WIP Amnesty: SPN fic
135. I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman. ~Anaïs Nin
138. They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.
-- Dorothy Parker, 'Fair Weather,' Sunset Gun, 1928
102. "Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." -- Muriel Strode
106. Hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves. -- Mitch Albom
130. Women keep a special corner of their hearts for sins they have never committed. ~Cornelia Otis Skinner
January 24, 1979 Dean is born
May 2, 1983 Sam is born
April 7, 1985 Jo is born
May 16, 1995 Bill RIP
These were my notes from the beginning... the quotes came from a challenge on a het fic community... or maybe it was a women-of-spn comm, I forget which... yet another reason for regretting never finishing this.
Bill Harvelle was not the kind of man she dreamed of marrying as a young girl.
When she was little her ideal husband was tall and handsome, an honest man who was always polite to ladies and respectful to his elders, and he was going to be a butcher just like her daddy, and they were going to run daddy’s shop together and take care of her parents when they got too old.
By the time she hit sixteen the only thing that hadn’t changed was the “tall & handsome” part, to which she had tacked on the common “dark”. The “honest” wavered in and out; she couldn’t make up her mind ever since Joey Davies, the pastor’s son and supposedly the nicest, most honest boy around had gotten to second base with her in his car behind the movie theatre and then told all his buddies that they had gone all the way. Like she would ever do that in a public parking lot, for crying out loud. In her teens her ideal man wasn’t a husband anymore, he was reckless and a little wild, needed the love of a good woman to save him, and he might be a bit of a rascal but he loved her with a passion unknown to mere mortals, and would always be devoted to her and only to her. And if the law sometimes didn’t agree with him, he would still have morals of steel and pureness in his heart.
Yeah, well, she was sixteen.
Her perspective changed again after she left high school. She wanted a husband again, but this time someone who would sweep her off her feet and take her away from that Nowhere town she had spent all her life in. Whenever she hit a streak of feminine pride she imagined leaving to make her own way in a big city and finding true love in someone that would respect her as an equal. She would have a career and he would be proud of his working wife, and never ask her to quit and have kids like Beth Carrison had to do during her senior year. Everyone knew that despite what she said she was never going to finish school. Her boyfriend- her husband- came from the sort of family where five kids were considered barely enough. She was going to spend her life as nothing more than a mother, and Ellen was damned if that was going to happen to her too.
Five months after she turned nineteen she left her house slamming the door and leaving behind only sour words with her father and tears with her mother. She made it as far as the next county before realizing that her money was not going to get her much farther, never mind New York, so she got a job waitressing in the least run-down diner she could find and settled there for six months. She was only two hundred shy of her goal when the murders started in Cennoweth, only thirty miles north of home. Five dead in three days, throats slashed open, no fingerprints, no suspects. The local papers plunged into a frenzy of speculation, going everywhere from “escaped lunatic” to “Satanist cult”. By the time they reached the “escaped satanist lunatic” stage and printed detailed maps about how all the houses that had been hit formed the imaginary corners of a pentagram she had quit reading, and people had taken to referring to the episode as the “terrible three”. She stayed put for the month, thinking about going back and life and death in general. Finally she called her dad on the phone and sort of apologized, but then had to refuse point blank to go back and she ended up slamming the phone down and getting nowhere.
Two days later her parents where dead, throats slashed, no fingerprints, no suspects. Probably a robbery, seeing as all the knives had been taken from the shop, and wasn’t that a reassuring thought. Ellen blew way too much money on a taxi ride back, plus a tip to go fifteen over the speed limit. Stupid on her part, it wasn’t like getting there early would make them any less dead. She got back at dusk, talked to the police in a state of shock, tried to make arrangements for the funeral right away even though the case was open and they weren’t going to release the bodies until God knew when. Then she went back to her house, settled on her old bed and curled in the pink bed-spread she had outgrown at thirteen and bawled her eyes out. She had every intention of spending the night like that, grieving and feeling sorry for herself, when someone knocked urgently at the door and didn’t let up until she went and opened.
That’s how she met him the first time.
He was tall but he wasn’t all that handsome, more of the open, friendly-faced kind, and he was definitely not dark, ginger actually. The first thing she thought when she saw him, despite everything, was: “that mustache is ridiculous”. The first thing he said after offering her a grim smile and the name Bill Harvelle was: “I know what really happened to your parents and I’m going to stop it from happening again, but I need your help”. She slammed the door in his face. She was lucky Bill was serious about all that stopping it from happening again nonsense because that night the Hell spawn was coming back to that house to clear it once and for all. Ellen didn’t see it but she heard it and felt it, the pure evil, the knowledge that she was going to die. To this day she isn’t sure what specific kind of hellish thing it was or how Bill stopped it, but he did. He stormed the house like some GI hero and swept her up in his arms and carried her out before going back in and finishing the job. It might have been romantic if she hadn’t been too frozen with terror to appreciate it and if he hadn’t been yelling “Fuck!” at the top of his voice like it was the only word he knew.
Something snapped in her that night. Maybe she grew up all of a sudden, or maybe it was the true loss of innocence, maybe it was all and nothing at the same time but whatever it was it changed her. When the man came out again she realized that she was still alive, that she was alone and that she wasn’t sure if she wanted to celebrate or break down. She had always been pro-active and she had already broken down once that day so she decided that now she was going to celebrate. She mentioned this to Bill who was still high from the successful hunt, and with an entirely inappropriate grin he asked if he could help her in any way. They ended up fucking in his car, in the parking lot behind her parent’s old shop. She felt illicit and adult and sexy and alive. She was probably not entirely in her right mind but she felt she had a good excuse, a few of them actually, and she didn’t care.
Bill hanged around and helped her in the aftermath. She didn’t realize it at the time but Bill was a sucker for helping others, and not in a boy-scout-kind-of-way either. He simply loved the feeling of having someone needing him, being dependent on him, of making the difference. It was what had drawn him to hunting in the first place, and it was what held him put in the days that followed a tragedy. He had a talent for making others feel like they were the center of his world, at least for a while, but eventually he moved on. By the time he was ready to leave she didn’t want to stay either, too many bad memories and a town that held nothing for her anymore, so tagging along seemed as good an idea as any.
She was two months pregnant before they realized what had happened. She wasn’t sure she wanted the baby but she didn’t want an abortion either, so she opted to leave and take some time to decide. She told him out of common courtesy, dead sure that he wouldn’t want to get saddled with a child, but he surprised her and asked him to marry him immediately.
“You’re a hunter, Bill; you can’t raise a child like that.”
“I’ll settle down- darling, don’t you see it? It’ll be great!”
“What you do is important. Don’t feel any obligation to me. I can manage on my own.”
“All right, I won’t,” he grinned with that adorable rascal-grin he shared with Bruce Willis. “I want to. I’ve always wanted a family.”
Ellen couldn’t argue with that. She wanted a family herself so badly it made her sick to her stomach sometimes, but the family she wanted was gone and her only shot at getting one was by starting from scratch. So she said yes and they got registered in the civil hall the day afterwards. Bill bought her a gold wedding ring but didn’t get one for himself, saying that he couldn’t afford two and that he didn’t like having anything on his fingers anyway, it interfered on the job. Ellen secretly thought that she’d had gladly taken two silver rings over one gold one, but she didn’t want to seem churlish and didn’t complain. A ring wasn’t important anyway, she knew he loved her. He took her to the Grand Canyon for their honeymoon and cut off his mustache for good as a wedding present, and that was enough.
She was five months pregnant and wishing for her mom when Bill came home one night to their dingy one-room apartment, glowing like he had just won the lottery. “I’ve found us a place,” he said, putting his hand on her belly and then kissing her, “for our family. It isn’t doing that well right now but we’ll take it and make it great. It’ll be great babe, you just wait and see.”
That’s how she ended up selling her parent’s old shop (not like she was ever going to do anything with it anyway) and buy The Roadhouse. It was so banged up when she saw it the first time that she cried but Bill assured her it was just hormones and that he could make it work and that he would, he could do anything for their family.
Joanna Beth was born exactly two hundred days after their wedding, the night after the new fridge arrived and Bill had finished repairing the roof. It was by far the happiest day of Ellen’s life, and she couldn’t even imagine that she had ever hesitated before plunging into her new life. She had been worrying about taking care of a baby and running a bar at the same time but Bill surprised her again, helping her more than she had imagined and defying all the hardened-men stereotypes of being bad with children.
Not only was he good with the baby, he was great. He was the one who stayed up and walked around all night, bouncing Joanna in his arms when she had a colic, he was the one who could get her to fall asleep and, later, he was the one who could make her eat even the most obnoxious baby food. He changed diapers, he bathed her in the sink, he took her out in her stroller. To be perfectly honest Ellen felt just a tiny, little smidgen of jealousy. Now that Bill had his family, his focus had shifted. He could make you feel the most important person in the world, true, but only one person at a time, and now that Joanna was there Ellen was no longer it. She loved her baby, and she loved her husband, and she knew he loved her back, but it wasn’t like before. Still, she had made herself a family with plenty of love to go around, she had a place to call her own, and everything considered life was good, better than she had expected it would be in those bleak weeks after the murders. She was happy.
When Joanna was two years old Bill started getting visits from other hunters, people he had met on the job and, always the social one, had never lost contact with. Harvelle’s Roadhouse, newly restored, had at first become a bit of a family spot. Ellen wished the hunters would stop coming, they scared regular customers away, but coming they kept, and then Bill started to help around with their research, then he left a couple of times to lend a hand here or there, two-three days at the most, and then the dust started to scratch the polish on the walls and the floor, and one day Ellen turned around and realized that the bar was full of hunters and only hunters, and that she couldn’t remember the last time they had had a proper family dining here.
When Joanna turned three she decided that her name was Jo and that she was going to grow up to be just like her daddy. Ellen indulged her. She had always been a bit of a tomboy herself and she didn’t see the point in trying to make a little princess out of her daughter. Bill positively glowed. Ellen had been afraid that he would spoil his little girl but he was a good father in every aspect, and he never did. She wished he wouldn’t talk so much about hunting around her though, it wasn’t a proper subject for a small child.
When Jo was five Bill came back from a two-week hunt with freshly laundered clothes. He told her the ghost had dumped him in a swamp while he was chasing it and he couldn’t travel like that, and since he had the opportunity he had cleaned all his stuff. He had never done that before, and Ellen knew he couldn’t have just dumped all of it in a washing machine, he’d have ruined all the whites. She didn’t say anything but she wished, for the first time since her marriage, that she had put her foot down and demanded he wear a damn wedding ring. Bit too late for that now.
Bill still loved her and he adored Jo. She loved him too, but it was a different kind of affection from the all-consuming passion she had always pictured as a girl. A lot of things were different from the way she had pictured them as a girl. For example she had never imagined that she would put up with a husband that left for days at a time to go hunting, and that often enough extended his trips on dubious excuses.
Certainly from the high-horse of adolescence she had never imagined that she could want to have an affair herself.
The moment he stepped in the door, wary and tired, she recognized him immediately. It was him. Tall, dark & handsome, just like she had imagined, brooding and haunted, in need of the love of a good woman and the sexiest man she had ever seen in person. She asked him if she could help him, heart beating in her chest, and then he looked her right in the eyes for a second and muttered “No.” Then he met her eyes again for a long, intense beat before turning away and settling at a corner table.
Ellen flushed. Bill lavished attention on everyone he was talking to but this man gave the impression that he only gave his very sparingly, and for a moment Ellen had had it. She had felt a spark, a vibe of mutual attraction, something she hadn’t felt in a long time now. Almost numbly, she went to his table to get his order.
He wasn’t in a friendly mood. Actually, he wasn’t friendly by character, but Ellen didn’t realize it at first. He ordered a beer, grunted an acknowledgment when she said her name, and when pressed he mumbled something about meeting someone there. He spent the whole time playing with his silver ring and avoided looking at her again. She got him his beer and left him alone, more than a little disappointed and pretty angry, mostly at herself.
She saw him talking to Dana a bit later and that was the final piece of the puzzle. A hunter (what else?); she already had a hunter in her life and she didn’t want another one. More trouble than they were worth, and with her luck Bill would probably get to know him, unless they were friends already. She was in a sour mood all night and even snapped at Jo when she put up her usual fuss to go to bed, but when he left he treated her to another one of those smoldering looks and extra tip. She decided that as far as fantasies went he was going to do just fine.
Part two
138. They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.
-- Dorothy Parker, 'Fair Weather,' Sunset Gun, 1928
102. "Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." -- Muriel Strode
106. Hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves. -- Mitch Albom
130. Women keep a special corner of their hearts for sins they have never committed. ~Cornelia Otis Skinner
January 24, 1979 Dean is born
May 2, 1983 Sam is born
April 7, 1985 Jo is born
May 16, 1995 Bill RIP
These were my notes from the beginning... the quotes came from a challenge on a het fic community... or maybe it was a women-of-spn comm, I forget which... yet another reason for regretting never finishing this.
Bill Harvelle was not the kind of man she dreamed of marrying as a young girl.
When she was little her ideal husband was tall and handsome, an honest man who was always polite to ladies and respectful to his elders, and he was going to be a butcher just like her daddy, and they were going to run daddy’s shop together and take care of her parents when they got too old.
By the time she hit sixteen the only thing that hadn’t changed was the “tall & handsome” part, to which she had tacked on the common “dark”. The “honest” wavered in and out; she couldn’t make up her mind ever since Joey Davies, the pastor’s son and supposedly the nicest, most honest boy around had gotten to second base with her in his car behind the movie theatre and then told all his buddies that they had gone all the way. Like she would ever do that in a public parking lot, for crying out loud. In her teens her ideal man wasn’t a husband anymore, he was reckless and a little wild, needed the love of a good woman to save him, and he might be a bit of a rascal but he loved her with a passion unknown to mere mortals, and would always be devoted to her and only to her. And if the law sometimes didn’t agree with him, he would still have morals of steel and pureness in his heart.
Yeah, well, she was sixteen.
Her perspective changed again after she left high school. She wanted a husband again, but this time someone who would sweep her off her feet and take her away from that Nowhere town she had spent all her life in. Whenever she hit a streak of feminine pride she imagined leaving to make her own way in a big city and finding true love in someone that would respect her as an equal. She would have a career and he would be proud of his working wife, and never ask her to quit and have kids like Beth Carrison had to do during her senior year. Everyone knew that despite what she said she was never going to finish school. Her boyfriend- her husband- came from the sort of family where five kids were considered barely enough. She was going to spend her life as nothing more than a mother, and Ellen was damned if that was going to happen to her too.
Five months after she turned nineteen she left her house slamming the door and leaving behind only sour words with her father and tears with her mother. She made it as far as the next county before realizing that her money was not going to get her much farther, never mind New York, so she got a job waitressing in the least run-down diner she could find and settled there for six months. She was only two hundred shy of her goal when the murders started in Cennoweth, only thirty miles north of home. Five dead in three days, throats slashed open, no fingerprints, no suspects. The local papers plunged into a frenzy of speculation, going everywhere from “escaped lunatic” to “Satanist cult”. By the time they reached the “escaped satanist lunatic” stage and printed detailed maps about how all the houses that had been hit formed the imaginary corners of a pentagram she had quit reading, and people had taken to referring to the episode as the “terrible three”. She stayed put for the month, thinking about going back and life and death in general. Finally she called her dad on the phone and sort of apologized, but then had to refuse point blank to go back and she ended up slamming the phone down and getting nowhere.
Two days later her parents where dead, throats slashed, no fingerprints, no suspects. Probably a robbery, seeing as all the knives had been taken from the shop, and wasn’t that a reassuring thought. Ellen blew way too much money on a taxi ride back, plus a tip to go fifteen over the speed limit. Stupid on her part, it wasn’t like getting there early would make them any less dead. She got back at dusk, talked to the police in a state of shock, tried to make arrangements for the funeral right away even though the case was open and they weren’t going to release the bodies until God knew when. Then she went back to her house, settled on her old bed and curled in the pink bed-spread she had outgrown at thirteen and bawled her eyes out. She had every intention of spending the night like that, grieving and feeling sorry for herself, when someone knocked urgently at the door and didn’t let up until she went and opened.
That’s how she met him the first time.
He was tall but he wasn’t all that handsome, more of the open, friendly-faced kind, and he was definitely not dark, ginger actually. The first thing she thought when she saw him, despite everything, was: “that mustache is ridiculous”. The first thing he said after offering her a grim smile and the name Bill Harvelle was: “I know what really happened to your parents and I’m going to stop it from happening again, but I need your help”. She slammed the door in his face. She was lucky Bill was serious about all that stopping it from happening again nonsense because that night the Hell spawn was coming back to that house to clear it once and for all. Ellen didn’t see it but she heard it and felt it, the pure evil, the knowledge that she was going to die. To this day she isn’t sure what specific kind of hellish thing it was or how Bill stopped it, but he did. He stormed the house like some GI hero and swept her up in his arms and carried her out before going back in and finishing the job. It might have been romantic if she hadn’t been too frozen with terror to appreciate it and if he hadn’t been yelling “Fuck!” at the top of his voice like it was the only word he knew.
Something snapped in her that night. Maybe she grew up all of a sudden, or maybe it was the true loss of innocence, maybe it was all and nothing at the same time but whatever it was it changed her. When the man came out again she realized that she was still alive, that she was alone and that she wasn’t sure if she wanted to celebrate or break down. She had always been pro-active and she had already broken down once that day so she decided that now she was going to celebrate. She mentioned this to Bill who was still high from the successful hunt, and with an entirely inappropriate grin he asked if he could help her in any way. They ended up fucking in his car, in the parking lot behind her parent’s old shop. She felt illicit and adult and sexy and alive. She was probably not entirely in her right mind but she felt she had a good excuse, a few of them actually, and she didn’t care.
Bill hanged around and helped her in the aftermath. She didn’t realize it at the time but Bill was a sucker for helping others, and not in a boy-scout-kind-of-way either. He simply loved the feeling of having someone needing him, being dependent on him, of making the difference. It was what had drawn him to hunting in the first place, and it was what held him put in the days that followed a tragedy. He had a talent for making others feel like they were the center of his world, at least for a while, but eventually he moved on. By the time he was ready to leave she didn’t want to stay either, too many bad memories and a town that held nothing for her anymore, so tagging along seemed as good an idea as any.
She was two months pregnant before they realized what had happened. She wasn’t sure she wanted the baby but she didn’t want an abortion either, so she opted to leave and take some time to decide. She told him out of common courtesy, dead sure that he wouldn’t want to get saddled with a child, but he surprised her and asked him to marry him immediately.
“You’re a hunter, Bill; you can’t raise a child like that.”
“I’ll settle down- darling, don’t you see it? It’ll be great!”
“What you do is important. Don’t feel any obligation to me. I can manage on my own.”
“All right, I won’t,” he grinned with that adorable rascal-grin he shared with Bruce Willis. “I want to. I’ve always wanted a family.”
Ellen couldn’t argue with that. She wanted a family herself so badly it made her sick to her stomach sometimes, but the family she wanted was gone and her only shot at getting one was by starting from scratch. So she said yes and they got registered in the civil hall the day afterwards. Bill bought her a gold wedding ring but didn’t get one for himself, saying that he couldn’t afford two and that he didn’t like having anything on his fingers anyway, it interfered on the job. Ellen secretly thought that she’d had gladly taken two silver rings over one gold one, but she didn’t want to seem churlish and didn’t complain. A ring wasn’t important anyway, she knew he loved her. He took her to the Grand Canyon for their honeymoon and cut off his mustache for good as a wedding present, and that was enough.
She was five months pregnant and wishing for her mom when Bill came home one night to their dingy one-room apartment, glowing like he had just won the lottery. “I’ve found us a place,” he said, putting his hand on her belly and then kissing her, “for our family. It isn’t doing that well right now but we’ll take it and make it great. It’ll be great babe, you just wait and see.”
That’s how she ended up selling her parent’s old shop (not like she was ever going to do anything with it anyway) and buy The Roadhouse. It was so banged up when she saw it the first time that she cried but Bill assured her it was just hormones and that he could make it work and that he would, he could do anything for their family.
Joanna Beth was born exactly two hundred days after their wedding, the night after the new fridge arrived and Bill had finished repairing the roof. It was by far the happiest day of Ellen’s life, and she couldn’t even imagine that she had ever hesitated before plunging into her new life. She had been worrying about taking care of a baby and running a bar at the same time but Bill surprised her again, helping her more than she had imagined and defying all the hardened-men stereotypes of being bad with children.
Not only was he good with the baby, he was great. He was the one who stayed up and walked around all night, bouncing Joanna in his arms when she had a colic, he was the one who could get her to fall asleep and, later, he was the one who could make her eat even the most obnoxious baby food. He changed diapers, he bathed her in the sink, he took her out in her stroller. To be perfectly honest Ellen felt just a tiny, little smidgen of jealousy. Now that Bill had his family, his focus had shifted. He could make you feel the most important person in the world, true, but only one person at a time, and now that Joanna was there Ellen was no longer it. She loved her baby, and she loved her husband, and she knew he loved her back, but it wasn’t like before. Still, she had made herself a family with plenty of love to go around, she had a place to call her own, and everything considered life was good, better than she had expected it would be in those bleak weeks after the murders. She was happy.
When Joanna was two years old Bill started getting visits from other hunters, people he had met on the job and, always the social one, had never lost contact with. Harvelle’s Roadhouse, newly restored, had at first become a bit of a family spot. Ellen wished the hunters would stop coming, they scared regular customers away, but coming they kept, and then Bill started to help around with their research, then he left a couple of times to lend a hand here or there, two-three days at the most, and then the dust started to scratch the polish on the walls and the floor, and one day Ellen turned around and realized that the bar was full of hunters and only hunters, and that she couldn’t remember the last time they had had a proper family dining here.
When Joanna turned three she decided that her name was Jo and that she was going to grow up to be just like her daddy. Ellen indulged her. She had always been a bit of a tomboy herself and she didn’t see the point in trying to make a little princess out of her daughter. Bill positively glowed. Ellen had been afraid that he would spoil his little girl but he was a good father in every aspect, and he never did. She wished he wouldn’t talk so much about hunting around her though, it wasn’t a proper subject for a small child.
When Jo was five Bill came back from a two-week hunt with freshly laundered clothes. He told her the ghost had dumped him in a swamp while he was chasing it and he couldn’t travel like that, and since he had the opportunity he had cleaned all his stuff. He had never done that before, and Ellen knew he couldn’t have just dumped all of it in a washing machine, he’d have ruined all the whites. She didn’t say anything but she wished, for the first time since her marriage, that she had put her foot down and demanded he wear a damn wedding ring. Bit too late for that now.
Bill still loved her and he adored Jo. She loved him too, but it was a different kind of affection from the all-consuming passion she had always pictured as a girl. A lot of things were different from the way she had pictured them as a girl. For example she had never imagined that she would put up with a husband that left for days at a time to go hunting, and that often enough extended his trips on dubious excuses.
Certainly from the high-horse of adolescence she had never imagined that she could want to have an affair herself.
The moment he stepped in the door, wary and tired, she recognized him immediately. It was him. Tall, dark & handsome, just like she had imagined, brooding and haunted, in need of the love of a good woman and the sexiest man she had ever seen in person. She asked him if she could help him, heart beating in her chest, and then he looked her right in the eyes for a second and muttered “No.” Then he met her eyes again for a long, intense beat before turning away and settling at a corner table.
Ellen flushed. Bill lavished attention on everyone he was talking to but this man gave the impression that he only gave his very sparingly, and for a moment Ellen had had it. She had felt a spark, a vibe of mutual attraction, something she hadn’t felt in a long time now. Almost numbly, she went to his table to get his order.
He wasn’t in a friendly mood. Actually, he wasn’t friendly by character, but Ellen didn’t realize it at first. He ordered a beer, grunted an acknowledgment when she said her name, and when pressed he mumbled something about meeting someone there. He spent the whole time playing with his silver ring and avoided looking at her again. She got him his beer and left him alone, more than a little disappointed and pretty angry, mostly at herself.
She saw him talking to Dana a bit later and that was the final piece of the puzzle. A hunter (what else?); she already had a hunter in her life and she didn’t want another one. More trouble than they were worth, and with her luck Bill would probably get to know him, unless they were friends already. She was in a sour mood all night and even snapped at Jo when she put up her usual fuss to go to bed, but when he left he treated her to another one of those smoldering looks and extra tip. She decided that as far as fantasies went he was going to do just fine.
Part two