Chapter Text
I worked the late night shifts every Thursday night, and each time, without fail, it proved to be the most eventful and interesting of all the days of the week.
One may think that the Friday night shifts would pack the most excitement and the largest assortment of bar crawlers, but the Friday night customers at most every pub were rather predictable. In the occasional times I'd worked the shift, I'd taken note of the college fraternity boys, who traveled in loud and unruly packs, as if they were incapable of disbanding and making decisions themselves, as well as speaking within a reasonable volume. Following them were the temporarily innocent sorority girls, who also trailed behind their male counterparts so closely that I imagined their roles like mother and child. It always pained me to know that the giggling purity that was dwindling in their hands would soon be stripped from them, but there was little one could do to pull them apart from the frat boys with beer dribbling down their chin and supposedly sexual murmurings escaping their slurred lips. I never had understood the attraction.
Secondarily, there were the ever present middle aged men with uncomfortable neck-beards and unnerving dark eyes, forever cast down at the amber liquid in their glasses or bottles not out of shame or any true emotion, but simply because they were much too drunk to raise their line of vision any higher. To accompany them were the forty year old "failures,” as my co-workers referred to them as, while I simply called them misguided souls. They often times were women, with cheap makeup plastering their eyelids and cheeks while lipstick colored their lips in like a child doodling in their coloring books, and they hung around those middle aged men, who had no sense of time or self control, until they accomplished something and whoever was bartending on that unfortunate evening was left to pick up the spewed contents of their insides and clean up their dirty bottles.
But that was the Friday night shift, one that I found dry and rather boring. Thursday night I reserved for the excitement it brought and so I could take note of each and every newcomer I saw. I had something of a mental notebook swirling within my head with the pictures and names and sentences of those I’d been lucky enough to come in contact with, their statements, uttered in their most intoxicated forms, all written in my scrawled lettering, and I loved getting the chance to update it. I thought of those Thursday night lurkers as those who were truly troubled in life, such that they couldn't hold out just one more rendition of twenty-four hours to burst into the bar and drink away their problems, and in turn ended up being the most quirky of characters.
I hoped that I didn't look too strange when I watched those seated at the bar, their elbows pressed up against the black countered surface and eyes scanning the massive selection of drink that was carved out of the extensive woodwork on the wall behind me. I liked to analyze their body language, their movement, their personality based on the way they ate, drank, spoke, and looked at that oddly captivating wall of alcohol. It was a skill that had become highly developed the longer that I worked at the pub, and there had never been a person I couldn't figure out. I turned everyone who took a seat and ordered a drink from me in my hand, felt their ridges and learned their oddities, and stored the information like codes in my mind. It was a wondrously rewarding process.
And like I said, I hadn't failed. I knew or could know everyone I came in contact with. Broken hearts, broken families, broken minds, broken homes, and broken lives alike, I understood it all…
...until he started coming, clad in his intimidating leather jacket while the smell of intrigue, cologne, and sweaty kisses hanging over his head like a cumulonimbus cloud.
It was a cold, November Thursday when he'd first arrived. It was just after ten-thirty PM and I'd finished a rather awkward conversation with a startlingly old lady, who'd ordered nothing but straight Irish whiskey and complained about her husband's inability to unload the "damn dishwasher, which he hasn't repaired in six years," and I was cleaning out a fresh round of shot glasses for any of the daring and fun-seeking souls to arrive later that night with a thin rag.
My head shot up at the sound of the door opening, the bell attached the doorframe chiming for the seventeenth-dozen time that day. With his entrance came a weight into the room, like the constant chatter of the customers and the clinking of glasses subsided for a moment to take this presence in, and his heavy outer-garments I described earlier didn't help in the least. He blocked out the streetlight that usually seeped in from the door's windows with his shoulders and his shadow, which had originally painted itself across the immediate wooden floor beneath his feet, combined with the new resulting darkness.
What was most shocking, however, was his instantaneous eye contact with me. There was a rush of forest hazel and amber specks that met me head on, shooting into my own gaze that was a good twenty-five feet away from him with surprising accuracy, that nearly caught me by surprise. But I remained still and held my ground, halfway bent over, in the middle of placing the shot glasses underneath the bar where they belonged. Regardless of his unusual behavior, nothing was entirely unusual on Thursday nights, so I chalked the incident up as another thing to remember, expect, and analyze.
Soon after his arrival, the chatter and the clinking resumed without further interruptions and the sudden air of tension blew away for a short while. I believe the old woman continued on her whiskey-fueled rant about dirty dishes, but I was a little too occupied with the man walking steadily towards the bar. His jacket, unzipped with a plain tee shirt underneath, the collar lowly cut to reveal a small portion of his tan chest area, covering his middle, flopped back and forth with each step he took, and each one of those steps carried purpose, much more purpose than the usual bar crawlers possessed. But, in all honesty, any purpose at all was more than what they had.
He sat down four seats away from the old woman, so two away from where I was stationed behind the bar, and his elbows slammed against the counter. The impact caused the other glasses seated on the surface to quake slightly, and I knew I had my work cut out for me. Often times those who paid the pub a visit did not want to be understood and liked to drape themselves in what they thought was mystery, but the added effort only made them more transparent. I finished my business with the woman, as politely as possible, and eventually made my way over to the newcomer.
I cleared my throat to alert him that I was there and ready to engage in conversation with him, but the action earned me no acknowledgment or reciprocation, so I merely carried on with my usual procedure.
"Good evening…what'll you have?"
I saw his tongue flick over and around his lips, as if he was collecting his choice of words, while his eyes were still trained everywhere but on my own.
"Double scotch, no ice."
I couldn't help but notice how blatantly angry he seemed. The emotion was radiating off of his stern voice yet quaking and trembling hands, which were now clasped together on the counter, fingers interlocked with one another, and in the way he still refused to look up at me. While I didn't think he was a partaker in "common courtesy," I would've assumed he would want to show me he meant business, and a mere gaze from his earthy eyes, harsh brow, and sharp jawline would've almost willed me into silence. Almost.
"Not a problem," I replied with a small smile, the one my boss taught me on my first day that had become muscle memory to my face, and went about my business of serving the angry and leathery customer. And while I went to work, I swear I could hear his very breath move in and out of his slightly parted lips. Something had seriously gotten under his skin.
Once I finished the task and made the simpler drink the newcomer asked for, I slid it to him across the counter and watched, intently, as his eyes flicked upwards to where it had landed. His hand extended forward and out of the fold it had found itself in moments before, fingers wrapping around the clear glass and bringing it to his mouth. Meanwhile, I fought the urge to sigh myself, much like he had, because of his lack of a thank you. The only thing he seemed to be interested in, however, was gulping down the toxic liquid at an alarmingly quick pace, one that I found it hard to keep up with.
And that pace didn't cease, either. The minutes turned to hours and the amount of money this man was practically throwing at me kept increasing, like the lack of color across his progressively more distressed face. Throughout that night, from the time he entered the pub until very early that morning, near closing time, I watched the old dishwasher lady come and go, along with a couple both clad in overalls who smelled of cow dung, seven men who all had come from another pub just down the street and who appeared to belong to some group I didn't want to know about, a young woman in a lavish dress who I assumed was underage, and on any other day I would've called her out on how obviously fake and illegal her ID was, but even the law I was under orders to so strictly follow in my line of work was hardly a match for the level of captivation that mystery man inspired within me.
As the time passed, I watched his shoulders slump inward more, his eyes focus less, and his fingers decrease in the severity of their grasp of the several glasses and bottles he went through. I'd kept track, of course, in hopes of not causing him harm or putting him in danger by being such an enabler, but I couldn't help but feel that sting of wonder coarse straight through me. What in the world could be driving him to drink himself into oblivion? What could've possibly occurred in his life that would need the burn of alcohol and stupid thought to relieve or fill it? What hole was there to patch up, and who had dug it?
For the first time in as many Thursday nights that I could remember, I could not bring myself to ask him any of those questions.
Maybe it was the way he still refrained from making anymore eye contact with me after that initial moment of arrival, or the way he was simply wolfing down frightening amounts of burning alcohol without so much as a single flinch, the only movement being his throat as it contracted along with the liquid it pushed into his damaged system, or perhaps it was just the way he carried himself, and how I watched the walls he had around him crumble with every sip and with every breath in between. I was used to watching the process, I was accustomed to seeing the barriers and layers of every kind of person under the sun being peeled back, but there was certainly something different in this one. There was something else trapped within and behind those layers that even me, the Thursday night bartender, had never experienced before.
My rather draining thoughts and theories were temporarily cut short, however, when my boss appeared from somewhere in the kitchen and walked behind the bar, face a little sweaty and an apron spotted with brown and an unsettling yellow tied around his waist, and signaled to me with a wave of his hand.
"Ay, Castiel, can you lock up for the night?" He asked me, removing a loud pair of keys from his jeans' pocket and jingling them in his hand as he awaited my response. I wasn't entirely sure what he thought I would say, however, seeing as though I didn't have much of a choice.
"Yes, of course," I answered. He gave me a grateful nod and a smile and launched the keys into the air, a sight that caused more anxiety to well up in my chest than what I assumed would be the normal amount. I had to focus my eyes and the rest of my senses tightly on the object flying across the short distance between me and my boss and will my hands upward, following the silvery metal pieces until they were close enough to capture between my fingers.
I acted, finally, after waiting until the very last second. I moved my arms forward and swung both of my hands inward and around what I hoped would be the keys, but when I felt their metal surface scratch against my fingertips and slide past, I knew I'd failed in my painfully basic mission. My senses faded in their intensity, my arms began falling back to my sides, and I watched with a now disheartened gaze as the keys clattered to the wooden floor with a harsh clang.
I would've scrambled downward at a breakneck pace to retrieve them, blurted out a rather incomprehensible apology to my boss for my clumsiness, only to watch him chuckle, roll his own eyes and leave, but there was another presence nearby, and their line of vision was burning its way into the back of my head. So as I found myself crouching down to pick up the pieces of my failed mission that lay sprawled out on the hardwood, I turned my neck just under ninety degrees to sneak the faintest of glances at the new-coming, alcohol-consuming extraordinaire in the few half seconds that I had to do so, and I was met with what I wasn't sure was a triumph or something to be hopelessly alarmed at:
He was staring right back at me.
There was barely a millisecond of time where I was met with two wildlife green eyes staring back at my own with an intensity I had never encountered before. It made my skin crawl and my breath catch for a moment within my chest, but then it was gone. His vision turned away as quickly as it had shifted to my neck and rear end of my skull and I'd hardly had enough time to process it, but it had been there. It had graced the back of my head. It was as plain as the look of wonder my face had contorted into, combined with my embarrassment at dropping the keys.
I soon regained my stance and stuffed the keys into my pants' pocket as my boss gave me one last wave of a goodbye and disappeared out the back door, leaving me nearly completely alone in the almost vacant pub. The only other presences I was sharing oxygen with were the last of those rather strange, cult-invested men and the mystery man stationed a few feet away, and the others were just about to walk out the door. In a matter of moments it would be the mystery man and myself.
As the other two entities walked out the door, causing that same bell to give a jingle that now rang harshly in my ears, since the usual hop and bustle of the pub had died down at that late hour, my eyes flicked upward to the clock above my head and I read the time: 1:58 AM. We closed in two minutes, and I knew I was now obligated to cut the mystery man off and ask for his method of payment for the last couple drinks.
I began inching my forward, my steps along the dark hardwood floor small and helpless, until I was sure all the fiddling with the object in my pocket and the wandering of my eyes in the world couldn't prevent him from noticing my presence advancing towards him. I could never been one-hundred percent sure, however, since he still refused to meet my eyes head on. I would be lying if I said that it wasn’t beginning to drive me crazy.
Eventually I made my way over to him, placed my hands on the bar's edge for support and in an attempt to look casual, and cleared my throat to gain his attention. I wasn't sure if it worked, of course, but hoped that the glass was half-full that evening and tried my luck by speaking
"Excuse me…sir, I'm afraid that I have to close up now…"
All my statement was met with was a rough grunt and the sudden shifting of his body on the barstool. I watched, with rather awkward captivation and curiosity may I add, as the mystery man dug into his leather jacket's coat pocket and removed an equally as leathery wallet, with the sides fraying and the many layers of the thick material peeling off the edges. It looked like it had undergone many years of wear and tear, just like he appeared to have.
He flicked open the front flap without so much as a glance upward and went digging for either cash or a credit card, but while he did so, I found myself staring much too intently at another card that was peeking up from a pocket opposite the one he was searching through. The top half of this mystery man's driver's license was sticking up ever so slightly, just enough to allow me to see a crucial part of his unknown identity that had been pressing my mind so…his name.
Dean S. Winchester.
Just as quickly as the ID had appeared, it vanished and was slid back into its designated pocket inside his ages wallet as this Dean character slapped down the necessary amount of cash needed to pay for the last couple beverages he'd consumed. In fact, the wad of money he'd forcefully placed on the counter was about five dollars more than what was required, and as I carefully took the green slips of paper in my hands and began counting out the change, I was alarmed for a second time in no longer than a minute and a half…
"Keep the change."
He'd spoken.
Dean's voice sounded just like he should have, in my opinion after having invasively stared at him for the past few hours or so. It was deep and rough around the edges, like its noise was reverberating around in his chest and rasping as it did so, but no amount of gruffness could take away from the firm and present intent his speech had. I imagined, from those three words, that whatever Dean S. Winchester said was always taken seriously.
Soon, however, I remembered that I had to speak as well, and threw out some sort of courteous reply that I could come up with on the spot. All the skills my boss had taught me so long ago when I'd first started working at that small corner pub, like the small smile of politeness now engrained into my very face, were escaping me and it was sending my mind into an unnatural panic mode.
"Oh-oh, are you sure? It's a whole four dollars and seven cents…"
Dean simply shook his head no, further embedding his request for me to keep the excess money, and arose from the barstool he'd been practically glued to all night. Upon rising up and standing in his full height, I realized just how massive and intimidating his form truly was. Dean was well over six foot, with shoulders broad and clad in what I was beginning to wonder was an irremovable leather jacket, and his brow was cast in the dark shadows from the dimmed lights above. I measured a measly five-foot-ten-inches, and my shoulders' width was hardly comparable to his literal wingspan.
Before the intimidation being posed onto me from the simple action of him standing up was able to get well inside my head, Dean turned around slowly on his heels and began approaching the door. His heavy, weighted, and now slightly clumsy footsteps sent sturdy creaks coursing through the wooden floor beneath his booted feet and the dips and pauses he took as he advanced towards the exit, caused by his mass consumption of alcohol, would've caused me to smile, perhaps, if I hadn't found myself so captivated.
That captivation was interrupted, however, with a mild sense of concern, seeing as though he was barely able to keep himself standing straight and upright. I called out to him again, for the fourth time that night, and my statement earned me his second response.
"Do you need me to call a taxi?" I inquired anxiously. He definitely was not fit to drive.
Dean paused at the door as his right arm fell onto the frame for support. In a long, drawn out movement, he turned his figure around once more to face me, and the face I was met with was rather shocking and drastically different from its appearance at the start of that long night.
He looked sad, distressed, and very much broken and exposed. The angry had transformed into a raw kind of helplessness, the side effect most borderline, or full-blown, alcoholics, tended to forget about in my experience. His face hung loosely, unable to contain any true emotion in his face other than that lost and bored kind of depression, and I could only imagine what the waves and waves of intoxication looked like as they swirled inside of him. Certainly what was on the outside was nothing compared to within.
I was so caught up in the magnitude of Dean Winchester’s changed appearance that I nearly missed his response as he called out to me, the syllable of his one word response fading into a murmur and accompanied by a small wave of the hand,
“Nah…”
I could feel my throat tense, constrict with guilt yet a polite kind of submission. I highly doubted he would listen to anymore pestering, no matter how much sincere concern I showed for his wellbeing and ability to successfully return home. The way his loose, stumbling fingers fumbled dependently on the door knob, as if it was the only thing holding his shaking knees upright, only furthered my theory. He was definitely leaving and wanted no assistance in doing so.
I swallowed the hodgepodge of emotions that accumulated somewhere just below the curve of my own throat and nodded my head rather gravely.
“Oh...alright. I hope you get home safely, Dean.”
Using Dean’s name was purposeful. I wanted to get a reaction, at least some spark of interest and excite the jumpstart his system and not only give me the acknowledgement I so oddly wanted of the broken man, but to judge the state of his mind in full. His defenses had been so airtight and tall a few hours ago, but if he failed to notice the mention of his own name, a detail Dean Winchester had intentionally hidden under lock and key from me, then I would have true reason to be concerned.
Yet, even from my spot behind the bar that good twenty-five feet away, I caught the spark of recognition alight his dazed eyes, and a slight escape of relieved breath blew past my lips. Dean cocked his head to one side, squinted his deep brow, and made an expression emulating strained thought. I suppose the strain was too much on his intoxicated brain, however, and he soon let the loss of his so well-kept secret slide with a shake of his head. Soon after he turned around clumsily on his heels and exited the pub, letting in a gust of cold air as he did so that blew straight into my direction and ruffled the few strands of hair that had come loose atop my head.
The bell attached to the front door gave one last chime, the chime of closing and the chime of rest, before I was wrapped up in a firm silence of solitude. There was no creak of stressed floorboards under heavy feet, the clinking of beer bottle necks on beer bottle necks had ceased, the delirious laughter was but a mere ringing in my ears, and the poor, lonely, old lady with the dishwasher-neglecting husband’s seat suddenly looked painfully vacant and quiet. But, feeling the sticky surface of the bar underneath my drumming fingers, fingers drumming in thought, I noticed that I could still hear one sound echoing somewhere in my mind, a place that I couldn’t identify.
“Keep the change.”
Dean Winchester’s voice came from deep within his chest, caught gravel and was scratched up in the process once it reached his throat, and the way his lips formed around the individual words allowed for much mumbling and several speech imperfections. Perhaps that it was just the drunken version, though one couldn’t deny the sound’s tremble. The way it came out in pieces only furthered my assumption: he was broken. Parts of him were in shattered fragments and instead of alcohol being the glue he so desperately needed and searched for, it merely separated the fragments farther until some were lost and deemed irreplaceable.
I spent ages running it over in my head, even as I wiped the sticky away from the bar and made my rounds throughout the pub to clear away the remaining shrapnel from the night. I almost chuckled to myself as I bent underneath a table to retrieve several carelessly discarded napkins from the floor at how intensely captivated I was by this Thursday-bar-crawler, because they typically came and gone like passing scenery, scenery that just happened to inexplicably odd.
Gripping the dirty papers in one tentative hand, I was making my way over to the trash bin when it hit me. Dean Winchester was far more than passing scenery. While he did possess the odd quality all those before him did, it wasn’t an odd that I could understand. I knew he was broken, I knew his voice, with its rumble yet worrisome tremble, and I knew he wasn’t the kind to share parts of him or his life. I also knew his name, but nothing else. I didn’t even know whether or not there was a wife at home, pestering him about their damned kitchen appliance that needed repairing.
I’d failed in my favorite game of learning the Thursday night tragedies’ stories and troubles, and Dean Winchester had brought upon that loss. I hadn’t been able to learn his story and analyze the reasons behind his presence and his volley of drinks, and I could barely even bring him to speak as he threw back the contents of each glass and bottle.
I’d often imagined what I would do if I ever lost, who would bring the loss upon me, and what I would do to redeem myself. The situation at hand was not one that I expected, of course, and as I grabbed my coat from the hanger nearby the back exit, draping its khaki length across my shoulders, I made an important decision. I would not feel bad about the defeat, but I would embrace it. I would challenge it, and, in doing so, I would challenge Dean Winchester in the longest game yet.
I would learn the story behind the rumble of his voice, the flecks in his eyes, the freckles along his cheeks, the silence in his bones, and the secrecy etched into his very programming no matter how long it took. The time limit I was usually confined to, one singular night, would not apply to this round of the game , which relieved the deal of stress losing would usually inspire and replaced it with fascination, excitement, and a fiery determination.
With one final look at the now dark and vacant pub, for I had turned off the lights and made yet another check for any possible intruders, unable to turn off my impenetrable paranoia, I closed the door and let it lock behind me. Within a few moments of walking towards my car, seated in the rear employee parking lot, I noticed the new spring in my step and the still, ever-present voice in my head, speaking to me like a song stuck in my head, but the meaning of the tune just kept eluding me. The drive home was full of the noise, it echoed off of my shower’s walls, and it played behind my eyes and seeped into my dreams, and I knew I was in far too deep. Redemption was definite. Victory was an absolute.
Game on, Dean Winchester.