![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Wow, have I been sitting on this too long. Clearing the decks for 8 Crazy Nights, upcoming.
Chuck versus the Family Business
SPN/Chuck
Pairings: Dean Winchester/Chuck Bartowski, with plenty of other subtext, including Sarah/Chuck/Casey and canon pairings.
Rating: NC-17
For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pinkfinity in Sweet Charity, forever ago. Chuck and the Winchesters hunt vampires. This is a sequel to Chuck versus the Uncanny, whose premise is that the premise is that Chuck Bartowski and Sam Winchester knew each other casually at Stanford, and met again at the Buy More, where the Winchesters mistook the Intersect for psychic gifts. Don’t even try to match the continuity; AU from after S3 of Chuck and vague post-S6 setting for SPN.
Warnings: Gore and just-offscreen torture, excessive attention to costuming. Also, Dean knows lines from Chicago.
Read it on AO3.
“Sarah,” Chuck said and immediately forgot his carefully planned discussion of the day’s business. “Hey, uh, yeah.” That answered the question of whether the absence of Shaw had diminished the awkwardness from their latest round of will-they-or-won’t-they. Well, they had, and Chuck was committed to believing that they were going to, but they weren’t at this exact moment, and Chuck couldn’t even say that the reasons were bad ones.
“Yes, Chuck?” Sarah looked up from the gun she was assembling.
Chuck cleared his throat and tried again. “I hear there’s a pretty good taco stand that just opened up on the other side of the mall. We would have to cross five lanes of traffic to get there, kind of a live-action Frogger thing, but I for one would go further than that for a good fish taco.”
Casey, who’d been fiddling with a sniper scope, snorted. Chuck turned and frowned at him.
“Sounds good, Chuck. Why don’t you come, too, John?” Sarah asked, either because she didn’t want to be alone with Chuck or because she actually cared about Casey’s ability to share in the promised taste sensation. Maybe both—Sarah was a very caring person, if you got past the adamantium walls. Which Chuck totally planned to do again, no matter how long it took, and if Casey came along for the ride, Chuck was okay with that.
Did that come out right? Chuck wasn’t sure if that was a question that could be asked about an interior monologue.
Meanwhile, Casey had made a sound that Chuck, through long experience, was able to translate into an affirmative.
Chuck had to supply most of the dialogue in the resulting journey, though he was used to that, and he did manage to explain his theory about how they could use their current downtime to practice more combination moves, so that when Chuck yelled out “Number three!” they’d all know what to do. Sarah said she thought it was an interesting idea, which meant that she thought it was a terrible idea but probably harmless, and Casey didn’t say anything at all, which meant that he wanted to think it over before deciding how to mock it. Not bad for a first try, if Chuck did say so himself.
They were coming back from the taco stand, Casey setting his usual brisk pace and Chuck and Sarah following in perfect spy formation, when all of their phones went off at once. Chuck glanced down, saw it was the General text-demanding their presence in Castle, and quickly unwrapped his first taco so he could eat and walk at the same time.
He was guessing that delicious tacos were about to be a lower priority in his life.
Chuck was vindicated when the General glared so hard at them over the videoscreen that Sarah and Casey didn’t make a move towards their own food. “Agents,” she said, “the Army has suffered a serious security breach. A major potential weapon has—” she paused, and her mouth pursed in disapproval. “Escaped.”
“How does a weapon escape?” Casey asked for all of them, though Chuck had the sinking feeling that he knew.
“This weapon—” The General sighed. “It’s--they’re--unusual.” And then she began to explain.
After a minute, Chuck interrupted, because he couldn’t keep himself silent. “You’re telling me that the government is secretly testing vampires as supersoldiers?” The Intersect looked substantially less silly by comparison, was all he was saying.
“Technically—” Chuck waited, but the General didn’t finish. “Your mission is to retrieve the individuals, alive if possible, but containment is a higher priority. Their tracking chips are still functioning, but they’re only accurate to within fifty meters, and they’ve been staying in high-density areas.”
After a few more words with Sarah and Casey about weaponry and civilian information control, she signed off, and then they were just staring at each other.
“Vampires?” Sarah said, which did seem worth repeating. But she shook herself, becoming Competent Agent Who Takes Everything Seriously in an instant. “How do we find a vampire in a crowd if they don’t really burst into flames in sunlight?”
Casey scratched his chin, looking thoughtful. “General said they were faster and stronger than humans,” and he sounded eager enough that Chuck was going to have to warn him about not going hand to hand with monsters if there were any alternatives.
“Yes, and if we could get them to run races, I’m sure that would help,” Sarah said, just a little annoyed. “Chuck, can you review all the security footage from the Army experiments and see if you can figure out how to distinguish them?”
“I can do that, yeah,” Chuck agreed. “But also, here’s an idea: we should call in the experts.”
****
Sam cleared his throat. Some of the roughly twenty coffee-drinkers in the place looked up, marginally interested.
Dean sighed. “Listen up, everybody!” he snapped. “We are federal agents Goldstein and Nimmer. Someone here is illegally downloading movies from the internet on the free wi-fi. If you are not that someone, we’re going to have to ask you to leave.”
In under sixty seconds, the place was clear except for one gawky teenaged kid, who Dean seriously hoped wasn’t sitting in a puddle of his own piss, because his day did not need that kind of glory. Sam, plainly having the same thought, indicated with a jerk of his chin that Dean should go talk to him, Dean being the one who’d terrified him into immobility. Sam went off to make nice with the owner, whose anger at losing all her customers Sam was going to placate by assuring her that the FBI wasn’t at all interested in blaming the coffee shop for the actions of a rogue tea-drinker.
Dean moseyed up to the teen, who if anything grew more statue-like, and took a look at his computer, then nodded to himself.
“How old are you?” Dean asked when he sat down across from the kid.
It took the boy more than a few tries to get his mouth working. “Suh—seventeen,” he managed.
“Big Jocks, Big Cocks II, hunh?” Dean made it a rhetorical question. “Lemme give you some advice, kid. First of all, volume three is ten times better. Second, don’t download this shit. That’s what PornTube is for. Third, when you do get your hands on an actual other person, don’t pound away at them like these guys do. Remember that looking good and feeling good are two different things, and if you’re not sure, ask the dude you’re with. Or the girl, that part’s pretty much the same. You hear me?”
The kid nodded desperately. Dean could feel Sam across the room trying not to let his eyes fall out of his head, either because Dean was being nice in the middle of a hunt or because Sam had some idea of the contents of Big Jocks, Big Cocks I-IV.
“Now go and sin no more,” Dean told him. “Or, anyway, sin somewhere else.”
The boy fled, almost forgetting to take his computer with him. Dean checked in with Sam, who nodded to show that the owner and staff had also been kicked out, and they got to work.
This was a good job, Dean thought. Easy enough, but still needing both of them, Sam on research and Dean with the hands-on application. Banishing a heart-attack-inducing curse was a good reminder of why it wasn’t just crippling codependence and shellshock keeping them together.
Right as Dean finished etching the last cleansing symbol onto the underside of the cursed Clover machine, Sam’s cellphone rang. “Hello?” Dean heard, with the careful tone that said that Sam didn’t recognize the caller’s number.
“Chuck?” Sam asked. Dean swore and banged his head painfully on the metal as he hauled his ass upright. He’d really thought they were done with all that prophecy bullshit, and if Chuck was contacting them then ‘clusterfuck’ was likely to be an understatement.
“How did you get this number?” Sam asked, and Dean closed his mouth. The prophet Chuck shouldn’t have had any problem with that. Sam glanced at Dean, and Dean gave him his most eloquent ‘dude, what the fuck?’ expression. Sam mouthed something that Dean didn’t understand, what with most of Sam’s attention still being on the phone call. Chuck was being a talkative bastard, apparently, because Sam was listening, nodding a little as if Chuck could see him, and generally being annoying, which in this case meant ignoring Dean.
“Sam!” Dean hissed.
Sam jumped a little and put his phone on speaker.
“—So, when they said ‘vampires,’ I thought, ‘I know someone who probably knows what to do with vampires, and probably could use being owed a favor by a powerful and secretive government organization, seeing as how you do tend to get arrested more than you probably want to be,’ and so I was thinking that maybe you could come out to Burbank—”
Dean lost track of the narrative because he was reorienting. That was not Chuck Shurley. That was that college friend of Sam’s, the one who’d dropped out of Stanford to become a government psychic. So the call was more on the order of the ordinary slog that was their lives instead of literally apocalyptic suckage. They were, just as of this minute, between hunts, and maybe they could use somebody else to talk to besides each other; they were doing fine, all things considered, but there was a lot of shit to consider. Working with new people who knew about the supernatural life might be almost like taking a vacation. Bonus, the spy chick was super hot.
Dean rubbed the back of his neck and suggested, “Ask him how many vampires,” because from what Dean had seen (and heard) this Chuck sometimes had performance issues in getting to the point.
****
Chuck had rarely been more grateful that Sarah and Casey gave him the benefit of the doubt on keeping Sam and his brother on the down low. Convincing the General to authorize outside consultants who were not wanted as felons only because they were supposed to be dead would have taken a lot more energy than he had at the moment. He was too busy accessing all the vampire-related records in the Intersect (gross, and also largely unhelpful, since they were focused on experiments on the things once captured and not on the process of capture itself) and reading the materials Sam had uploaded for him.
“How do you know they’ll help?” Sarah had asked. “The older one definitely had an attitude.”
Chuck had thought about the file he’d flashed through. “Because that’s what they do,” he said.
Sure enough, after some initial wobbling, plus Chuck’s explanation of how he’d put together various reported credit card frauds, unexplained deaths, and random phenomena (including message board reports of the sighting of one of the five cherry 1967 Impalas in the country) to find Sam’s current identity, Sam had agreed to come to California—they were in New Mexico, a day’s hard drive away, which gave the Buy More team time to assimilate all the vampire-related information they could find.
Chuck was definitely not allowing Morgan in on this one. He’d think that vampires were so cool he was likely to get himself killed or, worse, vamped. It would be classic to have to kill his own best friend to save him, and while Chuck appreciated the classics, he’d prefer to keep that one onscreen, thanks.
While Chuck was learning the differences between Buffy vampires and real vampires, Sarah was watching the footage of their escape for the third time. He knew she could handle the blood and death, but he was a little worried about the whole ‘surveillance while death is dealt’ issue, since it hadn’t been so long since she’d been the one on tape. Even though she hadn’t been a soulless creature of the night while doing her own killing, he had the sinking feeling that she might think that made her worse than the vampires. Meanwhile, Casey was off doing—hey, what was Casey doing again?
“Sleeping gas,” Casey said without turning around when Chuck found him in the armory. “Knock out the civilians, leave the vamps standing so we know who’s who.”
Chuck thought about that for a second. They had excellent pictures of the five escapees, but they had no idea how many new vampires those escapees had turned, so they did need some way to distinguish hostiles from nonhostiles. “They don’t go down with conventional sedatives, but maybe gas will work. But what if they use the now conveniently placed and helpless civilians as hostages?”
Casey shrugged, and Chuck resolved to think of a better idea. “This would be a lot easier if we could go public,” he continued. “I asked the General about announcing some kind of medical emergency or chemical leak that would allow us to quarantine the entire area and screen people as they left, but she said no go. Too much publicity.” Chuck would have ordered it on his own authority, because publicity was nothing compared to people being used as drink pouches for monsters, but he wasn’t a general and he doubted local reporters would listen to a Nerd Herder warning of the impending vampocalypse.
“Hey, speaking of sedatives,” Chuck realized, “can you get us a bunch of dead man’s blood? Apparently that’s like vampire Valium. Drink it or inject it, either way they lose the ability to fight back.”
Casey’s eyebrows raised; he was always interested in learning about new ways to harm things. “Hunh. Have to be a dead man?”
Chuck’s mouth fell open. Trust Casey to come up with a logical and yet completely unexpected question when it came to weaponry. “Um—I guess it’s a figure of speech?”
“You guess, or you know?” Casey growled. He shook his head, seeing the answer on Chuck’s face. “Never mind, I’ll get it from men. Can it be dried, or does it have to be liquid? If it has to be liquid, can I mix it with anticoagulants to keep it working longer?”
Chuck winced. “I’m just gonna give you Sam’s number, okay, and you can talk specs with him.”
He fled before Casey could do more than just give him the look that said he’d never kick as much ass as a real spy.
****
Dean had always known there had to be secret government outposts underneath big mall stores. Well, not that specific, but the general idea: the world was full of hidden things, most of them bad, but occasionally cool.
Chuck Bartowski (Dean wasn’t quite ready to call him ‘good Chuck,’ but maybe ‘tall Chuck’ or ‘geek Chuck’ was going to work; he was still thinking about it) met them at the Nerd Herd counter, right where Dean had first encountered him in his fruitless search for a real Walkman.
“Hey, Sam, hey, Dean,” he said, waving frantically, as if they’d have forgotten him and been able to ignore a six foot four guy in a painfully geeky short-sleeved-shirt-and-tie combo. Dean made a mental note to try the tech support disguise more often—it automatically ratcheted the threat level down even though he knew for a fact that Nerd Chuck had major mojo and a couple of well-armed keepers besides.
He took them past a couple of even more disturbingly geeky employees and led them down the hidden stairway, nodding to them in the middle of chattering about stuff Dean already knew about vampires and excitedly exchanging theories with Sam.
“So, you actually work at the Buy More too,” Dean said, interrupting a digression about rakshasa. He wasn’t book-smart like the geek Gigantors in front of him, but he could tell when there was a familiarity that only came from hating the same customers.
“Oh, uh, yeah,” Chuck said, turning to look at him for the first time since he’d realized that Sam was his psychic intellectual soulmate or whatever. “I’m now pretty much full-time with the spy thing, but the government covers for me by supposedly hiring me to do offsite installation and service, so my, uh, co-workers, if you can really call them workers which I’m not sure I would, don’t know what I do.”
Dean shook his head. “Man, if it was me, I’d make ‘em pay me like a supermodel and quit my day job.”
Chuck blinked, shocked. “But then I wouldn’t have a cover!”
Dean thought that a cover as a Buy More employee was probably not the most helpful thing for a spy, or a psychic, but then he wasn’t either one of those.
When they got to the secure government area, it was still just as intimidating as it had been the first time, except that the hot chick was, sadly, missing. They sat down at a table in front of some high-tech equipment that made Dean feel almost like James Bond himself and watched a tape of the vampires’ escape. Dean would’ve thought that he’d have an easy time of it, but usually he only saw the aftermath, or he was close enough to the action that he had to worry about saving himself and whoever else could be saved. Watching already-dead people die was not a good way to start a hunt. It reminded him of watching Meg use Sam’s body to kill, or—other times he’d been present for a slaughter.
As Chuck explained more about how the vampires had been held so that the government could figure out what made them tick (short answer: blood and killing people) and see if that could somehow be turned into Homeland Security, Sam got angrier and angrier, until he was practically vibrating with outrage. “This is an atrocity! The government put all these people in harm’s way! You don’t study vampires who insist on killing people, you put them down!”
Dean snorted while Chuck raised his hands like he wasn’t sure whether Sam was going to start throwing punches. Sam wasn’t wrong, but—“Sammy, that’s only the plot of, like, every third science fiction movie ever. What do you expect from the Men in Black? Anyway, it’s not like we can go Woodward and Bernstein on the conspiracy to weaponize vampires.”
Sam stared at Dean with his usual intensity when Dean was being practical (excuse him, ‘morally obtuse’). “If we help them cover this up—”
“Then we’ll be killing vampires, the thing you just said we should be doing, right?”
“I’ll tell them,” Chuck said resolutely. “I’ll make sure the message gets to the right people.”
Dean privately didn’t think much of that, either. Even if Chuck was, against the evidence, a well-respected part of the national security team, the supernatural was too rich a source of power for anybody in power to ignore once they knew about it. Which probably explained a lot about Dick Cheney, come to think of it.
“You mentioned something about ammo?” Dean asked, because the conversation was going nowhere.
Like that was the magic word, the other big guy—Casey, though Dean didn’t know whether that was his first name or his last—popped up out of nowhere. “Come to the armory. I want you to pick out stuff that’s good for killing vampires.”
Sam and Chuck continued to jerk each other off over respect for human life and shit like that, so Dean went with Casey.
“Oh my God,” Dean said when Casey showed him what he meant by ‘armory.’ Dean felt like he’d slammed an entire fifth of whiskey while getting a blowjob. A really good blowjob. “Can I--?”
Casey inspected Dean. His mouth twisted. “Tell you what,” he said. “Take what we need for this job—and you can take what you want, too.”
Dean didn’t hesitate, just grabbed a duffel bag sitting in the corner and started stuffing grenades, C-4, and other interesting-looking items in as carefully as the situation warranted while they discussed dead man’s blood. Unfortunately, while Dean could say for a fact that dead woman’s blood worked fine, he couldn’t answer Casey’s other questions, and the G-man was right that it would be useful to know whether, say, a shotgun shell packed with dried blood would also do the trick. Vampires plus distance weapon against vampires equalled a much better idea than stabbing them. So maybe there was some merit to experimenting on vampires, though Dean was of the opinion that locking the supernatural up longterm never made sense.
“The anticoagulant’s worth trying,” Dean admitted as he zipped up his bonus duffel, packed as full as would fit into the Impala. He had acquired a mini flamethrower, which justified the trip right there. “Think we can rig up an aerosol sprayer?” Yeah, inhaling blood would be nasty for the people they expected the vampires to be hiding among. But it would suck a lot more, pun intended, to get eaten, and it might be their best chance of sorting the quick from the undead.
Casey grunted an affirmative. “I can blow their heads off when they’re down, right?” he asked, with the tone of a man double-checking because he didn’t want to miss his favorite part.
Dean approved. “We tend to cut ‘em off, but a couple of hollow-points right on target should do the trick.”
Casey reached into one of his many pockets and held out a black-and-red box.
Dean whistled. “How the fuck do you have Black Talon bullets?” He’d heard about how well they killed, but he’d never had the opportunity to see them in action, seeing as how they’d supposedly been discontinued for over ten years.
Casey smirked, righteous and well-armed. “That’s a state secret.” But he tossed Dean the box.
****
Sarah joined Chuck and Sam soon after Dean and Casey went off to do some male bonding over weapons of mass destruction. Chuck was dubious about the wisdom of that; neither of them seemed to need any encouragement. But Casey as per usual hadn’t asked Chuck’s opinion, and Dean had just smirked at them all like he’d won the jackpot, so Chuck focused on his part of the job.
Sarah had been following the trackers—five of them, four in one cluster and the remaining one on its own, all in downtown LA. Busy commercial areas, Sarah said. The four were most likely in a restaurant-slash-nightclub that was open 24 hours. The theme was, naturally, Heaven and Hell. “Because that’s not in any way cliché,” Chuck commented. Sam looked more pained than usual—and from what Chuck had seen, Sam really needed to turn his frown upside down on a more regular basis, though even with just the patchy information from the Intersect Chuck could see where a guy with Sam’s life might be a teensy bit emo.
They had a brief debate over whether to go after the lone wolf—vampire—first and then take down the clot (heh), but they quickly agreed that the risk that the group of four would scatter meant that the harder job should be done first.
“Is there any chance the vampires know about the trackers?” Sam asked. “It’s not as if the vampires are alive in the first place, so how would we be able to tell if a tracker had been ripped out?”
Sarah quickly brought up the specs on the computer and they both leaned over her shoulders, though Chuck noted with approval that Sam was careful to do so in a non-touching, respectful, eyes-only-on-the-screen way. Whereas Chuck was pretty sure that if Sam’s brother had been present, Chuck would’ve been forced to do something to protect Sarah’s honor. Something like: watch while Sarah kicked Dean’s ass. But anyway, Sam’s presence was a real timesaver in that regard.
“According to the records, they were stuck with enough needles that they might’ve missed the tracker injection,” Sarah said after a minute. “Anyway, the trackers are still our best leads.”
****
In the privacy of his own head, Dean could admit that he really, really liked prepping for a job. It just felt good to take the time to get all the weapons ready and properly stowed. Right now, there was also a fair amount of eye candy involved.
Casey, for example, was wearing a dark blue paramilitary-style outfit that made clear just how much muscle there was in that ramrod-straight frame, with lots of little leather cases looking like random accessories but actually holding his weapons. Sam had dressed down with a white tank top that went a bit further than Casey’s getup, providing a detailed visual guide to each individual muscle whether covered by cloth or not, and cargo pants roomy enough to hide his knives, not that anyone would be looking that far down.
Sarah had gone the dominatrix route, thank fuck, with a kind of stacked black rubber ring necklace thing that highlighted the length of her neck and, not for nothing, provided a bite guard. Her hair was sleeked back into a high ponytail, with silver barrettes on each side that turned out to be handles for the razor wire coiled between them, and Dean couldn’t keep back his “Awesome!” when she explained that. Also thank fuck, she seemed to understand that he was completely sincere and would have had the same reaction even had she not been otherwise dressed like a leather wet dream, all straps and grommets, her knives tucked into her thigh-high boots.
“What about you?” she asked, staring at Dean.
He gave her his best shit-eating grin. “I get into bars no matter how I’m dressed.”
Yeah, so that didn’t work, even when Dean pointed out that Geek Chuck had also not changed, which led to the revelation that Sarah expected Chuck to sit in the surveillance van and coordinate, which led to the further revelation that Chuck expected to do no such thing. Dean tuned that fight out, and ultimately found himself in the government’s costume room, which, he had to admit, made up for a lot of having to get dressed to impress some poser club kids.
Chuck flailed around while Dean picked out a black T-shirt and black leather pants to go with his shitkicker boots. Dean tucked the shirt over the weapons stored at the small of his back and looked at himself in the full-length mirror. “Dude, I am rocking the John Crichton look,” he said to himself.
“You watch Farscape?” Chuck asked, a bit disbelieving.
“Aeryn Sun,” Dean said in his best duh-voice.
Chuck paused, then: “Aeryn Sun,” with deep conviction. Of course, Chuck had his own kick-ass warrior chick, but as far as Dean could tell they were both in pining mode right now, which was sad, especially since Dean had the feeling that offering Sarah a little recreational distraction would end with parts of his body in places they didn’t want to be. “Um,” Chuck said, “do you have any thoughts on what I should wear?”
Dean looked him over carefully. The hair could be slicked back, which he did, despite Chuck’s squirming, and then he got Chuck into a black button-down with the top couple of buttons undone and some black slacks. Chuck wasn’t as built as Sam (or Casey), but there were pro basketball players not as built as Sam, and, once Dean rolled up Chuck’s sleeves and added matching black leather wristcuffs and a bit of black eyeliner, Chuck was total club material.
Sarah and Casey certainly seemed to think so, when Dean brought out his creation, sneaking looks at Chuck like they couldn’t help themselves. Dean bet they thought they were being subtle, which made him hope they did the spy stuff better when they weren’t personally involved.
*****
In the end, Chuck managed to argue Sarah and Casey into letting him take the place of the bartender, where he could dose everyone’s drinks with dead man’s blood. Chuck had initially maintained that Casey was usually the bartender and Chuck the operative, but that argument had gone unheeded, since they didn’t need Chuck’s ability to flash. Everyone agreed that the safest place was behind the bar where Chuck could hide a machete. And honestly, the thought that he might need to use a machete was enough to keep him from fighting too hard to take a more exposed position.
The building was on a block entirely surrounded by parking lots, an oasis of artificial light reflecting off a sea of windshields. The night was clear and warm, and if he’d been taking Sarah on a date it would have been perfect. Instead he was reviewing blueprints in his head (two floors, plus a basement with plenty of room) and trying to figure out if he could tell where his companions had stored their weapons (those leather pants in particular were very form-fitting).
Sam and Dean seemed disconcerted by all the personnel deployed to lock the building down once the five of them entered. Chuck guessed the Winchesters weren’t used to having quite so much backup. Anyone who left would be quickly detained by soldiers posing as CDC employees, injected with dead man’s blood, and released if there was no reaction, with a cover story about a fast-spreading variant of H1N1. Inside, though, it was all on the team to find the vampires and take them out before any civilians saw anything that couldn’t easily be explained away.
Casey slipped in through the back entrance to take out the bartender, because that at least was standard, while Chuck, Sarah, and the Winchesters approached the doorman’s scrutiny. “I still feel like we should be turning these people away,” Chuck whispered to Sarah.
“You know we can’t afford to tip the fugitives off until it’s too late,” she responded in kind. Sarah did not like to use the word ‘vampires,’ Chuck had discovered. She’d been so cool about the Princess Leia costume, but he guessed that was different than taking part in a real-life horror movie.
Ahead of them, Dean grinned widely as he and Sam were passed inside. Chuck heard the bouncer ask which gym Sam used, and even with all the neon around Chuck could tell that Sam was blushing and that Dean couldn’t decide whether to mock or feel his own masculinity threatened. Chuck was getting the sense that having an older brother was very different from having an older sister.
Chuck smiled at the doorman, wasted effort since the guy couldn’t take his eyes off of Sarah, not that Chuck could blame him. All Chuck got was a once-over that expressed vague disbelief that Chuck was actually with this amazing woman, and Chuck had the urge to explain himself, but he could tell that it was in fact an urge to tell Sarah again that they should be together for real and not just as part of a mission. He was good at multitasking, but now was not the time.
They proceeded to the bar, which was in between Heaven and Hell. That could’ve made a good metaphor if it hadn’t been so easy to see up the skirts of the girls in Heaven, what with the transparent steps up to the second floor. Casey was just coming out from behind the service area, and he nodded at Chuck, who scooted around to take up his position behind the bar. Casey had left the vials of dead man’s blood right under the sink, next to the highball glasses.
“Hey,” a woman wearing a halo, fluffy wings, and very little else said, leaning over the bar with a tray of empties in her hand, “where’s Stu?”
“Sick,” Chuck said, which was undoubtedly close to how the guy would feel when he woke up from whatever Casey had done to him. “I’m filling in. What’ve you got for me?”
She listed off some truly ridiculous drink names—Touched by an Angel, really?--along with an order for some actual beer. Chuck consulted the Intersect and started working, scanning the crowd as he poured to look for the escaped vampires.
****
Dean bellied up to the bar and waited his turn. Chuck had decent sleight-of-hand, he noticed, getting the dead man’s blood even into beer bottles so quickly that no one who wasn’t watching for it would’ve seen. Chuck saw him and shook his head slightly—so he’d also come up empty on the vamps whose faces they knew—and then ambled away.
“Hey,” Dean snapped, and Chuck looked at him like he’d started belting out the National Anthem or something. “Can a guy get a drink around here?”
“Oh!” Chuck hesitated, as if he wasn’t sure that Dean should be drinking on the job. Dean couldn’t explain to him that his tolerance was just a little bit higher than the average bear’s—the term ‘functional alcoholic’ existed for a reason. But that wasn’t a conversation he could have even with an ordinary barkeep, so Dean just grinned toothily at him. “What’ll you have?”
“Corona for me, ice water for the lady, and a Devil Made Me Do It for my buddy,” Dean said. He was constitutionally required to give Sam a hard time, no matter what kind of memories it stirred up.
Dean took his drinks back to where Sam and Sarah were scoping out the crowds, at a little table right by the stairs. He looked around with the same casual curiosity, just another guy checking out the T&A on display, taking some time to sneer at the wings etched on the glass walls and at the pitchfork designs embedded in the marble floors. Sarah took a time-out from her surveillance to scrutinize him as if she could see his desire to smash it all, and then Sam noticed her noticing. Sam just shrugged uncomfortably and said, “We’ve got … religious issues,” which made Dean want to punch him.
“Heads up,” Dean said, because his mind was on the fucking job, “six o’clock.” He chugged his beer and slid out of his seat to get next to the hottie in the teeny-tiny red dress, who looked a lot better here than she had in the government videos.
He put himself almost in front of her—with a human woman, you never totally blocked her way unless you wanted to set off her creepazoid alert, and he doubted vampire chicks were that different—and smiled, lazy and friendly.
She looked him over and smiled right back. Yeah, he still had it.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.” Even with the noise surrounding them, he could hear the humor in it. They both knew they were just getting the formalities out of the way. She bit her lip; it was a pretty lip. “You wanna go in the back, where we can talk?”
“You’re a genius,” he said.
Once they were in the deserted hallway, the muted thump of the music still rumbling through them like a heartbeat, it was simple to press her up against the wall with one hand while reaching for the syringe in his back pocket with the other. He flicked off the cap with his thumb and had her sagging helplessly before she could even fang out on him. And then he used the garotte—he’d have preferred the machete, all told, but that would’ve been hard to smuggle in without going Sam’s route of big, baggy pants, and he just wasn’t down with that.
Her head popped off—the black T-shirt was good for more than making him look better--and he looked up to see Sam and Sarah hanging back, letting him take care of business. Sarah could’ve been watching somebody stack oranges at the grocery store; she either had a fantastic poker face or she didn’t really mind watching something that looked human get iced.
“I’ll get the body out the back door,” Sam volunteered. They hadn’t ever discussed it outright, but they weren’t turning over any intact vampires to the government. But they still needed the feds’ resources for disposal, especially if they didn’t want the people inside to panic when someone stumbled over a corpse.
“Don’t forget the head,” Dean said, helpfully, and smirked innocently at Sam’s scowl.
Then a second escapee entered the hallway, either to figure out where his companion had gone or to share in the drinking. They all gaped at each other for a couple of seconds, and then the vampire was staggering back against the wall, a slender blood-slicked knife sticking out of his chest.
Dean was impressed. He’d barely seen Sarah’s hand move.
Sam handed over his machete—Dean noticed that, for all Sarah was into Chuck, she looked a little disappointed when Sam was able to pull it out through a hole he’d put in one of his pockets instead of dropping trou—and Dean took care of vamp #2 as well. Then he was treated to the sight of Sam dragging two headless corpses down the hallway, hands fisted in their sagging shirts and heads squeezed under his arms, like a suburban resident with an excess of luggage.
“Found one,” Casey’s voice hissed in Dean’s ear. “Northwest corner. Red shirt.”
“Well, that’s appropriate,” Dean said, and Chuck made a choked-off sound, which was more appreciation than he usually got for his excellent sense of humor, so he chalked up a point in Chuck’s favor.
“I’m sorry your friend’s feeling so poorly,” Chuck said loudly through the comms—subtle the dude was not—“Why don’t I help him into the back office to sit down until he stops feeling so woozy?”
“You go to Casey,” Sarah said quickly. “I’ll help Chuck.”
Dean nodded and hurried back out into the press of bodies and noise.
****
Chuck could totally handle a vampire on his own, no worries. Okay, some worries, but the vampire in this case was drugged and pliant, sagging—or was that sloshing?—against him as they shuffled down the tiny, poorly lit hallway. The vampire’s mouth was only inches from Chuck’s neck! He tried to discreetly increase the distance, but the vampire just tilted more in response, and the only thing keeping him from screaming was that Chuck was pretty sure that the vampire would be falling over if Chuck let go.
He wanted this to be ‘the vampire.’ Not Oliver Gunderson, born in 1973, graduated from Cal State Fresno, employed until 2004 as a bookkeeper in a small dry-cleaning chain on the coast. Dean and Sam had been adamant that, whatever the person had been, the vampire part was in charge now. The footage he’d seen had supported that claim, but—those vampires, this vampire, had also been tortured by the government to figure out what made them tick. Chuck had seen Sarah and Casey leave behind a fair amount of carnage when necessary for their own escapes. If they could only get the vampire safely secured, maybe they could find out if there was an Oliver left in there after all.
He managed to get the vampire dumped into the chair in front of the manager’s desk, which looked oddly like Big Mike’s desk at the Buy More. In fact the Buy More could have stocked this office almost in its entirety, if you skipped over the naked-woman-of-the-month calendar, and probably that could’ve been snagged out of Jeff or Lester’s locker. “Hey,” Chuck told the vampire—Oliver—“how are you feeling?”
“Unnnnghh,” Oliver said, which was going to make it difficult to figure out if he was still homicidal. It was still homicidal, right? Even if he was no longer human, he was killing humans, so, definitely homicidal. Or possibly not, which was exactly the problem: Chuck couldn’t in good conscience turn him over to a top-secret government research program if there was any chance he was an upright but undead citizen.
“So, uh, Oliver.”
Chuck’s knowledge of his name was evidently surprising enough to get the vampire’s attention even through the dead man’s blood. Chuck watched, ready to kick and scream if necessary, as Oliver struggled to focus. “Hypothetically, if we offered you the opportunity to behave yourself and, you know, do takeout blood instead of killing people, how would you feel about that?”
“… Fuck you,” Oliver said, not promisingly. “…Gonna rip your, your spine …”
Which, of course, was when Sarah arrived, ending all possibility of negotiation. Even though she told him to turn away, he knew that he ought to be willing to watch. Oliver managed to go all fangy before she wrapped the razor wire around his neck, but his blood looked the same as anybody else’s. Chuck tried to remember that it was somebody else’s blood. That didn’t help much.
“That’s three,” Sarah said, efficiently tying off the trashbag containing Oliver’s head. “You should get back out there, keep dosing drinks and scanning the crowd in case you can find the one we’re still missing. I’m going to go help Casey.”
Chuck fled before he could find out what she planned to do with the body.
Part 2.
Chuck versus the Family Business
SPN/Chuck
Pairings: Dean Winchester/Chuck Bartowski, with plenty of other subtext, including Sarah/Chuck/Casey and canon pairings.
Rating: NC-17
For
pinkfinity in Sweet Charity, forever ago. Chuck and the Winchesters hunt vampires. This is a sequel to Chuck versus the Uncanny, whose premise is that the premise is that Chuck Bartowski and Sam Winchester knew each other casually at Stanford, and met again at the Buy More, where the Winchesters mistook the Intersect for psychic gifts. Don’t even try to match the continuity; AU from after S3 of Chuck and vague post-S6 setting for SPN. Warnings: Gore and just-offscreen torture, excessive attention to costuming. Also, Dean knows lines from Chicago.
Read it on AO3.
“Sarah,” Chuck said and immediately forgot his carefully planned discussion of the day’s business. “Hey, uh, yeah.” That answered the question of whether the absence of Shaw had diminished the awkwardness from their latest round of will-they-or-won’t-they. Well, they had, and Chuck was committed to believing that they were going to, but they weren’t at this exact moment, and Chuck couldn’t even say that the reasons were bad ones.
“Yes, Chuck?” Sarah looked up from the gun she was assembling.
Chuck cleared his throat and tried again. “I hear there’s a pretty good taco stand that just opened up on the other side of the mall. We would have to cross five lanes of traffic to get there, kind of a live-action Frogger thing, but I for one would go further than that for a good fish taco.”
Casey, who’d been fiddling with a sniper scope, snorted. Chuck turned and frowned at him.
“Sounds good, Chuck. Why don’t you come, too, John?” Sarah asked, either because she didn’t want to be alone with Chuck or because she actually cared about Casey’s ability to share in the promised taste sensation. Maybe both—Sarah was a very caring person, if you got past the adamantium walls. Which Chuck totally planned to do again, no matter how long it took, and if Casey came along for the ride, Chuck was okay with that.
Did that come out right? Chuck wasn’t sure if that was a question that could be asked about an interior monologue.
Meanwhile, Casey had made a sound that Chuck, through long experience, was able to translate into an affirmative.
Chuck had to supply most of the dialogue in the resulting journey, though he was used to that, and he did manage to explain his theory about how they could use their current downtime to practice more combination moves, so that when Chuck yelled out “Number three!” they’d all know what to do. Sarah said she thought it was an interesting idea, which meant that she thought it was a terrible idea but probably harmless, and Casey didn’t say anything at all, which meant that he wanted to think it over before deciding how to mock it. Not bad for a first try, if Chuck did say so himself.
They were coming back from the taco stand, Casey setting his usual brisk pace and Chuck and Sarah following in perfect spy formation, when all of their phones went off at once. Chuck glanced down, saw it was the General text-demanding their presence in Castle, and quickly unwrapped his first taco so he could eat and walk at the same time.
He was guessing that delicious tacos were about to be a lower priority in his life.
Chuck was vindicated when the General glared so hard at them over the videoscreen that Sarah and Casey didn’t make a move towards their own food. “Agents,” she said, “the Army has suffered a serious security breach. A major potential weapon has—” she paused, and her mouth pursed in disapproval. “Escaped.”
“How does a weapon escape?” Casey asked for all of them, though Chuck had the sinking feeling that he knew.
“This weapon—” The General sighed. “It’s--they’re--unusual.” And then she began to explain.
After a minute, Chuck interrupted, because he couldn’t keep himself silent. “You’re telling me that the government is secretly testing vampires as supersoldiers?” The Intersect looked substantially less silly by comparison, was all he was saying.
“Technically—” Chuck waited, but the General didn’t finish. “Your mission is to retrieve the individuals, alive if possible, but containment is a higher priority. Their tracking chips are still functioning, but they’re only accurate to within fifty meters, and they’ve been staying in high-density areas.”
After a few more words with Sarah and Casey about weaponry and civilian information control, she signed off, and then they were just staring at each other.
“Vampires?” Sarah said, which did seem worth repeating. But she shook herself, becoming Competent Agent Who Takes Everything Seriously in an instant. “How do we find a vampire in a crowd if they don’t really burst into flames in sunlight?”
Casey scratched his chin, looking thoughtful. “General said they were faster and stronger than humans,” and he sounded eager enough that Chuck was going to have to warn him about not going hand to hand with monsters if there were any alternatives.
“Yes, and if we could get them to run races, I’m sure that would help,” Sarah said, just a little annoyed. “Chuck, can you review all the security footage from the Army experiments and see if you can figure out how to distinguish them?”
“I can do that, yeah,” Chuck agreed. “But also, here’s an idea: we should call in the experts.”
****
Sam cleared his throat. Some of the roughly twenty coffee-drinkers in the place looked up, marginally interested.
Dean sighed. “Listen up, everybody!” he snapped. “We are federal agents Goldstein and Nimmer. Someone here is illegally downloading movies from the internet on the free wi-fi. If you are not that someone, we’re going to have to ask you to leave.”
In under sixty seconds, the place was clear except for one gawky teenaged kid, who Dean seriously hoped wasn’t sitting in a puddle of his own piss, because his day did not need that kind of glory. Sam, plainly having the same thought, indicated with a jerk of his chin that Dean should go talk to him, Dean being the one who’d terrified him into immobility. Sam went off to make nice with the owner, whose anger at losing all her customers Sam was going to placate by assuring her that the FBI wasn’t at all interested in blaming the coffee shop for the actions of a rogue tea-drinker.
Dean moseyed up to the teen, who if anything grew more statue-like, and took a look at his computer, then nodded to himself.
“How old are you?” Dean asked when he sat down across from the kid.
It took the boy more than a few tries to get his mouth working. “Suh—seventeen,” he managed.
“Big Jocks, Big Cocks II, hunh?” Dean made it a rhetorical question. “Lemme give you some advice, kid. First of all, volume three is ten times better. Second, don’t download this shit. That’s what PornTube is for. Third, when you do get your hands on an actual other person, don’t pound away at them like these guys do. Remember that looking good and feeling good are two different things, and if you’re not sure, ask the dude you’re with. Or the girl, that part’s pretty much the same. You hear me?”
The kid nodded desperately. Dean could feel Sam across the room trying not to let his eyes fall out of his head, either because Dean was being nice in the middle of a hunt or because Sam had some idea of the contents of Big Jocks, Big Cocks I-IV.
“Now go and sin no more,” Dean told him. “Or, anyway, sin somewhere else.”
The boy fled, almost forgetting to take his computer with him. Dean checked in with Sam, who nodded to show that the owner and staff had also been kicked out, and they got to work.
This was a good job, Dean thought. Easy enough, but still needing both of them, Sam on research and Dean with the hands-on application. Banishing a heart-attack-inducing curse was a good reminder of why it wasn’t just crippling codependence and shellshock keeping them together.
Right as Dean finished etching the last cleansing symbol onto the underside of the cursed Clover machine, Sam’s cellphone rang. “Hello?” Dean heard, with the careful tone that said that Sam didn’t recognize the caller’s number.
“Chuck?” Sam asked. Dean swore and banged his head painfully on the metal as he hauled his ass upright. He’d really thought they were done with all that prophecy bullshit, and if Chuck was contacting them then ‘clusterfuck’ was likely to be an understatement.
“How did you get this number?” Sam asked, and Dean closed his mouth. The prophet Chuck shouldn’t have had any problem with that. Sam glanced at Dean, and Dean gave him his most eloquent ‘dude, what the fuck?’ expression. Sam mouthed something that Dean didn’t understand, what with most of Sam’s attention still being on the phone call. Chuck was being a talkative bastard, apparently, because Sam was listening, nodding a little as if Chuck could see him, and generally being annoying, which in this case meant ignoring Dean.
“Sam!” Dean hissed.
Sam jumped a little and put his phone on speaker.
“—So, when they said ‘vampires,’ I thought, ‘I know someone who probably knows what to do with vampires, and probably could use being owed a favor by a powerful and secretive government organization, seeing as how you do tend to get arrested more than you probably want to be,’ and so I was thinking that maybe you could come out to Burbank—”
Dean lost track of the narrative because he was reorienting. That was not Chuck Shurley. That was that college friend of Sam’s, the one who’d dropped out of Stanford to become a government psychic. So the call was more on the order of the ordinary slog that was their lives instead of literally apocalyptic suckage. They were, just as of this minute, between hunts, and maybe they could use somebody else to talk to besides each other; they were doing fine, all things considered, but there was a lot of shit to consider. Working with new people who knew about the supernatural life might be almost like taking a vacation. Bonus, the spy chick was super hot.
Dean rubbed the back of his neck and suggested, “Ask him how many vampires,” because from what Dean had seen (and heard) this Chuck sometimes had performance issues in getting to the point.
****
Chuck had rarely been more grateful that Sarah and Casey gave him the benefit of the doubt on keeping Sam and his brother on the down low. Convincing the General to authorize outside consultants who were not wanted as felons only because they were supposed to be dead would have taken a lot more energy than he had at the moment. He was too busy accessing all the vampire-related records in the Intersect (gross, and also largely unhelpful, since they were focused on experiments on the things once captured and not on the process of capture itself) and reading the materials Sam had uploaded for him.
“How do you know they’ll help?” Sarah had asked. “The older one definitely had an attitude.”
Chuck had thought about the file he’d flashed through. “Because that’s what they do,” he said.
Sure enough, after some initial wobbling, plus Chuck’s explanation of how he’d put together various reported credit card frauds, unexplained deaths, and random phenomena (including message board reports of the sighting of one of the five cherry 1967 Impalas in the country) to find Sam’s current identity, Sam had agreed to come to California—they were in New Mexico, a day’s hard drive away, which gave the Buy More team time to assimilate all the vampire-related information they could find.
Chuck was definitely not allowing Morgan in on this one. He’d think that vampires were so cool he was likely to get himself killed or, worse, vamped. It would be classic to have to kill his own best friend to save him, and while Chuck appreciated the classics, he’d prefer to keep that one onscreen, thanks.
While Chuck was learning the differences between Buffy vampires and real vampires, Sarah was watching the footage of their escape for the third time. He knew she could handle the blood and death, but he was a little worried about the whole ‘surveillance while death is dealt’ issue, since it hadn’t been so long since she’d been the one on tape. Even though she hadn’t been a soulless creature of the night while doing her own killing, he had the sinking feeling that she might think that made her worse than the vampires. Meanwhile, Casey was off doing—hey, what was Casey doing again?
“Sleeping gas,” Casey said without turning around when Chuck found him in the armory. “Knock out the civilians, leave the vamps standing so we know who’s who.”
Chuck thought about that for a second. They had excellent pictures of the five escapees, but they had no idea how many new vampires those escapees had turned, so they did need some way to distinguish hostiles from nonhostiles. “They don’t go down with conventional sedatives, but maybe gas will work. But what if they use the now conveniently placed and helpless civilians as hostages?”
Casey shrugged, and Chuck resolved to think of a better idea. “This would be a lot easier if we could go public,” he continued. “I asked the General about announcing some kind of medical emergency or chemical leak that would allow us to quarantine the entire area and screen people as they left, but she said no go. Too much publicity.” Chuck would have ordered it on his own authority, because publicity was nothing compared to people being used as drink pouches for monsters, but he wasn’t a general and he doubted local reporters would listen to a Nerd Herder warning of the impending vampocalypse.
“Hey, speaking of sedatives,” Chuck realized, “can you get us a bunch of dead man’s blood? Apparently that’s like vampire Valium. Drink it or inject it, either way they lose the ability to fight back.”
Casey’s eyebrows raised; he was always interested in learning about new ways to harm things. “Hunh. Have to be a dead man?”
Chuck’s mouth fell open. Trust Casey to come up with a logical and yet completely unexpected question when it came to weaponry. “Um—I guess it’s a figure of speech?”
“You guess, or you know?” Casey growled. He shook his head, seeing the answer on Chuck’s face. “Never mind, I’ll get it from men. Can it be dried, or does it have to be liquid? If it has to be liquid, can I mix it with anticoagulants to keep it working longer?”
Chuck winced. “I’m just gonna give you Sam’s number, okay, and you can talk specs with him.”
He fled before Casey could do more than just give him the look that said he’d never kick as much ass as a real spy.
****
Dean had always known there had to be secret government outposts underneath big mall stores. Well, not that specific, but the general idea: the world was full of hidden things, most of them bad, but occasionally cool.
Chuck Bartowski (Dean wasn’t quite ready to call him ‘good Chuck,’ but maybe ‘tall Chuck’ or ‘geek Chuck’ was going to work; he was still thinking about it) met them at the Nerd Herd counter, right where Dean had first encountered him in his fruitless search for a real Walkman.
“Hey, Sam, hey, Dean,” he said, waving frantically, as if they’d have forgotten him and been able to ignore a six foot four guy in a painfully geeky short-sleeved-shirt-and-tie combo. Dean made a mental note to try the tech support disguise more often—it automatically ratcheted the threat level down even though he knew for a fact that Nerd Chuck had major mojo and a couple of well-armed keepers besides.
He took them past a couple of even more disturbingly geeky employees and led them down the hidden stairway, nodding to them in the middle of chattering about stuff Dean already knew about vampires and excitedly exchanging theories with Sam.
“So, you actually work at the Buy More too,” Dean said, interrupting a digression about rakshasa. He wasn’t book-smart like the geek Gigantors in front of him, but he could tell when there was a familiarity that only came from hating the same customers.
“Oh, uh, yeah,” Chuck said, turning to look at him for the first time since he’d realized that Sam was his psychic intellectual soulmate or whatever. “I’m now pretty much full-time with the spy thing, but the government covers for me by supposedly hiring me to do offsite installation and service, so my, uh, co-workers, if you can really call them workers which I’m not sure I would, don’t know what I do.”
Dean shook his head. “Man, if it was me, I’d make ‘em pay me like a supermodel and quit my day job.”
Chuck blinked, shocked. “But then I wouldn’t have a cover!”
Dean thought that a cover as a Buy More employee was probably not the most helpful thing for a spy, or a psychic, but then he wasn’t either one of those.
When they got to the secure government area, it was still just as intimidating as it had been the first time, except that the hot chick was, sadly, missing. They sat down at a table in front of some high-tech equipment that made Dean feel almost like James Bond himself and watched a tape of the vampires’ escape. Dean would’ve thought that he’d have an easy time of it, but usually he only saw the aftermath, or he was close enough to the action that he had to worry about saving himself and whoever else could be saved. Watching already-dead people die was not a good way to start a hunt. It reminded him of watching Meg use Sam’s body to kill, or—other times he’d been present for a slaughter.
As Chuck explained more about how the vampires had been held so that the government could figure out what made them tick (short answer: blood and killing people) and see if that could somehow be turned into Homeland Security, Sam got angrier and angrier, until he was practically vibrating with outrage. “This is an atrocity! The government put all these people in harm’s way! You don’t study vampires who insist on killing people, you put them down!”
Dean snorted while Chuck raised his hands like he wasn’t sure whether Sam was going to start throwing punches. Sam wasn’t wrong, but—“Sammy, that’s only the plot of, like, every third science fiction movie ever. What do you expect from the Men in Black? Anyway, it’s not like we can go Woodward and Bernstein on the conspiracy to weaponize vampires.”
Sam stared at Dean with his usual intensity when Dean was being practical (excuse him, ‘morally obtuse’). “If we help them cover this up—”
“Then we’ll be killing vampires, the thing you just said we should be doing, right?”
“I’ll tell them,” Chuck said resolutely. “I’ll make sure the message gets to the right people.”
Dean privately didn’t think much of that, either. Even if Chuck was, against the evidence, a well-respected part of the national security team, the supernatural was too rich a source of power for anybody in power to ignore once they knew about it. Which probably explained a lot about Dick Cheney, come to think of it.
“You mentioned something about ammo?” Dean asked, because the conversation was going nowhere.
Like that was the magic word, the other big guy—Casey, though Dean didn’t know whether that was his first name or his last—popped up out of nowhere. “Come to the armory. I want you to pick out stuff that’s good for killing vampires.”
Sam and Chuck continued to jerk each other off over respect for human life and shit like that, so Dean went with Casey.
“Oh my God,” Dean said when Casey showed him what he meant by ‘armory.’ Dean felt like he’d slammed an entire fifth of whiskey while getting a blowjob. A really good blowjob. “Can I--?”
Casey inspected Dean. His mouth twisted. “Tell you what,” he said. “Take what we need for this job—and you can take what you want, too.”
Dean didn’t hesitate, just grabbed a duffel bag sitting in the corner and started stuffing grenades, C-4, and other interesting-looking items in as carefully as the situation warranted while they discussed dead man’s blood. Unfortunately, while Dean could say for a fact that dead woman’s blood worked fine, he couldn’t answer Casey’s other questions, and the G-man was right that it would be useful to know whether, say, a shotgun shell packed with dried blood would also do the trick. Vampires plus distance weapon against vampires equalled a much better idea than stabbing them. So maybe there was some merit to experimenting on vampires, though Dean was of the opinion that locking the supernatural up longterm never made sense.
“The anticoagulant’s worth trying,” Dean admitted as he zipped up his bonus duffel, packed as full as would fit into the Impala. He had acquired a mini flamethrower, which justified the trip right there. “Think we can rig up an aerosol sprayer?” Yeah, inhaling blood would be nasty for the people they expected the vampires to be hiding among. But it would suck a lot more, pun intended, to get eaten, and it might be their best chance of sorting the quick from the undead.
Casey grunted an affirmative. “I can blow their heads off when they’re down, right?” he asked, with the tone of a man double-checking because he didn’t want to miss his favorite part.
Dean approved. “We tend to cut ‘em off, but a couple of hollow-points right on target should do the trick.”
Casey reached into one of his many pockets and held out a black-and-red box.
Dean whistled. “How the fuck do you have Black Talon bullets?” He’d heard about how well they killed, but he’d never had the opportunity to see them in action, seeing as how they’d supposedly been discontinued for over ten years.
Casey smirked, righteous and well-armed. “That’s a state secret.” But he tossed Dean the box.
****
Sarah joined Chuck and Sam soon after Dean and Casey went off to do some male bonding over weapons of mass destruction. Chuck was dubious about the wisdom of that; neither of them seemed to need any encouragement. But Casey as per usual hadn’t asked Chuck’s opinion, and Dean had just smirked at them all like he’d won the jackpot, so Chuck focused on his part of the job.
Sarah had been following the trackers—five of them, four in one cluster and the remaining one on its own, all in downtown LA. Busy commercial areas, Sarah said. The four were most likely in a restaurant-slash-nightclub that was open 24 hours. The theme was, naturally, Heaven and Hell. “Because that’s not in any way cliché,” Chuck commented. Sam looked more pained than usual—and from what Chuck had seen, Sam really needed to turn his frown upside down on a more regular basis, though even with just the patchy information from the Intersect Chuck could see where a guy with Sam’s life might be a teensy bit emo.
They had a brief debate over whether to go after the lone wolf—vampire—first and then take down the clot (heh), but they quickly agreed that the risk that the group of four would scatter meant that the harder job should be done first.
“Is there any chance the vampires know about the trackers?” Sam asked. “It’s not as if the vampires are alive in the first place, so how would we be able to tell if a tracker had been ripped out?”
Sarah quickly brought up the specs on the computer and they both leaned over her shoulders, though Chuck noted with approval that Sam was careful to do so in a non-touching, respectful, eyes-only-on-the-screen way. Whereas Chuck was pretty sure that if Sam’s brother had been present, Chuck would’ve been forced to do something to protect Sarah’s honor. Something like: watch while Sarah kicked Dean’s ass. But anyway, Sam’s presence was a real timesaver in that regard.
“According to the records, they were stuck with enough needles that they might’ve missed the tracker injection,” Sarah said after a minute. “Anyway, the trackers are still our best leads.”
****
In the privacy of his own head, Dean could admit that he really, really liked prepping for a job. It just felt good to take the time to get all the weapons ready and properly stowed. Right now, there was also a fair amount of eye candy involved.
Casey, for example, was wearing a dark blue paramilitary-style outfit that made clear just how much muscle there was in that ramrod-straight frame, with lots of little leather cases looking like random accessories but actually holding his weapons. Sam had dressed down with a white tank top that went a bit further than Casey’s getup, providing a detailed visual guide to each individual muscle whether covered by cloth or not, and cargo pants roomy enough to hide his knives, not that anyone would be looking that far down.
Sarah had gone the dominatrix route, thank fuck, with a kind of stacked black rubber ring necklace thing that highlighted the length of her neck and, not for nothing, provided a bite guard. Her hair was sleeked back into a high ponytail, with silver barrettes on each side that turned out to be handles for the razor wire coiled between them, and Dean couldn’t keep back his “Awesome!” when she explained that. Also thank fuck, she seemed to understand that he was completely sincere and would have had the same reaction even had she not been otherwise dressed like a leather wet dream, all straps and grommets, her knives tucked into her thigh-high boots.
“What about you?” she asked, staring at Dean.
He gave her his best shit-eating grin. “I get into bars no matter how I’m dressed.”
Yeah, so that didn’t work, even when Dean pointed out that Geek Chuck had also not changed, which led to the revelation that Sarah expected Chuck to sit in the surveillance van and coordinate, which led to the further revelation that Chuck expected to do no such thing. Dean tuned that fight out, and ultimately found himself in the government’s costume room, which, he had to admit, made up for a lot of having to get dressed to impress some poser club kids.
Chuck flailed around while Dean picked out a black T-shirt and black leather pants to go with his shitkicker boots. Dean tucked the shirt over the weapons stored at the small of his back and looked at himself in the full-length mirror. “Dude, I am rocking the John Crichton look,” he said to himself.
“You watch Farscape?” Chuck asked, a bit disbelieving.
“Aeryn Sun,” Dean said in his best duh-voice.
Chuck paused, then: “Aeryn Sun,” with deep conviction. Of course, Chuck had his own kick-ass warrior chick, but as far as Dean could tell they were both in pining mode right now, which was sad, especially since Dean had the feeling that offering Sarah a little recreational distraction would end with parts of his body in places they didn’t want to be. “Um,” Chuck said, “do you have any thoughts on what I should wear?”
Dean looked him over carefully. The hair could be slicked back, which he did, despite Chuck’s squirming, and then he got Chuck into a black button-down with the top couple of buttons undone and some black slacks. Chuck wasn’t as built as Sam (or Casey), but there were pro basketball players not as built as Sam, and, once Dean rolled up Chuck’s sleeves and added matching black leather wristcuffs and a bit of black eyeliner, Chuck was total club material.
Sarah and Casey certainly seemed to think so, when Dean brought out his creation, sneaking looks at Chuck like they couldn’t help themselves. Dean bet they thought they were being subtle, which made him hope they did the spy stuff better when they weren’t personally involved.
*****
In the end, Chuck managed to argue Sarah and Casey into letting him take the place of the bartender, where he could dose everyone’s drinks with dead man’s blood. Chuck had initially maintained that Casey was usually the bartender and Chuck the operative, but that argument had gone unheeded, since they didn’t need Chuck’s ability to flash. Everyone agreed that the safest place was behind the bar where Chuck could hide a machete. And honestly, the thought that he might need to use a machete was enough to keep him from fighting too hard to take a more exposed position.
The building was on a block entirely surrounded by parking lots, an oasis of artificial light reflecting off a sea of windshields. The night was clear and warm, and if he’d been taking Sarah on a date it would have been perfect. Instead he was reviewing blueprints in his head (two floors, plus a basement with plenty of room) and trying to figure out if he could tell where his companions had stored their weapons (those leather pants in particular were very form-fitting).
Sam and Dean seemed disconcerted by all the personnel deployed to lock the building down once the five of them entered. Chuck guessed the Winchesters weren’t used to having quite so much backup. Anyone who left would be quickly detained by soldiers posing as CDC employees, injected with dead man’s blood, and released if there was no reaction, with a cover story about a fast-spreading variant of H1N1. Inside, though, it was all on the team to find the vampires and take them out before any civilians saw anything that couldn’t easily be explained away.
Casey slipped in through the back entrance to take out the bartender, because that at least was standard, while Chuck, Sarah, and the Winchesters approached the doorman’s scrutiny. “I still feel like we should be turning these people away,” Chuck whispered to Sarah.
“You know we can’t afford to tip the fugitives off until it’s too late,” she responded in kind. Sarah did not like to use the word ‘vampires,’ Chuck had discovered. She’d been so cool about the Princess Leia costume, but he guessed that was different than taking part in a real-life horror movie.
Ahead of them, Dean grinned widely as he and Sam were passed inside. Chuck heard the bouncer ask which gym Sam used, and even with all the neon around Chuck could tell that Sam was blushing and that Dean couldn’t decide whether to mock or feel his own masculinity threatened. Chuck was getting the sense that having an older brother was very different from having an older sister.
Chuck smiled at the doorman, wasted effort since the guy couldn’t take his eyes off of Sarah, not that Chuck could blame him. All Chuck got was a once-over that expressed vague disbelief that Chuck was actually with this amazing woman, and Chuck had the urge to explain himself, but he could tell that it was in fact an urge to tell Sarah again that they should be together for real and not just as part of a mission. He was good at multitasking, but now was not the time.
They proceeded to the bar, which was in between Heaven and Hell. That could’ve made a good metaphor if it hadn’t been so easy to see up the skirts of the girls in Heaven, what with the transparent steps up to the second floor. Casey was just coming out from behind the service area, and he nodded at Chuck, who scooted around to take up his position behind the bar. Casey had left the vials of dead man’s blood right under the sink, next to the highball glasses.
“Hey,” a woman wearing a halo, fluffy wings, and very little else said, leaning over the bar with a tray of empties in her hand, “where’s Stu?”
“Sick,” Chuck said, which was undoubtedly close to how the guy would feel when he woke up from whatever Casey had done to him. “I’m filling in. What’ve you got for me?”
She listed off some truly ridiculous drink names—Touched by an Angel, really?--along with an order for some actual beer. Chuck consulted the Intersect and started working, scanning the crowd as he poured to look for the escaped vampires.
****
Dean bellied up to the bar and waited his turn. Chuck had decent sleight-of-hand, he noticed, getting the dead man’s blood even into beer bottles so quickly that no one who wasn’t watching for it would’ve seen. Chuck saw him and shook his head slightly—so he’d also come up empty on the vamps whose faces they knew—and then ambled away.
“Hey,” Dean snapped, and Chuck looked at him like he’d started belting out the National Anthem or something. “Can a guy get a drink around here?”
“Oh!” Chuck hesitated, as if he wasn’t sure that Dean should be drinking on the job. Dean couldn’t explain to him that his tolerance was just a little bit higher than the average bear’s—the term ‘functional alcoholic’ existed for a reason. But that wasn’t a conversation he could have even with an ordinary barkeep, so Dean just grinned toothily at him. “What’ll you have?”
“Corona for me, ice water for the lady, and a Devil Made Me Do It for my buddy,” Dean said. He was constitutionally required to give Sam a hard time, no matter what kind of memories it stirred up.
Dean took his drinks back to where Sam and Sarah were scoping out the crowds, at a little table right by the stairs. He looked around with the same casual curiosity, just another guy checking out the T&A on display, taking some time to sneer at the wings etched on the glass walls and at the pitchfork designs embedded in the marble floors. Sarah took a time-out from her surveillance to scrutinize him as if she could see his desire to smash it all, and then Sam noticed her noticing. Sam just shrugged uncomfortably and said, “We’ve got … religious issues,” which made Dean want to punch him.
“Heads up,” Dean said, because his mind was on the fucking job, “six o’clock.” He chugged his beer and slid out of his seat to get next to the hottie in the teeny-tiny red dress, who looked a lot better here than she had in the government videos.
He put himself almost in front of her—with a human woman, you never totally blocked her way unless you wanted to set off her creepazoid alert, and he doubted vampire chicks were that different—and smiled, lazy and friendly.
She looked him over and smiled right back. Yeah, he still had it.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.” Even with the noise surrounding them, he could hear the humor in it. They both knew they were just getting the formalities out of the way. She bit her lip; it was a pretty lip. “You wanna go in the back, where we can talk?”
“You’re a genius,” he said.
Once they were in the deserted hallway, the muted thump of the music still rumbling through them like a heartbeat, it was simple to press her up against the wall with one hand while reaching for the syringe in his back pocket with the other. He flicked off the cap with his thumb and had her sagging helplessly before she could even fang out on him. And then he used the garotte—he’d have preferred the machete, all told, but that would’ve been hard to smuggle in without going Sam’s route of big, baggy pants, and he just wasn’t down with that.
Her head popped off—the black T-shirt was good for more than making him look better--and he looked up to see Sam and Sarah hanging back, letting him take care of business. Sarah could’ve been watching somebody stack oranges at the grocery store; she either had a fantastic poker face or she didn’t really mind watching something that looked human get iced.
“I’ll get the body out the back door,” Sam volunteered. They hadn’t ever discussed it outright, but they weren’t turning over any intact vampires to the government. But they still needed the feds’ resources for disposal, especially if they didn’t want the people inside to panic when someone stumbled over a corpse.
“Don’t forget the head,” Dean said, helpfully, and smirked innocently at Sam’s scowl.
Then a second escapee entered the hallway, either to figure out where his companion had gone or to share in the drinking. They all gaped at each other for a couple of seconds, and then the vampire was staggering back against the wall, a slender blood-slicked knife sticking out of his chest.
Dean was impressed. He’d barely seen Sarah’s hand move.
Sam handed over his machete—Dean noticed that, for all Sarah was into Chuck, she looked a little disappointed when Sam was able to pull it out through a hole he’d put in one of his pockets instead of dropping trou—and Dean took care of vamp #2 as well. Then he was treated to the sight of Sam dragging two headless corpses down the hallway, hands fisted in their sagging shirts and heads squeezed under his arms, like a suburban resident with an excess of luggage.
“Found one,” Casey’s voice hissed in Dean’s ear. “Northwest corner. Red shirt.”
“Well, that’s appropriate,” Dean said, and Chuck made a choked-off sound, which was more appreciation than he usually got for his excellent sense of humor, so he chalked up a point in Chuck’s favor.
“I’m sorry your friend’s feeling so poorly,” Chuck said loudly through the comms—subtle the dude was not—“Why don’t I help him into the back office to sit down until he stops feeling so woozy?”
“You go to Casey,” Sarah said quickly. “I’ll help Chuck.”
Dean nodded and hurried back out into the press of bodies and noise.
****
Chuck could totally handle a vampire on his own, no worries. Okay, some worries, but the vampire in this case was drugged and pliant, sagging—or was that sloshing?—against him as they shuffled down the tiny, poorly lit hallway. The vampire’s mouth was only inches from Chuck’s neck! He tried to discreetly increase the distance, but the vampire just tilted more in response, and the only thing keeping him from screaming was that Chuck was pretty sure that the vampire would be falling over if Chuck let go.
He wanted this to be ‘the vampire.’ Not Oliver Gunderson, born in 1973, graduated from Cal State Fresno, employed until 2004 as a bookkeeper in a small dry-cleaning chain on the coast. Dean and Sam had been adamant that, whatever the person had been, the vampire part was in charge now. The footage he’d seen had supported that claim, but—those vampires, this vampire, had also been tortured by the government to figure out what made them tick. Chuck had seen Sarah and Casey leave behind a fair amount of carnage when necessary for their own escapes. If they could only get the vampire safely secured, maybe they could find out if there was an Oliver left in there after all.
He managed to get the vampire dumped into the chair in front of the manager’s desk, which looked oddly like Big Mike’s desk at the Buy More. In fact the Buy More could have stocked this office almost in its entirety, if you skipped over the naked-woman-of-the-month calendar, and probably that could’ve been snagged out of Jeff or Lester’s locker. “Hey,” Chuck told the vampire—Oliver—“how are you feeling?”
“Unnnnghh,” Oliver said, which was going to make it difficult to figure out if he was still homicidal. It was still homicidal, right? Even if he was no longer human, he was killing humans, so, definitely homicidal. Or possibly not, which was exactly the problem: Chuck couldn’t in good conscience turn him over to a top-secret government research program if there was any chance he was an upright but undead citizen.
“So, uh, Oliver.”
Chuck’s knowledge of his name was evidently surprising enough to get the vampire’s attention even through the dead man’s blood. Chuck watched, ready to kick and scream if necessary, as Oliver struggled to focus. “Hypothetically, if we offered you the opportunity to behave yourself and, you know, do takeout blood instead of killing people, how would you feel about that?”
“… Fuck you,” Oliver said, not promisingly. “…Gonna rip your, your spine …”
Which, of course, was when Sarah arrived, ending all possibility of negotiation. Even though she told him to turn away, he knew that he ought to be willing to watch. Oliver managed to go all fangy before she wrapped the razor wire around his neck, but his blood looked the same as anybody else’s. Chuck tried to remember that it was somebody else’s blood. That didn’t help much.
“That’s three,” Sarah said, efficiently tying off the trashbag containing Oliver’s head. “You should get back out there, keep dosing drinks and scanning the crowd in case you can find the one we’re still missing. I’m going to go help Casey.”
Chuck fled before he could find out what she planned to do with the body.
Part 2.
Tags: