for reals: gilmore girls/svu/supernatural/women's murder club chinese new year fic

[wizened_cynic]

PEOPLE. IT'S DONE. Man, this is going to be a fun one to explain when I post the fic to red_packet. Basically SPN! Alex and Lorelai go to San Francisco on a hunt! And they run into Lindsay Boxer! (Yeah, I might've been mainlining on WMC eps on Tudou.com, and speaking of, that Cindy is adorable stuff, isn't she?) The Monster of the Week is roughly based on this, and everything I know about San Francisco comes from Wikipedia.

Here goes, guys. Another unholy crossover by yours truly.

What Happens in San Francisco, Stays in San Francisco


Lorelai has never met Abbie Carmichael, but Lorelai has seen her picture on Facebook, and Lorelai has an excellent memory when it comes to faces, so she is fairly certain that the woman shoving her into an interrogation room is the same woman who used to yell, "Alex, it's your psychotic sister!" whenever Lorelai called.

Lorelai wants to make sure, but somehow it doesn't seem like the right moment to be asking the person who pulled her gun on you an hour ago, "Hey, are you the one who taught my sister that reverse-cowgirl position? Because if you are, AWESOME JOB!" and then following it up with a manly fistbump.

It is the perfect moment, though, for Abbie Carmichael to casually flip through a file --- an impressive feat, considering it's a pretty big file --- and inform Lorelai that she has a pretty interesting rap sheet. "Fraud, trespassing, drunk and disorderly ---"

"I wasn't drunk," Lorelai says. She was possessed. There is a difference.

"Suspect to a murder in San Antonio . . ."

Shapeshifter.

"Grave desecration on three separate occasions in two different states."

Zombies. Zombies. Spirit of a mean old hag that literally ate babies.

"Breaking and entering into a church?"

"That one is a mistake," Lorelai says. "I had an emergency."

"An emergency that required breaking into a church at four in the morning."

"Oh, you've never broken into a house of God in your line of work?"

For a second, Abbie Carmichael looks as if she wanted to smile, which means one thing: time for that manly fistbump.

Lorelai reaches an arm over, but before any fistbumping could commence, Abbie Carmichael grabs her hand, twists it backwards and slams it onto the table.

"What the fuck?" Lorelai yells, and right that second she prefers Olivia, poor dead Olivia, so much more than this particular psycho ex of Alex's.

"What the hell were you doing at the crime scene? Don't waste my time: either you give it to me straight, no bullshit, no jerking my chain, or you'll be enjoying the five-star accommodations of our precinct's holding cell."

Lorelai pretends to think for a minute before saying the magic words: "I want a lawyer."


*

Northern California is depressing. Northern California has nothing except gay people and top-rated universities; Southern California, on the other hand, has beaches and Brenda Walsh and Disneyland. It's almost like God made SoCal first and then ran out of the good stuff, so he saddled NorCal with all the leftovers.

"We're here on business," Alex reminds Lorelai over Chinese food --- really good Chinese food, admittedly --- at a hole-in-the-wall place on Grant Avenue. "Put your Lonely Planet away."

"You're the one who needed a map," Lorelai says. "Which you couldn't even read. It took us, what, three hours to find the right exit?"

"Your Mapquest directions were wrong."

"It's not my Mapquest. I don't own Mapquest, so I'm not responsible for any errors, okay?"

"Well, you should have double-checked."

"With what? Mapquest? Sorry then, Alex. I'll make sure to double-check my Mapquest directions with Mapquest next time."

It's an emergency, this job, and after a sixteen-hour drive with limited bathroom breaks and absolutely no music except for dead German composers, they are snapping at each other like sarcastic little turtles.

"Lovers' spat?" asks the short, stereotypically gay woman from the next table.

Welcome to San Francisco.


*


"I said no bullshit."

Abbie Carmichael has been standing and staring knives into Lorelai's skull for, Lorelai thinks, two hours at least. Lorelai wants to offer her a seat but that would probably end up with Lorelai's head in a hammerlock. She's starting to see why Alex dated this chick. Alex really has a type, doesn't she?

Before Lorelai can fast-forward her tale of intrigue and demon-hunting, there's a knock on the door and a really blonde woman with really short-cropped hair pokes her head in. "Lindsay, can I have a word?"

"Wait," Lorelai says. "Lindsay?"

"Inspector Boxer," Lindsay-Abbie corrects pointedly, and then leaves with the blonde woman, door slamming behind her.

"Dirty!" chortles Lorelai, but she's talking to herself.


*


The police are working it as a homicide but it's obvious to any person with demon-tracking experience that something else is responsible for the sudden disappearances of various upstanding citizens in San Francisco's Chinatown.

A monster, maybe. A serial killing monster. A serial killing monster with claws and a taste for human flesh.

Daddy had texted them last week, sent them an email with the relevant newspaper clippings. The attacks happen around late January to mid-February every year. People disappear from their homes, and when concerned friends or angry landlords visit days later, there's nothing left except claw marks on the walls and way too much blood on the bathroom floor for them to have survived.

Lorelai and Alex get there a day too late; Susan Hsu vanished two days ago. Her apartment is marked off by yellow police tape, the linoleum floor stained maroon and brown with dried blood.

They stare at the scratches on the wallpaper, made by a seemingly very large, very angry feline, until Alex asks, "So, what do you think?"

"A mountain lion with rabies?"

"That only comes out once a year?"

"There's no pattern," Lorelai says. "There's no link between the victims. No type either: old lady, old dude, younger old dude, chick that looks like Chun Li in Street Fighter."

"Lorelai!" Alex chides. "A little respect for the dead, perhaps?"

"Hey, Chun Li was cool," Lorelai says, and shrugs.

Alex rolls her eyes so far backwards she can probably see her oversized brain. "Whatever it is, it wasn't here until two years ago."

"And it only strikes in Chinatown. That's, like, its comfort zone." Alex looks at her, so Lorelai explains, "I watch a lot of America's Most Wanted when you're at the library."

"Of course you do," Alex says. They finish surveying the apartment, which gives them nothing except knowledge that Susan Hsu liked to collect cardboard. There's probably enough flattened cardboard boxes in that apartment to house an army of hobos.

"So what do we do now?" Lorelai asks, ducking under the police tape on her way out.

"You go talk to the neighbors, see if they saw or heard anything," Alex says. "I'm going to do some research in the library." She pauses, and then adds, "Do not watch America's Most Wanted while I'm gone."

"Don't worry, it's not on right now," Lorelai says, which is not what Alex wanted to hear, but at least it is the truth.


*


"Tell me about your sister."

They're pushing hour eight and Lorelai still doesn't have her lawyer. She's fired two public defenders already, one for looking too much like an ex-boyfriend, and the other for dressing like a prostitute that caters exclusively to clowns. Lorelai's buying time until Alex comes for her, and she knows Alex will. Lorelai doubts a lot of things: the existence of UFOs, the durability of Brad and Angelina's relationship, the impending extinction of bananas. But Alex being able to save her ass (hell, everybody's ass), that's not something she worries about.

If Lindsay Boxer is Abbie Carmichael, then she should know this already, but there is the chance that she suffers from dissociative fugue, which is seems a lot likely at this point.

"What do you want to know about her?" Lorelai asks. It should be the other way around, Lorelai thinks. She should ask Abbie-Lindsay-What's Her Name what she knows about Alex, which, Lorelai is guessing from that reverse cowgirl position, a lot.

"For starters," says Lindsay (let's just call her Lindsay for now), leaning back in her chair, "where she is."

"Can't help you with that," says Lorelai. "No idea where she is right now."

"Really? Because patrol just saw her at near the place where one of the victims used to work."

"Then you should ask patrol where she is, not me."

Lindsay studies Lorelai for so long that it gives her the chills. You can't tell what the woman is thinking. Say what you will about ghosts and ghouls and monsters, but they're simple. They're hungry for something: flesh, revenge, the truth. You find out what they want, you can get rid of them. Lindsay Boxer is going to prove to be much harder to shake off.

"I'm going to give you a minute to think of another answer," Lindsay says finally. "Or my friend Jill, the ADA, is going to charge you with obstruction, and since we currently have possession of your stolen credit cards and all seventeen dollars' worth of change in your wallet, we'll see if you can pay bail."

"If you were really going to charge me, you would've done it ten cups of coffee ago," Lorelai points out. "Since you haven't, I think either you want my help, or you just have a massive crush on me."

They make inkless pads now.

The San Francisco Police Department does not use them.


*


The waiters at China King know them now, if not by name, at least by their reluctance to try the pickled jellyfish. Lorelai is loyal to General Tso and his chicken, thank you very much.

"Why Chinatown?" Alex waxes rhetorically.

"Our monster is a racist?" Lorelai suggests as she reaches over for a second helping of the sauteed string beans.

"I think most carnivorous animals of a supernatural nature tend to be non-discriminatory when it comes to their food. I'm thinking they're all connected somehow."

"It's Chinatown. Everybody knows everybody through six degrees of separation."

"And you would know that."

"Su-Lin told me." Lorelai is trying not to be smug, but it's hard. "That's why it helps to butter up the waitresses, Alex. Su-Lin is also giving us extra fortune cookies."

"Did she give you anything that's actually useful?"

"How are fortune cookies not useful?"

"Unless they morphed into giant mutant cats that killed four people, no, Lorelai. Not useful."

"Okay, well. If you put it that way. Anyway, Su-Lin says that our dead woman's son-in-law works with the second cousin of the third wife of our first victim, the old guy, whose granddaughter goes to school with Chun Li, who lives two blocks away from this underground casino where our other, younger old guy was a frequent visitor." Alex is staring at her, glassy-eyed. "Guess you're starting to like the racist theory now, don't you?"

Alex sighs, scribbles something into her notebook in her chickenscratch handwriting. "All right then, let's work it from another angle. Why this time of the year?"

Lorelai shrugs. "I don't know. It should be, like, hibernating or something. It's winter. And yes, if you must know, Alex, sometimes when America's Most Wanted isn't on, I watch Animal Planet. For the hardcore animal porn."

Alex isn't even listening, which probably explains why she didn't hit the roof at the mention of "hardcore animal porn." (Lorelai happens to think that phrase isn't used nearly enough in everyday speech; she's going to make an effort to say it more often from now on.) She's watching Su-Lin and her illegally-employed first cousin hang up red paper banners and cardboard replicas of firecrackers.

"It's Chinese New Year," Alex says.

"Yep," Lorelai says. "Gonna be great food. Mei Xiang told me that we can join her family for dinner if we're still around next week."

"It's Chinese New Year," Alex says, this time complete with the eyeroll and the over-enunciation.

It strikes Lorelai then, like a slap in the face, and immediately she calls Su-Lin over for their fortune cookies and a history lesson.


*


Lorelai is almost done analyzing her cellmate Carmela's relationship with her two boyfriends when the door clanks open.

"Winchester," Lindsay says. Lorelai suspects this woman only has one expression: pissed. It sort of explains why she put up with Alex for so long. They're like two peas in a pissy, lesbian pod. "You can go."

Startled, Lorelai sits up. "Really? 'Cause I just got settled in and ---"

"Your sister warned me you'd be like this."

"Wait. You saw my sister?"

Lindsay holds up the folder in her left hand. "She gave me this on the condition that I let your sorry ass go. So what's it going to be?"

"You saw my sister," Lorelai says. "And it wasn't weird."

"You mean, compared to you?"

"No," Lorelai waves a hand, "I mean, in general."

Lindsay now looks confused in addition to pissed off. "You know what? Just get out of here."

The Volvo is double-parked in the parking lot, Alex behind the wheel and tapping at her PDA in a frenzy. "Man, the food in there sucks," Lorelai says as she climbs in and sits shotgun.

"Got a lead. Put on your seatbelt."

"Nice to see you too, Alex. I'm glad to hear that you missed me."

Alex glances up. "I traded all the information I had on the case to get you out of there."

Lorelai reaches over and flicks Alex on the side of the head. "Bullshit," she says. "You gave her a fake file. Like you'd ever hand over real information to save my ass."

Alex smiles absently, still staring at the tiny screen on her palm pilot. "Not as dim as you look, Lorelai. That's why I saved your ass." She starts up the engine, pulls out of the spot, and turns left to head for Portsmouth Square.

"Alex," Lorelai says, when they're two blocks down from the police station.

"What?"

"Drive slower. Your ex-girlfriend is tailing us."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"She also has amnesia," Lorelai adds.


*


Alex finds a survivor, a grad student at San Francisco State who lives three blocks from where the first victim used to work. Elizabeth Schekker looks as if she can be Alex's long-lost twin, except for the fact that Alex already has a twin: blonde hair, blue eyes, skin that burns instead of tans.

"That explains why she didn't turn up on the police radar," Alex says, after they've finished interviewing her.

Lorelai nods. "Doesn't fit the profile," she says, and Alex makes that face again.

"For the last time, stop pretending to be a profiler."

"I'm not pretending. Alex, I happen to be an expert at criminal profiling. I've seen every single episode of CSI ever. I've watched Seven fifty times. Man, I love knowing that Gwyneth Paltrow gets her head chopped off."

"Now that your credentials have been well-established, can we focus on tracking down this mythical Chinese animal?"

Elizabeth Schekker was attacked two years ago by the Nian beast, which, according to Wikipedia, is some sort of cross between a dragon and Tony the Tiger on steroids. She suffered only minor scratches and bruises, as well as a hefty bite to her left shoulder, but before the Nian could do any real damage, the sound of firecrackers scared it away.

So now they know what it is; they just need to figure out where it is.

"Someone's got to be hiding it," Alex determines. "Hell, someone had to have brought it here from somewhere, since it didn't start striking until two years ago."

"So we're looking at a Chinese person in Chinatown who moved in two years ago," Lorelai says. "That won't be hard at all."

"Get on it," Alex says. "You're the one who knows all the waitresses."


*


It's almost like a family reunion, except Abbie Carmichael isn't family. Abbie Carmichael isn't even Abbie Carmichael, if Lindsay Boxer's words are to be believed.

"I've always wanted to do this," Lorelai says. They're surveying Wong's Dried Seafoods from across the street, Lorelai having been banished to the backseat. She leans forward so that her head is in line with Alex's and Lindsay's. "Me, Alex, Alex's ex-girlfriend's doppelganger. Getting together, hanging out. Ideally we'd be watching Moulin Rouge, but hey, the world ain't perfect."

Lindsay turns and looks at Alex. "How have you not shot her yet?"

"I've tried," Alex says. "The part where my gun is full of salt puts a cramp on things."

"Bummer," Lindsay says.

"Yep, this is exactly like I imagined it," Lorelai says.


*


The staff of China King send Lorelai on a wild goose chase around Chinatown, from which the only thing Lorelai learns is how to say, "Can I get twenty percent off on this?" in Cantonese. Alex's cell is turned off, so hungry and desperate, Lorelai buys herself a double whopper at Burger King and heads back to Susan Hsu's apartment for another look at the crime scene.

The police tape is gone, the floor scrubbed, everything the woman owed covered with plastic tarps that are already starting to collect dust. The scratches on the wall are still there, but no matter how long Lorelai stares at them, they don't tell her where to find the creature that made them.

She's using the bathroom when she hears a noise outside, something getting knocking over. "Alex?" she calls. "Did you get my voicemail?"

Nobody answers, and Lorelai thinks, Shit.

Please, please, please be Alex, Lorelai pleads as she jumps off the toilet and attempts to yank her jeans back up. Don't let me be trapped in an apartment with a monster-dragon-lion hybrid, not right now, not when I don't even have my pants on.

Then she hears the click of a gun, and a second later she's staring down the barrel of it.

"Shit," Lorelai says, this time out loud.


*


"And you know what happens next," Lorelai concludes. She takes a huge swig from her water bottle, exchanging a look with Alex over the plastic rim. "You handcuff me, drag me to the station, try to put me in jail. Now I know why the caged bird sings."

"What does that have to do with anything?" Lindsay asks.

Lorelai shrugs. "I was in jail. It seems relevant."

"That book is not about being in jail," Lindsay says.

"Yeah, I never read it."

Alex stays quiet through all this, eyes fixed on the front doors of Wong's Dried Seafood still. Lindsay wanted to go in and confront the owner, one James Yik-Son Wong, proud owner of a reptilian feline with a taste for human flesh, but Alex urged her to wait. After all, she and Lorelai aren't cops, and James Wong isn't exactly what they're looking for.

Well, they left out telling Lindsay the part about the reptilian feline with a taste for human flesh.

As Alex will say later, "We're not that close."

James Wong steps out of his store at a quarter past seven, the outline of his shape barely visible under the milky light of the streetlamp. "He seems unarmed," Lindsay says, setting down the binoculars. "I'm going to get out of the car and follow him; I want you to drive around and cut him off in case he runs."

Alex looks at Lindsay like she's stupid, which clearly she is if she thinks she can get away with bossing Alex around. Not stupid, maybe. Fortunate enough not to be Alex Winchester's younger sibling is how Lorelai would put it. "How about I follow him, and you take the car around?"

"In case you forgot," Lindsay smiles her Ted Bundy smile, "I'm the cop here. You're not. You shouldn't even be involved in this case. So why don't you just do as I say, and no one gets hurt."

"Why don't you just go to hell?" Alex asks, which is a good question, though asked in the wrong tone of voice.

"Girls, girls, you're both pretty," Lorelai says, and they both glare at her. She slumps back into the seat. "Boy, you two are really not people persons, are you? Is it people persons or people people?"

"It's ---"

Lorelai sneaks her hand through the space between the front seat and the door, grabs the gun from Lindsay's holster, and makes a run for it.

Sometimes that's the only way to get things done around here.


*


It seems anticlimactic afterwards, especially since James Wong hands over the Nian without a fight.

"I thought you were going to mug me," he explains in thickly-accented English.

"Please, I'm a delicate flower," Lorelai says.

"You were holding a gun," Alex says.

"My gun," Lindsay says.

The Nian whimpers from its cage. It's smaller than Lorelai expected, and doesn't look anything like a dragon. It reminds her of that urban legend about the dog that a family adopts from Mexico that turns out to be a sewer rat.

"My family kept it captive for hundreds of years," Wong says sadly. He reaches into the cage and pets the Nian's unruly mane. "We tamed it; we thought we had tamed it. It never tried to leave when we were in China. But since we came to America . . ."

"Should've invested in a better lock on that cage," says Lindsay.

Wong shakes his head. "The Nian is not really animal. The Nian is a spirit. A spirit cannot be confined by objects of this world. If it wants out, it comes out. No stopping it."

"One more thing," Alex says, flipping through her journal. "What does hui jia mean? The girl who survived the attack swears she heard the Nian say it before it got scared off."

"It means 'come home,'" Wong says.

"Well," Lorelai says, "there you have it."


*


They drive across the Golden Gate Bridge when they leave, just because. It's the two of them again, Alex and Lorelai, as it was and ever shall be, amen.

Lorelai didn't really mind working with Lindsay, who turned out to be really funny and awesome once the Nian was FedEx-ed back to Shanghai and she stopped being a bitch. Most people in general are pretty funny and awesome once they stop being bitches, but with Lindsay, Lorelai enjoyed the added amusement of showing her Abbie Carmichael's Facebook account and watching both her and Alex deny vehemently that Abbie and Lindsay look anything alike.

"I cannot believe you guys don't see it," Lorelai said during their night out with Lindsay's friends, who were equally funny and awesome and knew exactly where to go when Lorelai suggested off-handedly, and inebriatedly, to hit a drag club.

Alex's smile was a tight line. She took the glass away from Lorelai and said, "You and the Long Island Iced Tea. You never learn, do you?"

The bridge is packed on the way back, and they get stuck in traffic for an hour. After the first twenty-five minutes drip by like a leaky faucet, Lorelai finally asks, still tipsy from the night before, "So tell me: did Abbie Carmichael teach you the reverse-cowgirl position?"

"Lorelai!" Alex says, focusing very hard on the license plate of the '84 Corolla in front of her.

"Actually, you don't have to." Lorelai tilts her head back and closes her eyes, rubs her thumb against her temple.

"Yeah, let's just add this to the list of things we should never, ever talk about."

"If I weren't so hungover, I'd think that was a great idea."

The car inches forward, and then Alex slams her hand on the horn, the resulting blare making Lorelai's brain bleed. "It's just," she says, when she can sort of hear her own voice again. "I want to know who to thank."

"How is this not talking about it?"

Lorelai sighs, huge and heavy. "It isn't. It really isn't. Sorry."

It's quiet for the longest time, and just as Lorelai is about to drift back off to sleep, Alex says, quietly, "Lorelai?"

"Hmmmm?"

"Let's just say, you're not the only one who watches Animal Planet."

Lorelai's eyes snap open, so quickly that the sun almost blinds her. "You're kidding," she spits, incredulous.

"Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. You'll never know, Lorelai Victoria Winchester."

Alex grins, the white of her teeth glinting in the afternoon light.

A million thanks as usual to bank_farter who enables, encourages, and entertains. It's every bit as dirty as it sounds. The Scrubs shoutouts are all yours, PB!

Comments

[wizened-cynic.livejournal.com]

Hee, thanks! Ha, if I'd known all it takes was Lindsay Boxer, I would've peppered her in all my fics! Oh, man, if you want to start the SPN AU and if you like casefiles, I say start from the beginning (http://wizened-cynic.livejournal.com/198681.html) and then try the one where they fight Dementors (http://crackfic.bitter-is-better.com/fic/dementors.html). And if you really want something daring, the Lorelai gets a penis fic (http://wizened-cynic.livejournal.com/229323.html#cutid1).