Fic: Owl of the Waste Places
Okay, I did it. Because I have so much time on my hands right now, I stayed up all night and well into the morning writing this thing. But I do feel more sane now, if 30 IQ points dumber for lack of sleep. I'm fighting a writing block on originals, and the sneaky way to do it is write about OCs from SPN fics.
DISCLAIMER: No Winchesters here whatsoever! No SPN canon characters at all. Except for one buried and obscure reference to John Winchester, because clearly you can't chase them all out completely. I have fic for readership, and this is for my personal writing experimentation, so I promise not to disown anybody for not being interested.
These two spend most or all of their respective SPN fics dead, so it's only fair. Lt. Cmdr. Darren Leigh is from "Row Charon Row", which hasn't even been fully edited yet, and he is the ghost captain of the ghost WWII destroyer that Sam and Dean get stuck on. He is the most closed up, secretive character I've ever tried to write. I even knew he was hiding shit in the BB but couldn't figure out what it was. I tried attacking this short story several times from his POV and failed miserably. Sarah Barnard is from "The Witch Is Dead" and is the witch that casts a love spell on Dean. I wanted to write about her because she is dead for most of the story and doesn't get to say that she really did love her husband and wasn't a gold digger and didn't kill him for his money. She gets to be in love but also be evil, eat babies and cast incestuous curses.
Owl of the Waste Places
“Darren” means “burnt land”. The name enjoyed a brief spike of popularity in the United Kingdom in the mid-seventies, but what no one knows is that the tiny splash of fashion was circles on the water and that the first stone of that fashion was dropped in 1967 in Missoula, Montana, at a christening of a newborn baby boy Hobbenbokken. The Hobbenbokkens asked an old family friend to be the boy’s godmother. Her name was Sarah Barnard and she was a witch, and they never would’ve let her near their boy if they knew what she liked to eat for New Year’s dinner, but they didn’t know. Sarah smiled sweetly and kissed the baby boy on the forehead - he cried, because he sensed she was a witch and because her kiss burned - and she gave him the name Darren.
The man she named baby boy Hobbenbokken after had been a pile of bones at the bottom of the Pacific for quite some time by then.
“Darren Hobbenbokken” had a bad ring to it. But then again, “Darren” was a strange name back when Sarah first came to America in 1922 and she never learned to think of it as anything but. Perhaps she was biased. The Darren she named the baby after got his strange name from a mother who secretly hoped that he’d grow up to be an actor. She wasn’t a witch like Sarah. She couldn’t know that no man named “burnt land” was going to have a single artistic bone in him. Darren Hobbenbokken grew up to sell insurance. Darren Leigh, whom he was named after, was a Navy officer in the Second World War.
“Leigh” means “from the meadow”. “Darren Leigh”, therefore, is a self-destructive sort of name. It’s a name that lays waste to itself, and it snagged Sarah’s curiosity the first time she heard it.
Sarah had once picked up an open Bible by accident and burned her fingers and eyes on it. She couldn’t see anything for three days and lay in bed, with Clementine blowing on her poor fingers and with the bit of the Bible verse glowing green and purple before her blinded eyes. The bit was “the owl of the waste places”.
The owl of the waste places. It made her think of Darren Leigh.
~~~~
Sarah Barnard was a witch and a beautiful woman. She was an old thing who never aged a day past twenty four. She was twenty four when she decided to stop aging in 1902, after the Second Boer War, and she was still twenty four when she left Africa twenty years later, and she remained twenty four until the day she died in the last hours of 1988. Young and beautiful and a witch, Sarah could get as many men as she wanted, and she got plenty and had her fun.
She’s only ever loved two. She was a romantic in her moss-overgrown heart.
The first man Sarah loved was older than she but only by five years and three days. But because she had decided to stop aging, he was over twenty years her senior when they met on his pleasure trip around Africa in 1922. He walked into her favorite café in his boots and his shorts and took his hat off at the doorway like a gentleman, and Sarah looked up from her book and decided that he possessed the most attractive mustache she’d ever seen. His name was Thomas Atkins. He was a wealthy land developer from Florida. He didn’t like the company of women much but contrary to the rumors back home, it wasn’t because he was a homosexual but because he had been keeping company with the wrong women.
Sarah was the right woman. They were married in Johannesburg a month later and returned together to Thomas’s home in Florida. Had he lived longer, Thomas Atkins would’ve eventually become puzzled by his wife’s ageless beauty. But as it was, he was only mildly embarrassed, deep inside, of having married such a young lady at his age. When he said it, Sarah kissed him and laughed and kissed him some more. She loved kissing that mustache.
Sarah Barnard spent the first forty years of her life out of love, then had two loves fall on her head like oranges in the garden, and then her mossy heart was mostly her own for another forty five years until she died.
The reference to the head is important here.
Sarah Barnard met the second man she’d love on the day she lost the first in 1925. Thomas had blown an aneurysm and died instantly, in bed next to her, and Sarah woke up with a pain like a thick burning needle piercing her head back to front. She kissed his lips and cried and kissed him some more. And when his body had been taken out of the house, she sent all the servants away and sat in the kitchen by herself all night and wept. Shortly before dawn, the grocery lady’s grandson came to the back door with the fresh delivery of fruit. His name was Darren Leigh, like a thing that had unknowingly burnt itself to ashes, and he was fourteen, and his parents sent him away to spend the summer at Grandma’s, and Grandma was the grocery lady. Darren Leigh had the brightest red hair Sarah had ever seen on a human head, like a caracara orange. She didn’t love him then, because he was a kid and she liked to do bad things to kids but a different kind of bad, and because she was in a lot of pain that night.
She did pay him, though, to pluck the mushrooms and grasses that had sprung from the skin on her back from the grief over Thomas. They came out with a little bit of blood on their pale roots. It must’ve been weird but he didn’t run. He felt sympathy for her and wanted to do something nice for her. Sarah sent him home with tiny yellow roses that grew from between her toes and a kiss on the lips.
Both men Sarah loved died with bleeding heads. Thomas Atkins bled into his skull in his bed when he went to sleep and never woke up. Darren Leigh bled out of his skull on the deck of a destroyer ship hit by a Japanese torpedo.
Interestingly enough, Sarah Barnard also died of traumatic brain injury. A moose stepped on her head.
~~~~
When Sarah was a little girl, she had terrible crying fits and pointed to various booboos. Her fingers swelled and throbbed and turned red. Her aunts thought she had sickle cell disease, as it later became known, but one day a daisy burst through the skin of her forearm. Her aunt Connie slapped her wrist and said that this was what she got for making the cicadas sing her to sleep. The more witchcraft Sarah did, the more green things grew from her body.
She used to pluck her body clean for Thomas, because she was still young and it was a new thing for her to be in love and she didn’t quite know what to do with it, how to hold it, how to keep it from going away. Strong feelings made a jungle out of Sarah. Forget-me-nots sprung from her head on her wedding day and she hadn’t noticed, and Thomas asked her later when she snuck those in. The day she met Darren, she had a patch of Venus flytraps between her shoulder blades and a tendril of ivy peeking out of her left nostril. He took it in stride. She could’ve bit his fingertips down to the bone with those tiny yellow roses she sent him home with, but in the end she was tired and not in the mood and she left it alone. She slept instead.
~~~~
An owl of the waste places is a thing that is very serious all the time.
Darren Leigh was a thing that was very serious like that. He ran grocery deliveries at five in the morning for his Grandma all summer at the age of fourteen, collected the pay and took it all back to the store. Sarah kissed him because a first kiss was a nice nugget to take for a witch, a nice and powerful nugget, and because she did want the sympathy. She also kissed him because she wanted to see if it would be like ashes and graphite. It wasn’t. The kiss was like green grapes. She tucked it inside her cheek and after the kid left, took it out of her mouth, pressed it into the cream between the layers of a leftover cake and ate the kiss all over again. It was mild but sweet, private and serious. She could bite his fingertips off too but didn’t.
The serious thing inside of Darren Leigh was the Pacific Ocean. It’s strange what people carry in them.
~~~~
Sarah never told Darren Leigh about her taste for baby flesh. Just because you love a man doesn’t mean you spill all your witching guts before him.
She never introduced him to Black Betty and Clementine. They were living in San Diego after their beautiful rollercoaster monster got spoiled irreversibly by a ham sandwich, and there were sailors everywhere. Poor Clementine who smelled like dead fish and looked like something from the bottom of the lake had to live vicariously through Sarah. As for Betty, if a human olfactory epithelium was the size of a post stamp, then that of a dog would be the size of ten football fields. Betty knew that Sarah wasn’t actually fucking her way through the Pacific Navy but Betty cared none for anyone’s love life. The Great Depression made her nervous and she was busy burying marrow bones in the yard.
Sarah had occasionally dreamed of Darren since 1925, and in her dreams he was an owl, or a burnt field, or the Pacific Ocean. He told her later that he dreamed of her too - all nightmares. She didn’t recognize him in San Diego because it’s been a long time, and he didn’t actually look like an owl, and the sun had bleached his hair. He recognized her because she was still twenty four and because there was a very conspicuous mushroom in her ear.
Clementine whined for stories when Sarah stayed out all night. Sarah told her but always kept out the name, so that Clem could picture whoever she wanted. Betty rolled her eyes. Finally, even Clem realized that Sarah was only fucking one Navy officer through the mattress, and she thought it was cute.
~~~~
One night in 1943, Sarah Barnard woke up screaming with a cluster headache, weeping out of one eye, with her head feeling as if it’s been pierced and broken by flying debris from an exploded ship.
Betty came into her bedroom and sat on the bed with her, blowing on her tortured right temple. Clem brought her a bowl of tomato and rice soup. After a while, they took Sarah outside, pressed between and supported by their bodies, sat on the porch and howled at the moon with her.
There were seas on the moon, too.
DISCLAIMER: No Winchesters here whatsoever! No SPN canon characters at all. Except for one buried and obscure reference to John Winchester, because clearly you can't chase them all out completely. I have fic for readership, and this is for my personal writing experimentation, so I promise not to disown anybody for not being interested.
These two spend most or all of their respective SPN fics dead, so it's only fair. Lt. Cmdr. Darren Leigh is from "Row Charon Row", which hasn't even been fully edited yet, and he is the ghost captain of the ghost WWII destroyer that Sam and Dean get stuck on. He is the most closed up, secretive character I've ever tried to write. I even knew he was hiding shit in the BB but couldn't figure out what it was. I tried attacking this short story several times from his POV and failed miserably. Sarah Barnard is from "The Witch Is Dead" and is the witch that casts a love spell on Dean. I wanted to write about her because she is dead for most of the story and doesn't get to say that she really did love her husband and wasn't a gold digger and didn't kill him for his money. She gets to be in love but also be evil, eat babies and cast incestuous curses.
Owl of the Waste Places
“Darren” means “burnt land”. The name enjoyed a brief spike of popularity in the United Kingdom in the mid-seventies, but what no one knows is that the tiny splash of fashion was circles on the water and that the first stone of that fashion was dropped in 1967 in Missoula, Montana, at a christening of a newborn baby boy Hobbenbokken. The Hobbenbokkens asked an old family friend to be the boy’s godmother. Her name was Sarah Barnard and she was a witch, and they never would’ve let her near their boy if they knew what she liked to eat for New Year’s dinner, but they didn’t know. Sarah smiled sweetly and kissed the baby boy on the forehead - he cried, because he sensed she was a witch and because her kiss burned - and she gave him the name Darren.
The man she named baby boy Hobbenbokken after had been a pile of bones at the bottom of the Pacific for quite some time by then.
“Darren Hobbenbokken” had a bad ring to it. But then again, “Darren” was a strange name back when Sarah first came to America in 1922 and she never learned to think of it as anything but. Perhaps she was biased. The Darren she named the baby after got his strange name from a mother who secretly hoped that he’d grow up to be an actor. She wasn’t a witch like Sarah. She couldn’t know that no man named “burnt land” was going to have a single artistic bone in him. Darren Hobbenbokken grew up to sell insurance. Darren Leigh, whom he was named after, was a Navy officer in the Second World War.
“Leigh” means “from the meadow”. “Darren Leigh”, therefore, is a self-destructive sort of name. It’s a name that lays waste to itself, and it snagged Sarah’s curiosity the first time she heard it.
Sarah had once picked up an open Bible by accident and burned her fingers and eyes on it. She couldn’t see anything for three days and lay in bed, with Clementine blowing on her poor fingers and with the bit of the Bible verse glowing green and purple before her blinded eyes. The bit was “the owl of the waste places”.
The owl of the waste places. It made her think of Darren Leigh.
~~~~
Sarah Barnard was a witch and a beautiful woman. She was an old thing who never aged a day past twenty four. She was twenty four when she decided to stop aging in 1902, after the Second Boer War, and she was still twenty four when she left Africa twenty years later, and she remained twenty four until the day she died in the last hours of 1988. Young and beautiful and a witch, Sarah could get as many men as she wanted, and she got plenty and had her fun.
She’s only ever loved two. She was a romantic in her moss-overgrown heart.
The first man Sarah loved was older than she but only by five years and three days. But because she had decided to stop aging, he was over twenty years her senior when they met on his pleasure trip around Africa in 1922. He walked into her favorite café in his boots and his shorts and took his hat off at the doorway like a gentleman, and Sarah looked up from her book and decided that he possessed the most attractive mustache she’d ever seen. His name was Thomas Atkins. He was a wealthy land developer from Florida. He didn’t like the company of women much but contrary to the rumors back home, it wasn’t because he was a homosexual but because he had been keeping company with the wrong women.
Sarah was the right woman. They were married in Johannesburg a month later and returned together to Thomas’s home in Florida. Had he lived longer, Thomas Atkins would’ve eventually become puzzled by his wife’s ageless beauty. But as it was, he was only mildly embarrassed, deep inside, of having married such a young lady at his age. When he said it, Sarah kissed him and laughed and kissed him some more. She loved kissing that mustache.
Sarah Barnard spent the first forty years of her life out of love, then had two loves fall on her head like oranges in the garden, and then her mossy heart was mostly her own for another forty five years until she died.
The reference to the head is important here.
Sarah Barnard met the second man she’d love on the day she lost the first in 1925. Thomas had blown an aneurysm and died instantly, in bed next to her, and Sarah woke up with a pain like a thick burning needle piercing her head back to front. She kissed his lips and cried and kissed him some more. And when his body had been taken out of the house, she sent all the servants away and sat in the kitchen by herself all night and wept. Shortly before dawn, the grocery lady’s grandson came to the back door with the fresh delivery of fruit. His name was Darren Leigh, like a thing that had unknowingly burnt itself to ashes, and he was fourteen, and his parents sent him away to spend the summer at Grandma’s, and Grandma was the grocery lady. Darren Leigh had the brightest red hair Sarah had ever seen on a human head, like a caracara orange. She didn’t love him then, because he was a kid and she liked to do bad things to kids but a different kind of bad, and because she was in a lot of pain that night.
She did pay him, though, to pluck the mushrooms and grasses that had sprung from the skin on her back from the grief over Thomas. They came out with a little bit of blood on their pale roots. It must’ve been weird but he didn’t run. He felt sympathy for her and wanted to do something nice for her. Sarah sent him home with tiny yellow roses that grew from between her toes and a kiss on the lips.
Both men Sarah loved died with bleeding heads. Thomas Atkins bled into his skull in his bed when he went to sleep and never woke up. Darren Leigh bled out of his skull on the deck of a destroyer ship hit by a Japanese torpedo.
Interestingly enough, Sarah Barnard also died of traumatic brain injury. A moose stepped on her head.
~~~~
When Sarah was a little girl, she had terrible crying fits and pointed to various booboos. Her fingers swelled and throbbed and turned red. Her aunts thought she had sickle cell disease, as it later became known, but one day a daisy burst through the skin of her forearm. Her aunt Connie slapped her wrist and said that this was what she got for making the cicadas sing her to sleep. The more witchcraft Sarah did, the more green things grew from her body.
She used to pluck her body clean for Thomas, because she was still young and it was a new thing for her to be in love and she didn’t quite know what to do with it, how to hold it, how to keep it from going away. Strong feelings made a jungle out of Sarah. Forget-me-nots sprung from her head on her wedding day and she hadn’t noticed, and Thomas asked her later when she snuck those in. The day she met Darren, she had a patch of Venus flytraps between her shoulder blades and a tendril of ivy peeking out of her left nostril. He took it in stride. She could’ve bit his fingertips down to the bone with those tiny yellow roses she sent him home with, but in the end she was tired and not in the mood and she left it alone. She slept instead.
~~~~
An owl of the waste places is a thing that is very serious all the time.
Darren Leigh was a thing that was very serious like that. He ran grocery deliveries at five in the morning for his Grandma all summer at the age of fourteen, collected the pay and took it all back to the store. Sarah kissed him because a first kiss was a nice nugget to take for a witch, a nice and powerful nugget, and because she did want the sympathy. She also kissed him because she wanted to see if it would be like ashes and graphite. It wasn’t. The kiss was like green grapes. She tucked it inside her cheek and after the kid left, took it out of her mouth, pressed it into the cream between the layers of a leftover cake and ate the kiss all over again. It was mild but sweet, private and serious. She could bite his fingertips off too but didn’t.
The serious thing inside of Darren Leigh was the Pacific Ocean. It’s strange what people carry in them.
~~~~
Sarah never told Darren Leigh about her taste for baby flesh. Just because you love a man doesn’t mean you spill all your witching guts before him.
She never introduced him to Black Betty and Clementine. They were living in San Diego after their beautiful rollercoaster monster got spoiled irreversibly by a ham sandwich, and there were sailors everywhere. Poor Clementine who smelled like dead fish and looked like something from the bottom of the lake had to live vicariously through Sarah. As for Betty, if a human olfactory epithelium was the size of a post stamp, then that of a dog would be the size of ten football fields. Betty knew that Sarah wasn’t actually fucking her way through the Pacific Navy but Betty cared none for anyone’s love life. The Great Depression made her nervous and she was busy burying marrow bones in the yard.
Sarah had occasionally dreamed of Darren since 1925, and in her dreams he was an owl, or a burnt field, or the Pacific Ocean. He told her later that he dreamed of her too - all nightmares. She didn’t recognize him in San Diego because it’s been a long time, and he didn’t actually look like an owl, and the sun had bleached his hair. He recognized her because she was still twenty four and because there was a very conspicuous mushroom in her ear.
Clementine whined for stories when Sarah stayed out all night. Sarah told her but always kept out the name, so that Clem could picture whoever she wanted. Betty rolled her eyes. Finally, even Clem realized that Sarah was only fucking one Navy officer through the mattress, and she thought it was cute.
~~~~
One night in 1943, Sarah Barnard woke up screaming with a cluster headache, weeping out of one eye, with her head feeling as if it’s been pierced and broken by flying debris from an exploded ship.
Betty came into her bedroom and sat on the bed with her, blowing on her tortured right temple. Clem brought her a bowl of tomato and rice soup. After a while, they took Sarah outside, pressed between and supported by their bodies, sat on the porch and howled at the moon with her.
There were seas on the moon, too.