Title: any couch in a storm
Ficverse: SPN
Series:
SPN comment!ficRating: PG
Length: 550 ish
Characters: Bobby, Rufus
Prompted and posted: from 1.08, Bugs
Dean: Wasn't that on Oprah?
Sam: You watch Oprah?
Notes: just something that's been in my head for a little while. There's something about bad daytime tv that says "grouchy old hunters" to me. I didn't have time to write it this afternoon, so I did. Because the other option was homework, and ... yeah. (Also, blue-label wasn't around as of the time frame of this fic. I checked.)
Warnings/Spoiler: pre-series
Feedback: let's hear it. The good, the bad, the ugly....
Drifting up from the murky depths of unconsciousness, it wasn’t hard to tell where he was.
Ratty sofa with that ratty sofa scratch; chatter of the tv; tantalizing scent of black-label Walker being indulged in the mid-afternoon glare that was bouncing in through flimsy curtains. The fusty, familiar smell of a womanless home. Besides, he’d driven himself here, before collapsing on the front step.
“Don’t pull any of’em stitches.” The bored warning was punctuated by a sip, a swallow. “I ain’t sewing you up again.”
Bobby shifted slightly, feeling the tugs and push of pain through whatever Rufus had given him to dope him up, then grunted in acknowledgement. “’Kay.”
Truth be told, it was more than he’d hoped for. It had been 50/50 that Rufus would even open the door, except maybe to push Bobby into the bushes so he wouldn’t make a mess on the porch while bleeding to death. But there had been nowhere else to go.
Applause erupted from the tv, mingling with twanging and assertive female voices. Bobby squinted his eyes open against the light and cleared his throat back to life.
“You watching Oprah now, Rufus?”
“You’re in my house, Bobby.” There was belligerence enough in his voice to finish the sentence: held together by my medical thread, floating above agony on my drugs, wearing my whole and unbloodied shirt, taking up my sofa, breathing my air.
Bobby shut his mouth. Resting his head back on the cushion, he let the babble and wash of audience response fill his world. After a few minutes, he cracked his eyes open again.
“Has she gained weight again?” he asked, although a few minutes of watching made it a rhetorical question.
Eyeing Oprah’s rounded figure as she put an arm around someone tearfully admitting something, Rufus shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. She’ll go twenty years. More.”
“You think?” Bobby couldn’t quite keep the skepticism out of his voice.
Rufus didn’t answer, he just put down the empty glass and stood, pulling on a jacket. “Going for supplies,” he said, in answer to Bobby’s unvoiced question. “I was low even before you showed up.”
Bobby’s eyebrow twitched. “Booze or gauze?”
Rufus’s eyes were cold when he leaned closer. “I know you ain’t dumb enough to come here with a critter still around to come after you. Because I checked your tracks. The salt’s down and there’s a bag of goofer dust under the sofa, and if anything is still after you, you pray you can lay it down before that gut wound kills you.”
Bobby pressed his lips together over his first response, then nodded. “Yeah. Listen ... thanks.”
Rufus straightened, not noticeably mollified. “I don’t know and I don’t care what you think of my choices. Or anyone. Once your insides and outsides’ll stay where the Good Lord intended them to, I don’t want you on my doorstep again.”
Considering everything, Bobby wasn’t offended. “You won’t even lay eyes on me,” he promised.
“Good.” Rufus checked his pockets, then half turned toward the tv. “I can turn it off,” he offered.
Bobby scratched his beard, half an eye still on the screen, then cleared his throat again. “Nah ... ’s okay.”