SPN FIC - They Just Keep Moving the Line
It's tough, being a hero - when you think you've gained a little ground, and then the rug gets pulled out from underneath you. AGAIN. But... it helps a little, having someone to talk to. And rant at.
CHARACTERS: Dean and Charlie
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2000 words
THEY JUST KEEP MOVING THE LINE
By Carol Davis
"It's creepy, all right? It's completely, over-the-line, whacked-out creepy. And OBSCENE. And OBJECTIONBLE. That's all. It's a complete invasion of my privacy and it freaks me the hell out. Do you GET that?"
Charlie nodded, a quick bobble of her head.
"I mean… come ON. Who gave them the RIGHT -"
For a good ten minutes, Dean had been pacing the length of the library (stomping might have been a better word, Charlie mused; or storming), his fists clenched, occasionally reaching up to grab a handful of his hair. He looked very much like he wanted to punch the hell out of something. Or someone.
It's not gonna be you, Charlie told herself. He wouldn't.
He had, of course. More than once. Hauled off and belted a woman.
They'd all been possessed by demons at the time; she was pretty sure of that. Though that didn't mean the person who owned the meatsuit in question hadn't felt the pain of the blow.
Or blows.
In a few of the cases, there'd been a lot of blows.
Still, she was pretty sure he wouldn't haul off and clock her.
There being no demons involved.
Maybe he'd settle for just tearing his hair out.
Since the day she'd first stumbled across Chuck Shurley's Supernatural series, she'd spent more than a little bit of her downtime pondering what she would have done if she'd been in Dean's (and/or Sam's) shoes - if somebody she'd never met, had never even heard of, had written down big chunks of her life and had had them published for all the world to see. The whole situation with her mom, for instance. Or the thing in Louisville a few years ago. Or that time…
She'd have found the nearest hole and crawled into it.
Hell, she'd have burrowed halfway to the core of the earth.
Now, with the whole thing being online?
Dean jerked to a halt and turned to face her, fists bunched so tightly his fingers were white. "There's no way you can get rid of it? Like - can't you invent some kind of worm or something that sniffs it out and deletes it, wherever it shows up? You can't do that? Frank could do that, if he wasn't… shit. In pieces. Or eaten. Come on, Charlie - there's gotta be a way to do that."
"Well," Charlie said.
"Then there is a way."
The shade of purple his face had turned (somewhat eggplant-like, but more vivid, a little more Day-Glo-ish) would have been really interesting, very ponder-worthy, if it hadn't looked so much like one of the Ten Warning Signs of an Imminent Massive Stroke. "I could try," Charlie murmured. "But the thing is - when you do something like that, it tends to attract more attention, not less. When the hacker community catches wind of it, they'll do everything they can to restore anything we delete. It'll end up… you know. On the Huffington Post. And Tumblr. Things like that kind of always turn into a cause célèbre."
"It's my friggin' LIFE, Charlie."
"I know."
"I mean - it would've been one thing if Chuck just wrote all that shit down and put it in a box somewhere for a thousand years. Nice big box with some sigils on it saying 'If you open this, you'll incinerate like a month-old Christmas tree.' I mean - the whole thing is stupid anyway. Come ON. 'The Winchester Gospels'? What the hell for?"
Charlie twitched a shoulder.
He stomped a few more steps, then seemed to run completely out of gas.
That didn't inspire him to do something different, of course. He simply stood where he was, knotting and unknotting his hands.
"Maybe you should sit down," Charlie suggested.
It took him a long time to surrender and sink into one of the empty chairs.
When the purple had faded into a sort of fluorescent lavender, Charlie offered him what she hoped looked like an extremely sympathetic, supportive smile and said softly, "I had a thought. About the whole thing." Dean scowled at that, but she shook her head and held up a finger to discourage him from continuing his rant, at least for the moment. "You said Chuck had visions, and he wrote down what he saw."
"Yeah. And?"
"Well… then… he just interpreted what he saw."
"Is that supposed to be helpful?"
"I read all the books, remember? They're all 'Dean did this, and Sam said that.' There's not a lot of depth to it."
Dean went on scowling.
"He wasn't you," Charlie said. "Or Sam. He just wrote down what he saw."
Still not helping, she thought, because his shoulders were bunching up toward his ears, and the purple was percolating again. "It's -" she said, and sighed. "It's like - nobody knows what was really in your heart, or what you were thinking when any of that stuff was going on. Like - like - when you went to Lisa's, the day of Ben's birthday party. Chuck made it all sound kind of funny, Ben being like a Mini-Me, and you tripping over the trash can. But -"
The purple was gone, as instantly as if someone had said Et…voilà!
His eyes closed, and his chin dipped toward his chest. His mouth turned into a thin line carved across a face that was now bloodless, as white as his fingers had been.
You just hauled off and clocked him, didn't you? Charlie realized.
There'd been more, then. More than him telling Lisa "It's not my life" and returning to the car to drive off into the sunset with Sam. Had he kept the promise he'd made to Sam in the last of Chuck's book - had he gone back to Lisa and tried to build an apple-pie life, while Sam was roasting in the pit with Lucifer?
God, was Ben his kid?
"I'm sorry," Charlie whispered. "Oh God. I should just shut up."
"They got no right," Dean said without opening his eyes. "To fling all that shit around and debate it and make cartoons out of it and decide who I oughta be sleeping with. Me and Sammy - this is our freaking life."
He seemed to want to get up from the chair, to go off and hide somewhere.
But he didn't.
"You think any of those people - you think any of 'em could come up with an answer?" he said in a voice as strained as if someone's hands had been wrapped around his throat. "You think they could offer a way out of this? Huh? Any of 'em?"
He was the strong one, Charlie had thought.
The books tried to paint that particular picture: that Dean could fight his way through anything. Come out battered and bloodied, but victorious.
He was the one who could win.
He didn't look like much of a winner now, slumped in one of the library's ass-murdering wooden chairs, drained and exhausted. He hadn't slept much the past few nights, but there was more to it than that. Having read the books helped her understand that; there was a lot of backstory there, a lot of information Charlie would have had to guess at. But she'd learned more about Dean Winchester through a few collected hours in his company than she would have from an entire mountain of books, no matter who they'd been written by.
Chuck, she figured, had never bothered to look into Dean's eyes.
Maybe because… well. Kind of weird.
Angels falling from the sky. Heaven emptied out, save for one egotistical douchebag. Hundreds of demons still roaming the earth.
God still among the missing.
And Sam… They still hadn't figured out what was going on with Sam.
Chuck had stopped chronicling the Winchesters' lives three years ago, but she knew the broad strokes of what had happened since then. Knew that nothing much had been solved by Sam's leap into the pit - although, granted, Lucifer and Michael were still locked up down there.
Which wasn't to say they'd never find a way to bust loose.
The Leviathans were still wandering around - leaderless, but around.
And the Alphas? Ditto.
Abaddon.
Who knew what all else.
Charlie sat silent for a good long while, running the fingertips of her right hand across the smooth surface of the table. It was quiet in this place, she realized, almost unnervingly so; the soft hum of machinery did little to alter that. All she could really hear was the strained huff of Dean's breathing, which made him seem like the only living thing in the world.
You should get some sleep, she thought, but didn't say it.
He'd seemed so strong, a few weeks back, when he'd gathered her into his arms after that thing with the djinn.
So very capable.
He didn't look that way now.
"It just never ends," he said after a while, and she wasn't sure whether he was talking to her, or himself, or someone else entirely. "We fight, and we get the shit kicked out of us, and we gain a little ground, but then something else happens, and back we go. I feel like we're a hundred miles back of where we started out."
His voice came close to breaking.
His eyes were still shut tight. Maybe he'd stopped realizing she was in the room.
"All we wanted to do was get the thing that killed Mom and Jess," he went on, his voice dropping to a near-whisper. "That's all. That, and help people. Gank a few evil sons of bitches. Get rid of a few angry spirits."
When he opened his eyes, they glistened for a moment, then cleared.
"And they want to debate whether I exchange meaningful glances with Cas. Good suffering Christ."
"They don't understand," Charlie murmured. "They just… don't know."
Dean's body twitched. Whether that was involuntary, or whether he'd intended to convey something, Charlie wasn't sure. "Dad always said, don't tell 'em," he murmured. "Said they didn't need to know, that it would just upset 'em. So unless they saw something and could get a handle on it - a few of 'em did, you know. We used to think, me and Sammy - we used to think it'd be good if they'd join the ranks, so we'd have more troops on our side, you know? Now I don't know. Seems like nobody's safe, no matter where they are, or what they know, or what they do. That son of a bitch Crowley - we frigging saved those people. We goddamn saved them."
"You gave them more time," Charlie said. "More time - that's worth a lot. It is."
Dean stared at her from the other side of the table.
"It is," Charlie said. "You're not going to sit there and say, 'I wish we hadn't bothered.' If you gave them five more years, or five months, or five minutes -"
"So Crowley could chew them up to make a point?"
"Shit happens, Dean. Shit will always happen."
He didn't say anything right away. Instead, he looked past her. Above her. Around her.
Maybe he was aware of the absolute stillness of this place.
Maybe he wasn't.
"I wanted to be what he wanted," he said finally, his voice again very soft. "I don't need a shrink to lay that out for me. I thought if I did everything he wanted, if I was everything he wanted, he wouldn't leave me. Then it was more than that. I tried to make the poor obsessed son of a bitch happy, and that was never gonna happen. Then -"
"Somewhere along the line, you turned into a hero."
Dean shuddered again. For a moment, she thought he'd object to that.
But he didn't.
"Where does that get you?" he asked quietly. "Does it get you anywhere? Do you ever get to the damn finish line?"
He stared at her, from the other side of the table.
Chuck really should have looked closer, she thought.
"I don't know," she said. "But you won't be alone. Okay?"
* * * * *
CHARACTERS: Dean and Charlie
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2000 words
THEY JUST KEEP MOVING THE LINE
By Carol Davis
"It's creepy, all right? It's completely, over-the-line, whacked-out creepy. And OBSCENE. And OBJECTIONBLE. That's all. It's a complete invasion of my privacy and it freaks me the hell out. Do you GET that?"
Charlie nodded, a quick bobble of her head.
"I mean… come ON. Who gave them the RIGHT -"
For a good ten minutes, Dean had been pacing the length of the library (stomping might have been a better word, Charlie mused; or storming), his fists clenched, occasionally reaching up to grab a handful of his hair. He looked very much like he wanted to punch the hell out of something. Or someone.
It's not gonna be you, Charlie told herself. He wouldn't.
He had, of course. More than once. Hauled off and belted a woman.
They'd all been possessed by demons at the time; she was pretty sure of that. Though that didn't mean the person who owned the meatsuit in question hadn't felt the pain of the blow.
Or blows.
In a few of the cases, there'd been a lot of blows.
Still, she was pretty sure he wouldn't haul off and clock her.
There being no demons involved.
Maybe he'd settle for just tearing his hair out.
Since the day she'd first stumbled across Chuck Shurley's Supernatural series, she'd spent more than a little bit of her downtime pondering what she would have done if she'd been in Dean's (and/or Sam's) shoes - if somebody she'd never met, had never even heard of, had written down big chunks of her life and had had them published for all the world to see. The whole situation with her mom, for instance. Or the thing in Louisville a few years ago. Or that time…
She'd have found the nearest hole and crawled into it.
Hell, she'd have burrowed halfway to the core of the earth.
Now, with the whole thing being online?
Dean jerked to a halt and turned to face her, fists bunched so tightly his fingers were white. "There's no way you can get rid of it? Like - can't you invent some kind of worm or something that sniffs it out and deletes it, wherever it shows up? You can't do that? Frank could do that, if he wasn't… shit. In pieces. Or eaten. Come on, Charlie - there's gotta be a way to do that."
"Well," Charlie said.
"Then there is a way."
The shade of purple his face had turned (somewhat eggplant-like, but more vivid, a little more Day-Glo-ish) would have been really interesting, very ponder-worthy, if it hadn't looked so much like one of the Ten Warning Signs of an Imminent Massive Stroke. "I could try," Charlie murmured. "But the thing is - when you do something like that, it tends to attract more attention, not less. When the hacker community catches wind of it, they'll do everything they can to restore anything we delete. It'll end up… you know. On the Huffington Post. And Tumblr. Things like that kind of always turn into a cause célèbre."
"It's my friggin' LIFE, Charlie."
"I know."
"I mean - it would've been one thing if Chuck just wrote all that shit down and put it in a box somewhere for a thousand years. Nice big box with some sigils on it saying 'If you open this, you'll incinerate like a month-old Christmas tree.' I mean - the whole thing is stupid anyway. Come ON. 'The Winchester Gospels'? What the hell for?"
Charlie twitched a shoulder.
He stomped a few more steps, then seemed to run completely out of gas.
That didn't inspire him to do something different, of course. He simply stood where he was, knotting and unknotting his hands.
"Maybe you should sit down," Charlie suggested.
It took him a long time to surrender and sink into one of the empty chairs.
When the purple had faded into a sort of fluorescent lavender, Charlie offered him what she hoped looked like an extremely sympathetic, supportive smile and said softly, "I had a thought. About the whole thing." Dean scowled at that, but she shook her head and held up a finger to discourage him from continuing his rant, at least for the moment. "You said Chuck had visions, and he wrote down what he saw."
"Yeah. And?"
"Well… then… he just interpreted what he saw."
"Is that supposed to be helpful?"
"I read all the books, remember? They're all 'Dean did this, and Sam said that.' There's not a lot of depth to it."
Dean went on scowling.
"He wasn't you," Charlie said. "Or Sam. He just wrote down what he saw."
Still not helping, she thought, because his shoulders were bunching up toward his ears, and the purple was percolating again. "It's -" she said, and sighed. "It's like - nobody knows what was really in your heart, or what you were thinking when any of that stuff was going on. Like - like - when you went to Lisa's, the day of Ben's birthday party. Chuck made it all sound kind of funny, Ben being like a Mini-Me, and you tripping over the trash can. But -"
The purple was gone, as instantly as if someone had said Et…voilà!
His eyes closed, and his chin dipped toward his chest. His mouth turned into a thin line carved across a face that was now bloodless, as white as his fingers had been.
You just hauled off and clocked him, didn't you? Charlie realized.
There'd been more, then. More than him telling Lisa "It's not my life" and returning to the car to drive off into the sunset with Sam. Had he kept the promise he'd made to Sam in the last of Chuck's book - had he gone back to Lisa and tried to build an apple-pie life, while Sam was roasting in the pit with Lucifer?
God, was Ben his kid?
"I'm sorry," Charlie whispered. "Oh God. I should just shut up."
"They got no right," Dean said without opening his eyes. "To fling all that shit around and debate it and make cartoons out of it and decide who I oughta be sleeping with. Me and Sammy - this is our freaking life."
He seemed to want to get up from the chair, to go off and hide somewhere.
But he didn't.
"You think any of those people - you think any of 'em could come up with an answer?" he said in a voice as strained as if someone's hands had been wrapped around his throat. "You think they could offer a way out of this? Huh? Any of 'em?"
He was the strong one, Charlie had thought.
The books tried to paint that particular picture: that Dean could fight his way through anything. Come out battered and bloodied, but victorious.
He was the one who could win.
He didn't look like much of a winner now, slumped in one of the library's ass-murdering wooden chairs, drained and exhausted. He hadn't slept much the past few nights, but there was more to it than that. Having read the books helped her understand that; there was a lot of backstory there, a lot of information Charlie would have had to guess at. But she'd learned more about Dean Winchester through a few collected hours in his company than she would have from an entire mountain of books, no matter who they'd been written by.
Chuck, she figured, had never bothered to look into Dean's eyes.
Maybe because… well. Kind of weird.
Angels falling from the sky. Heaven emptied out, save for one egotistical douchebag. Hundreds of demons still roaming the earth.
God still among the missing.
And Sam… They still hadn't figured out what was going on with Sam.
Chuck had stopped chronicling the Winchesters' lives three years ago, but she knew the broad strokes of what had happened since then. Knew that nothing much had been solved by Sam's leap into the pit - although, granted, Lucifer and Michael were still locked up down there.
Which wasn't to say they'd never find a way to bust loose.
The Leviathans were still wandering around - leaderless, but around.
And the Alphas? Ditto.
Abaddon.
Who knew what all else.
Charlie sat silent for a good long while, running the fingertips of her right hand across the smooth surface of the table. It was quiet in this place, she realized, almost unnervingly so; the soft hum of machinery did little to alter that. All she could really hear was the strained huff of Dean's breathing, which made him seem like the only living thing in the world.
You should get some sleep, she thought, but didn't say it.
He'd seemed so strong, a few weeks back, when he'd gathered her into his arms after that thing with the djinn.
So very capable.
He didn't look that way now.
"It just never ends," he said after a while, and she wasn't sure whether he was talking to her, or himself, or someone else entirely. "We fight, and we get the shit kicked out of us, and we gain a little ground, but then something else happens, and back we go. I feel like we're a hundred miles back of where we started out."
His voice came close to breaking.
His eyes were still shut tight. Maybe he'd stopped realizing she was in the room.
"All we wanted to do was get the thing that killed Mom and Jess," he went on, his voice dropping to a near-whisper. "That's all. That, and help people. Gank a few evil sons of bitches. Get rid of a few angry spirits."
When he opened his eyes, they glistened for a moment, then cleared.
"And they want to debate whether I exchange meaningful glances with Cas. Good suffering Christ."
"They don't understand," Charlie murmured. "They just… don't know."
Dean's body twitched. Whether that was involuntary, or whether he'd intended to convey something, Charlie wasn't sure. "Dad always said, don't tell 'em," he murmured. "Said they didn't need to know, that it would just upset 'em. So unless they saw something and could get a handle on it - a few of 'em did, you know. We used to think, me and Sammy - we used to think it'd be good if they'd join the ranks, so we'd have more troops on our side, you know? Now I don't know. Seems like nobody's safe, no matter where they are, or what they know, or what they do. That son of a bitch Crowley - we frigging saved those people. We goddamn saved them."
"You gave them more time," Charlie said. "More time - that's worth a lot. It is."
Dean stared at her from the other side of the table.
"It is," Charlie said. "You're not going to sit there and say, 'I wish we hadn't bothered.' If you gave them five more years, or five months, or five minutes -"
"So Crowley could chew them up to make a point?"
"Shit happens, Dean. Shit will always happen."
He didn't say anything right away. Instead, he looked past her. Above her. Around her.
Maybe he was aware of the absolute stillness of this place.
Maybe he wasn't.
"I wanted to be what he wanted," he said finally, his voice again very soft. "I don't need a shrink to lay that out for me. I thought if I did everything he wanted, if I was everything he wanted, he wouldn't leave me. Then it was more than that. I tried to make the poor obsessed son of a bitch happy, and that was never gonna happen. Then -"
"Somewhere along the line, you turned into a hero."
Dean shuddered again. For a moment, she thought he'd object to that.
But he didn't.
"Where does that get you?" he asked quietly. "Does it get you anywhere? Do you ever get to the damn finish line?"
He stared at her, from the other side of the table.
Chuck really should have looked closer, she thought.
"I don't know," she said. "But you won't be alone. Okay?"
* * * * *