SPN FIC - The Quality of Mercy (7.04)
CHARACTERS: Dean and Jo
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: 7.04
LENGTH: 923 words.
The word "god" carries with it a certain cachet, becomes a sort of buffer between its bearer and the real world, and the longer you believe you hold all the marbles, the less likely you are to question your own beliefs, your own decisions. The less likely you are to think things through.
THE QUALITY OF MERCY
By Carol Davis
She remembers her father, dusty and tired, slouched deep into a chair at the Roadhouse, his scraped and bloody right hand curled around a sweating bottle of Pabst.
She remembers him smiling.
Hey, you. Come say hi to your old man.
She remembers shying away. Frowning. He smelled bad, she thinks; or maybe it was just that the blood and the bruises spoiled her image of him as The King Of All Things. The Daddy Who Kills The Monster Under The Bed.
She remembers the knot in her stomach.
And the love that rolled off him like sunlight spilling across a winter landscape at the break of dawn.
Osiris does not know this about her, or doesn't understand it: she is William and Ellen Harvelle's daughter. They made her. They shaped her, and while it's true that both her parents hold a certain small degree of animosity towards the Winchesters, it's leavened these days by understanding. Sympathy. A somewhat grudging respect.
And.
Yes.
Affection.
Her father told her this about the wealthy and powerful: they tend to believe their own press. The word "god" carries with it a certain cachet, becomes a sort of buffer between its bearer and the real world, and the longer you believe you hold all the marbles, the less likely you are to question your own beliefs, your own decisions.
The less likely you are to think things through.
"He's making me do this," she says to Dean, and that's true enough; it's certainly enough to shape on Dean's face a mask of grief and regret - and exhaustion, the same exhaustion she remembers seeing her father wear, all those years ago. Dean's broad, capable shoulders slump in defeat. All the ambition's bled right out of him.
He's done.
He truly believes he's done.
What Osiris doesn't realize, and what she doesn't dare say to Dean, for fear that Osiris will hear her, is that the instruction DO THIS allows for a great deal of flexibility.
Maybe it's that Osiris has never dealt with a gas stove.
Maybe he doesn't know jack squat about physics - about the proportion of gas versus fresh air that's necessary to create an explosion powerful enough to kill.
Maybe he's just a stupid, preening dick.
Why Dean doesn't understand that he's not in danger - that she will not now, nor ever be his executioner, no matter what Osiris says - she isn't sure. No, that's wrong; she is sure. He's had enough of this life. That was true the day she met him, and if stopped being true at any point since then, it's come back in spades. What she sees in his eyes isn't fear. It's not guilt, either, exactly.
Sorrow, maybe.
She would like more than anything to embrace him - not as a lover, but as a friend. A compadre. Someone who understands every step he's taken in this life. Things become clearer when you're dead, she tells him, and he seems to like that, to find a tiny glimmer of hope in it, albeit one that's snuffed out almost immediately. Where he believes he's going, there won't be any time for pondering life's little questions. There'll only be more pain.
Not your fault, she tells him, and she wants to shake him until he believes her, though she suspects that would never happen. She's not the person who can grant him redemption. He can only do that for himself, and it won't happen here.
It certainly won't happen tonight.
But neither will his death.
She knows a hunter's tricks - and a spirit's tricks, too. She knows how to freeze and break a window so that a billow of wind can spill across the floor and disperse the thick ring of salt Dean's laid down around himself. "It's time," she says, and she reaches into his jacket pocket for the lighter she's seen him use so many times to burn and release things that no longer belong to this earth.
He doesn't object.
He thinks he's going back to Hell, and he's trying to convince himself he's all right with that.
If she could take him with her, she would.
But he's not dying tonight.
The best she could do for her father, bruised and bleeding and bowed with exhaustion and defeat, was to hold her breath and clutch him in a child's crushing hug while he stroked her hair and told her he loved her.
The best she can do for Dean this night is rest a gentle hand on his cheek and wish above all that her touch was still warm.
There isn't enough gas in this room to blow it up.
She knows a hunter's tricks, because she's the daughter of a hunter. She learned them to make her father proud. For a while, she learned them to spite her mother. At the end, she was a hunter because it was what she was meant to do - and she was good at it, though more than once she had to leave things that required a lot of physical strength to others. What she could do - and do it well - was learn to outsmart the things who've come to believe their own press.
In the end, she doesn't even need to flick Dean's lighter to life.
All she needs to do, after Osiris is dead, is offer her friend a final smile and drop his lighter to the floor.
They'll meet again, she thinks.
Maybe by the time that happens, he'll have come to believe what she tried to tell him.
* * * * *
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: 7.04
LENGTH: 923 words.
The word "god" carries with it a certain cachet, becomes a sort of buffer between its bearer and the real world, and the longer you believe you hold all the marbles, the less likely you are to question your own beliefs, your own decisions. The less likely you are to think things through.
THE QUALITY OF MERCY
By Carol Davis
She remembers her father, dusty and tired, slouched deep into a chair at the Roadhouse, his scraped and bloody right hand curled around a sweating bottle of Pabst.
She remembers him smiling.
Hey, you. Come say hi to your old man.
She remembers shying away. Frowning. He smelled bad, she thinks; or maybe it was just that the blood and the bruises spoiled her image of him as The King Of All Things. The Daddy Who Kills The Monster Under The Bed.
She remembers the knot in her stomach.
And the love that rolled off him like sunlight spilling across a winter landscape at the break of dawn.
Osiris does not know this about her, or doesn't understand it: she is William and Ellen Harvelle's daughter. They made her. They shaped her, and while it's true that both her parents hold a certain small degree of animosity towards the Winchesters, it's leavened these days by understanding. Sympathy. A somewhat grudging respect.
And.
Yes.
Affection.
Her father told her this about the wealthy and powerful: they tend to believe their own press. The word "god" carries with it a certain cachet, becomes a sort of buffer between its bearer and the real world, and the longer you believe you hold all the marbles, the less likely you are to question your own beliefs, your own decisions.
The less likely you are to think things through.
"He's making me do this," she says to Dean, and that's true enough; it's certainly enough to shape on Dean's face a mask of grief and regret - and exhaustion, the same exhaustion she remembers seeing her father wear, all those years ago. Dean's broad, capable shoulders slump in defeat. All the ambition's bled right out of him.
He's done.
He truly believes he's done.
What Osiris doesn't realize, and what she doesn't dare say to Dean, for fear that Osiris will hear her, is that the instruction DO THIS allows for a great deal of flexibility.
Maybe it's that Osiris has never dealt with a gas stove.
Maybe he doesn't know jack squat about physics - about the proportion of gas versus fresh air that's necessary to create an explosion powerful enough to kill.
Maybe he's just a stupid, preening dick.
Why Dean doesn't understand that he's not in danger - that she will not now, nor ever be his executioner, no matter what Osiris says - she isn't sure. No, that's wrong; she is sure. He's had enough of this life. That was true the day she met him, and if stopped being true at any point since then, it's come back in spades. What she sees in his eyes isn't fear. It's not guilt, either, exactly.
Sorrow, maybe.
She would like more than anything to embrace him - not as a lover, but as a friend. A compadre. Someone who understands every step he's taken in this life. Things become clearer when you're dead, she tells him, and he seems to like that, to find a tiny glimmer of hope in it, albeit one that's snuffed out almost immediately. Where he believes he's going, there won't be any time for pondering life's little questions. There'll only be more pain.
Not your fault, she tells him, and she wants to shake him until he believes her, though she suspects that would never happen. She's not the person who can grant him redemption. He can only do that for himself, and it won't happen here.
It certainly won't happen tonight.
But neither will his death.
She knows a hunter's tricks - and a spirit's tricks, too. She knows how to freeze and break a window so that a billow of wind can spill across the floor and disperse the thick ring of salt Dean's laid down around himself. "It's time," she says, and she reaches into his jacket pocket for the lighter she's seen him use so many times to burn and release things that no longer belong to this earth.
He doesn't object.
He thinks he's going back to Hell, and he's trying to convince himself he's all right with that.
If she could take him with her, she would.
But he's not dying tonight.
The best she could do for her father, bruised and bleeding and bowed with exhaustion and defeat, was to hold her breath and clutch him in a child's crushing hug while he stroked her hair and told her he loved her.
The best she can do for Dean this night is rest a gentle hand on his cheek and wish above all that her touch was still warm.
There isn't enough gas in this room to blow it up.
She knows a hunter's tricks, because she's the daughter of a hunter. She learned them to make her father proud. For a while, she learned them to spite her mother. At the end, she was a hunter because it was what she was meant to do - and she was good at it, though more than once she had to leave things that required a lot of physical strength to others. What she could do - and do it well - was learn to outsmart the things who've come to believe their own press.
In the end, she doesn't even need to flick Dean's lighter to life.
All she needs to do, after Osiris is dead, is offer her friend a final smile and drop his lighter to the floor.
They'll meet again, she thinks.
Maybe by the time that happens, he'll have come to believe what she tried to tell him.
* * * * *