And We Are Ashes - Chapter 1, Part 7

[thecatevari]

13,709 / 50,000 (27.4%)

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"I think Dean left town."

She doesn't mean to snap at Sam; she really doesn't. But after dealing with Joe Welch—unfaithful, small-minded and dull as a bag of hammers—after the hitch in Sam's voice, making her feel that her fears are true, the idea that Dean just left, intact and under his own power is apparently just the ignition fuel her temper needs. "Why would you think that?"

"The cops had his journal. He left you a message." Sam sounds uncomfortable with it as she is. "He said not to look for him."

Wait. What? "Now why the hell would he do that?" Mary reaches to snap off the radio, annoyed by the noise suddenly. As she straightens, she looks by reflex into the rearview mirror. Constance Welch looks at her with starving eyes from the backseat.

"Take me home."

Ah, hell.

"I swear, I don't know what goes through that boy's head sometimes," Mary says to Sam, struggling to keep her voice calm and level. "Or any of you. Winchester men are the most stubborn, pigheaded, wrong minded. Both of you, just like your daddy."

"Mom," Sam says, confusion and worry bleeding into his voice. "Mom. You're breaking up."

Mary snaps the phone shut and considers the odds that Sam won't come looking for her. She sighs and tromps harder on the gas, keeping one eye on the ghost. She's got some of Dean's rock salt rounds in her handgun in its holster, tight against her ribs, but they won't dissipate as strong a spirit as Constance for very long and she still needs to exhume the grave and then salt and burn the bones.

"I happen to be female, you know," she says conversationally t the ghost. Uncharitably—because outside of her sons she's never felt the need to be very charitable—she wonders if Constance was once a prom queen or a Miss Cornfed or whatever the hell it is they call them out here. Ms. Treehugger, probably. In any case, Constance has that same sweet-faced, spoiled look, used to wrapping men around her dainty little fingers.

The ghost does some of that moving without moving crap that always gives Mary the creeping willies and looks out the window in pointed silence. Mary bets what few girlfriends Constance had and the rest of the women in Constance's peer group had probably loathed the bitch with the fire of a thousand suns.

It's possible she's got a bit of a hate on for Constance fucking Welch.

Over the rise, she sees the shadowy and unlit eaves of a roof, ramshackle even in the weak light of the Impala's headlights. Mary checks her odometer. Yeah. Should be the place. Better be.

"I also haven't been unfaithful," she adds in a conversational tone as she pulls into the drive. Rocks ping up into the undercarriage and rumble under the wheels. She wonders how she can buy more time. She absolutely hates ghosts. It's ironical, given her chosen profession, but there it is. Ghosts are unaffected by her voice and other talents and yet, conversely, seem attracted to her. Probably by her bad blood, she thinks sourly.

"Yes, you have," Constance's spirit pronounces, and a shiver runs down Mary's back at such a bald and definitive condemnation.

"Hey, I never—" she starts, but when she looks in the rearview mirror, Constance's ghost is gone. Mary lets out a shaky sigh and puts the car in park. "Fuck," she breathes, her voice as quavery as her stomach. She flexes her hands on the wheel, knuckles aching from how tightly she was clenching on it. "I hate it when they do that."

She doesn't have the chance to say or think anything else before she's suddenly pinned to the seat and pierced with sharp, stabbing pains, unlocalized, like someone just shoved their hand into her chest.

When the ghost flickers into existence a moment later, its human seeming torn and shredded into the skull-faced angry spirit beneath, she sees that's just what's happened, spectral fingers buried to the top knuckle in her.

Mary gasps, her heart and lungs paralyzed with the pain. She claws uselessly at her breasts, hands passing through the ghost with no effect other than the ache spreading to the bones of her hand, her arm. "I wasn't unfaithful!" she gasps again, struggling for breath, her legs kicking out randomly. "I was never unfaithful!"

The ghost leans in. This close, she can smell the fait tang of ozone and the stench of damp graveyard dirt and rot. Constance's eyes roll loosely in the wet, raw sockets, not even resembling human. "Unfaithful to who?" it whispers, death's head grin widening. "Your husband?" It writhes up her body, solid enough she can feel slight weight on her legs, her belly. "Or the family you left behind, Maryam?"

If it were possible for Mary to grow colder, she would, ice crawling down her spine. The spirit—or whatever inhabits its shell—thrusts its fingers deeper, above the knuckles so she can't even think for pain. She wheeze-screams, arching up off the seat. "Who…? Who are you?"

She didn't even know they could do this. She didn't even know this was possible.

"Where is the boy, Maryam?"

Mary gropes across her body for her gun, cursing herself for not thinking of it sooner. The few seconds it would buy her might be enough to slam the idling car into reverse and get the hell out of here, away from Constance's possessed spirit. Her hand again passes right through the ghost's, the bones aching where the two of them intersect.

"Mom!"

No. No.

Her hands are too weak, her inability to breathe, the bone-deep chill, the squeezing, pulping pain taking its toll. Her fingertips only glance over the holster helplessly, unable to even undo the snap, to do anything more than graze the butt.

"Mom!"

Banging on the window and then the flat sound of shattering safety glass. Mary blinks blearily through the flickering shape on top of her and sees Sam reaching one long arm through the shattered window to unlock the door.

"No," she tries to say to him, sluggish panic stirring in her veins. "No. Don't be here. Don't let it—them—see you. It's not safe." But her voice is as weak as her body, failing before it even reaches her vocal chords. The ghost's fingers flex horribly, painfully in her chest.

Then Sam is half-climbing over her, his eyes wide and panicked. Her boy, her little boy. He grabs the wheel and jams one foot down onto the gas pedal. The car lurches and roars, leaping forward.

The ghost—or whatever it is now—makes a hideous mewling noise and vanishes. Mary sucks in her first full breath, a loud, swooping noise that feels like it tears all her bones loose from their moorings and her muscles loose from all the rest. Next she starts coughing, twisting and curling as much as she can with Sam half on top of her. Her chest burns at the same time she feels frozen through.

The car lurches again, the undercarriage scraping horribly, and she knows they've hit the house itself, the car tilting and jolting hard enough to drive the breath right out of her again. An earthshaking crash when they hit the façade, but the Impala's made of sterner stuff than most California building materials and though she gives a momentary despairing thought for the paint job, it only squalls briefly before they're through the wall and slamming into whatever furniture remains.

"Sam," she croaks, reaching out and putting her hand limply on his arm. "Ease down." She coughs again.

"She wanted to go home, I'll damn well take her home," Sam growls, sounding eerily like his father. She scrunches up in an effort to sit up and sees his hands are white knuckled on the wheel, so taut it looks like his knuckles might split open. Then, before she can say anything, he turns his head and looks at her, concern printed across his face. "Are you okay?"

She has a moment to wonder what she did—or failed to do—that Sam wears his heart and other emotions so close to the skin. With all that's in front of them, it seems like such a stupid tactical mistake to have made. Then she's shoving up, despite the pain, getting herself upright. "Yeah," she says. Another cough, dry and ugly. "Just peachy." She looks out the windshield at the wreckage of what had been the Welch's living room. It looks like Joe Welch didn't take much when he'd left the place, possibly just walked out the front door and locked it up behind him. Given what a cunt Constance has turned out to be, she can't say she blames him. "Jeez, Sam, what did you do?" she asks and she really needs to stop talking because it hurts like hell.

"We should get out of here," Sam says nervously. He takes off his hoodie and hands it to her. She's confused until she looks down and sees her tee-shirt is shredded where the apparition's fingers were, the pale plumpness of her breasts visible through the gaping fabric. It's not really embarrassing, but Sam is twenty-two and still embarrassed by just about everything about her and so she shrugs the hoodie on over her clothes and pushes up the trailing sleeves to her elbow. "We don't know that the ghost is really gone."

"I don’t want to just try to back out without seeing how much you fucked up my car," Mary says, sore down to her bones as she opens the door and hauls herself out, mainly by clinging to the window and dragging herself upright. "We won't get far without her."

Sam climbs out the other side and she debates uneasily whether it's better for him to wait in the car our out of it where he has room to run. She's bending to check the grille and front driver's side tire for damage, Sam watching her six, when a sideboard rumbles and tap dances on the hardwood floor and then comes hurtling at the two of them. It happens too fast; Mary lurches up and back, but doesn't have time to pull up any resistance of her own and so it hits them both and drives them back against the Impala's hood.

"Mom." Mary stops pushing on the sideboard long enough to see the ghost—or the spirit inside the ghost, she's no longer sure which—watching them from across the room. The sideboard is as cheap and flimsy as the rest of the furniture scattered around the farm house but the kinetic force of the spirit gives it the weight far beyond its physical presence. Mary's bad leg is protesting bitterly.

"Maybe," Sam pants, straining against the sideboard himself, "this might be a good time to work your mojo like you did with the car?"

"Sam if it worked on spirits, do you think I'd be using rock salt and fire for all these years?" She's already exerting what force she can to keep the sideboard from crushing them to a pulp across the Impala's grille but she's never been strong and she's already tired from stopping the Impala on the bridge, a throb from deep inside like an overworked muscle.

"So what do we do?" he asks.

"Don't suppose you're carrying?" she asks hopefully. Her own gun flew out of her hand on first impact and now lies uselessly on the moldering faux-Persian rug as if mocking her with it's nearness.

"No."

He sounds ashamed and that allows her to say mildly, "Well. That's a pickle," instead of venting her irritation at the depth of his willingness to be reinvolved with his former life, with her, with Dean. She supposes bitterly she should be grateful he still calls her "Mom".

"Mom, that's not fun…" He cuts off abruptly and for a moment, it's like everything stops.

They watch a light—too thin and sharp to be cast by any lamp or fire—brighten at the top of the stairs. Mary becomes aware of the water pattering down the stairs tardily, her attention frozen on the startled figure of Constance Welch and the two small shapes silhouetted in ghost flare at the stair head.

Constance's face twists, torn between the skull face of the agent inside her and her own true ghost-self. Mary feels the warring crosscurrent of energy between the two of them, something like the hum of angry bees in the back of her mind, something like a tug of war. C'mon, Constance, she urges silently, those are your kids up there. Be a mom, take back your body and say hello.

"You've come home to us Mommy."

Even thought Mary knows the words are not directed at her, she shivers, suddenly chilled through by the inhuman promise in them. It happens very quickly after that.

When the last crackle of spectral energy has died and there's nothing but a stinking pool of stagnant water soaking deep into the rug, the sideboard's push slacks with a suddenness that pitches Sam and Mary forward. It groans against the floor, a noise that Mary echoes. She heaves a relieved sigh right after it and she and Sam push the thing back far enough that they can crawl out from behind it. The formerly broken bone in her left thigh throbs something fierce and she's not at all sure it'll support her weight. She falls back onto the Impala's hood instead, panting and with her hair hanging in her face.

Sam puts a hand on her shoulder. "You all right?"

She nods and wave a hand. "Yeah. Just need a minute."

"Yeah. Sure." Sam plops down next to her, the car dipping under their combined weight. For a moment, she hates him for the resiliency of youth. "So I guess that's why she could never go home. She really did kill her kids after all."

"Yep." Mary generously avoids the 'I told you so'. "She was scared to face them." She shivers.

After the throb dies into a duller ache and she's promised herself liniment and a handful of drugs, she says, "Well. Never let it be said your mom doesn't know how to show you a good time."

Sam huffs in surprise and then he laughs.

Comments

[shadow-walker3.livejournal.com]

I take great pride in actually being first, cause it's never happened yet elsewhere and it ain't gonna happen anytime soon either. I swear, they soar like vultures around your LJ.

I like that even though Constance and Mary aren't anything ailke, Mary recognizes similarites - and the not being able to face her children line was a nice touch.

And I like that while Sam is different, he's still essentially Sam. His inner characters is still the same Sam.

Do we learn about the mob family when Sam does?