Wrappings of Gauze
Danielle Frances Ducrest

Disclaimer: Supernatural belongs to Eric Kripke and the CW. Dead Like Me belongs to MGM. Any copyright infringements were not intended. This story was written for entertainment and not for profit.

Author’s Note: This is a short fic where I try my hand at the first person limited, immediate present tense style that includes an abundance of conjunctions that I’ve seen often in fan fiction nowadays. I’m not sure what it’s called, if it’s got a name. It’s not my usual style, but I had fun trying it out.

Spoilers and Timing: There are general spoilers for Dead Like Me and Supernatural, with slightly more specific spoilers for season four of Supernatural.

Summary: Dead Like Me/Supernatural. George thought she’d seen it all…then a freak tornado picks her up and deposits her in a whole other county, where two men she dubs Glaring Hunk and Prince Charming have got a job for her.

*****

The world becomes a blur of speed and wind and nothing else, and she’s screaming and cursing until the wind rips the saliva from her throat and her mouth feels like it’s on fire, it’s so sore.

She drops, slaps, flops against a hardwood floor. The air is knocked out of her even as Reaper healing is fixing her throat. She blinks so hard tears come out, and she feels so heavy after that wild ride that she can’t move.

She groans. She can’t manage anything else.

Hands on her arms help her to her feet. The room tilts unpleasantly, her head hates everything and then she is puking…right on someone, who starts cursing.

Even as she stops throwing up her Der Waffle Haus waffles, Reaper healing takes over again, the room stops spinning and she can see and think. “What the fuck?” she says, and this time, the words come out the way they’re supposed to, though a little slurred. She pulls her arms free of the hands holding them and manages to stay on her feet, though her legs are a little wobbly and she might just fall over again. In fact, there she goes…

“Woah!” The man on her right catches her again—she dubs him Prince Charming in her head--while the man on her left glares at her and wipes at the puke on his clothes with a rag. The hand not holding the rag is holding a thick, leather bound book. Prince Charming guides her to a chair, and she doesn’t resist.

She wipes her mouth with her jacket sleeve. Prince Charming hands her a glass of water, and she gulps it down. Some of it spills on her shirt. She makes a face and waits for herself to stop shaking before she tries another sip. It’s warm in here, but she doesn’t think she’s coordinated at the moment to peel off her jacket.

“What the fuck is going on?” she demands. She still feels shaky, but she’s got a good handle on the situation now. She’s in a room in a house that screams “haunted” in a cliché way—too bad it’s nowhere near Halloween and she knows that places can be haunted. The paint is peeling on the walls, dust covers surfaces so well that she can see the dust layers from across the room, spider webs occupy corners. She knows from colliding with it that the wooden floor is sturdy, but it looks like it’ll collapse. No one lives here, not unless their last name is Addams.

Prince Charming is a tall one with long hair and cheekbones to make models weep. The Glaring Hunk is shorter, though still tall, and isn’t bad to look at, either. Both of them are older than her, though not by much, she’s guessing. She’s twenty-four, now, though her appearance is eternally stuck at 18. “Who the fuck are you? Where the fuck am I?” she asks.

Prince Charming and Glaring Hunk exchange glances. “I’m Sam,” says Prince Charming. “This is my brother, Dean.”

He pauses, waiting. She eyes him warily. “George,” she says.

“So, you’re a Reaper?” asks Glaring Hunk, aka Dean. He’s not glaring anymore, hasn’t since he got the worst of the puke off his pants. But he’s watching her carefully.

“What the fuck question is that?” George says, ‘cause she’s not about to admit what she is to a couple of strangers in an abandoned house. She’s starting to freak out. She doesn’t know how she got here. She was in downtown Seattle when a freak tornado came and swept her here, and that sentence sounds wrong in her head. “Where the fuck is this?”

Sam says, “You’re in Franks, Washington.”

“I’m where?” George jumps to her feet. She doesn’t fall over. “What the fuck did you do to me, you asshole?”

“We summoned you here to help us,” says Dean. “Can you?”

“I-”

She sees the objects lying on a table. They’re small things: a jewelry box, a paint brush, a hammer. All made at least partly of wood, though she thinks of that later. What she notices now is something else. There are white things around each object, like layers of see-through gauze wrapped tightly around the box, the brush and the hammer, separately.

The gauze is whispering in illegible, half heard sentences, and she realizes it’s not gauze at all: it’s a soul, a different one wrapped tightly around each object.

“What the fuck?” It’s impossible, and her eyes bulge out of her head. But she knows what she sees. She can’t make out features—the souls are too tightly wrapped around the objects—but she recognizes the white glow tinged with blue, the translucent, vague, two-dimensional quality a soul adopts the longer it’s been dead and hasn’t gone on to its lights. These souls have been in this state for a long time. Too long.

She feels like throwing up again, though out of repulsion this time. Furious, she stalks to the table and peers down at the objects.

“We think a soul has been bound to each object,” says Sam, which proves he can’t see the souls, just the objects. If he can see what George can see, he wouldn’t be saying, ‘We think.’ “Can you free them?” he asks.

George stares from him to Dean. They meet her gaze, completely serious. She looks down at the objects and her brain freezes. None of this can be real. She must be in Seattle, still; maybe this is all a dream. She isn’t waking up. Maybe she is supposed to see this to the end, except she has no idea how.

She stares at the paintbrush, in the center. She picks it up. Her hand tingles with contact with the soul. A shimmering light flows through the soul at the contact—but nothing else happens. She can’t reap this soul; it’s already been reaped.

She finds an edge. The soul is so old that it is truly two-dimensional now, truly as flat as gauze. She starts to unwrap the soul from the brush. The soul material sticks, and she has to pull a little to force it to come undone. She doesn’t really know what she’s doing—she’s acting mostly on instinct—but it is working. The soul unwraps like the gauze she’d thought it was until it is wrapped loosely around her hand instead of the brush

She drops the brush on the table. It’s just a brush now. She shakes the soul off her hand. It’s all folded and creased, so she works on unfolding it.

“Dude, what is she doing?” Dean whispers to Sam.

She looks over at them. They’re watching her hands, but she doubts they can see the soul she is holding. Finally, she has the soul unfolded and unrolled; it’s flat and lifeless now, without features to it at all, just a glowing outline of a humanoid shape. The interior glows smoky white, and a blue contour provides an outline.

She shakes the soul. Again, she’s not sure what she’s doing, not on a conscious level. She grabs the soul by its feet and shakes it.

The soul inflates. Two-dimensional feet become three in her hands. With a yelp of surprise, her brain takes over from instinct and she drops the feet.

The soul stands up. He looks normal, now; solid and as real looking as George, Sam and Dean, with colors and hair and skin and clothes, the whole shebang.

“Woah,” says Dean. He and Sam take a step back. “Hi, there.”

The soul is a man about mid-thirties. He’s wearing a smock and jeans covered in paint flecks. He’s a painter, an artist. He spots the brush. He reaches for it, but his hand passes through it.

This, George can deal with. It’s the first familiar thing she’s seen all afternoon; she knows how to talk to three-dimensional ghosts. “Do you really wanna touch that again?” she asks, sarcasm lacing every syllable.

He lets his hand fall to his side. “No. I guess not.”

George nods. “Give me a minute. I’ve gotta free the other two.”

She turns to the soul-wrapped box and soul-wrapped hammer, unwraps and unfolds the souls and makes them inflate. The box soul is a female teenager with lots of eye shadow and dyed black hair. The hammer soul is a girl, maybe eight years old, with a toy tool set strapped to her incorporeal belt.

“Damnit,” Dean mutters when he sees the girls, both too young. George gets it. One of the first souls she ever reaped was a little girl. She hated it. At least this girl with the tool set is already dead; George will never see her alive.

George turns away from the two people still living and looks at the souls. She doesn’t have post-its for them, but she’s apparently their Reaper for this afternoon. “You all know what to do,” she says. “Go to the light.”

They do. Each soul’s lights appear one after the other. Dean and Sam’s gazes stay locked on George and the souls; they see the souls, but they don’t see the souls’ lights.

The painter’s lights resolve into a room covered from floor to ceiling in canvas sheets. There are cans of paint and paintbrushes in a stack to one side. In the middle, a smiling woman sits at a dining table covered in food: a welcome feast. The painter smiles and steps inside, where George sees him embrace the woman before they and the scene disappear.

The eight-year-old girl steps through her portal to the front door of a homey looking house. She opens the house’s door and runs in, unafraid.

The teenager’s lights show a field of strawberry vines. A smile breaks on the girl’s gloomy face, and she dashes into the vines.

The lights fade away, and George is left in an abandoned house with two men she doesn’t know. She smiles, her best I’m-totally-fine-with-everything-and-am-not-still-wondering-how-I-got-the-fuck-here smile. “So. What next?”

“The souls are gone, right?” Dean glances around like he expects one of them to reappear.

She nods. “Off to their lights.”

The next thing to do is, apparently, salt and burn the objects. Dean grabs the hammer and Sam takes the brush and the box. George follows them outside and watches as Sam sprinkles a gas can full of salt over the objects, Dean pours on propane and Sam lights a match. The objects take several minutes to burn, and then they are charred piles of ash.

George’s stomach takes that moment to announce it is hungry. Dean and Sam look down at the growls. “So…reapers eat?” Dean asks.

“Yep,” she says. “And you guys are buying.” Dean looks taken aback, and she crosses her arms. “You’re the ones who brought me here without even having the decency to ask first, and you made me throw up my breakfast. You owe me food.”

Sam smirks. “She’s got us there, Dean.”

Dean glares at him, but he gestures to a car parked beside the house. The house looks worse on the outside, and though the muscle car is old, it looks to be straight off the assembly line when compared to the house. “Sweet,” she says, which earns her a happy grin from Dean.

They walk over, George and Dean in the lead with Sam just behind. George goes straight for the front passenger seat. Sam makes a face but squeezes into the back. She figures out she’s messed with their routine in a big way; they’re both uncomfortable on the ride to the closest iHop. By the time they reach the parking lot, she can’t stand it anymore. She climbs out first and takes a breath of relief free of the tense air inside the car.

Dean managed to wipe off the puke well enough that there are no obvious stains on his clothes. The iHop waiters don’t bat an eye as they walk in, even though it’s 3 in the morning and the other three patrons in the place look like they’re half asleep while George, Dean and Sam are far too awake.

The waffles she orders aren’t as good as Der Waffle Haus’s own. She piles on a ton of syrup, and then she ends up holding a fork in the air and gaping, waffles forgotten, as Dean and Sam explain exactly how they came across three souls bound to objects. It involves demons—fucking demons!—and actual fucking Seals of the fucking Apocalypse, and no, they are not shitting her.

It’s one of the craziest nights she’s had since she died. She wonders if any of her fellow Reapers would believe her if she told them a word.

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