Fic: But Deliver Us From Evil (4/8)
Fic: But Deliver Us From Evil (4/8)
By: Pen37
Beta: clarksmuse
Rating: PG-13
Fandoms: Smallville/Supernatural
Characters: Chloe, Sam, Dean, Jo
Pairing: Chloe/Dean, Sam/Jo
Disclaimer: Not Mine, Fun only.
Summary: While hunting Kelpie, things go very wrong for Sam, Dean and Chloe.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8
This is part of the Special Projects series. The rest of the fics can be found here.
Written for the Crossovers100 challenge. Prompt #30 Death. The table is here.
10 hours earlier
One of the many side perks of working at The Daily Planet was crawling around the old newspaper stacks. Larger papers were so much more literary at the time. But smaller newspapers were another matter. If there was something she hated about research, it was crawling around the old newspaper stacks in a million forgettable towns across the country. Smaller papers of the time read like a matron aunt’s vacation letter: chatty things, filled with gossip and speculation.
As she combed through the early copies of the Branson newspapers, she found much the same: the announcement that William Hawkins would be the new postmaster and that Charles Fullbright was selling his share of the Branson Town Company.
By the time that Dean returned from talking to the recovery divers, Chloe had a fairly accurate picture of life in early Branson, which started as a logging community before the publication of a novel, The Shepherd of the Hills, helped to turn the city into a tourist spot.
None of that, however, could explain the mysterious drownings on the lake. And nothing, no matter how far back she looked, eluded to supernatural events, lake monsters, demons, ghosts or water spirits.
Just as she was crawling out of the last stack of archived newspapers and brushing dust from her hair, Dean stuck his head into the library archives. “You just about done here?”
“For all the good it did me,” Chloe stood up.
“Where’s Sam?” Dean glanced around the room with barely-concealed trepidation.
“He’s looking up books on local folklore,” Chloe said.
“You let him out of your sight?” Dean frowned at her as he turned, and marched to the elevator.
“I thought the chances were remote that he would be squished to death by a library cart.”
“You’re supposed to be keeping an eye on him, Chloe. Anything could happen.”
“And exactly how did you expect me to wrap him up in gauze, and keep him safe Dean? In case you didn’t notice, he’s a foot taller, and a lot better with the hand-to-hand stuff. He can pretty much go wherever he wants.”
“Fine. Next time, I’ll watch him and you can go talk to the witnesses.”
“Seeing as that’s my job anyway, I don’t have issues with that,” she said.
“Fine!”
“Fine!”
“Guys, keep it down,” Sam said as they walked into the reading room. “I don’t want to get thrown out.”
“Whatever,” Dean said absently. “So what did you find, Geek Boy?”
Sam turned his book around so that Dean could see it. Chloe circled behind Sam and read the title over his shoulder: Spooky Tales of the Ozarks. “Back when this was a logging community, there was a sawmill located out near that spot on the river. The sawmill owners had a bunch of draft horses shipped over from Scotland. So the story goes, one of them went crazy one day and drug the other three on his hitch, and the driver into the White River. The driver and three horses were found dead, but the fourth was never seen again.” He looked at Dean expectantly.
“Now what do you know of that looks like a big white horse and drags people into the water to drown them?”
“I got nothing.” Dean scratched his head. “Chloe?”
“Kelpie?”
“That’s what I thought.” Sam nodded in agreement. “Most of the folklore says that if you can get a bridle on a Kelpie, you could compel it to work for you.”
“What? Like the Jethro Tull Song? That doesn’t fit with what the divers said,” Dean replied.
“What did they say?” Chloe asked.
“They’re convinced that they’re seeing things. But I tried that trick you do where you don’t say anything, and then people keep talking to fill up the silence. It worked.”
“Old reporter’s trick, grasshopper,” Chloe said. “Your interview-fu is strong. Tomorrow, you try to take the pebble from my hand.”
Dean shook his head and grinned at her. “Thank you, Master Po.”
“So what did you find out?” Sam asked.
“I spoke with two divers. Bud and Annette. Annette is a Libra, and she likes puppies and sad, rainy days.”
Chloe crossed her arms and looked down. So much for Sam’s theory that Dean was serious about her.
“Dean,” Sam scoffed. “Tell me you didn’t get her phone number.”
There was a long pause, and when Chloe looked up, Dean was looking from Sam to her and back. His face had that uncomfortable, I-know-I-screwed-up-this-time look on it. “Well . . . No? Maybe. . . I didn’t ask for it. She just gave it to me. I totally wasn’t going to call her. I thought maybe you--” Here he pulled a three-by-five card out of his pocket and tried to hand it to Sam like a hot-potato.
“Me? Nuh-uh.” Sam shook his head emphatically and held his hands in the air in an adamant refusal. “If I want any chance with Jo in the near future, I’m not going within a five mile radius of some strange girl’s phone number.”
Dean sighed, dropped the card and smiled a sad smile “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
Chloe shook her head, picked up Sam’s book, and feigned disinterest as she pretended to read the pages. “So what did the divers say they saw?”
“They said that it looked like something straight out of Creature From The Black Lagoon.”
“Could still be a kelpie,” Chloe said grudgingly. “In most Celtic folklore, Kelpie are shapeshifters. A lot of the lake monster stories you hear about are actually re-tooled myths about water spirits. In the oldest reports of lake monsters, they look like horses. But about the time that dinosaurs were discovered, the stories about water monsters changed from equine to reptillian in appearance.”
“Reptillian,” Dean said uncertainly.
“Means looks like a dinosaur.” Sam rolled his eyes.
“Dude, I know that!”
Sam rolled his eyes again and turned back to the pile of books on his table.
“So how do we get rid of it?” Dean asked.
“We could try and bridle it,” Sam said. “According to legend, if you bridle a kelpie, you can control it. That’s how it came to be in the river, and now in the lake, to begin with.”
“Dude, are you nuts?” Dean shook his head emphatically. “Why don’t we just ask it to drown us, too?”
“There is one account,” Sam picked up another book, and opened it so that Chloe and Dean could see it. “According to oral tradition, a blacksmith from the island of Rasay killed a kelpie with a red-hot iron spit.”
“Oral tradition,” Dean snickered. “Awsome.”
Sam and Chloe both ignored him as they flipped through the books again. “So I’m thinking wrought-iron rounds might do it,”
“Worth a try,” Chloe shrugged. “How are we going to get it to come to us?”
“Bait?”
Chloe looked up to see both Dean and Sam looking at her thoughtfully. She sighed. “Time to go up into the rafters again,” she muttered.
“Sometimes you stick with what works,” Dean said.
“Just . . . Don’t let it drag me into the water,” Chloe said. “Healing abilities aside . . . I’m pretty sure I need air to survive.”
“That ain’t happening,” Dean shook his head emphatically. “I’m not letting anything happen to you, Chloe.”
Despite her misgivings, Chloe smiled at him. When he was intense like that, she really believed him.
Pray for me, I am so helpless and alone.
Chloe existed half-in a dream state. As her body repaired itself, she slept fitfully. Her waking hours were filled with half-remembered prayers of her youth. The irony of her death-bed spirituality wasn’t lost on her, but she figured that her rosary turned up all of a sudden for a reason. And what did she really have to lose by trying, anyway?
She was dozing with her eyes open when Jo arrived.
“You look like hell, Princess,” the blond bar-owner pronounced.
“Jo - Shit.”
“Mom told me you said not to call.” Her words were accusatory.
“Thought I’d wait until I had word one way or another on Sam,” Chloe shrugged. “You were six hours away, and driving scared wouldn’t help matters any.”
“I caught a flight to Springfield. Made the trip in two hours.”
“Sorry,” Chloe sighed. “I meant well. How’d you get a flight so fast?”
“Mike.” She shrugged at the name of the cluricaun who worked for her. “You’ve heard of fairy gold? Apparently they also have fairy Visa and Master Card as well. I’ll worry about that when I get back.” Her eyes cut over to where Sam was resting on the bed by the window.
“He’s okay,” Chloe said. “He was the least injured of all of us.”
She nodded as she wandered over, and traced the lines of his face with gentle fingertips. “When both the boys wake up, they’ll want to go up to Bobby’s to recover. That’s the closest to a home they’ve had since Pastor Jim died.”
Chloe nodded. She didn’t know what to say, really. This was the worst part of her powers. Being nearly healed and feeling guilty that she wasn’t the one lying broken on the bed.
“Don’t.” Jo said.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t sit there and blame yourself for being in one piece.” Jo shook her head. “The hunt is dangerous. Shit happens. That’s just a fact. If you hadn’t been what you are, neither one of these boys would’ve gotten out of there alive.”
Chloe nodded in acceptance of her words. “Okay.”
“Mom said that you thought it was a Kelpie.”
“That’s what all the evidence pointed to,” Chloe said. “But it had hide like a tank. And wrought-iron rounds just bounced off it.”
“Is it dead?”
“I think so,” Chloe said. “It tried to bite off my gun hand, and I shot it from the inside.”
“Were you using wrought iron rounds?”
“I - Yes?”
“You don’t sound certain.”
“All three of us had iron rounds,” Chloe said. “But we were running a little short, and I was going to be bait, anyway.”
“So you had some ordinary lead at the bottom of the clip?”
“We didn’t think things would get as far as they did.”
“Then we’d better check to make sure it’s really dead,” Jo said.
“We?”
“Doc probably didn’t want to disturb you, but Jake is here. He picked me up from the airport.”
Chloe paused and looked at Dean hesitantly.
“Chloe,” Jo said gently. “There’s a lesson about hunting that you won’t learn from Sam or Dean, because they never learned it: There’s personal, and there’s important. Sometimes they aren’t the same. Do you understand?”
Chloe nodded. She understood far better than Jo realized. She rocked to her feet and took physical stock. She was wearing a spare pair of Martha Svenson’s clothes. She felt like a scarecrow in the oversized clothing, with the jeans and sleeves that were just a bit long for her cuffed at the ankles and elbows. Her own bloody clothing was probably long gone. Still, she had her guns, and her boots. “I understand,” she said shortly. “There’s a mess to clean up.”
“I thought you might,” Jo said with a satisfied nod.
Chloe took one more, hesitant look at Dean. Then she put the Sullivan rosary in his hands and lay her head on his pillow.
“If you die on me, Dean Winchester. I swear to God, I’m going to kick your ass,” she whispered to him. Then she stood and followed Jo out of the room.
come to my aid in all my needs. Especially at the hour of my death, deign to strengthen me against the power of my enemies.
By: Pen37
Beta: clarksmuse
Rating: PG-13
Fandoms: Smallville/Supernatural
Characters: Chloe, Sam, Dean, Jo
Pairing: Chloe/Dean, Sam/Jo
Disclaimer: Not Mine, Fun only.
Summary: While hunting Kelpie, things go very wrong for Sam, Dean and Chloe.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8
This is part of the Special Projects series. The rest of the fics can be found here.
Written for the Crossovers100 challenge. Prompt #30 Death. The table is here.
10 hours earlier
One of the many side perks of working at The Daily Planet was crawling around the old newspaper stacks. Larger papers were so much more literary at the time. But smaller newspapers were another matter. If there was something she hated about research, it was crawling around the old newspaper stacks in a million forgettable towns across the country. Smaller papers of the time read like a matron aunt’s vacation letter: chatty things, filled with gossip and speculation.
As she combed through the early copies of the Branson newspapers, she found much the same: the announcement that William Hawkins would be the new postmaster and that Charles Fullbright was selling his share of the Branson Town Company.
By the time that Dean returned from talking to the recovery divers, Chloe had a fairly accurate picture of life in early Branson, which started as a logging community before the publication of a novel, The Shepherd of the Hills, helped to turn the city into a tourist spot.
None of that, however, could explain the mysterious drownings on the lake. And nothing, no matter how far back she looked, eluded to supernatural events, lake monsters, demons, ghosts or water spirits.
Just as she was crawling out of the last stack of archived newspapers and brushing dust from her hair, Dean stuck his head into the library archives. “You just about done here?”
“For all the good it did me,” Chloe stood up.
“Where’s Sam?” Dean glanced around the room with barely-concealed trepidation.
“He’s looking up books on local folklore,” Chloe said.
“You let him out of your sight?” Dean frowned at her as he turned, and marched to the elevator.
“I thought the chances were remote that he would be squished to death by a library cart.”
“You’re supposed to be keeping an eye on him, Chloe. Anything could happen.”
“And exactly how did you expect me to wrap him up in gauze, and keep him safe Dean? In case you didn’t notice, he’s a foot taller, and a lot better with the hand-to-hand stuff. He can pretty much go wherever he wants.”
“Fine. Next time, I’ll watch him and you can go talk to the witnesses.”
“Seeing as that’s my job anyway, I don’t have issues with that,” she said.
“Fine!”
“Fine!”
“Guys, keep it down,” Sam said as they walked into the reading room. “I don’t want to get thrown out.”
“Whatever,” Dean said absently. “So what did you find, Geek Boy?”
Sam turned his book around so that Dean could see it. Chloe circled behind Sam and read the title over his shoulder: Spooky Tales of the Ozarks. “Back when this was a logging community, there was a sawmill located out near that spot on the river. The sawmill owners had a bunch of draft horses shipped over from Scotland. So the story goes, one of them went crazy one day and drug the other three on his hitch, and the driver into the White River. The driver and three horses were found dead, but the fourth was never seen again.” He looked at Dean expectantly.
“Now what do you know of that looks like a big white horse and drags people into the water to drown them?”
“I got nothing.” Dean scratched his head. “Chloe?”
“Kelpie?”
“That’s what I thought.” Sam nodded in agreement. “Most of the folklore says that if you can get a bridle on a Kelpie, you could compel it to work for you.”
“What? Like the Jethro Tull Song? That doesn’t fit with what the divers said,” Dean replied.
“What did they say?” Chloe asked.
“They’re convinced that they’re seeing things. But I tried that trick you do where you don’t say anything, and then people keep talking to fill up the silence. It worked.”
“Old reporter’s trick, grasshopper,” Chloe said. “Your interview-fu is strong. Tomorrow, you try to take the pebble from my hand.”
Dean shook his head and grinned at her. “Thank you, Master Po.”
“So what did you find out?” Sam asked.
“I spoke with two divers. Bud and Annette. Annette is a Libra, and she likes puppies and sad, rainy days.”
Chloe crossed her arms and looked down. So much for Sam’s theory that Dean was serious about her.
“Dean,” Sam scoffed. “Tell me you didn’t get her phone number.”
There was a long pause, and when Chloe looked up, Dean was looking from Sam to her and back. His face had that uncomfortable, I-know-I-screwed-up-this-time look on it. “Well . . . No? Maybe. . . I didn’t ask for it. She just gave it to me. I totally wasn’t going to call her. I thought maybe you--” Here he pulled a three-by-five card out of his pocket and tried to hand it to Sam like a hot-potato.
“Me? Nuh-uh.” Sam shook his head emphatically and held his hands in the air in an adamant refusal. “If I want any chance with Jo in the near future, I’m not going within a five mile radius of some strange girl’s phone number.”
Dean sighed, dropped the card and smiled a sad smile “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
Chloe shook her head, picked up Sam’s book, and feigned disinterest as she pretended to read the pages. “So what did the divers say they saw?”
“They said that it looked like something straight out of Creature From The Black Lagoon.”
“Could still be a kelpie,” Chloe said grudgingly. “In most Celtic folklore, Kelpie are shapeshifters. A lot of the lake monster stories you hear about are actually re-tooled myths about water spirits. In the oldest reports of lake monsters, they look like horses. But about the time that dinosaurs were discovered, the stories about water monsters changed from equine to reptillian in appearance.”
“Reptillian,” Dean said uncertainly.
“Means looks like a dinosaur.” Sam rolled his eyes.
“Dude, I know that!”
Sam rolled his eyes again and turned back to the pile of books on his table.
“So how do we get rid of it?” Dean asked.
“We could try and bridle it,” Sam said. “According to legend, if you bridle a kelpie, you can control it. That’s how it came to be in the river, and now in the lake, to begin with.”
“Dude, are you nuts?” Dean shook his head emphatically. “Why don’t we just ask it to drown us, too?”
“There is one account,” Sam picked up another book, and opened it so that Chloe and Dean could see it. “According to oral tradition, a blacksmith from the island of Rasay killed a kelpie with a red-hot iron spit.”
“Oral tradition,” Dean snickered. “Awsome.”
Sam and Chloe both ignored him as they flipped through the books again. “So I’m thinking wrought-iron rounds might do it,”
“Worth a try,” Chloe shrugged. “How are we going to get it to come to us?”
“Bait?”
Chloe looked up to see both Dean and Sam looking at her thoughtfully. She sighed. “Time to go up into the rafters again,” she muttered.
“Sometimes you stick with what works,” Dean said.
“Just . . . Don’t let it drag me into the water,” Chloe said. “Healing abilities aside . . . I’m pretty sure I need air to survive.”
“That ain’t happening,” Dean shook his head emphatically. “I’m not letting anything happen to you, Chloe.”
Despite her misgivings, Chloe smiled at him. When he was intense like that, she really believed him.
Pray for me, I am so helpless and alone.
Chloe existed half-in a dream state. As her body repaired itself, she slept fitfully. Her waking hours were filled with half-remembered prayers of her youth. The irony of her death-bed spirituality wasn’t lost on her, but she figured that her rosary turned up all of a sudden for a reason. And what did she really have to lose by trying, anyway?
She was dozing with her eyes open when Jo arrived.
“You look like hell, Princess,” the blond bar-owner pronounced.
“Jo - Shit.”
“Mom told me you said not to call.” Her words were accusatory.
“Thought I’d wait until I had word one way or another on Sam,” Chloe shrugged. “You were six hours away, and driving scared wouldn’t help matters any.”
“I caught a flight to Springfield. Made the trip in two hours.”
“Sorry,” Chloe sighed. “I meant well. How’d you get a flight so fast?”
“Mike.” She shrugged at the name of the cluricaun who worked for her. “You’ve heard of fairy gold? Apparently they also have fairy Visa and Master Card as well. I’ll worry about that when I get back.” Her eyes cut over to where Sam was resting on the bed by the window.
“He’s okay,” Chloe said. “He was the least injured of all of us.”
She nodded as she wandered over, and traced the lines of his face with gentle fingertips. “When both the boys wake up, they’ll want to go up to Bobby’s to recover. That’s the closest to a home they’ve had since Pastor Jim died.”
Chloe nodded. She didn’t know what to say, really. This was the worst part of her powers. Being nearly healed and feeling guilty that she wasn’t the one lying broken on the bed.
“Don’t.” Jo said.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t sit there and blame yourself for being in one piece.” Jo shook her head. “The hunt is dangerous. Shit happens. That’s just a fact. If you hadn’t been what you are, neither one of these boys would’ve gotten out of there alive.”
Chloe nodded in acceptance of her words. “Okay.”
“Mom said that you thought it was a Kelpie.”
“That’s what all the evidence pointed to,” Chloe said. “But it had hide like a tank. And wrought-iron rounds just bounced off it.”
“Is it dead?”
“I think so,” Chloe said. “It tried to bite off my gun hand, and I shot it from the inside.”
“Were you using wrought iron rounds?”
“I - Yes?”
“You don’t sound certain.”
“All three of us had iron rounds,” Chloe said. “But we were running a little short, and I was going to be bait, anyway.”
“So you had some ordinary lead at the bottom of the clip?”
“We didn’t think things would get as far as they did.”
“Then we’d better check to make sure it’s really dead,” Jo said.
“We?”
“Doc probably didn’t want to disturb you, but Jake is here. He picked me up from the airport.”
Chloe paused and looked at Dean hesitantly.
“Chloe,” Jo said gently. “There’s a lesson about hunting that you won’t learn from Sam or Dean, because they never learned it: There’s personal, and there’s important. Sometimes they aren’t the same. Do you understand?”
Chloe nodded. She understood far better than Jo realized. She rocked to her feet and took physical stock. She was wearing a spare pair of Martha Svenson’s clothes. She felt like a scarecrow in the oversized clothing, with the jeans and sleeves that were just a bit long for her cuffed at the ankles and elbows. Her own bloody clothing was probably long gone. Still, she had her guns, and her boots. “I understand,” she said shortly. “There’s a mess to clean up.”
“I thought you might,” Jo said with a satisfied nod.
Chloe took one more, hesitant look at Dean. Then she put the Sullivan rosary in his hands and lay her head on his pillow.
“If you die on me, Dean Winchester. I swear to God, I’m going to kick your ass,” she whispered to him. Then she stood and followed Jo out of the room.
come to my aid in all my needs. Especially at the hour of my death, deign to strengthen me against the power of my enemies.