Chapter Text
Ryan Bergara died on a Sunday.
When he didn’t show up at the office on Monday, no one was worried. Shane had been there on Friday for their movie night, and he told their coworkers that Ryan had complained of headaches and exhaustion. They all assumed that he was sick, and went on about their day as usual. Editing videos, being asked to comment on how Keith looked in his ridiculously high heels for an episode of the try guys, having lunch with coworkers, editing more videos. Everyone had texted Ryan their “get well soon”s, and didn’t think much more about it.
It was only after the workday ended that Shane began to worry.
Ryan hadn’t responded to his texts; according to his phone they hadn’t even been seen. Shane tried to shake it off, but the worry lingered. It only increased with every “how are you” and “are you okay???” And “dude you’re scaring me” that went unseen.
And Shane knew it was midnight, but he was worried dammit, and suddenly he was knocking on Ryan’s door.
After three rounds of loud knocks are ignored and a neighbor protests with a loud “shut the fuck up”, he decides a little bit of demon magic won’t hurt anyone except-
The doors already unlocked.
Now normally, he would shrug it off as just forgetfulness, but this was Ryan.
Ryan’s a paranoid bastard; all those unsolved crime stories getting to him. He never leaves the door unlocked. Ever.
Shane walks in the apartment, slowly and silently. The first thing he notices is the missing tv and the knocked over coffee table, and if he had blood it would’ve gone cold.
Ryan is in the kitchen, laying on the tile, blank eyes unseeing. His hand is reaching for his fallen phone less than a foot away. His nose is broken, and it looks like a few of his ribs are too. His ankle is clearly twisted, his left wrist sprained. There’s a bloody baseball bat lying a few feet away.
Shane’s seen enough corpses in his day to know that Ryan’s been dead a while. The blood is dried, his skin has paled, rigor mortis has set in.
He starts to put together a narrative in his head. Ryan, while believing in god, is not particularly religious and doesn’t go to church often. But by the crosses on the doors in the hallway, his immediate neighbors are. A burglar picks the lock during church time, finds Ryan in the living room, probably actually sick enough to be unable to fight back as strongly or scream as loudly as he would’ve needed to. He’s chased into the kitchen where he’s beaten nearly to death with a baseball bat, which is soon abandoned on the kitchen floor. The thief is gone before the neighbors come back, and closes the door again so no one notices the break in. Ryan’s last moments are spent desperately reaching for his phone, hoping to call for help.
Except help doesn’t come.
Not until early Tuesday morning.
Shane calls the police.
He watches as Ryan’s body is carried out in a body bag, answers the officers questions, and he doesn’t really feel a thing the whole time. It shouldn’t be surprising, he’s a demon after all, but something about this apathy seems… off.
It’s only when he gets home that anger consumes him. His aura lashes out around him, tearing up the couch, smashing the tv, setting papers on fire and he’s pretty sure one of those was his bill.
He had failed .
Shane had protected Ryan against every ghost, every demon, every witch and monster that had posed a threat to him. He had stood between his oblivious friend and danger more times than he could count.
He could protect him from demons, but he couldn’t protect him from a man.
And that’s when Shane dropped to his knees laughing hysterically at the irony. Humans feared demons because they’re dangerous, because they’re evil, but the truth was that they couldn’t hold a candle to humanity.
“Why do demons scare you so much?”
Ryan had looked at him with a baffled look on his face, Brown eyes incredulous.
“W- they’re demons dude! The height of evil! What is there to fear if not demons?”
“You mean other than strangers injecting me with heroin on the sidewalk?”
Ryan scoffed at him and rolled his eyes, but he was a bit less tense now, so Shane had called it a success.
“Yeah, big guy, other than things that will never happen ever.”
“Humans.”
Ryan turned to face him and tilted his head.
“Humans?”
“Demons could never come up with half the things that people have. Hell’s empty, Ryan. All the devils are here.”
The next day at work he stood at the front of the office and announced Ryan’s death. Everyone in the room cried, even Shane. They all gathered in the break room and broke out the alcohol as if they weren’t at fucking work and drank to his memory.
They put together a video announcing his death to the fans, and consequently the end of unsolved. That show had been Ryan’s pride and joy, Shane would never do it without him. Shane himself put together a compilation of Ryan’s best moments at the end, including some footage from his own phone of them at movie night or at the bar, ending with the most recent footage from Friday night. Likely the last time Ryan Bergara has been seen alive.
“ACHOO!”
“Dude, are you sick?”
Ryan glared at him over his tissue and rasped out a denial.
“Sure you’re not. Do you want anything?”
“I want you to bring the fucking popcorn here so we can start the movie.”
“All right little guy, let me know if you need anything else.”
The fans practically screamed their grief. Ryan’s name trended on every social media platform for days, condolences coming from every corner of the globe. When Ryan was buried they placed mounds of flowers at his gravestone.
After the grief came the rage. They demanded justice, demanded his killer be caught. Redditors used what they had to try and solve his murder, theories ran rampant around social media. (Even Shane himself was a suspect in a few, and while normally the demon would be proud that he had been suspected of such brutality, with Ryan as the victim he only felt… hollow. Had it been any other human he very well might have done it, but Ryan… he could never have hurt Ryan.)
But eventually the case went cold, and Ryan became one of the unsolved cases he loved to read about.
When the police called an end to the investigation, Shane hit the books in hell. Every sin committed by man was written down in their tomes. Finding the killer was easy. The humans had their chance to provide Ryan justice, now it was Shane’s turn.
“Was it you?”
He turned around on the barstool to see a woman so drunk off her ass it was a wonder she was still conscious.
“Pardon?”
“Shane Madej, right? The guy from Unsolved?”
Shane felt a pang of agony somewhere when he heard the name of Ryan’s magnum opus. He’s heard humans describe it as the heart, but that couldn’t be right. He didn’t have one.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry about Ryan.”
What was it with humans and saying sorry for things that weren’t their fault? This girl had nothing to do with Ryan’s murder, why should she feel sorry for it?
“Thank you.”
“His murderer turned up dead a while back, killed the same way Ryan was.”
Ah, alcohol. He would always marvel at its ability to make humans completely abandon the niceties and propriety they held so dear.
“I heard.”
“They’re calling whoever did it some kind of punisher, getting the guy when the police failed.”
“Is that so?”
“Some say- well, there was always that theory running around that you were a demon.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“So- was it you? Did you kill Ryan’s murderer?”
He thought of the man whose name he had stricken from history screaming down on the racks of hell, being personally seen to by a friend of his who had owed him a favor.
“Oh, honey. I did so much worse.”
After that, he tried to move on, tried to get over it. But Ryan’s memory followed him everywhere, at work, at home, in every restaurant they’d ever been at.
Shane quit his job, and moved to San Francisco. He tried to start over. It didn’t help.
It hit him one night that Ryan deserved to know the truth. Deserved to know his best friend was a demon, deserved to know that all the things he believed in were real even if the legends were so off it wasn’t funny.
So Shane set off to find Ryan in the afterlife.
He severely doubted that Ryan had ended up in hell, his soul was too bright for a dark place like that. But that was the easiest for Shane to get to so the started there. Purgatory was a little harder, but Shane was fairly high up on the food chain, so it didn’t pose too much of a challenge.
Ryan wasn’t in either. Which left heaven.
That meant this was going to be complicated.
He knew an angel named Zadkiel. He was the angel of freedom, benevolence, and mercy, so he was more willing to mingle with demons than most. As much as everyone liked to believe in black and white there was nothing that wasn’t cast in shades of gray. God was selfish, the devil had good intentions. Sometimes angels were evil and sometimes demons were good. Zadkiel understood this better than most angels, too caught up on their horse to realize it wasn’t any higher than anyone else’s.
Zadkiel was initially hesitant to allow Shane to see the list, but after staring him in the eye for a few moments, the angel smiled and allowed it. Shane figured he had sensed he had good intentions.
There was only one problem.
Ryan wasn’t there either.
Which meant he was a ghost.
Of course he was.
Ghosts generally didn’t have a good time. They wallow in sadness or rage or terror or confusion, trapped in an endless cycle of pain and misery with no end in sight.
Of course, most ghosts don’t have a demon best friend.
It wouldn’t be easy, but for Ryan, Shane would do anything.
Ghosts haunt places they have a strong emotional attachment to, be it the place they died or their childhood home. Ryan wasn’t in his apartment, Shane definitely would have felt him there.
So Shane went to Ryan’s childhood home, his school, the train tracks he used to hang out at, the entirety of his hometown, his university. He checked Ryan’s favorite bar and the movie theater they frequented, the place they usually went for lunch, all of Ryan’s favorite spots in the city, and came up empty handed.
Ryan didn’t have any major childhood traumas or any major depression anywhere, which left fear.
Because of course Ryan Believer Bergara would latch onto fear.
And so began a demon's international trip down memory lane to all the places they had ever shot for supernatural.