A pacifist vampire and an overzealous hunter walk into a bar…
Lenore shows her teeth. Her lips draw back and her fangs descend.
“You’re a vampire.”
“And you’re a hunter, you’ve killed more people than I have.”
For Sapphebruary Day 9: Teeth
Right now this is a fic that only exists in my head but I’m a little obsessed with the idea of a pacifist monster like Lenore paired with early seasons Jo, when she’s romanticized hunting. They’re both just trying to survive and they’re put at odds by the world they live in.
Mary is alone. For the first time since she went to sleep with two young sons and a loving husband and a beautiful home, for the first time since she woke up to blood and fire and death and then nothing, nothing for so long, and now this…
For the first time since that, Mary is alone. Or feels alone.
She is sitting in a car that doesn’t belong to her (not even by marriage anymore - no - her husband is dead, and everyone is acting like this is old news, even though Mary just found out, god her John is dead and she just found out) on some road she’s never driven, on some hunt she’s got no choice but to be on. She’s quickly falling back into her old ways of living someone else’s life.
Because this? This is not Mary’s life. It can’t be.
[read on a03 or continue below]
Sitting in the driver’s seat of Mary’s dead husband’s car is a 37-year-old man who’s calling her mom, like this is normal, like she wasn’t holding four-year-old-him on her hip what feels like yesterday, like Mary wasn’t 29 today and somehow 28 thirty-four years ago.
Last night she burned. This morning she’s alive.
She has no time to process any of this, of course, because she’s on the way to get her six-month-old son who is actually 33 now; oh my god, Mary is going to be sick.
“Stop the car,” Mary feels herself say the words but does not recognize the voice, not through the pounding of blood in her ears and the taste of smoke in her mouth.
She doesn’t need to look up to see the worry painted across the man’s face. She can hear it in his panicked reassurances and the way he keeps calling her mom, always mom, like she is supposed to recognize him as her own and not see him as the stranger that stands before her.
As the car that once belonged to her heaven-husband and is now being driven by her stranger-son skids to a stop on the side of a country road, Mary flings the door open to take a breath of fresh air, and her lungs find only dust. She chokes on her inhale and spits out onto the road, trying to clear the grit from the inside of her cheeks and from down inside her throat.
She will be fine. She always is. Not even turning their family home into her funeral pyre can keep Mary down.
******************
They’re driving again, hopefully pointed towards Sam, little perfect-baby Sammy, and imperfect-Mary hates how she can’t think about him too much. She hates how thinking of her baby brings knots to her stomach and nails to her palms before she realizes her hands are fists. She supposes some of that guilt doesn’t belong to her, not now that Sammy is his own adult.
She also supposes that thought makes her kind of evil, or at least selfish, and aren’t those two things one and the same for women?
Mary realizes she must have been quiet for too long because the man beside her - Dean - breaks the silence, all bundled nerves and worry, and it reminds Mary of her Dean, always fussing and fixing.
“You, um,” Dean starts, stumbling a little on his introduction. “You can talk to me, you know, if you want to. I know that…” A long pause, then a rush of words follows, and hearing them fills Mary with a confusing rush of guilt. “From experience, the whole dying thing can be sorta shocking.”
Mary tears her gaze away from her hands and forces herself to look at her son.
Her son.
Dean was supposed to get away from this. He was four years old, and he wanted to take dance classes, and he had just learned how to braid Mary’s hair - loose and uneven, but braids nonetheless - and his hands were so small. Tiny, gentle things that pulled at her apron and played clumsily with the bow tied at the back. The man she sits next to now grips the wheel with bruised knuckles and gunmetal-calloused fingers, talking about death like she’s an old friend.
He was supposed to get away.
“I don’t remember anything after the fire. Death was like blinking.” Mary says it to reassure him. It’s unsettling to her, but nothing is better than something, at least if she bases that on the relief that slides off of Dean when she says it.
She decides not to ask about her son’s death. They’re both here now, so it cannot matter.
***************
They get to the farmhouse where her son is likely being held, and the guilt spreads like fire, burning hot in Mary’s stomach, swelling and kicking at her insides. She instinctively grips at the pain, wincing with the memories.
It’s all her fault, all of it, the blood, the burning, all the death that came after and since. She doesn’t even know all that has happened while she’s been dead, but she knows it’s her fault. Her sons are older than her and have lived worse lives, and all of that is her fault too, her fault for not being there and her fault for setting those dominos in motion.
Selfish. Selfish Mary, unwilling to lose her heaven-prescribed love, reluctant to see the fire through the forest and the forest for the trees. Dooming her family before it even began.
Last month, Dean started preschool.
Today, Mary’s son presses a gun into her hands and she tries not to cry. She doesn’t have time for tears now.
***************
When they open the door to the basement and Sam is there, she barely notices the years she missed through her son’s blood. The decades don’t matter when her baby is broken, shivering on the floor of a dirty basement. His age is covered by the burns, by the cuts, by the rage that Mary feels towards whoever or whatever did this to him.
Dean rushes to his side, and Mary whips around, her fury blotted out by confusion when she sees a woman standing there, prim and proper, so viscerally out of place in her surroundings. The shock that Mary felt seemed to be mirrored back at her, the woman’s composure flickering for a moment before her expression washed clean.
The woman waves her hand, and gold rings at the base of slim fingers flash across Mary’s vision before it starts to go dark in the corners. She’s staring, transfixed, at the center of the woman’s palm, suddenly noticing the blood flowing there, dark deep red, spilling down the woman’s wrist, and it’s a while before she realizes she cannot breathe. It’s the darkness that teases at the edges of her sight that finally clues her in - the fuzziness in her brain and the fading of her consciousness.
Mary’s been choked before, felt a large hand squeeze against the sides of her breath, violent in the way it ripped the air from her lungs. It’s never been this soft before, this peaceful. She manages to look past the woman’s outstretched hand as the darkness starts to overcome her, and the two lock eyes.
Mary and her killer. It’s simple. There’s no air here to distract from the clarity of it.
She feels death curling around her feet, and it feels like the flames did, but cold this time. Ice cold and gripping.
The grasp falters for a moment, and Mary strains to pull in a breath, a heavy one that rasps and drags down her throat and claws into her hungry lungs. The small intake of air brings clarity, and Mary senses something akin to surprise behind the mask of careful concentration that the other woman wears.
Her killer’s lips are moving, but Mary cannot hear. Her focus is solely on the lack of breath in her lungs; the gasp she cannot take; the easy beauty of her killer; the comfort of the end.
Death is familiar, Mary finds herself thinking. A ghost of a smile passes across her lips, and the darkness lapping at the sides of her vision begins to overtake her.
The illusion is shattered with a sudden, violent start. Mary didn’t see it coming, and neither did her killer, but Dean had clambered to his feet and knocked her attacker to the ground, ending the peaceful grasp Mary was cradled within.
The next breath of air that Mary takes in burns worse than death.
a03 link! kudos and comments make my world go round and round. also reblogs r appreciated if u liked it!
OH billiewena, one of my favorite pairings!!!! Not gonna lie, keeping this one short was a challenge because post canon billiewena makes me want to write a whole fix it fic BUT I hope I did them justice in this short fic.
Billie and Rowena share a moment together at the end of the world. Read on AO3 or under the cut.
The reshaping of a universe without Chuck would take time, is taking time, did take time and also took no time at all. Time had to be reinvented during the reshaping of the cosmos and it took centuries and it took milliseconds and it is still taking place and has been taking place since before Chuck came into existence.
Billie, as a being of the cosmos, can feel all the other cosmic beings reworking their way through the strings of creation and she can also feel one cosmic being who is uncharacteristically still among the frantic busyness of a universe being remade.
Rowena, ruler of Hell, is sitting along the coastline of St. Ninian’s Isle, sipping a carefully brewed cup of tea. She’s in a rocking chair on a porch looking out towards the coastline off in the distance. (The entire residence will be undone in the remaking of the new world; in fact, it has already been undone.) It’s overcast but not currently raining, with enough of a chill in the air that a human might be bothered by it.
“You’re having a cup of tea at the end of the world?” Billie asks her, appearing by her side.
“There’s nothing a nice wee cup of tea can’t fix,” the queen of hell responds, calmly taking a sip. “It’s Scottish blend, the finest. Do you think it will taste different after all of this is done?”
“To us, yes,” Billie replies. “To the humans, probably not.”
Rowena sighs, “Another lovely thing lost to the passage of time.”
“More like the restructuring of time,” Billie says.
“Would you care to stay and watch for a while?” Rowena asks her.
Billie moves to stand beside Rowena in her rocking chair, looking off into the distance in the same direction Rowena does.
“I don’t suppose you’d care for some?” Rowena asks, indicating the mug in her hands.
“They used to be my thing,” Rowena sighs. “All I ever wanted was…”
“To be unkillable and to have every comfort in the world,” Billie finishes for her.
“That’s not too much to ask, is it?” Rowena asks primly, taking another sip of tea.
“What’s troubling you, Rowena?” Billie asks. She can feel Rowena’s energy, so still among a universe of movement. The only stagnant area in the whole of existence right now is this quiet moment Rowena has manufactured.
“Every particle in the universe is changing and most people won’t even notice the difference,” Rowena says softly.
“You’ve seen a lot—for a human,” Billie says.
“I’m not a human any longer,” Rowena sighs.
“Do you wish you still were?” Billie’s never been human but she knows how sentimental they can be, she can feel all living things deeply through their connection to death. “You’re more powerful now than you ever were before.”
“No amount of power can make you happy. I learned that over the years,” Rowena says. “And my son…he sacrificed himself rather than stay in the role I currently have.”
“That doesn’t really answer my question,” Billie says.
“No one can stay a human forever,” Rowena replies, eyes distant as she looks towards the coastline. “Not even in this new, hopefully better world. I suppose my post human life is better than others.”
Billie refrains from pointing out that that answer is still a non-answer and instead she says, “This is different to the creation of the world and yet—still so similar.”
“You’ve seen a lot—for a reaper,” Rowena says.
“I’m not a reaper anymore,” Billie says.
“Do you wish you still were?” Rowena asks, taking another sip of her tea.
“Being Death is…different,” Billie shrugs. “Sometimes there’s no better or worse. Things just are the way they are.”
“Like my becoming queen of hell,” Rowena says, the tea cup in her right hand gently clinking as it hits the saucer in her left hand. “Though I suppose the transition was easier for you.”
“Perhaps not,” Billie says.
“It wasn’t easier for you?” Rowena asks. “Aren’t reapers and Death made of the same…stuff? You feel similar to your reapers.”
“I suppose it's true we were made from the same cosmic powers,” Billie says. “We are connected but we are not…one. And being Death it’s…the grand scheme of things is clearer. I’m no longer a reaper working as a single cog in the mechanism of fate. Now I’m…”
“The engineer sent to fix the mechanism of fate?” Rowena suggests.
“Hm, I suppose that’s an apt enough metaphor,” Billie says.
“And that’s hard for you? Hard enough that you think this change was easier for me?”
“Human beings…they’re in a constant state of flux,” Billie muses. "For a human to become something that is no longer human is just another change for you in your ever changing lives.”
“You thought you’d be a reaper forever,” Rowena says sympathetically.
“I’ve been a reaper since before this world was born, I always thought I’d be a reaper when it ended,” Billie says quietly.
Rowena sets her teacup down and stands up. Moving close to her, she gently places her hand on Billie’s face, her thumb stroking Billie’s cheekbone. Billie can feel her energy reaching out and Billie sighs a bit and allows Rowena in. Rowena had been one of the most powerful humans Billie had ever met but she had still been human. Now, as ruler of hell, she’s made of something more celestial. Rowena’s energy washes over her. Her steadfast resolve is something that Billie has always admired. Rowena has been knocked down many times and she has never failed to get back up again. It’s so very human of her and something that comforts Billie in this moment, when everything around her is changing. Rowena’s energy flows through her, an energy that knows how to meet adversity and bend but not break. Billie remembers when she comforted Rowena with words when she was a witch. Words were the only thing her human brain would have understood. Now Rowena is able to soothe her with a cosmic exchange of energies a human would never understand.
They stand there together while the reshaping of the world goes on around them, for a single moment and for many moments and for every moment that ever existed and ever will exist. They stand there while time stretches on and wraps around them and skips ahead and reverses and repeats, swirling frantically around this one moment held still by Rowena’s powers.
“It’s the end of the world as we know it,” Rowena gives Billie a sly smile. “And how are we feeling?”
“I feel fine,” Billie’s mouth twitches but she doesn’t allow herself to smile at Rowena’s joke.
“Will we still have that song in this brand new world order?” Rowena asks.
“In some iteration or another,” Billie says.
“I suppose I’ve been idle long enough,” Rowena sighs, letting her hand fall and stepping away. “Time to dive back into the chaos, then?"
“Well, it wouldn't be much of a universe without either of us," Billie says.
Rowena gives her a small, satisfied smile.
Billie dematerializes first, her consciousness moving away from the frozen moment she shared with Rowena and out towards the magnificent chaos of a whole universe being reorientated. Rowena soon follows, chasing after her into a swirling mass of primordial atoms that were to become and have become and are the brand new universe.
YES. I love everything about this. One of my all time favorite pairings and what a compelling prompt. (Not so coincidentally, I am also posting this on the first day of sapphebruary since the day one prompt is "stabbing.")
This fic picks up RIGHT before the big annamary fight scene in the Song Remains the Same (5x13). CW: mild gore, canon-typical violence
Read on AO3 or under the cut.
“She’s here.”
Anna can hear one of the humans hiding inside the garage mutter this, as if a celestial being wouldn’t have better hearing than the things they normally hunt. Anna can see why they chose to take cover here. The garage is a wide space, filled with many cars and different types of equipment that would provide good hiding places for a human if the thing coming after them wasn’t an angel. John Winchester is the first person she sees as she enters the room and he is easily disposed of.
Or, at least, he should be. She raises her vessel’s arm and throws him across the room but she feels the effort of using her powers more than she should. Her vision is shaky and her vessel’s nose is bleeding. John Winchester is up again and knocking her down with a crowbar. It’s a shot that she should have been able to block but she recovers quickly, disappearing and reappearing behind him, throwing him across the room again, harder than before.
Dean moves swiftly to sneak up behind her, aiming to stab her but she turns and catches his arm, her other hand coming up to squeeze his throat.
“I wish I could say it’s good to see you, Anna,” he gasps out.
“You, too, Dean,” she says quietly, almost gently, before launching him across the garage and through a window. She wants to do this peacefully, to carefully unwrite history so they are never born. She has no wish to kill anyone she doesn’t have to, it will only add to their suffering and she intends to erase their suffering altogether.
Now Mary Winchester is coming for her, expertly wielding the angel blade that Dean dropped. It’s curious how they’ve chosen to come at her one at a time as opposed to altogether. A group of hunters should have been able to come up with a better plan for taking down an angel than this.
Anna focuses all of her attention on Mary, the woman who holds all the potential to end the world and doesn’t even know it. Mary’s a good fighter and Anna is in a weakened state. She gets in a couple of good shots, a kick to her stomach and a slice to Anna’s hand with the angel blade. The cut actually hurts her but still, a human is no match for an angel, even a severely weakened one.
Anna disappears herself from Mary’s vision and reappears behind her. Mary is admirably quick, turning to stab her so fast that she would have succeeded if Anna had been a less powerful creature.
But Anna is not a less powerful creature. She grabs Mary’s arm, softly says to her, “I’m sorry.” And she means it, she truly means it, she feels an overwhelming amount of remorse over the way things must be as she launches Mary straight into a car windshield. The angel blade clatters against the floor, skidding far from any human’s reach.
Mary drags herself across the car, clearly injured but desperately crawling across the body of the damaged car to put distance between herself and Anna. Anna walks towards her slowly, watching Mary scramble to find anything to defend herself.
There is nothing over there to help the human defend herself against a being as powerful as her but Anna is still too slow to stop Mary as Mary plunges a crowbar through her chest.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
In the days of the great warrior Joshua, in the land of Canaan, was a lower order of seraph assigned to watch over the children of the Levant, Anna, of the Seventh Angel Garrison, fourth ranking member of her regiment. A great war broke out between the men who followed the word of heaven and an invading force. Anna, ever watchful, strengthened the hearts of heaven’s children so that they might earn their own victory over their arrogant adversaries.
The enemies of heaven’s people fled and Anna, their protector, cast down great stones from heaven upon their retreating forces, as punishment for their hubris and warning against future retaliation. So badly did the hailstones reduce their numbers, more enemies died upon the retreat than upon the children of heaven’s sword.
And it came to pass that she was rewarded for her acts, granted a garrison of her own to lead. So vigilantly did she adhere to the commandments of heaven, her loyalty and ferocity could engender no doubt among even the highest of heaven’s celestial beings.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Mary is in so much pain but she forces herself to crawl over the car and away from the angel slowly advancing on her like the villain in one of those cheesy horror movies that John likes. She’s able to grab the first weapon shaped thing she sees, a crowbar, and drive it into Anna’s chest. It would be a killing blow for most creatures in existence but not for Anna.
Anna’s mouth is overflowing with blood and squelching noises come from the angel’s body as Anna slowly pulls the crowbar out of herself and says, “Sorry, it’s not that easy to kill an angel.”
It’s the second time Anna has apologized to her since she started trying to murder her and Mary almost believes her.
“No, but you can distract them,” Sam’s voice comes from across the room, his hand hovering over a sigil. Sam’s hand is only a fraction of an inch from the sigil when the ground starts to shake. His earlier injury must have left him wobbly because he loses his balance, falling away from the sigil.
“Not this time,” Anna says, the ground shaking so much that it causes cracks to form in the foundations of the garage and spread upward, breaking the banishing sigil in half.
Not this time but maybe the next, Mary thinks as she runs towards the dropped angel blade. Anna may be powerful but she’s also injured, causing a whole earthquake must be taking all of her concentration.
The unnaturally cool blade back in her hand, Mary moves the strike Anna again. She moves as quickly as her body will allow her, she knows she must be injured but the adrenaline pushes her forward, as it always does. She aims the blade to bury it in Anna’s back but Anna turns just a second before she gets there, bringing the crowbar still in her hand up and through Mary’s stomach as Mary brings the angel blade down, burying it in Anna’s shoulder.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Mary was fourteen years old and her face and hands were covered in blood and her father was proud of her. At her feet was a freshly dead body and the corpse’s head had rolled across the room. It was the first time she had ever seen remains so…newly remained.
She had researched before and she’d passed all her father’s many tests. She could shoot a gun and throw a dagger and fistfight her way out of anything her father had thrown at her. She’d banished and sigiled and spellworked. She’d fought ghosts and zombies before. Violent though that was, she was laying them to rest when she fought the undead. She’d been offering them some small measure of peace by reminding the already dead that they needed to act dead.
This moment was different. This was a kill. Her first kill. She wasn’t quite tall enough to decapitate the thing while it was standing, she had to kick out its knees before she could get a good enough angle with the blade to slice the vamp’s head clean off its neck with a force a grown man would envy.
“That’s my girl,” her father said, clapping a hand on her shoulder. He had her back the entire time, he would have stepped in if she needed it but he had hung back, watched to see what she could do—observed and judged every moment that led to her slicing the head off of a living creature and had apparently found no flaws in her technique.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Mary stabs Anna as her father would have wanted her to do and Anna stabs Mary as her father would have wanted her to do, both of them enacting violence on each other done at the behest of an absent father. Mary is frozen, impaled on a crowbar, choking on her own blood, her hand still tightly gripping the blade in Anna’s shoulder. Anna is equally frozen, her hand holding the crowbar killing Mary steady as the blade in her shoulder wreaks havoc on her celestial side, damaging her grace in ways not yet visible to humans. Mary’s mouth is filling with blood and if the organ damage doesn’t kill her soon, she will simply choke to death on her own blood. Anna’s celestial form is filling with gushing grace and if she can’t find a way to contain it, her angel form and her human body will choke to death on her own grace.
It is a moment splintering out across time like fractured glass, reflecting the same image over and over again in different shapes and sizes, distorted but fundamentally identical.
Until, that is, some invisible force shifts the fragments so they start reflecting new colors and new images.
Anna’s dying eyes stare deep into Mary’s dying eyes and she sees her own pain made human. Mary stares into Anna’s eyes and sees her own life story staring back at her, a mirror image magnified on a cosmic scale. The blood flowing from Mary coats Anna’s hands. The grace bleeding from Anna coats Mary’s hands.
With every pound of Mary’s heart, more blood is pumped out of her wounds and on to Anna’s body. With every shift of her celestial form, more grace spouts from Anna’s wounds and on to Mary’s hands.
Anna pulls the crowbar slowly from Mary’s body and Mary collapses into her, no longer held in place by the weapon that had run her through. Anna uses her true form to cover the human in the grace that is gushing out of her. It’s sloppy work, she’s not sure how much good a dying angel’s grace will do but Mary’s human injuries are minor in comparison to the damage done to Anna.
Mary grips the angel blade with as much strength as she can muster and pulls it out of Anna. Mary weakly pats at Anna’s shoulder, attempting to put pressure on the only wound she can see, unable to comprehend Anna’s most dire injuries. Anna breathes out, pushing as much grace towards Mary as she can, not just the grace that has been steadily flowing out of her since Mary stabbed her but her still living grace as well. Anna is dying but she won’t have her last act be murdering yet another human.
At least…Anna’s celestial form is dying. But she has ripped out her celestial form once before and she can do it again. This mortal body isn’t simply a shell, like so many other angels treat their vessels. It was made in the image of her human self. She reaches deep inside herself and severs her connection to her grace, flinging it outward and far from her body, hoping the grace that is left is too weak to find its way back to her now. It’s not as painful as she remembers it being before, perhaps because she was already on her way to dying this time.
Mary’s injuries are now mostly healed. There was not enough left in Anna to heal her easily and completely as she might have once done but Mary’s life is saved. She is able to support her own weight again and she straightens up, her hand placing a firmer grip on Anna’s shoulder. Anna shakes her head, it’s a bad injury but only a human one, this version of her is no longer dying. She shrugs her shoulder away from Mary’s hand.
They step apart.
The crowbar and the angel blade both clatter to the ground as they are dropped by their respective warriors. Anna stands, graceless and alive, next to Mary, grace filled and alive, their heavy breathing filling the silence as they stare at each other and the wreckage around them.
