"Achilles' Last Stand"
“Achilles’ Last Stand”
Prompt: (from roque_clasique): Both Sam and Cas have, at certain times during S6, been enabling Dean's drinking problem in an attempt to calm him down. I'd like to see something tactfully exploring this: every time he's riled-up, they pour him a drink and say hey, relax, drink this, not realizing (b/c angel and soulless) that it might be BAD FOR HIM. I'd like to see a fic where they get a reality check regarding Dean's (functional) alcoholism, and their own strange relationship to it.
And to quote honeylocusttrees: Please something more nuanced and in-depth than "drunk on a hunt, someone gets hurt, etc."
A/N: Title is from the song by Led Zeppelin. Please take into consideration that I know nothing about drinking or alcoholism beyond what St. Wikipedia, patron saint of the uninformed, has told me. Also- this is so not really what the prompt was looking for, but I thought, ‘Dean!’ and ‘alcoholism!’ and this is what happened. These things basically write themselves, I just do the typing, okay?
It’s less that something’s happened, but more that it hasn’t yet. Dean hasn’t lysed enough of his brain cells yet not to understand that. He almost hopes for it, sometimes, because at least then it will be over with. He can take his overdue punishment like a good boy, toast it up and then drink it down. It’s the inevitability that’s killing him, that naked feeling in his liver until he gets a few in him. It’s the way he suddenly knows Jim and Jack and Jose, and fuck, even that Russian bastard Smirnoff better than he knows his own brother.
~~~~~
Every morning he wakes up is the same. No matter what he does, no matter where he goes, his problem rides along with him, the shotgun to his autopilot. And no, Dean’s not talking about the way he needs a drink to get started in the morning like he needs to die again (really, he does. It’s on his to-do list and everything). He’s talking about Sam. Or at least his meatsuit, because that- thing- that’s wearing it is not his brother.
Dean’s checked, and thus far, he can’t determine the number of consecutive drinks it would take to forget that. He’s still working on the longitudinal study.
~~~~~
The same Led Zeppelin tape’s been in constant rotation since… well, since Dean stopped liking Def Leppard.
He’s feeling slightly buzzed already, but that’s okay, since that takes an edge off of his not-brother. There are a lot of edges, though.
They’re supposed to be getting rid of some rawhead hanging out in the basement of an old Carnegie library. Whoop-de-fucking-do, because everyone knows that Dean’s had great experiences with those in the past.
For some reason, Cas is with them, Dean can’t remember why, since he’s pretty useless. Besides bartending. He’s getting kind of good at that. Dean thought about nicknaming him ‘Lloyd,’ but since decided that it wasn’t worth the time spent trying to explain.
“What’s this?” Cas is asking him, gesturing at the tape deck. Sam’s meatsuit is in the backseat. [“Touch your nose,” Dean had muttered to Cas. “Just do it.” It’s a mark of how far over the side they’ve gone that Cas doesn’t question so much anymore, he just does. “Nose goes rides in the back!” Dean had exclaimed quickly, and then jumped in the front seat.]
“I want to build a stairway to heaven,” Dean says, fumbling around on the dash for his sunglasses.
“That is illogical, Dean, since to reach heaven you have to be dead, and if you’re dead you can’t build a ladder.”
Dean claps Cas on the shoulder. “Led Zeppelin, Cas.”
“No, you can’t reach it using hot-air balloons, either.”
“I meant it the first time I said it, and I mean it again- don’t ever change.”
~~~~~
When they get there, it’s storytime. Three adult men in coats with large pockets, loitering at the back and pretending to be enthralled by Madeline doesn’t look suspicious at all.
“Great fucking idea,” Dean hisses to Sam’s meatsuit as they’re making their way through narrow bookshelves, away from the children’s section. “I mean, why are we here in the daytime? Did libraries become hard to break into at night all of a sudden?”
He’s breathing hard- there’s just something about this thing being here and looking like Sam but not being him that makes Dean’s heart twist itself inside out every time he gets that sudden jolt of realizing that it’s not Sam. And after his heart is finished with its gymnastics set, it starts on cardio.
“Dean,” the meatsuit’s saying. “Don’t think I didn’t think this through. This is the optimal time to hunt this thing. There are children here, and it likes children.”
Dean sinks down on the floor next to FIC, FA-FL.
Dean’s never been one to pour sugar on his words, least of all now (Def Leppard, Def Leppard playing out the Impala’s open door, Def Leppard as the soundtrack to the apocalypse and his own failure), but he could really use a little candy-coating right about now. Or something to drown the whole deal in.
“Listen,” Cas is saying. “Your-brother-is right.”
There’s a slight sloshing noise, and the strange clunk of glass on thin carpeting over concrete as Cas kneels next to him.
Dean’s poking at Cas’ trenchcoat before he even knows what he’s doing.
“God, Cas, I didn’t know you had such deep pockets,” he says, and his fingers are already twisting the bottle open.
“God isn’t here,” Cas says, sounding confused. “I thought we established that.”
“Never mind.” Dean’s getting back to his feet now. See, all he needed was a little company to make it through this. That Jack, he was a good friend. He might even be closing in on Nicholson for Dean’s favorite.
~~~~~
By the time they’ve located the back stairs and figured out the schematics of who will go first (nose goes didn’t work so well with only one person playing, Dean found out), Dean’s feeling good. The tickle of whiskey-flame in his throat is comforting.
He’s supposed to be bringing up the rear here, covering Cas and Sa-okay, covering Cas-but before he can even get down the stairs, he hears the sound of the stun gun firing. Apparently, he’s not really needed.
~~~~~
It takes Cas and the meatsuit (Dean had suggested the moniker, ‘Man GaGa,’ but somehow it hadn’t really stuck) a lot longer to tidy up the body and do whatever else down there than Dean would expect.
He’s partway into the first chapter of a recent Koontz and he’s playing ‘drink every time he comes across a character with an implausible name, or a MENSA-level dog’. Cas emerges from the stairway first, and then the doppelganger.
Dean asks Cas something about hoping he hadn’t been doing any ‘Touched by an Angel’ business, especially when he was channeling Keanu Reeves so rakishly, but somehow his tongue gets tangled up and he ends up just sitting there fucking giggling at it all.
That’s before everything goes black, and also before he remembers about pacing. It seems fitting, though, since he hadn’t ever really gotten to distill it. The pain’s always been there, full-force, punching him so hard in the face every day that it feels like Lucifer’s still there, beating the concept of loss into him until it’s tattooed across his cheeks.
When he wakes up and sees that empty shell again, he almost wishes that Lucifer would come back and do-something. Anything was better than nothing, right?
Drinking himself into oblivion like he thought it would work, even that was better than trying to man up and look himself in the eyes. It was so much easier when everything was cloudy, except he should’ve remembered that that meant that it was going to storm soon.
~~~~~
It’s early morning in the ER, and Dean starts awake to the unmistakable sound of a flapping trenchcoat.
“Dean.”
Dean considers telling Cas to go and leave him to die in peace, but he knows already that no one’s going to let him die at all, so he might as well not start to be picky about the locale and atmosphere of it.
“I found this,” Cas says, taking something out of his pocket. It’s about the size of a flask, and for a moment Dean’s hopeful, but then he holds the thing up close to his eye and all of his words have deserted him (well, hadn’t everyone?).
“You found this?” Dean manages. “You.” He’s shaking his head in incredulity, yanking on his IV line but he doesn’t even care.
“I thought you would know what to do with it,” Cas explains. “It seemed like it belonged to you.”
Dean turns the tape over again, examines the font. He reads out the first track: “Achilles Last Stand.”
“Yeah,” Dean starts, and damn if he doesn’t want to cry. “Yeah, I think this is mine.”
Prompt: (from roque_clasique): Both Sam and Cas have, at certain times during S6, been enabling Dean's drinking problem in an attempt to calm him down. I'd like to see something tactfully exploring this: every time he's riled-up, they pour him a drink and say hey, relax, drink this, not realizing (b/c angel and soulless) that it might be BAD FOR HIM. I'd like to see a fic where they get a reality check regarding Dean's (functional) alcoholism, and their own strange relationship to it.
And to quote honeylocusttrees: Please something more nuanced and in-depth than "drunk on a hunt, someone gets hurt, etc."
A/N: Title is from the song by Led Zeppelin. Please take into consideration that I know nothing about drinking or alcoholism beyond what St. Wikipedia, patron saint of the uninformed, has told me. Also- this is so not really what the prompt was looking for, but I thought, ‘Dean!’ and ‘alcoholism!’ and this is what happened. These things basically write themselves, I just do the typing, okay?
It’s less that something’s happened, but more that it hasn’t yet. Dean hasn’t lysed enough of his brain cells yet not to understand that. He almost hopes for it, sometimes, because at least then it will be over with. He can take his overdue punishment like a good boy, toast it up and then drink it down. It’s the inevitability that’s killing him, that naked feeling in his liver until he gets a few in him. It’s the way he suddenly knows Jim and Jack and Jose, and fuck, even that Russian bastard Smirnoff better than he knows his own brother.
~~~~~
Every morning he wakes up is the same. No matter what he does, no matter where he goes, his problem rides along with him, the shotgun to his autopilot. And no, Dean’s not talking about the way he needs a drink to get started in the morning like he needs to die again (really, he does. It’s on his to-do list and everything). He’s talking about Sam. Or at least his meatsuit, because that- thing- that’s wearing it is not his brother.
Dean’s checked, and thus far, he can’t determine the number of consecutive drinks it would take to forget that. He’s still working on the longitudinal study.
~~~~~
The same Led Zeppelin tape’s been in constant rotation since… well, since Dean stopped liking Def Leppard.
He’s feeling slightly buzzed already, but that’s okay, since that takes an edge off of his not-brother. There are a lot of edges, though.
They’re supposed to be getting rid of some rawhead hanging out in the basement of an old Carnegie library. Whoop-de-fucking-do, because everyone knows that Dean’s had great experiences with those in the past.
For some reason, Cas is with them, Dean can’t remember why, since he’s pretty useless. Besides bartending. He’s getting kind of good at that. Dean thought about nicknaming him ‘Lloyd,’ but since decided that it wasn’t worth the time spent trying to explain.
“What’s this?” Cas is asking him, gesturing at the tape deck. Sam’s meatsuit is in the backseat. [“Touch your nose,” Dean had muttered to Cas. “Just do it.” It’s a mark of how far over the side they’ve gone that Cas doesn’t question so much anymore, he just does. “Nose goes rides in the back!” Dean had exclaimed quickly, and then jumped in the front seat.]
“I want to build a stairway to heaven,” Dean says, fumbling around on the dash for his sunglasses.
“That is illogical, Dean, since to reach heaven you have to be dead, and if you’re dead you can’t build a ladder.”
Dean claps Cas on the shoulder. “Led Zeppelin, Cas.”
“No, you can’t reach it using hot-air balloons, either.”
“I meant it the first time I said it, and I mean it again- don’t ever change.”
~~~~~
When they get there, it’s storytime. Three adult men in coats with large pockets, loitering at the back and pretending to be enthralled by Madeline doesn’t look suspicious at all.
“Great fucking idea,” Dean hisses to Sam’s meatsuit as they’re making their way through narrow bookshelves, away from the children’s section. “I mean, why are we here in the daytime? Did libraries become hard to break into at night all of a sudden?”
He’s breathing hard- there’s just something about this thing being here and looking like Sam but not being him that makes Dean’s heart twist itself inside out every time he gets that sudden jolt of realizing that it’s not Sam. And after his heart is finished with its gymnastics set, it starts on cardio.
“Dean,” the meatsuit’s saying. “Don’t think I didn’t think this through. This is the optimal time to hunt this thing. There are children here, and it likes children.”
Dean sinks down on the floor next to FIC, FA-FL.
Dean’s never been one to pour sugar on his words, least of all now (Def Leppard, Def Leppard playing out the Impala’s open door, Def Leppard as the soundtrack to the apocalypse and his own failure), but he could really use a little candy-coating right about now. Or something to drown the whole deal in.
“Listen,” Cas is saying. “Your-brother-is right.”
There’s a slight sloshing noise, and the strange clunk of glass on thin carpeting over concrete as Cas kneels next to him.
Dean’s poking at Cas’ trenchcoat before he even knows what he’s doing.
“God, Cas, I didn’t know you had such deep pockets,” he says, and his fingers are already twisting the bottle open.
“God isn’t here,” Cas says, sounding confused. “I thought we established that.”
“Never mind.” Dean’s getting back to his feet now. See, all he needed was a little company to make it through this. That Jack, he was a good friend. He might even be closing in on Nicholson for Dean’s favorite.
~~~~~
By the time they’ve located the back stairs and figured out the schematics of who will go first (nose goes didn’t work so well with only one person playing, Dean found out), Dean’s feeling good. The tickle of whiskey-flame in his throat is comforting.
He’s supposed to be bringing up the rear here, covering Cas and Sa-okay, covering Cas-but before he can even get down the stairs, he hears the sound of the stun gun firing. Apparently, he’s not really needed.
~~~~~
It takes Cas and the meatsuit (Dean had suggested the moniker, ‘Man GaGa,’ but somehow it hadn’t really stuck) a lot longer to tidy up the body and do whatever else down there than Dean would expect.
He’s partway into the first chapter of a recent Koontz and he’s playing ‘drink every time he comes across a character with an implausible name, or a MENSA-level dog’. Cas emerges from the stairway first, and then the doppelganger.
Dean asks Cas something about hoping he hadn’t been doing any ‘Touched by an Angel’ business, especially when he was channeling Keanu Reeves so rakishly, but somehow his tongue gets tangled up and he ends up just sitting there fucking giggling at it all.
That’s before everything goes black, and also before he remembers about pacing. It seems fitting, though, since he hadn’t ever really gotten to distill it. The pain’s always been there, full-force, punching him so hard in the face every day that it feels like Lucifer’s still there, beating the concept of loss into him until it’s tattooed across his cheeks.
When he wakes up and sees that empty shell again, he almost wishes that Lucifer would come back and do-something. Anything was better than nothing, right?
Drinking himself into oblivion like he thought it would work, even that was better than trying to man up and look himself in the eyes. It was so much easier when everything was cloudy, except he should’ve remembered that that meant that it was going to storm soon.
~~~~~
It’s early morning in the ER, and Dean starts awake to the unmistakable sound of a flapping trenchcoat.
“Dean.”
Dean considers telling Cas to go and leave him to die in peace, but he knows already that no one’s going to let him die at all, so he might as well not start to be picky about the locale and atmosphere of it.
“I found this,” Cas says, taking something out of his pocket. It’s about the size of a flask, and for a moment Dean’s hopeful, but then he holds the thing up close to his eye and all of his words have deserted him (well, hadn’t everyone?).
“You found this?” Dean manages. “You.” He’s shaking his head in incredulity, yanking on his IV line but he doesn’t even care.
“I thought you would know what to do with it,” Cas explains. “It seemed like it belonged to you.”
Dean turns the tape over again, examines the font. He reads out the first track: “Achilles Last Stand.”
“Yeah,” Dean starts, and damn if he doesn’t want to cry. “Yeah, I think this is mine.”