[fic] the places you have come to [oc_challenge: metal]
Title: The Places You Have Come To
Author: weaselett with charlies_dragon
Claim: Abigail and Lynn Rivers, Supernatural
Prompt: Table 1, metal ( tables)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Some inferred Violence
Summary: pieces of a life
Notes: The events of the story take place in the SPN universe, but no canon characters appear.
She focuses hard on drawing as perfect a representation of a fox as she can with her left hand, ignoring the mocking commentary from a number of her classmates.
As much as she hates the blackboard, she hates Miss Young more.
Their normal teacher, Miss Clark, knows that making them go up to the blackboard to illustrate their answers tends to be rather counterproductive. Half of the kids are more likely to draw random doodles than fulfil their actual purpose, others would cry when asked and the rest would just be mocked by the others.
Miss Young however, considers it character building.
Abby chews hard on her bottom lip as she stubbornly continues her work, focusing on working out how to make her hand do what she wants it to do and tuning out the voices. It’s not like she’s never used her left hand before. It's the hand that she uses when she plays chess with her grandfather, the hand that she uses to hold the plates when she dries them up every night. Though, she supposes, really that's not all that much compared to how many different things she uses her right hand for.
She finishes after what feels like a life time and returns to her seat, refusing to lower her gaze as Jennifer Darby sneers at her as she walks past. She does wince faintly though, when Jennifer manages to knock the new cast on her right arm.
--
She spends most of the night curled up on the backseat, waiting.
She would have slept, but sitting in a car in the middle of a graveyard she can't, though she's not sure why. If she kneels on the seat and looks out through the window she can see them both, outlined in the faint light from the torches, digging. She watches them for a few minutes every now and then, but in the end she gets bored and tries to sleep after a while.
She'd helped them, earlier, when they hadn't needed the torches, until her uncle had sent her back to the car. She wasn't allowed to be there when they reached the bottom of the grave, not yet. They should have been finished hours ago though, only that had been the wrong grave.
The right grave marker, but the wrong grave.
She isn't sure how her uncle knew, but he had seemed pretty certain when he'd told them. So he'd talked to the Sexton and had found the right one. The one that he and Lynn are digging now.
She isn't completely sure why they are doing it, she knows it has something to do with the weird lady and that it'll help people, if they salt and burn the coffin and the dead person inside, but she doesn't really understand how it will help. People are always saying that the dead can't harm you after all.
Then again, her uncle is always right about these things, so if he says they're helping people, they must be.
--
Once, only a few hours ago, the dress was pale blue and perfect.
Her cheeks burn as her uncle lectures her, out of the hearing of the many guests who are still milling around, even though her aunt and uncle are long gone now. She doesn't say a word, just nods and shakes her head at the appropriate moments.
He doesn't notice that she lacks any of the bloody scrapes to match the blood stains on the dress's torn hem. The collection of leaves and twigs woven into her hair, her filthy hands and face and her guilty silence are enough evidence for him.
She stands there for the whole ten minute lecture, silent and solemn, until he finishes. As long as she never does it again and she apologises to her aunt for ruining the dress, he's willing to let her off easy. He did worse himself when he was a boy after all. She gives him her word, never meeting his eyes, before scurrying off into the house to clean up.
She doesn't tell him that it was Lynn’s idea. Nor does she tell him that it's actually Lynn's dress that she's wearing, not her own.
--
She half expects it to burn her hand when she picks it up, taking in every detail of the delicate object. The longer she looks at it, the more her chest seems to ache.
The bright untarnished silver is a stark contrast to her hands, stained as they are with soil and other things that she doesn't want to consciously name, not yet. The chain's finer than most: the cross is covered in delicate swirls and lines, each one so lovingly engraved into the silver, barely visible unless the light catches the metal just right.
If someone made something like this for her she wouldn't have ever taken it off either.
Everyone's always telling her not to dwell on what could have been, but to focus instead on the good that they’re doing. They save people.
More people than they lose.
--
A few days after the national news stops mentioning the accident in every report, she slips out of the house alone and cycles the mile or so between their house and the junction.
She dismounts carefully, lowering her bike to the ground on one edge of a field before making her way across it to the side of the motorway. She hesitates for a moment before she steps out onto the hard shoulder, scanning the ground.
Most people, she knows, would think her strange, maybe even disturbed if they knew what she was doing, but most people live much safer and more ignorant lives than she does. She's killed things that used to be people and she's seen people die. Not many, but enough.
It takes fifteen minutes of searching before she finds what she's come for. She bends down carefully, hesitating for a moment before picking it up, tracing the edges carefully with her thumb. She straightens carefully before running back across the field to her bike, slipping the small fragment into a plastic bag before stowing it safely away in one of her pockets.
--
She lands heavily in the undergrowth, winded. This isn't how it was supposed to go.
Lynn screams at her from across the clearing, but she can't understand a word of what her sister's trying to say. It's probably a warning or some detailed plan to cover their arses now that the original plan has gone to pot. Sadly moving, to run or to fight doesn't seem like much of an option right now, not with a twisted ankle and a dislocated shoulder.
This is why she hates werewolves. Of all the hunts they've done, these are the ones that most often go wrong. Werewolves are just too unpredictable.
She rolls to the right just in time to avoid the wild claw swipe aimed in her direction by the werewolf, biting back a scream of pain. Having guns would also help she thinks, at least then they wouldn't have to get so close to the buggers. One decent shot and they'd be done, maybe two to be certain.
Lynn yells, this time it's a comment clearly directed at the beast himself, accompanied by a handful of well aimed stones, it howls it's annoyance before launching itself across the clearing. All Abby can do is hope that Lynn has something more than a handful of stones waiting for the thing when it reaches her.
--
She sits staring at the sorry looking knot of blue wool in her hands for a while before she finally gives in and starts to pack her small selection of tools away.
It was meant to be a surprise for Lynn. Something she'd made herself, with her own two hands. The only problem was that nothing she did seemed to turn out right, it either unravelled as soon as she tried to move it off the needles or it would turn into an unrecognisable mass of wool. She'd asked their aunt to help, but that seemed to only make it worse.
What was even more frustrating was the fact that every other woman in their family seemed to find it as easy as breathing.
She hides the bag quickly as the front door slams shut, effectively announcing her sister's return. She's going to have to think of something else to do now, there's nothing else for it, not with just a few days left until Lynn’s birthday. The only problem is she's not all that sure what else there is that she can do.
--
She doesn't cry, she doesn't think she could even if she wanted to. She presses down on the wound, ignoring her uncle’s soft cry of pain; she has to stop the bleeding.
Something soaks into her jeans as she kneels on the ground next to her uncle, using one hand to hold down the pressure bandage and the other to stop her uncle from moving away from the apparent source of his pain. She can hear her heartbeat in her ears in sharp contrast to his pained gasps for air.
She fights desperately against the panic, against the possibilities she refuses to consider. Instead she silently berates herself. This is her fault. If she hadn't forgotten this month this wouldn't be happening.
It didn't matter that her uncle had been too close to the thing, didn't matter that he had done one of the things that he always told the girls not to.
This was her fault, not his. Never his.
She doesn't know how long it's been since Lynn left. Doesn't know how long it's been since she saw their uncle go down to the death flails of their prey. Worse: she doesn't know why the bleeding won't stop.
--
She drives, keeping her eyes focused on the road, waiting.
She knows what to expect, what needs to be done. This isn't the first time she's been in this kind of situation, though it's the first time she's been in it alone.
It's cold in the car, despite the fact that the heating is cranked up to full blast and she curls up around the wheel a little, knuckles white. Time seems to pass slower than normal, but she's doing 70mph and has already easily negotiated half of the bends between the crossroads and the village that's her destination.
There's no one else on the road, a mercy given the fact that like so many other Cornish roads it's narrow and winding, the high boundary hedges making it even narrower with new growths. She shouldn't be driving as fast as she is. She doesn't know the road well enough.
There's a sigh from the back seat and she can't help but look away from the road, glancing in the mirror. The girl's as pretty as the stories say, but she's silent. She should have spoken the moment she'd appeared, begged to be taken home. Instead she just sits there, staring at Abby's back.
Abby focuses on the road again, forcing herself to focus on the job at hand. She isn't going to let the girl bother her. All she has to do is stay focused long enough to get to the village and turn down the right driveway.
She finally looks in the mirror again just as she rounds the last corner then she brakes hard, shocked.
The girl's gone and in her place is a snowdrop.
--
It's been years since she last forgot.
The poor battered old biscuit tin has pride of place on the mantle, between the picture of Beth’s family and the one good picture Abby has of her sister and uncle. It's harder for her to find things for it now, but she manages.
Last month it was a corner torn out of one of Beth's new sports magazines, so brightly coloured in comparison to other slips of paper that it now shares space with. The month before she had chosen a bead specially at the craft market that Beth had dragged her to, insisting that she needed to widen her horizons when it came to her sewing.
It's odd though, she's so used to having a balance in her collection. Once upon a time she would be secreting away a scrap of dirty blue fabric one month, a piece of a broken silver blade the next. The good with the bad.
Sometimes she's tempted to hunt down something more tragic to add to her collection, but that wouldn't be the same. Everything that she's put in that tin has meaning.
Every piece of her collection touches a part of her, however small. Every tiny little scrap in that ordinary looking biscuit tin has meaning, even when life doesn't seem to.
--------
Author: weaselett with charlies_dragon
Claim: Abigail and Lynn Rivers, Supernatural
Prompt: Table 1, metal ( tables)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Some inferred Violence
Summary: pieces of a life
Notes: The events of the story take place in the SPN universe, but no canon characters appear.
She focuses hard on drawing as perfect a representation of a fox as she can with her left hand, ignoring the mocking commentary from a number of her classmates.
As much as she hates the blackboard, she hates Miss Young more.
Their normal teacher, Miss Clark, knows that making them go up to the blackboard to illustrate their answers tends to be rather counterproductive. Half of the kids are more likely to draw random doodles than fulfil their actual purpose, others would cry when asked and the rest would just be mocked by the others.
Miss Young however, considers it character building.
Abby chews hard on her bottom lip as she stubbornly continues her work, focusing on working out how to make her hand do what she wants it to do and tuning out the voices. It’s not like she’s never used her left hand before. It's the hand that she uses when she plays chess with her grandfather, the hand that she uses to hold the plates when she dries them up every night. Though, she supposes, really that's not all that much compared to how many different things she uses her right hand for.
She finishes after what feels like a life time and returns to her seat, refusing to lower her gaze as Jennifer Darby sneers at her as she walks past. She does wince faintly though, when Jennifer manages to knock the new cast on her right arm.
--
She spends most of the night curled up on the backseat, waiting.
She would have slept, but sitting in a car in the middle of a graveyard she can't, though she's not sure why. If she kneels on the seat and looks out through the window she can see them both, outlined in the faint light from the torches, digging. She watches them for a few minutes every now and then, but in the end she gets bored and tries to sleep after a while.
She'd helped them, earlier, when they hadn't needed the torches, until her uncle had sent her back to the car. She wasn't allowed to be there when they reached the bottom of the grave, not yet. They should have been finished hours ago though, only that had been the wrong grave.
The right grave marker, but the wrong grave.
She isn't sure how her uncle knew, but he had seemed pretty certain when he'd told them. So he'd talked to the Sexton and had found the right one. The one that he and Lynn are digging now.
She isn't completely sure why they are doing it, she knows it has something to do with the weird lady and that it'll help people, if they salt and burn the coffin and the dead person inside, but she doesn't really understand how it will help. People are always saying that the dead can't harm you after all.
Then again, her uncle is always right about these things, so if he says they're helping people, they must be.
--
Once, only a few hours ago, the dress was pale blue and perfect.
Her cheeks burn as her uncle lectures her, out of the hearing of the many guests who are still milling around, even though her aunt and uncle are long gone now. She doesn't say a word, just nods and shakes her head at the appropriate moments.
He doesn't notice that she lacks any of the bloody scrapes to match the blood stains on the dress's torn hem. The collection of leaves and twigs woven into her hair, her filthy hands and face and her guilty silence are enough evidence for him.
She stands there for the whole ten minute lecture, silent and solemn, until he finishes. As long as she never does it again and she apologises to her aunt for ruining the dress, he's willing to let her off easy. He did worse himself when he was a boy after all. She gives him her word, never meeting his eyes, before scurrying off into the house to clean up.
She doesn't tell him that it was Lynn’s idea. Nor does she tell him that it's actually Lynn's dress that she's wearing, not her own.
--
She half expects it to burn her hand when she picks it up, taking in every detail of the delicate object. The longer she looks at it, the more her chest seems to ache.
The bright untarnished silver is a stark contrast to her hands, stained as they are with soil and other things that she doesn't want to consciously name, not yet. The chain's finer than most: the cross is covered in delicate swirls and lines, each one so lovingly engraved into the silver, barely visible unless the light catches the metal just right.
If someone made something like this for her she wouldn't have ever taken it off either.
Everyone's always telling her not to dwell on what could have been, but to focus instead on the good that they’re doing. They save people.
More people than they lose.
--
A few days after the national news stops mentioning the accident in every report, she slips out of the house alone and cycles the mile or so between their house and the junction.
She dismounts carefully, lowering her bike to the ground on one edge of a field before making her way across it to the side of the motorway. She hesitates for a moment before she steps out onto the hard shoulder, scanning the ground.
Most people, she knows, would think her strange, maybe even disturbed if they knew what she was doing, but most people live much safer and more ignorant lives than she does. She's killed things that used to be people and she's seen people die. Not many, but enough.
It takes fifteen minutes of searching before she finds what she's come for. She bends down carefully, hesitating for a moment before picking it up, tracing the edges carefully with her thumb. She straightens carefully before running back across the field to her bike, slipping the small fragment into a plastic bag before stowing it safely away in one of her pockets.
--
She lands heavily in the undergrowth, winded. This isn't how it was supposed to go.
Lynn screams at her from across the clearing, but she can't understand a word of what her sister's trying to say. It's probably a warning or some detailed plan to cover their arses now that the original plan has gone to pot. Sadly moving, to run or to fight doesn't seem like much of an option right now, not with a twisted ankle and a dislocated shoulder.
This is why she hates werewolves. Of all the hunts they've done, these are the ones that most often go wrong. Werewolves are just too unpredictable.
She rolls to the right just in time to avoid the wild claw swipe aimed in her direction by the werewolf, biting back a scream of pain. Having guns would also help she thinks, at least then they wouldn't have to get so close to the buggers. One decent shot and they'd be done, maybe two to be certain.
Lynn yells, this time it's a comment clearly directed at the beast himself, accompanied by a handful of well aimed stones, it howls it's annoyance before launching itself across the clearing. All Abby can do is hope that Lynn has something more than a handful of stones waiting for the thing when it reaches her.
--
She sits staring at the sorry looking knot of blue wool in her hands for a while before she finally gives in and starts to pack her small selection of tools away.
It was meant to be a surprise for Lynn. Something she'd made herself, with her own two hands. The only problem was that nothing she did seemed to turn out right, it either unravelled as soon as she tried to move it off the needles or it would turn into an unrecognisable mass of wool. She'd asked their aunt to help, but that seemed to only make it worse.
What was even more frustrating was the fact that every other woman in their family seemed to find it as easy as breathing.
She hides the bag quickly as the front door slams shut, effectively announcing her sister's return. She's going to have to think of something else to do now, there's nothing else for it, not with just a few days left until Lynn’s birthday. The only problem is she's not all that sure what else there is that she can do.
--
She doesn't cry, she doesn't think she could even if she wanted to. She presses down on the wound, ignoring her uncle’s soft cry of pain; she has to stop the bleeding.
Something soaks into her jeans as she kneels on the ground next to her uncle, using one hand to hold down the pressure bandage and the other to stop her uncle from moving away from the apparent source of his pain. She can hear her heartbeat in her ears in sharp contrast to his pained gasps for air.
She fights desperately against the panic, against the possibilities she refuses to consider. Instead she silently berates herself. This is her fault. If she hadn't forgotten this month this wouldn't be happening.
It didn't matter that her uncle had been too close to the thing, didn't matter that he had done one of the things that he always told the girls not to.
This was her fault, not his. Never his.
She doesn't know how long it's been since Lynn left. Doesn't know how long it's been since she saw their uncle go down to the death flails of their prey. Worse: she doesn't know why the bleeding won't stop.
--
She drives, keeping her eyes focused on the road, waiting.
She knows what to expect, what needs to be done. This isn't the first time she's been in this kind of situation, though it's the first time she's been in it alone.
It's cold in the car, despite the fact that the heating is cranked up to full blast and she curls up around the wheel a little, knuckles white. Time seems to pass slower than normal, but she's doing 70mph and has already easily negotiated half of the bends between the crossroads and the village that's her destination.
There's no one else on the road, a mercy given the fact that like so many other Cornish roads it's narrow and winding, the high boundary hedges making it even narrower with new growths. She shouldn't be driving as fast as she is. She doesn't know the road well enough.
There's a sigh from the back seat and she can't help but look away from the road, glancing in the mirror. The girl's as pretty as the stories say, but she's silent. She should have spoken the moment she'd appeared, begged to be taken home. Instead she just sits there, staring at Abby's back.
Abby focuses on the road again, forcing herself to focus on the job at hand. She isn't going to let the girl bother her. All she has to do is stay focused long enough to get to the village and turn down the right driveway.
She finally looks in the mirror again just as she rounds the last corner then she brakes hard, shocked.
The girl's gone and in her place is a snowdrop.
--
It's been years since she last forgot.
The poor battered old biscuit tin has pride of place on the mantle, between the picture of Beth’s family and the one good picture Abby has of her sister and uncle. It's harder for her to find things for it now, but she manages.
Last month it was a corner torn out of one of Beth's new sports magazines, so brightly coloured in comparison to other slips of paper that it now shares space with. The month before she had chosen a bead specially at the craft market that Beth had dragged her to, insisting that she needed to widen her horizons when it came to her sewing.
It's odd though, she's so used to having a balance in her collection. Once upon a time she would be secreting away a scrap of dirty blue fabric one month, a piece of a broken silver blade the next. The good with the bad.
Sometimes she's tempted to hunt down something more tragic to add to her collection, but that wouldn't be the same. Everything that she's put in that tin has meaning.
Every piece of her collection touches a part of her, however small. Every tiny little scrap in that ordinary looking biscuit tin has meaning, even when life doesn't seem to.
--------