(no subject)
Compass
by whereupon
Supernatural: Sam/ofc, season four, R. 3,160 words.
It is the first week of November, and he is walking, and he cannot remember why.
In very belated response to a prompt by santacarlagypsy.
The leaves rustling in the wind, caught against the curbs and trapped in the gutters all along this road down which darkness waits expectant and so patient at the edge of each streetlight's golden haze, sound like breath, the breath of something vast and predatory and impossibly old. It's not wise to be out tonight no matter how much silver a person has on him, how heavy his pockets are with iron or how quickly he might be able to draw the gun from where it's tucked like a talisman in his waistband, safe at the small of his back.
It's not wise, but he's here all the same, because that's how these things work -- curses, spells, enchantments, hexes. They're not fate, but if you get caught up in them, you're trapped all the same; all you can do, most of the time, is ride them out, play along and hope you make it through to the end. Sometimes, of course, you can't even do that: sometimes, you fall where you're standing, spindle-pricked or snake-bitten or what have you, and if there's a part of you left able to recognize your place in a fairy tale for what it is at that point, all you can do is wonder how long it will take until your hero, or your heroine, shows up.
Sometimes it takes a fortnight. Other times, you're left waiting for hundreds of years. On rare occasions, no one ever shows and the sleeper is thus never awakened, though those stories, due to their messier-than-preferable nature, are not often retold, or even written down at all.
This is not that kind of spell.
It is the first week of November, and he is walking, and he cannot remember why. If he were to think about that, he would be concerned, but he hasn't yet, and he won't. He is walking, drawn towards something without knowing why, or how, or even what it is to which he walks. He is focusing instead on the sound of his own breath, of his heartbeat, of the blood thrumming through his veins, hot copper against the year's chill. There are stories about that, too, about blood spilled onto fallowed fields and the life granted by such an act, but this isn't one of them.
As he walks, he sees, at the far end of the road, set back from the glow of the streetlights, that there is a light on in someone's home, the only one on down this road tonight. It's not the cool blue of a television left to play as someone sleeps uncomfortably on a couch, dreaming to a soundtrack of canned laughter; warped by the windowpane as he approaches, it reminds him of candles, and he thinks, without any sense of irony, that there are spells for summoning that work only at this time of year. There are others for winter and spring and for summer solstice; each date has its own, but it's this one, balanced at the precipice of the underworld, that has always seemed most relevant to him. It's easy to tell himself it's because of what happened on that night so many years ago, when the whole world burned and he was too young to know it. Sometimes, he even believes that.
But what he does or doesn't believe doesn't matter right now. What matters is that he sees this light like a candle, and as he does, he knows where he's going, where he'll end up. He recognizes it because he's been there before, not in a dream or in a vision, but a few hours ago when the sun had been high and bright in the cold autumn sky and his brother had progressed from telling him to get his oversized legs moving to kicking him in the ankle whenever he trailed behind. His brother isn't with him now, because that, too, is how this spell works, how this story goes. That his brother is absent not because he's playing his role by suffering hypersomnia but because he passed out in their motel room after finishing a bottle of cheap whiskey might be a matter of semantics: the result is the same, after all.
He doesn't need to knock on the door, when he reaches the porch upon which he'd stood that afternoon; being called here has granted him all the permission he needs to enter. The latch catches behind him and he sees for a moment his reflection in the mirror mounted on the wall. He does not linger. Warm light, darker than honey, spills from the kitchen at the end of the hall where hours before he'd sipped coffee laced with cinnamon and tried to be attentive enough to the witness for both himself and his brother, because once they'd stopped moving, once they'd gotten where they next needed to be, Dean had appeared to stop paying attention to much of anything at all.
Not that Sam could blame him, really. This time of year has rarely been anything but cruel to them, and this year in particular, though his brother is returned from hell, they are both red-eyed, weary with the weight of the secrets they keep from each other. Which is why neither of them gave it any thought when, after serving them both coffee heavy with spices, the witness, who by then they knew as Catherine Jeffries and who had hair the color of the fallen leaves wind-strewn across her yard and who said she was sorry she couldn't help them further, touched Sam's wrist where the white fabric of his shirt had ridden up, nor when, as they stood to leave, she recited to him the first seven words of a spell.
How were they supposed to know it was a spell, you want to know? After all, the words didn't rhyme and it wasn't in any of the languages that would have tipped them off immediately. She didn't hiss the words, nor dig her nails into his fragile skin to draw blood to seal the deal when she was done. In short, she didn't act, or look, in the least like she was sent over from central casting to play the Wicked Witch of New Haven County.
That's the thing about spells. That's why they work, over and over again, and that's why we tell these stories about them, so that you'll know. So that when you find yourself in a story, maybe you'll remember enough to make it to the end. Not all spells involve eye of newt and horn of toad, nor baby's blood or an innocent man's tears, just like not all witches live deep in the forest, tucked away from the world in cabins made of gingerbread or built up high on chicken legs.
Sometimes all it takes is a cup of coffee, and a few kind words, from which hang the dual, invisible weights of history and intent, and a pretty woman's smile.
Sometimes, spells aren't even bad, aren't cast for vengeance or out of greed or jealousy, out of the craving to make someone pay or to gain something that it is not one's right to claim. Knowing a little magic doesn't make somebody evil, and if sometimes they use that magic, is that really any different than somebody who knows cars finding work in a garage? You use the gifts that God, or the gods, or the contents of your chromosome pairs, gave you, or the ones you spend years bruising yourself, working yourself bloody, to learn. But that's not the point of our story right now, and where were we?
Sam takes one step into the kitchen, and then another, and the room smells like cardamom and baked pumpkin. Catherine smiles at him from her seat at the kitchen table, where she is reading an old paperback novel with spaceships on the cover, and rises to her feet. "You came," she says. "I was wondering if you would," and in truth she was, because enchantments are never a certain thing. They're not an exact science, you could say, and maybe find a kind of droll amusement in it. Some spells are broken just as soon as they're cast, through pure luck or through chance -- a tossed coin, salt spilled backwards, a kiss from one's beloved just as one's eyes begin to grow weary, to slip closed -- and while you could say it's pure luck that Sam and Dean have made it this far to begin with, well, not only are there stories about that, but there's a song about it, too. If it weren't for bad luck, and you know the rest.
Sam nods. He doesn't speak. "I'm not going to hurt you," Catherine says. "I just want to know why you're here. Not now, but before. What you think I did. I know you and that guy aren't really FBI agents." Three of her sentences are lies, two are truth. Sam does not yet know this, but he shifts uncomfortably on his feet all the same.
He is uncomfortable, with her watching him like she knows something that he doesn't, but he doesn't have to give her anything; that's not part of the spell. Summoning something doesn't give you power over it, not the power to make it speak truth. Just as you can make sure that a girl wanders down the right hallway, the one that will lead her to the boy with hair like thatched gold whom she will kiss as the clock chimes midnight, but you cannot make her love him, that he has been brought here means exactly that: he has been brought here. They could stand there all night, if he wanted, until the sun began to rise and he turned on his heel to walk through the wakening streets back to his brother.
"I know what you did," he says, and grits his teeth at the truth of that. He can't believe how foolish he's been, cannot believe that he let himself get this far, that he let himself get cursed like some --
He almost manages to keep himself from thinking human, but not quite. He tells himself it's part of the spell, but he knows it isn't; he swallows past the sense of dread that has welled like bitterness at the back of his throat and continues, "You're a witch." He means it as an accusation.
"Yeah," she says. "That doesn't mean I'm the one who killed her, though. You have to know that."
"No, I don't," he says. "You brought me here, didn't you? That's pretty black magic."
She lifts her eyebrows. "Black magic?" she says. "Seriously? It was a summoning spell." She shrugs. "You want it lifted, fine. There you go." She doesn't move, and neither does he. He tells himself it's because he's hesitant to try it; he knows what happens if you try to force your way out of a fairytale, throw yourself at the edge of the spell that binds you. The magical equivalent of an electric fence isn't kind.
"I'm not the one keeping you here," she says a moment later. "I'm not the one forcing you to do . . . what you're doing." She swallows and her throat works and he wonders how much she knows. She'd touched his wrist, after all, and all sorts of secrets can be transmitted that way. "I'm not the one writing your story like this, Sam. Some things, you can change."
He draws the gun from his waistband. Her breath catches at the sight of it, but she doesn't flinch. She meets his eyes, her gaze as steady as his own has become, and he can almost overlook the fact that her hands are trembling. She is telling the truth.
He sets the gun down on the counter. The barrel is black as his lover's eyes next to the bowl of fruit that he expects to contain apples, or maybe pomegranates, but that he sees holds three oranges, instead. No matter: they have their own mythology.
Catherine waits for him to come to her, and then she tilts her head up as he tilts his down. She's taller than he'd thought; he doesn't have to bend down nearly as far as he'd expected.
Not that he'd expected anything, he tells himself, and her mouth opens beneath his. Her mouth is gentle, she is gentle, and he had almost forgotten what that was like, to be kissed by a girl who smells not of gunpowder or sulfur or blood-iron but of pumpkin bread and the last lingering traces of an unfamiliar perfume, who does not dress in black as though spending each day in mourning. Her arms circle his neck, catch at the nape as she sighs against him. They are both breathing heavily by the time he lifts her onto the table. Her palm rests for a moment against the side of his face, her eyes meeting his intently and as deeply as though she is searching for something lost at the bottom of the sea. He blinks and she moves her hand to the collar of his shirt, quick fingers working all down the buttons.
Her breath is hot on his collarbone as he unzips her jeans; he rests his head against the curve of her neck, listening to the rhythm of her heart, pounding fragile and desperate as wings beneath her skin, and trails a hand across the soft skin of her thigh. He kisses her stomach and she tilts her head back; she makes a small cry when he enters her and her hands, gripping his shoulders, tighten. He stops listening to her heartbeat then, intent instead on the sounds she makes like just this side of a pleasure/pain dichotomy, until she moans low in her throat and he stops thinking about much of anything at all.
Later, more than minutes but less than hours, they part. She ducks her head, reaching behind herself for her bra, and he blushes faintly, looking away as he does up his belt. Spells can only take you so far, after all. What you do when you get to that point -- and how you deal with the aftermath -- is up to you. Draw the knife, turn back from the house, pretend not to hear the man who calls up to your tower, or the woman who beckons to you from the edge of that fog-wrapped river.
He knows what she has given him, and he wonders what he has given her in exchange, but he will not ask. He will not let himself hear the answers, because it's easier to pretend that things aren't true if they are not spoken aloud.
"I hope you find the ending you're looking for," she says, buttoning up her shirt. You can only do so much with the opportunities offered to you. Not all connections are instantaneous; only rarely does one fall in love at first sight. Rarer still are the times at which it is indeed true love as opposed to a combination of smoke and light and pheromones. If the confusion is not sorted out, if the correct identification isn't made before the exchanging of vows, the results might break your heart, and one thing that is true across almost every story is that your heart is the most valuable thing that you can ever fully own.
"Thank you," he says without thinking, force of habit, and the formality hangs in the air, weirdly polite. He turns to go; she doesn't move. She doesn't watch him leave, and she doesn't say anything else.
When he gets back to the motel room, he will find that his brother is still asleep, that his absence was not noticed. He will sit on the edge of his own bed and he will think of women offering him their bloody hands, of his brother offering his own bright and bloody heart in place of Sam's, so that Sam might have what Dean could not. He will think of temptresses and trades and bargains, and he will tell himself that he is not in a story; he will tell himself he does not know how this will end, that he cannot, because its ending has not yet been written. He will tell himself he does not believe in fate, and he will close his eyes, and as the sun begins at long last to rise, to spill harvest light down these cold November streets, he will tell himself that it was only a spell, that in real life one is never made aware of his or her role quite so easily, that one never sees behind the curtain. He will sleep.
And Catherine will lower her paperback novel, and she will measure grounds into the machine next to the sink, and as she waits for the coffee to brew, she will lean against the counter and watch the frost glitter on the fallen leaves, and she will wonder if she could have tried harder, if she could have said something else, could have somehow found the right combination of words to make him believe her. She knows better, though; she knows, even if he doesn't, her role in this story. She can warn, she can foretell and remind and plea, but her words will fall on deaf ears. It is not her role to intervene. When her story is told, she will serve as Madame Foreshadowing, though she might too play that femme fatale Irony with stilettos like daggers and a knife-glint smirk. It depends on the narrator. It always does.
She also knows that knowing as much won't make what happens next any easier. It never does.
The coffee machine burbles to a stop. She pours herself a cup, steaming and rich and smelling like places she has never seen and that she never will, and settles back onto the couch beside the window that looks out onto the street. There's work to be done. It is still autumn and so there is still power crackling amongst the shed leaves and the shadows on these last woodsmoke nights, and she has only until winter to finish. While her own ending cannot be changed, her story is still unraveling, and she would not have it any other way.
Still, even as she bends to her work, knowing that she has her own troubles to think about, she says a prayer on his behalf to whatever gods of story might exist.
She knows better than to expect it to be answered, to have any effect at all, but she says it anyway.
She's caught in this story, just like Sam is and just like his brother is, but for as long as she can, she's going to tell it like it's her own, just like they will. There's a chance, always, until at last it's written down--
--
end
by whereupon
Supernatural: Sam/ofc, season four, R. 3,160 words.
It is the first week of November, and he is walking, and he cannot remember why.
In very belated response to a prompt by santacarlagypsy.
The leaves rustling in the wind, caught against the curbs and trapped in the gutters all along this road down which darkness waits expectant and so patient at the edge of each streetlight's golden haze, sound like breath, the breath of something vast and predatory and impossibly old. It's not wise to be out tonight no matter how much silver a person has on him, how heavy his pockets are with iron or how quickly he might be able to draw the gun from where it's tucked like a talisman in his waistband, safe at the small of his back.
It's not wise, but he's here all the same, because that's how these things work -- curses, spells, enchantments, hexes. They're not fate, but if you get caught up in them, you're trapped all the same; all you can do, most of the time, is ride them out, play along and hope you make it through to the end. Sometimes, of course, you can't even do that: sometimes, you fall where you're standing, spindle-pricked or snake-bitten or what have you, and if there's a part of you left able to recognize your place in a fairy tale for what it is at that point, all you can do is wonder how long it will take until your hero, or your heroine, shows up.
Sometimes it takes a fortnight. Other times, you're left waiting for hundreds of years. On rare occasions, no one ever shows and the sleeper is thus never awakened, though those stories, due to their messier-than-preferable nature, are not often retold, or even written down at all.
This is not that kind of spell.
It is the first week of November, and he is walking, and he cannot remember why. If he were to think about that, he would be concerned, but he hasn't yet, and he won't. He is walking, drawn towards something without knowing why, or how, or even what it is to which he walks. He is focusing instead on the sound of his own breath, of his heartbeat, of the blood thrumming through his veins, hot copper against the year's chill. There are stories about that, too, about blood spilled onto fallowed fields and the life granted by such an act, but this isn't one of them.
As he walks, he sees, at the far end of the road, set back from the glow of the streetlights, that there is a light on in someone's home, the only one on down this road tonight. It's not the cool blue of a television left to play as someone sleeps uncomfortably on a couch, dreaming to a soundtrack of canned laughter; warped by the windowpane as he approaches, it reminds him of candles, and he thinks, without any sense of irony, that there are spells for summoning that work only at this time of year. There are others for winter and spring and for summer solstice; each date has its own, but it's this one, balanced at the precipice of the underworld, that has always seemed most relevant to him. It's easy to tell himself it's because of what happened on that night so many years ago, when the whole world burned and he was too young to know it. Sometimes, he even believes that.
But what he does or doesn't believe doesn't matter right now. What matters is that he sees this light like a candle, and as he does, he knows where he's going, where he'll end up. He recognizes it because he's been there before, not in a dream or in a vision, but a few hours ago when the sun had been high and bright in the cold autumn sky and his brother had progressed from telling him to get his oversized legs moving to kicking him in the ankle whenever he trailed behind. His brother isn't with him now, because that, too, is how this spell works, how this story goes. That his brother is absent not because he's playing his role by suffering hypersomnia but because he passed out in their motel room after finishing a bottle of cheap whiskey might be a matter of semantics: the result is the same, after all.
He doesn't need to knock on the door, when he reaches the porch upon which he'd stood that afternoon; being called here has granted him all the permission he needs to enter. The latch catches behind him and he sees for a moment his reflection in the mirror mounted on the wall. He does not linger. Warm light, darker than honey, spills from the kitchen at the end of the hall where hours before he'd sipped coffee laced with cinnamon and tried to be attentive enough to the witness for both himself and his brother, because once they'd stopped moving, once they'd gotten where they next needed to be, Dean had appeared to stop paying attention to much of anything at all.
Not that Sam could blame him, really. This time of year has rarely been anything but cruel to them, and this year in particular, though his brother is returned from hell, they are both red-eyed, weary with the weight of the secrets they keep from each other. Which is why neither of them gave it any thought when, after serving them both coffee heavy with spices, the witness, who by then they knew as Catherine Jeffries and who had hair the color of the fallen leaves wind-strewn across her yard and who said she was sorry she couldn't help them further, touched Sam's wrist where the white fabric of his shirt had ridden up, nor when, as they stood to leave, she recited to him the first seven words of a spell.
How were they supposed to know it was a spell, you want to know? After all, the words didn't rhyme and it wasn't in any of the languages that would have tipped them off immediately. She didn't hiss the words, nor dig her nails into his fragile skin to draw blood to seal the deal when she was done. In short, she didn't act, or look, in the least like she was sent over from central casting to play the Wicked Witch of New Haven County.
That's the thing about spells. That's why they work, over and over again, and that's why we tell these stories about them, so that you'll know. So that when you find yourself in a story, maybe you'll remember enough to make it to the end. Not all spells involve eye of newt and horn of toad, nor baby's blood or an innocent man's tears, just like not all witches live deep in the forest, tucked away from the world in cabins made of gingerbread or built up high on chicken legs.
Sometimes all it takes is a cup of coffee, and a few kind words, from which hang the dual, invisible weights of history and intent, and a pretty woman's smile.
Sometimes, spells aren't even bad, aren't cast for vengeance or out of greed or jealousy, out of the craving to make someone pay or to gain something that it is not one's right to claim. Knowing a little magic doesn't make somebody evil, and if sometimes they use that magic, is that really any different than somebody who knows cars finding work in a garage? You use the gifts that God, or the gods, or the contents of your chromosome pairs, gave you, or the ones you spend years bruising yourself, working yourself bloody, to learn. But that's not the point of our story right now, and where were we?
Sam takes one step into the kitchen, and then another, and the room smells like cardamom and baked pumpkin. Catherine smiles at him from her seat at the kitchen table, where she is reading an old paperback novel with spaceships on the cover, and rises to her feet. "You came," she says. "I was wondering if you would," and in truth she was, because enchantments are never a certain thing. They're not an exact science, you could say, and maybe find a kind of droll amusement in it. Some spells are broken just as soon as they're cast, through pure luck or through chance -- a tossed coin, salt spilled backwards, a kiss from one's beloved just as one's eyes begin to grow weary, to slip closed -- and while you could say it's pure luck that Sam and Dean have made it this far to begin with, well, not only are there stories about that, but there's a song about it, too. If it weren't for bad luck, and you know the rest.
Sam nods. He doesn't speak. "I'm not going to hurt you," Catherine says. "I just want to know why you're here. Not now, but before. What you think I did. I know you and that guy aren't really FBI agents." Three of her sentences are lies, two are truth. Sam does not yet know this, but he shifts uncomfortably on his feet all the same.
He is uncomfortable, with her watching him like she knows something that he doesn't, but he doesn't have to give her anything; that's not part of the spell. Summoning something doesn't give you power over it, not the power to make it speak truth. Just as you can make sure that a girl wanders down the right hallway, the one that will lead her to the boy with hair like thatched gold whom she will kiss as the clock chimes midnight, but you cannot make her love him, that he has been brought here means exactly that: he has been brought here. They could stand there all night, if he wanted, until the sun began to rise and he turned on his heel to walk through the wakening streets back to his brother.
"I know what you did," he says, and grits his teeth at the truth of that. He can't believe how foolish he's been, cannot believe that he let himself get this far, that he let himself get cursed like some --
He almost manages to keep himself from thinking human, but not quite. He tells himself it's part of the spell, but he knows it isn't; he swallows past the sense of dread that has welled like bitterness at the back of his throat and continues, "You're a witch." He means it as an accusation.
"Yeah," she says. "That doesn't mean I'm the one who killed her, though. You have to know that."
"No, I don't," he says. "You brought me here, didn't you? That's pretty black magic."
She lifts her eyebrows. "Black magic?" she says. "Seriously? It was a summoning spell." She shrugs. "You want it lifted, fine. There you go." She doesn't move, and neither does he. He tells himself it's because he's hesitant to try it; he knows what happens if you try to force your way out of a fairytale, throw yourself at the edge of the spell that binds you. The magical equivalent of an electric fence isn't kind.
"I'm not the one keeping you here," she says a moment later. "I'm not the one forcing you to do . . . what you're doing." She swallows and her throat works and he wonders how much she knows. She'd touched his wrist, after all, and all sorts of secrets can be transmitted that way. "I'm not the one writing your story like this, Sam. Some things, you can change."
He draws the gun from his waistband. Her breath catches at the sight of it, but she doesn't flinch. She meets his eyes, her gaze as steady as his own has become, and he can almost overlook the fact that her hands are trembling. She is telling the truth.
He sets the gun down on the counter. The barrel is black as his lover's eyes next to the bowl of fruit that he expects to contain apples, or maybe pomegranates, but that he sees holds three oranges, instead. No matter: they have their own mythology.
Catherine waits for him to come to her, and then she tilts her head up as he tilts his down. She's taller than he'd thought; he doesn't have to bend down nearly as far as he'd expected.
Not that he'd expected anything, he tells himself, and her mouth opens beneath his. Her mouth is gentle, she is gentle, and he had almost forgotten what that was like, to be kissed by a girl who smells not of gunpowder or sulfur or blood-iron but of pumpkin bread and the last lingering traces of an unfamiliar perfume, who does not dress in black as though spending each day in mourning. Her arms circle his neck, catch at the nape as she sighs against him. They are both breathing heavily by the time he lifts her onto the table. Her palm rests for a moment against the side of his face, her eyes meeting his intently and as deeply as though she is searching for something lost at the bottom of the sea. He blinks and she moves her hand to the collar of his shirt, quick fingers working all down the buttons.
Her breath is hot on his collarbone as he unzips her jeans; he rests his head against the curve of her neck, listening to the rhythm of her heart, pounding fragile and desperate as wings beneath her skin, and trails a hand across the soft skin of her thigh. He kisses her stomach and she tilts her head back; she makes a small cry when he enters her and her hands, gripping his shoulders, tighten. He stops listening to her heartbeat then, intent instead on the sounds she makes like just this side of a pleasure/pain dichotomy, until she moans low in her throat and he stops thinking about much of anything at all.
Later, more than minutes but less than hours, they part. She ducks her head, reaching behind herself for her bra, and he blushes faintly, looking away as he does up his belt. Spells can only take you so far, after all. What you do when you get to that point -- and how you deal with the aftermath -- is up to you. Draw the knife, turn back from the house, pretend not to hear the man who calls up to your tower, or the woman who beckons to you from the edge of that fog-wrapped river.
He knows what she has given him, and he wonders what he has given her in exchange, but he will not ask. He will not let himself hear the answers, because it's easier to pretend that things aren't true if they are not spoken aloud.
"I hope you find the ending you're looking for," she says, buttoning up her shirt. You can only do so much with the opportunities offered to you. Not all connections are instantaneous; only rarely does one fall in love at first sight. Rarer still are the times at which it is indeed true love as opposed to a combination of smoke and light and pheromones. If the confusion is not sorted out, if the correct identification isn't made before the exchanging of vows, the results might break your heart, and one thing that is true across almost every story is that your heart is the most valuable thing that you can ever fully own.
"Thank you," he says without thinking, force of habit, and the formality hangs in the air, weirdly polite. He turns to go; she doesn't move. She doesn't watch him leave, and she doesn't say anything else.
When he gets back to the motel room, he will find that his brother is still asleep, that his absence was not noticed. He will sit on the edge of his own bed and he will think of women offering him their bloody hands, of his brother offering his own bright and bloody heart in place of Sam's, so that Sam might have what Dean could not. He will think of temptresses and trades and bargains, and he will tell himself that he is not in a story; he will tell himself he does not know how this will end, that he cannot, because its ending has not yet been written. He will tell himself he does not believe in fate, and he will close his eyes, and as the sun begins at long last to rise, to spill harvest light down these cold November streets, he will tell himself that it was only a spell, that in real life one is never made aware of his or her role quite so easily, that one never sees behind the curtain. He will sleep.
And Catherine will lower her paperback novel, and she will measure grounds into the machine next to the sink, and as she waits for the coffee to brew, she will lean against the counter and watch the frost glitter on the fallen leaves, and she will wonder if she could have tried harder, if she could have said something else, could have somehow found the right combination of words to make him believe her. She knows better, though; she knows, even if he doesn't, her role in this story. She can warn, she can foretell and remind and plea, but her words will fall on deaf ears. It is not her role to intervene. When her story is told, she will serve as Madame Foreshadowing, though she might too play that femme fatale Irony with stilettos like daggers and a knife-glint smirk. It depends on the narrator. It always does.
She also knows that knowing as much won't make what happens next any easier. It never does.
The coffee machine burbles to a stop. She pours herself a cup, steaming and rich and smelling like places she has never seen and that she never will, and settles back onto the couch beside the window that looks out onto the street. There's work to be done. It is still autumn and so there is still power crackling amongst the shed leaves and the shadows on these last woodsmoke nights, and she has only until winter to finish. While her own ending cannot be changed, her story is still unraveling, and she would not have it any other way.
Still, even as she bends to her work, knowing that she has her own troubles to think about, she says a prayer on his behalf to whatever gods of story might exist.
She knows better than to expect it to be answered, to have any effect at all, but she says it anyway.
She's caught in this story, just like Sam is and just like his brother is, but for as long as she can, she's going to tell it like it's her own, just like they will. There's a chance, always, until at last it's written down--
--
end