SPN fic -- Seen and Unseen 2/?
Dec. 31st, 2006 08:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vanillafluffyTitle: Seen and Unseen 2/?
Authored by:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vanillafluffy
Pairing: None
Rating/Work-safeness: Safe
Approximate word count: 2300
Disclaimer: All rights belong to Eric Kripke and The Doors. Nancy McGill is mine.
Summary: Ellen makes a deal with a visitor to the Roadhouse.
Seen and Unseen
Seen -- Ellen Harvelle
In the twenty-five years that she's been running the Roadhouse, Ellen Harvelle has learned to size up her customers. The woman who comes through the door a little before three in the afternoon isn't anyone familiar to her, but Ellen reads weariness in the way she carries herself as she walks slowly over to the bar. A hunter she doesn't know? Could be, or maybe she's a hunter's woman, hoping to track down her missing man...gone without a trace. She's luckier than many of her sisters; at least she knows what happened to Bill. Some hunters lead double lives; their families don't know where they go or why they don't come back
"What can I get for you?" she asks the newcomer, who's looking around the bar as if walls could talk. Dishwater blonde hair is pulled back in a braid, and it looks to Ellen like somewhere along the line, somebody broke her nose and it set with a bump to it.
The woman fishes a dollar bill out of her pocket and drops it on the bar. "Will that get me a co'cola?" she wants to know. Her accent has a Southern tone to it---Bill's folks were from Georgia, and they called Cokes "co'cola" too.
"Compliments of the house," says Ellen, setting the plastic cup on the bar a moment later. Whoever this gal is---she's within a few years of Ellen's age, not some sassy young thing who thinks hunting is a glamourous business because she's seen too much Buffy---she looks like she needs a drink; if all she wants is soda-pop, that's not gonna break the bank. "Anything I can help you with?"
"Maybe you can." There's a pause as the thin-faced woman sips the fizzy liquid. "I'm a bit low on funds at the moment...most of my money is going into my gas tank right now." Ellen's immediately wary---she doesn't give loans to hunters, ever---and those are the people she knows. "Maybe we could make a trade? I'll work in your kitchen this evening if you'll set up the house so I can make a toast."
Ellen thinks it over for a moment, and the other woman doesn't rush her. That's one she's never heard before. There's no telling how many orders the kitchen will get---the Georgia peach might only have to cook for her and Jo and Ash---some nights, there might only be one or two folks around at midnight---or it could be a madhouse. Hunters are as likely to do their partying on a Wednesday as a Saturday, depending on what they've killed or are trying to forget.
"What's your name?" the bar owner asks, wondering if the blonde actually knows her way around a kitchen, or if it's some kind of scam. Still, it's a unique proposition, and there's something dignified about the woman in spite of her worn castoff clothes---and Ellen knows sometimes there are toasts people need to make, things they need to stand and declare and chase with firewater to get them out of their system.
"Nancy McGill. Yes, I can work a deep-fryer, no, I don't have typhoid, and if you want me to down a shot of holy water to prove I'm just me, let's get on with it."
Ellen Harvelle grins at her dry tone. "You do come to the point," she comments, but doesn't let herself be disarmed by the Southern woman's frankness, setting up another glass with three inches of liquid from one of the "special" bottles of mixers. Ellen watches as Nancy gulps it without flinching. "I guess we have a deal."
They shake on it. Ellen tries to puzzle out where she's heard the name McGill before, when the front door is yanked open, and Jo bounds in, looking around wildly. "Where is he, Momma? Where is he?" She sounds so upset that her mother has a hand on the sawed-off under the bar, certain something is after her.
"What in the world is going on, Joanna Beth?"
Jo points toward the parking lot. "That's John Winchester's truck out there."
"That's my truck, young lady," Nancy says, as Jo stares at her. She smiles without humor, providing a glimpse of uneven teeth. "Bought previously owned from a fella named Bobby Singer."
Ellen's met Bobby, knows he and John went way back, knows Dean and Sam have gotten help from him since John's death. Hell, plenty of people drive used vehicles. Just because Ellen has a beef with the previous owner is no reason to give this gal a rough time. She's seen that big fancy-ass truck of John's; the woman wasn't lying about her money going into the gas tank. Which begs the question of just who and what Nancy McGill is---a hunter...or someone on the edge of it all, like herself? Maybe the toast she wants to make will clarify the matter.
It turns out to be a much busier-than-average night. Everyone comes in hungry; the kitchen is slammed, and Ellen's glad for the unexpected help. Nancy McGill knows her stuff, alright---even with the press of constant orders, the burgers are juicy, the fries crisp, and she overhears a none-too-sober hunter tell Jo that if she's the one who cooked the chicken, he'll marry her.
"No, but I killed it," Jo retorts, one hand on the hilt of her knife, and walks away as the guy's friends laugh at him.
As midnight approaches, Nancy emerges from the kitchen and Ellen starts pouring drinks. More drinks than she expected to pour, because it's been quite a while since the house was this full. She doesn't mind; it's just too bad that she can't afford to offer the McGill woman a full-time job, because damn, the woman can cook, and could bring in more business like this.
The room gets quiet as Nancy steps forward with her glass raised---she's requested two fingers of bourbon in her cup, and a "co'cola" chaser waiting on the bar. After eight hours of cooking, she looks more gaunt and worn-out than ever. Her hair is matted with grease; her thin, angular face shiny with oil.
"For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand," intones Nancy. "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith."
Like someone walking over her grave...Ellen's spine stiffens. This doesn't sound good, for all it's Scripture. Does Nancy have some kind of death wish?
"Being a hunter isn't an easy road," continues the evening's cook. "It's about sacrifice. It's about offering to save the world from things no rational person would take on. It's lonely, scary and probably fatal in the long run. Like they say, it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. Here's to fighting the good fight, and keeping the faith." She knocks back the bourbon, and there's an approving buzz from the room. Ellen isn't so sure.
"You want to tell me what that was about?" she asks later, after the last stragglers have gone off to wherever it is they go. She still doesn't know where Nancy fits in.
"John Winchester was a friend of mine," says the blonde, unloading the dishwasher stacking clean plates on the shelf. "But John being John, I figured if I was to toast him by name, things might get a little loud. The man sure could piss people off when he set his mind to it." True enough. Reviewing the crowd present tonight, Ellen can think of a couple people who'd sooner turn down free booze than drink to John...including herself.
"You sent a card to him one time," she remembers, the elusive memory surfacing of a square envelope with 'N.L. McGill' printed in the return corner. "From somewhere in Florida, wasn't it?" The 'card' was a photo of a couple buzzards; a word bubble had been drawn above one of them, and it read 'Patience, hell---I'm gonna kill something!' "John passed that around. He laughed his ass off about it. So, what brings you up our way?"
Nancy makes a palms up gesture. "I guess I needed...closure," she says, and hesitates. "I don't suppose you know where he was laid to rest? I'd like to pay my respects."
"You don't think those boys were gonna put their daddy in the ground, do you?" Ellen shakes her head. "Oh, hell no---not knowing what's out there like they do. They lit him up and salted the ashes---"
"Did I hear my name?" her helper pipes up from the doorway.
"No, Ash---I was talking about Sam and Dean burning John's body."
"Oh, yeah. There was a big to-do in the White River paper about the body going missing from the local hospital."
"So it's not like there's a gravestone with his name carved on it, or anything like that," Ellen concludes, and Nancy nods. "Look, you're all in. I've got a spare bed...." She's almost surprised when the woman takes her up on it---she sees traces of the same stubborn pride John used to display, talk about your birds of a feather---but Nancy totes in a duffle that looks like it's gonna pull her over in a minute, and thanks her for her hospitality.
When Ellen gets up the next morning, Nancy's gone, and the bed doesn't look like it's been slept in.
0000
0000
Unseen -- Rolling the Bones
Arriving at White River at sunrise, Nancy wants to take the timing as a good omen, but right now, she's too damn tired. She washed off last night's cooking grease, ducked out of Harvelle's, and drove all night When did she last have a decent night's sleep? Not since September, for sure, when the whole ordeal started.
There's nothing like an out-of-body experience in Hell to make your life go crazy, she thinks grimly. She was sitting at her kitchen table, cutting up vegetables for stew, when suddenly, she couldn't breathe. It was like having a car parked on her chest, then she found herself in writhing darkness with no boundaries, a place of filth and corpse-stench, where the shrill sound of a universe in torment was as oppressive as the miasma of foulness.
John was there; she screamed his name and waved her arms and nothing she could do penetrated the indifference of this terrible realm. Then something else stood between her and John, something only vaguely human in shape, and it saw her, its yellow eyes flashing with amusement as she tried vainly to get to John's side. "Puny, soft, futile creature," it sneered. "He's mine, now." It swatted at her, like brushing away an annoying fly, and Nancy found herself sprawled on the green linoleum, paring knife and a half-scraped carrot nearby.
Panic set in, and as soon as she could move, she crawled to the phone and started calling everyone she could think of for news. It took days before she got confirmation of what she already knew: John Winchester was dead.
Random details drifted in as she grieved; a car wreck---they got T-boned by a semi, John and the boys---the trucker who hit them was a man with a spotless safety record during his twenty-five year career---they were registered at the hospital under the alias "McGillicuddy"---the oldest boy almost didn't make it, but he came out of his coma just before his daddy died---one of the hospital maintainence workers had some kind of seizure around the same time---the hunters and fellow travelers she talked to each had one or two pieces of the puzzle; they didn't see the shape of it the way she did.
Which is why she's here, in this overgrown field where there's a patch of scorched earth.
On her hands and knees, Nancy works her way toward the center of the burned earth in a clockwise spiral. The closer she gets to the epicenter, the more slowly she moves and the more careful she becomes. Her blackened fingers are numb with cold; sometimes she picks up bits of debris and holds them to her cheek, because her hands are so cold she can't sense them properly. They're always rocks, or carbonized branches from the funeral pyre.
No one sees the mad-looking sight she presents: a hollow-cheeked woman with coal smudges on her face, crawling around in the middle of a freezing field at daybreak. No one hears her mutterings, pleading with a universe that seems intent on ignoring her. So tired. She's been at this for how long now? She's gotten over feeling cold, but she can't get away from how weary she is...she'll close her eyes, just for a minute...maybe if she rests for a little while, she won't be so out of it and she'll be able to find something...she sags against the ground, almost motionless.
Nancy shifts just a smidgen, and her bare right wrist comes into contact with something that looks like just another blackened stone. The nearly flat rock is less than an inch thick and about as big as the bowl of a serving spoon, and she's suddenly wide awake. This time, when she touches the relic to her face, it resonates with a familiar energy. She regards it with something akin to awe, and wonders what it was---a shoulder blade, a chunk of pelvis? Salted or not doesn't matter to her. That's just a way of negating negative energy, and won't affect what she wants it for.
There's a rawhide cord around her neck, holding a red flannel pouch against her ribcage. Carefully, she deposits her find into the little bag and tucks it back beneath the soot-greyed front of her jacket. She ambles back to the truck with more energy than anyone who'd seen her just a few minutes ago would've given her credit for.
Her labors have earned her a shower and some rest, if only she can sleep.
The time to hesitate is through
No time to wallow in the mire
Try now we can only lose
And our love become a funeral pyre
Come on baby, light my fire---
-------------
Previously in the John-Nancy 'verse....
http://vanillafluffy.livejournal.com/135447.html The Girl From Cassadaga
http://vanillafluffy.livejournal.com/138894.html The End of an Era
http://vanillafluffy.livejournal.com/140653.html What Fresh Hell
http://vanillafluffy.livejournal.com/146321.html Seen and Unseen, Part One
Feedback is love.
Authored by:
vanillafluffy Pairing: None
Rating/Work-safeness: Safe
Approximate word count: 2300
Disclaimer: All rights belong to Eric Kripke and The Doors. Nancy McGill is mine.
Summary: Ellen makes a deal with a visitor to the Roadhouse.
Seen -- Ellen Harvelle
In the twenty-five years that she's been running the Roadhouse, Ellen Harvelle has learned to size up her customers. The woman who comes through the door a little before three in the afternoon isn't anyone familiar to her, but Ellen reads weariness in the way she carries herself as she walks slowly over to the bar. A hunter she doesn't know? Could be, or maybe she's a hunter's woman, hoping to track down her missing man...gone without a trace. She's luckier than many of her sisters; at least she knows what happened to Bill. Some hunters lead double lives; their families don't know where they go or why they don't come back
"What can I get for you?" she asks the newcomer, who's looking around the bar as if walls could talk. Dishwater blonde hair is pulled back in a braid, and it looks to Ellen like somewhere along the line, somebody broke her nose and it set with a bump to it.
The woman fishes a dollar bill out of her pocket and drops it on the bar. "Will that get me a co'cola?" she wants to know. Her accent has a Southern tone to it---Bill's folks were from Georgia, and they called Cokes "co'cola" too.
"Compliments of the house," says Ellen, setting the plastic cup on the bar a moment later. Whoever this gal is---she's within a few years of Ellen's age, not some sassy young thing who thinks hunting is a glamourous business because she's seen too much Buffy---she looks like she needs a drink; if all she wants is soda-pop, that's not gonna break the bank. "Anything I can help you with?"
"Maybe you can." There's a pause as the thin-faced woman sips the fizzy liquid. "I'm a bit low on funds at the moment...most of my money is going into my gas tank right now." Ellen's immediately wary---she doesn't give loans to hunters, ever---and those are the people she knows. "Maybe we could make a trade? I'll work in your kitchen this evening if you'll set up the house so I can make a toast."
Ellen thinks it over for a moment, and the other woman doesn't rush her. That's one she's never heard before. There's no telling how many orders the kitchen will get---the Georgia peach might only have to cook for her and Jo and Ash---some nights, there might only be one or two folks around at midnight---or it could be a madhouse. Hunters are as likely to do their partying on a Wednesday as a Saturday, depending on what they've killed or are trying to forget.
"What's your name?" the bar owner asks, wondering if the blonde actually knows her way around a kitchen, or if it's some kind of scam. Still, it's a unique proposition, and there's something dignified about the woman in spite of her worn castoff clothes---and Ellen knows sometimes there are toasts people need to make, things they need to stand and declare and chase with firewater to get them out of their system.
"Nancy McGill. Yes, I can work a deep-fryer, no, I don't have typhoid, and if you want me to down a shot of holy water to prove I'm just me, let's get on with it."
Ellen Harvelle grins at her dry tone. "You do come to the point," she comments, but doesn't let herself be disarmed by the Southern woman's frankness, setting up another glass with three inches of liquid from one of the "special" bottles of mixers. Ellen watches as Nancy gulps it without flinching. "I guess we have a deal."
They shake on it. Ellen tries to puzzle out where she's heard the name McGill before, when the front door is yanked open, and Jo bounds in, looking around wildly. "Where is he, Momma? Where is he?" She sounds so upset that her mother has a hand on the sawed-off under the bar, certain something is after her.
"What in the world is going on, Joanna Beth?"
Jo points toward the parking lot. "That's John Winchester's truck out there."
"That's my truck, young lady," Nancy says, as Jo stares at her. She smiles without humor, providing a glimpse of uneven teeth. "Bought previously owned from a fella named Bobby Singer."
Ellen's met Bobby, knows he and John went way back, knows Dean and Sam have gotten help from him since John's death. Hell, plenty of people drive used vehicles. Just because Ellen has a beef with the previous owner is no reason to give this gal a rough time. She's seen that big fancy-ass truck of John's; the woman wasn't lying about her money going into the gas tank. Which begs the question of just who and what Nancy McGill is---a hunter...or someone on the edge of it all, like herself? Maybe the toast she wants to make will clarify the matter.
It turns out to be a much busier-than-average night. Everyone comes in hungry; the kitchen is slammed, and Ellen's glad for the unexpected help. Nancy McGill knows her stuff, alright---even with the press of constant orders, the burgers are juicy, the fries crisp, and she overhears a none-too-sober hunter tell Jo that if she's the one who cooked the chicken, he'll marry her.
"No, but I killed it," Jo retorts, one hand on the hilt of her knife, and walks away as the guy's friends laugh at him.
As midnight approaches, Nancy emerges from the kitchen and Ellen starts pouring drinks. More drinks than she expected to pour, because it's been quite a while since the house was this full. She doesn't mind; it's just too bad that she can't afford to offer the McGill woman a full-time job, because damn, the woman can cook, and could bring in more business like this.
The room gets quiet as Nancy steps forward with her glass raised---she's requested two fingers of bourbon in her cup, and a "co'cola" chaser waiting on the bar. After eight hours of cooking, she looks more gaunt and worn-out than ever. Her hair is matted with grease; her thin, angular face shiny with oil.
"For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand," intones Nancy. "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith."
Like someone walking over her grave...Ellen's spine stiffens. This doesn't sound good, for all it's Scripture. Does Nancy have some kind of death wish?
"Being a hunter isn't an easy road," continues the evening's cook. "It's about sacrifice. It's about offering to save the world from things no rational person would take on. It's lonely, scary and probably fatal in the long run. Like they say, it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. Here's to fighting the good fight, and keeping the faith." She knocks back the bourbon, and there's an approving buzz from the room. Ellen isn't so sure.
"You want to tell me what that was about?" she asks later, after the last stragglers have gone off to wherever it is they go. She still doesn't know where Nancy fits in.
"John Winchester was a friend of mine," says the blonde, unloading the dishwasher stacking clean plates on the shelf. "But John being John, I figured if I was to toast him by name, things might get a little loud. The man sure could piss people off when he set his mind to it." True enough. Reviewing the crowd present tonight, Ellen can think of a couple people who'd sooner turn down free booze than drink to John...including herself.
"You sent a card to him one time," she remembers, the elusive memory surfacing of a square envelope with 'N.L. McGill' printed in the return corner. "From somewhere in Florida, wasn't it?" The 'card' was a photo of a couple buzzards; a word bubble had been drawn above one of them, and it read 'Patience, hell---I'm gonna kill something!' "John passed that around. He laughed his ass off about it. So, what brings you up our way?"
Nancy makes a palms up gesture. "I guess I needed...closure," she says, and hesitates. "I don't suppose you know where he was laid to rest? I'd like to pay my respects."
"You don't think those boys were gonna put their daddy in the ground, do you?" Ellen shakes her head. "Oh, hell no---not knowing what's out there like they do. They lit him up and salted the ashes---"
"Did I hear my name?" her helper pipes up from the doorway.
"No, Ash---I was talking about Sam and Dean burning John's body."
"Oh, yeah. There was a big to-do in the White River paper about the body going missing from the local hospital."
"So it's not like there's a gravestone with his name carved on it, or anything like that," Ellen concludes, and Nancy nods. "Look, you're all in. I've got a spare bed...." She's almost surprised when the woman takes her up on it---she sees traces of the same stubborn pride John used to display, talk about your birds of a feather---but Nancy totes in a duffle that looks like it's gonna pull her over in a minute, and thanks her for her hospitality.
When Ellen gets up the next morning, Nancy's gone, and the bed doesn't look like it's been slept in.
0000
0000
Unseen -- Rolling the Bones
Arriving at White River at sunrise, Nancy wants to take the timing as a good omen, but right now, she's too damn tired. She washed off last night's cooking grease, ducked out of Harvelle's, and drove all night When did she last have a decent night's sleep? Not since September, for sure, when the whole ordeal started.
There's nothing like an out-of-body experience in Hell to make your life go crazy, she thinks grimly. She was sitting at her kitchen table, cutting up vegetables for stew, when suddenly, she couldn't breathe. It was like having a car parked on her chest, then she found herself in writhing darkness with no boundaries, a place of filth and corpse-stench, where the shrill sound of a universe in torment was as oppressive as the miasma of foulness.
John was there; she screamed his name and waved her arms and nothing she could do penetrated the indifference of this terrible realm. Then something else stood between her and John, something only vaguely human in shape, and it saw her, its yellow eyes flashing with amusement as she tried vainly to get to John's side. "Puny, soft, futile creature," it sneered. "He's mine, now." It swatted at her, like brushing away an annoying fly, and Nancy found herself sprawled on the green linoleum, paring knife and a half-scraped carrot nearby.
Panic set in, and as soon as she could move, she crawled to the phone and started calling everyone she could think of for news. It took days before she got confirmation of what she already knew: John Winchester was dead.
Random details drifted in as she grieved; a car wreck---they got T-boned by a semi, John and the boys---the trucker who hit them was a man with a spotless safety record during his twenty-five year career---they were registered at the hospital under the alias "McGillicuddy"---the oldest boy almost didn't make it, but he came out of his coma just before his daddy died---one of the hospital maintainence workers had some kind of seizure around the same time---the hunters and fellow travelers she talked to each had one or two pieces of the puzzle; they didn't see the shape of it the way she did.
Which is why she's here, in this overgrown field where there's a patch of scorched earth.
On her hands and knees, Nancy works her way toward the center of the burned earth in a clockwise spiral. The closer she gets to the epicenter, the more slowly she moves and the more careful she becomes. Her blackened fingers are numb with cold; sometimes she picks up bits of debris and holds them to her cheek, because her hands are so cold she can't sense them properly. They're always rocks, or carbonized branches from the funeral pyre.
No one sees the mad-looking sight she presents: a hollow-cheeked woman with coal smudges on her face, crawling around in the middle of a freezing field at daybreak. No one hears her mutterings, pleading with a universe that seems intent on ignoring her. So tired. She's been at this for how long now? She's gotten over feeling cold, but she can't get away from how weary she is...she'll close her eyes, just for a minute...maybe if she rests for a little while, she won't be so out of it and she'll be able to find something...she sags against the ground, almost motionless.
Nancy shifts just a smidgen, and her bare right wrist comes into contact with something that looks like just another blackened stone. The nearly flat rock is less than an inch thick and about as big as the bowl of a serving spoon, and she's suddenly wide awake. This time, when she touches the relic to her face, it resonates with a familiar energy. She regards it with something akin to awe, and wonders what it was---a shoulder blade, a chunk of pelvis? Salted or not doesn't matter to her. That's just a way of negating negative energy, and won't affect what she wants it for.
There's a rawhide cord around her neck, holding a red flannel pouch against her ribcage. Carefully, she deposits her find into the little bag and tucks it back beneath the soot-greyed front of her jacket. She ambles back to the truck with more energy than anyone who'd seen her just a few minutes ago would've given her credit for.
Her labors have earned her a shower and some rest, if only she can sleep.
The time to hesitate is through
No time to wallow in the mire
Try now we can only lose
And our love become a funeral pyre
Come on baby, light my fire---
-------------
Previously in the John-Nancy 'verse....
http://vanillafluffy.livejournal.com/135447.html The Girl From Cassadaga
http://vanillafluffy.livejournal.com/138894.html The End of an Era
http://vanillafluffy.livejournal.com/140653.html What Fresh Hell
http://vanillafluffy.livejournal.com/146321.html Seen and Unseen, Part One
Feedback is love.