AN:/ almost all caught up on this story, because I don't think I have the heart to write Sam visiting Nick.

So we will just get some June in the next chapter and then onward to our well earned ending.

First order of business.

Booze.

But for some godforsaken reason, Nick had cleaned all of the lovely stuff out of his apartment a couple of weeks back. For the life of him he couldn't remember why he'd decided to do such a stupid thing.

Well, it was easy enough to fix.

There was a bar only two blocks from his house- sure he could have just swung by a liquor store, but there was just enough self awareness left by that point to remember that drinking alone was a very, very bad idea when he felt this way.

Sunday night, in a college town, just weeks away from midterms, and there was no parking in front of the bar. So he went home, parked his car, and took his bike. There was always room for his bike out in front of the bar- and if he was driving he was more likely to watch how much he drank then he would be if he just walked there.

Such a responsible, sorry son of a bitch he was.

Sitting at the end of the bar, five glasses of scotch in, and he was warm, and hazy, and for the life of him couldn't remember why he hadn't done this sooner. Two weeks was far too long to go without a drink.

Alcohol was an old friend. A good friend. One that understood him. One that he had missed.

On to the second order of business.

second…

He couldn't remember what it was that he wanted to do after getting good and drunk.

Which probably had something to do with the being drunk part of it.

He lightly knocked his mostly empty glass against the bar, letting the ice rattle around.

The bartender glanced over at him and lightly shook his head. He was a young kid, had only worked here for a year or so, and Nick didn't know him too well, but it was rather obvious that the other more seasoned people working here had warned this guy about Nick.

"If you get one more then I have to call your brother, and take your keys."

Yep, definitely warned.

These are the perils that you set yourself up for when you live in the same place for almost five years, and go to the same bar more than three times a week.

Nick rubbed at his mouth with the back of a wrist before knocking his glass again. "Come on," he slurred softly. "I've got to catch up."

See, there were fourteen days worth of alcohol that he owed himself. And if he couldn't make this up to himself then no one else was going to.

The bartender, whose name Nick either had never known, or forgot a few glasses ago, pushed him over another drink and then pulled out a phone from under the bar.

And Nick watched through the bottom of his drink, as the man hit a speed dial and then proceeded to tell someone on the other end of the phone that they needed to come pick up their brother.

And it had to be someone else's brother.

Nick wasn't that drunk, and there was no way that they had any of his family on speed dial.

At least that was what he had easily convinced himself of right up until Castiel sat down beside him.

Nick curled his hands defensively around his glass just in case anyone tried to take it away from him. "No."

Cassy didn't acknowledge him, just smiled politely at the man behind the bar and ordered himself a soda.

Perhaps it was about time for Nick to start looking for a new bar. One that didn't have his baby brother on retainer. One in which they didn't know when to cut him off, or call for reinforcements.

" 'm not done." He said unevenly into his glass.

"You are so done at this point that I think you might be embalmed." His brother played with the edge of the napkin beneath his soda. "I thought that you were going to quit."

"Changed my mind."

"Obviously."

Nick worked on his drink, throat already numb, chest feeling like it was on fire.

"How many have you had?"

"Not enough." Because if Nick could still remember why he was drinking then he definitely hadn't had enough yet.

Maybe just one more.

Castiel glanced over at him. "Your hands are shaking."

"Go away."

Castiel worked on his soda, just kind of quiet and non intrusive for a bit, maybe trying to give Nick some perceived space. It didn't really work. It's hard to pretend that you're alone when your brother's elbow is touching your own.

Nick ignored.

And Nick finished his drink.

So there.

"I thought that the Communion today was really… nice." Cassy said in that low, even way that he had. "And it was good to see you there with Sam."

"Fuck Sam."

Castiel sighed softly.

"An fuck you. I don'eed a babysitter." He pushed his empty glass away from him. "D'you know that that sonabitch, he… he… I was only with him bec'us there was no way ta get the fucker pregn't an end up with another kid I can't take care of." His teeth were slick and his tongue felt well oiled. " 's jus' …. jus'... you know."

He'd lost a word. It tended to happen after a few drinks. He glanced over for some help. Cassy was usually always so good with his words, but his brother only looked mildly horrified.

"...you know." Nick insisted.

"Did he… did you say that to him?"

Nick rubbed at his face, trying to clear the familiar haze that was settling over him. "No. Bu'he knows. I knows. Ev'ry fuckin' fuck knows."

Somethings were just painfully obvious.

Somethings Nick didn't even know until the instant he heard himself say them. Odd, and bitter uncertainties that he wasn't aware of having, coming out of him in an uneven voice.

And this whole time he'd thought he'd been in love.

Funny the kinds of things that come to light once you've moved into that glorious realm of drunkenness where everything makes perfect sense.

He didn't even know who he was angry at anymore. Old scotch was good at complicating things like that.

Castiel played with his straw, watching him from the corner of his eye with the practiced patience of someone who already knows how this story is going to go, because he'd heard it so many times before. "So, you two had a fight."

And anyone who said that Castiel didn't understand romance, and relationships, and basic human interactions, was obviously missing the finer nuances of this marvelously intelligent creature right here.

Nick raised a very poignant finger. " 'need another one."

"... another boyfriend?" Cassy asked hesitantly.

"Nhn. 'nother drink."

Castiel dropped his hands to his lap and just looked miserable. "Even you have a limit, Nick."

" 'm not there yet."

"I would really prefer if you don't vomit in my car."

" 'm not gett'n in your car."

Nick looked for the bartender, because his brother was not the boss of him. But the man was down at the far end, rather pointedly ignoring him.

Jackass.

Castiel gently put a hand on his arm. "You're not driving yourself anywhere like this."

"Aha, but you'r'not the boss of me." He wasn't interested in driving anywhere right now anyhow. He just wanted one more drink. It was not a complicated emotion. He didn't have any of those in him right now anyways. He just felt hard, and heavy and jilted.

He trusted Sam. Completely lost himself in the other man- only to discover that he'd made the same fatal mistake that he'd made years ago when he fell for Lilith. Sure, Sam had different nails to dig in, but the result was just the same.

"Hey," he knocked his glass against the bar, loud enough to startle himself, and get the bartender's attention.

The man came over, with the same reluctance that anyone approaching a wounded animal would show, but he didn't take Nick's glass, instead looking at Castiel.

Nick's baby brother shrugged one shoulder. "May as well. He'll probably be easier to move."

And that was possible true.

Nick certainly wasn't going to argue, because he got his drink, and sort of lost the rest of the night after that.

When he woke up it was to the harsh lights and antiseptic smell of a hospital, which was a far cry from the dim, warm bar that he last remembered- so yeah. Cassy must have been right. Nick had certainly moved.

And good god, but he hurt.

Everything just hurt.

His throat and his arms and his chest and his legs. He felt like he'd been mashed under a pile of bricks, like a wall had fallen on him. His head ringing, not at all aided or soothed by the relentless beeping of a machine that was keeping pace with the heartbeat that he could feel pounding in his ears.

He wished that this wasn't the first time waking up like this. The familiarity certainly wasn't comforting. All he could do was keep his eyes closed against the bright, white light and try to will his body to go back to sleep despite the pain.

"Are you waking up?"

Rekha's soft voice barely registered to Nick and he thought that he might have managed to grunt some kind of reply.

"Good." She said somewhere on his left side, one of her hands lightly touching his cheek. "Come on, Nick. I can't yell at your if you're sleeping."

Which wasn't much incentive, but he managed to pry his eyes open, hissing softly, wincing away from the hospital room as best as he could. His sister in law was there, sitting on his bed instead of the chair beside them. She was in her scrubs, which meant that he at least knew what hospital he had been admitted to. Someone must have recognized him during check in and gone and found her and told her that he was back.

"How bad does it hurt?" She asked as she smoothed a hand through his hair.

"I feel like I'm dying." His voice sounded wrecked, torn and raw, which when paired with the state of his throat, probably meant that someone had jammed a tube down it recently. He found that hospital staff was always doing that to him.

"Good." She cooed.

"Good?"

"Nick, you hit Castiel. You also somehow managed to drive your bike into the side of a parked van. The EMTs who brought you in said that you had a blood alcohol level of point thirtyeight. I hope it hurts like hell, you stupid son of a bitch." She said it all so soft and lovingly, slowly petting his hair over and over again.

"I hit him?" Nick was horrified. Everything else had happened before. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't nice. But it wasn't new either. He'd never hit Castiel before though. In fact, he'd broken the nose of the last guy who had dared hit his baby brother.

"He's got a split lip and it looks like he got into a fight with a staircase. He also made me promise not to smother you while you're sleeping." She continued petting him, and Nick watched her, saw the redness around the corners of her eyes, and realized that she'd been crying.

"How bad is it?"

"If you hadn't had your helmet on we'd be at your funeral right now."

"That's a little… over dramatic."

"You've been unconscious for two days. There are metal rods in your leg now and they've been considering skin grafts for your arms. They had to stich that big dumb head of yours back up, and if you'd had any brains at all I'm sure they would have been all over the road."

Nick swallowed. "No broken ribs this time?"

"Only one, but I can give you a few more if you'd like." She threatened quietly.

He closed his eyes, realizing that he couldn't look at her any longer. "I can't do anything right, can I?"

She stopped petting him, taking her hand away all together and leaving him alone in the darkness behind his eyes. "Nick. Did you do this on purpose?"

He'd love to have told her no. 'No' with any kind of certainty. But he honestly hardly even remembered going to the bar. Everything past that just kind of blurred, like trying to see what was at the bottom of a swiftly running stream. Distorted and confusing. He wasn't even sure why he'd been drinking in the first place.

Wait.

No.

He remembered. It just took a second to refocus.

Which really, really wasn't a pleasant place to return to at this moment, but it helped a little to draw his mind away from the fact that his leg had started hurting worse and worse since the mention of metal rods.

"Isn't it some kind of hospital policy to give injured people morphine?"

"Not if the injured person has a history of substance abuse, and his family has valid concerns. Those bastards only get extra strength tylenol."

He opened his eyes again. "I've never had a drug problem."

"Really? For some reason your doctor, a good friend of mine, she thinks differently."

Nick felt like crying. Not weeping, or sobbing. Just crying. The more he woke up the more he became overly aware of how badly he was hurt this time. To the point that he was sort of forgetting about the room, or Rekha, or anything else going on. There must have been something in his system, something strong enough to have kept him for lashing out, but he was on the tail end of it, and really not in any state to deal with whatever kind of punishment that his family felt that he deserved.

Some of that must have started to show in the way that he started to try and curl onto his side, or maybe it was in the involuntary little noises crawling out of his chest. Rekha got up and came back with a nurse who did something with the clear plastic tubes running between his arm and the IV. In the time between blinks Nick felt the echoing, quiet cloud of pain killers blanket him.

Rekha had only wanted to scare him, same as he had apparently scared her. She returned to his side, her hand back in his hair. "I'm going to go call your brother's, tell them that you've woken... if you feel up to them visiting you."

"No." He didn't even have to think about that one.

"I can't keep Gabriel away for very long. He comes in to check on you every few hours."

"What about you?"

"I was off shift three hours ago." She sighed in a tired kind of way. "You've been in and out of it since they hauled you in here, but this is the first time you've been focused enough to talk."

Nick didn't really have a response to that one, just sort of drifting senselessly on whatever drug they'd given him. He still hurt. Hurt in ways that were rather uncomfortable and difficult to ignore, but it wasn't all consuming.

"I'm a dumb ass, aren't I?"

"Absolutely." She kissed right above his eye, and she smelled like rubbing alcohol and soap.

The door to the room opened and even though Nick had been hoping it was the nurse returning to check on him- such thoughts only left him open to disappointment.

"You know, it never gets easier to walk in on my wife in bed with my brother." Gabriel masked some kind of relief under his gentle joking.

Nick looked over, and the room swam only a little. "It was one time."

"Two times. This is the third."

"You weren't my husband back then." Rekha pointed out, settling along Nick's side, warm and welcome. "We weren't even dating."

"It hurts all the same." Gabriel rolled his eyes and sat himself down in the chair that she wasn't using. "So, Luci, you decided to come back to me."

"Didn't do it for you." He tried to pull his blankets up, but found that his hands were wrapped up in a few healthy layers of gauze, same as his arms. He'd been bundled up like a cheap Mummy knock off. His clumsy mitts weren't much good for moving things around. "I'm only here for your wife's sweet ass and the promise of more drugs."

Rekha huffed a soft laugh against the side of his face.

"Well, you came to the right place for it- but you could have just asked. We wouldn't have made you go through all this trouble." Gabriel reached over and touched his side, very, very gently. Odd kind of reassurance. "But no. You've always gotta be the dramatic one."

Dramatic.

That was almost funny coming from Gabriel.

Though… Nick supposed that from time to time he could overreact to some things. It was that temper of his. He didn't think that it came from their dad. Maybe his Mom. She certainly hadn't been the most stable of women. But he hadn't grown up to be the most stable of men. These things must just run in his family.

Defensive, a fucking menace to themselves, weak, and afraid.

But when you lay bare all your most fragile parts, you leave yourself open to getting hurt.

He knew it. He knew it from first hand experience. It certainly wasn't any easier the second time around. Handling it the same way yet again hadn't done him any favors either.

Maybe he slept for a while after that. He must have gone somewhere for a bit, because when he opened his eyes again Rekha was gone.

Gabriel was still there though. which was evidence that the universe had decided that Nick wasn't in enough pain yet.

"You really scared us, you know?"

Nick wished that he could roll away, but hardly had the energy to open his eyes, much less indulge in any hearty physical movement.

"It was just a nap."

"No. The accident, you ass clown." Gabriel leaned over, elbows resting on the edge of the bed. "I've gotta say, as suicide attempts go, this is the closest you've gotten."

"Oh my god. I wasn't trying to kill myself."

"Could have fooled me."

"I was just," he licked his lips and they were chapped and dry, "I'd had a fight with Sam... I was angry."

"Must have been some fight."

Nick closed his eyes and shook his head. It wasn't. As fights went it was actually fairly tame. But you don't always need fists and yelling to have a good fight. Just a few wrong words and the right time.

"Did, uh, my phone make it?"

Gabriel almost smiled, just a little twitch of his lips. "It did. I got the joy of talking to that little firecracker you work with, tell her that I was standing watch over your sad, broken body. They sent you flowers." He inclined his head to a little black vase with some dark colored helleborus flowers. Some of his favorites. It was kind of sweet.

Far more importantly than work though, "has Sam called?"

A slow sigh and a little head shake, Gabriel didn't' exactly look sympathetic about it thoug.

Nick didn't know what answer he'd been hoping for.

He supposed 'yes' or 'no', either would have felt like a punch in the gut. Because Sam couldn't know that Nick wrecked his bike. But the guy had definitely been there for the fight that lead up to it. And apparently he hadn't called.

Nick hadn't really expected him to.

In a way though it sort of made this decision easier for him.

"Gabe, in my contacts there's a guy named Fergus. Call him for me, see if he still wants to buy my car."

"Your… car." He repeated like Nick had gone crazy, spouting nonsense.

"Should be able to get about thirty thousand for it." He licked his lips again and wondered if he was allowed to have a drink. "Haggle a bit though. He's been after my car since I fixed her up."

"What kind of drugs did they give you, Luci?"

"And I've got about eleven grand saved up- you're giving me the rest." He kind of twitched his hand nearest to Gabe, as close as he could get to prodding his brother rather meaningfully in the chest.

"For what?"

"I'm buying June."

"Nick-"

"I'm buying June." He said more firmly. "Because I'm not fucking drinking anymore- police are going to come by any day now and give me one of those little bracelets that freaks out if I've had alcohol." He'd done this before. They'd also be letting him know that his license had been suspended, and that he would have to take classes or something. "And I'm moving to a place without stairs, with a second bedroom and an oven that works."

Gabriel leaned back in his chair, little pointed weasel nose wrinkling. "You planing on fixing those self employed, bad tempered, incredibly gay, parts of yourself too?"

"I've got a fine, reliable job, I'll work on the temper… thing, and I'm currently single, so that's not an issue."

Which canceled out the majority of objections that Gabriel had had up until this point. But his brother seemed unmoved, focusing on all the wrong things.

"That was some fight you two had."

"Look, sell my car, send the money to Lilith. Then talk to a judge for me and tell them what an upstanding citizen I am."

Gabriel kept on looking at him, expectantly, like he was waiting for the punchline or something.

"Now would be a good time."

"Wait," Gabriel sat up, frowning even more. "You're actually serious."

Nick gave his brother the most serious, this isn't funny- expression, that he could.

Gabe got out of his chair, raising his hands defensively. "I want this to go on record as a fucking bad idea that I've been against from the start."

"But you'll do it?"

"Yeah." He said with a sigh. "Yeah. I'll do it."