Chapter Text
Singer Auto: her home away from home. Every other week, something new was off with Grampa Alastair's vintage (of the rusted through variety) BMW, and so, every other week, it was Meg's responsibility to take the bloody thing to the auto shop.
No one could get the man a new car. That was absurd, an act even more unthinkable than letting him actually drive, Mister Glaucoma with a side of Mild Dementia. He couldn't operate the vehicle, but it'd be heartless not to fix it; it was one of the last joys in his life, along with whatever projects he had going on in his shed. (No one asked. He didn’t tell. )
Did bring up the question of how things kept going wrong with it, though.
It was a mystery, but not one that Meg cared enough to solve. It didn’t matter in the end. Even if she found a way to cut off the head of the Pop Pop Problem, another would grow into its place; no matter how fast the problems bred, or what the particulars were, if there was a mess, it was up to Meg to clean it up. The benefit of being the oldest child, supposedly.
She wasn’t actually the oldest.
Everything worked out in the end, though. It wasn’t a benefit.
(Should’ve signed up for the military, like Abaddon. For years, Meg thought that her cousin was a moron, but as it turned out, she -- well, she was still a moron. One who managed to make a better call than Meg did, and escaped Lawrence. The shame burned.)
For those reasons, and more, including God’s hatred of Meg, specifically, as well as her hatred of herself, she was once again in her least favourite place on the planet, waiting for the interaction she dreaded even more than running the register on BOGO Fries-days.
There wasn’t a single thing to appreciate about Singer Auto.
If somebody held her at gunpoint over it, she might say the dinky chairs didn’t break under her ass, or that the classic rock station had a clear idea of what their audience was like, playing the same twenty-odd songs in rotation, or, maybe, that she liked having to shake the vending machine to get her snacks, because it broke up the tedium of waiting around.
She might even admit that Bobby Singer himself seemed like an alright human being, if she had to.
But there was no power on this Earth that could make her say anything pleasant about Dean Winchester. She’d rather be shot.
Was he a decent guy? Probably. Maybe. Someone, with enough lack of self-respect and/or situational awareness, might think that he was an alright guy. Possibly. Meg knew better. As she saw it, anyone would hate him, if they had to put up with him the way she had to.
It wasn’t anything he did, or said. That was the problem in a nutshell.
Fucker gave her the silent treatment. Never said a word to her, as if they were in some Regency-era production, and he was a maiden with no better option to tell her how deeply she had wronged him. On good days, he might nod when she walked in the door.
Generally, though, he didn’t.
Never, not once, did he so much as give her a single 'good afternoon', and, honestly, she didn’t begrudge him for that, too much. She hated plastering fake smiles for the customers. She daydreamed too often of their ‘the customer is always right’ heads exploding for her to hold a lack of forced friendliness against him.
If he was simply a surly cuss, she could’ve deal with it.
If he needed to lay out options, he told Meg’s grandfather, the man who couldn’t reliably confirm which century it was. He called over her shoulder to thank the man, when Meg paid the bill. Sometimes, Dean brought back food from his lunch break, and shared with Alastair, the biggest, brightest, fakest smile on his face, while the geriatric rambled on about the war, or how all the children except Abaddon disappointed him, or his dear friend, Luc, some guy he lost contact with half a century ago.
He had infinitely more patience for Meg’s grandfather than she did. And yet, he couldn’t muster so much as a basic acknowledgement of her existence? Not classy.
It wasn’t as if she even knew why he gave her the cold shoulder. She’d never met him before.
There weren’t many facts at her disposal, to form a hypothesis. Her best guess was that they might’ve gone to the same high school. Or, he knew somebody who knew somebody who told him rumours about her. Lawrence wasn't that big a town, especially in certain circles.
She never saw him at Gehenna, but he seemed to like burgers. Maybe he talked to Ellsworth, or Guy, and they told him what a unreasonable harpy she was, without the context of how much they deserved to be yelled at. Maybe he was pals with one of her exes. Didn’t Kevin used to tell people ‘dude, she’s literally Satan’?
Whatever the reason was, he could keep his opinion of her. She just wanted him to show some basic goddamn manners. But, clearly, he couldn’t be civil. It was that forward-minded Kansas thinking in action.
Interrupting her thoughts, the door swung open, and the bow-legged mechanic sauntered through, cleaning the oil from his hands. "All it needed was an oil change, Mister Nixon," he said, cheery.
Meg took her cue, and kept the roll of her eyes to her imagination. Because, unlike other people, she wasn’t raised in a barn. (Seriously, someone should give her a medal for patience.)
As she handed over the check from her wallet, the strangest thing happened. A miracle.
"There's cheaper ways to flirt than draining an old man's bank account, lady.” Dean shrugged one shoulder, the freckles over his nose scrunching. “You should treat your grandfather better.”
He acknowledged her.
Thanks, God. Couldn’t cure cancer, or smite some pedophiles. Instead, the wefts of fate were rearranged for Dean still-a-sack-of-shit Winchester to move up from ignoring her to mouthing off.
She was such an idiot for thinking it was a problem that he never talked to her. Sure, it was infuriating, but her past self should have known that it could be worse. Always, it gets worse.
Before had been a golden era.
Now, her teeth clicked together as she slammed her jaw shut. She had to close her eyes and count, to keep her expression neutral, and focus, or else she was going to rip the Blue Steel right off his worthless, jackass face, and as much as she wanted to do exactly that, she couldn’t. She had an image of superiority to maintain.
She could talk to people she hated with civility. She wasn’t Dean.
"These visits are out of my own pocket,” she said, every bit as calm as she didn’t feel. She folded her arms, to hold herself still, and bared her teeth. “Besides, if I were flirting? You'd know. Never saw the point in subtlety."
Some people have this neat thing called self-control. You should try it, sometime.
"Yeah, why waste time beating around the bush? Never understood it, either. See, I’d believe you, if it weren’t for the fact I just repaired cut brakes. That’s not some accident.”
“So, instead, you think I did it? Because I’m going to take the car of the man I’m trying to kill to the same place every week?”
“Good alibi, ain’t it?” Dean snapped, defensive.
Thankfully, before she truly let the extent of her disbelief sail, before she shattered her illusion of calm, the door jingled once again, which was a bit of a mundane miracle unto itself. Meg never saw other customers, either because they knew to keep away during her visits or, more likely, they knew to keep away during Dean’s shifts.
Turned out, he didn’t like this customer, either. His face flatlined and his shoulders shot up.
"Cas," he croaked. "What are you doing here? What'd I say about popping up unannounced?"
Splendid. Cas, was it? They needed to be friends, stat. Anyone who made Dean Winchester miserable was someone she wanted to get to know. Meg tucked her hair behind her ear, and drawled out a little "Hello, stranger," at Tall, Dark, and Snappily Saying That She Called The Shop Already, who stared at her as if she were an ingredients list on a sack of potatoes.
“Hello,” she said, slow and gravelly. Molasses flowing down a rock quarry.
She liked Cas already. It was all in the way Dean's face turned atomic red watching the two of them, the slow, pained drag of his hand over his face as he stared up to the heavens. It was the exasperation in his voice when he said, "Leave already, would you?", even though she was fairly certain that was addressed to her, not the newcomer.
"Oh, but Dean-o," she crooned, folding her hands together, "I'm dying to get to know more of the behind the scenes of your life. It's why I'm here, isn't it? My unwavering, borderline-stalkerish feelings for you, the bigwig auto mechanic??"
She leant into his space, her eyes as dewy as she could muster. All the eyelash fluttering gave her a bit of a headache, but, it was worth it for his reaction of pure disgust. Not so fast with the smart mouth, now, are you, Dean?
Cas watched them from the doorway, impassive. She still had the look of an explorer in some godforsaken steppe, as if the local traditions were beyond her understanding of social order, or, as if the waiting area were bogged down with hidden landmines. Meg didn’t presume to know which was going on inside her noggin. She looked like a lights on, nobody home type.
With a defeated sigh, Dean slunk back through the door to the car bay. Cas followed.
It wasn’t a good day at the mechanic, but, at least it was different. Meg couldn’t have asked for better.
-
The sad thing was, she couldn’t even rate the encounter on the first 50 of her Top 100 most incomprehensible mornings. Crazy followed her like goldfish poop.
For one reason or another, when God made her, he chose something artsier than giving her a bum leg or ass cancer. No, for some reason or another, he chose to go a little meta, and said to himself: why not make this child a magnet for the stupidest shit?
Wherever there's an eccentric with a superiority complex, there'll be a Meg. Whenever some soccer mom gets physical over ordering a cheeseless cheeseburger, it'll be Meg's shift. No arbitrary, awful circumstance should ever be un-Meg'd.
It started when she was six, when her birth family's house burned down. The only reason she survived was that an entrepreneur from halfway across the country had just so happened to notice smoke billowing while he was driving through Andover, lost, looking for his hotel. He found her, passed out underneath the debris, before the fire trucks had so much as pulled out on to the scene, before the neighbors even noticed anything was wrong. It was a the sort of scenario people call out for being unrealistic, in movies. A one-in-a-million chance.
That was the beginning. Over the next eighteen years, things got weirder.
-
"That boy shouldn't talk to you like that. Should've trussed him up, hung him from the ceiling."
"If only," she sighed, dreamily.
Alastair thumped the dashboard. "No 'if only.' If wishes were horses, beggars would ride."
"Sadly, torture's illegal."
"The law's just a panty-waisted fop. Law's nothing to stop you. Bring him to the shed, we can show him what's what."
"Okay, Pop Pop. We'll do that."
-
Next point on the itinerary: family dinner. This week, it was at her father’s house.
All she wanted was to sneak through the kitchen so she could hide in her brother’s room until everyone sat at the table. If the person she was trying to avoid hadn’t been in the kitchen, she might’ve succeeded. But, naturally, he was right next to the door she entered, at the periphery of the conversation between his brothers-in-law.
(Cain was enthusiastically telling Papa about bean sprouts, or whatever. Some new adventure in the land of the hippie dippie.)
Familiar, stubby fingers curled over her hips; she couldn’t hotfoot it without making a scene. If she did, she knew she’d get nothing but vague, soulful stares from the one, and agita from the other two. She’d be even more miserable than withstanding whatever the pig had to say.
As always, she had to deal with Crowley on her own.
(“You’re an al-Shaitan, Meg,” her father told her vaguely, once. “When your grandmother first came over here from the old country, she couldn’t even speak English, you know. The locals swore she was a witch, or the devil’s mistress. That’s why she changed her name to Lilith. It’s why we keep the theme with the restaurant. They tried to crush her, but she endured. We have to do the same. Don’t disappoint her legacy.”)
Crowley manhandled her until she was turned to face him. Standing close enough she could feel the warmth of his skin under his clothes. He was like a chipmunk-faced radiator, really.
“If it isn’t my favourite niece. Don’t be a stranger. Give us a kiss.” These days, she had to lean down for the job of pecking the man on the cheek. “That’s a girl,” he said, as he rifled his hands through her hair.
(When she was growing up, he always fixated on her hair, long and dark. She cut it into a shaggy bob and bleached it in the hopes it would shut him up, but instead, it turned out bobs were his second favourite look, though he still reminded her on a regular basis how beautiful her hair had been, before. It didn’t matter what she did. He always found a way to make it about his pleasure.)
“Uncle Crowley.” Her face felt like it might crack. “If you don’t mind, I wanted to catch up with my brother, before his shift tonight. Could you excuse me? We can still talk at dinner.”
“Tell me, and I’ll pass it along. There’s no time for chitchat. Your cousin’s gone missing.”
“Casey?” she asked, her disbelief overriding her senses. It just didn’t make sense why he’d worry about her. If she was unavailable, she was probably out with Gil. If her father wanted her home so desperately, he could try calling the bar they frequented, or loverboy’s house. It wasn’t a mystery.
“No, not Casey,” he snapped. “Her twin. You know, the one that doesn’t have a foregone conclusion for where she might be? Hence, my concern. I’m such a terrible father, worrying about my girl, when she’s never before missed Sunday dinner. The worst. Isn’t that right, you mouthy--”
The over door slammed shut. Crowley collected himself.
Cain patted her shoulder. “I’ll make plates for the two of you,” he said, kindly. “Don’t worry about making it back before everyone sits down. Just, see if you can find Ruby. Make sure she’s not in trouble. This isn’t like her.”
It was unlike her enough that Meg had absolutely no idea where to begin looking. Didn’t matter. It never did. So what if she had to skip out on dinner so she could look for Crowley’s kid? That was her job. At the restaurant, and at home; everywhere it was the same -- clean other people’s messes, without questions, or complaints. Her purpose in life was to do as she was told.
Luckily, if it was Cain’s culinary escapade this week, she wasn’t broken up about missing out. The man insisted on never putting enough salt on anything. Bonus -- she didn’t have to talk to Crowley, or listen to her family argue over asinine points, if she was busy driving all over creation.
Wouldn’t that just kill them, if they knew they were making her that little bit happier?
“Got it.”
“Splendid,” said Crowley, distractedly, before he threw her out the door. The screen clattered behind her.
As nonsensical as it was, she swore she could hear the disapproval from her father. He’d smile, the way he did when the people around him weren’t able to keep up, when a lesser man might raise his voice. It weirded her out. The bad blood between the two brothers and their sister’s husband wasn’t anything new, but usually, they kept it hidden under genteel layers. Usually, neither of them would have helped her.
Life was funny. Maybe things were changing, the way things did; maybe it wouldn’t turn into a headache for her future self. She hoped.
She’d burn that bridge when she came to it.