The lady of the right hand (gen, 1789 words, pg-13)
mickeym and thehighwaywoman, so much love for you two. You have no idea how much I needed that. ♥
Originally written for the awesome gleeweek fest, and thanks to thehighwaywoman and greenspine for reading it through for me.
The lady of the right hand
(gen, 1789 words, pg-13)
Dean's last night in New Orleans with that voodoo gig
After she has wrapped the bad man's severed left hand in a red shawl, Mama Elize looks to Dean Winchester, whose machete is clenched in his fist and dripping red-red-red on the cobbled New Orleans street, and says, "Thanks to you, that crazy bokor will make no more mothers cry for their babies. It is a good thing you have done today, sweet boy."
And she takes him home with her. He doesn't want to go but Mama Elize is seventy-six years old, carries her two-hundred pounds with natural grace, and always gets her own way.
So she takes him down the streets, through the hot shadows, where the jasmine trails from girded iron balconies and its fragrance hangs sticky-sweet in the humid air, to her violet-trimmed, low-built wooden house. He stands awkwardly in the doorway, fingers toying with the delicate bird bones strung up into a wind chime, the rattle of it light and hollow. Mama Elize lets him be while she busies herself with dealing with the bokor's left hand.
It's just a symbol, taking his hand, but symbols are what make up the world. His left hand is gone - the bokor will do no more harm.
Mama Elize serves with the right hand. Even when she uses her left, she serves with the right. She has no time for them that can’t pick a damn side, and even less for them that choose wickedness. And this boy, this beautiful green-eyed boy who did what she could not and took the bokor's left hand - oh, she'll do for him!
"Now then," she says, once she's wrapped the hand away in a red silk scarf and bound it up with a seven-knotted black leather cord. "You, boy, take your clothes off."
His eyes go wide and he backs up a step. "Look, lady, I'm sure you're very grateful but I-"
"Just do it. Mama Elize gonna give you a bath. Make you strong for the road you're gonna be walking."
He looks at her and- Smart boy, he shrugs off his jacket and strips, shy and slow. Pretend I'm one of those girls you like so much, those girls with sticky thighs and pink lips you like so very much, she wants to say. But Mama Elize is gonna be more use to this boy than any of those girls.
When he's naked, Mama Elize looks him over - hard, powerful lines of his body, flat belly and carved out definition of muscle, sharp angles of jutting hipbones, pretty cock between his legs - and smirks up at him. Maybe she should stop thinking of him as a boy, even when he's all fluttery lashes and uncertain pout.
He won’t look back at her, flushes and shifts his weight from foot to foot.
"Can we hurry this up?" he says.
There's a sweat slick on his skin, pink-gold and glistening. Mama Elize clicks her tongue disapprovingly at him.
"Let an old lady look! Such a pretty boy. These fields of mine have been dry for nearly thirty years but jus' looking at you brings the rain!"
She laughs at his horrified expression then herds him into the tiny bathroom. Murmurings of the sad city drift in through the open window. Coiling tendrils of creeping fig from the pot on the sill tumble and tangle over the copper-rusted rim of the old cast iron bathtub, its shape ominous in the night. Leaving the only light in the room as what spills in through the open door, Mama Elize turns the faucet on and jerks her head from Dean to the tub.
Dean complies, sits himself in the tub and then jerks around, startled, as a leaf curls over his bare shoulder, possessive and tender as a lover's caress. Mama Elize laughs and sets her hand on his shoulder to settle him back down, the rings she's wearing glinting like the colours of a stained glass window.
The water slaps hard against the bottom of the tub, the sound smoothing out as the level rises. It shivers over Dean's legs and Mama Elize lets it keep swallowing him up until it sits about his waist. When she turns the faucet off, the room is full of nothing but the soothing rush of water lapping each time Dean moves.
In the nape of Dean's neck his hair makes little sweat-damp curls. His head is bowed like a child, like he's sending up a prayer. And Mama Elize sends up another one for him - light as bubbles and strong as iron.
Having taken three slim, beaded bottles from the cabinet, she moves back to the tub. She uncorks the bottle of rum and takes a good pull of it and then, while the alcohol is still a hot burn in her throat and chest, she pours it over Dean's head. He makes a stifled noise of surprise, half shout and half curse. By the time she's picked up the bottle of milk, he's obligingly tilting his head back.
The milk she pours over him courses down his back, mingling creamy white with the golden-brown rivulets of rum already on his skin.
And the last bottle: holy water.
When she washes him over with it, Dean looks at her, eyes lit up too bright, and she thinks he recognises the water for what it is. Oh, this boy! Precious creature, ridden hard even if he don't recognise it yet. Mama Elize thinks of the blood-wet machete she saw flash in his hands only an hour ago. She doesn't often see one serving Ogoun so very obviously, or so obliviously.
Her thick fingers burrow into his wet hair and massage the fluids into his scalp. The strings of glass and plastic beads that hang about her neck dip into the murky bathwater and Dean's fingertips rub at their shapes, as if transfixed by their gaudy colours.
"Where are you going next, boy?" she says. "You tell Mama Elize."
"I got a message from my dad," he says, after a moment's hesitation. "Been three weeks since I heard from him last. But I got this message and I'm gonna go look for him."
Mama Elize nods and thinks, you're not going alone.
They don't talk again until she's got Dean out of the bathtub and towelled him dry, caught between admiring him as a woman and soothing him as a mother. He's sweetly quiescent and Mama Elize feels a warm ache deep down, both sorrow and want.
When he's dressed, hair still dark with damp but all of the messy spots of blood gone - even those streaks over his wrists that looked like spindly fingers - Mama Elize sits him down in front of her. She knows what she's going to see before she looks, but she goes about it all the same - setting out her flat corn sieve with its candle and flat stone and her sacred beads, taking her clamshells from their wallet.
Sometimes the Invisibles like to add something to the conversation and Mama Elize wants her sweet boy to have more on his side than his machete and pretty eyes.
She throws the shells and peers at the arrangement they fall in. Her fingers skim over the cool ridges of the small shells, telling them they're back on the shore and she's the breeze moving over them. And when she looks up, there's a boy standing just behind Dean. She wants to call him a man because he's tall and strong, and there's the end of everything in his eyes. He stands there, silent and looking right back at her.
"You're not supposed to be alone," Mama Elize says to Dean.
"Tell me about it," Dean says, low and aggrieved.
"Your brother," she says. As she strains her hand towards the shape of the man, the fat, cracked yellow stone in the ring on her finger winks like an eye in the half-light. She flinches and drops her hand. "You've gotta go to your brother."
"He won't come."
"You gotta ask!" Mama Elize scolds him. "How's he s'posed to know there's a path to walk if you don't point it out to him?"
Breathless, she starts picking the clamshells up, gathering them in her palm. But her hands are shaking and the shells clatter free again. Dean reaches out to help her, his hand stretched out over the sieve, the shadow of it falling over her beads and her stone. She shoots him a stern look and he stops.
"All right," he says. "I'll ask him. But I don't think he's exactly gonna be thrilled to see me."
He helps her to her feet and - abruptly - she tightens her grip on his hand. The last grains of sand in the hourglass are trickling through and she feels it in her bones. Maybe it shows on her face because those green eyes of his go wide and concerned. And that's enough to warm her through again. She's done so much, survived so much, no more work left to do. It's a good feeling.
"Time for you to go." She looks out of the window at the troubled sky, and nods. "You'll not see Mama Elize again, pretty child. She goes to sleep tonight, and she won't wake up."
"C'mon, you're gonna be okay. You're tough, you got through the storm. And there are still people out there who need you. This whole place needs you." He tries a grin and her fading heart flutters at it. "Or you can help me convince Sam that he needs to come with me? You don't have to-"
"I'm an old lady! You think I am afraid to die? No, the reapers will treat Mama Elize like an old friend. I'll get me a nice seat by the window and drink sweet, black coffee, maybe eat peaches and plums 'til my fingers are sticky. Don't you worry for me. There's another storm coming. This one's for you, and it's been so long in the brewing."
He leaves her then - reluctantly, because he's good boy and he doesn't want to leave an old lady who's talking of her own death with such longing. But she shoos him out the door and won't allow herself to watch him disappear.
And her gaze falls on the new pattern her shells have fallen in. Her breath catches and something crumples like old newspaper inside her chest. Her first instinct is to grab the door back open and holler for her poor, stupid boy. But she knows he'll be gone, too far gone already. This is for her and it isn't for sharing. One last secret from the Invisibles.
She closes her eyes. She won't see morning, and she's grateful.
~end
Originally written for the awesome gleeweek fest, and thanks to thehighwaywoman and greenspine for reading it through for me.
The lady of the right hand
(gen, 1789 words, pg-13)
Dean's last night in New Orleans with that voodoo gig
After she has wrapped the bad man's severed left hand in a red shawl, Mama Elize looks to Dean Winchester, whose machete is clenched in his fist and dripping red-red-red on the cobbled New Orleans street, and says, "Thanks to you, that crazy bokor will make no more mothers cry for their babies. It is a good thing you have done today, sweet boy."
And she takes him home with her. He doesn't want to go but Mama Elize is seventy-six years old, carries her two-hundred pounds with natural grace, and always gets her own way.
So she takes him down the streets, through the hot shadows, where the jasmine trails from girded iron balconies and its fragrance hangs sticky-sweet in the humid air, to her violet-trimmed, low-built wooden house. He stands awkwardly in the doorway, fingers toying with the delicate bird bones strung up into a wind chime, the rattle of it light and hollow. Mama Elize lets him be while she busies herself with dealing with the bokor's left hand.
It's just a symbol, taking his hand, but symbols are what make up the world. His left hand is gone - the bokor will do no more harm.
Mama Elize serves with the right hand. Even when she uses her left, she serves with the right. She has no time for them that can’t pick a damn side, and even less for them that choose wickedness. And this boy, this beautiful green-eyed boy who did what she could not and took the bokor's left hand - oh, she'll do for him!
"Now then," she says, once she's wrapped the hand away in a red silk scarf and bound it up with a seven-knotted black leather cord. "You, boy, take your clothes off."
His eyes go wide and he backs up a step. "Look, lady, I'm sure you're very grateful but I-"
"Just do it. Mama Elize gonna give you a bath. Make you strong for the road you're gonna be walking."
He looks at her and- Smart boy, he shrugs off his jacket and strips, shy and slow. Pretend I'm one of those girls you like so much, those girls with sticky thighs and pink lips you like so very much, she wants to say. But Mama Elize is gonna be more use to this boy than any of those girls.
When he's naked, Mama Elize looks him over - hard, powerful lines of his body, flat belly and carved out definition of muscle, sharp angles of jutting hipbones, pretty cock between his legs - and smirks up at him. Maybe she should stop thinking of him as a boy, even when he's all fluttery lashes and uncertain pout.
He won’t look back at her, flushes and shifts his weight from foot to foot.
"Can we hurry this up?" he says.
There's a sweat slick on his skin, pink-gold and glistening. Mama Elize clicks her tongue disapprovingly at him.
"Let an old lady look! Such a pretty boy. These fields of mine have been dry for nearly thirty years but jus' looking at you brings the rain!"
She laughs at his horrified expression then herds him into the tiny bathroom. Murmurings of the sad city drift in through the open window. Coiling tendrils of creeping fig from the pot on the sill tumble and tangle over the copper-rusted rim of the old cast iron bathtub, its shape ominous in the night. Leaving the only light in the room as what spills in through the open door, Mama Elize turns the faucet on and jerks her head from Dean to the tub.
Dean complies, sits himself in the tub and then jerks around, startled, as a leaf curls over his bare shoulder, possessive and tender as a lover's caress. Mama Elize laughs and sets her hand on his shoulder to settle him back down, the rings she's wearing glinting like the colours of a stained glass window.
The water slaps hard against the bottom of the tub, the sound smoothing out as the level rises. It shivers over Dean's legs and Mama Elize lets it keep swallowing him up until it sits about his waist. When she turns the faucet off, the room is full of nothing but the soothing rush of water lapping each time Dean moves.
In the nape of Dean's neck his hair makes little sweat-damp curls. His head is bowed like a child, like he's sending up a prayer. And Mama Elize sends up another one for him - light as bubbles and strong as iron.
Having taken three slim, beaded bottles from the cabinet, she moves back to the tub. She uncorks the bottle of rum and takes a good pull of it and then, while the alcohol is still a hot burn in her throat and chest, she pours it over Dean's head. He makes a stifled noise of surprise, half shout and half curse. By the time she's picked up the bottle of milk, he's obligingly tilting his head back.
The milk she pours over him courses down his back, mingling creamy white with the golden-brown rivulets of rum already on his skin.
And the last bottle: holy water.
When she washes him over with it, Dean looks at her, eyes lit up too bright, and she thinks he recognises the water for what it is. Oh, this boy! Precious creature, ridden hard even if he don't recognise it yet. Mama Elize thinks of the blood-wet machete she saw flash in his hands only an hour ago. She doesn't often see one serving Ogoun so very obviously, or so obliviously.
Her thick fingers burrow into his wet hair and massage the fluids into his scalp. The strings of glass and plastic beads that hang about her neck dip into the murky bathwater and Dean's fingertips rub at their shapes, as if transfixed by their gaudy colours.
"Where are you going next, boy?" she says. "You tell Mama Elize."
"I got a message from my dad," he says, after a moment's hesitation. "Been three weeks since I heard from him last. But I got this message and I'm gonna go look for him."
Mama Elize nods and thinks, you're not going alone.
They don't talk again until she's got Dean out of the bathtub and towelled him dry, caught between admiring him as a woman and soothing him as a mother. He's sweetly quiescent and Mama Elize feels a warm ache deep down, both sorrow and want.
When he's dressed, hair still dark with damp but all of the messy spots of blood gone - even those streaks over his wrists that looked like spindly fingers - Mama Elize sits him down in front of her. She knows what she's going to see before she looks, but she goes about it all the same - setting out her flat corn sieve with its candle and flat stone and her sacred beads, taking her clamshells from their wallet.
Sometimes the Invisibles like to add something to the conversation and Mama Elize wants her sweet boy to have more on his side than his machete and pretty eyes.
She throws the shells and peers at the arrangement they fall in. Her fingers skim over the cool ridges of the small shells, telling them they're back on the shore and she's the breeze moving over them. And when she looks up, there's a boy standing just behind Dean. She wants to call him a man because he's tall and strong, and there's the end of everything in his eyes. He stands there, silent and looking right back at her.
"You're not supposed to be alone," Mama Elize says to Dean.
"Tell me about it," Dean says, low and aggrieved.
"Your brother," she says. As she strains her hand towards the shape of the man, the fat, cracked yellow stone in the ring on her finger winks like an eye in the half-light. She flinches and drops her hand. "You've gotta go to your brother."
"He won't come."
"You gotta ask!" Mama Elize scolds him. "How's he s'posed to know there's a path to walk if you don't point it out to him?"
Breathless, she starts picking the clamshells up, gathering them in her palm. But her hands are shaking and the shells clatter free again. Dean reaches out to help her, his hand stretched out over the sieve, the shadow of it falling over her beads and her stone. She shoots him a stern look and he stops.
"All right," he says. "I'll ask him. But I don't think he's exactly gonna be thrilled to see me."
He helps her to her feet and - abruptly - she tightens her grip on his hand. The last grains of sand in the hourglass are trickling through and she feels it in her bones. Maybe it shows on her face because those green eyes of his go wide and concerned. And that's enough to warm her through again. She's done so much, survived so much, no more work left to do. It's a good feeling.
"Time for you to go." She looks out of the window at the troubled sky, and nods. "You'll not see Mama Elize again, pretty child. She goes to sleep tonight, and she won't wake up."
"C'mon, you're gonna be okay. You're tough, you got through the storm. And there are still people out there who need you. This whole place needs you." He tries a grin and her fading heart flutters at it. "Or you can help me convince Sam that he needs to come with me? You don't have to-"
"I'm an old lady! You think I am afraid to die? No, the reapers will treat Mama Elize like an old friend. I'll get me a nice seat by the window and drink sweet, black coffee, maybe eat peaches and plums 'til my fingers are sticky. Don't you worry for me. There's another storm coming. This one's for you, and it's been so long in the brewing."
He leaves her then - reluctantly, because he's good boy and he doesn't want to leave an old lady who's talking of her own death with such longing. But she shoos him out the door and won't allow herself to watch him disappear.
And her gaze falls on the new pattern her shells have fallen in. Her breath catches and something crumples like old newspaper inside her chest. Her first instinct is to grab the door back open and holler for her poor, stupid boy. But she knows he'll be gone, too far gone already. This is for her and it isn't for sharing. One last secret from the Invisibles.
She closes her eyes. She won't see morning, and she's grateful.
~end