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"What the hell?” Who put a sticker on the milk carton? Dean just wants to make pancakes, accompanied by the peaceful gurgling and vitalizing aroma of coffee being freshly brewed. Not having to decipher some shitty mystery at fuck o’early in the morning. In his own kitchen. After pouring a big splash of milk into a mixing bowl, Dean shoves the carton back into the fridge with the sticker out of sight.
There’s another sticker on the bottle of beer Dean just took from the six-pack he bought this morning. “Cas, let me check yours.” Without waiting for permission, Dean grabs the bottle from Cas’s hands. No sticker.
“Why?” Cas snatches his bottle back and takes a swig. He squints at the sticker Dean shows him. “Why is there a tulpa symbol hovering over that sofa?”
“Beats me.” Dean pushes back his chair. “Wait here.” In the kitchen, Dean takes the milk carton out of the fridge. Yep, same sticker. It shows a picture of a red sofa crosshatched with dark lines, with the symbol for creating a tulpa drawn over it in yellow. He puts the milk carton back in the fridge and returns to the library.
Cas is glaring at the sticker as if he’s about to smite the thing off the beer bottle. “This sofa looks a bit like one of your shirts.”
Dean flops into the chair next to Cas. “I take it you didn’t put it there.”
Cas directs his smitey glare at Dean in response. Sam enters the library and for once Dean is thankful for Sam being the designated interrupter of whatever he and Cas are doing.
“Guys, look what I found stuck to my shampoo bottle.” Sam sounds rather annoyed.
“How dare someone touch your precious shampoo,” Dean says. “Let me guess, a sofa tulpa sticker.”
“Yeah, how did you-“
Dean raises his beer bottle. “Guess you didn’t stick ‘m either.”
“Why would anywhmpfhgg.”
Cas quickly gets up and peels off the sticker that suddenly covered Sam’s lips. “Did I hurt you?”
Sam shakes his head and rubs his hand over his face. “No, it just felt unpleasant. Did you see what happened?”
Dean guffaws, finally this sticker business is getting interesting. “Someone found a way to shut your mouth from a distance.”
“I didn’t see anything, it came out of nowhere. Instantly.” Cas tilts his head a little while getting down again in the chair next to Dean. “Is this a case?”
“Can you feel anything, any weird vibes or whatever?” Dean pokes Cas’s side with his elbow.
Cas pushes Dean away. “I sense some lowkey magical energy, not enough to trace it back to a source.”
Now there’s a sticker on the palm of Cas’s hand, Dean notices. And another where Cas touched his arm.
Sam’s forehead and eyebrows are doing their ‘let us show you how hard Sam is thinking’ dance. “Maybe we actually are dealing with a tulpa. One that takes the form of these stickers.”
“If so then we’re not dealing with just one tulpa. Then every sticker is a tulpa,” Cas says.
Eleven more stickers have popped up in the last minute or two. One on Dean’s left temple, one on top of Cas’s head, two on Sam’s torso, the rest scattered on the table between them. Who knows how many more of them are now sticking to all kinds of surfaces in other parts of the bunker. Dean decides it’s time for some action. “I’m more interested in stopping this kindergarten fest of sticking sticky things on everything. You guys do your research thing, I’m going to hunt down each and every one of thesmpffffgrh.” While Dean peels the sticker off his mouth and gulps down the rest of his beer to get rid of the bitter taste of glue, Sam opens his laptop and Cas starts perusing the bookshelves. Dean opens his second bottle of beer and heads towards the garage.
After two hours of incessantly searching for and plucking at stickers, Dean gives up. The stickers keep materializing all over the place, without any regard for surface or height or anything, though the highest manifestation rate seems to be around and on top of Dean himself. His Baby also attracts swarms of the bloody things. Dean has been back to the garage three times now and every time the amount of stickers attached to the Impala has quadrupled. Thank Chuck they’re removable without fucking up Baby’s paint.
Back in the library, Dean finds Cas, Sam, their bottles of beer, and the table between them covered in stickers.
“Before you ask, we stopped removing them from any body part but our faces, we couldn’t get any work done otherwise,” Sam says.
“I’m glad they don’t get underneath our clothes,” Cas adds.
Dean’s body suddenly feels itchy all over. He pushes the thought of having to peel stickers off sensitive body parts out of his mind. Time for another beer. “Did you find anything useful?”
Sam nods. “Our fans are running wild with this idea of the bunker needing a sofa. Apparently, people write stories about you and Cas and various sofa related activities.”
“Dean, how do they know we have sex on the sofa?” Cas interjects, plucking a sticker from his ear.
“Cas, not the point. Get this, someone made stickers just like the ones that pop up around here. I think they meant to create a tulpa that would take the form of a sofa, but instead, they created tulpa stickers.”
Dean ignores Sam for now. “Let me tell you about fanfic, Cas.”
“Dean, I already know. There’s a story I want you to read that I really liked. It’s a list of reasons -“
“Guys, guys, back to business! Before we drown in thesempfhghhh.”
“Dude, someone really doesn’t like you talking. I’m liking this magic sticker maker more by the minute. We should send them a fruit basket. Wait, how do they even know about the bunker? Chuck didn’t write about that part of our lives, did he?”
Sam has managed to free his lips again. “They’re talking about a tv show, not books.”
“Like bizarro earth, the one Balthazar sent us to?”
Sam searches the web for a minute. “I think it’s another universe, Misha still seems to be alive.”
“Who’s Misha?”
“That’s not-you. I’ll tell you later,” Dean replies. “But how? How does stuff from bizarro earth 2.0 get over here?” He pulls at the sticker that has just adhered to his forehead.
“If you two hadn’t derailed this conversation I would’ve told you already. Cas thinks the symbol created some kind of portal. But a limited one. Only stuff about us and sofas in the bunker can pass through, like certain websites.” Sam absentmindedly scratches at the new sticker on the back of his hand.
“And these stickers.” Cas suddenly has another three of them stuck to his face. “Because of the way the symbol is drawn. And I think the transfer from their world to ours is part of the idea they wanted to make real.”
“Are you saying lots of people over there want to be over here? Do they even know how fucked up our lives are?” Dean can’t wrap his head around the idea that other people might actually be interested in him, and not in a ‘we need you for our own purposes so do as you’re told’ kind of way. “Did you find a way of stoppinpfgrhhg.”
Cas removes the sticker from Dean’s lips and leans in for a kiss, but a wad of stickers materializing all over their faces prevent their lips from touching. This is getting ridiculous. Huffing and grumbling Dean rips the nasty things off his face. “What do we do now?”
Sam is reading some text on his laptop screen. “Man, some of these fanfics are really weird. Oh, you mean… Cas assumes the flow will stop when all the stickers have crossed over. It seems to be a one-way thing. I guess that when there are no more tulpa symbols left over there keeping the portal open, it will close. But I can’t find any info on how many stickers there are.”
“Let’s hope they don’t print newwwffghhh.” Dean carefully peels another sticker off his - now quite sore - lips.
When all you can do is wait, eat. For some reason Sam is bent on continuing his internet research, so Cas and Dean go out for burgers without him. After taking a gazillion stickers off of Baby and themselves, of course. Dean is not interested in attracting more attention than strictly necessary. To his relief, no new stickers manifest on them when they’re out nof the bunker, which means they get to kiss and eat their cheeseburgers in peace.
“Maybe we should go to a motel for the night, I’d like to touch you without getting cockblocked by a bunch of those stupid sticky thingies.”
“And leave your brother to deal with the plague of stickers alone?”
“He can come too. Well, not in the same room as us.”
“I’ll call and ask him.”
But Sam isn’t interested in leaving the bunker. “You two stay away if you want,” he says, “I wanna see how this sticker invasion pans out. See you tomorrow.”
After Sam ends the phone call, Dean says, “He sounded like he really wants to be rid of us, didn’t he?”
“Maybe he wants us to have a nice evening together, Dean.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know. I think he wants to read more of the fanfic from the other side. The porny kind. Whatever. As long as it’s not about us.” Dean shudders at the thought. “Let’s get a room in a fancy place for once. With a jacuzzi.”
It takes a day and a half for the stream of stickers to dry out. Back in the bunker Cas and Dean put every sticker they find on the one wall of the tv room that was still empty. Like Dean says, “If by any chance a sofa gets tulpa-ed into existence after all, this is where we want it.”