Two chapters again. ^^
I DO NOT OWN SUPERNATURAL OR ANY OF ITS CHARACTERS; I ONLY OWN AUBREY AND A COUPLE OTHER OC'S. Don't sue me.
Greg had finally let Aiden loosen up. It was high noon, around 2 o'clock, and they were in the junkyard. After Aubrey's dozen repeats of telling the man that it was safe, Greg allowed Aiden to play Race Car inside one of the beat-up trucks. Aubrey wasn't lying, too; the cars might have been rusty and old, but they weren't old enough to crumble to dust the moment a young boy sat in the driver's seat.
She watched from the bench by the repair shop as Aiden made quiet engine noises with his mouth. Greg stood waiting by the door of the car in case anything happened. Lorraine—whether fortunately or unfortunately, Aubrey didn't know—had decided to remain in her room for the remainder of the day. Despite the fact that they had had canned pork and beans for breakfast, at least she had eaten with them. Aubrey was fairly sure that she wasn't going to make a break for the police station anymore, because one, she had no means of getting there, and two, if she tried to run there, there was no way for her to be able to do so without Aubrey hearing her exit her room. She was thankful that Bobby's floorboards were creaky at the top floor.
Aubrey took a swig of her ice-cold beer, eyeing the bottle that Greg had denied not ten minutes ago. She supposed he had good reason to, considering his boy was running around. She didn't need to be valedictorian to know that drinking in front of kids was bad, but that was what she was doing at that moment, so she must have been a very bad role model.
Nevertheless, after a minute or two of pondering, she pushed her bottle away from her as well. She would stow it away in the fridge and continue drinking it when Sam and Dean got back. But then she remembered what kind of hunt they were on, and her impatience bubbled up again.
They'd been tracking down the Mother of All a little over a month now, trying to pin down exactly what she was, and how they were going to kill her. She wasn't so mad at the boys because they'd left her (though that was definitely a large factor), but because they had made a reckless decision. So what if it wasn't the Mother of All, if it was just one of her children? That didn't make it any less dangerous. And Aubrey was supposed to be the one hunting with Sam and Dean, not Bobby. She loved the old man like a second father, for she would never forget her own, but he was old. He showed that whenever he bent down to pick up a stray nail and he would hurt his back, or when his hands shook whenever he held up something heavy, or when he would have to run upstairs to fetch something and come back down breathing heavily.
It wasn't exactly reassuring to know that the only family she had left had gone on a very dangerous hunt, with one of them emotionally unstable, one of them mentally unstable, and the other physically unstable.
Aubrey wasn't sure if she was mentally unstable too. After her first blackout caused by hearing Remiel's name, there had been no repeats. At least, not yet. She found that if she didn't think about it too much, she'd forget about it… for a while. The feeling of fire on her skin, the pain, the golden grass still being there when she opened her eyes, the tree…
She was thinking about it again. Shaking her head, her hand reached out and grasped around the cool surface of the beer bottle she'd recently pushed away. With a heavy sigh, she took in three large gulps before pushing it away again. Prickling sensations started running up and down her arms, resulting in goose bumps and standing hair follicles, but she didn't mind.
Her phone started ringing. Loudly. Greg looked up from where he was watching Aiden but Aubrey waved a hand at him in a gesture of nonchalance. She picked up the phone and flipped it open, still feeling Greg's eyes on her. That faded to the background, however, when she saw who was calling. She pressed the answer button and placed the phone against her ear.
"Find out what it is yet?" she immediately demanded, her eyes flickering to where Greg was. He'd looked away, now, but was sending fleeting glances at her.
"It's Mother Dearest," came Dean's sarcastic reply, but Aubrey froze. "Yeah, we had a talk with that guy who butchered his wife and son. He worked at Starlight Cannery, a gas station just off I-80." I'm betting that's where it all went to shit."Says he blacked out and woke up back in his truck in the morning. Our camera feeds say differently, though."
Aubrey's stomach churned. "Mother?"
"Yep. Butcher guy says he was giving a girl a ride, but then she took off. So, we're looking at the feeds now and they just went crazy—static all over the girl's face. Freakish nightmare."
Her finger started tapping wildly on the wooden surface beneath her hand. "I seem to recall Bobby giving me permission to drop everything and run when something like this came up."
"You are not leaving those three alone there, Aubrey," said Dean in his firm voice. "And you're not bringing them here either. Just wait for us. The plan hasn't changed."
"You didn't even have a plan when you left!"
"We made one up in the car." There was a pause, behind which Aubrey had to concentrate to hear the distant voice of Sam. "Hey, Bobby's on the phone with Sam right now," Dean said after a moment. "He says that Rufus turned up at the Cannery station, wants us to rendezvous there with them. They found something, Aub…"
"Call me as soon as you can," she said, ignoring his last statement. "Stay safe… Please." A pleading tone seemed to have edged into her voice. Hoping Dean hadn't noticed she cleared her throat and quickly changed the subject. "Anyway, Aiden's fine. Greg's playing with him right now. Lorraine's been cooperating so far so that's something, right?"
"Right," came Dean's hasty response. "Look, Aub, we really need to get going. We'll call you."
"Sure," she was about to say, but the line had already went dead. Pursing her lips, she flipped the phone closed and placed her head in her hands. She wondered whether this was how Bobby felt every time they cut a call with him. Months ago, he had finally given the brothers a piece of his mind. "You ain't the center of the universe," the old man had said, and only now was Aubrey starting to understand.
Phoenixes may have been very powerful, and very rare creatures—she was second to the last one of her race—but she wasn't the center of the universe as much as Dean could dance ballet. She needed to let that sink in—the fact that the world wasn't going to stop spinning if she died, but it would seriously put a dent on God's plans for her species though. He wanted her to stay alive and 'reproduce', so Phoenixes could roam the world once more. That wasn't exactly possible considering a.) Aiden was a child, and b.) She had no spouse.
And dying permanently wasn't exactly one of the things Aubrey had made a bucket list for. They didn't even know anything that could make her stay dead yet, only Hellfire, which was apparently one of the few things that could burn her. A thought occurred to her. She hadn't tested that theory yet—that burning was a rare occurrence for her. She surprised herself that she actually wanted to. Perhaps she was just bored out of her mind.
A loud scream echoed from the distance, sending shivers down Aubrey's spine. She was on her feet in a second, nearly turning the table over in her rush to get to Aiden and Greg. Her eyesight had turned dull, and she didn't know why. Only when she reached them did her vision straighten out, and she saw that Aiden was laughing. Greg had pulled him out of the car and laid him across the rusted trunk, where he tickled the boy's sides. Aiden's peals of laughter resonated all across the junk yard, easing Aubrey back into her chill attitude.
Her adrenaline died down. She straightened her knees and relaxed her hands, already starting the walk back to the bench.
"What's up?" Greg asked, slightly breathless because of his son struggling against his ministrations.
Aubrey turned back around and schooled a small smile on her face. "You nearly gave me a heart attack," she told him, laughing lightly to hide her nerves.
Greg frowned. "Everything alright?"
"Yeah, you just scared me…" Aubrey waved him off. "Go ahead and play with Aiden. I'm probably just tired."
Aiden kept giggling in his father's arms, prompting him further to start the tickling but Greg remained motionless. "When was the last time you slept?" he asked Aubrey, who tilted her chin upwards in an appearance of deep thought.
"About a day ago, give or take," she said. Greg pursed his lips at her and she laughed. "What? I couldn't sleep last night." We saw some pretty radical stuff yesterday, she wanted to say, but she didn't for safe-conversation's sake. "Anyway…" She waved him off again, and this time, didn't wait for him to say more. When she plopped back down on the bench, Greg had already starting chasing Aiden around the junkyard.
Aubrey watched their movements with amused eyes, knowing Greg was purposefully slowing his pace so Aiden could get away. They continued their chase for minutes on end; often times, Aiden would hide inside a car to catch his breath, while Greg loomed outside because, apparently, "monsters can't open doors". Once Aiden was rested, he would jump out of the opposite door and the chase would start over again.
From afar, Aubrey could see the trickles of sweat starting to form on their brows, slipping into the hollow parts of their clothing if their shirts hadn't soaked them up yet.
Suffice it to say, Aiden was a little ball of energy. The sun had dipped low—almost an hour had passed—when he finally let Greg catch him; though the older one of the pair was practically dragging himself by that point. Greg muttered something into Aiden's ear, still breathing heavily. Aubrey didn't hear anything of what he'd said but the boy laughed, and that was hint enough.
The boy started running towards her, swinging his arms about. "Jenna," he started happily. "Can I have some water—?" Then a short, shrill yell tore through his throat as he tripped over a small rock, which was coincidentally jutting out of the ground like a single baby tooth.
He called me 'Jenna' again, thought Aubrey right before she saw the unmistakable red of a wound. She bolted to her feet just as the flashback started.
A boy is wrapped in my arms. I look down and see many cuts on his young face, his clothes dirty and torn, and his leg seems be bent in an unnatural angle between my thighs; the sight makes me want to vomit. But we're both doing things that we weren't doing before. He sobs against my chest, and I'm yelling my throat raw because it seems the flames are interested in turning me to ash first. But wasn't that the exact reason why I had enveloped the boy against me in the first place?
He stops sobbing abruptly, and I look down to find him staring at my neck. My vision can't reach that far, and I use my hand to grope along my jaw. When I pull it away, my fingers come out bloody.
The blaze rises up and seems to seep into my nose, travelling down my throat and burning me there. I scream, and I hear the boy's crying mingle with mine before the fire reaches its peak and I can see nothing more but tongues of flame.
Not a minute had passed, but it had felt like days to Aubrey. She came to her senses and she was on her knees. Her head throbbed painfully, but through the retreating haze of the memory, she could make out Aiden sitting on the ground with his one leg propped up on his father's knee. Greg was fussing over the scrapes on both of the boy's knees. Aubrey pushed herself back onto her feet, ignoring the mental protests travelling down her spine.
"What the hell happened to you?" Greg demanded as she approached them.
She shook her head. "Nothing. Let's get you inside and clean this up, alright, buddy?" Aiden nodded his head vigorously, looking shell-shocked. He stared down at the paper-thin scratches on his knees, courtesy of the tiny rocks littered on the ground. Aubrey made a move to pick him up off the ground but Greg gently pushed her hand away and did it himself. In the brief moment where their skin brushed against the other, she noticed his finger flinch, as if burned. Her eyes snapped up to his face and she found a pained look behind the otherwise worried-father look.
Frowning, she clenched her hands into fists and forced her body temperature to go back to normal. Together, and without further touching either of the two, Aubrey led them back into the house.
Once inside, she directed Greg into the living room and told him to lay Aiden down on the sofa. She didn't watch as he did, turning around to rush into the kitchen, where she filled a small bowl with tap water. She quickly ran upstairs and into her room, snatching two clean towels from one of her drawers and a bottle of alcohol before running back to the living room again.
"It's not that bad," she crooned to Aiden, who had started crying softly as he stared down at the scrape on his knee. It seriously could have been worse. Luckily, he hadn't scratched it too bad. His hands had probably shot forward to stop his fall, for there were mild scrapes below his palms too. The gravel outside had made thin cuts on his skin, and though they weren't very deep, they had to get the tiny rocks out before his Phoenix abilities started healing the wound. She knew from experience that letting skin grow over a piece of debris, no matter how tiny, was a bad idea.
Two nights before, when they had just gotten back from Bizarro Earth (as Dean liked to call it), Aubrey had stood with her back to the mirror to find several tiny glass pieces embedded by her shoulder blades. Her skin had healed over it, and they had stood out like tiny mounds of very sharp dirt over a patch of otherwise flat ground. She ended up having to cut them out afterward because every movement was irritating, and letting the glass pieces stay would have been bad for her bloodstream, she was sure.
Shaking the pointless memory from her head, Aubrey knelt in front of Aiden and dipped the towel into the bowl of tap water. "Stay still, okay?" she told the boy, gripping his hand tightly. He sniffled, but nodded his head. Aubrey started rubbing the towel over the scrape as gently as she could. She was only doing so to get the dirt out. Without taking her eyes off the wound, she handed Greg the extra towel and told him to dip it in the water. He did, and she guided his hand to the scrape she'd previously been treating.
"Keep cleaning that," she told him, letting her mind go on autopilot. She moved to the side and got to work on Aiden's other knee. There wasn't as much debris there as she'd previously thought. She moved to clean the boy's hands in less than a minute; (again, just to get the debris out.)
Aiden started wincing, then, and Aubrey pulled away. Her free hand shot out to stop Greg's ministrations on the boy's other knee. He glanced at her questioningly, and she frowned. He'd never seen Phoenix Powers at work before, but it was now or never. Pursing her lips, she nodded to Aiden's knee, which was already stitching itself back together. From the corner of her eye, she noticed Greg turn rigid, and her stomach further twisted in on itself.
Meanwhile, Aiden was beaming, seeming to have forgotten the sharp pinching sensation through his excitement. "Cool!" he exclaimed loudly. "How'd you do that?"
Aubrey schooled on a small smile. "My brothers know a thing or two about patching up scrapes. Those'll be good as new by tomorrow morning," she said, nodding at the scars on his hands and knees. She supposed his Powers hadn't fully developed yet, and his healing abilities took more time. To her surprise, however, a yawn escaped her lips, and not long after Greg was helping Aiden off the sofa.
He sighed, feigning tiredness. "How about we all take a nap?" Aubrey gave him a sideways glance, but even in that short span of time looking at his face, she saw that he wanted to keep Aiden's identity a secret for as long as he could—just as she herself wanted to.
That night, Aubrey cooked up a decent batch of fried chicken and buttered corn and carrots. It wasn't a very difficult recipe, so she was even more surprised when Lorraine came down to help her. When she asked why, the woman said, "I don't want my food to be burnt." Aubrey realized how she'd said my instead of our, and a couple of retorts flew into her head, but she kept them to herself.
They sat around the table in an awkward silence, much like they had that morning. Crickets were chirping in Aubrey's head as she watched Aiden wrestle to separate the meat from the chicken bone. Greg helped before she could, though, and she was left to take a bite out of her own dish. She wasn't feeling particularly hungry, which was odd; everyone else was because she'd forgotten to call for a pizza delivery for snack time. They hadn't had lunch either.
Memories of her flashback sat fresh in her mind, waiting for the perfect time to spill out of their jar once more to torture Aubrey with questions that were yet to be answered: Where was Purgatory? Where was her Purgatory? Could Remiel help them against the Mother of All? Would he help them?
"Mom?" Aiden suddenly said, snapping Aubrey out of her thoughts. "What happened to you at… at the house?" Aubrey really wished he hadn't asked that. Her eyes flicked to Lorraine, who sat across from her and beside Greg. The woman's hands tightened around her utensils, and Aubrey tensed, waiting for her to blow.
"I don't know, Aiden," said Lorraine, her voice uncharacteristically shaky. "Why don't you ask Jenna? She was awake for more of it—"
"Aubrey," Aubrey interrupted sharply. All eyes turned to her, and she softened her expression. "It's Aubrey, not Jenna—alright?" She looked to Aiden, knowing that he was really the only one who didn't fully understand what was happening yet. Lorraine had been filled in, she just refused to believe. Aiden nodded his head, and Aubrey racked her brain for any plausible answer that he would believe.
"Your mom and I," she ended up saying, "Had a… disagreement."
Aiden frowned. "I heard what she was saying. She said she would kill the human because you wouldn't let her in. Did she mean she was going to kill me—?"
"It was a very huge overreaction, sweetie," Aubrey cut in, meeting Lorraine's eyes. For the first time, they came to an agreement. "You see, women have these monthly… happenings"—her mind was racing for the perfect bribe—"where we're sort of given the right to overreact to certain things."
His eyes widened slightly. "I think my teacher mentioned something like that at school before."
From the corner of her eye, Aubrey saw the ghost of a smile tracing over Greg's lips. "As it so happened," she continued, "Your mom was in this kind of stage when we had a fight so… I guess I kind of deserved it." No, I didn't. "You get it?"
Aiden bobbed his head slowly, then: "But wait! Why were you looking for salt and holy water? And why did you ask my dad to lock us in my drawing room? And why did you give me a knife?"
Aubrey flinched at the last question, and it was noticeable, if she had to guess. The kid had a good memory; she had to admit. "I was in that monthly stage too, bud," she lied easily. "I overreacted."
The boy crossed his arms and pouted grumpily. "You scared me!"
"I know, I'm sorry." Aubrey stroked his knuckles lightly, watching from the corner of her eye for Lorraine's reaction. She was blushing profusely (most likely because of the mortifying lies Aubrey had made up), but otherwise she didn't object. Aubrey had to pull away soon enough, though.
And then Aiden asked: "But why did we have to leave the house?"
No reasonable lie came to mind, and Aubrey started panicking; why did they have to leave the house? Because there was a gas leak? Because an epidemic was spreading in the town and they had to evacuate? Because Greg wanted to get a break, or he had found a good story in a home close to Bobby's? If that was the case, why didn't he leave the house more often?
Aubrey was saved by the sudden buzzing in her pocket, which was not long afterward followed by the ring tone of her cellphone.
Her heart leaped into her throat and she quickly slipped out of the dining room, the phone already against her ear. "What's happening?" she said immediately, only then thinking of how rude she must have been, exiting the table without excusing herself first—not that she much cared.
"Something came up, Aub," came Bobby's distinct accent, making the girl freeze. Why was Bobby using Dean's phone when Dean himself could call her? "We're, uh, kind of stuck here for the night. We had to put the place in lockdown. The thing that mind-jammed that poor guy into killing his family… it's here. It got into Dean, got him to kill Gwen."
"Gwen Campbell?" Aubrey said in disbelief, getting her a grunt of affirmative from Bobby. "So Samuel must be there too. Has Dean killed him yet?"
"No, but God knows we all want to," Bobby replied. "It's gotten out of Dean now, though. It's him, me, Sam, Rufus and Samuel against this worm thing. If I had to guess, Aub, this thing is straight out of Mommy Dearest, one of her newest. We're doing all we can, but…" There was a pregnant pause, one Aubrey was desperate to fill but knew she shouldn't. "I'm taking your dropping-everything-and-running privileges away. You stay there with that family and keep 'em safe until we get back."
"And if you don't?"
"Then shag ass out of there and take 'em to Cambodia. Make sure to drag Cas down to put those Enochian sigils in 'em too. They're gonna need it."
"You're coming back, Bobby," Aubrey urged. "You, and Rufus, and the boys."
"What about Samuel?"
"I couldn't give a rat's ass about him, but Gwen didn't deserve what she got. I would rather Dean have shot Samuel instead of her."
"You been acquaintanced?"
Her lip twitched up in a smile. "You could say that."
Voices suddenly echoed in the background; Aubrey recognized one of them to the Rufus Turner's. She'd only ever talked with him once on the phone, never met with him before, though, but she'd gathered that he'd been friends with Bobby for a long time. Then Sam's voice, then Dean's. Aubrey couldn't understand much but something was happening; she was sure of it.
"Aub, I gotta go," Bobby hastily said. He'd already hung up before Aubrey could formulate a response.
She flipped her phone shut and sighed heavily, looking up at the cloudless sky. She wanted them to get back more than anything; she didn't want to 'shag ass' with the Bishops and rehabilitate them to Cambodia. Staring at the stars, she could almost imagine the angel Castiel fighting with his brothers upstairs. A hot rod of guilt suddenly pressed into her; she wanted to be mad at him, but it was getting more impossible the longer he was gone. She missed him.
But she was upset with him as well.
Her feelings were complicated at that moment and she decided to go back inside and rejoin the Bishops for dinner. When Greg asked what the call was about, she answered, "They ran into some problems at the job. Nothing much to worry about though," even though there was a lot to worry about. From the corner of her eye, she spotted Greg throwing her doubtful looks, but she held her peace until dinner finished, and even until afterwards.