"I think you pissed off my sandwich."

More of the grey goo started to dribble from the middle of what Chrys had to assume was supposed to be chicken.

Dean paled. "That's… That's in me?"

"Uh…" Sam winced. "Only half of it."

Bobby frowned. "Does that snot look familiar?"

"Okay," Sam said firmly, clearly trying to move all of them out of the "that's disgusting and Dean ate some of it" mindset. "So whatever turned Gerry Browder into a pumpkin head and is currently turning Dean into an idiot-"

"I'm right here," Dean protested. "Right here."

"-is in the Turducken Slammer at Biggerson's," Chrys finished, rolling her eyes at both of them.

Sam nodded. "Yeah."

"It's in the meat." Bobby poked at the goo with his forceps.

Dean sighed. "If I wasn't so chilled out right now, I would puke."


Chrys was sitting next to Bobby in an old junker, staring at the Biggerson's receiving entrance. It was still dark, and it had been a long day, so she was fighting off sleep. She drained the rest of the shitty coffee she'd gotten from the very Biggerson's they were casing and wished it was helping.

"So," Sam said, apropos of nothing, "do we think he's okay?"

Chrys blinked. "Who?"

Sam glanced back at his brother, who was sleeping heavily in the backseat. "Dean."

Bobby nodded. "Yeah, he's all right."

"Good. So you guys don't… Worry about him?"

Chrys frowned. "What do you mean? Before the Turducken?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I kinda mean more like… Uh, more like ever since my head broke, and we lost Cass. I mean, you ever feel like he's… He's going through the same motions, but he's not the same Dean? You know?"

Chrys rolled her eyes. "For fuck's sake, Sam, of course he's not actually okay. His brother is hallucinating Satan, his best friend is dead, and he's stuck with my bitchy ass. The only one of us who's any good is Bobby, and one out of five is terrible odds." She turned to look at the restaurant again. "We're all just limping along. Until we deal with this latest shitstorm, we're just gonna have to live like that."

Bobby was nodding. "All you do is worry about him, boy, and all he does is worry about you. Who's left to live their own life here? Aren't you full up just playing Snuffleupagus with the devil, anyway?"

"I don't know Bobby. Seeing Lucifer's fine with me."

Chrys whipped around to glare at her soulmate. "Excuse me?" she snarled.

Sam jerked back in a gratifying way, his hands up in surrender, but his eyes were hard. "Look, I'm not saying it's fun. But, to be honest with you, I… I kinda see it as the best-case scenario. At least all my crazy's under one umbrella, you know? I kinda know what I'm dealing with. A lot of people got it worse."

"Oh for fuck's sake," Chrys snapped.

"You always were one deep little son of a bitch."

Before she could growl at both of them again, Chrys saw a delivery truck driving around the building. "Wait, wait, both of you, shut up. Look"

All three of them shifted forward to watch the truck back into the receiving entrance. The driver got out, opened the back, and started to wheel cartons into the restaurant. They continued to watch in silence until he got back into the cab and drove away. A street light hit the side of the truck, highlighting the emblem proclaiming the truck part of MIDWEST MEAT AND POULTRY WHOLESALE DISTRIBUTION.

Chrys pointed. "Let's follow that guy, then."


Sam was using binoculars to track the Midwest Meat truck as it pulled up to the warehouse they'd followed it to. Chrys was a long line of heat against his side, reassuring and real. On his other side, Lucifer was muttering to himself, probably limericks.

Sam was getting really good at multitasking.

"That's weird, right?" he asked, not taking his eyes off of the truck. "I mean, national franchise like Biggerson's getting meat from a place that looks like it wholesales Hong Kong knockoffs."

Chrys snorted, and Sam finally put down the binoculars to look over at her.

Three years after they'd first met, when she'd introduced herself by introducing her fist to his jaw, Chrys was still the most beautiful person Sam had ever laid eyes on. Her hair was shorter now, but her eyes no less sparkling and fierce. Her face was classically pretty, and her long legs, squeezed next to his in the bench seat the four of them had shuffled onto to watch the warehouse, were encased in denim and still enough to make his thoughts derail for a moment.

God, he loved her.

He opened his mouth to say so, but Chrys was already speaking.

"Yeah, it's a little weird."

Dean grunted. "Well, what, then? We wait till they close up shop? Go take a look around?"

Bobby was frowning. "Hang on, lookit."

A car had pulled up to the warehouse next to the delivery truck they'd followed. The door opened, and Sam flinched in shock as Edgar, the leviathan Chrys had sworn she'd crushed with a car, stepped out onto the pavement.

"Real?" he whispered, automatically reaching for her.

"Unfortunately, yes," she replied, her voice low and furious. "Very real." She wove their fingers together and gripped his hand hard.

They all watched tensely as Edgar rounded the car and pulled another person from the backseat. It was difficult to see in the dark, and their head was covered by a hood besides, but it looked like the person was wearing a Biggerson's uniform.

"Son of a bitch," Dean snarled.

"What the fuck is going on?"


"There's nothing happening back here," Chrys was whispering into the phone. Dean was listening carefully for any sounds of trouble on the other end of the line, in case she or Sam needed help.

Bobby was nodding. "Yeah, okay. Well, they're pretty dug in, looks like. You kids finish circling and head on back."

"Ten-four, old man," Chrys said smartly before the line went dead.

"Goddamn smartass kids," Bobby grumbled, but Dean could see the hint of a smile hiding behind his mustache as he hung up the phone.

Dean sat back into the passenger seat, scrubbing a hand down his face to keep himself focused. He wouldn't really relax until Sam and Chrys were back in the car, but he could pretend, at least.

He was deep enough into his own thoughts of his brother and honorary sister-in-law that when Bobby spoke it surprised the shit out of him.

"How's your head?"

Dean blinked. "Well, I think the slammer's pretty much worn off. In between that and the twenty cups of coffee, I'm real tense. And alarmed. Ready to go."

"I wasn't talking about that."

Oh, I'm not nearly drunk enough for a conversation like this."Oh, Bobby, don't. Don't go all sigmund Freud on me right now, okay? I just got drugged by a sandwich."

Bobby, however, was undeterred. "I want to talk about your new party line."

"Party? What are you talking about? I don't even vote."

"'The world's a suicide case. We save it, it just steals more pills?'"

Dean sighed. "Bobby, I'm here, okay? I'm on the case. What's the problem?"

"I've seen a lot of hunters live and die. You're starting to talk like one of the dead ones, Dean."

"No," Dean spat, suddenly angry. "I'm talking the way a person talks when they've had it, when they can't figure out why they used to think all this mattered.

"Oh, you poor, sorry… You're not a person."

Dean recoiled a little, stung. "Thanks."

"Come on, now. You tried to hang it up and be a person with Lisa and Ben. And now here you are with a mean old coot and a van full of guns. That ain't person behavior, son. You're a hunter, meaning you're whatever the job you're doing today. You get a case of the Anne Sextons, something's gonna come up behind you and rip your fool head off. Now, you find your reasons to get back in the game. I don't care if it's love or spite or a ten-dollar bet. I've been to enough funerals." Bobby met his eyes again, his expression deadly serious, and pointed a finger. "I mean it. You die before me, and I'll kill you."

Dean struggled for a moment. It was… Easy, sometimes, to forget that the people around him felt the same way that he did. It was easier, sometimes, with Chrys around, because even if she didn't want to, either, she forced them to confront the way they felt and talk about how it was affecting them, but it still sometimes took him by surprise. Just because he was willing to die for his family didn't mean they wouldn't turn around and do the exact same thing.

His voice was a little raw and shaky when he spoke next. "We need to scrape some money together, get you a condo or something."

Before either one of them could speak again, Chrys was opening the door and pulling her way up into the backset. "Hey," she said urgently as Sam came in behind her, "Something's up."

Attention swung back to the warehouse, where two black vehicles were pulling up as Edgar and another man (probably a leviathan, Dean thought sourly) stepped out to greet them. Out of one of the sleek cars stepped a tall man dressed in a crisp suit.

"Well, I'll be a squirrel in a skirt," Bobby muttered. "It's Dick fucking Roman."

Dean blinked. "What? Who the hell is Dick Roman?"


"Another great question," Dick Roman said in a booming, confident voice on Sam's laptop screen. "No, I am not running for political office at this time. But I do have a number-one bestseller."

Dean was scowling. "What the hell is that?"

"That's one of the top fifty most powerful men in America, Dean," Sam answered dryly.

Chrys was reading an article on her phone. "Says here top thirty-five as of last month."

"Now it's all making sense," Dean said darkly. "Remember when Crowley kept going on about hating Dick? I thought he was just being general." He scoffed.

"Well," Bobby said from behind them, where he was sitting in the backseat, "if the leviathan got to him, then that means they're playing on a much bigger board than we were thinking."

"So what, then?" Sam asked. "I mean, we can't exactly outgun them."

"No, but we got the drop on them," Bobby said. "Means we got a chance to figure out what these guys are really doing here."

Chrys turned to ask what Bobby was talking about, only to have the words catch in her throat and her eyebrows shoot to her hairline when she took in the advanced surveillance equipment Bobby was assembling in the backseat.

"Where did you get all this?" she demanded.

"On loan from Frank's Big Brother collection," Bobby said. "It'll pick up vocal vibrations from window glass at half a mile. It's time to find out what these ugly bastards are up to."


They took Bobby. They took Bobby.

The words were an endless litany in Chrys' head as Dean cursed and clenched the broken tech they'd found on the roof where Bobby had been watching.

"They got him," Dean snarled.

"Guys," Sam said, his voice cautious, always trying to be reasonable. "There are at least four leviathans out there, and we don't even know for sure how to kill one."

An ACME Cleaning van pulled up, and a lightbulb went off in Chrys' head.

She nodded at Sam's words. "Well, then, it will be quite the shock when we walk in through the front door, won't it?


Adrenaline made Chrys' heart pound as the three of them walked into the warehouse, sporting jumpsuits and power washers filled with cleaning solution. It had been a long time since she'd felt this focused. There were always things to fight, of course, but rarely this kind of direct enemy.

She couldn't punch Dean's depression and hopelessness in the face and hope it worked. She couldn't point a gun at Sam's hallucinations and expect them to flee in fear. She could, however, spray the leviathan bastards who had taken Bobby with Borax and watch as their faces melted off.

It's the little things.

They burned through Edgar, the truck driver, and the two others who were guarding the doors to the warehouse. They moved forward and searched quickly through the aisles, looking for a hint of where the leviathans would have taken Bobby.

They split off from one another, and as Chrys darted down the first aisle she came across, she almost ran smack dab into Dick Roman himself.

She blanched and took a few steps back before remembering herself. He smiled at her, and it was like a shark, wide and predatory.

"Chrysanthemum Summers," he said, genial and light. "At last, we meet."

She wanted to think of something snappy, but the bastard still had Bobby somewhere, so this wasn't the time. Instead, she raised the nozzle of the power washer she was holding and shot Dick in the face.

His skin started to sizzle and burn, and he hissed, but he didn't actually back down at all. Before she could puzzle out another way to get rid of him, her washer started to sputter and jerk, and the stream of cleaning solution slowly drizzled out until nothing but drips were coming out.

Dick pulled a handkerchief from the inside pocket of his jacket and advanced on her as he wiped his still burning face. Chrys dropped the empty pressure washer and started to back away.

"Chrys," Dick said, his voice scolding, "that is not how we communicate from a place of yes."

She took another step back and hit the wall. She'd backed herself into a corner, she realized with a creeping, paralyzing sort of fear.

Dick smiled. "That was bracing." His face was already beginning to heal. "Where'd you kids find this stuff?"

She opened her mouth to tell him to go fuck himself, but two shots rang out through the warehouse before she could get the words out. She leaned to look around Dick, who was glaring at the holes in his torso that were oozing black goo. Bobby stood there, pointing what looked like a very, very nice gun at the leviathan.

The sight of the older hunter spurred Chrys into action. She bolted by Dick and toward Bobby, who held one hand out to her. Once she got to him, he gripped her hard and pulled her along.

She heard Dick shout, "Hey! That's mine!" She didn't turn around, just kept running.

Now that they were almost out and all of them were together, she could admit that the plan had been fucking stupid. Given the chance, she probably wouldn't change anything, but she knew how foolhardy they'd been.

She faintly heard another splash, Dick grunt in pain, then footsteps behind them. Before she could get scared, Dean shouted. "Go! Go!"

Sam caught up with them from the other end, and the four of them rushed out of the warehouse together. Another leviathan tried to step out in front of them, but Chrys felt Sam yank her forward and Bobby push her away at the same time, so she kept up with the Winchesters as they ran to the van.

She dove into the back as Dean and Sam clambered into the front. Dean had the van started and was racing toward the warehouse door before Chrys could get turned around, but she stumbled over to the open sliding door on the van to help Bobby up as soon as he got there.

She had go cling to the passenger seat as Dean swung around, but she saw Bobby running their way. She also saw Dick Roman step out of the big loading bay doors, gun raised in his hand.

"Bobby!" she shouted, reaching a hand out. "Come on, come on, come on!" Dick started to pull the trigger.

To her relief, Bobby made it. He gripped her hand and she threw herself backwards. She felt pain explode in her shoulder as Bobby fell forward into the van, both of them jostled by the way Dean hit the gas. The momentum when he swung the van into a turn again had the sliding door slamming shut behind Bobby.

She registered that the Winchesters were talking up front, but she grunted and pushed at Bobby's weight where he was still half on top of her. "Hey, Singer, move," she said, but she was smiling in relief. "Getting dizzy here," she joked, although she was kind of woozy, and damn her shoulder hurt. Maybe I pulled it yanking him into the van?

It didn't really occur to her that something might be wrong until Bobby didn't move off of her. "Hey," she snapped, really starting to shove at him, ignoring the spreading fire in her shoulder. "Bobby, snap out if it, get off of me."

Nothing.

"Bobby?" She finally managed to heave him off of her, and she sat up so she could twist and get a good look at him.

Her first thought (and she would think this very strange later on) was that he didn't have his hat on. It made him look… Well, she thought of him as older quite frequently, and she knew in her heart he was a bit older, but without his hat he actually looked old.

That, and the blood starting to pour from his temple.

"Bobby! Bobby!"


- I'm so sorry.
- Sorry about the delay. Life got hard.