deadly_ned | 029 - Oregon Marionberry

[It is two days after the Marquis de Carabas has graduated. For the past 48 hours, Dean has walked out of his cabin and seen a blank door across the hall from his for the first time in eighteen months; he wonders how long it will take him to get used to it, if he ever will. He still stops outside the vacant third door on level one, sometimes, though he has become more subtle about it.

He's not sure he ever wants to get used to it. Some things, like saying goodbye, he doesn't think should be easy. It's not.

By the time he turns up at Ned's door unannounced, he's been drinking. Not enough to call himself drunk, but enough that he wouldn't drive unless he had to, enough that he suspects others will be able to smell it. He doesn't want to be drunk. He's fought so hard not to be drunk - he's afraid if he starts drinking, he'll never stop.

But one more of the anchors he used to keep himself upright has gone, and as happy as he is about that, as proud, as vindicated, he hasn't learned how to step around it yet. So he shows up at Ned's door, and after he knocks he tries desperately to think of a reason why he's here.]

From:

deadly_ned

[The Piemaker has been doing his best not to think of the marquis' leaving as going away, but instead as an undetermined but lengthy vacation, of which it would eventually come to an end. Being in the habit of bringing the dead back to life made goodbyes hard for the man with the golden finger, who did his best not to walk by the missing man's door so as not to muse on what was missed.

But there was one other man the Piemaker hadn't considered. Dean Winchester, the rock of the Piemaker's existence and the gravel-voiced guardian he held in high regard, had only just now turned up. Smelling of alcohol and something deeper and more heart-felt, Dean's arrival caused the Piemaker to immediately shut off his communicator to run to attend to his friend.

He opens the door]

Dean?

From:

surfaceshine

[Dean does not get the option to avoid the door. For the second time in as many months - does December count? He slept through most of it, he can never decide - he is considering requesting a change in cabins. It's only the strange, unfamiliar possessiveness over the space that keeps him there, some sense of stability and security.

Ned has seen Dean at his worst on the Barge; in the days when he first arrived, he hadn't had anyone to put before himself except the dead brother he'd come for, and so he had nursed his wounds quietly in seclusion and presented the brightest face possible to the rest. But Ned had needed him, death tolling for the first time and terrified, and Dean had had no choice but to let him in; he is not the dead-eyed, miraculously still moving wreck that he'd been after October. But the surface shine has worn off him just enough to show to someone who knows how to look.

Not that he doesn't grin brightly at his friend the moment the door opens.]

Hey, Squeaker. You're in. I didn't, ah.

[He still hasn't thought of a reason. He just knows what he wants, on a level too simple and too powerful to merely ask for: he wants to be around someone else. He doesn't want to be alone with himself, again. He grins more broadly.]

You busy?