Chuck/SPN crossover 2/2
Part 1.
Redshirt checked Dean out in the way guys did when they were looking for competition, not company, so Dean gave up on the sex decoy idea immediately; too much to ask for it to work twice in one night. He felt Casey’s presence behind him-dude was as big as Sam, which was saying something (something he’d never say out loud, but whatever). He’d still rather have Sam at his back, but on the other hand if he never had to see Sam and vampires in the same room again it would be too soon.
Sarah swept past them like a fighter plane, all sharp edges. Dean let himself look, because anybody within thirty yards who was into girls was looking too, and Redshirt couldn’t help himself either even though the rubber rings around her neck would undoubtedly stick in his teeth.
She smiled at Redshirt (Sam had made him look at the dossiers, but what kind of word was dossier anyway, plus they were all vampires, just like they were all lost souls on the rack; knowing more would only get in the way of the job). Now, in reality, no girl as hot as Sarah would’ve gone for Redshirt, at least not unless Redshirt was wearing a Patek Philippe watch and the girl had serious self-esteem problems besides, but hope springs eternal and so Redshirt didn’t seem as shocked as he should’ve been when Sarah leaned in to speak into his ear.
Redshirt grinned, which made him look better. He tilted his head and said something back, and Sarah laughed. She edged closer-
But then Redshirt looked around, and his face tightened with unease. Almost as if he was looking for people and not seeing the ones he expected. He said something to Sarah, not even bothering to turn to face her all the way.
Dean stumbled forward, double-time, and sloshed his beer down the exact center of Redshirt’s red shirt. “Whoah,” he said. “You should watch where you’re going, dude.”
Now he had the vampire’s attention. “Excuse me?” Redshirt was mad, working his way up to outraged, and he wasn’t worrying about his dead friends any more.
Dean shoved him in the shoulder. “Yeah, excuse you.”
“Listen, you mouth-breathing-”
“Really?” Dean interrupted, hoping to get the show on the road with minimal fuss. “Wanna take this out back?”
The vampire snarled, though he kept his human face on. “Fine, asshole.”
Dean caught Casey’s eye, raising an eyebrow and hoping Casey picked up on the idea that Redshirt should think he was going off, alone, with an easy victim. Dean swaggered towards the back, putting just enough drunk into his walk to make Redshirt extra confident. He didn’t like turning his back on a vampire, but they were in public and the chance of getting bit from behind was pretty low.
As soon as they were around the bend in the hallway cutting them off from the rest of the club, Dean spun around, and nearly got a faceful of pissed-off vamp-fuckers were fast, had to give them that-as he brought his knife up. It wouldn’t have been much of a wound under ordinary circumstances; Dean’d given worse to Sam sparring, but with the dead man’s blood the vamp choked and fell back, and Casey’s big-ass knife flashed out easy as the flick of a windshield wiper.
“Dude,” Dean said respectfully, stepping back from the spray of blood and wondering where Casey was going to put the knife. (Thigh sheath, it turned out.)
“Okay, shut it down,” Casey said into thin air. This whole comms thing was awesome, even better than the headsets Dean had gotten to use in Hollywood. Dean was also a fan of preventing further civilians from entering. According to the plan, they had fifteen more minutes to go through the place looking for piles of corpses or other vamptastic leavings before everyone already inside would be herded out due to the faked-up health scare Chuck had planned. With any luck, even if the vamps had made some baby vamps, those would be too new to the game to put up organized resistance when the mock-CDC moved in.
“You wanna check out the basement?” Casey asked. “Walker and Bartowski can run crowd control.”
Dean hit his own earpiece. “Sam, cleanup on aisle four.”
“Fuck you,” Sam said, after a fifteen-second delay which had to be Sam figuring out how to work the comms (Dean grinned to himself). “We hitting the basement?”
“Fine,” Dean sighed, because even if someone did stumble onto the corpse parts that Casey was even now shoving into a supply closet, they were all going to be evacuated anyway in a few minutes, so there wasn’t much need to worry about mass panic.
They met at the top of the stairs. There was a macho moment about who was going to go down first, which Sam resolved by rolling his eyes and telling Casey that he should watch their six, almost as if Sam had actually listened to all those war movies Dean had exposed him to. They went down fast, blood-tipped dartguns at the ready, which sounded wimpy but was a really good idea if Dean did say so himself now that they had no further need for concealment.
The basement was well-lit and well-organized, almost a disappointment, though there were a couple of darker corners where extra barstools and broken tables were piled. Nothing big enough to hide a drained corpse. Casey signalled that Dean should go on into the storeroom ahead.
Grinning, Dean stepped through the doorway.
****
Most of the clubgoers went, grumbling but obedient, when Chuck took over from the DJ, killed the music, and announced that the club was closing due to a potential health issue. “Walk slowly to the exits,” he warned, “and public health officials will assist you.” There was some shoving and squawking, but after Sarah put a drunk frat boy on his ass for trying to push to the front people were a bit more orderly, and Chuck put on some light jazz to improve the mood.
Then they had to go around corralling the people who were too drunk to comprehend Chuck’s instructions, at least two of whom clearly thought that the reason the lights had gotten so bright and the music so weird was because of the drugs they were on. One of them was awfully handsy, too, and Chuck had to dodge a lot of groping, though at least he got to see Sarah frown in disapproval. Chuck was a little worried that the agents outside wouldn’t be able to distinguish the effects of dead man’s blood from the effects of being totally blitzed, so he fed the girl a couple of drops from his remaining stash and all she did was throw up on his shoes. Good enough, he figured, and handed her out.
“Casey!” Sarah’s raised voice cut through the smooth sounds of piano and saxophone. “What happened?”
Casey smiled, which made the blood smeared on his face look a lot scarier. “There were a couple extra vamps in the basement.”
“Are you okay?” Chuck demanded. “Is that blood from a-get it off, you could be at risk-”
“Not if he didn’t get bit,” Dean said, sounding out of breath as he hobbled up behind Casey. “Anyway, ’s just human.” Then he crumpled.
So then there was more shouting and running around, and Sam proved that he was as good a field medic as he was a monster hunter, which Casey also seemed to love. Chuck was getting the feeling that Casey thought he’d ended up with the wrong Stanford dropout.
“One of the new vamps had a cellphone, texted a message before we got him,” Casey reported, handing over the phone.
“Let’s get back to Castle and track the call,” Chuck suggested, which they did. By which he meant that he traced the call to a cell tower near where the final tracker was also showing up, a foreclosed house in a relatively nice neighborhood.
The team the military sent out found only an abandoned phone and a bloody chip.
The thing was, Chuck might not have been the greatest vampire slayer, but he did have other skills. Casey was mooning over the Winchesters, going so far as to sit next to Dean and tell him war stories while the blood transfused into him.
Chuck wasn’t jealous. Not even, like, for half a second. But he was a darned good researcher, so he brought up the databases and looked into the background of their last, cleverest vampire. The military had managed to identify her as Jane Sherman, born 1980. Disappeared from her home in 2005. That made her new, though the Winchesters hadn’t been clear on whether there were really a lot of Lestat-old vampires walking around-Chuck had to think that there’d be an overpopulation problem unless the numbers got kept down either by hunters or by internecine warfare-anyway, vampire population dynamics aside, Jane Sherman had enough of a record as a human to be a relatively known quantity.
And she was from California. LA, to be exact, which might explain why the escapees had gone to ground there. The question was whether she was smart enough to stay away from the people she’d known back before her life had been taken from her.
Chuck thought about Ellie, what he’d do in similar circumstances. Maybe there were people who could leave their pasts entirely. But he wasn’t going to bet on it.
A few more minutes of work determined that Jane’s parents were dead, but that her sister was still living in LA. She’d filed the first police report and she’d never found out what happened to her sister, but she still called every year to see if there’d been any change in the status of the case. Chuck knew what that felt like: losing someone with no explanation whatsoever. Kelly Sherman loved Jane, had never stopped, and Chuck hoped that it went the other way too.
****
Sam pulled Dean aside when they got back to the secret underground lair (no, that was not going to stop being cool any time soon). “How sure are we that we can trust these guys?” he asked, low like somehow that wouldn’t get picked up on the concealed microphones undoubtedly monitoring them.
Dean shrugged. “Can’t trust the feds in general, that’s for sure. Like I said, have you never seen a movie? But these guys-you tell me, Sam.”
Sam frowned and his mouth did that bit-into-a-kumquat thing that usually only Dean could trigger. “Stanford was a long time ago. Anyway, you seem to be getting along fine with them.”
Dean raised his eyebrows-that was a problem now? Okay, yes, the last new guy he’d found it easy to hunt with had been Gordon Walker, but Dean was much more together now. Well, much more experienced. Much more-whatever. “I’m not lookin’ to put a ring on it. But your buddy called us in for a reason, and as long as we’re killing vampires, I don’t see how we can walk away.”
“I know you wish we had something more stable,” Sam said, and then looked about as embarrassed to have said it as Dean was to hear it.
Dean didn’t want to go there, mostly because he wouldn’t get back out if he did. “You saying this place is cooler than my baby? Because if you’ve got a beef with our home base, Sam-”
Sam sighed heavily, and looked like he was considering pushing further, but then Chuck was coming around the corner to collect them for an update. While Chuck herded them, Dean tried to figure out how to reassure Sam that he wasn’t harboring a secret desire to become a fed and get awesome guns and amazing tech, but that way lay talking about what Sam could be doing instead of hunting, so he focused his attention on the big computer screen in the main room, which was showing a satellite map.
Sarah launched right in: “Surveillance says the patterns of activity around Kelly Sherman’s condo are unusual. Lots of coming and going at night, not so much during the day.”
“Could one vampire really have taken over a whole condo?” Chuck asked, sounding appalled.
Sam and Dean exchanged glances. Dean could’ve told him about some of the grimmer scenes they’d encountered, but even thinking about that felt kind of like planning to kick a puppy. Sam clearly was of the same mind. “It’s possible,” Sam said apologetically.
“A completely infested building,” Casey mused.
Dean nodded at him. “Get in the HVAC, spread some dead man’s blood around, could make it real simple.”
Sam shot him a look, and Dean couldn’t tell whether it was ‘you idiot, it’s never simple,’ or ‘you idiot, you’re talking about maybe dozens of lives sacrificed.’ Didn’t matter, because Dean wasn’t about to go in assuming that all he needed was a fine mist of dead man’s blood, and because they couldn’t save anybody who was already dead. Up to and including the vamp’s sister. Now that had real clusterfuck potential. Given what they’d seen from vampires who were just fucking, weren’t even real family, Dean was not about to get careless.
The funny thing was, when the time came the operation was a cakewalk, mostly. They pumped Casey’s anticoagulant-laden spray into the air through every vent, went in, and found twenty new vamps, all so easy to kill that Dean felt more like a butcher than a hunter. Chuck made some noises about checking to see if they were all killers, but anybody who’d turned double-digits’ worth of people into monsters wasn’t training them to be vegetarians, and both Dean and Sam had kept their mouths shut about Lenore just to keep the moral confusion to a minimum, so that argument didn’t outlast the first couple of executions. After all that, Jane Sherman wasn’t among the catch.
They did keep the sister alive. Kelly. It was important to know their names if you wanted to get the most out of them. After some debate (Chuck was worried about what would happen at the Buy More if they took Kelly back to the secret government lair and she escaped), they decided to question her right where she was. Tied up six ways to Sunday, of course, and dosed with just enough dead man’s blood to keep her sluggish.
“Where’s Jane?” Sarah asked, standing in front of Kelly and radiating danger. God, that was hot. Sam kicked Dean’s ankle, because he cockblocked even Dean’s fantasies, and Dean forced his attention back to the vampire, as outnumbered and incapacitated as she was.
“Eat shit and die,” Kelly slurred. Her head slumped to the side, but the gleam in her eyes said she was ready to tear out the first throat that got near enough.
Sarah eyed Kelly carefully, as if assessing just where to hit first. Dean saw Chuck’s worried expression over Sarah’s shoulder. Worried for her, not worried that she wouldn’t be able to get it out of Kelly if she worked hard enough. Like Chuck thought that there was still something for Sarah to lose, as far in the life as she already was, and a couple of years back Dean would’ve thought how almost cute that was. He knew better now: there was always another step down.
“You know,” he said, “why don’t you guys secure this place, so that Jane can’t come back and get the jump on us. I’ll take care of this.”
Sarah raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You’ve been trained in interrogation?”
He grinned without humor, suppressing the urge to tell her that it wasn’t exactly interrogation he’d spent his time learning. “I can get a demon to give up its secrets, no worries.”
He could feel Sam behind him, radiating Do Not Want, and it just pissed him off. Yeah, Sam meant well and it was sweet that he cared about Dean’s mental health, but they needed to find this vampire and Dean wasn’t going to get any nicer if he refrained from using his skills here.
Kelly was recovering enough to catch the bad vibe in the room and cringe away from them, as much as she could. That was good; he could tell she wouldn’t give him much trouble once he really got started. She’d probably been a nice girl before all this. Her sister had probably thought that she was doing Kelly a favor turning her, because of what happened in this world to nice girls.
Dean made himself concentrate on the task at hand. “Sam?” he asked.
“Yeah, okay,” Sam said, somewhere between disappointed and accepting. “I’m going to set some traps in case Jane comes back. I could use some help.”
Sam managed to get Casey and Sarah to follow him, but Chuck stayed. Dean could’ve warned him off, but he was getting impatient-Kelly had been tied up and waiting for so long, and ever since he’d realized that he’d need to persuade her he’d felt the old red haze waiting for him, familiar as the taste of his own blood.
“All righty,” Dean said cheerily, extracting his knife from his back pocket. “I’ve got some questions for you, Kelly.”
Dean flipped the knife in the air, easily, like it wasn’t even a trick, so that he was holding the hilt with the blade pointing down. “I’m gonna tell you something, and you probably don’t care, but I think it’s interesting.” He waited a second, tilting his head expectantly. She stared at him, frozen, as if he were the kind of predator who only attacked when something moved. Oh well. “Before I went to Hell, I didn’t have a favorite knife. Sure, I thought I did. Turns out it’s not the same thing.”
Then he stepped forward.
****
Chuck knew that vomiting was not going to increase their credibility with the vampire. And he’d seen the pile of corpses in Kelly Sherman’s bedroom; voluntary or not, she’d exited the human race and taken a whole bunch of people with her. Chuck got that. But still-
“Hey, Chuck, I bet Sam and the rest of them could use a hand,” Dean said without turning, cheery enough that the horror-movie vibe notched up another level. Kelly-the vampire, Chuck needed to think of her as the vampire-made a whimpering sound, but Chuck couldn’t really see why what with Dean’s body mostly between her and Chuck.
Dean had given him a good excuse, and Chuck took it. Dean didn’t look away from his work.
Sam was waiting just outside Kelly’s apartment, grabbing at Chuck’s elbow and dragging him far enough down the hall that Dean wouldn’t be overhearing them. “Is he--? Is he okay?”
Chuck swallowed, not knowing where to begin on answering that. “I thought, you know, he’s doing it for us, for all of us, for humanity really, it’s sort of my duty to bear witness at least, right?” Sam nodded sympathetically, like that had made sense, even though his grip didn’t slacken. “I mean, he seems pretty much as calm as when he started. Is that good? It’s bad if the job gets to you, I know, but now I’m thinking it’s maybe bad if it doesn’t, too.”
“You get stuck in this life, and it gets stuck in you,” Sam said, which Chuck took as agreement of a sort. “But Dean-”
“He, uh, he told her he’s not enjoying it.” Dean had said that like a guy observing that there was a bulb burnt out in the bathroom: like there was a boring but standard task ahead of him.
“Chuck,” Sam said, careful. “Dean’s survived a lot. He might be-flippant, but you saw at the bar, he knows what he’s hunting. He’s one of the good guys.”
In Chuck’s recent but still extensive experience, this was not something that ordinarily needed to be said about actual good guys. Not that he disbelieved Sam, not necessarily. It was just something he’d had cause to wonder about himself, and about Sarah. If you live a secret life destroying evil, without even the recognition that cops and firefighters get, do you eventually become that which you fight? Was that going to be the price, and was Chuck willing to pay it, or to watch Sarah pay it, the way Sam was already watching Dean pay?
“That’s not a person in there, Chuck,” Sam said, his eyes wide and sincere, as if sensing Chuck’s uncertainty.
“Now, Sammy, I’m offended,” Dean said almost in Chuck’s ear, and he jumped half a foot.
Dean chuckled warmly, and he wasn’t nearly as scary as when he’d been questioning Kelly even though he had a fleck of dried blood on the bridge of his nose. “Relax, Chuck, I’m real good at telling the monsters from the people these days.”
Sam’s mouth tightened, but before he could say anything, Dean continued: “She didn’t know exactly where Jane went, but apparently dear sis always wanted a recording career and went and found herself a studio where she can produce an album. Gonna take advantage of the Twilight phenomenon, at least that’s the plan, all dolled up like that ‘Bring Me to Life’ chick.”
“So we’re going after a glampire?” Chuck asked before he could think better of it.
Dean sniggered, moving even further away from the person who’d been questioning the vampire. “You just don’t quit, do you? I like that.”
Sam’s nostrils flared; Chuck remembered one time at Stanford when Sam had gotten into a huge argument with a guy in their study group about compulsory health insurance, and back then he hadn’t been nearly as scary when angry but somehow the expression was the same. Usually Chuck’s humor went over better with non-Casey people, but Chuck thought maybe Sam was more focused on Dean’s reaction, embarrassed or-wait, was Sam jealous that Chuck made Dean laugh? Then Sam blinked, like clouds clearing from the sky, and tilted his head. “Since when do you listen to Evanescence?” he asked Dean.
“Since MTV,” Dean said, unfazed. “Anyhow, we need to find ourselves a recording studio that’s suddenly doing midnight hours. You up for it?” he asked, turning to Chuck. “Your supergeek thing’s worked so far.”
“I’m pretty sure a lot of these places operate around the clock already,” Chuck said, “because recording stars can have stranger habits than vampires, but I can definitely take a look at the data.”
“Awesome,” Dean said, and slapped him on the back just hard enough to rock him forward. “Now we just need to clean up this place.”
“Sarah and Casey will call it in,” Chuck reminded them. “I think they might just burn the whole building down. They say there’ll be fewer questions that way, though I personally would wonder about the fire safety codes if I read about it.”
Dean’s eyes lit up. “I’ll go see if they need help.”
Sam and Chuck were left staring at each other. Sam’s smile was a bit strained. “Dean likes setting fires. I mean, not randomly,” he hurried, perhaps realizing that he was making Dean sound like even more of a psycho, which considering what Chuck had just watched took some effort. “But it’s a standard method of disposal for ghosts, burning the bones, and it can be-satisfying.”
Chuck could see that. Getting rid of a ghost seemed like a nice, modular problem to solve. Not like taking down a global terrorist cell. “What about Kelly?” he asked, because even a vampire shouldn’t be burned alive. Undead. But the look in Sam’s eyes told him that his concern was misplaced.
****
Before Dean had even managed to finish the burger he’d snagged for lunch, Chuck found Jane’s demo tape on some music website somewhere. (Sam had rolled his eyes at Dean’s bull-headed ignorance about the internet, as usual, while Dean had pointed out that they still called it a “demo tape,” meaning that even internet idiots respected the achievements of the classics, and the resulting scuffle had taken up most of the time required for Chuck to track down Jane’s studio.) She was using a stage name, for which Dean could hardly blame her; even Joan Jett wasn’t born that way.
Still, Dean wasn’t so sure that Plain Jane and the Prowlers was the best name. The music wasn’t Sam’s emo crap when Chuck played it for them, which put it well outside the range of Dean’s experience of modern bands. “What would you call that?” Chuck asked. “It’s got a sort of coldwave feel, with some beauty and the beast aesthetics layered on top.”
“Think you nailed it, buddy,” he said, because Chuck looked like he could use some appreciation, and also because it would annoy Sam no end: if Sam had said something like that, the mockery would’ve been eternal.
Chuck grinned happily, and that was Dean’s good deed for the day taken care of.
Then it was just loading up on concealed weaponry and driving.
They got inside the studio the easy way: Chuck told the speaker at the entrance that they’d heard her demo tape and would like to talk about something called a ‘360 deal.’ The door clicked open before he was done talking.
The building seemed empty as they walked through, nobody even sitting at the front desk. They didn’t know if she was watching the security cameras, so they couldn’t afford to split up and search.
Sarah, looking as hot as ever in her royal blue business suit and executive bun, led the way. The vampire was standing at the end of the hallway, trying to control her smile (Dean briefly wondered if she was struggling to keep the teeth hidden, but from what he recalled it wasn’t happiness that posed the challenge). Dark hair, dark eyes, hipster skinny, black tattoos peeking out from under the sleeves of her black T-shirt-Dean could definitely imagine her on stage somewhere, sexy because she was so deep into the performance. If only she wouldn’t be eating her groupies, he’d have been happy to see that.
“I’m Sarah Walker,” Sarah said to the vampire, sticking her hand out. “These are my lawyers, Charles Carmichael and Sam Wesson.” Flanking her, they nodded, looking professional even with Sam’s hair flopping everywhere and Chuck’s not much better. It was probably the quality of the suits-the CIA sure had good tailors. The vampire glanced at Casey, who folded his arms. In his own black suit, along with one of those earpieces with the little corkscrews and dark sunglasses, he made a convincing bodyguard.
Dean had refused to wear a monkey suit, preferring to stick with what worked for him. “I’m Dean,” he said, giving the vampire a wave. That seemed to be enough for her; she probably watched Entourage.
“My engineer is out,” she said-Dean hoped that was true and not code for ‘bled dry in the recording booth’-“but I can speak for everyone here.”
Sarah took her cue to peer over the vampire’s shoulder. “Is there anyone else here?” she asked. “Because-” lowering her voice-“we are really most interested in you, if you understand my meaning.”
The vampire hesitated-leftover loyalty?-and then shook her head. “I can do that,” she said, pushing her shoulders back and straightening, though she was still a couple of inches shorter than Sarah. “Anyway, I’ve been having some artistic differences with the rest of the group.”
Yeah, Dean thought, they saw themselves as alive and you saw them as dead.
“Wonderful,” Sarah said, smiling sharklike, nothing like she’d been at the bar but just as convincing. “Why don’t we sit down?”
When the vampire turned to lead them deeper into the studio, Sarah stabbed her in the back with a needle coated with dead man’s blood, and had her head off as fast as Dean could’ve done it himself.
“Okay,” Chuck said on a shuddering breath. “Well, that was-okay. At least she died happy, thinking she was going to be a star.”
“The poor sucker,” Dean said, shaking his head.
Sam winced; Chuck winced; Sarah winced. Casey sneered, but on him it somehow looked more like a grin.
And that was when the Prowlers, who were not in fact dead, showed up.
Dean only saw the others in flashes, too focused on saving his own ass and watching Sammy’s back to do more than note a particularly beautiful dive-and-roll (Sarah), a headshot right between the eyes (Casey), and a weird but effective split kick setting both kickees up to have their heads taken off by Sam and Casey (Chuck).
The spies were adaptable when the vamps were able to take more punishment than an ordinary human. Dean felt almost patriotic, watching them. And dodging, swinging, and kicking some skanky vampire ass of his own, of course. Still, it was nice to see a team together, deep in the hunt, the way he and Sam were. Maybe things weren’t perfect between them, but the job was important enough to shut your mouth and help each other out, like Sam did when he rammed his knife straight through the sternum of a vampire who was about to rip Dean’s throat out. Dean nodded his approval, and even through the blood and chaos he could see Sam’s face light up.
No doubt it was screwed up that this was the best approval he had to offer, Dean thought as he rolled and came up on one knee, hamstringing one vamp and knocking another towards Sam’s waiting machete on the backswing. He ducked another attacker-fuck, Jane had made herself a freaking orchestra, not a backup band-and, he could not make this shit up, tripped one headed towards Chuck. A quick slice and dice took care of that one, along with the screaming hamstrung vampire (who was really getting on Dean’s nerves), and just as suddenly as the assault had begun it was over, nothing but five people panting loudly in a room Jackson Pollocked with vampire backsplash. Even Sarah looked somewhat less smoking covered with more blood than Carrie at the prom.
“Wow,” Chuck said into the silence. His eyes were very wide. “Can we go back to hunting down terrorists now?”
****
Chuck was a little surprised when the knock on his apartment door turned out to be Dean Winchester. He’d pretty much expected the Winchesters to blow out of town before the blood dried, especially now that they’d all seen Dean in action, and Sam had seen them seeing Dean in action. Chuck had the uneasy feeling that Dean wasn’t even the scariest one between the two of them.
“Uh, hi,” he said, standing in the door, and made a split-second decision that he hoped wasn’t going to get him messily killed. “You want to come in?”
Dean nodded and ambled past him, taking in Chuck’s apartment with a casual thoroughness that was not too different from the way Sarah and Casey scanned a room. Sometimes Chuck wondered what the world looked like to them: everything assessed for its potential utility in defense and attack, like a very specialized form of Intersect.
“I’m gonna ask you a personal question,” Dean announced as soon as Chuck closed the door. “Sam always says I have bad boundaries. So: why aren’t you with her? Or,” Dean hesitated before continuing, “with them?”
Chuck thought there was probably a point in his life when he would have blushed. “It’s … complicated.”
Dean smiled lopsidedly. “Yeah, I don’t do complicated. But, uh, one-night stands-I totally do those.”
It took Chuck a couple of seconds to decode that. “Oh. Oh! Wow.”
Dean shrugged like Chuck’s surprise meant nothing. “Whatever, dude.”
“Wait!” Chuck held up both of his hands. “That was supremely and absolutely in no way a no. More like a general expression of amazement at, well, my life. I, uh, would’ve thought you’d go for Casey before me.” It was astonishing that getting hit on by a guy who was both as butch as Dean and as nuclear-hot as Dean was far from the least plausible thing that had happened to Chuck in the past year. Regardless, it was pretty near the top of the list of the best things that had happened.
Dean grinned, leaning back against the wall by the door, showing himself off with a shamelessness that was absolutely not attractive. “So was that a yes, or just not a no?”
Chuck swallowed. He loved Sarah (and he wasn’t going near what he felt for Casey), but Dean was just - different. He was offering something as unlike what Chuck had with Sarah as, well, as a vampire was unlike a person. But hopefully less dangerous. “Yes?”
Dean’s smile widened. “I bet you’ve got a perfectly good bed somewhere back there. Care to give me a tour?”
Chuck swayed forward, but before he gave in completely he had to know: “Does that actually work on women?”
That earned him a pout, but not a real one; Dean wasn’t taking him seriously, any more than he took Sam seriously, which was maybe not the best comparison Chuck could have made, but anyway: “That’s why I’m so good-looking.”
Chuck thought the causation on that was probably reversed. But he got the point, especially when Dean moved closer and put his hands on Chuck’s waist, all grace and confidence and bowlegged swagger. He let Dean pull him into his room.
Dean might’ve been butch in the streets, but he was downright eager to please in the sheets, or anyway the upright version of the sheets. He let Chuck take his time with the kissing, tilting his head up and melting into Chuck with absolute confidence. Even when Chuck wobbled on his feet, Dean just rocked back and stabilized them both, walking backwards until Chuck had him pressed up against a convenient wall, where they could rub against each other without any fear of falling.
“So what do you do?” Dean asked after they were both breathless and Dean’s lips were swollen from kissing.
Chuck only barely prevented himself from saying ‘I work at the Buy More,’ as if this were a first date, and blushed harder in shame at his own social awkwardness than from figuring out what Dean was really asking. “I’m pretty vanilla, really,” Chuck said at last. “I like all the, uh, standard things.”
Dean grinned as his fingers flew over the buttons of Chuck’s shirt. “So, you want me to suck your cock?”
Chuck was never actually sure if he answered in words, but a couple of minutes later Chuck’s button-down was gone and his pants were around his ankles as he concentrated on not falling over while Dean’s mouth did amazing, unbelievable, hot, wet things to him. Chuck narrated, because that’s what he did, and Dean’s eyes glinted up at him through those ridiculous lashes with humor and what Chuck took as encouragement. Dean made a hot little moan when Chuck put a hand in his hair, and so Chuck took that as permission to thrust, his fingers tightening and getting no purchase on Dean’s short, gel-stiff hair.
Dean’s tongue was soft and his throat tight, and Chuck came and came. Dean swallowed, making it even better, pulling back just before Chuck finished, so the last of it caught on his lips. Dean’s smirk would’ve been filthy even if it hadn’t been smeared with Chuck’s come; as it was, Chuck’s cock made a valiant attempt to get hard all over again.
Dean allowed him to stay Windows-frozen for a minute, then half-led, half-shoved him to the bed. Without really understanding how, Chuck found himself all the way naked, and then he was on his stomach, Dean spreading his legs apart with his warm hands high on Chuck’s thighs.
“Um,” he managed, realizing that Dean hunted monsters for a living, and so maybe for Dean ‘vanilla’ meant ‘no tentacles please.’
“Relax,” Dean said in a voice that was honey-thick and strangely not at all relaxing, “you’ll like this.” Then he did something inconceivable with his mouth, and Chuck was too busy gasping and moaning to disagree, and then he didn’t disagree, and when Dean’s fingers got involved Dean said, “Relax, you’ll like this” again, which was even more implausible, but by the time Dean said, “Relax, you’ll like this” for the third time, Chuck was more than convinced, and he said so until Dean said, “God, do you ever shut up?” but not like he was pissed off about it, and Chuck babbled into the pillow while Dean fucked him with such enthusiasm that the mattress squeaked and the headboard thudded against the wall hard enough to crack the paint, which Chuck had never actually believed happened, but then Chuck had recently learned that lots of things that he thought were mythical were only very, very unlikely.
Afterwards, Chuck melted into the sheets, not caring how messed up they were, and made happy little purring-type sounds while Dean patted him. It was comfortable, even though they didn’t really know each other and were never going to do this again-or maybe because of that.
Eventually, he fell asleep.
****
Sam was up when Dean snuck back in. Dean wouldn’t ever admit it except under torture (he’d learned the hard way that there was really no such thing as ‘never’ in their worlds), but he liked that Sam was worried enough to stay up, even though he could’ve lived without the impending bitchfest.
“So …” Sam said, of course, leaning up against the headboard of his bed.
“Sew buttons,” Dean said, and Sam looked at him like he’d started speaking Italian.
“Where have you been?” Sam asked, giving up. “You didn’t-you couldn’t’ve been with Sarah,” as if Dean hadn’t pulled harder girls.
“No,” Dean said. “More ‘n that, don’t ask, ‘cause I’m not gonna tell.”
Sam looked at him with suspicion as he passed by on the way to brush his teeth, probably wondering if Dean even knew that it sounded like he’d slept with Casey. Dean didn’t mind Sam wondering. Keeping Sam on his toes wasn’t always easy-but it was always fun.
****
The Winchesters swung by the Buy More, supposedly to check and make sure that everything was squared away with the government, but given the bags Dean carried down to Castle Chuck thought he was probably more interested in loading up with every piece of the armory Casey would give him. Sam waited upstairs with Chuck at the Nerd Herd counter.
“How did Dean get Casey to like him?” Chuck asked Sam, since most days he thought Casey just barely tolerated Chuck, and Charles Carmichael didn’t do much better.
Sam shrugged, his expression discontented. “No clue.” Then, after some hesitation: “I think Dean does well with structure, you know? When everyone has a place, and works together. He would’ve done well in the military, if-” He looked down.
Chuck didn’t mean to make Sam all maudlin. “Well, you guys have friends in the military now. I’m not saying you can rely on us to get you out of everything, but we’ll do what we can if you need info, or maybe official cover once in a while.”
Sam raised his head and smiled, and it was broad and dimpled, sincere even though he still looked bone-tired. “Thanks, man. Hard to believe we used to think physics was the toughest obstacle we faced, isn’t it?”
Chuck nodded. “But on the other hand, we do get to save the world a lot.”
Sam chuckled. “There is that.”
At that point, Dean returned, carrying two bags so loaded that Chuck could see he was struggling to pretend they were easy to carry. Chuck shuddered to think what was in them, or, more to the point, what Jeff and Lester would do with what was in them. He needed to get those bags out of the Buy More quickly, because the best scenario here was that Dean would cut off Jeff and Lester’s sticky fingers.
“Take these out to the car,” Dean ordered. Chuck waited for Sam to snap at Dean’s tone, but Sam just rolled his eyes and accepted the bags. He didn’t seem to have any trouble with the weight, and Dean’s expression as he watched Sam depart was a bit disgruntled, as if he’d hoped for at least a protest, if not a struggle. Dean leaned on the counter and tilted his head, giving Chuck a bright and micron-thin grin.
“One-night stand, hunh?” Chuck asked, not really unhappy with the expected answer.
Dean shrugged. “Not much room in my life for more’n that.”
“Yeah,” Chuck agreed, wistful. “And of course I’m sure you were in no way sublimating any issues you have with Stanford dropouts taller than you are with freaky stuff in their brains, any more than I was sublimating my issues with guys with gun fetishes and jawlines like Greek gods.”
Dean’s face blanked with surprise, then slowly flushed. He turned his face away with a small coughlike sound and said without turning back, “Don’t forget trouble talking about my feelings. Not that I know what ‘sublimate’ means.”
“Of course not,” Chuck agreed. “Like I told Sam, call if you need us.”
“Yeah, sure,” Dean said, exactly as unconvincing as Chuck had expected. But that was the virtue of working with a team, he knew: Dean didn’t have to make all the right decisions, as long as someone else was there to talk sense to him. “Friendly advice, dude: don’t wait too long to ask for what you want. This life doesn’t come with a retirement plan.”
“I know,” Chuck said, and he did, really. “I’m just waiting for the bruises to go down.”
Startled, Dean flicked his eyes over Chuck’s neck, as if worried he’d left visible marks. Chuck shook his head, smiling, to show that he wasn’t talking about anything physical. Dean rubbed the back of his head, looking a lot like Casey when matters of the heart came up. “Probably get new bruises tomorrow, though.”
Chuck sighed. “I hear you.” Sarah knew how he felt, but she could probably stand to hear it again, to know that nothing had changed. And Casey-God only knew how that conversation would go, but Chuck should probably find out. “Take care, okay?”
Dean half-shrugged. “Just don’t let the feds let out any more vampires,” he said, and then he was walking away, six feet of leather jacket and attitude swaggering through the white-and-plastic of the Buy More like a refugee from the auto parts store on the other side of the mall.
Chuck watched him go, and not just because of the rear view. You had to be pretty brave to do their kinds of jobs, he knew. But sometimes it was so much easier to put your life on the line than your heart. Chuck had done both, but the need didn’t stop with one time.
And, if there really were vampires, then who was Chuck to stop believing in happy endings too?
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Redshirt checked Dean out in the way guys did when they were looking for competition, not company, so Dean gave up on the sex decoy idea immediately; too much to ask for it to work twice in one night. He felt Casey’s presence behind him-dude was as big as Sam, which was saying something (something he’d never say out loud, but whatever). He’d still rather have Sam at his back, but on the other hand if he never had to see Sam and vampires in the same room again it would be too soon.
Sarah swept past them like a fighter plane, all sharp edges. Dean let himself look, because anybody within thirty yards who was into girls was looking too, and Redshirt couldn’t help himself either even though the rubber rings around her neck would undoubtedly stick in his teeth.
She smiled at Redshirt (Sam had made him look at the dossiers, but what kind of word was dossier anyway, plus they were all vampires, just like they were all lost souls on the rack; knowing more would only get in the way of the job). Now, in reality, no girl as hot as Sarah would’ve gone for Redshirt, at least not unless Redshirt was wearing a Patek Philippe watch and the girl had serious self-esteem problems besides, but hope springs eternal and so Redshirt didn’t seem as shocked as he should’ve been when Sarah leaned in to speak into his ear.
Redshirt grinned, which made him look better. He tilted his head and said something back, and Sarah laughed. She edged closer-
But then Redshirt looked around, and his face tightened with unease. Almost as if he was looking for people and not seeing the ones he expected. He said something to Sarah, not even bothering to turn to face her all the way.
Dean stumbled forward, double-time, and sloshed his beer down the exact center of Redshirt’s red shirt. “Whoah,” he said. “You should watch where you’re going, dude.”
Now he had the vampire’s attention. “Excuse me?” Redshirt was mad, working his way up to outraged, and he wasn’t worrying about his dead friends any more.
Dean shoved him in the shoulder. “Yeah, excuse you.”
“Listen, you mouth-breathing-”
“Really?” Dean interrupted, hoping to get the show on the road with minimal fuss. “Wanna take this out back?”
The vampire snarled, though he kept his human face on. “Fine, asshole.”
Dean caught Casey’s eye, raising an eyebrow and hoping Casey picked up on the idea that Redshirt should think he was going off, alone, with an easy victim. Dean swaggered towards the back, putting just enough drunk into his walk to make Redshirt extra confident. He didn’t like turning his back on a vampire, but they were in public and the chance of getting bit from behind was pretty low.
As soon as they were around the bend in the hallway cutting them off from the rest of the club, Dean spun around, and nearly got a faceful of pissed-off vamp-fuckers were fast, had to give them that-as he brought his knife up. It wouldn’t have been much of a wound under ordinary circumstances; Dean’d given worse to Sam sparring, but with the dead man’s blood the vamp choked and fell back, and Casey’s big-ass knife flashed out easy as the flick of a windshield wiper.
“Dude,” Dean said respectfully, stepping back from the spray of blood and wondering where Casey was going to put the knife. (Thigh sheath, it turned out.)
“Okay, shut it down,” Casey said into thin air. This whole comms thing was awesome, even better than the headsets Dean had gotten to use in Hollywood. Dean was also a fan of preventing further civilians from entering. According to the plan, they had fifteen more minutes to go through the place looking for piles of corpses or other vamptastic leavings before everyone already inside would be herded out due to the faked-up health scare Chuck had planned. With any luck, even if the vamps had made some baby vamps, those would be too new to the game to put up organized resistance when the mock-CDC moved in.
“You wanna check out the basement?” Casey asked. “Walker and Bartowski can run crowd control.”
Dean hit his own earpiece. “Sam, cleanup on aisle four.”
“Fuck you,” Sam said, after a fifteen-second delay which had to be Sam figuring out how to work the comms (Dean grinned to himself). “We hitting the basement?”
“Fine,” Dean sighed, because even if someone did stumble onto the corpse parts that Casey was even now shoving into a supply closet, they were all going to be evacuated anyway in a few minutes, so there wasn’t much need to worry about mass panic.
They met at the top of the stairs. There was a macho moment about who was going to go down first, which Sam resolved by rolling his eyes and telling Casey that he should watch their six, almost as if Sam had actually listened to all those war movies Dean had exposed him to. They went down fast, blood-tipped dartguns at the ready, which sounded wimpy but was a really good idea if Dean did say so himself now that they had no further need for concealment.
The basement was well-lit and well-organized, almost a disappointment, though there were a couple of darker corners where extra barstools and broken tables were piled. Nothing big enough to hide a drained corpse. Casey signalled that Dean should go on into the storeroom ahead.
Grinning, Dean stepped through the doorway.
****
Most of the clubgoers went, grumbling but obedient, when Chuck took over from the DJ, killed the music, and announced that the club was closing due to a potential health issue. “Walk slowly to the exits,” he warned, “and public health officials will assist you.” There was some shoving and squawking, but after Sarah put a drunk frat boy on his ass for trying to push to the front people were a bit more orderly, and Chuck put on some light jazz to improve the mood.
Then they had to go around corralling the people who were too drunk to comprehend Chuck’s instructions, at least two of whom clearly thought that the reason the lights had gotten so bright and the music so weird was because of the drugs they were on. One of them was awfully handsy, too, and Chuck had to dodge a lot of groping, though at least he got to see Sarah frown in disapproval. Chuck was a little worried that the agents outside wouldn’t be able to distinguish the effects of dead man’s blood from the effects of being totally blitzed, so he fed the girl a couple of drops from his remaining stash and all she did was throw up on his shoes. Good enough, he figured, and handed her out.
“Casey!” Sarah’s raised voice cut through the smooth sounds of piano and saxophone. “What happened?”
Casey smiled, which made the blood smeared on his face look a lot scarier. “There were a couple extra vamps in the basement.”
“Are you okay?” Chuck demanded. “Is that blood from a-get it off, you could be at risk-”
“Not if he didn’t get bit,” Dean said, sounding out of breath as he hobbled up behind Casey. “Anyway, ’s just human.” Then he crumpled.
So then there was more shouting and running around, and Sam proved that he was as good a field medic as he was a monster hunter, which Casey also seemed to love. Chuck was getting the feeling that Casey thought he’d ended up with the wrong Stanford dropout.
“One of the new vamps had a cellphone, texted a message before we got him,” Casey reported, handing over the phone.
“Let’s get back to Castle and track the call,” Chuck suggested, which they did. By which he meant that he traced the call to a cell tower near where the final tracker was also showing up, a foreclosed house in a relatively nice neighborhood.
The team the military sent out found only an abandoned phone and a bloody chip.
The thing was, Chuck might not have been the greatest vampire slayer, but he did have other skills. Casey was mooning over the Winchesters, going so far as to sit next to Dean and tell him war stories while the blood transfused into him.
Chuck wasn’t jealous. Not even, like, for half a second. But he was a darned good researcher, so he brought up the databases and looked into the background of their last, cleverest vampire. The military had managed to identify her as Jane Sherman, born 1980. Disappeared from her home in 2005. That made her new, though the Winchesters hadn’t been clear on whether there were really a lot of Lestat-old vampires walking around-Chuck had to think that there’d be an overpopulation problem unless the numbers got kept down either by hunters or by internecine warfare-anyway, vampire population dynamics aside, Jane Sherman had enough of a record as a human to be a relatively known quantity.
And she was from California. LA, to be exact, which might explain why the escapees had gone to ground there. The question was whether she was smart enough to stay away from the people she’d known back before her life had been taken from her.
Chuck thought about Ellie, what he’d do in similar circumstances. Maybe there were people who could leave their pasts entirely. But he wasn’t going to bet on it.
A few more minutes of work determined that Jane’s parents were dead, but that her sister was still living in LA. She’d filed the first police report and she’d never found out what happened to her sister, but she still called every year to see if there’d been any change in the status of the case. Chuck knew what that felt like: losing someone with no explanation whatsoever. Kelly Sherman loved Jane, had never stopped, and Chuck hoped that it went the other way too.
****
Sam pulled Dean aside when they got back to the secret underground lair (no, that was not going to stop being cool any time soon). “How sure are we that we can trust these guys?” he asked, low like somehow that wouldn’t get picked up on the concealed microphones undoubtedly monitoring them.
Dean shrugged. “Can’t trust the feds in general, that’s for sure. Like I said, have you never seen a movie? But these guys-you tell me, Sam.”
Sam frowned and his mouth did that bit-into-a-kumquat thing that usually only Dean could trigger. “Stanford was a long time ago. Anyway, you seem to be getting along fine with them.”
Dean raised his eyebrows-that was a problem now? Okay, yes, the last new guy he’d found it easy to hunt with had been Gordon Walker, but Dean was much more together now. Well, much more experienced. Much more-whatever. “I’m not lookin’ to put a ring on it. But your buddy called us in for a reason, and as long as we’re killing vampires, I don’t see how we can walk away.”
“I know you wish we had something more stable,” Sam said, and then looked about as embarrassed to have said it as Dean was to hear it.
Dean didn’t want to go there, mostly because he wouldn’t get back out if he did. “You saying this place is cooler than my baby? Because if you’ve got a beef with our home base, Sam-”
Sam sighed heavily, and looked like he was considering pushing further, but then Chuck was coming around the corner to collect them for an update. While Chuck herded them, Dean tried to figure out how to reassure Sam that he wasn’t harboring a secret desire to become a fed and get awesome guns and amazing tech, but that way lay talking about what Sam could be doing instead of hunting, so he focused his attention on the big computer screen in the main room, which was showing a satellite map.
Sarah launched right in: “Surveillance says the patterns of activity around Kelly Sherman’s condo are unusual. Lots of coming and going at night, not so much during the day.”
“Could one vampire really have taken over a whole condo?” Chuck asked, sounding appalled.
Sam and Dean exchanged glances. Dean could’ve told him about some of the grimmer scenes they’d encountered, but even thinking about that felt kind of like planning to kick a puppy. Sam clearly was of the same mind. “It’s possible,” Sam said apologetically.
“A completely infested building,” Casey mused.
Dean nodded at him. “Get in the HVAC, spread some dead man’s blood around, could make it real simple.”
Sam shot him a look, and Dean couldn’t tell whether it was ‘you idiot, it’s never simple,’ or ‘you idiot, you’re talking about maybe dozens of lives sacrificed.’ Didn’t matter, because Dean wasn’t about to go in assuming that all he needed was a fine mist of dead man’s blood, and because they couldn’t save anybody who was already dead. Up to and including the vamp’s sister. Now that had real clusterfuck potential. Given what they’d seen from vampires who were just fucking, weren’t even real family, Dean was not about to get careless.
The funny thing was, when the time came the operation was a cakewalk, mostly. They pumped Casey’s anticoagulant-laden spray into the air through every vent, went in, and found twenty new vamps, all so easy to kill that Dean felt more like a butcher than a hunter. Chuck made some noises about checking to see if they were all killers, but anybody who’d turned double-digits’ worth of people into monsters wasn’t training them to be vegetarians, and both Dean and Sam had kept their mouths shut about Lenore just to keep the moral confusion to a minimum, so that argument didn’t outlast the first couple of executions. After all that, Jane Sherman wasn’t among the catch.
They did keep the sister alive. Kelly. It was important to know their names if you wanted to get the most out of them. After some debate (Chuck was worried about what would happen at the Buy More if they took Kelly back to the secret government lair and she escaped), they decided to question her right where she was. Tied up six ways to Sunday, of course, and dosed with just enough dead man’s blood to keep her sluggish.
“Where’s Jane?” Sarah asked, standing in front of Kelly and radiating danger. God, that was hot. Sam kicked Dean’s ankle, because he cockblocked even Dean’s fantasies, and Dean forced his attention back to the vampire, as outnumbered and incapacitated as she was.
“Eat shit and die,” Kelly slurred. Her head slumped to the side, but the gleam in her eyes said she was ready to tear out the first throat that got near enough.
Sarah eyed Kelly carefully, as if assessing just where to hit first. Dean saw Chuck’s worried expression over Sarah’s shoulder. Worried for her, not worried that she wouldn’t be able to get it out of Kelly if she worked hard enough. Like Chuck thought that there was still something for Sarah to lose, as far in the life as she already was, and a couple of years back Dean would’ve thought how almost cute that was. He knew better now: there was always another step down.
“You know,” he said, “why don’t you guys secure this place, so that Jane can’t come back and get the jump on us. I’ll take care of this.”
Sarah raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You’ve been trained in interrogation?”
He grinned without humor, suppressing the urge to tell her that it wasn’t exactly interrogation he’d spent his time learning. “I can get a demon to give up its secrets, no worries.”
He could feel Sam behind him, radiating Do Not Want, and it just pissed him off. Yeah, Sam meant well and it was sweet that he cared about Dean’s mental health, but they needed to find this vampire and Dean wasn’t going to get any nicer if he refrained from using his skills here.
Kelly was recovering enough to catch the bad vibe in the room and cringe away from them, as much as she could. That was good; he could tell she wouldn’t give him much trouble once he really got started. She’d probably been a nice girl before all this. Her sister had probably thought that she was doing Kelly a favor turning her, because of what happened in this world to nice girls.
Dean made himself concentrate on the task at hand. “Sam?” he asked.
“Yeah, okay,” Sam said, somewhere between disappointed and accepting. “I’m going to set some traps in case Jane comes back. I could use some help.”
Sam managed to get Casey and Sarah to follow him, but Chuck stayed. Dean could’ve warned him off, but he was getting impatient-Kelly had been tied up and waiting for so long, and ever since he’d realized that he’d need to persuade her he’d felt the old red haze waiting for him, familiar as the taste of his own blood.
“All righty,” Dean said cheerily, extracting his knife from his back pocket. “I’ve got some questions for you, Kelly.”
Dean flipped the knife in the air, easily, like it wasn’t even a trick, so that he was holding the hilt with the blade pointing down. “I’m gonna tell you something, and you probably don’t care, but I think it’s interesting.” He waited a second, tilting his head expectantly. She stared at him, frozen, as if he were the kind of predator who only attacked when something moved. Oh well. “Before I went to Hell, I didn’t have a favorite knife. Sure, I thought I did. Turns out it’s not the same thing.”
Then he stepped forward.
****
Chuck knew that vomiting was not going to increase their credibility with the vampire. And he’d seen the pile of corpses in Kelly Sherman’s bedroom; voluntary or not, she’d exited the human race and taken a whole bunch of people with her. Chuck got that. But still-
“Hey, Chuck, I bet Sam and the rest of them could use a hand,” Dean said without turning, cheery enough that the horror-movie vibe notched up another level. Kelly-the vampire, Chuck needed to think of her as the vampire-made a whimpering sound, but Chuck couldn’t really see why what with Dean’s body mostly between her and Chuck.
Dean had given him a good excuse, and Chuck took it. Dean didn’t look away from his work.
Sam was waiting just outside Kelly’s apartment, grabbing at Chuck’s elbow and dragging him far enough down the hall that Dean wouldn’t be overhearing them. “Is he--? Is he okay?”
Chuck swallowed, not knowing where to begin on answering that. “I thought, you know, he’s doing it for us, for all of us, for humanity really, it’s sort of my duty to bear witness at least, right?” Sam nodded sympathetically, like that had made sense, even though his grip didn’t slacken. “I mean, he seems pretty much as calm as when he started. Is that good? It’s bad if the job gets to you, I know, but now I’m thinking it’s maybe bad if it doesn’t, too.”
“You get stuck in this life, and it gets stuck in you,” Sam said, which Chuck took as agreement of a sort. “But Dean-”
“He, uh, he told her he’s not enjoying it.” Dean had said that like a guy observing that there was a bulb burnt out in the bathroom: like there was a boring but standard task ahead of him.
“Chuck,” Sam said, careful. “Dean’s survived a lot. He might be-flippant, but you saw at the bar, he knows what he’s hunting. He’s one of the good guys.”
In Chuck’s recent but still extensive experience, this was not something that ordinarily needed to be said about actual good guys. Not that he disbelieved Sam, not necessarily. It was just something he’d had cause to wonder about himself, and about Sarah. If you live a secret life destroying evil, without even the recognition that cops and firefighters get, do you eventually become that which you fight? Was that going to be the price, and was Chuck willing to pay it, or to watch Sarah pay it, the way Sam was already watching Dean pay?
“That’s not a person in there, Chuck,” Sam said, his eyes wide and sincere, as if sensing Chuck’s uncertainty.
“Now, Sammy, I’m offended,” Dean said almost in Chuck’s ear, and he jumped half a foot.
Dean chuckled warmly, and he wasn’t nearly as scary as when he’d been questioning Kelly even though he had a fleck of dried blood on the bridge of his nose. “Relax, Chuck, I’m real good at telling the monsters from the people these days.”
Sam’s mouth tightened, but before he could say anything, Dean continued: “She didn’t know exactly where Jane went, but apparently dear sis always wanted a recording career and went and found herself a studio where she can produce an album. Gonna take advantage of the Twilight phenomenon, at least that’s the plan, all dolled up like that ‘Bring Me to Life’ chick.”
“So we’re going after a glampire?” Chuck asked before he could think better of it.
Dean sniggered, moving even further away from the person who’d been questioning the vampire. “You just don’t quit, do you? I like that.”
Sam’s nostrils flared; Chuck remembered one time at Stanford when Sam had gotten into a huge argument with a guy in their study group about compulsory health insurance, and back then he hadn’t been nearly as scary when angry but somehow the expression was the same. Usually Chuck’s humor went over better with non-Casey people, but Chuck thought maybe Sam was more focused on Dean’s reaction, embarrassed or-wait, was Sam jealous that Chuck made Dean laugh? Then Sam blinked, like clouds clearing from the sky, and tilted his head. “Since when do you listen to Evanescence?” he asked Dean.
“Since MTV,” Dean said, unfazed. “Anyhow, we need to find ourselves a recording studio that’s suddenly doing midnight hours. You up for it?” he asked, turning to Chuck. “Your supergeek thing’s worked so far.”
“I’m pretty sure a lot of these places operate around the clock already,” Chuck said, “because recording stars can have stranger habits than vampires, but I can definitely take a look at the data.”
“Awesome,” Dean said, and slapped him on the back just hard enough to rock him forward. “Now we just need to clean up this place.”
“Sarah and Casey will call it in,” Chuck reminded them. “I think they might just burn the whole building down. They say there’ll be fewer questions that way, though I personally would wonder about the fire safety codes if I read about it.”
Dean’s eyes lit up. “I’ll go see if they need help.”
Sam and Chuck were left staring at each other. Sam’s smile was a bit strained. “Dean likes setting fires. I mean, not randomly,” he hurried, perhaps realizing that he was making Dean sound like even more of a psycho, which considering what Chuck had just watched took some effort. “But it’s a standard method of disposal for ghosts, burning the bones, and it can be-satisfying.”
Chuck could see that. Getting rid of a ghost seemed like a nice, modular problem to solve. Not like taking down a global terrorist cell. “What about Kelly?” he asked, because even a vampire shouldn’t be burned alive. Undead. But the look in Sam’s eyes told him that his concern was misplaced.
****
Before Dean had even managed to finish the burger he’d snagged for lunch, Chuck found Jane’s demo tape on some music website somewhere. (Sam had rolled his eyes at Dean’s bull-headed ignorance about the internet, as usual, while Dean had pointed out that they still called it a “demo tape,” meaning that even internet idiots respected the achievements of the classics, and the resulting scuffle had taken up most of the time required for Chuck to track down Jane’s studio.) She was using a stage name, for which Dean could hardly blame her; even Joan Jett wasn’t born that way.
Still, Dean wasn’t so sure that Plain Jane and the Prowlers was the best name. The music wasn’t Sam’s emo crap when Chuck played it for them, which put it well outside the range of Dean’s experience of modern bands. “What would you call that?” Chuck asked. “It’s got a sort of coldwave feel, with some beauty and the beast aesthetics layered on top.”
“Think you nailed it, buddy,” he said, because Chuck looked like he could use some appreciation, and also because it would annoy Sam no end: if Sam had said something like that, the mockery would’ve been eternal.
Chuck grinned happily, and that was Dean’s good deed for the day taken care of.
Then it was just loading up on concealed weaponry and driving.
They got inside the studio the easy way: Chuck told the speaker at the entrance that they’d heard her demo tape and would like to talk about something called a ‘360 deal.’ The door clicked open before he was done talking.
The building seemed empty as they walked through, nobody even sitting at the front desk. They didn’t know if she was watching the security cameras, so they couldn’t afford to split up and search.
Sarah, looking as hot as ever in her royal blue business suit and executive bun, led the way. The vampire was standing at the end of the hallway, trying to control her smile (Dean briefly wondered if she was struggling to keep the teeth hidden, but from what he recalled it wasn’t happiness that posed the challenge). Dark hair, dark eyes, hipster skinny, black tattoos peeking out from under the sleeves of her black T-shirt-Dean could definitely imagine her on stage somewhere, sexy because she was so deep into the performance. If only she wouldn’t be eating her groupies, he’d have been happy to see that.
“I’m Sarah Walker,” Sarah said to the vampire, sticking her hand out. “These are my lawyers, Charles Carmichael and Sam Wesson.” Flanking her, they nodded, looking professional even with Sam’s hair flopping everywhere and Chuck’s not much better. It was probably the quality of the suits-the CIA sure had good tailors. The vampire glanced at Casey, who folded his arms. In his own black suit, along with one of those earpieces with the little corkscrews and dark sunglasses, he made a convincing bodyguard.
Dean had refused to wear a monkey suit, preferring to stick with what worked for him. “I’m Dean,” he said, giving the vampire a wave. That seemed to be enough for her; she probably watched Entourage.
“My engineer is out,” she said-Dean hoped that was true and not code for ‘bled dry in the recording booth’-“but I can speak for everyone here.”
Sarah took her cue to peer over the vampire’s shoulder. “Is there anyone else here?” she asked. “Because-” lowering her voice-“we are really most interested in you, if you understand my meaning.”
The vampire hesitated-leftover loyalty?-and then shook her head. “I can do that,” she said, pushing her shoulders back and straightening, though she was still a couple of inches shorter than Sarah. “Anyway, I’ve been having some artistic differences with the rest of the group.”
Yeah, Dean thought, they saw themselves as alive and you saw them as dead.
“Wonderful,” Sarah said, smiling sharklike, nothing like she’d been at the bar but just as convincing. “Why don’t we sit down?”
When the vampire turned to lead them deeper into the studio, Sarah stabbed her in the back with a needle coated with dead man’s blood, and had her head off as fast as Dean could’ve done it himself.
“Okay,” Chuck said on a shuddering breath. “Well, that was-okay. At least she died happy, thinking she was going to be a star.”
“The poor sucker,” Dean said, shaking his head.
Sam winced; Chuck winced; Sarah winced. Casey sneered, but on him it somehow looked more like a grin.
And that was when the Prowlers, who were not in fact dead, showed up.
Dean only saw the others in flashes, too focused on saving his own ass and watching Sammy’s back to do more than note a particularly beautiful dive-and-roll (Sarah), a headshot right between the eyes (Casey), and a weird but effective split kick setting both kickees up to have their heads taken off by Sam and Casey (Chuck).
The spies were adaptable when the vamps were able to take more punishment than an ordinary human. Dean felt almost patriotic, watching them. And dodging, swinging, and kicking some skanky vampire ass of his own, of course. Still, it was nice to see a team together, deep in the hunt, the way he and Sam were. Maybe things weren’t perfect between them, but the job was important enough to shut your mouth and help each other out, like Sam did when he rammed his knife straight through the sternum of a vampire who was about to rip Dean’s throat out. Dean nodded his approval, and even through the blood and chaos he could see Sam’s face light up.
No doubt it was screwed up that this was the best approval he had to offer, Dean thought as he rolled and came up on one knee, hamstringing one vamp and knocking another towards Sam’s waiting machete on the backswing. He ducked another attacker-fuck, Jane had made herself a freaking orchestra, not a backup band-and, he could not make this shit up, tripped one headed towards Chuck. A quick slice and dice took care of that one, along with the screaming hamstrung vampire (who was really getting on Dean’s nerves), and just as suddenly as the assault had begun it was over, nothing but five people panting loudly in a room Jackson Pollocked with vampire backsplash. Even Sarah looked somewhat less smoking covered with more blood than Carrie at the prom.
“Wow,” Chuck said into the silence. His eyes were very wide. “Can we go back to hunting down terrorists now?”
****
Chuck was a little surprised when the knock on his apartment door turned out to be Dean Winchester. He’d pretty much expected the Winchesters to blow out of town before the blood dried, especially now that they’d all seen Dean in action, and Sam had seen them seeing Dean in action. Chuck had the uneasy feeling that Dean wasn’t even the scariest one between the two of them.
“Uh, hi,” he said, standing in the door, and made a split-second decision that he hoped wasn’t going to get him messily killed. “You want to come in?”
Dean nodded and ambled past him, taking in Chuck’s apartment with a casual thoroughness that was not too different from the way Sarah and Casey scanned a room. Sometimes Chuck wondered what the world looked like to them: everything assessed for its potential utility in defense and attack, like a very specialized form of Intersect.
“I’m gonna ask you a personal question,” Dean announced as soon as Chuck closed the door. “Sam always says I have bad boundaries. So: why aren’t you with her? Or,” Dean hesitated before continuing, “with them?”
Chuck thought there was probably a point in his life when he would have blushed. “It’s … complicated.”
Dean smiled lopsidedly. “Yeah, I don’t do complicated. But, uh, one-night stands-I totally do those.”
It took Chuck a couple of seconds to decode that. “Oh. Oh! Wow.”
Dean shrugged like Chuck’s surprise meant nothing. “Whatever, dude.”
“Wait!” Chuck held up both of his hands. “That was supremely and absolutely in no way a no. More like a general expression of amazement at, well, my life. I, uh, would’ve thought you’d go for Casey before me.” It was astonishing that getting hit on by a guy who was both as butch as Dean and as nuclear-hot as Dean was far from the least plausible thing that had happened to Chuck in the past year. Regardless, it was pretty near the top of the list of the best things that had happened.
Dean grinned, leaning back against the wall by the door, showing himself off with a shamelessness that was absolutely not attractive. “So was that a yes, or just not a no?”
Chuck swallowed. He loved Sarah (and he wasn’t going near what he felt for Casey), but Dean was just - different. He was offering something as unlike what Chuck had with Sarah as, well, as a vampire was unlike a person. But hopefully less dangerous. “Yes?”
Dean’s smile widened. “I bet you’ve got a perfectly good bed somewhere back there. Care to give me a tour?”
Chuck swayed forward, but before he gave in completely he had to know: “Does that actually work on women?”
That earned him a pout, but not a real one; Dean wasn’t taking him seriously, any more than he took Sam seriously, which was maybe not the best comparison Chuck could have made, but anyway: “That’s why I’m so good-looking.”
Chuck thought the causation on that was probably reversed. But he got the point, especially when Dean moved closer and put his hands on Chuck’s waist, all grace and confidence and bowlegged swagger. He let Dean pull him into his room.
Dean might’ve been butch in the streets, but he was downright eager to please in the sheets, or anyway the upright version of the sheets. He let Chuck take his time with the kissing, tilting his head up and melting into Chuck with absolute confidence. Even when Chuck wobbled on his feet, Dean just rocked back and stabilized them both, walking backwards until Chuck had him pressed up against a convenient wall, where they could rub against each other without any fear of falling.
“So what do you do?” Dean asked after they were both breathless and Dean’s lips were swollen from kissing.
Chuck only barely prevented himself from saying ‘I work at the Buy More,’ as if this were a first date, and blushed harder in shame at his own social awkwardness than from figuring out what Dean was really asking. “I’m pretty vanilla, really,” Chuck said at last. “I like all the, uh, standard things.”
Dean grinned as his fingers flew over the buttons of Chuck’s shirt. “So, you want me to suck your cock?”
Chuck was never actually sure if he answered in words, but a couple of minutes later Chuck’s button-down was gone and his pants were around his ankles as he concentrated on not falling over while Dean’s mouth did amazing, unbelievable, hot, wet things to him. Chuck narrated, because that’s what he did, and Dean’s eyes glinted up at him through those ridiculous lashes with humor and what Chuck took as encouragement. Dean made a hot little moan when Chuck put a hand in his hair, and so Chuck took that as permission to thrust, his fingers tightening and getting no purchase on Dean’s short, gel-stiff hair.
Dean’s tongue was soft and his throat tight, and Chuck came and came. Dean swallowed, making it even better, pulling back just before Chuck finished, so the last of it caught on his lips. Dean’s smirk would’ve been filthy even if it hadn’t been smeared with Chuck’s come; as it was, Chuck’s cock made a valiant attempt to get hard all over again.
Dean allowed him to stay Windows-frozen for a minute, then half-led, half-shoved him to the bed. Without really understanding how, Chuck found himself all the way naked, and then he was on his stomach, Dean spreading his legs apart with his warm hands high on Chuck’s thighs.
“Um,” he managed, realizing that Dean hunted monsters for a living, and so maybe for Dean ‘vanilla’ meant ‘no tentacles please.’
“Relax,” Dean said in a voice that was honey-thick and strangely not at all relaxing, “you’ll like this.” Then he did something inconceivable with his mouth, and Chuck was too busy gasping and moaning to disagree, and then he didn’t disagree, and when Dean’s fingers got involved Dean said, “Relax, you’ll like this” again, which was even more implausible, but by the time Dean said, “Relax, you’ll like this” for the third time, Chuck was more than convinced, and he said so until Dean said, “God, do you ever shut up?” but not like he was pissed off about it, and Chuck babbled into the pillow while Dean fucked him with such enthusiasm that the mattress squeaked and the headboard thudded against the wall hard enough to crack the paint, which Chuck had never actually believed happened, but then Chuck had recently learned that lots of things that he thought were mythical were only very, very unlikely.
Afterwards, Chuck melted into the sheets, not caring how messed up they were, and made happy little purring-type sounds while Dean patted him. It was comfortable, even though they didn’t really know each other and were never going to do this again-or maybe because of that.
Eventually, he fell asleep.
****
Sam was up when Dean snuck back in. Dean wouldn’t ever admit it except under torture (he’d learned the hard way that there was really no such thing as ‘never’ in their worlds), but he liked that Sam was worried enough to stay up, even though he could’ve lived without the impending bitchfest.
“So …” Sam said, of course, leaning up against the headboard of his bed.
“Sew buttons,” Dean said, and Sam looked at him like he’d started speaking Italian.
“Where have you been?” Sam asked, giving up. “You didn’t-you couldn’t’ve been with Sarah,” as if Dean hadn’t pulled harder girls.
“No,” Dean said. “More ‘n that, don’t ask, ‘cause I’m not gonna tell.”
Sam looked at him with suspicion as he passed by on the way to brush his teeth, probably wondering if Dean even knew that it sounded like he’d slept with Casey. Dean didn’t mind Sam wondering. Keeping Sam on his toes wasn’t always easy-but it was always fun.
****
The Winchesters swung by the Buy More, supposedly to check and make sure that everything was squared away with the government, but given the bags Dean carried down to Castle Chuck thought he was probably more interested in loading up with every piece of the armory Casey would give him. Sam waited upstairs with Chuck at the Nerd Herd counter.
“How did Dean get Casey to like him?” Chuck asked Sam, since most days he thought Casey just barely tolerated Chuck, and Charles Carmichael didn’t do much better.
Sam shrugged, his expression discontented. “No clue.” Then, after some hesitation: “I think Dean does well with structure, you know? When everyone has a place, and works together. He would’ve done well in the military, if-” He looked down.
Chuck didn’t mean to make Sam all maudlin. “Well, you guys have friends in the military now. I’m not saying you can rely on us to get you out of everything, but we’ll do what we can if you need info, or maybe official cover once in a while.”
Sam raised his head and smiled, and it was broad and dimpled, sincere even though he still looked bone-tired. “Thanks, man. Hard to believe we used to think physics was the toughest obstacle we faced, isn’t it?”
Chuck nodded. “But on the other hand, we do get to save the world a lot.”
Sam chuckled. “There is that.”
At that point, Dean returned, carrying two bags so loaded that Chuck could see he was struggling to pretend they were easy to carry. Chuck shuddered to think what was in them, or, more to the point, what Jeff and Lester would do with what was in them. He needed to get those bags out of the Buy More quickly, because the best scenario here was that Dean would cut off Jeff and Lester’s sticky fingers.
“Take these out to the car,” Dean ordered. Chuck waited for Sam to snap at Dean’s tone, but Sam just rolled his eyes and accepted the bags. He didn’t seem to have any trouble with the weight, and Dean’s expression as he watched Sam depart was a bit disgruntled, as if he’d hoped for at least a protest, if not a struggle. Dean leaned on the counter and tilted his head, giving Chuck a bright and micron-thin grin.
“One-night stand, hunh?” Chuck asked, not really unhappy with the expected answer.
Dean shrugged. “Not much room in my life for more’n that.”
“Yeah,” Chuck agreed, wistful. “And of course I’m sure you were in no way sublimating any issues you have with Stanford dropouts taller than you are with freaky stuff in their brains, any more than I was sublimating my issues with guys with gun fetishes and jawlines like Greek gods.”
Dean’s face blanked with surprise, then slowly flushed. He turned his face away with a small coughlike sound and said without turning back, “Don’t forget trouble talking about my feelings. Not that I know what ‘sublimate’ means.”
“Of course not,” Chuck agreed. “Like I told Sam, call if you need us.”
“Yeah, sure,” Dean said, exactly as unconvincing as Chuck had expected. But that was the virtue of working with a team, he knew: Dean didn’t have to make all the right decisions, as long as someone else was there to talk sense to him. “Friendly advice, dude: don’t wait too long to ask for what you want. This life doesn’t come with a retirement plan.”
“I know,” Chuck said, and he did, really. “I’m just waiting for the bruises to go down.”
Startled, Dean flicked his eyes over Chuck’s neck, as if worried he’d left visible marks. Chuck shook his head, smiling, to show that he wasn’t talking about anything physical. Dean rubbed the back of his head, looking a lot like Casey when matters of the heart came up. “Probably get new bruises tomorrow, though.”
Chuck sighed. “I hear you.” Sarah knew how he felt, but she could probably stand to hear it again, to know that nothing had changed. And Casey-God only knew how that conversation would go, but Chuck should probably find out. “Take care, okay?”
Dean half-shrugged. “Just don’t let the feds let out any more vampires,” he said, and then he was walking away, six feet of leather jacket and attitude swaggering through the white-and-plastic of the Buy More like a refugee from the auto parts store on the other side of the mall.
Chuck watched him go, and not just because of the rear view. You had to be pretty brave to do their kinds of jobs, he knew. But sometimes it was so much easier to put your life on the line than your heart. Chuck had done both, but the need didn’t stop with one time.
And, if there really were vampires, then who was Chuck to stop believing in happy endings too?
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