Author's Note: I have the worst track record for updating, and if there was a world record of time it took to update a story, I would win it - and then every year after that I didn't update. So, I hope this will last, but I can't promise it will. Just a warning.
All the usual stuff: none of the original characters belong to be, Fiona's character was written by me and while not patented or anything, copying her/a story or character anyone else wrote but yourself IS plagiarism, which is SO not cool. Less cool than real fur lined leather/aligator thigh-high heels - with matching purse - at a combined PETA and ASPCA gala. (They have gala's, right, I feel like they have galas.)
Alright, enough time wasted - if you bother to read this, I usually don't - just know that any canon facts I use from the show are from the really cool Supernatural wikia. I'm not Spencer Reid and I also don't have time to re-watch every episode, so I'm going to trust that they're accurate. If it's not, please tell me, however I might not correct it right away because I'm lazy. Thank you!
No Place For Spirits
Chapter One Good Times With John and Fiona
Supernatural beings exist for a reason. There is a world where they don't - a world where John and Mary Winchester had six children, the first three being boys and the last three being girls, who all moved out slowly, one after the other, only to collect back in Lawrence whenever the wind, or a birthday, blows them all back home. There is a world where the monsters ravaged humanity into extinction years ago, where the Winchesters have never existed.
There are infinite, much less drastic worlds, where Sam Winchester was burned down in his apartment when Dean was twenty minutes too late after stopping to get a burger before heading back to scope out his brother's place. There is a world where John Winchester laid, helpless, bleeding on the ceiling above his baby son and Mary Campbell-Winchester stole her children away into the night, returning to her hunter's life like it was a deadly bike she hadn't ridden in a while.
In the world we know, monsters are real. Angels and demons both lurk in the darkness.
In another world, much like this one, just one person is different. Just one event, just one butterfly is changed, altered. Asked to play a role that, in our world, never existed. In this world, time is allowed to bend backward just this once, and the ability of one mind is allowed to expand, just a fraction of an inch.
And it changes everything.
A June night, 1987
John wished he was in bed.
It was the most important thing to him right now. He watched the second bed in the dark room, the one unoccupied by his eldest son, and nearly salivated. Well, whoops, nevermind. He gently scrubbed the drool from his bearded chin. When the bundle on top of him stirred, he froze, arm mid-air. A small voice groaned pathetically from his shirt collar. "Daddy," was all it said, "I'm thirsty."
John let himself collapse against the motel chair. His four-year-old, Sam, felt completely relaxed against him, but apparently he wasn't asleep. Fuck, he thought. He spared one glance at his bed, feeling all his bones ache for it, for the warmth of the covers, any covers. His eyes squeezed shut, feeling the tears coming on from complete exhaustion. "Come on, Sammy," he whined. God, his throat felt disgusting. "It's time to go to sleep."
"I'm thirsty," was the only, sleepy, reply.
John lifted them both out of the chair with a little difficulty. He didn't dare try to put Sam down first - the last time he tried that the other night, Sam screamed so hard it woke up Dean and half the motel, too.
John thought it was going to get better. He thought, that as Sam got older it would mean better night's sleep and less back problems. At first, things did seem to steadily get easier. The past four weeks, however, Sam suddenly started having night terrors. Not nightmares, absolute night terrors. John knew what they looked like - he'd driven his share of hours to help a desperate wife out with an old buddy who'd seen too much of the dark side, and he can't say he'd been much better those first few years out of the Marines.
Mary had helped. She always helped.
John fought back his climbing anxiety. Shit. He grabbed a dirty cup - hey, Sam had only used it that day for juice - and put some warm water in it. He tried to be quiet - it would be worse if his eight-year-old were up, too. Dean tried his hardest to help, John knew, but sometimes he tried to help a little too much. He just didn't know that his dad wasn't alright with communication at four in the morning.
John handed Sam the water, and went, dutifully, back to the chair.
Even when the warmth of the water knocked the little guy out, John checked every salt line over, every window latch, every lock, every sigil, and checked over his gun and awaiting magazine before putting them back under his pillow with his silver knife and holy water, only then did he pass out instantly, clothes on, over the covers, hoping the boys just slept in today. He wasn't taking Dean to school for the President, himself.
A June morning, 2013
Fiona woke up at five.
Five. If she was up at six-thirty during the week, she was ahead of the game.
But five? On a Sunday? She groaned and stretched, arching off her bed like she was Reagan and about to float the whole thing towards the ceiling.
When she fell back down, thoroughly rid of the tenseness in her muscles from last night, she stared at her closet aimlessly. She willed her eyes to get tired. She tried closing them. Good grief, she thought, go back to sleep.
Five minutes later, she was staring at the closet again.
She huffed but got up out of bed. At least it was light out - if it wasn't light out she wasn't sure if she could deal. Fiona slunk downstairs, drifting to the coffee pot.
No coffee. Of course, because her mother always woke up before her and made the coffee, and when Fiona eventually woke up at a Godly hour, that's when she had coffee. Not at - Fi checked the stovetop clock - five-ten.
Not willing to endure the brewing process, Fi forced herself to microwave a cup of water and find the instant. Five long minutes later and it was still damn early, but at least she had coffee.
She slunk back upstairs with said coffee, and turned her stereo on, turning the best station for talk-to-music-ratio down so that it didn't wake her mother up.
Fiona leaned out her window in the morning light, sitting on her bed, coffee in hand and lit a cigarette. Now, she thought, maybe waking up this early was worth it. The morning world was pretty, she thought. She took a drag and started to think about what woke her up. She rubbed her face, willing her brain to bring up the memories. She remembered. . .the dark. Why did she dream of the dark? And a man, telling her, "No, don't, please don't leave." Well, that was nice, at least. The man didn't look that bad, either. She, in the dream, was really old. Like, substantially so. And her hair was long. Fiona pulled at her short dark brown hair. Huh.
It had that weird quality, though, her dream. Like when she dreamt of herself being chased by some psycho in some basement who giggled a lot and chased her like they were six-year-olds playing tag. When she woke up, she heaved for breath and her heart raced, even when in hindsight she realized it was a little ridiculous. This dream was the same. Fi shook her head. Oh, well. She didn't remember enough of the dream to write it down.
What she did remember is that, despite what was happening tomorrow, she did not have the day off that day, but she did have time for a shower.
Fi finished the cigarette and after flicking off the remaining tobacco with her nail, tossed it far and wide out the window, not in the mood to find the Snapple bottle she'd been extinguishing butts in. She shoved the screen of the bedside window shut before pushing herself to get up off the bed and into the bathroom.
Fiona could be a methodical person if she wanted to. With a humming, but not active, mind, she scrubbed the dirt off of her, especially her feet and arms, shampooed her hair, used her new acne wash and then rinsed herself off with the showerhead.
When she stepped out the door to work, no one was up yet. She'd been watching House M.D. on her laptop for a while, until ten-thirty finally snuck up on her. She easily drove Tonks - radio on, windows open, cheesy sunglasses on - two towns over, happy with her gas tank, to her job as a secretary of a medical clinic. It wasn't a free medical clinic, which was why she got paid. She worked eight and six hour shifts, mostly. The place opened at 11 on weekends, and closed at 7. Fiona never knew why the hours were so late on weekends, but it wasn't something that impeded her life. Fi organized papers, handled client paperwork, invoices, ordering supplies, and, of course, answering phones and greeting patients. Everyone else was medically certified, except for Maureen, a sixty-year-old woman who took the morning shifts during the week.
Fi must have walked in two seconds after Carole opened the front door. The lights turned on as she swung herself inside and the A/C kicked on all at the same time. "Hey, Fi," Carole called knowingly from the back.
All day passed at the clinic. Fi worked; probably not hard, but constantly. She always took her ten minutes before and after lunch to smoke a cigarette, and she always brought her own lunch, never looking forward to the small process it took to order or pick up anything.
In the middle of her shift, after lunch, a decisively irritating man was talking to her. Fi leaned onto the old china colored spiral cord phone in her left hand, using her right hand to make purple designs on a Post-It. What was his name? Oh, Mr. Henry. She was reminded of Will Henry, a character from a favorite book - this man didn't live up to his name. "Mr Henry?" she interrupted. "Mr Henry, sir, I have to explain something."
The man actually got quiet. Fi raised her eyebrow, not getting her hopes up. "Unfortunately, I can't give you the answer to your questions right now. You would have to talk to doctor Gaines yourself. I can only write down that you called, and give your message to your doctor-"
"Then why have I been talking to you the past five minutes? Excuse me, miss, but it seems to me that you are neglectful in doing your job if you let a man talk for five minutes-"
"Mr Henry I seem to have another call I apologize for your inconvenience have a nice day!"
Fi yanked the phone away from her ear in time to hear him actually, "harumph!"; never had she talked so fast in her life, good Lord. Fi slammed the phone down onto the hook, but before Carole, the nurse in the room with her, could say, Bill Henry, huh? Sorry about that, ha ha, a pencil shot across the room from Fiona's desk and stabbed itself in the wall. "Holy shit!" the pair said at the same time, both whirling around to see it's rubber end sticking up out of the cubical-like-material (that stuff lined the walls, intended to use all available space as a giant cork-board). "Holy cow, Fi, what did you do?" Carole asked, looking down at it like she was examining a flat tire.
"What did Fiona do?" Matt - or, doctor Gaines - said, peeking into the room. He was obviously joking, smiling in a way that erased his double chin and made him quite handsome, actually. His expression changed to surprise when Carole said, "She used her magic powers to stab the wall with a pencil."
"What?" he asked again, trying to see what Carole was looking at, "Whoa, you really did stab the wall? What did it ever do to you?" He was back into a joking mood again, while Fiona was a little bemused. She took and yanked the pencil out of the wall before sidling back into her chair, "I don't have magic powers," she said, laughing a little, "I was just talking to Bill Henry, and I ended up slamming the phone down - the pencil must have been underneath the phone or something."
"Oh so you're a physics expert, huh?" Carole said, going back to making her copies as Matt left, laughing all the way down the hallway. "Covering up for your - magic powers?"
"Here," Fi said, taking a rubber frog off the counter, "here's some magic powers for ya," she then tossed it at Carole - it landed in her patented seventies Charlie's Angels hair and they both burst out laughing once again.
At seven, Fiona was dead tired, and hungry. She drove Tonks - who, by the way, was named after Nymphadora Tonks because she was an old Nissan painted a dark, pinkish-purple, ten points to Gryffindor - to a nearby Subway and got a sandwich loaded with tuna, cheddar, spinach and pepperoni, and a coke. As if on purpose, Fiona found herself driving towards a neighboring town instead of straight home. She wove through streets, past the residential houses and the town's center, towards dirty, aged roads and more forest cover. She came upon a water reservation. Everyone called it, "the reservation." Everyone also thought it was "cool" to swim in it - at least Fiona didn't. She parked away from the designated spaces, and sat there, watching the wind blow tiny waves on the surface. She ended up eating her whole sandwich there, radio on - oldies, Etta James, Otis Redding kind of old - and drinking the majority of her soda there, before she took off, unsure of why she came in the first place. Maybe she wanted some peace, subconsciously.
She made it home, and still didn't know the answer when her mother asked her what took her so long. So, she told her the one she told herself.
She sat up in bed with her laptop on, watching more hospital dramas, then slowly turned her laptop off, and listened to a few new songs she'd downloaded on her phone. Green Day. Frank Ocean. Someone called Vacationeer. N*Sync. She smiled, listening to "Giddy Up" while she stared at her room in the dark. The song switched, and then she frowned. She snuggled into the blanket. It was too cold to be wearing no pants and the same Led Zeppelin shirt from the night before. Oh, well.
My life is boring, she thought. Then, she went to sleep.