Work Text:
1 New Voicemail from: Queen Charlie
Hi guys, um, it's me. I don't know if you're anywhere close to Detroit right now but – someone just kind of broke into my apartment and I think they might be after me because, okay, I've never seen a real life break-in before but it's all weird in there like maybe monster weird? Or something, and you never did tell me if there's such a thing as a monster magnet and I'm kind of freaking out here and– Frak, you guys probably aren't anywhere NEAR here and I'm totally alone and this is SO my life right now. So if you never here from me again, I got AK'd. Maybe you can find my ghost or something. Adios, bitches.
Sam was settling in on a motel bed with his laptop and a few episodes of Firefly when Dean half-jogged back into the room, boots thumping, way too soon to have finished his evening pie run. He had his phone clamped to his ear and quickly scanned the room until his eyes fell on Sam.
"Dude – Charlie. Something's up."
"She in trouble?" Sam asked, sliding the laptop away and standing.
Dean shrugged, jaw tense. "I don't know, maybe." He pulled the phone away to look at its screen again and jabbed the Call button with his thumb. "Come on..."
Their duffle bags were open on Dean's bed, never really emptied, and Sam started repacking their scattered things while Dean kept glaring at the phone. "Put it on speaker, would you?" he asked. Dean nodded. "Did she say where she was?"
"Yeah, sh–"
"Oh thank Glod," exclaimed Charlie, and through the speaker her voice was high-pitched and sort of shrill, and there were a lot of crackling thumps and the rasp of moving fabric, as though she had her hands wrapped around her cell.
"Hey, Charlie, you okay?" Dean asked.
"Do I sound okay, you nerf-herder?" she demanded. Dean closed his bag one-handed and Sam went to grab their stuff from the bathroom.
"You sound alive, Your Highness. Where are you?"
"Some bar in the closest busy part of town I could find, which I'm starting to think was a bad idea because it's packed and anyone could be the ones who did it and crap, if they're monsters I've just killed everyone in this room and–"
"Whoa, slow down, you haven't killed anyone," Sam said, stowing his laptop and handing Dean his duffle, "and you're not going to. It's going to be fine. What's the street and the name of the bar?"
"Timberwolf Tavern, on Plymouth. You guys are coming?" she sounded faintly pleading.
"On our way now, sweetheart," said Dean, nodding to Sam that yep, that was everything, and he opened the door. "We're about an hour out so you're going to have to wait there for us, okay?"
Sam didn't hear the rest – he had to check them out at the office while Dean got the car started – but he rolled his eyes anyway. An hour, right; more like three. Except that Dean was driving.
Timberwolf Tavern on Plymouth was probably a pretty cool place when you were relaxed and had a few beers and there were some cute chicks to flirt with, but all Charlie could see was dark corners and big bulky coats that could hide guns or knives or claws and way too many people giving her weird-and-possibly-threatening looks. Didn't help that she was crammed into the farthest possible corner of her booth with her knees drawn up and clutching her phone manically. Maybe they just thought she was an obsessed Angry Birds-er or something but she was freaking out worse than she had at the disaster zone that was her apartment and she was pretty much gnawing her knuckle off in time with the ear-busting music. It'd been eighty minutes. Where the hell were they?
"Miss, would you like to order a dri–?"
"Yeaaaaagh!" she jumped in her seat. "No! No no no no no, no drinks, I'm good, all hydrated, thanks, thank you, bye!"
Okay, so the bargirl gave her the stink-eye. Deserved that. But drinks could be spiked even by normal people and–
Her phone rang. Handmaiden, it read. She banged her elbow trying to accept the call as fast as possible. "Dean?"
"We're here, where are you?"
She stood up on the bench and looked around. There were a lot of people. "In the back, near the ladies' room– I see you."
Well, she saw Sam, freakishly tall that he was. He spotted her at almost the same moment and Charlie's phone went dead in her ear as they shouldered their way through the crowd. It was the most gorgeous sight she'd ever seen. They probably even had weapons.
"Hey Charlie," said Dean, sliding in to sit next to her. "You all right?"
And honestly? She really was. Now. She sat back down in her corner and Sam took the seat opposite, and the Force-choke that had been around her lungs all evening started to relax. Maybe it was stupid because the burglars were still out there and could be anything and could still be after her, but the guys were big and Sam was tall (okay, Dean was tall too) and with them both sitting so close between her and the world she finally felt safe again. She let out a huge breath and slumped against the wall.
"Yeah," she said quietly. "Just my life, you know?"
"Why don't you tell us what happened?" Sam said gently. Dean signalled for some beers.
Charlie shrugged. "Not much. It's been quiet. I came home; the door was wide open, my stuff was everywhere and mostly broken and they took my laptop and blu-ray and most of my DVDs. And yeah, I know that sounds like a normal break-in," she said when she saw them exchange a glance, "but there was this green shit splattered everywhere and this really weird smell–"
"Like sulphur?"
She thought about it. "Rotten eggs, right? No, not that. More like... vegetables."
Sam's forehead wrinkled. "That is weird."
"Very," said Dean. "How far's your place from here?"
The beers arrived then (Charlie tried to look apologetic at the bargirl, but just got another stink-eye for it) and Dean handed the bottles round. Charlie took a gulp from hers – probably too big, but she didn't choke. "Ah. Right, uh, couple of blocks from here. Inkster Street. I ran outta there and hid in the first busy place I could find, you know?"
"Always smart," said Dean, but he was paying more attention to Sam, who was frowning. "What?"
"Charlie," said Sam, "is your building old, like sixties-old, six stories high, made of brick? Because there were cop cars pulling up when we drove by just now."
"Urg, so someone must've reported it," she groaned, and took a gulp of beer. "Great, how do we track the freaks now with the Empire crawling all over the place?"
Pretty easily, it turned out. She'd forgotten that Sam and Dean had turned up in Moondoor in suits and walking around like they owned the place, and the fake badges Sam pulled out while Dean went to change clothes pretty much backed that up. When Dean came back and Sam went off with his own bag of suit, he walked her to their car (sweet ride) and talked her through what to say to the cops to keep them busy while he and Sam played up the Feds thing to have a look around.
She hated talking to cops. She hated talking to anybody when she was lying because she was so fricking bad at it. She stumbled and stuttered her way through a half-assed story about being out in town having fun and trying to score a date when Sam swooped in and rescued her, saying something about time to calm down and getting a hot drink. The cop with the notebook let her go; he'd been looking bored anyway.
Charlie slumped over her kitchen table and closed her eyes. The bad guys hadn't been in here, or if they had hadn't messed anything up, and with her back to the door and Sam at her back she could almost pretend nothing had happened. Sure, there were still flashes from cops taking photos and the sound of them talking about it but if she jammed her hands over her ears she could block it out.
Didn't last long. Footsteps made the cheap table tremble a bit and then Sam touched her shoulder and she squinted in the light. Dean had come in, and he looked apologetic when she turned to him. "I've got nothing," he said, shrugging. "The slop they threw everywhere isn't laid out in any symbols or patterns, there's no sigils, no sulphur, no hex bags."
"And the sludge, it isn't like... tentacle trails?"
Okay, that sounded dumb, but he could have tried harder not to laugh. "Er, no. Not unless they climbed halfway up your walls sideways and never came down again." He held out a glass (her glass) that had some of the green stuff scooped up inside. Sam took it. "It's not ectoplasm," said Dean. "It's not anything, far as I can tell. It's just... goo."
Sam sniffed the glass. He frowned, then leaned over and sniffed again. Then he very very carefully dipped a finger in and tasted it. Charlie bit her lip, praying he wouldn't drop dead of some exotic monster poison.
He chuckled, shook his head, and licked the rest off his finger. "It's avocado juice. An avocado smoothie."
"Huh," said Charlie. "You sure?"
Dean was making a face. "Dude, you can recognise that?"
"It's a healthy drink, Dean," Sam replied, and he said it like he'd be sticking his tongue out if he wasn't, you know, in his thirties. "It's good for you."
"I'd rather die."
Sam laughed but didn't retort. Instead he looked back at the green-goo glass. "So what've we got? Besides the missing stuff and a lot of veggie juice thrown around."
Dean shrugged. "I'm sorry, Charlie, but it really looks like a normal break-in, nothing supernatural about it. Doesn't look like anyone was after you either – they didn't leave anything, didn't go near your bed or anywhere you might've been hiding. They were probably just robbers who'll never come back."
She stared. "So that's it? Forget it, not your department, leave it to the cops?"
The guys snorted. "Hell no."
Jack, Frank and George Nesbit never knew what hit them. The twins and their little brother were too wasted to know much of anything anymore anyway, especially Frank, who hadn't taken too well to switching from his coach's strict all-juice diet to an all-beer one, and they were too busy fumbling with the stubborn ports on the back of Charlie's blu-ray player to hear two hunters sneak up on them.
"Hey, Frankie! Think coach'll stick you on a strawberry go-go juice next season? We throw that out on the next place and the nerd chicks'll think it's blood!"
The others laughed. "Did you see how fast she freaked and ran outta there?"
Their gleeful uproar ended pretty quickly when Sam and Dean stepped in, grabbed the guys by their collars, hauled them onto the threadbare couch and stood there with two wicked-huge machetes gleaming in their hands.
"Hi there, boys," said Dean. "We've come to play."
Three gibbering wrecks otherwise known as the Nesbit brothers turned themselves into the Detroit Metropolitan Police just after dawn. They didn't have a scratch on them, but from the way they were going on about knives and guns and gunshots you'd have thought they'd been extras in a slasher movie.
"You guys totally love playing Knights in Shining Armour, don't you?" Charlie said when they told the story (and how the hell was she going to keep a straight face when the cops called to say they'd found her stuff?). "Bet you had loads of fun doing it, too."
Dean and Sam shrugged in their seats, looking a little sheepish. "Hey, you needed help," said Dean. "Not like you could've done it yourself."
"And this is doing so much for the whole Girl Power thing," Charlie replied, but she was chuckling as she flopped onto her back on the couch, legs dangling over the armrest. "'The Epic of Charlie Bradbury and the Break-In That Wasn't, starring Charlie Bradbury as the damsel in distress'," she announced. "Betcha they'll put some hot chick with perfect skin in a dress for the movie. Maybe I'll get Amy Adams."
"I call dibs on Chris Hemsworth to play me," said Dean.
Sam didn't miss a beat: "Only if I get Chris Evans."
Charlie laughed. "So it'll be not so much a great stride forward for gender rights and more of a muscles-for-eye-candy, boy-saves-girl flick."
"Nah, it'll be two hunters helping out their civilian friend," said Sam, and he smiled and reached over to fistbump her shoulder. "Don't worry about it. You were scared."
"Yeah, and I had every fricking right to be. D'you know I still get nightmares of that Leviathan eating my manager?" She sighed and let her arm flop off the side of the couch. "In the end, I'm still a computer geek, and you guys can kick ass way better me any day. Maybe I'll take up karate."
"Even if you do, you call us if you ever need another ass-kicking, okay?" said Dean, and he was so serious about it that for a second Charlie thought about telling them how much this meant to her, how glad she was that they'd met, how grateful she was that they were friends now; bros, even.
For a second. "You better not be talking about my ass, handmaiden," she replied in her Most Queenly voice. "I can have you flogged for that and set to mucking the stables for a week."
He chuckled and Sam grinned and shook his head. "Hey, come on I think I've totally graduated to captain of the guard by now," said Dean.
Charlie squinted at him. "Nah, captains are usually taller. You can be my lady-in-waiting."