sarosefics | Master Post for "Down the Valley of the Shadow"

I have been dying to post this story, and now

spn_cinema time is here at last! The idea was inspired by a piece

cassiopeia7 did for a genre challenge, and the story almost wrote itself once I sorted out who was who.

A/N: Despite this being a totally fictional AU, I’ve tried to excise a few of the movie’s worst historical and geographical errors. There’s no reason, for example, for someone riding from the Rio Grande (south/west of San Antonio) to go through Cuero (east of San Antonio) on the way to the real town of Eldorado (west of San Antonio)... even ignoring the fact that neither Eldorado nor Sonora existed in the early 1870s, when the movie is set! So I’ve moved the fictional El Dorado—note the spelling difference; it’s pronounced differently, too—to an area where ranchers did settle before the Civil War and shuffled other geographical references accordingly. But I have kept the fiction of “sheriff” being more or less equivalent to “police chief” and not a county-wide office.

Many thanks to

jennytork for being an awesome beta and sounding board as usual and for suggesting a couple of the other divergences from the movie!

Warning: Hollywood physics and highly questionable Hollywood-frontier medicine of the absolutely-do-not-try-this-at-home kind. Unfortunately, both figure into the plot too greatly to leave out. There’s also at least one major point of lore that is deliberately AU to work with the movie plot (so nolettersonthatpleasethankyou).

Pairing: Gen (brief background John/Ellen)
Rating: PG
Word Count: ~23,000
Summary: The only thing standing between carpetbagger Dick Roman and the water rights owned by widowed rancher Jody Mills is the law, in the persons of Sheriff Bobby Singer and Deputy Rufus Turner. Gunslinger John Winchester's already refused to fight his old friends for Roman once. Now, six months later, Roman's used a honey trap to push Bobby into alcoholic despair, and one of the deadliest gunmen in Texas is on his way to El Dorado to help Roman force Jody to capitulate before Bobby sobers up.

At least, that's how the situation looks from the outside.

But in El Dorado, nothing is as it seems. And when a chance meeting on the border reunites John with his sons and brings him news of Roman's plan, the race is on to free Bobby from a hellish curse and to stop demons and Leviathans from taking over the town... to say nothing of the secrets Sam and John are carrying that could be their undoing.

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