Victoria

Title: I haven’t seen Barbados
Word Count: 1138
Rating: PG
Genre: Gen
Characters: Jess, Dean
Warnings/Spoilers: Through 3.16 to be safe
Summary: So this place where Jess is? It’s not really all that bad. She’s pretty sure it’s more Purgatory than heaven, but that’s okay with her.

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So this place where Jess is? It’s not really all that bad.

It’s more of a non-place, really, some space that she can change and shift with her mind, and she’s pretty sure it’s more Purgatory than heaven, but that’s okay with her. She gets the feeling, at least based on the scary Campus Crusade for Christ people, that there wouldn’t be anyone fun in heaven anyway. Not that this non-place has raucous parties or anything, but it could be so much more boring, and no one walks around with a creepy beatific smile and that annoying sense of entitlement being Saved seemed to give people.

Sometimes, when she gets scared or angry, she finds herself wandering around in somebody else’s nightmares, and she guesses that others here get to walk around in hers when they feel similarly. The only time that really even scared her was the time she had a dream about Sam and woke up in a big green room with his brother spitting up blood on her. At least nothing leaves stains in her non-place, because she was wearing beige and she didn’t even want to think about what a bitch it would be to get blood out since there was no bleach in Purgatory.

He’d choked on a cry of “Sammy!” and then fallen from some height above her head, landing in front of her feet with a sickening crunch. “What are you doing in my Hell?” he demanded of her once he’d sort of sat up, looking way more offended than anybody who was just a twisted sack of broken bones lying in a heap of skin had any right to be.

She’d given him that same sad, serene look everybody in Purgatory gets really, really good at really, really quick. “What are you doing in my afterlife?” she’d retorted. She didn’t like the chains that were dangling around. It looked like a cheap horror movie set.

Then he disappeared, and she was back in the same boring field of weeds she was usually wandering around in by default, the horizon stretching a million miles in each direction before blending into the grayish sky. The experience left her more shaken than she had been since she realized that she was dead, knowing that now Sam was alone up there (or maybe down there? she wasn’t too clear on where she was in space in relation to earth). By the looks of him, the brother had died messily. She feels a little bad that she can’t remember his name, but to be fair she’d just met him the once and she’d ended up dead so soon afterwards that he’d gotten rather forgotten in the upheaval she went through.

Jess spends most of her time playing badminton with a gay grad student from Malaysia, who thinks he died in a car accident, but he doesn’t remember because he was drunk at the time and maybe a lot blacked out. He’s funny, excruciatingly bad at badminton, and is even less bothered by his lot in afterlife than she is.

“It’s not Hell,” he says sometimes in his crisp British accent, “which is better than any preacher promising me damnation for liking cock ever said.” He’s a terrible server, but he’s not too bad at volleying the shuttlecock as long as Jess hits it right to him.

“That’s what everyone says,” Jess tells him, bending to pick up the shuttlecock with her racket. “But honestly, Vignesh, I’m actually more glad this isn’t heaven.”

“Me too,” he agrees. “Because that would be an eternity with those same people telling me I should be damned. Of course, that would actually be Hell, wouldn’t it?”

“We’ve got it made here,” she says, and then she serves.

She’d always considered herself a fairly decent human being, nice and friendly most of the time. She’s not sure what it was she did to deserve eternity here, the place where the not-good-enoughs and not-bad-enoughs congregate and have tea and spend time doing floral arrangements and arguing with Ayn Rand about Ayn Rand. Jess was surprised to find her here, honestly. After reading The Fountainhead in freshman lit she’d been convinced the woman was rolling in some of the hotter flames of Hell.

Jess likes imagining up some anonymous beach, and she spends interminable hours walking up and down it, combing for sand dollars and sea glass. She’s not interested in shells; she grew up on the East Coast where they’re as abundant as cigarette butts and medical waste. But the interesting things? She collects the jellies that wash up without their tentacles, just clear blobs that look like somebody’s misplaced saline implants, and hollow little urchins some bigger creature ate the middle out of, and she lines them up in a room she sits in when she reads, dreaming up more shelves when she needs them. It's never sunny, but that's just fine.

She and Sam went to the beach once, the summer before she died. They spent a week in a little cottage in San Luis Obispo. The beach she dreams up now looks a lot like that one. She was lying in the sand having a dream about that week when she ran into Sam’s brother, actually.

She has the sinking feeling she should probably seek him out again and find out what’s been going on topside, wherever the world of the living is. Hey, maybe the world’s ended or something, like Sam’s weird scars and twitchy desperation for normal always made her expect just a little bit. She’d never been totally sure of it, but really, there weren’t too many rational fears a guy who’s six-five and a little weird gets to entertain. She considers hunting the brother down, but if she’s honest—and really, why bother lying in the afterlife?—she’s scared of what he might tell her.

She died in a fire, but she hasn’t coughed up ashes since her first night in the quiet fields, so either the brother was new to being dead that time she’d run into him, or he just couldn’t let go. She doesn’t want to find him in case he’s still dangling around in that big room, dribbling blood on everybody who passes below him on their way through his misery.

She’d like to hear about Sam. She misses Sam like a limb sometimes. Those are usually the moments she finds herself stuck in somebody else’s bad dreams and fears, stuck in rooms full of sad clowns or watching small children run from clouds of angry bees.

But Jess is happy here, as happy as anybody can be, so she buries her toes in the sand of her empty beach, and bends over to pick up a piece of saltwater-tumbled glass the same color as Sam’s eyes. It makes her feel better.


End.