spn_springfling | Last Call by balder12 for <user site="livejournal.com" user="mi

springflingmod.livejournal.com posting in

Title: Last Call
Pairing: Rufus & Bobby
Rating: PG-13
Any warnings: Alcohol, canonical character deaths

Rufus had been a religious man, so it pained him to admit it, but Heaven was bullshit. His death found him back in the same raggedy-ass house he’d had in life: heavy on the security cameras, light on the homey details. Sometimes he wondered if it was fair to blame God, or if it was his own goddamn useless mind that couldn’t aspire high enough to picture living in a happy home.

At least he had the highlight reel waiting for him when he couldn’t take the solitude anymore. Just beyond the razor wire fence in the backyard his loved ones waited for him. Some days he watched his mom cook up a pot of chicken soup in his childhood kitchen, his dad laying a familiar hand on her waist as he whispered something in her ear that made her laugh. Other days he watched his daughter at her fifth grade dance recital, proud and beautiful in her pink tutu.

The knock at the front door was so unexpected that he grabbed for his shotgun by force of habit. He gripped it confidently for a long moment before it occurred to him that any enemy powerful enough to hunt him down Heaven-side was too powerful to fend off with a shotgun. Especially an imaginary shotgun. He set it down, and turned to look at the feed from the camera.

“Bobby?” Part of him had always figured that persistent son of a bitch would track him down some day, even here.

“It ain’t Roma Downey. You want to let me and our old friend here in for a few minutes?” Bobby held up a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue to the camera. Rufus drank Johnny Walker Blue whenever he damn well pleased these days—a self-restocking liquor cabinet was one of the few worthwhile perks of the afterlife—but he appreciated the respect in the gesture.

Bobby tromped right in like he owned the place as soon as Rufus cracked the door, though, same way he used to do when they were alive, and started looking for clean glasses. It was still presumptuous as shit. Rufus felt a familiar flicker of irritation, almost indistinguishable from affection. Bobby had always known how to get under his skin.

Bobby filled two glasses and settled into his usual seat, as if it were just another Friday night, thirty years gone. Rufus sat across from him and downed the whisky in a single gulp. The warm sting in his throat took him back to times past—not happier, necessarily, but familiar, and comfortable as an old pair of boots.

“Goddamn,” Bobby said, his voice briefly clotted and thick with the fumes. “That’s good scotch.”

“Never tastes the same to me up here,” Rufus said. “I miss the hangover. There’s a special pain to a good hangover, you know what I mean? It’s got a weight to it that makes you feel alive.”

Bobby swirled the whisky in his glass. “Can’t say I miss hangovers. Never got quite that sentimental about the dumb shit I pulled.”

That was a joke. Bobby was the sentimental-est bastard Rufus had ever met. Three drinks in he’d be crying into his beer about some dead civilian, or a girl he dated when he was nineteen, or those boys of John Winchester’s he liked to pretend were his sons, even when he hadn’t seen them for well-nigh on a decade.

Rufus grabbed the bottle of Johnny Walker and re-filled both their glasses, a little higher than before. “What do you want from me, Bobby?” Nice as it was to take a trip down memory lane, he could smell the set up from a mile away. Bobby wasn’t here to reminisce.

“You remember Ash? That boy Ellen Harvelle used to keep around the bar?” Rufus nodded. “He’s got himself a set-up to monitor angel chatter, and a whole mess of sigils that let folks jump from one part of Heaven to another.”

“Mmm,” Rufus said. He took a hefty swallow of whisky while he waited for Bobby to get to the point. Back in the day he would’ve considered it a travesty to swill a scotch this expensive, but now that it replaced itself at will, there was no point in restraint.

Bobby followed his lead, draining his glass again. “Last time I helped out Sam and Dean, I got jammed up in the angel pokey for my trouble. Lot of awkward questions, lot of pointy implements. That boy pulled my bacon out of the fire, and took me over to Ellen’s.” Bobby smiled. “She says hello, and that you ought to come by for a drink.”

Rufus had stuck to his own patch of mental real estate since he’d died, so he hadn’t even known there’d been an angelic prison to avoid. He couldn’t say he was shocked Bobby had found his way into it, though. Rufus’s mother had used to say of a certain sort of malcontent, “If he were in Heaven, he’d be off in one corner trying to dig his way out!” Rufus had never quite known what she’d meant by that until he’d met Bobby Singer. Bobby was just the man to get arrested in Heaven.

“Well, I’m glad you got yourself sprung from jail, and I’m glad to hear Ellen is doing all right. She’s a good woman. Still don’t see what any of this has to do with me.” He filled their glasses again. He had the feeling this conversation called for it.

Bobby drank the whisky this time like it was water, his mind clearly elsewhere. “You know why. We sure could use your help. There’s a lot of humans up here just trying to get by, trying to find their families, trying to live their lives . . .” Bobby gave a wry smile and refilled his glass. “Afterlives.” He snorted. “Me and Ellen and Ash, we’re just trying to keep them from getting caught in the middle of some angel slap fight, help decent human beings stay safe and get home to the people they love.” Bobby traced the edge of his empty glass with his finger and then glanced up to catch Rufus’s eye. “Not so different from hunting, when you get down to it. What do you say?”

Rufus took another slug of whisky. It tasted like wet earth and campfire smoke, like the countless nights he and Bobby had spent together camping out in one ass-end piece of wilderness or another, waiting for monsters. The thing about Heaven was that he didn’t get to pick which memories he was allowed to relive and which were buried and forgotten. Shaping his life into a happy one meant carving away huge chunks, separating out whole months and years that had to go into the fire. Bobby barely appeared in the moving dioramas beyond the razor-wire fence--he was too integrally linked to Rufus’s years of loneliness, violence, and grief to be “safe” in the way the officially endorsed memories were. And yet as they sat across from each other Rufus knew he’d missed getting drunk with his old friend, even with all the sour notes of grief, disappointment, and equivocal companionship that came with the experience. No number of chipper reenactments could replace the distinct flavor of the moments they’d shared.

Rufus leaned his head on his hand and studied Bobby. He felt the effects of the whisky creeping into his chest and the tips of his fingers, warm and heavy-light. His lips tasted bittersweet when he licked them. “I’m an all right hunter, I’ll give you that. Pretty damn good. But history is full of hunters, and all of them are up here for you to find. You know that, right? You have to. What do you really want from me?”

Bobby poured another round into their glasses, splashing some of it onto his hand. He sucked on his thumb for a moment as he avoided eye contact. “I don’t know all the hunters in history, but I know you. We made a good team, Rufus. We could again.”
Rufus shook his head. There was a part of him that ached for the familiarity of that partnership, but the rest of him remembered how it had ended. Bobby was a good man, maybe too good for the kind of life they’d lived, but his softness made him weak. He was a threat to the people who loved him.

“We’ve been over this, Bobby. Over it and over it.” Rufus took a drink. The whisky had lost all its nuance on his tongue. It was just bitter water now. “I’ll never forgive you for what happened to Andrea. Not in this world or any other. My daughter shouldn’t have ended up dead at 19.”

Bobby stared into his own drink like it was going to give him an answer. “I told her no, you know. Told her and told her.”

“Not often enough.” Bobby had been like an uncle to her, all the way back to her pink tutu days. After she’d graduated high school she’d gotten it into her head she wanted to hunt. Rufus had told her no in strong terms and handed her college brochures. Bobby had told her no too, right up until he’d cracked and said yes, okay, just this once, better with me than without me, and taken her out on a case behind Rufus’s back. It was supposed to be a milk run, a one-man job that Bobby could take point on while Andrea watched, but it turned out the vetala they were after had a mate, and one of them tore right through her neck while Bobby was tied up with the other.

“Not often enough,” Bobby agreed under his breath. He emptied his glass. “You ever find her up here?”

“Nah.” Rufus had thought about it, sure enough. The locks on his Heaven were solid, but he was smart enough to crack them if he really wanted out. He never had. “If she’s up here, she’s happy, or close enough as makes no difference. I don’t want to bring all the dangerous bullshit that follows a man like me to her doorstep.” Rufus took a drink. “What about you? Ever look for Karen?”

“Yeah.” Bobby sighed. “Maybe it’s selfish, but I look for her everywhere I go. Can’t say I’ve had much luck.”

There was a long silence, and Bobby wiped a hand sloppily across his beard. His eyes were red. “I know I fucked up that hunt, Rufus. I know it, and there hasn’t been a day since that I haven’t thought about it. I should’ve known vetalas hunted in pairs, but I didn’t, and I . . . all those years afterward, I did the research for other hunters, built a whole library of lore. I did my best to make sure they got it right because I hadn’t. That has to count for something, doesn’t it?” It wasn’t a plea for pity. It was an honest question: he wanted to know whether he’d wasted his life.

“Yeah,” Rufus said. “Yeah, man, it counts for something. You did a lot of good.” He wished to God he could leave it there. He missed their partnership. He missed Bobby’s irritating, complicated, solid presence, and the knowledge that there’d always be someone who had his back. It wasn’t anger that stopped him, whatever Bobby might think. Every time he looked at Bobby he saw Andrea’s face, and it pierced him like a knife in the gut. The years hadn’t changed that, and neither had death. He couldn’t work with Bobby any more than he could commit himself to a life of eating broken glass. “But that doesn’t change how I feel.”

“No, no, I don’t suppose it would,” Bobby said, and pushed away his glass. He stood with determination, steadying himself on the table, and the bottle of Johnny Walker tottered. Rufus caught it in his hand. Imaginary or not, some things deserved respect. “I guess I’ll see you around.”

Rufus didn’t answer at first. He watched Bobby make his way to the door, the only real person in a fake world. “Hey,” he said when Bobby’s hand was on the door handle, “Maybe bring Ellen around here some time. Just because I don’t want to do all the work for your sorry ass doesn’t mean I don’t want see her.”

Bobby’s eyes showed a familiar flicker of humor. “If she’s got any interest in paying a visit to an old codger like you, I’ll see if I can bring her out.”

Rufus turned the bottle around his hands so he didn’t have to look Bobby in the face. “And if you’re not smart enough to figure some shit out on your own, maybe you can run it by me. But only every now and then, you hear? I don’t want your drama taking over what I got going on here.”

Bobby grinned at him the way he used to when a case went just right. Rufus didn’t know whether he wanted to hug him, punch him, or scream at him about Andrea, so he did none of the above. “You’ve been in my house long enough,” he said, with a scowl that was almost a smile. “It’s time you move along before I get my shotgun.” Bobby was still grinning when he walked out.

Alone in his kitchen, Rufus considered Bobby’s bottle of Johnny Walker Blue, which had refilled itself while he wasn’t looking. He thought about late night drives listening to Bobby’s godawful Kenny Rogers albums, and the dull, sour throb of a hangover headache after a bad hunt, when they were both squinting at the morning light and picking over the hash browns at Denny’s. He thought about his daughter pirouetting, and he thought about her lying broken on the ground. He thought about all the other people’s daughters he might help, if he threw his lot in with Bobby and Ellen. It didn’t feel like a decision, but it was something to consider.

He walked out of the house, and headed toward the dioramas in the back yard.