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And here's my
apocalyptothon assignment out of the way ...
Title: Lay Your Weary Head To Rest
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural/Charmed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4,000 words, give or take
Spoilers: This season's finales for both (although obviously AU from then on)
Pairing: None (Gen)
Warnings: Bad language, character death (You know, like you'd expect ... ;))
Disclaimer: I don't own these characters, I just like playing with them.
Recipient:
ladybug218
Request: Chris & Wyatt meet up with Sam & Dean at the end of the world. NO INCEST!
Summary: You don't find the boys. The boys find you.
Author's note: Okay, so I tried to think of a way for this to work considering Chris and Wyatt are practically babies now, and I just figured, "Ooo, ooo! I can run with that!" Which is why I whipped this up. :) (Thanks to
phaballa and
dragonsinger for the beta help. *hugs* I added a little bit more at the end, just so.)
*****
Lay Your Weary Head To Rest
*****
You don't find the boys. The boys find you.
You've had that feeling for a while, you know. This light brush of something resting on the back of your neck every so often, this warm tingle that you had almost been afraid you had gotten out of the habit of recognizing. It's like sitting in a movie theater and having the guy three rows behind you spend two hours studying the back of your neck instead.
You and Dean take down this creature roaming the woods outside this small town in Pennsylvania, a monster like nothing you've ever seen before, all fire and smoke and fangs. Killing these things anymore isn't a matter of saving lives, it's just a bad habit neither one of you can break. Dean smirks at you over the steaming corpse, gun twirling in his hand like he's a fucking gunslinger. You just shake your head with a smile as you give the body a good solid thump to its midsection with your boot, one more hit for that last swipe its claws made towards your face.
From that fight on, that sensation of being watched weighs on you like a wet scarf draped around your neck.
That was two days ago.
So you're standing in a supermarket in that same small town rifling through the cereal boxes looking for something the animals haven't gotten to, and that's when the little boy appears behind you.
*****
Plague is a funny thing. People don't want to believe they'll die from mass sickness, from their throats choking off from the phlegm and their glands bulging bruised and dark against their skin. And they still won't believe it, not until their dying breath, not until they collapse in the cold and flu aisle at Wal-Mart with a humidifier and four boxes of Kleenex in their cart. People could be really stupid like that.
The two of you have found corpses lying in their own beds with a tucked-in sheet their only protection against the elements. Neatly dressed bodies slumped over in droves in the bitter silence of dozens of churches. A row of children's graves evenly dug into a backyard right next to the swing set. You've seen a dead man reclining against his wife's tombstone with a spent revolver in his lap and a relaxed smile on what's left of his face.
The hospitals make for decent mass graves these days.
"We should burn them down," Dean says after the two of you drive away from the fifth one so filled with bodies you couldn't walk into the building. "Unfinished business is going to get to be a real bitch after a thing like this."
You shrug and focus on Dad's journal. "You're going to be grateful for that in a few months," you say quietly.
The sad thing is how right you are. Speaking to the dead is infinitely better than speaking to no one at all.
But the thing is that after a while, people just stopped being stubborn and started dying at home. The grocery store managers and mall employees stopped coming into work just like the customers stopped coming in to shop, and the only dead people you see in their abandoned depths anymore usually sport what used to be pressed pants and a clean uniform shirt. You're almost tempted to start collecting nametags from them like morbid postcards. And I got this one in Utah from the dead guy in the ice cream aisle at Price Chopper.
When the boy tugs on your jeans to get your attention, you'd be less surprised to turn around and see a deer nibbling on the denim. That's just the way things are these days.
"Hi," he says, and smiles.
You freeze for a second with a box of Lucky Charms in your hand and blurt out, "Hi," like a faulty echo. There's a long moment when you have to force yourself to remember how to talk to other people. Being with Dean all the time means knowing what the world thinks by looking at it, talking just to fill the silence.
It takes you a moment to recover. You finally put aside the box of cereal and kneel down in front of him, doing a mental checklist. Four years old, maybe five. Clothes and face clean, eyes bright and body well-nourished. Whoever the kid is, he's been taken care of.
You try not to look like a threat. Putting away the handgun in your non-shopping hand helps.
"What's your name?" you ask.
"Wyatt," he says.
There's something in his eyes, something mischievous and calculating far beyond his years. After the last few months, you figure everyone's earned the right to be a little flighty. Slow and cautious is how you move, like approaching a skittish goat in a petting zoo, like tempting a stray dog.
When you hold out your hand, his lips purse as his brow furrows. He looks a lot like Dean when things don't go your way and his next move might be the worst idea yet.
"Well, Wyatt, I'm Sam, and it's very nice to meet you."
He stares at your hand for a long, quiet moment, and he's reaching for it when --
"Sammy!"
You turn at Dean's voice, calling you from the other side of the store, and when you turn back to Wyatt, he's gone.
*****
You search the town for the kid for two straight hours before Dean makes you give up. He tells you that he's going to fucking puke if he has to check out any more houses full of dead people and maybe you will, too. When you realize the kid's not in the supermarket, you check the library next door, and when that doesn't pan out, it's the candy store down the block. Dean calls it quits for the both of you when he turns a corner and sees a nursing home nearby.
"Oh, no way in hell, dude," he says. "The only thing worse than the hospitals are the nursing homes."
"The churches aren't all that pretty, either."
"That's not helping with that whole puking thing, you know."
"That wasn't me trying to help."
You're positive Dean doesn't believe there was a kid.
He won't say it, but he thinks maybe you're losing it a little. The whole powerful-psychic gig is getting to you, what with the dead world and the neverending silence and the near-total lack of girls. It's understandable, really. But you're positive Wyatt wasn't a ghost. Just something about him, the way he moved, the hum of power that even pinged on your untrained radar. So, okay, now you're seeing lost little boys in supermarkets. Next it'll be dancing elephants and talking parking meters. You've gone batshit. Dean will just deal with it, the way he takes care of anything else.
But that's not why you're insane.
You're insane because when the two of you finally do leave town the next day, you know the boy will follow you.
*****
You don't even get three towns away in Dad's pickup before you see the kid again, standing on a street corner in this place that isn't more than a blip on a map. He's wearing a clean pair of overalls, sucking on a lollipop, and holding the hand of a dark-haired boy even smaller than he is.
The truck slams to a stop. You'd like to think Dean saw them and hit the brakes, but ten bucks says that was your doing.
"You see them, right?"
Dean leans forward in the driver's seat just in time to see Wyatt wave at you. "Yeah," he says with a sigh, "I see 'em."
The smaller boy sucks his thumb, huddles close to Wyatt. You stare at their joined hands and know the feeling. "Wait here," you say to Dean, and he listens for once.
When you kneel before the boy this time, he's tense like a coiled spring, the presence of the other boy making him jumpy, and you expect Wyatt to just bounce away with the first sudden movement you make. The __expression on his face is like a common phrase in a foreign language. If you could read minds, you know what his would say, and even though you can't, I'm giving you a lot of leeway here and you'd better be worth it is sketched in neon lights in the air.
"Hey, Wyatt," you say, "is this your little brother?"
He pauses a second like he's got to think about it, his grip on the kid's hand tightening, but after a moment he lets himself nod. "His name is Chris," he says.
You don't want to think about where the kid was when Wyatt was trailing around after you in some deserted grocery store. You don't know if it's worse if he left Chris alone somewhere or if he left him someplace where the scent of death hung heavy in the air for a reason.
You're sure he didn't leave Chris with their parents, because if he had, you just know neither one of them would be standing here.
And you're almost afraid to ask the next question, but that's never stopped you before. "How did you guys get here?"
Chris looks up at Wyatt. Wyatt just looks down at the ground, toeing the stones in the sidewalk with his sneaker.
Behind you the door to the truck opens, nice and easy. You refuse to turn around at the sound of boots on pavement. If you take your eyes off the boys, they'll bolt, and if they do you don't want to miss it this time.
When the footsteps stop, you say, "That's my big brother, Dean." You lean forward and add in a conspiratorial whisper, "He's not as stupid as he looks."
Wyatt grins at that, and maybe that's why Dean doesn't calling you a fucking bitch and threaten to punch the shit out of you later. He wants to, though, but instead he just comes up to your side and says, "Yeah, well, I can't say the same about this one," and rumples your hair like you're a freaking five-year-old.
But Wyatt giggles and Chris even smiles a little, and it's the first bright spot the two of you have seen in weeks.
*****
It takes a while to find a good house in the middle of nowhere like this, because the plague took nearly all of the people and that meant a lot of the livestock didn't make it past the first month or so. The stench of a dairy barn full of dead cows carries on the breeze for miles, so the first test of a good house after checking the inside for bodies is standing outside and breathing deeply. Any other problems, you can always handle with a gun or a can opener.
Funny, how the meandering existence you hated for so long trained you to survive when everybody dropped dead around you.
Dad didn't plan for this shit, you think sometimes.
It usually takes you ten minutes after that to catch your breath again, because Dad isn't around to be quietly smug about that.
It doesn't take as much persuading as you're afraid it will for the boys to decide to come with you. Wyatt lets you take his hand, and when Dean reaches down to pick them up and swing them into the truck, Chris latches onto him and won't let go. So you drive out to the country biting back a smile the whole time, and you're the one who checks out the house and makes sure it's livable.
The entire time, Wyatt watches his little brother cling to Dean with a thousand different emotions a boy his age shouldn't even know hiding behind his eyes.
It's one of those old farmhouses, the ones where the water comes from a well and the generator in the barn probably got a lot of use every winter. There aren't any bodies in the house, but the most recent newspaper on the cluttered kitchen table sports a date a week before the plague went from "that thing that's going around" to "Jesus, I heard the hospitals are full of people dying from this shit."
You salt the doors and windows anyway. People never were your family's biggest problem.
An hour after the four of you settle in, after Wyatt's stopped trailing after Dean-carrying-Chris and fallen asleep on the couch in the living room, Dean strides into the kitchen where you're scooping Beefaroni out of a can sporting a goofy grin on his face.
"Dude, watch this," he says, and holds out his arms.
Chris continues to hold on, groggy with sleep but clutching at Dean's shirt with fearsome need.
You can't help but smile at that. "What did you do, put suction cups on him?"
"I don't even get it, Sam," he says. He slides a hand under Chris again just as easy as could be, arm curving around his small body, and just looking at him holding the kid makes the sensation of being carried by stronger arms rise across your skin like an old burn.
*****
Dean falls asleep in a recliner in the living room with Chris sprawled across his chest, the boy's chubby fist pressed against his lips as he worries his thumb in his sleep. Wyatt gets up to the scent of a dinner he eat two spoonfuls of before he heads back to the couch, takes one look at Chris latched onto Dean, and goes back to sleep the second after he climbs into Dean's lap and gets comfy.
You watch the whole thing from the chair nearest the front door with a shotgun in your lap and the nagging sensation that something you won't like's about to happen.
Every so often, your eyelids shut, and the last time they do, they slam back open to the echoing sound of women crying out in agony in your mind.
Your head clears with the faint weight of Wyatt's small hands on your knees. You clear your throat and wonder if he knows you had a nightmare. You notice the coffee table's off-kilter and wince. You wonder if you screamed. "Sorry, kiddo," you say, and force a smile.
There is this photo of Dean when he was a kid from after the fire, a toddler version of you sitting between his spread legs as he colors even though you're chewing on one of the red crayons. The Dean in the picture has a hand raised to pull the crayon from your mouth, and there's something so serious and responsible about the look in his face in that photo that you've never been able to think about it without cringing.
Only a few days of knowing the kid, and it already scares you how much Wyatt looks like that all the time.
"My mommy screamed a lot," he says.
You may be suffocating. It sure as hell feels like it.
Then he takes your hand, and the next thing you know, you're not in the farmhouse anymore.
*****
The last time you saw a real newscast, all they talked about was the flu and the anchor couldn't stop coughing. If there's been an earthquake on the West Coast since then, you wouldn't have known.
Blink and you miss it, and when you open your eyes again, you know you're in San Francisco the same way you sometimes just know which fork in the road to take without checking the atlas. Palo Alto's only a short car ride away, or at least it was before the highways turned into boneyards. If you look out the window of the house Wyatt's brought you to -- and he has brought you here, whether or not you want to admit it -- you almost hope you'll see the campus, the burned shell of your apartment, the hillside where Jess is buried. Your normal life, shredded and scorched by the goddamn demon long before the normal contagious world could do it to you.
Makes you wonder now, if you and Dean keep each other alive, if being brothers alone in this world is what keeps the sickness at bay.
The thing about an earthquake is that it's the first thing you think of when you see the house you're standing in, furniture turned over and light fixtures shattered against the hardwood floors. If you had to guess from the interior, you'd bet it's one of those expensive homes that are all over San Francisco, the ones they put on souvenir postcards. It's just something about the curve of the staircase, the scattering of antiques all over. Picture frames tilt lazily on the walls in the foyer, and one glance at the people in them is enough to tell you the obvious.
Wyatt's home.
You can't see anything frightening from where you're standing other than a big mess, but Wyatt goes eerily silent at your side just the same. You can't even hear him breathing, not even when you look down at him just to make sure his small chest rises and falls. He doesn't tell you anything, and you can't bring yourself to ask. "Stay here, okay?"
Wyatt nods and hangs back. You have a feeling when he does so that he doesn't stay because you asked him to.
It's the smell that hits you first, not the rot you're familiar with but the burn you've tried to forget. The air weighs heavy with the taint of seared meat, like hamburger left to char too long on a grill. And there have been fires since the population dwindled down to nothing -- hell, Chicago was a pile of used matchsticks the last time you and Dean passed through -- but this is the stench of a death that makes chills crawl up your spine like wild vines.
It's only the one body, though, spread out on the floor of the sunroom and burned down just this side of ashes. You're almost afraid to step into the room, positive a heavy enough vibration will make the body shatter and rain down on the floor in a cascade of gray dust. Just the one body, burned and broken and curled up into itself, and not a scorch mark to be seen anywhere on the floor or ceiling. Like spontaneous combustion, like flame burning to life out of nothing at all.
But just looking at the body and testing the air with a sniff for a hint of sulfur is enough to know it wasn't like spontaneous combustion.
Not like it at all.
*****
When Dean finds you in the morning, you're in an upstairs bedroom in a chair next to the bed you tucked the boys into. Your knees press into the comforter, you've slid the chair so close, and Wyatt and Chris curl up together like puppies under the blankets.
You don't notice he's carrying mugs of coffee until he slips one into your hands. It's got to say something, the strong bitter scent not cutting through the stark, gruesome image in your mind.
"Cute little buggers, aren't they?"
You nod distractedly as Dean takes a gulp of his own coffee. You take a deep breath and suddenly you can smell it all again, the dead air in the house and the startling strength of the coffee and the fact that every single one of you needs a bath more than anything. "Wyatt took me somewhere last night," you say.
Dean's cup stops halfway to his lips. He knows that tone of your voice, and his job face slips into position like a blind being yanked down. "Took you where?"
"San Francisco," you say.
Dean freezes, then downs his coffee in one long swig. It suddenly occurs to you that it might not just be coffee in there.
"He took me home." There's no easy way to say the rest of it. "I think something set their mother on fire."
For a second, it feels like Dean's left the room, and maybe he has. Maybe he went downstairs to punch a wall and bite back tears. Maybe he went outside to shoot something. Maybe he went back in time to blow another tunnel right through your father's skull with the Colt's last bullet to make sure he got the fucking demon all over again.
It's not the same thing that killed your mother. You know this, Dean knows this.
Doesn't stop the feeling, though, doesn't stop both of you from looking down at the boys and thinking you might just be getting a little allergic to deja vu.
"So we're keeping them, then," Dean says, and it's not a question. Something like this could never be a question with him.
And yeah, it's not like you have a choice. The last living person the two of you saw before the boys showed up was a crazy woman in Ohio two weeks ago who shrieked and tore at her clothes with ragged, dirty nails and raced at you and Dean with a predatory look in her eyes. You wonder now what would have happened if Wyatt had found her first, and you think with a terrifying chill that maybe he did and just kept looking.
Looking for you.
If the comforter tugs up over the boys another inch without anyone touching it, Dean doesn't mention it.
If your hands still tingle from whatever it was Wyatt did to take you halfway across the country and back again, you don't mention that, either.
You don't look at Dean. "Yeah, we're keeping them."
*****
When you finally take the boys on their very first hunt, Wyatt gets between Chris and the demon you're hunting and raises his hands, and the demon disintegrates in a burst of flames before your eyes.
You wish you could be scared, standing on the center line of the main drag of a long-dead town in Mississippi with a scorch mark the only evidence there was ever a monster here. The kind of monster you're used to, of course, not the kind that emptied this town and thousands like it and left bodies and bones in the oddest places like morbid Easter eggs.
It takes a minute but Dean finally claps his hand on Wyatt's shoulder and says, "Good one, little man." Chris latches onto Wyatt's waist and hugs tight and Wyatt beams over at you and Dean tries to let out a ragged breath tinged with a hint of relief without the boys noticing.
And you're not scared.
Not scared at all.
FIN
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
Title: Lay Your Weary Head To Rest
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural/Charmed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4,000 words, give or take
Spoilers: This season's finales for both (although obviously AU from then on)
Pairing: None (Gen)
Warnings: Bad language, character death (You know, like you'd expect ... ;))
Disclaimer: I don't own these characters, I just like playing with them.
Recipient:
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
Request: Chris & Wyatt meet up with Sam & Dean at the end of the world. NO INCEST!
Summary: You don't find the boys. The boys find you.
Author's note: Okay, so I tried to think of a way for this to work considering Chris and Wyatt are practically babies now, and I just figured, "Ooo, ooo! I can run with that!" Which is why I whipped this up. :) (Thanks to
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
Lay Your Weary Head To Rest
*****
You don't find the boys. The boys find you.
You've had that feeling for a while, you know. This light brush of something resting on the back of your neck every so often, this warm tingle that you had almost been afraid you had gotten out of the habit of recognizing. It's like sitting in a movie theater and having the guy three rows behind you spend two hours studying the back of your neck instead.
You and Dean take down this creature roaming the woods outside this small town in Pennsylvania, a monster like nothing you've ever seen before, all fire and smoke and fangs. Killing these things anymore isn't a matter of saving lives, it's just a bad habit neither one of you can break. Dean smirks at you over the steaming corpse, gun twirling in his hand like he's a fucking gunslinger. You just shake your head with a smile as you give the body a good solid thump to its midsection with your boot, one more hit for that last swipe its claws made towards your face.
From that fight on, that sensation of being watched weighs on you like a wet scarf draped around your neck.
That was two days ago.
So you're standing in a supermarket in that same small town rifling through the cereal boxes looking for something the animals haven't gotten to, and that's when the little boy appears behind you.
Plague is a funny thing. People don't want to believe they'll die from mass sickness, from their throats choking off from the phlegm and their glands bulging bruised and dark against their skin. And they still won't believe it, not until their dying breath, not until they collapse in the cold and flu aisle at Wal-Mart with a humidifier and four boxes of Kleenex in their cart. People could be really stupid like that.
The two of you have found corpses lying in their own beds with a tucked-in sheet their only protection against the elements. Neatly dressed bodies slumped over in droves in the bitter silence of dozens of churches. A row of children's graves evenly dug into a backyard right next to the swing set. You've seen a dead man reclining against his wife's tombstone with a spent revolver in his lap and a relaxed smile on what's left of his face.
The hospitals make for decent mass graves these days.
"We should burn them down," Dean says after the two of you drive away from the fifth one so filled with bodies you couldn't walk into the building. "Unfinished business is going to get to be a real bitch after a thing like this."
You shrug and focus on Dad's journal. "You're going to be grateful for that in a few months," you say quietly.
The sad thing is how right you are. Speaking to the dead is infinitely better than speaking to no one at all.
But the thing is that after a while, people just stopped being stubborn and started dying at home. The grocery store managers and mall employees stopped coming into work just like the customers stopped coming in to shop, and the only dead people you see in their abandoned depths anymore usually sport what used to be pressed pants and a clean uniform shirt. You're almost tempted to start collecting nametags from them like morbid postcards. And I got this one in Utah from the dead guy in the ice cream aisle at Price Chopper.
When the boy tugs on your jeans to get your attention, you'd be less surprised to turn around and see a deer nibbling on the denim. That's just the way things are these days.
"Hi," he says, and smiles.
You freeze for a second with a box of Lucky Charms in your hand and blurt out, "Hi," like a faulty echo. There's a long moment when you have to force yourself to remember how to talk to other people. Being with Dean all the time means knowing what the world thinks by looking at it, talking just to fill the silence.
It takes you a moment to recover. You finally put aside the box of cereal and kneel down in front of him, doing a mental checklist. Four years old, maybe five. Clothes and face clean, eyes bright and body well-nourished. Whoever the kid is, he's been taken care of.
You try not to look like a threat. Putting away the handgun in your non-shopping hand helps.
"What's your name?" you ask.
"Wyatt," he says.
There's something in his eyes, something mischievous and calculating far beyond his years. After the last few months, you figure everyone's earned the right to be a little flighty. Slow and cautious is how you move, like approaching a skittish goat in a petting zoo, like tempting a stray dog.
When you hold out your hand, his lips purse as his brow furrows. He looks a lot like Dean when things don't go your way and his next move might be the worst idea yet.
"Well, Wyatt, I'm Sam, and it's very nice to meet you."
He stares at your hand for a long, quiet moment, and he's reaching for it when --
"Sammy!"
You turn at Dean's voice, calling you from the other side of the store, and when you turn back to Wyatt, he's gone.
You search the town for the kid for two straight hours before Dean makes you give up. He tells you that he's going to fucking puke if he has to check out any more houses full of dead people and maybe you will, too. When you realize the kid's not in the supermarket, you check the library next door, and when that doesn't pan out, it's the candy store down the block. Dean calls it quits for the both of you when he turns a corner and sees a nursing home nearby.
"Oh, no way in hell, dude," he says. "The only thing worse than the hospitals are the nursing homes."
"The churches aren't all that pretty, either."
"That's not helping with that whole puking thing, you know."
"That wasn't me trying to help."
You're positive Dean doesn't believe there was a kid.
He won't say it, but he thinks maybe you're losing it a little. The whole powerful-psychic gig is getting to you, what with the dead world and the neverending silence and the near-total lack of girls. It's understandable, really. But you're positive Wyatt wasn't a ghost. Just something about him, the way he moved, the hum of power that even pinged on your untrained radar. So, okay, now you're seeing lost little boys in supermarkets. Next it'll be dancing elephants and talking parking meters. You've gone batshit. Dean will just deal with it, the way he takes care of anything else.
But that's not why you're insane.
You're insane because when the two of you finally do leave town the next day, you know the boy will follow you.
You don't even get three towns away in Dad's pickup before you see the kid again, standing on a street corner in this place that isn't more than a blip on a map. He's wearing a clean pair of overalls, sucking on a lollipop, and holding the hand of a dark-haired boy even smaller than he is.
The truck slams to a stop. You'd like to think Dean saw them and hit the brakes, but ten bucks says that was your doing.
"You see them, right?"
Dean leans forward in the driver's seat just in time to see Wyatt wave at you. "Yeah," he says with a sigh, "I see 'em."
The smaller boy sucks his thumb, huddles close to Wyatt. You stare at their joined hands and know the feeling. "Wait here," you say to Dean, and he listens for once.
When you kneel before the boy this time, he's tense like a coiled spring, the presence of the other boy making him jumpy, and you expect Wyatt to just bounce away with the first sudden movement you make. The __expression on his face is like a common phrase in a foreign language. If you could read minds, you know what his would say, and even though you can't, I'm giving you a lot of leeway here and you'd better be worth it is sketched in neon lights in the air.
"Hey, Wyatt," you say, "is this your little brother?"
He pauses a second like he's got to think about it, his grip on the kid's hand tightening, but after a moment he lets himself nod. "His name is Chris," he says.
You don't want to think about where the kid was when Wyatt was trailing around after you in some deserted grocery store. You don't know if it's worse if he left Chris alone somewhere or if he left him someplace where the scent of death hung heavy in the air for a reason.
You're sure he didn't leave Chris with their parents, because if he had, you just know neither one of them would be standing here.
And you're almost afraid to ask the next question, but that's never stopped you before. "How did you guys get here?"
Chris looks up at Wyatt. Wyatt just looks down at the ground, toeing the stones in the sidewalk with his sneaker.
Behind you the door to the truck opens, nice and easy. You refuse to turn around at the sound of boots on pavement. If you take your eyes off the boys, they'll bolt, and if they do you don't want to miss it this time.
When the footsteps stop, you say, "That's my big brother, Dean." You lean forward and add in a conspiratorial whisper, "He's not as stupid as he looks."
Wyatt grins at that, and maybe that's why Dean doesn't calling you a fucking bitch and threaten to punch the shit out of you later. He wants to, though, but instead he just comes up to your side and says, "Yeah, well, I can't say the same about this one," and rumples your hair like you're a freaking five-year-old.
But Wyatt giggles and Chris even smiles a little, and it's the first bright spot the two of you have seen in weeks.
It takes a while to find a good house in the middle of nowhere like this, because the plague took nearly all of the people and that meant a lot of the livestock didn't make it past the first month or so. The stench of a dairy barn full of dead cows carries on the breeze for miles, so the first test of a good house after checking the inside for bodies is standing outside and breathing deeply. Any other problems, you can always handle with a gun or a can opener.
Funny, how the meandering existence you hated for so long trained you to survive when everybody dropped dead around you.
Dad didn't plan for this shit, you think sometimes.
It usually takes you ten minutes after that to catch your breath again, because Dad isn't around to be quietly smug about that.
It doesn't take as much persuading as you're afraid it will for the boys to decide to come with you. Wyatt lets you take his hand, and when Dean reaches down to pick them up and swing them into the truck, Chris latches onto him and won't let go. So you drive out to the country biting back a smile the whole time, and you're the one who checks out the house and makes sure it's livable.
The entire time, Wyatt watches his little brother cling to Dean with a thousand different emotions a boy his age shouldn't even know hiding behind his eyes.
It's one of those old farmhouses, the ones where the water comes from a well and the generator in the barn probably got a lot of use every winter. There aren't any bodies in the house, but the most recent newspaper on the cluttered kitchen table sports a date a week before the plague went from "that thing that's going around" to "Jesus, I heard the hospitals are full of people dying from this shit."
You salt the doors and windows anyway. People never were your family's biggest problem.
An hour after the four of you settle in, after Wyatt's stopped trailing after Dean-carrying-Chris and fallen asleep on the couch in the living room, Dean strides into the kitchen where you're scooping Beefaroni out of a can sporting a goofy grin on his face.
"Dude, watch this," he says, and holds out his arms.
Chris continues to hold on, groggy with sleep but clutching at Dean's shirt with fearsome need.
You can't help but smile at that. "What did you do, put suction cups on him?"
"I don't even get it, Sam," he says. He slides a hand under Chris again just as easy as could be, arm curving around his small body, and just looking at him holding the kid makes the sensation of being carried by stronger arms rise across your skin like an old burn.
Dean falls asleep in a recliner in the living room with Chris sprawled across his chest, the boy's chubby fist pressed against his lips as he worries his thumb in his sleep. Wyatt gets up to the scent of a dinner he eat two spoonfuls of before he heads back to the couch, takes one look at Chris latched onto Dean, and goes back to sleep the second after he climbs into Dean's lap and gets comfy.
You watch the whole thing from the chair nearest the front door with a shotgun in your lap and the nagging sensation that something you won't like's about to happen.
Every so often, your eyelids shut, and the last time they do, they slam back open to the echoing sound of women crying out in agony in your mind.
Your head clears with the faint weight of Wyatt's small hands on your knees. You clear your throat and wonder if he knows you had a nightmare. You notice the coffee table's off-kilter and wince. You wonder if you screamed. "Sorry, kiddo," you say, and force a smile.
There is this photo of Dean when he was a kid from after the fire, a toddler version of you sitting between his spread legs as he colors even though you're chewing on one of the red crayons. The Dean in the picture has a hand raised to pull the crayon from your mouth, and there's something so serious and responsible about the look in his face in that photo that you've never been able to think about it without cringing.
Only a few days of knowing the kid, and it already scares you how much Wyatt looks like that all the time.
"My mommy screamed a lot," he says.
You may be suffocating. It sure as hell feels like it.
Then he takes your hand, and the next thing you know, you're not in the farmhouse anymore.
The last time you saw a real newscast, all they talked about was the flu and the anchor couldn't stop coughing. If there's been an earthquake on the West Coast since then, you wouldn't have known.
Blink and you miss it, and when you open your eyes again, you know you're in San Francisco the same way you sometimes just know which fork in the road to take without checking the atlas. Palo Alto's only a short car ride away, or at least it was before the highways turned into boneyards. If you look out the window of the house Wyatt's brought you to -- and he has brought you here, whether or not you want to admit it -- you almost hope you'll see the campus, the burned shell of your apartment, the hillside where Jess is buried. Your normal life, shredded and scorched by the goddamn demon long before the normal contagious world could do it to you.
Makes you wonder now, if you and Dean keep each other alive, if being brothers alone in this world is what keeps the sickness at bay.
The thing about an earthquake is that it's the first thing you think of when you see the house you're standing in, furniture turned over and light fixtures shattered against the hardwood floors. If you had to guess from the interior, you'd bet it's one of those expensive homes that are all over San Francisco, the ones they put on souvenir postcards. It's just something about the curve of the staircase, the scattering of antiques all over. Picture frames tilt lazily on the walls in the foyer, and one glance at the people in them is enough to tell you the obvious.
Wyatt's home.
You can't see anything frightening from where you're standing other than a big mess, but Wyatt goes eerily silent at your side just the same. You can't even hear him breathing, not even when you look down at him just to make sure his small chest rises and falls. He doesn't tell you anything, and you can't bring yourself to ask. "Stay here, okay?"
Wyatt nods and hangs back. You have a feeling when he does so that he doesn't stay because you asked him to.
It's the smell that hits you first, not the rot you're familiar with but the burn you've tried to forget. The air weighs heavy with the taint of seared meat, like hamburger left to char too long on a grill. And there have been fires since the population dwindled down to nothing -- hell, Chicago was a pile of used matchsticks the last time you and Dean passed through -- but this is the stench of a death that makes chills crawl up your spine like wild vines.
It's only the one body, though, spread out on the floor of the sunroom and burned down just this side of ashes. You're almost afraid to step into the room, positive a heavy enough vibration will make the body shatter and rain down on the floor in a cascade of gray dust. Just the one body, burned and broken and curled up into itself, and not a scorch mark to be seen anywhere on the floor or ceiling. Like spontaneous combustion, like flame burning to life out of nothing at all.
But just looking at the body and testing the air with a sniff for a hint of sulfur is enough to know it wasn't like spontaneous combustion.
Not like it at all.
When Dean finds you in the morning, you're in an upstairs bedroom in a chair next to the bed you tucked the boys into. Your knees press into the comforter, you've slid the chair so close, and Wyatt and Chris curl up together like puppies under the blankets.
You don't notice he's carrying mugs of coffee until he slips one into your hands. It's got to say something, the strong bitter scent not cutting through the stark, gruesome image in your mind.
"Cute little buggers, aren't they?"
You nod distractedly as Dean takes a gulp of his own coffee. You take a deep breath and suddenly you can smell it all again, the dead air in the house and the startling strength of the coffee and the fact that every single one of you needs a bath more than anything. "Wyatt took me somewhere last night," you say.
Dean's cup stops halfway to his lips. He knows that tone of your voice, and his job face slips into position like a blind being yanked down. "Took you where?"
"San Francisco," you say.
Dean freezes, then downs his coffee in one long swig. It suddenly occurs to you that it might not just be coffee in there.
"He took me home." There's no easy way to say the rest of it. "I think something set their mother on fire."
For a second, it feels like Dean's left the room, and maybe he has. Maybe he went downstairs to punch a wall and bite back tears. Maybe he went outside to shoot something. Maybe he went back in time to blow another tunnel right through your father's skull with the Colt's last bullet to make sure he got the fucking demon all over again.
It's not the same thing that killed your mother. You know this, Dean knows this.
Doesn't stop the feeling, though, doesn't stop both of you from looking down at the boys and thinking you might just be getting a little allergic to deja vu.
"So we're keeping them, then," Dean says, and it's not a question. Something like this could never be a question with him.
And yeah, it's not like you have a choice. The last living person the two of you saw before the boys showed up was a crazy woman in Ohio two weeks ago who shrieked and tore at her clothes with ragged, dirty nails and raced at you and Dean with a predatory look in her eyes. You wonder now what would have happened if Wyatt had found her first, and you think with a terrifying chill that maybe he did and just kept looking.
Looking for you.
If the comforter tugs up over the boys another inch without anyone touching it, Dean doesn't mention it.
If your hands still tingle from whatever it was Wyatt did to take you halfway across the country and back again, you don't mention that, either.
You don't look at Dean. "Yeah, we're keeping them."
When you finally take the boys on their very first hunt, Wyatt gets between Chris and the demon you're hunting and raises his hands, and the demon disintegrates in a burst of flames before your eyes.
You wish you could be scared, standing on the center line of the main drag of a long-dead town in Mississippi with a scorch mark the only evidence there was ever a monster here. The kind of monster you're used to, of course, not the kind that emptied this town and thousands like it and left bodies and bones in the oddest places like morbid Easter eggs.
It takes a minute but Dean finally claps his hand on Wyatt's shoulder and says, "Good one, little man." Chris latches onto Wyatt's waist and hugs tight and Wyatt beams over at you and Dean tries to let out a ragged breath tinged with a hint of relief without the boys noticing.
And you're not scared.
Not scared at all.
FIN
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Date: 2006-06-01 11:24 am (UTC)Oh, *boys*. ;_;
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Date: 2006-06-01 11:25 am (UTC)crossover, apocolyptic, AND cute :D
*squeeee*
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Date: 2006-06-01 11:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 11:41 am (UTC)So what do we need to bribe you with to get you to keep writing this one? *g*
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Date: 2006-06-01 12:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 12:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 12:56 pm (UTC)I also wanted to say that I have been lurking for a while, but joyfulgirl41 convinced me to delurk, and I have been meaning to come by and comment on your fic for a few days.
Having read a lot of your other stuff, I think you are a really good writer and look forward to reading more of your stories in the future.
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Date: 2006-06-01 02:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 02:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 03:09 pm (UTC)This image makes me all warm & fuzzy inside. (or sets my biological clock into overdrive. One of the two.)
And I love the whole premise here. Sam & Dean hunting with Wyatt & Chris is more than a little frightening in its rightness... not to mention power.
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Date: 2006-06-01 03:29 pm (UTC)wait...big!Wyatt, right? He did something? I dunno. All I know is the image of Dean holding Chris who's clinging to him and them sleeping in the arm chair...and then Wyatt curling up on his lap too...the most adorable image I've ever had.
I really really like this. And I wish I had watched the Charmed eason finale because...thatd be so cool. Maybe its up for download, somewhere...
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Date: 2006-06-01 03:29 pm (UTC)It almost makes me want to watch some charmed, almost.
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Date: 2006-06-01 03:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 04:50 pm (UTC)Nice stuff. I like being in the middle of Sam's thoughts and seeing this sad aftermath of a world.
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Date: 2006-06-01 04:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 05:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 06:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 08:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-02 12:32 am (UTC)yes
It hurts but I love it.
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Date: 2006-06-02 04:30 am (UTC)And dammit, you're making me want to watch Charmed. I stopped at the beginning of season 6, 'cuz I just couldn't take it, but I've got the last two eps of the series downloading right now. Hopefully that'll be enough.
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Date: 2006-06-02 08:24 am (UTC)Seriously, this was awesome. Very well done.
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Date: 2006-06-02 06:17 pm (UTC)there are really no words for how absolutely amazing this is.
thank you :)
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Date: 2006-06-02 06:39 pm (UTC)I would love you even more, though, if you wrote more of this. Like the first time Chris speaks to them, and Wyatt beaming because his little brother is speaking again, maybe calling Dean 'Daddy'.
Please?
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Date: 2006-06-02 07:20 pm (UTC)I love how you write from Sams perspective. Everything is so tangible, and evocative. Absolutely brilliant.
I love the idea of crossovers with these boys, but I'd never though a crossover with the children could be so powerful.
Amazing.
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Date: 2006-06-02 09:53 pm (UTC)First of all: A crossover with my two favourite shows and second... it wasn't quite what I expected when I saw "SPN/Charmed-Crossover" because I immediately thought of Sam and Dean and adult Chris and Wyatt. But your story just worked so well with Sam, Dean and the two kids.
I think this was the first time I acctually liked Wyatt. ;-)
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Date: 2006-06-03 01:11 am (UTC)More please?
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Date: 2006-06-05 06:26 am (UTC)Brilliant.
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Date: 2006-06-25 07:18 am (UTC)Thank u 4 that. I’m still tripping over how immensely beautiful that was. I love the imager of Dean hauling Chris around of the two boy curled in the bed Sam in the chair next to it. The stark death image of a dead street in Mississippi that was awesome thank u.
Peace
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Date: 2006-06-25 10:21 pm (UTC)I can't believe I've never heard of this one before. Its just so well written and wow. Yes I am still in shock. lol.
Is there more? Do you write anything else that I can read?
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Date: 2006-06-30 08:15 pm (UTC)Any and all apocalypse fic is of the good, but this one is fantastic! Creepy and a little bit scary and surprisingly adorable (Chris! clinging to Dean like a Garfield plushie! snuggling on the chair!) *hearts them all*
Sam's little moments of telekinesis were a nice touch and I was sad to see they really had lost the Impala.
Maybe he went back in time to blow another tunnel right through your father's skull with the Colt's last bullet to make sure he got the fucking demon all over again.
That? Broke me a little on the inside and made me want to hug Dean a lot.
Now I'm almost curious enough to watch the Charmed finale. I've only ever seen some of the really old ones, and the new ones kind of scare me.
Wow!
Date: 2006-09-12 03:07 pm (UTC)Rose
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Date: 2006-10-19 09:31 pm (UTC)**Will now proceed to search**
Thanks for sharing
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Date: 2008-07-09 07:23 pm (UTC)i loved it. :D
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Date: 2009-11-15 09:00 am (UTC)Great read!