Chapter 3

I sat at the end of the table, opposite Bobby. Dean sat in the chair at Bobby's right hand and Sam deliberately took the chair opposite but one closer to me. It was a nice gesture. It earned him another black look from his brother.

The three men ate fast. I wasn't sure if that was a compliment to the cooking or if they'd have put away week-old take-away at the same speed. All of them left their dishes clean anyway.

"Good to have a home-cooked meal for a change," Bobby said, looking down the table at me. "Thanks."

"Yeah," Sam said, chewing and swallowing the food in his mouth hurriedly. "Thank you."

Dean stared at the folder that sat next to Bobby's left hand.

"You're welcome," I said, feeling uncomfortably as if I'd somehow asked for that attention. I couldn't have told you if the food was any good or not, I couldn't taste it. I ate enough to make sure it didn't look like I was trying to poison them – something I'm sure went through Dean's mind when I set the plates in front of them – and got to my feet, carrying the empty plates away to the sink.

In case you're thinking that I'm some kind of Betty Crocker-wannabe home-maker, let me set your mind at rest. I'm not. I just found it a lot easier to breathe naturally twenty feet from the nuclear reactor disguised as a man than I did sitting at the table within his blast zone.

I grabbed the full pot of coffee and took it back to the table, and Sam went and got clean cups from the cupboard and Bobby waved a hand at the chair next to him.

"Alright, let's hear how this works," he said, pushing the folder to me.

"Filming takes a few months. Most of the season's storyline is decided during the hiatus, over the summer months when the show isn't on," I started, keeping my eyes firmly fixed to the pages in front of me. "Some of the writers get their scripts in early, some late. They're supposed to stick to a rough outline of what's going to happen, building additional stories and character development into that main storyline."

"Which is?" Sam asked, leaning on the table to look at the folder. "You had a draft of the episode that followed the one where Balthazar shoved us into your world – what happens after that?"

"Bear in mind, this isn't a hundred percent bedded down yet," I said carefully, not wanting them to think it was going to be a gold-plated guarantee. Some of the draft scripts really were rough. "The next episode draft is where Balthazar unsinks the Titanic."

"What?" Bobby choked on his coffee and I patted him awkwardly on the back. "The Titanic?"

"Yeah. Apparently, he decides to divert it from ever hitting the iceberg."

"Is that possible?" Dean asked Bobby. "Cas always said no one could change destiny."

"Got me," Bobby answered him, turning back to me. "How do we fit into that?"

I looked down at the pages, uncertain of how to explain the idea. "In the first draft, it seems like Cas asks Balthazar to unsink the ship so that he will get an extra fifty thousand souls for his fight against Raphael, in Heaven's civil war," I started, eyes skimming the details on the page. I'd read through the overall outline and I didn't really want to tell them the worst bits that were coming. "Atropos, one of the Fates, takes offence at that and begins to kill the people descended from those who weren't killed when the ship went down in the real world. The thing is…when Balthazar changes history, everything changes."

"What do you mean – everything?" Sam asked me.

"It puts everything onto an alternative destiny line," I said, trying to think of a way to describe it that wasn't going to be using science-fiction terms. I also wasn't sure how they were going to take some of the things that happened. "So…um…Ellen and Jo don't die when you try to take out Lucifer."

I felt Dean's eyes boring into me. "That's a good thing."

I hummed noncommittally.

"Why would Cas need fifty thousand souls?" Dean looked at Bobby.

Bobby glanced at me, deciding he didn't actually need to ask the same question again.

"Well, this is where it's not very well explained but hinted at through the season's stories. Heaven is powered by human souls. The more souls Castiel can tap into, the more power he has for a war," I said, relieved to have gotten past the whole Ellen/Bobby thing, not to mention the Impala/Mustang thing.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Dean look down at the table. "The Alpha," he said, lifting his gaze to his brother. "He was talking about souls. Said that Purgatory held millions of them."

"Crowley would want those," Sam said, following along Dean's thought.

I cleared my throat. "It gets worse."

"Worse?" Bobby asked, his voice cracking a little high. "How much worse?"

I licked my lips and shuffled through the pages until I found the outline for the whole season. "Castiel has made a deal with Crowley, to open Purgatory and divide the souls between Heaven and Hell. The unsinking of the Titanic was – is – an attempt to not have to go through with that, or at least not yet."

The silence at the table was extraordinarily loud and it made my ears ring. I couldn't look at any of them.

"Bull," Dean said suddenly, shaking his head. "No way Cas would be making a deal with Crowley. He'd come to us."

I passed the outline across the table and he took it reluctantly, skimming over the details of each episode. Bobby winced as he looked up and threw the paper back at me.

"Bull-SHIT!" he said, pushing back in his chair and getting up, kicking back with his heel when the chair fell over behind him. "This is Cas!"

He turned to look at Bobby, his expression almost pleading. "You remember the angel who's saved our asses more times than we can count?! The one who-who when we were stuck – really stuck, with no other way out, broke ranks and went to the mat for us?!"

"This isn't the best –" I started to say and he rounded on me.

"Shut it, this-this-this – stuff, you've got, we don't know that it's real, or that it's accurate," he said furiously. "We don't even know if the writers are really seeing our lives."

I nodded. "No. Only you two can verify that."

"Can we take that chance, Dean?" Sam asked, his voice low and reasonable. "If it's like Chuck's visions –"

"Chuck was –" Dean said, stopping suddenly. "How are we supposed to verify if this is like Chuck? We didn't see any of this crappy show."

Bobby sighed. "Therese has seen them. You could go through the last five years with her, see if they hit the high points."

Sam's face brightened and he looked at me. "Do you remember them?" he asked.

I repressed the inappropriate and, given Dean's state of mind, insane urge to laugh. Did I remember them?

"Yeah, I remember them," I told him, fishing around for episodes that wouldn't ignite the powder keg across the table. "In New York state, you met a girl called Sarah. Sarah Blake. She was the daughter of an art dealer and she helped you find a painting that was coming to life and killing people. You thought it was the father in the painting for a while, and realised it was the little girl when you and Sarah were trapped in the house by it, and Dean was at the mausoleum, looking for the remains."

As I spoke, the colour drained out of Sam's face and the look he turned on Dean was complicated, fear and surprise and dread mixed together. Dean's face hardened to stone as he looked from Sam to me. Dean was going to be harder to sell, I thought. He needed a lot of proof.

"Zachariah kept you in 'a beautiful room' while Ruby took Sam to find Lilith's location," I said to him, looking at the table instead of his face. "He offered you beer and burgers and he told you that you couldn't help Sam. You asked Castiel to help you, to get to the convent, to save Sam. And he did, but it was too late. Sam's eyes turned black when he killed Lilith and the cage was broken. He held Ruby while you stabbed her with her own knife."

"You could've got that from Chuck," Dean said, his voice thick and raw.

I resisted the temptation to ask him if I could've gotten that information from a different world. He wasn't thinking straight and there were a million more examples I could give him.

"Before Lucifer escaped, when the convent was filled with a white light, you and Sam were transferred instantly to a plane flying nearby," I said, keeping my voice as steady as I could. "And you couldn't get it out of your head that Sam had chosen Ruby over you, until you couldn't look at him any more and when he said he needed to leave, you agreed. That was in a rest area just outside Riverpass, after you'd taken War's ring."

"Fuck!"

I looked up as he swung away from the table. Catching Bobby's eye, I saw his small head-shake. I dropped my gaze back to the notes in front of me. I knew it was too much, to tell a stranger that you know the most intimate details of their life. What else could I have done? What was I supposed to do? The danger from Cas, at least in the outline, was real. Real here.

"What else?" Dean said, turning back to the table. "What else do you know about us?"

"Last season ended with Sam holding onto Lucifer and jumping in the cage. You picked up the rings and went to live with Lisa and Ben for a little under a year," I told him reluctantly.

It'd been unbelievable, a plot device retroactively fitted into the story because Sam was gone and they didn't know what to do with Dean, but I had the feeling from the silence that it'd happened here anyway. "Then a djinn targeted you at the house in Cicero and Sam came out of hiding, to save you." I sucked in a deep breath.

"The last episode we shot, that was in the can, was about a ghost whose remains were still living in her sister's body, a kidney transplant, I think. It was revenging itself against the young men who killed it. It possessed the Impala briefly. Ben called you early in the case and you drove all the way back to Battle Creek to talk to Lisa, and found out she was dating someone else. It seemed like that was the end of that relationship."

Dean turned around and walked out of the room, his face white and tense, his back rigid. For a long moment, Bobby, Sam and I just sat there in silence.

"They showed that?" Sam asked eventually, turning to look at me.

"Not really, not whatever was said between them," I said. "Just showed him in the car driving back to you and the case, and his memories of the relationship."

I could feel the questions bouncing around in Sam's head, about what I knew about him, what I'd seen. I didn't know what to say to him.

"What about…everything else?" Bobby asked me quietly. "Eve and the alpha vamp…Crowley?"

"You can poison Eve, kill her," I suddenly remembered, wetting the tip of my finger and flicking fast through the draft scripts until I found it. "The ashes of a phoenix will kill her and Dean and Sam find a reference to a phoenix in Samuel Colt's journal. Colt wrote that there was a phoenix in Sunrise, Wyoming, in 1861 and they go back in time to kill it."

"You're shittin' me?"

"No," I said, looking to the next script. "Dean's supposed to mix the ash in a glass of whiskey and drink it, then she bites him and dies."

"And how do we get back to 1861, exactly?" Sam asked.

"Cas…," I said falteringly. "Cas takes you." I realised I'd just snafu-ed that solution by introducing the angel's betrayal before they'd gotten that far. "Crap."

"That's puttin' it mildly," Bobby remarked.

"The alpha vamp disappears. I don't know what happened to it." I looked down at the outline again. "Crowley has been collaborating with Cas and Samuel to get the alpha monsters to find out the location of Purgatory and how to open it."

"We knew about Crowley and Samuel," Sam said, glancing again to the door. "How'd we find out about Cas?"

"Cas was listening in on your conversations," I said, hurriedly flicking through the scripts to the second-last in the pile. "You tried to find out where Crowley was by torturing demons and got a name, then Crowley sent a bunch of demons –" I shook my head and handed him the draft. "This is going to go quicker if you all read these yourselves. I don't know what happens in between the scenes or in between the episodes, only what the writers write."

I gave Bobby the outline and the five other drafts and skimmed through the rest of the notes I'd taken down and stuffed into the folder, trying not to hear the pounding of my heart in the silence of the room, against my ears, as the two men read.

The last script outline I'd been given, roughly filled in but still missing a few details, was Crowley kidnapping Lisa and Ben. I did not want to be in this room when Dean found out about that.

Sam put down his script and picked up one from Bobby's pile, reading fast, his eyes flashing over the pages. We all looked up as the front door opened and closed, none too gently, and I fidgeted in my chair, Bobby's gaze pinning me there.

"I'm not buying this –" Dean said, not looking at me as he came into the room.

"Sit. Read," Bobby told him, pushing the outline and the first two scripts over to him.

"What's this?" Dean stared at the paper warily.

"Our future," Sam said, looking over his script at his brother. "We can get ahead of it."

"If it's real."

"However they did it, however it happened, they seem to have gotten it pretty right for the last five years," Sam countered tautly. "Just read it."

He glanced sideways at me. "And she didn't write it so quit shooting the messenger."

Dean glared at him, and picked up the outline and I eased my chair back a smidgin. Bobby looked at me warningly.

"I'll, um, just start the dishes," I said, hoping that would be seen to be staying put while at the same time removing me from Dean's eyeline. He hadn't seemed so threatening on the show. At least, not to anyone not a demon.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Like I said, I'm not all that mad keen on housework, and in my own place I ate mostly take-out off serviettes so that I could avoid the issue of washing dishes entirely. But here, I was out of the firing line and with warm, sudsy water up to my elbows and the undemanding repetition of washing, rinsing and stacking, my pulse had slowed and steadied, even when I heard Dean's five minutes of concerted and inventive cursing coming from the other room.

I was almost sorry when the last cup was clean, rinsed and balanced on the drying rack, taking my time with letting the water drain out of the sink and wiping my hands on the towel on the rail beside it, keeping my back to the dining room.

"Look at this way," Sam said, his tone determinedly optimistic. "It's not like with Chuck, where we only got a short lead-time, this time we know everything that's coming."

"Not helping," Dean growled, pushing the papers across the table toward his brother.

There wasn't a lot of dialogue written down in the script where the angel tells his story in his own words. The introduction was there. From Dean's perspective, I thought that the worst bit was where Cas makes a decision to leave him in his normal life, not asking for help and not telling him about Sam, not telling him anything. It was, I realised gradually, more proof that even his closest friends didn't know him well enough to have known that the year he'd spent in Cicero had been the worst kind of torture for him. And that, I thought, was eating him as much as the betrayal of his trust, the difficulties they were facing in getting rid of Eve and shutting Cas and Crowley down.

"What do you want to do?" Bobby asked him, glancing over his shoulder at me.

Dean saw the glance and turned away. "What can we do?" he asked him. "Pretend we don't know this stuff until we get the phoenix ash? Cas is spying on us later, what's to say he's not doing it now?"

"You're right," Sam said suddenly. "We need a room that's completely warded."

"According to that," Dean said, waving a dismissive hand at the pile on the table. "We get some of it wrong anyway."

"Then we gotta be smarter," Bobby said, his voice grating as his patience got thin. "C'mon, think! We need to figure out how to use this stuff!"

"Hey! Dorothy!" Dean turned in the chair and looked at me. "Any ideas on how to turn this crap-fest into a useful weapon?"

I stared back at him, feeling a flush of red rising up my neck and filling my cheeks, every thought blanked out of my brain, his mocking demand ringing in my ears, my nails digging into my palms as I stood as mute as a freakin' table-lamp. Normally I'm not bad with come-backs, even the occasional memorable zinger to mark an attack. This time I felt like I'd forgotten how to use words.

"Didn't think so," he said, after a moment. He turned back to Bobby. "We're fried."

"No. We're not," Sam said in a vehement hiss. "We just found out about this. We'll – we'll get some sleep and we'll ward a room and we'll figure it out, Dean, just like we always do."

Dean gave him a pitying look and got up from the table. He looked around the room, appearing to remember that the sofa was now somewhere else.

"Therese cleaned out the bedrooms upstairs," Bobby said in a tired voice, looking at him. "Grab one for yerself and get some shut-eye. It's been a helluva long day."

I was still standing there, still unable to make my voice work when he walked out of the room and thumped his way up the staircase. Sam looked over at me.

"Sorry," he said, wincing, no doubt at my stunned-and-frozen expression. "He's just…he'll come around."

I walked slowly to the table and began to gather up the scripts, papers and notes, piling them haphazardly into the leather folder.

"He's right," I said, as I closed the folder and looked at Bobby. "You saw the end of the outline."

Bobby nodded. "They open Purgatory."

"If we stop that, if we change…change all of this," Sam said, sweeping a hand above the table. "What happens? Do we all cease to exist? Does your world cease to exist?"

"I don't think so," I said, opening the folder again, my fingers finding the printed changes I'd done in the office. "The ending of the episode you appeared in was different from what happened." I handed him the pages of the scenes. "Up to the point that you came through that window, it was the same, Balthazar and the key, I mean. But the rest…Cas was supposed to find you in another world, take you back, use the key to get into his secret stash of weapons…none of that happened, right?"

"Balthazar did give Cas the key," Sam said slowly.

"Maybe what we're looking at here is some leeway?" Bobby mused, looking at Sam. "Like, we might be following some of the story but there's places we can change, things we do differently so that it doesn't come out the same way or some bits anyway?"

"If Balthazar – on Cas' orders – changes history and the Titanic doesn't sink," Sam said, gesturing at the folder. "And all those other things change, what happens to you?"

I blinked at him. I had no idea. I was here now, but in a world where the Titanic hadn't been sent to the bottom of the ocean? A world where Ellen was married to Bobby and Dean drove a Mustang? Was there going to be room for me in that world?

"I don't know," I said, glancing from him to Bobby. "I might get sent back home?"

"Or you might disappear – completely," Sam said. "We gotta figure a way to stop this from happening at all."

Neither voiced an opinion on how that might be possible.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

I couldn't sleep. The room at the end of the hall, the furthest from the others, was quiet and dark, but what had been said at the dining table was churning over and over in my head, refusing to go away, refusing to come clear and I tossed this way and turned that way, finally lying still on my back, staring at the ceiling.

There had to be other ways of doing this, I thought. What I'd said about the scenes that were included in the scripts – in the episodes – and those that were not, was important, I was sure of that. Things the writers hadn't seen, hadn't witnessed or written down. Sam had asked me what had happened to Chuck and I'd been forced to tell him that in the show, he'd finished the last chapter, Dean turning up at Lisa's, and had just vanished. He'd frowned and asked what I'd meant, but there wasn't anything more I could tell him about it. I said the fans were convinced Chuck was God, but the production team hadn't gotten an answer one way or the other.

Rolling onto my stomach, I grabbed the pillow and tucked it under my chin, staring through the window at the night sky. Same stars, I realised slowly. Somehow, that felt wrong, as if there should've been a difference.

I wondered if just doing everything differently to the script would bring about a change in the outcomes. Sam and Dean had tried with Chuck's chapter, I remembered. That hadn't worked out so well. But the writers in my world, they weren't prophets, more like…seers or psychics, tapping into something happening in a parallel universe, than a prophet seeing the outcome of the lines of destiny.

Punching the pillow in frustration, I groaned to myself. Now I was sounding like some stupid TV show writer. I wanted a clear thought. Something to offer them. Something that would work.

Time-travel. It'd been used on the show a couple of times already. Both times instigated by angels. Were there any other angels, other than Cas, who would help them? Balthazar, I thought. Not out of the goodness of his heart, but maybe he could be convinced of what Cas was trying to do and become a –

The thought provoked a faint memory of the second-last script. It'd been loosely titled 'Let It Bleed'. And in it, Dean and Sam had convinced the campy angel that Cas was out of control. Frowning, I turned over and knocked the lamp over in my haste to switch it on. I tried to get out of bed to pick it up and the covers tangled around my feet, sending me head-first to the floor, my elbows thumping on the carpet while my feet remained stubbornly trapped in the sheets on the bed.

The door burst open, the overhead light going on and I looked up at Bobby, Sam and Dean, standing in the doorway, all three scanning for the room for the intruder they thought must've been there.

Kicking the covers free, I finished my collapse to the floor in slow-motion, picking myself up first then the lamp.

"What the hell –?" Dean's gaze circled the room and focussed on the lamp, then me.

"Just fell out of bed," I said, as cheerfully as I could manage, turning to the nightstand and setting the lamp back onto it as heat flooded my face. "Must've been a nightmare."

"About what?" Sam asked.

"I can't remember," I lied, fiddling with the lamp cord and switching it on. "I'm fine, I'm sorry I woke you."

"Uh huh," Bobby grunted and turned away, heading back down the hall.

Sam shook his head and followed him. I didn't hear a third set of footsteps and I risked a glance over my shoulder.

Dean's expression suggested that he thought it'd be safer for everyone if I slept in the panic room. He flipped off the light-switch without making a snarky comment to that effect, however, grabbing the door-handle and pulling the door shut behind him.

Well, that could've gone better, I thought wearily. His expressions were remarkably eloquent and I got that he thought it was a huge mistake that I was here. I also got that I hadn't exactly exhibited any massively redeeming features since my arrival.

Instead, I'd handed them the worst news they'd probably had in a while, a blue-print proving that despite all their past efforts, the world was in danger once again and their one ally couldn't be trusted. I might've been just the messenger but it was already painfully obvious I was going to be forever tainted with that news, just in telling them about it.

They weren't quite as light-hearted as they'd been in the show, I thought to myself. That shouldn't have surprised me. Along with a few other fans, I'd been getting sick of the way the Winchesters had been getting less experienced as hunters for the last couple of seasons thanks to some of the writers handing in scripts without doing their research. In this world, where a mistake didn't mean a re-set and another take but more likely a funeral pyre or at best a trip to a hospital, it made sense that they were more on the ball and less forgiving.

Sinking back down to the floor, a few things occurred to me at the same time. You're gonna think I'm slow – can't be helped, 'cause I felt slow – but it wasn't until then that it really got through that in this world, Dean had really gone to Hell, had been tortured and had tortured others. Sam had really drunk demon blood, manipulated by a demon and himself and the devil had really gotten out. The signs of the apocalypse, the earthquakes, the storms, the deaths – here all those things had really, truly happened. I shook my head. When it was the show, it'd been kind of easy to…not brush those things off, so much as forget what impacts they must have had.

All the scars were there, I thought, in a kind of a daze. All of them. Four fine lines along Sam's left cheek, courtesy of the daeva they'd faced, hard to notice at first but there. There would be bullet wounds in their shoulders, Bobby would have a knife scar on his abdomen…x-rays would show multiple breaks and a set of strange markings on their ribs…

In the show, the writers had suggested that Dean's scars had been healed when he was pulled from Hell, and again when Castiel healed him after Lucifer's beating. But those scars were all still there…did that mean that the writers didn't see everything? Or was it just that the production team thought it was a good way to lighten up on the make-up and continuity issues?

All still there.

How many other things might have been fudged then, I wondered? Changed or overlooked because of costs? Or the too-hard factor? I leaned back against the bed. It was possible that there were openings in the outlines I'd brought, things that the show couldn't or wouldn't do because of the production requirements. Things that wouldn't apply here.

May have been born at night, boy, but it wasn't last night.

Bobby's – actually, Jim Beaver's – voice spoke clearly in my memory. Sam had summoned Balthazar to stop Dean from putting his soul back, I remembered, flipping backwards through the older scripts. If he could do it once, he could do it again.

Thin, I thought. Anorexic, actually. But it wasn't out of the ballpark.

Before the phoenix could be tackled, something had to be done about the Titanic. Maybe two birds could be killed with one stone, I considered, getting up and picking up the leather folder that had precipitated my dive to the floor and settling myself back on the bed, leaning up against the pillows as I opened it.

I looked back for the details of the production team's summoning spell. Hopefully Sam would have the full details because the notes I had were even thinner than my idea. It wasn't going to be easy to get Balthazar to go covertly behind Cas' back – both in the matter of the Titanic, and in transporting the Winchesters back to 1861 for the phoenix. But in the last of the outlines I had, Balthazar does help them when he realises what Cas is trying to do.

I fished out the pen from the sleeve on the inner cover of the folder, found a clean sheet of paper and started writing. If it succeeded, I thought, the scratching of the pen loud in the silent room, it would change everything…

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~