Title: It's not like the Books.

Rating: PG-13 for death.

Pairing: John/Chas…sorta

Summery: The moments leading up to and including Chas dying from his point of view.

Note: I'm actually planning on making this into a chapter story of undetermined length. This is really just meant to be the prologue for it, though it could be considered a stand alone. It's also 1000 words of not beta'd goodness as my editor is going through finals week or something to that effect that gives him an excuse not to read through it.

It's also not very good as I wrote it in a couple of hours and I'm very bad at basically rewriting a scene into someone's perspective that I've already seen in a movie. I can't use my imagination as much to describe things, so it gets a little shoddy.

Prologue

Everything can be planned out, everything can be perfectly timed and measured, but the second you get to the battle field, everything goes wrong.

Whoever the hell said that was right, he mused to himself. Fuck him.

At first, everything had gone according to plan, including the fear that had his stomach in knots. The cross had worked, causing Holy Water to rain down on the demons and give John a chance to deport their asses. He was inordinately proud that the cross had been his idea. Maybe, Chas had thought, maybe this'll finally prove to John that I'm ready.

Then when he shot the demon lunging at John his mind yelled Fuck yeah asshole! but managed to remain looking calm and cool with the situation. He hoped.

When they had walked into the room with the bath/pool thing, he knew there was something wrong. No powerful physic in sight and a dead guy floating in the water. Never a good thing. Then John was chest deep in water that started to mysteriously bubble, not a good thing either.

They had come expecting to do an exorcism, so it wasn't even that much of a surprise when Angela shot up out of the water in a very possessed manner. He couldn't see her face, but had guessed that she was by the time that John was on the bottom of the pool being drowned. Again with the saving John thing, it was almost starting to be a habit.

That woman was damn hard to move, it was almost like when she got possessed she'd become a lot denser and gained a couple hundred pounds that didn't show anywhere. By the time Chas finally wrenched her off of John's neck and back onto the tiles, he was completely soaked and John was half drowned. Payback time bitch, went through his mind as he held down the demon possessing Angela…who was wearing John's shirt? What the fuck?

John chanted out some Latin, expelled Mammon and things seemed to be alright.

That's when everything went to hell.

The demon was trying to fucking eat his way out of her, and John lost it. It seemed like everything that he'd ever learned just flew out of his mind and he started chanting the first bits of scrambled Latin that came to mind.

Uh John? Chas's mind thought at the exorcist after thinking through the random bits of Latin he was hearing. This isn't a steam demon you know…

John couldn't seem to get a hold on the words he was trying to say, and the things he was saying were doing jack shit. Chas knew the words, he had looked over them just that afternoon, they were all there ready to use. He began softly at first, and then getting stronger as John glanced up at him in surprise then joined in with him. It felt good, to finally be doing something, even it was kneeling on a cold floor, completely soaked and hoping to hell that the world wasn't going to end. He was with John though, and it felt so good despite all of that, to be chanting together, like he had finally been accepted as an actual apprentice.

When John had said, "You did good, kid" the best emotion he ever felt was just making his fingers itch and his mouth say "Kramer. Chas Kramer assho - " before something yanked him backwards away from John before slamming him repeatedly between the floor and ceiling.

It hurt, everything hurt. He lay there knowing he was dying, he could feel it. There was just something inside of him that said: You're fucked.

He thought about the tunnel of light other people had talked about when coming back from death. He didn't see any light, all he saw was John's face looking down at him with an anguished expression.

Most people thought that John was completely emotionless, and never showed a thing. It wasn't true though, you just had to look much deeper. The slight wrinkle at the edge of his eye, the minuscule twist of his mouth, but his eyes, his eyes said everything. And right now they were saying I'm sorry.

"It's not like it is in the books, is it?"

"No kid, it's not."

He could feel the blood welling up in his lungs, knew that soon he'd start to drown in his own blood. There was a trickle of it at the edge of his mouth but he was so tired, too tired to wipe it away.

It really wasn't like the books; they made everything seem so simple. Well, at least that's how it started out as, and then fate threw him a curveball.

If he had never met John, or if he'd walked away as soon as he could, he wouldn't have been lying there on the cold hard floor of a hospital, choking to death on his own blood. He didn't regret it though, not a minute.

Chas was struggling with the darkness, trying to stave it off until the last moment so he could make sure John would be okay. The asshole didn't deserve to go to Hell. From a very far distance, he could hear John trying to call something into the light, he sounded really pissed off. Chas guessed that having your apprentice die would do that to you.

Everything was slipping away, John's voice, the light, the rushing of some sort, the flash of wings and white? Gabriel his mind thought dizzily as he struggled with unconsciousness.

It was too hard to stay there, he couldn't hold on any longer. His last thought before making the dive into death was, Fucking angels.