the sound of a gentle word

"In the beginning, there was me."

Chuck Shurley started off as just a baby. Little curls and big blue eyes and tiny fists. Developing movement and thought and understanding. Nothing extra attached. Tiny spaces between cells for something to take residence in.

He became a teenager and his eyes stayed blue and his hair stayed curly, and he started growing taller and got headaches and anxious stomach pains. And the spaces filled in with pure light. Nagging thoughts, strange dreams, prickling behind the eyes. Glasses helped, and clarified things close to his face.

He became an adult and stopped growing. Small hands and feet, nervous and shy, staying in his room writing nonsense as his headaches grew worse. Of course he never mentioned them. Struggled through college and kept to himself, squinting at a piece of paper and parsing his strange, strange dreams.

Sometimes he swore his dreams came true.

Other times he swore he saw things in the shadows.

He began to turn his dreams into deeper drafts.

The headaches came more frequently, and the dreams came out of sleep and pounded his head day and night, only easing by siphoning onto paper and downing beer and whisky and rum with cola. Living alone, he found himself in a cluttered den of literature and TV static. Papers everywhere, empty bottles and cans, stains on the furniture and dust on the counters.

He ate takeout pizza with his alcohol, hazy and dulled so he could sleep on the bumpy couch or sometimes his bed-when he could make it up the stairs.

Two tall boys and a man in a trench coat. An amulet unfamiliar. A tingling at the back of his head.

Sometimes he lost time. Five minutes, thirty minutes, an hour, entire days he couldn't remember. A vague light was all he could bring to mind. Sometimes he got snippets of people he'd never met, separate from his dreams-his visions.

His hands shook.

When he stood with the man in the trench coat-the angel. That light, blaring through the house, filled his eyes with the strangest familiarity. Singing between his cells and behind his eyes and he could hear voices and music and the highest tone running through his bones. He must have said something to Castiel but he didn't know what. He felt more like a passenger in his own body than anything else.

More years gone by, leaves falling from the trees.

Sometimes Chuck got himself together enough to date. Most were run-of-the-mill, short-lived relationships. People he met through his editor, or the rare times he went to the bar for his alcohol instead of the liquor store. There were good ones and bad ones. Becky was not one of the good ones. He wasn't sure she was one of the bad ones either. She stole one of his manuscripts. She didn't want him anyway. She was after the tall one. Chuck didn't blame her. Sam had dimples and broad shoulders, after all.

All this time, and he lost more time, but also found himself more often riding in his own body feeling as though someone else steered him around. 2009, 2010? Sitting at his kitchen table, his hands typing but not really under his control. Yet still his thoughts. A strange automatic action. Whisky and the light from his computer, and the dim vision of Hell opening up out of the ground and the slow dive into the darkness.

His visions never stopped, when one or the other died or disappeared. Only changed in what they showed.

He slept more, relying less on alcohol, but found himself less aware of his surroundings, never sure what day it was, unable to judge the passage of time.

He heard conversations and prayers, more and more every day.

He stopped leaving the house.

It seemed every vision he had, something horrible happened. Black sludge, red blood, golden glowing veins and lights dropping from the sky. His bones ached and his ears rang when he saw the angels fall to earth. Their voices filled his head in a clamor of bells and screams and shattering glass. Asking for help, reaching out for him-but not him at all.

Why?

Why did their voices come to him, shrieking for God and salvation?

Why did his shoulder blades and teeth and eyes hurt all the time?

Why did his body move on its own?

Who spoke in the back of his skull?

Murmurs like thunder saying "Sleep, let go, let me do this."

"You are my son." But Chuck's father was a bald gay man, not a disembodied voice.

"I am your father. You are my son. You are your father and your son. Ghosts live in your atoms."

Sometimes when Chuck looked in the mirror-on the days he was able to eat and move-he could have sworn he saw a rim of blue-white light around his edges and an abyss in the pupils of his eyes.

Wasting away. He bruised at the slightest touch and the bags under his eyes grew darker, like storm clouds under blue sky eyes.

He didn't drink anymore but neither did he eat. Or sleep. His fingers typed out his constant visions, and the pain became something almost comforting. Always there. Normal. His roof leaked but he never did anything about it. His phone rang but he didn't answer. The internet disconnected but it didn't matter because he still had his word program, and when the electricity went out he had piles and piles of paper, and a ballpoint pen in worn-down, trembling fingers.

His awareness dimmed.

Nothingness.

He opened his eyes once to see firmer arms and steadier hands and the same old computer, but with lights on overhead and an electric hum. He went back to the nothingness.

The next time he opened his eyes he saw himself in the mirror, shirtless. He had weight. Muscles around his stomach and shoulders. Fat on his chest and thighs, around his waist. Lighter, softer bags under his eyes-somehow the color of them startled him. The blue reminded him of an ocean he couldn't remember going to, with a pebbly beach and mountains and fog.

His mind went to that ocean and he rested there, formless, drifting in the sea breeze with the gulls. Admiring the steam rising from between the trees in the distance.

Sometimes he caught glimpses of blood and tears and sharp blades, but mostly he just floated in the tides with the jellyfish.

There were days he found himself thrown back and forth between the cold ocean, non-existence, and a warmly lit bar. Riding in his own head and seeing strong arms as he wrote unfamiliar words on his decades old computer plugged into nothing as a small dog clicked across the wooden floors.

He felt like vomiting.

He spoke to himself.

"Listen, Chuck." He didn't whisper, just spoke in a matter of fact way. "It's better this way. I'm you. You're me. I'm as much Chuck Shurley as you are Carver Edlund. You're my pseudonym. My alias. We blend in. At least, we used to." He leaned back on the booth, and watched the dog run back and forth. "I'm a ghost, a prophet, an author, a God."

The nausea wouldn't go away.

Chuck couldn't feel anything other than his burning eyes.

Gone, again.

Snippets.

High school girls and a stage.

Castiel with blood in his eyes.

The Beach Boys.

Black smoke.

A lone guitar. The one he bought in college.

Typing a thousand more words, a hundred thousand, a million.

A man even shorter than him. Pathetic. Sometimes on the verge of tears.

That dog again.

Pieces of visions of a woman so familiar he didn't know her name and thick fog and the boys with black veins streaking up their arms.

Back to the rainy ocean, disembodied, with his own voice echoing through the foothills—

"We should probably talk."

NOTES: also can be found on AO3 under the same title.

I have some complicated thoughts and feelings on Chuck's status as God.
After writing 1000+ words about those complicated feelings (which can be found on my tumblr .com tagged as meta posted may 5th) I decided to write this