One Upon a Mattress--SPN Reverse Big Bang 2/2
Title: Once Upon a Mattress
Author: borgmama1of5
Fandom/Genre: SPN gen, season 2 (Sam & Dean)
Pairing: None
Rating: G
Wordcount: 7400 (complete in 2 linked parts)
Warnings: None
Summary: Dean just wanted to get the two of them away from Baltimore as fast as he could. Pulling the Impala into a secluded area to get a couple hours' sleep shouldn't have been problematic.
Beta: The awesome sandymg
Disclaimer: Not mine. Just having fun with 'em.
Artist: alteredloc
Art Link: http://alteredloc.livejournal.com/19837.html
Part 1: http://borgmama1of5.livejournal.com/50497.html
They both decided to save some of the loaf for later, just in case, Dean said, “The zoo doesn’t have a regular feeding schedule.” Sam pulled out a couple of napkins to wrap the bread in, to be stashed in their pockets.
Again being cautious, they only drank a little of the water, once more perched on the only available surface, the mattress.
“Dean!” Sam hissed. “Look slowly.”
A careful turn of his head and Dean saw it, too.
A four-foot tall bundle of branches - that was walking. On stick legs. Toward them.
“Seriously, what the hell?” Dean muttered. He started to move, but Sam put a hand on his shoulder to keep Dean down.
“Let’s wait a minute, see what it does,” Sam whispered. “I … I don’t think … it might be harmless.”
“Not if it put us in this cage and did something to my car!”
“Watch!”
The creature stepped through the barrier without pausing, then stopped just inside and put its arms out in a wide gesture.
With a shock Dean suddenly saw the face of the thing, beady black eyes and a round mouth incongruously stuck on a face-sized piece of tree bark.
With a hand consisting of honest-to-god twigs, it touched its chest and clacked out “Parre-en.”
Dean eased his hand into his left-hand pocket and curled his fingers around one of the lighters. Sticks would burn. But he didn’t know if that would release the barrier, so he waited.
Another touch to its chest. “Parre-en f-frie-n-d-d.”
“You gave us the water and the bread?” Sam said softly.
“Yes-s-s. No-o-o ha-rrm-m.”
“Well, then, why’d you put us in a cage?” Dean cut in harshly.
“S-s-saf-f-e.” It put out one of those creepy stick hands. “T-t-ou-c-h y-y-ou?
Both brothers looked suspicious.
“No-o-o hur-t-t.”
Sam suddenly nodded. “I think I know what it might be, Dean. And it’s okay, it’s not dangerous.”
“What?”
“I think it’s a wood-wife.”
“A what?”
“A forest creature … similar to a dryad. Connected to trees. I think they’re supposed to be harmless.”
“You think?”
“I’m pretty sure … I’m gonna see what it wants.” Sam took a step toward the creature, his hands out to the sides, palms up, doing his best not to loom over it.
“Sam …”
“Look at it, Dean. It’s not gonna hurt me.”
Dean looked from his brother to the moving collection of sticks. It had a central trunk, maybe six inches diameter, with twigs jutting from it randomly. A brown cloth was tied around its middle. The tree-bark face was propped on top without so much as a neck.
The limbs resembled nothing so much as bundles of kindling he would have used to start a fire. Except the sticks bent awkwardly where elbows and knees would be, and the arms ended in incongruously graceful stick fingers. One of which was now reaching for Sammy’s face as he knelt in the leaves in front of it.
“Sam!” Dean didn’t like this at all, but of course Sam was gonna do what he wanted anyway. As one of the fingers touched Sam’s forehead, Dean grasped Sam’s shoulder.
There was a tiny flash of green light as the thing touched Sam, and Sam’s face went from surprised to still until the creature’s hand dropped.
“Sam?”
Sam shook his head as if to clear it, blinking furiously.
Dean huffed a little noise of relief when Sam finally spoke.
“It’s okay, Dean. Her name is Pieryn, and she is a wood-wife. She didn’t mean to scare us. She found us sleeping in the car last night and put up a ward - a schutzwand, I think is the word she used - to protect us.”
“So fine, why doesn’t she take it down? And what did she do to the Impala?”
“It’s complicated. When she touched me I got pictures in my head, images, not sentences. But she definitely doesn’t mean us harm.”
Dean froze.
“And what about them?” he asked, as a swarm of the little stick people approached.
Pieryn turned to face the advancing pack and stepped back through the barrier.
There were certain tells that must be universal, because Dean knew from the sudden stiffness how does a piece of wood get stiffer? that their wood-wife was afraid of the others.
“What have you done?” Hadnilga shrieked. “You have betrayed us all!”
“No!” Pieryn tried to break through Hadnilga’s rant but it was as useless as fighting the wind.
“I just protected them, as was once our duty to keep safe the poor wanderer! You must remember, Hadnilga!”
“Traitor! Sisters, seize her! And take down the schutzwand!”
Pieryn hoped that she really heard a few cries of dissension among her kin, but there were not enough who would stand against their mother for her, and she fell to the force of the mob as they struck her down and snapped her limbs. It was her own fault.
She felt the drain as her sisters obliterated the warding marks, saw the brief reflection of green on the others’ faces as the shield collapsed. What would happen to the men? was her last thought as her eyes closed.
It happened fast. A rush of raspy voices and then Pieryn went down under an onslaught of the tree-creatures while more of the things scuttled to the three trees with the symbols, and then there was an incandescent flash of green light that made Dean squeeze his eyes closed for a minute.
Immediately upon taking his hand away from his face, Dean checked for Sam, who was, like Dean, protecting his eyes from the brilliant flare.
They stepped to where the force field had been, but there was no longer anything knitting the air into solidity. The forest was still, no sight of the tree-creatures.
With a soft gasp, Sam pointed at a disturbed collection of branches in front of them. A torn brown cloth was mixed with the pieces that had been Pieryn.
Both of them jumped at the wispy noise coming from the jumble, and they knelt simultaneously beside the little pile. Sam slid a hand under Pieryn’s head while Dean unwillingly studied the broken limbs. The phrase ‘greenstick fracture’ suddenly had a new meaning as he looked at the wrongness of broken white ends protruding from the brown sticks that had been the wood-wife’s legs.
Crazily enough, his first thought was to make splints for them.
“Sam,” he started, and then saw that his brother was holding Pieryn’s hand in place against his forehead, going for another Vulcan mind meld.
Screw it, Dean thought. Sam might be right that she hadn’t meant to harm them, and anyway the other tree people had attacked her …
He got up and looked around for some branches that were straight enough to make good splints. You’re putting wood braces on a wooden stick … thing … person, Winchester.
He shook his head and grabbed the water jug before he returned to Pieryn and Sam.
“Here,” Dean handed the jug over as Sam gently put the wood-wife’s hand back on her chest. “Do you think I should … splint these?” He motioned at the broken legs.
Sam touched his own fingers to the gnarly brown face and then nodded.
Dean figured he could use some of the creepers twining around the closest trees to secure the splints in place. He cut the vines to even lengths and began to push the broken pieces of the wood-wife’s legs back into alignment.
“So, does she know where the Impala is?” Dean asked as he worked, wanting to distract himself from feeling like he was pushing actual bones together. He couldn’t tell if he was hurting her.
And he wanted to stop wondering why he was helping a supernatural creature that had put him and Sam in a freakin’ cage.
"Uh, yeah, actually.” Sam was still doing the fingers-to-the-face thing with her.
“So? Where is it?”
“Well,” a hesitation. “She turned the car into the mattress,” Sam said in a rush, as if he said it fast Dean wouldn’t react.
“What?!” Dean stopped in the middle of tying a knot and just looked at Sam, then stood and walked up to the bed and stared at it, then back at Sam.
“This,” his voice came out slightly strangled, “This is the Impala?”
Dean stalked back to the wood-wife and glowered down at her.
“Tell her to turn it back!”
“She, um, can’t. Yet!” Sam added hastily. “She’s really sorry. She didn’t mean for this to happen.”
Dean continued to fiercely glare at the thing that had defiled his car.
“Maybe … you should talk to her?” Sam asked carefully. “Just let her touch …”
“No!” exploded out of Dean, and he turned away and stomped past the first line of trees. Sam could finish fixing the thing, and then Dean was going to send it up in flames.
She winced as the pretty one - Dean, brother to this Sam - stormed away. The Hunt hadn’t come to this clearing last night, so if she had just left them alone, none of this would have happened.
But maybe The Hunt stayed away because the schutzwand was already up? She just didn’t know.
Pieryn had been surprised at how much it hurt when Dean’s green eyes turned hard and angry at her. More even than the stinging burn of her broken limbs. Sam had finished securing them with the braces after Dean walked away.
Sam’s fingertips rested on her face again. “I’m sorry, Pieryn. But we need you to fix things back. Right away.”
All so wrong. But yes, she did need to fix this soon. While she was still able.
She formed deliberate thoughts of what needed to be done, and when, and why.
"Hey, Dean.”
Dean didn’t respond, knowing Sam was going to come up to him anyway.
“Look, Pieryn’s really sorry things went wrong. But she explained why she did it and she really was trying to protect us, Dean. There’s stuff …”
“We don’t need a goddamn piece of wood protecting us, Sam! We’re hunters, what the hell does it think we need protecting from?”
“The Wild Hunt.”
“Huh?”
“European mythology. Same source as the wood-wives, actually … Spirits of the dead race through on their horses with their hounds, following the god of the hunt. It happens here every fall for three nights around the full moon. Last night was the second night. And anyone or anything that gets in their way is hunted down for sport. And killed.
“That doesn’t explain what that creature did to the Impala. Or the force field.”
“Well, yeah, it does. Pieryn says this clearing is one of the spots The Hunt passes through. When she saw us asleep in the car she figured we’d be toast if The Hunt came here last night, so she put up a ward, the force field, to protect us. That’s what her people do for safety on the nights of The Hunt.”
“So what happened to our car?”
“Well, the thing is, wood-wives and metal are incompatible. She couldn’t put up the protection around it, so she … transformed it into something the barrier could contain. And, uh, she turned it into a bed because she … she wanted us to be comfortable.”
“Butting in where she’s not wanted. Might as well be a real wife. This is crap, Sam. Just …” Dean kicked the mattress hard enough to shift it a few inches. Then realized he had just kicked the Impala and wanted to take it back. Still wanted to punch something, though.
“It’s okay, Pieryn is going to try and fix it.”
“It better - now!”
“She explained to me that we need to wait until moonrise for her to have enough power. And it’s going to be tricky because The Hunt starts up then. She thinks she can do it, though, if we help her.”
“How?”
“Well, mostly, it’s that she has to walk around and with her legs broken … I said I could carry her, she said that should work.”
Dean wiped his hand over his chin. This was so monumentally screwed up. But there was nothing to do but wait, then.
“She better be able to bring ‘m car back,” he muttered and stalked off to take his frustration out on some innocent foliage. If he was lucky, maybe he’d accidentally step on another damn wood fairy.
Dean was back at the clearing as dusk was closing in, frowning when he saw the bundle of sticks lying on the mattress, Sam sitting next to it. Dean walked up to them and stopped.
“So?”
Sam picked up that Dean was not pleased to see the wood-wife there. He stood and spoke quietly.
“She’s in pretty bad shape. There’s a good chance that doing the spell reversal will kill her.”
“Well, she better get the car back.”
“Dean.” There was reproach in Sam’s voice.
“She made this mess, she undoes it.”
“Pieryn was trying to help, Dean.”
“Yeah, well, one, we didn’t need her help and two, hasn’t turned out very well now, has it? So let’s get this divorce on the road.”
A creaky warble from the bed interrupted them and Sam sat back down. Dean kicked futilely at the leaves. He hated being defenseless in the dark. Worst case scenario? Tree thing didn’t bring the car back. That would leave them with his knife and a smidgeon of holy water against a horde of angry ghosts on horseback.
Not great odds.
He killed some time collecting larger branches and making a pile beside the mattress. Not that they would be much use, but Dean needed to have something he could swing in place of the iron and rock salt he’d normally have.
An undulating howl in the distance made the hair on the nape of his neck rise.
“Sam?”
Sam was carefully lifting the wood-wife from the bed. “Pieryn’s ready, Dean.”
“So what do I do?”
Another wail, closer.
“Nothing. Pieryn has to do it.”
“What if it doesn’t work?”
“I don’t know. I guess we’re in trouble.”
Crap. “Well, do it, then.”
The illumination of the moon made the clearing starkly black shadows and brightly lit flashes of movement as Sam began circling the mattress. Dean could see the creature’s arms, gesturing, bits of sticks poking out at wrong angles.
Sam completed the first lap.
A sudden burst of furious barking and the hoarse yelling of multiple voices made Dean whirl to face the trees. Too close.
He glanced back at Sam. Second round almost finished.
Dean pulled his knife and grabbed one of his branches in the other hand.
A scream that wasn’t human but was still one of terror, and a chorus of feverish yammering. Dean tightened his grip on the branch.
Dean knew yelling ‘hurry’ wouldn’t help, Sam could hear the threat as well as he did. He couldn’t help but mutter ‘move it’ under his breath, though.
There was a flash of radiant green behind him. Dean turned even as Sam hollered his name. Discarding the branch, he leaped to thank god, Baby, I love you the car with the trunk key ready.
"Get in!” he yelled at Sam.
“Pieryn!” Sam yelled back.
Dean had two sawed-offs and rounds out in seconds and slammed the trunk shut.
Driver door open, yet Sam was still just standing with the thing in his arms.
The frenetic thunder of a lot of horses was too close.
“Get in the car!” Dean screamed.
“It’s too much metal for Pieryn!”
He wanted to say just drop her, he really did …
He threw the shotguns in the front seat and pulled off his leather jacket.
“Wrap her in this and get in!”
In a fluid series of motions, Dean thrust the coat at Sam, grabbed one of the guns from the seat, opened the rear door for his brother and then turned to fire at the first of the huntsmen crashing into the clearing.
The rider exploded into mist but the thing that wasn’t a horse kept coming and Dean flung himself into the car just as the horse thing landed on the Impala’s roof and kept going.
And then the hunting pack filled the clearing, too many to count, man shapes with wrecked faces and streaming hair, brandishing long swords and axes and chains, riding monstrous animals with fangs and red eyes. The car was surrounded, weapons bashing the hood, hooves beating against the sides.
The window by Dean’s head shattered and he jerked away from the shattering glass. A black arm reached in and Dean fired.
The arm was replaced by the slavering mouth of a hound, teeth reaching for Dean’s arm. He fired again and it vanished.
“Dean!”
One of the rear windows splintered under a blow that shook the whole vehicle.
“Here!”
Dean tossed the second shotgun into the back seat while firing at the ghost coming through the broken glass.
The swarming seemed to go on for hours but in reality probably only lasted minutes, and then the raucous hollering moved away and the riders passed into the other side of the trees.
Dean remained ready until the last of the noise vanished. Then he patted the dashboard and murmured, “You did good.”
They both stayed awake till dawn. Then Dean stepped out to see the damage. He winced at the dents that pockmarked the car all over, then started to brush the broken glass out from the seats.
When he finished with the front, he opened the back door to see Sam still holding the wood-wife wrapped in Dean’s jacket.
“How is …?”
Sam looked at Dean with a sober expression, then started to hand the bundle in his arms to Dean.
“Hold her while I get the glass off me.”
Dean took the jacket gingerly. The wood-wife was unexpectedly light. And limp. No beady black eyes looked at him.
Out of the car, Sam placed his fingertips on the creature’s face, then shook his head.
“I think she’s gone.”
Damn. “So what do we do with her?”
“I dunno, Dean. Maybe we should bury her by a tree?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll take her.”
" ’S okay, I got her. Go pick a tree, I’ll follow you. But grab shovels first.”
Sam led a few hundred yards into the forest, then stopped by a grand old pine.
“How about here?”
“Okay.” Dean laid his jacket on the dirt, unfolded it to see the flakes of bark that had fallen off the wood-wife stuck to the inside of the lining. The ends of the sticks that had been broken yesterday were caked with dried brown sap. Dean didn’t know if there was a heartbeat to feel, but he laid his hand on her trunk anyway.
Nothing.
“Let’s do this.” He took the shovel Sam held out to him and started to dig.
Wouldn’t need to be a big hole.
“Dean!” Sam hissed.
A half-dozen of the wood things were watching them.
“Rock salt?” he asked Sam softly.
“Wait, I don’t think so … they don’t seem like they’re going to attack …”
“Pa-a-rrr-en.”
One of the tree people pointed, took a hesitant step.
Sam backed away, pulling Dean with him. For each step they moved away, the creatures moved closer to the dead wood-wife, until they were kneeling around her in a circle.
They rasped at each other, then one pulled a jug from an apron pocket and began to pour its contents over the corpse.
“Hey! My jacket!” Dean yelped, but Sam shushed him and held him back.
The creatures touched hands and murmured in unison, a sound that evoked the feeling of the wind whispering through leaves.
Green-tinged light flared around them and suddenly Pieryn sat up. There was a gabble from the surrounding wood-wives, then they bent to remove the branches Dean had fastened as splints.
Finally, Pieryn stood up, and hugs were exchanged with her resurrectors.
“I need my coat back,” Dean muttered and started to edge toward the assembly. At once the other wood-wives scuttled away behind the trees.
When Dean reached Pieryn, she held out her arm and he understood she wanted to ‘talk’ with him. He shook his head.
“Sam.”
Sam immediately knelt before the wood-wife and let her graze his forehead with those unnatural fingers.
Sam put his hand on her head as well, then simultaneously they broke touch. Moments later Pieryn slid into the forest shadows.
Dean started to shake the crumbs of bark out of his coat.
“Wait, Dean, Pieryn wanted us to take those!”
Sam scrambled to collect the few shards that were left.
“What the hell for?”
“I’m not sure, just she said to …”
“And we always do what the monsters tell us to do? Let’s go.” Dean spun around and started back to the car.
It took a few minutes of maneuvering to get the Impala turned to be pointing out of the clearing, and Dean took the dirt road slowly.
“Those wood-wives who came for Pieryn, they’re breaking away from their kin to start their own clan,” Sam offered. “It used to be their job to help wanderers. That’s what Pieryn was trying to do.” He was playing with one of the bark pieces, flipping it through his fingers.
“Well, they can help somebody else next time. We don’t need it.”
The Impala reached the end of the tree-shrouded path, and Dean turned onto the two-lane highway. The wind was blowing in the broken windows and Dean was figuring where the nearest garage was to get new glass and the dents pounded out and how the hell they were going to pay for all this when Sam let out a startled yell.
“What?”
“Look!”
Sam held out his palm, where the piece of bark was now a shiny gold coin.
“Well, I’ll be a son of a …” Dean turned his head toward the dark woodland flanking the highway. “Alimony.”
The End
***
A/N: First, credit to alteredloc for her great art prompt. The moment I saw it, I just knew that something had transformed the Impala. And then she created an image of Pieryn that was exactly as I had imagined her! It was great collaborating with her!
Big hug and thanks to my friend and beta, sandymg, who among other things, found the woodwife lore for me.
Thanks to the mods of spn_reversebang for their hard work putting this together. This was my first ever big bang, and this is a fun format.
And thanks to you for reading! Be sure to go to alteredloc's art post and leave a comment for her! http://alteredloc.livejournal.com/19837.html