out to the surrounding areas.
Not like Sam, who moved around like he was running from something.
Risa thinks back to Detroit.
Who knows - maybe he was.
35.
There’s a woman sitting with a baby, on a porch of one of the cabins. Risa’s walking past slowly, working her slowly healing leg. It still hurts but she’s not going to let being out of shape get her killed.
She walks past twice before she does a double take.
“That baby,” she says, going up to the porch, holding the wooden rail for the steps. “Where - where’d it come from?”
“She,” the woman says, smiling a little.
She. She. Of course, of course she. Risa can’t breathe.
“Castiel brought her. He does it sometimes. Some of the other camps, they move about, can’t keep a baby. So he brought her here.”
“Did he say where she came from?” Risa asks. Splinters from the wooden rail sink into her palm.
“Oh, yes. Small town in Wisconsin, if I’m not mistaken.”
Small town in Wisconsin. Small town in Wisconsin. Fucking hell.
It's too early to joke, but it pops out of her mouth anyway. “Men suck,” she says.
The woman laughs a little and holds the baby out, asks if Risa would like to hold her.
Risa thinks about it, nods and climbs up the steps.
36.
Dean finds her a week after she arrives.
She’s on the porch. He sits down carefully next to her, smelling like the forest.
“I always thought he was dead,” he says, blandly and non-sequitur.
“Don’t lie,” Risa spits automatically. “Don't you fucking dare.”
She’s seen them. Chuck and Castiel. They’re always around Dean and they always stay here. She knows now, who was keeping tabs on Sam Winchester.
37.
A few weeks later they get the first report: Lucifer has a new meat suit.
Risa spends the whole day going back and forth between her bed and the bathroom, while the rest of the camp gets shitfaced. She vomits all of the nothing she’s eaten and keeps right on going most of the day.
Lucifer was trying to possess Sam.
And Risa?
Risa ran. Risa just left him.
She did that. She did that and now she’s going to have to live with it. Forever.
38.
She wakes suddenly that night. For a moment, she just lies there, trying to figure out what broke her sleep.
She hears a noise and sits up quickly, heart hammering and hand reaching for her gun.
There’s someone outside. She can see them through the window, a fingerprint against the darkness. She creeps out of bed quietly, goes over to her window.
It’s Dean. She recognizes the set of his shoulders, of all things.
He’s standing there, looking up at the starry sky. She watches him.
It’s only when he wilts and brings a hand up to his face does she realize he’s crying. His shoulder’s shake with silent sobs. She goes to the door and opens it a little, meaning to go out, but changes her mind at the last moment. Dean hits his knees, actually hits them, with his fists, pummels his thighs over and over. He falls then. His fingers dig hard into the dirt. There's so much violence in his stance, charging the air around him, but nothing nearby to hit. He’s not making the slightest sound.
Her own grief suddenly feels silly in comparison. This man was Sam’s brother. That much she knows. But brother is such a simple word. Such a tiny thing. Who knows how much more they were to each other. Maybe he's only person left on the planet who really understands what’s been lost. Maybe he's the only one who could ever understand, ever know.
“He’s changing,” a solemn voice says.
Risa stumbles back a little, hand over her heart. “Holy Mary Mother of Jesus - you moron!” she hisses. “How about a little warning?”
Castiel just gazes at her mildly. “Sorry,” he says. He’s different. Not much, but a little, since the last time she saw him which was months ago.
“What do you mean he’s changing?” Risa asks.
Castiel shrugs a little. “Just that. He’s changing. This… news. It’s not going to be good for him.”
“Why weren’t they together if it matters so much?” Risa whispers. Because it obviously does, matters too much to fathom, and it makes no sense at all.
“Long story,” Castiel says, in a way that implies he has no intention of ever enlightening her.
“Right,” says Risa. Folds her arms over her chest and watches the figure curled in the moonlight.
She could fall in love with him too.
The thought catches her by surprise.
She stands there for a moment longer before turning away and closing the door behind her.
Tomorrow already has bullet holes punched into it. She needs to be up at dawn.
39.
With this bullet lodged in my chest, covered with your name, I will turn myself into a gun, because it's all I have. - Richard Siken
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters: Risa (from 5.04 The End)
Word Count: 7400
Rating: R
Warnings: Graphic imagery.
Summary: “Nothing ends, Adrian,” Risa says, without really knowing why. “Nothing ever ends.”
Notes: Extremely belated fic written for roque_clasique's birthday and the prompt: The End 'verse. How did Dean find out that Sam had said yes? How did he react? Dialog in summary belongs to Alan Moore. Title from Richard Siken.
1.
There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse is often closer to the truth. - Alan Moore
2.
A year and a half from now, they’ll find a bunch of dead bodies in an old dried-out swimming pool. The bodies will be rotting, flesh melting away from bone, but it’ll be obvious that all of them - every last one - drowned.
They’ll stare down at the open grave, at the bloated remnants of some teenager’s stomach, the partially revealed alien smile of a child’s skull.
Lisa will wonder if they were killed or if they did it to themselves, and no one will answer.
Dean will un-cock his pistol, slide it into his waistband, and set a hand on the rifle strapped to his shoulder. “Let’s go,” he’ll say.
They’ll be two miles away before Risa will say, with completely nonchalance, “I used to love swimming.” Her voice floats through the muggy air, hangs heavily around their ears. No one says a word, but a couple of people twitch, shrug their shoulders a little, like they’re trying to get kinks out of their muscles.
Rubber soles will crunch over dried grass and dead leaves.
They’ll find a nest of Croats twenty minutes later. Dean will end up with a concussion, Robert with three broken ribs and Megan with a five inch gash down her back, but aside from that, they’ll be fine.
They’re all dying - every last one of them - but they’ll be fine.
3.
Her second or third boyfriend - she can’t really remember which now - was a comic book geek. Saga of the Swamp Thing, Watchmen, V for Vendetta - a real Alan Moore fan. He’d walk around quoting him all day, which, depending on her mood, Risa either found completely endearing or utterly annoying.
His name was Michael and he had a great smile. She was sixteen then. They were together for years and years. Long enough for her to think they were it.
Risa brushes the dirt next to her sleeping bag to smoothness with her palm and wonders where Michael is now.
She hopes he’s dead. She hopes anyone she ever cared about died quickly, before things got bad. She hopes they never had to see what she’s seen. Find out what she’s found out.
Sam walks past, holding his gun out. He’d taken first watch. He always takes first watch, Risa thinks. Has as long as she’s known him, anyway. He looks down as she turns her lantern’s burner down.
“Rest up,” he says quietly, before moving on, stepping carefully over Mai’s sleeping bag.
Risa watches his back until it disappears into the darkness.
4.
A few hours later she wakes from a nightmare and takes it back.
Who fucking wishes people dead, anyway?
Like she needs that kind of karma.
5.
Richard, Devon and Michelle are walking, up ahead. Their voices carry back to Risa, something about what they’d like to be doing right now and what they’ll do when all of this ends.
“Nothing ends, Adrian,” Risa says, without really knowing why. “Nothing ever ends.”
Michelle shoots her a weird look over her shoulder.
Sam’s watching out of the corner of his eye, walking a few feet to the left.
“Watchmen,” she says. Laughs a little. Hitches her pack higher up her shoulders. “One of my boyfriends from high school, he’d had a thing for comics… dunno, I guess. I guess I’ve been thinking about him lately.”
Sam doesn’t say anything much, as usual.
“The weirdest stuff gets stuck in your head, you know?” she goes on.
“I swear,” says Gavin from behind and the group launches into a discussion about the kind of weird things they have stuck in their heads.
Sam’s eyes are grazing the horizon. Risa’s eyes are grazing Sam.
6.
She thinks that maybe she’s fallen a little in love with him. The way you’re always going to fall for those sorts of men. The ones you look up to and admire. The ones who save your life every day, for no reason that you can figure. The ones who are quiet and enigmatic and beautiful all at once.
It’s not going to go anywhere though. She’s not stupid.
But, compared to the other tortures of today, this one’s not so bad. It’s got a lulling rhythm, the fantasy that someday, she’ll be in the right place at the right time and he’ll decide to open up to her. Decide to tell her who he is and why he’s here.
It’s the daydream she falls asleep to, and it’s better than imagining exactly how she’ll die or when. It makes her feel a little less lonely. Even if it’s only in her head.
7.
They pass through a government camp in Minnesota. Sam seems agitated the whole time, even though it was his decision to go through here. They’ve been killing Croats nonstop for three days, met six demons just last night. They’re all tired and hungry and this is a safe route.
People peer out of their tents to watch them pass.
A wizened old woman with brilliant blue eyes stops Sam with her hand. “You a dead man,” she says to him, eyes narrowing. She looks at the rest of the group. “You all dead. Can see it in your bones.”
Sam waits until she lets go of him to walk away but doesn’t say a word. The others exchange looks.
Risa can’t stop looking over her shoulder at the woman as they walk away.
“She’s full of shit,” someone says. Matt, maybe, because the words are followed by a nervous laugh. High-pitched.
“Full of shit,” he says again, quietly and no one else says anything.
8.
That night Sam pops aspirin like they’re pieces of candy.
He ignores Carter, who keeps track of their supplies and is twitching with each crackle of foil.
He skips dinner too.
9.
Most towns they pass through now, abandoned are not, have walls plastered with fliers. Black-and-white photos, grainy smiles and eyes full of shadows.
Missing: Annie Walker, Age 15, Last Seen July 2nd, 2010
Missing: Robbie Downs, Age 3, Last Seen March 23rd, 2012
Missing: Eli Roberts, Age 67, Last Seen October 19th, 2012
Risa reads as they walk.
She searches for her name. For some sign that there’s still someone out there, searching for her. It would be nice, you know? Some meaning now, when the world’s going to hell around them. Something to hold onto and someone to fight for.
There’s something inherently selfish in fighting only to survive, only for yourself.
Even if you’re all you’ve got.
10.
Her name is actually Sonrisa. It’s a strange name. Gets lots of questions, so she started introducing herself as Risa when she was fifteen.
It bothers her now, that she’s the only one who knows that. Full name Sonrisa. It means smile.
She wouldn’t mind if someone asked, now. But no one does.
11.
There are bodies lined up along the Mississippi River.
They’ve all got pennies on their eyes, glinting in the afternoon sunlight.
“Who would do that?” Mai whispers. “Who would do that?” Her voice is getting shriller, louder. “Who the fuck would do that?!”
Everyone’s sort of watching her. Maybe because it’s distracting. Keeps their own fear at bay, their own urge to just breakdown.
Sam fiddles with his gun, so the strap is across his chest, and goes over to Mai. Pulls her into a hug, one arm around her back and a hand against her head. He lets her cry and rests his cheek against her hair.
Risa stares. She can’t help it.
Just when you think you’ve seen all there is to see about a man, he goes and surprises you.
Acid burns in her chest and she looks away.
Ridiculous. She’s like a teenager. You’d think there weren’t more important things going to worry about.
12.
It’s been a quiet day. They’re taking a break. They’ve got a few tents set up, enough for everyone to be in one without too much discomfort. But right now they’re all sitting outside. Gavin and Matt are playing with a ratty deck of cards. Mai is braiding her own hair and humming under her breath, eyes on the sky. It’s drizzling lightly.
Sam’s cleaning guns with Richard, nearby. They’re talking quietly. Risa wonders what about.
Carter stumbles out of a tent. He’s got a bottle of liquor in his hands.
“Dude, where they hell’d you get the alcohol?” Alex says, sounding peeved. Carter just shrugs. Plops down on the dirt, raising dust.
“Guess what?” he slurs loudly. Heads come up all around. “Guess. What. My parents? My parents are dead. My sister is dead. My brother is dead. My wife and my daughter are… wait for it, wait for it - dead!” He laughs, explosively. Laughs and laughs until he’s sobbing. Ugly, loud sobbing.
“Christ,” someone says under their breath. No judgment in their voice, just shock. Realization perhaps. “Jesus Christ.”
Jenny goes over to Carter and pulls him into a hug.
It’s a long time before he stops wailing, and by the time he does, a bunch of others have joined him, tears dripping silently down their faces.
13.
In the beginning they called it rabies.
Risa can still remember the headline, a single word splashed across the New York Times.
They tried decontamination at first, with their hazmat suits and burning chemicals. It was still ‘cure’ at that point instead of ‘kill’.
Everyone thought it was beatable.
No, actually, everyone thought it was a joke. That’s more accurate. Harsh maybe, because no one could have known what it actually was. Except for psycho cult people.
Religious extremists.
Those crazy preachers you see on television, the ones who demand you pray for forgiveness before you are damned.
Maybe even Scientologists.
Oh. Hunters too.
Not that anyone would have believed them, since one, demons are supposed to be a figment of your imagination, and two, even if they’re real, who’s ever heard of a demonic virus? It’s like something from the 15th century when people would blame illness on witchcraft. It sounds ridiculous, really.
Risa hadn’t been around when the news first went public. She used to be a relief worker, once upon a time and you don’t really expect much news from home to reach Cambodia. And when she’d finally gotten home, she’d been stuck in quarantine, so… anyway.
She watched recordings afterwards, of news bulletins and stuff. Whatever came out after the first announcement from the White House. Typically, those bastards had been suspicious for months before they let the cat out of the bag.
She spent hours and hours going through YouTube when she finally got home, like it was somehow going to help her survive if she knew what everyone was saying.
That was always one of her failings, she supposes. Thinking knowledge would get her everywhere.
Some douche on CNN blamed North Korea, interfamily marriages and HBO all at once. The president went on pretending nothing was going on at all and then snuck out to his family home when he thought no one was looking. Oprah did a special and those ladies on The View went on and on comparing the virus to the stuff you see in horror movies (“Maybe it’s actually zombies. Night of the Living Dead, you know? Or - or - or - like 28 Days Later! Bacteria, right?”).
See? Joke.
Maybe there had been too many similar things going around just beforehand - bird flu, swine flu - that people were more likely to take seriously. Who knows? For some reason, folks let their guard down. Or, well - didn’t have it up all the way, at the very least. So when it came, really came, no one was ready. No one could protect themselves.
And it ate right through all of them, until people figured it out: for once, this really was a matter of life or death.
14.
Rachel’s bait.
She’s standing out in the clearing, a bunch of decomposing corpses for company.
Richard’s fidgeting next to Risa, behind the bushes. Risa knows he and Rachel have been sleeping together for a couple of months now. She hopes Rachel gets out okay. The fewer people you have to hold onto, the harder each loss becomes.
Not that Sam sends people out to play bait unless he’s sure he can get them out safely. But then, there’s a first time for everything.
Last time they did this the Croats snuck up on them quietly. This time, they come screaming.
“Go!” Sam shouts, and he’s up and running himself, towards Rachel, who’s shooting for her life. Literally.
It’s a bloodbath, like these things usually are. Mostly one-sided. Croat pieces scattered about like flowers. Risa stares at one from a safe distance.
Once, they were human, just like her. She wonders how it feels. If it feels like anything. If it happened to her, could she blow her own brains out?
She turns around, walks back to the rest of the group. They have cairns to build.
Alex, Michelle and Jenny are spread wide across the bloody earth, their insides on the outside.
15.
Six days in quarantine. It was 2010 and she was coming back from Cambodia. They attached a staircase to the plane, instead of the usual tunnel thing, deposited them outside in the open air where they were met by a bunch of suited officials, walkie-talkies humming. They lined them all up and walked them down to a unit they’d set up outside, sterilized showers and blue tiles everywhere and the kind of uniforms you might see on people dealing with nuclear chemicals. They were told to strip. None of them really knew what was happening. Eric said something about rights and a couple others followed his lead, demanding information.
What they found out was this: there was a virus. Some strain of rabies, maybe. There was something about how the disease incites violence. How Beach City, Texas had been wiped off all sentient life, how they’d stopped answering radio calls and when a team was sent out, the city was just… empty. How there was a massacre in Odell, Oregon. How the government finally decided to take action.
Megan laughed. “You’re kidding me, right? You’re fucking kidding, you - you can’t be serious. How can a damn virus do that? It sounds like mass murder, it sounds like some fucked up cult’s decided to purify the earth!”
It did sound like that. It wasn’t that. They’d done tests on live subjects from Odell. That’s what they called them: ‘live subjects’. Like monkeys or mice or something to be experimented on.
People’s eyes went panicky, wide. Risa felt a shiver run up her spine, shifted a little. Her fingers were still on the buttons of her jacket.
16.
They appear out of thin air. This tends to happen every few months, maybe a little longer, but Mai still jumps sixteen feet and shouts, “Shit! Holy shit! Motherfucking goddamn son of a bitch, shit!”
Gavin and Matt are falling over themselves laughing until Mai turns around and punches Matt square in the eye.
“Guys,” Sam says, coming up to the visitors.
It’s a little hard to believe but one of them is an angel. Demonic virus? Fine. Demons? Okie-dokie. Crazy rabid people? Great!
But angels? It’s a little ridiculous. ‘Cause angels sort of imply God and if God’s really out there, why is any of this happening, right? Risa stopped trying to figure it out ages ago. She also stopped trying to figure out how someone could just fucking… Apparate or whatever. Sometimes you’ve just got to go with the flow. There are worse sacrifices you can make.
The angel’s name is Castiel. Sometimes they get Gabriel - yes, the Gabriel - but this one’s Castiel and with him is his trusty sidekick prophet, Chuck.
Seriously.
Risa doesn’t really know where they come from or where they go afterwards. It’s like someone’s keeping tabs on Sam or something. Or he’s keeping tabs on someone, because he definitely knows them.
It’s weird, running into people Sam actually knows. It means that once upon a time, he had a life and it wasn’t this - commanding a straggly bunch of survivors and trying to save the world one Croat at a time. There had been a man named Bobby who they’d come across once. Sam spent that entire night stuck to his side, not even talking really, just being there like he needed it or something, like he couldn’t bear to leave. It was the first sign of weakness she’d ever seen him show.
That was when it started. This whole infatuation thing.
They never saw Bobby again, now that she thinks of it.
The angel, the prophet and Sam conference for a while.
17.
Michael asked her to elope.
She said yes. They were supposed to meet up. She never went.
If you’d asked her two years ago what her biggest regret was, leaving him hanging would never have been it. Not by a long shot.
The end of the world sort of has a way of reorganizing your priorities, though.
She should have said yes. She should have just said yes, instead of worrying about how he’d hold her back, bog her down. She loved him, she did, and he loved her, no lie. He loved her. They’d had something Risa’s never found in anyone else, and it never seemed to matter before. She had her education and her job and a few dates here and there. She was stable and happy and just… okay. And then, suddenly, none of that mattered, and she’s sitting here having fantasies about some guy she hardly knows opening up to her, just so she can feel something aside from fear and anticipation and her heart, beating like a countdown.
And she could have had it. She could have had him.
That’s what you hold onto, in the end. Right? That’s what matters - the people you love, who love you. Not how many degrees you have or that you went to Wellesley or how much money’s sitting in your bank account. Not really. Because you’re going to die, someday, here one second and gone the next - bullet to the gut or a head wound that doesn’t stop bleeding or your own mind turning against you - and all you can really hope for is someone to be there to hold your hand when it happens and tell you it’s going to be okay. All you can hope for is to leave someone behind who cares enough to mourn.
If only.
Those two words seem to pop up a lot these days.
18.
It goes on forever. They trek across continental America as if few years ago, the streets weren’t jam-packed with cars. From town to, city to city, state to state.
If a Croat doesn’t get her first, Risa knows how she’s going to die. One day, just like this, they’ll be walking. Walking, walking, walking. And she’ll just lie down. In a puddle of orange light on the black asphalt of just one of America’s endless back roads, she’ll lie down and she’ll never get up.
That’s where she’ll wait.
For whatever’s out there to come and get her too, yes. But mostly, just for death.
Mostly just for the end.
19.
After people started realizing the virus wasn’t rabies, started believing the people who stood up, calling themselves ‘hunters’ of the supernatural, well. After that there was anger.
A lot of it.
Why didn’t they say anything before this happened?
Why didn’t they protect us?
Why did they let this happen, shouldn’t they have been able to stop it?
There was talk of repercussions. People saying the hunters should answer for their mistakes. It all fizzled out pretty quickly, because things got bad fast.
Sometimes, they’ll come across a malevolent spirit and Sam will try his best to find their graves and bones. He’ll gather some of them, spend a couple of hours in deserted, half-destroyed libraries. If that doesn’t work he tries to speak to them, to tell them to leave. Some of them actually do.
Who’da thunk? Ghosts, demons, witches. Even more than that - demi-gods, werewolves, vampires. They’ve met a bunch, but probably haven’t met anywhere close to everything there is out there.
It must be a lonely life. Knowing these things, these nightmare things, are actually real, and having to fight them, all alone.
If you ask Risa, these people, these hunters - they’ve already been punished for crimes they didn’t commit. Just by living. Just by doing what they do every day. They don’t even ask for thanks. How do you live like that?
It still boggles her mind, the kinds of things that have been happening right under her nose, right under most of humanities nose.
Really, how blind can you be?
20.
The Croatoan virus is transmitted by blood. If the Croats can get a hand on you and they want to turn you, all they have to do is press one of your bleeding cuts with one of their own.
Game over.
Sam says the virus originates from demons. There are traces of sulfur in Croat blood, and that means demons. He thinks a demon infects someone with their blood, and it poisons the person. Makes them lose their mind.
It’s just a theory.
There’s a town in Wisconsin. Small and quiet and empty. There are a couple of cars on the main street, parked in front of the shops like their owners have just ducked inside to buy some bread.
The group splits up, to clear the town. Make sure there are no Croats around. When that’s done, they raid the stores for supplies, and then head towards the houses.
They’re modest, but picturesque. Maybe the kind home Risa would have liked to have. Not outrageous, but not shabby either.
Risa’s just brought out a first aid kit onto the street, where they’re collecting everything they find when Gavin comes running out of one of the houses, red-faced.
“There’s a baby in the house,” he says, pointing behind him. He’s talking to Sam.
“A dead baby?” Rachel squeaks. The others turn to their closer friends to discuss this new development.
“No, fuck it,” Gavin says. “Alive! It’s - it’s - it’s crying.”
Matt comes running out of the same house just then. “It’s a she,” he announces. “She’s been cut; I’m pretty sure the Croats turned her.”
“That’s impossible,” Risa says, above everyone’s muttering. “She should be dead.”
“No,” Sam says then. His voice is hard as rock. He’s not looking at any of them, just opening up all the first aid kits they’ve found and rummaging through them. Everyone’s fallen completely silent, and now they can all here the infant’s wailing cries.
Risa’s heart is trying to choke her.
“No,” Sam says again, quieter. “She wouldn’t be. Can you tell her age?”
“I - um - I - um,” says Matt. He and Gavin exchange unsure looks.
Men.
“She’s probably six months or younger,” Sam mutters and now it’s more like he’s talking to himself. “Maybe, I don’t know. Maybe at that age, the DNA changes to incorporate the new blood. It makes sense.”
“How does it make sense?” Risa asks incredulously. Her pistol is slippery in her hand.
The baby’s cries have grown louder, more affecting. Mai says, “I’m going to go get her,” and makes to head to the house.
“No,” says Sam loudly. He looks up finally. “No. Leave her.”
“Excuse me?” Risa exclaims while Mai snorts incredulously, says, “Fuck that,” and heads towards the house.
“What - the fuck - why?” asks Richard.
“She’s been infected,” Sam says, watching the door Mai disappeared into.
“No, she hasn’t,” Devon says slowly. “She’s not dead. And she didn’t go all kamikaze on Gav and Matt.”
“That’s not-” Sam shakes his head, gets to his feet and brushes his hands off. “The Croatoan virus is demonic in origin. She hasn’t been turned into a Croat, but she has been infected with demon blood.”
Risa doesn’t know what that has to do with fucking anything, but she does know what it sounds like Sam’s suggesting.
“So what, you want to leave her here? She’s an infant!”
Mai comes back out. The baby’s in her arms now, her clothes bloody and ripped. She’s thin. Too thin. Her skin is yellow around the eyes and her cries are so fucking painful that Risa can hardly keep her own tears at bay.
“You don’t think I know that?” Sam says harshly, his eyes on Risa now. There’s a fire in them, a deep anger. He’s not looking at the baby. Neither are many of the others. “You think I - you think I want to do this? We don’t even - she’ll live if we take her, fine, but she’s going to grow up cursed. You don’t even - you don’t understand.”
“Then fucking make me understand!” Risa shouts. They are not going to leave a baby, no way.
“I can’t,” Sam snarls.
“Then what’re we gonna do?” Mai asks. She’s jiggling the baby up and down.
Sam swallows hard. Presses his hand over his eyes. “I don’t - I need to-” His hand moves away and his eyes are stormy. He looks… destroyed, though. He looks shattered. He looks like a boy.
For the first time, Risa realizes, this man, her leader - he’s probably younger than she is. Twenty-five maybe. Twenty-six. Less than thirty.
“I need to think,” Sam says, and he walks up to Mai then. Takes the baby from her, gently, so gently, like he wasn’t talking about leaving her to die a minute ago. He walks back into the house Mai brought her from.
Everyone stands stock still in his absence, looking at each other.
They’re all waiting for that sound. The final gunshot.
It doesn’t come, but the baby’s cries do soften. After awhile, silence has been restored.
Everyone shuffles around a little before going back to work.
21.
They leave without the baby. Risa doesn’t know what happened to her. Doesn’t want to ask.
She watches Sam’s back as they leave the town. It’s the first time he’s ever been ugly to her.
22.
Sam and a few of the other guys are poring over a map.
Something big’s coming to Detroit.
The people are talking. The angels are talking. The demons are talking.
Everyone is talking.
Something big’s coming to Detroit.
23.
Sounds like a warning, doesn’t it?
The kinda thing that would make you stay away from Detroit. The kinda thing that would make you stay away from anywhere 100 miles of Detroit.
Yeah.
24.
Short and sweet?
It ends like this:
Gavin’s body lying two feet away. Just his body, though. His head’s a couple of yards further than that, where the demon threw it. Mai over by the gutted bookshop, her eyes wide and unseeing. Matt blown to pieces.
Richard and Rachel went down back to back. They took out about twenty Croats before it happened. Risa can still see them, over to the left. Half of Rachel’s face is gone. Some demon’s slit Richard’s stomach. His intestines are hanging like jewelry around his neck.
Devon and Carter, well, Risa doesn’t know where they are. Can’t see them. Dead, probably. Dead, of course.
The whole world is reduced, in a single moment, to the time between one trigger-pull and the next. There’s you and there’s me and there’s a thin line between life and death that’s just itching to snap.
It’s shoot, feel the kick-back jar your arm and check: still alive, right? Still breathing? Limbs all attached? Head on?
In the end, it all comes down to sheer dumb luck, and Risa can hear every single fucking cliché on the planet gloating.
In the end, it’s just her. Just her and Sam, separated by a half a mile of cracked tarmac and the noxious spray of blood and bile.
25.
It came out of nowhere. A fucking ambush. Demons and Croats and every fucking thing they could throw at them.
They weren’t ready for it, weren’t ready for anything like it.
It was a trap. Someone lured them, spread that bullshit story. Said the Croats were going to gather. Said you could wait there, surprise them. Sends those freaks to hell once and for all.
They met up with two other camps for it. It’s about seventy people in total.
It took fifteen minutes for most of them to be taken down.
Even months afterwards, Risa won’t really understand what happened or why.
All she knows is that it was planned.
Surprise, surprise.
26.
She runs away. The dead are settling into rigor mortis and the living, well, most of them are screaming their last breaths.
She runs. Sue her. Call her a coward. What the fuck ever you want to say, say it. Her friends, the only family she had left, were disemboweled before her eyes, so she fucking runs, okay?
She goes back, using cars and tables and all the rest of the junk on the street as a shield, and finds a shop on the long street that doesn’t have corpses for a welcome mat. That’s where she hides. Occasionally a Croat or two will sneak up and she’ll shoot their brains out.
Funny thing? A few demons see her too, their eyes black as pitch. They don’t touch her. Don’t do a thing.
It takes an hour, at most, for things to get quiet. Her gun still has ammo so she’s rises from behind the counter, slowly. Maybe someone’s still out there. Maybe someone survived. They might need help.
She creeps out of the store, debris cracking and crunching under her boots. The wind is blowing outside. It billows her hair around and she pushes it out of her eyes.
It’s like a bomb fell outside.
Bodies everywhere, unmoving. Silence so thick it’s suffocating. The sun is rising, the sky brightening in the east.
She steps further out into the street.
Croats are gone. Demons are gone. The road’s steaming, but empty.
How can every single one of them be dead? How?
She turns full circle, and that’s when she spots them. Two figures, half a mile down the road, directly to the east where the sky is palest. They barely look like shadows at this distance. Risa quickly ducks behind someone’s scarred Toyota.
Curiosity fucking kills. A voice in her head is yelling that, in her mother’s voice. Curiosity fucking kills, Risa! Are you listening to me? She moves forward in spite of it, trying her best to remain unseen. Jumps over rabble, keeps her gun squeezed tight. She can’t feel her fingers.
She looks over her shoulder and sees that she’s trailing blood. Ignores it. Nothing’s hurting. She’ll check it out later.
She stops a good thirty feet away, too far to hear anything above a murmur, but close enough to see.
There’s a man she doesn’t know standing with his back to her. And right in front of him, on his knees, is Sam. Risa has to cover her mouth to keep a gasp in. A chunk of skin is missing from his temple, blood flowing sluggishly down his face. He’s sucking in air through his mouth. There’s something sticking out of his ribs, like - like a tree branch, Risa can't tell. His right arm is gone. Just - gone. And for some reason, what she notices? What really hits her? Not that there’s blood spurting from a hole in his body, no, but that his shirt is all frayed at the arm, where it was ripped away. His stupid shirt is stupid frayed.
Risa swallows back bile with difficulty, can’t keep the burning tears in control though. Her hand is still pressed tight over her mouth.
Sam lists to the left like he’s going to fall, but the man bends a little. Puts a hand on his shoulder to keep him upright and touches a finger under Sam's chin. Raises his head until Sam's looking him in the eyes.
Blood trickles down Sam's chin, down his neck, into his torn shirt. His eyes are dead.
The man’s talking. Low murmur.
Risa thinks, Please God, oh please, please, please. She doesn’t even know what she’s praying for.
It’s like a bad horror movie, but in 3-D and more than Technicolor and those noises she can hear coming out of Sam’s mouth aren’t good acting, they’re fucking real.
Oh. There’s Sam’s arm. A couple of inches away from his knees. It’s still holding his gun.
This time it rushes up her throat faster than she can push it down, and she bends over and vomits all over her shoes. And fuck, it’s loud in the emptiness, and she’s caught, this is it. She’s going to die because she couldn’t keep from upchucking.
She finishes retching. Looks up slowly, expecting the man to be standing over her.
But he’s not.
Instead, he’s still standing in front of Sam, hand fisted in the cloth of Sam's shirt, keeping him upright. Sam’s eyes are closed now and his head is hanging back, neck bared, but Risa can’t - she doesn’t know if he’s dead, doesn’t really care at this point because he’s staring at her. That man. And he’s no man, oh no, oh fuck no, Risa doesn’t have a clue how she knows but she does, he's no man.
This is the thing they’ve been running from. This is the thing that’s destroying the world.
It’s Lucifer, and he’s right there, staring at her.
It’s animalistic fear that runs through her. Her brain takes full control. She’s up and running before she can even think about it, running back the way she came, like she can fucking outrun the fucking Devil.
She trips twice, skins her knees bloody. Gets right back up again.
It’s not until she’s a good two miles away that she realizes: she’s alive.
He let her go.
She’s gasping hard, hands on her knees. They're red and white, her hands, from their death grip on her gun. She swallows hard, spits onto the tarmac. Looks over her shoulder. The figures have disappeared behind an incline in the road.
There’s a bright light on the horizon, though. Pulsating and white.
It doesn’t look anything like the sun.
27.
She walks alone in that great vapid void that follows every battle.
She’s numb. She only has her gun for company. It’s got a few rounds left. Her pistol’s still full of bullets.
Her leg’s burning. She drags it along behind her and keeps walking.
28.
My name’s Sonrisa. It means smile.
My name’s Sonrisa. It means smile.
When the sun rises it’s quickly smothered by clouds. That’s what happens after a massacre. There has to be cleansing.
Thunder rumbles.
When the rain finally starts to fall, it’s like acid against her skin.
29.
It pours.
She can’t see more than ten feet in front of her because of the rain.
There it goes, washing it all away. Any sign that Gavin and Matt and Richard existed. That Rachel, Devon, Carter and Mai lived. Fought. Died. That there was a man named Sam Winchester who Risa had maybe loved and who she knew next to fucking nothing about.
Any sign that only six hours ago she’d been asleep, surrounded by each and every one of them, breathing and dreaming and not even thinking that in a few hours they’d be deader than dead.
If she cries, well, who’s to say?
There’s too much water as it is. She can hardly tell herself.
30.
A truck’s coming. No - not a truck. More like one of those army vehicles. Whatever the fuck they’re called. If they’re called anything.
Risa can’t think properly. Can’t really see properly. The rain, you see.
No, wait. It stopped raining a while ago.
Risa stops walking and blinks. The truck thing stops.
“Hey - hey you! Lady! Whoa, whoa, whoa, Chuck - get out and check.”
“What? Why - why me? You go, you’re authorized.”
“No one’s authorized anymore you moron, now go out there and check on her!”
Risa decides this is as good a time as any to pass out.
31.
She wakes up.
She’s lying in a bed.
There’s a man in a chair two feet away with a gun pointed at her head. She thinks he’s the man from the jeep, too, but she can’t be sure.
“What’re you doing?” she gets out hoarsely.
The man smiles. It would be a nice smile if it wasn’t so… psychopathic.
“I get to sit here and make sure you’re not a Croat,” he says levelly.
Risa swallows hard. Not enough spit. She sure would like some water. “And what if I am?”
“Then I get to shoot you in the head,” he says. “That’s the fun part. The not-so-fun part will be cleaning your brains off my wall.”
“Well,” Risa mumbles. “Good luck.”
She tries to go back to sleep but her leg is hurting like a bitch now. She moves it around a bit. It’s wrapped.
“Stitched you up,” the man said. Risa knows exactly where the wound was going. Despite that, the jerk pointing a gun in her face doesn’t leer. Not even a little.
Man, and she thought Sam had stoic down. This guy’s made it a religion or something.
It comes back then, suddenly, and hurts more than her leg and a gut shot combined. She can’t stop the cry. Her face just crumples together hard, doesn’t give her a choice in the matter.
She feels, instead of sees, the man sit up a little straighter. He doesn’t say anything though, and fuck it. Fuck it all. She lets go. Sobs loud and hard. Wailing. She used to mock those women on television, years ago, the ones who keened right in public without a shred of self-respect.
She shouldn’t have.
She gets it now, how it is, when there’s something inside you too big to be there and just too painful to keep in.
32.
“You’re not a Croat,” the guy says, after a while. She cried, slept, drank some water and cried some more.
Now she’s hungry.
“Thanks for the update,” she mutters.
“Yeah,” the man says. Swings his pistol on his finger, looks at the wooden floor between his spread legs. “What’s your name?”
“Sonrisa,” she says, before she can stop herself.
“Sonrisa. What’s it mean?”
“Smile,” she says. “In Spanish.” It’s like a weight lifting off her shoulders, the fact that someone else knows now.
“Well, I’m Dean,” the man says. “Dean Winchester.”
“What?” Risa breathes. Shit, the tears are back, thick in her voice, but seriously, what the hell? What the hell?
“Dean Winchester,” he repeats, and that’s when Risa looks. There’s no resemblance, really. Maybe the slight cleft in the chin. Not much else. It’s just really big coincidence.
“You have family?” she asks, anyway.
The word ‘family’ is like a trigger. Something spreads over his face, lightning fast, is gone just as quickly and there it fucking is. That one expression, that brief show of pain - it was like looking at Sam all over again.
“You have family,” she repeats. “Oh fuck. Fuck.”
He’s watching her with eyes like his brother’s - not the color, no, but… it’s like they had the same soul or some fucked up thing like that.
Jesus. Okay, that was the painkillers talking.
“What?” Dean says, and that’s when she tells him.
It just comes spilling out. Whose camp she’s been in for two years. Which man she chose to follow. What happened this morning - yesterday morning.
Whenever.
She talks until she’s hoarse and instead of seeing Dean’s face, sees yesterday happening inside her head like a movie.
Mai laughing as they headed to Detroit. Gavin, Matt and Richard flexing their muscles and saying they couldn’t wait to get rid of the nest.
See? You and me and that thin line between life and death that’s just itching to snap.
33.
Dean leaves when she’s done. Just gets up and leaves.
She doesn’t see him for days.
34.
It’s a settled camp. They just stay in one place, send missions out to the surrounding areas.
Not like Sam, who moved around like he was running from something.
Risa thinks back to Detroit.
Who knows - maybe he was.
35.
There’s a woman sitting with a baby, on a porch of one of the cabins. Risa’s walking past slowly, working her slowly healing leg. It still hurts but she’s not going to let being out of shape get her killed.
She walks past twice before she does a double take.
“That baby,” she says, going up to the porch, holding the wooden rail for the steps. “Where - where’d it come from?”
“She,” the woman says, smiling a little.
She. She. Of course, of course she. Risa can’t breathe.
“Castiel brought her. He does it sometimes. Some of the other camps, they move about, can’t keep a baby. So he brought her here.”
“Did he say where she came from?” Risa asks. Splinters from the wooden rail sink into her palm.
“Oh, yes. Small town in Wisconsin, if I’m not mistaken.”
Small town in Wisconsin. Small town in Wisconsin. Fucking hell.
It's too early to joke, but it pops out of her mouth anyway. “Men suck,” she says.
The woman laughs a little and holds the baby out, asks if Risa would like to hold her.
Risa thinks about it, nods and climbs up the steps.
36.
Dean finds her a week after she arrives.
She’s on the porch. He sits down carefully next to her, smelling like the forest.
“I always thought he was dead,” he says, blandly and non-sequitur.
“Don’t lie,” Risa spits automatically. “Don't you fucking dare.”
She’s seen them. Chuck and Castiel. They’re always around Dean and they always stay here. She knows now, who was keeping tabs on Sam Winchester.
37.
A few weeks later they get the first report: Lucifer has a new meat suit.
Risa spends the whole day going back and forth between her bed and the bathroom, while the rest of the camp gets shitfaced. She vomits all of the nothing she’s eaten and keeps right on going most of the day.
Lucifer was trying to possess Sam.
And Risa?
Risa ran. Risa just left him.
She did that. She did that and now she’s going to have to live with it. Forever.
38.
She wakes suddenly that night. For a moment, she just lies there, trying to figure out what broke her sleep.
She hears a noise and sits up quickly, heart hammering and hand reaching for her gun.
There’s someone outside. She can see them through the window, a fingerprint against the darkness. She creeps out of bed quietly, goes over to her window.
It’s Dean. She recognizes the set of his shoulders, of all things.
He’s standing there, looking up at the starry sky. She watches him.
It’s only when he wilts and brings a hand up to his face does she realize he’s crying. His shoulder’s shake with silent sobs. She goes to the door and opens it a little, meaning to go out, but changes her mind at the last moment. Dean hits his knees, actually hits them, with his fists, pummels his thighs over and over. He falls then. His fingers dig hard into the dirt. There's so much violence in his stance, charging the air around him, but nothing nearby to hit. He’s not making the slightest sound.
Her own grief suddenly feels silly in comparison. This man was Sam’s brother. That much she knows. But brother is such a simple word. Such a tiny thing. Who knows how much more they were to each other. Maybe he's only person left on the planet who really understands what’s been lost. Maybe he's the only one who could ever understand, ever know.
“He’s changing,” a solemn voice says.
Risa stumbles back a little, hand over her heart. “Holy Mary Mother of Jesus - you moron!” she hisses. “How about a little warning?”
Castiel just gazes at her mildly. “Sorry,” he says. He’s different. Not much, but a little, since the last time she saw him which was months ago.
“What do you mean he’s changing?” Risa asks.
Castiel shrugs a little. “Just that. He’s changing. This… news. It’s not going to be good for him.”
“Why weren’t they together if it matters so much?” Risa whispers. Because it obviously does, matters too much to fathom, and it makes no sense at all.
“Long story,” Castiel says, in a way that implies he has no intention of ever enlightening her.
“Right,” says Risa. Folds her arms over her chest and watches the figure curled in the moonlight.
She could fall in love with him too.
The thought catches her by surprise.
She stands there for a moment longer before turning away and closing the door behind her.
Tomorrow already has bullet holes punched into it. She needs to be up at dawn.
39.
With this bullet lodged in my chest, covered with your name, I will turn myself into a gun, because it's all I have. - Richard Siken