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AN: Shorter than my usual fics, but I was rereading 'Pet Semetary' recently and was inspired to do this quick one-shot; hope you like the result.
The Truth Behind Dreams
Life was never the same for Ellie Creed after she lost her parents.
It wasn't just the mystery of what had happened on that dark night back in Ludlow while she slept in Chicago- her father's throat slashed and her mother having suffered a morphine overdose while something had apparently eaten her body- but even at five, Ellie knew that there was more to the story than anyone knew, even if her grandparents had told her 'the full story' when she was older. While only her parents' fingerprints had been on both weapons, the investigators had never been able to explain why the Creeds would have done such a thing to each other, or account for how Jud Randall's house had burned down on the same night.
The dream she'd had of the figure she could never remember as anything more than 'Paxcow' haunted her for years, along with the occasional glimpse of her barely-remembered brother in the same nightmare, but she learned to live with them as she got older, moving past the childhood acquaintances who knew about her tragedy and simply saying when asked that her family had died in an accident. After her few salvageable belongings had been sent to her grandparents, she'd never even asked about what had happened to Church; it was as though, on some level, she'd already known what would only be confirmed later. When the cat's body had been discovered in the burnt house and identified as having been dead for months rather than days, Ellie had put the whole thing behind her and tried to follow her grandparents' advice to move on, but she had silently promised herself that she would never have another pet, despite her grandmother's offer to get her a new cat. She'd been withdrawn from the rest of her schoolmates when she moved to Chicago, but it had never struck anyone as anything more than a natural reaction to what she'd been through, and she still managed to make friends and have a fairly normal life despite all that.
After she left school, she went on to college with her grandparents' financial support- her grandfather had died of a stroke a couple of years ago, and her grandmother was far more tolerant without him there to control things- and hadn't taken long to decide on her course.
Following her father's example by becoming a doctor was her way of trying to help others, but her decision to study psychology had been fuelled by a need to understand herself as much as to help other people.
No matter what she studied, however, she was never able to explain the recurring nightmares about her long-dead family, or how everything was always so clear despite how little time she had spent with them in the grand scheme of things.
More importantly, she could never explain why the dreams always featured Gage hiding behind his mother from her white-haired father; her little brother had loved both his parents, and Louis Creed had never become old enough for his hair to go white…
When she experienced another dream shortly before her twenty-sixth birthday, this one featuring a white-haired woman asking if she was ready to be strong, she didn't even stop to think before she answered.
She'd had to be strong ever since she became the last Creed living with a family of Goldmans who had always believed that her father wasn't good enough for her mother while dealing with inexplicable nightmares; acknowledging that was just the next step.
For a time, she'd thought nothing of it, apart from noting the sudden bursts of strength and speed when she needed them- chasing after a mugger, moving objects around in her flat- but it was only when she was visited by a slightly older woman in black leather and a red-haired woman in more flowing attire that Eleanor learned what had happened to her.
More importantly, she realised that there might have been more to her past dreams than she'd ever been willing to consciously acknowledge.
As she listened to their stories of the history of the legacy that she had apparently become a part of, along with some of their own experiences, it didn't take Eleanor long to suspect that she had been aware of this 'new' world on some level for far longer than she had been willing to consciously acknowledge. When the redhead who'd introduced herself as Willow noted that she was puzzled at Eleanor's greater age than the standard 'Potential', it had been just the cue that Eleanor needed to ask the question that had been hovering on the edge of her mind.
"If I had an… encounter… with something… supernatural… when I was younger," she said, the words still feeling strange to her conscious mind even as her subconscious agreed with them completely, "could that have made me more… sensitive… to this kind of thing?"
"You've encountered magic before now?" the dark-haired girl who'd introduced herself as Faith said, looking at Eleanor in surprise.
"I suppose it's possible that past contact with magic could make you receptive to the Slayer essence for longer than the usual age limit, but it would depend on what kind of magic and what it did to you…" Willow mused, looking thoughtfully at Eleanor for a moment. "Why do you ask?"
"Because I think there was something behind my childhood house," Eleanor said grimly. "And I think it killed my parents and my baby brother."
She knew that description was an over-simplification of what had happened back in 1983, but as she took in the shocked expressions on Willow and Faith's faces, she was certain of one thing.
Whatever it took, now that she had some idea of what she was dealing with, she would go back to Ludlow, and she was going to make sure that what had happened to her parents was never going to happen to anyone else ever again…