Title: Mouths of Babes
Author: Maat
Characters: Jimmy Novak
Category: Gen
Rating: K
Summary: Jimmy's been running into strange people all his life. Gen oneshot.
Word Count: 2,195
Author's Note: I just love writing Jimmy, because we know so little about him. Not necessarily the same 'verse as If There Be Angels, but it could be.
Reviews are appreciated and loved.
Mouths of Babes
Jimmy's been running into strange people his whole life.
It's like they're drawn to him, like he has a huge glowing sign on his forehead beckoning the crazy, the bizarre, the flat-out wack-jobs. Amelia always says it is because he has 'kind eyes.' Jimmy doesn't understand this.
He asked, once, the first time she said it, after the campus preacher incident. "My eyes attract the insane?"
"Well, I don't know." Amelia was flustered. This was when they were still just dating, and her hair was long, nearly to her waist; every time he saw her he wanted to comb his fingers through it, marvel at how it stayed so smooth despite wind and rain and the heat of summer. "You just…radiate goodness. I think they can see that. Maybe they can see things that the rest of us can't."
She was right, he realizes now, sleeves rolled up and hand dipped in a pot of boiling water. Just not in the way she thought.
When Jimmy was six, he was snatched up by a homeless man on the street.
The man was filthy, crouched in garbage, and he scared Jimmy even from two blocks away. But as they approached his parents pressed several dollars into his chubby hand and told him to drop them in the man's tin cup.
"We must always help those less fortunate," his mother said, her white-gloved fingers on his shoulder. They had just come from church as she was wearing a flower-print dress with a little hat tipped to the side, like a housewife out of old magazines. "Go on, then, Jimmy."
He clutched the money and inched his way to the man, who smelled of cat urine and whose one eye drifted to the side almost comically. For one moment, the man simply held out his cup. Jimmy dropped the money in, and turned away, beaming.
Then the man scooped him into his lap and held him tight, and Jimmy screamed.
"Blessed!" the man yelled, holding Jimmy up with surprisingly strong arms as the boy wailed. "Blessed is this child!"
"Let him go!" Jimmy's father growled, pulling his son out of the man's grasp. "We give you money and this is how you thank us?"
"Honey, he clearly has problems," Jimmy's mother said as Jimmy buried his face in his father's coat, still shaking. "Let's just go."
"He is blessed!" the man called, trailing after them. Jimmy peeped over his father's shoulder to see him hopping up and down, shaking a fist in the air, toothless mouth opened in a wide, insane grin. "He will be filled! Praise the Lord!"
Even to this day, Jimmy remembers those words. The first time he heard them.
He will be filled.
When Jimmy was in high school, his grand-aunt Enid was admitted to the hospital for the last time.
She had late-stage Alzheimer's, and spent most of her time in a near-comatose state, eyes rolling around in her head. "Trapped in her mind," the doctor said. Sometimes she would come out of it, only to mutter incoherently about those long-dead.
"I don't understand why we have to visit every Sunday," Jimmy grumbled. He was fifteen, all slouching shoulders and too-big feet, his dark hair grown out enough to cover his eyes, his clothes fashionably over-large. "She doesn't even know who we are anymore."
"Because it's the Christian thing to do," his mother said primly, wiping drool from his great-aunt's mouth.
That was always the answer, for everything: It's the Christian thing to do.
Jimmy hated the hospital. It smelled of old people and antiseptic, false, sterile. Something about that smell made bile rise up in the back of his throat, as did the sight of great-aunt Enid's skin, soft and powdery, like it would sloth off at the slightest touch to reveal nothing but bone underneath.
The doctor said she was slipping. He said to expect the worst. Jimmy didn't understand that. The worst was already here, in her glassy, staring eyes, in the stench of age and sickness that radiated from her pores, in the tubes that dripped clear fluids into her arm, in the bedpans and diapers. At this point, death could only be a relief.
The last time Jimmy saw his great aunt, she looked like a corpse, waxy, still except for her lips that moved in a stream of muted mumblings. When he at last went to say his goodbyes he ghosted his lips over her clammy forehead, and her claw shot out to wrap around his arm with surprising strength.
He stumbled back, but she didn't let go.
"You are blessed," she wheezed, the first coherent words she had spoken in months, her eyes clear and lucid. "I can see it! You shine like the angels, and they will take you for their own. You shine so brightly, but you are…" She trailed off, sinking back onto the bed, her hand slipping from his arm. Irrationally, Jimmy leaned forward.
"What?" he asked breathily. "What am I?"
She stared at the ceiling, eyes slipping shut. "Empty," she murmured. "But you will be filled."
That night, great-aunt Enid died in her sleep, without saying another word.
Then there was the apocalyptic campus preacher.
Every campus had one; the kind of man who would stand on the library steps with his beard and his battered bible, yelling to the wind and a small group of curious onlookers about how the end was nigh.
Jimmy was twenty-two, in college and wildly, giddily in love. Amelia was perfect, with her long hair and doe eyes and lovely full lips, her soft-spoken intelligence, her sly humor. Her smile made his heart stutter in his chest like a drum, like a sick man.
It was springtime, and they had been dating for three weeks. The cherry trees and dogwoods were in full bloom, and after class they would meet at the quad, lace fingers, and walk aimlessly. This particular calm Wednesday, when the sky was wispy with dispersed clouds and the air was bright and damp, they walked past the street preacher. They hovered for a moment at the edge of the group, Amelia giggling helplessly into her hand, and then the preacher's eyes locked with his and Jimmy got a distinctive oh no, not again feeling deep in his gut.
"Let's get out of here," he murmured, attempting to draw Amelia away, but it was too late.
"Oh, praise the Lord, oh praise Jesus!" the man howled, bounding off of the steps like a deer. The crowd parted and in an instant he was by Jimmy's side, trying to drag him forward. Jimmy resisted, forcefully, so the preacher settled for lifting his arm in the air and waving it. "Praise Jesus! This, ladies and gentleman, this is our savior! Can't you see the light? He unfilled, yes, but he is for only angels to fill! A vessel of the LORD, ladies and gentleman, oh, happy day! The end is nigh, the apocalypse is soon upon us, but the Lord will FILL his empty cup and SAVE us all!"
Jimmy wrestled his arm away, and then he and Amelia ducked heads and ran, through the spray of falling cherry blossoms, until the crazed preacher's voice faded in the distance and Amelia collapsed laughing on the damp grass.
Empty. Filled. Those words always kept coming to Jimmy, no matter how hard he ran from them. He didn't know what they meant, back then. Just that they repeated, from the mouths of the insane, the dying, the simple, the child-like, the faithful.
Empty. Full.
Vessel.
The strangest was the man in the diner.
This one happened only three months ago. Amelia and Claire were out of town visiting Amelia's sister, so Jimmy was eating dinner alone in a diner. The waitress served a piece of blueberry pie that he hadn't ordered, and when questioned, pointed to a wiry man sitting at another table. "He ordered it for you," she said, then shrugged at Jimmy's wide-eyed look and walked away.
Jimmy's gaze flickered between the pie and the man at the other table. The guy was small and jittery, with a trimmed beard and somewhat reddened eyes that were darting back and forth between Jimmy and the ground.
Finally Jimmy stood and walked over to the table. "What's up?" he asked, dropping into a seat. The man squeaked like he had seen a ghost. "Do I know you?"
"Uh…" the man stuttered. "It, uh, probably depends on your definition of know. Is your name…is your name Jimmy Novak?"
Jimmy raised an eyebrow. "Yeah. How…have we met?" The man shook his head, his bloodshot eyes huge. Jimmy noticed that he had ink under his fingernails. "Then why did you just buy me pie?"
"Because…" The man hesitated and gulped. "Because you're real, I mean I thought I thought you up but you're sitting here and you're Jimmy Novak, you're really Jimmy Novak, and that deserved…pie."
"Who the hell are you?" Jimmy asked, studying the man, who was drumming his ink-stained fingers on the table with nervous energy. "Is this some kind of joke?"
"Oh no, no joke," the man said, shaking his head. "I wish it was, because, the way I've written it, things are going to get real real bad for you in the upcoming months." He stared at Jimmy pleadingly. "I'm sorry, I really am. I don't know how you exist but whatever it means…I'm sorry." He sighed deeply and ran his hands through his hair. "I don't know, I really don't. Maybe I'm a god," he muttered to himself.
"Just what I need," Jimmy said, standing and clenching his fists. "More crazies. I swear, why do you people always target me?"
The man looked at him. "Because you're special," he said simply. "Just…not everyone can see it."
"And what are you?" Jimmy shot back. The man sagged in his seat, looking like he was about to cry.
"If this is anything to go on, apparently I'm a prophet. Or completely mad." He let out a groan. "This sucks balls."
It all makes a lot more sense, now. He is special, and not everyone can see it.
Amelia can't see it.
She wants him to take pills. She's accused him of being just as crazy as the people who follow him around, with their mad words and adulations: The young man with autism, the little girl with Down's Syndrome, the middle-aged woman with schizophrenia, the old blind man on the street corner. They've come to him his whole life. Called him empty. Called him special.
Now he knows why.
He puts on his trench coat in the hallway, checking his reflection in the mirror, the messy black hair and wide blue eyes, the tie that is already choking him.
It's physically painful to walk out of that house, to leave his wife and daughter sleeping in their beds and know that he may never come back. But this sense of destiny has been following him around ever since he was six years old and a homeless man snatched him up in the middle of the street, and now that it finally makes sense he can't, can't back away from it. Like it would be letting all of those people down, the ones who stared at him like he was beautiful and told him: You are empty.
Castiel told him: You will do God's work. He likes the sound of that better.
He steps outside. He says yes.
He waits, patiently, to be filled.