There were five things in the world that Hannah was scared of.
One: Heights. This made sense. If you fell more than two stories, you were definitely injured, possibly dead. At four stories or more, you were almost definitely dead. Heights were only made to kill you.
Two: Ghosts. This was just common sense.
Three: Zombies. Also common sense. And plus, those things stunk. To the high heavens. And above.
Four: Messing up. Hannah was terrified of messing up and getting herself killed. If she tripped over something, let her guard down for even a second, she could be dead faster than someone hopping off the CN Tower.
Five: Bars. Everyone drank too much and flirted too much and generally thought that inhibitions were things of the past. Hannah didn't like getting hit on. Hannah hated getting hit on by drunk men. Hannah was petrified of getting hit on by groups of men too drunk to take 'no' for an answer.
The rest of the world, Hannah could mostly deal with. But those five things were on the list of AVOID AT ALL COSTS. Or at least, be really, really, really ridiculously prepared.
Like salt-filled hula hoops, for example. And salt-filled garden hoses. Linked together, they made excellent size-variable salt rings. Also: iron rings, necklaces, earrings, and retractable pokers. Now, that last one was difficult to get a hold of, inadvisable for use with a fire, and was a bitch to keep from rusting. But for ghosts? Hannah had two.
No need to go the Winchester Way and fight your way out with whatever random shelves and pokers and boxes of nails happened to be on hand. That didn't work for anybody besides the Winchesters themselves. Hannah's way did. And if her last name was coincidentally Winchester, well, she was looking into getting that changed at the nearest opportunity. She didn't want to be linked to the hunters, fictional, legendary, or otherwise.
Oh, and holy water super soakers. And water pistols. And having about sixteen rosaries on her person at once. This, too, was the Hannah Way. So far, she hadn't died, so at twenty four, she was already doing better than the Winchesters. She was going to win the Most Days Alive In A Row pool at Harvelle's if it was the last thing she did.
Hannah did one last check, running her fingers over the slim iron rings, ornate necklace, backpack full of garden hoses, rosaries, hula hoops, water bottles, a bag of salt, four clips of rock salt, three further clips of consecrated iron rounds, and a Beretta and sawed off. Hannah couldn't quite remember the last time she'd restocked, but she was doing pretty okay on supplies at the moment.
And a warm green sweater under her leather jacket. She didn't want to freeze to death, after all. That would just be a fail. Make it past the ghosts, the zombies, the heights, just to get dead by forgetting a sweater. That would really be a Winchester Way to go.
Now, all she needed to do was gank the ghost.
Hannah knew five things about this case.
One: The ghost wasn't killing people, but it was freaking them out. It had attacked anyone who entered the house. Yelled that it was waiting for a special someone to come home. A lover? A friend? A family member? Nobody knew.
Two: There were no local legends about the ghost. No creepy stories about the man that hung his daughters when times got tough, blah, blah, blah. It was as if the ghost had appeared overnight. Hannah was so hoping she didn't have to go after a fresh corpse.
Three: No other hunters were in the area. Ash and Ellen had seemed almost surprised to hear of a ghost, had gived Hannah a funny look. Almost pitying. Jo had made her a hot chocolate on the house, brushed it off as good luck for the hunt. Which Hannah wouldn't need.
She wasn't a Winchester, after all. She knew what she was doing, and she was prepared.
Four: The ghost was weirdly close to where Hannah was crashed in a motel. It would be a pretty short ride to get right into the thick of things.
Five: The house had no sordid history. It was a bland old manor with only hoity toity old people deigning to buy it then live and die elsewhere. No murders. No slaves. No even affairs, as far as Hannah could tell. There was absolutely no reason for a ghost to be hanging around, which is what made it all the more spooky.
And another thing. Hannah was getting a bad feeling about it. The circumstances were fishy. Too easy. Too familiar. To put it simply, it was the sort of case a Winchester would take. And then promptly 'accidentally' start the Apocalypse. Again.
But it was a ghost, and as much as Hannah hated ghosts, hated the smell of salt, hated the smell of ancient garden hose, she owed the world. She'd lived near Harvelle's her whole life, biked past it every day on the way to school. When a vampire had killed her grandmother and made to eat her alive, Ellen had been there and saved Hannah's life. Traumatized her with a beheading, sure, but saved her nonetheless.
She owed her grandmother a world without beasties lurking in every shadow. She owed Ellen. She owed the hunting community. She even owed the Winchesters, sort of, for not letting the world go up in flames. So ghost killing Hannah would go.
It was pretty early when Hannah got into town. The streets were empty, echoed, the fronts of the stores all the same faded glass and signs for NO WIFI, SORRY. Jeez. What did you have to do to get WiFi nowadays, anyway? Hannah couldn't remember the last time she'd got the chance to check her email.
Not that anybody would be sending her any. Her grandmother had been the last family member Hannah had, and it wasn't like she was super sociable. Whenever she tried to make friends, they moved. Yatesville wasn't exactly a place where people wanted to raise their children. It was too gloomy, too cold, and there were too many sketchy strangers coming through in ancient muscle cars.
Hannah made the only sounds in town, kicking rocks and tripping over poorly made sidewalk stones. Not a single other person was awake. Mist hovered, blurring the store faces into faceless heads, doorways gaping like empty mouths. Hannah shivered, dug herself deeper into her giant leather jacket. She'd liberated it from the back of a rattly old car a while back, along with her guns and a bit of ammo. She'd been desperate, okay? Hunters didn't exactly get regular pay checks. Plus, it was totally a hunter's car. They could do their thing and get a new coat and new guns, judging by the enormity of their weapon cache. Hannah couldn't.
When Hannah reached the house — 135 Sorry Lane (a terrible name, if she did say so herself) — the sun still hadn't broken out of clouds. It was easy to see, light everywhere, but still the sky remained a steely grey. Not a good omen.
But omens weren't one of the things Hannah was scared of.
The house was old, Victorian, with faded green trim and white boarding. The porch creaked softly as Hannah jogged up the stairs, her sawed-off gun in hand. There was something oddly familiar about the sound, but Hannah dismissed it. Everything seemed to be oddly familiar these days. It had to be one of those things all hunters got after long enough chasing the things that went bump in the night — paranoia. Hannah had the angst and dead family down pat. It was only logical that she'd move up the next level.
The Winchesters probably had the whole shebang by the time they were five. Dead family, angst, paranoia, too many weapons. That sure sounded like the Winchester Way.
Dammit, she thought, as she jimmied the lock. I forgot the EMP thingamajig.
Hannah didn't need it. The second she stepped through the door, the temperature dove, clouds of her breath rising around her. Hannah drew the poker with her free hand, snapped it out to full length. Even the house seemed to be holding its breath, the creaking notably absent.
A figure flickered into sight for a split second, female, dark hair draped over her face in true ghost style. Hannah tucked her own dark hair out of the way as she advanced, shotgun and telescopic poker at the ready.
Fzzt.
The figure again, farther down the corridor. Hannah fired, but the ghost was already gone. Heart choked in her chest, Hannah followed, reminding herself that she was safe. She had enough salt to make a lake into an ocean, enough iron to get her arrested just out of principle at a metal detector. Ghosts weren't scary if you were the dangerous one.
The ghost fizzled in for another split second, head still down, arms hugged tightly around herself. The ghost was wearing a green sweater, something tight fitting and torn. It almost seemed to be taunting her, shifting back and forth jitter-fast. Follow me. Follow me.
Hannah did. Up the stairs, down the hall, until at last, the ghost appeared just inside a door. There was a last burst of cold and eerie energy and the ghost was gone. Hannah could no longer see her breath in the air.
She frowned, but entered anyway. There was a body on the floor, neck twisted sideways, cheeks still flushed pink. It had long dark hair, a torn green sweater.
It had Hannah's face.
Hannah stared and stared and time spun forward, her breath jerking in and out of her chest. She couldn't even blink. Then, snap, time went back to normal, frost creeping over the walls, the ghost juddering back into the room. Ice crackled over the window, the walls. Hannah's body lay there, looking almost alive besides the torn spots in the green leaking dark red and the way her neck was turned just-so.
Hannah's chest was still heaving with air and life, heart about to fly away, breath freezing and dropping to the floor in piles of crystal ice. She turned, slowly, to see her ghostly self smiling sadly at her.
"I'm sorry," it said, "but you deserve to know. Don't waste your heaven."
Hannah screamed.
(There were more than five things she was afraid of.
Six: Dying.)
Soooo... Hi? Yes. Weird. Hannah has been in heaven for an unspecified amount of time, not knowing she's dead, popping through to the Harvelle's heaven every once and a while. Then her subconscious whipped her up a little surprise. It's my first non-Ben's Clues Supernatural oneshot! Whee!