"Well, this is quite a charming way to ring in the new year."
With a hand and an icepack over her (incredibly sore, which she is trying her best not to think about) left eye, Bela looks over to Jo, at the blonde waves cascading down her back… and at the fact that, ever the stubborn one, she is still reading that damn waiting room copy of Ladies' Home Journal with the smiling, ginger Stepford cunt from Desperate Housewives on the cover. This would be all well and good, Bela thinks, were it not for the fact that they're sitting in the emergency room, and the fact that she is tiring of holding this ice over her eye when it doesn't feel like it's helping the swelling, and the fact that Jo has paid her absolutely no attention since helping check her in. Jutting her lower lip out at her girl, Bela slumps to the side and puts her head on Jo's shoulder.
Jo sighs, sounding far too contemplative for six o'clock in the morning — much less six o'clock in the morning after they've been up all night protesting. "Did you know that you can use toothpaste to fight acne?" she informs Bela, her voice brighter than a bucket full of rainbows. "There's something about the peppermint that makes it great for your skin."
"Lovely," Bela deadpans. "Absolutely stunning. Can you buy that Risa girl in my calculus class a tube of Colgate and teach her how to take a shower already?"
Tapping the top of Bela's head, Jo smirks. "Be nice, Bells."
"But she's disruptive to my learning experience!" Bela points out, purposefully adding in the Veruca Salt whine that she's perfected since she started seeing Jo Harvelle, their university's founder's great-granddaughter — as intended, it gets her girl to snicker, and with another well-placed pout, Bela even gets Jo to put her magazine down and hold the icepack for her. Sighing, she gives her favorite blonde a nuzzle. "You know, that dick with the bricks might have detached my retina. That could be what the flashes of light were. And if it were anybody else—"
"My stars — if it isn't Miss Bela Talbot," someone interrupts her, right before succumbing to a fit of coughs that come from deep within his chest. Taking the ice back from Jo, Bela turns in her seat to see none other than Gabriel, who even from this far off, and even considering the injury to her eye, looks pale, and exhausted, and generally as though he's seen better days — not least because he has his arm draped over the campus pastor's blue-eyed son and is practically using the other boy as a human crutch. Putting on a wobbly smile, Gabriel waves at her. "Hey, Bela," he says, only coughing a little. "How's tricks?"
It takes her a moment to notice, but once she gets the first hints of it, she can smell the remnants of margaritas, whiskey, and peach schnapps reeking off of Gabriel from here; Castiel, at least, has the reliable, responsible scent of sobriety. "Oh, not so bad," Bela teases them, as Castiel brings Gabriel to sit opposite her and Jo. "A fire-breathing dragon might've detached my retina while I was saving Jo-punzel from a tower—"
"Jo's hair isn't long enough for her to be Rapunzel," Gabriel points out, his brow furrowing at her. Too drunk to function — she might have expected as much from him.
"She's just kidding, Bukowski." Rolling her eyes, Jo coaxes Bela's head back onto her shoulder, and holds the ice to Bela's eye again. "She got whanged in the face by some dude at the protest we went to last night."
"…Why were you at a protest last night?" Castiel asks, the first time he's said anything and, knowing him, possibly the last.
Jo and Bela shrug simultaneously. "It seemed like a better use of our time than chasing around after each other once we're too trashed to function," Bela suggests, and shoots the boy a smile.
Coming up from another hacking jag, Gabriel slurs, "Well, I had a looooong night, last night. …So much sex. AJ… Ladies, even wasted he has the stamina of the gods. …And Chuck swore that he's getting a girlfriend for Valentine's Day this year. again — and I mean, I love him t'death, he's like a brother to me, but… girlfriend!" Collapsing into Castiel's shoulder, Gabriel laughs like there's some invisible feather machine going at his ribcage. "I mean… am I right, or am I right?"
Ignoring him like one of the masters, Jo asks, "What about your New Year's, Cas?"
Castiel wrinkles his nose as if to say that it was nothing special. "Chuck and I played Mario Party and did shots to that ridiculous Twilight movie while Gabriel and Crowley debauched each other."
"His boyfriend wasn't here for him to have sex with," Gabriel informs the ladies with a snicker, utterly oblivious to the way Castiel proceeds to glare at him. "He's in Kansas with his daddy, and his mommy, and his little brother, and his beard, and his car, and — OW!" Now, Castiel gets glared at in return, and the expression that he gives Gabriel is, at best, unmoved. "What was that for, Blue Eyes?"
"You're being a brat." With a glance down at his shoulder, Castiel adds, "and you're drooling on my trench-coat."
Gabriel mutters a string of curses in at least four languages (including Mandarin), and Bela means to respond — but, instead she hears a nurse calling her name. "Well, boys," Jo tells them, helping Bela to her feet and trading off duty with the icepack. "It's been a great time, but we have to go see if my lady's retina got detached or if she's just being a drama queen."
It's not until a bit later, when they've gone through the pleasantries of describing to the nurse what happened and she's wandered off to get the doctor, that Bela leans down to Jo's ear and whispers, "I'm probably fine — but don't pretend for a second that you don't love my dramatics."
Jo, in her idiom, answers Bela with a kiss.