A Covenant Without a Coaster

Nov 22, 2009 06:37

Title: A Covenant Without a Coaster
Pairing/Characters: Chuck's POV, mentions of Sam/Castiel
Rated: PG
Warnings: None really, some language
Word Count: 1,300
Notes: Beta edited by judas_denied./ Follows in the same 'verse as Under Covenant of Working Grace, which you should read first.


A Covenant Without a Coaster
“You know, I can see two tiny pictures of myself
And there's one in each of your eyes.
And they're doin' everything I do.
Every time I light a cigarette, they light up theirs.
I take a drink and I look in and they're drinkin' too.
It's drivin' me crazy. It's drivin' me nuts.”
~Laurie Anderson (Sharkey's Night)

Chuck wakes up on the couch with an open bag of Doritos going stale literally right under his nose and the mother of all hangovers. He’s got the headache that ate England-no, scratch that-bypassed England and took out the better part of the entire European continent. It’s currently trekking its way toward China.

“You creative bastard, you,” he mutters to himself.

With a groan, he uses the back of the couch to pull himself up and sits there trying not to throw up. Chuck isn’t so sure if it’s creativity or delusion, really, but with all the people and fucking angels-and demons, mustn’t forget those assholes-stomping up and down through his grey matter daily, he figures he’s fully entitled to either one.

He rubs his face and spots the beer on the end table that he opened right before he passed out. He figures it’s flat, but picks it up to drink it anyway. It is.

It occurs to him as he lays his head back against the back of the sofa that Sam’s gone. Not only gone, but gone; sleeping. And thank God and all his sleazy shithead angels for small mercies.

He closes his eyes and Sam’s right there; sound asleep with his brother’s spirit wandering the halls in a snit and Castiel…

Well, that’s interesting.

Chuck quirks a brow at finding Castiel curled up and sleeping in Sam’s bed. That would explain Dean’s mood. The ghost is fairly dripping ectoplasm down the walls, he’s so jealous.

“’Bout damn time, you ask me,” Chuck says.

He huffs out a breath and lifts his head to drink the rest of his flat, warm beer. And yeah, he knows no one is asking him, which is pretty stupid since he knows nearly everything about them, but he can dig it. If some twitchy, alcoholic, shit writer in a ratty bathrobe came up to him and said he could tell him anything he wanted to know about goddamn near anything, he’d probably laugh it off, too. Okay, no, if it happened to him he wouldn’t, but… whatever.

The point is, somewhere between making up his mind that Sam was going to get them all killed, and the epic battle where just about everyone died while Sam was about eighty miles away, Castiel had fallen smack in love with Sam Winchester.

Of course, being an angel and therefore one of the most clueless creatures God ever breathed life into, Castiel still doesn’t know what it is. Sam Winchester is crazier than an entire family of shithouse rats and clueless as hell himself, so he doesn’t know. It seems like the only ones who know are Chuck, who doesn’t really feel comfortable informing them and Dean, who doesn’t want it to be true so refuses to.

Chuck deals with it by getting drunk; Dean deals with it by throwing shit through the apartment and freaking Sam out. And Chuck really wishes Dean wouldn’t do that because the backlash of crazy, scrambled emotions from Sam make for some of his worst days. If the guy weren’t already dead, Chuck would suggest he seek therapy to deal with his anger.

Those headaches are like Attila the Hun sacking Rome; seriously fucking unpleasant.

But Sam and Castiel are both asleep right now, Bobby fell asleep in his chair in front of the fire with a book on folklore, so the only lively one Chuck has to deal with this morning is Dean. Which strikes him as morbidly ironic.

Doesn’t matter though because Chuck is not telling them. If Castiel and Sam can’t fumble around and figure out that they want in each other’s pants, then they are too stupid to be having sex, period. Besides, not only did no one ever listen to him; when he was right sometimes they blamed him and fuck if he’s going to get blamed for that one. It’s not like he makes this shit happen. He certainly didn’t make Armageddon happen; he hadn’t even been awake for that one.

And was it really Armageddon if the world was still here when it was over? Sometimes he thinks so, because whether the world is still here or not, sometimes everything still feels like it’s over. Then logic reasserts itself and he remembers he needs to take a shower and get dressed because he’s out of toilet paper, which clearly means that things are still trucking right along like normal. He doubts anybody runs out of toilet paper in Paradise.

Grumbling, Chuck heaves himself off the couch, trips over a pile of papers and one of his old books and has to catch himself on the arm of the sofa. He gets himself steady, gauges the distance between the couch and doorway then pushes himself toward it. In a very fucked up way that he doesn’t feel like examining at the moment, it’s a lot like being the ball in a pinball machine. One that steals quarters a lot and thus gets banged around on a regular basis.

He reaches the refrigerator and makes a soft whooping sound of triumph under his breath as he yanks it open and snatches a cold beer. He twists the cap off, drinks and then lets his head fall back against the freezer door with a thunk.

With his eyes closed, he can see Sam and Castiel still sleeping on the bed. The light is filtering through the navy blue sheet Sam nailed over the window and the room is so cold with Dean’s anger that they’re both breathing fog. As Chuck watches, Castiel wakes and shifts closer to Sam, rolling onto his stomach to bury his face against Sam’s chest. He puts a hand on Sam’s arm and pets it up and down, over his shivering, goose pimpled skin, trying to warm him.

It’s so sweet that it tugs at Chuck’s heart and he feels, for the first time in a very long time, like an intruder in his own head. He opens his eyes and tries to shove it out of his mind. It doesn’t work, but everything recedes enough that he doesn’t feel so much like a peeping tom.

He finishes his beer and leans down to take a quick count of what’s left in the refrigerator. He judges it to be enough to see him through the day and makes a mental note to sober himself up by the next morning so he can take a shower before making an emergency beer run.

When the headache blooms suddenly behind his eyes, he winces and reaches automatically for the bottle of pills on the counter by the microwave. He takes three painkillers, washing them down with beer then bends back into the fridge to grab a six-pack to take with him back into the living room.

He half falls onto the sofa, sending up a puff of dust as he flops down. He’s laying there watching the naked weather girl on the Playboy channel tell him about the torrential rains on the West coast when pain stabs at the back of his eyes and he closes them, cursing.

One of these days-not too far away-he expects to die from one of these headaches. An aneurysm or just some weird combination of explosions along his nervous system that reaches up into his brain and scrambles it. Failing that, there’s always liver or kidney failure to look forward to.

Chuck lifts his beer in a silent toast to what’s left of his liver and kidneys and drinks, thinking maybe it would be best to call Sam over tomorrow to drive him to the store. He’s probably going to be too drunk. Then he remembers that Sam can’t drive anymore since he went off the deep end.

Maybe he’ll call him to come over anyway.

XXX

covenant verse, sam/castiel

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