Chapter Text
Chuck was passed out again. From the sex, not the booze, Becky thought with a sort of pride. This knowledge made her feel warm and a bit tingly, just like Chuck’s collection of scotch might. It didn’t help her sleep, though.
She had slept, briefly: drifted off with Chuck snoring and half-sprawled on top of her, which was comforting if not entirely comfortable. But then three a.m. had rolled around and Becky found herself once again wide awake. Just like meeting Sam Winchester and helping to stave off the apocalypse, having a boyfriend apparently didn’t magically cure her insomnia.
Becky was not someone to dwell on disappointment, however. She lay still for a few minutes, listening to Chuck’s heavy breathing and his occasional bouts of mumbling to himself before slipping carefully out from under his arm. The cold air was not kind to her naked body, and she winced her way over to her killer rabbit slippers. She picked up Chuck’s shirt from where it lay on the floor and pulled it on, swiping her hair out of the way. The idea of lounging around in her boyfriend’s tee made her grin, but the winter weather was against her and she soon had to add a pair of her own sweatpants and a sweater to the ensemble. And the odd-smelling blanket she’d snagged off the back of the couch. Curling into the lopsided chair in the corner of the spare room, she pulled her computer into her lap. The fan didn’t work so well, so with the laptop up and running, she was almost toasty.
After a moment’s hesitation, she logged into her 
samlicker81 gmail account.
Becky had never been ashamed of her fannish activities—her hobby, her obsession, whatever you wanted to call it. Some people played golf, and some people knit, and Becky did this—what was the big deal? Of course, discovering that the subjects of her erstwhile activities were real had changed things a lot—and not in the ways Becky had expected. Not that Becky had expected to find out that Sam and Dean and angels and demons and the apocalypse were real—she wasn’t crazy, after all—but prior to Chuck’s first call, she had, maybe, possibly, envisioned on occasion what it would be like to meet Sam, and those fantasies had involved a lot more of Sam ripping her clothes off and Dean being surprisingly okay with it, and a lot less of what had actually happened. In Becky’s head, Sam had always been enchanted by her instead of freaked, and Dean wasn’t a big gruff dude but instead the pretty blond uke Becky would have sworn the books described, and they all solved their pesky apocalypse problems in the space of a couple of paragraphs before they did sex the end.
Instead, Bobby ended up in a wheelchair and Becky ended up on Fandom Wank and it was months and months later and the world was still doomed and everyone was still miserable and the only people having sex were Becky and Chuck.
Becky was pretty sure that was not the way the story was supposed to go. Sure, certain parts (mostly the sex parts) were nice, and yeah, okay, Becky knew that reality was much more complicated than fanfic. But she would have liked it not to be, sometimes.
And so even though it was a bit weird, and even though she was currently about as popular as Ms. Scribe in certain parts of the internet, occasionally Becky went back to being samlicker81 for a while.
Logging into her fandom account, Becky saw that she had new mail. The first message was a comment to the post she had made a couple months ago with photos from the 1st Annual Supernatural Con. Becky tensed: she thought she’d made the right decision not to close comments or delete the post, but it meant that she sometimes still got a certain type of response... Yup, it was another stupid mouse calling her a liar and a cheat and a “Victoria Bitter wannabe.” Becky archived it without reading it all. The con had been fun, despite/because of it turning out to be haunted, but it still bummed Becky out that the attendees had mostly been fanboys brought in through the magazine ads Chuck had placed, and not the fangirls Becky had tried to recruit through her website and her failed LJ comm, whom she had never been able to convince to believe her.
But that was over, that was in the past, she reminded herself, lifting her chin and repositioning her laptop. She’d win them over next year (if there was a next year), or maybe by then she’d be more into Dr. Sexy or something and then she wouldn’t care.
The next message in her inbox was a PM from somebody whose name she didn’t recognize. Becky opened it with a combination of wariness and hope. Hi! it began, already much too cheerful to be a troll. You don’t know me—I’ve been lurking for a while—but I’ve always been a big fan of your work. I’m not sure if you still beta for people since you stepped down as webmistress of morethanbrothers.net, but I thought I’d ask just in case because I would love your insight on this story I’m working on. If you’re interested, this link’ll give you access to my googledocs. And if not I totally understand! I hope you’re doing all right after all the recent “controversy”—I understand why people are suspicious and find it hard to have faith, but I miss seeing you around the interwebs. Cheers and thanks, renegadeangel
There was that warm feeling again, pooling gentle at the bottom of her belly. Chuck was great, and real, and frequently and enthusiastically naked, but Becky had still missed having online friends. She missed betaing for people and having long, goofy conversations about intriguing asides or odd inconsistencies in their shared source text. (Even though she now knew that the most likely explanation was, “Chuck was pretty wasted when he wrote that.”) Eagerly, she clicked on the googledocs link and hoped that the story would be good, something she could genuinely say she liked and maybe even help make better.
If on a winter’s night a fangirlYou are about to begin reading
Crud, Becky thought, holding back on a sigh. It was in the second person. And it was some weird meta thing. Becky thought that fandom’s collective obsession with fourth-wall breaking metafiction was getting to be a bit much. This was really not the sort of story she wanted to read—she wanted something old-school, something romantic, something that recaptured what used to be her happy place. Did she really want to not only read, but beta a story like this? It was pushing 4 a.m. Chuck was snoring soundly in the next room. Maybe if she shut the computer and crawled back into bed with him, she could get some sleep...
Doubtful, though. And this girl’s PM had been so nice. Becky really ought to give her more of a shot. She returned her gaze to the screen and kept reading.
Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; Chuck is snoring rather loudly in the next room. In the morning, you should try to convince him to see a doctor: this may be a sign of a deviated septum.
The computer nearly slid off Becky’s lap and onto the floor, but it caught on her killer rabbit slippers’ ears. Becky grabbed at it with shaky hands, steadied it, stared. The words remained where they were, steady and black—decidedly not a sleep-deprived hallucination. The rest of the paragraph continued to describe the racket Chuck was making and its probable causes, before suggesting that she make herself more comfortable—what lay ahead required her full attention.
It had to be a joke. A trick, a prank: it had to be. Someone getting back at her for her perceived deception: Oh, so samlicker81’s gonna claim she met Carver Edlund, and that he introduced her to “the real Sam and Dean”? And then when she gets suitably mocked for that, she’s gonna switch to brazenly asserting that she’s hosting a Supernatural convention with “Carver Edlund” and that “Sam and Dean” are going to be there, so why not book now via Paypal? Well, let’s see how this crazy wanker likes it when we mess with her...
Becky’s eyes stung. She tried not to let it get to her, she really did, but sometimes she couldn’t help it. Sure, Sam Winchester was real, and she had maybe helped him maybe-save the world, and she totally had a boyfriend now, but that didn’t change the fact that she had lost almost all her friends.
Becky tried to think rationally about what to do. Part of her want to slam the computer shut and passive-aggressively stomp around the house until Chuck woke up and gave her someone to talk to. Part of her wanted to write an angry message back to “renegadeangel” and vent her fury and frustration that way. And part of her wanted to message renegadeangel, but adopt a tone of the nobly wounded and guilt the bitch into apologizing for making Becky feel in quick succession such happy hope and such crushing despair.
None of these, she knew, were particularly productive solutions, so after taking a few deep breaths, she did close the computer—gently, though: it wasn’t the Metallicomp’s fault—and shuffled into the kitchen. She’d coaxed Chuck into going to the actual store instead of the gas station quickie mart and so for once when she visited there was real food in the house. It was four o’clock in the morning, her boyfriend had a deviated septum and she was infamous on the internet: Becky decided that the best thing to do was bake.
“You should get up at four every morning!” Chuck enthused when he woke, several hours later, to the smell of her freshly-baked scones. Becky gave him a long, long look—a look that suggested that while all of Sam Winchester’s girlfriends might die, at least he never said anything to them that was that insensitive. Chuck fumbled with his knife and accidentally smeared jam on the tablecloth. “Er. I mean. I’m sorry that you couldn’t sleep.”
Becky shrugged. “I’m used to it,” she said, trying to inject some brightness back into her voice.
“Well, anyway, these are awesome,” Chuck said, brushing crumbs from his beard. “Even better than the marzipan,” he added with a grin.
Becky grinned back at him: she liked that they already had private jokes like this. Even though she was still slightly peeved at Chuck’s confession that he’d thrown her original batch of marzipan away just like all the other edible gifts his publisher had forwarded to him. “They could have been poisoned!” had been Chuck’s defense, which, yeah, the other fans’ stuff, maybe. But that batch of marzipan had been like her best batch ever.
The thought of other fans and their possibly-poisoned gifts made Becky think about the “story” she’d been trying not to think about again. She’d been stupid and hadn’t closed the tab before she shut her laptop, so she knew that in a way it was still there, waiting for her. She didn’t want to think about it, but the more she did, the more it skeeved her out. The story had mentioned Chuck by name—his real name—and had mentioned that he was snoring in the next room precisely when he was snoring in the next room. That could be a coincidence, a supposition, but in the bright light of morning, it was starting to seem less and less like something an asshole troll could conceivably achieve. Becky had been right to be freaked out, she realized with a gnawing sense of horror, but she’d freaked out for entirely the wrong reason.
“Chuck,” she said suddenly, “I think Lucifer hacked my computer!”
Chuck spent several seconds nearly choking to death on a raisin. Fortunately, Becky proved to be a robust back-patter, and Raphael didn’t appear to intercede on behalf of Chuck’s life.
“What?” he finally managed to ask.
“Or maybe it was Zachariah,” Becky amended. She gave him a brief summation of what had happened.
“Wait, you still read fanfic?” Chuck stared at her with wide eyes and a curled lip. “Still?”
“So?” Even though she was defending her internet porn habit, Becky felt righteous in her indignation.
“You know they’re real people,” Chuck hissed, blushing. “You’ve met them.”
“You seriously want to launch a tired RPS debate right now? My laptop may be possessed!”
“Your laptop isn’t possessed,” Chuck said with a dismissive sigh.
“Are you saying you don’t believe me?”
“I’m saying,” Chuck said carefully, as if to a small child, “that it was the middle of the night and you may not have been thinking super clearly—”
Becky growled, turned on her heel, and stomped out of the room—a series of actions that might have been more effective if she hadn’t still been wearing her killer rabbit slippers. She snatched her laptop off the chair where she’d left it and stomped back. “There,” she said, thrusting the computer at Chuck. “See for yourself.”
Chuck gave her an annoyingly tolerant look and lifted the screen. His expression remained the same for a few seconds as the laptop woke up and he started to read. Then abruptly his eyes went wide and he sprang melodramatically backward. “Fuck, Becky! Are you possessed? Why would you make me read that?”
This was not the reaction Becky had been expecting. She had kind of been hoping that Chuck would read the story, suck in a long breath, announce that they needed to call Sam immediately, and then spend the time until the Winchesters arrived apologizing profusely to Becky for ever doubting her. Instead he was acting like she’d made him look at a picture of the goatse guy.
She turned the laptop toward herself and looked.
Fumbling Towards DestinyBy
Castiel lay naked on the altar, his pale body glowing like fine porcelain in the candlelight. Dean stood before him, quaking with equal parts worry and want. “Are you sure this is a good idea, Cas?” the hunter asked. “You’re sure you want to do this?”
“Yes, Dean,” the angel solemnly intoned. “This ritual may be the key to finding my Father. Nothing could be more important than that. We must do whatever is necessary to ensure He is found.”
“And a kinky angel sex ritual is what’s necessary, gotcha,” Dean said, trying to inject humor into his voice, but stumbling a little over the words. He couldn’t let Castiel know his secret: that this ritual was an all-too-perfect excuse, that he wanted this, wanted Cas, more than he had ever wanted anything before in his life...
Becky stared at her Judas of a computer in shock. “That’s not what it said before!” she insisted. “I swear, earlier it was some weird meta thing about me and you and how loud you snore.”
“Hey, that’s a legitimate medical condition!” Chuck protested weakly. “I was actually thinking I should maybe go to the doctor: I might have a deviated septum or something...”
“I mean, why would I even read this?” Becky asked the room at large as she scanned the rest of the page. “This isn’t even my pairing!” Though, whoa, it looked like the story got pretty impressively hot before too long...
She clicked back over to the tab containing the PM from renegadeangel, but it was gone: the comment from the mean anonymouse was what was at the head of her message queue. “This doesn’t make any sense,” Becky said, staring at her laptop, betrayed. “Chuck, I’m serious: the internet wouldn’t do this to me!”
Chuck still looked terrified from his accidental exposure to teh gay. “Maybe you have a virus?” he suggested. “A random gay-porn generating virus?” He ran a hand through his hair. “Man, I knew I shouldn’t have let you and Sera convince me to start e-publishing. The incest was bad enough, but now I’m indirectly responsible for blasphemous angel sex... Raphael is going to kill me.”
Becky was momentarily distracted by the thought that 1) Blasphemous Angel Sex was a pretty good name for a band, and 2) a gay porn virus didn’t sound too bad. However, she was fairly sure that wasn’t what was going on.
The last “story” she’d read had described what was going on at that precise moment—Becky reading fic, Chuck snoring. What if...what if it was still doing that?
“Chuck!” she said, grabbing at his arm. “What if this is like a vision? Maybe this is how you’re supposed to write what’s happening now that Zachariah’s hacked your brain!”
“This?” Chuck’s voice rose to an alarming pitch. “You think this is part of the gospel?” He took a deep breath and seemed to force himself to calm down. “This is porn,” he said, gesturing at the screen as one might indicate an unseemly and possibly vomitous mess, “not prophecy.”
Becky huffed. “God, Chuck, you can be so narrow-minded. There’s an easy way to find out—give Dean a call.”
“I’m not calling Dean and asking him if he’s having improbably located ritualistic gay sex with Cas!” Chuck squeaked. He looked scandalized.
“Well, then I’ll do it.” Becky thrust out her hand. “Give me your phone.”
Chuck balked.
“It’s just as likely to disprove my theory as prove it,” Becky said reasonably.
This got him rolling his eyes at least. He passed her his cell, muttering, “Just as likely. Right.”
Dean picked up fairly quickly. “Chuck. What’s up?” He did not sound out of breath, which did not speak well for Becky’s argument. She found herself oddly disappointed.
Nevertheless, she pressed on. “This is Becky,” she said, and Dean immediately groaned.
“Sam isn’t here right now,” he said.
Sam, Becky thought wistfully, but she needed to concentrate: “I want to talk to you,” she said. She could all-too-easily picture Dean’s eyebrow twitch upward.
“Oh, great. Fantastic.”
Have you sexed up your angel recently? Becky wasn’t shy, but she found it more difficult to squeeze the question out than she’d thought. RPS was a whole new level of weird when you actually knew the RP involved. “You haven’t performed any rituals lately, have you?” she asked instead.
“What? What do you care?”
“We’re trying to determine if Chuck’s visions are the real deal again,” Becky lied—smoothly, she thought.
“No we are not,” said Chuck in the background, which didn’t help.
“Put Chuck on the phone,” Dean demanded.
Reluctantly, Becky handed over the cell. She liked the Dean from the books so much better. She’d always gotten the impression that he was all vulnerable and sensitive and stuff. Real!Dean was just...surly.
“I don’t know, man,” she heard Chuck say. “She’s got this crazy idea that...you know, never mind. I think you’ve answered our question. Sorry to bug you.”
“Ask him about the altar,” Becky said, waving her hand in front of Chuck’s face frantically. “Just say ‘altar’ and see if he gets uncomfortable!”
“I think you already made him uncomfortable,” Chuck said, with the line still connected. She could hear Dean snort before he hung up and Chuck snapped the phone shut. Great, he had totally sold her out. Some boyfriend. Would Sam do that? she felt like asking him. He always got really awkward and apologetic and quiet when she compared him to Sam.
“That doesn’t prove anything,” she said, folding her arms. “He avoided answering me and you didn’t really ask him anything!”
“Becky.” Chuck rolled his eyes again. “There is no way that there’s a ritual to find God that involves sex on an altar. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard—and I’m saying this as someone who wrote a whole book about a racist truck.”
Becky had to concede that Route 666 was not Chuck’s—or, she supposed, reality’s—best effort. For one thing, Sam wasn’t in it enough. But that was all beside the point: something important and real was going on here, and it was super frustrating that she was the only one who saw it. “Maybe there are more clues in the story,” she said, suddenly struck by the notion. Neither of them had finished reading the thing, after all. She reached out to turn the laptop back toward her, but Chuck reached out too, trying to twist it back.
“Come on, Becky, no more gay angel porn, please. Can’t we try to have a normal morning for once?”
They grappled for a moment, Chuck swatting ineffectually and somewhat girlishly at her fingers. “It’s my computer! I can look at whatever I want on my computer. I didn’t touch those copies of Busty Asian Beauties I found behind the toilet, did I?”
“What? Those aren’t mine!” Chuck said hastily. His grip slackened and Becky took advantage of the moment to wrench the computer away. In the process, however, she hit the Refresh button with the side of her hand. The page of text they’d been looking at vanished, then reappeared.
It was not, Becky saw instantly, at all the same as it had been. Not even the names were the same: there was ‘Dean Smith’ screaming at her from the very first line.
Stretching the Limits of Mind and BodyBy
Dean Smith was feeling tense. The pressure was on at Sandover Bridge & Iron and the Director of Sales and Marketing needed to relax. Kripke in Advertising had given him the name of his private yoga instructor, and Dean hoped the guy would be able to make the executive feel loose enough to do his job.
“Hi, I’m Castiel Angel,” said the wiry looking man who arrived at Dean’s office that evening. He had lightly muscled arms, dark, tousled hair, and a soul patch on his chin. “Would you like to get started?”
*~~*~~~*~~*
Castiel was helping Dean stretch out his hamstrings, hoisting Dean’s leg into the air and pressing himself against Dean’s body. Dean was embarrassed to find himself starting to get hard. He was straight—he couldn’t be attracted to a man! He blushed and looked away, but the yoga instructor caught Dean’s chin in his hand and turned the businessman’s face back toward his. “It’s okay,” Castiel said, staring at him with blistering azure eyes. “I’m just here to make you feel good. Would you like me to make you feel good?”
Dean could only nod as Castiel moved his mouth down to the bulge in Dean’s slacks...
Becky frowned. “Dean/Cas again?” Was the universe trying to tell her something?
“Oh God, not more,” said Chuck.
“No, this is different,” Becky said, moving past her disappointment at the lack of Wincest. (It had lost some of its charm, anyway—Sam could totally do better.) She brought the laptop back over to the table, puzzling at the screen. “This is...weird. How many books in the new series has Sera put up so far?”
“Uh, through the big Alastair one. Whatchamacallit.”
Sera, Chuck’s publisher, did most of his titling for him, and half the time Chuck couldn’t even remember what the titles were. Becky knew, though. With the new ebook series she’d even totally helped beta.
“On the Head of a Pin,” she said. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, you know she sends me the freakish Poser art to ‘approve,’ and believe me, I am not going to be forgetting the creepy Saw ripoff she came up with for that one anytime soon.”
“So the only people who’ve read the one after that are me and you and her?”
Chuck nodded. “If she even has, yet. I only sent the edited file to her two days ago. And she’s pretty obsessive but I assume she does have, like, some sort of a life...”
Becky pushed the laptop into Chuck’s personal space. “Then how is someone writing fic about the next book?” she asked, feeling as triumphant in her reveal as Sherlock Holmes.
Chuck stared slack-jawed at the screen. After a minute or so, he began shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “Uh, wow.” He rubbed his hands on his flannel PJ pants. “I feel really confident about my own writing skills right now.”
Becky was about to concur when his eyes narrowed and he turned his head up toward her. “Did you write this?”
Becky felt like she’d been slapped. “How could you even ask that?”
“Okay, I know, it doesn’t have Sam in it...” Chuck waved a dismissive hand.
“Um, and it’s bad,” Becky said indignantly. “Do you think I’m a bad writer?”
Chuck had the decency to blanche. “No, no. I meant as a joke—you wrote it as a joke, right? You’re having me on?”
He looked like he really hoped the answer would be yes. In other circumstances, Becky might have been more inclined to ease him toward the truth, but she’d been up since four a.m. baking scones and this conversation was making her feel like she was bashing her head against a brick wall.
“Chuck,” she said, slowly and carefully and very, very seriously. “I think someone is trying to communicate with us through the fanfic.”
In retrospect, Becky could see why Chuck started laughing hysterically, but at the time it really cheesed her off.
In the end, the only one she was able to convince that she was onto something was Castiel. She texted him from Chuck’s phone while Chuck was in the shower. Becky had never met him before, but from what she’d read, he seemed pretty serious, and she figured a serious angel would therefore believe her that this was serious business.
It wasn’t until he appeared in front of her, looking curious and slightly alien in his rumpled trenchcoat, that Becky realized that her plan relied on her showing an angel porn about himself.
“Becky.”
She couldn’t help it—she shivered a little when he said her name. Man, Chuck had only scraped the surface with his description of Castiel’s voice. When he gave her the next book to go over, she was totally going to encourage him to elaborate.
“Where’s Chuck?”
“Um, I’m the one who texted you, not Chuck.” She stared down at the murderous eyes of her killer rabbit slippers, feeling overwhelmed in a way that felt completely different from the emotions evoked by Sam. “I need some help. Something weird’s been going on with my computer.”
Castiel’s head tilted to the side—oh my god, it was exactly like she’d pictured! “I’m afraid I am not well-versed in computer repair.”
She laughed, much harder and far longer than was necessary. Fuck, what was wrong with her? She’d delivered to Sam Winchester vital information; why was Dean’s dorky little angel making her act like such a n00b?
“No, it’s not broken—I think it might be possessed? Someone’s sending me fic that’s full of things that are impossible for some random fangirl to know. True things! Well,” she added, blushing, “some of them are true. Others I’m not so sure.” Chuck’s draft of the upcoming book certainly hadn’t included anything about Dean Smith having sex with his soulpatch-sporting yoga instructor who was also an angel of the Lord. “But it has to mean something. Doesn’t it?”
Castiel looked, perhaps understandably, confused. Becky flushed when she realized she would have to backtrack.
“Um, gosh, okay. Fanfiction is—”
“I am aware of the phenomenon,” said Castiel, his eyes flickering over her. Like he was maybe sort of in on the joke—or possibly unaware that such a thing as “jokes” even existed.
br />“Right. Good.” Becky tried not to think too hard about the fact that angels knew she wrote gay porn on the internet. God, she hoped Castiel didn’t know about Bibleslash—although she supposed that to him, all her innocently written Supernatural fic was just as bad. “Um. I guess I better just show you.”
She turned her laptop toward Castiel, swiping her head over the trackpad to wake it up. “See?” she said.
She watched as the angel’s eyes moved across the screen—they were a really pretty shade of blue. She wouldn’t say azure though. Maybe cerulean...
Castiel shoulders stiffened almost imperceptibly and he straightened up, his hands curling into fists at his sides. “This story is apocryphal.”
Becky nodded. “I know, but see, it takes place in the AU from when Zachariah mind-whammied everyone and nobody could write about that because no one knows about it yet except me and Chuck and Chuck’s publisher, maybe. Oh, and you guys, of course. And Zachariah. Do you think this is all some evil plan of Zachariah’s?”
Castiel shoulders, impossibly, grew even stiffer. “I think you have shown me the wrong document.” He turned the computer back toward her.
On a Quest for the TruthBy
Castiel pushed Dean back into the supply closet, reveling in the supple strength of the young hunter’s 17-year-old frame. “I can’t keep coming to you like this,” the angel whispered, trying to keep his distance but unable to entirely resist the play of Dean’s slim fingers in his hair, on the inside of his thigh.
“You afraid we’re going to get caught?” Dean asked huskily. “Isn’t that half the fun?”
“Nevertheless, we must be more subtle in our approach. I will not desert you, Dean,” the angel promised, meeting Dean’s green gaze with his own cerulean orbs. “If you look for me, you will find me. I want to be found. Please don’t forget that. Even when the search becomes hard...”
“Want to see what else is hard?” Dean interrupted with a waggle of his eyebrow. Castiel thought briefly of protesting, but his time in this time was short, and Dean so lusciously ripe and untouched. Castiel couldn’t help reaching out and
“Oh my God, I am so sorry!” Becky slammed the computer shut. This was more uncomfortable than when people asked actors about fanfic at cons. “That was not the story I meant to show you. It keeps changing! And see, actually, that’s sort of my point—that shouldn’t be possible. Someone—or something—is making it happen. I think whatever it is is trying to tell us something.”
“I would not trust any message from this source,” Castiel said definitively. “It cannot be given credence if it believes I would take advantage of Dean in such a manner.”
“No, I know,” Becky assured him. “I think it’s maybe a code? Like maybe there are encrypted messages in it? But it keeps changing before I can figure it out.”
“I will remember this one,” Castiel said. “Unfortunately.”
“Sorry,” Becky muttered again. She really had to hope that this awkward “show an angel underage gay porn about himself” scene never made it into the gospels.
She heard Castiel shift beside her, and something in the movement made her look up again. “On the off chance that you are correct, perhaps you should try to recollect all you can of the previous stories.”
“Oh, good idea!” Becky darted over to Chuck’s desk and returned with a pad and pen. Castiel had opened Becky’s laptop again, and was frowning at the screen. “It’s gone,” he told her.
“Is there a new one?” she asked, stooping to look over his shoulder. The empty screen before them answered the question for him.
“What did you do? Did you click on something?”
Anxiously, she tried to push him aside but it was like shoving against the side of a semi. Castiel’s eyes flickered toward her, betraying what may have been a hint of annoyance. “I didn’t do anything. It simply isn’t there.”
“Well, lemme bring my googledocs folder back up! Maybe there’ll be a link to it!” She pushed into his personal space and started typing.
“I am beginning to see what Dean means,” Castiel remarked—rather nonsensically, Becky thought.
“Shit! It’s really gone. And I don’t have any more PMs or anything!”
Castiel shot her a blank stare. “Prime Ministers,” he said after a moment.
“What?”
“What?”
“Becks, I’m sorry for what I said to you before. Let me make it—fuck!”
Chuck bolted out of the room, grabbing for Becky’s discarded blanket as he went.
“He must have been cold,” Castiel said, staring after the departed prophet.
“No, it’s always like that,” Becky said without thinking. Then she blushed and returned her gaze resolutely to the computer, thankful that Castiel seemed mostly oblivious. “Why would it just vanish?” she asked.
“Perhaps the message, if there is one, has been delivered in its entirety,” Castiel suggested. “Or perhaps...”
For a few seconds the angel appeared to be staring vacantly into space. Then, “‘I can’t keep coming to you like this,’” he said—recited, Becky realized. “‘If you look for me, you will find me. I—’”
“‘Want to be found’!” Becky finished with him. “You’re a genius, Cas!” She couldn’t quite stop herself from bouncing on her heels and clapping her hands a little. Castiel stared at her. “Er, that is, if I can call you Cas? Dean does and it seems like almost everyone else is starting to but I don’t want to presume...”
“It’s fine,” Castiel—Cas!—interrupted. “I have to thank you for bringing this to my attention. Now—where do you think we should start looking?”
“Um. Maybe LJ? Whoever or whatever sent me a PM—a private message—through LJ, so maybe they—maybe he/she/it has an account? But LJ’s really big. Maybe we should try my website? Or my former website, I guess. That would make sense. Except, wait, so far none of the stories have been Wincest—I wonder what that means? Anyway my site’s a Wincest site so I don’t know. What do you think?”
“I believe I am somewhat out of my depth,” Castiel said. His tone sounded almost wry.
Chuck slunk back into the room, much more fully clothed. “Oh, you’re still here,” he said, spotting Castiel. “I was hoping that when I almost died of embarrassment, Raphael would have come back and smote you again.”
Becky and Castiel both glared at him.
Chuck let out an uncomfortable laugh. “Er, too soon? Sorry. Sorry, Cas. Weird morning.”
“I understand. Becky has shown me the messages she has been receiving via the pornographic compositions of your writing’s fans.”
Chuck appeared to choke on the air in his mouth. “She’s been what?”
Castiel remained unruffled by this outburst. “As...unconventional as the mode of communication may be, I believe she is correct in concluding that some sort of correspondence is being attempted. Unfortunately, it seems our primary method of receiving these messages is no longer viable.”
“I guess we’re just going to have to read a lot of fic and see if we can find anything that looks suspicious?” Becky said.
Castiel nodded—a tiny, controlled movement. “Precisely.”
Chuck sank brokenly into a chair. “I’m being punished for something. It’s the hookers, isn’t it? I’m being punished for the hookers?”
“Hookers?” said Becky. Busty Asian Beauties was one thing, but...
“It would be hypocritical for me to judge you for indulging in such a practice,” Castiel told Chuck, almost gently. “I too have visited a den of iniquity...”
That sounded like a fic right there. The lines between reality and fiction were once again blurring. Or it was possible that Becky was losing it.
“So are you guys gonna help me read a lot of gay porn or what?” she asked.