SPN FIC - Wren
A couple of weeks ago, with Amalyn, I kick-started a mini-verse where Jo is off hunting on her own, and begins collecting a family of kids in a somewhat Angelina Jolie fashion (minus the Brad). I have in mind a whole flock of 'em -- though perhaps not as huge as 19 Kids and Counting and certainly not as Stepford-ish as that. :)
Here's the second one.
"I saw you come in," the voice said. "I know you've been around for a few days. But I didn't know what you were doing. The cops don't bother with anything around here. They come once in a while to kick out the homeless, but you didn't look like a cop."
CHARACTERS: Jo Harvelle, OMC
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language and a hint of child endangerment
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2308 words
WREN
By Carol Davis
Unnnnnnggghhhhnnnn.
Hangover?
Worst hangover in the history of the WORLD.
What…
Every inch of her body heavy and electric-shock-tingling and wrong. The world spinning slowly, lazily, beneath her.
Jo tried to peel open her eyes, but her lids were dry and gummy and refused to separate. Just as well; whatever the rest of humanity was doing this morning - was it morning? - she probably didn't need to see it.
Didn't want to see it.
Head. Uhhhhhhh…
Hands were there, all of a sudden, capable, understanding hands, turning her onto her side so she wouldn't choke on her own vomit, which…yeah, would have been a ridiculous way to go after all these years, after everything she'd done - or tried to do, at least. The hands held her firmly as the remains of a meal she didn't remember eating came roiling back up, held her face away from the mess, although the smell of it was still near enough to keep her stomach doing backflips and continuing its efforts to blow all tanks, yessir captain, empty the bilge and…
"It's okay," a voice said, low and comforting.
Blow…
Daddy'd loved submarine movies.
Did she say that out loud? Must have, because the owner of the hands huffed a little bit, like he - she? - thought that was funny. Or stupidly inappropriate.
"It's okay," the voice said again.
Whoever it was was holding her hair, keeping it up out of the puddle of puke. Bless you, she thought, whoever the hell you are.
She'd passed out on the…floor? Had to be the floor. It sure as hell wasn't a bed, and that was just as well, too, because whether it'd been her own bed or somebody else's, this'd be a bitch to clean up, would be soaking clear through to the mattress.
The vomiting stopped, finally, after her stomach had heave-ho'ed every last drop that was in it, leaving her exhausted and drained and sore. She lay where she was for a minute, then the hands helped her roll cautiously onto her back, into the position she'd been in when she woke up - if you could call this awake. Once she was settled, the hands went away for a minute and came back with something cool and wet, a cloth of some kind, that they used to wipe her mouth, her chin. Then they levered her head and shoulders gently up and held the rim of a cup to her lips.
Water. Cool. A little metallic.
After a couple of sips she was able to move herself into a sit, hold the cup on her own. She drank the water slowly, a tiny bit at a time, waiting for the warning of another revolt from her stomach, but that didn't happen.
You could be grateful for small things, sometimes, and this was one of them.
"Do you want more?" the voice asked.
"No."
The hands took the cup away and she sat there for a while, eyes closed, head still reeling though at a somewhat less violent pace.
"It bit you," the voice said.
That made sense, because she didn't remember any booze. Well, she did, but it'd been a couple of days ago. She knew time had passed since then, and even if it hadn't, she hadn't been hammered enough to puke, not anywhere near it. She knew better - had learned that from the crowd at the Roadhouse, understood that rule of rules and carried it with her like a well-thumbed book when she left the place: You wanna get shitfaced, fine, but do it when you're safe.
One at a time, with a little assist from her fingers, she got her eyes open, which might not have been the right move for this particular moment in time, because her head whirled like a globe somebody'd given a good, solid, flick-of-the-wrist spin. "Jesus," she moaned, and held her head in both hands, tears dribbling out from between lids that had slammed shut again.
"Maybe you should lay down."
"No."
"Is there somebody - you want me to call somebody?"
"No."
There was a small, pregnant pause. Then the voice asked tentatively, "Do you speak English? All you keep saying is 'No.'"
This was not a good time to laugh.
"Where the hell am I?" she hissed when her stomach and her head had finally settled down once more - "settled," of course, being a relative term.
"I dunno."
Not an encouraging answer. "You don't know?"
"It's an empty building. I don't know what you'd call it. I guess there used to be some kind of a store here. Downstairs, anyway. It looks like up here was offices or something. It's been empty for a long time. 'Cause everything's dirty. Broken windows and stuff."
That little monologue prompted Jo to crack one eye.
Empty building.
That…
Okay.
"I saw you come in," the voice said. "I know you've been around for a few days. But I didn't know what you were doing. The cops don't bother with anything around here. They come once in a while to kick out the homeless, but you didn't look like a cop."
"I'm not," Jo mumbled.
"So you're a hunter."
Both eyes popped open, lids fighting free of that layer of sleep-like goop. "What?"
"You're a hunter."
No lamps, no flashlight, no lantern to see by, just a small spill of light through the broken windows at the far end of a long, cavernously high-ceilinged room, furnished with unidentifiable mounds of dust-covered debris. Was it -? Yeah. It was the room she'd crept into…whenever…in search of the thing that'd been lurking around this part of the city for a couple of weeks, no doubt accountable for the missing persons list that had been growing day by day. Homeless, most of them, but that didn't mean they weren't worth protecting. Mom had given her the tip, and remembering that, remembering Mom and phones and a couple-hundred-mile ride with a cool wind in her face and the feeling that she had a handle on this thing, made her cringe.
"Yeah," she admitted.
"I didn't see it. But I heard this noise. And when I came up here, you were on the floor."
Handled that just right, Harvelle. Dad'd be proud.
She looked. Squinted into the darkness. The owner of the voice was small, no bigger than she was. Another woman? "Who are you?" she asked.
Dirty face. Hair that hadn't been cared for for a while.
"Wren."
"Ren?"
"Like the bird."
A hand disappeared underneath what looked like a fatigue jacket. Came back out with a small flashlight. The suddenness of the beam of light made Jo blink convulsively.
Not a woman. A kid, a boy. Maybe twelve, thirteen.
"Wren," Jo said.
"Used to be Brian. Reynolds. But I gave it up." He shrugged, then amended, "It gave me up."
She let that lie for a moment, then asked, "You live around here?"
"Kinda."
"Your family…?"
"Don't have one."
"So you're here all by yourself?" Twelve? Thirteen? she thought, and shuddered. With that thing lurking around, grabbing whoever… "Did it get away? Did you - did it hurt you?"
"I got it."
"You what?"
Wren's hand disappeared underneath the jacket again and came back out holding what Jo recognized as her own gun. "I got it," he said, and gestured with the barrel of the gun toward what Jo had assumed was a pile of long-abandoned trash. "There's silver in here, huh? Silver bullets?"
"Yes," Jo said. "Are you sure it's dead?"
That earned her a snort, seasoned with thirteen-year-old disdain. "Come on."
"These things -"
"I know dead when I see it. And I checked. It's starting to, you know, rot already. Fast. Like it's gonna be a puddle of goo before much longer."
This was a little much. No, it was a lot much.
"My dad was a hunter," Wren said before she could ask, and to her regret she recognized the tone of the words, remembered it shaping a lot of what she'd said, after Dad was killed. "He died a couple years ago," Wren confirmed. "So it was just me and my mom." He stopped then and looked long and hard at Jo, his face wiped almost clean of expression but deeply shadowed by the flashlight beam. "She got scared," he murmured. "Of the dark. It was a daeva that killed my dad - that's what they told her. They only come out in the dark, you know? After that, after he died, kind of a little bit at a time, she got scared to be in the dark. We had to have the lights on all the time, even when we went to bed. She bought all these lightbulbs. Filled up half of our apartment with lightbulbs, so we'd always have more if they blew out. She got so she'd sit there and count them. And shake them, to make sure they weren't broken."
"I'm sorry."
"Then…I guess she couldn't take it any more."
He turned away, shoulders slumped, head bowed.
"She died?" Jo said softly.
"She took a bunch of pills," Wren said. "I guess she's not scared any more. I guess that's better."
"And you? You're just - by yourself?"
"Didn't know where to go. We didn't really know anybody that'd, you know, take me in. They've all got their own problems."
"And you're a hunter."
He didn't turn back, but she could see his shoulders move. He was waiting for her to challenge what she'd just said, make light of it, tell him a kid his age had no right thinking he knew anything about hunting, let alone try to do it on his own.
But she knew someone else who would have been capable of doing it on his own at thirteen, of putting down things that had slaughtered people by the dozens and acting like it was just another day at the races.
On the other hand, maybe that someone wouldn't have been capable of that at all; maybe alone would have been too much for him. He'd certainly rejected being alone enough times as an adult.
Slowly, wary of doing an awkward faceplant on the filthy floor if she moved too fast, Jo climbed to her feet, took the flashlight and the gun away from Wren and walked over to the dark mound on the floor, maybe thirty feet away from where she'd been sitting. That far away from where she'd fallen, from where it had bitten her, it had either tried to run - or had chased someone across the room.
One flick of the light over the puddle of ooze that was seeping out of the creature and spreading across the floor told her Wren was right: this particular ugly wasn't going to be eating any more homeless people.
Or her. Or Wren.
"What is it?" Wren asked.
"Damned if I know. Nothing I've ever seen before." Frowning, Jo fished her phone out of her jacket pocket and used it to take a couple of pictures of the thing's remains. "Somebody'll know, though. Somebody always knows."
"You do this on your own?"
"Yeah," Jo said. "Most of the time."
He was silent for a moment, then ventured, "What about the rest of the time?"
"Work with my mom sometimes. Or with…people I know. Depends on what the job is. Some things, it takes more than one person to tackle."
"Yeah. I get that."
"Listen," Jo said, using the flashlight to take a look at the tear in her jacket sleeve where the thing had bitten her. "I need to get this cleaned up."
"Okay."
"I've got a room, a few blocks away."
"Okay," Wren said again.
"Where do you -"
"You gonna call CFS?"
"No. I - no."
But now that he'd brought it up, the question was big and alive and there. He was a kid, a scrawny, underweight kid. Winter was coming on, and staying warm and safe and fed would be tough enough for an adult, somebody old enough to do odd jobs and big enough to defend themselves against…
He was on his feet. Moving steadily away.
He'd end up disappearing.
"I know people," she said. "Wren. I know people."
"Like who?"
"You want to meet them?"
He didn't answer. There was just enough light in the room for her to see his head bow again, like he was trying to make himself smaller.
"I'll take you," she said.
"Why would you do that?"
The sudden weariness in his voice startled her. There was despair in it, too, and not enough of the defensiveness she wanted to hear from a kid that age. Not enough of the cocky Who the hell do you think you are? crap she remembered coming out of her own mouth at that age.
She died afraid of the dark, Jo thought. She ran away, and he couldn't stop her.
She glanced down at the thing on the floor, the thing that had taken her by surprise in spite of the fact that she knew where it was hiding, knew what it was capable of, knew how to defend herself and how to overcome something that big, that fast, that nasty.
Somehow, it hadn't gotten the best of that kid. But that wasn't to say something else wouldn't, if he was left here on his own.
In the dark.
Jo crossed the room, legs still a little wobbly, and curved a hand around the boy's thin, fatigue jacket-covered forearm.
"Because," she said. "You're one of us. And you saved my butt. I owe you."
He looked at her again. Searching. She didn't need him to say for what. "Yeah?" he said quietly.
He'd named himself after a little brown bird, she thought.
She tightened her grasp on his arm, just a little. Let it serve as an embrace.
And smiled.
"Yeah," she told him. "Yes."
* * * * *
Here's the second one.
"I saw you come in," the voice said. "I know you've been around for a few days. But I didn't know what you were doing. The cops don't bother with anything around here. They come once in a while to kick out the homeless, but you didn't look like a cop."
CHARACTERS: Jo Harvelle, OMC
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language and a hint of child endangerment
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2308 words
WREN
By Carol Davis
Unnnnnnggghhhhnnnn.
Hangover?
Worst hangover in the history of the WORLD.
What…
Every inch of her body heavy and electric-shock-tingling and wrong. The world spinning slowly, lazily, beneath her.
Jo tried to peel open her eyes, but her lids were dry and gummy and refused to separate. Just as well; whatever the rest of humanity was doing this morning - was it morning? - she probably didn't need to see it.
Didn't want to see it.
Head. Uhhhhhhh…
Hands were there, all of a sudden, capable, understanding hands, turning her onto her side so she wouldn't choke on her own vomit, which…yeah, would have been a ridiculous way to go after all these years, after everything she'd done - or tried to do, at least. The hands held her firmly as the remains of a meal she didn't remember eating came roiling back up, held her face away from the mess, although the smell of it was still near enough to keep her stomach doing backflips and continuing its efforts to blow all tanks, yessir captain, empty the bilge and…
"It's okay," a voice said, low and comforting.
Blow…
Daddy'd loved submarine movies.
Did she say that out loud? Must have, because the owner of the hands huffed a little bit, like he - she? - thought that was funny. Or stupidly inappropriate.
"It's okay," the voice said again.
Whoever it was was holding her hair, keeping it up out of the puddle of puke. Bless you, she thought, whoever the hell you are.
She'd passed out on the…floor? Had to be the floor. It sure as hell wasn't a bed, and that was just as well, too, because whether it'd been her own bed or somebody else's, this'd be a bitch to clean up, would be soaking clear through to the mattress.
The vomiting stopped, finally, after her stomach had heave-ho'ed every last drop that was in it, leaving her exhausted and drained and sore. She lay where she was for a minute, then the hands helped her roll cautiously onto her back, into the position she'd been in when she woke up - if you could call this awake. Once she was settled, the hands went away for a minute and came back with something cool and wet, a cloth of some kind, that they used to wipe her mouth, her chin. Then they levered her head and shoulders gently up and held the rim of a cup to her lips.
Water. Cool. A little metallic.
After a couple of sips she was able to move herself into a sit, hold the cup on her own. She drank the water slowly, a tiny bit at a time, waiting for the warning of another revolt from her stomach, but that didn't happen.
You could be grateful for small things, sometimes, and this was one of them.
"Do you want more?" the voice asked.
"No."
The hands took the cup away and she sat there for a while, eyes closed, head still reeling though at a somewhat less violent pace.
"It bit you," the voice said.
That made sense, because she didn't remember any booze. Well, she did, but it'd been a couple of days ago. She knew time had passed since then, and even if it hadn't, she hadn't been hammered enough to puke, not anywhere near it. She knew better - had learned that from the crowd at the Roadhouse, understood that rule of rules and carried it with her like a well-thumbed book when she left the place: You wanna get shitfaced, fine, but do it when you're safe.
One at a time, with a little assist from her fingers, she got her eyes open, which might not have been the right move for this particular moment in time, because her head whirled like a globe somebody'd given a good, solid, flick-of-the-wrist spin. "Jesus," she moaned, and held her head in both hands, tears dribbling out from between lids that had slammed shut again.
"Maybe you should lay down."
"No."
"Is there somebody - you want me to call somebody?"
"No."
There was a small, pregnant pause. Then the voice asked tentatively, "Do you speak English? All you keep saying is 'No.'"
This was not a good time to laugh.
"Where the hell am I?" she hissed when her stomach and her head had finally settled down once more - "settled," of course, being a relative term.
"I dunno."
Not an encouraging answer. "You don't know?"
"It's an empty building. I don't know what you'd call it. I guess there used to be some kind of a store here. Downstairs, anyway. It looks like up here was offices or something. It's been empty for a long time. 'Cause everything's dirty. Broken windows and stuff."
That little monologue prompted Jo to crack one eye.
Empty building.
That…
Okay.
"I saw you come in," the voice said. "I know you've been around for a few days. But I didn't know what you were doing. The cops don't bother with anything around here. They come once in a while to kick out the homeless, but you didn't look like a cop."
"I'm not," Jo mumbled.
"So you're a hunter."
Both eyes popped open, lids fighting free of that layer of sleep-like goop. "What?"
"You're a hunter."
No lamps, no flashlight, no lantern to see by, just a small spill of light through the broken windows at the far end of a long, cavernously high-ceilinged room, furnished with unidentifiable mounds of dust-covered debris. Was it -? Yeah. It was the room she'd crept into…whenever…in search of the thing that'd been lurking around this part of the city for a couple of weeks, no doubt accountable for the missing persons list that had been growing day by day. Homeless, most of them, but that didn't mean they weren't worth protecting. Mom had given her the tip, and remembering that, remembering Mom and phones and a couple-hundred-mile ride with a cool wind in her face and the feeling that she had a handle on this thing, made her cringe.
"Yeah," she admitted.
"I didn't see it. But I heard this noise. And when I came up here, you were on the floor."
Handled that just right, Harvelle. Dad'd be proud.
She looked. Squinted into the darkness. The owner of the voice was small, no bigger than she was. Another woman? "Who are you?" she asked.
Dirty face. Hair that hadn't been cared for for a while.
"Wren."
"Ren?"
"Like the bird."
A hand disappeared underneath what looked like a fatigue jacket. Came back out with a small flashlight. The suddenness of the beam of light made Jo blink convulsively.
Not a woman. A kid, a boy. Maybe twelve, thirteen.
"Wren," Jo said.
"Used to be Brian. Reynolds. But I gave it up." He shrugged, then amended, "It gave me up."
She let that lie for a moment, then asked, "You live around here?"
"Kinda."
"Your family…?"
"Don't have one."
"So you're here all by yourself?" Twelve? Thirteen? she thought, and shuddered. With that thing lurking around, grabbing whoever… "Did it get away? Did you - did it hurt you?"
"I got it."
"You what?"
Wren's hand disappeared underneath the jacket again and came back out holding what Jo recognized as her own gun. "I got it," he said, and gestured with the barrel of the gun toward what Jo had assumed was a pile of long-abandoned trash. "There's silver in here, huh? Silver bullets?"
"Yes," Jo said. "Are you sure it's dead?"
That earned her a snort, seasoned with thirteen-year-old disdain. "Come on."
"These things -"
"I know dead when I see it. And I checked. It's starting to, you know, rot already. Fast. Like it's gonna be a puddle of goo before much longer."
This was a little much. No, it was a lot much.
"My dad was a hunter," Wren said before she could ask, and to her regret she recognized the tone of the words, remembered it shaping a lot of what she'd said, after Dad was killed. "He died a couple years ago," Wren confirmed. "So it was just me and my mom." He stopped then and looked long and hard at Jo, his face wiped almost clean of expression but deeply shadowed by the flashlight beam. "She got scared," he murmured. "Of the dark. It was a daeva that killed my dad - that's what they told her. They only come out in the dark, you know? After that, after he died, kind of a little bit at a time, she got scared to be in the dark. We had to have the lights on all the time, even when we went to bed. She bought all these lightbulbs. Filled up half of our apartment with lightbulbs, so we'd always have more if they blew out. She got so she'd sit there and count them. And shake them, to make sure they weren't broken."
"I'm sorry."
"Then…I guess she couldn't take it any more."
He turned away, shoulders slumped, head bowed.
"She died?" Jo said softly.
"She took a bunch of pills," Wren said. "I guess she's not scared any more. I guess that's better."
"And you? You're just - by yourself?"
"Didn't know where to go. We didn't really know anybody that'd, you know, take me in. They've all got their own problems."
"And you're a hunter."
He didn't turn back, but she could see his shoulders move. He was waiting for her to challenge what she'd just said, make light of it, tell him a kid his age had no right thinking he knew anything about hunting, let alone try to do it on his own.
But she knew someone else who would have been capable of doing it on his own at thirteen, of putting down things that had slaughtered people by the dozens and acting like it was just another day at the races.
On the other hand, maybe that someone wouldn't have been capable of that at all; maybe alone would have been too much for him. He'd certainly rejected being alone enough times as an adult.
Slowly, wary of doing an awkward faceplant on the filthy floor if she moved too fast, Jo climbed to her feet, took the flashlight and the gun away from Wren and walked over to the dark mound on the floor, maybe thirty feet away from where she'd been sitting. That far away from where she'd fallen, from where it had bitten her, it had either tried to run - or had chased someone across the room.
One flick of the light over the puddle of ooze that was seeping out of the creature and spreading across the floor told her Wren was right: this particular ugly wasn't going to be eating any more homeless people.
Or her. Or Wren.
"What is it?" Wren asked.
"Damned if I know. Nothing I've ever seen before." Frowning, Jo fished her phone out of her jacket pocket and used it to take a couple of pictures of the thing's remains. "Somebody'll know, though. Somebody always knows."
"You do this on your own?"
"Yeah," Jo said. "Most of the time."
He was silent for a moment, then ventured, "What about the rest of the time?"
"Work with my mom sometimes. Or with…people I know. Depends on what the job is. Some things, it takes more than one person to tackle."
"Yeah. I get that."
"Listen," Jo said, using the flashlight to take a look at the tear in her jacket sleeve where the thing had bitten her. "I need to get this cleaned up."
"Okay."
"I've got a room, a few blocks away."
"Okay," Wren said again.
"Where do you -"
"You gonna call CFS?"
"No. I - no."
But now that he'd brought it up, the question was big and alive and there. He was a kid, a scrawny, underweight kid. Winter was coming on, and staying warm and safe and fed would be tough enough for an adult, somebody old enough to do odd jobs and big enough to defend themselves against…
He was on his feet. Moving steadily away.
He'd end up disappearing.
"I know people," she said. "Wren. I know people."
"Like who?"
"You want to meet them?"
He didn't answer. There was just enough light in the room for her to see his head bow again, like he was trying to make himself smaller.
"I'll take you," she said.
"Why would you do that?"
The sudden weariness in his voice startled her. There was despair in it, too, and not enough of the defensiveness she wanted to hear from a kid that age. Not enough of the cocky Who the hell do you think you are? crap she remembered coming out of her own mouth at that age.
She died afraid of the dark, Jo thought. She ran away, and he couldn't stop her.
She glanced down at the thing on the floor, the thing that had taken her by surprise in spite of the fact that she knew where it was hiding, knew what it was capable of, knew how to defend herself and how to overcome something that big, that fast, that nasty.
Somehow, it hadn't gotten the best of that kid. But that wasn't to say something else wouldn't, if he was left here on his own.
In the dark.
Jo crossed the room, legs still a little wobbly, and curved a hand around the boy's thin, fatigue jacket-covered forearm.
"Because," she said. "You're one of us. And you saved my butt. I owe you."
He looked at her again. Searching. She didn't need him to say for what. "Yeah?" he said quietly.
He'd named himself after a little brown bird, she thought.
She tightened her grasp on his arm, just a little. Let it serve as an embrace.
And smiled.
"Yeah," she told him. "Yes."
* * * * *