Disclaimer: I do not own any part of Supernatural or anything even tangentially related to it. Well, except for my Funkopop figures, but I don't own the rights to those. I only own this particular arrangement of fan written fiction because I have written and arranged it, in its entirety, myself without any outside input. If you would like to write something loosely based on this fic – I'm going to start playing with angel lore later, for example – feel free! But please reference me in your notes on your work. And message me so that I can read it! I'd love that!
Author Notes/Introduction: Howdy! If you have followed me as an author due to my Young Justice fanfics, I promise I haven't forgotten the story in progress on that end, but my time for writing is very slim right now and is being devoted to whatever is pressing on my mind most at the time. If you happen to be both a YJ fan and a Supernatural fan, I hope you'll enjoy this one! This first chapter is really short (especially if you know how long my chapters can usually get), but I'm really excited about getting back to writing after so long and wanted to post what I'd written so far. At the very least, it's a taste of my writing style, and the story will really get rolling in the next chapter. Thanks for reading!
Chapter 1: Alert
Claire's eyes were half lidded, half staring dazedly at the computer in front of her. Her mind was half asleep, half churning synonymous words on a never-ending rotation.
This paper was killing her.
She tried to be a responsible college kid – she really did. She had started this paper, only a three page or 1,200 to 1,800 word assignment, at 8:00 p.m. a full five hours ago and a day before it was due. The last paper she had turned into her freshman composition course, though, had come back with marks taken off for word choice – word choice! – for sheer lack of seeing the need or having the desire to replace perfectly fine words with more complicated ones. She needed to bring up her grade in this course, and she had assumed, perhaps mistakenly, that concentrating on bettering her word choice would be the easiest correction to make to help her begin losing fewer points on papers as soon as possible. And so the waking half of her mind continued spinning along like a thesaurus, trying to choose the word to best replace "show."
Perhaps "demonstrate" or "suggest" or "accentuate" or "highlight" . . . or "demonstrate" or "suggest" or "accentuate" or "highlight" . . . or "demonstrate" or "suggest"–
A ping from her computer set her eyelids fluttering as it drew her out of her stupor. Instinctively, she clicked on the notification that had popped up in the right-hand corner of her computer screen. She gazed at it. For several moments. Then finally realized she wasn't actually reading it. She took a deep breath, yawned, and stretched her arms above her head, her black and white striped sleep t-shirt stretching with her so that a small strip of her belly showed above her gray sweatpants. Wiping her face with a hand and feeling a little more awake, she tried again to read the notification.
It was a police radio alert. When she'd chosen to go back to her studies, she'd decided to move out of Judy's home and into a college dorm at a new university, a fresh start on her own again, but she hadn't entirely given up on the hunting life. A week of normalcy after moving into her dorm room with a new roommate had been enough to convince her that she couldn't survive it. Normalcy, that is. Yet, she'd been honest enough with herself to know that she needed to concentrate if she was going to make school work. So she'd gotten smarter. She'd figured out how to set up an alert system that filed through internet articles about nearby crimes, "read" them, and then pinged across her computer and smartphone whenever at least three articles had a certain number of words – other than words like "the" or "I" – in common.
This notification was one of those alerts. She sat forward in the flimsy, plastic dorm desk chair and smoothed back her messy blonde hair as she skimmed through it. Most of these alerts were nothing at all. If all one was looking for was common words, half the muggings in the county sounded similar enough to set off the alert system. This alert, though . . . this one might be something.
Glancing over her shoulder at her roommate's bed and reassuring herself that she was asleep, she picked up the phone and dialed.