Chapter Text
CLANG CLANG
The end-of-day bell rang loudly across the orchard, aided by the loudspeaker. Much has changed in 3000 years, Andi couldn’t help but think as she straightened up and surveyed her remaining row. ‘Halfway done with this one, the others can wait until tomorrow,’ she groaned, arching her back into her sore muscles and rubbing her shoulders. Almost done. She sighed, picked up her ladder, and made her way over to the next apple tree.
Half an hour later, with the warm satisfaction of having completed a day’s worth of hard work, she made her way back towards the main barn. The fall evening sun began it’s dip below the surrounding trees, golden rays catching the just-beginning-to-turn leaves of the orchard and casting a red-orange glow around her feet. Andi closed her eyes and breathed in the crisp air of the Michigan farm, rich with the smell of coming frost and soon-to-be cider. ‘Fall is my favorite season,’ she thought. Of course, she said that about whatever season she currently found herself in, but fall held something special. She stood with her eyes closed for a moment longer, reveling in the respite from the flashes of voices and images that came whenever she was around other people. A raven caw from a nearby tree startled her from her reverie. “Come on, Andi, clock out.” she groaned, goading herself back to the barn to return her equipment and wrap up the day.
Not many other hands were left out on the field at this late hour, just as she had hoped. Most of them were eager to get home; fall harvest was an exhausting, back-breaking time of year for seasonal workers like herself. Andi was all too happy to stay late, if it kept her safe from the inevitable headache of social interaction, both literal and figurative. Even so, this evening she felt on edge, a familiar itch at the base of her skull alerting her to impending danger. She paused, looking for stragglers. There - a figure strolling lazily back towards her from the barn. Frickin’ Jason. As if she didn’t have to put up with him enough as it is: his lewd remarks, his not-so-subtle staring, his roaming hands. She had known men like him for her entire life, men who believed they owned everything they saw. She redoubled her stride and arced toward the main barn door, silently cursing the awkward ladder that slowed her movement and filled her hands. Eyes down, ears listening intently, she heard his footsteps coming nearer.
The inevitable flash came: she saw Jason laying on the cold, grassy ground, glassy eyes gazing sightless at the sky, a pool of blood under his back slowly advancing towards his ears. Familiar laughter bounced around the inside of her skull; Andi automatically pressed her four left fingers against her thumb - tactile centering to bring her back to the present.
“Andi! Wait up, girl!”
“Jason, this isn’t going to end well for you.” she replied, keeping her voice even.
“Aww, come on, is that any way to talk to someone like me? I just wanna talk to ya! Ya know, I was watching you today. You sure do have a way of moving up and down that ladder. Makes a man wonder what else you’d be good at climbing, if you get me.”
Andi rolled her eyes as she turned around. “I’m not interested, Jason.”
“Oh come on, baby, ya don’t know what you’re missin!” he stepped forward into her space. “Give it a try. I’m gonna make you feel real good.”
“I’m going to give you one last chance, and pretend I didn’t hear that.” Andi stepped away, heading again to the barn door.
“Oh no you don’t.” he said, grabbing onto the ladder she held. “You see, you don’t really get to shimmy around the field like that and not expect a man like me not to do something about it.” He gave the ladder a yank, pulling Andi off balance, almost knocking her to the ground. Apples came spilling out of the basket on her back, bouncing and rolling over the grass.
Andi leaned into the pull, letting the ladder fly from her grasp and clatter to the ground. “Jason, what the heck?” she cried out, putting a false tremolo into her voice. Crouching down and taking off her basket as if to begin collecting the fallen apples, she looked up at him, making her eyes as wide and innocent as she could in order to keep his attention on her face, not her hand. “What did you do that for?” She slipped the tips of her fingers into her boot, surreptitiously pulling out her slender boot knife from its sheath and turning it out of sight behind her arm.
“Oh baby, I’m just trying to show you what ya do to me.” he leered down at her, pushing her shoulders back into the dirt.
Andi let it happen, keeping her eyes wide and trying to look at scared as possible.
It all happened quickly, like it had every time before. Well, almost every time. Jason shifted his weight on top of her, keeping his leering eyes on her face. As soon as his back was exposed and in range, Andi moved her hand with a lightning speed that betrayed her years of experience, plunging her knife into his back just below his rib cage, expertly angling the long blade upwards to pierce his stomach.
“Oh no.” she said dryly, “you’ve got me.” Throwing all of her harvest-earned muscles into a sideways thrust, she drew her knife between two vertebrae, severing sinew and spinal cord in one smooth motion.
Jason’s eyes went wide with shock and disbelief. His mouth open in a frozen silent cry, he twitched as the life began to ebb out of him.
“I told you this wouldn’t end well for you.” Andi reminded him, withdrawing her knife and pushing his body off of hers with a strength that would have surprised Jason if every remaining live nerve in his body hadn’t been screaming in his ears. “But they never listen. Nobody ever listens.” She crouched over his form, watching his eyes jump back and forth in futile desperation. “Poor, stupid bastard. Let me make this a bit easier on you, though I doubt you appreciate the gesture. Much less deserve it.” She drew the knife across his throat, opening it to the fall breeze. A single breathy gurgle came from the new wound, and his body lay still.
Andi’s headache faded, and she pulled herself back. Her heart was racing, and a familiar mixture of regret, grief, anger, guilt, and fear raged through her system. “Damn it, Jason.” she muttered to herself, running her fingers through her hair. ‘Deep breaths, Andi. Deep breaths. You’re ok. It’s over. Breathe.’
As clarity returned, she felt the warm stickiness on her forehead and in her hair. “Fuck!” she exclaimed, looking down at her bloody fingers and the thick, wine colored stain on her brown t-shirt and jacket. Quickly she looked around, constructing a plan of action. There, a spigot on the side of the barn. She probably had about fifteen minutes before the harvest supervisor came out to the barn to collect the time cards. Then, if he noticed the body immediately, half an hour for the cops to arrive from town. By then she could be at her campsite, ready to hitchhike to the next city over, where there was a bus depot. ‘Go.’
She sprinted over to the spigot and dropped her knife, opening the tap and spilling frigid water over her fingers, watching the blood peel away from her skin. She grabbed a few handfuls of water, dumping it over the handle of the spigot to wash away the smear her hands had left before grabbing her knife and rinsing that too. Deftly drying it on the grass, she tucked it back into her sheath, pushed herself smoothly from the dirt, and launched into an all-out run into the nearby woods, carefully putting the barn and apple trees between her and the other farm buildings to avoid being spotted.
Startled, the raven took off, following her trail away from the orchard.
Weaving in and out of the trees, planting her feet firmly as she nimbly leapt over roots and hollows, she tracked herself on the map in her head. ‘When the farm is out of sight, head left, cross the road, and you’ll be set. Five minutes to change, leave the bloody clothes there. They will know it’s you anyway. Then off to the highway. Wait until the cops pass, flag down a car heading towards the city. Buy the next ticket for the next bus, and you’re home free. What’s one more move?’ she said to herself.
An hour later, she was at the ticket window, handing over more than $200 of her hard-earned cash. The hit hurt - that was almost all she had left of last week’s earnings. Seasonal work didn’t pay much, and it paid less if you asked the supervisors to not ask questions. That was the price of not leaving a trail. In the end it was worth it; she made enough in the summers and falls to grab a motel room when it rained and a bus ticket down south for the winter, where she cleaned houses and washed dishes until the snow had melted and she could return to the less-populated north. As long as she kept moving, nobody took much notice of her.
“One ticket to Austin, TX. Here ya go, bus leavin’ in seven minutes. Glad ya got here when ya did, ya know?” the old man behind the counter smiled at her, rheumy eyes watering.
Andi forced herself to smile back in that cheerful way midwesterners had. “Me too!” She said brightly, moving away from the counter before he could say anything else. She grabbed her duffel with its one remaining clean change of clothes, thick blanket, tent, and a day's worth of canned goods. Tomorrow was supposed to have been grocery day. Sighing, she handed her duffel over to the attendant and climbed onto the bus. Thankfully, there weren’t many people on it - a late bus on a weekday. She chose a seat in the middle, several rows away from her nearest fellow traveller, and leaned back in the chair. Visions, meaningless without context, danced in her head; names of strangers, terrified voices, sobbing faces, the stuttering final breaths of elders dying alone in their beds filled her mind unbidden. Andi steadied her breath, and sang quietly to herself as she waited again for the visions to pass. She tapped her fingers on her temples and rocked back and forth gently, unaware of the sideways glances the other passengers levelled at her.
Soon they were on the road, and each passenger settled themselves into the long sleep of the overnight drive.
Andi walked through familiar stone hallways, feeling every seam and divot of the pavers through her thin slippers as she approached her lady’s chamber. She knocked firmly on the wooden door.
“Isa? My lady? Are you ready to dress?” to Andi’s surprise, the only response was the same light, manic giggling. Confused and worried, Andi rattled the door handle, but it was still latched. “Lady Isabella? My lady? Isa! Unlatch the door!”
The giggling continued, drifting in and out of song. The door wouldn’t budge.
Fear grew heavy in Andi’s stomach. Was she too late? It wasn’t supposed to happen until after Isabella’s wedding, still a week away. What had changed? “Isa! Isa! Please, Isa, open the door! It’s me! It’s Cassandra! Please let me in!” she pounded desperately on the unyielding wood. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the door opened, revealing a slight girl in her late teens, dark hair spilling around her shoulders and blood soaking the front of her shift.
“He loves me, he loves me not, he loves like love I long forgot…’ chanted Isabella nonsensically, swaying on her feet.
“Oh, Isa…” Andi groaned, looking over Isa’s shoulder at the slumped body of the duke on the bed, his blood spilling over the covers onto the stone floor. She reached out and gathered her friend in her arms, disregarding the blood that now soaked into her dress as well. “I should have been with you. I was supposed to be with you! I’m so sorry Isa, I’m so sorry! I thought I could spare you!”
Andi woke in a start to find that it was morning, and the bus was pulling into a Chicago station. Shaking off the bad dream, she smiled up at the tall buildings. “Hello, old friend.” she whispered to the city as she switched buses, steeling herself for several more hours on the road.
She stayed on the bus route for the rest of the day, eventually disembarking at a random Missouri border town with the larger crowd, who were all desperate for some dinner. It was too easy to convince the weary bus driver to let her get her bag from the cargo hold under the pretext of retrieving her wallet and then, as he made a beeline for the bathroom, close the hold and sneak behind a nearby building. She waited almost an hour for the bus to leave, but after it finally did she slung her bag across her shoulder and made her way to the highway.
Two days of empty hitchhiking later, the warning prickle at the base of her neck had finally begun to fade, signalling that she had sufficiently covered her trail. She thanked her driver and looked around at the new middle-of-nowhere town in which she had found herself. “Lebanon, Kansas. Well, let’s see how this goes.”
She walked down the worn road, looking around at the sparse trees and rundown buildings. Finally she spotted a market with a few dumpsters out back, cardboard boxes piled haphazardly around them. She ducked into the alley, ripping off a piece of cardboard and scratching a message onto the makeshift sign: Starving, Will Work for Food.
Grabbing an empty paper coffee cup, she positioned herself on the street corner, pulling the hood of her sweatshirt over her head, trying to look as sad and scared as possible. Though she would never admit it to anyone, much less herself, she didn’t have to dig far to reach those feelings. Her vagrant lifestyle was lonely and terrifying - no matter how used to it she got, or how much she hardened her heart and steeled her nerves, her private ghosts came out to play most nights when the air was cold and the whiskey weak.
Few people passed her, even fewer stopped to drop change in her cup. Nobody spoke to her. Occasionally she would get a whiff of a vision - the usual petty griefs of an unfulfilling, boring, apple pie life: divorces, family members passing, car accidents, peaceful death after peaceful death. ‘Disgusting, vapid, and meaningless’ she muttered to herself. But gods, if it wasn’t all she wanted, even after all this time. A quiet life, maybe with her own farm...but it never worked. People always found her, asked questions, tried to know her, and before long feared and hated her, hurt her, drove her away.
Andi rocked back and forth, pressing her left fingers into her thumb again, breathing deeply. She glanced up as a tall, dusty-brown haired man in a suit walked by, curiously glancing back at her. He kept walking towards the market, then paused, seemed to think better of it, and walked back towards her corner, pulling a couple bills out of his wallet.
“Keep the change.” he quipped with a rakish smile as he stooped to tuck them into her cup.
As he bent down, she was suddenly hit with a nauseating wave of visions: screaming, black eyes, demon smoke, ghosts, terrified strangers, a brother’s worried face, and finally two brilliant green eyes, weary, surrounded by deep wrinkles, staring defiantly at a foggy attacker as the life faded slowly from them. Through all of it, one name pounded bright as liquid steel into her mind. She gasped for air as the vision dropped her suddenly, and she turned towards the man walking jauntily to the market’s front door.
“Dean Winchester, I presume” she said as she stood, letting her hood fall back from her face. “It’s been decades since I’ve met someone with a future like yours.”