Title: Before the Storm
Rating: PG
Summary: Bobby feels like drinking now more than he did the day before. He suspects that he’ll feel even more like drinking at this time the following evening.
Disclaimer: Add Supernatural to the list of things I most certainly do not own.
Author's Note: I finally wrote my Bobby/Ellen fic! Yay! :D This is dedicated to everyone who encouraged me to do so. ♥



Bobby feels like drinking now more than he did the day before. He suspects that he’ll feel even more like drinking at this time the following evening. At least when there was work to be done, a crisis at hand, he could lose himself in it. An apocalypse was a welcomed distraction from things he didn’t want to think about, things like what they were all in for this coming year.

A year. A fucking year. He could beat the hell out of Dean for that, and the more he drank, the more appealing the possibility sounded.

“Can’t sleep?”

Bobby wasn’t the kind of man that was startled easily, but in his own home, in the middle of the night (especially a night like tonight) he wasn't exactly expecting to be interrupted in the middle of his thinking and drinking. He looks up sharply and sees Ellen standing in the kitchen’s doorway, leaning with her shoulder against the wall and her arms wrapped around herself.

“Can you?” he replies, tilting the whisky bottle and refilling his shot glass. She takes a few steps forward, watching the soft brown liquid instead of him. Bobby doesn’t exactly blame her.

“You in a sharing mood?” she asks, pulling out the chair across from him and taking a seat. Bobby pushes another shot glass toward her and fills it. She swallows it a second later.

Bobby watches her for a few moments, watches her hold up her glass and focus on it. He’s smart enough to know she isn’t admiring his dime a dozen glassware. “This probably ain’t the best time to bring it up, but…you know where Jo is?” he eventually asks.

Her long fingers tighten around the shot glass as he refills it. She swallows it just as quickly as she did the first. “No,” she replies. “She hasn’t called in a couple weeks.”

“She know where you are?” Bobby asks, leaning back in his chair.

“No,” she answers. “She probably doesn’t know about the Roadhouse either.”

“Well,” Bobby says with a shrug, trying his hand at optimism. “With the hell that just got unleashed, somethin’ tells me we might be seein’ her soon enough.”

Ellen cracks a small, mostly bittersweet smile and nods, clenching her fingers around the shotglass in her hand. “You trying to make me feel better?” she asks. Bobby shrugs again.

“Is it workin’?” he asks. She shrugs back.

“It’s a start,” she replies. “You tired of drinkin’ yet?”

Bobby sighs and his shotglass before nodding his head, setting it back down on the table and pushing away his chair. “Yeah,” he says, watching Ellen do the same. “We can go back to worryin’ about all of this in the morning.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Ellen replies with a nod before wrapping her arms around herself and ambling back toward the bedroom. The fabric of her late husband’s flannel shirt is comforting, as always, but not enough tonight. There’s too much on her mind, things that she’ll probably continue to think about as she lays in bed trying to sleep.

Bobby falls into stride behind her and sets his hands on her shoulders, trying to comfort her. She leans back against them and closes her eyes. He pushes open the door for both of them and she sits on the edge of the bed. Exhaustion grips her the second she lays down, and as Bobby follows her, as he reaches for her and she folds her body into his arms, she thinks she just might have an hour or two of sleep in her after all.