Fic: Supernatural After-Hours
Title: Supernatural After-Hours
Author: brightly_lit
Rating: R for language and not too vivid descriptions of porn
Pairing: None
Characters: Sam, Dean, Becky, David Letterman, and a surprise character (I don't want to give away the ending)
Genre: Gen, humor
Word Count: 6,000
Disclaimer: Supernatural don't belong to me, don't I know it.
Spoilers: Through part of season 7
Warnings: None
Summary: What's with all the shifters lately wanting to look like Sam and Dean? Why were those fans of Chuck's books at the store talking so dirty about Sam? And what was up with that porn Dean tried to watch that starred a very tall, very ripped character named Sam with long dark hair?! You can bet Sam and Dean will do what it takes to find out.
Sam and Dean stood in the express line at the Wal-Mart in a tiny California town. That freakin’ shifter had stolen their clothes so he could look like them, then in the fight before they finally ganked him, he’d managed to completely shred what Sam was wearing, then got skin and goo and crap all over Dean as he tried to shift. Basically, Dean and Sam had to drive back to the hotel naked. There wasn’t a thrift store in town, so here they were at Wal-Mart buying basics, dressed in their backup clothes--some nerdy sweater-vest thing Sam used to wear at college, while Dean wore something he’d once mistakenly stolen from a laundromat that fit but that he wouldn’t be caught dead wearing unless the only alternative was to go around naked--a time like now.
Whatever; they’d be on the road by noon, and this town would be nothing but a few scattered buildings and a giant-ass Wal-Mart in their rearview mirror.
Out of the corner of his eye, Dean saw Sam stiffen as they heard someone say their names. They turned surreptitiously to look, only to see two young women waiting in line behind them--the kind of girl who would probably be in college if she lived in the big city, and here would wind up marrying some guy she’d known all her life because he was the only guy in town her age.
“I know, right?” one of the girls--the blonde--was saying. “The only thing that could be better is if they did it with each other!” She glanced up and saw Dean looking at her, scoffed, rolled her eyes, and turned in toward her friend, shoulder to Sam and Dean. Okaaay ... apparently, they weren’t talking about the real Sam and Dean.
Sam and Dean shared a glance and turned forward again. “Supernatural fans?” Sam sighed.
“I guess,” said Dean. There was always a curious mixture of fury and morbid curiosity when it came to the books Chuck used to write about him and Sam and the crazy life they led. There just wasn’t any way not to listen when someone was describing third-hand an event you had lived. Things changed in the telling and retelling of the stories, but it was always just barely recognizable as their lives, dramatized and romanticized to sound infinitely cooler and better than it had really been. Actually, what these girls were talking about wasn’t even recognizable; must be something they made up themselves. As he listened absently to the girls giggling and sharing Sam and Dean fantasies, he could not help thinking of Chuck, and he found himself rubbing his knuckles. Sam was fondling his concealed weapon.
The conversation behind them died, and he felt the back of his neck tingle like he was being watched. The girls lowered their voices, but since they were standing right behind Sam and Dean and had been talking loudly to begin with, they could still hear them just fine. “They could be Sam and Dean,” the dark-haired one murmured. “The one is tall enough, and with the long hair.”
“Yeah,” said the other, unconvinced, the tone of a shopper unimpressed by the product. “But, standing in the express line at Wal-Mart, buying dental floss, fruit pies, and tighty-whities?” They both snickered. Sam glanced down at the basket he was holding and moved it so it was in front of him, a little better hidden from their view. “Besides, they wouldn’t be caught dead dressed like that.” Dean set his jaw.
“Plus, could you ever see the tall nerd ...” and she launched into the filthiest, most pornographic description of a sexual encounter Dean had ever heard out of anyone’s mouth ... well, ever, but certainly in the checkout lane at Wal-Mart. Dean suddenly couldn’t seem to swallow or speak, frozen, riveted. He didn’t notice when the line moved forward, but the girl did, interrupting her mind-blowing monologue with, “Hel-LO, the line is moving!” Dean managed to jerk and shamble his way forward, catching sight as he did of the back of Sam’s neck and his ears, both of which were bright red.
“Hey, Sammy--” Dean began with a grin, elbowing him. Sam smacked him away. Dean couldn’t help chortling softly as the dirty talk resumed behind them. “I had no idea you were so--”
“Shut up!” Sam whispered.
“I mean, I’ve never been there, so I don’t know, but I figured you’d be a little more romantic than that--”
“Dean, I never did anything like that, and it wasn’t in any of the books, either!” he hissed. “It must be some other Sam and Dean!”
Dean had read the books, too, and knew there was nothing like that in them. Not to mention Sam would never do anything like that, and even if he would, he hadn’t had the time. They were together 24/7. If he got laid, Dean would know about it, and it only happened maybe twice a year. The poor bastard. Thus, the obvious thing was to tease him mercilessly over this while it was still fresh; it would be forgotten by this afternoon, and the opportunity to torment Sammy would be past. “Nothin’ to be ashamed of. Sounds like she enjoyed it--”
“So help me, Dean, I will make the apocalypse look like Sunday dinner if you don’t leave it alone. Pranking will have a whole new definition--”
“All right, all right.” Dean waved it off as they finally reached the checker, then spied the cover of Time, which had a couple of good-looking young guys by the headline “The New Face of Romance: Love in the Time of Naughty Novels.” The guys in the picture were identified as Sam and Dean. “That answers it,” said Dean, grabbing the magazine and adding it to their stuff, because it promised to talk a lot about porn. The girls behind them snorted hysterically, and Dean turned a little red to realize he was buying a magazine with a couple of hot guys on the cover, but he paid the checker and walked away with his head held high.
Dean’s other cell phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number, so he answered with, “Tull.”
“Oh, what, ‘Jethro’?” sneered the caller. “That’s the name of the band, not the guy, you idiot.”
Dean looked at the number of the caller again. “Who is this?”
“Doesn’t really matter ... since I’m gonna be you soon. I’m in Oregon. Come ’n’ get me.”
“What’s with all these freakin’ shifters lately?” Dean hissed to Sam at a whisper before taking out a piece of paper and a pen and putting the phone next to his mouth again. “Great, well, since you’re being so helpful, care to give us an address?”
“He gave it to you?” Sam asked, bewildered, as Dean hung up, address in hand. He’d also given him directions, which included landmarks, shortcuts--even sharing the route that had the least traffic.
“Yeah, another one who wants to look like us. What the hell?”
“He wants us to come kill him?”
“Well, if he’s like the last one, he just wants to get a look at us so he can shift into us, too.”
“Dude, I’ve killed you, like, three times in the last week.”
“I’ve killed you more times than that.”
“Maybe the alpha shifter is making them help him try to kill us or something.”
“That’s probably it.”
“Well,” said Sam, looking down at his sweater vest, “at least we’re already dressed for it.”
Before they arrived, they’d already looked at maps of the area and triangulated where this shifter’s lair probably was. Of course, it was always possible he was actually dumb enough to direct them to his house, but Dean figured anyone who knew that much about Tull had to be smarter than that and he was probably just trying to send them somewhere he could get a good look at them. They checked through the house he’d sent them to in under a minute, then headed to his lair, where he was in the midst of trying to shift. “I wanna be the tall one!” were his last words.
“Well, that was kind of weird,” Dean remarked as they got to their hotel room.
“Everything’s kind of weird,” Sam said, clearly troubled.
Dean’s eyes lit up, picking up the card on top of the t.v. “Nothin’ a little porn can’t fix. Look, Sammy--pay-per-view!” He arched his eyebrows at him.
“Watching porn together? That would be a new low for us.”
“You do what you want. I’m watchin’ porn.”
Dean selected one that looked good and settled down on the bed while Sam sat as far from the t.v. as he could get and opened his laptop to do research. Dean only had to sit through about three minutes of “plot” before the sex got underway. He put his hands behind his head on the pillow and sighed joyously, troubles forgotten.
“Give it to me, baby,” said the man. “I’ve had a long, hard day of killing things and I need the release of sex.”
“Ooh, Sam, you’re so tall and commanding,” she moaned as they got down to it. Dean tilted his head curiously. The guy had longish, dark hair and was noticeably muscular.
“How ’bout that, Sammy?,” Dean teased Sam. “He’s got your name. He even kind of looks like you. You’re the one who should be watching this, not me.”
The woman praised ‘Sam’s’ stamina and prowess. He said, “It’s because I don’t have a soul. I have no soul, so I’m good at sex, and I have lots of it.”
Sam peered hesitantly back over his shoulder while Dean frowned at the t.v. Sam finally got up and came over to watch with him.
“Not having a soul makes you so good in bed!” the woman squealed.
“And smart,” added the guy. “Not totally evil, but kind of.”
There was a long, uncomfortable stretch when neither Dean nor Sam could bring themselves to look at each other or say anything, but staring at a screen watching a guy named Sam who looked like Sam have remarkably athletic sex wasn’t helping anything. Finally, Sam picked up the pay-per-view ad from the top of the t.v. “What’s this movie called?”
“Uh ....” Dean checked how it was listed on the screen. “’A Hundred Screws of Sam.’”
Sam’s eyes flickered toward Dean, who, after staring with morbid fascination a little longer, finally saw nothing for it but to just turn off the t.v. What a waste of perfectly good dirty money. “What’s going on?” Sam asked, freaked out.
“Hell if I know.”
The next day, they went to the town library to look up biographical information on the shifter they’d killed the day before, hoping for some window into the recent sharp increase in shifter activity. It was a long shot, but they didn’t have any better ideas.
Sam waited politely to talk to a librarian about getting access to physical records while Dean headed for the computers. He stopped mid-stride as he heard a librarian giggling with a co-worker nearby: “... about these brothers named Sam and Dean, and the stories are really dirty! I mean, yowsa. And do you know how many holds there are on this copy? Two hundred! I didn’t think that many people in this town could even read. Anyway, put it on the holds shelf.” Dean stalked the stocker. By the time she’d put it on the holds shelf and gone to another aisle, Sam was at his side, having overheard the same conversation. They looked around in the general area where she’d shelved it, and Dean finally spotted it: A Hundred Hues of Sam. They glanced at each other. Sam had that pissy look. Dean grabbed it off the shelf. On the cover was a colorless photo of a gun on a black background. Dean showed it to Sam. “That look romantic to you?”
“That’s my gun,” Sam said icily.
Dean looked at it. “Well, I’ll be. A lot less beat up than yours, though.”
Sam grabbed the book out of his hands and opened it, reading fast. This didn’t last long; he looked disgusted, put it back on the shelf, and said, “I’m going to go look at records.”
Dean looked at the author’s name: Tucker Loflin, not Carver Edlund, Chuck’s pen name, so it must not be Chuck. “Well? Is it good?” Dean teased.
“No, it’s not good,” Sam hissed. “And it’s all lies.”
“All right, well, who would do that? Who would make up a bunch of sex stories about you ...?”
They both said it at the same time: “Becky.”
Without another word, they stepped outside the library together, put Sam’s phone on speaker, and dialed. “Sam?!” she answered eagerly.
“Hi, Becky,” Sam said, his usually impressive degree of patience when it came to Becky obviously strained. “Or should I say, ‘Tucker Loflin’?”
“What?! No, I HATE her!”
“So you’ve heard of her.”
“Of course I’ve heard of her! Her craptastic books are currently taking up spots one through four on the New York Times bestseller list--and the top three are those evil books full of lies about Sam!”
Sam and Dean glanced at each other. “So, you don’t have anything to do with this?” said Sam.
“Of course not! I would NEVER write about you doing anything like that! Thoughts like that couldn’t even go through my mind! How could you think they could?! I know you would never be capable of treating women like that!--like ... like ... Dean would.”
“Hey!” said Dean. He didn’t miss Sam’s slight, smug smirk.
“Besides,” she went on coyly, “I only write about ... you two.”
Dean shook his head. This topic had to be put to rest immediately. “Then who is it?” he asked, unconvinced.
Dean had never heard her sound so vicious. “Obviously some fan of Chuck’s, writing BAD fanfiction that should have stayed in the dark, sick, twisted bowels of her laptop--”
“What’s her name? Where does she live?” Sam asked intently.
“How will that help, Sam?” Dean said, made nervous by the slightly crazed look in Sam’s eye. “What’re we gonna do, kill ’er?”
“We’ll start by talking,” Sam said with a sinister grin, and Dean got a chill--it was a little too reminiscent of when Sam didn’t have a soul.
“I don’t know,” Becky hissed, “but when I find out, I’m gonna--”
Sam let his phone drop to his side and looked at Dean as Becky detailed what she would do to the author if she ever got her hands on her. “I guess we could find the publisher, like we did with Chuck, but what’ll we do when we find her?”
“We can be very convincing,” Sam said darkly. “We couldn’t rough up Chuck because he has an angel on his shoulder, but what are the chances this author is a prophet?”
“You know, Sam, you’re taking this way too personally. Come on. Be the bigger man, let it go, let the girl have her fun. You’re gonna terrorize some girl just ’cos she’s in love with you? You should be flattered!” The fact was, this was freakin’ hilarious, and promised to provide priceless yuks for months or years to come.
“It was bad enough when it was just Chuck and hardly anybody had read them, but this thing is a bestseller, Dean!”
“Well, whattya gonna do? You win some, you lose some. So you’re a porn star. Worse things have happened.”
Sam gave him that look. “Okay, thanks, Becky,” he said into the phone as she was still talking, and closed it. After glaring at Dean until Dean was able to quell the wicked gleam in his eye, he huffed, “Fine,” and stalked back into the library.
Dean went straight back to the holds shelf and picked up the book in an effort to gather some gems before they hit the road again. He opened the book to a random page: “Sheila was in love. Sam would never know. Sam could think of only one thing. Well, actually, he could only think of two things: How to capture the alpha, and satisfying his own selfish, carnal desire. Sheila would never be more to Sam than a moderately good-looking ship in his Toledo port that had brown eyes, slightly longer than shoulder-length hair, and dangerously long toenails. They left scratches on his legs, a few of which got infected, but Sam didn’t care. All he cared about was getting his fingers as far inside--” Dean closed the book. Yep, all lies. Sam was more of a girl than any girl Dean had ever known. He got all dewy-eyed over every girl he’d even gotten to third base with. Well, there had been that whole year when he didn’t have a soul. He didn’t know what Sam was like then. Even Sam didn’t. But other than that ....
Dean’s cell phone rang. He looked at the number, then answered, stunned, “... Cassie?”
“Dean. I can’t believe you actually answered.”
“How--how are you? Do you--there aren’t any more haunted trucks, are there?” he asked anxiously, “or other inanimate objects turning racist? You know you can always call me any time you’re in trouble--”
“You’re gonna wish another ‘monster truck’ was trying to run you over by the time I’m done with you, you jerk.”
“Wh-- Cassie?”
“I know you’re too illiterate to have actually written the thing yourself, but you had to go and tell them everything? EVERYTHING? ‘Absently, Dean fingered the cute little mole on Cassie’s a--”
Dean’s blood froze in his veins. “W--What?”
“’Cassienova’?! What the hell kind of stupid, lame-ass title--”
“Please tell me you’re not talking about ... Tucker Loflin.”
“Your ghost writer? Yeah, actually, I am. I didn’t realize you remembered every single time we did it in such scintillating detail, Dean--the exact sounds I made, whether I’d changed my sheets recently, that time my ‘hair looked a little “something about Mary.”’” She hissed, and she sounded just like a wraith for a second ... or was that a shtriga? “Always figured I dodged a bullet; now I’m sure.”
“But--but Cassie, I swear I--”
“Yuh-huh. Save it for your next victim.”
Okay, now there was nothing funny about this at all.
Dean and Sam walked into the bookstore with the same expression they usually had when facing, oh, say, the apocalypse. The clerk eyed them both, taking in Sam’s height, and smiled at them. “In for the latest Tucker Loflin book? It’s right over here. Actually, we have all the titles in today! You’re lucky--we just got a shipment this morning. Can’t keep ’em on the shelves.”
Sam smiled brittly. “Perfect.”
They were all lined up in order of publication. They started with Supernatural Nights. Dean grabbed it, saw his and Sam’s names in the description on the back cover, and scoffed. “Supernatural Nights? Like we come home from a long day’s work and get laid? We work at night! All things Supernatural happen at night! That’s when little monsters come out to play.” Sam picked up the next in the series: Supernatural After-Hours. “Okay, now that just sounds like porn,” said Dean.
“Have you read it? It is porn! It’s nothing but porn, Dean! You want to know why Cassie was so upset? I bet you ten to one that there isn’t even anything about your relationship in there; it’s just a series of sex vignettes.”
Dean spied it then. The book was really, seriously called Cassienova. He picked it up and flipped through quickly, anxiety rising. Sam was right. Well, kind of right. Okay, he and Cassie hadn’t had a lot of time to develop a relationship, not to mention that Dean had been young, and the whole relationship thing had never been his forte ....
Then he saw a much worse title, and gulped: Dean Does Domesticity. With trembling hands, he reached for it, feeling like he was leaving his body. He stared uncomprehendingly at the words on the page, reading them over and over. It was about Lisa. Lisa and Ben. The tone seemed to be humor awkwardly alternating with sexy, a la “Watch the violent hunter do dishes! Watch him screw up boiling water! Watch him try to parent!” followed by a steamy sex scene with Lisa. Okay, Cassie was right: this was accurate. Way, WAY too accurate ... and detailed. Dean closed his eyes and said a prayer to Castiel--well, really just a thank-you, for erasing Ben and Lisa’s memories. At least he didn’t also have to expect a livid call from her.
He flipped to the back cover, furiously reading the uninformative author bio, squinting at the blurry, distant photo. You couldn’t even tell if the person was male or female from it, but Dean knew two things: whoever it was was a prophet, and Sam and Dean were going to be paying them a visit real soon.
Chuck’s publisher had been one woman publishing out of her house. Tucker Loflin used a large nationwide publishing house. Sam and Dean had each called a few times, pumping various employees for information, but they’d gotten nowhere. They hadn’t figured out yet whether Tucker Loflin was a pen name or not. They hadn’t even learned whether it was a man or a woman. Bursting into an office building, guns blazing, hardly seemed helpful. If they paid a visit in person, they figured they’d better have something good planned, because they would only have one shot at convincing them to cough up the intel once they’d seen Sam and Dean’s faces, but part of the problem was that this publisher had offices nationwide, each of which attended to a different aspect of the business. Employee records seemed to be housed in a different building--in a different state--from author records, but authors of textbooks were kept separate from authors of fiction, and so on. It was a dreadful tangle that only got more confusing the more they researched it.
In the meantime, they read the books--or tried to. Reading this kind of thing about themselves was uniquely mortifying, so they thought they would try to read about each other and glean what information could be got that way, but that was just a different kind of horror. Eventually, they’d come to an unspoken agreement never to read the books about the other, but Dean had gotten an eyeful before that happened.
Somehow, the trilogy about when Sam didn’t have his soul--A Hundred Hues of Sam, A Hundred More Hues of Sam, and A Hundred Other Hues of Sam--were the easiest to read--for Dean, at least, because it wasn’t really Sam. Becky was right; the real Sam would never do anything like that stuff. Dean had to assume three whole books were devoted to that one-year period in Sam’s life because there was so much material. Man, that boy got around.
Dean closed his laptop, sick of doing research that only kept leading him back to square one, and looked around for something to do. He absently picked up one of the Hues of Sam books. Sam noticed. “Hey!”
Dean quickly put it down again. “Oh ... sorry. I just was in the mood for porn, and ... you know, no pay-per-view in this dump.”
“You’re reading porn about me??”
“Well ... it’s easy to forget it’s you, and if you’re stuck with written porn, it’s pretty good. The stuff you did during that year, Sam ....” Dean shook his head, chortling. “It’s like if Caligula were real ....”
“Dean! No!”
Dean began to quote a choice passage from memory, and Sam snatched Dean Does Domesticity and opened to a random page. “All right, all right! Truce,” Dean said quickly, picked up the remote, and switched on the t.v. just in time to hear Letterman say, “... Tucker Loflin, who will be here for tomorrow’s show.” He mugged the camera, waggled his eyebrows, made a couple of innuendos. Dean smiled grimly and started packing as Sam did a quick search on the location of Letterman’s studio.
Security was easy to bypass. Soon Dean and Sam were on their way to the green room, dressed as aides or pages or whatever they were called, charged with making sure the “talent” got all the bottled water and junk food they wanted. They paused in front of the green room door, made sure they had their weapons concealed, and burst through it.
A female producer turned to look at them quizzically. A grizzled old musician didn’t even look up. Their eyes went to the only other person in the room, who turned around with a characteristically nervous expression: It was Chuck.
Sam summarily shoved him up against the wall. “’Tucker Loflin’?” he murmured menacingly.
“Uh--hey. Hey, guys,” Chuck said, attempting a friendly smile.
“Hey, Chuck,” Sam hissed, bringing his gun between them so that no one else in the room could see it, but Chuck could most definitely feel the cold metal against his stomach. “How’s my sex life?!”
“Um ... I really wouldn’t do that,” Chuck said, wide-eyed, and pointed up as a distant rumble just became audible--his archangel on its way, sensing danger to Chuck.
Reluctantly, Sam let him go. The rumbling went away. Chuck straightened his clothes, shuffling. “So ... Sam and Dean!” he said with a weak chuckle. “Long time no see.”
“You could have arranged for it to be a lot longer, if you hadn’t gone and--” Sam began, when the producer came over with a big grin.
“’Sam and Dean’?” she repeated excitedly. “Mr. Loflin--is this the real Sam and Dean, the boys you based your books on?”
“Uh ...,” Chuck looked at them, a deer in the headlights. For a writer, he sure wasn’t very good with words. Then again, it’s not like Sam and Dean were coming up with anything, either.
Apparently, she didn’t need an answer; she was looking them both up and down intently. “My God, it is you!” she exclaimed. “I thought you were fictional!”
“Well, of course, it isn’t--” Sam began, and she interrupted.
“Oh, I know, of course the monster plots and the thing about your soul are fiction, but--my goodness, it really is you! Mr. Loflin, did you bring them with you so they could appear on our show, too?”
Her hope was so high, even Dean felt bad about crushing it, but he didn’t hesitate. “Nope; we just came to talk with our old friend Chu--uh, Tuck. Tucker. Heard he was gonna be on the show, and, uh ... we couldn’t resist,” he said honestly, though with a different meaning than she was going to take from it. He gave her his best fake smile.
“Oh, are you sure?” she pouted. “I’m sure we could come up with something fast. We could do a hilarious skit--” then, seeing the looks on their faces, she changed her tune, “or--or you could tell your side of the story, sit up there with Mr. Loflin and share anecdotes--I’m sure the fans would love it!”
“I’m sure they would,” Dean grumbled.
“No,” Chuck said quickly. Apparently he knew Sam and Dean well enough to know that having them tell anecdotes from their lives on a talk show would be a very bad idea. “No, uh--it’s just me. They’re just here for ... moral support.” He gave them a pathetic side-long smile, as if begging them to be supportive.
In response, Sam patted the gun that was once more tucked into his waistband. “Yes, moral,” said Sam pointedly.
“Too bad. Well, then, Mr. Loflin, you’re on in two minutes.”
“Guys, I’ve really got to get ready ...,” Chuck said, trying to weasel out of dealing with them. Seemed like he was usually doing some kind of weaseling.
“No problem,” Sam said with a sinister smile. “We’ll be waiting right here for you.”
Chuck got a pained look on his face and went to stand by the curtains leading out onto the stage, keeping an eye on the monitor in the green room that showed Letterman introducing him and his books, twice as nervous to go on this show than he had been before he laid eyes on Sam and Dean. He glanced back one last time, to see Sam and Dean both standing there staring at him, arms crossed, stance wide. Dean knew they could look pretty intimidating, even more so to a guy Chuck’s size. Chuck attempted a smile that ended up a wince, and went through the curtains to the sound of wild applause.
Sam uncrossed his arms and turned to Dean. Only the musician was left in the green room with them now, and he hadn’t lifted his head yet, so Sam took his gun out of the front of his waistband and shined it a little before putting it back in the back. “Just getting ready for when he comes off-stage,” he said tightly.
“What’re we gonna do, huh? You know we can’t kill him because of the archangel.”
“We could shoot him before it arrives.”
“It’d just bring him back to life.”
“Still, it’d be worth it. I’m sure we could at least administer a beating before it can get here.” Chuck must be killing it onstage; they heard uproarious laughter from the audience. Maybe he was more talented as a public speaker than as a writer.
“You know what he’s gonna say, Sam. It’s gonna be all, ‘Sorry I’ve been writing about your sex lives, but I have to make a living, and these are the only stories I have, blah blah.’”
“Dean, he published a book about me and Madison called Werewolf Wuv. If that doesn’t deserve some pummeling, I don’t know what does.” The audience was dying out there.
“Yeah, well, he published a book about me called Dean: Desperate!, and I still think we’d better hold off. I’ll kill a demon any day of the week, but I’m not messing with angels if I can help it.” What the hell was Chuck saying out there? It sounded like they were rolling in the aisles.
“Dean, millions of people have read every last detail of my sex life,” Sam growled. “They know more about the girls I dated and how good the sex was and how much she liked it than I do! They know every thought, every noise, every sensation ....” He went on, but Dean’s attention was caught by the monitor in the green room. Before Chuck went onstage, it was just showing Letterman, but now, it was showing ... Sam and Dean. Dean stared blankly at the screen for a long moment, which seemed to be eliciting delighted chuckles and snorts from the audience. “Dean, are you listening to me?”
Dean pointed at the screen. Sam looked, annoyed to be interrupted. On the monitor, Dean saw Sam’s reaction as he figured it out, the comical widening of his eyes, the sudden desperation as his eyes darted around, looking for an escape. The audience was screaming with hysteria. Dean and Sam both spied the camera just outside the curtain that had been filming them this whole time. Apparently that producer had come up with something fast, all right.
“We gotta get out of here,” Dean gasped.
They booked it out of the green room, where there were various studio employees milling about. One was grinning as they burst out into the hallway. “Exit’s thataway,” he told them, pointing.
Dean thanked him quickly. They ran down the hall in the direction he pointed and through a big set of double doors ... straight into the theater, where Letterman greeted their arrival by saying, “The real Sam and Dean, everybody!” The audience went wild.
“This can’t be happening!” Sam whispered, horrified. The camera not five feet away that captured their entrance probably caught that. They saw an “exit” sign at the side of the theater and took off, slamming through the doors, running top speed down the hall, pursued by the guy with the camera. They were cheered on by various people who were watching the show on monitors along the way. They didn’t stop running until they reached the Impala. Actually, they didn’t stop running until they were two states away.
“It could be worse, Sam,” Dean told him as they sat down at Biggerson’s, nodding at the waittress who was taking in the sight of them with obvious pleasure.
Every female in the restaurant was looking at them. A guy walked by. He grinned at them as he held out his hand for a side five, which Dean gave up. This had been going on all day; he was used to it. “Hey, Sam and Dean, could you keep it in your pants once in a while? Leave a couple for the rest of us.”
“No way, man; they’re all mine,” Dean said with a wink, and the guy chuckled, continuing on his way.
“How could it be worse?” Sam hissed.
Dean gave a table full of openly staring ladies the silent ‘how you doin’?’. They turned red and giggled and whispered among themselves. “It’s better than when they thought we were mass murderers.”
“Oh, yeah, much better! Now they know I didn’t have a soul for a year!”
Dean finally tore his eyes away from scouting the hottest chicks in the restaurant and looked back at the remarkably huffy Sam. “No one believes that’s real, Sam. They think those Hues books are all made up, ’cause they know the real Sam hardly gets laid at all.”
Sam gave him the withering look Dean had been counting on. Dean grinned.
“Come on, Sam. You think this won’t be good news, you know, for ...?”
“For you? Yeah, I guess it’s good news for you.”
“Sam,” a woman passing by murmured seductively, stroking Sam’s arm as she passed. Sam snatched it out of her reach.
“It’s all in how you look at it, buddy. The way I see it, Chuck just published a personal ad that reached eight million readers.”
“Great, Dean, perfect. Then think of all eight million of them the next time you try to do it with one of them, because you know they’ll be reading about it a few months later. Every single detail--whether it was good, whether it was bad, every piggish thought you had, how long you lasted ....”
Dean abruptly stopped smiling. Why did he have to say things like that? Freakin’ Sam! Why’d he have to be so ... so ... logical?! “Thank a lot, bro. Seriously, why’d you have to point that out? Now I won’t be able to do it at all!”
Sam smiled, looking happier than he had in days. “... And then Chuck won’t have any books to write!”
“At the expense of my sex life?!”
“And mine.”
“You don’t have any sex life to sacrifice!”
“We all have to do what we have to do, Dean.”
“Not that!”
“You’ll make a deal with a crossroads demon, but you won’t give up sex for a few months?”
“I’d rather die.”
“There’s always the right-hand man. ’Course, then Chuck’ll probably write about that, too ....”
What kind of sicko actually enjoyed teasing his brother like this?! He was merciless! At a loss for anything else to say, Dean exclaimed with feeling, “God, Sam, I hate you!”
Sam looked pleased with himself, leaning back in the booth, relaxed enough to smile at one of his countless admirers, because Sam had all the admirers. Sam had three books about how awesome he was in the sack, and what did Dean have? A book about when he fell in love when he was young and stupid, a book about trying to be a family man, and a book all about his desperate attempts to get laid? This sucked.
Dean and Sam didn’t believe in killing humans, but on very rare occasion, when the evil they committed was bad enough and there was no other option, you made an exception. Sam was right: One way or another, they were just going to have to kill Chuck.
~ The End~
End notes:
- When I was trying to come up with an idea for my next gen story, I thought of who my favorite characters were, and Chuck jumped to mind. (I've always been fond of Becky, too, though I'm not sure other fans share the feeling ...?) I thought about what Chuck might do next, and now that erotica is so popular and lucrative, the subject of this story seemed a likely possibility!
- When I came up with Chuck's new pen name for his pornographic novels, I had to give a shout-out to writers Raelle Tucker and Daniel Loflin, since they were always some of my favorites (I really wish Tucker was still with the show!), and Carver and Edlund were already taken. :-)
Author: brightly_lit
Rating: R for language and not too vivid descriptions of porn
Pairing: None
Characters: Sam, Dean, Becky, David Letterman, and a surprise character (I don't want to give away the ending)
Genre: Gen, humor
Word Count: 6,000
Disclaimer: Supernatural don't belong to me, don't I know it.
Spoilers: Through part of season 7
Warnings: None
Summary: What's with all the shifters lately wanting to look like Sam and Dean? Why were those fans of Chuck's books at the store talking so dirty about Sam? And what was up with that porn Dean tried to watch that starred a very tall, very ripped character named Sam with long dark hair?! You can bet Sam and Dean will do what it takes to find out.
Sam and Dean stood in the express line at the Wal-Mart in a tiny California town. That freakin’ shifter had stolen their clothes so he could look like them, then in the fight before they finally ganked him, he’d managed to completely shred what Sam was wearing, then got skin and goo and crap all over Dean as he tried to shift. Basically, Dean and Sam had to drive back to the hotel naked. There wasn’t a thrift store in town, so here they were at Wal-Mart buying basics, dressed in their backup clothes--some nerdy sweater-vest thing Sam used to wear at college, while Dean wore something he’d once mistakenly stolen from a laundromat that fit but that he wouldn’t be caught dead wearing unless the only alternative was to go around naked--a time like now.
Whatever; they’d be on the road by noon, and this town would be nothing but a few scattered buildings and a giant-ass Wal-Mart in their rearview mirror.
Out of the corner of his eye, Dean saw Sam stiffen as they heard someone say their names. They turned surreptitiously to look, only to see two young women waiting in line behind them--the kind of girl who would probably be in college if she lived in the big city, and here would wind up marrying some guy she’d known all her life because he was the only guy in town her age.
“I know, right?” one of the girls--the blonde--was saying. “The only thing that could be better is if they did it with each other!” She glanced up and saw Dean looking at her, scoffed, rolled her eyes, and turned in toward her friend, shoulder to Sam and Dean. Okaaay ... apparently, they weren’t talking about the real Sam and Dean.
Sam and Dean shared a glance and turned forward again. “Supernatural fans?” Sam sighed.
“I guess,” said Dean. There was always a curious mixture of fury and morbid curiosity when it came to the books Chuck used to write about him and Sam and the crazy life they led. There just wasn’t any way not to listen when someone was describing third-hand an event you had lived. Things changed in the telling and retelling of the stories, but it was always just barely recognizable as their lives, dramatized and romanticized to sound infinitely cooler and better than it had really been. Actually, what these girls were talking about wasn’t even recognizable; must be something they made up themselves. As he listened absently to the girls giggling and sharing Sam and Dean fantasies, he could not help thinking of Chuck, and he found himself rubbing his knuckles. Sam was fondling his concealed weapon.
The conversation behind them died, and he felt the back of his neck tingle like he was being watched. The girls lowered their voices, but since they were standing right behind Sam and Dean and had been talking loudly to begin with, they could still hear them just fine. “They could be Sam and Dean,” the dark-haired one murmured. “The one is tall enough, and with the long hair.”
“Yeah,” said the other, unconvinced, the tone of a shopper unimpressed by the product. “But, standing in the express line at Wal-Mart, buying dental floss, fruit pies, and tighty-whities?” They both snickered. Sam glanced down at the basket he was holding and moved it so it was in front of him, a little better hidden from their view. “Besides, they wouldn’t be caught dead dressed like that.” Dean set his jaw.
“Plus, could you ever see the tall nerd ...” and she launched into the filthiest, most pornographic description of a sexual encounter Dean had ever heard out of anyone’s mouth ... well, ever, but certainly in the checkout lane at Wal-Mart. Dean suddenly couldn’t seem to swallow or speak, frozen, riveted. He didn’t notice when the line moved forward, but the girl did, interrupting her mind-blowing monologue with, “Hel-LO, the line is moving!” Dean managed to jerk and shamble his way forward, catching sight as he did of the back of Sam’s neck and his ears, both of which were bright red.
“Hey, Sammy--” Dean began with a grin, elbowing him. Sam smacked him away. Dean couldn’t help chortling softly as the dirty talk resumed behind them. “I had no idea you were so--”
“Shut up!” Sam whispered.
“I mean, I’ve never been there, so I don’t know, but I figured you’d be a little more romantic than that--”
“Dean, I never did anything like that, and it wasn’t in any of the books, either!” he hissed. “It must be some other Sam and Dean!”
Dean had read the books, too, and knew there was nothing like that in them. Not to mention Sam would never do anything like that, and even if he would, he hadn’t had the time. They were together 24/7. If he got laid, Dean would know about it, and it only happened maybe twice a year. The poor bastard. Thus, the obvious thing was to tease him mercilessly over this while it was still fresh; it would be forgotten by this afternoon, and the opportunity to torment Sammy would be past. “Nothin’ to be ashamed of. Sounds like she enjoyed it--”
“So help me, Dean, I will make the apocalypse look like Sunday dinner if you don’t leave it alone. Pranking will have a whole new definition--”
“All right, all right.” Dean waved it off as they finally reached the checker, then spied the cover of Time, which had a couple of good-looking young guys by the headline “The New Face of Romance: Love in the Time of Naughty Novels.” The guys in the picture were identified as Sam and Dean. “That answers it,” said Dean, grabbing the magazine and adding it to their stuff, because it promised to talk a lot about porn. The girls behind them snorted hysterically, and Dean turned a little red to realize he was buying a magazine with a couple of hot guys on the cover, but he paid the checker and walked away with his head held high.
Dean’s other cell phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number, so he answered with, “Tull.”
“Oh, what, ‘Jethro’?” sneered the caller. “That’s the name of the band, not the guy, you idiot.”
Dean looked at the number of the caller again. “Who is this?”
“Doesn’t really matter ... since I’m gonna be you soon. I’m in Oregon. Come ’n’ get me.”
“What’s with all these freakin’ shifters lately?” Dean hissed to Sam at a whisper before taking out a piece of paper and a pen and putting the phone next to his mouth again. “Great, well, since you’re being so helpful, care to give us an address?”
“He gave it to you?” Sam asked, bewildered, as Dean hung up, address in hand. He’d also given him directions, which included landmarks, shortcuts--even sharing the route that had the least traffic.
“Yeah, another one who wants to look like us. What the hell?”
“He wants us to come kill him?”
“Well, if he’s like the last one, he just wants to get a look at us so he can shift into us, too.”
“Dude, I’ve killed you, like, three times in the last week.”
“I’ve killed you more times than that.”
“Maybe the alpha shifter is making them help him try to kill us or something.”
“That’s probably it.”
“Well,” said Sam, looking down at his sweater vest, “at least we’re already dressed for it.”
Before they arrived, they’d already looked at maps of the area and triangulated where this shifter’s lair probably was. Of course, it was always possible he was actually dumb enough to direct them to his house, but Dean figured anyone who knew that much about Tull had to be smarter than that and he was probably just trying to send them somewhere he could get a good look at them. They checked through the house he’d sent them to in under a minute, then headed to his lair, where he was in the midst of trying to shift. “I wanna be the tall one!” were his last words.
“Well, that was kind of weird,” Dean remarked as they got to their hotel room.
“Everything’s kind of weird,” Sam said, clearly troubled.
Dean’s eyes lit up, picking up the card on top of the t.v. “Nothin’ a little porn can’t fix. Look, Sammy--pay-per-view!” He arched his eyebrows at him.
“Watching porn together? That would be a new low for us.”
“You do what you want. I’m watchin’ porn.”
Dean selected one that looked good and settled down on the bed while Sam sat as far from the t.v. as he could get and opened his laptop to do research. Dean only had to sit through about three minutes of “plot” before the sex got underway. He put his hands behind his head on the pillow and sighed joyously, troubles forgotten.
“Give it to me, baby,” said the man. “I’ve had a long, hard day of killing things and I need the release of sex.”
“Ooh, Sam, you’re so tall and commanding,” she moaned as they got down to it. Dean tilted his head curiously. The guy had longish, dark hair and was noticeably muscular.
“How ’bout that, Sammy?,” Dean teased Sam. “He’s got your name. He even kind of looks like you. You’re the one who should be watching this, not me.”
The woman praised ‘Sam’s’ stamina and prowess. He said, “It’s because I don’t have a soul. I have no soul, so I’m good at sex, and I have lots of it.”
Sam peered hesitantly back over his shoulder while Dean frowned at the t.v. Sam finally got up and came over to watch with him.
“Not having a soul makes you so good in bed!” the woman squealed.
“And smart,” added the guy. “Not totally evil, but kind of.”
There was a long, uncomfortable stretch when neither Dean nor Sam could bring themselves to look at each other or say anything, but staring at a screen watching a guy named Sam who looked like Sam have remarkably athletic sex wasn’t helping anything. Finally, Sam picked up the pay-per-view ad from the top of the t.v. “What’s this movie called?”
“Uh ....” Dean checked how it was listed on the screen. “’A Hundred Screws of Sam.’”
Sam’s eyes flickered toward Dean, who, after staring with morbid fascination a little longer, finally saw nothing for it but to just turn off the t.v. What a waste of perfectly good dirty money. “What’s going on?” Sam asked, freaked out.
“Hell if I know.”
The next day, they went to the town library to look up biographical information on the shifter they’d killed the day before, hoping for some window into the recent sharp increase in shifter activity. It was a long shot, but they didn’t have any better ideas.
Sam waited politely to talk to a librarian about getting access to physical records while Dean headed for the computers. He stopped mid-stride as he heard a librarian giggling with a co-worker nearby: “... about these brothers named Sam and Dean, and the stories are really dirty! I mean, yowsa. And do you know how many holds there are on this copy? Two hundred! I didn’t think that many people in this town could even read. Anyway, put it on the holds shelf.” Dean stalked the stocker. By the time she’d put it on the holds shelf and gone to another aisle, Sam was at his side, having overheard the same conversation. They looked around in the general area where she’d shelved it, and Dean finally spotted it: A Hundred Hues of Sam. They glanced at each other. Sam had that pissy look. Dean grabbed it off the shelf. On the cover was a colorless photo of a gun on a black background. Dean showed it to Sam. “That look romantic to you?”
“That’s my gun,” Sam said icily.
Dean looked at it. “Well, I’ll be. A lot less beat up than yours, though.”
Sam grabbed the book out of his hands and opened it, reading fast. This didn’t last long; he looked disgusted, put it back on the shelf, and said, “I’m going to go look at records.”
Dean looked at the author’s name: Tucker Loflin, not Carver Edlund, Chuck’s pen name, so it must not be Chuck. “Well? Is it good?” Dean teased.
“No, it’s not good,” Sam hissed. “And it’s all lies.”
“All right, well, who would do that? Who would make up a bunch of sex stories about you ...?”
They both said it at the same time: “Becky.”
Without another word, they stepped outside the library together, put Sam’s phone on speaker, and dialed. “Sam?!” she answered eagerly.
“Hi, Becky,” Sam said, his usually impressive degree of patience when it came to Becky obviously strained. “Or should I say, ‘Tucker Loflin’?”
“What?! No, I HATE her!”
“So you’ve heard of her.”
“Of course I’ve heard of her! Her craptastic books are currently taking up spots one through four on the New York Times bestseller list--and the top three are those evil books full of lies about Sam!”
Sam and Dean glanced at each other. “So, you don’t have anything to do with this?” said Sam.
“Of course not! I would NEVER write about you doing anything like that! Thoughts like that couldn’t even go through my mind! How could you think they could?! I know you would never be capable of treating women like that!--like ... like ... Dean would.”
“Hey!” said Dean. He didn’t miss Sam’s slight, smug smirk.
“Besides,” she went on coyly, “I only write about ... you two.”
Dean shook his head. This topic had to be put to rest immediately. “Then who is it?” he asked, unconvinced.
Dean had never heard her sound so vicious. “Obviously some fan of Chuck’s, writing BAD fanfiction that should have stayed in the dark, sick, twisted bowels of her laptop--”
“What’s her name? Where does she live?” Sam asked intently.
“How will that help, Sam?” Dean said, made nervous by the slightly crazed look in Sam’s eye. “What’re we gonna do, kill ’er?”
“We’ll start by talking,” Sam said with a sinister grin, and Dean got a chill--it was a little too reminiscent of when Sam didn’t have a soul.
“I don’t know,” Becky hissed, “but when I find out, I’m gonna--”
Sam let his phone drop to his side and looked at Dean as Becky detailed what she would do to the author if she ever got her hands on her. “I guess we could find the publisher, like we did with Chuck, but what’ll we do when we find her?”
“We can be very convincing,” Sam said darkly. “We couldn’t rough up Chuck because he has an angel on his shoulder, but what are the chances this author is a prophet?”
“You know, Sam, you’re taking this way too personally. Come on. Be the bigger man, let it go, let the girl have her fun. You’re gonna terrorize some girl just ’cos she’s in love with you? You should be flattered!” The fact was, this was freakin’ hilarious, and promised to provide priceless yuks for months or years to come.
“It was bad enough when it was just Chuck and hardly anybody had read them, but this thing is a bestseller, Dean!”
“Well, whattya gonna do? You win some, you lose some. So you’re a porn star. Worse things have happened.”
Sam gave him that look. “Okay, thanks, Becky,” he said into the phone as she was still talking, and closed it. After glaring at Dean until Dean was able to quell the wicked gleam in his eye, he huffed, “Fine,” and stalked back into the library.
Dean went straight back to the holds shelf and picked up the book in an effort to gather some gems before they hit the road again. He opened the book to a random page: “Sheila was in love. Sam would never know. Sam could think of only one thing. Well, actually, he could only think of two things: How to capture the alpha, and satisfying his own selfish, carnal desire. Sheila would never be more to Sam than a moderately good-looking ship in his Toledo port that had brown eyes, slightly longer than shoulder-length hair, and dangerously long toenails. They left scratches on his legs, a few of which got infected, but Sam didn’t care. All he cared about was getting his fingers as far inside--” Dean closed the book. Yep, all lies. Sam was more of a girl than any girl Dean had ever known. He got all dewy-eyed over every girl he’d even gotten to third base with. Well, there had been that whole year when he didn’t have a soul. He didn’t know what Sam was like then. Even Sam didn’t. But other than that ....
Dean’s cell phone rang. He looked at the number, then answered, stunned, “... Cassie?”
“Dean. I can’t believe you actually answered.”
“How--how are you? Do you--there aren’t any more haunted trucks, are there?” he asked anxiously, “or other inanimate objects turning racist? You know you can always call me any time you’re in trouble--”
“You’re gonna wish another ‘monster truck’ was trying to run you over by the time I’m done with you, you jerk.”
“Wh-- Cassie?”
“I know you’re too illiterate to have actually written the thing yourself, but you had to go and tell them everything? EVERYTHING? ‘Absently, Dean fingered the cute little mole on Cassie’s a--”
Dean’s blood froze in his veins. “W--What?”
“’Cassienova’?! What the hell kind of stupid, lame-ass title--”
“Please tell me you’re not talking about ... Tucker Loflin.”
“Your ghost writer? Yeah, actually, I am. I didn’t realize you remembered every single time we did it in such scintillating detail, Dean--the exact sounds I made, whether I’d changed my sheets recently, that time my ‘hair looked a little “something about Mary.”’” She hissed, and she sounded just like a wraith for a second ... or was that a shtriga? “Always figured I dodged a bullet; now I’m sure.”
“But--but Cassie, I swear I--”
“Yuh-huh. Save it for your next victim.”
Okay, now there was nothing funny about this at all.
Dean and Sam walked into the bookstore with the same expression they usually had when facing, oh, say, the apocalypse. The clerk eyed them both, taking in Sam’s height, and smiled at them. “In for the latest Tucker Loflin book? It’s right over here. Actually, we have all the titles in today! You’re lucky--we just got a shipment this morning. Can’t keep ’em on the shelves.”
Sam smiled brittly. “Perfect.”
They were all lined up in order of publication. They started with Supernatural Nights. Dean grabbed it, saw his and Sam’s names in the description on the back cover, and scoffed. “Supernatural Nights? Like we come home from a long day’s work and get laid? We work at night! All things Supernatural happen at night! That’s when little monsters come out to play.” Sam picked up the next in the series: Supernatural After-Hours. “Okay, now that just sounds like porn,” said Dean.
“Have you read it? It is porn! It’s nothing but porn, Dean! You want to know why Cassie was so upset? I bet you ten to one that there isn’t even anything about your relationship in there; it’s just a series of sex vignettes.”
Dean spied it then. The book was really, seriously called Cassienova. He picked it up and flipped through quickly, anxiety rising. Sam was right. Well, kind of right. Okay, he and Cassie hadn’t had a lot of time to develop a relationship, not to mention that Dean had been young, and the whole relationship thing had never been his forte ....
Then he saw a much worse title, and gulped: Dean Does Domesticity. With trembling hands, he reached for it, feeling like he was leaving his body. He stared uncomprehendingly at the words on the page, reading them over and over. It was about Lisa. Lisa and Ben. The tone seemed to be humor awkwardly alternating with sexy, a la “Watch the violent hunter do dishes! Watch him screw up boiling water! Watch him try to parent!” followed by a steamy sex scene with Lisa. Okay, Cassie was right: this was accurate. Way, WAY too accurate ... and detailed. Dean closed his eyes and said a prayer to Castiel--well, really just a thank-you, for erasing Ben and Lisa’s memories. At least he didn’t also have to expect a livid call from her.
He flipped to the back cover, furiously reading the uninformative author bio, squinting at the blurry, distant photo. You couldn’t even tell if the person was male or female from it, but Dean knew two things: whoever it was was a prophet, and Sam and Dean were going to be paying them a visit real soon.
Chuck’s publisher had been one woman publishing out of her house. Tucker Loflin used a large nationwide publishing house. Sam and Dean had each called a few times, pumping various employees for information, but they’d gotten nowhere. They hadn’t figured out yet whether Tucker Loflin was a pen name or not. They hadn’t even learned whether it was a man or a woman. Bursting into an office building, guns blazing, hardly seemed helpful. If they paid a visit in person, they figured they’d better have something good planned, because they would only have one shot at convincing them to cough up the intel once they’d seen Sam and Dean’s faces, but part of the problem was that this publisher had offices nationwide, each of which attended to a different aspect of the business. Employee records seemed to be housed in a different building--in a different state--from author records, but authors of textbooks were kept separate from authors of fiction, and so on. It was a dreadful tangle that only got more confusing the more they researched it.
In the meantime, they read the books--or tried to. Reading this kind of thing about themselves was uniquely mortifying, so they thought they would try to read about each other and glean what information could be got that way, but that was just a different kind of horror. Eventually, they’d come to an unspoken agreement never to read the books about the other, but Dean had gotten an eyeful before that happened.
Somehow, the trilogy about when Sam didn’t have his soul--A Hundred Hues of Sam, A Hundred More Hues of Sam, and A Hundred Other Hues of Sam--were the easiest to read--for Dean, at least, because it wasn’t really Sam. Becky was right; the real Sam would never do anything like that stuff. Dean had to assume three whole books were devoted to that one-year period in Sam’s life because there was so much material. Man, that boy got around.
Dean closed his laptop, sick of doing research that only kept leading him back to square one, and looked around for something to do. He absently picked up one of the Hues of Sam books. Sam noticed. “Hey!”
Dean quickly put it down again. “Oh ... sorry. I just was in the mood for porn, and ... you know, no pay-per-view in this dump.”
“You’re reading porn about me??”
“Well ... it’s easy to forget it’s you, and if you’re stuck with written porn, it’s pretty good. The stuff you did during that year, Sam ....” Dean shook his head, chortling. “It’s like if Caligula were real ....”
“Dean! No!”
Dean began to quote a choice passage from memory, and Sam snatched Dean Does Domesticity and opened to a random page. “All right, all right! Truce,” Dean said quickly, picked up the remote, and switched on the t.v. just in time to hear Letterman say, “... Tucker Loflin, who will be here for tomorrow’s show.” He mugged the camera, waggled his eyebrows, made a couple of innuendos. Dean smiled grimly and started packing as Sam did a quick search on the location of Letterman’s studio.
Security was easy to bypass. Soon Dean and Sam were on their way to the green room, dressed as aides or pages or whatever they were called, charged with making sure the “talent” got all the bottled water and junk food they wanted. They paused in front of the green room door, made sure they had their weapons concealed, and burst through it.
A female producer turned to look at them quizzically. A grizzled old musician didn’t even look up. Their eyes went to the only other person in the room, who turned around with a characteristically nervous expression: It was Chuck.
Sam summarily shoved him up against the wall. “’Tucker Loflin’?” he murmured menacingly.
“Uh--hey. Hey, guys,” Chuck said, attempting a friendly smile.
“Hey, Chuck,” Sam hissed, bringing his gun between them so that no one else in the room could see it, but Chuck could most definitely feel the cold metal against his stomach. “How’s my sex life?!”
“Um ... I really wouldn’t do that,” Chuck said, wide-eyed, and pointed up as a distant rumble just became audible--his archangel on its way, sensing danger to Chuck.
Reluctantly, Sam let him go. The rumbling went away. Chuck straightened his clothes, shuffling. “So ... Sam and Dean!” he said with a weak chuckle. “Long time no see.”
“You could have arranged for it to be a lot longer, if you hadn’t gone and--” Sam began, when the producer came over with a big grin.
“’Sam and Dean’?” she repeated excitedly. “Mr. Loflin--is this the real Sam and Dean, the boys you based your books on?”
“Uh ...,” Chuck looked at them, a deer in the headlights. For a writer, he sure wasn’t very good with words. Then again, it’s not like Sam and Dean were coming up with anything, either.
Apparently, she didn’t need an answer; she was looking them both up and down intently. “My God, it is you!” she exclaimed. “I thought you were fictional!”
“Well, of course, it isn’t--” Sam began, and she interrupted.
“Oh, I know, of course the monster plots and the thing about your soul are fiction, but--my goodness, it really is you! Mr. Loflin, did you bring them with you so they could appear on our show, too?”
Her hope was so high, even Dean felt bad about crushing it, but he didn’t hesitate. “Nope; we just came to talk with our old friend Chu--uh, Tuck. Tucker. Heard he was gonna be on the show, and, uh ... we couldn’t resist,” he said honestly, though with a different meaning than she was going to take from it. He gave her his best fake smile.
“Oh, are you sure?” she pouted. “I’m sure we could come up with something fast. We could do a hilarious skit--” then, seeing the looks on their faces, she changed her tune, “or--or you could tell your side of the story, sit up there with Mr. Loflin and share anecdotes--I’m sure the fans would love it!”
“I’m sure they would,” Dean grumbled.
“No,” Chuck said quickly. Apparently he knew Sam and Dean well enough to know that having them tell anecdotes from their lives on a talk show would be a very bad idea. “No, uh--it’s just me. They’re just here for ... moral support.” He gave them a pathetic side-long smile, as if begging them to be supportive.
In response, Sam patted the gun that was once more tucked into his waistband. “Yes, moral,” said Sam pointedly.
“Too bad. Well, then, Mr. Loflin, you’re on in two minutes.”
“Guys, I’ve really got to get ready ...,” Chuck said, trying to weasel out of dealing with them. Seemed like he was usually doing some kind of weaseling.
“No problem,” Sam said with a sinister smile. “We’ll be waiting right here for you.”
Chuck got a pained look on his face and went to stand by the curtains leading out onto the stage, keeping an eye on the monitor in the green room that showed Letterman introducing him and his books, twice as nervous to go on this show than he had been before he laid eyes on Sam and Dean. He glanced back one last time, to see Sam and Dean both standing there staring at him, arms crossed, stance wide. Dean knew they could look pretty intimidating, even more so to a guy Chuck’s size. Chuck attempted a smile that ended up a wince, and went through the curtains to the sound of wild applause.
Sam uncrossed his arms and turned to Dean. Only the musician was left in the green room with them now, and he hadn’t lifted his head yet, so Sam took his gun out of the front of his waistband and shined it a little before putting it back in the back. “Just getting ready for when he comes off-stage,” he said tightly.
“What’re we gonna do, huh? You know we can’t kill him because of the archangel.”
“We could shoot him before it arrives.”
“It’d just bring him back to life.”
“Still, it’d be worth it. I’m sure we could at least administer a beating before it can get here.” Chuck must be killing it onstage; they heard uproarious laughter from the audience. Maybe he was more talented as a public speaker than as a writer.
“You know what he’s gonna say, Sam. It’s gonna be all, ‘Sorry I’ve been writing about your sex lives, but I have to make a living, and these are the only stories I have, blah blah.’”
“Dean, he published a book about me and Madison called Werewolf Wuv. If that doesn’t deserve some pummeling, I don’t know what does.” The audience was dying out there.
“Yeah, well, he published a book about me called Dean: Desperate!, and I still think we’d better hold off. I’ll kill a demon any day of the week, but I’m not messing with angels if I can help it.” What the hell was Chuck saying out there? It sounded like they were rolling in the aisles.
“Dean, millions of people have read every last detail of my sex life,” Sam growled. “They know more about the girls I dated and how good the sex was and how much she liked it than I do! They know every thought, every noise, every sensation ....” He went on, but Dean’s attention was caught by the monitor in the green room. Before Chuck went onstage, it was just showing Letterman, but now, it was showing ... Sam and Dean. Dean stared blankly at the screen for a long moment, which seemed to be eliciting delighted chuckles and snorts from the audience. “Dean, are you listening to me?”
Dean pointed at the screen. Sam looked, annoyed to be interrupted. On the monitor, Dean saw Sam’s reaction as he figured it out, the comical widening of his eyes, the sudden desperation as his eyes darted around, looking for an escape. The audience was screaming with hysteria. Dean and Sam both spied the camera just outside the curtain that had been filming them this whole time. Apparently that producer had come up with something fast, all right.
“We gotta get out of here,” Dean gasped.
They booked it out of the green room, where there were various studio employees milling about. One was grinning as they burst out into the hallway. “Exit’s thataway,” he told them, pointing.
Dean thanked him quickly. They ran down the hall in the direction he pointed and through a big set of double doors ... straight into the theater, where Letterman greeted their arrival by saying, “The real Sam and Dean, everybody!” The audience went wild.
“This can’t be happening!” Sam whispered, horrified. The camera not five feet away that captured their entrance probably caught that. They saw an “exit” sign at the side of the theater and took off, slamming through the doors, running top speed down the hall, pursued by the guy with the camera. They were cheered on by various people who were watching the show on monitors along the way. They didn’t stop running until they reached the Impala. Actually, they didn’t stop running until they were two states away.
“It could be worse, Sam,” Dean told him as they sat down at Biggerson’s, nodding at the waittress who was taking in the sight of them with obvious pleasure.
Every female in the restaurant was looking at them. A guy walked by. He grinned at them as he held out his hand for a side five, which Dean gave up. This had been going on all day; he was used to it. “Hey, Sam and Dean, could you keep it in your pants once in a while? Leave a couple for the rest of us.”
“No way, man; they’re all mine,” Dean said with a wink, and the guy chuckled, continuing on his way.
“How could it be worse?” Sam hissed.
Dean gave a table full of openly staring ladies the silent ‘how you doin’?’. They turned red and giggled and whispered among themselves. “It’s better than when they thought we were mass murderers.”
“Oh, yeah, much better! Now they know I didn’t have a soul for a year!”
Dean finally tore his eyes away from scouting the hottest chicks in the restaurant and looked back at the remarkably huffy Sam. “No one believes that’s real, Sam. They think those Hues books are all made up, ’cause they know the real Sam hardly gets laid at all.”
Sam gave him the withering look Dean had been counting on. Dean grinned.
“Come on, Sam. You think this won’t be good news, you know, for ...?”
“For you? Yeah, I guess it’s good news for you.”
“Sam,” a woman passing by murmured seductively, stroking Sam’s arm as she passed. Sam snatched it out of her reach.
“It’s all in how you look at it, buddy. The way I see it, Chuck just published a personal ad that reached eight million readers.”
“Great, Dean, perfect. Then think of all eight million of them the next time you try to do it with one of them, because you know they’ll be reading about it a few months later. Every single detail--whether it was good, whether it was bad, every piggish thought you had, how long you lasted ....”
Dean abruptly stopped smiling. Why did he have to say things like that? Freakin’ Sam! Why’d he have to be so ... so ... logical?! “Thank a lot, bro. Seriously, why’d you have to point that out? Now I won’t be able to do it at all!”
Sam smiled, looking happier than he had in days. “... And then Chuck won’t have any books to write!”
“At the expense of my sex life?!”
“And mine.”
“You don’t have any sex life to sacrifice!”
“We all have to do what we have to do, Dean.”
“Not that!”
“You’ll make a deal with a crossroads demon, but you won’t give up sex for a few months?”
“I’d rather die.”
“There’s always the right-hand man. ’Course, then Chuck’ll probably write about that, too ....”
What kind of sicko actually enjoyed teasing his brother like this?! He was merciless! At a loss for anything else to say, Dean exclaimed with feeling, “God, Sam, I hate you!”
Sam looked pleased with himself, leaning back in the booth, relaxed enough to smile at one of his countless admirers, because Sam had all the admirers. Sam had three books about how awesome he was in the sack, and what did Dean have? A book about when he fell in love when he was young and stupid, a book about trying to be a family man, and a book all about his desperate attempts to get laid? This sucked.
Dean and Sam didn’t believe in killing humans, but on very rare occasion, when the evil they committed was bad enough and there was no other option, you made an exception. Sam was right: One way or another, they were just going to have to kill Chuck.
~ The End~
End notes:
- When I was trying to come up with an idea for my next gen story, I thought of who my favorite characters were, and Chuck jumped to mind. (I've always been fond of Becky, too, though I'm not sure other fans share the feeling ...?) I thought about what Chuck might do next, and now that erotica is so popular and lucrative, the subject of this story seemed a likely possibility!
- When I came up with Chuck's new pen name for his pornographic novels, I had to give a shout-out to writers Raelle Tucker and Daniel Loflin, since they were always some of my favorites (I really wish Tucker was still with the show!), and Carver and Edlund were already taken. :-)