FIC: Reap What You Sow One: Three Days (AB/SPN)
Reap What You Sow One: Three Days
A Supernatural/Anita Blake crossover
by mhalachaiswords
Summary: John Winchester made a deal with the Devil, but Death doesn't play by the same rulebook.
Disclaimer: Supernatural belongs to the CW and Kripke. Anita Blake belongs to Laurell K. Hamilton. No profit has been made from this fic, and the only benefit to me is personal satisfaction and the creative process of mixing things together.
Rating: Overall, R for swearing and violence. PG this part.
Characters: AB: Edward, Donna and Becca Parnell. SPN: John Winchester, with more to be added later.
Words: 1,975
Spoilers: Contain spoilers for season two for Supernatural, especially 2x08, Crossroads. While this story takes place before that episode, there are issues that came up in the show that were just to precious for me to pass up. Obsidian Butterfly for AB.
Note: I have decided that John gave the gun to the demon at 10:18 am, and was pronounced dead at 10:41 am, Missouri time.
~~~~~~
The next few minutes were a painful blur. Doctors and nurses rushed into the room, fluttered around John. He fleetingly heard the words "miracle" and "impossible" as they poked at him, and he wanted to punch them. Whatever was happening had nothing to do with miracles.
The world coalesced into a single bright point of pain, scraping in his throat, and suddenly John could breathe on his own. Each breath was loud and painful. Broken ribs? John wondered as he stared up at the white ceiling. The pain was localized on the front of his chest, instead of the sides. If his ribs were broken near his sternum, he was in deep shit. But the pain deeper than just broken ribs. It felt almost like a burn, and that was something John didn't understand.
John tried to sit up, but straps held him in place. He swallowed the sudden panic at being held immobile. The adrenaline rushing through his body pushed him past the fuzziness in his head, pushed him all the way to full alertness. He had to find out how badly he was hurt. He had to find out what he was doing here, and not in the hell he had been promised. He had to find out what was happening with his boys.
Dean and Sam.
Were his boys still alive? Were they safe? They had to be. John couldn't even imagine a world in which his boys were dead. He'd made a deal, damning himself in the process, and he'd do it again in a heartbeat.
He could feel his heart beating hard in his bruised chest.
"Mr. Parnell?" A voice next to his ear. "Peter. You need to stop struggling. You were badly hurt and you risk hurting yourself if you keep fighting."
John swallowed, ignoring the pain. "Who..." was all he could get out before a cough threatened and John shut his mouth. He'd been hit with a coughing fit on top of broken ribs before, and he didn't want to experience it again.
"I'm Dr. Stevens," the voice said. John rolled his eyes to the side to see the man. "I'm the doctor in charge of your case. Do you know what happened to you?"
John started to say no, but memories that were not his own began to flit around in his head.
~~~~
"Becca! Come on, we're going to be late for trick-or-treating and Mom's going to kill us!"
Becca looked up from the muddy bank by the pond. "Just a minute, Peter! I need another water strider!"
Peter shook his head. There were so many other things he could be doing, instead of accompanying his little sister to the park so she could get samples of insects for her science class. What kind of third grade science class collected bugs on Halloween, anyway?
The friend Peter'd had to bail on had suggested Peter just let Becca go on her own. The look on Peter's face had been enough to shut the kid up good. That happened more often than Peter wanted to admit, these days.
He might bitch about the chore, but Peter wasn't going to let anything happen to Becca, ever again. He'd already failed her once.
"Hurry up, will you?" Peter shouted. He slumped against the swing set in the empty playground. "You know how Mom's head starts spinning if we are late."
Becca sat up. "Is Ted taking me trick-or-treating?" she asked, her eyes lighting up.
"I dunno. Get your ass in gear, will you?"
Becca glared, her expression so unlike Mom, so much like the father she never knew. Whenever Peter saw that expression on Becca, all he could think about was his father, ripped to shreds by that werewolf, and of standing tall with the too-large shotgun in his hands. "You swore!"
"Becca!"
"I'm going!" Becca got to her feet, carefully balancing the heavy jar in both hands. "Don't leave!"
Peter watched his little sister walk around the side of the pond. She walked tall for nine, but she didn't walk like a child, hadn't since she was six years old. The three broken fingers on her hand had healed perfectly, but some days, Becca didn't use that hand at all. Peter saw these things, and he said nothing.
Fuck. He didn't want to think about this shit, not now. His therapy sessions were bad enough, with his psychiatrist always wanting to know how Peter was feeling, how he was dealing. Peter always lied and told the man what he wanted to hear. He never said he was dealing by learning to shoot every gun in Ted's arsenal, to throw knives with deadly accuracy, to do everything he could to be able to protect his family.
Peter rubbed his eyes. He was so tired. He'd had yet another crazy dream last night, of people burning, dying, of evil. It had been happening for a year now, these dreams. Sometimes it was the burning dream, with a series of blondes burning on the ceiling. Other times, it was people dying in strange situations, and there was nothing Peter could do about it.
He didn't tell anyone about the dreams. Not his shrink, not his mother. Especially not Ted, his mother's fiancé.
Peter's stomach rumbled. He pushed off the bench, picking up his and Becca's backpacks. "Come on, kid, time to..."
Peter's voice trailed off as he scanned the area. Becca had vanished.
"Becca?" Peter dropped the backpacks, already running towards the pond. All he could think was, something had grabbed Becca and he hadn't been paying enough attention to protect her. "Becca!"
Something was in the water of the pond, thrashing, just below the surface. Something was dragging Becca down, and she was fighting.
Peter dove into the water. With a few desperate strokes, he grabbed a handful of his sister's shirt and pulled as hard as he could. Something slimy brushed over Peter's hands, and he kicked as hard as he could. Becca came free, and Peter wrapped his arms around her and kicked for the surface.
They broke the water, gasping for air. Becca was crying as Peter started swimming for the closest bank. "P-Peter, something grabbed me!"
"Yeah." Peter concentrated on swimming while holding a dead-weight nine-year-old. "I've got you, you're safe."
They reached the branches overhanging the water. The wood was fragile and old, and Peter knew it wouldn't be enough to hold both Becca and himself. Without a second thought, Peter heaved Becca up onto the branches, as something under the water brushed past his leg.
"Becca, you're going to be safe, I promise," Peter said. The something below the water grabbed his leg. "Stay here and stay safe!"
Becca's wide, scared eyes were the last thing he saw before he was pulled underwater.
Her screams followed him down.
~~~~
"Water," John croaked. What the hell was happening to him? Why did he have these memories?
"Yes, Peter, that's right. Your sister Becca fell into the pond at the park. You pulled her out, but then you got caught on something and were held under the water."
Right. Caught on some water creature's claws. John was under no delusions of what had pulled Peter down into the water. But what the hell was a Kappa, a Japanese water demon, doing in New Mexico?
Wait.
Everyone was calling him Peter. John was remembering things from Peter's perspective. Did that mean that...
Christ, no!
"Peter, you've been on life support since we brought you in. Your heart stopped several times and you weren't breathing on your own. You were under the water for so long..." The doctor's voice trailed off. "We started monitoring your brain activity since you came in. There were no higher brain functions until 9:18 this morning. That's three days."
John's eyes drifted back to the ceiling.
"There's a possibility that you've suffered some brain damage, from being under the water so long." The doctor shuffled something. "We're going to need to keep you here to make sure that you don't suffer a relapse."
A relapse from what? John wondered. Being dead? He would never be able to understand how people ignored what was in front of their faces. Peter Parnell had been dragged under water by some evil son of a bitch, hadn't had any brain activity for three days. Hell, he hadn't been breathing in that time. Peter had been dead.
Was still dead.
"I'm going to go talk to your mother and we'll be right back." The doctor's footsteps echoed out of the room. A few nurses remained, but John could tune them out.
Was this hell? Being shoved into a dead kid's body? Peter had sacrificed himself to save his sister, and his reward was being kicked out of his body to make room for some damned soul?
At least now Peter could rest.
A horrible chill ran down John's spine. Peter had been having dreams of people burning on the ceiling. Searching these foreign memories, John realized that Peter had been dreaming of possessions, of evil, of the Demon.
John closed his eyes on one of the remembered dreams. Mary, his precious Mary, burning.
Please God, don't let this boy be like Sammy.
John's thoughts were interrupted as someone else entered the room. "Peter?"
Peter's memories supplied John with the identity of the woman. "Mom?" John said, hating himself. The woman had a right to know her son was dead, had died a hero in saving his sister.
Donna Parnell crossed the room and stopped by the bed. Her eyes were red with continued crying. As if she'd just lost a son. "Oh, Peter."
Donna started crying again, and leaned into the man at her side. It took John a few seconds to glance at the man. When he realized who was standing there, he almost tore through the restraints.
Edward.
The man didn't have a last name. He didn't need one. Every Hunter knew Edward, and avoided him at all costs. The man was a sociopath, killing humans as often as he did evil creatures. He'd been the best hitman in the U.S. once, but in the past six years he hadn't been killing as many humans, moving onto evil because of the challenge. He didn't care what he was killing, most days, as long as it was hard to kill.
He'd even allied himself with that necromancer bitch in St. Louis.
Peter's memories told him that the man was calling himself Ted Forrester, had been engaged to Peter's mother for three years, took Becca to ballet class and taught Peter to shoot every gun in his collection.
Now Edward was staring down at Peter with a concerned face and cold, suspicious eyes.
Becca shuffled up to the bed, a space between her and her mother. The little girl's eyes were dry and so old. "Peter?"
John noted how Donna didn't reach out for Becca, and hated the woman. "Hey, kid." John made himself smile, even though it hurt like a bitch. "You okay?"
Becca nodded. "I'm sorry," she whispered.
"Don't be," John said immediately. He wished he could sit up, wished Donna would act like the adult here, wished Edward would stop staring at him. "It's what big brothers do."
It's what Dean would do for Sam, John thought. Loss threatened to overwhelm him, as he realized exactly what he had done. He'd damned himself to save his boys, and he would never see his sons, his children, again.
But they were alive and safe, just like Becca was safe. John was alive, after a fashion, and where there was life there was hope for vengeance.
John had promised to kill the Demon that had killed Mary, and now, it seemed, he had a second lease on life to do it.
He wasn't going to fail again.
to be continued
Monster footnote: Kappa
A Supernatural/Anita Blake crossover
by mhalachaiswords
Summary: John Winchester made a deal with the Devil, but Death doesn't play by the same rulebook.
Disclaimer: Supernatural belongs to the CW and Kripke. Anita Blake belongs to Laurell K. Hamilton. No profit has been made from this fic, and the only benefit to me is personal satisfaction and the creative process of mixing things together.
Rating: Overall, R for swearing and violence. PG this part.
Characters: AB: Edward, Donna and Becca Parnell. SPN: John Winchester, with more to be added later.
Words: 1,975
Spoilers: Contain spoilers for season two for Supernatural, especially 2x08, Crossroads. While this story takes place before that episode, there are issues that came up in the show that were just to precious for me to pass up. Obsidian Butterfly for AB.
Note: I have decided that John gave the gun to the demon at 10:18 am, and was pronounced dead at 10:41 am, Missouri time.
~~~~~~
The next few minutes were a painful blur. Doctors and nurses rushed into the room, fluttered around John. He fleetingly heard the words "miracle" and "impossible" as they poked at him, and he wanted to punch them. Whatever was happening had nothing to do with miracles.
The world coalesced into a single bright point of pain, scraping in his throat, and suddenly John could breathe on his own. Each breath was loud and painful. Broken ribs? John wondered as he stared up at the white ceiling. The pain was localized on the front of his chest, instead of the sides. If his ribs were broken near his sternum, he was in deep shit. But the pain deeper than just broken ribs. It felt almost like a burn, and that was something John didn't understand.
John tried to sit up, but straps held him in place. He swallowed the sudden panic at being held immobile. The adrenaline rushing through his body pushed him past the fuzziness in his head, pushed him all the way to full alertness. He had to find out how badly he was hurt. He had to find out what he was doing here, and not in the hell he had been promised. He had to find out what was happening with his boys.
Dean and Sam.
Were his boys still alive? Were they safe? They had to be. John couldn't even imagine a world in which his boys were dead. He'd made a deal, damning himself in the process, and he'd do it again in a heartbeat.
He could feel his heart beating hard in his bruised chest.
"Mr. Parnell?" A voice next to his ear. "Peter. You need to stop struggling. You were badly hurt and you risk hurting yourself if you keep fighting."
John swallowed, ignoring the pain. "Who..." was all he could get out before a cough threatened and John shut his mouth. He'd been hit with a coughing fit on top of broken ribs before, and he didn't want to experience it again.
"I'm Dr. Stevens," the voice said. John rolled his eyes to the side to see the man. "I'm the doctor in charge of your case. Do you know what happened to you?"
John started to say no, but memories that were not his own began to flit around in his head.
~~~~
"Becca! Come on, we're going to be late for trick-or-treating and Mom's going to kill us!"
Becca looked up from the muddy bank by the pond. "Just a minute, Peter! I need another water strider!"
Peter shook his head. There were so many other things he could be doing, instead of accompanying his little sister to the park so she could get samples of insects for her science class. What kind of third grade science class collected bugs on Halloween, anyway?
The friend Peter'd had to bail on had suggested Peter just let Becca go on her own. The look on Peter's face had been enough to shut the kid up good. That happened more often than Peter wanted to admit, these days.
He might bitch about the chore, but Peter wasn't going to let anything happen to Becca, ever again. He'd already failed her once.
"Hurry up, will you?" Peter shouted. He slumped against the swing set in the empty playground. "You know how Mom's head starts spinning if we are late."
Becca sat up. "Is Ted taking me trick-or-treating?" she asked, her eyes lighting up.
"I dunno. Get your ass in gear, will you?"
Becca glared, her expression so unlike Mom, so much like the father she never knew. Whenever Peter saw that expression on Becca, all he could think about was his father, ripped to shreds by that werewolf, and of standing tall with the too-large shotgun in his hands. "You swore!"
"Becca!"
"I'm going!" Becca got to her feet, carefully balancing the heavy jar in both hands. "Don't leave!"
Peter watched his little sister walk around the side of the pond. She walked tall for nine, but she didn't walk like a child, hadn't since she was six years old. The three broken fingers on her hand had healed perfectly, but some days, Becca didn't use that hand at all. Peter saw these things, and he said nothing.
Fuck. He didn't want to think about this shit, not now. His therapy sessions were bad enough, with his psychiatrist always wanting to know how Peter was feeling, how he was dealing. Peter always lied and told the man what he wanted to hear. He never said he was dealing by learning to shoot every gun in Ted's arsenal, to throw knives with deadly accuracy, to do everything he could to be able to protect his family.
Peter rubbed his eyes. He was so tired. He'd had yet another crazy dream last night, of people burning, dying, of evil. It had been happening for a year now, these dreams. Sometimes it was the burning dream, with a series of blondes burning on the ceiling. Other times, it was people dying in strange situations, and there was nothing Peter could do about it.
He didn't tell anyone about the dreams. Not his shrink, not his mother. Especially not Ted, his mother's fiancé.
Peter's stomach rumbled. He pushed off the bench, picking up his and Becca's backpacks. "Come on, kid, time to..."
Peter's voice trailed off as he scanned the area. Becca had vanished.
"Becca?" Peter dropped the backpacks, already running towards the pond. All he could think was, something had grabbed Becca and he hadn't been paying enough attention to protect her. "Becca!"
Something was in the water of the pond, thrashing, just below the surface. Something was dragging Becca down, and she was fighting.
Peter dove into the water. With a few desperate strokes, he grabbed a handful of his sister's shirt and pulled as hard as he could. Something slimy brushed over Peter's hands, and he kicked as hard as he could. Becca came free, and Peter wrapped his arms around her and kicked for the surface.
They broke the water, gasping for air. Becca was crying as Peter started swimming for the closest bank. "P-Peter, something grabbed me!"
"Yeah." Peter concentrated on swimming while holding a dead-weight nine-year-old. "I've got you, you're safe."
They reached the branches overhanging the water. The wood was fragile and old, and Peter knew it wouldn't be enough to hold both Becca and himself. Without a second thought, Peter heaved Becca up onto the branches, as something under the water brushed past his leg.
"Becca, you're going to be safe, I promise," Peter said. The something below the water grabbed his leg. "Stay here and stay safe!"
Becca's wide, scared eyes were the last thing he saw before he was pulled underwater.
Her screams followed him down.
~~~~
"Water," John croaked. What the hell was happening to him? Why did he have these memories?
"Yes, Peter, that's right. Your sister Becca fell into the pond at the park. You pulled her out, but then you got caught on something and were held under the water."
Right. Caught on some water creature's claws. John was under no delusions of what had pulled Peter down into the water. But what the hell was a Kappa, a Japanese water demon, doing in New Mexico?
Wait.
Everyone was calling him Peter. John was remembering things from Peter's perspective. Did that mean that...
Christ, no!
"Peter, you've been on life support since we brought you in. Your heart stopped several times and you weren't breathing on your own. You were under the water for so long..." The doctor's voice trailed off. "We started monitoring your brain activity since you came in. There were no higher brain functions until 9:18 this morning. That's three days."
John's eyes drifted back to the ceiling.
"There's a possibility that you've suffered some brain damage, from being under the water so long." The doctor shuffled something. "We're going to need to keep you here to make sure that you don't suffer a relapse."
A relapse from what? John wondered. Being dead? He would never be able to understand how people ignored what was in front of their faces. Peter Parnell had been dragged under water by some evil son of a bitch, hadn't had any brain activity for three days. Hell, he hadn't been breathing in that time. Peter had been dead.
Was still dead.
"I'm going to go talk to your mother and we'll be right back." The doctor's footsteps echoed out of the room. A few nurses remained, but John could tune them out.
Was this hell? Being shoved into a dead kid's body? Peter had sacrificed himself to save his sister, and his reward was being kicked out of his body to make room for some damned soul?
At least now Peter could rest.
A horrible chill ran down John's spine. Peter had been having dreams of people burning on the ceiling. Searching these foreign memories, John realized that Peter had been dreaming of possessions, of evil, of the Demon.
John closed his eyes on one of the remembered dreams. Mary, his precious Mary, burning.
Please God, don't let this boy be like Sammy.
John's thoughts were interrupted as someone else entered the room. "Peter?"
Peter's memories supplied John with the identity of the woman. "Mom?" John said, hating himself. The woman had a right to know her son was dead, had died a hero in saving his sister.
Donna Parnell crossed the room and stopped by the bed. Her eyes were red with continued crying. As if she'd just lost a son. "Oh, Peter."
Donna started crying again, and leaned into the man at her side. It took John a few seconds to glance at the man. When he realized who was standing there, he almost tore through the restraints.
Edward.
The man didn't have a last name. He didn't need one. Every Hunter knew Edward, and avoided him at all costs. The man was a sociopath, killing humans as often as he did evil creatures. He'd been the best hitman in the U.S. once, but in the past six years he hadn't been killing as many humans, moving onto evil because of the challenge. He didn't care what he was killing, most days, as long as it was hard to kill.
He'd even allied himself with that necromancer bitch in St. Louis.
Peter's memories told him that the man was calling himself Ted Forrester, had been engaged to Peter's mother for three years, took Becca to ballet class and taught Peter to shoot every gun in his collection.
Now Edward was staring down at Peter with a concerned face and cold, suspicious eyes.
Becca shuffled up to the bed, a space between her and her mother. The little girl's eyes were dry and so old. "Peter?"
John noted how Donna didn't reach out for Becca, and hated the woman. "Hey, kid." John made himself smile, even though it hurt like a bitch. "You okay?"
Becca nodded. "I'm sorry," she whispered.
"Don't be," John said immediately. He wished he could sit up, wished Donna would act like the adult here, wished Edward would stop staring at him. "It's what big brothers do."
It's what Dean would do for Sam, John thought. Loss threatened to overwhelm him, as he realized exactly what he had done. He'd damned himself to save his boys, and he would never see his sons, his children, again.
But they were alive and safe, just like Becca was safe. John was alive, after a fashion, and where there was life there was hope for vengeance.
John had promised to kill the Demon that had killed Mary, and now, it seemed, he had a second lease on life to do it.
He wasn't going to fail again.
to be continued
Monster footnote: Kappa