Title: The Coming Storm
Author: Gin
Rating: PG-13
Summary: People's minds
are dirty places. Missouri-centric, but having to do with the
Winchesters and their role in her life.
Notes: This was
painstaking to write. I'm sure I botched up every kind of folk magic
there is along the way, too. Spoilers for… most of the series,
actually. Some of it is thinly-veiled. Also, note the thinly veiled
Wincest! I rule. The ending is a bit more ambiguous than I'd like,
but I feel like any more and I'd hit people over the head with it.
Thoughts? I had to go back and make a few edits after I watched Home
again; nothing major, but some things that
conflicted with canon.
Missouri's real name is Lucille. Her last name is a smudge on a birth certificate and her Social Security card. A few of the boys from Lawrence know it and call her Lucy as a joke, and she lets them because they're dogs too old and tired to bite anymore. She isn't Moseley, either, but the first man she loved so hard she nearly married was. When she went to get a job from Larry Bench, he called her Missourah on account of where she was from, and it stuck.
She moved to Kansas in 1976, when she was 27 and too damn stupid to know any better than to hop just one state over. She meant to end up in Wichita, but got a nice read off of the people in Lawrence. Kansas wasn't as bad as Missouri, where she got called nigger out loud as opposed to in people's heads. That kind of rudeness she could handle, back then. Now she counts you lucky she doesn't believe in guns if you think that sort of filth in her presence.
People's minds are dirty places, no matter which state you're in. When she was 9, she thought she wanted to live in France because she didn't speak the language. That was when it was all coming at her in words, jumbles of words and sentences and whispers, confusing her so she couldn't pass the spelling tests at school or sometimes even speak. She could hear the dull irritation inside her teacher's head, that child ain't right, and the children learning by rote all out of time with each other. A-B-C-D-A-B-D-E-C-A-F-X-L-Z.
Took her ages to learn to shut them all up. Like shutting off the water so it didn't overflow the sink. But when she learned it, it just turned into something worse, moods and images like film with a few frames missing. For a while she made it so she only saw it while she slept, but that was no good either. She started sleepwalking, and a few times they found her outside doing God knows what, screaming and rolling in the dirt and the dewy grass. People's minds are dirty places.
--
By the time she set up shop in Lawrence, she'd got it under control. It was like putting on glasses, or picking up a book. Still, that sort of gift doesn't keep quiet, and the shouts of witch that drove her out of Missouri became quiet whispers in Kansas. Larry Bench had to let her go when she kept breaking plates during the lunch rush. Strange things in Lawrence. Strange, strong people, strong minds. She'd be gathering hot plates, ready to get them out, when some sound inside her head like a wail and a wash of images would hit her, bursting through her walls. It was like being attacked. And a few days later, something would happen. Sometimes it wasn't anything, and sometimes it was the name of a girl found dead in a lake, same name Missouri'd gasped with pieces of cheap diner china scattered at her feet.
She should have known better. She should have packed up and left her place with its leaking pipes. Start up somewhere else, maybe moved another over to Colorado. But somehow she felt like if she moved over, something would chase her out and out until she was in California, and then what? Drown? Swim to Hawaii?
So she stayed, and she let those strange minds brush over her when they felt like. Nothing she could do about it anyway. She hung up bottles in trees and had too many mirrors hung in her place for a woman of her vanity, but if she didn't get a job where she could start scaring folk, it was fine. Sometimes a neighbor needed some advice, which she was too happy to dole out. And sometimes folks who had trouble moving on needed a little shove from this life to the next. It was fine. She wasn't happy, but it was all right.
--
In 1983, John Winchester's house burned down. She liked John, he helped her with her car when the transmission went and smiled when she asked about the wife and children he never mentioned out loud. She woke up that night screaming like she hadn't since she was a child, and she could smell the smoke like it was choking her even though he lived across town.
It took him a few days to come to her. He sat on her couch with the tea she made him, big shaking hand sloshing it around. He told her about the money he'd saved up and the money from the house insurance, eyes earnest and begging her.
"Why are you telling me this, honey?"
John looked at the tea in his cup and she saw his pretty dead wife. "You're the only one who knows the truth, Missouri."
She didn't have answers, at least not the ones he needed. She told him what he wanted. He sat on her couch for a few more hours and looked like she'd ended his life. Maybe she had. She tried to stay away from his mind. There were some things she didn't need to know.
He left Lawrence four months later. He gave her his second car, a station wagon, and a note. She touched the paper with his frantic writing and flashed on a gleaming black Impala, his boys in the backseat, wind whistling through the open window. A black cloud hovered over him, but it wasn't like the cloud over the burnt skeleton of his home. That one was so dense she couldn't see past it, she was too afraid to even drive past.
--
The sign outside her front door read 'Missouri Moseley, Psychic' in a cheesy black stencil when she heard from John again.
"Hey John," she said, soft, because across the telephone line in his breathing she could hear nothing but pain and struggle.
"Missouri."
She asked him about everything and nothing. He made good contacts, most of them trustworthy, a few like that Pastor she set him up with before he left turning into real friends. He told her about his boys, and she chided him for not keeping the eldest in school.
"I'm not in one place long enough," he explained, the wound of her censure raw in his voice. Missouri saw his wife again, Mary, her curling blonde hair and mouth like a gift from heaven. She saw all the things she had wanted for her boys that John couldn't give by himself. John saw them too. She shook her head to clear it and let Mary go back to John's memory, where she belonged.
"You'd best get over that if you want those boys to grow up sane."
"Yeah, I know." He was in a phone booth and it was raining, wherever he was. New England, somewhere like that.
John asked about his house. She made herself go on the second year anniversary, a few months back. It was hard to cross the street from where she parked the wagon, even with herbs tucked away in both her pockets. It was like when John took her right after the fire; the whole place was like a corpse, some rotting corpse just sitting there in a row of other houses. It made her sick like nothing ever had, but from what she could tell, the real threat was still gone. She put down some Devil's Bit to be sure, and buried a gris-gris in the yard. She hustled away, back to her car, and felt stupid and helpless.
It was and it wasn't what he wanted to hear. No way in hell John wanted to come back to Lawrence unless he had to. But he had no leads on the damned thing that killed his Mary, and if digging through the remains of his life was what it took, he'd do it without a complaint. But there was nothing.
He kept in touch every few years, bringing her little tokens along the way. She passed on what she knew about folk magic and legends, what to use to kill this spirit or that. Most of it he already had a handle on, and what she didn't know someone else did. The calls were little reminders of that house across town, and every so often she'd go check on it and see if that cloud was back.
It never was. But she kept checking.
--
John had the subtlety of a rock, showing up on her door a day before his boys did. She took one look at his face, his eyes on the ground, beard shot with gray. "Well, come in then. You're letting out all the heat."
She let him sleep in her guest room. It wasn't very hospitable, one of the rooms she hadn't cared enough about to decorate fully. Half of it was devoted to sewing and other crafts. She never had the patience for all that, but it waited in that room until she was old and senile enough to enjoy it. He was only there for two or three nights, stretched out on a creaky old cot.
His youngest, Sam, made her want to knock on the side of his head to get him to pay attention. There was too much in the way, too much history and denial and another soft smiling blonde woman burning on the ceiling. He was so much like John had been, but Missouri knew John had never woken up from nightmares that came true. Sam had his brother, Dean, who was so easy to read it was like seeing the bottom of the cleanest, stillest blue lake.
And that damn house. It sat there, taunting her with all of her missed opportunities to lay the thing to rest before she finally did. Too many accidents, too many close calls. She wasn't able to keep on top of whatever that thing was, and people paid for it.
--
"I'm sorry to hear about your daddy, Dean. He was a good man." She knew for a fact everyone said that to him, Bobby and Pastor Jim and some older woman with hard eyes and a face prone to beauty but wearing exhaustion. Didn't make it any less true.
"Yeah, thanks, Missouri."
She sat him down, even though he'd have been comfortable standing in her living room with his hands stuffed in his pockets all day. She set out tea for him, like she had for John so many years ago. He didn't meet her eyes. John never really met her eyes, either, unless he was asking for some answer she couldn't give.
When he looked up with eyes so impossibly wide, she knew it was trouble.
"Dean," she started, and put her hand on his. He drew it back, but she already knew enough. She'd known when he knocked. Sam was a coming storm, sweetness on the air, electricity. "Your brother, Sam?"
"Yeah." Sam didn't know Dean was there. Sam didn't know where Dean was. Dean took off in the middle of the night; she saw two beds and a droning TV and a neon vacancy sign outside the window. She saw a lot of things she didn't want to see, and Dean must have known it, because he looked over his shoulder so he didn't have to face her.
"Oh, honey."
"I don't know what to do." He wasn't the type to break down in some woman's house, but it was a close thing. She could feel how thin he was stretched, how scared. She could feel how near Sam was to finding him, just one more push of his power. And she knew she didn't have enough in her to keep him away.
She didn't have a name for what he was. Just like that thing in John's old house. It didn't settle well.
He looked back at her, finally. She tried to keep her face still, impassive. "I need your help." He stopped, whet his lips. "I need you to… tell me."
Missouri didn't believe in paramnesia. It just didn't happen to her, and she basically lived life believing in whatever showed itself. But she looked down at Dean Winchester, and she found herself saying the same thing she'd said to his daddy, nearly thirty years before.
"You already know the truth."
--
After, he sat on her couch, unmoving. Like she'd killed him. Maybe she had. Maybe it was like John, and she was setting him on a path he couldn't ever turn back from. She didn't know. She collected the cups and took them to the kitchen, let him sit on the couch and think.
Storm was coming, and a black cloud hung over Dean Winchester.