eighth_horizon | sn:/disinterment, coda

Yeah...I left a lot of things open in that tale on purpose. See here for the other codas and a very pretty Salvation AU page.

Listening, PG, 1111 words.

There’s nothing else we can do.

I’m here to take you to x-ray -

The jell-o cup, it’s not sugar free.

Can you loosen this? It’s pinching, and...

I don’t know where it is. I don’t even know where to look, Dean.

Allie heard it all. The older things were fainter, words trailing off into echoes, strangers with other concerns. The newest thing, the clearest words, were in her father’s voice, words spoken maybe twenty minutes earlier.

No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t catch anything else. Whatever hung in the cool, urgent air hard enough to be picked up had nothing to do with any choice she made. She couldn’t block it out either, when it happened. She couldn’t predict when it would happen or why. It happened almost exclusively at home, and she had begun to wonder how much it had to do with her proximity to places she knew better or people she knew too well. It didn’t happen at school and it rarely happened in public. It never quite overwhelmed her, but it was hard to ignore. For it to be happening in a hospital room was weird. It may have been happening in the waiting room too, but there was enough talking and other peripheral noise to blot out the details.

She never heard the echoes of her own voice. She didn’t think that meant anything; it was just an oddity. Maybe it was feedback and her inner ears couldn’t pick up something that was too close to the source.

She had felt like a spy, had in turn felt guilty or shocked or concerned when it had started happening just after puberty. But, she had reconciled it with the understanding that she was the eldest child in a family that was far outside the standard definition of normal, and any extra knowledge she picked up that had been reserved for adults only seemed her due. She had been instilled with an urge to protect herself and others, weapons and hand to hand defense training, and this extra thing was simply apt additional preparation for whatever might come along.

She sat and stared openly at Dean, whose upper body was elevated slightly to help his wounds drain. She hadn’t seen them, but she knew that the thing that had tried to break into the house had also tried to field dress her uncle like common game.

She remembered The Divorce because of the emotional impact it had leveled against the entire family, the fears it had awoken in her and Mary as far as why people who loved each other decided to stop. She remembered the time Dean had been too ill to be alone, and had ended up at her house with Charlie; he had been fine the next morning, and she had never had any idea what had gone on. She had been only nine at the time, but old enough to take charge of the rest of the girls.

She did not have a prior memory of this, of Dean helpless and faded and nearly lost.

We can’t do this anymore. We just can’t. This walked up on us, we didn’t go looking for anything, but there’s something about us that started it and whatever it is, we’ve gotta shut it off.

Her father, so afraid, and rightly so.

She tried not to think too hard about something that could be dead but still run around with enough strength to nearly break her mother’s neck with one hand. Tried not to think of her uncle’s bones tossed aside and that same something coming to the door wearing his face instead of the face it had stolen.

She would have shot that face all the same.

“I’m going to tell you something because you probably can’t hear me,” she said. “I’d tell you everything, I’d tell you things I don’t want to tell my parents, and it has nothing to do with what they’d think or whether they’d be upset. Sometimes I think I understand you better than anybody and I don’t know why.”

She could never pick up the echoes of her own voice, so it felt safe to make confessions to the stillness.

She folded her hand around one of Dean’s, glad that his hand was warm. Her own were so cold, and it was the only outward sign of her fear.

She worried about the bandages on his wrists and tried to avoid disturbing them. She wondered what it had restrained him with and whether he tried to take one of his own hands off rather than allow it to do what it had meant to.

“I think maybe I should tell someone,” she said. “I mean, Mary has dreams that she talks about, mostly with dad but sometimes with me. Dad’s never actually had migraines, I’m not dumb, I know he sees things when he’s wide awake. Charlie gets pissed and everything locks or unlocks, which you think none of us kids know about. She always knows where you are, no matter where you are, and it’s the only thing that saved you. Charlie doesn’t even get it, and all this secrecy is bullshit. We’re all part of something and the way you guys - you and mom and dad - act, it’s like it should just be kept quiet, and it’s going to make us all feel like freaks, sooner or later.”

She paused to sigh and refold his hand in hers. “You mean to protect us, I get that. I do. But we’re getting too old for it. I...hear things. You guys have all these hushed conversations and then leave the room, and I can go in and catch parts of it most of the time. It’s too bad I have the guts to shoot things at the back door but not enough to tell you all this while you’re awake.”

She laid his hand down carefully and leaned forward to rest her head against his forearm. “I wonder if Leigh has some sort of ‘gift’,” she said. “Funny, none of these things feel very given. All the guns and the ‘hunting’ trips, and the thing you shot that one Halloween...and now we get things at the door. We have to be part of it, but we don’t get to talk about it or acknowledge it, so I guess I’m wondering who you’re really protecting.”

She lifted her head again and looked at Dean’s face. It hadn’t changed.

I’m not sure what we are, Dean.

Her father would not say the things to Dean awake that he had already said in that room.

In that, they were alike.

-|-

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Omg! You rock! You both do. You both just... Rock. So. Hard.

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sn:/disinterment, coda

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