Eight-Ball (Gen, R)
Title: Eight-Ball
Rating: R
Characters: Dean, Sam and small bits of OCs
Category: Gen fic
Spoilers: None
Word Count: 1386
Author’s Notes: Written for "Prompt 3: Addiction" for
psych_30 challenge.
Disclaimer: The following characters and situations are used without permission of the creators, owners, and further affiliates of the Warner Bros television show, Supernatural, to whom they rightly belong. I claim only what is mine, and I make no money off what is theirs.
There were fifty-seven dollars nestled in his back pocket, and the dead presidents’ faces were rubbing against his concealed switchblade. He had already played enough games for the night to keep Sam and him comfortable during the next few days until they packed up again. Enough for gas and food if the credit card didn’t take and enough to make Sam feel a little bit better for not having to throw fake names around. It was fifty-seven bucks from tonight, eighty-two last night, and tomorrow still held the promise of that three figure pay-all.
Across the pool table, a man stubbed out his cigarette on a worn table and switched his cue stick from one hand to the other. Before he took a long gulp of his beer, he asked Dean if he was going to stay for a few more rounds. For a boy, he was a good player, the man said. Somebody must’ve taught him well.
Bowing his head with a forced grin, Dean knew that he could stay the rest of the night until his pockets were bulging with damp, sweaty bills and his head was pounding with the sheer rush of winning ecstasy. If it wasn’t pool, it would be cards. If it wasn’t cards, it would be darts. If it wasn’t darts, it would be something else. There was always a gamble with a stranger close. The prospect of won cash walked hand in hand with gambling, and the green dollars held so much appeal.
But, Dean smiled, a crooked smirk that parted on the side of his mouth to reveal a few teeth, and he picked up one of the pool balls. The eight-ball, of course. The only black one in the game. He tossed it one-handed in the air and caught it with a sharp clink against the metal of his ring. Before the other man could ask him to stay again, Dean set the ball down on the green felt and said he had to be going for the night.
- - - - -
She fingered the button on his jeans and didn’t take her eyes off his face as she bit her lip. Her hair was a bit too blonde with brown roots, and her eyeliner was smudged at the corners of her eyes. She smelled like cheap hairspray and baby powder deodorant, and as she laughed, he could hear every pack of cigarettes she had ever smoked. But, when she said that her apartment was only five minutes away, he didn’t object.
He only kissed her on the mouth once, though, and that was just to get things started. The rest of the time, he kept his head bent, breathing in hitching gasps next to her ear when she dipped her hand down the front of his unzipped jeans. He later fucked her twice-once against the hallway wall with her pants around her ankles and the second time in her bed with his shirt still on.
When it was all over, and they had both caught their breath, she asked him to stay longer. That was his cue to swing his legs to the floor and pull on his pants-realizing only later he had left his underwear beneath the foot of her bed. Brushing a strand of hair away from her face, he knew there will be more sex if he saw the sun rise from her window. He called her “baby” when it told her it had been real nice and if he was ever in town, they could do it again. But, he also told her, there was somewhere else he had to be.
- - - - -
The pain that came with hunting had never really bothered him. Getting a bloodstain on his shirt was almost a requirement to a good hunt, he had started to believe. After Sam left, and it had just been Dad and him working together, there had still been that extra person to help with the bandaging and the stitching. Now that he was working by himself, he had to be a little bit more careful not to do anything too damaging. Still, the pain didn’t bother him. The wounds bled, but the scabs formed to scars, and the scars faded to a memory that was his choice to recall when all was said and done.
While the hunting was all he knew, it was all that he had ever wanted to know. He pretended to play a normal citizen when searching for information, but even that pretending in normality had made him uncomfortable. There was simply too much uncertainty. Too many variables when it came to dealing with people.
So, he would always go back to his guns and knives, the poltergeists and werewolves. In the cases, he could take life one day and give it back the next. Even though he would wake in the morning, not knowing if he would live to see the next sunrise, he was willing to pay such a lucid price.
Sometimes, though, he called Dad and told his father he was taking a break. No, nothing bad had happened, he just needed some time off for a week or so. He’d be back, he promised; he would never leave this lifestyle. There was something else to take care of first. Something that was more important than the hunts.
- - - - -
He figured he got his liking for alcohol from his father, who offered him a beer at the age of eight when he shot his first gun. Most of the time that affinity for the bottle was okay, too. After all, some nights he needed a bottle of whiskey by his side to ease him into the next day. Other times, just the beer to make him laugh and smile. Just to smooth out the edges on life.
There was relaxation and fun, repression and comfort in his glass bottles. He wasn’t a drunk because he knew better than to allow himself to become dependent on such a physical substance. Yet, he recognized the fact that with some beer in him, he wasn’t always the same person he had been before he lifted the bottle. It was just that if there was a bar in town, he wouldn’t avoid it strictly on principle. Things were just better when he had a shot glass in his hand.
Some nights, he would crack open a beer while driving even though he knew it was against the law-but he had broken most of those anyway; one more didn’t matter much. He only finished half of the drink, then dumped the rest of it out the window and tossed the can in a passing ditch. There was somewhere he needed to be, and he didn’t want the alcohol messing too badly with his mind when he got there.
- - - - -
Dean enters the motel room when the only sunlight is premature gray streaks on the bed sheets. He tosses his keys on the nightstand and walks to his bed, where he sits down and starts untying his boots, still crusted with mud from their hunt the previous day.
In the opposite bed, Sam stirs, rubbing his eye with the heel of his hand, and rolls over. Through a sleep-thick voice, he asks Dean where he’s been all night, and then settles back down into the pillows while he waits for an answer.
At the question, Dean thinks about his nights. The ones where he’s turned down the gambling and money before the sun rose, and the ones where he’s declined warm beds of sex through the morning. There’s the hunts he’s abandoned to drive to California during those separated years that he refuses to speak of, and there’s the beer and the bottles he’s pushed away to keep it from numbing his emotions when his passenger’s a lanky young man who complains about the music selections. All tantalizing prospects, all addicting moments, but there’s only ever been on thing more important than those.
Sam asks him again where he’s been, and Dean rises to his feet. He pats Sam on the shoulder with a smile that says everything and nothing all at once. Even if his younger brother wouldn’t believe him, Dean does the same thing every night and has been for as long as he can remember.
Dean comes back home to Sam.
End