Joan Ritter ✞ Mary Winchester (leftheaven) wrote in thereincarnates, @ 2017-06-25 01:43:00 |
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Entry tags: | joan ritter |
Who: Joan Ritter
What: She didn't expect hunting to be this lonely.
Where: Her home, Galena, Illinois
When: Sunday, June 25, about 2AM.
Warnings: Mentions of violence and child death.
When she'd started out Joan had thought that hunting would be like any military op, or at least like working a case as a police officer. You either had an objective or you went in looking for clues to lead you to one. You took care of the problem. Then you were done. Simple. Maybe not easy but always simple; they weren't always the same thing. Sometimes the simplest and most straightforward thing in the world could be nearly impossible to do. Not a fun lesson to learn but Joan knew it now as well as she knew how to shoot a gun—something else deceptively simple. It was a simple mechanic but when it came to actually squeezing the trigger with another person (or something that looked like another person) on the other side of it... there was nothing in the world harder than that sometimes. Even when you knew it was the right thing to do.
Not everything was clear when you hunted. Not always. Not when you were hunting for monsters that you'd always thought were just stories that someone made up to scare their kids into being good. It turned out that it wasn't the parts of them that were monsters that were complicated. It was the parts that were all too human, the parts that Joan could empathize with. Those were the parts that tripped her up. And when there was no one but her out there making the calls, if she made the wrong one because she saw a little too much of herself in a monster then there wasn't anybody to pull her back in and make it all simple again.
Joan hadn't gone into the night thinking that she was going to be salting and burning a child's bones.
The water was hot enough to scald her but he could still swear she smelled gasoline on her skin. She hadn't touched the blood on her forehead yet; it was dried there. It pulled at her skin when she turned her head. The ghost had thrown her into a wall when she realized how small it was and froze. It didn't make it any less dangerous, being a child. When someone did things to a child like had been done to the one that she'd laid to rest... kids could hate just as much as anyone else. Could be just as angry as any adult. More, sometimes. When a child felt something, it was all or nothing. Not that Joan knew from experience. She'd never had a son or a daughter that would swear up and down that they hated her and mean it with all of their heart for that moment even if they'd change their mind by morning.
Her coworkers had kids though. She heard all about them and she laughed along where she was supposed to and pretended that everything was alright. And Joan had seen kids. Other kids. Kids that had suffered through horrible things and lived to try to bounce back from it somehow. Kids who hadn't made it out the other side. Maybe she'd have to put them to rest too someday, those little bodies that someone should have taken better care of. Not many of them, fortunately. Galena wasn't big enough for her to have seen many of them. It was mostly kids in countries on the other side of the ocean that Joan was thinking of. Too thin. Rawboned. Casualties of a war that they'd never asked for.
He'd been so young. The boy that she'd dug up that night. He'd been barely six and someone had done things to him that made him hate so much that he hadn't been able to find peace even in death.
Joan scrubbed at her hands a little harder. They were raw now too. Red. She wasn't sure how much of that was the heat and how much of it was how long she'd been trying to wash off a scent that was only there in her mind. All she'd wanted was to give him a hug and tell him that it would be okay; it would be a lie though. The kind of lie that adults told kids all the time. She wondered how many times someone else had told him that when he was still alive, that it was all going to be okay. She wondered if he'd believed them right up until the end.
She wondered if it would be easier if she had someone else that had been there with her. She didn't need to talk about it. She didn't want to talk about it. That was the last thing that Joan wanted to do. Someone else knowing though. Someone else seeing those small fragile bones and telling her that she was doing the right thing... maybe that would have helped. Maybe it wouldn't have but at least then she'd have known. A burden shared is a burden halved. Something her mom always said. Joan had rolled her eyes at it once before she started piling up the burdens that no one else could take part of onto their shoulders. Her husband. Their baby. A little boy with no one who'd loved him enough to keep him safe.
Slowly, with hands that hurt as much as her bruised and bloodied forehead, Joan turned the taps off. She should get a shower. Wash the rest of the dried sweat off. Her parents would expect her for church the next morning. Her whole body felt too heavy to keep holding it up any longer. She'd miss Sunday school, she decided. Even an hour less of listening to someone talk about how good a God that could let a child linger on after his death in even more pain... it was worth the disappointed look that she'd get. Someday soon maybe she wouldn't even go at all.
Another look at herself in the mirror, at dark circles under green eyes and skin almost as pale as the ghost she'd hunted. Another moment to breathe, and then Joan went to bed. Alone.