SN Fic: It Worked In the Movies
Yeah, I know I said I wasn't going to use this journal for this, but ...
Supernatural Fic: It Worked In the Movies (PG13 for Language)
Summary: Some tales just get better with age.
Disclaimer: Yep, still paying off the student loan sharks, so I won't be buying anything copyright related for a long time. Check back in about forty years.
Author's Note: Wow! I've never written anything this short before. I'm not sure what to think about that. This is what happens when I can't sleep and end up catching bad movies on cable. The book was better. Still, it was kind of fun. I don't have an exact timeline for this story except that Dean's deal has somehow been worked around. Hope you enjoy! Thank you for reading.
It Worked In the Movies
by That Girl Six
When they died, it was proclaimed a victory for the law enforcement community. At least, it was by some. After all, the Dillingers and Barrows of the world died with the repeal of Prohibition and World War II. To catch one of those guys now was vintage, retro, or any other word that comes to mind to mean like so five minutes ago. It didn’t even make the national papers. A couple of kid cowboys took the swim that needs no towel. It wasn’t exactly worth more than a line or two on the police blotter.
It had been rumored that the agent in charge of the investigation had not received a commendation for his efforts. The case had been botched from the beginning. How in the hell the chain of custody for the Winchester body had been interrupted wasn’t clear, but that should have been the end of it right there. That they’d eluded capture for nearly three more years was hardly something worth praise. That they’d eluded capture in front of an entire block of news crews and half the Milwaukee force was cringe worthy. That they’d made it out of Green River without an impedance was damn near pathetic.
So when the Minneapolis field office scrambled cars to the bridge over the Mississippi (reluctantly and mostly to get the barking agent off their dispatcher’s back), it was at least somewhat a surprise. Yes, the brothers had been caught before, but it had seemed so deliberate. The agent in charge had no problem with the way it looked. He just wanted to get the two of them, especially the older one, into custody for good. He had been chasing them for so long; he wanted some damn answers.
Bullhorns had come out, lights were shining, and a hand from the car had flipped them off before the window had rolled up. The two heads had sunk down below the dashboard to protect themselves from the view of the relatively bored officers aiming their weapons at the car. The order came to cut the engine, but just like the driver, the car told them exactly what they could do with that request. The low growl of the engine told the agent in charge that there would be no negotiating that day.
Not long after the sun set (at 7:58 p.m., according to the paperwork), two heads popped up above the dash once again. They seemed to sit there, waiting for something, waiting for everyone to start breathing again instead of just waiting to see what they were going to do. Then without so much as a whoop or holler, the car took off, seemingly impervious to the bullets that threatened her shell. She took a sharp turn and crashed through the side barriers of the bridge. She sparked the bumper on the cement before gracefully floating in a downward arc toward the murky water below. The tail lights glowed an eerie red, seeming to blink in laughter at the agents and officers who ran to the edge to see her sink.
They waited. The civilians who had been forced from their cars by entertainment and curiosity broke out in applause. There was no way that this was real, not after a stunt like that. With all the of the helicopters hovering nearby, they had to be filming a movie of some sort. They wouldn’t know it was real until they flipped on the news the next morning. The sunny anchorwoman told them that police and search and rescue were combing the river. Security points had been set up. That the car’s occupants had survived was impossible, but the FBI wanted the bodies, just to be sure.
That was the all the excitement that there was about it. For two weeks, it was just a story that the people who were there talked about once in a while. You should have seen it. It was like Bonnie and Clyde, only without the blood. But people are easily bored and the story didn’t matter once you’ve told it a few times to everyone you’ve ever met.
It was three weeks after the case was closed by the agent in charge that his inbox delivered the blow. The case of the brothers Winchester was not as closed for everyone else as it was for him. The letter directed him to an online journal, user number 11021983. It was plain, no decorative theme or flashy icons. It had no "friends" or comments to any of the entries.
The last entry clocked in approximately half an hour before the Winchesters were supposed to be out of his life for good. It was labeled "ATTN: FBI".
If you are reading this, we’re dead (I’ve kind of always wanted to say that). We obviously didn’t survive the jump. I’d say we’d miss the chase or something like that, but we won’t. You make our job a helluva lot harder than it needs to be. You couldn’t chase after the real bad guys? Yeah, we love seeing our government dollars at work. (That’s Dean, not me -Sam)
Hi, it’s Sam. Now that that’s out of his system . . . As you read through this journal, you’ll find exactly what we’ve been up to for the last three years. Every name, address, date, whatever you need is in here. I’d suggest you start authenticating it right away; there are over 500 stories here from people we helped. If we used an alias, it’s in there. You can tell whoever that our aliases said it was okay to tell you what you need to know. Maybe then you’ll understand that we aren’t what you think we are. Five hundred people can’t all be crazy.
This is the online copy. The real thing is where it belongs. If you don’t attempt to clear our names, the right people will know. They’ll make sure you do.
The ‘fuck you’ wasn’t explicitly there, but the Feds all heard it anyway.
It took nearly two years to authenticate every entry, which began with the story of a woman whose brother was lost in the woods but somehow survived what had been publicly called a bear attack. The woman spoke kindly about the men who had saved her and her brothers at great risk to themselves. She had gone into great detail, down the peanut M&M’s the older brother had carried with him. ‘Provisions’, he’d called them. She didn’t look at peanut M&M’s without looking heavenward and thanking whatever was up there that the brothers had been sent her way. The victim of one of the St. Louis attacks smiled fondly when she spoke about the brothers. She would give anything to be able to hug the younger brother one more time. Several police officers in different states with no relationship to one another described the brothers as heroes. They had been happy to take the hit to their own careers to keep the men out on the road doing their job. Mothers had children because of them. Marriages had been saved. Husbands felt their missing wives fall into grace and peace with their help. One story after another, the only people who ever seemed to be hurt in them were the brothers themselves.
The FBI had no protocol for a public retraction of that size. When all was said and done, the only thing that could be done was to send the agent in charge to a salvage yard in South Dakota to tell the owner that there had been a mistake. The condolences of the FBI meant shit to Bobby Singer, and he was happy to tell them so. Those boys had been the only family he had. They were good boys who in no way deserved to go out like that. The agent in charge was sent off the property with a cocked shotgun. Singer informed him as he got in the unmarked car that his boys would have appreciated the joke.
* * *
The first sightings started not long after Paramount optioned the script for the biopic. A user identified only as "sulfur1183" declared to the film’s fansite that he or she had heard from a friend that people who lived near the crash site had seen the black specter of the car late at night. It would sit in the middle of the bridge like it was waiting for something, even as unaware drivers drove right through it. The engine would rumble until the faceless driver would step on the gas and send the vehicle through the barriers on the edge of the bridge into the rough current of the Mississippi. There would be no sign of it after that until the next night when it would repeat the sickening ritual once again. The next day "themagnificentone" would confirm the story. He’d seen it himself.
Dean and Sam Winchester’s life story opened to huge numbers at the Memorial Day box office, holding the number one slot for almost five weeks until the Fourth of July weekend hit. It came off as little bit of Natural Born Killers meets The Ring, but the formula apparently worked, especially on the young female crowd who swooned over the two unknowns who played the brothers. Their boyfriends didn’t seem to mind the Easy Rider feel of it either. During the end credits in the Thank Yous, the brothers themselves were thanked for giving the writer something to write about. The film was dedicated to their memory.
More sightings of a ghostly Chevy Impala started to hit the web. It wasn’t too long after the Special Edition, Two Disc DVD set was released that the local KARE-11 news crew spent two of the five minutes of the Local Urban Legends segment on the story for their Halloween broadcast. Two pimpled teenagers, an old couple, and a woman with a toddler in her arms all claimed to have witnessed the replay on more than one occasion. There were no pictures of the two men who had been in the car that fateful day, but an artist’s rendering based on eyewitness accounts came pretty close.
Somehow the story continued to grow even bigger. Dean and Sam Winchester were no longer nameless, faceless criminals. The contents of the journal, while they had always been public, were published by "Anonymous" as a companion to the DVD release of the movie. It had taken a while to get the man in charge of the men’s legal affairs, Bobby Singer, to give permission. He hadn’t been happy about some of the content of the movie apparently. If the outside world was going to get a peek into those boys’ lives, they were going to get it right. It didn’t matter that no one believed it was real except for the people it had happened to. They would know if it was real or not. That was what mattered.
After the "novel" was published, the ghosts in the car on the bridge flipped off the unseen police cars from eight, nine, ten years ago. The eyewitnesses seemed to have forgotten that part.
A couple of ghost hunters who claimed to have had a run in with the brothers Winchester way back when (they cited one of the journal entries as proof) started up a website in their memory. The banner at the top, which had a picture of either brother at the edges, read "Sam and Dean Winchester: Gone But Not Forgotten". The subtitle read "We Forgive You For the Fish". Thanks to book sales, the site generated over 100,000 hits the first week and took off from there.
It wasn’t long after that the ghostly Impala blared Blue Oyster Cult out of the windows on the way down. A comment on the site, left by someone who said she’d been there that day, said that the car didn’t have any music coming from it as it went down. The site administrators made a note to say that it was what Dean would have wanted. He and Sam had saved their lives. They owed the brothers that much.
Two days later, a response to the defense popped up, simply reading, "Thanks, Dude!"
* * *
Ten years to the day, three men stood directly at the spot where the Winchesters’ car had broken through the bridge and plunged into the depths of the Mississippi River, drinking warm beer and swapping war stories with the wistful tone of people who missed being young enough not to feel their beers the next morning.
"What time is it?"
The younger man glanced at his watch. "7:56."
The elder man grinned. His eyes took on a gleeful but faraway look. As if in synch with what had happened in the car that night, he said, "You know, we could always pull off a Thelma and Louise."
"Dude, you fall asleep every time you watch that movie," the younger one said, the same look on his own face. "You don’t even know how it ends."
"So tell me."
"No one knows how it ends. We don’t know what happens to them."
The older man’s face split in a laugh. "Okay, so we’ll Butch and Sundance it. At least we know how that one ended."
"Yeah, and I am not going to Bolivia. I hate Bolivia."
"I’m just sayin’, at least we know the fall won’t kill us."
Teeth shown in the darkness as the younger man’s grin grew even wider. "And we’ll get away."
"What do you say?"
"Oh, shit?"
While one man stood to the side, the two younger men drank from their beer bottles, leaned over the edge of the concrete barrier, and dropped their bottles down into the darkness of the river below. The specter of the Impala charged them, only to disappear half way down into the river as it fell in time with their bottles. They never heard the car or bottles hit the water below.
The grin on the older man’s face fell a little as he turned to his companions and asked, "So . . . Any ideas on how in the hell we’re supposed to dust them?"
"We don’t," the grizzly older man with them said. He pulled the baseball cap from his head and wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. His imagination had done some pretty terrible things to him over the years over how his boys had died. Seeing the Impala careen over the edge like that, ghostly or otherwise, didn’t help him any. "Dean and Sam Winchester were good boys. If that car doing a swan dive over the edge every night is the only way to get people to talk about them and know what they really did, then let her go over. I can live with that. Let some other hunter decide what to do about it long after we’re gone."
"They were good guys, weren’t they?" asked the older man, his mouth twitching and unable to look as somber as he was trying to be. "And that Dean, he was a good lookin’ sonofabitch, wasn’t he?"
The other men rolled their eyes. "He was something, all right," the younger one groaned.
"What do you say you two somethings get back in the damn car before someone decides to notice you standing around here?" the oldest man asked.
"Bobby, relax. It’s been ten years. We’re fine," the younger one said.
"I feel like we should leave flowers or something," the elder one said.
"De- . . ."
"NO NAMES!" Bobby hissed. He tapped each man on the chest as he reminded them, "You, you are Jesse. You, you are Frank. That’s who you are. Period." He pointed down at the water. "We don’t know how the hell this happened. I’m not taking the chance that you two are going to end up getting called out like Eddie Wilson. All it takes is one person to break the illusion. Now get your asses back in the car before our luck runs out on us again."
Jesse looked cockeyed at Bobby for a moment. "You don’t even own a television, Bobby. How do you know who Eddie Wilson is?"
"I read," groaned Bobby emphatically.
"There’s a book?" asked Frank.
"It was better than the movie," Jesse said with a shrug, turning around and leading the way back to the car they had parked on the edge of the bridge where Sam and Dean Winchester had made their final stand. "The real thing is always better than the movie."
"Ours wasn’t so bad," said Frank as he followed close behind. Just before he got into Bobby’s car, he looked back down into the river and waved. "’Bye, Baby. Thanks for keeping us alive. You did good."
(February 2008)