And We Are Ashes: Chapter 6, Part 4
Nov. 14th, 2007 02:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thecatevariWriting this, this year, has been such a different experience for me from previous NaNos. On the one hand, I see very clearly the things I want to do. More than just knowing how the plot goes, I have actual images. Gesture, expression, facial tics... I know the blocking of the scenes and--more or less--how they intersect. At the same time, actually hedging the words around my vision has been so excruciating. The window into the page has been flimsy and fragile, apt to dump me out at strange times, mute and frustrated. And, of course, there's the lingering fear that the vision itself is faulty and the end product will be a forgettable piece of go se that no one but me (and maybe ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
baileytc will care about. *laughs*
28,319 / 50,000 words. 57% done!
Today's Word Count: 2,793
Current Total Word Count: 28,319
Estimated Total Word Count: ~100,000
What's bad: I feel better about this scene than I did when I started it (thank you,technosage), but the end of it definitely needs work. I rushed it and it needs some filling in. Other than that, I think it actually went pretty well for as far AU as it went. I was really afraid that I wouldn't be able to bring Mary around to the righteous indignation she needed to be able to act against one of her own, but I think it actually did, without me having to steamroll at all. It's funny, because Mary is totally a made up character at this point, but I see a little bit of canonical Dean in Mary, which is kind of a hoot and makes me think that I'm doing SOMETHING right with her characterization.
What's good: Mary. I love the way she went from reluctantly confronting Sue-Ann to the moral impetus to bring the situation to a close. I love that she has a moral impetus, whatever Sam might think.
What pleases me: "I ask again: would it have made a difference?" She holds out her hand, ushering Mary into the seat across from hers. The room doesn't look like it's used all that often, but there's no mustiness and only the faint lemony reek of polish. Mary guesses it's probably only used for Sunday's dinners. It isn't often that she lets herself indulge in might-have-beens, but here, with another McCoy for the first time in decades, she feels a vague sense of longing for her own house and all the Sunday dinners she'd dreamed of and never gotten to have.
"No," Mary admits grudgingly, taking the seat. The aging wood is covered with a crocheted cushion that doesn't really ameliorate the hardness of the chair. "Probably not." Sue-Ann makes a pleased, subvocal noise, sitting back in her chair. "You still should have told me."
Sue-Ann snorts. "You've been away too long. That's hardly the McCoy way."
Previous parts can be found here
"Well…you know…" Sam rolls his glass of iced tea between his hands, the tall, slim glass dwarfed by his huge palms. His head ducks. "I'm just trying to make sense of it all."
"Well it was a miracle, son," Roy answers genially. "A genuine, God-given miracle. They seem to follow me around, these days."
"What do you mean?"
Mary closes the heavy door between the kitchen and narrow, dark dining room beyond. She sees Sam look up, the glitter-shine of his eyes, before the pocket door thunks into its socket and she turns away to regard Sue-Ann.
"Did you know?" she asks, throat aching with the effort to keep her tone even. "Did you know that boy would die in Sam's place?"
"Does it matter?" Sue-Ann untucks her crossed arms and goes to the table to twitch the cloth to a more pleasing configuration, smoothing its folds. "You asked me for a blood-gift. You asked me for your son's life. I gave it to you. That's more than my son got." She looks up from straightening the cheap steel and glass candelabra, eyes both watchful and wise under the plucked arches of her eyebrows. "Let's not pretend to be morally outraged now, Lillith."
Mary's eyes narrow, not very helpful in the claustrophobic dimness of the room. "I should have known, Sue-Ann."
"Would it have made a difference?" Sue-Ann sounds genuinely interested, seating herself at the table and folding her hands. She examines her nails in between glances at Mary. Though nothing about Roy or Sue-Ann's clothes or home indicates any particular wealth, the nails are perfectly—and professionally—manicured.
Mary persists. "I should've had the choice. I should've known what I was choosing."
"I ask again: would it have made a difference?" She holds out her hand, ushering Mary into the seat across from hers. The room doesn't look like it's used all that often, but there's no mustiness and only the faint lemony reek of polish. Mary guesses it's probably only used for Sunday's dinners. It isn't often that she lets herself indulge in might-have-beens, but here, with another McCoy for the first time in decades, she feels a vague sense of longing for her own house and all the Sunday dinners she'd dreamed of and never gotten to have.
"No," Mary admits grudgingly, taking the seat. The aging wood is covered with a crocheted cushion that doesn't really ameliorate the hardness of the chair. "Probably not." Sue-Ann makes a pleased, subvocal noise, sitting back in her chair. "You still should have told me."
Sue-Ann snorts. "You've been away too long. That's hardly the McCoy way."
Mary ignores that, as it's true. "What happened?" she asks instead. "Your healing… Did your powers change?"
The faint smug satisfaction on Sue-Ann's face falls away, though she doesn't look up from her continued contemplation of her nails, smoothing over a jagged spot on her right index finger with the thumb of her left. "No," Sue-Ann answers shortly.
Mary lets the quiet lie. Her memories of Sue-Ann are old and youthful, but there are some characteristics that don't change no matter how old someone gets and Mary remembers how uneasy Sue-Ann gets in the silence.
"They… You know what it's like. I never left the family, not like you did."
"You weren't as unhappy there as I was," Mary observes quietly.
Sue-Ann waves her hand in acknowledgment. "But that almost makes it worse, when you find out that you're pregnant. The long months of waiting to find out which way it'll go. By the time I knew…it was too late."
"You loved him."
Sue-Ann's face turns both brittle and hard. "Yes. Of course I did." Her hands unlock and shift beneath the table's edge to her lap. "And after that, there really wasn't any choice about what to do. I had to go away. I had to save my son. And that meant leaving no way for the family to find me, including using my powers."
That had to have been hard for Sue-Ann, Mary reflects. Her own abilities are slight, require a lot of effort and are not, in and of themselves, that useful, though Juneau had disagreed with her vehemently about that. Sue-Ann, on the other hand, had been exceptionally proud of her healing abilities and much petted by the Aunts.
Mary had never particularly wanted her gifts (look what they'd done to her mother) and it cost her nothing to give them up. For Sue-Ann, hiding among the mundanes this way must be been agony.
When Sue-Ann looks up at her, sharp and sudden like a bird, Mary sees some of that residual pain in her expression and her red-rimmed eyes, the too-tight press of Sue-Ann's lips. "Did you…? Was it like that for you?" She fiddles with the high collar of her shirt, tugging it closer to the sides of her neck.
"Yes. Of course it was." She dislikes remembering that time, too. Her sick state of constant anxiety had made both boys' pregnancy nightmares, but after Dean had turned out as normal as John, being pregnant with Sam had been infinitely worse, plagued by a sense of outracing mounting odds.
Sue-Ann reaches forward, a jerky snatch that Mary's hard pressed not to pull away from, snagging her fingers through the perpetually loosened ends of Mary's hair. "Your hair is turning dark again," she observes. There could be a trap in the words, but Mary doesn't sense one and it's possible that it's only the observation it seems.
Possible.
"Things have been…dicey since Dean disappeared. I've had to play a little fast and loose." Mary sits back, drawing her hair from Sue-Ann's grip.
"And you think that's wise? With Sam with you?"
Mary doesn't like Sue-Ann's tone. Or the implication. Sue-Ann lost her son; Mary's kept both of hers alive for more than two decades, by herself. "Did you use your powers on behalf of your boy?"
"Jacob. His name was Jacob."
"That doesn't answer the question." Mary parrots Sue-Ann's own words back at her.
Sue-Ann bares her teeth. It's not a smile. "Yes," she hisses, conceding.
"Is that how?"
"I don't know, really. It had been so long. Maybe they…atrophied. I don't know. I just know I couldn't save Jacob, when he got sick." Sue-Ann's voice shakes a little, though with anger or grief, Mary isn't sure. "I had to watch my son die. And then, when Roy got sick…"
"Roy?"
"Cancer. Like Layla, actually. It's how he went blind. He'd been having headaches, but who doesn't? By the time they found it, the doctors told Roy he had a month. A month." Sue-Ann's mouth presses into a fussy, outraged little line.
"But your powers were gone."
The line of Sue-Ann's mouth curves up into a humorless little smile. "You're a McCoy, Lillith. You do what you have to. You—"
"…make do," Mary says softly at the same time. There's a pause. Then: "He's my son, Sue-Ann."
"And you love him?" Sue-Ann asks. "You'd do…anything for him?"
"Of course."
"Then don't look down on me for doing the same," Sue-Ann responds. She lumbers to her feet, clumsy in her anger. Her thighs jag the table, tipping the candelabra over. Sue-Ann catches it with one hand and sets it upright, straightening the celery colored candles.
"I trapped the reaper," Sue-Ann says abruptly. "The one that came for Roy." Her fingers stray to her neck again, adjusting her necklace; an oddly dark chain that crosses the line of her collarbone to disappear beneath her blouse. "I just… I couldn't lose him too."
A grue of cold slips down Mary's spine so fast her toes and fingertips tingle. She's never seen a reaper, she only knows about them in an academic, theoretical sense; dark, ugly spells of summoning and binding. She's never heard of someone actually doing it, though if she'd had, she would've laid even odds it was a McCoy.
"You're using it to steal life force, feed it to your parishioners," Mary says numbly, inanely.
Sue-Ann makes a face. "You always were a goody-two shoes, Lillith."
"Mary."
"What?"
"I'm not Lillith anymore," she says through her teeth, "I'm Mary. Mary Winchester."
"So what if I am? So what if I am taking life force and giving it to the more deserving?" Sue-Ann demands. "Are you going to judge me, Mary? You?"
"You didn't have to do this, Sue-Ann."
"I should've let Roy die? Really? Like you let Sam die?"
"It wasn't Sam's time."
"And it isn't Roy's. You know as well as I do that if I let the reaper go, it will kill him. I can't let that happen. I won't."
"But you didn't need to do this…sideshow carnival to keep Roy alive, Sue-Ann."
"With him blind?" Sue-Ann's eyes widen in outrage. "The medical bills left us destitute and Roy was in no fit condition to work. We would have starved."
"And so you make your living on blood-money." Mary spits, hating Sam was right, hating that, for all her horror, she would do it all over again.
"How is it any different from the things you've done?"
"Because of all the things I've done and all the sins I've committed, they were all to keep my sons alive, Sue-Ann! None of them have been for fucking profit."
"Don't you use that language to me, Lillith, don't you dare. I, who gave you your son's life and I, who can take it. You will show me respect in my home."
Mary shakes her head. "I can't leave it like this, Sue-Ann. I can't leave you here to play gods and monsters. It's not right and it's not your place."
"I am a McCoy; my place is wherever I say it is," Sue-Ann answers venomously, backing away from the table's edge.
Mary sighs. "I'm sorry, Sue-Ann." She lunges across the table. Sue-Ann shies back, but she's a preacher's wife, sedentary and slow for all her relative slimness and Mary's spent the last twenty-two years fighting everyone and everything she came across. Sue-Ann isn't fast enough to escape the dart of Mary's hand, snagging the dark chain around Sue-Ann's neck and tugging a pagan circled cross of earth and sky from beneath the plain cotton. Sue-Ann's hand closes over Mary's wrist, nails gouging blood from Mary's skin, but Mary twists her arm and wrenches, pulling Sue-Ann half across the table.
"Mom?" The pocket door opens, harsh golden light spearing from the kitchen beyond to fall across both of them like a wave.
"Sue-Ann?" Roy asks at nearly the same time.
"Sam, I need you to find her altar!" Mary yells back to him, still wrestling with Sue-Ann for control of the cross. "A basement, a storm cellar…somewhere below ground. Smash it."
"Sue-Ann?" Roy calls again. "What's going on?
"Help!" Sue-Ann gasps, half-choked by her own chain. "Roy, help me, she's trying to kill me!"
Mary steps right, dragging Sue-Ann across the table's surface with her. Even blind, she doesn't want Roy at her back. She doesn't doubt she's stronger and faster, but he's more familiar with the house and any potential weapons and you don't have to be strong to cosh someone on the back of the head. Sue-Ann squeaks, her sensible shoes kicking and thrashing on the wood of the table as she slides, still held in Mary's iron grip.
The cross itself looks strangely friable, Mary thinks, sidestepping again as Roy lumbers toward her, hands held out.
Sue-Ann starts chanting in a language Mary doesn't recognize and Mary feels cold trace over the back of her neck and scalp like a fingernail of ice. It doesn't take a genius to know what Sue-Ann's doing.
"Hurry, Sam!" Mary shouts, thought she has no idea if he can hear her as she hefts in one hand the candelabra Sue-Ann spent so much time fussing over. She drags Sue-Ann's head brutally down, flattening the amulet to the wood of the table and brings the candelabra down with a thick crunch.
Sue-Ann screams like it was her head instead of the necklace, clawing at Mary's arms and Roy takes the opportunity to make a lunge himself and wrap her in a bear hug, tight enough that the breath whooshes out of her lungs. Mary stomps on his foot hard as she can, his mild brown loafers no match for her hard-soled boots, and at the same time, she brings the candelabra down again.
The amulet shatters. The glass of the candelabra breaks, cutting deep into Mary's hand in a spurt of her own blood, hot as molten metal. Mary feels the sense of cold slither across her skin again, taking her by the throat and stealing what little breath she has left and paralyzing her as if she's truly frozen.
She sinks limply through Roy's grip to the floor. Sam, she thinks desperately, seeing the reaper over her, like an impossibly ancient mummy in a suit.
Sue-Ann's legs swing down from the table top as she sits up, her hair hanging in ragged strands around her face and her throat red and marked from where the chain scraped her. Her voice gains in volume, triumph threaded through it and in the satisfied glitter of her golden-hazel eyes.
"Sue-Ann?" Roy stands uncertainly, head swiveling. "Sue-Ann, what's happening?"
I'm dying is what, Mary thinks with irritated exasperation. Oh, fuck, Sam, hurry… Even those thoughts sink and fall into unknowable blackness as the reaper drains the life from her. She feels pain bloom in her head—her brain—like all the rats in the world are chewing through it and she can't even raise her hands enough to clutch.
Then, suddenly, the reaper tilts its head as if listening to a sound in another room. Mary tries to twist away, knock it from her, but the motion's beyond her.
Slowly, the reaper smiles.
It rises to its feet and the moment its hand leaves her skin, Mary gasps, a sound like tearing paper, loud enough to make her ears ring. The breath blows out of her again in a fit of coughing and she turns on her side, curling up around her aching bones.
The reaper glides to Sue-Ann as if on rollers. Mary has the momentary satisfaction of watching Sue-Ann's eyes widen in shock and dismay and her feet kick in desperate haste to crawl across the table. Then the reaper obscures her and all Mary can hear is her screams, high and terrified and Roy saying over and over, "Sue-Ann? Sue-Ann?"
Mary doesn't really remember losing consciousness, but the next thing she's aware of is the farm house's boards throbbing under her cheek and Sam's voice bellowing, "Mom? Mom?"
"Here," she says, or tries to. It comes out only a broken puff of air and another cough, She rolls from her side onto her hands and knees, head hanging. It feels like her skull is made of stone, hanging from the end of her neck. "Here, Sam," she croaks again, louder, this time. She can see Roy's shoes in her peripheral vision. They're not moving.
Sam comes to her side, arms going around her, helping her to her feet. Mary feels weak as a kitten; she lets him, leaning heavily on his shoulder and arm. Sue-Ann is sprawled across the table, eyes open, staring and very, very dead. As is the rest of her. Mary turns her head and sees Roy is the same, though his eyes are still—mercifully—hidden by his blind man's glasses.
"What happened?" Sam asks, sounding awed and scared at the same time.
Mary shakes her head. "I'll explain to you later. We've got to get out of here. We don't want to be found with their bodies." She tries to take a step and both her legs buckle. Sam catches her, and after a moment's awkward hesitation, he lifts her off her feet with a grunt of effort. Mary's too dizzy and too noodle-limbed to put up a fight. "Please, Sam," she says, when he makes no move to go, still staring at Sue-Ann and Roy's corpses.
She feels bad about Roy, who, in all likelihood ultimately knew as little about his wife as John had. At the same time, he'd been living on borrowed—stolen—time ever since Sue-Ann trapped the reaper. He'd gotten more than John ever had.
"Did…did you do this, Mom? Did you kill them…for me?"
"No. No, it was their own spells, turning back on them." That, at least is the pure and unvarnished truth and she thinks Sam must hear it in her voice, because he releases a shaky breath and starts moving. Mary closes her eyes—because the roll of Sam's gait is making her motion sick—and before she even knows it, she's gone.
baileytc will care about. *laughs*Today's Word Count: 2,793
Current Total Word Count: 28,319
Estimated Total Word Count: ~100,000
What's bad: I feel better about this scene than I did when I started it (thank you,
technosage), but the end of it definitely needs work. I rushed it and it needs some filling in. Other than that, I think it actually went pretty well for as far AU as it went. I was really afraid that I wouldn't be able to bring Mary around to the righteous indignation she needed to be able to act against one of her own, but I think it actually did, without me having to steamroll at all. It's funny, because Mary is totally a made up character at this point, but I see a little bit of canonical Dean in Mary, which is kind of a hoot and makes me think that I'm doing SOMETHING right with her characterization.What's good: Mary. I love the way she went from reluctantly confronting Sue-Ann to the moral impetus to bring the situation to a close. I love that she has a moral impetus, whatever Sam might think.
What pleases me: "I ask again: would it have made a difference?" She holds out her hand, ushering Mary into the seat across from hers. The room doesn't look like it's used all that often, but there's no mustiness and only the faint lemony reek of polish. Mary guesses it's probably only used for Sunday's dinners. It isn't often that she lets herself indulge in might-have-beens, but here, with another McCoy for the first time in decades, she feels a vague sense of longing for her own house and all the Sunday dinners she'd dreamed of and never gotten to have.
"No," Mary admits grudgingly, taking the seat. The aging wood is covered with a crocheted cushion that doesn't really ameliorate the hardness of the chair. "Probably not." Sue-Ann makes a pleased, subvocal noise, sitting back in her chair. "You still should have told me."
Sue-Ann snorts. "You've been away too long. That's hardly the McCoy way."
Previous parts can be found here
"Well…you know…" Sam rolls his glass of iced tea between his hands, the tall, slim glass dwarfed by his huge palms. His head ducks. "I'm just trying to make sense of it all."
"Well it was a miracle, son," Roy answers genially. "A genuine, God-given miracle. They seem to follow me around, these days."
"What do you mean?"
Mary closes the heavy door between the kitchen and narrow, dark dining room beyond. She sees Sam look up, the glitter-shine of his eyes, before the pocket door thunks into its socket and she turns away to regard Sue-Ann.
"Did you know?" she asks, throat aching with the effort to keep her tone even. "Did you know that boy would die in Sam's place?"
"Does it matter?" Sue-Ann untucks her crossed arms and goes to the table to twitch the cloth to a more pleasing configuration, smoothing its folds. "You asked me for a blood-gift. You asked me for your son's life. I gave it to you. That's more than my son got." She looks up from straightening the cheap steel and glass candelabra, eyes both watchful and wise under the plucked arches of her eyebrows. "Let's not pretend to be morally outraged now, Lillith."
Mary's eyes narrow, not very helpful in the claustrophobic dimness of the room. "I should have known, Sue-Ann."
"Would it have made a difference?" Sue-Ann sounds genuinely interested, seating herself at the table and folding her hands. She examines her nails in between glances at Mary. Though nothing about Roy or Sue-Ann's clothes or home indicates any particular wealth, the nails are perfectly—and professionally—manicured.
Mary persists. "I should've had the choice. I should've known what I was choosing."
"I ask again: would it have made a difference?" She holds out her hand, ushering Mary into the seat across from hers. The room doesn't look like it's used all that often, but there's no mustiness and only the faint lemony reek of polish. Mary guesses it's probably only used for Sunday's dinners. It isn't often that she lets herself indulge in might-have-beens, but here, with another McCoy for the first time in decades, she feels a vague sense of longing for her own house and all the Sunday dinners she'd dreamed of and never gotten to have.
"No," Mary admits grudgingly, taking the seat. The aging wood is covered with a crocheted cushion that doesn't really ameliorate the hardness of the chair. "Probably not." Sue-Ann makes a pleased, subvocal noise, sitting back in her chair. "You still should have told me."
Sue-Ann snorts. "You've been away too long. That's hardly the McCoy way."
Mary ignores that, as it's true. "What happened?" she asks instead. "Your healing… Did your powers change?"
The faint smug satisfaction on Sue-Ann's face falls away, though she doesn't look up from her continued contemplation of her nails, smoothing over a jagged spot on her right index finger with the thumb of her left. "No," Sue-Ann answers shortly.
Mary lets the quiet lie. Her memories of Sue-Ann are old and youthful, but there are some characteristics that don't change no matter how old someone gets and Mary remembers how uneasy Sue-Ann gets in the silence.
"They… You know what it's like. I never left the family, not like you did."
"You weren't as unhappy there as I was," Mary observes quietly.
Sue-Ann waves her hand in acknowledgment. "But that almost makes it worse, when you find out that you're pregnant. The long months of waiting to find out which way it'll go. By the time I knew…it was too late."
"You loved him."
Sue-Ann's face turns both brittle and hard. "Yes. Of course I did." Her hands unlock and shift beneath the table's edge to her lap. "And after that, there really wasn't any choice about what to do. I had to go away. I had to save my son. And that meant leaving no way for the family to find me, including using my powers."
That had to have been hard for Sue-Ann, Mary reflects. Her own abilities are slight, require a lot of effort and are not, in and of themselves, that useful, though Juneau had disagreed with her vehemently about that. Sue-Ann, on the other hand, had been exceptionally proud of her healing abilities and much petted by the Aunts.
Mary had never particularly wanted her gifts (look what they'd done to her mother) and it cost her nothing to give them up. For Sue-Ann, hiding among the mundanes this way must be been agony.
When Sue-Ann looks up at her, sharp and sudden like a bird, Mary sees some of that residual pain in her expression and her red-rimmed eyes, the too-tight press of Sue-Ann's lips. "Did you…? Was it like that for you?" She fiddles with the high collar of her shirt, tugging it closer to the sides of her neck.
"Yes. Of course it was." She dislikes remembering that time, too. Her sick state of constant anxiety had made both boys' pregnancy nightmares, but after Dean had turned out as normal as John, being pregnant with Sam had been infinitely worse, plagued by a sense of outracing mounting odds.
Sue-Ann reaches forward, a jerky snatch that Mary's hard pressed not to pull away from, snagging her fingers through the perpetually loosened ends of Mary's hair. "Your hair is turning dark again," she observes. There could be a trap in the words, but Mary doesn't sense one and it's possible that it's only the observation it seems.
Possible.
"Things have been…dicey since Dean disappeared. I've had to play a little fast and loose." Mary sits back, drawing her hair from Sue-Ann's grip.
"And you think that's wise? With Sam with you?"
Mary doesn't like Sue-Ann's tone. Or the implication. Sue-Ann lost her son; Mary's kept both of hers alive for more than two decades, by herself. "Did you use your powers on behalf of your boy?"
"Jacob. His name was Jacob."
"That doesn't answer the question." Mary parrots Sue-Ann's own words back at her.
Sue-Ann bares her teeth. It's not a smile. "Yes," she hisses, conceding.
"Is that how?"
"I don't know, really. It had been so long. Maybe they…atrophied. I don't know. I just know I couldn't save Jacob, when he got sick." Sue-Ann's voice shakes a little, though with anger or grief, Mary isn't sure. "I had to watch my son die. And then, when Roy got sick…"
"Roy?"
"Cancer. Like Layla, actually. It's how he went blind. He'd been having headaches, but who doesn't? By the time they found it, the doctors told Roy he had a month. A month." Sue-Ann's mouth presses into a fussy, outraged little line.
"But your powers were gone."
The line of Sue-Ann's mouth curves up into a humorless little smile. "You're a McCoy, Lillith. You do what you have to. You—"
"…make do," Mary says softly at the same time. There's a pause. Then: "He's my son, Sue-Ann."
"And you love him?" Sue-Ann asks. "You'd do…anything for him?"
"Of course."
"Then don't look down on me for doing the same," Sue-Ann responds. She lumbers to her feet, clumsy in her anger. Her thighs jag the table, tipping the candelabra over. Sue-Ann catches it with one hand and sets it upright, straightening the celery colored candles.
"I trapped the reaper," Sue-Ann says abruptly. "The one that came for Roy." Her fingers stray to her neck again, adjusting her necklace; an oddly dark chain that crosses the line of her collarbone to disappear beneath her blouse. "I just… I couldn't lose him too."
A grue of cold slips down Mary's spine so fast her toes and fingertips tingle. She's never seen a reaper, she only knows about them in an academic, theoretical sense; dark, ugly spells of summoning and binding. She's never heard of someone actually doing it, though if she'd had, she would've laid even odds it was a McCoy.
"You're using it to steal life force, feed it to your parishioners," Mary says numbly, inanely.
Sue-Ann makes a face. "You always were a goody-two shoes, Lillith."
"Mary."
"What?"
"I'm not Lillith anymore," she says through her teeth, "I'm Mary. Mary Winchester."
"So what if I am? So what if I am taking life force and giving it to the more deserving?" Sue-Ann demands. "Are you going to judge me, Mary? You?"
"You didn't have to do this, Sue-Ann."
"I should've let Roy die? Really? Like you let Sam die?"
"It wasn't Sam's time."
"And it isn't Roy's. You know as well as I do that if I let the reaper go, it will kill him. I can't let that happen. I won't."
"But you didn't need to do this…sideshow carnival to keep Roy alive, Sue-Ann."
"With him blind?" Sue-Ann's eyes widen in outrage. "The medical bills left us destitute and Roy was in no fit condition to work. We would have starved."
"And so you make your living on blood-money." Mary spits, hating Sam was right, hating that, for all her horror, she would do it all over again.
"How is it any different from the things you've done?"
"Because of all the things I've done and all the sins I've committed, they were all to keep my sons alive, Sue-Ann! None of them have been for fucking profit."
"Don't you use that language to me, Lillith, don't you dare. I, who gave you your son's life and I, who can take it. You will show me respect in my home."
Mary shakes her head. "I can't leave it like this, Sue-Ann. I can't leave you here to play gods and monsters. It's not right and it's not your place."
"I am a McCoy; my place is wherever I say it is," Sue-Ann answers venomously, backing away from the table's edge.
Mary sighs. "I'm sorry, Sue-Ann." She lunges across the table. Sue-Ann shies back, but she's a preacher's wife, sedentary and slow for all her relative slimness and Mary's spent the last twenty-two years fighting everyone and everything she came across. Sue-Ann isn't fast enough to escape the dart of Mary's hand, snagging the dark chain around Sue-Ann's neck and tugging a pagan circled cross of earth and sky from beneath the plain cotton. Sue-Ann's hand closes over Mary's wrist, nails gouging blood from Mary's skin, but Mary twists her arm and wrenches, pulling Sue-Ann half across the table.
"Mom?" The pocket door opens, harsh golden light spearing from the kitchen beyond to fall across both of them like a wave.
"Sue-Ann?" Roy asks at nearly the same time.
"Sam, I need you to find her altar!" Mary yells back to him, still wrestling with Sue-Ann for control of the cross. "A basement, a storm cellar…somewhere below ground. Smash it."
"Sue-Ann?" Roy calls again. "What's going on?
"Help!" Sue-Ann gasps, half-choked by her own chain. "Roy, help me, she's trying to kill me!"
Mary steps right, dragging Sue-Ann across the table's surface with her. Even blind, she doesn't want Roy at her back. She doesn't doubt she's stronger and faster, but he's more familiar with the house and any potential weapons and you don't have to be strong to cosh someone on the back of the head. Sue-Ann squeaks, her sensible shoes kicking and thrashing on the wood of the table as she slides, still held in Mary's iron grip.
The cross itself looks strangely friable, Mary thinks, sidestepping again as Roy lumbers toward her, hands held out.
Sue-Ann starts chanting in a language Mary doesn't recognize and Mary feels cold trace over the back of her neck and scalp like a fingernail of ice. It doesn't take a genius to know what Sue-Ann's doing.
"Hurry, Sam!" Mary shouts, thought she has no idea if he can hear her as she hefts in one hand the candelabra Sue-Ann spent so much time fussing over. She drags Sue-Ann's head brutally down, flattening the amulet to the wood of the table and brings the candelabra down with a thick crunch.
Sue-Ann screams like it was her head instead of the necklace, clawing at Mary's arms and Roy takes the opportunity to make a lunge himself and wrap her in a bear hug, tight enough that the breath whooshes out of her lungs. Mary stomps on his foot hard as she can, his mild brown loafers no match for her hard-soled boots, and at the same time, she brings the candelabra down again.
The amulet shatters. The glass of the candelabra breaks, cutting deep into Mary's hand in a spurt of her own blood, hot as molten metal. Mary feels the sense of cold slither across her skin again, taking her by the throat and stealing what little breath she has left and paralyzing her as if she's truly frozen.
She sinks limply through Roy's grip to the floor. Sam, she thinks desperately, seeing the reaper over her, like an impossibly ancient mummy in a suit.
Sue-Ann's legs swing down from the table top as she sits up, her hair hanging in ragged strands around her face and her throat red and marked from where the chain scraped her. Her voice gains in volume, triumph threaded through it and in the satisfied glitter of her golden-hazel eyes.
"Sue-Ann?" Roy stands uncertainly, head swiveling. "Sue-Ann, what's happening?"
I'm dying is what, Mary thinks with irritated exasperation. Oh, fuck, Sam, hurry… Even those thoughts sink and fall into unknowable blackness as the reaper drains the life from her. She feels pain bloom in her head—her brain—like all the rats in the world are chewing through it and she can't even raise her hands enough to clutch.
Then, suddenly, the reaper tilts its head as if listening to a sound in another room. Mary tries to twist away, knock it from her, but the motion's beyond her.
Slowly, the reaper smiles.
It rises to its feet and the moment its hand leaves her skin, Mary gasps, a sound like tearing paper, loud enough to make her ears ring. The breath blows out of her again in a fit of coughing and she turns on her side, curling up around her aching bones.
The reaper glides to Sue-Ann as if on rollers. Mary has the momentary satisfaction of watching Sue-Ann's eyes widen in shock and dismay and her feet kick in desperate haste to crawl across the table. Then the reaper obscures her and all Mary can hear is her screams, high and terrified and Roy saying over and over, "Sue-Ann? Sue-Ann?"
Mary doesn't really remember losing consciousness, but the next thing she's aware of is the farm house's boards throbbing under her cheek and Sam's voice bellowing, "Mom? Mom?"
"Here," she says, or tries to. It comes out only a broken puff of air and another cough, She rolls from her side onto her hands and knees, head hanging. It feels like her skull is made of stone, hanging from the end of her neck. "Here, Sam," she croaks again, louder, this time. She can see Roy's shoes in her peripheral vision. They're not moving.
Sam comes to her side, arms going around her, helping her to her feet. Mary feels weak as a kitten; she lets him, leaning heavily on his shoulder and arm. Sue-Ann is sprawled across the table, eyes open, staring and very, very dead. As is the rest of her. Mary turns her head and sees Roy is the same, though his eyes are still—mercifully—hidden by his blind man's glasses.
"What happened?" Sam asks, sounding awed and scared at the same time.
Mary shakes her head. "I'll explain to you later. We've got to get out of here. We don't want to be found with their bodies." She tries to take a step and both her legs buckle. Sam catches her, and after a moment's awkward hesitation, he lifts her off her feet with a grunt of effort. Mary's too dizzy and too noodle-limbed to put up a fight. "Please, Sam," she says, when he makes no move to go, still staring at Sue-Ann and Roy's corpses.
She feels bad about Roy, who, in all likelihood ultimately knew as little about his wife as John had. At the same time, he'd been living on borrowed—stolen—time ever since Sue-Ann trapped the reaper. He'd gotten more than John ever had.
"Did…did you do this, Mom? Did you kill them…for me?"
"No. No, it was their own spells, turning back on them." That, at least is the pure and unvarnished truth and she thinks Sam must hear it in her voice, because he releases a shaky breath and starts moving. Mary closes her eyes—because the roll of Sam's gait is making her motion sick—and before she even knows it, she's gone.
