a subtle sort of brilliance (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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avandell2007-03-26 11:37 pm
theladyscribe) wrote in avandell2007-03-26 11:37 pm
Entry tags:
All These Places Feel Like Home
Title: All These Places Feel Like Home
Characters: Dean, Sam, OFC (no pairing)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 6032
Warnings: dark!fic, future!fic, AU, spoilers for everything up to and including Born Under a Bad Sign
Summary: It makes sense now, all the hunts Dean found between Indianapolis and Chicago during that fifteen year span between Duluth and their pseudo-retirement to Idaho, all the days Dean disappeared only to come back around six or seven without even a trace of cigarette smoke or cheap beer.
Notes: Fourth and final installment of my BUaBS AU. You’ll need to read the others first for this one to make any sense. Title is from Snow Patrol’s “Chocolate.”
Keep You From the Gallows Pole | A Face From the Ancient Gallery
Nothing You Can Say to Make Me Change My Mind | All These Places Feel Like Home
In My Hour of Darkness
Characters: Dean, Sam, OFC (no pairing)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 6032
Warnings: dark!fic, future!fic, AU, spoilers for everything up to and including Born Under a Bad Sign
Summary: It makes sense now, all the hunts Dean found between Indianapolis and Chicago during that fifteen year span between Duluth and their pseudo-retirement to Idaho, all the days Dean disappeared only to come back around six or seven without even a trace of cigarette smoke or cheap beer.
Notes: Fourth and final installment of my BUaBS AU. You’ll need to read the others first for this one to make any sense. Title is from Snow Patrol’s “Chocolate.”
Keep You From the Gallows Pole | A Face From the Ancient Gallery
Nothing You Can Say to Make Me Change My Mind | All These Places Feel Like Home
In My Hour of Darkness
All These Places Feel Like Home
Chicago, September 2027
It’s not until after her mother dies that Glory thinks to look for her father. She has spent almost twenty years without one, has spent the last eight without really wanting one (since her mother explained that after she was conceived, he never contacted her again). But when Joanna Harvelle succumbs to breast cancer at the age of forty-two, Glory decides that it’s time to track down the man who loved and then left her mother.
She starts with her mother’s journals. After the funeral, after all of Glory’s friends go home, after Glory takes care of her mother’s last wishes (to be salted and cremated, which was strange, but she promised), she pulls out the boxes stashed away in the back of the bedroom closet. They’re filled with journals – there are about fifteen or twenty of them, some leatherbound, some plastic, some cardboard. The oldest have dry yellow paper, the pages stiff with age; one even dates all the way back to 1995 – when Glory’s mother was just ten years old.
She’s shocked to learn about the hunting – her mother had never spoken of it to her, but there it is, all laid out plain as day in the journals. Glory’s surprisingly okay with it. She supposes it makes sense now, all the odd little things her mother did, like putting salt across the windowsill and hanging herbs in the corners of their apartment (not to keep out slugs and insects after all). She understands her mother’s last wishes now – she can’t blame her for not wanting to become a ghost. She sifts through all of the journals – buys a couple of her own and starts jotting down notes about the hunting and about the people her mother knew, searching all the while for clues about her father.
A week into her venture, and she’s finally reached the journal with the dates August 2006-May 2007. If any of them will have mention of Glory’s father, this will be it. She reads it in one sitting, stopping only to make more coffee as the evening wears on. It doesn’t say outright who her father is, but her mother has left enough clues that Glory is fairly certain she’s figured it out. The only thing left is to track him down, and hope he’ll hear her story.
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It takes her another week to finally track down a phone number – she finally resorted to calling up a friend with connections to a telephone company - but at last, Glory has a number with an Idaho area code that hopefully hasn’t been disconnected within the last month.
“Hello?” The man that answers is gruff and irritated, as if Glory has interrupted his afternoon nap.
“Um, hi, is this Sam Winchester?” she begins, but she is cut off when the man says, “Jo?”
“Sorry, this isn’t Jo,” she says.
“Oh.” He sounds almost disappointed. “I’m sorry. You sound just like a girl I used to know.”
Glory smiles at that. “I should. Jo – Joanna Harvelle was my mother.”
“You mean feisty little Jo Harvelle settled down and got married? I never would have thought she’d be the marrying type.” She can almost hear his smile, hear him shake his head at the idea.
“Mr. Winchester--”
“Sam, please. ‘Mr. Winchester’ sounds so old.”
“Sam,” she repeats. “My mom never married. I, uh, I’ve never met my father. She hardly even talked about him, said those were the blackest memories of her life. I couldn’t even get her to tell me his name.”
The man on the other end is so quiet, Glory thinks maybe he has hung up or passed out or something, but then he says, “Past tense – Jo’s dead, isn’t she?”
No one has said it so bluntly to her, but the way this Sam Winchester guy says it so matter-of-fact, Glory wonders what he’s seen in his life to be so numb toward death. “Yeah,” she says in answer. “It was cancer. Nothing the doctors could do, even with all their miracle drugs.”
“I’m sorry…” He trails off, obviously waiting for a name.
“Glory,” she tells him. “Glory Harvelle.” She takes a deep breath. “Anyway, I’m calling because I’ve been going through Mom’s old things, thinking maybe I could find out a little bit about my father. She hardly talked about him, but when she did, it sounded like she did love him, at least at some point. I mean, she said her memories were bleak, but the way she said it – it was almost like she hated what she might have missed more than what actually happened. So anyway, I’ve been looking for anything from around the time I was born, and I came across your name while reading her journals, and I thought – well, she mentioned you were a hunter, and I know a little bit about what you do – or used to do, anyway – and I know this isn’t the same, but I thought you might be able to help me. I realize it’s kind of weird, me calling you up out of the blue and asking for your help – I’m a total stranger and you’ve probably got a wife and kids of your own – but I want – I need – to find my father, and the only people I know of who’d be able and willing to pick up a cold case like this are hunters. I went through Mom’s lists of contacts, and I’ve been calling people for about a week now – most of them have either changed their names or retired or died, some of them refused to do anything and others were too busy. You were the last one.” Glory pauses for a moment. “So. There you have it.”
The guy laughs a little, and again Glory can hear his smile in his voice as he says, “God, you really are just like her.”
“Thanks,” she says, and she means it.
“As for helping you, well, if you’ve got the time to come to Idaho, you can bring your mom’s journals and we’ll see what we can do. Least I can do is help you find someone willing to follow any leads we get.”
Glory sighs in relief, glad that someone has finally agreed to help her. “Thank you so much,” she says. “I’m taking the year off – told the university that I needed some time away after Mom’s death – and I figured now was as good a time as any to find my father. I mean, it’s been almost twenty years and I’ve never met him, and I don’t know that I’ll ever get another chance to look.” She’s so excited that she doesn’t even notice the catch in Sam’s breath as she rambles.
“How soon do you think you could fly out here?” Sam asks her.
“Soon as I can get the ticket,” she answers.
“Great,” he says. “Call me when you’ve got your tickets and I’ll pick you up from the airport.”
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Sam arrives at the Twin Falls airport almost an hour early, but it gives him time to try to relax before he meets Jo Harvelle’s daughter. It’s been almost a week since that out-of-the-blue phonecall, and he still hasn’t called Dean, hasn’t told Dean that Jo gave birth to a little girl about nine months after the last time they saw her. He sits on a bench in the luggage retrieval area, wondering whether inviting her to come out to Idaho was really such a good idea. After all, he hasn’t seen Jo since that horrifying night in Duluth, and she obviously didn’t want her daughter knowing who her father was.
“Mr. Winchester?” That same voice from over the phone interrupts his thoughts and he looks up to see a ghost. Glory Harvelle is the spitting image of her mother, with two glaring exceptions: her hair is darker (more dirty-blonde than sandy-blonde) and her eyes are green. Sam takes a deep breath; if he had any doubt of Glory’s paternal lineage, it’s completely gone. He knows those eyes, sees them every time his older brother shows up on his doorstep. And now he has to pretend like he’s never seen them before, and he wonders what in the world he’s going to do when Dean gets back from Salt Lake City and how in the world he’s going to reconcile Jo’s girl with the man who might be – is – her father.
He smiles at the girl in front of him, pushing all of those thoughts aside for the moment. “Glory?”
She grins back and says, “Thanks for letting me do this, Mr. Winchester. You have no idea how much it means to me.”
He stands and shakes her hand. “It’s my pleasure. Jo was a friend. And please, call me Sam,” he says, changing the subject before it gets awkward. “Got your stuff?”
“Yeah. Mom taught me how to pack light.” She moves to pick up her duffle, but Sam is quicker and he throws it over one shoulder and gestures for her to follow him.
He throws her bag into the back of his pick-up, and the two of them climb into the cab. “Hungry?” he asks.
She shrugs. “I had a sandwich during the layover in Dallas.”
“Burgers it is, then,” he says with a smile.
While they wait for their food, he asks her about her life – about school, her friends, her mother. “I was at Vanderbilt last year,” she says, “but when Mom got sick again, I withdrew and came back to Chicago so I could be close. I’ve decided to take the year off, but I think I might re-enroll at Vandy next fall. Luke – my friend – wants me to, because he says it’s just not the same without me, but I don’t know.” She shrugs. “It kinda depends on what we find.” She grins at him, and Sam’s stomach lurches.
He coughs. “About that… What will you do if we find him?”
She shrugs again. “Dunno. I guess it depends on who he is. I mean, if he turns out to be a drug addict or a felon or something, I’m not even sure I want to track him down. And if he’s already got a wife and kids, I don’t want to just barge in and say, ‘Hi, I’m your long-lost daughter you probably didn’t even know you had.’ But if he’s a good guy and doesn’t mind too much, I might stay with him and go to school near where he lives.”
Sam nods and thinks that maybe Glory meeting Dean won’t go quite as badly as he feared it might.
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“So tell me what you’ve got on your father so far,” Sam says as they begin to lay all of her mother’s old journals out on the floor of the living room.
“Well, I know that Mom loved him, from what she told me, anyway. I mean, she never said it outright, but the way she talked about him – it was like what I’d expect from an unhappy fairytale or something, where the hero can’t marry the princess for whatever reason. I just can’t figure out the reason why.” She looks at him pointedly, and he merely stares back. “Anyway, I also know that he was a hunter, like Mom.”
“How’s that?”
“She quit hunting because of him – well, because of me, really. But in her journals, just after she found out about me, she wrote about leaving hunting and how she just didn’t want to raise her child like him – ‘to be a warrior’ were her words.” She runs her fingers over the leather journals, almost caressing them. “You know, I actually didn’t know about the hunting until I started reading these. I mean, she taught me how to defend myself and how to throw knives and shoot and stuff, but I always just assumed that it was to protect myself – inner-city Chicago’s not exactly the safest place in the world – and I never thought to ask her where she’d learned it all.”
Sam smiles. “I wish I’d grown up like that,” he says.
“Why do you say that?” Glory asks, curious. The Winchesters were in her mother’s journals, but she had written very little about their history – why they’d started hunting in the first place.
“Dean – my brother – and I grew up ‘to be warriors.’ Our mother died in my nursery when I was six months old. A demon pinned her to the ceiling, and the whole room exploded into flames. Dad handed me over to Dean with orders to get outside as fast as he could. Dean’s been watching out for me ever since.” He sighs. “Dad went a little berserk after Mom died. He packed us up and took us on the roadtrip of a lifetime – literally. We spent the next twenty years on the road, chasing after every supernatural thing we could find. I left to go to school – Stanford, full ride and everything – and Dad and Dean kept hunting.” He pauses and presses his knuckles to his forehead. “Dad disappeared in October my last year of school and Dean came to Palo Alto to get me. We went to the last place Dad had been and ended up hunting a Woman in White. When I got back to my apartment in Palo Alto, my girlfriend, Jess, was pinned to the ceiling, the same way Mom had been, twenty-two years - to the day - before.”
“Oh god, I’m so sorry,” Glory whispers, unable to think of anything else to say.
Sam smiles tightly at her and shrugs. “It’s hardly your fault,” he says. “Anyway, it kind of gets worse. I started having these visions – really, I’d been having them since before Jess died – and they all seemed connected to the demon that killed Mom. There were other kids like me, with powers like mine – one could move things, one could persuade people, another could electrocute people just by touching them. The demon was after all of us, creating an army. It got most of us.” He says it quietly, as if, even after all these years, it still hurts. “If it hadn’t been for Dean – it would have gotten me, too.”
Glory is staring at him, undoubtedly slack-jawed. It doesn’t seem fair to her that one person could have so many tragedies in his life. “What happened after that?” she asks.
“Somehow, we managed to defeat the demon. Sent it back to Hell, permanently, we think. Dean still keeps track of weather patterns and things, just in case.”
“Wow,” she breathes. And then, “You guys still hunt?”
“I haven’t been hunting much recently – I got hurt pretty badly about five years back and can’t move quite as fast as I used to – but Dean still hunts. He stays fairly local – no more than a day’s drive away, if he can help it. He says it’s so he’s nearby in case I get myself into trouble, but I think it’s really because he’s starting to feel his age, even if he denies it.” Sam smiles and shakes his head.
“Where’s Dean now?” Glory asks, trying for nonchalant, but not sure if she succeeds.
“He’s taking care of some business down around Salt Lake City. Something about ghosts of vengeful Mormon wives, I think. He said he’d be back by the end of the week.” He pauses. “Listen, Glory, about Dean – ”
She stops him. “Sam, if you’re going to tell me that Dean’s my father, you don’t have to. I know.” He blinks at her, and she almost laughs. “I figured it out a while ago – really, before I even called you up. I lied about that, by the way. You weren’t the last person I called. You were the only one.”
“What?”
“Mom’s journals,” she explains. “She wrote page after page about the people she knew, especially hunters. You guys were mentioned a lot, especially Dean, up until February of 2007 – which was when I would have been, well, you know. She mentioned seeing you on the news after that Milwaukee thing, and had notes about not hearing whether you’d been caught or not. And then all of a sudden, she stopped mentioning you altogether. There was one entry that simply said, ‘Sam called,’ and the next one was her pregnancy test results. Neither of you were ever mentioned by name again, so I knew it had to be one of you.” Glory ducks her head and blushes a little. “I thought it was you, which is why I contacted you instead of Dean. When I got to the airport, I knew I was wrong.”
“Yeah, how’s that?”
She looks up at him again. “Mom said I had my father’s eyes.”
Sam laughs and says, “That you do.”
She blushes a little at that before saying, “But the reason I tracked you guys down is because there are gaps in Mom’s story. I mean, she stopped writing about you entirely – there might’ve been a couple oblique references, like ‘I thought I saw him today, but I must have been imagining things,’ but other than that… nothing. So what happened? Did you guys have a falling out or something?” Sam gets a pained look in his eyes, as if he had been afraid that he would have to narrate this part of the story. Glory furrows her brow. “Sam, what happened?”
He looks down at his hands and begins quietly. “February 2007, Dean and I were finishing a job in Texas. It was a chupacabra, a nasty motherfucker, and we both fell into bed that night, exhausted. When I woke up the next morning, Dean was gone, which was a little weird, since I’m the morning person most days. It wasn’t totally out of the ordinary, though, especially not back then, so I didn’t think anything of it. When it hit noon and he still hadn’t shown up, I started to worry.”
He relates his frantic search for his brother with such collected calmness, Glory is amazed. He tells her about the phonecalls to all of their contacts – Bobby, Ellen, even Missouri Moseley. He tells her about receiving the call from Dean, who had woken up in the hotel in Twin Lakes, about finding his brother covered in another man’s blood, about the discovery of Steve Wandell’s body, about Dean’s second disappearance. It brings him to Duluth, where he stops the narration. “He was possessed, Glory.” He says it brokenly, and Glory wonders if maybe even after twenty years, they still struggle with that part of their lives. “He was possessed, and I was too late.”
Understanding dawns on her and her stomach drops. “He didn’t – ” she gasps, and he merely nods miserably.
“I didn’t get there in time to stop it. He was gone by the time I arrived. Even if I had gotten there faster, I don’t know if I could have stopped it. Demons are powerful, and that one was out for revenge.” He grimaces and then continues. “He told me later that it made him watch – it even let him have control over his body for just a few moments before… It gave him just enough time to tell Jo he was sorry, and then it threw him back into unconsciousness – he said it felt like getting thrown into a wall. When it let him resurface, it was already…” He stops and runs a hand through his hair. “When I found Jo, she was unconscious. She asked to come with me, to help find Dean, but I wouldn’t let her. Maybe I should have; then you wouldn’t have had to come all the way out here for this story.”
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It’s late that night when Glory calls Luke to tell him about what she’s found. Sam has set her up in the attic – with profuse apologies for not being able to give her the guest room (their office).
“Hey,” she says quietly after Luke’s groggy, “Hello?”
She can practically hear him rubbing a hand across his face and she smiles. “I found him,” she says.
“What? You did?” Suddenly, Luke is wide awake and all ears. “Is he the one you thought he was – that Sam guy?”
“No. Sam’s my uncle.”
“What? Your uncle?”
“Crazy, I know, to gain an entire family in just one day,” she says with a little laugh. “Dean Winchester – the one Mom wrote about so much in her journals – he’s my father.”
“So did they have a one-night stand or something?”
Glory takes a deep breath. She’s been practicing this speech in her head all evening. “No,” she says. “They didn’t.”
“Oh.” Luke takes a breath like he’s about to say something, but Glory cuts him off.
“Luke, I’m not sure how to say this, but Dean… he…” She stops and starts again. “You remember what I was telling you about her journals? About the hunting stuff, like ghosts and demons and whatever?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“Dean was possessed. And he couldn’t stop it. He tried – Sam told me that he tried, but that the demon had absolute control over him.” All of a sudden, it hits Glory, and the next thing she knows, she’s crying. “That’s why, Luke,” she whispers. “That’s why Mom never talked about him. It wasn’t that he left her, it was that neither of them wanted it to begin with.” She trails off in a mess of tears and hiccups. She takes a deep breath and pulls herself together. “Sam said they never talked about it afterward, and they never heard anything from Mom again.”
“Oh God, Glory, I’m so sorry,” he says. And then, “Do you want me to come out there? I can claim family emergency and get off work and – ”
“No, Luke,” she says, cutting him off. “I’ll be alright.” She sniffles a little. “Besides, I still want to meet him. I feel like – I think I owe it to him, and to Mom, because… I don’t know. I just… I need to do this.”
“Yeah okay,” he says, and she can hear the confusion and disappointment in his voice. “Call me again soon, alright?”
“Of course I will,” she answers. “Good night, Luke.”
“Night, Glory.”
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The next several days pass in an odd haze for Sam. Glory asks him all sorts of questions about hunting and Dean and their lives both growing up and over the past twenty years. He tells her about the early hunts when he just wanted to stay at the hotel or the apartment or the trailer and read Beowulf or The Odyssey. He also tells her about his decision to go to Stanford and finds himself telling her more about Jess than he has ever told anyone else before (like how they met the day after his twenty-first birthday while he was still trying to get over a hangover). Sam then tells her about Halloween of 2005 and Dean coming to get him and all of the tragedies that followed. Glory has all of the right reactions to each story – she laughs at the guys from HellHoundsLair.com and tears up when he tells her about their mother. She holds his hand when he talks about their father and cries when he tells her about their father’s sacrifice.
Sam tells her about cracking their father’s voicemail and finding her grandmother’s message. She laughs at the tale of their first encounter with Ellen and Jo Harvelle. He tells her about the zombie chick who broke his arm and about Andy’s power of persuasion and their run-ins with the law. He doesn’t tell her about the death of her Grandfather Harvelle, and she doesn’t ask.
She does ask him about hunting – she even pulls out a leather-bound journal and begins writing down everything he’s told her. Sam’s a little afraid that she may turn out to be too much like her mother, jumping into hunting without all the information she needs. He asks her what she’s going to do with it. She merely shrugs and says, “I’m studying anthropology at school. You could end up in a field study.” Her grin is so infectious, he can’t help but smile himself. Still, he makes a mental note to make sure she knows everything she might possibly need to know in case she does decide to go hunting.
They don’t talk about Duluth any more, which is fine by him.
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Glory’s been at the cabin for almost a week when she and Sam are making dinner and hear a rumbling engine pull up outside. “That’d be Dean,” Sam says.
“Sam?”
“In the kitchen, Dean,” he replies, and Glory can see the broad smile that she’s grown so used to seeing in the past several days. She grins despite herself and turns back to the stove, where she’s cooking the shrimp to go with their pasta.
“Whatcha cooking, I’m starv – well, well, well, Sammy, I thought you said you weren’t interested in romance anymore.” His voice is warm and gravelly, just like Glory thought it should be, and she has to force herself not to turn around just yet. She does sneak a glance at Sam, who’s come to stand beside her, and she has to bite her lip to keep from laughing at the eyeroll he gives his brother.
“Dean, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.” And Glory takes her cue and starts to turn, suddenly bashful and more than a little nervous. Sam puts a reassuring hand on her shoulder, and she raises her head. “This is—”
“Glory,” Dean breathes at the same time Glory yelps, “You?”
It’s a good thing Sam’s there to steady her, because Glory has a feeling that if he weren’t holding her up, she’d be passed out on the floor at the moment. As it is, she’s staring wide-eyed at the man in front of her – her father – and he’s staring back at her, looking just as gape-mouthed and confused as she feels, and Sam is trying to look at both of them at once without going cross-eyed.
Sam is the first of the three of them to regain the ability to speak. “Wait, you already know each other?”
Glory sets her jaw and looks at her uncle. “I’ve never met him in my life,” she says. “But, yeah, I’ve seen him around.” She looks back at her father. “God, I thought you were some kind of pedophile or something.”
He has the grace to look sheepish and vaguely embarrassed. “Sorry,” he says quietly. “I was just watching out for you.”
“Yeah, well, you could have at least had the decency to introduce yourself to me,” she snaps.
“And how would I have done that?” he snaps back. “Hi, you don’t know me, but I’m your long-lost father even though I was fucking possessed at the time? Oh yeah, Glory, I’m sure that would have gone over well. How many seconds would it have taken you to call the police on me?”
“You could have tried. Or you could have called Mom. You could have at least let her know that you were there, that you knew I existed,” she shouts at him. “You could have done something instead of hiding in the shadows like some kind of stalker. You could have cared.” She throws down the spoon still in her hand and storms out the back door, leaving two very startled men in her wake.
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The meal is ruined, the pasta overcooked and the shrimp burned on the stove. Dean sits at the kitchen table, his head in his hands, and Sam has never seen his brother look so lost, so old. “What just happened, Sam?” his brother mutters, but for once, he doesn’t have an answer. “When did all of this go so terribly wrong?”
There isn’t an easy answer to that question. Well, there is, but it goes back twenty years to a night that both brothers would rather forget. Sam sits heavily in the chair across from Dean and says quietly, “You knew about her?”
“I saw Jo about seven months after…” He gestures helplessly, but he doesn’t need to elaborate. “She didn’t see me, and I didn’t think she would want to talk to me, so I didn’t call or anything.” He looks up. “I did keep track of her, though. Every few months – if we were nearby – I’d look them up, make sure they were happy. Make sure they were safe.”
Sam nods; it makes sense now, all the hunts Dean found between Indianapolis and Chicago during that fifteen year span between Duluth and their pseudo-retirement to Idaho, all the days Dean disappeared only to come back around six or seven without even a trace of cigarette smoke or cheap beer. It explains why those were the nights that saw Dean lying restlessly in their motel room, tossing and turning instead of sleeping, why Sam was always the one driving the next day, heading to a hunt as far away from Chicago as Dean could find.
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“I’m sorry for yelling at him,” Glory says when she feels Sam’s presence behind her. She’s sitting on the ancient wooden swing left over from whoever last owned the cabin, watching the sun set in the distance, and she doesn’t turn to look at him when he doesn’t speak; it’s enough to know he’s there.
She continues after a moment. “I just – he wasn’t – I mean, I’ve seen him before, and… He’d been around all those years, and I didn’t know it.” She grips the ropes tighter. “I saw him a lot, actually. Especially when I was a little kid. I’d see him after school sometimes, when I was getting on the bus, and then sometimes he’d pass the bus in that big black car, watching it – watching me – like a hawk.” She laughs a little bitterly. “Mom used to tell me stories about guardian angels who watched my sleep and kept me safe from the darkness, and I thought that the black car was my guardian angel. When I got older, I realized that cars couldn’t be angels, of course, and then I stopped seeing it when I got to high school. I forgot about it after a while, getting caught up in school and whatever – I almost thought that I had dreamed it rather than actually saw it. It wasn’t until I was at Vandy that I thought about it again – I was in a psychology class, and we spent a week discussing pedophilia. I didn’t sleep well for a while after that, thinking that I’d been victim to some sort of bizarre form of child abuse, even though all the car had ever done was be there.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam says, but his voice doesn’t sound quite right. Glory turns to look at him and it’s not Sam standing behind her, but Dean, and he looks awkward and embarrassed, as if he’s not used to this sort of thing, and Glory realizes that really he isn’t. He’s her father, and while he could exorcise demons with Latin and knows practically everything about shapeshifters, ghosts, and vampires, he has no experience dealing with a daughter beyond watching her get on the school bus from his car, which only upsets her more.
“You should be,” she mutters, turning away from him again.
“Hey,” Dean says sharply.
She glares over her shoulder at him and says, “What?”
He sighs, his shoulders falling as if defeated. “How much do you know?” he asks quietly, sitting down on the roots of the oak tree.
She swallows; she knows what he’s asking without a clarification. “Sam told me everything,” she answers. “About you and about Mom and about the… about Duluth.”
Dean nods slowly, taking a deep breath before he begins to speak. “I loved her, you know,” he starts. “Maybe not deep love, not true love like what my parents had, but in my own way, yeah, I guess I loved her. Or I could have, if… Well, if I hadn’t been possessed.” He rubs a hand across his forehead. “She ran away to go on a hunt with us, did Sam tell you that?”
“I saw it in her journals. H. H. Holmes’ ghost, right? Sounded pretty harrowing.”
“Yeah, it was. Anyway, she snuck out of the Roadhouse and joined up with us in Philadelphia. Ellen wasn’t happy about it. We didn’t come around to the Roadhouse for a while after that.” He doesn’t mention the revelation about her grandfathers, so Glory keeps her mouth shut, figuring he’ll speak again in a moment. He does. “The next time we came around, she was gone, taken off to go hunting on her own. Ellen asked us to keep an eye out for her, to let her know if we caught wind of her. We did, but neither of us saw her. Not until… not until Duluth, and after that, we didn’t go back to the Roadhouse again. I couldn’t have looked Ellen in the eye without reliving it.”
“Mom didn’t go back either,” Glory tells him. “She wrote in her journal that she wouldn’t ‘prove him right’ by running back home. I’m not sure what that means, but that was when she decided to go to Chicago.” She kicks at the grass at her feet, and the two of them fall silent, both lost in their thoughts.
“I never met any of my grandparents,” she says out of the blue. “That was probably the worst part of it just being mom and me – not knowing any of my relatives. It wasn’t too bad, I guess, but sometimes it really sucked, like around father-daughter day at school, when all the girls got to visit their dads at work instead of go to school, and I didn’t get to go.” She bites her lip and smiles a little, glancing at her father, who still looks a bit like a repentant puppy. “I guess you probably wouldn’t have taken me to work even if you’d been around, huh?”
Dean laughs outright at that, and it’s a wonderful sound. “No, probably not,” he admits. And then, “We would have spent the day at the movies or the park or maybe just driving around.”
“I would’ve liked that,” she says. She frowns a little and then says, “Would you now?”
He blinks at her. “Would I what?”
“Take me hunting,” she clarifies. “I mean, I could take a year off from school, and you could teach me what you know. Mom taught me hand-to-hand and how to shoot and stuff, but she never mentioned the hunting.” She gives him her best puppy-dog eyes and hopes that they work.
“No.”
She’s surprised at his outright refusal, and she immediately starts arguing. “Why not? I’m interested. I want to do it. And I want to get to know you, and I was planning to take the year off regardless, so why not spend it doing something really worthwhile?”
“Absolutely not. You’re going back to school and that’s final.”
“You can’t force me,” she snaps back, and later, they’ll laugh at the fact that practically the only thing they’ve done since meeting each other officially is argue. “Besides, if I go back now, I’ll just be weeks behind in all my classes and flunk out.”
He sets his jaw, and Glory can see what her mother meant when she wrote about how stubborn the elder Winchester could be. “Then you can go back at the beginning of next semester.”
“But what will I do until then? I can’t very well sit around the house all day. And I could be really helpful on hunts. I read all of Mom’s journals, and Sam has told me even more about it. And I can get access to college libraries a lot easier than you can.”
He glares at her. “You’re just like your mother, you know that?”
He sighs. “One year of hunting, and next fall you’re going back to school, whether you want to or not. And no complaining. If you can’t take it, tough. You’re in this now, and there’s no backing out.”
She grins. “Is that a yes, then?”
***************************************************************************************************************************************
A/N: Well, that was a bit longer than I intended. 13 pages, no double-spacing. Longest piece I’ve written in years. I think it was warranted, though.
I feel like I’ve brought these people some closure. It was important to me, again, to have Glory as a strong character – she wouldn’t be a true Harvelle or Winchester if she weren’t. It was also very important for me to show how much Duluth affected the boys (and Jo) even twenty years down the road. That’s not the sort of thing you get over easily.
As for whether or not I’ll write any more in this ‘verse, I don’t really know. I left the ending open on purpose, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m going to write about Glory’s adventures with her father. I do have one small thing to say that I couldn’t squeeze into the fic, though: Glory Ann Harvelle is an archaeology major. She’s going to dig up bones for a living.
Lyrics to Chocolate:
This could be the very minute
I'm aware I'm alive
All these places feel like home
With a name I'd never chosen
I can make my first steps
As a child of 25
This is the straw, final straw in the
Roof of my mouth as I lie to you
Just because I'm sorry doesn't mean
I didn't enjoy it at the time
You're the only thing that I love
It scares me more every day
On my knees I think clearer
Goodness knows I saw it coming
Or at least I'll claim I did
But in truth I'm lost for words
What have I done it's too late for that
What have I become truth is nothing yet
A simple mistake starts the hardest time
I promise I'll do anything you ask...this time
Chicago, September 2027
It’s not until after her mother dies that Glory thinks to look for her father. She has spent almost twenty years without one, has spent the last eight without really wanting one (since her mother explained that after she was conceived, he never contacted her again). But when Joanna Harvelle succumbs to breast cancer at the age of forty-two, Glory decides that it’s time to track down the man who loved and then left her mother.
She starts with her mother’s journals. After the funeral, after all of Glory’s friends go home, after Glory takes care of her mother’s last wishes (to be salted and cremated, which was strange, but she promised), she pulls out the boxes stashed away in the back of the bedroom closet. They’re filled with journals – there are about fifteen or twenty of them, some leatherbound, some plastic, some cardboard. The oldest have dry yellow paper, the pages stiff with age; one even dates all the way back to 1995 – when Glory’s mother was just ten years old.
She’s shocked to learn about the hunting – her mother had never spoken of it to her, but there it is, all laid out plain as day in the journals. Glory’s surprisingly okay with it. She supposes it makes sense now, all the odd little things her mother did, like putting salt across the windowsill and hanging herbs in the corners of their apartment (not to keep out slugs and insects after all). She understands her mother’s last wishes now – she can’t blame her for not wanting to become a ghost. She sifts through all of the journals – buys a couple of her own and starts jotting down notes about the hunting and about the people her mother knew, searching all the while for clues about her father.
A week into her venture, and she’s finally reached the journal with the dates August 2006-May 2007. If any of them will have mention of Glory’s father, this will be it. She reads it in one sitting, stopping only to make more coffee as the evening wears on. It doesn’t say outright who her father is, but her mother has left enough clues that Glory is fairly certain she’s figured it out. The only thing left is to track him down, and hope he’ll hear her story.
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It takes her another week to finally track down a phone number – she finally resorted to calling up a friend with connections to a telephone company - but at last, Glory has a number with an Idaho area code that hopefully hasn’t been disconnected within the last month.
“Hello?” The man that answers is gruff and irritated, as if Glory has interrupted his afternoon nap.
“Um, hi, is this Sam Winchester?” she begins, but she is cut off when the man says, “Jo?”
“Sorry, this isn’t Jo,” she says.
“Oh.” He sounds almost disappointed. “I’m sorry. You sound just like a girl I used to know.”
Glory smiles at that. “I should. Jo – Joanna Harvelle was my mother.”
“You mean feisty little Jo Harvelle settled down and got married? I never would have thought she’d be the marrying type.” She can almost hear his smile, hear him shake his head at the idea.
“Mr. Winchester--”
“Sam, please. ‘Mr. Winchester’ sounds so old.”
“Sam,” she repeats. “My mom never married. I, uh, I’ve never met my father. She hardly even talked about him, said those were the blackest memories of her life. I couldn’t even get her to tell me his name.”
The man on the other end is so quiet, Glory thinks maybe he has hung up or passed out or something, but then he says, “Past tense – Jo’s dead, isn’t she?”
No one has said it so bluntly to her, but the way this Sam Winchester guy says it so matter-of-fact, Glory wonders what he’s seen in his life to be so numb toward death. “Yeah,” she says in answer. “It was cancer. Nothing the doctors could do, even with all their miracle drugs.”
“I’m sorry…” He trails off, obviously waiting for a name.
“Glory,” she tells him. “Glory Harvelle.” She takes a deep breath. “Anyway, I’m calling because I’ve been going through Mom’s old things, thinking maybe I could find out a little bit about my father. She hardly talked about him, but when she did, it sounded like she did love him, at least at some point. I mean, she said her memories were bleak, but the way she said it – it was almost like she hated what she might have missed more than what actually happened. So anyway, I’ve been looking for anything from around the time I was born, and I came across your name while reading her journals, and I thought – well, she mentioned you were a hunter, and I know a little bit about what you do – or used to do, anyway – and I know this isn’t the same, but I thought you might be able to help me. I realize it’s kind of weird, me calling you up out of the blue and asking for your help – I’m a total stranger and you’ve probably got a wife and kids of your own – but I want – I need – to find my father, and the only people I know of who’d be able and willing to pick up a cold case like this are hunters. I went through Mom’s lists of contacts, and I’ve been calling people for about a week now – most of them have either changed their names or retired or died, some of them refused to do anything and others were too busy. You were the last one.” Glory pauses for a moment. “So. There you have it.”
The guy laughs a little, and again Glory can hear his smile in his voice as he says, “God, you really are just like her.”
“Thanks,” she says, and she means it.
“As for helping you, well, if you’ve got the time to come to Idaho, you can bring your mom’s journals and we’ll see what we can do. Least I can do is help you find someone willing to follow any leads we get.”
Glory sighs in relief, glad that someone has finally agreed to help her. “Thank you so much,” she says. “I’m taking the year off – told the university that I needed some time away after Mom’s death – and I figured now was as good a time as any to find my father. I mean, it’s been almost twenty years and I’ve never met him, and I don’t know that I’ll ever get another chance to look.” She’s so excited that she doesn’t even notice the catch in Sam’s breath as she rambles.
“How soon do you think you could fly out here?” Sam asks her.
“Soon as I can get the ticket,” she answers.
“Great,” he says. “Call me when you’ve got your tickets and I’ll pick you up from the airport.”
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Sam arrives at the Twin Falls airport almost an hour early, but it gives him time to try to relax before he meets Jo Harvelle’s daughter. It’s been almost a week since that out-of-the-blue phonecall, and he still hasn’t called Dean, hasn’t told Dean that Jo gave birth to a little girl about nine months after the last time they saw her. He sits on a bench in the luggage retrieval area, wondering whether inviting her to come out to Idaho was really such a good idea. After all, he hasn’t seen Jo since that horrifying night in Duluth, and she obviously didn’t want her daughter knowing who her father was.
“Mr. Winchester?” That same voice from over the phone interrupts his thoughts and he looks up to see a ghost. Glory Harvelle is the spitting image of her mother, with two glaring exceptions: her hair is darker (more dirty-blonde than sandy-blonde) and her eyes are green. Sam takes a deep breath; if he had any doubt of Glory’s paternal lineage, it’s completely gone. He knows those eyes, sees them every time his older brother shows up on his doorstep. And now he has to pretend like he’s never seen them before, and he wonders what in the world he’s going to do when Dean gets back from Salt Lake City and how in the world he’s going to reconcile Jo’s girl with the man who might be – is – her father.
He smiles at the girl in front of him, pushing all of those thoughts aside for the moment. “Glory?”
She grins back and says, “Thanks for letting me do this, Mr. Winchester. You have no idea how much it means to me.”
He stands and shakes her hand. “It’s my pleasure. Jo was a friend. And please, call me Sam,” he says, changing the subject before it gets awkward. “Got your stuff?”
“Yeah. Mom taught me how to pack light.” She moves to pick up her duffle, but Sam is quicker and he throws it over one shoulder and gestures for her to follow him.
He throws her bag into the back of his pick-up, and the two of them climb into the cab. “Hungry?” he asks.
She shrugs. “I had a sandwich during the layover in Dallas.”
“Burgers it is, then,” he says with a smile.
While they wait for their food, he asks her about her life – about school, her friends, her mother. “I was at Vanderbilt last year,” she says, “but when Mom got sick again, I withdrew and came back to Chicago so I could be close. I’ve decided to take the year off, but I think I might re-enroll at Vandy next fall. Luke – my friend – wants me to, because he says it’s just not the same without me, but I don’t know.” She shrugs. “It kinda depends on what we find.” She grins at him, and Sam’s stomach lurches.
He coughs. “About that… What will you do if we find him?”
She shrugs again. “Dunno. I guess it depends on who he is. I mean, if he turns out to be a drug addict or a felon or something, I’m not even sure I want to track him down. And if he’s already got a wife and kids, I don’t want to just barge in and say, ‘Hi, I’m your long-lost daughter you probably didn’t even know you had.’ But if he’s a good guy and doesn’t mind too much, I might stay with him and go to school near where he lives.”
Sam nods and thinks that maybe Glory meeting Dean won’t go quite as badly as he feared it might.
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“So tell me what you’ve got on your father so far,” Sam says as they begin to lay all of her mother’s old journals out on the floor of the living room.
“Well, I know that Mom loved him, from what she told me, anyway. I mean, she never said it outright, but the way she talked about him – it was like what I’d expect from an unhappy fairytale or something, where the hero can’t marry the princess for whatever reason. I just can’t figure out the reason why.” She looks at him pointedly, and he merely stares back. “Anyway, I also know that he was a hunter, like Mom.”
“How’s that?”
“She quit hunting because of him – well, because of me, really. But in her journals, just after she found out about me, she wrote about leaving hunting and how she just didn’t want to raise her child like him – ‘to be a warrior’ were her words.” She runs her fingers over the leather journals, almost caressing them. “You know, I actually didn’t know about the hunting until I started reading these. I mean, she taught me how to defend myself and how to throw knives and shoot and stuff, but I always just assumed that it was to protect myself – inner-city Chicago’s not exactly the safest place in the world – and I never thought to ask her where she’d learned it all.”
Sam smiles. “I wish I’d grown up like that,” he says.
“Why do you say that?” Glory asks, curious. The Winchesters were in her mother’s journals, but she had written very little about their history – why they’d started hunting in the first place.
“Dean – my brother – and I grew up ‘to be warriors.’ Our mother died in my nursery when I was six months old. A demon pinned her to the ceiling, and the whole room exploded into flames. Dad handed me over to Dean with orders to get outside as fast as he could. Dean’s been watching out for me ever since.” He sighs. “Dad went a little berserk after Mom died. He packed us up and took us on the roadtrip of a lifetime – literally. We spent the next twenty years on the road, chasing after every supernatural thing we could find. I left to go to school – Stanford, full ride and everything – and Dad and Dean kept hunting.” He pauses and presses his knuckles to his forehead. “Dad disappeared in October my last year of school and Dean came to Palo Alto to get me. We went to the last place Dad had been and ended up hunting a Woman in White. When I got back to my apartment in Palo Alto, my girlfriend, Jess, was pinned to the ceiling, the same way Mom had been, twenty-two years - to the day - before.”
“Oh god, I’m so sorry,” Glory whispers, unable to think of anything else to say.
Sam smiles tightly at her and shrugs. “It’s hardly your fault,” he says. “Anyway, it kind of gets worse. I started having these visions – really, I’d been having them since before Jess died – and they all seemed connected to the demon that killed Mom. There were other kids like me, with powers like mine – one could move things, one could persuade people, another could electrocute people just by touching them. The demon was after all of us, creating an army. It got most of us.” He says it quietly, as if, even after all these years, it still hurts. “If it hadn’t been for Dean – it would have gotten me, too.”
Glory is staring at him, undoubtedly slack-jawed. It doesn’t seem fair to her that one person could have so many tragedies in his life. “What happened after that?” she asks.
“Somehow, we managed to defeat the demon. Sent it back to Hell, permanently, we think. Dean still keeps track of weather patterns and things, just in case.”
“Wow,” she breathes. And then, “You guys still hunt?”
“I haven’t been hunting much recently – I got hurt pretty badly about five years back and can’t move quite as fast as I used to – but Dean still hunts. He stays fairly local – no more than a day’s drive away, if he can help it. He says it’s so he’s nearby in case I get myself into trouble, but I think it’s really because he’s starting to feel his age, even if he denies it.” Sam smiles and shakes his head.
“Where’s Dean now?” Glory asks, trying for nonchalant, but not sure if she succeeds.
“He’s taking care of some business down around Salt Lake City. Something about ghosts of vengeful Mormon wives, I think. He said he’d be back by the end of the week.” He pauses. “Listen, Glory, about Dean – ”
She stops him. “Sam, if you’re going to tell me that Dean’s my father, you don’t have to. I know.” He blinks at her, and she almost laughs. “I figured it out a while ago – really, before I even called you up. I lied about that, by the way. You weren’t the last person I called. You were the only one.”
“What?”
“Mom’s journals,” she explains. “She wrote page after page about the people she knew, especially hunters. You guys were mentioned a lot, especially Dean, up until February of 2007 – which was when I would have been, well, you know. She mentioned seeing you on the news after that Milwaukee thing, and had notes about not hearing whether you’d been caught or not. And then all of a sudden, she stopped mentioning you altogether. There was one entry that simply said, ‘Sam called,’ and the next one was her pregnancy test results. Neither of you were ever mentioned by name again, so I knew it had to be one of you.” Glory ducks her head and blushes a little. “I thought it was you, which is why I contacted you instead of Dean. When I got to the airport, I knew I was wrong.”
“Yeah, how’s that?”
She looks up at him again. “Mom said I had my father’s eyes.”
Sam laughs and says, “That you do.”
She blushes a little at that before saying, “But the reason I tracked you guys down is because there are gaps in Mom’s story. I mean, she stopped writing about you entirely – there might’ve been a couple oblique references, like ‘I thought I saw him today, but I must have been imagining things,’ but other than that… nothing. So what happened? Did you guys have a falling out or something?” Sam gets a pained look in his eyes, as if he had been afraid that he would have to narrate this part of the story. Glory furrows her brow. “Sam, what happened?”
He looks down at his hands and begins quietly. “February 2007, Dean and I were finishing a job in Texas. It was a chupacabra, a nasty motherfucker, and we both fell into bed that night, exhausted. When I woke up the next morning, Dean was gone, which was a little weird, since I’m the morning person most days. It wasn’t totally out of the ordinary, though, especially not back then, so I didn’t think anything of it. When it hit noon and he still hadn’t shown up, I started to worry.”
He relates his frantic search for his brother with such collected calmness, Glory is amazed. He tells her about the phonecalls to all of their contacts – Bobby, Ellen, even Missouri Moseley. He tells her about receiving the call from Dean, who had woken up in the hotel in Twin Lakes, about finding his brother covered in another man’s blood, about the discovery of Steve Wandell’s body, about Dean’s second disappearance. It brings him to Duluth, where he stops the narration. “He was possessed, Glory.” He says it brokenly, and Glory wonders if maybe even after twenty years, they still struggle with that part of their lives. “He was possessed, and I was too late.”
Understanding dawns on her and her stomach drops. “He didn’t – ” she gasps, and he merely nods miserably.
“I didn’t get there in time to stop it. He was gone by the time I arrived. Even if I had gotten there faster, I don’t know if I could have stopped it. Demons are powerful, and that one was out for revenge.” He grimaces and then continues. “He told me later that it made him watch – it even let him have control over his body for just a few moments before… It gave him just enough time to tell Jo he was sorry, and then it threw him back into unconsciousness – he said it felt like getting thrown into a wall. When it let him resurface, it was already…” He stops and runs a hand through his hair. “When I found Jo, she was unconscious. She asked to come with me, to help find Dean, but I wouldn’t let her. Maybe I should have; then you wouldn’t have had to come all the way out here for this story.”
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It’s late that night when Glory calls Luke to tell him about what she’s found. Sam has set her up in the attic – with profuse apologies for not being able to give her the guest room (their office).
“Hey,” she says quietly after Luke’s groggy, “Hello?”
She can practically hear him rubbing a hand across his face and she smiles. “I found him,” she says.
“What? You did?” Suddenly, Luke is wide awake and all ears. “Is he the one you thought he was – that Sam guy?”
“No. Sam’s my uncle.”
“What? Your uncle?”
“Crazy, I know, to gain an entire family in just one day,” she says with a little laugh. “Dean Winchester – the one Mom wrote about so much in her journals – he’s my father.”
“So did they have a one-night stand or something?”
Glory takes a deep breath. She’s been practicing this speech in her head all evening. “No,” she says. “They didn’t.”
“Oh.” Luke takes a breath like he’s about to say something, but Glory cuts him off.
“Luke, I’m not sure how to say this, but Dean… he…” She stops and starts again. “You remember what I was telling you about her journals? About the hunting stuff, like ghosts and demons and whatever?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“Dean was possessed. And he couldn’t stop it. He tried – Sam told me that he tried, but that the demon had absolute control over him.” All of a sudden, it hits Glory, and the next thing she knows, she’s crying. “That’s why, Luke,” she whispers. “That’s why Mom never talked about him. It wasn’t that he left her, it was that neither of them wanted it to begin with.” She trails off in a mess of tears and hiccups. She takes a deep breath and pulls herself together. “Sam said they never talked about it afterward, and they never heard anything from Mom again.”
“Oh God, Glory, I’m so sorry,” he says. And then, “Do you want me to come out there? I can claim family emergency and get off work and – ”
“No, Luke,” she says, cutting him off. “I’ll be alright.” She sniffles a little. “Besides, I still want to meet him. I feel like – I think I owe it to him, and to Mom, because… I don’t know. I just… I need to do this.”
“Yeah okay,” he says, and she can hear the confusion and disappointment in his voice. “Call me again soon, alright?”
“Of course I will,” she answers. “Good night, Luke.”
“Night, Glory.”
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The next several days pass in an odd haze for Sam. Glory asks him all sorts of questions about hunting and Dean and their lives both growing up and over the past twenty years. He tells her about the early hunts when he just wanted to stay at the hotel or the apartment or the trailer and read Beowulf or The Odyssey. He also tells her about his decision to go to Stanford and finds himself telling her more about Jess than he has ever told anyone else before (like how they met the day after his twenty-first birthday while he was still trying to get over a hangover). Sam then tells her about Halloween of 2005 and Dean coming to get him and all of the tragedies that followed. Glory has all of the right reactions to each story – she laughs at the guys from HellHoundsLair.com and tears up when he tells her about their mother. She holds his hand when he talks about their father and cries when he tells her about their father’s sacrifice.
Sam tells her about cracking their father’s voicemail and finding her grandmother’s message. She laughs at the tale of their first encounter with Ellen and Jo Harvelle. He tells her about the zombie chick who broke his arm and about Andy’s power of persuasion and their run-ins with the law. He doesn’t tell her about the death of her Grandfather Harvelle, and she doesn’t ask.
She does ask him about hunting – she even pulls out a leather-bound journal and begins writing down everything he’s told her. Sam’s a little afraid that she may turn out to be too much like her mother, jumping into hunting without all the information she needs. He asks her what she’s going to do with it. She merely shrugs and says, “I’m studying anthropology at school. You could end up in a field study.” Her grin is so infectious, he can’t help but smile himself. Still, he makes a mental note to make sure she knows everything she might possibly need to know in case she does decide to go hunting.
They don’t talk about Duluth any more, which is fine by him.
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Glory’s been at the cabin for almost a week when she and Sam are making dinner and hear a rumbling engine pull up outside. “That’d be Dean,” Sam says.
“Sam?”
“In the kitchen, Dean,” he replies, and Glory can see the broad smile that she’s grown so used to seeing in the past several days. She grins despite herself and turns back to the stove, where she’s cooking the shrimp to go with their pasta.
“Whatcha cooking, I’m starv – well, well, well, Sammy, I thought you said you weren’t interested in romance anymore.” His voice is warm and gravelly, just like Glory thought it should be, and she has to force herself not to turn around just yet. She does sneak a glance at Sam, who’s come to stand beside her, and she has to bite her lip to keep from laughing at the eyeroll he gives his brother.
“Dean, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.” And Glory takes her cue and starts to turn, suddenly bashful and more than a little nervous. Sam puts a reassuring hand on her shoulder, and she raises her head. “This is—”
“Glory,” Dean breathes at the same time Glory yelps, “You?”
It’s a good thing Sam’s there to steady her, because Glory has a feeling that if he weren’t holding her up, she’d be passed out on the floor at the moment. As it is, she’s staring wide-eyed at the man in front of her – her father – and he’s staring back at her, looking just as gape-mouthed and confused as she feels, and Sam is trying to look at both of them at once without going cross-eyed.
Sam is the first of the three of them to regain the ability to speak. “Wait, you already know each other?”
Glory sets her jaw and looks at her uncle. “I’ve never met him in my life,” she says. “But, yeah, I’ve seen him around.” She looks back at her father. “God, I thought you were some kind of pedophile or something.”
He has the grace to look sheepish and vaguely embarrassed. “Sorry,” he says quietly. “I was just watching out for you.”
“Yeah, well, you could have at least had the decency to introduce yourself to me,” she snaps.
“And how would I have done that?” he snaps back. “Hi, you don’t know me, but I’m your long-lost father even though I was fucking possessed at the time? Oh yeah, Glory, I’m sure that would have gone over well. How many seconds would it have taken you to call the police on me?”
“You could have tried. Or you could have called Mom. You could have at least let her know that you were there, that you knew I existed,” she shouts at him. “You could have done something instead of hiding in the shadows like some kind of stalker. You could have cared.” She throws down the spoon still in her hand and storms out the back door, leaving two very startled men in her wake.
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The meal is ruined, the pasta overcooked and the shrimp burned on the stove. Dean sits at the kitchen table, his head in his hands, and Sam has never seen his brother look so lost, so old. “What just happened, Sam?” his brother mutters, but for once, he doesn’t have an answer. “When did all of this go so terribly wrong?”
There isn’t an easy answer to that question. Well, there is, but it goes back twenty years to a night that both brothers would rather forget. Sam sits heavily in the chair across from Dean and says quietly, “You knew about her?”
“I saw Jo about seven months after…” He gestures helplessly, but he doesn’t need to elaborate. “She didn’t see me, and I didn’t think she would want to talk to me, so I didn’t call or anything.” He looks up. “I did keep track of her, though. Every few months – if we were nearby – I’d look them up, make sure they were happy. Make sure they were safe.”
Sam nods; it makes sense now, all the hunts Dean found between Indianapolis and Chicago during that fifteen year span between Duluth and their pseudo-retirement to Idaho, all the days Dean disappeared only to come back around six or seven without even a trace of cigarette smoke or cheap beer. It explains why those were the nights that saw Dean lying restlessly in their motel room, tossing and turning instead of sleeping, why Sam was always the one driving the next day, heading to a hunt as far away from Chicago as Dean could find.
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“I’m sorry for yelling at him,” Glory says when she feels Sam’s presence behind her. She’s sitting on the ancient wooden swing left over from whoever last owned the cabin, watching the sun set in the distance, and she doesn’t turn to look at him when he doesn’t speak; it’s enough to know he’s there.
She continues after a moment. “I just – he wasn’t – I mean, I’ve seen him before, and… He’d been around all those years, and I didn’t know it.” She grips the ropes tighter. “I saw him a lot, actually. Especially when I was a little kid. I’d see him after school sometimes, when I was getting on the bus, and then sometimes he’d pass the bus in that big black car, watching it – watching me – like a hawk.” She laughs a little bitterly. “Mom used to tell me stories about guardian angels who watched my sleep and kept me safe from the darkness, and I thought that the black car was my guardian angel. When I got older, I realized that cars couldn’t be angels, of course, and then I stopped seeing it when I got to high school. I forgot about it after a while, getting caught up in school and whatever – I almost thought that I had dreamed it rather than actually saw it. It wasn’t until I was at Vandy that I thought about it again – I was in a psychology class, and we spent a week discussing pedophilia. I didn’t sleep well for a while after that, thinking that I’d been victim to some sort of bizarre form of child abuse, even though all the car had ever done was be there.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam says, but his voice doesn’t sound quite right. Glory turns to look at him and it’s not Sam standing behind her, but Dean, and he looks awkward and embarrassed, as if he’s not used to this sort of thing, and Glory realizes that really he isn’t. He’s her father, and while he could exorcise demons with Latin and knows practically everything about shapeshifters, ghosts, and vampires, he has no experience dealing with a daughter beyond watching her get on the school bus from his car, which only upsets her more.
“You should be,” she mutters, turning away from him again.
“Hey,” Dean says sharply.
She glares over her shoulder at him and says, “What?”
He sighs, his shoulders falling as if defeated. “How much do you know?” he asks quietly, sitting down on the roots of the oak tree.
She swallows; she knows what he’s asking without a clarification. “Sam told me everything,” she answers. “About you and about Mom and about the… about Duluth.”
Dean nods slowly, taking a deep breath before he begins to speak. “I loved her, you know,” he starts. “Maybe not deep love, not true love like what my parents had, but in my own way, yeah, I guess I loved her. Or I could have, if… Well, if I hadn’t been possessed.” He rubs a hand across his forehead. “She ran away to go on a hunt with us, did Sam tell you that?”
“I saw it in her journals. H. H. Holmes’ ghost, right? Sounded pretty harrowing.”
“Yeah, it was. Anyway, she snuck out of the Roadhouse and joined up with us in Philadelphia. Ellen wasn’t happy about it. We didn’t come around to the Roadhouse for a while after that.” He doesn’t mention the revelation about her grandfathers, so Glory keeps her mouth shut, figuring he’ll speak again in a moment. He does. “The next time we came around, she was gone, taken off to go hunting on her own. Ellen asked us to keep an eye out for her, to let her know if we caught wind of her. We did, but neither of us saw her. Not until… not until Duluth, and after that, we didn’t go back to the Roadhouse again. I couldn’t have looked Ellen in the eye without reliving it.”
“Mom didn’t go back either,” Glory tells him. “She wrote in her journal that she wouldn’t ‘prove him right’ by running back home. I’m not sure what that means, but that was when she decided to go to Chicago.” She kicks at the grass at her feet, and the two of them fall silent, both lost in their thoughts.
“I never met any of my grandparents,” she says out of the blue. “That was probably the worst part of it just being mom and me – not knowing any of my relatives. It wasn’t too bad, I guess, but sometimes it really sucked, like around father-daughter day at school, when all the girls got to visit their dads at work instead of go to school, and I didn’t get to go.” She bites her lip and smiles a little, glancing at her father, who still looks a bit like a repentant puppy. “I guess you probably wouldn’t have taken me to work even if you’d been around, huh?”
Dean laughs outright at that, and it’s a wonderful sound. “No, probably not,” he admits. And then, “We would have spent the day at the movies or the park or maybe just driving around.”
“I would’ve liked that,” she says. She frowns a little and then says, “Would you now?”
He blinks at her. “Would I what?”
“Take me hunting,” she clarifies. “I mean, I could take a year off from school, and you could teach me what you know. Mom taught me hand-to-hand and how to shoot and stuff, but she never mentioned the hunting.” She gives him her best puppy-dog eyes and hopes that they work.
“No.”
She’s surprised at his outright refusal, and she immediately starts arguing. “Why not? I’m interested. I want to do it. And I want to get to know you, and I was planning to take the year off regardless, so why not spend it doing something really worthwhile?”
“Absolutely not. You’re going back to school and that’s final.”
“You can’t force me,” she snaps back, and later, they’ll laugh at the fact that practically the only thing they’ve done since meeting each other officially is argue. “Besides, if I go back now, I’ll just be weeks behind in all my classes and flunk out.”
He sets his jaw, and Glory can see what her mother meant when she wrote about how stubborn the elder Winchester could be. “Then you can go back at the beginning of next semester.”
“But what will I do until then? I can’t very well sit around the house all day. And I could be really helpful on hunts. I read all of Mom’s journals, and Sam has told me even more about it. And I can get access to college libraries a lot easier than you can.”
He glares at her. “You’re just like your mother, you know that?”
He sighs. “One year of hunting, and next fall you’re going back to school, whether you want to or not. And no complaining. If you can’t take it, tough. You’re in this now, and there’s no backing out.”
She grins. “Is that a yes, then?”
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A/N: Well, that was a bit longer than I intended. 13 pages, no double-spacing. Longest piece I’ve written in years. I think it was warranted, though.
I feel like I’ve brought these people some closure. It was important to me, again, to have Glory as a strong character – she wouldn’t be a true Harvelle or Winchester if she weren’t. It was also very important for me to show how much Duluth affected the boys (and Jo) even twenty years down the road. That’s not the sort of thing you get over easily.
As for whether or not I’ll write any more in this ‘verse, I don’t really know. I left the ending open on purpose, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m going to write about Glory’s adventures with her father. I do have one small thing to say that I couldn’t squeeze into the fic, though: Glory Ann Harvelle is an archaeology major. She’s going to dig up bones for a living.
Lyrics to Chocolate:
This could be the very minute
I'm aware I'm alive
All these places feel like home
With a name I'd never chosen
I can make my first steps
As a child of 25
This is the straw, final straw in the
Roof of my mouth as I lie to you
Just because I'm sorry doesn't mean
I didn't enjoy it at the time
You're the only thing that I love
It scares me more every day
On my knees I think clearer
Goodness knows I saw it coming
Or at least I'll claim I did
But in truth I'm lost for words
What have I done it's too late for that
What have I become truth is nothing yet
A simple mistake starts the hardest time
I promise I'll do anything you ask...this time
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And Glory? She's gonna go on to do great things, I think.
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I love mature, old Dean and Sam... how they're still pretty much the same. Also loved Glory's interaction with the winchesters. :)
I'm sad that Jo wasn't there because I adore her character (but then again, not everything can be happy-endings and fluff and romance :P). but i did think that you wrote her daughter very well, just jo-like enough to be real...
I was a little suprised, though, at the seemingly very positive relationship between mother & daughter. I guess I was expecting a bit more antagonism to seep through, especially considering the Ellen-Jo interaction.
All in all, a very nice way to round up the series, to tie up loose ends. :) Thanks for a great read!
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I'm sad that Jo wasn't there because I adore her character.
Yeah, when I wrote it, I had to figure out how to get Glory from point A (living with her mother) to point B (finding her father and uncle), and I realized that Jo would have been completely unwilling to talk about the circumstances regarding Glory's conception with her daughter. And I really felt like the only way to get Glory where she needed to be was by killing Jo (oops), but I wanted it to be quiet and relatively peaceful instead of a hunting-related thing.
I'm glad that you liked Glory. So often, I see futurefics where the boys (or Jo) have kids and they're totally unbelievable and unrealistic. I tried to give Glory some of her mother's traits and even managed to sneak in a few things that are totally Winchester (like her academic aptitude and her decision to stick with family even when she has every reason to despise her father).
As for Glory's relationship with her mother, well, that was part of the great Jo Has Matured A Lot Since No Exit project, something that I continue to work into *all* of my stories, regardless of which 'verse I'm writing. I imagine that there was quite a bit of antagonism when Glory was younger, but all those mother-daughter quarrels became insignificant when they found out about the breast cancer.
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I'm not that crazy about AU but this worked because the characters were very true and the story very touching... :)
So thanks for sharing!!!
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I love that Dean watched her from afar all those years and that she thought the black Impala was her guardian angel. *tear*
Personally, I think it was perfect ending it the way you did. Beautiful, beautiful job!
As a side note, I'd love for you to come post it at Twisted Hunters (http://deanjo-fiction.com). :D
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Glory Ann Harvelle is an archaeology major. She’s going to dig up bones for a living.
...cracked me up so hard! LMAO! Gotta love the irony. ;D
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And Dean would be her guardian angel, of course.
Thank you.
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I'm very glad that you enjoyed it and that you liked Glory. I'm always nervous about bringing OFCs into the story, because so often they get a bad rap.
And yeah, I suspect when Glory informs Dean of her career goal, he's gonna flip ("She's gonna be the female version of Indiana Jones, Sammy! How awesome is that?").
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The part about Dean watching Glory from a distance when she was younger was kind of sad yet cute at the same time. It showed that even though he couldn't look Jo in the face after what happened, he still wanted to be Glory's dad in some way. It's sweet but heartbreaking.
Sam is just awesome. Coolest uncle ever. Glory is lucky to have him. =D
Awesome work!!
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There are a few things that are essentially Winchester, and even though up until this point, Glory hadn't met anyone on that side of the family, there are some things that just had to be a given. Like the bone-digging. And the classic music, which didn't make it into the story (although Glory's idea of "classic" is not quite the same as Dean's - her favorite classic artists are Eminem and 50 Cent, haha).
And you *know* that Dean would check up on them as much as possible without actually revealing himself. I see Glory as Dean's second chance - he raised Sam all by himself pretty much and then watched him from afar while he was at Stanford, so it stands to reason that he'd do essentially the same thing for Glory (though he was forced to stop after Sam got chewed up by the chupacabra in Idaho).
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I like the open end, and I like the fact that it's lighter, optimistic, full of potentials.
Niiiice.
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I wanted to give them closure and a (mostly) happy ending. And yes, it's so full of potential!
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Glory. First off, she is just what you would think a daughter of your Jo should be. (And, yes, I say your Jo because you know what I think about that. ;-P)
She’s shocked to learn about the hunting – her mother had never spoken of it to her, but there it is, all laid out plain as day in the journals. Glory’s surprisingly okay with it. She supposes it makes sense now, all the odd little things her mother did, like putting salt across the windowsill and hanging herbs in the corners of their apartment (not to keep out slugs and insects after all).
This was a lovely touch. That she would recognize the things that didn't make sense as suddenly making sense. (Although...are you sneaking a peek at my Old!Chesters notes? ;-P)
“Sam, please. ‘Mr. Winchester’ sounds so old.”
I admit it. This made me smile.
“Great,” he says. “Call me when you’ve got your tickets and I’ll pick you up from the airport.”
I love Sam. Although I wish he would have told her the truth initially, I know why he wouldn't. I think he wanted to know that she'd be okay knowing what happened, knowing Dean.
Yes, our poor broken Winchesters...
And when he tells her... Oh, Sammy...
All of a sudden, it hits Glory, and the next thing she knows, she’s crying. “That’s why, Luke,” she whispers. “That’s why Mom never talked about him. It wasn’t that he left her, it was that neither of them wanted it to begin with.” She trails off in a mess of tears and hiccups. She takes a deep breath and pulls herself together.
What a powerful paragraph. It says so much about her character, her intelligence and her intuition. I love Glory. She's an incredible character.
And, yes, you made me cry...
He has the grace to look sheepish and vaguely embarrassed. “Sorry,” he says quietly. “I was just watching out for you.”
Oh, just oh...
He sighs. “One year of hunting, and next fall you’re going back to school, whether you want to or not. And no complaining. If you can’t take it, tough. You’re in this now, and there’s no backing out.”
And now I'm grinning and crying at the same time.
You know, this verse was hard for me to read because of my background but I'm so glad you wrote it. Thank you.
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I love Sam. Although I wish he would have told her the truth initially, I know why he wouldn't. I think he wanted to know that she'd be okay knowing what happened, knowing Dean.
I thought about that, but one of the things I wanted to be clear on was that Sam didn't know that Glory existed until she called him up. And I imagine that he would want to be absolutely certain about Glory's parentage before he said anything, just in case his intuition is wrong.
What a powerful paragraph. It says so much about her character, her intelligence and her intuition. I love Glory. She's an incredible character.
*blushes* Thank you. There were shades of Winchester in the way she didn't let the news hit her until she was on the phone with Luke. Couldn't break in front of someone she still barely knew. And then there were shades of Harvelle in the way she pulled herself back together almost immediately (a little tip of the hat to the scene in No Exit when Jo allows herself to freak out for just a moment before trying to work out a plan).
You know, this verse was hard for me to read because of my background but I'm so glad you wrote it. Thank you.
You're welcome. To be honest, I wrote this last piece with you in mind, in terms of thinking, 'How can I tell this story and show just how much it would affect these people but still show that they've grown and moved on as much as possible?' Which sounded a lot better in my head than it does written.
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Good to know. My apologies that this one was overdue, though... ;-P
The whole scene was nicely done.
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