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apocalypsosI wasn't planning on cornering any particular genre, but, well ... *points*
Title: If You Told Me You Were Drowning
Author: Troll Princess
Rating: R
Fandom: Supernatural
Spoilers for: "Pilot" (It is, however, very AU)
Pairing: Sam/Jess
Disclaimer: Not mine, not mine, wheeee!
Warning: Character deaths, general dead-body grossness
Author's note: I had the urge to write Sam/Jess and to write post-apocalyptic fic completely unrelated to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
apocalyptothon, so you get this. :)
*****
If You Told Me You Were Drowning
*****
In your nightmares, it drags you out of the shower naked and flailing, and you're the one looking down at the man with the shocked expression rather than the other way around.
It's an awful way to learn geography, knowing which towns you wake up screaming in. An old campground next to a pair of empty trailers in Raleigh. A park thick with overgrown grass in Allentown. The remains of a cornfield destroyed by wildfires in Nebraska. The world burns on its own anymore, searing away the dead and the living with indiscriminate force, and you're almost grateful for every town you find that's an empty charred shell of its former self.
When you sit straight up in your sleep with your chest heaving and your hair soaked with sweat, you realize that Sam's done the exact same thing. It's not the first time.
He runs his fingers through his hair, and they come away damp. "You, too?"
You nod your head, saying nothing.
Ten bucks says it's the same dream. It usually is.
*****
"Dean?"
He looks up from the old fashion magazine he's been flipping through for hours in the back seat, taking in painfully skinny girls in painfully trendy dresses. You should have made him throw it away, a flimsy catalogue of stick figures one step away from death, and it would be a melodramatic way to look at it if you weren't positive they had probably been some of the first to choke.
He doesn't say anything, but with that look on his face, he never has to.
"Look," you say, and point up ahead to a column of smoke rising. In four years, you've all learned the difference between the fires that warm a group of survivors and the ones that send them running away. "There's a settlement up ahead."
He shrugs before turning his attentions back to the magazine, and you look to Sam for backup, for him to say something to keep Dean from sinking into himself like he does.
John chooses that moment to cough from behind the driver's seat.
Sam's knuckles go white on the steering wheel of the Impala and Dean keeps his gaze firmly focused on the Vogue in front of him, and you have to grit your teeth to keep from screaming.
*****
Sam tells you the truth not long after Rebecca's body is rolled out of her apartment, her neck swollen and black, the rest of her wasted to nothing and the color of old moldy paper. You never saw her body, of course, but after a few months of seeing the same thing on a daily basis, you didn't need to.
He sits you down in the living room, more serious than you've ever seen him, and there's that hint of glassy haze to his eyes. You briefly wonder how much he's been drinking. "My brother's coming," he says. "My dad, too. Maybe. I don't know. I just --"
He pauses, frozen on some tough decision, and then the moment passes. "I need to tell you something," he says.
"Tell me what?" you ask.
After a long moment of silence, his answer is to take you by the hand, because he never wants to tell you this. You can tell that right off, because he doesn't say the words but he still manages to only point things out to you. Weapons you didn't even know were there, symbols carved into the doorways and window frames you chose to ignore, houseplants he'd organized in specific little groups around the apartment like tiny crowds of floral wards.
"Sam?" Your voice is small and thin, mired in suspicion. "Sam, what is all this?"
He looks into your eyes and his jaw clenches in that familiar stubborn way of this, and that's what gets him to start talking. He uses words like "warriors" and "evil" like it actually means something, like it's not some big stupid joke. He talks of his mother dying pinned to the ceiling engulfed in flames, killed by something that wasn't human. And he keeps going and going, stunning you to the point of silence.
You don't even get a chance to respond, not before his brother Dean suddenly shows up at your front door with a cocky smile and his eyes hiding a wealth of concern for you both.
In your memories, Dean is always on fire, even when he's just standing in your living room. It's your curse, you think, for not being the one on that ceiling.
*****
Intensive training begins the day after the apartment burns, the fire trucks long since gone as you and Sam stand in the street and stare at the ruins of your home. He lets you sit in the driver's seat of the Impala, a blanket wrapped around your shoulders, and the two of you can't tear your gaze away from the building where you've lived for the last year and a half.
You can't even remember what happened the night before, outside of seeing his brother on the ceiling. There's the vague memory of Sam's arms around as he dragged you from the apartment, of screams that might not even have been your own, but you can't even be sure of that.
A gaping black hole takes up the spot where you used to live, and the world doesn't even notice. In the building, you hear a woman crying loudly, but not about the fire, and somewhere else on campus more than one siren rings out. A dump truck drives past heavy with cargo twice as pungent as its usual contents, the scent of burnt flesh that hangs in the air dying in its wake, and you wouldn't even phrase it like that if it weren't the most apt way to put it.
It seems only fair the world doesn't notice your own personal tragedy, you think, because apparently you didn't notice just how badly the world was crumbling around you.
Sam starts talking then, this hazy drone about protecting you and getting out of town and "training you," whatever the hell that means. You wish you could take it seriously, but then he goes around to the back of the car and opens up the trunk, and when you follow him you see a stash of weapons that makes you wonder just how much like warriors the Winchesters were raised like.
A minute later, you're bending against the side of the car, everything you've eaten for the past day or so coming up and then some.
Sam holds your hair back with a sawed-off shotgun in his free hand, and it isn't half as scary as it should be.
*****
After you leave California, Sam teaches you how to kill an attacker with a few well-placed punches (or less) and how to fire every kind of gun he can dig out of the Impala's trunk. He teaches you Latin when he drives and points out important herbs and spell ingredients when he stops the car. He tells you dozens of anecdotes about his life before Stanford -- about black dogs and Jersey devils and women in white -- before it hits you he's pumping you full of information.
Sam's just managed to con your way through a roadblock in Missouri when you start throwing up, and that's when Dean shows up.
*****
Before everything went to hell, you had a younger sister and two loving parents and a 4.0 grade-point average and a biology major and a history minor and a boyfriend who made your heart flip over with a smile.
Since everything went to hell, you have Sam and Dean and John and enough ammo to invade a small country and the third black Impala Sam's managed to fix and the stinging scent of burnt flesh forever hanging in the air around you.
*****
In Ohio, you arrive in a small town beset by the ghosts of those killed by the plague, pale angular bodies that drift through town and avoid fixing their black-eyed gazes on you. Sam hands you a shotgun and shells full of rock salt. "Just in case," he tells you.
You always prepare for the "just in case," for the worst scenario possible. More often than not, the worst-case scenario becomes painful truth within minutes.
The two of you walk through the streets and salvage what you can where you can, wherever the ghosts will let you. Sam rummages through the remnants of a hardware store without incident, but you take one look at the pharmacy and a ragged, pale man flickers between you and the building. It shambles towards you with ominous intent, and it only takes you a minute to decide that a town devoid of living people isn't worth wasting the bullets over.
Somewhere along the line, you've become Sam's practical little warrior princess, sleek and lean like a fucking racehorse. You'd think it was a bad thing, if you weren't sure it's the only thing keeping you alive.
*****
In Arizona, there's a luxury hotel that was used as a makeshift hospital, with bodies neatly lined up in the halls under stained sheets, but out back are private bungalows that neither one of you would ever have been able to afford before. You take the biggest one you can find, one clean of bodies and upwind with enough beds for everyone. Dean and John pass out as soon as their heads strike the pillows, too tired, too weak, and you try not to think about it as Sam leads you towards the huge four-poster in the main bedroom suite.
You were afraid when this all began that you'd never want this again, but life has become a series of lows interspersed with the occasional high, and there is nothing higher than the sensation of Sam's hands and lips drifting over you. He's grown a goatee for some reason you can't even begin to guess, but lately there have been brush burns across your skin, on your neck, your breasts, your thighs.
The two of you stay quiet so as not to wake Dean or John, careful, careful, but everything's frantic and wild and you're positive you bite Sam more than once to keep from screaming.
This is the high, and you live in it as much as possible before the lows return.
*****
In Georgia, they hear the name Winchester and stare at you and Sam like heroic warriors moving from battle to battle. You wonder when your reputation became this, when it began that you'd tell someone your name and they'd tremble with relief. Communication has become word of mouth on a global scale, rumors passed around like well-worn hand-me-downs, and the Winchester name is like everybody's favorite pair of jeans in that regard.
They tell Sam of the monster who lives in the nearby swamp and pay you in perfectly preserved chocolate bars and batteries that haven't ruptured.
You try to remember any of your poli-sci classes or the faces of the girls in your study group and find each memory fading with every bag of simple luxuries strangers hand you in payment.
*****
Neither one of you sneezes or coughs or so much as gets a little feverish, not ever. In the beginning, you were optimistic and thought it was luck.
Realism has long since set in. If every once in a while you wonder if Sam sold his soul to keep the two of you alive, you don't think you can be blamed.
*****
You think after it's been hollowed out that it's the smallest thing you've ever seen, an empty hole in the ground, rough-edged and deep. The coffin looks so small from up above, although you're not sure how it really could get much smaller. John weighed half as much as he should, and when you found him lying still and quiet on the back seat of the Impala and lifted him into your arms, it felt as if you were saying your goodbyes to a tiny rag doll.
Dean's small fingers grip yours, and they tighten as Sam pours salt into the grave.
The protest you want to make chokes off in your throat as he lights a match. That is your son in there, but black-eyed spirits still dance through the streets of a small town in Ohio and sometimes -- not always, but sometimes -- you feel familiar unseen eyes staring at you, at your boys.
Suddenly Dean begins to cough, and you're not so sure how much more of this you can take.
*****
It is twins, you think most of the time, or another boy. In the end it turns out to be a girl, strong and healthy and screaming, and Sam names her Mary before you can stop him. He holds her with trembling hands that never shook once with either one of the boys, and even when she cries to be fed, it's him she reaches out for.
The next time he presses you into the blankets and slides his hands along your thighs, you're tempted to ask him which dead relative he plans to name your next baby after.
Title: If You Told Me You Were Drowning
Author: Troll Princess
Rating: R
Fandom: Supernatural
Spoilers for: "Pilot" (It is, however, very AU)
Pairing: Sam/Jess
Disclaimer: Not mine, not mine, wheeee!
Warning: Character deaths, general dead-body grossness
Author's note: I had the urge to write Sam/Jess and to write post-apocalyptic fic completely unrelated to
apocalyptothon, so you get this. :)If You Told Me You Were Drowning
*****
In your nightmares, it drags you out of the shower naked and flailing, and you're the one looking down at the man with the shocked expression rather than the other way around.
It's an awful way to learn geography, knowing which towns you wake up screaming in. An old campground next to a pair of empty trailers in Raleigh. A park thick with overgrown grass in Allentown. The remains of a cornfield destroyed by wildfires in Nebraska. The world burns on its own anymore, searing away the dead and the living with indiscriminate force, and you're almost grateful for every town you find that's an empty charred shell of its former self.
When you sit straight up in your sleep with your chest heaving and your hair soaked with sweat, you realize that Sam's done the exact same thing. It's not the first time.
He runs his fingers through his hair, and they come away damp. "You, too?"
You nod your head, saying nothing.
Ten bucks says it's the same dream. It usually is.
"Dean?"
He looks up from the old fashion magazine he's been flipping through for hours in the back seat, taking in painfully skinny girls in painfully trendy dresses. You should have made him throw it away, a flimsy catalogue of stick figures one step away from death, and it would be a melodramatic way to look at it if you weren't positive they had probably been some of the first to choke.
He doesn't say anything, but with that look on his face, he never has to.
"Look," you say, and point up ahead to a column of smoke rising. In four years, you've all learned the difference between the fires that warm a group of survivors and the ones that send them running away. "There's a settlement up ahead."
He shrugs before turning his attentions back to the magazine, and you look to Sam for backup, for him to say something to keep Dean from sinking into himself like he does.
John chooses that moment to cough from behind the driver's seat.
Sam's knuckles go white on the steering wheel of the Impala and Dean keeps his gaze firmly focused on the Vogue in front of him, and you have to grit your teeth to keep from screaming.
Sam tells you the truth not long after Rebecca's body is rolled out of her apartment, her neck swollen and black, the rest of her wasted to nothing and the color of old moldy paper. You never saw her body, of course, but after a few months of seeing the same thing on a daily basis, you didn't need to.
He sits you down in the living room, more serious than you've ever seen him, and there's that hint of glassy haze to his eyes. You briefly wonder how much he's been drinking. "My brother's coming," he says. "My dad, too. Maybe. I don't know. I just --"
He pauses, frozen on some tough decision, and then the moment passes. "I need to tell you something," he says.
"Tell me what?" you ask.
After a long moment of silence, his answer is to take you by the hand, because he never wants to tell you this. You can tell that right off, because he doesn't say the words but he still manages to only point things out to you. Weapons you didn't even know were there, symbols carved into the doorways and window frames you chose to ignore, houseplants he'd organized in specific little groups around the apartment like tiny crowds of floral wards.
"Sam?" Your voice is small and thin, mired in suspicion. "Sam, what is all this?"
He looks into your eyes and his jaw clenches in that familiar stubborn way of this, and that's what gets him to start talking. He uses words like "warriors" and "evil" like it actually means something, like it's not some big stupid joke. He talks of his mother dying pinned to the ceiling engulfed in flames, killed by something that wasn't human. And he keeps going and going, stunning you to the point of silence.
You don't even get a chance to respond, not before his brother Dean suddenly shows up at your front door with a cocky smile and his eyes hiding a wealth of concern for you both.
In your memories, Dean is always on fire, even when he's just standing in your living room. It's your curse, you think, for not being the one on that ceiling.
Intensive training begins the day after the apartment burns, the fire trucks long since gone as you and Sam stand in the street and stare at the ruins of your home. He lets you sit in the driver's seat of the Impala, a blanket wrapped around your shoulders, and the two of you can't tear your gaze away from the building where you've lived for the last year and a half.
You can't even remember what happened the night before, outside of seeing his brother on the ceiling. There's the vague memory of Sam's arms around as he dragged you from the apartment, of screams that might not even have been your own, but you can't even be sure of that.
A gaping black hole takes up the spot where you used to live, and the world doesn't even notice. In the building, you hear a woman crying loudly, but not about the fire, and somewhere else on campus more than one siren rings out. A dump truck drives past heavy with cargo twice as pungent as its usual contents, the scent of burnt flesh that hangs in the air dying in its wake, and you wouldn't even phrase it like that if it weren't the most apt way to put it.
It seems only fair the world doesn't notice your own personal tragedy, you think, because apparently you didn't notice just how badly the world was crumbling around you.
Sam starts talking then, this hazy drone about protecting you and getting out of town and "training you," whatever the hell that means. You wish you could take it seriously, but then he goes around to the back of the car and opens up the trunk, and when you follow him you see a stash of weapons that makes you wonder just how much like warriors the Winchesters were raised like.
A minute later, you're bending against the side of the car, everything you've eaten for the past day or so coming up and then some.
Sam holds your hair back with a sawed-off shotgun in his free hand, and it isn't half as scary as it should be.
After you leave California, Sam teaches you how to kill an attacker with a few well-placed punches (or less) and how to fire every kind of gun he can dig out of the Impala's trunk. He teaches you Latin when he drives and points out important herbs and spell ingredients when he stops the car. He tells you dozens of anecdotes about his life before Stanford -- about black dogs and Jersey devils and women in white -- before it hits you he's pumping you full of information.
Sam's just managed to con your way through a roadblock in Missouri when you start throwing up, and that's when Dean shows up.
Before everything went to hell, you had a younger sister and two loving parents and a 4.0 grade-point average and a biology major and a history minor and a boyfriend who made your heart flip over with a smile.
Since everything went to hell, you have Sam and Dean and John and enough ammo to invade a small country and the third black Impala Sam's managed to fix and the stinging scent of burnt flesh forever hanging in the air around you.
In Ohio, you arrive in a small town beset by the ghosts of those killed by the plague, pale angular bodies that drift through town and avoid fixing their black-eyed gazes on you. Sam hands you a shotgun and shells full of rock salt. "Just in case," he tells you.
You always prepare for the "just in case," for the worst scenario possible. More often than not, the worst-case scenario becomes painful truth within minutes.
The two of you walk through the streets and salvage what you can where you can, wherever the ghosts will let you. Sam rummages through the remnants of a hardware store without incident, but you take one look at the pharmacy and a ragged, pale man flickers between you and the building. It shambles towards you with ominous intent, and it only takes you a minute to decide that a town devoid of living people isn't worth wasting the bullets over.
Somewhere along the line, you've become Sam's practical little warrior princess, sleek and lean like a fucking racehorse. You'd think it was a bad thing, if you weren't sure it's the only thing keeping you alive.
In Arizona, there's a luxury hotel that was used as a makeshift hospital, with bodies neatly lined up in the halls under stained sheets, but out back are private bungalows that neither one of you would ever have been able to afford before. You take the biggest one you can find, one clean of bodies and upwind with enough beds for everyone. Dean and John pass out as soon as their heads strike the pillows, too tired, too weak, and you try not to think about it as Sam leads you towards the huge four-poster in the main bedroom suite.
You were afraid when this all began that you'd never want this again, but life has become a series of lows interspersed with the occasional high, and there is nothing higher than the sensation of Sam's hands and lips drifting over you. He's grown a goatee for some reason you can't even begin to guess, but lately there have been brush burns across your skin, on your neck, your breasts, your thighs.
The two of you stay quiet so as not to wake Dean or John, careful, careful, but everything's frantic and wild and you're positive you bite Sam more than once to keep from screaming.
This is the high, and you live in it as much as possible before the lows return.
In Georgia, they hear the name Winchester and stare at you and Sam like heroic warriors moving from battle to battle. You wonder when your reputation became this, when it began that you'd tell someone your name and they'd tremble with relief. Communication has become word of mouth on a global scale, rumors passed around like well-worn hand-me-downs, and the Winchester name is like everybody's favorite pair of jeans in that regard.
They tell Sam of the monster who lives in the nearby swamp and pay you in perfectly preserved chocolate bars and batteries that haven't ruptured.
You try to remember any of your poli-sci classes or the faces of the girls in your study group and find each memory fading with every bag of simple luxuries strangers hand you in payment.
Neither one of you sneezes or coughs or so much as gets a little feverish, not ever. In the beginning, you were optimistic and thought it was luck.
Realism has long since set in. If every once in a while you wonder if Sam sold his soul to keep the two of you alive, you don't think you can be blamed.
You think after it's been hollowed out that it's the smallest thing you've ever seen, an empty hole in the ground, rough-edged and deep. The coffin looks so small from up above, although you're not sure how it really could get much smaller. John weighed half as much as he should, and when you found him lying still and quiet on the back seat of the Impala and lifted him into your arms, it felt as if you were saying your goodbyes to a tiny rag doll.
Dean's small fingers grip yours, and they tighten as Sam pours salt into the grave.
The protest you want to make chokes off in your throat as he lights a match. That is your son in there, but black-eyed spirits still dance through the streets of a small town in Ohio and sometimes -- not always, but sometimes -- you feel familiar unseen eyes staring at you, at your boys.
Suddenly Dean begins to cough, and you're not so sure how much more of this you can take.
It is twins, you think most of the time, or another boy. In the end it turns out to be a girl, strong and healthy and screaming, and Sam names her Mary before you can stop him. He holds her with trembling hands that never shook once with either one of the boys, and even when she cries to be fed, it's him she reaches out for.
The next time he presses you into the blankets and slides his hands along your thighs, you're tempted to ask him which dead relative he plans to name your next baby after.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-01-31 07:27 am (UTC)Seriously, I would kill to be able to write like you. This is fucking AWESOME.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-31 11:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-31 04:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-31 04:51 pm (UTC)Damn.
Again.
Damn.
And I just realized that... Dean's small hand means it's their son, doesn't it? Cause I totally missed that the first time.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-31 05:47 pm (UTC)For as important as Jess was to Sam, she sure didn't get a lot of screen time, so the idea of having her work beside him seems like, for lack of better words, a tribute to what she could have been. She was already important in his "normal" life, and I like how you made her important in his "other" life.
There's so many good things I liked about this story. The writing style, first of all, and the way it all flows so prettily from one moment to the next. The moment I knew this one was going into the memories was in the following: "Sam holds your hair back with a sawed-off shotgun in his free hand, and it isn't half as scary as it should be."
Thank you so much for sharing this! :)
no subject
Date: 2006-02-01 02:09 am (UTC)OMG so fucking awesome.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-01 07:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-03 10:19 pm (UTC)I love it.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-14 12:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-28 02:53 am (UTC)The first mentions of Dean and John I thought were the original Dean and John - I was wrong and I found that out as I got to the part where John is buried.
Wow. That was amazing. I love it.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-19 03:45 am (UTC)*lower lip wobbles*
Ok, I had to go read some other fic before I could say anything other than, "Ow! The ouchie lady done hurt me!"
Of course, I have to say - it hurt so good.
I was confused by the perspective in the beginning. Who was speaking? Just thinking it was Dean with the magazine was. Then, the presence of John and Dean when - weren't they dead? Maybe they're zombies? *confusion*
But. Oh. Sad.
How long have they been travelling for them to have had children, born and buried?
Anyway. Nicely done.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-16 04:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-11 12:15 am (UTC)