Tougher Than the Rest
Soundtrack:
Toto – Rosanna
Elton John – Bennie and the Jets
Embrace – AshesLacey picked up her book and headed down the hall to the staircase. She was staying at the Institute for a few days while the adults were away at a political conference. All the older X-men had gone with them so she was "babysitting" the newer recruits. As she descended the stairs she stopped short of slipping on a patch of ice on the lower steps. Shaking her head she headed for the kitchen, where the sounds of chatter could be heard.
"Bobby! Clean up your ice!" She told him as she entered, heading for the kitchen counter, where all the breakfast items were laid out. She grabbed a pastry before turning to survey the room. Bobby had disappeared but the others were still sat round the table.
"I'm going out to read by the pool, you guys need anything?" There was a resounding chorus in dissent. "Ok, cool. If you wouldn't mind cleaning up the breakfast stuff when you're done, and preferably not you know kill each other." Lacey smiled at them as they all began to laugh but a few of them looked around, shiftily. With a final nod Lacey headed out the back door and picked a lounge chair by the pool to relax on. She picked up her book and leafed through it before putting it down again with a sigh. She'd hoped the book would distract her but no such luck. She let out another sigh before closing her eyes and drifting away. When she opened them again she was standing on a suburban street. She glanced around taking in her surroundings before she heard a familiar voice. She turned around to find Sam and Dean walking towards her. Dean was grinning happily and motioned her to come over.
"Hey, Lacey's here, let's get her opinion on your artistry." Dean chuckled. He held up a notebook and showed Lacey one of the pages.
"Uhhh, if I didn't know any better, I'd say it was done by a six year old." Lacey frowned at the drawing that was barely more detailed than a stick figure. Dean began to laugh again.
"Drawn by a six year old." He managed to gasp out before Sam grabbed the notebook from him.
"Yeah, like you could have done any better. So what did the Doc have to say about Kyle's brothers?"
"Not much, they were D.O.A at the scene. He did give me the lowdown on the coroners report."
"Lemme guess, their hearts were missing?"
"Nope." Sam looked surprised. "But chunks of their kidneys, lungs and intestines."
"That's just gross." Lacey pulled a face in agreement with Sam.
"Yeah. Also definitely not werewolf behaviour."
"So, what? Demon? Attacker could have been possessed." Sam suggested.
"Why would a demon stop half way through an attack?"
"I think that…could've… Yeah, I got nothing."
"Me either."
"Sounds like a mystery to me." Lacey smiled as they continued walking down the road.
"Yeah, you wanna help solve it, Nancy Drew?" Dean asked, smirking at her.
"I'll do my best."
They got a call a short while later and headed to the hospital, where another strange case had come in. As they arrived the Doctor was just coming out of the patients room.
"Detectives."
"Doctor Garrison." Dean nodded.
"What the hell is going on here? My whole town is going insane."
"We'll let you know as soon as we do." Sam told him. The Doctor nodded before continuing on his rounds. They headed into the room to talk to the patient.
"Miss Watson? Hi. We just need to ask you a few questions." Dean told her, flashing his bagde.
"Do we have to go over this again? Now?" She asked looking pained.
"We'll try to be brief. Miss Watson, can you tell us how you got away?"
"I didn't eat as much as Ken did, so I wasn't as out of it. And when the old woman was… carving up Ken." She shuddered, holding back tears. "I shoved her and she fell. Cracked her head on the stove. She's dead, right? I killed her?"
"Do you have any idea why she'd do this to you?" Dean asked.
"No. One minute she was a sweet old lady and the next, she was like a monster."
"Can you remember anything else?"
"Yeah. Did you find a little girl there, by any chance?"
"A little girl? At the house?" Sam looked confused.
"I thought I saw her outside the window. She just disappeared. Just vanished into thin air." She looked between the two of them, knowing it sounded crazy. "It must have been the drugs."
"This disappearing girl, what did she look like?" Dean asked.
"Does it matter?"
"Yes. Every detail matters."
"She had this dark, dark hair and really pale skin. She was around eight. She was a beautiful child. It was odd to see her in the middle of something so horrible."
Their next stop was the cottage the girl had been attacked in. Dean parked the Impala outside and they ducked under the yellow tape to get in. The place was deserted so they began to look around.
"Well, there's no sulphur anywhere. How about the EMF?" Dean called to Sam from across the room.
"Yeah, it's going nuts. When I went over here by the window. There's definitely a spirit here."
"Who stood outside the crime scene and watched." Dean sounded sceptical.
"Looks like." Sam shrugged.
"What the hell do you make of that?"
"Actually I do have a theory, sort of." Sam admitted.
"Hit me." Lacey stood next to Dean, arms folded, waiting for his response.
"Well, thinkin' about fairy tales." Sam said carefully.
"Oh, that's… that's nice. You think about fairy tales often?" Dean asked, raising an eyebrow.
"No, Dean, I'm talking about the murders." Sam sounded exasperated. "A guy and a girl? Hiking through the woods, an old lady tries to eat them? That's Hansel and Gretel." Lacey whacked Dean on the arm. Causing him to stumble backwards slightly.
"He's right you know!"
"And then we've got three brothers, arguing over how to build houses, attacked by the big bad wolf." Sam continued.
"Three little pigs." Dean nodded.
"Yeah."
"Actually those guys were a little chubby. Well, wait, I thought those things ended with everybody living happily ever after?"
"No, no. Not the originals. See the Grimm Brothers stuff was kinda the folklore of its day, full of sex, violence, cannibalism. Now, it got sanitized over the years, turned into Disney flicks and bedtime stories."
"I like the Disney films." Lacey pouted. Dean chuckled at her expression.
"So you think the murders are what? A re-enactment? That's a little crazy." Dean responded.
"Crazy as what? Every day of our lives?" Sam pointed out.
"Touché. How's the creepy ghost girl involved?"
"Well, she must have been here for a reason. I'm willing to bet you top dollar she was at the construction site too."
"We gotta do research now, don't we?" Dean said, sounding despondent.
Lacey stood with Sam outside of the library, waiting for Dean. Of course Sam couldn't see her and didn't know she was there. Dean appeared, heading out the front door and made his way towards them.
"So?" Sam asked.
"Checked every record they had. Found the usual amount of violent childhood deaths for a town this size."
"Okay." Sam nodded as they began to walk down the street, towards the park.
"Wanna know how many were little girls with black hair and pale skin?"
"Zero." Sam guessed.
"Zero! You wanna know how many little girls with black hair and pale skin have gone missing? Right again. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Tell me you've got something good, cause I've totally wasted the last six hours. I could have been doing way more interesting things." Dean winked at Lacey, who shook her head, smirking at him. Sam rolled his eyes.
"Well, you ever hear of Lillian Bailey? She was a British Medium from the 1930's."
"She got a thing for fairytales?"
"Nah, trances. See she'd go into these unconscious states where, get this, her thoughts and actions were completely controlled by spirits."
"A ghost puppet master."
"Yeah."
"Think that's what this kid is doing? Sending wolfboy and grandma into trances, making them go kill crazy?"
"Could be." Sam shrugged. "You know, kinda like spirit hypnosis or somethin'."
"Trances I get, but fairytale trances? That's bizarre even for us." The three of them stopped in their tracks as an enormous bullfrog hopped across their path. Lacey tilted her head, looking confused.
"Yeah, you're right, that's completely normal." Sam said sarcastically as the frog croaked loudly.
"All right. Maybe it is fairytales. Totally messed up fairytales. I tell you one thing, there's no way I'm kissing a damn frog." Lacey smirked at Dean.
"Hey, check that out." Sam pointed at one of the houses across the road. There was a pumpkin sat on the front porch.
"Yeah? It's close to Halloween." Dean shrugged.
"You remember Cinderella? With the pumpkin that turns into a coach, and the mice that become horses?" Dean slowly turned his head, glaring at Sam.
"Dude, could you be more gay?" Sam and Lacey stared at him, speechless. "Don't answer that." Lacey smacked him in the arm.
"What?" Dean asked as they walked up to the porch.
"He's right you know." Lacey reprimanded him.
"Yeah, yeah." Dean grumbled. They walked up the porch and Dean picked the lock on the front door. "Well who knows, maybe you'll find your fairy godmother." Sam gave him a withering look as they headed inside the house, each heading in a different direction, guns drawn.
"Help I'm in here!" A voice called from the kitchen. The three of the followed the sound of the voice and found a young girl on the floor, handcuffed to the stove.
"It's okay. We're here, we're here. We got you." Sam said, putting his gun away and pulling out his lock pick kit.
"You have to help me. She's a lunatic." The girl told him as he began to work on her handcuffs.
"What happened?" Dean asked.
"My step mom, she just freaked out, screamed at me, beat me. Chained me up."
"Where is she now?"
"I don't know." Dean and Lacey began to look around. Lacey grabbed Dean's arm and pointed to the little girl with the long dark hair peering out of one of the rooms.
"Sam." Sam loosened the handcuffs and looked up in the direction Dean was pointing. Dean and Lacey followed the little girl into the living room. She turned back to face them.
"Who are you?" Dean asked. The girl stared at them silently for a moment before disappearing, leaving an apple on the ground where she had been standing. Dean reached down and picked it up.
"An apple?"
"Well, you know what that means." Lacey nodded at him, assuredly.
"Am I supposed to?" Dean wrinkled his forehead.
"Snow White?" Lacey stared at him. "Oh right, we haven't met her yet."
"Met her?" Dean continued to look confused.
"Never mind. Just take my word for it. Snow White." Lacey nodded at the apple.
"Right."
Lacey and Dean were sitting on the hood of the Impala, tossing the apple between them when Sam walked over.
"Paramedics picked up Cinderella." He informed.
"That's good."
"Yeah." Dean tossed the apple to Sam.
"So... Little girl, shiny red apple. Lacey says it's Snow White, that make sense to you fairy tale boy?"
"Yeah, that sounds about right." Sam nodded.
"Snow White, huh. I saw that movie. Or the porn version anyway, 'cause there was this wicked Stepmother? Woo, she was wicked." He grinned at the two of them. Lacey rolled her eyes but couldn't help but smile a little too.
"There is a wicked Stepmother. And she tries to kill Snow White with a poison apple." Sam reminded him.
"But the apple doesn't actually kill the girl, right?"
"No. Puts her into a deep sleep, so deep it's almost like she's dead." Sam frowned at the apple.
"No, sorry. We don't have any comatose little girls." The nurse on duty told them. They had headed back to the hospital to begin their search for "Snow White".
"You sure?" Sam asked.
"Totally. It's mostly old guys. And, well... Callie. She's been around since before I started here."
"Callie?" Dean asked.
"Yeah, it's so sad. And poor Dr. Garrison, he just ... won't give up on her."
"Is Callie one of his patients?"
"No. His daughter." Sam and Dean shared a look.
The three of them walked down the room until they reached Callie's room. As they idled in the doorway, they found Dr Garrison reading to Callie.
"...and the Huntsman stepped inside, and in the bed lay the Wolf. So the Huntsman took a pair of scissors and cut open the Wolf's belly." Dean and Lacey shared a look. Noticing their presence, the Dr put down the book and got to his feet.
"Detectives. Can I help you?" He asked, approaching them.
"We just... heard that Callie is your daughter." Dean explained.
"And we wanted to say how very sorry we are." Sam added.
"Well, uh. Thank you. If you'll excuse me." The Dr brushed past them and headed into the corridor.
"Oh, heading this way? We'll walk with you. How long's Callie been like that?" Dean asked.
"We don't mean to intrude. We can't possibly understand how hard it must be for you seeing her like this." Sam said. Lacey had noticed how much he had been doing this lately.
"It's not easy. She's uh, been here since she was eight years old."
"That's when she was poisoned?"
"Yeah. Swallowed, uh, bleach. Never figured out how she got her hands on the bottle. My wife found her, uh, brought her to the ER here and I was on call."
" You're wife was uh, was that Callie's stepmother?" Dean asked. The Dr stopped and stared at him.
"Actually, yes. How'd you know that?"
"Lucky guess." Dean shrugged, trying to appear nonchalant.
"Well, Julie was the only mother that uh, Callie ever knew. My wife passed away last year and, uh ... it's just my daughter and me now. She's all I've got left. Uhm, excuse me. I've gotta get back to work."
"Yeah." Dean nodded as the Dr walked away.
"Well you're right. It's Snow White in spades." Dean said, as they headed for the exit.
"Yep. Step-mom poisons the girl, puts her into a deep sleep. What's the motive you think?"
"Could be like Mischa Barton." Sam looked confused. "Sixth Sense" not the O.C.
"What?" Clearly that hadn't enlightened anything for Sam.
"Hey, you know fairy tales, I know movies. She played the pasty ghost. You know, remember the mom had that thing you know, where you keep the kid sick so you get all the attention?"
"Oh yeah yeah yeah, uh, Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. Huh, could be." Sam nodded.
"So say all these years, Callie's been suffering silently because nobody knows the truth about what mommy dearest did?"
"And after all this time her spirit just gets angrier and angrier, until it finally just starts lashing out." Sam mused.
"Right. Meanwhile she has to listen to Dad tell her these deranged stories about a rabid wolf or a cannibalistic old lady. It's enough to drive anybody nuts." Dean shook his head.
"OK, but how are we gonna stop her, I mean Callie's stuck here, her father's keeping her body alive."
"It does make it a bit hard to burn the bones." Dean agreed.
"You think?" Sam scoffed. There was a sudden flurry of activity around them as someone was brought into the emergency room. The three of them watched as an old lady was wheeled in.
"OK, what's her status?" One of the Dr's asked.
"Seventy-two year old female, sustained multiple lacerations and puncture wounds. BP is eighty over forty and falling. Sinus tachycardia."
"Is that a bite?" The Dr asked, pointing at the wound on her neck.
"Looks like she was mauled by a mad dog or, maybe a wolf?"
"What was the last story Dr. Garrison was reading Callie?" Dean asked.
"Little Red Riding Hood."Sam and Dean watched solemnly as the woman flatlined. When nothing could be done a white sheet was pulled across the body.
"Excuse me." Sam and Dean showed the EMT their badges. "Was she the only victim?"
"She was found by the side of the road, barely alive. Alone." The EMT clarified.
"We need to find her next of kin." Dean explained. The EMT leafed through the paperwork.
"She has a granddaughter."
"Do you have an address?" The EMT handed him the papers. "Thank you." The three of them headed for the exit.
"Hey, you find a way to stop Callie, all right?" Dean told Sam.
"What about you?"
"I'm gonna go stop the Big Bad Wolf. Which is the weirdest thing I've ever said." Dean shook his head, Lacey grabbed his hand and they headed out the door.
They found the house on the paperwork and Dean broke down the door. He pulled his gun out as they wandered further into the house. When they reached the living room they found a little girl in a red hoodie, curled up on the floor crying.
"You okay?" Dean asked, crouching down beside her.
"Yeah, I…" The girl let out a scream, staring at something over Dean's shoulder. Lacey spun round just in time to see the big bad wolf knock Dean's gun from his hands. Dean straightened up and punched the guy in the face. The wolf let out a low, guttural growl and threw Dean clean across the room. Dean tried to get to his feet but the wolf grabbed him again and sent him flying into some cabinets. Lacey saw the younger version of Callie appear in the corner of the room a small smile on her face as she watched the two men fight. At the sound of more crashing, Lacey turned her attention back to the fight. She stepped between the two of them and managed to bring up a shield momentarily, just long enough to stop Dean getting whaled on and long enough to send the wolf flying backwards into a book case. Dean grabbed a pair of scissors from a basket of knitting implements. The wolf tackled him to the ground and the two began to wrestle for the scissors. Lacey tried to focus her powers so she could grab hold of the wolf and pull him off Dean. The wolf let out a gasp.
"Whoa! Stop, stop! Whoa stop! Whoa! Where am I? What's going on?!" The guy got to his feet, startling Lacey and knocking her off balance. Lacey phased through him as he backed away, landing on Dean. Dean let out a gasp as the wind was knocked out of him. Lacey shook the hair out of her face and looked at him sheepishly.
"Oops." Dean chuckled at her expression.
"If you wanted to be on top, all you had to do was ask." Dean winked at her.
"I well… I… oh shhh." Lacey told him as she struggled to her feet. Dean grinned at her and got to his feet.
"Well, looks like this is pretty much over."
"Yeah, I should probably get going, I… ow!" Lacey felt something hit her in the side of the head. She spun around looking for what it was, but there was nothing there. Dean looked at her, eyebrows raised.
"Those little…." Lacey grumbled.
"What? What happened?"
"I'm babysitting back at the institute and I think my little proteges are getting into trouble." She told him, rubbing her head. "I better get going." She reached up on tip toes and kissed him before blinking out.
Lacey opened her eyes slowly. There was yelling and splashing noises going on around her. Sitting up she found the new mutants cavorting in the pool. A rubber ball sat on the floor beside the recliner she was laying on.
"Sorry Lacey!" Bobby called from the pool, waving his arm at her. Lacey shook her head and tossed him the ball before picking up her book again.
