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He says “social call” with an awkward face. It hasn’t been a year this time, which is probably good. She was a little worried about how tired he looked. Sure, he’s looked kind of beat the last time, and before that in Chicago too, but it seems worse.
“So, social call? That’s cool.”
She’s halfway through a frozen pizza but he doesn’t seem to notice it. Ryan had left earlier before they could finish planning their quest so the board is still out with all the pieces. Dean picks up a few of them only to put them down in the exact same place with a lot more care that his thick fingers would have you believe.
“Hungry?”
“No, no thanks. Just wanted to see how you’re doing before we head out of town.”
The emotions on his face do not scream ‘casual visit’ but its okay – she can fake this. She’s gotten at the whole roleplaying thing; she can do oblivious.
She’s working at something to say when he surprises her.
“So how does this work?” and for a moment she honestly thinks he means the whole friendship thing. He’s pointing at the game map.
She doesn’t ask where Sam is. She launches into an explanation that segues into her favorite campaigns that segues into creating a character for him that he’ll never use.
Dean laughs somewhere around her attempt at coming up with a name for his warrior. She feels wildly successful.
He asks her what a “Skype” is. He shares his laptop with his brother. He doesn’t know what iTunes is. He must be joking. He must.
She makes him an account makes herself his first friend.
The building she works in is just as scary as the last one and she’s still getting used to her new name. The people are friendly enough but a lot of them don’t like to make eye contact. Some take offense to her desk’s decorations. She’s thinking of getting a new job.
She’s not sure if she feels like dancing on the way to work anymore. Coming home to her apartment, one that doesn’t have the nice shelving for her bobble heads, doesn’t really make her feel any better.
Dean calls her for the first time just as she’s coming in the door. He asks whether her weekend plans could possibly top a night looking through abandoned buildings in Mebane, North Carolina.
At least she’s certain to have a better time than him.
He chuckles and says that he has to go but he’ll call her back later. When she hangs up, she’s still in her too–empty apartment in a too-new town, but it feels a little less alien. She curls up on the couch with her computer and watches Harry Potter, and it almost feels normal.
After they first met in Chicago, she’d googled them. She wasn’t expecting much (especially not the million police/FBI reports she found) and she definitely hadn’t been expecting there to be books. At the time, she’d raised an eyebrow and left it.
She remembers while waiting for a file from her boss. It doesn’t take much work to get one to her apartment by the next day.
“I just spent all night staring at the ceiling, thinking about all the times me and my friends did Bloody Mary when we were kids.”
Dean stares at her blankly for a moment then raises an eyebrow. “What?”
“I mean, how sick is it that all of those little kids are actually summoning an evil spirit that’s going to kill them and their families at slumber parties?”
She’s nervous and rambling like she always does so he doesn’t understand. She holds up the book so he can read the title. She is aware that this is a horrible idea.
She feels like she should apologize but she doesn’t; Dean never responded to apologies well. She’s gotten the idea in her head that if she mentions it, he’ll talk to her about it or something. Of course she already wants to take it all back. Instead, she bites her lip as his expression shifted through surprise to horror to something he probably intends to be blank.
“I’d honestly forgotten about those.”
“I haven’t read them yet. I probably won’t, actually. It’s not fair.”
This is her way of making the promises he needs to hear. He wants to keep everything to himself. She wants to know more about Dean, everything he’s not telling her, but reading it in the books feels like cheating and she wants to win his trust fair and square. He isn’t looking at her anymore; focusing on something off screen and shifting his jaw.
“Really, I’m not going to read them,” she promises. “The titles are more than enough to freak me out.”
He laughs that laugh, the one that sounds like his insides are being scooped out. She wishes she hadn’t even mentioned it. It was something that would have to be said eventually but she wishes she could have let it be.
“Seriously though. You have a book series about you?”
“Welcome to my life.”
“How did this even happen? And who is Carver Edlund? Is he psychic or something?”
“Not quite.”
He doesn’t say anything for a long time. She’s about to cut her loses and make some excuse to leave when he laughs again, a little more sincere.
“His name was Chuck. He was a prophet.”
She’s never heard about Chuck, or prophecies. The heaviness of his tone keeps her from counting it as a victory, but its close.
If she was going to write a book about Dean, she knows what would be in it. There would be no hunting or monsters, except for the one that Dean sees in himself. She knows that he sees it because he flinches at mirrors. Or, that’s how she would put it. She’s not a writer, but she knows enough about roleplaying to recognize a fellow character.
Dean is infuriating but she pushes and pushes. She’s had to give things up too often to give up even though she doesn’t know why she’s trying so hard.
There is a whole realm of things she can’t talk about. They’re completely random so she can never tell when she’s going in a bad direction until his shoulders get all tense and it’s obvious that he’s about 5 seconds from logging off. She is now a ninja at subject changes.
She didn’t know that being friends with someone could feel like this. It’s a mission or a quest or something. He doesn’t like to tell her about monsters or anything, like that’ll protect her somehow. Even though she saved the day and (almost) got the girl, she’s a little thankful for it.
But Dean defended her from enemies, real and imaginary. He sends her photos of weird things he sees on the road to make her laugh. She can deal with a lot in a friendship to have someone to laugh with.
She tells stories about the girls she’s met at charity events and conventions and Dean finds them hilarious. Sometimes he likes to try to top hers, leading to bizarre competitions full of increasingly improbably stories that are obviously just ripped off of porno films. They end when one of them is laughing too hard to come up with a response.
If she’d ever worried about how comfortable he really was with her liking girls, his enthusiasm reassures her. That may even be part of what he likes about her, if she’s honest. He seems to enjoy talking to a female he doesn’t feel like he should be flirting with.
Sometimes she thinks her first impression of him as some sort of playboy is wrong. He’s good looking – the kind of guy whose picture you’d find under “handsome” in the dictionary – but for all of his stories none of them are really recent. But soon after she starts to question it, he makes some ridiculous, almost offensively hyper-masculine comments and she decides she’s thinking too much.
Not too long after the LARPing incident, he calls her again. She’s at work but she picks up anyways.
“Are you alright?” he asks because he does that sometimes. She’s not sure if he’s actually worried or if he’s just had one of those days. Whatever “one of those days” means when you hunt monsters.
“Yeah I-,” she switches her Bluetooth on so she can keep working. “I’m at work. Where are you?”
“Tennessee.”
There are a lot of weird, car-like noises going on in the background and Dean is breathing kind of heavily. And he’s not saying anything, creating this long silence she doesn’t really know how to deal with.
So she talks. She’s nervous and she’s not sure if he’s okay, so she talks about what she’s doing even though he won’t understand. And when he continues not to say anything, she starts talking about her DnD session last night. It keeps going and going and she’s starting to forget that this it’s weird to talk to herself for this long when he finally cuts in.
“Hey, my brother is probably looking for me so I’ve got to go. Stay safe alright?”
And he hangs up. She’s so startled that she just stares at her phone for a little while.
Every once and a while, Dean will tell a story.
It is usually only distantly related to what they’re talking about. She knows, after a few failures, to listen even if she doesn’t understand what he’s saying. Questions are rarely allowed, unless he’s gotten stuck on something and needs a push. When he’s finished, he’ll usually find an excuse to go and hang up. About a half hour later, he’ll send her a text about something random and it’ll be like nothing ever happened.
She learns a lot this way, or at least she thinks she does. A lot of the parts don’t go together and she’d kill for a list of characters to look on, to keep the ‘Bobby’s form the ‘Ben’s. And there is a big ‘he’, who is never mentioned. ‘He’ once drank a liquor store’s worth of alcohol, and ‘he’ never gets any of Dean’s jokes.
‘He’ is also the only person who earns a weirdly reverent tone, one close to Sam or their father, but also totally different.
‘He’ is also the only subject Dean has outright declared off-limits.
Dean seems to notice the time in the corner of his screen, and pushes out his chair to leave.
“Hey, I’ve got to go. I found this drive in theatre that’s showing some old Batman cartoons.”
“I thought Sam didn’t like Batman.”
“Sam hates the old Batman cartoons.” Dean doesn’t disconnect as he puts on his jacket.
She has no idea who this would leave, but she can guess. “Are you going with ‘him’ then?”
He’s obviously amused that she refers to him as ‘him’, or maybe it’s the emphasis she can’t help but put on it. “Yeah, he’s never seen Batman before.”
He signs off before she can ask any more questions.
She was never really into comic books as much. She knows enough about them to catch a reference but it’s hard to get into something like that and she never bothered trying.
Dean likes comic books, apparently. He makes a Batman reference in passing and it seems like all it takes is a questioning noise before he’s off; a whole dissertation on the guy. It’s almost terrifying in how adorable it is.
So she’s never really been into comic books, but she talks to the guy behind the counter and comes home with a whole stack of Batman and no idea what she’s doing.
It turns out, they’re kind of addicting. And the look on Dean’s face when she mentions it is awesome.
Dean doesn’t seem to care that Charlie isn’t her real name. He laughs when she steals money from super PACs and complains about how shitty her boss treats her. When she catches the flu, he calls in sick for her.
She’s never had a better friend than Dean Winchester.
She misses her friends back in Chicago. She’s met some nice people but she’s not comfortable enough to break out the ice cream and horrible wine coolers. So she calls Dean.
“So, I am now officially single. Again.”
They’re totally beyond ‘hello’s at this point and he knows it. She can tell he’s in his car because of all of the ‘whoosh’ing and Sam is probably right next to him, which is kind of embarrassing, but he’s beyond caring and she’s already started on the ice cream.
“What happened?”
She launches into her story and by the end of it she’s sniffling and she can tell she’s being ridiculous. Her last few words are lost to mumbling as she wipes her face with her sleeve.
“So she clearly didn’t know what she had, or she never would have cheated on you. Where are you?”
“I’m at home, in my pajamas, eating ice cream.”
“I’m not too far away; how about I take you to a bar to cheer you up?”
There is no way Dean is anywhere near Michigan and she can hear what is probably Sam protesting in the background. But Dean doesn’t take it back and he promises to pick her up by 8. Until then, she can veg on her couch and finish the Ben and Jerrys.
Dean takes about a million years to park (if she hears him sweet talk his car one more time she’s going to barf) but they get to her favorite bar and she’s already feeling a little better. One of the waitresses gives her a definitely flirty smile as they sit down.
“You know, you didn’t have to do this.”
“Sure I did. I could use a break anyways.”
She doesn’t mention the look Sam had given his brother when he’d asked to be dropped off at a motel or the research (for some case in New Jersey involving something that had something to do with cattle mutilations) she found under her seat. Communication with Dean was all about when to not say things.
He goes up to get another drink for them and ends up talking to a girl at the bar. He nods at her at one point, and the girl starts to come over.
The girl is smiling and she’s got something tattooed on her shoulder that looked like Elvish. Dean raised a drink towards her from the bar.
Charlie raises her drink and grins as the other girl sits down next to her.
According to Sam, Dean hasn’t slept with anyone in ages.
She and Sam sometimes talk when Dean is in the shower, or going to get food. Their conversations are a little awkward and maybe it’s because she’s a little bit too much like Dean for him to find comfortable. Personally, she can’t look at his hair and keep a straight face.
She really wasn’t expecting a conversation about Dean’s sex life but Sam had, off handily, said that Dean seemed to be spending the nights he used to spend with women talking to her. If he didn’t know better, he said, he would have thought Dean had a crush on her or something.
She’s not sure what that means. Dean was the one who had started talking to her, not the other way around. When Dean gets back, she asks him what made him go to her motel room in the first place.
He says that he hadn’t wanted to go back to their hotel room to drink himself to sleep again.
Sometimes he’s drunk when he calls her.
He asks really stupid questions and he talks about girls a lot, in a weirdly deliberate way. It’s as if he wants to make sure that everyone knows that he likes women and she finds it unsettling somehow. She’s never doubted it and she doesn’t know why he’s trying to reassure her.
The worst is when he does those silent calls, when she has to talk to herself for a while so he can remember how to breathe again. All she can hear is the noise he makes when he takes another drink and she doesn’t mean to, but in her head she’s counting every sip.
He drinks too much and it scares her because the regularity of it screams “alcoholic”. He drinks and he eats badly because he doesn’t think he’s going to live much longer anyway. Of course Sam lets him, because he’s some kind of weird enabler that nags and encourages bad behavior silmultaniously. But she can’t do anything either so she tries not to judge.
He calls her when he gets to his motel and it should probably feel a little clingy. She’s never had a friend like this before, one she talked to all of the time without it feeling weird. There is something in her that worries that he hasn’t had a lot of friends, period.
“So I’m thinking about getting a pet. Probably a cat.”
“Cats are good. I’m not a huge fan of dogs myself.”
There’s something there, that thing that sometimes makes normal comments seem really tense and deliberate. She’s gotten really good at smiling and plowing past them like they never happened. There are some things she is not meant to know.
He teases her about becoming a cat lady and she tells him about some article she read online that said something about a pheromone that made women want cats. There is a Rocky film on TV and he comments on it occasionally as he watches it. She’s still talking about possible cat names when she realizes that the weird buzzing sound isn’t her dishwasher.
Dean has fallen asleep.
Sam apparently notices a few minutes later, taking a moment to say “hello” before he hangs up the phone. She’s startled when she realizes that she’s getting used to it.
Dean is waiting for something.
She’s not sure why she gets that impression, but he calls her, sitting on the top of his ridiculous muscle car, and she knows that when he hangs up he lies out on the hood and stares at the stars.
He’s waiting for something. She has no idea what it is. She asks Sam and he laughs. He has the same awful laugh that his brother does and he tells her that Dean has always been waiting for something but he doesn’t think Dean will know what to do when he gets it.
She never really talks to Sam but she sees him sometimes, in the background. Today he’s making fun of Dean’s enthusiasm over the pictures she’s just shown him of Ivy’s new costume in Arkham Asylum.
“Shut up dude, Batman is badass. And Ivy is hot, look at this.”
Sam’s gigantic form suddenly appears and looms in front of the screen, scaring her half to death. He scoffs before moving away, mumbling something she can’t understand. Dean protests – apparently Sam’s called him a “pig”.
Charlie can hear him grinning, even when he turns away. Sometimes she really likes Sam.
Sometimes she really hates Sam.
She doesn’t know everything that has happened and she’s super biased because she’s Dean’s best friend. But the whole situation with Benny seems fucked up beyond belief and she’s not sure, but she feels like maybe Sam’s allowing her to be friends with Dean. Like, he’d decided that Benny wasn’t a good choice but she was somehow and Dean is totally letting it happen.
She worries that maybe one day Sam will say “no” and she’ll lose her best friend. Because she isn’t sure that Dean will fight for it like she will.
A New Hope is on TV and she’s convinced him to watch it with her. They both have a lot to say about Leia’s clearly visible nipples and Dean tries to make the noise Obi Wan makes to scare away the sand people. They’re also more than a little drunk.
She almost dies laughing.
“I can’t believe they made Greedo shoot first,” she says, mostly out of some kind of fan-obligation. “It’s not like anyone thought that Han was a bad guy or something.”
“Han Solo is the original badass.”
She rolls onto her side with the phone wedged under her ear. “You totally had a crush on him as a kid, didn’t you?”
It’s the sort of thing she would tease any guy about if they weren’t Dean, and she regrets it as soon as it comes out of her mouth. But Dean laughs, a little embarrassed, and says “Shut up,” so she knows it’s totally true.
“It’s okay, in his hey-day Harrison Ford was a total hunk.”
She can’t even make herself sound sincere and Dean laughs far longer than he should. If he sounds a little watery towards the end she won’t call her out. It’s enough feelings for one day.
He says “thanks” before hanging up and all she can say is “don’t mention it,” and hope he hears the ‘thank you’ in return.
Apparently a broken ankle doesn’t warrant a visit to the hospital. Dean’s casual mention of it kind of pisses her off.
But he’s in bed for at least a couple of days now and she’s showing him how to get a copy of the Avengers movie offline to keep him company. (He says he was “away” when it came out and he hasn’t gotten a chance to see it yet. Apparently “away” didn’t have movies. She’s not sure what kind of horrible place this “away” is.)
“I can’t believe they got Scarlett Johansson in all that leather. Thank you.” She’s not sure if he’s thanking her or some deity in charge of Scarlett Johansson’s wardrobe.
“No problem, after all what are best friends for?”
It takes her a few minutes to release that Dean hasn’t said anything. There’s this big, heavy silence and she starts to get worried that something has happened. She runs what she said through her head a few times and it doesn’t seem offensive.
“Yeah. That’s what best friends are for.”
And god his voice was all husky and if she liked guys she would have melted. It wavered on ‘best friends’ because of course Dean hadn’t had a best friend before. Of course.
The silence is broken when Dean asks her what her plans are for the night, in the most obvious attempt at changing the subject known to man. She lets him.
He pretends that he still doesn’t know how Skype works and she laughs a lot. She knows he’s lying but it makes him happy to see her laugh, so she doesn’t say anything.
Dean comes to Moondoor at her behest. He’s in the area and she has a big battle coming up, so she wants her best strategist by her side. He promises they’ll be there and pretends that he’s not excited.
He calls when they arrive and she’s in the middle of a meeting with her personal guard so she tells him to get dressed and meet her at her tent when he’s finished. He can hear him pull the phone away to speak to someone; she didn’t expect Sam to come back. She’s impressed.
Dean arrives without Sam. Instead, there is a dark-haired man trailing after him.
“I didn’t know you were bringing anyone.”
“Yeah, this is Castiel. He, uh, just came into town and I thought he could be some help.”
For some reason, she feels compelled to stick out her hand for a shake. “Thanks for coming Castiel.”
Castiel is stiff but he doesn’t seem to be embarrassed to be wearing chainmail or elf ears. She doesn’t know why, but she likes him. She really likes him. Maybe it’s because of the weird looseness to Dean’s shoulders or the way Castiel looks at the swords on her guard’s hips like they are threats he may have to protect Dean from.
If there was any question at all, Dean steps forward and Castiel does the same. There is a force between them that literally pulls them together.
“Hello Charlie,” Castiel says in what has to be the gravelliest voice ever. He took her hand and shook it with far too much force and grip. “It is a pleasure to meet you.”
Charlie definitely likes him. “He’s like Spock. Or Data. Does he always do that?”
Castiel turns to Dean and says, “I understood that reference,” with a definite amount of pride. Dean grins because he’s proud too. She’s officially melting in cute.
They’re interrupted by a messenger because there is a battle to win and she can put off teasing Dean for a little while longer. Especially when Castiel asks why she keeps referring to Dean as a handmaiden, since Dean is “not female, and thus should not be able to occupy that position”. Especially when Dean looks genuinely embarrassed, with color on his cheeks and everything.
She does stop with Dean as Castiel is outfitted with a sword. “He’s a catch,” she tells him and she actually sort of means it.
Castiel charges into battle with them despite clearly not understanding what was going on or why they were fighting. He protects Dean with the ferocity of someone who is used to doing it, and who gets pleasure in it.
She’s not sure where Castiel has been for so long that Dean has been left, waiting for him, but she’s pretty glad he’s come back. Especially when they win.