stipendium peccati by duckondebut for <user site="livejournal.c

[springflingmod.livejournal.com]

Title: stipendium peccati
Pairing: Sam, Charlie, Jody – gen
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Character death. Some violence.

One chill autumn night in 1998, a young boy joins hands with a girl as they run away from their families. One of them is a monster, and the other is not.

(Wait. That’s not right.)

Both of them are monsters. Neither of them are. (It doesn’t matter.) They catch a bus that leaves them alone in a huge city three states over; they have barely gathered their bodies to match their bounding spirits when a speeding car crashes into the boy (monster) and kills him on the spot.

Everything changes.

(Except it doesn’t.)

The couple in that speeding car own a nondescript house in the suburbs, go to nondescript jobs, have a nondescript pet, and a truly remarkable daughter. (She loves them. She hates them.) They were supposed to be picking her up from a sleepover with a friend, but get arrested instead. They lose their nondescript jobs, their nondescript house, and finally their remarkable daughter, who runs away when she is sixteen.

(She only hates them now, and there are no hospital rooms, no zombie armies, no light to balance out the dark. This, too, hasn’t changed.)

The police officer in charge of the sordid case is engaged to be married in three weeks. This is her last big case before she moves to a small town in the Dakotas—which one, it doesn’t matter right now (the whole universe hinges on it). She can barely console the young girl (monster)—she’s spitting words and accusations that the officer doesn’t understand, crying, rocking back and forth. In a tiny, unguarded moment, the girl escapes.

(Ten years later, the officer will hear the same words. She’ll still pretend not to understand.)

The dead boy (monster)’s father and brother arrive. The father goes terribly cold, terribly still at the sight of his son’s body—even as his older son erupts into a maelstrom of wild fury and wilder grief, he is at the centre, a singularity point. He has already stocked up on salt on the way here, incantations from a dozen different faiths, holy water, a shovel, and his dead son’s old soccer trophy. (He has been building this tomb for fourteen years now.)

The older son explodes. (He implodes. There is decay in a part of his soul now, and it will lay claim to all of him.) He hunts down the young girl (monster) and kills her slowly. Agonisingly. He misses his brother’s funeral pyre (his exorcism, his banishment) and he never forgives his father for it.

(This never, ever changes.)

Years pass. The father dies, then lives forever. The older brother lives, but he is already dead. The officer has a family of her own, and the remarkable daughter a career in hacking and a beautiful girlfriend.

(Somewhere, five kids with demon blood battle it out in an old abandoned town plagued by the living dead. All of them die.)

When the world begins the last phase of its slow, slow slide into destruction, the grieving brother, the officer, and the remarkable daughter meet. The dead son (boy, monster) rises from Hell to finally fulfil his destiny, and he is greeted with joy, with fear, and always, always with awe.

(He has already defeated Lucifer. They don’t know this yet.)

In the end, everything has changed.

(Nothing’s changed at all.)

End

Comments

[marciaelena.livejournal.com]

Wow. I don't have the words to tell you how much I loved this. So beautifully lyrical.

[lyryk.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, this is so gorgeous! I love how everything's changed but not really.

[troll-la-la.livejournal.com]

This was so poetic and gorgeous!! I loved all the alternate pathways and early intersections of the characters. Thank you so much Anon, for such a brilliant and beautiful and haunting story! I love it, it is perfection.

[vyperdd.livejournal.com]

That was wonderful. So much said with so few words, so many little details that tell such a complicated story in quite a simple way.

Well done.

[quickreaver.livejournal.com]

WHOA. Twitsty-turny, smart, sad, FANTASTIC!

[tipsy-kitty.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow. What a neat twist of canon, and so interestingly told.

[tifaching.livejournal.com]

I love this twisty take on, well, everything. So sparingly written but showing so much. Kudos.

[sophiap.livejournal.com]

This was lovely, and will stick with me for a good long while.

[caranfindel.livejournal.com]

This is messed up, and amazingly good.

[madebyme-x.livejournal.com]

What a haunting and lyrical fic!

I love the sparseness of this, how it's almost fact based and how each word has been carefully chosen (and not chosen) for it's impact. And I love how despite the way you've twisted canon and characters, the end result is so different, and yet also not so different, from where we are. Beautifully crafted :)

[fiercelynormal.livejournal.com]

Beautifully written!