Be it ever so humble..

[roadhouse_mama]

Who : Ellen Harvelle and others (open to anyone who'd like to come through)
What : Celebrating the Roadhouse (version II)
When : The evening of March 20th
Rating : pg-ish, probably some language
Status : Ongoing

Comments

[grace_optional]

Leaving Castiel to his drink and his thoughts, Anna walked to the other end of the bar, where Ellen had discreetly removed herself while they were talking. She appreciated the courtesy, especially considering she'd put off coming over to say hello when she came in.

"Hi, Ellen," she said with a subdued smile. "The place is really nice. I'm sure it'll do great." She liked it better than any of the other bars she'd seen in town. Cleaner, quieter and less rowdy, among other things, though some of that was probably owing to the place's newness.

[roadhouse_mama]

Ellen kept herself at a distance while Cas and Anna spoke. She still didn't know much about anna, and given the fact that she arrived in the Underworld in the middle of a monster invasion, she hadn't had time to ask either. The boys and Bobby seemed to trust her well enough, and that went a long way in Ellen's book.

"Hey Anna," she said, clearing a few empty glasses away from the bar so she could sit if she liked. "Thanks. It's a nice place. Not exactly like the original, but still," Ellen glanced towards the pool table and the Winchesters, "it's starting to feel like it. Can I get you something to drink?"

[grace_optional]

Trust her? Well, maybe provisonally. She'd been working hard to earn back the trust she had forfeited when she tried to kill Sam, and she felt as if she'd made some real progress. Still, one wrong move and she didn't doubt for a moment she would find herself at the bottom of a four-way pileup with about fifteen weapons trained on her.

"A beer, thanks," Anna said, sliding onto a stool. "I'm sorry I never got to see the original." She hadn't heard what happened to the first Roadhouse, but given the company Ellen kept, she was guessing it wasn't a happy story. "And sorry you got dragged to this place. Though I gotta say, it was really a lucky break for the guys." If Ellen hadn't shown up, she suspected she'd have brought Cas home to find the others held together with duct tape and super glue.

[roadhouse_mama]

“You got it,” Ellen pulled another beer from the tap and slid it across to her. “Thanks. It’s a pretty good take on the original. Not exactly the same, but the feel’s right and that’s what matters. Demons took out the last one,” she said by way of explanation.

Ellen sketched a shrug. She wasn’t sorry. “It beats being dead,” she glanced over to the pool table and the Winchesters, with a slanted, but affectionate smile, “and getting to spend time with family makes up for the monster attacks and general weirdness. Even if I did spend the first two days doing nothing but patching them all up.”

“Here’s hoping they get enough time to heal before I have to do it again,” she said, inclining her glass in Anna’s direction. The toast was a tradition after a hunt and she saw fit to keep it alive, even in the Underworld.

[grace_optional]

Anna clinked her glass against Ellen's and took a sip. "There is that," she was forced to agree. It still troubled her, at odd moments, the lack of a pulse and the cold temperature (though she had done a bit of experimenting and found she could fake both pretty convincingly if she wanted to put the effort into it. Generally, it wasn't worth the energy or concentration.) But she was beginning to find some grudging gratitude for the chance to mend fences...not that she thought Hades had any such generous motive for bringing her here.

"If the pattern holds like it has so far, there'll be a few days of quiet and then something else will happen," she remarked. "Not necessarily anything too bad--though it's always strange--or it could be horrible. Cas has been here longer and he says nothing's ever gone on more than a week." And thank god he had told her that before he disappeared. At odd moments, it was probably all that had kept her from complete panic.

[roadhouse_mama]

Ellen was still getting accustomed to the idea of not being alive, but still not a revenant or some kind of creature that would eventually threaten her loved ones. But she also trusted Dean and Bobby enough that should it come down to that; they'd take care of things for her. It was a grim comfort, but it helped her cope.

"So it could be something horrible, or something not horrible." She shook her head and tilted her glass back. "I suppose as long as it moves on a predictable schedule we can always wait some of it out. I'll keep the bar stocked with medical supplies incase it all goes to hell again."

[grace_optional]

"Probably a good idea," Anna sighed. At least she'd had plenty of practice at waiting things out.

She glanced sidelong down the bar. "Thank you for making him see reason, by the way," she said in an undertone. "I really wasn't looking forward to that particular 'I told you so.'"

[roadhouse_mama]

"Reason?" she chuckled and gave Anna a conspiratorial wink, "I couldn't make that stubborn SOB see anything he didn't want to without a heavy bat and blunt force trauma to the head."

She pitched her voice a little lower, adding, "Which is exactly what I was considering if he didn't let you put him under so me and Bobby could take care of his hand."

[grace_optional]

Anna stifled a giggle behind her hand, carefully not looking back down the bar. "But then you'd have had to fix his head," she murmured. Her amusement faded quickly, though. "I was surprised he let me. It would almost have been more reassuring if we did have to sap him."

This really wasn't the time or the place to discuss it at length, if only because the object of the conversation was so close to hand, so she left it at that. But even with Castiel on the mend and back on his feet, a week's worth of frantic nonstop worry didn't just evaporate overnight. They knew so little of his captors, their motives and exactly what they had done to him (and learned in the process.) And there was no guarantee that they were really finished with those who had been taken, or that no one else would fall prey.

[roadhouse_mama]

Ellen smiled, “Hell, we just break out the concrete and patch up any dings, it’d blend right in.”

She fell silent for a moment as well, her own thoughts following a similar path. It had been a rough week on all of them, even if her part in it had been reduced to just a few days. The toll it had taken on all of them was apparent, especially on Anna. She had been nearly as frantic as Dean, even if Ellen hadn’t seen much of her during the battle. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Anna; but she didn’t know her very well yet. Ellen was fairly sure that Bobby and Dean were pretty partial to her, and that went a long way in her mind.

“There ain’t no sense in worrying about what we can’t see coming,” she said gently. “We’ll look after our own, and the next time this place throws something at us, we’ll beat it back too. Come on, just relax and enjoy yourself for tonight. Save the worrying for tomorrow.”

[grace_optional]

Anna nodded. "Okay. I can do that." She took a good swig of her beer. "So how'd you get mixed up with this crew? You obviously know the business inside and out." And she didn't mean the business of bartending.

[roadhouse_mama]

She hooked the collar of her shirt, pulling it aside to reveal a mass of white, knotted scar tissue along the top of her shoulder. “Vampire attack when I was seventeen. His aim was off because I had just clocked him in the head with a tire iron. A hunter came along and finished him off before he could change his grip and turn me into a snack.” Her eyes grew a little distant and her smile fond. “I married him a year later

[grace_optional]

Anna nodded, dropping her eyes and finishing off her beer in one long pull. Faster, meaner, more relentless, or just all-around bigger. Oh boy, did she know how that went.

Maybe that had been the wrong question to ask if the point was to relax and have fun. But she liked Ellen, and she wanted to understand the lady better. Besides, apart from their current rather unencouraging situation, what else did they really have in common to talk about?

"Sam and Dean found me hiding in my father's church after I broke out of an asylum where they'd put me because I could hear angels talking," she said. "I didn't know it was because I was one of them. I'd run away to become human and forgotten. First Hell sent demons to kidnap me, and then Heaven tried to have me executed." Exactly who Heaven had dispatched on that errand, she kept to herself

[roadhouse_mama]

There was a fair piece to Anna’s story that Ellen was sure she was leaving out. The details didn’t matter, at least not here. Mistakes were always made, and Ellen knew full well that no one in that bar had lived a blameless life free of mistakes committed against loved ones. Still, it was enough to elicit a pang of sympathy as she related a slightly edited version of her story. Getting caught between the machinations of Heaven and Hell was no small thing; especially for an angel that had forgotten she was one to begin with.

“Family never gets along, least not all the time. That’s how you know its family,” she said with a crooked smile.

[grace_optional]

Anna huffed softly. "You don't know the half of it." Her extended family had more or less invented the concept, and for all her bitter complaining of an absent, unknowable Father, she was grateful in the extreme that she'd never been involved in his and the archangels' bickering. Just dealing with her own 'generation' had been painful and exhausting enough

[roadhouse_mama]

She blinked, a little surprised at the question. Didn't someone tell her than angels could heal injuries? Perhaps it was something reserved for particular angels, or some other detail that she didn't want to ask about just now.

Anna was a nice girl. A tad skittish, but nice, and the more Ellen got to know her, the more she was starting to like her. "Sure, hon. I'll show you what I can, but most of it is gonna be a hands-on experience. I learned by doing, and picking the brains of any good docs that came through the old Roadhouse. You okay with that?"