SPN FIC - Hunter
liliaeth asked for some Henriksen! And the Muse, being the quirky, unpredictable girl that she is, decided to comply.
After seventeen repetitions of this nonsense, he can't even bother to work himself up to being annoyed. At least, no more annoyed than he's been more or less constantly since the last few weeks of 2006.
Since he first heard the name Dean Winchester.
CHARACTERS: Special Agent Victor Henriksen
TIMELINE: Just prior to Jus in Bello
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 1969 words
HUNTER
By Carol Davis
"You buy a lotta stuff off eBay? That what you do?" the mailman asks, and smiles.
He doesn't mean anything by it. It's not a criticism, or mockery. He's just trying to be friendly. Neighborly.
"Yeah," Victor Henriksen replies. "That's exactly what I do."
"Huh. Well, you have a good day for yourself."
The mailman's still smiling as he walks away.
Victor Henriksen is not.
The packages started arriving a couple of months ago. They're all different shapes, and sizes. Boxes, bubble mailers, heavy manila envelopes. None of them bears a return address; they're postmarked from all over the country, each one from a different city, different state. About the only thing in common is that they're all light in weight.
And they all contain the same goddamn thing.
Henriksen doesn't even bother to open this one. What would be the point? He could open it, study it, run it through the lab, and he'd get the same results he's gotten seventeen times before. There are no prints on the contents. On the packaging, yes, but given that all seventeen (eighteen, now) have been run through the United States Postal Service, have passed through God knows how many different hands, it's no surprise that the outside of every one of those packages is an absolute motherloving cornucopia of fingerprints.
The inside, however?
Nothing.
After seventeen repetitions of this nonsense, he can't even bother to work himself up to being annoyed. At least, no more annoyed than he's been more or less constantly since the last few weeks of 2006.
Since he first heard the name Dean Winchester.
The phone starts to ring as he steps away from his front door - the land line, because Momma won't call his cell. She read somewhere about brain tumors, and while she's never met anyone who actually has a brain tumor (from a cell phone or any other cause), she sees no reason to tempt fate. No cell phone for her. Nothing that's portable. She wants all her communication done over a wire, thank you very much; if it was good enough for her momma and her momma's momma before her, then it's good enough for her, and all the people on those TV commercials who keep trying to sell her a cell phone plan can just go scratch.
"Momma," he says when he picks up the phone.
She huffs. Doesn't say, You're using that caller ID thing. I don't like that, Victor, you know I don't like that.
She believes in a little bit of mystery when it comes to phone calls.
The package in his hand? That's more than enough damn mystery for him. "I'll be over at lunch, all right?" he tells her. "Tell Eddie, we'll have lunch, then head out."
"You're a good boy, Victor."
"I try."
Good boy or not, it's had no effect on his brother.
Eddie was Momma and Daddy's surprise, born long after they'd figured the Lord was done blessing them. He was the apple of Daddy's eye, in a way Victor and June and Bobbie and Evangeline never were - something to do with the lateness of his arrival, Henriksen figures, something to do with the surprise of it. Whatever the reason, Eddie was Daddy's joy. And Daddy would have been heartbroken to know it was Eddie who found him, after he had the stroke and died in the middle of the dining room floor.
Nobody connects the words "Eddie" and "joy" these days, though Victor tries his best. Takes the boy out, to a movie, to a game. To eat and talk a little.
Nothing made Daddy grieve more than seeing a boy go bad. That won't happen with Eddie; he doesn't have the personality for it. No drugs, or stealing cars, none of that. What he's got is the personality to be sad. It's been two years now, going on two and a half, and Eddie just plain won't give up on the damn sadness. It hangs on him, like an old coat.
"Tell me, Momma," Victor says into the phone. "You tell me what to do."
"You do what you do," she murmurs back. "You do it the best you can. You lay down some footsteps he can follow in."
"I'll try, Momma."
"That's good," she says, then, "I made up some chicken salad for you. It'll be waitin' here for you."
She doesn't say goodbye.
Doesn't believe in that, either.
He stands there for a minute with the package in one hand and the phone receiver - the portable phone receiver, with its little caller ID window - in the other. The package (a bubble wrap envelope, this time, like three of the others) is no heavier than any of them, nothing significant, as packages go. It's addressed in blue ballpoint ink, to SPECIAL AGENT VICTOR HENRIKSEN, just like all the others.
To his home address.
That bugs him.
That bugs the living shit out of him.
He's tempted, for a moment, to throw something: the package, or the phone, or both. The phone would hit the wall harder, might even break. Might break something else on its way to the floor. But, he thinks as he stands there, breath moving in and out of him so steadily you could use him as a big walking metronome, he's not gonna do that. Throw things. Break things. Because this is HIS HOUSE, goddammit. These are his things.
Jaw tight, he drops the phone receiver into its cradle, then uses both hands to rip open the bubble mailer.
What's inside drops out, thuds softly when it hits the floor.
It's no surprise, what's inside that package.
Henriksen stands there looking down at it, jaw so tight it's starting to hurt.
Down on the floor, on the cover of a plastic DVD case, bold red letters proclaim HARRISON FORD IS THE FUGITIVE.
The same.
The same as the last seventeen times. Mailed from different cities, different states, in different types of packages. Addressed in different handwriting, each time.
Eighteen copies of The Fugitive.
Some of them are new. The rest are varying degrees of old and battered, bought from a discount bin, maybe, or stolen from a library. Henriksen watched the first few, all the way through, to see if somehow, some way, there was information embedded on the disk. He had the lab check them. There's no information.
There's a movie. And some bonus features.
There's Harrison Ford, and Tommy Lee Jones. A fugitive, and a fanatically dedicated FBI agent.
Somebody, he thought at first, was a fucking smartass, and he had no doubt whatsoever that that somebody was Dean Winchester.
He stopped thinking that a while back.
That smug little PD, Mara Daniels: he suspected her for a while. For all he knows, she's got friends and relatives spread all around the country. Thanks to the Internet, people are in touch with people in every possible place. Wouldn't take much to convince a few friends to run out to the local Blockbuster, grab up a few copies of The Fugitive, wipe 'em down and throw 'em in the mail.
Maybe she's got a thing for Dean Winchester. Winchester's charming, he'll give the sonofabitch that. Probably has a long history of wrapping the ladies around his little finger.
So, yeah. PD Daniels. Helping out the charming rogue. It was thanks to her that Winchester and his brother got away, after they busted out of Green River.
Maybe she's still helping, any way she can.
Maybe she'll marry him.
Women do that. There's a lot of screwball women around.
There's a lot of screwball women around. That blonde from the bank in Milwaukee. That cop down in Baltimore. Girl named Rebecca Warren in St. Louis - and that one takes the cake, for sure, because she was one of Winchester's victims, assaulted and almost killed. Every one of those women claims Winchester didn't do anything wrong. That he helped them. That maybe Special Agent Victor Henriksen ought to take a closer look at this whole thing.
Women, he thinks.
WOMEN.
It's not a woman whose face is down there on the floor, on the DVD sleeve. It's Harrison Ford. The Fugitive.
The guy who got framed for murdering his wife.
Framed, like so much HELL, he thinks.
This isn't one case, one dead woman. This is a whole string of deaths, and mutilations, and grave desecrations. Car theft and credit card fraud and arson. Larceny of any grade you want to name. There's too damn much of it, going back decades, back to when Dean and Sam Winchester's daddy was hauling them around the country, not a one of them with a legitimate job or a steady address or anything at all that didn't look fishy in some way.
There's just no damn way all of that's not wrong.
After a minute he stoops down and picks the DVD up off the floor. Sits down on the couch with the plastic case in both hands. Like he's holding something holy, he thinks for a moment, like it's something that's going to give him some answers, if only he'd let it.
He's tried. But there's just too damn MUCH.
There's too much, and it's filled him up, taken up all the space in his mind and his will and his heart, taken up space that ought to belong to Eddie, and Momma, and his sisters.
And Daddy.
Daddy believed in people. Believed the best of them, until the last card was turned over and he had no more reason to be hopeful. Boys, especially, because Daddy came out of some rough times, and managed to fight his way up into the sunlight. He believed anybody was capable of doing that, if somebody would just give them a helping hand, so he gave one, every chance he had. Gave out hope, food, money.
Listened to everybody, as long as they wanted to go on talking.
And he grieved with all his heart for the ones who walked away.
He wonders, just for a moment, if Daddy would grieve over Dean Winchester.
He's still sitting there, with HARRISON FORD IS THE FUGITIVE looking up at him from that plastic box, when the phone rings again. This time it's his cell, and he has to set the DVD down on the coffee table so he can fish the phone out of his pocket.
"Yeah," he says.
"You're gonna like this," says the voice at the other end.
"I am?"
"You are. We got a call. Came in to the field office in Denver. Feel like hauling your ass out to Colorado?"
He promised Eddie.
Chicken salad, and a trip out to the mall.
"You there?" says his partner, out of the tiny, brain-tumor-inducing cell phone.
"Yeah," he says. "I'm here."
"It's a good tip. We got the bastard, Vic. But we gotta go."
Got him, he thinks. Then: For how long?
But maybe this time - maybe this is it. Maybe (and his lip curls, in a stiff, humorless version of the smile the mailman gave him a little while ago) the third time's the charm. Maybe this time he'll be able to tie down that slippery son of a bitch, and this will all be over.
He'll be able to mark this down as a win.
And he'll be able to work on saving his brother.
"Meet you at the airport," he says into the phone.
Flips it shut. Slips it back into his pocket. Sits, for a moment, looking down at the cover of that beat-up DVD.
Picks it up, and flings it across the room.
Then he gets up from the couch and strides through the house to his bedroom to change into a suit and tie.
To retrieve his gun.
This time, he thinks.
This time, it ends.
* * * * *
After seventeen repetitions of this nonsense, he can't even bother to work himself up to being annoyed. At least, no more annoyed than he's been more or less constantly since the last few weeks of 2006.
Since he first heard the name Dean Winchester.
CHARACTERS: Special Agent Victor Henriksen
TIMELINE: Just prior to Jus in Bello
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 1969 words
HUNTER
By Carol Davis
"You buy a lotta stuff off eBay? That what you do?" the mailman asks, and smiles.
He doesn't mean anything by it. It's not a criticism, or mockery. He's just trying to be friendly. Neighborly.
"Yeah," Victor Henriksen replies. "That's exactly what I do."
"Huh. Well, you have a good day for yourself."
The mailman's still smiling as he walks away.
Victor Henriksen is not.
The packages started arriving a couple of months ago. They're all different shapes, and sizes. Boxes, bubble mailers, heavy manila envelopes. None of them bears a return address; they're postmarked from all over the country, each one from a different city, different state. About the only thing in common is that they're all light in weight.
And they all contain the same goddamn thing.
Henriksen doesn't even bother to open this one. What would be the point? He could open it, study it, run it through the lab, and he'd get the same results he's gotten seventeen times before. There are no prints on the contents. On the packaging, yes, but given that all seventeen (eighteen, now) have been run through the United States Postal Service, have passed through God knows how many different hands, it's no surprise that the outside of every one of those packages is an absolute motherloving cornucopia of fingerprints.
The inside, however?
Nothing.
After seventeen repetitions of this nonsense, he can't even bother to work himself up to being annoyed. At least, no more annoyed than he's been more or less constantly since the last few weeks of 2006.
Since he first heard the name Dean Winchester.
The phone starts to ring as he steps away from his front door - the land line, because Momma won't call his cell. She read somewhere about brain tumors, and while she's never met anyone who actually has a brain tumor (from a cell phone or any other cause), she sees no reason to tempt fate. No cell phone for her. Nothing that's portable. She wants all her communication done over a wire, thank you very much; if it was good enough for her momma and her momma's momma before her, then it's good enough for her, and all the people on those TV commercials who keep trying to sell her a cell phone plan can just go scratch.
"Momma," he says when he picks up the phone.
She huffs. Doesn't say, You're using that caller ID thing. I don't like that, Victor, you know I don't like that.
She believes in a little bit of mystery when it comes to phone calls.
The package in his hand? That's more than enough damn mystery for him. "I'll be over at lunch, all right?" he tells her. "Tell Eddie, we'll have lunch, then head out."
"You're a good boy, Victor."
"I try."
Good boy or not, it's had no effect on his brother.
Eddie was Momma and Daddy's surprise, born long after they'd figured the Lord was done blessing them. He was the apple of Daddy's eye, in a way Victor and June and Bobbie and Evangeline never were - something to do with the lateness of his arrival, Henriksen figures, something to do with the surprise of it. Whatever the reason, Eddie was Daddy's joy. And Daddy would have been heartbroken to know it was Eddie who found him, after he had the stroke and died in the middle of the dining room floor.
Nobody connects the words "Eddie" and "joy" these days, though Victor tries his best. Takes the boy out, to a movie, to a game. To eat and talk a little.
Nothing made Daddy grieve more than seeing a boy go bad. That won't happen with Eddie; he doesn't have the personality for it. No drugs, or stealing cars, none of that. What he's got is the personality to be sad. It's been two years now, going on two and a half, and Eddie just plain won't give up on the damn sadness. It hangs on him, like an old coat.
"Tell me, Momma," Victor says into the phone. "You tell me what to do."
"You do what you do," she murmurs back. "You do it the best you can. You lay down some footsteps he can follow in."
"I'll try, Momma."
"That's good," she says, then, "I made up some chicken salad for you. It'll be waitin' here for you."
She doesn't say goodbye.
Doesn't believe in that, either.
He stands there for a minute with the package in one hand and the phone receiver - the portable phone receiver, with its little caller ID window - in the other. The package (a bubble wrap envelope, this time, like three of the others) is no heavier than any of them, nothing significant, as packages go. It's addressed in blue ballpoint ink, to SPECIAL AGENT VICTOR HENRIKSEN, just like all the others.
To his home address.
That bugs him.
That bugs the living shit out of him.
He's tempted, for a moment, to throw something: the package, or the phone, or both. The phone would hit the wall harder, might even break. Might break something else on its way to the floor. But, he thinks as he stands there, breath moving in and out of him so steadily you could use him as a big walking metronome, he's not gonna do that. Throw things. Break things. Because this is HIS HOUSE, goddammit. These are his things.
Jaw tight, he drops the phone receiver into its cradle, then uses both hands to rip open the bubble mailer.
What's inside drops out, thuds softly when it hits the floor.
It's no surprise, what's inside that package.
Henriksen stands there looking down at it, jaw so tight it's starting to hurt.
Down on the floor, on the cover of a plastic DVD case, bold red letters proclaim HARRISON FORD IS THE FUGITIVE.
The same.
The same as the last seventeen times. Mailed from different cities, different states, in different types of packages. Addressed in different handwriting, each time.
Eighteen copies of The Fugitive.
Some of them are new. The rest are varying degrees of old and battered, bought from a discount bin, maybe, or stolen from a library. Henriksen watched the first few, all the way through, to see if somehow, some way, there was information embedded on the disk. He had the lab check them. There's no information.
There's a movie. And some bonus features.
There's Harrison Ford, and Tommy Lee Jones. A fugitive, and a fanatically dedicated FBI agent.
Somebody, he thought at first, was a fucking smartass, and he had no doubt whatsoever that that somebody was Dean Winchester.
He stopped thinking that a while back.
That smug little PD, Mara Daniels: he suspected her for a while. For all he knows, she's got friends and relatives spread all around the country. Thanks to the Internet, people are in touch with people in every possible place. Wouldn't take much to convince a few friends to run out to the local Blockbuster, grab up a few copies of The Fugitive, wipe 'em down and throw 'em in the mail.
Maybe she's got a thing for Dean Winchester. Winchester's charming, he'll give the sonofabitch that. Probably has a long history of wrapping the ladies around his little finger.
So, yeah. PD Daniels. Helping out the charming rogue. It was thanks to her that Winchester and his brother got away, after they busted out of Green River.
Maybe she's still helping, any way she can.
Maybe she'll marry him.
Women do that. There's a lot of screwball women around.
There's a lot of screwball women around. That blonde from the bank in Milwaukee. That cop down in Baltimore. Girl named Rebecca Warren in St. Louis - and that one takes the cake, for sure, because she was one of Winchester's victims, assaulted and almost killed. Every one of those women claims Winchester didn't do anything wrong. That he helped them. That maybe Special Agent Victor Henriksen ought to take a closer look at this whole thing.
Women, he thinks.
WOMEN.
It's not a woman whose face is down there on the floor, on the DVD sleeve. It's Harrison Ford. The Fugitive.
The guy who got framed for murdering his wife.
Framed, like so much HELL, he thinks.
This isn't one case, one dead woman. This is a whole string of deaths, and mutilations, and grave desecrations. Car theft and credit card fraud and arson. Larceny of any grade you want to name. There's too damn much of it, going back decades, back to when Dean and Sam Winchester's daddy was hauling them around the country, not a one of them with a legitimate job or a steady address or anything at all that didn't look fishy in some way.
There's just no damn way all of that's not wrong.
After a minute he stoops down and picks the DVD up off the floor. Sits down on the couch with the plastic case in both hands. Like he's holding something holy, he thinks for a moment, like it's something that's going to give him some answers, if only he'd let it.
He's tried. But there's just too damn MUCH.
There's too much, and it's filled him up, taken up all the space in his mind and his will and his heart, taken up space that ought to belong to Eddie, and Momma, and his sisters.
And Daddy.
Daddy believed in people. Believed the best of them, until the last card was turned over and he had no more reason to be hopeful. Boys, especially, because Daddy came out of some rough times, and managed to fight his way up into the sunlight. He believed anybody was capable of doing that, if somebody would just give them a helping hand, so he gave one, every chance he had. Gave out hope, food, money.
Listened to everybody, as long as they wanted to go on talking.
And he grieved with all his heart for the ones who walked away.
He wonders, just for a moment, if Daddy would grieve over Dean Winchester.
He's still sitting there, with HARRISON FORD IS THE FUGITIVE looking up at him from that plastic box, when the phone rings again. This time it's his cell, and he has to set the DVD down on the coffee table so he can fish the phone out of his pocket.
"Yeah," he says.
"You're gonna like this," says the voice at the other end.
"I am?"
"You are. We got a call. Came in to the field office in Denver. Feel like hauling your ass out to Colorado?"
He promised Eddie.
Chicken salad, and a trip out to the mall.
"You there?" says his partner, out of the tiny, brain-tumor-inducing cell phone.
"Yeah," he says. "I'm here."
"It's a good tip. We got the bastard, Vic. But we gotta go."
Got him, he thinks. Then: For how long?
But maybe this time - maybe this is it. Maybe (and his lip curls, in a stiff, humorless version of the smile the mailman gave him a little while ago) the third time's the charm. Maybe this time he'll be able to tie down that slippery son of a bitch, and this will all be over.
He'll be able to mark this down as a win.
And he'll be able to work on saving his brother.
"Meet you at the airport," he says into the phone.
Flips it shut. Slips it back into his pocket. Sits, for a moment, looking down at the cover of that beat-up DVD.
Picks it up, and flings it across the room.
Then he gets up from the couch and strides through the house to his bedroom to change into a suit and tie.
To retrieve his gun.
This time, he thinks.
This time, it ends.
* * * * *