spn fic "all you need to know" (Women of Spn: Gwen)

[fannishliss]

title: "all you need to know"
author: fannishliss
length: 700 words
rating, pairing: G, none
warnings, spoilers: none, spoilers for general s6
note:  part of my Women of Supernatural project.

summary:  How did Samuel Campbell make himself known to Gwen and the others?

~*0*~

The trouble with having a homebase is home invasions.

You can have the best security system in the world, and given enough time, someone will crack it -- especially if they’re human, and your defenses are all laid out in salt and iron and demon-repelling sigils. Especially if  the person who helped design those defenses is the one who means to get in.

But when you open the door after a three-week hunt, you’re ready to relax.  You’re just thinking about the bed where you washed the sheets yourself; the frying pan your mama seasoned years before you were born; the library and the books you’re planning to re-read. 

You’re not thinking that your long lost legendary relative has made himself at home in your cousin’s favorite easy chair.

To his credit, you hear Mark’s safety click off behind you a second after your own. 

“Not a very nice welcome,” the old man says.  You recognize his eyes from the pictures and from the mirror.  He’s definitely a Campbell, unless he’s a monster.  You’re pulling the silver from your hind pocket with your left hand even while you’re still steady as a rock with the .45 in your right. He doesn’t flinch.

“Silver, holy water -- give me what you got.”   His voice is so much like your Dad’s that it throws you, the little mannerisms so much like the crystallized memories of your own Grandpa, his brother: sitting on the old man’s lap as he leafed through the family grimoire, repeating after him the names of the sigils as he pointed out their cruxes, the erasures that would nullify them. 

Your gun wavers and you see it in his eyes.  You tighten up again.  You hand off the knife to Mark as he comes around, leaving you a clear line of fire as he cautiously approaches the sharp-eyed man in the easy chair. 

He casually holds out his left arm and Mark cuts it.  Everyone breathes a little easier as Mark dribbles holy water over the wound.  Nothing.  He really is a man-- but still, he’s a man returned, almost forty years dead.

The night comes down around you like a dream.  You’re sitting at the kitchen table, tipping Dinty Moore’s out of the old enamel pot onto the chipped blue tinware soup plates Mama used to set the table with, pulling a sleeve of saltines out of the old tin Premium box.

His eyes fix on the box, and you remember from childhood the name Deanna scrawled here and there on cracked and yellowing pieces of masking tape. He used to come here with his wife, his daughter Mary. She died the year you were born.

Her death had demon and deal written all over it -- after she’d told her uncles in no uncertain terms to keep the Campbells away from her boys, like she’d somehow gotten away from the things that go bump. Stupid. The Campbells were one of the oldest hunting families around, with generations of gathered lore under their belts, but the girl had wanted out, so whatever.  News trickled along the vine about two rawboned cousins, hunting like rabble:  Winchesters.  You pretty much ignored them as requested until they tried to pull the world down on everyone’s shoulders, and now you’ll do what you have to do, if it comes to that. 

You’re sitting at the table the old man probably sat at with Grandpa when they were boys, listening while Mark asks guarded questions.  Samuel claims he doesn’t know, he can’t remember.  He thinks he was in Heaven, or at least, he can’t recall the alternative, which is probably best for everyone, and yeah, that holy water, so that at least checks out.

Your mind wanders as you remember how Mama and Dad and Grandpa had built this place back up after Mary had left it almost a shack, every iron nail blessed, salt in all the paint, runes and sigils carved on every sill and lintel, sacred herbs outside like a shaman’s pharmacopeia. It’s a Campbell stronghold, and the old man is here because he’s a Campbell. 

You look into Samuel’s dark eyes, and he looks back. He’s family, and that’s all you’ve ever known, and all you need to know.

Comments

[borgmama1of5.livejournal.com]

Excellent backstory for Samuel's return, and I like Gwen's characterization in this.

[fannishliss.livejournal.com]

thanks very much! I'm hoping we'll see more of Gwen... I think it would be interesting to be in her position, as a lifelong member of a Hunting clan -- she sees the world through very different eyes than the Winchesters, who were kept somewhat outside Hunting circles by John, initially through his ignorance but later because he feared that Hunters would go after Sam. It's very interesting to me how few Hunters Sam n Dean knew as kids, because John screened who he would work with -- and apparently the Campbells were willing to stay clear of them as well.

[tifaching.livejournal.com]

Excellent picture of Gwen, but it doesn't make me like her any better. Maybe she can't help her heritage, help her upbringing, but the way the Campbells look down on the Winchesters just rankles. Sam and Dean are family too. Hunters too. Just like Samuel.

I like the fact that they're at a family place, that things that were Deanna's are there. Great look at Samuel's homecoming.

[fannishliss.livejournal.com]

thanks very much for reading and commenting! Gwen's not very likeable, expecially with how snide she was when she first met Dean... I can't help but feel that as a Campbell, she'd probably heard tell of them throughout her life, probably not in the best of lights. In this story, what came to me was that the place we visited in 5.13 was a Campbell stronghold and would have reverted to Gwen and her relatives -- and it's naturally where Samuel would go. :)

I'm hoping we'll see more of Gwen.