SPN fic -- Seen and Unseen 3/?
Jan. 5th, 2007 01:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vanillafluffyTitle: Seen and Unseen 3/?
Authored by:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vanillafluffy
Pairing: None
Rating/Work-safeness: Fighting and cussing; PG-13
Approximate word count: 2800
Disclaimer: All rights belong to Eric Kripke and The Doors. Nancy McGill is mine.
Summary: They're in for nasty weather, and a strange woman wants something from a hunter named Sweeney.
Seen -- Sam Winchester
It's a joint called Eddie's, on a back road to Nowhere Special, USA. It isn't a hunter's bar; but it just so happens that three of the four people occupying it this afternoon are hunters. One of them is Sam Winchester, another is his older brother Dean, and the third hunter is someone Sam knows slightly from Harvelle's Roadhouse, a man named Steve Sweeney. Ash told him that the Sweeney's nickname was Psycho, 'cause he's not too tightly wrapped, but at the moment, he and Dean are peaceably talking shop, about the best multi-purpose loads, and how Steve has a system for combining salt and silver that won't corrode the silver. Steve carries his gear in an old canvas satchel, and he's got it open on the bar, a couple cartridges out, showing them off.
The bartender is over in the far corner near the heater, oblivious, TV turned up loud while he watches a daytime drama. Sam picks at the corner of the label on his bottle and yawns. It's only about two-thirty in the afternoon, but the sky is the color of pewter, and it looks like they're in for nasty weather.
Two hours ago, Steve was having a helluva time against a poltergeist when Sam and Dean showed up. The guy is showing his thanks with a couple rounds of drinks. Although if Sam's any judge, Steve's about to get hustled at pool by Dean, who has no qualms about drinking a guy's beer and beating him out of his bankroll. He may have to nag Dean to get him out of here; trying to find a motel during a blizzard is not Sam's idea of a good time and neither is being stranded in a dump like this.
He's the first one to see the woman enter. There's a mop of dark blonde hair visible above a battered olive drab parka four sizes too big for her---it reminds Sam of one he outgrew when he was about fifteen, definitely NOT a ladies' garment---and she's looking in their direction, probably hoping to catch the bartender's attention.
Dean, who'll notice any woman, anywhere, unless he's in a coma, gives her a two-second glance and dismisses her. He likes babes, and this lady is too old and worn-looking to qualify. Psycho cuts his gaze that way, and cusses.
"You damn crazy bitch," he snarls as the newcomer moves over to where they're standing. "Don't you know when to give up?"
"No, Stevie-boy, you're the one who's supposed to be giving it up." There's a jagged edge to her voice. "We had an agreement. You shook on it, and I held up my end. I've had to follow you around for three weeks trying to get what's mine, but it ends now."
"What's going on here?" Dean asks, at the same time Sam says, "Can't we talk about this?" because the blonde in the parka is glaring at Psycho Steve through narrowed eyes, and Sam, who knows pissed off when he sees it, has a feeling this is about to turn ugly.
"Give it here, Steve," she says, holding out her right hand, palm up. "We can still do this like civilized people. Don't make this any worse than it has to be."
"Or what?" Sweeney mocks her. "You'll stamp your feet and pout?"
She leans forward, nose-to-nose with him, warning in her tone, "Or I will stamp you like a postcard, and mail you straight to Memphis. I don't think you'd care too much for Memphis, not on a day like this..."
To Sam's surprise, Psycho seems taken aback by her threat. "You don't---you're trying to mess with my head!" he accuses.
"You don't want to try me," she advises him. "You taken a look outside lately? We're in for snow...." She draws the last word out like a moaning wind, and Steve snaps. He shoves her away, hard. The blonde stumbles back, catches herself on a chair, and pivots.
In his twenty-three years, Sam Winchester has been in his share of bar-room brawls, and he watches now with reluctant admiration as the woman whips around, smashing the chair legs against Sweeney's shins, taking him down. In what seems to be one continuous movement, she's released the chair, which skitters to rest over near the door, and dropped onto him, pinning him. Her left hand is at his throat, pressing against his windpipe, and she's drawn a Bowie knife from a back sheath, the feminine Lady Crocodile Dundee model, to go with her jacket. The business end is now between Steve's thighs, and Sam feels himself twitch in sympathy.
Dean starts forward, and without looking up, she growls. "Don't. This is a private matter." To Sweeney, she says, "I've tried to be nice about this, and you've done nothing but try to take advantage of me. I'm over being nice. Are you gonna give me that knife?"
"Hell, no, you stupid freak bitch!"
"Memphis, in the snow...but it wasn't the middle of the afternoon, was it? No, it was the middle of the night---"
"Shut up!" Psycho Steve yells, but she doesn't. She keeps talking in a conversational tone, never taking her eyes from his, even when he's avoiding her gaze.
"Twenty-four degrees, and with the wind howling along, it was more like twenty below. And oh, how the snow came down...." The way she says it draws out the sounds of the 'ohs' and the 'oohs' and 'ows', and with the wind is picking up outside, her voice blends with the oncoming storm.
"Nothing but darkness and snow falling and the sound of your tires spinning, spinning, spinning. Cold in the car, oh so cold..." She purrs the words, and Sam listens wide-eyed. Dean has stopped trying to break it up, he's blinking at the husky tone of her words like he's hearing a bedtime story. "It was even colder outside. No signal on your phone, no one to hear you leaning on the horn...at least, nobody human."
Sam flinches and Dean starts, while Psycho tries to buck her off him then, but she bears down on his throat until he starts coughing. "Ready to give me what's mine? No? There's no place lonelier than an industrial park in two feet of snow...." And those 'ohs' are getting longer and more urgent, and Steve's face has the look of a man caught in a nightmare, prey, not hunter. "And all you want is to go back to your hotel, where there's no snow---"
"Take it!" he screams. "Take it! Just stop it! Make it stop!"
The blonde doesn't turn, but pitches her voice at Dean. "Reach into Mr. Sweeney's bag, if you would, and hand him that roll of tan suede."
"Take it, just take it!" Steve is hysterical, nearly weeping from whatever terror she's conjured up.
"It doesn't work that way. You're going to hand it to me of your own free will. Nice and easy." Dean cautiously removes a length of soft suede from the bag. "That's it," the blonde says, still looking down at Sweeney. "He hands it to you, you hand it to me, your oath is satisfied, and you're free to go." She's sliding the knife back into the scabbard between her shoulder-blades and extends her hand to take the package that Dean hands to Sweeney.
Before releasing Steve's throat, she rests the bundle on his chest and unrolls it. Inside the yellowish suede is a knife or short sword, Asian by the look of it. The blonde looks away from the fallen hunter for the first time, and the corners of her mouth lift upward. "There we go," she croons, rolling it back up. "It could've been that easy three weeks ago, but you had to be macho, didn't you?" She stands with one swift motion, backing up three paces so Psycho can't make a grab for her.
He doesn't even try, just grabs his bag off the bar and bolts for the door, loose rounds rolling along the surface in his wake. He stands for a moment, holding the door half-open, wind howling loudly just beyond, and blusters at the blonde: "Go to hell!"
"I'll send you a postcard," she retorts as the door swings closed behind him. She looks Sam and Dean over, still smiling.
"Hello, boys. I'm Nancy McGill. How's life treating you?
0000
0000
Unseen -- Communing With the Light
Locked safely in her cheap motel room, protected by salt and wards, Nancy unrolls the suede again. Now she can appreciate the craftsmanship of the blade without distraction. It's a sleek, beautiful, deadly thing, and she intends to see it used for the purpose for which it was forged. "Demon-Killer," she murmurs, stroking the engraved kanji on the hilt with a reverent finger.
There's an improvised altar on the top of the bureau---the cheap formica covered with John's worn flannel shirt as an altarcloth. The space hosts a blue votive, a wilting convenience store rosebud, a miniature bottle of scotch, and a piece of blue sodalite the size of a hazelnut. Nancy arranges the blade on its plaid cushion, just so, and adds the old Bowie knife John gave her way back when. It's nowhere near as sleek as Demon-Killer, but any little bit of mojo she can think of to throw in can't hurt, and John carried that knife for a lot of years.
Unbuttoning the top two buttons of her threadbare shirt, she loosens the drawstrings on the medicine bag and rummages among its contents, careful not to dislodge anything. The chunk of charred bone is the weighiest thing in there, slightly bigger than the Roadhouse matchbook. The lock of dark hair, tied with a thread of silk, is featherweight. At the bottom of the pouch, beneath the bone-relic, is a linked silver chain with a religious medal---St. Michael the Archangel---strung on it.
Nancy fishes out the chain and the matchbook. She sets the latter beside the votive. Undoing the clasp of the chain, she twines it through the perforations on the guard of the blade, wrapping it in and out, until it won't shorten any more. The silver medal is lodged just under the guard, where the sword-wielder's hand will rest against it.
Lighting a candle with one of the matches, she extinguishes the overhead light in the room. She kneels on the floor in front of her humble shrine---it's the prayer and the intent that matter, she knows, not the setting. Nancy prays to St. Michael, patron saint of warriors, wondering with distant whimsy, if the blade from a far-off shore has ever heard the like of Latin before.
The first time Nancy McGill sees an angel, she's nine years old, and Nona is pruning her rose trellis and singing softly nearby. It's a melody familiar to the girl, and she hums along softly, because it sounds so much nicer when her grandmother sings it.
It's early on a Saturday morning---she slipped out of the house before her brother and sister got up for their habitual squabbling over who gets to pick the cartoons and who's having which cereal---and now she's here in her favorite place in the whole world with her favorite person in the whole world, and it's going to be a pretty day. The sunlight is as soft as a kiss, and she isn't too cold or too warm, and Nancy wishes she could stay in this moment forever, because it's just so perfect.
You can, something tells her. It isn't the inner voice she's always heard, but it isn't someone talking to her, either. It's music, a song, but it wasn't Nona singing it. She looks around, and just behind her right shoulder is a brightness. The only thing Nancy can think of to liken it to is when Glinda floats away like a soap bubble after she talks to Dorothy in Oz, but this isn't round, or a bubble, it's just...bright. Not hurt-your-eyes like a flashbulb bright; more like cut-glass making a rainbow when the light hits it just so. It's white, but it's colorful white, and for a moment, she just gazes at it, enraptured.
You can always call on this memory if you need it, the voice tells her calmly, or on me. The sparkling sound meets the shining light, and it pulses, fanning her with a motionless wind and a sense of joy so fierce that tears twinkle down her cheeks.
That was an angel, Nancy thinks with wonderment. An angel just came and talked to me.
Almost forty years later, she focuses on that memory, on that beautiful light-sound. She's in a meditative reverie so profound that only the trembling flame reflected in the polished bronze blade has any meaning for her. The dancing votive flickers. The glow seems to expand, to become brighter, until the dingy room is lit with radiance that can be seen clearly through the draperies in the snow-covered parking lot beyond. The candle-fire is now unwavering, yet there's a tremendous rush of sound as if great wings are sweeping the air.
Mindful of her manners, Nancy greets the Being she's summoned with all due deference. She thanks St. Michael for responding, and when she feels approval, takes a deep breath, and says she has a petition to make. It isn't easy to explain what she needs in Latin, but Latin is the venerable language of ancient rites and ceremonies. There's a formality to it, to match the gravity of her request. English would be too common.
It's not easy to speak of Hell in the presence of an angel. only with the greatest effort can Nancy make herself form the words. A soul is in torment, she explains, the soul of a man who fought Evil for many years. She knows that Michael can't directly interfere with such things, but she needs help to right this greivous wrong.
BY DOING WHAT?
For the first time, Nancy puts her plan into words. She's studied a way to locate John, wherever he is. She'll go in...There, kill the demon and liberate John. It sounds decisive; kill the demon. (As if John, who is a thousand times her superior as a hunter didn't dedicate half his life to that end!) But he never had the right weapon...she recounts the history of the Demon-Killer, shows it to the Archangel, points out where she's affixed his medal to the hilt.
THIS, TOO, IS A WARRIOR'S WEAPON, pronounces the angel, surveying the old Bowie knife. I WILL SET MY BLESSING UPON THEM BOTH, THAT THEY CANNOT BE SEIZED FROM THEIR WIELDER BY FORCE.
"Thank you." The promise is a huge relief; if the demon could knock her aside so easily, it could just as easily snatch the weapon from her.
WHY DO YOU DO THIS? YOU RISK DESTROYING YOURSELF.
Nancy does her best to explain what John is to her. How, the first time she met him, spattered with the blood of evil-doers, she had the sense of a knight in tarnished armor, a bold conquistador, a crusader on a long journey, mad to some, but beneath it all, noble and dedicated and strong. Her faith in him has never faltered, and if that's what it takes, she'll sacrifice herself to give his soul the peace it deserves.
It's a test, she knows. If she can't stand up to an angel without flinching, what will happen when she's up against a demon? She draws herself up. "I thank you for blessing our weapons. All I ask is that if I can get John out, that you'll take charge of him. He's a warrior; you'll get on fine with him, you'll see. I just don't want him to be...lost." Her voice cracks on the last word, and Nancy fights unshed tears. She hasn't wept for John; tears would be soft, would make him truly dead and beyond her help and she will not accept that while there is breath in her body.
BE STRONG.
Peace fills her, her resolve is strengthened. There is no sense of time; when the Archangel departs to etheric realms, the candle has long since burned out.
Nancy gropes for the light switch. For the first time in months, she has a sense of hope. She's that much closer to her goal. Not all the way---there's more to do yet---but her angelic guide has not tried to dissuade her from her course. Taking up the blade, she finds its strength has increased. Her hand tingles where it touches the silver medal. The consecration by its maker made Demon-Killer powerful; even before St Michael's intervention, Nancy was aware of its implacable purpose. She secures her prize, tucks John's shirt away and smiles, an unsettling smile that John Winchester would recognize. Soft and puny? Not by a long shot. Compared to her plans for a rematch with that demon, Steve Sweeney got off light.
Girl ya gotta love your man
Take him by the hand
Make him understand
The world on you depends
Our life will never end
Gotta love your man, yeah
Riders on the storm...
--------------------
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
http://vanillafluffy.livejournal.com/146652.html Seen and Unseen, Part Two
Authored by:
vanillafluffy Pairing: None
Rating/Work-safeness: Fighting and cussing; PG-13
Approximate word count: 2800
Disclaimer: All rights belong to Eric Kripke and The Doors. Nancy McGill is mine.
Summary: They're in for nasty weather, and a strange woman wants something from a hunter named Sweeney.
Seen -- Sam Winchester
It's a joint called Eddie's, on a back road to Nowhere Special, USA. It isn't a hunter's bar; but it just so happens that three of the four people occupying it this afternoon are hunters. One of them is Sam Winchester, another is his older brother Dean, and the third hunter is someone Sam knows slightly from Harvelle's Roadhouse, a man named Steve Sweeney. Ash told him that the Sweeney's nickname was Psycho, 'cause he's not too tightly wrapped, but at the moment, he and Dean are peaceably talking shop, about the best multi-purpose loads, and how Steve has a system for combining salt and silver that won't corrode the silver. Steve carries his gear in an old canvas satchel, and he's got it open on the bar, a couple cartridges out, showing them off.
The bartender is over in the far corner near the heater, oblivious, TV turned up loud while he watches a daytime drama. Sam picks at the corner of the label on his bottle and yawns. It's only about two-thirty in the afternoon, but the sky is the color of pewter, and it looks like they're in for nasty weather.
Two hours ago, Steve was having a helluva time against a poltergeist when Sam and Dean showed up. The guy is showing his thanks with a couple rounds of drinks. Although if Sam's any judge, Steve's about to get hustled at pool by Dean, who has no qualms about drinking a guy's beer and beating him out of his bankroll. He may have to nag Dean to get him out of here; trying to find a motel during a blizzard is not Sam's idea of a good time and neither is being stranded in a dump like this.
He's the first one to see the woman enter. There's a mop of dark blonde hair visible above a battered olive drab parka four sizes too big for her---it reminds Sam of one he outgrew when he was about fifteen, definitely NOT a ladies' garment---and she's looking in their direction, probably hoping to catch the bartender's attention.
Dean, who'll notice any woman, anywhere, unless he's in a coma, gives her a two-second glance and dismisses her. He likes babes, and this lady is too old and worn-looking to qualify. Psycho cuts his gaze that way, and cusses.
"You damn crazy bitch," he snarls as the newcomer moves over to where they're standing. "Don't you know when to give up?"
"No, Stevie-boy, you're the one who's supposed to be giving it up." There's a jagged edge to her voice. "We had an agreement. You shook on it, and I held up my end. I've had to follow you around for three weeks trying to get what's mine, but it ends now."
"What's going on here?" Dean asks, at the same time Sam says, "Can't we talk about this?" because the blonde in the parka is glaring at Psycho Steve through narrowed eyes, and Sam, who knows pissed off when he sees it, has a feeling this is about to turn ugly.
"Give it here, Steve," she says, holding out her right hand, palm up. "We can still do this like civilized people. Don't make this any worse than it has to be."
"Or what?" Sweeney mocks her. "You'll stamp your feet and pout?"
She leans forward, nose-to-nose with him, warning in her tone, "Or I will stamp you like a postcard, and mail you straight to Memphis. I don't think you'd care too much for Memphis, not on a day like this..."
To Sam's surprise, Psycho seems taken aback by her threat. "You don't---you're trying to mess with my head!" he accuses.
"You don't want to try me," she advises him. "You taken a look outside lately? We're in for snow...." She draws the last word out like a moaning wind, and Steve snaps. He shoves her away, hard. The blonde stumbles back, catches herself on a chair, and pivots.
In his twenty-three years, Sam Winchester has been in his share of bar-room brawls, and he watches now with reluctant admiration as the woman whips around, smashing the chair legs against Sweeney's shins, taking him down. In what seems to be one continuous movement, she's released the chair, which skitters to rest over near the door, and dropped onto him, pinning him. Her left hand is at his throat, pressing against his windpipe, and she's drawn a Bowie knife from a back sheath, the feminine Lady Crocodile Dundee model, to go with her jacket. The business end is now between Steve's thighs, and Sam feels himself twitch in sympathy.
Dean starts forward, and without looking up, she growls. "Don't. This is a private matter." To Sweeney, she says, "I've tried to be nice about this, and you've done nothing but try to take advantage of me. I'm over being nice. Are you gonna give me that knife?"
"Hell, no, you stupid freak bitch!"
"Memphis, in the snow...but it wasn't the middle of the afternoon, was it? No, it was the middle of the night---"
"Shut up!" Psycho Steve yells, but she doesn't. She keeps talking in a conversational tone, never taking her eyes from his, even when he's avoiding her gaze.
"Twenty-four degrees, and with the wind howling along, it was more like twenty below. And oh, how the snow came down...." The way she says it draws out the sounds of the 'ohs' and the 'oohs' and 'ows', and with the wind is picking up outside, her voice blends with the oncoming storm.
"Nothing but darkness and snow falling and the sound of your tires spinning, spinning, spinning. Cold in the car, oh so cold..." She purrs the words, and Sam listens wide-eyed. Dean has stopped trying to break it up, he's blinking at the husky tone of her words like he's hearing a bedtime story. "It was even colder outside. No signal on your phone, no one to hear you leaning on the horn...at least, nobody human."
Sam flinches and Dean starts, while Psycho tries to buck her off him then, but she bears down on his throat until he starts coughing. "Ready to give me what's mine? No? There's no place lonelier than an industrial park in two feet of snow...." And those 'ohs' are getting longer and more urgent, and Steve's face has the look of a man caught in a nightmare, prey, not hunter. "And all you want is to go back to your hotel, where there's no snow---"
"Take it!" he screams. "Take it! Just stop it! Make it stop!"
The blonde doesn't turn, but pitches her voice at Dean. "Reach into Mr. Sweeney's bag, if you would, and hand him that roll of tan suede."
"Take it, just take it!" Steve is hysterical, nearly weeping from whatever terror she's conjured up.
"It doesn't work that way. You're going to hand it to me of your own free will. Nice and easy." Dean cautiously removes a length of soft suede from the bag. "That's it," the blonde says, still looking down at Sweeney. "He hands it to you, you hand it to me, your oath is satisfied, and you're free to go." She's sliding the knife back into the scabbard between her shoulder-blades and extends her hand to take the package that Dean hands to Sweeney.
Before releasing Steve's throat, she rests the bundle on his chest and unrolls it. Inside the yellowish suede is a knife or short sword, Asian by the look of it. The blonde looks away from the fallen hunter for the first time, and the corners of her mouth lift upward. "There we go," she croons, rolling it back up. "It could've been that easy three weeks ago, but you had to be macho, didn't you?" She stands with one swift motion, backing up three paces so Psycho can't make a grab for her.
He doesn't even try, just grabs his bag off the bar and bolts for the door, loose rounds rolling along the surface in his wake. He stands for a moment, holding the door half-open, wind howling loudly just beyond, and blusters at the blonde: "Go to hell!"
"I'll send you a postcard," she retorts as the door swings closed behind him. She looks Sam and Dean over, still smiling.
"Hello, boys. I'm Nancy McGill. How's life treating you?
0000
0000
Unseen -- Communing With the Light
Locked safely in her cheap motel room, protected by salt and wards, Nancy unrolls the suede again. Now she can appreciate the craftsmanship of the blade without distraction. It's a sleek, beautiful, deadly thing, and she intends to see it used for the purpose for which it was forged. "Demon-Killer," she murmurs, stroking the engraved kanji on the hilt with a reverent finger.
There's an improvised altar on the top of the bureau---the cheap formica covered with John's worn flannel shirt as an altarcloth. The space hosts a blue votive, a wilting convenience store rosebud, a miniature bottle of scotch, and a piece of blue sodalite the size of a hazelnut. Nancy arranges the blade on its plaid cushion, just so, and adds the old Bowie knife John gave her way back when. It's nowhere near as sleek as Demon-Killer, but any little bit of mojo she can think of to throw in can't hurt, and John carried that knife for a lot of years.
Unbuttoning the top two buttons of her threadbare shirt, she loosens the drawstrings on the medicine bag and rummages among its contents, careful not to dislodge anything. The chunk of charred bone is the weighiest thing in there, slightly bigger than the Roadhouse matchbook. The lock of dark hair, tied with a thread of silk, is featherweight. At the bottom of the pouch, beneath the bone-relic, is a linked silver chain with a religious medal---St. Michael the Archangel---strung on it.
Nancy fishes out the chain and the matchbook. She sets the latter beside the votive. Undoing the clasp of the chain, she twines it through the perforations on the guard of the blade, wrapping it in and out, until it won't shorten any more. The silver medal is lodged just under the guard, where the sword-wielder's hand will rest against it.
Lighting a candle with one of the matches, she extinguishes the overhead light in the room. She kneels on the floor in front of her humble shrine---it's the prayer and the intent that matter, she knows, not the setting. Nancy prays to St. Michael, patron saint of warriors, wondering with distant whimsy, if the blade from a far-off shore has ever heard the like of Latin before.
The first time Nancy McGill sees an angel, she's nine years old, and Nona is pruning her rose trellis and singing softly nearby. It's a melody familiar to the girl, and she hums along softly, because it sounds so much nicer when her grandmother sings it.
It's early on a Saturday morning---she slipped out of the house before her brother and sister got up for their habitual squabbling over who gets to pick the cartoons and who's having which cereal---and now she's here in her favorite place in the whole world with her favorite person in the whole world, and it's going to be a pretty day. The sunlight is as soft as a kiss, and she isn't too cold or too warm, and Nancy wishes she could stay in this moment forever, because it's just so perfect.
You can, something tells her. It isn't the inner voice she's always heard, but it isn't someone talking to her, either. It's music, a song, but it wasn't Nona singing it. She looks around, and just behind her right shoulder is a brightness. The only thing Nancy can think of to liken it to is when Glinda floats away like a soap bubble after she talks to Dorothy in Oz, but this isn't round, or a bubble, it's just...bright. Not hurt-your-eyes like a flashbulb bright; more like cut-glass making a rainbow when the light hits it just so. It's white, but it's colorful white, and for a moment, she just gazes at it, enraptured.
You can always call on this memory if you need it, the voice tells her calmly, or on me. The sparkling sound meets the shining light, and it pulses, fanning her with a motionless wind and a sense of joy so fierce that tears twinkle down her cheeks.
That was an angel, Nancy thinks with wonderment. An angel just came and talked to me.
Almost forty years later, she focuses on that memory, on that beautiful light-sound. She's in a meditative reverie so profound that only the trembling flame reflected in the polished bronze blade has any meaning for her. The dancing votive flickers. The glow seems to expand, to become brighter, until the dingy room is lit with radiance that can be seen clearly through the draperies in the snow-covered parking lot beyond. The candle-fire is now unwavering, yet there's a tremendous rush of sound as if great wings are sweeping the air.
Mindful of her manners, Nancy greets the Being she's summoned with all due deference. She thanks St. Michael for responding, and when she feels approval, takes a deep breath, and says she has a petition to make. It isn't easy to explain what she needs in Latin, but Latin is the venerable language of ancient rites and ceremonies. There's a formality to it, to match the gravity of her request. English would be too common.
It's not easy to speak of Hell in the presence of an angel. only with the greatest effort can Nancy make herself form the words. A soul is in torment, she explains, the soul of a man who fought Evil for many years. She knows that Michael can't directly interfere with such things, but she needs help to right this greivous wrong.
BY DOING WHAT?
For the first time, Nancy puts her plan into words. She's studied a way to locate John, wherever he is. She'll go in...There, kill the demon and liberate John. It sounds decisive; kill the demon. (As if John, who is a thousand times her superior as a hunter didn't dedicate half his life to that end!) But he never had the right weapon...she recounts the history of the Demon-Killer, shows it to the Archangel, points out where she's affixed his medal to the hilt.
THIS, TOO, IS A WARRIOR'S WEAPON, pronounces the angel, surveying the old Bowie knife. I WILL SET MY BLESSING UPON THEM BOTH, THAT THEY CANNOT BE SEIZED FROM THEIR WIELDER BY FORCE.
"Thank you." The promise is a huge relief; if the demon could knock her aside so easily, it could just as easily snatch the weapon from her.
WHY DO YOU DO THIS? YOU RISK DESTROYING YOURSELF.
Nancy does her best to explain what John is to her. How, the first time she met him, spattered with the blood of evil-doers, she had the sense of a knight in tarnished armor, a bold conquistador, a crusader on a long journey, mad to some, but beneath it all, noble and dedicated and strong. Her faith in him has never faltered, and if that's what it takes, she'll sacrifice herself to give his soul the peace it deserves.
It's a test, she knows. If she can't stand up to an angel without flinching, what will happen when she's up against a demon? She draws herself up. "I thank you for blessing our weapons. All I ask is that if I can get John out, that you'll take charge of him. He's a warrior; you'll get on fine with him, you'll see. I just don't want him to be...lost." Her voice cracks on the last word, and Nancy fights unshed tears. She hasn't wept for John; tears would be soft, would make him truly dead and beyond her help and she will not accept that while there is breath in her body.
BE STRONG.
Peace fills her, her resolve is strengthened. There is no sense of time; when the Archangel departs to etheric realms, the candle has long since burned out.
Nancy gropes for the light switch. For the first time in months, she has a sense of hope. She's that much closer to her goal. Not all the way---there's more to do yet---but her angelic guide has not tried to dissuade her from her course. Taking up the blade, she finds its strength has increased. Her hand tingles where it touches the silver medal. The consecration by its maker made Demon-Killer powerful; even before St Michael's intervention, Nancy was aware of its implacable purpose. She secures her prize, tucks John's shirt away and smiles, an unsettling smile that John Winchester would recognize. Soft and puny? Not by a long shot. Compared to her plans for a rematch with that demon, Steve Sweeney got off light.
Girl ya gotta love your man
Take him by the hand
Make him understand
The world on you depends
Our life will never end
Gotta love your man, yeah
Riders on the storm...
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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
http://vanillafluffy.livejournal.com/146652.html Seen and Unseen, Part Two