SPN FIC - Drunk
Sometimes something as simple as a couple of words creates a story. In this case it's two words: Town drunk. From there, a look at Bobby, and loss, through the years.
He ought to be more compassionate, he supposes, but compassion's always been in short supply in the Singer bloodline. Once in a while he thinks that if his father would just cry, he'd be able to put his book down and answer a call for help with something that feels like enthusiasm.
CHARACTERS: Bobby, Dean, Sam
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language
SPOILERS: 5.15
LENGTH: 2000 words
DRUNK
By Carol Davis
Bobby Singer's a smart kid - for what little good it does him, trapped with a father who lives with pain like it's a hog wallow. Wrecked back and ulcers and recurring headaches; he's trapped in chair or bed other than once or twice a day, when he works up enough juice (bile, Bobby thinks; it's pure, unfiltered bile) to drag himself to the bathroom. The pain is Bobby's father's universe.
Books are Bobby's.
They're a wall, he thinks, and he wishes to hell it was soundproof.
"BOY!" his father bellows, and he cringes.
He ought to be more compassionate, he supposes, but compassion's always been in short supply in the Singer bloodline. Once in a while he thinks that if his father would just cry, he'd be able to put his book down and answer a call for help with something that feels like enthusiasm.
But maybe not.
Maybe watching his father cry would be worse.
"What're you lookin' at me like that for, you friggin' princess?" his father snarls.
Nothing, Bobby thinks. I'm lookin' at nothing.
When the pain finally wins this grudge match, when Bobby's father can no longer work up enough bile to avoid giving up the ghost, he leaves behind a run-down house, a mountain of bills, and eleven old junked cars of varying makes and vintages. He was gonna fix them bastards up, he always said - when he got rid of the friggin' pain, he was gonna fix 'em up and sell 'em. But the pain never did pull up stakes, and the cars still sit out back of the house, rotting by degrees, like Bobby's father did.
Bobby sits looking out the window at them with a glass in his hand. It's a toast to his father, in a sense.
He goes on toasting until long past sundown, when it's gotten so dark out back that he can no longer see the cars.
Eleven days later, a stranger rings the doorbell.
"You've got an old Riviera out back," the man says with more enthusiasm than Bobby can find any sort of explanation for. "I'm restoring one - same year - and I've been looking all over for a junker I could strip for parts. Could you - would you maybe consider -"
"Hell yes," Bobby says.
And he follows the stranger out into the yard thinking maybe his father left him something after all. Not much of something, but…something.
He returns to the kitchen with ten twenty-dollar bills in his pocket, plus the promise of more. Through the window he watches the stranger happily detach pieces from the old Riviera with the aid of a rusty screwdriver Bobby found in the garage. Through the screen door Bobby can hear the crazy sumbitch whistling.
Glad somebody's happy, he thinks.
Then he realizes the house is quiet. No TV playing full-bore, no one screaming "BOY!"
It's quiet, and the liquor in his belly sours a little.
He thought he'd like quiet.
But that's not true. It's not true at all.
~~~~~~~~
It's the dog he finds first: the sweet-natured dog they rescued from the pound on their first anniversary. For a long minute (maybe it's as much as five minutes, or ten; maybe it's only a few seconds) his mind can't grasp what he's looking at.
When reality begins to intrude on the cascade of Whatthehell?Whatthefrigginhell? in his brain, he thinks Coyote? Mountain lion?
"You're home," croons a voice, and he turns to face something that makes even less sense than the remains of that poor harmless dog.
There's blood all over her dress. Her hands. Her face.
His mouth soundlessly forms her name. She doesn't seem to be hurt. But the blood. So much blood.
"Are you hungry?" she asks.
She blinks. What he sees then he calls a trick of the light.
"I've got dinner almost ready," she says, and somehow it's not her. It's like someone's wearing her.
"Karen?" he says on a breath.
Smiling - although it's not her smile at all, not his wife's sweet smile - she turns on a heel and walks back into the house. Something in him says following her is entirely the wrong thing to do, is the dumbest possible choice out of the half-dozen options that lie open to him, but the part of his brain that still can't figure this out and wants badly to do that compels him to take a step, then another, to leave the poor mutilated dog behind and walk up the steps, grasp the doorhandle and follow her (not her) into the house.
The kitchen.
God, the kitchen.
"I thought I'd pull out an old recipe," she says cheerfully, underlaid with a note of something he doesn't recognize then but realizes later was mockery.
A bird-bomb went off in the kitchen. Karen's formerly gleaming stove, the table, the countertops, the front of the fridge - they're all pasted with gore and an impossible number of black feathers.
"Four and twenty blackbirds," she beams.
Black…?
Her eyes are black.
"I'm so glad you're home," she says.
He calls the sheriff when she's dead.
Although someone else might well have done it already.
Might have heard the screaming.
It takes a long while for him to remember what happened in between the words "blackbirds" and "Hello, Sheriff's Department" even though half a dozen people insist that he tell them right now, that he lay it all out for them, chapter and verse. It's not until he cries and pukes all over his own lap that they cut him a little slack.
In the end, it's the slices on his hands and the bite marks on his back and the puncture just beneath his left shoulder blade that do the talking for him.
When they finally let him go home, everything's gone. The blood. The dog. The black feathers.
His wife.
Someone cleaned his house, and to the end of his life he'll never find out who.
They left the bottles, though. Thank the sweet Christ, they left the bottles.
~~~~~~~~
"NO," Sam says, and there's a snarl in it that reminds Bobby of his old man.
"Let me help you," Bobby insists, feeling the words logjam in his throat. Really, helping is the last thing he wants to do right now - because nothing he can do will be of any real help, not any more. He was across the street, watching patterns of light and dark change through curtained windows, when he should have been here.
Standing between these boys and those hounds.
He knows - dear God, he knows - that even if he'd been here, his presence wouldn't have prevented anything. Wouldn't have saved the life of that earnest little boy he found standing on his front porch all those years ago. Sam was here, after all, and for all that Sam was determined to stand between his brother and Hell, Sam didn't prevent a damn thing.
"Let me," Bobby says, and it's as prayerful as anything that's ever come out of his mouth.
And again, Sam says, "No."
So there's nothing left to do, after Sam has driven off into the pale light of morning with his brother.
Nothing left to do but go home.
Where everything is just as they left it.
As if time stopped there.
As if, if he listens carefully enough, he can still hear Dean's voice. Still hear himself promising that there's an answer to be found.
He sits in a chair in the living room with his head bowed and his eyes closed while the light changes around him.
After a while, he finds a phone.
Calls.
Listens to Sam's voice telling him to leave a message.
Sits.
Calls again.
Again.
When it occurs to him that he's cold, that he can hear rain, feel wind lifting and stirring the smell of old books, he opens his eyes to find the front door standing open. Dumbass, he thinks fleetingly, because what's the use of charms and sigils and devil's traps if you leave the damn door wide open?
Come get me, he thinks. Sonsabitches. I'm done fighting. Come get me.
But nothing does.
No one does.
Someone, though, has done a job on the supply of liquor in the house. When he shuffles into the liquor store in town, the guy behind the counter gives him a look, a long, steady, disapproving look, but there's nothing to go along with it, no words of warning, no refusal of Bobby's money. As Bobby gathers up his purchases someone else comes in, someone whose face he vaguely recognizes, and as he goes out he hears voices murmuring his name.
He ought to be stronger, he thinks at some point that summer.
Ought to be.
Ought to be, because Karen would be disappointed in him, and might say so. Because Dean would be, and wouldn't say.
Because maybe he's proving his father right.
"Fuck you." The words come out half-strangled. "Fuck the whole bunch of you."
There's no one in the house to hear him sob.
~~~~~~~~
Five days, he thinks, and every minute of it spent knowing it wasn't a mercy but a punishment. Every minute spent knowing it would come to an end and the end wouldn't be any better than it was the first time.
For somebody who's supposed to have all the answers, he thinks, you're a friggin' fine piece of work.
He hears them come back: hears the familiar rumble and chug of that old engine, feels the faint vibration of it through the ground, up through the wheels of his chair. After a minute he hears the crunch of boots on gravel and old, dry leaves.
No one says anything.
Done so much burning, he thinks. So almighty much burning.
"You need anything, Bobby?" Sam asks quietly.
He moves his head. Side to side.
They move away - he can hear their steps, feel that lack-of-presence - and for a while he's alone, listening to the dying crackle of the fire and twitching his nose against a smell that he can identify from five miles off.
Don't you ever get tired of being WRONG?
He does.
He's tired of all of it.
Tired unto death, he thinks.
The boy can move like a cat when he wants to, and Bobby doesn't quite hear him approach; the wind and the remnants of fire and the noise in Bobby's own head are enough to cover what little bit of sound he makes, so it's almost a surprise when something cool and smooth nudges against Bobby's hand. When he shifts his head to look at Dean, the boy lifts one shoulder and quirks his mouth.
Dean's holding the bottle. And another glass.
"I don't need a damn drinking buddy," Bobby rasps.
But the boy doesn't leave. Doesn't even shift his weight like he's considering the possibility of leaving.
"I said -"
"Yeah," Dean murmurs. "I heard you."
He sits cross-legged on the dry ground alongside Bobby's chair. Sets the bottle down in a place where it won't tip. Takes a long, slow swig of the contents of his glass. Leaves his head tipped back a little.
"It's fucked up," he says after a minute.
"Anything in particular?" Bobby mutters.
Dean looks over at him. His eyes are bloodshot all to hell. From the smoke, Bobby allows.
From nothing more than smoke.
When their glasses are empty, Dean picks up the bottle and pours.
"This gonna end, Bobby?" he asks.
That first night - that first time this boy showed up on Bobby Singer's front porch, Bobby saw something in him, something it took him a while to define. No: took him a while to admit he could define.
To admit he could remember.
He drinks, and as it burns it way down his gullet, he remembers a voice screaming "BOY!"
"I don't know," he says quietly. "Wish to Christ I did."
And he reaches down to rest a hand on Dean's shoulder, close to his neck.
They sit that way until the sun's disappeared behind the hills.
* * * * *
He ought to be more compassionate, he supposes, but compassion's always been in short supply in the Singer bloodline. Once in a while he thinks that if his father would just cry, he'd be able to put his book down and answer a call for help with something that feels like enthusiasm.
CHARACTERS: Bobby, Dean, Sam
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language
SPOILERS: 5.15
LENGTH: 2000 words
DRUNK
By Carol Davis
Bobby Singer's a smart kid - for what little good it does him, trapped with a father who lives with pain like it's a hog wallow. Wrecked back and ulcers and recurring headaches; he's trapped in chair or bed other than once or twice a day, when he works up enough juice (bile, Bobby thinks; it's pure, unfiltered bile) to drag himself to the bathroom. The pain is Bobby's father's universe.
Books are Bobby's.
They're a wall, he thinks, and he wishes to hell it was soundproof.
"BOY!" his father bellows, and he cringes.
He ought to be more compassionate, he supposes, but compassion's always been in short supply in the Singer bloodline. Once in a while he thinks that if his father would just cry, he'd be able to put his book down and answer a call for help with something that feels like enthusiasm.
But maybe not.
Maybe watching his father cry would be worse.
"What're you lookin' at me like that for, you friggin' princess?" his father snarls.
Nothing, Bobby thinks. I'm lookin' at nothing.
When the pain finally wins this grudge match, when Bobby's father can no longer work up enough bile to avoid giving up the ghost, he leaves behind a run-down house, a mountain of bills, and eleven old junked cars of varying makes and vintages. He was gonna fix them bastards up, he always said - when he got rid of the friggin' pain, he was gonna fix 'em up and sell 'em. But the pain never did pull up stakes, and the cars still sit out back of the house, rotting by degrees, like Bobby's father did.
Bobby sits looking out the window at them with a glass in his hand. It's a toast to his father, in a sense.
He goes on toasting until long past sundown, when it's gotten so dark out back that he can no longer see the cars.
Eleven days later, a stranger rings the doorbell.
"You've got an old Riviera out back," the man says with more enthusiasm than Bobby can find any sort of explanation for. "I'm restoring one - same year - and I've been looking all over for a junker I could strip for parts. Could you - would you maybe consider -"
"Hell yes," Bobby says.
And he follows the stranger out into the yard thinking maybe his father left him something after all. Not much of something, but…something.
He returns to the kitchen with ten twenty-dollar bills in his pocket, plus the promise of more. Through the window he watches the stranger happily detach pieces from the old Riviera with the aid of a rusty screwdriver Bobby found in the garage. Through the screen door Bobby can hear the crazy sumbitch whistling.
Glad somebody's happy, he thinks.
Then he realizes the house is quiet. No TV playing full-bore, no one screaming "BOY!"
It's quiet, and the liquor in his belly sours a little.
He thought he'd like quiet.
But that's not true. It's not true at all.
~~~~~~~~
It's the dog he finds first: the sweet-natured dog they rescued from the pound on their first anniversary. For a long minute (maybe it's as much as five minutes, or ten; maybe it's only a few seconds) his mind can't grasp what he's looking at.
When reality begins to intrude on the cascade of Whatthehell?Whatthefrigginhell? in his brain, he thinks Coyote? Mountain lion?
"You're home," croons a voice, and he turns to face something that makes even less sense than the remains of that poor harmless dog.
There's blood all over her dress. Her hands. Her face.
His mouth soundlessly forms her name. She doesn't seem to be hurt. But the blood. So much blood.
"Are you hungry?" she asks.
She blinks. What he sees then he calls a trick of the light.
"I've got dinner almost ready," she says, and somehow it's not her. It's like someone's wearing her.
"Karen?" he says on a breath.
Smiling - although it's not her smile at all, not his wife's sweet smile - she turns on a heel and walks back into the house. Something in him says following her is entirely the wrong thing to do, is the dumbest possible choice out of the half-dozen options that lie open to him, but the part of his brain that still can't figure this out and wants badly to do that compels him to take a step, then another, to leave the poor mutilated dog behind and walk up the steps, grasp the doorhandle and follow her (not her) into the house.
The kitchen.
God, the kitchen.
"I thought I'd pull out an old recipe," she says cheerfully, underlaid with a note of something he doesn't recognize then but realizes later was mockery.
A bird-bomb went off in the kitchen. Karen's formerly gleaming stove, the table, the countertops, the front of the fridge - they're all pasted with gore and an impossible number of black feathers.
"Four and twenty blackbirds," she beams.
Black…?
Her eyes are black.
"I'm so glad you're home," she says.
He calls the sheriff when she's dead.
Although someone else might well have done it already.
Might have heard the screaming.
It takes a long while for him to remember what happened in between the words "blackbirds" and "Hello, Sheriff's Department" even though half a dozen people insist that he tell them right now, that he lay it all out for them, chapter and verse. It's not until he cries and pukes all over his own lap that they cut him a little slack.
In the end, it's the slices on his hands and the bite marks on his back and the puncture just beneath his left shoulder blade that do the talking for him.
When they finally let him go home, everything's gone. The blood. The dog. The black feathers.
His wife.
Someone cleaned his house, and to the end of his life he'll never find out who.
They left the bottles, though. Thank the sweet Christ, they left the bottles.
~~~~~~~~
"NO," Sam says, and there's a snarl in it that reminds Bobby of his old man.
"Let me help you," Bobby insists, feeling the words logjam in his throat. Really, helping is the last thing he wants to do right now - because nothing he can do will be of any real help, not any more. He was across the street, watching patterns of light and dark change through curtained windows, when he should have been here.
Standing between these boys and those hounds.
He knows - dear God, he knows - that even if he'd been here, his presence wouldn't have prevented anything. Wouldn't have saved the life of that earnest little boy he found standing on his front porch all those years ago. Sam was here, after all, and for all that Sam was determined to stand between his brother and Hell, Sam didn't prevent a damn thing.
"Let me," Bobby says, and it's as prayerful as anything that's ever come out of his mouth.
And again, Sam says, "No."
So there's nothing left to do, after Sam has driven off into the pale light of morning with his brother.
Nothing left to do but go home.
Where everything is just as they left it.
As if time stopped there.
As if, if he listens carefully enough, he can still hear Dean's voice. Still hear himself promising that there's an answer to be found.
He sits in a chair in the living room with his head bowed and his eyes closed while the light changes around him.
After a while, he finds a phone.
Calls.
Listens to Sam's voice telling him to leave a message.
Sits.
Calls again.
Again.
When it occurs to him that he's cold, that he can hear rain, feel wind lifting and stirring the smell of old books, he opens his eyes to find the front door standing open. Dumbass, he thinks fleetingly, because what's the use of charms and sigils and devil's traps if you leave the damn door wide open?
Come get me, he thinks. Sonsabitches. I'm done fighting. Come get me.
But nothing does.
No one does.
Someone, though, has done a job on the supply of liquor in the house. When he shuffles into the liquor store in town, the guy behind the counter gives him a look, a long, steady, disapproving look, but there's nothing to go along with it, no words of warning, no refusal of Bobby's money. As Bobby gathers up his purchases someone else comes in, someone whose face he vaguely recognizes, and as he goes out he hears voices murmuring his name.
He ought to be stronger, he thinks at some point that summer.
Ought to be.
Ought to be, because Karen would be disappointed in him, and might say so. Because Dean would be, and wouldn't say.
Because maybe he's proving his father right.
"Fuck you." The words come out half-strangled. "Fuck the whole bunch of you."
There's no one in the house to hear him sob.
~~~~~~~~
Five days, he thinks, and every minute of it spent knowing it wasn't a mercy but a punishment. Every minute spent knowing it would come to an end and the end wouldn't be any better than it was the first time.
For somebody who's supposed to have all the answers, he thinks, you're a friggin' fine piece of work.
He hears them come back: hears the familiar rumble and chug of that old engine, feels the faint vibration of it through the ground, up through the wheels of his chair. After a minute he hears the crunch of boots on gravel and old, dry leaves.
No one says anything.
Done so much burning, he thinks. So almighty much burning.
"You need anything, Bobby?" Sam asks quietly.
He moves his head. Side to side.
They move away - he can hear their steps, feel that lack-of-presence - and for a while he's alone, listening to the dying crackle of the fire and twitching his nose against a smell that he can identify from five miles off.
Don't you ever get tired of being WRONG?
He does.
He's tired of all of it.
Tired unto death, he thinks.
The boy can move like a cat when he wants to, and Bobby doesn't quite hear him approach; the wind and the remnants of fire and the noise in Bobby's own head are enough to cover what little bit of sound he makes, so it's almost a surprise when something cool and smooth nudges against Bobby's hand. When he shifts his head to look at Dean, the boy lifts one shoulder and quirks his mouth.
Dean's holding the bottle. And another glass.
"I don't need a damn drinking buddy," Bobby rasps.
But the boy doesn't leave. Doesn't even shift his weight like he's considering the possibility of leaving.
"I said -"
"Yeah," Dean murmurs. "I heard you."
He sits cross-legged on the dry ground alongside Bobby's chair. Sets the bottle down in a place where it won't tip. Takes a long, slow swig of the contents of his glass. Leaves his head tipped back a little.
"It's fucked up," he says after a minute.
"Anything in particular?" Bobby mutters.
Dean looks over at him. His eyes are bloodshot all to hell. From the smoke, Bobby allows.
From nothing more than smoke.
When their glasses are empty, Dean picks up the bottle and pours.
"This gonna end, Bobby?" he asks.
That first night - that first time this boy showed up on Bobby Singer's front porch, Bobby saw something in him, something it took him a while to define. No: took him a while to admit he could define.
To admit he could remember.
He drinks, and as it burns it way down his gullet, he remembers a voice screaming "BOY!"
"I don't know," he says quietly. "Wish to Christ I did."
And he reaches down to rest a hand on Dean's shoulder, close to his neck.
They sit that way until the sun's disappeared behind the hills.
* * * * *