FIC: An Accomplished Exile (VM/SPN Crossover; PG-13)
Title: An Accomplished Exile
Author:
unreckless
Summary: She’s starting to have trouble remembering what normal felt like. Mostly what she feels is angry, and neither she nor Sam eats much because apparently that’s enough. At least they save money on food. Supernatural crossover.
Words: 3933
Rating: PG-13 at most
Warnings: Character death (all offscreen), general darkness, angst, some cursing, nonlinear storyline
Spoilers: Through all current episodes of both shows (all current locations of characters apply, except for the one I killed off in order to have this plot at all)
Author’s note: Written for the
gogetem_bobcat Lost in the Dark challenge. They never said the dark couldn't be figurative as well as literal.
Also works with
un_love_you, and retroactively applied to prompt #21, You'll do.
By the end of September she’s gained ten pounds of muscle and is starting to have trouble remembering what normal felt like. Mostly what she feels is anger, and neither of them eats much because apparently that’s enough. At least they save money on food.
They don’t talk much. They discuss ammo and gas prices when their levels of either start getting low. Sometimes they argue while working on a case and she can feel an old familiar spark flaring up in her chest, something that reminds her of her old life. It rarely lasts longer than a second, and they rarely make eye contact.
She’s glad he’s there, though, and she’s grateful she found him again. It’s better to be running headlong into the dark to chase the monsters out than sitting around in Neptune, crying and sleeping with the light on.
Sam flips his shit if Zeppelin ever comes on the radio- changing the station, jamming a different tape in, killing the engine-anything to get Jimmy Page and his merry band of heathens out of the speakers. She doesn’t ask, and she buys Anthology of the Misfits on tape at some record exchange shop in Ohio in early July. They listen to “Night of the Living Dead” and “Last Caress” and “Horror Business” a little too much, but he never turns it off. He keeps his eyes on the horizon and his lips pressed in that same tight, straight line.
She sees how normal people react to him, all six and a half feet and two hundred pounds of perfectly-controlled but poorly-concealed anger and hurt, and she gets the feeling that she should be afraid. She just isn’t.
She wonders how she must look to those same people, if her own pain broadcasts as loudly.
*
“Short hair, kind of skinny, recently in possession of his intestines inside his body?” he asked delicately. She nodded weakly but didn’t look up. There was a thump outside and the taller one turned the flashlight away from her face and shined it out the open front door at the car, then the thin strip of overgrown lawn between the driveway and the edge of the forest. Something cat-sized and furry went running for the trees, turning back to flash its eyes at them from the wall of dark.
“We found him in the kitchen,” the shorter one said.
“What was it?” she demanded. “We were just-and then this thing grabs him and then I’m hiding in a closet-” she broke off and he made an abortive gesture like he wanted to put his hand on her shoulder but isn’t convinced she wouldn’t bite him if he tried.
“Does it matter?” he asked, kind of pursing his lips in a way that made him look a little like water fowl.
“Yes,” she snapped, planting herself in front of him and jabbing her finger into his sternum. “He’s dead. I watched something eviscerate him, and this is his blood all over me, and I freaking deserve to know what kind of thing it was, okay? I’m about this close to pickpocketing your gun and turning it on you, so just tell me!”
He reached behind him and drew a pretty gun out of the back of his jeans. “Yeah? How good’a shot are you?”
After she hit every single can he lined up on the porch railing, he said, “So would you believe me if I told you it was a ghost?”
*
The first time she speaks to her father on the phone, a week after running into Sam, she’s using the hardwired avocado plastic specimen at the front counter of a diner in Corpus Christi. Sam’s still at their table, looking too large for the place and vaguely dangerous. She had to order for the both of them because he just growled at the waitress, and from what Veronica can tell from across the diner, he hasn’t touched his food.
“Where are you?” Dad asks.
“I don’t know,” she tells him and it’s the truth as much as it can be. Location has become nebulous at best, under a haze of shooting tin cans set on trash barrels and curbs in parking lots so underutilized there aren’t even any oil stains. “I mean, I’m in Texas, and I’m fine, but where I am? I have no idea, Dad.” Sam stands up and tosses money on the table, giving her a pointed look on his way out to the Impala. She closes her eyes and presses the heel of her hand into her eyesockets, first one then the other.
Dad sounds lost and nervous and a dozen other things she never imagined in a million years would come from him. “Veronica, I think you should come home. You missed the-”
“I know,” she interrupts sharply, thinking That’s not fair. “Look, I have to go.”
She makes her first kill that night. It’s a chupacabra, and it doesn’t even bleed on her shoes.
*
She buys a Ramones tape in Baton Rouge the first week of August, and she’s pretending to sleep slumped against the door when Sam softly sings along to “I Wanna Be Sedated.”
She knows the feeling.
*
“What do I do now?” she asked, shivering despite being wrapped up in one of the woolen blankets cops give you when your house or life goes up in flames. It was comforting to watch the old house burn.
“You live a normal life,” he told her, looking desperately like he wanted what he was saying to be true. “You go and you have an awesome, normal life, and you don’t look back.”
She tried to swallow around the pony camping out in her throat, giving him the Look. “Yeah,” she said. “Right.”
He sighed, scratched the back of his head, plucked at the collar of his leather jacket. He squinted at her in the police flood lights and said, “Look, you’re hot, you got your whole life in front of you or something. Things could be worse.”
She stared at him. “You seriously suck at this.”
*
Famous last words: “I’ll go with you. Come on, it’ll be fun.”
First words said upon entering the house: “Okay, so this place smells like something died in one of the closets.”
Actual last words: “No! Veronica, run! No! Get away from-”
Last sound: gurgling blood past a slashed throat.
Then nothing.
*
In late July, they stay for a week at this salvage yard somewhere in the upper plains states, with a grouchy older man who’s something like sixty percent stubble, thirty percent growl, and ten percent demon encyclopedia. Veronica adores him on sight.
Bobby grudgingly takes a shine to her as well, and the two of them play poker for two days straight, betting with silver change, while Sam buries himself like a mole in Bobby’s library. Neither of them attempts conversation with him and he ignores them completely.
Bobby’s a good cook, and his bolognese sauce actually puts Dad’s to shame. When Bobby makes a poundcake, she’s shocked to notice that Sam eats three-fourths of it. Neither of them let her go get the meat from the freezer in the basement. She has a morbid feeling she knows why, since Sam spends half of his time down there talking and talking and talking.
Somewhere between their seventh and twenty-eighth poker game, Bobby tells her the Winchester story like it’s gospel, right down to the demonically-enhanced psychic currently holed up in the basement. He seems content that Sam is totally obsessed with fishing Dean out of the pit and totally ignoring his enemies, which kind of annoys Veronica as a citizen of the world.
She sits in the car a lot and listens to the tapes in the shoebox she found in the trunk. Physical Graffiti. Master of Puppets. Appetite for Destruction. Slippery When Wet.
She puts most of them back when she’s done, but she adds How Could Hell Be Any Worse? to the new box she’s amassing in the glove compartment. Sam’s face tightens when he sees the tape but he taps his fingers in time with “Fuck Armageddon.. This is Hell!”
She wonders if a hunt gone wrong spectacularly fucked up the lead singer’s life, and if the hunter just left without offering any advice as to how to clean up the mess. Somehow, she doubts it, but if it did happen she’d bet a kidney that a Winchester was involved.
*
They watch Spanish soap operas in the afternoons and it becomes a sort of religion to them. It’s nice to know that no matter how convoluted her life gets with the monsters in the dark, Dario and Ana and Carlos and Josephina on Buena Vista will always have it worse.
The last week of June, they’re lying there, staring at the TV in an un-air-conditioned motel room in Jackson, Mississippi. She’s finally had enough of her hair sticking to her forehead and neck, and she grabs the pair of shears he keeps in the toiletries bag to trim his own mop and holds it out to him without a word.
When he’s finished, her hair is shorter than his. It looks adorable.
Logan would have hated it.
*
A handful of bad life choices and she was scared, alone, and cold. Trapped in a closet was more trapped like a rat than R. Kelly, and she was sure she was never going to feel warm again. All she wanted to do was curl up with Dad on their couch and gorge herself on lasagna until she never wanted to see lasagna again.
A bang from a shotgun reverberated through the old house, somewhere upstairs, shaking dust from the ceiling of the closet. She curled up further, wrapping her arms under her knees. It wasn’t that hard to do; the closet was so small that her feet were flat on the wall across from her and her knees so far up around her chin that it would have been difficult for her to swallow even without the lump in her throat the size of San Diego. Every bang, curse, and struggle sound made her try to make herself just a little big smaller, a little more invisible in the dark.
Several minutes of quiet passed, Veronica keeping wide eyes fixed on the marble chessboard floor outside, through the door’s ventilation slats, then suddenly she could hear someone wearing heavy-soled boots clomping toward the staircase over her head. Another, softer set of footfalls followed, and she could hear a muffled exchange of men’s voices as they got closer and clearer.
“-the back stairs. You saw the body in the kitchen. You really think there’s anybody else in here, Sammy?” the deeper of the two voices asked, sounding agitated but not particularly upset. It seemed to belong to the heavier pair of footsteps.
“S’it matter?” the other voice, harder to make out, answered as they descended the stairs right over her hiding spot. He sounded tired.
“I ain’t gonna just torch the place with civilians still inside,” the deeper voice snapped, sounding about half a foot from the end of his proverbial rope. “Shit’s not that bad I gotta start adding to the bill.”
“Fine,” the softer voice said as they stopped right outside the closet. She could just make out a pair of shins in the darkness. The owner of the softer voice was very tall. “Will one last sweep make you happy?”
“As a pig in shit,” the first voice muttered, clomping past in his heavy boots. His pants were tattered and he walked a little funny, like an old injury had left him slightly bowlegged.
They headed off in opposite directions, and she figured she could make a break for the front door, which she could just see across the foyer, but she was still too paralyzed with pure animal terror. She could still hear the crack-snap of breaking bones, the rip-shred of tearing flesh, the gurgle of blood in the cut throat, echoing all around her head.
Five minutes later, the man in clompy boots comes back through the foyer to investigate some other part of the house, but he apparently noticed the little closet under the stairs and stopped to consider it. All she could see was knees-down, but he stopped in a crack of moonlight that let her know his jeans were that brownish-blue that comes from long car rides in the desert. He had a flashlight, she noticed belatedly, and it caught the gold of her hair through the slats in the door.
“Well, fuck me,” he murmured.
*
There’s a case in Salt Lake City the second week in August, and Veronica gets to use one of her own Jedi mind tricks on a perfectly human suspect. Sam actually nods to her, almost smiling, looking impressed. She’s also a godsend when it comes to making fake IDs for them. Her current alias is Linda Eastman. His is James Osterberg.
Later in the same hunt, which turns out to be a case of a demon body-hopping one step ahead of them, Sam throws a guy across a room with his brain. Veronica smiles back at him, because at that point, she still remembers how to work her cheek muscles that way.
He does the exorcism, of course, because she has a terrible time remembering all the Latin. She imagines that Weevil would be awesome at this whole hunting deal and she calls him while Sam goes out to get food.
“Where the hell have you been, Mars?” He sounds very upset. “Your Dad’s searching all over for you, Fennel’s takin’ the semester off to help, and you missed the funeral-”
“I know,” she says sharply.
“I went,” he says. “I mean, we were pretty cool towards the end, there. We had kind of an understanding, you know?”
“Thank you for being there. I just- couldn’t.”
She can picture him squeezing the bridge of his nose. “Do you know what you’re doing, V?”
“No idea,” she admits, running her fingers through her hair. “But I feel like I have to.”
“Okay then.”
“I won’t be here by the time Dad traces this call, either,” she tells him. “Just- tell him I love him, would you?” Then she disconnects. By the time Sam comes back, she’s asleep. They leave in the morning.
*
They deal with a demon in Billings, Montana, on September second. It’s easy. Veronica has a harder time deciding between Give Me Convenience or Give me Death and a Stooges anthology that looked like someone had recorded it from a bunch of LPs on the stereo in his garage. She went with the Dead Kennedys.
Sam doesn’t really like it much, she can tell, but he has a concussion and doesn’t argue with her. She’s driving, pleased as punch that the Impala’s an automatic.
*
She was studying for her anthropology exam in January when a tall woman with red hair and overly large sunglasses came into the office. “You find things nobody else can find, right?” the woman had asked, taking the seat across from Veronica.
“Sure,” Veronica had said.
The woman’s boyfriend, Mitch, had gone with a couple of friends up to the old Dorsey house off the PCH- “that big abandoned house with the cupola, you know what I’m talking about, right?”-two weeks earlier. Only one of the guys had come back, and he’d promptly checked himself into a psychiatric hospital. The woman was desperate for answers, and Sheriff Van Lowe just wouldn’t do anything.
Veronica should have told the woman she was sorry for her loss, but it wasn’t Mars Investigations’s kind of case.
“I didn’t know who else to turn to,” the woman had sobbed. “Then I thought ‘what about Keith Mars? They’ll investigate cases the sheriff won’t because they know when something isn’t right.’”
Veronica had taken the case.
*
The first week of October they go to a gun show in South Carolina, where they run into another hunter, an old acquaintance of his family’s. It’s a reedy-looking, underfed stick of a man who obviously isn’t aware of recent developments. The man gets halfway through a joke about the little blonde in the leather jacket being a gender-swapped Dean before he notices the look on Sam’s face. Then he gets oddly silent, muttering about Sam being a “goddam clone of John.”
Veronica doesn’t get an introduction to the man or any explanations, but she does get a new gun out of the trip, so she’s happy.
*
“So is this what you do? Destroy lives and just skip off into the sunset?”
“Something like that.”
“It’s really unfair, you know.”
“Yep.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I have this pretty pistol with a mother-of-pearl grip, you see, and the permission of its previous owner to hunt down every ‘evil son of a bitch out there in the dark.’ And you have a car even my Dad can’t trace and a finger on the pulse of the dark, Mr. Demon Messiah. I’m coming with you.”
“You don’t want to do that.”
“This is me shrugging. Know why? Because I have to.”
*
The third week of October, Bobby calls them back to South Dakota. Deer season is coming up and he’d really like the space in his freezer back, so it seems apt that he’s figured out that maybe Dean’s brand of dead isn’t proper dead.
“I think it’s purgatory,” he tells Veronica after Sam has silently left their motel room.
“Of course it is,” she tells him, staring out the open door after the younger Winchester and wondering how Dean’s body can possibly still be in good shape after five months.
*
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, approaching the closet door slowly like it was a shying horse, and Veronica pressed herself against the far wall, ducking behind the moldering shreds of fabric hanging from the bar. It was a trenchcoat at one time, something Sam Spade might wear. There was a matching moth-eaten fedora on the shelf above the rack.
“Everything’s gonna be okay,” he said in a placating tone. His hand was on the doorknob but he hadn’t turned it.
She buried her face in her knees.
The door opened without a squeak, and Veronica was busy repeating umbrellas coats and boots over and over in her head, channeling inanimate objects. She didn’t so much as twitch, not even when he moves the remains of the coat out of the way, wire hanger screeching its protest.
“It’s okay,” he said, crouching down to her level. “You’re safe now.”
She didn’t move.
“I don’t believe it. I’m hunting all over the fucking house and you find someone in the room where we started.” The quieter voice said, apparently belonging to someone who moved stealthily.
“Dude,” the first one said, admonishing in a stage whisper, “it’s just a little girl.”
Suddenly affronted and no longer caring about looking up into the barrels of two shotguns, she lifted her head and glares at them like a wild thing. The guy with the deeper voice and tattered jeans fell back on his ass in surprise and the other one let out a tense bark of laughter.
“Yeah, that’s a little girl all right,” he said, helping the smaller one to his feet. Veronica glared up at him hotly, and holy fuck but he was tall. Insanely tall. She imagined her nose might come up to his sternum if she were standing. Tall like superheroes tend to be, in that broad-shouldered, brick-shithouse way, except this guy had stupid floppy hair and about six layers of ugly clothing on.
He stared back at her impassively, while the other one reached out a hand to her to help her up. She regarded it like a poisonous lizard. “You really need to get out of here,” they said in unison.
But by then her fear had all converted to anger, and she shook her head and stood on her own. If her hand rested on the closet’s doorjamb it was because she’d been crouching for just about forever and the ligaments in her knees were very angry with her. “What’s going on here?” she demanded, flashing fierce looks at both of them.
They both grimaced, although in different ways. The taller one had a slightly wild, desperate look in the hollows around his facial features, and looked like he might have been good at empathy at one time. The shorter one looked like he isn’t used to being the one who connects, and is one hysterical outburst on her part away from fish-gobbing and possibly going postal himself.
“Come on, we need to get you out of here,” he said, breaking up a long, uncomfortable moment. He was tall, too, she realized, just not a doorway-scraper like the other one hovering nearby like a big, tall, scary thing that breathed hard. She knew she was in shock when she had the impulse to stick her tongue out at them.
It was either that or cry.
*
Salting and burning a corpse is an excellent way to keep warm on a chilly evening in September in New Hampshire, Veronica learns. It helps, too, that she gets to sit and watch Sam do all the digging. He even sheds several layers of clothing to do it, and she’s willing to overlook the fact he doesn’t go down to the skin because it’s the simplest pleasure she’s had in months.
It helps that he looks absolutely nothing like Logan. Not a lot, of course, but it helps.
He lets her light the match and drop it in.
“Thank you,” she says.
“I couldn’t have all the fun,” he responds. It’s the longest conversation they’ve had that doesn’t have big, epic, tragic connotations.
*
“I’m Sam,” he said, sliding into the driver’s seat and barely affording her a glance.
“I know,” she said, swiping at her eyes. He nodded and put the car in gear. The old engine seemed to be crying, too.
The stopped at her apartment after she was sure her father had left for work. She made him come in with her, not trusting him not to just drive off and leave her stuck in her newly ill-fitting life, and while he makes use of the bathroom for a shower and shave, she shoves clothes and gadgetry and a handful of photographs into a bag.
“Make sure your clothes are sturdy,” he told her, and they were on the road out of Neptune by nine.
The only goodbye call she made was to Mac, who understood best of all and who wished her luck. “Please don’t call me if you need anything, though. I don’t want to have to lie to your dad.”
“Okay,” she replied.
There was a pause and she could tell Mac was crying. They both sighed heavily, and shared a tense giggle. Finally, Mac said, “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
“I just hope I don’t get lost.”
*
In Syracuse, she trades the Bad Religion tape for Patti Smith’s Horses in a little record store next door to the cafe where Sam stops to get a cup of coffee.
Sam kind of has an epiphany during “Break It Up” that has him calling Bobby and leaving a panicky, strange message on the man’s answering machine. Veronica doesn’t understand most of it, but there’s something about ripping yourself open and breaking through that she finds particularly interesting.
The End.
Notes:
1. I'm sorry I killed Logan, but it was sort of necessary to the plot. I've been talking with
pyrebi about the rubble that the Winchesters leave when they pass out of people's lives, and how those ordinary civilians are left to pick up the pieces. This is Veronica trying to do that after she and Logan get caught in the crossfire of a hunt.
2. Timeline-wise... Logan died in February, so somewhere in that gap between Jus in Bello (3.12) and Ghostfacers (3.13). Sometime after the showdown with Lilith in early May, Sam finds himself in Veronica's presence again (this I left intentionally vague) and she invites herself along.
3. And just for fun (because I had a lot of it while writing this):
Suggested Soundtrack for An Accomplished Exile
(or at least what I listened to while writing):
St. Anger (Metallica)
9 Crimes (Damien Rice)
Last Caress (Misfits)
All Hell Breaks Loose (Misfits)
Green Hell (Misfits)
Mosquito Song (Queens of the Stone Age)
Break It Up (Patti Smith)
White Rabbit (Jefferson Airplane)
I Wanna Be Sedated (the Ramones)
Fuck Armageddon… This is Hell! (Bad Religion)
News from the Front (Bad Religion)
Warning (Incubus)
Under My Umbrella (Incubus) - title comes from this one
Ouroboros (Mars Volta)
Metatron (Mars Volta)