Title: This Distant Moon
Author: Silverkitsune1
Summary: Ellen can't be kept out of the hunting world.
Warnings: Wee!Ellen
Disclaimer: Supernatural does not belong to me. No money was made from this.
Rating: PG-13
Author's Notes: Set in the same universe as "Not Distress or That Dress Either." Many thanks to my beta justruth. Written for SPNXX's Women of Supernatural Gen Flashfic Challenge.
"Do one thing every day that scares you." - credited to Eleanor Roosevelt
The possessed woman comes crashing through the window with Cynthia Morning on its back. The glass turns and shimmers in the half moon's light. From her place behind her daddy's legs, Ellen sees the blonde woman with the bad perm, and the inky eyes, speckled with the blood that falls from the cuts across her mama's skin.
Todd Morning pushes Ellen into the bathroom, shooting as he moves his daughter across their home's beige carpet. He shuts the door once he knows his nine year old is behind ladder lines of salt and under a devil's trap.
The bathtub has a ring around its middle. An old brown water stain that Ellen's mama and then her daddy had scrubbed at the first week they moved in four years ago before shrugging their shoulders and deciding to let the stain alone. The holy water that fills the tub sloshes over the top of the faded line as Ellen climbs inside. She wraps her hands around her ankles, holds her breath, and shoves her head under. The water fills her ears and wraps the world's sounds in thick quilted blankets, like the ones her mama sometimes stitches. It keeps Ellen from hearing the dying screams of the demon and her daddy.
After the funeral, Cynthia Morning tears the blood stained carpet up. She and Ellen burn the rug in the diner's back dumpster, the same way they'd burned Todd Morning's body hours before. Ellen buries her head in her mama's side, and Cynthia wraps her arms tight around Ellen as the flames sparkle and dance in the humid August sunset.
New carpet, dark green and thin under Ellen's bare feet gets hammered in, and the glass in the front window is replaced, but they don't move. What money Todd Morning left his family is enough to pay the bills for a while, but the tips Cynthia brings from working at the diner aren't enough to find a new house, and keep them in silver bullets so they stay.
There are nights when Ellen finds her mother sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, the shotgun resting across her lap. The curtains will be open, and the moonlight and the starlight twisting together in a rope of brightness that Cynthia won't let herself be caught by.
"Sit with me, honey," she says on those nights when she catches Ellen hovering. "Tell me what's got you prowling the halls."
A man walks into her Cynthia's place of work one day. It's early enough that not even the sun has done much more then grunt and roll over, and Ellen is curled up in one of the booths in Todd's old fleece jacket despite the fact that it's April. She dozes while Cynthia washes down the floor, and makes small talk with Maria who fires up the diner's oven.
They don't get a lot of Asian folk in this part of Iowa. They don't get a lot of folk period, and when Ellen cracks an eye open she memorizes the new man with his long tired face, long nose and bushy black eyebrows that rest over one brown eye and one black eye patch. Cynthia brings him coffee and shoots his order back to Maria before pouring herself a cup and settling down on the other side of the booth.
Ellen sits up kneeling in her own seat, but she can't hear much besides the quite sounds of her mama's voice responding to the man's. The man sips his coffee, and mama goes to get his order. They talk while he eats, and occasionally the man will wave his hand in emphasis or Cynthia will tap a finger on the table which is what she does when she's thinking hard. The man leaves once the last of the egg yoke has been scraped off his plate, and Cynthia goes back to work.
Ellen eats her French toast breakfast, and wraps up the sausage in her napkin and pockets it for later. She reads the first few chapters of The Secret of the Old Clock as the day drags on, and around her the diner fills, then empties and the fills again. By the time noon rolls around Ellen's bored and restless, and wishing she could spend the weekends outside with allher friends. She's more than happy to accept the sack lunch and the instructions to go home and clean out the shed in their backyard.
It turns out that the man's name is Edmond Kato, and Ellen is slightly annoyed to find him at her breakfast table the next day, reading a book with pages that are tissue paper thin and older than Ellen's great-grandma Violet.
"You shouldn't read something so delicate while you're eating," Ellen tells him firmly. "You'll get gunk all over the pages."
Cynthia is leaning against the counter chewing at a bagel, but she pauses to give Ellen a firm eye that Ellen thinks about ignoring for all of five seconds.
Ellen stabs her spoon into her cereal bowl and pouts. "I never get to read at the table."
Edmond stays on for a week and two days. He doesn't say much, not to Ellen at least, and breakfast is the only meal he shares with them, but he's polite when he speaks and even does his own dishes before picking his way across the crab grass and dandelion speckled grass to the shed that Cynthia made into a spare room.
The morning before he leaves Edmond's got his jacket hanging on the back of his chair, and a clean white bandage winding its way up his left arm.
"I'm lucky that bastard didn't take my other eye with it," Ellen hears him say as she comes into the kitchen before school.
Cynthia laughs with him, and she doesn't stop even when she sees that Ellen has slid into her usual chair. Her mama's eyes are red rimmed and the bags underneath them are puffy and grey.
Ellen never sees Edmond again, but that following month a woman with a short black braid, and enough resemblance in her face to let Ellen know she's of blood relation to their one time guest shows up on the doorstep with red seeping through the fingers she presses against her side
"I need a little patching up," she gasps, leaning hard against the door frame. "I have a cousin who said you might help."
The moon is full, and Edmond's unnamed cousin snores. The sound rolls out of Cynthia's room in waves, and Ellen leans against her mama's side happy to sit on living room floor, just outside the pool of moonlight, with the warm weight of her mama's arm over her shoulders.
"You did real good, honey," Cynthia says, her fingers ghosting through her daughter's long brown hair. "I'm proud of you."
Ellen doesn't know if her mama's words are enough to make the sick feeling in her stomach go away. She doesn't like that she's still got blood under her fingernails, and the other woman's screams playing hide-and-seek in the nooks and crannies of her ears.
"I wanted to hide us after what happened to your daddy," Cynthia says. "I thought it would be better, but I can't ignore the world I came out of. It's sure as hell not going to ignore us."
Ellen's sleepy now, the adrenaline that kept her awake through lines of ugly black stitches and puckered red skin that steams under holy water is fading and she with it.
"We're going let it in, honey," Cynthia says, softly and stretches her legs out so that they enter the neat circle of moonlight like the shadow made needle of an unreliable compass. "But were going do it on our own terms."