fic: nancy wore green stockings (claire/dean, claire/sam, various, R)
For alwaysenduphere, for Novakfest over at spn_jimmynovak.
title: nancy wore green stockings
rating: R
pairings/characters: Claire/Sam, Claire/Dean, Sam/Dean, Dean/Castiel, mentions of Jimmy
word count: ~2,200
summary: AU from 701/702. When Claire saw the man with her father's face on the evening news, accused of mass murder, she called Dean. She wasn't sure what she expected, but what she found were two broken Winchesters trying to hold back the Leviathans alone, and she said, let me help. Title from Leonard Cohen.
warnings: sex involving a 17 year old; incest; second person voice.
Dean is not, is not anything like, your father. You know that -- know the way your skin sings dirtily at the sight of him is nothing a daughter should ever feel, the dry yearning in your mouth incestuous, if Dean intends to surrogate. You know, too, that he does, and the knowledge makes everything both worse and exponentially better, your cravings sharper at the edges. Dean wears his guilt around his shoulders like a leaden cape. He is father, brother, caretaker to everyone; you only wish he would bring himself low, give in, let himself be lover too.
You aren't a child any more. You haven't been since long before that day you saw your father on the television, slaughtering politicians and grinning maniacally at security cameras. Not your father, really, that entity, any more than Dean is, but whatever-it-was wore his face, and you sought Dean out, fingers shaking as you dialled. You said, "Hello, Dean," and listened to his rough, pained breathing.
You learned that your father, not-your-father, had inhaled purgatory, a turbulence of ancient souls barely contained within the fragile cage of his skin. Things had grown too much for your mother long before this juncture. Even before the end, she fairly rattled with pills. When she slipped away, pushed herself or was pushed, you barely blamed her, but it made your situation starker. When Dean explained himself -- where he and his brother were; what they were doing to keep the detritus your father-not-father inhaled from ending the world -- you barely thought before you spoke.
"There's only me now," you said. "Let me help," you said, but Dean heard: help me.
Dean believes he can help everyone -- or, at least, that he should. You learn quickly that this is baggage passed on to him by his father, given him unceremoniously to heft through the years. Dean has no children, but everyone is his responsibility. This is the nature of Dean. By the time you reach them, Dean and his brother holed up in backwoods South Dakota, the world is already beginning to blur. Dean explains, haltingly, that something -- not the angel -- walked your father's (twice reconstituted) body into a lake, where it disintegrated in a cloud of black ink. His eyes are downcast, and when he speaks the angel's name it catches at the back of his tongue, full of love and loneliness. You hate the angel for what he did to you, hate him more for what he has done to Dean, but the way Dean speaks of him, you cannot help but love him just a little, too. You resent it, but you cannot resent Dean, however hard you try.
Sam is another person whose father Dean thinks he ought to be. He hears voices, sees things, scratches at his wrists anxiously while he watches the devil move about the house, but he can still strip a field revolver and hit a two-inch target at fifty paces. You are seventeen, and Sam is crazy and brilliant and overpowering, getting thinner as the months pass but still an imposing figure of a man. He says he can tell the difference between what is real and what is not, but sometimes he looks at you -- reaches his hands for you, hesitantly, before he drops them and retreats -- in ways that make you wonder if he thinks you are a hallucination, too. Sam teaches you to strip a weapon, keep it clean. Dean, outside in the scrapyard, teaches you to shoot it, an arm around your shoulder for steadiness as you fire, bang - bang - bang. This is the way the brothers are on the surface, the way they think they are: Sam constructive, Dean the destroyer, yin and yang. You have no wish to shatter their illusions, but you see through them as easily as if they were made of glass. You could hardly have failed to do so.
The creature that destroyed your father-not-your-father is called Leviathan. You don't know whether that is its name or its species, whether it is one entity or many. You suspect the Winchesters don't know for sure, either. What is certain is that, whatever battle they are fighting, Leviathan is winning. Illness spreads like legend. The viable world shrinks. Dean's worry deepens the crows' feet around his eyes, so Sam tells him he no longer sees the devil in every detail of your lives. It's a lie, of course; you are around Sam too much not to know that, but you and Sam are collaborators, now, a united front. Both of you are Dean's responsibility in his mind; both of you try to bolster yourselves, lessen your weight on Dean's back. Partially, at least, it seems to be working.
In some things, though, you find you still are not conspirators. You may know now that every awful thing you ever imagined in the dark is real, but there are other secrets the Winchesters keep. When you round the corner of the house one afternoon to find Dean pressed close between his brother's thighs, mouth nipping at Sam's, the dark sludge of knee-jerk repulsion floods your stomach automatically. Sam is Dean's brother, his son, his responsibility, and every impulse in your body tells you this is wrong. Then Dean slants his head, opens his mouth over Sam's, and Sam's hands come up to fist in the front of his shirt, desperate. You think, fiercely: this is incest. You think how absolutely society, all society, condemns it.
In the distance, the sky is still heavy with grey smoke from the last power station to have exploded, not twenty-four hours ago. Most of South Dakota is empty, unless you count the corpses. Society, as you knew it, no longer exists, and you are all so desperate. Dean's mouth moves slow over Sam's, his palms flattening on Sam's face, and you think, well.
Really, at this juncture, it isn't as if any sort of judgement is worth passing.
You are easy, now, with a gun; a natural, Dean says. The Leviathan are spawning like vermin, like zombies, and you take out half a dozen with a Winchester at either shoulder the day after you see them together. Afterwards, strung out on adrenaline and the kamikaze spirit, you straddle Sam's spread legs, crush him into his customary chair with your slight weight and say his name into his ear until he whimpers, gives in. Perhaps he thinks he's dreamed you, or perhaps you and he are of one mind, reckless in the knowledge that nothing matters any more. It's not important. Dean is the one you really want; Dean who, your intuition says, has had his hands and dick and self inside your father's body, fucked into him with only an angel between them. Dean is the one you both want, you and Sam, but you are both easier, more irrevocably broken than Dean is and you know Sam will not say no.
"Claire," he says instead, big hands spanning the small of your back with painful ease. "Claire."
You lost your virginity the summer before last to a boy from Tulsa, three years your senior. He played first-string football and tasted of nicotine, and he was smaller than Sam, and he was the only one. When Sam pushes into you, then; when you push yourself down onto Sam, it hurts more than a little, but you swallow the burn, shore it up against your ruins. You think about your father, taking an angel inside of him without complaint, and you look at Sam's face, the small measure of contentment there, and you are fortified.
"Sam," you say; you say his name as you ride him, fingers threading into his hair, pushing it back from his stress-thinned face. His cheekbones are sharp against your palms, almost gaunt. He is all bones now, Sam, loose and lanky and unhinged. Once, you know, he was tan and heavily muscled, his smile like a beacon in the night, but even so, you think you like him like this. Even if he isn't what you want, he will suffice to give you what you need, and something in his gauntness is beautiful, utilitarian and clean. When he says your name, there is despair in it, nothing concealed. You think of your father and you clutch at Sam Winchester's hair and you fuck your narrow young body down onto his cock and wonder who he thinks you are; know, at your core, that he knows you.
Sam isn't who you want, but you are kindred spirits, and you will take him, splinters and all. After all, somebody has to.
Dean is a bastion of strength because he believes he has to be. At his edges, he is crumbling, and you feel yourself cracking with his every slip, arms and hands and mouth aching to paste him back together. You have lived with the Winchesters six months before he forgets himself enough to leave your father's worn overcoat out where you can see it, a little heap of devastation at the end of his bed. You know it has been battered and obliterated by Heaven and Hell; that your-father-not-your-father was wearing it when he waded into the lake. All the same, when you press it to your face, it still smells like his cologne.
You know you ought to put it down again, creep out before Dean comes back, but you can't, and you find you don't want to. Dean stumbles when he sees you, breath catching. You know you are taking advantage of his uncharacteristic flash of pure despair when you hold out one hand to him, but you can't bring yourself to care. Dean thinks he owes everything to everyone and deserves nothing for himself, and you know that he is wrong, especially because he fails, for all his good intentions, to understand what it is that his charges really need.
"Dean," you say. You run a hand over his face, slow, learning the bones. You set the trenchcoat down slowly, reluctantly, and his expression tightens, crumples, falls apart as he falls into you.
"I can't do this," he tells you. It isn't something Dean says, can't, even when it's been six weeks since your last human contact; even when the world is collapsing around your ears. Dean doesn't say can't, not Daddy's little soldier, and the sad, simple sound of it in his mouth only makes you love him more.
"Yes, you can," you tell him, although you don't believe it, not the way he means it. "Yes, you can." You say all the right words because it's what he does for you, what he's always done for everyone, and even if you can't save yourselves you can do this, now, together. You unbutton your jeans and you step out of them, heedless of his wide, startled eyes. You unzip his pants, crawl back onto the bed, pull him on top of you and feel his heart beating low in his back as he complies. This is Dean, you think, who wants to be your father. This is Dean, whose body remembers the shape of your real father's, but who never knew the way Jimmy Novak sounded when he laughed, or what he liked to eat, or how much he loved college basketball.
"Please," you say, canting your hips towards him. Dean is not your father, but your father is gone, blown apart over and over by his treacherous faith. Your father is gone, and Dean and his mantle of guilt are all that is left of him.
Dean rolls forward in despair, slow, and it hurts. You spread your thighs wide for his hips; you scrabble at his back; you cry out. He rocks into you over and over, pets your hair and kisses you until some frail fragment of beauty spirals up inside of you out of the darkness, and when he comes his face is pressed to your neck.
"Cas," he whispers, reedy, and his hips are still moving reflexively. "Cas."
We can't do this, you think, not any of this. You can't keep pretending, can't keep on keeping on, can't keep the whole of purgatory back. You can't save the world, not again. Not this time.
"We can do this," you tell Dean, soft, and kiss his temple. "Dean. We'll be all right, you'll see."
You don't pause to wonder if he knows you are lying. You know him well enough to be sure he won't care, and that's good enough. It will have to be.
title: nancy wore green stockings
rating: R
pairings/characters: Claire/Sam, Claire/Dean, Sam/Dean, Dean/Castiel, mentions of Jimmy
word count: ~2,200
summary: AU from 701/702. When Claire saw the man with her father's face on the evening news, accused of mass murder, she called Dean. She wasn't sure what she expected, but what she found were two broken Winchesters trying to hold back the Leviathans alone, and she said, let me help. Title from Leonard Cohen.
warnings: sex involving a 17 year old; incest; second person voice.
Dean is not, is not anything like, your father. You know that -- know the way your skin sings dirtily at the sight of him is nothing a daughter should ever feel, the dry yearning in your mouth incestuous, if Dean intends to surrogate. You know, too, that he does, and the knowledge makes everything both worse and exponentially better, your cravings sharper at the edges. Dean wears his guilt around his shoulders like a leaden cape. He is father, brother, caretaker to everyone; you only wish he would bring himself low, give in, let himself be lover too.
You aren't a child any more. You haven't been since long before that day you saw your father on the television, slaughtering politicians and grinning maniacally at security cameras. Not your father, really, that entity, any more than Dean is, but whatever-it-was wore his face, and you sought Dean out, fingers shaking as you dialled. You said, "Hello, Dean," and listened to his rough, pained breathing.
You learned that your father, not-your-father, had inhaled purgatory, a turbulence of ancient souls barely contained within the fragile cage of his skin. Things had grown too much for your mother long before this juncture. Even before the end, she fairly rattled with pills. When she slipped away, pushed herself or was pushed, you barely blamed her, but it made your situation starker. When Dean explained himself -- where he and his brother were; what they were doing to keep the detritus your father-not-father inhaled from ending the world -- you barely thought before you spoke.
"There's only me now," you said. "Let me help," you said, but Dean heard: help me.
Dean believes he can help everyone -- or, at least, that he should. You learn quickly that this is baggage passed on to him by his father, given him unceremoniously to heft through the years. Dean has no children, but everyone is his responsibility. This is the nature of Dean. By the time you reach them, Dean and his brother holed up in backwoods South Dakota, the world is already beginning to blur. Dean explains, haltingly, that something -- not the angel -- walked your father's (twice reconstituted) body into a lake, where it disintegrated in a cloud of black ink. His eyes are downcast, and when he speaks the angel's name it catches at the back of his tongue, full of love and loneliness. You hate the angel for what he did to you, hate him more for what he has done to Dean, but the way Dean speaks of him, you cannot help but love him just a little, too. You resent it, but you cannot resent Dean, however hard you try.
Sam is another person whose father Dean thinks he ought to be. He hears voices, sees things, scratches at his wrists anxiously while he watches the devil move about the house, but he can still strip a field revolver and hit a two-inch target at fifty paces. You are seventeen, and Sam is crazy and brilliant and overpowering, getting thinner as the months pass but still an imposing figure of a man. He says he can tell the difference between what is real and what is not, but sometimes he looks at you -- reaches his hands for you, hesitantly, before he drops them and retreats -- in ways that make you wonder if he thinks you are a hallucination, too. Sam teaches you to strip a weapon, keep it clean. Dean, outside in the scrapyard, teaches you to shoot it, an arm around your shoulder for steadiness as you fire, bang - bang - bang. This is the way the brothers are on the surface, the way they think they are: Sam constructive, Dean the destroyer, yin and yang. You have no wish to shatter their illusions, but you see through them as easily as if they were made of glass. You could hardly have failed to do so.
The creature that destroyed your father-not-your-father is called Leviathan. You don't know whether that is its name or its species, whether it is one entity or many. You suspect the Winchesters don't know for sure, either. What is certain is that, whatever battle they are fighting, Leviathan is winning. Illness spreads like legend. The viable world shrinks. Dean's worry deepens the crows' feet around his eyes, so Sam tells him he no longer sees the devil in every detail of your lives. It's a lie, of course; you are around Sam too much not to know that, but you and Sam are collaborators, now, a united front. Both of you are Dean's responsibility in his mind; both of you try to bolster yourselves, lessen your weight on Dean's back. Partially, at least, it seems to be working.
In some things, though, you find you still are not conspirators. You may know now that every awful thing you ever imagined in the dark is real, but there are other secrets the Winchesters keep. When you round the corner of the house one afternoon to find Dean pressed close between his brother's thighs, mouth nipping at Sam's, the dark sludge of knee-jerk repulsion floods your stomach automatically. Sam is Dean's brother, his son, his responsibility, and every impulse in your body tells you this is wrong. Then Dean slants his head, opens his mouth over Sam's, and Sam's hands come up to fist in the front of his shirt, desperate. You think, fiercely: this is incest. You think how absolutely society, all society, condemns it.
In the distance, the sky is still heavy with grey smoke from the last power station to have exploded, not twenty-four hours ago. Most of South Dakota is empty, unless you count the corpses. Society, as you knew it, no longer exists, and you are all so desperate. Dean's mouth moves slow over Sam's, his palms flattening on Sam's face, and you think, well.
Really, at this juncture, it isn't as if any sort of judgement is worth passing.
You are easy, now, with a gun; a natural, Dean says. The Leviathan are spawning like vermin, like zombies, and you take out half a dozen with a Winchester at either shoulder the day after you see them together. Afterwards, strung out on adrenaline and the kamikaze spirit, you straddle Sam's spread legs, crush him into his customary chair with your slight weight and say his name into his ear until he whimpers, gives in. Perhaps he thinks he's dreamed you, or perhaps you and he are of one mind, reckless in the knowledge that nothing matters any more. It's not important. Dean is the one you really want; Dean who, your intuition says, has had his hands and dick and self inside your father's body, fucked into him with only an angel between them. Dean is the one you both want, you and Sam, but you are both easier, more irrevocably broken than Dean is and you know Sam will not say no.
"Claire," he says instead, big hands spanning the small of your back with painful ease. "Claire."
You lost your virginity the summer before last to a boy from Tulsa, three years your senior. He played first-string football and tasted of nicotine, and he was smaller than Sam, and he was the only one. When Sam pushes into you, then; when you push yourself down onto Sam, it hurts more than a little, but you swallow the burn, shore it up against your ruins. You think about your father, taking an angel inside of him without complaint, and you look at Sam's face, the small measure of contentment there, and you are fortified.
"Sam," you say; you say his name as you ride him, fingers threading into his hair, pushing it back from his stress-thinned face. His cheekbones are sharp against your palms, almost gaunt. He is all bones now, Sam, loose and lanky and unhinged. Once, you know, he was tan and heavily muscled, his smile like a beacon in the night, but even so, you think you like him like this. Even if he isn't what you want, he will suffice to give you what you need, and something in his gauntness is beautiful, utilitarian and clean. When he says your name, there is despair in it, nothing concealed. You think of your father and you clutch at Sam Winchester's hair and you fuck your narrow young body down onto his cock and wonder who he thinks you are; know, at your core, that he knows you.
Sam isn't who you want, but you are kindred spirits, and you will take him, splinters and all. After all, somebody has to.
Dean is a bastion of strength because he believes he has to be. At his edges, he is crumbling, and you feel yourself cracking with his every slip, arms and hands and mouth aching to paste him back together. You have lived with the Winchesters six months before he forgets himself enough to leave your father's worn overcoat out where you can see it, a little heap of devastation at the end of his bed. You know it has been battered and obliterated by Heaven and Hell; that your-father-not-your-father was wearing it when he waded into the lake. All the same, when you press it to your face, it still smells like his cologne.
You know you ought to put it down again, creep out before Dean comes back, but you can't, and you find you don't want to. Dean stumbles when he sees you, breath catching. You know you are taking advantage of his uncharacteristic flash of pure despair when you hold out one hand to him, but you can't bring yourself to care. Dean thinks he owes everything to everyone and deserves nothing for himself, and you know that he is wrong, especially because he fails, for all his good intentions, to understand what it is that his charges really need.
"Dean," you say. You run a hand over his face, slow, learning the bones. You set the trenchcoat down slowly, reluctantly, and his expression tightens, crumples, falls apart as he falls into you.
"I can't do this," he tells you. It isn't something Dean says, can't, even when it's been six weeks since your last human contact; even when the world is collapsing around your ears. Dean doesn't say can't, not Daddy's little soldier, and the sad, simple sound of it in his mouth only makes you love him more.
"Yes, you can," you tell him, although you don't believe it, not the way he means it. "Yes, you can." You say all the right words because it's what he does for you, what he's always done for everyone, and even if you can't save yourselves you can do this, now, together. You unbutton your jeans and you step out of them, heedless of his wide, startled eyes. You unzip his pants, crawl back onto the bed, pull him on top of you and feel his heart beating low in his back as he complies. This is Dean, you think, who wants to be your father. This is Dean, whose body remembers the shape of your real father's, but who never knew the way Jimmy Novak sounded when he laughed, or what he liked to eat, or how much he loved college basketball.
"Please," you say, canting your hips towards him. Dean is not your father, but your father is gone, blown apart over and over by his treacherous faith. Your father is gone, and Dean and his mantle of guilt are all that is left of him.
Dean rolls forward in despair, slow, and it hurts. You spread your thighs wide for his hips; you scrabble at his back; you cry out. He rocks into you over and over, pets your hair and kisses you until some frail fragment of beauty spirals up inside of you out of the darkness, and when he comes his face is pressed to your neck.
"Cas," he whispers, reedy, and his hips are still moving reflexively. "Cas."
We can't do this, you think, not any of this. You can't keep pretending, can't keep on keeping on, can't keep the whole of purgatory back. You can't save the world, not again. Not this time.
"We can do this," you tell Dean, soft, and kiss his temple. "Dean. We'll be all right, you'll see."
You don't pause to wonder if he knows you are lying. You know him well enough to be sure he won't care, and that's good enough. It will have to be.