Fic: My Time Coming, Any Day (Kevin BigBang, Sam/Dean implied) Part 1 of 2
Title: My Time Coming, Any Day (don’t worry about me, no)
Author: smalltrolven
Artist: ses mercurial
Rating: G
Word Count: 8,700
Pairing: Sam/Dean but not at all explicit
Warnings: Canon minor character death
Author’s Notes: Not my characters, only my words. Written for the 2015 Kevin Big Bang. Title from “Estimated Prophet” by The Grateful Dead. Thank you so much for the timely and very useful as usual beta, amypond45.
Summary: A post season 7 AU where Kevin turns into a genuine prophecy-receiving Prophet while surviving his confinement with Crowley, all because he reads a certain set of paperbacks to get a break from translating the demon tablet. Once he’s reunited with the Winchester brothers, it’s hard to balance what he’s learned about their back-story with how they are now. He does his best to help them with insights of what’s coming for them, and what they’ve neglected to tell each other from their recent past.
Read it over on AO3 right here.
Please make sure to go check out ses mercurial and ooh and ah over the awesome art!
~**~**~
At first, the books were a diversion from the initial all-consuming impulse he’d had to translate the tablet. That strange hunk of ancient stone with incomprehensible markings carved all over it he couldn’t stop trying to read. The stone that haunted his every waking moment as well as his dreams. Any time he spent reading the books was like taking a vacation, one that he sorely needed during his time spent as Crowley’s captive.
He remembers the first time he came across the books, lined up on one of the shelves of Crowley’s bookcases in his overly ornate office. He’d only noticed them because they were completely different from anything else on the shelves, lurid colors and fonts splashed across their end-bindings, catching his eye from all the dull encyclopedias of demon history and ancient texts that he had no business even knowing existed. But once he’d started reading them, he realized these books…well, they were more than just vaguely familiar. The brothers that hunted and fought side by side through thick and thin, angels and demons and monsters and each other, those brothers were worth reading about because he knew them.
Kevin didn’t understand how the descriptions of the brothers and their car and their adventures could match so closely to the Winchester brothers that he had briefly known. How was that even possible? Was it a friend of theirs writing these books? Or was it maybe even one of them coming up with the stories and publishing them to make money to fund their strange lifestyle? Sam had seemed like he’d be into writing, he was definitely into reading, but probably not Dean as much. But the brothers’ personalities and everything that he could remember about them came through so clearly on the page. It was as if the writer, Carver Edlund, had been a fly on the window of the Impala for a few years.
Kevin thought that maybe it was just a result of his being held captive for so long; he’d lost track of how long it had been. Or perhaps the overwhelming effort it took to translate the demon tablet and hide the results from Crowley were messing with his mind even more than he thought they were. The demon banishing ritual he’d just finished translating was going to be his ticket out of here, and then first thing he’d call Sam; hopefully he’d gotten Dean back from wherever he’d disappeared to with Cas and the exploding Dick. He didn’t know them very well, but he knew without a doubt that Dean would be making tons of exploding dick jokes, and Sam would be rolling his eyes at them.
The more he started thinking about the Winchesters, the more he got the urge to write. His first impulse was to write down what had happened to him since he’d met them. He asked for and received quite promptly from his demon captors a Moleskine journal. Kevin told them it was to set down all his translations in one place. They were so stupid believing him without question. Crowley was right about the demons who worked for him; most of them were loyal and subservient, but wouldn’t have known what to do without his direction. Crowley was always bragging about his organizational prowess and about the ineptitude of his underlings. Kevin humored him, because when he got off on these bragging jags, it took his mind off of tormenting him about speeding up his translation. That and all the damn haircuts. Crowley was obsessed with cutting Kevin’s hair and giving him what he called mani-pedis. It was weird being handled like that by this man who was the King of Hell, but it was the only physical contact he had with anyone for months and he was startled by how starved for it he was.
~**~**~
Once the requested journal was in his hands, he checked it over carefully, running his hands over the smooth, empty pages and pulling gently on the elastic closure, he flipped the bookmark ribbon out of the way and began writing. He lost himself in telling the story, surprised at the details he was able to recall and incorporate of his experiences with Sam and Dean. When he re-read it, he realized that there were many complete scenes that he had not witnessed himself. It was strange how detailed and fully sketched out they were, almost as if he’d seen them happen. But as he read them, he felt the ring of truth in his mind, this was what had actually happened, how he knew that, he had no idea.
Kevin could close his eyes and see it all happening like a great horror/action movie; the Winchesters moving through the epic long-running battle with Dick Roman that had begun before he even knew a thing about being a Prophet of the Lord or the monsters with way too many teeth, the Leviathans; Sam fighting off and reasoning with someone named Bobby, who was a ghost; Dean yelling at Cas when they’d gone off to retrieve the Impala; and this red-haired girl who called herself Charlie transforming herself from a geeky nerd into a monster fighter just by hanging out with the Winchesters for a few days. He saw the brothers improbably dressed in airplane service worker outfits complete with goggles pull a fast one on the Leviathans and come out of it with a hunk of rock in their car’s trunk. The trunk of one of the crappy cars they kept stealing when he’d first met them.
Kevin remembered how Dean had always told him stories about their real car that was hidden in storage, his Baby. He could tell Dean capitalized it like a proper name just by how he said the word. Kevin hadn’t missed Sam’s fond smiles at Dean when he’d talk about the car like it was their missing third brother. Once Sam had even called it their home which had made Dean’s eyes go glassy with unshed tears.
For such a macho guy, Dean was really quite sensitive, and that came through in these scenes that Kevin was somehow an un-embodied witness to, sometimes he even saw Dean alone, talking to himself, usually about Sam. His whole being seemed to revolve around Sam, and vice versa really. He’d never met anyone quite like them, set aside the obvious difference of being monster hunters, but two people who were so consumed with the effort to keep each other alive and as happy as possible. It seemed somehow ideal for the life that they led, full of danger around every turn, but someone at your side that you could always depend on making it possible to bear and even enjoy occasionally.
One of the scenes he saw in great detail centered around the hunk of rock they’d stolen from Dick Roman, the colorful windows all lined up behind the brothers, the tools they assembled, the goggles they wore, Dean nonchalantly smashing the rock with a hammer, the thunder and lightning rumbling immediately, the shrug of Dean’s shoulders as he continued until the demon tablet sat on the old wood of the table glowing and alive in his memory. But it wasn’t his memory. It wasn’t his. None of these were. Whose memories were they?
The more he wrote, the more detailed observances and nuances of the Winchesters’ epic story he spilled out of himself, the more he worried. Kevin became convinced that he was absolutely not creating this on his own, it felt like it was pouring through him somehow. Like he’d become a clear glass pitcher that kept refilling from some mysterious source and his only job was to contain the story long enough to spill it out onto the acid-free pages of his one-hundred-seventy-six page notebook. He’d wanted the acid-free page of a Moleskine, since he knew about chemistry and the longevity of the written word. Something told him that what he was writing down needed to last for a very, very long time. It wasn’t a hunch, or a feeling, it was a certainty, as well as an imperative. There was no question, this story that he was so wrapped up in telling became as equally important as the translation project. He soon had to ask for another journal, having filled up the first.
For some reason, Crowley let him do this writing; he knew that Crowley saw it, and he’d even taken away the first journal for a while, presumably reading it himself. Maybe it was about knowing your opponent, because he’d had the Edlund books already. But then Crowley had started to talk about the Winchesters, a fond undertone in his voice as he called them Moose and Squirrel, relaying how they’d gone back and forth as adversaries and reluctant compatriots with each other for years over many twists and turns. For being such mortal enemies, it was obvious how much Crowley admired the brothers. Kevin could see that he’d missed a lot between where the Edlund books stopped and where the stories that Crowley knew began, and where he himself had started knowing what had gone on with the Winchesters.
He was slowly starting to realize that this was probably one of his jobs as a Prophet. Just like the prophet in the books, Chuck Shurley, the guy that had written under the pen name Carver Edlund. It seemed unlikely, just because of who his subjects were, they were unlikely as could be. But they were epic, everything about them put them at another level from regular human beings. No one he knew, not even his tough-as-nails mother, could have survived what they had and still remained so caring. He remembered Dean having him breathe into a paper bag as he’d sat in that dank basement he’d been worried was a sex-torture dungeon. How gruff Dean had tried to be, but underneath he was a caring gooshy marshmallow. At first Sam had seemed so scattered and distant, but he’d appeared to somehow reassemble himself over the first week Kevin had known them. Sam proving himself over and over again to be especially caring, and not at all afraid to show it like his brother was.
Between his tablet-translating sessions, Kevin had time to re-read the books a second time, which left off at a horrible cliff-hanger: Sam having jumped into the pit with Lucifer and Michael, then reappearing on the street outside of the house where Dean lived with Lisa and her son, Ben (who Kevin was convinced was really Dean’s son although Lisa hadn’t fessed-up yet). The story just stopped, as if the Prophet had disappeared.
He noticed the publication dates of the books were strange too. Most of them were published by the same company, regularly over the course of a few years at first, and then there was a noticeable gap. Then another company took over the publishing duties. It was interesting, and he wondered if it had something to do with what had happened to Chuck Shurley in the last book. Writing yourself into the story was really tripping him out as an authorial construct. Especially since he was essentially doing the same exact thing. He remembered reading the scene when Castiel told Dean that they would come to be called the Winchester Gospels, which he himself was apparently now adding to. By the time he escaped Crowley, he’d filled up two more of the Moleskine journals, adding all three of them to the backpack along with the tablet, the only things that mattered to him in the world.
~**~**~
Those first months running and hiding from the demons that Crowley sent after him were almost harder than being Crowley’s pet Prophet captive had been. He took risks in making increasingly desperate and embarrassing phone calls to Sam, for all the good that did. But he was free, and the demon tablet was done, translated completely, and he had more time to devote to writing down the rest of the Winchester story in all its gory detail. It seemed that the faster he wrote, the faster the story poured through him onto the page, he would write until his hand cramped and then write some more, forgetting to eat or drink, but never forgetting to protect himself from the demons that hunted him.
Kevin didn’t let himself think too much about the implications of what being a prophet meant as far as the existence or non-existence of God. He’d never been a believer, his mom wasn’t, it hadn’t really come up in his life. But the more he spent time writing the Winchester Gospels, the more he became convinced that if there was a God, he really had left Earth to be fought over by the angels and demons. It made him mad that here he was, stuck with some divine imperative he couldn’t ignore and the divinity in question wasn’t even around. And that itself was completely pointless; being mad at God seemed like a big waste of time. Although he did wish that he’d gotten an archangel protector like Chuck Shurley had. That seemed rather unfair after all he’d suffered at the hands of Crowley.
Kevin wished he could get in touch with his mom or his kind-of girlfriend, Channing, just to let them know he wasn’t kidnapped anymore. Maybe to even let them know he was a Prophet, not that there was a chance in hell they’d believe him. But he didn’t want to risk it. There had to be demons watching them, Crowley had gotten that much out of him, so the jerk knew how important the two women were to Kevin. His mother, his only parent, the driving force behind all his academic success, proudly claiming the title of Tiger Mom when she first read about that whole controversy. And Channing, the girl-friend (or friend that was a girl,) he wasn’t really sure as they hadn’t nailed that down before he’d gone on the run. She was smart and funny, and just as nerdy and driven as he was. She was probably already in college for her first year. And here he was, living alone in an abandoned church that he’d learned how to fortify against demons, armed only with a Super-Soaker filled with a custom mixture of holy water and borax. He’d given up on finding Sam since he’d never heard back from him and had to assume the worst had happened. Maybe the Leviathan had gotten him or he’d been trapped in the lab that he’d blown up. That was all Kevin could find online, the video of the smoking remains of the SucroCorp lab.
He spent a few months, hunkered down in that church, just writing and keeping vigilant watch for demons. It was as if there was an invisible shield to allow him the time to write the Winchesters’ story down. He realized that the information download (that’s what he called it now, ‘The Download’) had started over at the point where the last published book, Swan Song had left off. So now he got to know the aftermath of Sam’s great sacrifice. He still couldn’t wrap his mind around Bobby leaving Dean to think for an entire year that his brother was in Hell. That never would make much sense to him at all. The Sam who was hunting with those strange relatives, the Campbell family, even in his soul-less state should have known how damaging that would be to Dean. And that meant that his friend’s soul, Sam’s soul, had stayed in the Cage with Lucifer and Michael that whole time. To Kevin, that made Sam’s choice to kill off his remaining split persona, the one who remembered Hell, a million times more impressive. To choose to take on all that horrible stuff, knowing it would likely kill you, if not make you permanently crazy, just on the off chance you could help your brother, made Sam even more of a hero in Kevin’s mind now. Anyone else would have taken the easy way out and stayed in his memories, but not Sam. And as far as Kevin could tell, Dean never knew about this choice. Sam had kept all of that private for some reason.
Some of the Download was specific about their motivations and feelings, at least enough to make a good story when written on the page, but it left a lot unsaid. And he knew those guys were deep, especially Sam. They’d seen more shit in a life than most, and yeah they were terrifying and violent, but they were two of the most caring people he’d ever met, especially for each other. That seemed to be the ultimate lesson out of the Winchester Gospels: their love saved the world over and over again, as they saved each other.
Finally he caught back up to where he’d come into the story, and he thought that meant he’d be done. Because obviously, Dean was dead, blown up with Dick Roman, and something had to have happened to Sam because there’s no way he wouldn’t have answered his phone calls if he was alive. But that was when it got really weird. Kevin was woken up in the middle of the night with a new Download, one that felt different from all the others. This one wasn’t as sharp around the edges, not as defined, and it included some of his own latest travails, including this very evening’s entertainment of venturing out to buy a new journal to write in and get supplies.
Then the last paragraph came to him all in one burst of information, where Sam came back into focus. He was petting a dog and packing a duffle bag quietly so as not to wake the woman who was sleeping, leaving a small house in the Impala, driving off into the night. Kevin was astonished for many reasons, first the fact that Sam seemed likely to be alive, and that he’d been living with a woman and a dog, not hunting. But why was he leaving like a thief in the night? No more was forthcoming from the Download so he folded up the new journal and snuggled back into his sleeping bag for the rest of the night, dreaming of slapping Sam upside the head when he finally saw him.
In the morning, after going through his usual post-breakfast routine of checking the salt lines and making another batch of holy water and borax for the Super Soaker, his brain felt like it was turned inside-out and then back again in less than a second, his whole body drenched in sweat from the pain which drove him to his knees beside the front pew of the church. He came back to himself slowly, noticing his unsteady, panting breaths, and concentrated on getting at least that under control. His brain continued to throb like it was trying to expand out of his skull with every single heartbeat. He unsteadily got to his feet and tried to focus his eyes, worried that this would be the moment that Crowley’s demons would finally attack.
After a long worried moment where he wasn’t sure that he was even awake, Kevin made his way back to his workspace and opened up his new journal, staring at the blank page. He flipped backwards and re-read the last paragraph of what he’d written last night, about Sam driving, and felt something like a relieved sigh go through him all at once. He wrote, steadily and without a break, until it was well past his normal lunch time, the words pouring through him, assembling a new story of escape and happy reunion and another road trip towards the very city he was in. The last sentence he wrote was some dialogue, Dean briefly describing his experience in Purgatory to Sam. They both sounded so strange, like they weren’t back in sync with each other after their separation, but at least they were coming to find him.
He sat back in his chair and looked up at the rafters, dust motes twirling in the sunbeams shining through the stained glass. How did he feel about this, the Winchesters finally coming for him, or to him? Was he happy that they hadn’t forgotten him or was he worried that being back in their orbit made his life much more dangerous again? It was a toss-up really, and he couldn’t deal with that right now, because, holy shit, that right there, that was a prophecy! His first one in real-time! And it had hurt getting that written down, god did his head ache. He remembered that in the books, Chuck had complained of his head hurting. Must be the physical manifestation of receiving a prophecy from wherever the hell they came from.
Kevin rifled through his backpack for a bottle of ibuprofen and popped three of them with half a bottle of Gatorade. He had to prepare for the Winchesters’ imminent arrival, he had to get his story straight about what he’d tell them. How was he going to look them in the eye now, when he’d seen everything about the last few years of their lives in Imax 3-D detail? What was it Chuck had done? He’d told them part of the story at first of how and what he saw about them. But he hadn’t known he was a prophet until the angels came to him; he hadn’t known that it wasn’t psychosis or whatever, it was a mission from God.
So, that left Kevin in a better position; he had more information in a way, but then so did the brothers. They knew he was a prophet after all. Chuck had confessed to Sam that he intentionally left out some of the things he thought would make Sam’s story of demon-blood addiction less sympathetic to the reader. But he hadn’t elaborated about everything that he’d left out. It had gone unsaid between Chuck and the Winchesters at least as far as he knew. And he sure as hell wasn’t bringing any of that up. It was their own personal business, and he wasn’t a judge, he was just a prophet. While he’d been writing their story down, he’d taken the cue from Chuck and left out the more private details of the Winchesters’ relationship.
As far as Kevin was concerned the point of telling their story was the transcendent love between the brothers and what that love had accomplished for the world. So, he was resolved, he wouldn’t tell them that he was carrying on writing the Winchester Gospels, but he would share the prophecies he received, just in case they’d be useful. It had worked when Chuck had done it, so why not give that a try?
Rearranging his meager belongings so that they’d be ready to go tonight gave Kevin time to think about his first prophecy. He was going to be honest with himself; getting over the anger at being abandoned by Sam was made easier by knowing the story of their separated year. It hadn’t been a vacation or something for Sam; in some ways, Kevin supposed it had been the hardest year of Sam’s life, and that was really saying something. For Dean to not immediately understand that just showed how messed up being in Purgatory had made him. The brothers were going to be pretty dysfunctional and he needed them to be up to the task of keeping him safe until they could do something about the demons.
Thinking about the demons though, that unfortunately led to a mini-breakdown; worrying about seeing Channing again. Knowing what was going to happen to her ahead of time did not help things. It made it so much worse. Preparing himself for finally seeing Channing after all this time was hard enough, but knowing what had already happened to her, just because she had been unlucky enough to know him…he didn’t know how to deal with this much guilt. There was so much he wished he could have said or done, but knowing none of it would really have helped was crushing. He laid down on the pile of his gathered belongings and cried himself to sleep.
Onto Part 2