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apocalypsosTitle: We All Make Wrong Turns
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: None
Spoilers for: "Nightmare"
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Not mine, not mine, wheeee!
Summary: Jess had to die, but why?
Author's note: Just playing with a little theory I had after Nightmare.
*****
We All Make Wrong Turns
*****
Fairy tale. A noun. A story you tell children to make them believe there
can be a happily-ever-after when a witch tried to eat you or a spell kept you in a goddamn
coma for a hundred years.
See also: Lie.
Once upon a time, there was a brave knight who married a beautiful princess. They were very happy because they were blessed with two sons, both of whom were adorable beyond all reasonable comprehension.
If this were any other story, that would be the ending, and everybody would get sick from saccharine poisoning because of it. But this is a fairy tale, which means there's more where that came from. See, what the brave knight and his princess didn't know was that their younger son, their baby, was full of magic. It was just like he was a chubby-cheeked babbling bottle of potential, but magic is just like any other part of you, and if you never use it, it fades away to nothing before you can blink.
So one night after the goodnight kisses had been given and the baby blankets had been firmly tucked around their sons, the beautiful princess heard a noise in her younger son's room and went to investigate. There, she found the most powerful wizard in the land watching him sleep.
"What are you doing here?" she asked.
The wizard smiled, and the sight of that horror of bared teeth made her blood slow to a crawl. "I come," he said, "to choose an apprentice."
The princess shook her head. "You cannot have my son," she said, and the wizard's smile -- if it can believed -- grew even worse and more terrifying.
"Ah, I do not plan to take him," the wizard said. "For, you see, if he is to be my apprentice, I must take you instead."
Soon after that, the brave knight heard his beautiful princess scream, and there began a life of darkness and despair for them all.
*****
Sacrifice. Noun. The act of giving up something or someone very important
for the benefit of someone else. Permission from everyone involved not required.
Feeling like a real asshole and wallowing in guilt afterwards optional.
After the Millers, he sneaks the photo out of Sam's wallet whenever he's not looking, when Sam's in the shower or asleep for just long enough. There's more than one, of course -- the two of them on the beach, her and what looked like her brother leaning against a tree with innocent smiles, her and three other girls holding up plastic cups in a bar and laughing hysterically over something -- but he likes the black and white one.
Hell, he doesn't know. Maybe he just doesn't like touching the others because he feels like he's dragging them along for the ride or something.
Wherever it was taken, it had to have been posed, chin resting in her palm as she stared wistfully out a sunlit window. Long blond waves rippled down her back, reflecting the light like spun gold, and it was times like this he thinks that if he were Sammy, he wouldn't need much more to be infatuated. Girl was fucking gorgeous, that was for sure.
Of course, the girl was fucking dead now, but gorgeous only got better-looking in retrospect when it burned out young the way she had.
He's seen worse than Max blowing his own brains out. Oh, there isn't much on that list, but it exists, that's for sure. It's not the act of it that breaks him, though, the splatter of blood and brains across cool pale walls.
It's the times he wakes up, breathing fine and dry of sweat but shaken just the same, a vivid image fresh in his mind of Sam's face broken and shattered by that bullet.
It could have gone another way for them all, Sam points out, because if Dad hadn't actually held it together the only way he'd known how, they would have been just as fucked-up as Max. More tequila, fewer demons, he'd said. Nice to see Sam showing a little fucking gratitude for once.
That wasn't what was throwing him off, though. It was the demon. Hell, didn't it always boil down to the goddamn demon in the end?
He thinks of women sliced open and left to burn, and the word "sacrifice" hangs in his head like a neon sign. He's seen sacrifices before, bodies with strange markings, innocents given up to die for power, and every time he does, he gets sudden mental images of blond women in white robes bathed in flames.
Max's mother dies and he gets telekinesis. Mary Winchester dies and Sam gets prophetic dreams.
So he looks at the photo, looks hard and looks often, and tries to figure out who the hell gets something because of Jessica.
*****
Test. A verb. To prove to someone who knows more than you that you understand
exactly what the fuck you're doing. Also, a noun. Something you pass to prove you're
not an incompetent asshole.
After the beautiful princess died in a storm of smoke and fire, the brave knight went to visit a seer, the greatest seer he knew of. He knelt before her and offered her his shield and sword and said, "Tell me why my love was taken from me."
The seer knew that telling the knight the whole truth would break his heart, so instead she said, "There are dark forces in this world that you know nothing about, my lord. And they are after your son."
Fear settled in the knight's chest, for though he was braver than anyone, he worried for the safety of his boys, and he knew even without having to be told which of his sons she meant.
"What can I do?"
So the seer sat him down, and told him everything she thought he should know, filling him with images of wrongs that needed righting and evils that needed their proper destruction. She spoke of dragons that hadn't been slayed and monsters that yet lived to see another day. She gave him the names of wizards with no law but themselves, an outlet for his rage, a reason to turn his sons into the warriors he'd never wanted them to be.
But there was one thing she never told him, not even when he returned to her in the following years.
His elder son had his own sort of magic.
*****
Perform. A verb. To show off a skill or talent before a select audience in an attempt to
get them to give you a cookie.
He is not an idiot. Jesus, he couldn't do his job if he were a freaking idiot.
He knows everything John Winchester could teach him about demons and the supernatural. He knows how to pick a lock, impersonate a law enforcement officer, conjugate Latin verbs, construct paranormal detection equipment with what he can pick up for fifty bucks at a Radio Shack, and hit targets dead center while blindfolded and upside-down.
He's good at hunting, damn it. The only person better at it than him is his father, and the only one who might come close to being an equal at it is Sam. Just the way things work in the Winchester family, is all.
And yeah, his grades weren't perfect, but whose were? He came close on a number of occasions, though, close to good, close to Sam levels of smart. It was all a matter of putting it in perspective. Geography tests became silent stories of places he'd killed things. The only difference between a creative writing assignment and the God's honest truth depended on who knew what he'd done on the hunting trip last weekend. It was easy to be the most knowledgeable one in biology lab when dissection wasn't that big of a step from dismembering a demon.
All a matter of perspective, the way Sam used to put it.
It's too bad I can't take a class in hunting, Dean thought more than once. I'd coast through the damn thing with flying colors.
*****
Courage. A noun. Standing in front of a big monster with blood-stained teeth,
having only a book of matches and muttered prayer for protection, and being too stupid to
run in the opposite direction.
The death of a beautiful princess is a powerful fuel for rage.
And it turned out that in the long run, thanks to the brave knight and his fierce sons, the death of one beautiful princess inadvertantly saved a hundred others.
*****
Brother. A noun. That guy who has the same mother and father as you. Someone
whose ass you have to save on a regular basis.
The thing is, it doesn't really count. Not the way he sees it. Sam's his brother, for Christ's sake. His little brother, if you really want to nitpick, and that's even worse. If he's overprotective to a weird extreme, maybe it's because ... oh, maybe it was because their mother got set on fire. Maybe it's because they've spent their entire lives hunting things with bigger teeth than they've got. Who the hell knows?
The point -- and there is one, surprisingly enough -- is that if he knows the little bastard is in trouble, that's not magic or voodoo or some other creepy shit. It's just, you know, Sam.
Yeah, he knows when Sam's angry, when Sam's depressed and when he's in pain and ... okay, yeah, maybe he knew Sam was in danger the night of the fire. That doesn't make him --
Fuck.
*****
Pawn. A noun. A chess piece. Also, a noun. What you are when someone
gets you to do certain things for some sort of fucked-up master plan. Also, a verb. When
someone gets rid of something valuable to them by giving it to someone who royally shafts
them in return.
So the brave knight trained his sons to be warriors, and they fought the darkness with righteous anger and revenge in their hearts, and that would have been the end of it if the younger son hadn't gotten sidetracked by a very pretty milkmaid.
It couldn't be denied that the milkmaid was lovely and gentle, and that she and the younger son were very happy together. But it also couldn't be denied that the younger son never told her of his past, of the dragons he'd been taught to slay and the evil he'd been taught to fight. And while she might have forgiven the desire to protect her from the darkness, the milkmaid would never have forgiven the lie of it, and that was what her love was afraid of.
It shouldn't have been the only thing he had to be afraid of, though. There were worse things in the world
See, one day the brave knight discovered just what the wizard had been doing when he'd come to visit his son and kill the beautiful princess. A sacrifice, it turned out, to turn the knight's son into the apprentice he desired, to strengthen the boy's power.
And then the brave knight got greedy.
Well, not greedy, I suppose, but hopeful. His sons were good and strong, and while he'd fallen out with the younger, the elder son knew he could always go to his brother for help. So the brave knight swallowed his concern for his sons and went into hiding.
It was easy enough to disappear -- he'd taught his sons well, but he had been the one who'd taught them. So the elder son went to his brother to ask for help to find the knight, and the knight waited with a heavy heart for what he knew was coming.
The wizard would return, you see, as he did on the same day every year to those he desired as apprentices. He'd come back to see the younger son, to witness his power and see the warrior that the brave knight had turned him into.
And while the wizard was there, he would see the elder in all of his glory.
It was a cruel trick, the brave knight knew, something he shouldn't be doing to either one of his sons. Because the wizard would come, and he would see not only the magic of the younger but the strength of the elder. Power is tempting, the knight knew, and his courageous sons were lures no sane person could ignore. The knight could ignore what the wizard planned for them, what the wizard would do to the milkmaid in exchange for his dark gift to the elder boy, but the brave knight could still take his revenge against the creature that had destroyed his family.
His sons were his revenge, and his vengeance would be righteous indeed.
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: None
Spoilers for: "Nightmare"
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Not mine, not mine, wheeee!
Summary: Jess had to die, but why?
Author's note: Just playing with a little theory I had after Nightmare.
We All Make Wrong Turns
*****
Fairy tale. A noun. A story you tell children to make them believe there
can be a happily-ever-after when a witch tried to eat you or a spell kept you in a goddamn
coma for a hundred years.
See also: Lie.
Once upon a time, there was a brave knight who married a beautiful princess. They were very happy because they were blessed with two sons, both of whom were adorable beyond all reasonable comprehension.
If this were any other story, that would be the ending, and everybody would get sick from saccharine poisoning because of it. But this is a fairy tale, which means there's more where that came from. See, what the brave knight and his princess didn't know was that their younger son, their baby, was full of magic. It was just like he was a chubby-cheeked babbling bottle of potential, but magic is just like any other part of you, and if you never use it, it fades away to nothing before you can blink.
So one night after the goodnight kisses had been given and the baby blankets had been firmly tucked around their sons, the beautiful princess heard a noise in her younger son's room and went to investigate. There, she found the most powerful wizard in the land watching him sleep.
"What are you doing here?" she asked.
The wizard smiled, and the sight of that horror of bared teeth made her blood slow to a crawl. "I come," he said, "to choose an apprentice."
The princess shook her head. "You cannot have my son," she said, and the wizard's smile -- if it can believed -- grew even worse and more terrifying.
"Ah, I do not plan to take him," the wizard said. "For, you see, if he is to be my apprentice, I must take you instead."
Soon after that, the brave knight heard his beautiful princess scream, and there began a life of darkness and despair for them all.
Sacrifice. Noun. The act of giving up something or someone very important
for the benefit of someone else. Permission from everyone involved not required.
Feeling like a real asshole and wallowing in guilt afterwards optional.
After the Millers, he sneaks the photo out of Sam's wallet whenever he's not looking, when Sam's in the shower or asleep for just long enough. There's more than one, of course -- the two of them on the beach, her and what looked like her brother leaning against a tree with innocent smiles, her and three other girls holding up plastic cups in a bar and laughing hysterically over something -- but he likes the black and white one.
Hell, he doesn't know. Maybe he just doesn't like touching the others because he feels like he's dragging them along for the ride or something.
Wherever it was taken, it had to have been posed, chin resting in her palm as she stared wistfully out a sunlit window. Long blond waves rippled down her back, reflecting the light like spun gold, and it was times like this he thinks that if he were Sammy, he wouldn't need much more to be infatuated. Girl was fucking gorgeous, that was for sure.
Of course, the girl was fucking dead now, but gorgeous only got better-looking in retrospect when it burned out young the way she had.
He's seen worse than Max blowing his own brains out. Oh, there isn't much on that list, but it exists, that's for sure. It's not the act of it that breaks him, though, the splatter of blood and brains across cool pale walls.
It's the times he wakes up, breathing fine and dry of sweat but shaken just the same, a vivid image fresh in his mind of Sam's face broken and shattered by that bullet.
It could have gone another way for them all, Sam points out, because if Dad hadn't actually held it together the only way he'd known how, they would have been just as fucked-up as Max. More tequila, fewer demons, he'd said. Nice to see Sam showing a little fucking gratitude for once.
That wasn't what was throwing him off, though. It was the demon. Hell, didn't it always boil down to the goddamn demon in the end?
He thinks of women sliced open and left to burn, and the word "sacrifice" hangs in his head like a neon sign. He's seen sacrifices before, bodies with strange markings, innocents given up to die for power, and every time he does, he gets sudden mental images of blond women in white robes bathed in flames.
Max's mother dies and he gets telekinesis. Mary Winchester dies and Sam gets prophetic dreams.
So he looks at the photo, looks hard and looks often, and tries to figure out who the hell gets something because of Jessica.
Test. A verb. To prove to someone who knows more than you that you understand
exactly what the fuck you're doing. Also, a noun. Something you pass to prove you're
not an incompetent asshole.
After the beautiful princess died in a storm of smoke and fire, the brave knight went to visit a seer, the greatest seer he knew of. He knelt before her and offered her his shield and sword and said, "Tell me why my love was taken from me."
The seer knew that telling the knight the whole truth would break his heart, so instead she said, "There are dark forces in this world that you know nothing about, my lord. And they are after your son."
Fear settled in the knight's chest, for though he was braver than anyone, he worried for the safety of his boys, and he knew even without having to be told which of his sons she meant.
"What can I do?"
So the seer sat him down, and told him everything she thought he should know, filling him with images of wrongs that needed righting and evils that needed their proper destruction. She spoke of dragons that hadn't been slayed and monsters that yet lived to see another day. She gave him the names of wizards with no law but themselves, an outlet for his rage, a reason to turn his sons into the warriors he'd never wanted them to be.
But there was one thing she never told him, not even when he returned to her in the following years.
His elder son had his own sort of magic.
Perform. A verb. To show off a skill or talent before a select audience in an attempt to
get them to give you a cookie.
He is not an idiot. Jesus, he couldn't do his job if he were a freaking idiot.
He knows everything John Winchester could teach him about demons and the supernatural. He knows how to pick a lock, impersonate a law enforcement officer, conjugate Latin verbs, construct paranormal detection equipment with what he can pick up for fifty bucks at a Radio Shack, and hit targets dead center while blindfolded and upside-down.
He's good at hunting, damn it. The only person better at it than him is his father, and the only one who might come close to being an equal at it is Sam. Just the way things work in the Winchester family, is all.
And yeah, his grades weren't perfect, but whose were? He came close on a number of occasions, though, close to good, close to Sam levels of smart. It was all a matter of putting it in perspective. Geography tests became silent stories of places he'd killed things. The only difference between a creative writing assignment and the God's honest truth depended on who knew what he'd done on the hunting trip last weekend. It was easy to be the most knowledgeable one in biology lab when dissection wasn't that big of a step from dismembering a demon.
All a matter of perspective, the way Sam used to put it.
It's too bad I can't take a class in hunting, Dean thought more than once. I'd coast through the damn thing with flying colors.
Courage. A noun. Standing in front of a big monster with blood-stained teeth,
having only a book of matches and muttered prayer for protection, and being too stupid to
run in the opposite direction.
The death of a beautiful princess is a powerful fuel for rage.
And it turned out that in the long run, thanks to the brave knight and his fierce sons, the death of one beautiful princess inadvertantly saved a hundred others.
Brother. A noun. That guy who has the same mother and father as you. Someone
whose ass you have to save on a regular basis.
The thing is, it doesn't really count. Not the way he sees it. Sam's his brother, for Christ's sake. His little brother, if you really want to nitpick, and that's even worse. If he's overprotective to a weird extreme, maybe it's because ... oh, maybe it was because their mother got set on fire. Maybe it's because they've spent their entire lives hunting things with bigger teeth than they've got. Who the hell knows?
The point -- and there is one, surprisingly enough -- is that if he knows the little bastard is in trouble, that's not magic or voodoo or some other creepy shit. It's just, you know, Sam.
Yeah, he knows when Sam's angry, when Sam's depressed and when he's in pain and ... okay, yeah, maybe he knew Sam was in danger the night of the fire. That doesn't make him --
Fuck.
Pawn. A noun. A chess piece. Also, a noun. What you are when someone
gets you to do certain things for some sort of fucked-up master plan. Also, a verb. When
someone gets rid of something valuable to them by giving it to someone who royally shafts
them in return.
So the brave knight trained his sons to be warriors, and they fought the darkness with righteous anger and revenge in their hearts, and that would have been the end of it if the younger son hadn't gotten sidetracked by a very pretty milkmaid.
It couldn't be denied that the milkmaid was lovely and gentle, and that she and the younger son were very happy together. But it also couldn't be denied that the younger son never told her of his past, of the dragons he'd been taught to slay and the evil he'd been taught to fight. And while she might have forgiven the desire to protect her from the darkness, the milkmaid would never have forgiven the lie of it, and that was what her love was afraid of.
It shouldn't have been the only thing he had to be afraid of, though. There were worse things in the world
See, one day the brave knight discovered just what the wizard had been doing when he'd come to visit his son and kill the beautiful princess. A sacrifice, it turned out, to turn the knight's son into the apprentice he desired, to strengthen the boy's power.
And then the brave knight got greedy.
Well, not greedy, I suppose, but hopeful. His sons were good and strong, and while he'd fallen out with the younger, the elder son knew he could always go to his brother for help. So the brave knight swallowed his concern for his sons and went into hiding.
It was easy enough to disappear -- he'd taught his sons well, but he had been the one who'd taught them. So the elder son went to his brother to ask for help to find the knight, and the knight waited with a heavy heart for what he knew was coming.
The wizard would return, you see, as he did on the same day every year to those he desired as apprentices. He'd come back to see the younger son, to witness his power and see the warrior that the brave knight had turned him into.
And while the wizard was there, he would see the elder in all of his glory.
It was a cruel trick, the brave knight knew, something he shouldn't be doing to either one of his sons. Because the wizard would come, and he would see not only the magic of the younger but the strength of the elder. Power is tempting, the knight knew, and his courageous sons were lures no sane person could ignore. The knight could ignore what the wizard planned for them, what the wizard would do to the milkmaid in exchange for his dark gift to the elder boy, but the brave knight could still take his revenge against the creature that had destroyed his family.
His sons were his revenge, and his vengeance would be righteous indeed.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-10 10:11 pm (UTC)That was so beautifully written there are no words.