Title: Vengeance Comes in Pointe Shoes
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: I don't own the tv show, I don't own the pictures I linked to and I don't own the ballet stuff either.
Rating: PG for some implications of adult activities.
Spoilers: None really.
Timeline: It's in season two by default, really, I suppose.
Summary: Dean. Ballet. Ghosts. It's also sort of crack!fic.
Notes: I've just been bothered by the Giselle thing for a while. I got hit in the face with this plot bunny and it clung to me like a limpet. Also, Because I'm a little lazy on this, I'm just including links. If you want to see either what the wilis in Giselle look like or my concept of Nicole, you can follow the links as they appear in the fic. If they appear in the posting. Also, no. I didn't spellcheck.
They were backwoods of nowhere, in a town that was surrounded by other small towns that were all backwoods of nowhere, and had no leads whatsoever on whatever spirit it was that was doing the killing. Worse, Sam had turned up what looked to be a second spirit or something, that was killing at irregular intervals with no predictable pattern, just the same MO every time.
"Okay," Sam said as he fussed with the laptop. "Young men go missing in the woods if they're out there after dark. They get found having died of a heart attack."
"What the coroner's office calls a heart attack 'cause there's no visible cause of death," Dean corrected from the other side of the room. "Come on Sam, there must be something. Indian territory? Murdered people? Massacre? You musta found somthin'."
Sam shook his head. "I haven't found anything. Only those weird deaths scattered around the town, and those can't be related to the deaths in the woods. I mean, the town ones consistently have one guy found pitched off something tall somewhere around the town, not far from another who died of a . . ." he corrected himself when Dean shot him a look. "Who died of causes unknown." He shrugged. "And those don't seem to have any pattern other than that it's the same two kinds of killing."
Dean raised an eyebrow. "No pattern?"
"It doesn't happen around the same time of year, it doesn't happen at regular intervals, it never coincided with any astronomical phenomena and it's never at the same spot, just off something high. Sometimes the cliffs at the far end of town, sometimes the water tower, once the city hall, and I can't find any records of anything that would be it." Sam shook his head in disgust. "I found no deaths that look anything like this before the first ones back in 1957." He shrugged. "I have no idea about either case."
As Dean took a breath, Sam told him, "And we're not going into the woods in the middle of the night with the EMF either. We both match the profiles of the guys who died there. Such as they are," he added grumpily. The fact was, the deaths in the forest only had the common denominator that the victims were male and over 16 but under thirty-five.
"So interviews?" Dean asked.
"Yeah," Sam let out a sigh. "Any ideas?"
But Dean was already lost to another interest. "Yeah," he said, focussed on something outside the window. "I know who I'm gonna interview." Then he was out the door, striding toward the attractive young woman on the far side of the motel parking lot.
"Wha-?" Sam frowned as he got up to follow Dean, then spotted the object of Dean's interest. "I can't believe you," he said, raising his voice slightly. He was rewarded with Dean waving vaguely in his direction in acknowledgement that his younger brother had spoken.
Sometimes Sam really needed to learn to kick back and relax, Dean thought with an internal roll of his eyes. Since they didn't have any leads, they might as well see what they'd get if they poked around a little. Maybe a local ghost story or something. If Dean happened to want to pick the pleasant ones to spend time with, what did it matter?
This one looked like she'd be very pleasant.
He carefully approached, years of practice at balancing the James Dean thing, rebellious, dangerous and sexy, with the whole non-threatening thing, got him a return smile right off the bat. "Hey," he said, "I'm just passing through town and I was hoping I could find someone to tell me where the excitement is around here."
Her smile became an amused smirk and he suddenly realised how that had sounded. "Well," she told him, "We're kinda in the sticks out here, but if you're looking for an adrenaline rush, you could head out to the bar tonight. I hear some of the locals are going to drink themselves into a violent stupor tonight."
Dean opened his mouth, thought better of what he was going to say, closed it, thought of something better to say and tried again. "Hey, I just figured I'd ask if there was something to do here while my brother and I took a break from the road. There must be something people do around here besides gettin' drunk." He smiled easily at her.
She smiled again, and said, "If you'd come a week ago, or two weeks from now, there'd've been the annual baking contest or the annual Jell-o mould contest."
He raised an eyebrow. "Jell-o mould contest?"
"It's for people who can't cook but want to try to win a cooking contest. Jell-o moulds as far as the eye can see. Jiggling away."
Wincing, Dean asked, "Nothing else?"
"Well, there is the Haverford Falls Ballet Company."
Blink. "Huh?"
She shrugged. "Haverford is a little small for a ballet company, but we get all the good dancers from the surrounding counties and in return, we seem to be the only non-seasonal thing to do around here."
"We?" Dean encouraged. "You're a dancer?" This was good. He liked dancers. They had great muscles and even better legs. Best of all, they had lots of stamina.
"Yeah. Actually, I just got the lead in Giselle. I can't believe it," she said with a broad, happy smile. "I'm the lead."
"Wow," Dean said. He wasn't sure how impressed he should be. He didn't know anything about ballet, and this was a small-town company. On the other hand, he didn't want to alienate the pretty dancer in front of him. "I . . . uh . . . don't know much about ballet, but that's pretty cool."
She looked him up and down, then said, "Would you like to come tonight? The opening night is tonight and I have an extra ticket I could give to someone."
He considered. "Well. . ." On the one hand, he'd have to watch ballet. On the other, if he did, the dancer might sleep with him. His decision was made. "I don't even know your name yet," he said to her with a flirtatious tilt of his head and a quick smile. "I'm Dean. Dean Patterson."
"Well, Dean, I'm Nicole Carleton. It's nice to meet you." She glanced down at her watch and cursed. "Ah! I have to get going. I'm going to be late for class." She turned to him. "Meet me outside the theatre at six-thirty and I'll give you your ticket. And maybe we could have coffee after the show?" she asked.
Dean smiled in satisfaction. "Absolutely. I'll see you this evening."
Date set for the evening, Dean strolled back into the motel room, to see Sam look up at him with a glare of aggravation. "You done?"
"For now," he replied. "I got a date this evening with a dancer. Man, I love dancers. Great legs."
Sam and Dean had split up and spent the entire day trolling the town for information. Local legends, ghost stories, theories, anything that might give them a bead on what was killing men in the woods near the town. Sam, as usual when they were in situation like this, had called Dean every hour to check in. It was a little aggravating, but every so often one or the other of them would stumble on to something while they were separated and without the check-ins the other brother wouldn't know something had happened. The first couple times before they instituted the rule the one who was fine had almost been too late to save the one who was about to be killed by the monster of the moment.
He'd spent most of the day talking with the locals and had come up with nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. He'd talked to the town historian and found no suspicious deaths. He'd found nothing that would indicate someone died in any way that could be connected with either the falling and heart attack combination deaths, or the ones in the woods. To top it off, even though it was a very small town, it was as though the people had so completely rationalised away the deaths in the woods, they might as well not have happened. Which was odd in itself, and the next thing that Sam was going to research if all else failed.
It seemed from the phone calls that Dean was in exactly the same situation. No stories, no myths or legends, not even a creepy feeling from anyone there.
"Hey."
"Anything?" Sam raked a hand through his hair. "Absolutely nothing. Still. You?"
"Nope. I'm going to be in the theatre this evening though," Dean told his brother.
Sam frowned, "Uh . . . why?"
He could almost hear his brother's grin over the line. "Well, old theatres tend to attract ghosts, you know that."
Eyes rolling, Sam said, "You're going on a date with that dancer to the theatre."
"Dude, she's giving me a free ticket to her show. We're just meeting after for coffee."
He blinked in confusion. "Dean, there aren't any coffee shops open that late in Haverford."
"I know," replied the older brother smugly.
With an impatient growl, Sam said, "Fine. I'll see you tomorrow." As he hung up, he muttered, "Jerk."
Sam had gotten dinner and made one more circuit of the town before heading back to the motel to see if he'd missed anything in his research before.
It was well after dark now and Sam was pacing just outside the boundary of the forest with the EMF metre, seeing if he could pick something up. He wasn't getting anything, but that didn't mean anything either.
His phone rang, and he glanced at it, taking note that the time was after eleven, and the caller was Dean. "Hey. Did you upset her so much you need me to pick you up?"
"Dude, I think I know what's going on here, but I need to check some dates and thing. Meet me at the motel, would you?" Dean just hung up and Sam stared at the phone in surprise before shrugging and heading to the motel. It looked like Dean's theatre 'hunch' had paid off after all.
Earlier that evening, Dean had met up with Nicole outside the Haverford Falls Main Street Theater.
"So . . . uh . . . what time's the show?" He asked as she handed him the ticket. "And would you like to go out to dinner before?"
"I'd love to, but I can't," she told him regretfully. "But, I can give you a bit of a backstage tour. Point out some interesting things," she said.
Nodding, Dean had put on a vague approximation of a gentlemanly air, and had offered her the crook of his arm. She'd taken it and led him inside. "What's that about?" Dean asked, nodding his head toward the banners reading things like, "50 YEARS OF CLASSICAL DANCE."
"Oh, that," she shrugged dismissively. "The company started in '57. Today's the first performance of the new season," she told him. "We're actually doing Giselle because of that. I mean, we do Giselle every couple of years, just like all the big name ballets, but we're recreating the first season of the company, with the same schedule as the 1957 season."
"Oh," Dean said. Not really sure how to respond to that.
"Actually, there's an interesting story about the first season," Nicole told him. "My mom had joined the company as a teenager, and she was really good friends with Annette Hanson, who was the lead in the Giselle premiere that year." She leaned in closer and Dean, who wasn't all that interested in old gossip from fifty years before decided it was worth the boring gossip for the proximity. "So she danced it that night, and then, right after the show, before the cast party, she stepped into the street, no one knows why, and got hit by a car."
Dean blinked. So far, the story wasn't really worth the buildup, but Nicole wasn't done yet. "Anyhow, there were all kinds of rumours, and a lot of people said she committed suicide. But what was really sad was that her fiance Jake Ashton and one of her best friends in the corps - Fred Laughlin - both died just days later."
Huh. "Wow. That must've been tough for people."
"Yeah," Nicole said. "But they dedicated the theatre in the memory of Annette, Jake and Fred and the town moved on." She shook it off. "But anyhow, let me show you around backstage." Which she proceeded to do for just long enough to show Dean some very interesting dark corners of the wings, and Dean trotted back to be let into the theatre with the other theatregoers, making sure there were no traces of lipstick on his face.
Settling into his seat minutes later, Dean took the only entertainment on offer in the period before the show started, and read the program he'd been handed by an usher at the door.
Act I:
Act II:
One night, not long after Giselle's death, both Hilarion and Albrecht, (who deeply regrets his actions that led to Giselle's death) are mourning near Giselle's grave. The Wilis appear, lead by their Queen, Myrtha. Wilis are the ghosts of young girls who died before their wedding day, and who avenge themselves by making the men they meet dance themselves to death. Giselle is transformed into a Wili and joins the spirits. The Wilis chase Hilarion through the woods, eventually making him dance himself off a cliff. They next attempt to kill Albrecht, but Giselle breaks free, interfering, and asks Myrtha to save him. Myrtha refuses to spare him, and forces him to dance. He becomes more and more exhausted, until Giselle tells him to take shelter behind the cross of her gravestone. The Wilis, unable to go near the symbol of God, are forced to leave him alone. As dawn breaks, Albrecht tries to get Giselle to return with him, but as she is a spirit, she fades away as the sun rises.
About the Ballet
Giselle was first choreographed by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot. It was later revised by Marius Petipa. It was based in part on a poem by Victor Hugo, and part on writing by Heinrich Heine. It first premiered in 1841 in Paris. It . . .
Blah blah blah.
Dean switched over to people watching. There was a hot babe in a little tiny black number and Dean, from the balcony, had a perfect view straight down the top.
Dean felt a little interested in the ballet in spite of himself. Chicks going crazy and killing themselves, guys cheating on their fiancees, a bunch of vengeful spirits and it shaped up to have potential to be interesting.
It wasn't really. Okay, so he was impressed with the physical prowess of the dancers, and seeing attractive women with nice legs in revealing postures was definitely a pleasant thing. But it was dull. The music was dull, the dancing was dull, and if he hadn't read the summary he'd have no idea there was a plot at all.
It was pretty though. And that Hilarion guy was managing to look pretty shifty as he broke into Albrecht's house. More than that, he could see that Nicole was truly enjoying what she was doing up there. And Dean could appreciate that. He knew that feeling of doing exactly what he loved most just as it all came together.
He perked up a little when the Mad Scene started. Okay, he had been forced to read more of the program to kill the time. And it was kinda cool. Suddenly her hair was everywhere and even Dean felt a little creeped. Then she ran around with the sword, which was kinda neat, and killed herself, which bumped the show up into kinda interesting.
Then intermission started and Dean wandered around listening to people yap about quality of performance or some other crap like that. He went over to the concessions to pick something up, and found the concession prices were higher than sports event prices.
Fifteen minutes later he was suffering through some pretty boring dancing, although the bit where the guy ran straight over a cliff was sort of awesome. The thing with ghost Giselle pushing aside her true nature as a vengeful spirit was completely unreal, but that was okay. It was fiction after all.
All in all, he'd spent worse evenings, and while he and Nicole had "coffee" at her place, Dean decided that it was, basically, a very good evening. Out of the blue, something came to Dean. He bolted upright, eyes wide, and said, "Dammit!"
"What?" Nicole asked. She looked a little put out.
Dean barely even paused as he said, "It's my grandmother's birthday. I sent her flowers, but I meant to call her. She's somewhere out in Hawaii at the moment, but I left the number in my motel room. I really have to call her." He added for good measure, "I promised."
Nicole's face softened, and she said, "Go on. But I expect you back here soon."
Dean grinned and said, "Hold that thought." Then he was out the door, and calling Sam.
When Sam got back to the motel, he was surprised to see that Dean had beaten him there, and more, that Dean was actually doing what looked like research on the laptop. Still, he said, "You'd better not be using that to cover up porn. I don't want to have to pay to get the laptop debugged again."
Dean just waved at him dismissively, still focussed on the screen. "Okay, so we're trying to find the grave of a ballet dancer who died in '57. She was hit by a car. Her name's Annette Hanson and she's doing both the killings. The ones in the woods and the ones in town."
Sam blinked. "How'd you get that? Even if she's a vengeful spirit, there's a consistent pattern to spirit killings like that, and while the ones in the woods are consistent with each other and ditto to the town ones, the two sets aren't consistent with each other."
"Yes they are," Dean said. "See, she was dancing the lead in the ballet I saw tonight, Giselle. It's all about this chick who goes crazy and kills herself because her boyfriend's cheating on her. Then she comes back from the dead as a wili."
He was interrupted by Sam, "The spirit of a woman whose death was caused by the betrayal of her husband on the wedding night?"
"How do you know this stuff?" Dean demanded, then he shook his head. "Anyhow, fifty years ago, she's playing Giselle right? And apparently, right after the performance, she walked straight into traffic and died. Her fiance and a close male friend were the first paired town victims." He looked at Sam who was looking interested, but not completely convinced.
"Okay," said Sam. "But why those intervals-" he cut himself off. "Performances of Giselle?" He asked.
"Yeah," Dean gave him a significant look. "I'll bet she found out that Jakey, the fiance, was cheating on her. So she ran into traffic, maybe suicide, maybe accident, doesn't matter. She comes back and recreates the final act of Giselle."
Sam easily picked up the thread at that point. "And she's been killing the men in the woods because a wili is a forest spirit."
At which point Dean stood and pointed at the laptop. "So now that I've done all the hard work, how about you find out where she's buried so we can salt and burn her before she kills anyone this week during the run of Giselle?" Then he turned and headed to the door.
"Where are you going?" Sam asked, even as he started checking into possible locations for her burial.
Dean gave him a look of combined amusement and exasperation. "Dude. I left Nicole alone and told her I had to call my grandmother."
A heaved sigh escaped Sam, and he waved Dean off with resignation. "Go. Do . . . whatever." The older shot the younger a cheeky grin as he whipped out the door and back toward the very flexible dancer he had waiting for him.
Nicole was waiting on the porch for Dean and sent him a sultry smile as he approached. And then the smile turned to a look of fear as her eyes locked onto something behind Dean.
With a sinking sensation, Dean found himself turning around and saw a lovely woman, dressed in a white calf-length tulle dress. The ones the ballerinas had been wearing in the second act earlier in the evening. She gestured, and suddenly, Dean found himself moving. Unable to stop himself. He was freakin' dancing. He'd've been embarassed if he weren't so concerned that he was about to suffer death by either exhaustion or falling off a tall thing.
He could faintly hear music in the background as he found himself hopping around, (not ungracefully, a distant part of his mind noticed) and more than that, he was suddenly lifting and carting around the ghost in the costume. Who, despite being a spirit weighed about as much as any other person her size Dean had carried.
Still, Dean managed to get his cell phone out and toss it to Nicole. She didn't catch it, but it managed a soft landing on the shawl she'd dropped at her feet. "Speed dial one!" Dean shouted between grand jetes and piouettes. "Tell my brother what's happening!" Then he was more concerned about conserving his breath.
Sam had just worked out where Annette was buried when his cell went off. It was Dean again. "Hey," he said. "What?"
It wasn't Dean. "Oh my God!," said a female voice on the other end of the line. "He . . . he said to call you, and he's . . . She-"
Sam interrupted, with the sinking feeling that Dean was in trouble. "Ma'am, tell me what's going on."
"Dean was coming up the walk when she just came out of nowhere, just appeared behind him! Oh my God! She's a ghost or something, and he's dancing and-"
"Ma'am. Please. Nicole?"
"Yes?" She was breathing very fast and sounded pretty freaked. Sam didn't exactly blame her.
"Where are you?"
"At home I . . ."
"Can you tell me the address," Sam asked in as soothing a tone of voice he could manage. He was pretty concerned because while wearing Dean to the point of exhaustion gave Sam at least a little time to find his brother, all it would take would be getting Dean to the nearest place that was high enough to cause a deadly fall to kill him. And Sam had no idea whether the fall or the exhaustion deaths came first.
But she told him her address and Sam pretty much flung himself into the Impala, shotgun loaded with rock salt at his side, ready to shoot. He actually nearly ran Dean down, because by the time he got close to Nicole's house, Dean had migrated out into the street. It was the work of a moment to see Dean hoisting the ghost into the air, aim the shot gun and fire a blast of rock salt at it.
Annette dispersed, and Dean dropped to his knees, gasping for breath. Sam was beside him a moment later. "Dean? You alright?"
"Yeah," Dean managed between breaths. "You know where she's buried Sam?"
"Yeah," Sam replied. "Let's go and deal with her before I have to watch you performing solos in my nightmares."
"Cute. Really," Dean shot his brother a sour look, but was still breathing too hard to give a really good comeback.
They arrived at the cemetary, heading straight for her plot. Dean's first inkling something was wrong, was the sudden absence of Sam, followed by the sight of Sam's 6'4" fluttering by on tiptoe, followed by the ghost. Dean felt the impulse to join his brother, but resisted long enough to shoot her again. "You gonna join me twinkletoes?" he asked a somewhat flushed Sam.
"Shut up," Sam muttered as he started digging again.
The next time she came back it was Dean starting to dance off. "Let's finish with this," Sam said after he got her off his brother's back, "Then we can go get your toe shoes."
Dean shot him a dark look even as he started digging again. "At least I got to grope the sexy ghost, Tinkerbell," he snarked back.
"Jerk."
"Bi- Got it!" Dean was quickly smashing in the lid, not wanting to make a further idiot of himself. Sam was right there with the shotgun, this time getting to Annette before she got to either of them, smoothly getting the corpse covered in gasoline, salt and pitching in a match.
It was the smoothest, most choreographed bit of salt-and-burn they'd ever done.
As Annette went up in flames and the apparition followed suit, both men heaved a sigh of relief.
Dean was disappointed, but unsurprised, when Nicole told him the next day that he was unwelcome and he could take his crazy, scary, self and go somewhere far away.
As they drove off into the metaphorical sunset, Sam caught sight of the edge of something poking out of the glove compartment. It was a folded poster. "Put that back," Dean growled.
Sam, as was his wont, ignored his brother. "Nice," he said. It unfolded into a publicity shot of Nicole.
"Very nice." He turned to Dean. "Should I start stocking up on extra cash for ballet tickets, I hear San Francisco's ballet is-"
"Shut up bitch."
"Jerk," Sam replied happily.
Fin