FIC - My Hero
Title: My Hero
Characters: Sam, Dean, Castiel
Pairing: None
Rating: PG-13
W/C: ~2460
Summary: Just another night at the bar. Until Sam starts to cry. Written for the reversebang at spn_bigpretzel for the art posted by dollysdoodles.
A/N: I know this isn’t up to the expected word count, but I hope y’all will enjoy it anyway. Oh, and check me out writing gen fic like a boss. I know it doesn't happen often.
A nice autumn breeze was floating in through the open windows of the Impala on the day when Team Free Will decided to take a little break. Maybe just a day. One day, that wasn’t too much to ask, right? They’d spent the past two months fighting nonstop, hunting without a single sign of respite, and they were exhausted. Well, maybe not Castiel, but he was at the very least the angel-equivalent of exhausted. Which meant that basically, he was shockingly tired of constant battles and didn’t argue when Dean and Sam decided that they were headed for this sleazy small-town bar.
Once they were checked into the motel down the street, they walked. Dean and Sam both hoped they’d end the night in no shape to drive, and Castiel didn’t know how.
Yet.
He still had his sights on convincing Dean to teach him, or maybe Sam. For now, he was keeping that little secret to himself.
As far as sleazy small-town bars went, it was no different than the others they’d frequented in the past. There were pool tables, scantily clad women (Castiel often wondered what it was that made them think being overly made-up and styling their hair so…high…was attractive), an annoyed-looking bartender and a jukebox. The minute he’d ordered his first drink, Dean headed right for it, gracing the other patrons with a mix of AC/DC, Johnny Cash and Led Zeppelin.
No one seemed to object. Not even Sam, who’d ordered a shot with his beer. Castiel knew alcohol didn’t affect him much, so he ordered the same shot and beer that Sam had gotten. The shot was something called Jagermeister, and it felt hot and thick, almost like syrup, as he swallowed it in one go. Dean only had that one beer before heading toward the pool tables, not wanting to be impaired as he went about the business of hustling other men out of their hard-earned paychecks.
Pool hustling could be dangerous, Castiel knew that. He’d seen Dean break up fights and Sam get knocked on his ass on more than one occasion while engaging in this particular activity. These events reminded him that his task of keeping the brothers safe had somewhere along the line morphed into something he assumed was similar to caring for them, which he could not explain. It was not in his nature to experience that kind of emotion.
Luckily, Sam seemed content to stay away from the tables and stick to the bar, matching his beers and shots evenly.
“You don’t want to play pool with your brother?” Castiel inquired, “Take on the role of the less experienced player in order to obtain additional amounts of money?”
Sam just laughed. “Not tonight, Cas. Maybe it’s not the same as hunting, but husting pool is still work.” Setting his shot glass down almost sideways on the bar before righting it, he continued, “I don’t wanna work. I wanna drink. That all right with you?”
“Of course. You know I am not fond of either you or your brother placing yourself in harm’s way by engaging in illegal activity.”
“Dude, hustling pool isn’t illegal. I mean…I don’t think it’s…maybe it’s not exactly moral, but it’s not exactly cheating either. Not really. And even if it was, there’s probably no law on the books against it.”
Castiel knew Sam had some legal education, so he took him at his word. He didn’t doubt that during Sam’s years at Stanford, he’d probably investigated whether or not ‘hustling pool’ was actually against the law. While Castiel was an unending font of information regarding morality, he didn’t know much about what was considered to be illegal. He’d only assumed it was illegal because it was clearly immoral. Still, so much confused him about the differences between the two. Activities he saw as causing no harm to anyone except the person willingly engaged in them were sometimes likely to land a person in the local lockup, while at the same time there were things that horrified him on an ethical level but were perfectly legal.
He figured he could just add it to the list of human customs that he might not ever fully understand.
So while Dean cleaned up at the pool table, Sam continued to drink. He took his beer in bottles, finding it hilarious that Cas would only order his from a glass. Nothing wrong with draft, Sam thought, maybe Cas just liked it better that way. But Sam had his first beer from a lukewarm can when he was fifteen, and had gotten used to drinking from cans or bottles stored in the cooler he and his brother tried to keep stocked while they were on the road.
Watching Cas gulp down his Stella on draft was a fabulous sight, though, in Sam’s opinion. Guy couldn’t even ask for a Michelob or a Bud. Stella was all he’d ever had, so Sam figured Cas decided to stick with it as opposed to trying something new that he would end up not liking. For some reason, the angel always seemed disappointed in himself when he found he didn’t enjoy something Dean or Sam liked.
It made sense, in a way, at least to Sam’s booze-addled brain at that moment. Cas had become more and more a part of their life, going with them on hunts, helping out where he could. Sam thought it was brave, to be honest. Getting brought back from the dead and facing the apocalypse while steadfastly ignoring orders from On High (whatever that meant nowadays), only to continue on the road that got him flash-fried by his asshole of a big brother in the first place. Either way, it had cost him. Sam could clearly tell that Castiel’s powers were fading on an incremental level. That, surely, was the price of disobedience. Cas had paid it willingly, though. He never complained about the fact that there were things he used to be able to do that weren’t so easy anymore. He didn’t seem sorry to have lost some of what Dean referred to as his ‘mojo’, except when it meant he couldn’t help in the ways that seemed important. His inability to heal Bobby and get his out of that godforsaken (was that blasphemy? He’d ask later.) wheelchair seemed to bother him immensely.
Dean came back to the bar, looking smug and in possession of about $400 that he didn’t have when they got there. A few glares were tossed his way from the pool tables, but they didn’t have much heat behind him. The guy was sitting with a dude in a trenchcoat who looked scared out of his mind and a younger man whose floppy hair made him seem even younger than he was. The other players figured he was out with his socially awkward brothers or friends, so he probably didn’t mean any harm. And oh, how wrong they were. Sizing them up, Sam figured he could take at least three of them without even showing the Taurus tucked into his waistband (okay, so he tended to overestimate a bit when he was tipsy) and Castiel could still (despite his slightly deceased powers) render every one of them immobile with just a look if necessary.
Finished with his ‘work’ for the evening, Dean started in on the heavy drinking. Instead of shots and beers, he ordered double bourbons one right after the next. It wasn’t long before the booze started catching up with him.
Sam was an expert on gauging the levels of Dean’s drunkenness, and Castiel was getting to know the signs himself.
The process had clearly identifiable steps. First, stealing Sam’s empties to tear at the labels on the bottles. He almost never slurred his words, even when he was completely wasted, but his voice would take on a different quality, slower and more deliberate. Sam always thought that was interesting, and wished like hell he had that kind of control. He was pretty good at acting like he wasn’t drunk even when he was, but damn if he had any way to keep his consonant sounds from slipping together automatically, often eliminating all the vowels from a word entirely.
Back to Dean, though, the final signs pointing to him having too much to drink came along with the music that was playing in the background. ‘Ring of Fire’ affected him profoundly when it echoed from the jukebox. Tears in his eyes when ‘Simple Man” played was the last cue necessary. Sam reached into Dean’s pocket, threw a handful of bills onto the bar, and herded all three of them out into the parking lot.
Castiel could certainly have Angel-Air’d them back to the motel, but it was a nice night and walking had been the plan to start with, so they stuck with that. He thought Dean needed to clear his head a bit, and so did Sam. Though Dean might have shown his intoxicated state more clearly, it was obvious that Sam was more than a little tipsy himself. Unfortunately, no head-clearing seemed to have occurred during their short walk. By the time they arrived back at the motel room, Dean was stumbling a bit and it took Sam three tries to get the key into the door’s lock.
They were in the room approximately four minutes, not even long enough for Castiel to urge them both to drink a glass of water, before Dean was passed out cold, still in all of his clothes, including his jacket and boots.
For his part, Sam…well, much to Castiel’s chagrin, Sam didn’t appear to be finished drinking for the night. When they’d arrived, they had brought a couple of sodas and a six-pack of beer in from the car and left them in the mini-fridge. While Castiel went about the task of removing Dean’s shoes and jacket, Sam liberated a bottle from the six-pack and took a seat at the small table by the television.
Trying not to sound, as Dean had said a few times before, ‘judge-y’, Castiel began, “Sam, don’t you think you’ve already had-”
When his half-sentence was met with a loopy grin and an eyeroll, he stopped. “Nah, one or two more maybe. M’fine, Cas, jus’ wanna, y’know…wanna get drunk.”
“You are already drunk. You’ve had 48 ounces of beer and approximately eight ounces of hard liquor, judging by the generous servings of the shots we got at the bar.”
Sam giggled. “Girl thought you were cute. Tryin’ to flirt. Get your attention. Or somethin’. Maybe she thought I was cute”, he finished, with another laugh.
“That may be true, but the amount of alcohol you’ve already ingested, even for a man your size, is more than sufficient to produce intoxication. If your goal is, as you said, to get drunk, you have already achieved it.”
“Not drunk enough. Not for today.” There was no laugh to accompany that comment. Sam’s mood, as it tended to when he was drinking, had swung from silly to melancholy in a matter of seconds.
Castiel was naturally concerned. There was nothing more he could do for Dean, who was unconscious and snoring, so he sat across from Sam. “Is there a significance to this day of which I am not aware?”
Sam was quiet for a moment, then responded, “No, not really. S’all jus’ startin’ to get so heavy. Soon as I woke up this morning, firs’ thing I thought was how I wanted to jus’ put it all down.”
“You are referring to the burden of responsibility you have in regard to the apocalypse, I assume.”
“Ding ding ding ding!!!”, Sam shouted, startling Castiel. “Right on the firs’ try! Give the man a prize. I mean, the angel. Give the angel a prize! What does he win? A coupla pain in the ass brothers who can’t get their shit together even when they gotta save the whole go-“, the blasphemy died on his lips before he continued, “the whole stinkin’ world.”
Sam finished the rest of his beer in one long gulp and tried unsuccessfully to set the empty bottle onto the table. The bottle fell to the floor with a crash, and that was it for Sam. His bottom lip started to quiver and the tears began rolling immediately.
Castiel was not good at this.
Not good at all.
In fact, he was very bad at it.
But it had to be done.
Dean was passed out in a drunken stupor, and Sam was crying in a drunken mood swing. Which meant Dean was unavailable to comfort Sam. Castiel was the only one there, so he tried to center himself. He reflected on the memories he had of seeing other people offer emotional support to their friends or loved ones, and decided his first course of action should be a hug.
Scooting his chair over to the right, getting into Sam’s space, he reached over and pulled Sam into an embrace. Sam’s head immediately dropped onto Castiel’s shoulder, but this did not stop his crying. Before Castiel had a chance to move away and rethink his strategy, Sam grabbed onto him tightly.
Through the tears, Castiel could make out bits and pieces of Sam’s words, now distorted both by the crying and the alcohol. “Couldn’t have done…so glad you’re with us…a good friend…think I’m an a-bommm-in-ay-shunnn but you still hug me…kick all those asses…” Castiel was starting to wonder how long this was going to go on when Sam suddenly sat up and looked straight at him. His red-rimmed and wet eyes suddenly shone like he’d had some kind of revelation.
“You - you - you’re like a superhero, Cas! Really! You are! You can do, like, all this, stuff, magic-y angel stuff and you save us from monsters and…and…”
Then Sam’s eyes began to droop a bit and his words got even harder to understand through all the yawning.
Castiel gently led Sam from his chair to the other bed, helped him out of his boots and jacket as he had for Dean earlier, and managed to get a couple of aspirin and a few sips of water into him before telling him to get some rest.
Right on the edge of sleep, Sam mumbled, “Mean it, Cas. Like a real live hero.”
Too quiet for Sam to hear, Castiel replied, “You are a hero as well, Sam.”
There was a faint sound of wings as Castiel slipped back into the night, concentrating on his other duty now that his responsibilities to the Winchester brothers was finished for the present time. He would come back and make their hangovers disappear in a few hours. Maybe.
Characters: Sam, Dean, Castiel
Pairing: None
Rating: PG-13
W/C: ~2460
Summary: Just another night at the bar. Until Sam starts to cry. Written for the reversebang at spn_bigpretzel for the art posted by dollysdoodles.
A/N: I know this isn’t up to the expected word count, but I hope y’all will enjoy it anyway. Oh, and check me out writing gen fic like a boss. I know it doesn't happen often.
A nice autumn breeze was floating in through the open windows of the Impala on the day when Team Free Will decided to take a little break. Maybe just a day. One day, that wasn’t too much to ask, right? They’d spent the past two months fighting nonstop, hunting without a single sign of respite, and they were exhausted. Well, maybe not Castiel, but he was at the very least the angel-equivalent of exhausted. Which meant that basically, he was shockingly tired of constant battles and didn’t argue when Dean and Sam decided that they were headed for this sleazy small-town bar.
Once they were checked into the motel down the street, they walked. Dean and Sam both hoped they’d end the night in no shape to drive, and Castiel didn’t know how.
Yet.
He still had his sights on convincing Dean to teach him, or maybe Sam. For now, he was keeping that little secret to himself.
As far as sleazy small-town bars went, it was no different than the others they’d frequented in the past. There were pool tables, scantily clad women (Castiel often wondered what it was that made them think being overly made-up and styling their hair so…high…was attractive), an annoyed-looking bartender and a jukebox. The minute he’d ordered his first drink, Dean headed right for it, gracing the other patrons with a mix of AC/DC, Johnny Cash and Led Zeppelin.
No one seemed to object. Not even Sam, who’d ordered a shot with his beer. Castiel knew alcohol didn’t affect him much, so he ordered the same shot and beer that Sam had gotten. The shot was something called Jagermeister, and it felt hot and thick, almost like syrup, as he swallowed it in one go. Dean only had that one beer before heading toward the pool tables, not wanting to be impaired as he went about the business of hustling other men out of their hard-earned paychecks.
Pool hustling could be dangerous, Castiel knew that. He’d seen Dean break up fights and Sam get knocked on his ass on more than one occasion while engaging in this particular activity. These events reminded him that his task of keeping the brothers safe had somewhere along the line morphed into something he assumed was similar to caring for them, which he could not explain. It was not in his nature to experience that kind of emotion.
Luckily, Sam seemed content to stay away from the tables and stick to the bar, matching his beers and shots evenly.
“You don’t want to play pool with your brother?” Castiel inquired, “Take on the role of the less experienced player in order to obtain additional amounts of money?”
Sam just laughed. “Not tonight, Cas. Maybe it’s not the same as hunting, but husting pool is still work.” Setting his shot glass down almost sideways on the bar before righting it, he continued, “I don’t wanna work. I wanna drink. That all right with you?”
“Of course. You know I am not fond of either you or your brother placing yourself in harm’s way by engaging in illegal activity.”
“Dude, hustling pool isn’t illegal. I mean…I don’t think it’s…maybe it’s not exactly moral, but it’s not exactly cheating either. Not really. And even if it was, there’s probably no law on the books against it.”
Castiel knew Sam had some legal education, so he took him at his word. He didn’t doubt that during Sam’s years at Stanford, he’d probably investigated whether or not ‘hustling pool’ was actually against the law. While Castiel was an unending font of information regarding morality, he didn’t know much about what was considered to be illegal. He’d only assumed it was illegal because it was clearly immoral. Still, so much confused him about the differences between the two. Activities he saw as causing no harm to anyone except the person willingly engaged in them were sometimes likely to land a person in the local lockup, while at the same time there were things that horrified him on an ethical level but were perfectly legal.
He figured he could just add it to the list of human customs that he might not ever fully understand.
So while Dean cleaned up at the pool table, Sam continued to drink. He took his beer in bottles, finding it hilarious that Cas would only order his from a glass. Nothing wrong with draft, Sam thought, maybe Cas just liked it better that way. But Sam had his first beer from a lukewarm can when he was fifteen, and had gotten used to drinking from cans or bottles stored in the cooler he and his brother tried to keep stocked while they were on the road.
Watching Cas gulp down his Stella on draft was a fabulous sight, though, in Sam’s opinion. Guy couldn’t even ask for a Michelob or a Bud. Stella was all he’d ever had, so Sam figured Cas decided to stick with it as opposed to trying something new that he would end up not liking. For some reason, the angel always seemed disappointed in himself when he found he didn’t enjoy something Dean or Sam liked.
It made sense, in a way, at least to Sam’s booze-addled brain at that moment. Cas had become more and more a part of their life, going with them on hunts, helping out where he could. Sam thought it was brave, to be honest. Getting brought back from the dead and facing the apocalypse while steadfastly ignoring orders from On High (whatever that meant nowadays), only to continue on the road that got him flash-fried by his asshole of a big brother in the first place. Either way, it had cost him. Sam could clearly tell that Castiel’s powers were fading on an incremental level. That, surely, was the price of disobedience. Cas had paid it willingly, though. He never complained about the fact that there were things he used to be able to do that weren’t so easy anymore. He didn’t seem sorry to have lost some of what Dean referred to as his ‘mojo’, except when it meant he couldn’t help in the ways that seemed important. His inability to heal Bobby and get his out of that godforsaken (was that blasphemy? He’d ask later.) wheelchair seemed to bother him immensely.
Dean came back to the bar, looking smug and in possession of about $400 that he didn’t have when they got there. A few glares were tossed his way from the pool tables, but they didn’t have much heat behind him. The guy was sitting with a dude in a trenchcoat who looked scared out of his mind and a younger man whose floppy hair made him seem even younger than he was. The other players figured he was out with his socially awkward brothers or friends, so he probably didn’t mean any harm. And oh, how wrong they were. Sizing them up, Sam figured he could take at least three of them without even showing the Taurus tucked into his waistband (okay, so he tended to overestimate a bit when he was tipsy) and Castiel could still (despite his slightly deceased powers) render every one of them immobile with just a look if necessary.
Finished with his ‘work’ for the evening, Dean started in on the heavy drinking. Instead of shots and beers, he ordered double bourbons one right after the next. It wasn’t long before the booze started catching up with him.
Sam was an expert on gauging the levels of Dean’s drunkenness, and Castiel was getting to know the signs himself.
The process had clearly identifiable steps. First, stealing Sam’s empties to tear at the labels on the bottles. He almost never slurred his words, even when he was completely wasted, but his voice would take on a different quality, slower and more deliberate. Sam always thought that was interesting, and wished like hell he had that kind of control. He was pretty good at acting like he wasn’t drunk even when he was, but damn if he had any way to keep his consonant sounds from slipping together automatically, often eliminating all the vowels from a word entirely.
Back to Dean, though, the final signs pointing to him having too much to drink came along with the music that was playing in the background. ‘Ring of Fire’ affected him profoundly when it echoed from the jukebox. Tears in his eyes when ‘Simple Man” played was the last cue necessary. Sam reached into Dean’s pocket, threw a handful of bills onto the bar, and herded all three of them out into the parking lot.
Castiel could certainly have Angel-Air’d them back to the motel, but it was a nice night and walking had been the plan to start with, so they stuck with that. He thought Dean needed to clear his head a bit, and so did Sam. Though Dean might have shown his intoxicated state more clearly, it was obvious that Sam was more than a little tipsy himself. Unfortunately, no head-clearing seemed to have occurred during their short walk. By the time they arrived back at the motel room, Dean was stumbling a bit and it took Sam three tries to get the key into the door’s lock.
They were in the room approximately four minutes, not even long enough for Castiel to urge them both to drink a glass of water, before Dean was passed out cold, still in all of his clothes, including his jacket and boots.
For his part, Sam…well, much to Castiel’s chagrin, Sam didn’t appear to be finished drinking for the night. When they’d arrived, they had brought a couple of sodas and a six-pack of beer in from the car and left them in the mini-fridge. While Castiel went about the task of removing Dean’s shoes and jacket, Sam liberated a bottle from the six-pack and took a seat at the small table by the television.
Trying not to sound, as Dean had said a few times before, ‘judge-y’, Castiel began, “Sam, don’t you think you’ve already had-”
When his half-sentence was met with a loopy grin and an eyeroll, he stopped. “Nah, one or two more maybe. M’fine, Cas, jus’ wanna, y’know…wanna get drunk.”
“You are already drunk. You’ve had 48 ounces of beer and approximately eight ounces of hard liquor, judging by the generous servings of the shots we got at the bar.”
Sam giggled. “Girl thought you were cute. Tryin’ to flirt. Get your attention. Or somethin’. Maybe she thought I was cute”, he finished, with another laugh.
“That may be true, but the amount of alcohol you’ve already ingested, even for a man your size, is more than sufficient to produce intoxication. If your goal is, as you said, to get drunk, you have already achieved it.”
“Not drunk enough. Not for today.” There was no laugh to accompany that comment. Sam’s mood, as it tended to when he was drinking, had swung from silly to melancholy in a matter of seconds.
Castiel was naturally concerned. There was nothing more he could do for Dean, who was unconscious and snoring, so he sat across from Sam. “Is there a significance to this day of which I am not aware?”
Sam was quiet for a moment, then responded, “No, not really. S’all jus’ startin’ to get so heavy. Soon as I woke up this morning, firs’ thing I thought was how I wanted to jus’ put it all down.”
“You are referring to the burden of responsibility you have in regard to the apocalypse, I assume.”
“Ding ding ding ding!!!”, Sam shouted, startling Castiel. “Right on the firs’ try! Give the man a prize. I mean, the angel. Give the angel a prize! What does he win? A coupla pain in the ass brothers who can’t get their shit together even when they gotta save the whole go-“, the blasphemy died on his lips before he continued, “the whole stinkin’ world.”
Sam finished the rest of his beer in one long gulp and tried unsuccessfully to set the empty bottle onto the table. The bottle fell to the floor with a crash, and that was it for Sam. His bottom lip started to quiver and the tears began rolling immediately.
Castiel was not good at this.
Not good at all.
In fact, he was very bad at it.
But it had to be done.
Dean was passed out in a drunken stupor, and Sam was crying in a drunken mood swing. Which meant Dean was unavailable to comfort Sam. Castiel was the only one there, so he tried to center himself. He reflected on the memories he had of seeing other people offer emotional support to their friends or loved ones, and decided his first course of action should be a hug.
Scooting his chair over to the right, getting into Sam’s space, he reached over and pulled Sam into an embrace. Sam’s head immediately dropped onto Castiel’s shoulder, but this did not stop his crying. Before Castiel had a chance to move away and rethink his strategy, Sam grabbed onto him tightly.
Through the tears, Castiel could make out bits and pieces of Sam’s words, now distorted both by the crying and the alcohol. “Couldn’t have done…so glad you’re with us…a good friend…think I’m an a-bommm-in-ay-shunnn but you still hug me…kick all those asses…” Castiel was starting to wonder how long this was going to go on when Sam suddenly sat up and looked straight at him. His red-rimmed and wet eyes suddenly shone like he’d had some kind of revelation.
“You - you - you’re like a superhero, Cas! Really! You are! You can do, like, all this, stuff, magic-y angel stuff and you save us from monsters and…and…”
Then Sam’s eyes began to droop a bit and his words got even harder to understand through all the yawning.
Castiel gently led Sam from his chair to the other bed, helped him out of his boots and jacket as he had for Dean earlier, and managed to get a couple of aspirin and a few sips of water into him before telling him to get some rest.
Right on the edge of sleep, Sam mumbled, “Mean it, Cas. Like a real live hero.”
Too quiet for Sam to hear, Castiel replied, “You are a hero as well, Sam.”
There was a faint sound of wings as Castiel slipped back into the night, concentrating on his other duty now that his responsibilities to the Winchester brothers was finished for the present time. He would come back and make their hangovers disappear in a few hours. Maybe.