Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural. If I did, I wouldn't be killing off every recurring female character left, right and centre. Ahem.

Author's Note: 'Jump the Shark' pissed me off. I'm pretty sure it pissed just about everybody off, but probably not for the same reasons it pissed me off. I thought it was cruel…so of course I had a go at fixing it. This has been eating at me for awhile now, and as much as I love Peggy over in the Clothesline 'verse, I feel like this needs my attention more at the moment.

It was either write or experience a muse-induced lobotomy. I'm not kidding, she was standing there smiling and holding a cattle-prod. You try arguing with that!

Teaser: Somebody Whispering

Broken Bow, Nebraska
January, 1992

When Sam was small, maybe eight or so, he saw a guy on a cable TV show who could bend spoons with his brain.

He remembered this very vividly, because it came maybe a month after he found out what his father really did for a living.

Monsters were real, everything was real, Dean had said. Dad was a superhero…

"Dean," he called over the back of the couch to where Dean was sitting on his bed.

His brother looked up, glowering. Dean was doing homework, for once, and it was making him no fun to be around.

"What?" was the snapped reply.

Sam pointed at the screen, where the bald spoon-bender was lining up for another shot, his eyes huge, fingers to his bare temples. The on-screen spoon wobbled and bent nearly in half.

"Can people really do that?"

Dean snorted, "What? Of course not."

"How do you know?" Sam demanded hotly.

"Can you bend spoons with the power of your tiny brain?"

"No…but – but I can't do that think where you drink milk with your nose and squirt it out your eye."

"Yeah, so?" Dean could, you see, it was a point of pride that everywhere they went, he was the only kid who could squirt milk out of his eye. Couldn't do juice though; he'd tried that and it had stung for hours.

"So," Sam continued earnest now, "I can't do it, but someone else somewhere might be able to. Like, special people, or something."

He watched his brother's face. Dean had his brows knitted in thought now. They both watched the screen as a third spoon wobbled and fell back.

"I guess so," Dean said slowly. "Dad said he went to see a psychic once."

"Really? What did he say about it?"

Dean rolled his eyes. "Nothing. Just that he went to see a psychic once."

"Oh."

A few minutes later…

"Dean?"

"What?"

"Do you think we'll ever meet someone who can do that?"

"I hope not," Dean said dryly, still half-heartedly working on his math. He hated math…

"Why?"

Dean snorted incredulously. "Oh, come on, Sam, what kind of a lame superpower is spoon-bending?"

Windom, Minnesota
April, 1994

When Evie was small, maybe four or so, she saw a guy on a cable TV show who could bend spoons with his brain.

Tiny, impressionable Evie watched with awe and delight, and then thought, I can do that!

It never occurred to her as she pulled open the draw containing her mother's best silverware that bending a spoon – or any piece of cutlery for that matter – should be impossible.

Keyword: should.

Evie held the spoon by its handle with both little fists and stared hard at her own concave reflection in the spoon's face.

Bend, she thought.

The spoon did not oblige.

Bend! she thought again, a little more aggressively.

The spoon remained uncooperative.

Not the most patient of children, but certainly stubborn, Evie began to get angry.

BEND! she commanded, scowling fiercely and stamping one small foot, as though getting ready to throw one truly epic wobbly.

The spoon reacted as through it had taken a blow from a hammer.

Evie blinked, a little surprised, and studied the spoon, its face now pointed away from her, the handle bent into a perfect L-shape.

"I did it," she said, then smiled.

She tossed the bent spoon down and retrieved another one.

"Mommy!" she cried, dashing to the laundry room. "Mommy, look what I can do!"

Madison, Wisconsin
April, 2009

The first inkling that something was wrong was the call from Joe Barton.

Evie had been in the middle of a biochem lecture when her phone went off, filling the lecture hall with the wailing strains of MGMT's 'Electric Eel'. Feeling like her face might just burn off with shame, she grabbed her bag and dashed for the hallway, only opening her Nokia once she was safely hidden from accusing faces in the nearest girls' bathroom.

"Yes?"

"Is this Eve Milligan?"

"Yeah…can I ask whose calling?"

"Sure. I'm Joe Barton, Eve; I'm a friend of your mother's."

Oh, really?

Cliché as it was, she felt the hair on the back of her neck rise in silent warning. She and her mother were close, seeing as how for years it had just been the two of them. She was reasonably sure she knew all her mother's friends, even the distant ones. She didn't remember Mom ever mentioning a Joe Barton.

The clincher was her name. No one ever called her Eve except when they were reading off an official record. Her mother had always introduced her as Evie, ever since she was little.

What was going on here?

"I'm just calling because I think you should hear this from me rather than from a stranger," he was saying. There was a heavy sigh. "Eve, you're mother is missing."

Windom, Minnesota

The house was quiet when she got home.

Empty, she thought, like when Mom's on a shift…

It hurt to think about it.

Worn out from the six hour drive from Madison, she stumbled towards the kitchen, thinking only of the chocolate stashed in the cupboard over the fridge. Comfort food wouldn't really improve the situation, but it would make her feel better for awhile, and it was better than heading for the vodka kept at the back of the china cabinet.

It was then that they jumped her.

She barely had time to scream.

AN2: So…there you have it. Let me know how you feel about it?