SPN FIC - The Next Big Thing (In Which She Fixes Things)
Okay... you wanted more. So there's this. But now we're done. Srsly. Because it's a one-shot. \O/
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, Kevin, Charlie
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: Brief mention of the end of 8.23
LENGTH: 2190 words
THE NEXT BIG THING (IN WHICH SHE FIXES THINGS)
By Carol Davis
"Where is he?"
A number of possible responses popped into Dean's head as he stepped away from the door so Kevin could stomp his way into the bunker. Out of habit he glanced past Kevin to the road at the top of the small flight of steps, and (as was normal) found nothing there but the Impala - which did nothing to explain why Kevin was here all of a sudden, scowling, his head turtled into the collar of his jacket, most of his face hidden by the huge lenses of a pair of cheap sunglasses.
Nor did it explain why Kevin was hauling a suitcase large enough to transport the Impala.
"Dude," Dean said. "What's going on?"
"Where is he?" Kevin repeated.
"Who?"
"Your brother. I'm going to kick his ass."
Apparently, that was all the information Kevin was willing to provide. Muttering to himself, he stormed on past Dean and down the narrow passageway, dragging the suitcase - which was obviously jammed to the gills - along behind him.
Dean followed him to what Sam always called "the mezzanine," then down the stairs to the heart of the bunker. There, Kevin finally let go of the giant suitcase, snorted a couple of times, and yanked off his sunglasses so roughly that one of the bows snapped off and clattered to the floor.
"You said I could stay here," he announced. "Well, here I am."
"That was a while ago," Dean reminded him. "During the Crowley situation. If I remember it right, you said you'd rather have body parts ripped off than live here."
"So I'm not welcome any more?"
Not if this is gonna turn into Revenge of the Bitchface, Part Sixteen, Dean thought.
Before he could say anything, though, Kevin sputtered, "Because let me tell you, in my wildest dreams I can't imagine anything more rich and fulfilling than living in an underground bunker in the middle of freaking nowhere with the YOU TWO. I had my life back, man! I had it back! I was going to school and meeting people and I had a nice apartment with a balcony and pool access and I didn't have to look over my damn shoulder all the time! Then I say 'sure, okay' to your brother, 'Sure, I'll run this through my Amazon account for you, no problem,' and all of a sudden I'm living in fear again. Only this time it's not Crowley and his demon henchmen I have to worry about, it's reporters from TMZ!"
He stopped, finally, and hauled in a breath.
"I thought that was over," Dean said. "That whole book thing."
"Over?" Kevin echoed shrilly.
"Yeah."
"Over. Oh, sure, it's over. That's why there's a website called Kill Kevin Tran."
"There's a what, now?"
Kevin jabbed a forefinger at Sam's laptop, sitting open but unattended on the library table. "They've decided that Lindy Jeffries is a blatant ripoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - that it's the most egregious example of plagiarism ever seen by the civilized world. And since Joss Whedon hasn't seen fit to haul my ass into court and sue me for every nickel I or my heirs will ever see from now until the end of time, the fans are going to soothe their wounded psyches by making my life a living hell."
"Joss… who?"
"WHEDON!" Kevin barked. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer!"
"Oh," Dean said.
His face now the color of cherry pie filling, Kevin dropped into a chair and began to squeeze his head between his hands, as if it were a huge, throbbing zit he was intent on popping. "There's a faction that prefers to accuse me of ripping off Katniss from Hunger Games," he said, mostly to the floor, "but they're younger, and kind of stupid. The Buffy crowd's been around for a while. Two of them are lawyers, and they've announced that they're researching precedent for filing a third-party action. Which they need to do because Mr. Whedon apparently thinks the whole thing is funny, and doesn't seem to be interested in" - he yelped out a laugh - "ruining me."
"Mr. - dude, I don't know who that is."
"I had to dump my car, and have Charlie pick me up. She took me to Garth, who brought me here. And if you even start to breathe 'Did anybody follow you here?', after I kill your brother, I'm going to kill you. And you know what? After that, I'll turn myself in. I'll contact all the major networks, and the cable channels, and Jon Stewart, and TMZ, and freaking Ellen DeGeneres, who for some reason thinks I'm the coolest thing EVER, and have them all come and watch me throw myself, bleeding and broken, on the mercy of the law. With any luck, they'll find me guilty. Because Supermax cannot possibly be any worse than THIS."
He ran out of steam then, and as he sat staring at Dean he looked very much like the kid he actually was - the kid who, as near as Dean could figure, had never wanted anything more than to attend a good college and make his mother proud.
"I'm sorry, man," Dean said quietly.
"Yeah? Well, you ought to be."
"Internet's a bad idea. It's a bad, bad idea. I told him that."
Kevin's chin wobbled a little.
"We'll fix it," Dean said. "I - hell, I got no idea how, but we'll fix it. We averted the Apocalypse, and we took care of that whole Heaven and Hell thing. How hard could this be?"
"You don't get out much, do you?" Kevin asked.
~~~~~~~~
"I didn't," Sam said. "Seriously, I didn't imagine any of this. I thought maybe we could make a few hundred dollars. Enough for some groceries and a couple of tanks of gas. Nobody feels worse about this than I do."
Dean arched an eyebrow. "Don't try that speech in front of Kevin."
"It's -"
"Yeah. I know. Things get out of control. What else is new?"
Sam cranked his head back and stared up at the ceiling for a long while, as if he were trying to decipher a pattern visible only to him. "All I intended to do was write a story. It was in my head, and I was bored, so I wrote it down. I didn't imagine any of this. My God, Dean, I've never imagined any of this. What would come of any of it."
"'It seemed like a good idea at the time'? That's gonna be your defense?"
"I think that's the best a lot of people can offer."
Half an hour ago, Dean had deposited Kevin and his enormous suitcase in one of the bunker's dozen-odd bedrooms - had lingered in the doorway long enough to watch Kevin sprawl on the bed and drop instantly into sleep, as if he were falling off the cliff of consciousness, then had closed the door gently and walked away. With Cas now powerless, and with no higher authority to appeal to, he had no idea what he, or Sam, or both of them, could possibly do to resolve any part of this situation, let alone all of it.
"I could step forward," Sam said.
"And you figure that would accomplish something. Being that you're legally dead, and/or wanted by the FBI?"
"I could… step forward anonymously."
"Maybe Ellen DeGeneres could say she did it."
Sam's brow furrowed. "What?"
"Nothing. But - who's that guy he keeps talking about? The one who ought to be freaked out, but isn't?"
"Joss Whedon?"
"Yeah, him. I guess. Why does everybody know who he is?"
"Buffy. Angel. Dollhouse. Firefly. Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. The Avengers. Yes, Dean, I know: if it's not a cult movie classic, or anime porn, you don't know what it is."
"I don't know who wrote it."
Sam didn't respond. In fact, he'd gone unnervingly silent.
"Don't do that," Dean told him. "You make me twitch when you do that."
Sam shook his head, gestured for Dean to be still. He had a look of great concentration on his face when he got up from his chair and began to pace the room, none of which boded at all well, given much of Sam's track record - but, Dean told himself, it was something. And thankfully, he was in the room to witness it, which meant Sam wasn't able to flounder ahead all on his own. At the very least, Dean would get a vote. Would possibly be able to batter Sam unconscious before he got anywhere near the Internet.
"I've got an idea," Sam said finally.
"You do."
"Yeah. But it depends on whether somebody's willing to throw themselves on their sword."
"Sam," Dean said. "No swords."
"It's a metaphor, Dean."
"I know it's a - you're not gonna rope somebody else into this, are you?"
"Yeah," Sam said. "I think I am."
~~~~~~~~
"Sam? Oh! Sam… I - I - oh."
~~~~~~~~
Hell had no fury like a pissed-off fangirl, Dean figured.
He'd been scrolling through messages on Sam's laptop for maybe five or six minutes before he began to think he ought to be wearing protective gear. For what felt like the first time ever, he was enormously grateful for the sense of distance provided by the Internet. Not to mention the value of living in a highly-shielded underground bunker.
"They call this 'flaming', you said?" he murmured.
"Yeah," Kevin replied.
"I can see why."
It still made no sense to him that if this Weeding guy (Whiting? Walton? Whitman?) had no beef with Kevin (and, by extension, with Sam), why the rest of the world couldn't just let the whole thing drop. After all, life was full of rip-offs of one kind or another.
"Is it the money?" he asked Kevin. "They're torqued about the money, is that it?"
Kevin and Charlie looked at each other across the library table and sighed almost in unison. "Not really," Charlie said, and Kevin shook his head. "It's just - there's a whole 'sense of ownership' thing going on. And being invested. It gets to be important to you. Heck, they've turned the nukes on Joss more than once. Pretty much everybody who's ever created something has had their butt handed to them by the fans."
"Because that makes so much sense," Dean said.
"It does to us," Charlie replied.
The "us" made Dean's left eyebrow jump, but Charlie either didn't notice or chose to ignore it.
"It's up," Kevin said.
Sucking in a deep breath, he turned his laptop around so that he, Dean and Charlie could all see the screen. He'd been at the YouTube site for the last fifteen or twenty minutes, waiting for the video he'd uploaded to go "live" - to be visible to anyone who cared to look for it. There'd be a lot of hits, he said. Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands.
"Again - why is she doing this, exactly?" he asked Dean. "Saying she wrote the book?"
"Because she friggin' owes us, is why."
"Does she really understand that -"
"Yeah," Sam said from the library doorway, where he was standing with his arms folded across his chest, leaning against the doorframe for support. "She does. And she said it didn't matter, because she's spent half her life reinventing herself on the Internet. The other fans ate her alive when she started saying Dean and I were real, and she'd met us, so she set up another persona. Then again, after she said she'd married me and it… didn't go over really well. She's got a dozen different identities. She said one more wouldn't be a problem." He huffed out a laugh that Dean very much hoped had no real amusement behind it, then said on a groan, "I told her I'd really appreciate it if the new screen name didn't include any version of the word 'Samlicker'."
Kevin coughed at that, eyes widening.
"Believe me," Sam said. "I didn't pick it."
"Past history aside," Charlie mused, "is she really okay with whatever's going to happen? It's gonna get pretty ugly out there."
Good, Dean thought.
But when he looked at Sam, his brother didn't seem to share that sentiment. He looked truly repentant, the way he had in that old church in Sioux Falls the night the angels had fallen, and it was an expression that made him look both very young and impossibly old. He'd tried any number of times to explain to Dean that he'd meant no harm, that all he'd intended to do was bring their mother to life in a kind of sideways fashion, giving her back the strength and determination that the yellow-eyed demon had stolen from her when she was nineteen years old.
The thing was, Dean didn't need any convincing. Not about that one particular thing, at least.
And now?
Now, things would either settle down, or they'd get worse. With luck, some of the flaming would be drawn away from Kevin.
The kid could try to get his life back.
Again.
After Kevin had made a couple of mouse clicks, a face that was all too familiar filled the screen.
"Hey, you guys," Becky Rosen said to the Internet.
* * * * *
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, Kevin, Charlie
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: Brief mention of the end of 8.23
LENGTH: 2190 words
THE NEXT BIG THING (IN WHICH SHE FIXES THINGS)
By Carol Davis
"Where is he?"
A number of possible responses popped into Dean's head as he stepped away from the door so Kevin could stomp his way into the bunker. Out of habit he glanced past Kevin to the road at the top of the small flight of steps, and (as was normal) found nothing there but the Impala - which did nothing to explain why Kevin was here all of a sudden, scowling, his head turtled into the collar of his jacket, most of his face hidden by the huge lenses of a pair of cheap sunglasses.
Nor did it explain why Kevin was hauling a suitcase large enough to transport the Impala.
"Dude," Dean said. "What's going on?"
"Where is he?" Kevin repeated.
"Who?"
"Your brother. I'm going to kick his ass."
Apparently, that was all the information Kevin was willing to provide. Muttering to himself, he stormed on past Dean and down the narrow passageway, dragging the suitcase - which was obviously jammed to the gills - along behind him.
Dean followed him to what Sam always called "the mezzanine," then down the stairs to the heart of the bunker. There, Kevin finally let go of the giant suitcase, snorted a couple of times, and yanked off his sunglasses so roughly that one of the bows snapped off and clattered to the floor.
"You said I could stay here," he announced. "Well, here I am."
"That was a while ago," Dean reminded him. "During the Crowley situation. If I remember it right, you said you'd rather have body parts ripped off than live here."
"So I'm not welcome any more?"
Not if this is gonna turn into Revenge of the Bitchface, Part Sixteen, Dean thought.
Before he could say anything, though, Kevin sputtered, "Because let me tell you, in my wildest dreams I can't imagine anything more rich and fulfilling than living in an underground bunker in the middle of freaking nowhere with the YOU TWO. I had my life back, man! I had it back! I was going to school and meeting people and I had a nice apartment with a balcony and pool access and I didn't have to look over my damn shoulder all the time! Then I say 'sure, okay' to your brother, 'Sure, I'll run this through my Amazon account for you, no problem,' and all of a sudden I'm living in fear again. Only this time it's not Crowley and his demon henchmen I have to worry about, it's reporters from TMZ!"
He stopped, finally, and hauled in a breath.
"I thought that was over," Dean said. "That whole book thing."
"Over?" Kevin echoed shrilly.
"Yeah."
"Over. Oh, sure, it's over. That's why there's a website called Kill Kevin Tran."
"There's a what, now?"
Kevin jabbed a forefinger at Sam's laptop, sitting open but unattended on the library table. "They've decided that Lindy Jeffries is a blatant ripoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - that it's the most egregious example of plagiarism ever seen by the civilized world. And since Joss Whedon hasn't seen fit to haul my ass into court and sue me for every nickel I or my heirs will ever see from now until the end of time, the fans are going to soothe their wounded psyches by making my life a living hell."
"Joss… who?"
"WHEDON!" Kevin barked. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer!"
"Oh," Dean said.
His face now the color of cherry pie filling, Kevin dropped into a chair and began to squeeze his head between his hands, as if it were a huge, throbbing zit he was intent on popping. "There's a faction that prefers to accuse me of ripping off Katniss from Hunger Games," he said, mostly to the floor, "but they're younger, and kind of stupid. The Buffy crowd's been around for a while. Two of them are lawyers, and they've announced that they're researching precedent for filing a third-party action. Which they need to do because Mr. Whedon apparently thinks the whole thing is funny, and doesn't seem to be interested in" - he yelped out a laugh - "ruining me."
"Mr. - dude, I don't know who that is."
"I had to dump my car, and have Charlie pick me up. She took me to Garth, who brought me here. And if you even start to breathe 'Did anybody follow you here?', after I kill your brother, I'm going to kill you. And you know what? After that, I'll turn myself in. I'll contact all the major networks, and the cable channels, and Jon Stewart, and TMZ, and freaking Ellen DeGeneres, who for some reason thinks I'm the coolest thing EVER, and have them all come and watch me throw myself, bleeding and broken, on the mercy of the law. With any luck, they'll find me guilty. Because Supermax cannot possibly be any worse than THIS."
He ran out of steam then, and as he sat staring at Dean he looked very much like the kid he actually was - the kid who, as near as Dean could figure, had never wanted anything more than to attend a good college and make his mother proud.
"I'm sorry, man," Dean said quietly.
"Yeah? Well, you ought to be."
"Internet's a bad idea. It's a bad, bad idea. I told him that."
Kevin's chin wobbled a little.
"We'll fix it," Dean said. "I - hell, I got no idea how, but we'll fix it. We averted the Apocalypse, and we took care of that whole Heaven and Hell thing. How hard could this be?"
"You don't get out much, do you?" Kevin asked.
~~~~~~~~
"I didn't," Sam said. "Seriously, I didn't imagine any of this. I thought maybe we could make a few hundred dollars. Enough for some groceries and a couple of tanks of gas. Nobody feels worse about this than I do."
Dean arched an eyebrow. "Don't try that speech in front of Kevin."
"It's -"
"Yeah. I know. Things get out of control. What else is new?"
Sam cranked his head back and stared up at the ceiling for a long while, as if he were trying to decipher a pattern visible only to him. "All I intended to do was write a story. It was in my head, and I was bored, so I wrote it down. I didn't imagine any of this. My God, Dean, I've never imagined any of this. What would come of any of it."
"'It seemed like a good idea at the time'? That's gonna be your defense?"
"I think that's the best a lot of people can offer."
Half an hour ago, Dean had deposited Kevin and his enormous suitcase in one of the bunker's dozen-odd bedrooms - had lingered in the doorway long enough to watch Kevin sprawl on the bed and drop instantly into sleep, as if he were falling off the cliff of consciousness, then had closed the door gently and walked away. With Cas now powerless, and with no higher authority to appeal to, he had no idea what he, or Sam, or both of them, could possibly do to resolve any part of this situation, let alone all of it.
"I could step forward," Sam said.
"And you figure that would accomplish something. Being that you're legally dead, and/or wanted by the FBI?"
"I could… step forward anonymously."
"Maybe Ellen DeGeneres could say she did it."
Sam's brow furrowed. "What?"
"Nothing. But - who's that guy he keeps talking about? The one who ought to be freaked out, but isn't?"
"Joss Whedon?"
"Yeah, him. I guess. Why does everybody know who he is?"
"Buffy. Angel. Dollhouse. Firefly. Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. The Avengers. Yes, Dean, I know: if it's not a cult movie classic, or anime porn, you don't know what it is."
"I don't know who wrote it."
Sam didn't respond. In fact, he'd gone unnervingly silent.
"Don't do that," Dean told him. "You make me twitch when you do that."
Sam shook his head, gestured for Dean to be still. He had a look of great concentration on his face when he got up from his chair and began to pace the room, none of which boded at all well, given much of Sam's track record - but, Dean told himself, it was something. And thankfully, he was in the room to witness it, which meant Sam wasn't able to flounder ahead all on his own. At the very least, Dean would get a vote. Would possibly be able to batter Sam unconscious before he got anywhere near the Internet.
"I've got an idea," Sam said finally.
"You do."
"Yeah. But it depends on whether somebody's willing to throw themselves on their sword."
"Sam," Dean said. "No swords."
"It's a metaphor, Dean."
"I know it's a - you're not gonna rope somebody else into this, are you?"
"Yeah," Sam said. "I think I am."
~~~~~~~~
"Sam? Oh! Sam… I - I - oh."
~~~~~~~~
Hell had no fury like a pissed-off fangirl, Dean figured.
He'd been scrolling through messages on Sam's laptop for maybe five or six minutes before he began to think he ought to be wearing protective gear. For what felt like the first time ever, he was enormously grateful for the sense of distance provided by the Internet. Not to mention the value of living in a highly-shielded underground bunker.
"They call this 'flaming', you said?" he murmured.
"Yeah," Kevin replied.
"I can see why."
It still made no sense to him that if this Weeding guy (Whiting? Walton? Whitman?) had no beef with Kevin (and, by extension, with Sam), why the rest of the world couldn't just let the whole thing drop. After all, life was full of rip-offs of one kind or another.
"Is it the money?" he asked Kevin. "They're torqued about the money, is that it?"
Kevin and Charlie looked at each other across the library table and sighed almost in unison. "Not really," Charlie said, and Kevin shook his head. "It's just - there's a whole 'sense of ownership' thing going on. And being invested. It gets to be important to you. Heck, they've turned the nukes on Joss more than once. Pretty much everybody who's ever created something has had their butt handed to them by the fans."
"Because that makes so much sense," Dean said.
"It does to us," Charlie replied.
The "us" made Dean's left eyebrow jump, but Charlie either didn't notice or chose to ignore it.
"It's up," Kevin said.
Sucking in a deep breath, he turned his laptop around so that he, Dean and Charlie could all see the screen. He'd been at the YouTube site for the last fifteen or twenty minutes, waiting for the video he'd uploaded to go "live" - to be visible to anyone who cared to look for it. There'd be a lot of hits, he said. Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands.
"Again - why is she doing this, exactly?" he asked Dean. "Saying she wrote the book?"
"Because she friggin' owes us, is why."
"Does she really understand that -"
"Yeah," Sam said from the library doorway, where he was standing with his arms folded across his chest, leaning against the doorframe for support. "She does. And she said it didn't matter, because she's spent half her life reinventing herself on the Internet. The other fans ate her alive when she started saying Dean and I were real, and she'd met us, so she set up another persona. Then again, after she said she'd married me and it… didn't go over really well. She's got a dozen different identities. She said one more wouldn't be a problem." He huffed out a laugh that Dean very much hoped had no real amusement behind it, then said on a groan, "I told her I'd really appreciate it if the new screen name didn't include any version of the word 'Samlicker'."
Kevin coughed at that, eyes widening.
"Believe me," Sam said. "I didn't pick it."
"Past history aside," Charlie mused, "is she really okay with whatever's going to happen? It's gonna get pretty ugly out there."
Good, Dean thought.
But when he looked at Sam, his brother didn't seem to share that sentiment. He looked truly repentant, the way he had in that old church in Sioux Falls the night the angels had fallen, and it was an expression that made him look both very young and impossibly old. He'd tried any number of times to explain to Dean that he'd meant no harm, that all he'd intended to do was bring their mother to life in a kind of sideways fashion, giving her back the strength and determination that the yellow-eyed demon had stolen from her when she was nineteen years old.
The thing was, Dean didn't need any convincing. Not about that one particular thing, at least.
And now?
Now, things would either settle down, or they'd get worse. With luck, some of the flaming would be drawn away from Kevin.
The kid could try to get his life back.
Again.
After Kevin had made a couple of mouse clicks, a face that was all too familiar filled the screen.
"Hey, you guys," Becky Rosen said to the Internet.
* * * * *