strangetrip | [EP] A little fuss

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[EP] A little fuss - OTA

Some time ago, Corbie had found a calendar and counted back from the spring equinox. And then ahead from the winter solstice. And settled on a date. And then she’d done it again the next day. And again the next, until she was finally satisfied that she’d correctly translated between calendar systems and definitely had the correct date. Caroline had caught her at it and pried it out of her that Corbie had been trying to figure out when her birthday was and, wheels turning behind her eyes, Caroline had left it there. And Corbie had forgotten all about it.

Which was how she could be surprised now as she was shunted into the cafe that Caroline had bullied cake out of Pike and had possibly bullied other people around the inn to come eat it.

Okay, that wasn’t fair. It was a kind gesture, since Corbie hadn’t told anybody. Hadn’t intended on telling anybody. Growing up, her birthday was only so big a deal. She and Gran hadn’t had very much money for presents or treats, though Gran had tried when Corbie was small; they were both always more concerned with having enough to get by. Birthdays were for rich kids. Or at least bourgeois kids. And then there was just the part where… well, what was the point? They were here. It made doing anything special for anybody kind of hard. If anybody cared enough.

… Okay, she was being entirely unfair, because here were two people who had cared enough and had tried for her and it was incredibly sweet.

Unexpected tears in her eyes, Corbie laughed and flitted to the café door, calling out to anybody in earshot. “Come help me eat cake!”

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"I was six when I learned to shoot and ten when I made my first sawed off shotgun." Dean said fondly. He had better memories of those days than Sam did. "My first hunting trip with my dad, I was probably fourteen or fifteen."

Which was how old Lord Brightmore had been when he first rode to war and then became margrave. How old she'd been when she'd buried her grandmother.

In other words, probably too young to be an adult, but what were you gonna do.

"... What's a sawed off shotgun?"

Dean took another bite of the delicious cake. "It's a gun that's usually long and if you saw it off, cut it, it gives you a broader pattern." And when you were talking about supernatural big bads, that's what you relied on.

Corbie's knowledge of guns was limited, but she'd asked Jackson questions about his before. She understood a little that the barrel length had to do with how far you could shoot accurately, so why would you take a gun and make it less accurate?

"... And that makes killing monsters easier?"

"It makes killing a lot of monsters at once easier." Dean nodded. "It depended on the monster, but usually it's better to cover a lot of ground when they're attacking." Not that Dean ever missed, but he was less accurate when he was younger.

Corbie in general wasn't good at the idea of herself doing a lot of damage to anything. Something Illyana had noticed, so offensive magic wasn't a big part of her education. But the basic idea made sense. Do as much with as little as possible.

Almost reflexively she summoned a little flame to her fingertip and considered it. Fire was the most destructive thing she knew how to do--Regina's doing--but the problem was that there was no way to contain it. Once you unleashed it, it spread on its own.

She put the flame back out. "Usually? When would that not be?"

Son of a bitch. Just his luck. Dean should have known that where Sam was in his life, he'd befriend a witch. Long before they'd both been screwed over and almost killed by witches.

"You're a witch?" It was said in an almost defeatist of course you are tone, rather than accusatory.

He wasn't above using magic. He had many times, but witches were different. Except for Pike. She was a warrior, hunter first. At least that was how Dean viewed her.

The tone wasn't accusatory, but it was an accusation all the same. Corbie shrank from it. She should perhaps have known better; Mary had clearly considered attacking her. But Sam had never had a problem with her and what she was.

That was what got her to straighten her back and hold her head up. She wasn't ashamed of her magic. "Wizard. I'm a wizard."

"I thought wizards were old guys with pointy hats." Dean said before he could stop himself then added because he wondered about the difference since it might save his life one day. "What's the difference between a witch and a wizard?"

"Far as you're concerned, prolly nothing," Corbie admitted with a shrug. "I've got magic. Came in when I was thirteen, along with other more normal shit. I can't get rid of it, and I wouldn't want to even if I could." It was perhaps an interesting comparison to people in her own world to put magic alongside other parts of puberty like breasts or menstruation, but the fact of the matter to Corbie was that magic was just as much a part of her as any part of her body. It just was.

But the word 'witch' carried certain stigma with it that she didn't think she could explain properly.

"Wait, it just appeared? Genetic? You didn't get a spell in a book and try it? Huh."

Dean was having a hard time wrapping his head around that. He just figured it was learned. Hell even Pike got it through a goddess or whatever.

"Just appeared," Corbie said with a nod. And it had. One day she'd been just like everybody else, and the next she'd been lit up with power. She hadn't understood what it was, not until she came home that evening and saw the fear and then the sorrow in Gran's eyes. "'less you count learning to hide it from other wizards, I didn't learn any spells 'til I was seventeen."

Again, Corbie had caught Dean's attention with what she was saying. "You don't get along with other wit - uh wizards?" Dean pulled back from saying witches, which showed how much he'd changed since Purgatory.

This... was complicated. Corbie chewed her lip as she thought about how to explain this concisely and well. "When my gran was a girl in Caloxa, the wizards in charge there were doing some pretty dark shit. 'Bout forty years ago there was a war that wiped out those wizards, which nobody's cried over, and annexed the country to Corambis, which people are still pretty pissed about. But Gran was convinced that they couldn't all be gone. So she hid. And she taught me to hide. And I kept hiding 'til I found somebody to teach me."

For an instant, Dean saw Benny and how he fought against vampires - his own kind. "Maybe their not all bad, brother." He could almost hear his voice.

"They didn't know how to make a hex bag did they?" That might have seemed out of left field but it actually wasn't. Hex bags were what witches used to try to kill Sam and Dean. "Dark magic shit where I'm from."

Corbie's blank look probably answered that question before her words did, but she still thought about what she knew of Mulkists before she shook her head. "I dunno. But I don't know what that is."

Dean wanted to make sure it wasn't called something else where she was from, but he had a feeling it wasn't. "It's literally a bag that wi-zards put herbs in to make the curses stronger. They usually are hidden somewhere near the victim and nine times out of ten it's used to kill."

Now, yes, it was obvious that something with a name like that wasn't going to be pleasant, but Corbie's eyes widened in horror all the same. "I ain't used my magic to kill anybody."

The look of horror wasn't feigned, he had a great bullshit detector, so while Dean still wasn't a fan of witches, never would be, he appeared to be able to be okay with a couple of them.

"Glad to hear it. That's what the witches in my world are like." That time he did use the term since they were clearly different than Corbie's world.

Corbie chewed her lip in hesitation before she asked, "... You know there's more'n just me, right?" And it wasn't like she was subtle about it. Or Illyana or Sunny for that matter, and the library upstairs was saturated with magic. Regina, Molly, Carlos, Dorian, Kash, Pike, there was a lot of magic around the Madonna and more than a few people to wield it. And most of them pretty open about it.

"Met Pike." Dean said in way of answering her, but he hadn't known there were more. Just his luck he was tossed in with witches. There always would be a down side to the up side. His mom and Sammy, definitely up side. Hot women, another up side. Witches and a prison that was so very down side.

"But since you said more than you and not just there's another one, I'm gonna guess there's more than just you and Pike."

Corbie blinked slowly, trying to find words for that. This was Sam's family. She didn't want to be rude.

Eventually what popped out was, "If you been here so long and ain't noticed any weird shit yet, you maybe could put away the idea that you might have to put anybody down. We're doing fine."

Dean arched an eyebrow at her comment. He was pretty sure she'd just insulted him. There was amusement in his voice when he spoke, "so you're saying that witches here are a lot less subtle than in my world and I should take my head out of my ass and notice books floating across the lobby?"

"Pretty much." Corbie said with a shrug. "We been here a while and maybe someone's still hiding, but it's kinda hard to keep secrets when there's fifty people and nothing to do."

"Yeah? Might have been a little busy dealing with a dead mother come back into my life and being jerked to a magical inn in the month and half I've been here. But, I'll be sure to watch out for others." Dean set his empty plate down.

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