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fic fragments
My paid account at LJ has done gone. I'm not sure that I'll renew it, as I just renewed my DW paid time and I'm not so frequent a poster and commenter that I actually need a paid account. The icons are nice, but I never read FreindsFreinds on LJ (too many entries!), while I frequently read my Network on DW. My layout isn't broken by ads, and you know, I can addblock without paying LJ for the convenience. Also, I find that I don't really want to give them money.
Which is a great seque into topic the second - my fic journal. I've had it for years now, and it's got my earliest, most terrible fic archived right next to my current stuff. I'm not ashamed of the old badfic - though it does make me wince - but I'm kind of tired of looking at it. I want a fresh start, but I'm waffling about how to go about it. New fic journal on DW? Delete the old badfic and continue on LJ? Post straight to ao3? *waffles*
And while we're talking about fic,![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
neotama says it's ok to post fragments. As a procrastinator and over-scheduler extraordinaire, this is great news. (Happy to be enabled!) If I'm not super tired, there might be another piece of these tomorrow, but the Great Gazoo knows that's not something to count on.
SPN, Anna, Cas, Dean. The End, AU where Anna is human and traveling Dean and Cas. I have a feeling this might end in a threesome. (Apocalypse)
Dean taught her to shoot. Put a gun in her hand, showed her the safety, the clip, the trigger. Center mass, double tap. Shoot as many times as you needed to, but put it down.
The Croats taught her to run. To listen for them, because they maintained some thin cunning, and didn't announce themselves for the convenience of survivors. Run, and never stop running.
There was no one to teach them how to live with the silence, so they found their own way, Castiel and Anna. Their own way was shit, predictably. Insufficient, as anything would be on earth. Never quite a substitute for having earth to play in, and heaven to go home to. Even having been human, she could miss the old days of being an angel, unassailable and so damn certain.
Their own way was distraction, bitterness, whatever they had at hand, and from Castiel, an obsessive cataloguing of everyday joys and miseries. He went through a phase of complaining about scratchy clothes. A phase where he noted every change of temperature, pressure and wind direction, as if anyone cared.
"It's easier for you," he insisted, fingers digging into her shoulders and upper arms, raising bruises. "You've done all of this before."
"Not like this."
"Well, at least you got a test run." A grimace then, meant to pass for a smile, the difference getting narrower every month, every day. His best smile was now reserved for killing demons, but then, so was hers.
They picked it up quickly - shooting, running, driving - the rhythms of survival. Maybe it was easier, for both of them. They'd never been anything but soldiers, unlike the former dentists, secretaries and assorted paper pushers that populated the camp. An unbroken string of orders, missions, wars, all for the glory of a God who'd long since stopped talking. Unbroken except for Anna's time out, playing house with Mr. and Mrs. Milton, parents of the infant body she stole.
"My father tried to take up jogging once," she told him, the words whispered into his neck, so they didn't carry in the close quarters of the bunkhouse. "He didn't make it more than two miles, before giving up. My mother was just as bad."
The door banged open, stragglers heading for their bunks. Letting in a shockingly cold breeze. It cut off with the closing of the door, but still had survivors groaning, and shifting restlessly. They both shivered and shook in their too-light clothes, and huddled closer, beneath the ragged blanket they'd salvaged from a nearly empty Walmart, at the start of the cold snap.
"I'm glad they're dead," she said. Castiel pulled her tighter, nothing to say.
They started sleeping together, beside each other, a few months in. Pure pragmatism, initially: shared heat and shared protection; two guns, if they had to wake up fighting. Along the way it became a comfort. She remembered comfort, a human thing. Castiel had no idea what to do with it. What was flesh, when the world was overrun with Croatoan infected people? Nothing but meat, if you listened to him. What were arms and legs except prisons, walls put up between them? Touch was a cruel mimicry of their former closeness; even Anna felt it.
When it became too much for them, there was Dean, who hated sharing a bed, but hated being alone just as much. Maybe more. Castiel bullied him into it, back when it was still possible to push Dean until he cracked. He slid into bed beside Dean, telling him, "Shut the hell up and go to sleep." And miraculously, he did, grumbling at first, but quickly settling. Anna listened from her own bed, while their breathing slowed, evened out; listened until she fell asleep herself.
Then it was Anna's turn. Castiel had been showing his temper, all day. It started with sniping, picking at their weak spots, until no one was talking to anyone else. It ended with Castiel curled around a bottle of Jack, facing the wall.
She slid into Dean's bed, ignoring his hard look. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Going to sleep," she said.
"Get the hell out of my bed." He actually sounded outraged.
"Do you really expect me to sleep with him?" She nodded at her brother, who was little more than a series of dark lumps, huddled at the edge of his cot.
"I don't care where you sleep-"
"Fine, then you'll shut up and go to sleep yourself."
"Anna," Dean said imploringly.
She shut her eyes and buried her face in the lumpy pillow. "Sleep, Dean, if you can manage it." Finally he did. He tossed, turned and bitched for long minutes, but eventually he dropped off. As usual, Anna was the last to sleep, hyper-conscious of Dean's heat beside her, and the lack of Castiel's.
After the first camp fell apart, they spent too many weeks on the road together, sleeping in shifts. All of them crammed into the Impala, two armed to the teeth and alert, and one stretched out in the back. Between Chitaqua and that first, desperate, makeshift camp, there were miles of road. The Croats didn't drive, and those fleeing infection tended to get out fast, or pile up on major through ways.
They took the back roads, nearly all of which Dean was intimately familiar with. He'd gone through here on a hunt and knew a shortcut. This had been the way to a hunter's place, a decade back. That road, he and his dad had gone down it by mistake once, and there was nothing good at the end of it. Anna soaked in it, these bits and pieces of Dean's childhood, the emptiest road they'd had in too long, and the quiet. It was easier than when they actually talked to each other.
SPN, Ruby remembering her first time out of hell. Supposed to be part of a larger adventure/horror story with some Ruby/Meg. idek (Possession)
Most demons, even the ones clever or lucky enough to make it out of hell, were simple agents of chaos: they wanted to cause as much suffering and confusion as they could, before they were inevitably sent back downstairs. That was the irksome part - nobody stayed upstairs forever. There were too many priests, hunters, and so-called light witches, for even the craftiest demon to stay on earth forever. Sooner or later, they all went back home. And since home was hell, no one was in a hurry to be returned to sender.
Ruby's first time out of hell, was maybe a hundred years after she entered it as a human. After a hundred years in hell, (though not so many on earth), she found it reassuringly familiar.
Different men in charge, but still men, as she knew them. Still petty, and grasping, and too easily manipulated. Still so worried about their women. Were they loyal? Did they love their husband-masters? What did they get up to, without men around? So worried about things. Did they have enough? Was their horse better or worse than their neighbor's? Easily read, and even more easily pushed and persuaded into doing exactly what she wanted.
It would have been boring, if it weren't so much fun. And eventually, even that wouldn't have been enough, if it weren't for the mission.
Before - her human life was a tiny space she called before, the memories too sharp, too vague, too unrelated to her now purposeful and vast existence; still available to her, but not hers; simply before - she'd been a witch. So she watched witches, knowing that they knew ways to summon demons, and were generally too stupid to prevent things from going in exactly the wrong direction. Demons could be bound, but who was clever and patient enough to find that out?
Ruby's first time out of hell, she'd rode the witch who'd summoned her right back to her family home. Strictly speaking, she hadn't been looking for Ruby. Not exactly. She'd been looking for power though, and she'd found it.
She materialized in the witch's circle, and looked around her. And yet not looked, because she no longer had eyes. In hell, she'd existed as a projection of herself, her body, and then when that had been ground down into nothing, as something else. But here-- earth was not hell, and on earth, she was smoke: a formless black cloud that moved and thought and existed, contrary to every human wisdom and science.
She looked, and immediately found the circle's weakness. The witch was sloppy. So many of them were. Before the witch could finish the invocation - binding the demon to her will - Ruby struck. She narrowed herself into a fine curl of smoke, and pushed forward, through the gap in the salt and painted blood. Toward her host. It was nothing like learning to walk. It was more like feeding. She pushed the witch's mouth, already open in a scream, even wider, then she pushed herself in and down, and everywhere. She crushed the witch's consciousness, wherever she went, driving it into the darkest corners of her mind.
There was a way - she could push further, press down with her being, until the witch's being was snuffed out, and the body with it. Ruby didn't need her alive.
The witch screamed and screamed and screamed. It was a small sound. There was no place for it to go. No place that wasn't already Ruby. The witch screamed, cried, begged, and then finally broke. Went silent. Mutely watched while Ruby learned how to use her body.
The first steps were shaky. She stumbled into the circles of the broken devil's trap, and then out of them, steadying herself by flinging out her arms. This was exactly like learning how to walk. The absurdity of it: the body, and herself-in-the-body. She laughed. Startled.
It was a new laugh. Not the one that had belonged to her human self, and not the one she'd made for herself in the pit. This was an old woman's laugh. Pale and thin with age. She raised the body's hands to the light. They were likewise old, and withered. Skin pulled tight over bone, veined with blue, and spidering lines of red and darkest purple. She turned them over.
Ruby had once studied palm reading very seriously. The old woman's palms had much to say. She had lived a long and interesting life. That much was obvious just from the age of her. But palm-reading was always halfway a scam. The other half, the real half of it, told Ruby that the witch had been staring into an oncoming storm. So she'd summoned a demon, in an effort to stave off, or even misdirect whatever terrible things fate had in store for her. Palm reading never was clear. The storm was Ruby.
She settled into her new body. Not borrowed, because she had no intention of giving it back. Used its eyes to see as a human would, and her eyes, to see as her kind did. It was night. A clearing, in a deep forest. Lots of life around her, and not much that was interesting to a demon. No angry spirits, strange creatures, or even stray travelers. The witch hadn't wanted anyone to stumble across her ritual. She'd managed that beautifully.
The night air was cool and clear, and would have carried sound perfectly, had there been any to carry. Nothing but insects, rodents, and whatever paltry game had managed to avoid being hunted to extinction. It felt like autumn, near the last harvest of the year. It was cold to the witch's naked body. Ruby felt it, the body's reaction, but it had no meaning to her - Ruby wasn't body. She warmed and sustained this one with a thought. Registered its discomfort, distantly, but didn't feel it. That was interesting.
The clearing wasn't man made - the blackened stumps that ringed it made that clear - but someone had maintained it. Scrub grass was suppressed by stone, everything from precious marble, to the cheapest local rocks. Group effort. There was no altar, but the witch's devil's trap had been laid inside a rough circle of stone. The clearing, lightning made if she judged it right, was just shy of a ley line. There was nothing like back country magic.
Where had the witch summoned her? Ruby put all her human and demon senses to the problem.
She was far north of the city that a human Ruby had called home, but not too far from the whole point to this little excursion. Ruby probed the witch's memories of the area, mentally plotting her course out of the forest, and to the road that eventually, after endless twists and turns, would take her to her destination. Should she ride the body, or travel in her true form? The latter was faster. The former was... more interesting.
"What's that witch?" Ruby asked the empty clearing. The witch could hear her, even stuffed down inside her own head, as she was. "You have a family? Maybe we should pay your son a visit." The witch's being jerked and flailed in its prison. Ruby noticed only because she was paying attention - all her protests, they were less than nothing.
The witch's village, where her grown son and his children lived, was out of her way, but Ruby had time. The witch screamed again, and threw herself at the walls Ruby had built in her mind. "I almost felt that." Ruby laughed. The witch was stubborn. She kept fighting, kept picking away at Ruby, like the tiniest, most persistent flea.
Ruby sighed. "This stopped being amusing two minutes ago." If anything, the witch only fought harder, pushing with everything left to her, scratching at Ruby, searching and searching for a foothold, a break in the lines, a way out. There wasn't one. "I was actually considering letting you say goodbye to your son, but now... I'll let you wonder. For one breath, witch. What will I do to your family, once you're gone?" The witch screamed, and for once it was almost a word, almost no - Ruby caught the sentiment, regardless.
She pushed into those dark places where the witch's being hid. Inexorably, so the witch could feel her coming, could see the thread of her existence running thin, thin, thin, to nothing. One tiny spark of the witch's being was left. Ruby breathed. She was gone.
She propelled her stolen body out of the clearing, and down the narrow path that would take her to the witch's home, and then to her actual destination. She didn't stop to put on the witch's discarded rags. Ruby didn't need them. It had been a long time since she'd been embodied: a hundred years since she'd walked, breathed, touched rock and dirt. It was novel and familiar at once, but this stolen meat suit wasn't quite pleasant.
Which is a great seque into topic the second - my fic journal. I've had it for years now, and it's got my earliest, most terrible fic archived right next to my current stuff. I'm not ashamed of the old badfic - though it does make me wince - but I'm kind of tired of looking at it. I want a fresh start, but I'm waffling about how to go about it. New fic journal on DW? Delete the old badfic and continue on LJ? Post straight to ao3? *waffles*
And while we're talking about fic,
neotama says it's ok to post fragments. As a procrastinator and over-scheduler extraordinaire, this is great news. (Happy to be enabled!) If I'm not super tired, there might be another piece of these tomorrow, but the Great Gazoo knows that's not something to count on. SPN, Anna, Cas, Dean. The End, AU where Anna is human and traveling Dean and Cas. I have a feeling this might end in a threesome. (Apocalypse)
Dean taught her to shoot. Put a gun in her hand, showed her the safety, the clip, the trigger. Center mass, double tap. Shoot as many times as you needed to, but put it down.
The Croats taught her to run. To listen for them, because they maintained some thin cunning, and didn't announce themselves for the convenience of survivors. Run, and never stop running.
There was no one to teach them how to live with the silence, so they found their own way, Castiel and Anna. Their own way was shit, predictably. Insufficient, as anything would be on earth. Never quite a substitute for having earth to play in, and heaven to go home to. Even having been human, she could miss the old days of being an angel, unassailable and so damn certain.
Their own way was distraction, bitterness, whatever they had at hand, and from Castiel, an obsessive cataloguing of everyday joys and miseries. He went through a phase of complaining about scratchy clothes. A phase where he noted every change of temperature, pressure and wind direction, as if anyone cared.
"It's easier for you," he insisted, fingers digging into her shoulders and upper arms, raising bruises. "You've done all of this before."
"Not like this."
"Well, at least you got a test run." A grimace then, meant to pass for a smile, the difference getting narrower every month, every day. His best smile was now reserved for killing demons, but then, so was hers.
They picked it up quickly - shooting, running, driving - the rhythms of survival. Maybe it was easier, for both of them. They'd never been anything but soldiers, unlike the former dentists, secretaries and assorted paper pushers that populated the camp. An unbroken string of orders, missions, wars, all for the glory of a God who'd long since stopped talking. Unbroken except for Anna's time out, playing house with Mr. and Mrs. Milton, parents of the infant body she stole.
"My father tried to take up jogging once," she told him, the words whispered into his neck, so they didn't carry in the close quarters of the bunkhouse. "He didn't make it more than two miles, before giving up. My mother was just as bad."
The door banged open, stragglers heading for their bunks. Letting in a shockingly cold breeze. It cut off with the closing of the door, but still had survivors groaning, and shifting restlessly. They both shivered and shook in their too-light clothes, and huddled closer, beneath the ragged blanket they'd salvaged from a nearly empty Walmart, at the start of the cold snap.
"I'm glad they're dead," she said. Castiel pulled her tighter, nothing to say.
They started sleeping together, beside each other, a few months in. Pure pragmatism, initially: shared heat and shared protection; two guns, if they had to wake up fighting. Along the way it became a comfort. She remembered comfort, a human thing. Castiel had no idea what to do with it. What was flesh, when the world was overrun with Croatoan infected people? Nothing but meat, if you listened to him. What were arms and legs except prisons, walls put up between them? Touch was a cruel mimicry of their former closeness; even Anna felt it.
When it became too much for them, there was Dean, who hated sharing a bed, but hated being alone just as much. Maybe more. Castiel bullied him into it, back when it was still possible to push Dean until he cracked. He slid into bed beside Dean, telling him, "Shut the hell up and go to sleep." And miraculously, he did, grumbling at first, but quickly settling. Anna listened from her own bed, while their breathing slowed, evened out; listened until she fell asleep herself.
Then it was Anna's turn. Castiel had been showing his temper, all day. It started with sniping, picking at their weak spots, until no one was talking to anyone else. It ended with Castiel curled around a bottle of Jack, facing the wall.
She slid into Dean's bed, ignoring his hard look. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Going to sleep," she said.
"Get the hell out of my bed." He actually sounded outraged.
"Do you really expect me to sleep with him?" She nodded at her brother, who was little more than a series of dark lumps, huddled at the edge of his cot.
"I don't care where you sleep-"
"Fine, then you'll shut up and go to sleep yourself."
"Anna," Dean said imploringly.
She shut her eyes and buried her face in the lumpy pillow. "Sleep, Dean, if you can manage it." Finally he did. He tossed, turned and bitched for long minutes, but eventually he dropped off. As usual, Anna was the last to sleep, hyper-conscious of Dean's heat beside her, and the lack of Castiel's.
After the first camp fell apart, they spent too many weeks on the road together, sleeping in shifts. All of them crammed into the Impala, two armed to the teeth and alert, and one stretched out in the back. Between Chitaqua and that first, desperate, makeshift camp, there were miles of road. The Croats didn't drive, and those fleeing infection tended to get out fast, or pile up on major through ways.
They took the back roads, nearly all of which Dean was intimately familiar with. He'd gone through here on a hunt and knew a shortcut. This had been the way to a hunter's place, a decade back. That road, he and his dad had gone down it by mistake once, and there was nothing good at the end of it. Anna soaked in it, these bits and pieces of Dean's childhood, the emptiest road they'd had in too long, and the quiet. It was easier than when they actually talked to each other.
SPN, Ruby remembering her first time out of hell. Supposed to be part of a larger adventure/horror story with some Ruby/Meg. idek (Possession)
Most demons, even the ones clever or lucky enough to make it out of hell, were simple agents of chaos: they wanted to cause as much suffering and confusion as they could, before they were inevitably sent back downstairs. That was the irksome part - nobody stayed upstairs forever. There were too many priests, hunters, and so-called light witches, for even the craftiest demon to stay on earth forever. Sooner or later, they all went back home. And since home was hell, no one was in a hurry to be returned to sender.
Ruby's first time out of hell, was maybe a hundred years after she entered it as a human. After a hundred years in hell, (though not so many on earth), she found it reassuringly familiar.
Different men in charge, but still men, as she knew them. Still petty, and grasping, and too easily manipulated. Still so worried about their women. Were they loyal? Did they love their husband-masters? What did they get up to, without men around? So worried about things. Did they have enough? Was their horse better or worse than their neighbor's? Easily read, and even more easily pushed and persuaded into doing exactly what she wanted.
It would have been boring, if it weren't so much fun. And eventually, even that wouldn't have been enough, if it weren't for the mission.
Before - her human life was a tiny space she called before, the memories too sharp, too vague, too unrelated to her now purposeful and vast existence; still available to her, but not hers; simply before - she'd been a witch. So she watched witches, knowing that they knew ways to summon demons, and were generally too stupid to prevent things from going in exactly the wrong direction. Demons could be bound, but who was clever and patient enough to find that out?
Ruby's first time out of hell, she'd rode the witch who'd summoned her right back to her family home. Strictly speaking, she hadn't been looking for Ruby. Not exactly. She'd been looking for power though, and she'd found it.
She materialized in the witch's circle, and looked around her. And yet not looked, because she no longer had eyes. In hell, she'd existed as a projection of herself, her body, and then when that had been ground down into nothing, as something else. But here-- earth was not hell, and on earth, she was smoke: a formless black cloud that moved and thought and existed, contrary to every human wisdom and science.
She looked, and immediately found the circle's weakness. The witch was sloppy. So many of them were. Before the witch could finish the invocation - binding the demon to her will - Ruby struck. She narrowed herself into a fine curl of smoke, and pushed forward, through the gap in the salt and painted blood. Toward her host. It was nothing like learning to walk. It was more like feeding. She pushed the witch's mouth, already open in a scream, even wider, then she pushed herself in and down, and everywhere. She crushed the witch's consciousness, wherever she went, driving it into the darkest corners of her mind.
There was a way - she could push further, press down with her being, until the witch's being was snuffed out, and the body with it. Ruby didn't need her alive.
The witch screamed and screamed and screamed. It was a small sound. There was no place for it to go. No place that wasn't already Ruby. The witch screamed, cried, begged, and then finally broke. Went silent. Mutely watched while Ruby learned how to use her body.
The first steps were shaky. She stumbled into the circles of the broken devil's trap, and then out of them, steadying herself by flinging out her arms. This was exactly like learning how to walk. The absurdity of it: the body, and herself-in-the-body. She laughed. Startled.
It was a new laugh. Not the one that had belonged to her human self, and not the one she'd made for herself in the pit. This was an old woman's laugh. Pale and thin with age. She raised the body's hands to the light. They were likewise old, and withered. Skin pulled tight over bone, veined with blue, and spidering lines of red and darkest purple. She turned them over.
Ruby had once studied palm reading very seriously. The old woman's palms had much to say. She had lived a long and interesting life. That much was obvious just from the age of her. But palm-reading was always halfway a scam. The other half, the real half of it, told Ruby that the witch had been staring into an oncoming storm. So she'd summoned a demon, in an effort to stave off, or even misdirect whatever terrible things fate had in store for her. Palm reading never was clear. The storm was Ruby.
She settled into her new body. Not borrowed, because she had no intention of giving it back. Used its eyes to see as a human would, and her eyes, to see as her kind did. It was night. A clearing, in a deep forest. Lots of life around her, and not much that was interesting to a demon. No angry spirits, strange creatures, or even stray travelers. The witch hadn't wanted anyone to stumble across her ritual. She'd managed that beautifully.
The night air was cool and clear, and would have carried sound perfectly, had there been any to carry. Nothing but insects, rodents, and whatever paltry game had managed to avoid being hunted to extinction. It felt like autumn, near the last harvest of the year. It was cold to the witch's naked body. Ruby felt it, the body's reaction, but it had no meaning to her - Ruby wasn't body. She warmed and sustained this one with a thought. Registered its discomfort, distantly, but didn't feel it. That was interesting.
The clearing wasn't man made - the blackened stumps that ringed it made that clear - but someone had maintained it. Scrub grass was suppressed by stone, everything from precious marble, to the cheapest local rocks. Group effort. There was no altar, but the witch's devil's trap had been laid inside a rough circle of stone. The clearing, lightning made if she judged it right, was just shy of a ley line. There was nothing like back country magic.
Where had the witch summoned her? Ruby put all her human and demon senses to the problem.
She was far north of the city that a human Ruby had called home, but not too far from the whole point to this little excursion. Ruby probed the witch's memories of the area, mentally plotting her course out of the forest, and to the road that eventually, after endless twists and turns, would take her to her destination. Should she ride the body, or travel in her true form? The latter was faster. The former was... more interesting.
"What's that witch?" Ruby asked the empty clearing. The witch could hear her, even stuffed down inside her own head, as she was. "You have a family? Maybe we should pay your son a visit." The witch's being jerked and flailed in its prison. Ruby noticed only because she was paying attention - all her protests, they were less than nothing.
The witch's village, where her grown son and his children lived, was out of her way, but Ruby had time. The witch screamed again, and threw herself at the walls Ruby had built in her mind. "I almost felt that." Ruby laughed. The witch was stubborn. She kept fighting, kept picking away at Ruby, like the tiniest, most persistent flea.
Ruby sighed. "This stopped being amusing two minutes ago." If anything, the witch only fought harder, pushing with everything left to her, scratching at Ruby, searching and searching for a foothold, a break in the lines, a way out. There wasn't one. "I was actually considering letting you say goodbye to your son, but now... I'll let you wonder. For one breath, witch. What will I do to your family, once you're gone?" The witch screamed, and for once it was almost a word, almost no - Ruby caught the sentiment, regardless.
She pushed into those dark places where the witch's being hid. Inexorably, so the witch could feel her coming, could see the thread of her existence running thin, thin, thin, to nothing. One tiny spark of the witch's being was left. Ruby breathed. She was gone.
She propelled her stolen body out of the clearing, and down the narrow path that would take her to the witch's home, and then to her actual destination. She didn't stop to put on the witch's discarded rags. Ruby didn't need them. It had been a long time since she'd been embodied: a hundred years since she'd walked, breathed, touched rock and dirt. It was novel and familiar at once, but this stolen meat suit wasn't quite pleasant.