Fic: Talk To Me

[summergen_mod]

Title: Talk to Me
Author: sophiap
Recipient: davincis_girl
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Some minor crossover elements, knowledge of the other fandoms is not required.
Author's Notes: Largely for the prompt "What Bobby does in an average day," but also draws from the request for a crossover (or two...). Set during season two, shortly before 'Nightshifter' (going by the date on a photo of the boys).

Summary: Some days, it seemed like the goddamn telephone rang from first light to last and beyond.



Monday, September 4, 2006

Some days, it seemed like the goddamn telephone rang from first light to last and beyond. In the beginning was the Word, which was all well and good, but sometimes Bobby had to wonder when the Almighty would finally get around to chiming in with a thunderous 'Shut Up.'

When the phone rang for the fourth time in less than an hour, Bobby was starting to wish they were back in the days of the telegram. Or maybe even smoke signals.

Smoke signals didn't whine, didn't panic, and didn't butt in with stupid questions while you were trying to look up requested information in a hurry and translating from bastardized Aramaic on the fly.

"Joshua, so help me, this ain't exactly simple." The kitchen windows were big, but even with the shutter slats open wide, there was barely enough light at this hour to read by. Bobby used Joshua's next burst of frantic questions to pull the shutters wide open to let in the morning glare. He bent back over the old text--the crabbed, faded letters now leapt into sharp relief, the meanings of the old rites illuminating themselves as he read. "The grammar in this is acting like it's trying to be Persian, and the tenses can get a bit dicey depending on--"

He should have known better than to try to explain.

"Listen, son. I know you're under the gun, but first of all, you'll get your ifrit-banishing instructions a hell of a lot faster if you'd just shut up and let me work. Second, I don't care how stupid you thought eighth-grade grammar was--it's not stupid when how I read a verb stem means the difference between you getting that thing back in its goddamn bottle where it belongs and it using your spine to open you up like a box of crackers. So, you going to be quiet now? Good."

Another ten minutes of translating and a brief detour to verify some details in two different herbals, and Bobby sent Joshua on his way. By nightfall, with any luck, Joshua would still have his spine and the ifrit would have been put up in its jar like a pint of kosher dills.

By now, the morning sun slanted directly across the kitchen table. Bobby rolled up the scrolls and gently closed the books--the light that let him coax sense from the ancient words and diagrams also slowly wore away at them.

Yes, he could look into getting them copied, but like the Word that called everything into being, there were some things that just couldn't--no, make that shouldn't--be replicated. It always paid to be careful, and so Bobby let the phone ring a few more times while he wrapped the scroll in its ceremonial cloth and put it back into a lead-lined box.

So far, aside from Joshua, he'd gotten a crack-of-dawn call from Pamela that had all the hallmarks of a drunk-dial, a terse call from Ellen asking him if he knew of anyone who had any experience dealing with banshees, and a call from one of his London contacts asking if he'd be interested in trading a couple of bestiaries for a small (slightly foxed, sulfur-spotted, and bloodstained, but otherwise in excellent condition) book of demon lore thought to have been burned by the Vatican in 1372.

In the first case, he gently convinced Pamela to drink a bottle of Gatorade and try to get some sleep, and did his level best not to give her a few well-deserved 'told you so's about how Jesse turned out to be a lowdown dirty skunk she was better off without. In the second, he admitted he didn't know anyone off-hand, but once he'd been properly caffeinated, he'd take a stab at some of his gaoidhealg texts and see if anything useful came up. In the third, he couldn't give a firm answer because Mr. Fell had been understandably reluctant to read more than a few snippets aloud over the phone, and besides, that particular contact wanting to get rid of a book set off more than a few alarm bells.

All in all, it was shaping up to be a typical Monday.

The fifth call of the day didn't do anything to break the pattern. Bobby grabbed the phone right as it went to the answering machine, and there was a moment's fumbling as he told the caller to hold on, hold on, let me cut this damned thing off unless you want me to get this all on tape for posterity.

This caller was also British, but not calling from Britain. Bobby recognized the voice at once.

"Morning, Rupert. What kind of trouble you land in this time?"

"Why is it you always assume there's trouble?" He sounded more put-upon than offended.

"Because I've met you, you jackass." They'd both been different people back then, but some things would never change.

The sigh of ultimate longsuffering didn't fool Bobby a bit. "Well, yes, since you ask, there is some trouble on the horizon. An apocalypse--rather a small one, by the way such things are reckoned, but still..."

Bobby started taking notes. "California again?"

"Ah, no. Cleveland, this time."

"There's a surprise," Bobby snarled. "So, what do you need from me?"

"Any information you might have about deals made with grigori--the, ah, unhelpful variety to be precise, and details about a particular seal pattern."

Bobby winced when he heard which one.

"That's some pretty high-octane stuff, Rupert." All in a day's work, though. "Breaking or making?"

"Reinforcing, actually. And my own research tells me we are working on something of a deadline." Bobby could hear other voices in the background. "And more to the point," he continued in a whisper, "I have a few people here who are a bit too confident in their own abilities. I'd rather take care of this before they decide to take matters into their own hands and make things worse. You know how the young can be."

"That sound you're hearing is me not talking about karma, Ripper."

The silence at the other end of the line was pointed enough to put a porcupine to shame. There was a sigh, and a faint click that may or may not have been a pair of glasses being put down on a desk.

"Robert, should you happen to receive word of any of your 'hunter' friends whose work might take them to northern Ohio..."

"I'll steer 'em towards something else, way I always do. Lord knows there's plenty of other work to be done out there."

The next silence was softer than the first, and may have had a touch of gratitude to it. Bobby may have turned down a job with Rupert's organization with a bit more profanity than absolutely necessary, but that didn't mean he would sell them down the river to people who were as like to see them as a bigger threat than help.

"Yes," Rupert said wearily. "There always is, isn't there?"

Truer words were never spoken in all of creation.

"Always is, always will be. Best of luck, and I'll fax over that seal in a couple of different parts--don't want something like that going 'cross the wires in one piece."

"Quite. If this works, this should keep things quiet here for a generation or two--touch wood. Of course, that just means we'll have something equally unpleasant crop up in, say, Scranton."

No matter how much light was thrown at them, the forces of darkness always seemed to keep on coming, inevitable as nightfall.

All that meant was he had to keep on working, and that no matter how annoying it got, he had to keep on answering that damned phone.

"Scranton's got more'n its fair share of unpleasant as it is, as I recall. Anyhow, let me know how it all turns out. Sounds like it's in good hands, though."

It also meant he clung tight to any reminder that the light maybe had some sort of fighting chance.

The day went on, the shadows grew shorter, and the phone kept ringing. Before lunchtime rolled around, Bobby had translated from Russian to help get rid of a rusalka, from old Gaelic to help Ellen's friend get rid of that bean sí, from Japanese to help get rid of an inugami, from Acadian French to help get rid of a loup-garou, and from something that was supposedly English to help his neighbor figure out how set a trap and get rid of the skunk that was living in her crawlspace.

By the time he was done, he had code-switched so many damn times he had to read the instructions on the box of Hamburger Helper three times before they made a lick of sense.

Languages, especially the 'dead' ones, had always come easy to him--easy enough that he'd made a paid and respectable living off them for a good number of years--as had the old, old stories those old languages had been birthed to tell.

He let the ground beef slide out of its styrofoam tray and into the hot pan. As he hacked the sizzling meat into smaller bits with a spatula, he spared a moment to wonder if any of the young men and women he'd taught those stories had found out that far too many of them were true.

He hoped not. But if so, he hoped their enlightenment had come at a lesser cost than his own.

The ground beef was still mostly pink when the phone started ringing again.

This time, it was the bank of phones he'd recently had put in, and for whatever reason, over the next twenty minutes they went off in continual sequence like church bells on Easter morning. After that, they rang off and on throughout the rest of the day, much as he'd expected.

Just as he thought earlier--typical. When the phones went off, it was either all or nothing, and today was clearly all and then some.

The labeled phones kept him hopping, and racking his brain and checking his notes to remember what cover he'd promised to which hunters on which cases. He was doctor Simonson from the CDC on two calls (and god knows what people thought if they heard frying meat and a whistling kettle on the other end of the line when they called the nation's top pathology lab). As Assistant Director Murtagh, he was clearly having a very trying day, interrupted as it was by continual calls by people checking on the bona fides of FBI agents Ulrich and Hetfield. There was a tense moment when he had to convince a bright young deputy that making yet another call to check up on the bona fides of Murtagh, Sidney B. was a waste of everyone's time in general, and of a kidnap victim's in particular.

It was as tricky as translating Akkadian on the fly, but in a different way. A false step when he was pretending to be a Fed could cost one of his friends near as much as if he botched the proper way of putting together a hex bag or warding charm.

By the time the sky was darkening towards the east, Bobby had made and received more phone calls than he could count. He was all but talked out, and still the day was far from over.

Rufus called three times, and Bobby hung up on him three times. Still, before the phone slammed down for the last time, Rufus had passed along all the information he had about what sounded like a spike in demon activity outside Topeka, and Bobby was able to walk away from the phone serene in his conviction that Rufus was a no-good prick bastard.

The fact that Rufus no doubt returned the sentiment threefold didn't take any shine off that final slam.

Next was a hushed and hurried call from a psychic he'd met some years back. Allison worked with the police, mostly, but from time to she had a glimmer that more than police might be needed.

"I'll see who might be out Phoenix way these days--I'll call you back and tell you who you can expect. Tell Joe and the girls hi for me, okay?"

He meant to call Ellen right away--she often had a better grasp than he did of who was where--but the phone rang again before he could do more than put his hand on the receiver.

"Joshua? Either you're still alive, or I've got to drown another phone in holy water. I take it the ifrit's been jugged?"

"Jugged and--hey, another beer over here!--on its way to the bottom of Boston Harbor." He was pleased as punch and three sheets to the proverbial wind.

Bobby couldn't blame him. Ifrits were nasty business.

"Glad to hear it worked out okay," he said with complete sincerity. "Good to hear that thing's under a whole bunch of salt water, too. That should keep it quiet even if the seal breaks."

"It's Boston Harbor--the pollution'll kill it before the salt water can do its thing."

Bobby laughed. "Hell, you're lucky it sank. Anyhow, good work, son. Thanks for calling to let me know how it went."

"Couldn't have done it without you." Joshua's drunkenness switched suddenly from merry into maudlin. "I'm glad you could find the rites as fast as you did. There's three people alive today who might not've been."

"We all do what we can. Glad you were there to take care of it." It was good to hear that sometimes, what they did worked.

Too bad it couldn't make up for all the times it didn't.

After he hung up, Bobby waited a few seconds before picking up and dialing.

"Harvelle's." The voice on the other end of the line was so blunt as to be one step away from hostile.

Normally, he looked forward to talking to Ellen, but these days...

Well, she wasn't as much in a mood to talk as she used to be, not that Bobby could blame her.

"Hey, Ellen. Wanted to let you know that the banshee thing's on its way to being taken care of. Also, I was wondering if you know anyone who might be in reach of Arizona. Got what looks like a Woman in White."

There was a sigh, and Bobby thought it might be relief. He had promised her that if he got any word from or about Jo, he'd let her know as soon as he could--no matter what that word might be.

A word that could set Ellen's world to rights, or end it.

"Olivia Lowry is out in Las Cruces, or at least she was last Friday." Ellen sounded a little friendlier than she had a few seconds ago. "Want me to give her a call?"

"No, no... I'll take care of it. It'll be faster for me to fill her in on the what's what and who's who."

"Fair enough. And thanks for helping R.C. with that banshee. Sorry if I was short with you earlier, but..."

"Don't worry about it." Bobby headed back into the kitchen, then pulled the half-full pan of Hamburger Helper out of the fridge and put it back on the stove to reheat for supper. "You've got nothing to apologize for."

"It's just that Jo--"

He cut her off a bit more testily than he would have liked. "I told you I'd call."

"She sent me a postcard."

He gave it a second, then said, "I see."

"Yeah." Her voice was a little shaky, but she sounded not too far removed from 'all right.' "Got it this afternoon. Said she was out in Oregon. Place called Coos Bay--postcard's got a picture of a lighthouse on it. Pretty. Real pretty."

Bobby thought he could hear a swish of cloth brushing against the phone, and at once he pictured her lifting her sleeve to her face to wipe her eyes.

"She didn't give me too many details, but said she'd gotten rid of a couple of ghosts and that she was doing okay."

Jo had probably said more than she thought in that postcard. A seaside town--especially the kind that needed lights to warn sailors away from stony and fog-bound shores--could breed some truly nasty ghosts, ones that were harder than normal to put down. "You think that's true? That she's doing okay?"

There was a pause, then another 'yeah,' this one more solid than the first. "Yeah, I do. It was just sort of slid in there along with a mention that she'd done up to Seattle to play tourist." She actually laughed then, and it was the first laugh Bobby had heard from her in some time. "Just thought you'd like to know."

"I appreciate the call, Ellen."

"Nice to get good news once in a while, right?" Her voice had gone back to being a little shaky again. But still, it sounded so much better than that terse call this morning with all its unspoken fears. "She said she'd tell me the whole story the next time..." he heard her swallow, hard. "The next time she saw me."

So few words, so much meaning. He hoped Ellen was reading it right. He hoped he was reading it right.

"I'll keep my fingers crossed for Thanksgiving. Who knows? Maybe I'll invite myself down."

Her goodbye after that was abrupt, but Bobby knew to let it slide. He set the phone down gently and then sat down to a supper that was blessedly uninterrupted.

The quiet spell lasted a bit longer, and he was able to delve into some research, going so deep that he was thinking in languages that hadn't been spoken in hundreds of years. Finishing up the seal for Rupert was his main focus but from time to time he paused in his reading and copying and let himself float back into English and ponder who he might know who was working the Pacific Northwest these days.

He did get a call a little after eight, but that was just a matter of telling his neighbor that a couple gallon of tomato juice might get the skunk stink off her cats.

A couple of hours rolled on past, and he was done with his research. All that was left was to fax the seal diagram in parts over to Rupert. The phone stayed quiet. Still, Bobby waited five minutes, just in case. Then another five. Then at last he sighed and got a bottle of Wild Turkey out from under the sink.

He had just put the cap back on the bottle when the phone rang. Bobby grabbed the phone before the first ring had even stopped.

"At this hour, this had damn well better be an emergency."

There was a silence on the other end of the line, but it was an active silence. A hitch of breath, the sound of background traffic swishing past, a faint smacking of someone's mouth opening and then closing. Then another breath that was almost a sigh, and Bobby suspected that if he didn't say something soon, the next thing he heard would be a click and then dead air.

"Whoever this is, if you're on a pay phone, you're burning through your fifty cents for a whole lot of nothing."

He half-expected the caller to hang up, but instead there was a startled, rueful laugh. He couldn't place who it might be, but then the person on the other end of the line finally spoke up. "Nah. It's okay. I'm on my cell."

The voice was shakier than it should be, torn between fatigue and hysterical laughter, but it was still as familiar as familiar could be.

"Hey, Dean." Bobby walked the phone into his study, carrying his drink with him. He sat down at one end of the old couch rather than at his desk. Dean wasn't there--no, from the sound of things he was in some parking lot out by a highway, car doors and room doors opening and closing in the background--but this was as close as he could get to inviting the boy to sit down for a spell. It sounded like he needed it.

"Everything okay?" He knew damn well it wasn't.

"N-yeah. Yeah. Fine. Anyhow, we just stopped in Ohio for the night--took forever to find something with a vacancy sign."

"How's Sam?"

That got him a moment's silence, unreadable and worrying. "Fine. He's... fine. Got that cast off his wrist this morning," Dean said with a brittle cheer. "He's in the shower right now--you know how stanky it can get under a cast. I told him he's gotta keep scrubbing until he doesn't smell like cheese anymore."

A semi roared past, nearly drowning him out. If Sam was in the shower, there was no good reason for Dean to be outside to make this call.

"That the only reason you called? To tell me your brother smells like cheese?"

The far-off blare of a horn was the only thing that let him know that Dean hadn't hung up on him.

"Did Dad... did he ever tell you anything about what Yellow Eyes wants with--" From the other end of the line Bobby heard the fakest cough that was ever faked. "With our family? What he's after? And why us?"

There were a couple of big breaks in Dean's rambling, the kind of obvious break that meant he was starting to say one thing and then switching to another. There were smaller silences, too, bare hesitations that he would have missed if he didn't know the cadences of Dean's speech.

"Nothing I haven't already passed along, Dean. You know that. Why the hell would I keep that from you?"

For a moment, it seemed like Dean was going to try to answer that question. He didn't.

"Sorry. Just... no stone unturned, right? You know how it is. I keep turning up crap lead after crap lead, and Sam--"

Apology gave way to rising anger and then once more to abrupt silence.

Large silences, and smaller ones. Silences he couldn't read any more than he could read words in a manuscript that had been damaged by sun, by water, or by fire. Bobby downed a swallow of whiskey and he waited.

"I just want to catch this thing, you know? Put it down, scratch it off the to-do list."

Bobby was missing something. Something that wasn't being said among all the words that made sentences but little sense. Something that would explain the weariness, and the sense that something was about to break and break big.

"Dean, you want to tell me what's really going on?"

No. That much was clear from the cold defensiveness of Dean's next words. "It was the last thing Dad said to me. That he wanted me to finish this thing. Finish it so it couldn't hurt our family any more. And Sam... Sam wants it dead, too."

"I don't know what to say, son." And he didn't know what Dean was trying to say--or trying very hard not to say. "I gave John everything I found, and he went and built on that. If you have his journal, you know more than I do."

"It's not enough."

"It's all I got. And if I get anything else, you know I'll pass it along." Bobby took another sip of whiskey. It burned its way down his throat, and maybe did something to free up his next words. "It would help if I knew more about just what the hell I'm supposed to be looking for."

The mumbled response barely sounded like English, but it was probably some variation on 'fuck if I know.' "Forgot to thank you for covering for us earlier today. So, um, thanks." And with that, the earlier conversation was over.

"Any time, Agent Hetfield. Get some sleep, Dean. You sound like you're stupid tired."

It took a moment for Bobby to register that he was listening to dead air.

After he set the phone down, Bobby looked up at the clock. Eleven o' clock. Almost tomorrow, and while he was bone tired and it was pitch dark, he wasn't quite ready to call it a day.

Just like with the Word that was spoken at the beginning of all things, there was no 'shut up' to shut things down. Another slug of Wild Turkey quieted things down, but it could never do so all the way. He considered a chaser, but instead put his glass in the sink on his way through the kitchen. He could always take care of it tomorrow. A tomorrow that wasn't all that far away.

Today was a good day, he told himself with mixed pride and defensiveness. He headed upstairs, doing his best to hang on to that thought. Today, there were no losses, only victories and the promise of victory. He'd pulled miracles out of old scraps of paper.

Then there were the miracles that were simply given to him without anyone having to ask. He thought about Jo, who had carelessly and generously said so much in so few words.

He changed quickly, tossing his jeans over the end of the bed as they were clean enough to go another day. Ellen was good and shaken up by that postcard, but it was all right. It was good.

But no matter how much he tried to focus on what had gone wrong, his mind kept circling back to Dean's words. Words he could make no sense of, no matter how he turned them about in his mind. Even when he pulled a book from the nightstand and started reading, the Hebrew came through in his mind as if it were being read in Dean's voice. Flickers of anger, flickers of fear came through, casting the words in a different light and making Bobby wonder if he was reading the poems the right way.

He read until he started to nod off, chin falling against his chest and the book flopping forward in his lap. He kept jerking himself awake, half-convinced that he just needed to press on until he got the translation right.

It kept evading him, though. Sleep pushed it aside, and the book nearly fell from his hands as he half-dreamed, half-remembered walking out into the salvage yard and seeing a car that had mostly been rebuilt now covered with dents and gashes that reminded him of some brutal cuneiform.

Bobby crouched down by the car, feeling the long dents in the once shiny metal. They formed letters. He could just about read them. He just had to remember what they meant--

--and he snapped awake one last time, just long enough to put the book back on the nightstand. He couldn't remember the last ten pages he'd read, and he could no longer remember the not-quite-dream. Whatever meaning was there was lost.

Finally, he turned off the light and finally fell asleep in the dark of a new day.