ultraviolet9a (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ultraviolet9a) wrote2008-04-26 09:25 pm
ultraviolet9a) wrote2008-04-26 09:25 pm
Entry tags:
just like
>> just like
TITLE: just like
AUTHOR: ultraviolet9a
SPOILER: up to and including 3.13.
ultraviolet9aSPOILER: up to and including 3.13.
GENRE: Gen.
CHARACTERS: Sam Winchester and characters from 3.13 which would be a spoiler to mention, so erring on the safe side yadda yadda.
SUMMARY: Several months after 3.13. All else would be spoilers.
RATING: PG-13.
FEEDBACK: Dude…duh.
DISCLAIMER: I totally own them (in my head. Currently bled dry by a djin, see.)
FEEDBACK: Dude…duh.
DISCLAIMER: I totally own them (in my head. Currently bled dry by a djin, see.)
NOTE: happily covers the found_fic_spnchallenge 31.
found_fic_spnchallenge 31.NOTE2: beta by shiny tiffosis.
tiffosis.Ten months after Spruce leaves them, seven months after she loses her virginity to Harry and two hours after Harry and Ed try to kill her (dead say it dead not gone just dead) Maggie finds the small piece of paper in Harry’s wallet. It’s drenched in blood (so much blood. It always ends in blood, shit and fear and blood, she has learned that by now, should have learned it long ago when Corbett delivered the lesson) and her thumb runs circles over it as she holds it in her palm. She flips the wallet back open, looks at the photo of her and Ed and Harry and Spruce and Corbett - Ghostfacers Inc., blood smeared on the plastic cover, like an omen of things to come. Of things that have come. Not an omen. A testament.
Then she picks up the phone and dials the number. She clears her throat before she speaks and forces all other noises down. When she does, her voice seems to come from far away, from a person that can’t be her. Maybe it’s not. Maybe the salt that separates between death and safety somehow distorts her reality, but her silent tears are scorching as they fall and they are salt too, and they do not lie.
One tear falls on the salt on the floor and she thinks, that’s saltwater. Like the sea. Harry always talked about getting rich and buying a yacht and drinking margaritas on a Mexican beach. Ed loved it. Secretly, she did too.
“Maggie?” Sam says over the phone when she’s done.
“Can’t leave,” she says. Her teeth are beginning to chatter again. “Can’t leave. Not like this.”
“Maggie. Listen to me. I’m just a few hours away.” She forces her breathing down to hear him. “I’m coming for you. Stay put.”
She does.
Click.
The dead line feels like a door closing.
Opposite the barriers of salt, Harry and Ed are sitting cross-legged on the floor watching her.
“You can’t stay like this forever,” Ed croons. “And you know he’s not really going to help. Why would he, Maggie? For someone like you?”
“Ed, please…” she whimpers.
“Ed, please,” Harry mocks. “Please, Ed, please. That’s how you were begging for it, bitch, and you know, you weren’t even worth it.”
She flinches.
“Come on, Maggie. Break the circle. Be a good girl. You know you deserve it. It’s your fault after all. You shot us.”
“Oh don’t be like that, Harry. We love you, Maggie,” Ed says. “You know we do. Ghostfacers all the way. Come on, Mags.”
And it feels just like Ed, and just like Harry, and she wants it so bad. So bad.
“Come on, little sister,” Ed says opening his arms. “Gimme a hug and I’ll call it even.”
“Come on, love,” Harry says. “We’re family.”
It’ll go on for hours, she knows. Hours till help comes, and she can’t leave.
First it was pleading and cajoling and lies that twisted her gut with their truth (God damned bitch, you always think that I am lying about everything, why, Maggie, why did you shoot me?), then it was threats, then it was them screaming, then it was her screaming, almost losing her mind, teeth chattering with the oncoming cold of night and fear. Then she stretched her arm and got Harry’s torn jacket, tried to throw it around her shoulders for warmth, and her hand touched his wallet. And she called.
It’s too much.
Hours of tainted words and taunting and nightmare stories from them. She hopes Sam can come in time. She doesn’t know how much more she can take of it before reality unravels around her.
“Mags,” Harry says. His voice is tender. His eyes are black.
Maggie huddles into a ball, hides her face on her knees and starts crying.
.:::.
“You did good,” Sam says.
The night should smell of oncoming daylight. It smells of loss. Salt and fire.
At least this way Ed and Harry will never get caught in a loop. They’re the lucky ones, Maggie’s thinking, she’s the one in the loop now, dreaming and waking to the same nightmares over and over again.
“You did the right thing,” Sam says. “If you hadn’t shot them, if you hadn’t trapped them in salt in time, you’d be dead. Others would be dead, too. You had no choice.”
“I didn’t mean to,” she says, but truth is, she did. She did. They came to kill her and there was no margin to think of anything else except afraid and survive.
“The demons?” she asks for the nth time. “Are they gone?”
“Went back straight to Hell,” Sam replies as if she hadn’t asked before.
“And Ed and Harry? They’re not in Hell, are they?”
“No,” Sam says. She watches his jaw clench. “They’re not in Hell.”
There’s something so hard and pained and wistful when he says it that her fingers reach out to his. He doesn’t push them away.
She wishes she could cry, cry at the layers and the darkness of the world, cry at her guilt and loss, cry because she knows that no other day will ever hold so much pain and terror in her life, no other day will ever follow her like this. But for now something in her has shifted and her eyes are dry, watching the paths of unfolding futures. It all clicks into place.
She can see a future where she’ll get back home and tell what happened and end up with a punch in the face and a straitjacket. Or a future where she’ll get back home and never utter the truth, and the truth will grow like cancer in her and eat her alive.
And she can see a future where she’ll never get back home, because home died with Ed and Harry and Maggie-that-was. Where she’ll ride in the black car and have Sam ride her in cheap motel rooms; where he teaches her how to take all those shadows down, because she’s just like him now; where she turns like bitter earth and all she feels is darkness and shit and blood under her skin; where all that binds her to this life is memory and the need for redemption.
She’s one of them now. The real ghostfacers. Or hunters. Or whatever they’re called. She’s one of them. Cut off from the normal world, but part of them. Part of the shadows.
And she can see it, sense it on her skin already, feel herself turn to steel and bitterness. No oncoming daylight. Scent of loss, salt and fire. Her scent. Sam’s scent.
“Dean’s gone, isn’t he?”
Sam nods.
She squeezes his hand.
“Let’s go.”
He doesn’t let go till they reach the car.
As they leave miles and lives behind them, Maggie falls asleep to the purr of the engine.
-The End.
SIDENOTE: I have no idea where this came from. Except that for some reason, I liked Maggie. And I thought, imagine if she really got caught in a hunter’s reality, the gritty, cruel reality of it. So I made her get caught. (Don’t judge me. She’s going to have Sam sex in future, that’s compensation enough for the shit I put her through, right? Right?)
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