SPN FIC - 1-800-MISSING (Part 1 of 4)
There's someone we haven't seen in a while -- and we've made assumptions about where he's gone. But that's because Show has let us see a little bit more than it's allowed the boys to see. A year and a half (ish) has gone by since the last time either of the Winchesters saw the eminent Chuck Shurley, and to their dismay, it's been just as long since someone else saw him: someone who believes something terrible might have happened, and insists that Sam and Dean help her in her quest for the truth.
It wasn't the maid.
"Oh," he sighed.
SHIT, was what he was thinking.
The smiting they'd been worried about? That would have been better than this. That would have been truckloads better than this.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, Becky (with others to come)
GENRE: Gen
SPOILERS: Heavily spoilery for S6 finale (takes place two days post-6.22 and will undoubtedly be mightily Kripke'd)
RATING: PG
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; this part is 3824 words
1-800-MISSING
By Carol Davis
"Maybe we should…go somewhere," Sam said quietly.
Jupiter? That far enough? Because they can't hear you scream in space.
Under optimum circumstances, Dean would have gone on looking anywhere but at his brother, who was sitting over there on the other bed, taking slow, meditative sips from a bottle of Orange Crush. Neither one of them had been able to muster the energy to make a serious grocery run since their arrival at the Wagon Wheel Inn two days ago; the only store within easy walking distance of the motel was the mini-mart at the service station, and for some completely unfathomable reason, the only beverage the mart was selling was Orange Crush.
"I don't care," was Sam's response to Dean's raised eyebrow. "It's cold. It's wet."
And you liked it when you were five.
"You got any suggestions?" Dean said on a sigh. "'Cause we could go anywhere on the planet. Mount Everest. Death Valley. We could go into one of those mines that's like twenty miles underground, and if the son of a bitch wanted to find us, he'd find us. Maybe you missed the word 'god'."
That prompted Sam to issue a sigh of his own.
They hadn't gone far. They couldn't go far, not with the Impala in the dire shape she was in, and Dean had steadfastly refused to leave his baby behind, no matter how easy a target their continued presence in the general vicinity of Bootback, Kansas might make them.
Besides, as he'd told Sam, what was the point of running?
From a GOD.
In a surprising display of mercy - or something; Dean hadn't yet decided if it was mercy or if Castiel had simply realized he had something more pressing to do - Cas had left without waiting to see if Sam, Dean and Bobby would actually do some bowing-down before him, or if they'd risk being turned into sticky puddles of goo by telling him to shove his new-and-improved, omnipotent self up Jimmy Novak's bunghole.
All three of them had expected Cas to come back. All three of them would have laid a sizeable pile of money on the odds of his coming back. If not within a few minutes, then certainly within an hour or two.
He didn't come back.
Left with little else to do, they'd climbed up the stairs, out of the basement, and returned to the road, where the Impala still lay flipped onto her formerly glossy black roof.
"This SUCKS," Dean had announced at the sight of her, down for the count like that.
He hadn't said much else since then.
Faced with the choice of leaving or staying, Bobby had opted to Go Greyhound and head back to Sioux Falls, to regroup, check in with some of his contacts, and (as he put it) "Go a couple of days without having to look you chuckleheads in the eye." When Sam and Dean had argued that his being alone made him a better target, all he'd done was stare.
It made sense. Together or alone, they were at the mercy of Castiel's whims.
It'd been two days, now, since Cas's departure. More precisely, fifty-one hours and thirteen minutes - which wasn't all that much time, in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, it was way more than enough time for Cas to have done…something. The Winchesters had had CNN playing constantly on the battered TV ever since their arrival at Room 117 of the Wagon Wheel (Bootback's Favorite Family Destination!!), and as near as they could tell, Castiel hadn't been inspired to smite anyone.
Yet.
Of course, CNN couldn't be everywhere.
"He wouldn't, would he?" Sam asked. "Kill us? I mean…he's Cas, man."
"He's the friggin' artist formerly known as Cas. I don't know what the hell he is any more."
"God," Sam said distractedly.
"A god."
"That's not what he said."
"I don't give a gold-plated crap what he said. The original's still around somewhere. That makes him one of…more than one." When Sam didn't respond to that with anything approaching agreement, Dean huffed out a long breath and suggested, "You know - like that Borg chick. Seven of Nine."
That might be somewhere to go, he mused.
The starship Voyager.
The friggin' Delta Quadrant.
"That's who we need," he blurted.
"Who?"
"Picard. He always knew how to outsmart Q."
"Dude," Sam said, and belched a small fog of Orange Crush out into the air above his bed. "Q played Picard like a fiddle. He was always zapping them somewhere. Remember? That one time, he took the whole ship out to the ends of the universe."
"You figure that's what he's like? Cas? Like one of the damn Q?"
They sighed in unison. Like they'd planned to do it.
"Don't think I really want to see the ends of the universe," Sam said, turning the soda bottle around and around in his hands. "I mean…it'd be interesting, but that whole taking ten thousand years to get back thing? I think that'd be kind of counter-productive."
"It's the most lame-assed -"
Somebody rapped at the door.
"We don't need any towels!" Sam called out. "Thank you! We're good! Gracias!" Into the silence that followed, he told his brother, "We ask for Jean-Luc Picard and we get towels. Typical, right? You'd think that maybe once it would go the other way around, but -"
Again with the rapping.
"How do you say, 'You're being a pain in my ass' in Spanish?" Dean asked his brother.
The rapping turned into banging.
Dean covered the distance to the door in a couple of steps. EASY, he cautioned himself as he grabbed the doorhandle. Poor chick's just trying to do her job. Probably got in trouble for skipping a couple rooms. Or she busted in on somebody doin' the nasty and burned out her retinas, and she's trying to make sure we heard her before she opens the door.
"We don't -" he said as he pulled the door open.
It wasn't the maid.
"Oh," he sighed.
SHIT, was what he was thinking.
The smiting they'd been worried about? That would have been better than this. That would have been truckloads better than this.
Becky.
The shriek the Queen of Supernatural Fangirls emitted when she spotted Sam shot straight to Dean's brain like a jet-propelled icepick. Paying him no attention whatsoever - except as an obstacle - she elbowed him out of the way and streaked into the room, hands clasped together, eyes blown wide open like she'd just witnessed…
"It's a MIRACLE!" she screeched.
Dean would have said Kill me now, except that…well. He'd already tried that, on a number of occasions, and it hadn't been at all preferable to the current situation, largely because being dead didn't deliver the peace and quiet people liked to think it did.
"Sam!" she howled. "OhmyGodSAM!"
"Hey, Becky," Sam grimaced.
That, apparently, was all she needed to push her over the edge of whatever precipice she'd been standing on, because at the sound of her name she burst into a torrent of tears. And it wasn't bursting into tears the way most people burst into tears, with some overflow down the cheeks and maybe a couple of low moans building up to some heartfelt sobbing. This was a Going For Olympic Gold level breakdown.
"Hey," Dean said as she wept. "Hey, now."
He and Sam looked at each other. Standing behind Becky, Dean was free to mouth The hell, man. Seriously, what the freaking HELL. But sitting in front of her, and possessed of her full attention, Sam was limited to smiling uncomfortably and fumbling for the box of cheap tissues on the night table. When he passed her a handful, she grabbed them and crushed them in her fist, then jammed the fist up against her mouth.
It didn't do anything to deaden the noise.
"Saaaaaaaam," she wailed around her hand. "I thought I'd never see you again!"
Then she bolted for the bathroom.
She shut the flimsy door, loose on its hinges, with such force that it rattled for several seconds. Once it had settled back down it did nothing to interrupt the flow of sound coming from within; if anything, it intensified it.
She sobbed. She wailed. She moaned.
There were any number of people - and/or entities - who might have shown up at their door. Raphael, somehow reconstituted. Crowley. Local law enforcement. The manager of the motel, pre-emptively upset with them for making a mess. Any one of the alphas the soulless version of Sam had been hunting with their grandfather. Hell, it could have been one of those guys from HGTV offering them a room makeover. Anything would have been preferable to this: the flighty, hormone-overloaded uber-fan weeping in their bathroom.
"Dude," Dean said. "This is not good."
"I know. Just - let her calm down."
"How about we let her calm down somewhere else? Like maybe the Moon?"
"We can't throw her out, Dean."
"We can't?"
"She's -" Sam stared at his half-empty bottle of soda like he expected to find a game plan spelled out on its brightly-colored label. He looked as woeful as he had years ago, when Dad had told him no, there was no room in the car for the bike he'd found in an alley and had spent two weeks fixing up so that it gleamed like the Impala. "She's not that bad."
"No?"
"She's -" With a wry smile, Sam amended his thought to, "You weren't that enthusiastic when you found out I was topside."
"If I had been, you could have committed me to the nuthouse of your choice, with my blessing."
They both turned to look at the bathroom door.
The twenty-piece-orchestra version of OhMyGod SAM!!!! continued: wails and shrieks and reverberating, gulpy sobs interspersed with loud honks of nose-blowing.
"She sounds like the friggin' horn on a tugboat," Dean moaned. "How the hell did she find us, anyway?"
As if she'd been listening - and for all Dean knew, she had - the bathroom door opened and Becky shuffled out, bearing a thick stack of paper that she'd apparently pulled out of the tote bag that was slung over her shoulder. She sniffed a couple of times as she approached Sam's bed, swiped at her nose with the back of her free hand, then inhaled in a snort powerful enough to propel that particular breath southward through the soles of her feet, through the floorboards, and on into the bosom of Mother Earth.
"Here," she said, and handed the papers over to Sam.
"What's -" Sam began.
Dean leaned in for a look.
He'd seen enough paper scattered around Chuck Shurley's home to know it was the cover page of a manuscript, and given that it was Chuck's Number One Fan proferring it to them (all right, to Sam), odds were that it was the latest Chuck Shurley masterpiece. "We told him, no more books," Dean told Becky crossly. "No more, as in zero. So what the hell is this?"
SWAN SONG, it said on the cover page.
"You said he couldn't publish any more books," Becky sniffed. "And he didn't. But he felt it was his - he was being true to his artistic integrity."
"I'm gonna kick his ass."
Sniffy-snuffling, her eyes still glistening with tears, she looked from Dean to Sam and back again. She seemed tempted to snatch back the manuscript, but had a little argument with herself instead, took a step back from the bed and folded her arms across her chest.
"You'll have to find him first," she announced.
"Why? Where is he?"
"If I knew where he was, would I be asking you to find him?"
"Ask?" Dean echoed. "I'm not remembering anybody asking anybody to do anything. I'm remembering people being…snippy."
"You did it first."
"You barged into my frigging room."
"You opened the door."
"Like I could ignore all the pounding?"
Sam had begun to flip through the pages and was reading something that radically deepened the furrows on his forehead. "Why does he keep going on about the car?"
"Car? What car? My car?" The look on Sam's face did nothing to quiet the sense of unease that had begun to knot itself together in Dean's gut the moment Becky emerged from the bathroom. Almost as leery of the manuscript as he'd been of life in general two nights ago, driving up to the house where Cas was getting ready to swing wide the gates of Purgatory, he grabbed the papers away from Sam and began scanning the words that had spun out of Chuck's little desktop printer.
The first several pages were all about the Impala.
"If he knew," Dean said, his grip tightening on the flimsy sheets of the manuscript, "if that idiot son of a bitch knew ABOUT MY CAR, I'm going to -"
"Dean," Sam said.
"I'm going to -"
Tears were dribbling down Becky's cheeks. Silently, this time, until she whispered, "He's gone."
"Gone where?" Dean groused.
He didn't object when she took the manuscript away from him. Handling it tenderly, she shuffled pages until a sheet that had been near the end was now on top. "He keeps talking about endings," she murmured. "About how endings are hard. He finished this, and…and…nobody's seen him since."
Dean pondered that for a moment. "What, you think he offed himself?"
"He was depressed. He was very, very depressed."
"Dude. He's always been depressed."
"This was different."
The last Dean had seen of Chuck Shurley, the day he'd gone to Chuck's house hoping for some clue to halting the Apocalypse, the Prophet of the Lord had been drinking and phoning hookers, neither of which - as far as Dean was concerned - was much of a sign of impending suicide. And Chuck's house had only been at a slightly higher grade of pig sty than Dean had seen it in previously.
That had been a year and a half ago, though.
"When was the last time you saw him?" Sam asked.
"A year and a half ago," Becky replied.
Huh, Dean thought.
Clutching the manuscript to her chest, Becky lowered herself onto one of the two rickety chairs that were the room's only seating, aside from the beds. She spent a long moment studying the Winchesters, with nothing of what she was thinking visible on her face, then said abruptly, "It was glorious."
"It?" Sam asked.
"Me. And Chuck. After the convention, when we…connected," she said with a wistful sigh. "Days and nights of endless bliss."
Sam and Dean grimaced at each other. "And then?" Sam prompted.
"He left."
"Just -"
"He said he needed to write. That he needed to be alone to write. He was - he didn't - we didn't -"
"So he took off."
"He went home." She began to focus on a spot high up on the wall over Sam's head; when Dean turned to look at it, he found nothing there worth considering, other than a cobweb. "Before that," Becky went on, "when we were apart, he - we -" She giggled softly. "We sent each other pictures." Another giggle. "I bet you didn't know that his -"
"Don't really want to," Dean told her quickly.
"He stopped taking my calls. And he wouldn't call back when I left a message. He wouldn't answer my e-mails or my texts. I got worried, so I went to his house. And I found this." Her face again on the verge of collapse, she nodded down at the manuscript. "I looked everywhere. No one in his neighborhood had seen him leave, and his car was still there. Things were still lying around, as if he'd been…snatched out of there. There's no sign of him anywhere." A moan crept up out of her; it reminded Dean of footage he'd seen on TV of gas bubbling up through the mud at Yosemite. "It can't be true!" she wailed. "It can't!"
"Nobody found a body?"
Becky snuffled and wiped at her nose. "No."
"Well, that's a good sign, then. Easy enough to dispose of a body when you off somebody else. When you do it to yourself…it's kinda tough."
She glared at him, then shrugged. "I suppose. But he - what about this?" She gestured with the manuscript. "Why did he go on and on about endings, if he didn't mean he wanted to…end it?"
"Why does Chuck do anything?" Dean groaned. "All that stuff he wrote, he was just taking dictation, kind of. Right? Maybe -" He cut himself off. Presumably, Chuck's dictation had been coming straight from the top. And the idea of God (the original) pondering offering Himself was way beyond ridiculous.
Wasn't it?
"We'll find him," Sam said.
Dean locked eyes with his brother.
"What?" Sam asked.
"Got other things to worry about," Dean reminded him tersely. "Our friend Bucket Full of Souls? 'Bow down before me or I'll kill you?' That ringing any bells?"
Becky's eyes narrowed. "What are you talking about?"
"Not your problem, sweetheart."
"Fine," she sniped. "I came here because I thought you'd want to help. Chuck would have helped you." Scowling, she got up from the chair and took enough stompy little steps to carry her to the door. "Rest assured that the next time you need something, and you come crying to me, I'll remember exactly what happened here."
"Becky, wait," Sam said.
"I won't stay where I'm not wanted."
Sam glanced at this brother, then asked in a gentle tone, obviously intending to placate his One True Admirer, "How did you find us?"
Her features pinched, like someone had pulled them in with a drawstring. She pondered things for a moment, then told him grudgingly, "I went to Bobby Singer's. And let me tell you, that was no easy task. Do you have any idea how big Sioux Falls, South Dakota is? Why Chuck kept calling it a small town, I have no idea. I spent two whole days trying to find someone who knew him, and when I finally got to his house, no one was there. I would have had no idea at all where to go if one of my flisties hadn't seen Sam at the E-Z Mart pumping gas, and if he hadn't dropped this."
After a moment of juggling the manuscript and her tote bag, she produced a wrinkled scrap of paper: the same piece of paper Dean had left pinned to Sam's pillow down in Bobby's panic room several days ago, the one that had been delivered to Dean by Balthazar.
"Your - who gave you this?" Dean sputtered.
"My friend."
"No. That other word. Flistie? What the hell is a flistie?"
"As if you care."
"I care that there's no segment of my life right now that isn't gigantic buckets of crazy! Sam dropped that" - Dean waved a hand at the slip of paper - "at a gas station, and one of those obsessed nutballs that orbit around Chuck - the ones who can't find a frigging clue that my life is not a GAME - what? Sent you a text? An instant message? Said 'Come quick! If you hurry, you can tail his perky, shiny ass to Kansas'? Chuck left you, lady. I don't know what the two of you had going on, but it sounds like he pretty much told you flat out that it was finito. He left. Okay? Do you want me to engrave it in granite for you? Go back to your…what passes for a life, leave me and Sam alone, and tell your little club of weirdos to do the same."
Becky's expression pinched even tighter. Then her chin began to quiver.
"Oh, no," Dean said. "Don't haul out the weepy face again. Do not do that, because it's not gonna work. Just go home. Okay? Your little honeymoon with the Great and Wonderful Chuck is over. Maybe this is gonna come as a surprise to you, but we've got bigger fish to fry. Your problems? Ain't a blip on the meter, as far as we're concerned. And by the way - did it occur to you that maybe Chuck went somewhere where you and the fan club can't find him, because he wants to be left alone? That maybe he got tired of you fawning over him and sending him dirty pictures? That maybe it JUST AIN'T FUN ANY MORE?"
She stood staring at him for a long moment.
Then she said quietly, "Of course it did," pulled the door open and left the room, closing the door gently but firmly behind her.
"That was a little harsh," Sam said after a minute.
"Harsh? Are you shitting me? So - what? You want to forget about this whole thing with Cas, who apparently has the power to turn the world into a freaking charcoal briquette if he decides it suits him, and spend your time helping that little freakazoid track down Chuck Shurley, who as near as I can tell, doesn't want to be found?"
"Something might have happened to him."
Dean sank down onto the end of his bed and dropped his head into his hands.
"Dean," Sam persisted. "Nobody's seen him for a year and a half? Okay, he was depressed. And agoraphobic. And who knows what else. But in a year and a half, he never made a liquor run? Come on, man. There could be something seriously wrong here."
After a minute of staring between his fingers at bright green shag carpeting, Dean replied, "Okay, so the guy did us a couple of favors. But we can't -"
"We could go to his house. Check it out."
"It's a long walk from here, Sam."
"So we'll rent a car."
"You want that little whack job to end up thinking all she needs to do is say 'jump' and we'll say 'how high?'"
"She's not that bad, Dean."
Dean lifted his head long enough to give Sam a weary look. "I'm starting to think I liked you better minus the soul."
Sam raised a brow.
"All right, all right. I'm against this. I am a hundred percent against this, and not only because it means leaving my baby in the hands of some stranger in Bumf -"
"Bootback."
"Whatever," Dean groused. "First thing in the morning, I'll check in with that guy Tim at the garage and make sure he hasn't got anything crazy floating around between his ears. We'll rent the car, and we'll go see what going on at Chuck's House of Lame-Assed Drama. That good enough for you?"
"I'm not the one who needs to think so."
"Oh, no," Dean said.
"You're the one who sent her out of here crying."
"She'll get over it."
"Dean."
Muttering things that were unintelligible even to him, Dean got to his feet. Slowly. Painstakingly. Gave Sam plenty of time to volunteer to go after Becky.
Sam didn't move.
"You owe me for this," Dean said as he headed for the door.
Part 2…
It wasn't the maid.
"Oh," he sighed.
SHIT, was what he was thinking.
The smiting they'd been worried about? That would have been better than this. That would have been truckloads better than this.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, Becky (with others to come)
GENRE: Gen
SPOILERS: Heavily spoilery for S6 finale (takes place two days post-6.22 and will undoubtedly be mightily Kripke'd)
RATING: PG
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; this part is 3824 words
1-800-MISSING
By Carol Davis
"Maybe we should…go somewhere," Sam said quietly.
Jupiter? That far enough? Because they can't hear you scream in space.
Under optimum circumstances, Dean would have gone on looking anywhere but at his brother, who was sitting over there on the other bed, taking slow, meditative sips from a bottle of Orange Crush. Neither one of them had been able to muster the energy to make a serious grocery run since their arrival at the Wagon Wheel Inn two days ago; the only store within easy walking distance of the motel was the mini-mart at the service station, and for some completely unfathomable reason, the only beverage the mart was selling was Orange Crush.
"I don't care," was Sam's response to Dean's raised eyebrow. "It's cold. It's wet."
And you liked it when you were five.
"You got any suggestions?" Dean said on a sigh. "'Cause we could go anywhere on the planet. Mount Everest. Death Valley. We could go into one of those mines that's like twenty miles underground, and if the son of a bitch wanted to find us, he'd find us. Maybe you missed the word 'god'."
That prompted Sam to issue a sigh of his own.
They hadn't gone far. They couldn't go far, not with the Impala in the dire shape she was in, and Dean had steadfastly refused to leave his baby behind, no matter how easy a target their continued presence in the general vicinity of Bootback, Kansas might make them.
Besides, as he'd told Sam, what was the point of running?
From a GOD.
In a surprising display of mercy - or something; Dean hadn't yet decided if it was mercy or if Castiel had simply realized he had something more pressing to do - Cas had left without waiting to see if Sam, Dean and Bobby would actually do some bowing-down before him, or if they'd risk being turned into sticky puddles of goo by telling him to shove his new-and-improved, omnipotent self up Jimmy Novak's bunghole.
All three of them had expected Cas to come back. All three of them would have laid a sizeable pile of money on the odds of his coming back. If not within a few minutes, then certainly within an hour or two.
He didn't come back.
Left with little else to do, they'd climbed up the stairs, out of the basement, and returned to the road, where the Impala still lay flipped onto her formerly glossy black roof.
"This SUCKS," Dean had announced at the sight of her, down for the count like that.
He hadn't said much else since then.
Faced with the choice of leaving or staying, Bobby had opted to Go Greyhound and head back to Sioux Falls, to regroup, check in with some of his contacts, and (as he put it) "Go a couple of days without having to look you chuckleheads in the eye." When Sam and Dean had argued that his being alone made him a better target, all he'd done was stare.
It made sense. Together or alone, they were at the mercy of Castiel's whims.
It'd been two days, now, since Cas's departure. More precisely, fifty-one hours and thirteen minutes - which wasn't all that much time, in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, it was way more than enough time for Cas to have done…something. The Winchesters had had CNN playing constantly on the battered TV ever since their arrival at Room 117 of the Wagon Wheel (Bootback's Favorite Family Destination!!), and as near as they could tell, Castiel hadn't been inspired to smite anyone.
Yet.
Of course, CNN couldn't be everywhere.
"He wouldn't, would he?" Sam asked. "Kill us? I mean…he's Cas, man."
"He's the friggin' artist formerly known as Cas. I don't know what the hell he is any more."
"God," Sam said distractedly.
"A god."
"That's not what he said."
"I don't give a gold-plated crap what he said. The original's still around somewhere. That makes him one of…more than one." When Sam didn't respond to that with anything approaching agreement, Dean huffed out a long breath and suggested, "You know - like that Borg chick. Seven of Nine."
That might be somewhere to go, he mused.
The starship Voyager.
The friggin' Delta Quadrant.
"That's who we need," he blurted.
"Who?"
"Picard. He always knew how to outsmart Q."
"Dude," Sam said, and belched a small fog of Orange Crush out into the air above his bed. "Q played Picard like a fiddle. He was always zapping them somewhere. Remember? That one time, he took the whole ship out to the ends of the universe."
"You figure that's what he's like? Cas? Like one of the damn Q?"
They sighed in unison. Like they'd planned to do it.
"Don't think I really want to see the ends of the universe," Sam said, turning the soda bottle around and around in his hands. "I mean…it'd be interesting, but that whole taking ten thousand years to get back thing? I think that'd be kind of counter-productive."
"It's the most lame-assed -"
Somebody rapped at the door.
"We don't need any towels!" Sam called out. "Thank you! We're good! Gracias!" Into the silence that followed, he told his brother, "We ask for Jean-Luc Picard and we get towels. Typical, right? You'd think that maybe once it would go the other way around, but -"
Again with the rapping.
"How do you say, 'You're being a pain in my ass' in Spanish?" Dean asked his brother.
The rapping turned into banging.
Dean covered the distance to the door in a couple of steps. EASY, he cautioned himself as he grabbed the doorhandle. Poor chick's just trying to do her job. Probably got in trouble for skipping a couple rooms. Or she busted in on somebody doin' the nasty and burned out her retinas, and she's trying to make sure we heard her before she opens the door.
"We don't -" he said as he pulled the door open.
It wasn't the maid.
"Oh," he sighed.
SHIT, was what he was thinking.
The smiting they'd been worried about? That would have been better than this. That would have been truckloads better than this.
Becky.
The shriek the Queen of Supernatural Fangirls emitted when she spotted Sam shot straight to Dean's brain like a jet-propelled icepick. Paying him no attention whatsoever - except as an obstacle - she elbowed him out of the way and streaked into the room, hands clasped together, eyes blown wide open like she'd just witnessed…
"It's a MIRACLE!" she screeched.
Dean would have said Kill me now, except that…well. He'd already tried that, on a number of occasions, and it hadn't been at all preferable to the current situation, largely because being dead didn't deliver the peace and quiet people liked to think it did.
"Sam!" she howled. "OhmyGodSAM!"
"Hey, Becky," Sam grimaced.
That, apparently, was all she needed to push her over the edge of whatever precipice she'd been standing on, because at the sound of her name she burst into a torrent of tears. And it wasn't bursting into tears the way most people burst into tears, with some overflow down the cheeks and maybe a couple of low moans building up to some heartfelt sobbing. This was a Going For Olympic Gold level breakdown.
"Hey," Dean said as she wept. "Hey, now."
He and Sam looked at each other. Standing behind Becky, Dean was free to mouth The hell, man. Seriously, what the freaking HELL. But sitting in front of her, and possessed of her full attention, Sam was limited to smiling uncomfortably and fumbling for the box of cheap tissues on the night table. When he passed her a handful, she grabbed them and crushed them in her fist, then jammed the fist up against her mouth.
It didn't do anything to deaden the noise.
"Saaaaaaaam," she wailed around her hand. "I thought I'd never see you again!"
Then she bolted for the bathroom.
She shut the flimsy door, loose on its hinges, with such force that it rattled for several seconds. Once it had settled back down it did nothing to interrupt the flow of sound coming from within; if anything, it intensified it.
She sobbed. She wailed. She moaned.
There were any number of people - and/or entities - who might have shown up at their door. Raphael, somehow reconstituted. Crowley. Local law enforcement. The manager of the motel, pre-emptively upset with them for making a mess. Any one of the alphas the soulless version of Sam had been hunting with their grandfather. Hell, it could have been one of those guys from HGTV offering them a room makeover. Anything would have been preferable to this: the flighty, hormone-overloaded uber-fan weeping in their bathroom.
"Dude," Dean said. "This is not good."
"I know. Just - let her calm down."
"How about we let her calm down somewhere else? Like maybe the Moon?"
"We can't throw her out, Dean."
"We can't?"
"She's -" Sam stared at his half-empty bottle of soda like he expected to find a game plan spelled out on its brightly-colored label. He looked as woeful as he had years ago, when Dad had told him no, there was no room in the car for the bike he'd found in an alley and had spent two weeks fixing up so that it gleamed like the Impala. "She's not that bad."
"No?"
"She's -" With a wry smile, Sam amended his thought to, "You weren't that enthusiastic when you found out I was topside."
"If I had been, you could have committed me to the nuthouse of your choice, with my blessing."
They both turned to look at the bathroom door.
The twenty-piece-orchestra version of OhMyGod SAM!!!! continued: wails and shrieks and reverberating, gulpy sobs interspersed with loud honks of nose-blowing.
"She sounds like the friggin' horn on a tugboat," Dean moaned. "How the hell did she find us, anyway?"
As if she'd been listening - and for all Dean knew, she had - the bathroom door opened and Becky shuffled out, bearing a thick stack of paper that she'd apparently pulled out of the tote bag that was slung over her shoulder. She sniffed a couple of times as she approached Sam's bed, swiped at her nose with the back of her free hand, then inhaled in a snort powerful enough to propel that particular breath southward through the soles of her feet, through the floorboards, and on into the bosom of Mother Earth.
"Here," she said, and handed the papers over to Sam.
"What's -" Sam began.
Dean leaned in for a look.
He'd seen enough paper scattered around Chuck Shurley's home to know it was the cover page of a manuscript, and given that it was Chuck's Number One Fan proferring it to them (all right, to Sam), odds were that it was the latest Chuck Shurley masterpiece. "We told him, no more books," Dean told Becky crossly. "No more, as in zero. So what the hell is this?"
SWAN SONG, it said on the cover page.
"You said he couldn't publish any more books," Becky sniffed. "And he didn't. But he felt it was his - he was being true to his artistic integrity."
"I'm gonna kick his ass."
Sniffy-snuffling, her eyes still glistening with tears, she looked from Dean to Sam and back again. She seemed tempted to snatch back the manuscript, but had a little argument with herself instead, took a step back from the bed and folded her arms across her chest.
"You'll have to find him first," she announced.
"Why? Where is he?"
"If I knew where he was, would I be asking you to find him?"
"Ask?" Dean echoed. "I'm not remembering anybody asking anybody to do anything. I'm remembering people being…snippy."
"You did it first."
"You barged into my frigging room."
"You opened the door."
"Like I could ignore all the pounding?"
Sam had begun to flip through the pages and was reading something that radically deepened the furrows on his forehead. "Why does he keep going on about the car?"
"Car? What car? My car?" The look on Sam's face did nothing to quiet the sense of unease that had begun to knot itself together in Dean's gut the moment Becky emerged from the bathroom. Almost as leery of the manuscript as he'd been of life in general two nights ago, driving up to the house where Cas was getting ready to swing wide the gates of Purgatory, he grabbed the papers away from Sam and began scanning the words that had spun out of Chuck's little desktop printer.
The first several pages were all about the Impala.
"If he knew," Dean said, his grip tightening on the flimsy sheets of the manuscript, "if that idiot son of a bitch knew ABOUT MY CAR, I'm going to -"
"Dean," Sam said.
"I'm going to -"
Tears were dribbling down Becky's cheeks. Silently, this time, until she whispered, "He's gone."
"Gone where?" Dean groused.
He didn't object when she took the manuscript away from him. Handling it tenderly, she shuffled pages until a sheet that had been near the end was now on top. "He keeps talking about endings," she murmured. "About how endings are hard. He finished this, and…and…nobody's seen him since."
Dean pondered that for a moment. "What, you think he offed himself?"
"He was depressed. He was very, very depressed."
"Dude. He's always been depressed."
"This was different."
The last Dean had seen of Chuck Shurley, the day he'd gone to Chuck's house hoping for some clue to halting the Apocalypse, the Prophet of the Lord had been drinking and phoning hookers, neither of which - as far as Dean was concerned - was much of a sign of impending suicide. And Chuck's house had only been at a slightly higher grade of pig sty than Dean had seen it in previously.
That had been a year and a half ago, though.
"When was the last time you saw him?" Sam asked.
"A year and a half ago," Becky replied.
Huh, Dean thought.
Clutching the manuscript to her chest, Becky lowered herself onto one of the two rickety chairs that were the room's only seating, aside from the beds. She spent a long moment studying the Winchesters, with nothing of what she was thinking visible on her face, then said abruptly, "It was glorious."
"It?" Sam asked.
"Me. And Chuck. After the convention, when we…connected," she said with a wistful sigh. "Days and nights of endless bliss."
Sam and Dean grimaced at each other. "And then?" Sam prompted.
"He left."
"Just -"
"He said he needed to write. That he needed to be alone to write. He was - he didn't - we didn't -"
"So he took off."
"He went home." She began to focus on a spot high up on the wall over Sam's head; when Dean turned to look at it, he found nothing there worth considering, other than a cobweb. "Before that," Becky went on, "when we were apart, he - we -" She giggled softly. "We sent each other pictures." Another giggle. "I bet you didn't know that his -"
"Don't really want to," Dean told her quickly.
"He stopped taking my calls. And he wouldn't call back when I left a message. He wouldn't answer my e-mails or my texts. I got worried, so I went to his house. And I found this." Her face again on the verge of collapse, she nodded down at the manuscript. "I looked everywhere. No one in his neighborhood had seen him leave, and his car was still there. Things were still lying around, as if he'd been…snatched out of there. There's no sign of him anywhere." A moan crept up out of her; it reminded Dean of footage he'd seen on TV of gas bubbling up through the mud at Yosemite. "It can't be true!" she wailed. "It can't!"
"Nobody found a body?"
Becky snuffled and wiped at her nose. "No."
"Well, that's a good sign, then. Easy enough to dispose of a body when you off somebody else. When you do it to yourself…it's kinda tough."
She glared at him, then shrugged. "I suppose. But he - what about this?" She gestured with the manuscript. "Why did he go on and on about endings, if he didn't mean he wanted to…end it?"
"Why does Chuck do anything?" Dean groaned. "All that stuff he wrote, he was just taking dictation, kind of. Right? Maybe -" He cut himself off. Presumably, Chuck's dictation had been coming straight from the top. And the idea of God (the original) pondering offering Himself was way beyond ridiculous.
Wasn't it?
"We'll find him," Sam said.
Dean locked eyes with his brother.
"What?" Sam asked.
"Got other things to worry about," Dean reminded him tersely. "Our friend Bucket Full of Souls? 'Bow down before me or I'll kill you?' That ringing any bells?"
Becky's eyes narrowed. "What are you talking about?"
"Not your problem, sweetheart."
"Fine," she sniped. "I came here because I thought you'd want to help. Chuck would have helped you." Scowling, she got up from the chair and took enough stompy little steps to carry her to the door. "Rest assured that the next time you need something, and you come crying to me, I'll remember exactly what happened here."
"Becky, wait," Sam said.
"I won't stay where I'm not wanted."
Sam glanced at this brother, then asked in a gentle tone, obviously intending to placate his One True Admirer, "How did you find us?"
Her features pinched, like someone had pulled them in with a drawstring. She pondered things for a moment, then told him grudgingly, "I went to Bobby Singer's. And let me tell you, that was no easy task. Do you have any idea how big Sioux Falls, South Dakota is? Why Chuck kept calling it a small town, I have no idea. I spent two whole days trying to find someone who knew him, and when I finally got to his house, no one was there. I would have had no idea at all where to go if one of my flisties hadn't seen Sam at the E-Z Mart pumping gas, and if he hadn't dropped this."
After a moment of juggling the manuscript and her tote bag, she produced a wrinkled scrap of paper: the same piece of paper Dean had left pinned to Sam's pillow down in Bobby's panic room several days ago, the one that had been delivered to Dean by Balthazar.
"Your - who gave you this?" Dean sputtered.
"My friend."
"No. That other word. Flistie? What the hell is a flistie?"
"As if you care."
"I care that there's no segment of my life right now that isn't gigantic buckets of crazy! Sam dropped that" - Dean waved a hand at the slip of paper - "at a gas station, and one of those obsessed nutballs that orbit around Chuck - the ones who can't find a frigging clue that my life is not a GAME - what? Sent you a text? An instant message? Said 'Come quick! If you hurry, you can tail his perky, shiny ass to Kansas'? Chuck left you, lady. I don't know what the two of you had going on, but it sounds like he pretty much told you flat out that it was finito. He left. Okay? Do you want me to engrave it in granite for you? Go back to your…what passes for a life, leave me and Sam alone, and tell your little club of weirdos to do the same."
Becky's expression pinched even tighter. Then her chin began to quiver.
"Oh, no," Dean said. "Don't haul out the weepy face again. Do not do that, because it's not gonna work. Just go home. Okay? Your little honeymoon with the Great and Wonderful Chuck is over. Maybe this is gonna come as a surprise to you, but we've got bigger fish to fry. Your problems? Ain't a blip on the meter, as far as we're concerned. And by the way - did it occur to you that maybe Chuck went somewhere where you and the fan club can't find him, because he wants to be left alone? That maybe he got tired of you fawning over him and sending him dirty pictures? That maybe it JUST AIN'T FUN ANY MORE?"
She stood staring at him for a long moment.
Then she said quietly, "Of course it did," pulled the door open and left the room, closing the door gently but firmly behind her.
"That was a little harsh," Sam said after a minute.
"Harsh? Are you shitting me? So - what? You want to forget about this whole thing with Cas, who apparently has the power to turn the world into a freaking charcoal briquette if he decides it suits him, and spend your time helping that little freakazoid track down Chuck Shurley, who as near as I can tell, doesn't want to be found?"
"Something might have happened to him."
Dean sank down onto the end of his bed and dropped his head into his hands.
"Dean," Sam persisted. "Nobody's seen him for a year and a half? Okay, he was depressed. And agoraphobic. And who knows what else. But in a year and a half, he never made a liquor run? Come on, man. There could be something seriously wrong here."
After a minute of staring between his fingers at bright green shag carpeting, Dean replied, "Okay, so the guy did us a couple of favors. But we can't -"
"We could go to his house. Check it out."
"It's a long walk from here, Sam."
"So we'll rent a car."
"You want that little whack job to end up thinking all she needs to do is say 'jump' and we'll say 'how high?'"
"She's not that bad, Dean."
Dean lifted his head long enough to give Sam a weary look. "I'm starting to think I liked you better minus the soul."
Sam raised a brow.
"All right, all right. I'm against this. I am a hundred percent against this, and not only because it means leaving my baby in the hands of some stranger in Bumf -"
"Bootback."
"Whatever," Dean groused. "First thing in the morning, I'll check in with that guy Tim at the garage and make sure he hasn't got anything crazy floating around between his ears. We'll rent the car, and we'll go see what going on at Chuck's House of Lame-Assed Drama. That good enough for you?"
"I'm not the one who needs to think so."
"Oh, no," Dean said.
"You're the one who sent her out of here crying."
"She'll get over it."
"Dean."
Muttering things that were unintelligible even to him, Dean got to his feet. Slowly. Painstakingly. Gave Sam plenty of time to volunteer to go after Becky.
Sam didn't move.
"You owe me for this," Dean said as he headed for the door.
Part 2…