Four bottles of beer on the wall

Summary: Chuck Shurley had always wanted to be a writer. Turns out, being a prophet sucks.

An Ordinary Man

He had always wanted to be a writer. Ever since those first (few dozen) love letters to Nancy McKeon (the immensely talented actress who played Jo in The Facts of Life), slaved over painstakingly by lamplight and written in shaky teenaged penmanship, Chuck had always wanted to be a writer.

He had always wanted to see his name in print; well, maybe not his name, but a pseudonym, maybe. Charles "Chuck" Shurley just sounded so… unsatisfying and ordinary. Any penname he'd use would have to be cool, sharp, dangerous.

He fiddled around with different names, the way a lovesick schoolgirl writes her name in hundreds of different ways, combining it with her crush's. He tried out a lot of them over the years: Ed Hacker. Axel Lund. Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton stole that one). Machete Edwards. Carver Edlund. He likes the sound of the last one. Only, he'd never had the chance to use it.

Until the Supernatural book series, that is. I'll get to that later, though.

Chuck was an ordinary guy. Alright, maybe shyer, freakier, geekier, nerdier, than your typical Joe Schmo, but suffice it to say that Chuck would never, ever be voted "Most Likely to Succeed," "Best-Looking," "Most Likely to be Famous," and most certainly not "Most Likely to Save the World." He graduated from high school with straight Cs, went to an okay college, majored in Lit., did so-so in it, and managed to graduate with an average GPA. Ordinary, ordinary, ordinary.

So after he graduated, he tried his hand at writing. That was easier said than done. There he was, sitting at his computer with a shiny new college degree and nothing to type. Nothing, nada, zip. The genius of Chuck Shurley was uninspired.

He took lowly-paid, cringe-worthy, humiliating jobs to pay the bills (just barely, and a couple of times, not even). For a dozen years, he mopped floors, fished around in clogged up toilets for hairballs, did garbage duty at his apartment complex—in effect, eked out a living so that he could do his real work. At one point, he had to sell his computer to get enough money to buy his month's ration of Cup-A-Noodle. Let's just say, Chuck Shurley in the nineties was the epitome of "struggling artist."

And to be honest, a part of Chuck liked that: the masochistic part of him.

Simply put, twelve years of no ideas took their toll; eventually, he took to drink.

It happens to the best of us, and Chuck was certainly not the best; he was, as I said earlier, an ordinary man. So he got drunk. He got trashed. He got so shitfaced that as is inevitable in such cases, he passed out in a puddle of his own vomit. Yes, sad story, happens to everyone. La-di-dah, la-di-dah.

At least he didn't land facing up, or else he would have asphyxiated like a rock star and we wouldn't be talking about him right now…or maybe we would, since the angels would probably have brought him back to life. But I'm getting ahead of myself again.

You see, up to this point, Chuck Shurley had been an ordinary guy. I'm drumming this into you because at this moment, Chuck joined the ranks of a bunch of not-so-ordinary guys. You probably know them, those old geezers out of the Bible, like Moses, Elijah, Abraham, Jacob, and the crazy guy with the big boat and the zoo, what's-his-name, Noah.

Chuck Shurley became a prophet.

Perhaps it is more correct to say that "Chuck Shurley came into his prophetness at this moment," since he had been a prophet from birth and nothing could ever change that, unless someone went back in time and murdered him or stopped his parents from getting hitched like in a movie, but that's nonsense because there's no such thing as time travel…or is there?

On Halloween of 2005, Anno Domini ("in the year of Our Lord," for those non-Latin speakers out there), Charles "Chuck" Shurley had his first vision while passed out on the linoleum floor of his dining room from eating too much candy (no kids had come to his door) and drinking too much vodka.

Imagine: Twenty-two years ago. A young mother is kissing her baby goodnight. This is Mary Winchester and the baby is Sammy. He is exactly six months old tonight. Now, an energetic tyke of four bursts into the room. This is Dean. His mother helps him say goodnight to his baby brother. Dad walks in; John Winchester was in the Marines during the war, but those memories are far behind him now. Dean rushes up to him, and is caught up in a warm embrace. He's as much Daddy's boy as he is Mommy's prince.

Fast forward a couple of hours: Mary wakes up to sounds coming from the baby monitor. John's not next to her, so she gets up and pads over to little Sammy's room. But not to worry, Sammy's already being taken care of. "Shhh," says the shadowed figure in the dark room.

Satisfied, Mary turns around and walks back down the hall to their bedroom. The lamp on the wall flickers, prompting her to tap on it and frown. Then she sees that the television set downstairs is on. John's left it on again. But then walking down the stairs, she sees that her husband isn't upstairs at all, but sleeping in a clearly uncomfortable position in the armchair.

Well, it goes without saying that Mary rushes to her baby's room, sure that something terrible is happening to her son…and she's suddenly pushed back against the wall by a force she can't see and which slides her up, up the wall and on the ceiling. She's looking down at her baby now; Sammy's gurgling happily, unaware of what's happening to his mother only a few feet over him. Mary screams; a red slash appears on her abdomen, marring the perfect white of her nightgown.

John wakes up and runs up to help his wife, but when he gets to baby Sammy's room, there's nothing the matter there; Sammy's still fussing like all babies do. Then a red droplet drips down, then another, and another, and so he looks up…at his wife as she bursts into flame like some kind of grotesque butterfly pinned on the ceiling being fired up with an invisible acetylene welding torch.

Holy freakin' shit, right?

John snaps out of it long enough to take the baby out of his crib and hand him over to the goofy-looking older kid, who was curious enough to run out into the hall to see what's up, and order him to take his brother outside as fast as he can and to not look back.

In the end, Mom doesn't make it, but the rest of the Winchesters sit on the front hood of what's to become home for the next twenty-five years or so, looking pretty darn traumatized.

And so concludes the Prologue, and the introduction of the dramatis personae (that's "persons or characters of the drama" for those readers who are not scholars of dead languages). And…scene.

That's what Chuck saw that first night, and boy, when he woke up with a hangover the size of an elephant, he just sat there with his head in his hands and thought, "What the hell was that? It was kind of like a movie. That was a pretty good intro. Wonder what comes next." Then he threw up in his lap.

Let me tell you this: There were times after that when Chuck wished that he had not wondered what happened next in the lives of the Winchester family because things got complicated for him, very complicated indeed.

It didn't seem like it in the beginning, when he was writing about two brothers on a road trip hunting monsters and demons and whatever goes bump in the night while searching for their missing father—that was fine. Only, he had to get drunk and pass out in order to get ideas. Otherwise, he got stuck with writer's block. Yeah, bummer, right? But he just took it like a man because he had finally come into his genius.

So he drank his way though Supernatural, Wendigo, Phantom Traveler, Bloody Mary, Skin—you get the idea. The books never really took off, but at least some people were reading them and he got to use his awesome nom de plume (that's French for "pen name") and he finally had the means (not a whole lot of money, but more than being a janitor) to actually full-on play the reclusive writer he'd always dreamed of being.

Chuck had always wanted to be a reclusive writer. Just like Salinger, but with a better hero. Make that "heroes." Sam and Dean could totally kick Holden Caulfield's ass, blindfolded and with their hands tied, one-on-one.

Sam and Dean were cool. They could fight like ninjas, had a well-stocked armory in the hidden compartment in the trunk of their very awesome black '67 Chevy Impala, and had movie-star looks (or at least they were pretty enough to be on the CW). Plus, they had this unconquerable brotherly love of the sort that spawned thousands of Sam-slash-Dean fan fiction stories.

That's right, Chuck's books had fans, and these fans wrote fan fiction about the two protagonists. Some of them even had them in a romantic relationship, which was stupid—Sam and Dean? No way.

Anyway, Chuck was feeling pretty good until he got a notice in September of 2008 from Sera Siege at Flying Wiccan Press that they were now bankrupt and would have to stop publishing the Supernatural books after No Rest for the Wicked. Terrible, ain't it? So sad. Tragic.

That made Chuck go on another drinking binge (not that he had been exactly sober the last three years) and pass out again. Then—whoa. He dreamed about Dean waking up in a pine box. His coffin. And an angel, and Sam exorcizing demons with his mind.

Chuck had to write that story plot down. He simply had to; the artist in him simply would not quiet until he had it all typed up and printed out on sheets of white copy paper. Well actually, each time he tried to stop writing, he'd get a vivid vision accompanied by the fiercest headache imaginable. He tried to stop the dreams by not drinking, but that didn't do much either: he just ended up having phone sex all day and depleting his bank account.

So it went on; he'd write books that would never get published, but he typed them out because otherwise, the nagging sensation that he had to do it would bug him forever and ever. And ever. Then the day came that he had another vision that Sam and Dean find out about a series of books written about them and they hunt down the writer of the novels and…

What? That's a little presumptuous, isn't it? Writing a book about two guys who find out that books are being written about them and then having them go meet the author…? Was that a knock on the door?

And there they were. Sam and Dean. Not LARPers, not a couple of crazy dudes with lots of guns. The Winchester brothers. Proof: they knew the actual last names of the brothers. Holy shit.

Holy freaking shit. Holy—wait, did that mean that he was controlling the lives of these two guys? That sucked. He had put them through so much, and had actually killed both of them just because he had thought they were fictional characters. Chuck felt so bad. He felt kind of awesome too, though. Of all the kids at his high school, he would have been the last choice for "Most Likely to be God."

Then an angel showed up and said that he—Chuck, not the angel—was a prophet of the Lord. And that made everything suck even more. He was a Chosen One, hand-picked by God to write down the chronicles of Sam and Dean into the Gospel of Winchester. A bunch of bad horror-fantasy novels is actually part of the holy scripture? No way, right? Yes, way, actually.

So much "yes, way" that Chuck even got threatened out of not warning the brothers from running straight into danger because that was their "destiny." Being special sucks. What's the point of having superpowers if you can't use them for good?

Anyway, he kept typing, writing out what he saw, Sam's final betrayal with Ruby, Dean getting stuck in the angels' Green Room, Sam getting tricked into killing Lilith to raise Lucifer, and—

Hold it, hold it. Chuck's last night on earth was not going to be spent at the computer. No, he was going to die happy, he was going to die having sex, sex with twenty girls. At once. And screw the cost and the—

The flutter of wings behind him made him whirl around. Cas and Dean. Cas and Dean, who were supposed to be in the Green Room, not here, in Chuck's house. Turned out they wanted to change their destinies. Whatever happened from then on was unwritten, unscripted. That sounded a whole lot better than having Lucifer running around on earth, so Chuck told them where Sam and Ruby were.

What was the worst that could happen, right?

Uh, yeah, having an angel explode in your kitchen is not an experience that Chuck would recommend.

So Dean didn't make it in time to stop Sam from killing Lilith and breaking the last seal. Lucifer rose, someone miraculously whisked them onto a plane and put Castiel back together again.

And Chuck had another bottle of Jack and started typing.