![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ella_mennoTitle: as you would have wished to live
Author Name: jenowago
Characters: Meg; OCs, both m and f; mentions of Sam, Dean, and the YED
Prompt used: for the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
batoutofkansas challenge - #31: I got a taste of paradise/I'm never gonna let it slip away/I got a taste of paradise/It's all I really need to make me stay/Just like a child again
Word Count: 1700, give or take a few.
Spoilers: Scarecrow, Dead Man’s Blood, Salvation, Devil’s Trap
A/N: Thanks from the bottom of my procrastinating heart to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dolimir_k for her excellent last-minute beta.
Inspired in large part by somethingmorgan32 said in her bible entry for “Devil’s Trap” over in spnheavymeta. (The actual quote can be found after the story.)
Rating: 14+, for violent imagery, slight reference to non-con, and sexual activity.
Meg Masters doesn’t like to cook. It’s not like she’s going to starve – she can fix herself something to eat, for Pete’s sake – but she doesn’t enjoy cooking the way some people do. Her mom and granny had always managed to guilt-trip her into helping with holiday dinners, though she’d flat out refused to have anything to do with what they called “preparing” the turkey. Raw meat is absolutely where she draws the line.
The summer she was nine, her grandfather had taken all the cousins fishing on his boat. Even though it was Meg’s very first fishing trip, somehow she knew better than to ask someone else to bait her hook for her. Worms were gross and slimy, but stabbing one on was a whole lot better than getting teased for being “a baby.”
Turned out the worm wasn’t the hard part after all. Grandpa docked the boat right before dinnertime and all the kids clambered out, sticky with sunscreen and lake water and saltwater taffy. Most of the cousins wandered up to the campsite, arguing over whether they’d play “ghost in the graveyard” before or after the s’mores that night.
Meg hadn’t; she'd stayed, transfixed, watching in horror as the older boys gutted the day’s catch. Billy, her oldest cousin, picked up the one fish Meg had managed to catch and deftly opened its belly with his knife.
Without warning, Meg had thrown up, violently, spectacularly. The fish was ruined, as was poor unlucky Billy’s favorite shirt.
She’d never gone fishing again. Never had another chance, really. By the next summer, Grandpa was too sick to even make the trip to the lake, and by Christmas, he was gone.
She remembers sitting under the tree at just-Grandma’s house, gently touching the gift tags that were all in Grandma’s handwriting alone. All the girls got sewing kits that year, even the little ones.
Meg can’t sew, either. The only time she ever tried was during the dreadful home economics class she had to take in the seventh grade. Her teacher called the project a “tissue holder,” – what it looked like was a weird little lopsided fabric thing you could stuff one of those purse packs of Kleenex into. Meg finally finished the stupid project (after ripping out all of the stitches at least twice), and didn’t bother to take it out of her locker until she cleaned it out at the end of the school year.
She’s never done any kind of hunting, either – not with a bow and arrow, not with a gun. The closest she had ever been to anything like a weapon is when she put away the clean silverware after Sunday dinners.
And none of those things matter when Meg Masters watches the Other use Meg’s own hands to expertly wield a knife. When the Other passes a blade across a stranger’s throat and lets Meg feel the slick warmth of blood rush over her hands.
Meg Masters is not afraid of the dark. She doesn’t remember ever having been. Meg supposed she never got a chance to find out, since there was always a nightlight in the butter-yellow room she and her sister shared until they were teenagers.
The haunted houses she’s been in have never frightened her, either. Honestly, she doesn’t understand how anyone could be scared by what was, after all, the fall fundraiser for the local Kiwanis club.
Movies never bothered Meg. Well. Except for The Ring; that one gave her nightmares for days.
Meg didn't find spiders and snakes scary, either. Bats, though; those things freaked the hell out of her. Not that she ever made excuses for that – the little bastards carried rabies, which was plenty of justification for not liking them. And Meg had always thought that anyone who wasn’t at least a little creeped out by clowns was, frankly, an idiot.
If it would help at all, in any way, Meg knows she’d sit in a cave full of bats next to a hundred clowns, all of them watching The Ring on an endless loop, if only she could forget even half of the memories the Other has made and then lodged in Meg’s brain.
It laughs at her, laughs aloud in Meg’s voice, when it realizes Meg is thinking that what it – she – they have done is hell. For a minute, Meg knows the Other is thinking about telling her exactly how off the mark she is. It doesn’t, though.
It just walks across the room and runs Meg’s fingers over the still-warm bones scattered over the altar.
Meg Masters is not a slut. It’s not like she’s not a prude, either; she just always believed ‘doing it’ should mean something.
Unlike too many of her friends, Meg remembers her first time with fondness. She and Jimmy Ashmore had, as she thought of it at the time, "gone all the way" the summer after their junior year of high school.
She still got a little warm when she thought about it: his uncertain hands, the messy kisses, how they’d almost rolled off the big futon in the room her mother insisted on calling the rec room, even though everyone knew it was just a regular old basement.
There have been a few other guys since Jimmy, and (at the time, anyway) she’d been mostly in love with each of them. Meg liked sex to be in the context of a stable relationship, and then she had no problem at all seeing it as a lot of fun.
The Other that controls Meg Masters’ body thinks fucking is a damned fine way to pass the time. When the Other isn’t using her to torture and kill people for reasons Meg never quite understands, it both uses her body and lets her body be used in all kinds of ways.
Behind her eyes, Meg watches her body do things she’d never considered doing – some things she’d never believed a human being could do. The Other enjoys making sure Meg is awake for everything as it happens. Meg feels the sting, the burn, the blood and stickiness dripping down her thighs, her face, her back. But Meg can’t make her body move, she can’t control it enough to wash it off afterwards. She wants to puke so badly she swears that she can almost feel her stomach contract.
The Other simply steers her over to a mirror and stares, forcing Meg to look at her own smiling, sticky face.
Meg Masters sits roped to a chair that’s smack in the middle of a drafty old ramshackle cabin. She is bleeding. She is broken. For the first time in a year, she is whole.
She is going to die, and it’s going to be soon. This doesn’t scare her. She’s spent too much of the past year praying to die, praying for it to please, just be over for the thought of her own death to be anything other than welcome. Meg isn’t sure she could bear to live any more, anyway – not after what she’s seen, what she’s been made to do.
But Meg is not dead yet. She inhales – oh, god, does it hurt – and opens her eyes.
Her head is buzzing, and it’s an effort to stay conscious, but she forces herself to focus on the men standing over her. Their names are Sam and Dean, she knows, though Meg herself has never actually met them.
And right now, knowing how much the Other that held her captive inside her own body for so long hated these men – they call themselves hunters, she thinks, but right now they’re her saviors - Meg realizes the gratitude she feels toward them is even stronger.
Sam and Dean evicted that thing, that Other. Sam and Dean gave Meg back her own self, and she feels the wetness gather in her eyes as she looks up at their faces. She wants to tell them how grateful she is, how much she owes them. They saved her – but all she can manage is an exhaled “thank you,” and she hopes they hear her.
Their hands are tender, now. They’re all gentleness and concern, loosening the ropes that bound her to the chair, carefully lifting her body (hers, only hers!) and setting her on the floor. The tall one – Sam – murmurs to her in a soothing voice, a voice that reminds her of the way her mother had cuddled and comforted Meg back when she was a little girl.
Meg thinks of her father. Her mother. Of all the people she loves and has ached for what feels like all the time in the world. It’s been twelve months, damn it - twelve months spent as a prisoner in her own body. It’s utterly bizarre, and completely horrible, and she’s going to make it mean something.
“A year,” Meg whispers. They have to know. She needs these men who saved her to know that nothing they think they know about Meg Masters has anything to do with who she really is.
Sam cradles her head, still trying to soothe her. She’d shake him off if she had the strength, because damn it, she wants him to listen. She grits out another couple of sentences, telling them how long it’s had her, the awful things she’s seen and done.
Meg can see the sorrow in their eyes; more than that, she can see the urgent, barely suppressed terror for their father. They love him, and he’s in danger, and they don’t know where he is or how to get to him.
She does. She also knows that it’s a trap for these men: she’s sure of that. But she’s just as sure that there is nothing that will keep these boys from their father.
And she knows that she’ll never see her own father (Daddy) again. A thought skitters through her head in an instant - maybe now she’ll get her second chance to go fishing with Grandpa. She wishes she could smile.
She prays her family knows she loves – loved – them, because she’s not going to get the chance to tell them.
But there are things she can tell other people.
Meg Masters takes a breath, fixes John Winchester’s sons in her gaze, and hopes she lasts long enough to help them find him.
~end~
morgan32’s quote: Meg - the real Meg - is a hell of a gal, isn't she? She must have been in agony, but she actually thanks Sam, and uses her last moments of life to try to help them.
The title comes from Christian Furchtegott Gellert: “Live as you would have wished to live when you are dying.”
Author Name: jenowago
Characters: Meg; OCs, both m and f; mentions of Sam, Dean, and the YED
Prompt used: for the
batoutofkansas challenge - #31: I got a taste of paradise/I'm never gonna let it slip away/I got a taste of paradise/It's all I really need to make me stay/Just like a child againWord Count: 1700, give or take a few.
Spoilers: Scarecrow, Dead Man’s Blood, Salvation, Devil’s Trap
A/N: Thanks from the bottom of my procrastinating heart to
dolimir_k for her excellent last-minute beta.Inspired in large part by something
morgan32 said in her bible entry for “Devil’s Trap” over in spnheavymeta. (The actual quote can be found after the story.)Rating: 14+, for violent imagery, slight reference to non-con, and sexual activity.
Meg Masters doesn’t like to cook. It’s not like she’s going to starve – she can fix herself something to eat, for Pete’s sake – but she doesn’t enjoy cooking the way some people do. Her mom and granny had always managed to guilt-trip her into helping with holiday dinners, though she’d flat out refused to have anything to do with what they called “preparing” the turkey. Raw meat is absolutely where she draws the line.
The summer she was nine, her grandfather had taken all the cousins fishing on his boat. Even though it was Meg’s very first fishing trip, somehow she knew better than to ask someone else to bait her hook for her. Worms were gross and slimy, but stabbing one on was a whole lot better than getting teased for being “a baby.”
Turned out the worm wasn’t the hard part after all. Grandpa docked the boat right before dinnertime and all the kids clambered out, sticky with sunscreen and lake water and saltwater taffy. Most of the cousins wandered up to the campsite, arguing over whether they’d play “ghost in the graveyard” before or after the s’mores that night.
Meg hadn’t; she'd stayed, transfixed, watching in horror as the older boys gutted the day’s catch. Billy, her oldest cousin, picked up the one fish Meg had managed to catch and deftly opened its belly with his knife.
Without warning, Meg had thrown up, violently, spectacularly. The fish was ruined, as was poor unlucky Billy’s favorite shirt.
She’d never gone fishing again. Never had another chance, really. By the next summer, Grandpa was too sick to even make the trip to the lake, and by Christmas, he was gone.
She remembers sitting under the tree at just-Grandma’s house, gently touching the gift tags that were all in Grandma’s handwriting alone. All the girls got sewing kits that year, even the little ones.
Meg can’t sew, either. The only time she ever tried was during the dreadful home economics class she had to take in the seventh grade. Her teacher called the project a “tissue holder,” – what it looked like was a weird little lopsided fabric thing you could stuff one of those purse packs of Kleenex into. Meg finally finished the stupid project (after ripping out all of the stitches at least twice), and didn’t bother to take it out of her locker until she cleaned it out at the end of the school year.
She’s never done any kind of hunting, either – not with a bow and arrow, not with a gun. The closest she had ever been to anything like a weapon is when she put away the clean silverware after Sunday dinners.
And none of those things matter when Meg Masters watches the Other use Meg’s own hands to expertly wield a knife. When the Other passes a blade across a stranger’s throat and lets Meg feel the slick warmth of blood rush over her hands.
Meg Masters is not afraid of the dark. She doesn’t remember ever having been. Meg supposed she never got a chance to find out, since there was always a nightlight in the butter-yellow room she and her sister shared until they were teenagers.
The haunted houses she’s been in have never frightened her, either. Honestly, she doesn’t understand how anyone could be scared by what was, after all, the fall fundraiser for the local Kiwanis club.
Movies never bothered Meg. Well. Except for The Ring; that one gave her nightmares for days.
Meg didn't find spiders and snakes scary, either. Bats, though; those things freaked the hell out of her. Not that she ever made excuses for that – the little bastards carried rabies, which was plenty of justification for not liking them. And Meg had always thought that anyone who wasn’t at least a little creeped out by clowns was, frankly, an idiot.
If it would help at all, in any way, Meg knows she’d sit in a cave full of bats next to a hundred clowns, all of them watching The Ring on an endless loop, if only she could forget even half of the memories the Other has made and then lodged in Meg’s brain.
It laughs at her, laughs aloud in Meg’s voice, when it realizes Meg is thinking that what it – she – they have done is hell. For a minute, Meg knows the Other is thinking about telling her exactly how off the mark she is. It doesn’t, though.
It just walks across the room and runs Meg’s fingers over the still-warm bones scattered over the altar.
Meg Masters is not a slut. It’s not like she’s not a prude, either; she just always believed ‘doing it’ should mean something.
Unlike too many of her friends, Meg remembers her first time with fondness. She and Jimmy Ashmore had, as she thought of it at the time, "gone all the way" the summer after their junior year of high school.
She still got a little warm when she thought about it: his uncertain hands, the messy kisses, how they’d almost rolled off the big futon in the room her mother insisted on calling the rec room, even though everyone knew it was just a regular old basement.
There have been a few other guys since Jimmy, and (at the time, anyway) she’d been mostly in love with each of them. Meg liked sex to be in the context of a stable relationship, and then she had no problem at all seeing it as a lot of fun.
The Other that controls Meg Masters’ body thinks fucking is a damned fine way to pass the time. When the Other isn’t using her to torture and kill people for reasons Meg never quite understands, it both uses her body and lets her body be used in all kinds of ways.
Behind her eyes, Meg watches her body do things she’d never considered doing – some things she’d never believed a human being could do. The Other enjoys making sure Meg is awake for everything as it happens. Meg feels the sting, the burn, the blood and stickiness dripping down her thighs, her face, her back. But Meg can’t make her body move, she can’t control it enough to wash it off afterwards. She wants to puke so badly she swears that she can almost feel her stomach contract.
The Other simply steers her over to a mirror and stares, forcing Meg to look at her own smiling, sticky face.
Meg Masters sits roped to a chair that’s smack in the middle of a drafty old ramshackle cabin. She is bleeding. She is broken. For the first time in a year, she is whole.
She is going to die, and it’s going to be soon. This doesn’t scare her. She’s spent too much of the past year praying to die, praying for it to please, just be over for the thought of her own death to be anything other than welcome. Meg isn’t sure she could bear to live any more, anyway – not after what she’s seen, what she’s been made to do.
But Meg is not dead yet. She inhales – oh, god, does it hurt – and opens her eyes.
Her head is buzzing, and it’s an effort to stay conscious, but she forces herself to focus on the men standing over her. Their names are Sam and Dean, she knows, though Meg herself has never actually met them.
And right now, knowing how much the Other that held her captive inside her own body for so long hated these men – they call themselves hunters, she thinks, but right now they’re her saviors - Meg realizes the gratitude she feels toward them is even stronger.
Sam and Dean evicted that thing, that Other. Sam and Dean gave Meg back her own self, and she feels the wetness gather in her eyes as she looks up at their faces. She wants to tell them how grateful she is, how much she owes them. They saved her – but all she can manage is an exhaled “thank you,” and she hopes they hear her.
Their hands are tender, now. They’re all gentleness and concern, loosening the ropes that bound her to the chair, carefully lifting her body (hers, only hers!) and setting her on the floor. The tall one – Sam – murmurs to her in a soothing voice, a voice that reminds her of the way her mother had cuddled and comforted Meg back when she was a little girl.
Meg thinks of her father. Her mother. Of all the people she loves and has ached for what feels like all the time in the world. It’s been twelve months, damn it - twelve months spent as a prisoner in her own body. It’s utterly bizarre, and completely horrible, and she’s going to make it mean something.
“A year,” Meg whispers. They have to know. She needs these men who saved her to know that nothing they think they know about Meg Masters has anything to do with who she really is.
Sam cradles her head, still trying to soothe her. She’d shake him off if she had the strength, because damn it, she wants him to listen. She grits out another couple of sentences, telling them how long it’s had her, the awful things she’s seen and done.
Meg can see the sorrow in their eyes; more than that, she can see the urgent, barely suppressed terror for their father. They love him, and he’s in danger, and they don’t know where he is or how to get to him.
She does. She also knows that it’s a trap for these men: she’s sure of that. But she’s just as sure that there is nothing that will keep these boys from their father.
And she knows that she’ll never see her own father (Daddy) again. A thought skitters through her head in an instant - maybe now she’ll get her second chance to go fishing with Grandpa. She wishes she could smile.
She prays her family knows she loves – loved – them, because she’s not going to get the chance to tell them.
But there are things she can tell other people.
Meg Masters takes a breath, fixes John Winchester’s sons in her gaze, and hopes she lasts long enough to help them find him.
~end~
morgan32’s quote: Meg - the real Meg - is a hell of a gal, isn't she? She must have been in agony, but she actually thanks Sam, and uses her last moments of life to try to help them. The title comes from Christian Furchtegott Gellert: “Live as you would have wished to live when you are dying.”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-04-20 01:10 am (UTC)This is just lovely. You're descriptions are vivid and real and I feel like I really get to know a character that was barely introduced on the show. You make me care about her. You make me pity her. She was raped and violated and made to do things she never dreamed. She was an innocent, the kind of person Sam and Dean work so hard to protect and you just really projected that beautifully.
She remembers sitting under the tree at just-Grandma's house, gently touching the gift tags that were all in Grandma's handwriting alone.
This line just killed me. My grandfather passed away in 2005 and I remember the first time my grandmother called me after he died and both their names popped up on my caller ID. I cried so hard I couldn't answer the phone. This line is so perfect at capturing what it feels like to lose someone you love. It's simple and yet it speaks volumes.
Great job. Beautiful fic!
no subject
Date: 2007-04-20 02:35 am (UTC)I'm so glad it worked for you. Of all the horrible things that happen to people in the 'SPN universe' (for lack of a better term) being possessed is hands-down the most awful, to me. I mean, it's rape and torture and kidnapping and so many other things all wrapped together - even if you live through it, how do you get past it, you know?
Thanks again for your kind, gracious comment - now I don't feel as though I've written in vain. *smiles*
no subject
Date: 2007-04-21 09:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-30 11:41 pm (UTC)I apologize for taking so long to respond - I don't want you to think your comment was unappreciated, because it most certainly isn't. I'm starting to understand the whole "feedback makes the world go 'round" thing. *g*
Thanks for taking the time to comment!
no subject
Date: 2007-04-21 11:13 pm (UTC)Great job. :D
no subject
Date: 2007-04-30 11:42 pm (UTC)So glad you enjoyed it, and I can't thank you enough for leaving a comment. Makes my whole day! (Sorry for the delay in responding, too.)
no subject
Date: 2007-04-29 07:54 pm (UTC)First of all, wow.
The entire last section is hard-hitting and perfect. The little pieces of dialog are perfectly inserted and the internal stuff is just so right it hurts.
I love all of the little details, pieces of Meg, that we get to see in the first few parts. I never gave much thought to what Meg might have been like before, but you've done a beautiful job showing her.
The demon taunting her is painful and eerie and very well done. I love this line in particular: It laughs at her, laughs aloud in Meg’s voice, when it realizes Meg is thinking that what it – she – they have done is hell. For a minute, Meg knows the Other is thinking about telling her exactly how off the mark she is. It doesn’t, though.
In all, this was a wonderfully written piece. Very nice use of the prompt.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-30 11:51 pm (UTC)The entire last section is hard-hitting and perfect. The little pieces of dialog are perfectly inserted and the internal stuff is just so right it hurts.
That makes all the hair-pulling I had to do with that part worth it. The first paragraph of that last section was the very first thing I wrote, and it came really easily - but the rest of it just wasn't working, at all. I ended up parking myself in front of the TV and rewatching that scene over and over until I could 'hear' what Meg wanted to say, if that doesn't sound too weird.
And I especially like hearing that I did a good job of showing who Meg was. A big part of the horror of being possessed, I'd think, is how it robs you of your self-ness, of who you fundamentally are. After I watched that scene the first time, I was stuck with the sense that "wow, we didn't even know who she really was," and I guess that's what stayed with me.
Okay! Sorry for rambling; it seems that lovely feedback like this just encourages me. Thanks so much for your comment.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-01 12:01 am (UTC)That happens to me all the time! A line of dialog or a particular scene will pop into my head and I'll sit down to write it and it'll all just flow really well, but then I'll stall out. Glad to know I'm not the only one who has that problem!
I ended up parking myself in front of the TV and rewatching that scene over and over until I could 'hear' what Meg wanted to say, if that doesn't sound too weird.
No, that's very cool. And obviously, it worked, because you pulled it off beautifully!
Thanks so much for your comment.
I can't let something like this go by without showing my appreciation for it! Thanks for writing! I look forward to seeing more from you! I'll keep an eye out!
Also, I just have to say that it really kind of sucks that stuff like this doesn't get read by very many people, especially when so much work goes into making it happen.
I was afraid my fic for this challenge was going to turn out that way, too. (It's Dean/Jo-but not in a happy way.) It just seems that anything outside of Sam/Dean, people pass right on by. Not that I don't love Sam/Dean, it's just unfortunate that stuff like this doesn't get the attention it deserves.
You mind if I rec this on my journal?
no subject
Date: 2007-05-01 03:17 am (UTC)I'd be honored if you did!
*runs off to find your non-happy Dean/Jo*
no subject
Date: 2007-05-02 10:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-02 01:36 pm (UTC)