Delia for bratfarrar
Title: Delia
Recipient: bratfarrar
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2700
Warnings: references to past suicide and possession
Spoilers: S14
Author’s Notes: Thank you for these (and other) evocative visual prompts, bratfarrar! I hope you enjoy this gift.
https://unsplash.com/photos/XKOdMFYiBRo
https://unsplash.com/photos/o97vBPxvSew
https://unsplash.com/collections/219539/road-tripping
Summary: Three things are true in the united states of Winchester: 1) Ghosts make more ghosts. 2) Darkness has taken up residence in a girl named Delia, who is dead. 3) You can pick your friends, but you can't pick your readers.
Way down in the hollow, there was a girl with the all-seeing eyes painted on her hands, sunflowers and iris bright as the sun. It had been some time. It had been a very long time since she wove a spell with her own fingers, needles and kettles and willow wands, since her feet were in the creek and her head was in the sky.
One day, the darkness came to see her.
***
You'd think when god said lights out, Dean says, it would be, you know, dark.
And he'd know, Sam thinks--he's faced off with lights-out herself, or no, bonded with her, sent her Dean-fashion off, happy, to hold hands with her other half.
But the sky is bright grey over Kentucky and they are driving, east and south to see a girl who’d set off an epidemic of soullessness, or what looked like it, faultlines of bloodshed running through the hills and rivers and little college towns of the Shenandoah like smoked and crackled glass.
It’s not like they don’t have a back catalogue, or that the world isn’t devolving, devouring, shucking all their good and then some--but there the sun still is and Dean (Sam thinks) has an idea that maybe they can, well, reason with a thing he’s reasoned with before.
What if it isn’t her, Sam says.
Or: what do they know, anyway. She could be anyone, anything, a girl washing her hands in a stream, crooning to an old-fashioned doll, calling the blue-ticks out of the wood and the crows out of the corn while god rewrote the book of Winchester and all of history besides.
One more round, Delia’s gone, one more round.
***
Sam’s been remembering things.
Lake water. Blackwater. A bottle of pop tastes like drowning, like sulfur and moss, like so many years ago when they were young.
His shoulder aches and his other parts besides. Dean shifts in the driver’s, winces like every ache’s an echo.
You can’t stop a god-bullet; surely that’s an end. But it isn’t.
One night, Sam dreamt he drove to Canada, saw Max and Alicia alive and well and witchy, told them, “I want to quit but Dean doesn’t, or Dean wants to quit and I don’t.”
“And it’s a package deal,” dream-Max said.
Yeah, Sam mutters, and Dean asks him, here and now, if he’s alright, does he need to stop, what was he dreaming because it didn’t sound like fun.
I’m OK, Sam says, and thinks: ghosts only make more ghosts.
A haunting in Arkansas offered to take their hands, laughed maniacally about a bridge. Another, well, best not spoken of.
Sam takes photos of motels now, like he wants to remember what it was like before angels, before god.
Dean eats fries in every state.
***
Lightning in the air, murder ballads on the radio.
Soullessness: Lexington to Manassas Gap, shadow of the Blue Ridge, 66 to 81; old mountains worn to knees and knobs.
Delia (if that’s her name) is a contagion. A scout troop, a mother in Fishersville, neighbors run amok in the hills, tipped crates and loose hounds and spatterings; crows.
Dean said: chase the souls and maybe it’ll right itself, if only temporarily. It’s a sickness--not like when Amara first landed, and not, well, Croatoan, or the whacko virus-ghost-alien that took Roanoke, but--
Rowena calls, says on speaker,boys, don’t drive into an ambush now.
A spell could bring her to them, she says. A little work from the Book could help; a little of their history.
You mean your sisterhood, Dean says, to make her laugh.
***
At a brick church in Fishersville, the minister says: all of our angels are gone, for the time being, anyway.
Ours too, Sam says, and Dean looks grim, and listens to the lists of the dead, or those run off into the fields and woods, mountains to east or to the west.
There’s a place in Raphine, the minister says, that I’ve heard-
He’s old Virginia, sorrowful, mineral-soft on the r’s. Holds out his King James, flipped to the last where a yellow birth certificate (Molly M…, Sam makes out, thinks, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary) shudders in the breeze.
That’s where it’s coming from, he says.
***
Dean wants to go in now and naked, not even stop off for sleep.
But they have to dispatch a ghost on the way down, side of a county road where there was once a cross. A tendril of smoke climbs the barks into a white sky.
Dean, Sam says-
Something is crackling between his eyes, at his senses like the lightning that never came, and he thinks of Missouri, and Magda, and Mom.
What do you want?
This isn't the way back to the beginning. That isn't what they want, anyway.
Or is it.
***
They’re so tired.
They pull off, nap quick in the car, wake and check, again, the best weapons in their uselessness, the wards, the salt and the iron.
Do you sense her, Sam asks, and sinks; relief like a river when Dean says no.
Here’s the thing: the one neighbor left says the girl’s been gone a long time, that she was twenty, that she was a witch, that she was an orphan from a long line of granny magics, that she was in love, that she had tattoos, flowers and eyes, some kinda quote marks, a fern; that the local kids used to dare each other into her garden, sometimes, but now-
the cottage is fallen-in, parchment-toned; tangle of broomsedge, Virginia sweetspire, cinnamon fern, chokeberry and salt wort. A short stand of ash.
Tendrils of something dark.
***
They’re shoulder-to-shoulder in the door when Delia tells them she contains multitudes.
She is a ghost, her hands abloom with lashes and her lap full of needles; black thread, red yarn. Cards. A willow wand. A bowl--and a black book.
Oh, crap, Dean says, and she welcomes them as only a witch can:
Winchesters.
Dean? Sam says, but Dean goes and sits, and Sam goes and sits, elbows on the squirrel-scratched oak of her table.
Delia smiles.
She wants you to know, Delia says, that she can show you every good you’ve ever done, remind you. She can-
Her face is so young, Sam thinks, gossamer, cobweb with the thrum of power beneath, like ore in a mine. A little like Jack.
She? Dean asks, though he doesn’t have to.
So many souls, Delia says, I can channel her.
Yeah, Dean says, we noticed.
But her hands are full of cards, and on them, Winchesters. Ghosts. Cases. All the way back to the beginning. Faith. Judgment. Sacrifice. Death.
I was already a witch, she says, with my rods and my switches and my thrift-shop chalice, but I could do magic as complex as any of the high stuff. And then I was a ghost. And this-
her hand sweeps round, the cottage, the yard, the tangle, the road, ley lines in the ironclad earth--
is a place of power, she says. You know.
Yeah, Sam says, but--
I’ve seen angels here before, Delia says, why not the dark? She wanted to speak to you. She knew you’d come. She wants to give you something.
What's that, Dean says, her Keno payout?
The ending you want, Delia says, and opens the black book.
This isn’t a case, Sam thinks, it’s a summit.
A gift, Dean says, like last time? Why would she do that? Why didn’t she just-
Delia’s hands move across the oak, up over the pages of the book.
There are advantages, she says, to the indirect.
A shadow passes through her translucence, like the arrival of a bird.
How did you … get to be a ghost, Sam almost says, but he doesn’t really need to ask--
he knows she chose it.
***
They’re outside in the yard of a sudden, the bright grey sky and the breeze kicking leaflets over birdbath stones.
They’re waiting on a ghost-witch who can channel god’s sister and it’s another Wednesday; another state, another story.
It doesn’t happen here, Sam says, I don’t think …
We need the world not to end in an apocalypse of our re-runs, Dean says, or a re-run of our---
Would that be so bad, Sam thinks, would it really? Dean’s thinking it too; he knows it.
They’re tired. One or the other of them has been skipping to the end of the book for a long time, reading backwards, guessing how it'll be. But now?
No-one can write this but them.
Freedom, peace, the world, the veil; I offer you it all, Delia said in someone else’s voice.
Dean’s actually trembling a little, and there--Sam feels it, the great hollow holy sympathy of post-possession, all of their traumas alive in both of them, these places angels have walked, the hurts make them want to go… somewhere else, these hills, home, the roads they’ve loved and driven, side-by-side while the monsters slept and the country quieted itself around them.
She killed herself, Sam says, we can’t--
Dean says, I told Cas once, a long time ago, that this makes it all worth it, you know--a playground, some trees.
Sam looks and he can see them, somehow: kids on swings, a heaven.
She’s not here, Dean says, not really.
He means Amara, or Delia, or Death, a spirit channeling spirits and ghosts on ghosts on ghosts. He means all the ends he’s ever been offered.
What’re we gonna do, Sam says, about the souls?
***
It’s not like they can gather them up in baskets, or sweep contagion clean from the hills with Delia’s broom.
Rowena sighs on the phone.
Obviously you can’t, she says, dispatch this ghost. This needs a witch’s delicate unneedling, you know--unwending the ghost-witch-cosmic entity from one another. I could--
No, Dean says.
You could, Rowena says, leave her a spirit. Try speak to Amara more directly. Leave that door open. And if her brother--
Sam doesn’t want to talk to Rowena about god, or the devil.
But she texts them a cleansing, a banishing, a spell.
***
She’ll be disappointed, Delia said, and shut the book.
The cottage shook, and the hollow, and the hills beyond, when they said the words, and there was a flash of fire in the sky.
It’s not like they haven’t said no before, Sam thinks, feels the earth shift, feels his brother next to him like rock.
They’ll send Delia back to herself, leave her to her stream and sky, her tangle, burn some other bones they’ve burnt before.
In a month or two, maybe, the kids’ll creep back here for a tale, a haint, spook at the cottage gate, pack their herbs, their weed-and-beer, their tattooed eyes, try out some neo-pagan on the hearth: Hipster Witches of the Shenandoah.
She wouldn’t mind.
***
Soullessness cannot be cured, unless it never was.
The minister in Fishersville says something to them about faith, judgment, fear, love; tells them about the daughter he lost years ago.
Up the road, Dean tangles with a mechanic with a tire iron, aftereffect of infection, or something, a fever dream.
Sam tends to Dean's bruises. Dean complains but lets him.
You're my favorite story, Dean says, dopey, like he's channeling Chuck or something, though really-
It wasn’t really her, Dean says, and her brother’s the worst.
He’s a writer, Sam says, like that explains it.
Like the wings of a crow, Sam thinks and he knows, somehow, that Dean hears him think it.
Down in the hollow there’s a girl fishing, singing to an old-fashioned doll, calling the blue-ticks out of the wood.
Round the valley-edge, Afton, Dooms, Ferrol, Swoope, all the way west to Buffalo Gap, people are walking, dazed, down out of the hills.
***
We have a history too, Rowena said.
They are driving, and the road is warm beneath them, and then the highway, 81 to 64, through the national forest.
I don't want to be anyone's story, Sam says, or anyone’s favorite; I never have.
You might not have a choice about that, Dean says.
I really thought, Dean says, you know?
That this was our last case? That we were done? That we could just let it all go and leave the world to someone else?
Yeah.
It could have been. It could still be, probably, Sam says. His hands are folded in his lap and it's a kind of prayer.
You mean it? Dean's hands shift on the wheel.
No.
Nah, Dean says, gives Baby a little juice. His smile is younger and it cracks Sam's hands open again. The fresh air lifts their hair in a wheatfield wave.
They turn away from the darkening hills. They keep on Kansas-ward in a slow turning of joy.
Recipient: bratfarrar
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2700
Warnings: references to past suicide and possession
Spoilers: S14
Author’s Notes: Thank you for these (and other) evocative visual prompts, bratfarrar! I hope you enjoy this gift.
https://unsplash.com/photos/XKOdMFYiBRo
https://unsplash.com/photos/o97vBPxvSew
https://unsplash.com/collections/219539/road-tripping
Summary: Three things are true in the united states of Winchester: 1) Ghosts make more ghosts. 2) Darkness has taken up residence in a girl named Delia, who is dead. 3) You can pick your friends, but you can't pick your readers.
Way down in the hollow, there was a girl with the all-seeing eyes painted on her hands, sunflowers and iris bright as the sun. It had been some time. It had been a very long time since she wove a spell with her own fingers, needles and kettles and willow wands, since her feet were in the creek and her head was in the sky.
One day, the darkness came to see her.
***
You'd think when god said lights out, Dean says, it would be, you know, dark.
And he'd know, Sam thinks--he's faced off with lights-out herself, or no, bonded with her, sent her Dean-fashion off, happy, to hold hands with her other half.
But the sky is bright grey over Kentucky and they are driving, east and south to see a girl who’d set off an epidemic of soullessness, or what looked like it, faultlines of bloodshed running through the hills and rivers and little college towns of the Shenandoah like smoked and crackled glass.
It’s not like they don’t have a back catalogue, or that the world isn’t devolving, devouring, shucking all their good and then some--but there the sun still is and Dean (Sam thinks) has an idea that maybe they can, well, reason with a thing he’s reasoned with before.
What if it isn’t her, Sam says.
Or: what do they know, anyway. She could be anyone, anything, a girl washing her hands in a stream, crooning to an old-fashioned doll, calling the blue-ticks out of the wood and the crows out of the corn while god rewrote the book of Winchester and all of history besides.
One more round, Delia’s gone, one more round.
***
Sam’s been remembering things.
Lake water. Blackwater. A bottle of pop tastes like drowning, like sulfur and moss, like so many years ago when they were young.
His shoulder aches and his other parts besides. Dean shifts in the driver’s, winces like every ache’s an echo.
You can’t stop a god-bullet; surely that’s an end. But it isn’t.
One night, Sam dreamt he drove to Canada, saw Max and Alicia alive and well and witchy, told them, “I want to quit but Dean doesn’t, or Dean wants to quit and I don’t.”
“And it’s a package deal,” dream-Max said.
Yeah, Sam mutters, and Dean asks him, here and now, if he’s alright, does he need to stop, what was he dreaming because it didn’t sound like fun.
I’m OK, Sam says, and thinks: ghosts only make more ghosts.
A haunting in Arkansas offered to take their hands, laughed maniacally about a bridge. Another, well, best not spoken of.
Sam takes photos of motels now, like he wants to remember what it was like before angels, before god.
Dean eats fries in every state.
***
Lightning in the air, murder ballads on the radio.
Soullessness: Lexington to Manassas Gap, shadow of the Blue Ridge, 66 to 81; old mountains worn to knees and knobs.
Delia (if that’s her name) is a contagion. A scout troop, a mother in Fishersville, neighbors run amok in the hills, tipped crates and loose hounds and spatterings; crows.
Dean said: chase the souls and maybe it’ll right itself, if only temporarily. It’s a sickness--not like when Amara first landed, and not, well, Croatoan, or the whacko virus-ghost-alien that took Roanoke, but--
Rowena calls, says on speaker,boys, don’t drive into an ambush now.
A spell could bring her to them, she says. A little work from the Book could help; a little of their history.
You mean your sisterhood, Dean says, to make her laugh.
***
At a brick church in Fishersville, the minister says: all of our angels are gone, for the time being, anyway.
Ours too, Sam says, and Dean looks grim, and listens to the lists of the dead, or those run off into the fields and woods, mountains to east or to the west.
There’s a place in Raphine, the minister says, that I’ve heard-
He’s old Virginia, sorrowful, mineral-soft on the r’s. Holds out his King James, flipped to the last where a yellow birth certificate (Molly M…, Sam makes out, thinks, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary) shudders in the breeze.
That’s where it’s coming from, he says.
***
Dean wants to go in now and naked, not even stop off for sleep.
But they have to dispatch a ghost on the way down, side of a county road where there was once a cross. A tendril of smoke climbs the barks into a white sky.
Dean, Sam says-
Something is crackling between his eyes, at his senses like the lightning that never came, and he thinks of Missouri, and Magda, and Mom.
What do you want?
This isn't the way back to the beginning. That isn't what they want, anyway.
Or is it.
***
They’re so tired.
They pull off, nap quick in the car, wake and check, again, the best weapons in their uselessness, the wards, the salt and the iron.
Do you sense her, Sam asks, and sinks; relief like a river when Dean says no.
Here’s the thing: the one neighbor left says the girl’s been gone a long time, that she was twenty, that she was a witch, that she was an orphan from a long line of granny magics, that she was in love, that she had tattoos, flowers and eyes, some kinda quote marks, a fern; that the local kids used to dare each other into her garden, sometimes, but now-
the cottage is fallen-in, parchment-toned; tangle of broomsedge, Virginia sweetspire, cinnamon fern, chokeberry and salt wort. A short stand of ash.
Tendrils of something dark.
***
They’re shoulder-to-shoulder in the door when Delia tells them she contains multitudes.
She is a ghost, her hands abloom with lashes and her lap full of needles; black thread, red yarn. Cards. A willow wand. A bowl--and a black book.
Oh, crap, Dean says, and she welcomes them as only a witch can:
Winchesters.
Dean? Sam says, but Dean goes and sits, and Sam goes and sits, elbows on the squirrel-scratched oak of her table.
Delia smiles.
She wants you to know, Delia says, that she can show you every good you’ve ever done, remind you. She can-
Her face is so young, Sam thinks, gossamer, cobweb with the thrum of power beneath, like ore in a mine. A little like Jack.
She? Dean asks, though he doesn’t have to.
So many souls, Delia says, I can channel her.
Yeah, Dean says, we noticed.
But her hands are full of cards, and on them, Winchesters. Ghosts. Cases. All the way back to the beginning. Faith. Judgment. Sacrifice. Death.
I was already a witch, she says, with my rods and my switches and my thrift-shop chalice, but I could do magic as complex as any of the high stuff. And then I was a ghost. And this-
her hand sweeps round, the cottage, the yard, the tangle, the road, ley lines in the ironclad earth--
is a place of power, she says. You know.
Yeah, Sam says, but--
I’ve seen angels here before, Delia says, why not the dark? She wanted to speak to you. She knew you’d come. She wants to give you something.
What's that, Dean says, her Keno payout?
The ending you want, Delia says, and opens the black book.
This isn’t a case, Sam thinks, it’s a summit.
A gift, Dean says, like last time? Why would she do that? Why didn’t she just-
Delia’s hands move across the oak, up over the pages of the book.
There are advantages, she says, to the indirect.
A shadow passes through her translucence, like the arrival of a bird.
How did you … get to be a ghost, Sam almost says, but he doesn’t really need to ask--
he knows she chose it.
***
They’re outside in the yard of a sudden, the bright grey sky and the breeze kicking leaflets over birdbath stones.
They’re waiting on a ghost-witch who can channel god’s sister and it’s another Wednesday; another state, another story.
It doesn’t happen here, Sam says, I don’t think …
We need the world not to end in an apocalypse of our re-runs, Dean says, or a re-run of our---
Would that be so bad, Sam thinks, would it really? Dean’s thinking it too; he knows it.
They’re tired. One or the other of them has been skipping to the end of the book for a long time, reading backwards, guessing how it'll be. But now?
No-one can write this but them.
Freedom, peace, the world, the veil; I offer you it all, Delia said in someone else’s voice.
Dean’s actually trembling a little, and there--Sam feels it, the great hollow holy sympathy of post-possession, all of their traumas alive in both of them, these places angels have walked, the hurts make them want to go… somewhere else, these hills, home, the roads they’ve loved and driven, side-by-side while the monsters slept and the country quieted itself around them.
She killed herself, Sam says, we can’t--
Dean says, I told Cas once, a long time ago, that this makes it all worth it, you know--a playground, some trees.
Sam looks and he can see them, somehow: kids on swings, a heaven.
She’s not here, Dean says, not really.
He means Amara, or Delia, or Death, a spirit channeling spirits and ghosts on ghosts on ghosts. He means all the ends he’s ever been offered.
What’re we gonna do, Sam says, about the souls?
***
It’s not like they can gather them up in baskets, or sweep contagion clean from the hills with Delia’s broom.
Rowena sighs on the phone.
Obviously you can’t, she says, dispatch this ghost. This needs a witch’s delicate unneedling, you know--unwending the ghost-witch-cosmic entity from one another. I could--
No, Dean says.
You could, Rowena says, leave her a spirit. Try speak to Amara more directly. Leave that door open. And if her brother--
Sam doesn’t want to talk to Rowena about god, or the devil.
But she texts them a cleansing, a banishing, a spell.
***
She’ll be disappointed, Delia said, and shut the book.
The cottage shook, and the hollow, and the hills beyond, when they said the words, and there was a flash of fire in the sky.
It’s not like they haven’t said no before, Sam thinks, feels the earth shift, feels his brother next to him like rock.
They’ll send Delia back to herself, leave her to her stream and sky, her tangle, burn some other bones they’ve burnt before.
In a month or two, maybe, the kids’ll creep back here for a tale, a haint, spook at the cottage gate, pack their herbs, their weed-and-beer, their tattooed eyes, try out some neo-pagan on the hearth: Hipster Witches of the Shenandoah.
She wouldn’t mind.
***
Soullessness cannot be cured, unless it never was.
The minister in Fishersville says something to them about faith, judgment, fear, love; tells them about the daughter he lost years ago.
Up the road, Dean tangles with a mechanic with a tire iron, aftereffect of infection, or something, a fever dream.
Sam tends to Dean's bruises. Dean complains but lets him.
You're my favorite story, Dean says, dopey, like he's channeling Chuck or something, though really-
It wasn’t really her, Dean says, and her brother’s the worst.
He’s a writer, Sam says, like that explains it.
Like the wings of a crow, Sam thinks and he knows, somehow, that Dean hears him think it.
Down in the hollow there’s a girl fishing, singing to an old-fashioned doll, calling the blue-ticks out of the wood.
Round the valley-edge, Afton, Dooms, Ferrol, Swoope, all the way west to Buffalo Gap, people are walking, dazed, down out of the hills.
***
We have a history too, Rowena said.
They are driving, and the road is warm beneath them, and then the highway, 81 to 64, through the national forest.
I don't want to be anyone's story, Sam says, or anyone’s favorite; I never have.
You might not have a choice about that, Dean says.
I really thought, Dean says, you know?
That this was our last case? That we were done? That we could just let it all go and leave the world to someone else?
Yeah.
It could have been. It could still be, probably, Sam says. His hands are folded in his lap and it's a kind of prayer.
You mean it? Dean's hands shift on the wheel.
No.
Nah, Dean says, gives Baby a little juice. His smile is younger and it cracks Sam's hands open again. The fresh air lifts their hair in a wheatfield wave.
They turn away from the darkening hills. They keep on Kansas-ward in a slow turning of joy.