Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Musings On Icebergs and All That’s Underneath
by Cassie Robinson

There’s a lot to be said about the mystifying nature of celebrity. The feeling of knowing so much about a person—a musician, an actor, a reality star—and yet never quite getting close enough to touch. Understanding that what you see is only a fraction of them, like an iceberg in the Arctic.

Johnson Wisconsin is one such iceberg. 6’1, broad across the shoulders, and decidedly not from Wisconsin, he burst from nowhere into public consciousness nearly two decades ago, and has remained there since. The small town in Kansas where he grew up has yet to claim him as their own, and despite the best efforts of the more Nancy Drew minded in the online forums, they haven’t been able to find trace of a blond haired, blue-eyed, angel-voiced crooner growing up anywhere near the Midwest. He is the heartthrob of women and men alike everywhere, with a sharp jaw, freckles, and a voice that would break hearts. His songs have—

That’s all Cas manages to read before he’s rolling up the newspaper to whack Charlie with it for making fun of him. It’s not like she isn’t a fan of Johnson Wisconsin herself, not like she didn’t line up with him at midnight three times in a row to buy the latest album. And yet he’s the one getting roasted for having a crush on a guy he’s never met.

And Cas certainly doesn’t have a crush. Cas is forty-three years old and an investment banker with a diverse portfolio of investments. He owns his own car, pays his bills promptly on the first of the month and has his suits dry cleaned. Cas does not have a crush.

Still, it doesn’t explain the fluttery sort of feeling he gets in the pit of his stomach when the guy walks onto the talk show stage, waving at the crowd with his blond ponytail bouncing behind him. Cas can take or leave the ponytail, if he’s honest, but the rest of the guy is hot.

“Please, be quiet,” Cas growls at his guests as the tinny applause from the audience dies down on the screen. He waves his hand in Charlie’s general direction and her replying snort of laughter is loud enough to cover up the host’s first question.
“Cas has a cruuuuuuuush!” She singsongs, with giddy delight in her voice. She’s sitting cross-legged on the couch next to him, wearing a pair of Cas’s sweats and Stevie’s plaid shirt wrapped around her shoulders like a cape. In front of her, Stevie sits on a cushion on the floor so Charlie can massage her shoulders in between sips of the red wine she’s drinking from a mug. The impromptu sleepover had occurred after Cas’s third failed date of the month had told him not to call him anymore, so he had called Charlie instead in a fit of melodrama. Charlie, who has had her share of bad dates in a long, sordid dating past, had driven herself and her wife over, tanked half a bottle of wine and then promptly ‘lost’ her car keys. Cas doesn’t mind, not really. He’s glad of the company, however scrutinised he may feel under Charlie’s all-knowing gaze.
At least, he had been glad of the company, until Charlie started teasing him about what definitely isn’t a crush on the singer laughing on his television screen.
“It’s not a crush, Charlie,” Cas says, frowning. According to Charlie, he frowns over 60% of the time (he had to believe her—she coded an algorithm to measure it), and it’s her sole duty as his best friend to reverse that. Hence, the dates. Hence, the company. Hence, the wine. The screen is flashing green and blue with all of Wisconsin’s previous album covers. “I like his music very much.”
“Oh, come on, Cas. Even I can admit he’s hot!” Charlie gestures wildly in the direction of the TV with her mug, and the red liquid sloshes dangerously around inside it. Cas casts a wary eye as the wine hits the rim of the mug, but Charlie, a seasoned expert, doesn’t spill a drop. “Babe! Don’t you think he’s hot?” She pats Stevie messily on one of her shoulders.
“He’s hot,” Stevie concedes, smirking.
“Thanks, babe,” Charlie says, and Stevie holds her hand up for a high five, which she returns without looking, face buried in her mug. Cas watches the pair fondly—he’d introduced them, after all, back when Stevie had worked two floors below him and Charlie had come in, freelance, to check their security systems. But still, he can’t help the spike of jealousy that goes through him. Even when he’d been married, he’d never had that kind of easy camaraderie with Hannah—she loved him too much, and then too little, and he had never had it in him to pretend to care about the lunches and the church socials she dragged him to. By the end, their relationship was so tense that Cas resorted to surrendering his phone to Charlie and having her compose all his text messages.

But dwelling on the past has never gotten him anywhere, and he and Hannah have been happily divorced for nearly three years now—they’d be civil, even, if they ran into each other in the street. She’s engaged to a man called Alfie now, and they seem, if not happy, then comfortable.
And Cas is getting turned down for second dates everywhere he looks.

Still, he has his friends, a bottle of wine at his feet, and an interview with his favourite musician to watch. Having long been a connoisseur of Wisconsin interviews, this one is fairly standard. Johnson’s new album came out on January 24th, Johnson’s birthday, and the promotional tour has been extensive, so much so that several of the talk show hosts have commented on it. So far, they’ve been met with awkward chuckles to outright derision from the man, who is clearly getting a little bored with answering the same questions over and over. The longer he’s on the tour, Cas notices, the more sarcastic he’s getting with the hosts. The guy has just asked him a question that has the audience going ‘ooooh’, and Johnson grins a sharp-toothed grin and sits up straighter, leaning his body forwards as if he’s delivering a secret.
“I really don’t have a crush, Charlie.” Cas says, eyes fixed on the triangle of throat he can see at the neck of Johnson’s cowboy shirt. Johnson swallows and his Adam’s apple bobs. In Cas’s peripheral vision, he can see Charlie smirk.
“Yeah? What if I told you I had standing room tickets for his tour?”
Cas narrows his eyes. “Those tickets sold out months ago.” Not getting those tickets was one of the only times Cas has cried in his adult life. Luckily, only his secretary had seen it, and she was kind enough to pretend she hadn’t. Cas gave her a raise the very next day.
“And I went on seven dates with his manager’s girlfriend in college.”
Stevie seems completely unfazed by this information, and Charlie is draining her mug and grinning at him, lips stained red.
“For how long have you been three degrees of separation from my favourite musician and kept that information from me?”
Charlie rolls her eyes, shaking her head. This, Cas recognises, is the look she gets when he’s said something that she wants to laugh at, but knows that laughing will infuriate him. “I only reconnected with Eileen last week, dummy. She asked Stevie to dress her boyfriend for the album party.”
“Not Johnson?” Cas tries to hide his disappointment and immediately feels like an asshole—he truly is happy for his friend, since he knows how tough it is to get a gig as a stylist right now. But he can’t help but be a little upset that he won’t get to peek behind the wardrobe curtain of Johnson Wisconsin.
“God, no,” Stevie winces. “Apparently Johnson dresses himself.”
That, Cas can believe. It’s not that his style is bad, per se, but it’s not what one would call chic: patterned cowboy shirts, bootcut trousers in a rainbow of pastel colours, patent leather cowboy boots that clack-clack-clack when he walks across a stage. Cas remembers an interview from a few years back—Cas had still been married, then, still thought he was straight, still thought that the reason having sex with his wife was a chore was because he was tired, not gay. Johnson had been younger, too, but the ponytail was the same length as always, his blue eyes sparkling when they crinkled with crow’s feet at the corners. His plush, full lips pulling into that same mischievous grin. When the interviewer asked him who his style icon was, Johnson looked dead into the camera and said, “Y’know Marty McFly in Back to the Future 3? That.” and refused to answer the question ever again.

Johnson’s current interview is nearly over. Cas isn’t too mad that he’s missed bits and pieces—it’ll all be in his Youtube subscription box later, and the questions and answers have been pretty standard for him: “Tell us why your new album is called KAZ2Y5?” (“License plate growing up”); ”What was the hardest song to write?” (“All of them, I’m running out of ideas”); “Are there any ladies in your life?” (“None that compare to you, Missouri”). Eventually, he stands, gives a little bow and walks off the stage with his cowboy boots clack-clack-clacking on the dark, shiny floor.

“So, are you coming?” Charlie asks, pulling Cas out of the little reminiscence he’d fallen into. She’s up on her knees on the couch beside him, hands clasped in front of her, puppy dog eyes in full force. Stevie has twisted round to look at them both, makes brief eye contact with Cas, and bursts out laughing: she knows as well as Cas does that there’s no one in this room who can say no to Charlie.

With a very small amount of fake hemming and hawing, Cas agrees on the condition that Charlie doesn’t try to set him up with random guys she finds in the bathroom again, like she does every time she drags him to a club. He got one good date out of an encounter like that, and a couple of half decent hookups, but he’d been single for three years without much more to show for it. Eventually, they shake on it.

Cas spends the next two weeks in nervous anticipation, working far too much and somehow thinking about work less than he has in a decade. It’s not that he’s never been to a concert before—he did the college thing, and the getting wasted at the bar thing, and the waking up on the floor of his dorm room soaked in sweat and yet absolutely freezing thing, but the point is that he only did those things once, and so long ago that he’s beginning to wonder if he dreamt it.

Charlie, a seasoned concert professional, seems to have a new story to tell him every time he sees her: Charlie crowd surfed at a Rolling Stones gig; Charlie did shots with Dave Grohl backstage at a Foo Fighters concert; Charlie has punched Nickelback in the face. Every time, Stevie stands by and nods along, looking for all intents and purposes like she has found her dream.

Cas is both excited and terrified that Charlie will add a new story to the list tonight.

“Are you gonna throw Wisconsin your underwear?” Stevie teases Cas as they walk into the venue, waving their VIP passes at anyone who’ll look at them. When Charlie had first presented it to him that morning, Cas had nearly wept, and that’s another secret added to his and Charlie’s books.
“Of course not!” Cas splutters, firstly because that’s a waste of good underwear, and secondly because he hadn’t thought of it in time.
Anyway, Wisconsin must get legions of fans throwing their underwear at him from all corners of the world, beautiful women that he could have at any time of day or night, so it’s not like it would be worth anything.

Charlie begins to push through the crowd, using her sharp little elbows to get them right to the barrier. She’s wearing the big stompy boots that give her a couple extra inches in height and a significant amount of downward force when she applies it right, and her long, red hair is pulled back into a high bun. She’s ready for anything. Cas, in a fit of confusion about what, exactly, forty-three year olds wear to concerts, had worn entirely black and allowed Stevie to artfully rip his jeans. With his concert programme in hard and his sombre expression, he looks like the world’s most disrespectful funeral attendee.

Johnson isn’t expected on for another hour, at least, and the support act hasn’t even finished setting up their equipment, so Cas settles in for a long wait. As the crush of bodies surrounds him, he begins to sweat on his palms, the back of his neck. It’s warm, but he also isn’t big on crowds, and there’s a lot of strangers breathing on him from all sides.

There are kids to his left who can’t be older than eighteen, younger than Wisconsin’s first album. They’re gushing over how handsome they think he is (relatable), and on his right, a couple of guys older than he is are wearing purple cowboy shirts, like the one Johnson wears in the album notes of Pilot, his debut album. It’s been an awful long time since Cas listened to that particular album in full. He discovered it in his senior year of college, about six months after its release, in the bargain bin of Cassettes, his local music store. In a fit of madness that he now chalks up to fate, he’d spent the money he was supposed to use for the bus on it and walked home.

The third song, Daddy Troubles, went on repeat in his tape deck for days, over and over until his roommate threw it out of the window in a rage-induced rampage. Cas retrieved the cassette from the courtyard and invested in a Walkman.

Since then, Spotify has become a thing and Cas has all of the albums downloaded to his phone, Still, that song doesn’t go on playlists, and it never shows up on his Top 100 of the year. Maybe it’s the raw emotion in Johnson’s voice, or maybe it’s the cool chill he gets when he thinks of his own father, but he always finds himself skipping that one when it comes on shuffle, and when he told Charlie it was his favourite song, the look she’d given him had been a little too knowing.

The opening act is a pop-punk duo with a heavy Green Day sound—Cas is almost 100% sure he hears the opening bassline of Longview as they launch into their set. They’re fine, really, but if he wanted to listen to 90s Green Day, he would have stayed home and listened to 90s Green Day, so he settles for bobbing his head along with the music and texting Stevie on and off. In front of them, hanging over the barrier, Charlie is whooping every time there’s a break.

Eventually, the act closes with a cover of a Nirvana song and heads off the stage. The roadies come on to change the equipment, and a girl on the right hand side of the stage yells every time, as though she’s sure one of them will be Wisconsin. Cas feels the anticipation building in the crowd, a low level hum that starts in everyone’s toes. The purple shirt guys are grinning, grabbing each other’s arms in excitement, and the youths are getting their camera phones ready. Cas pulls out his own phone—the new iPhone his assistant insisted on buying for him so she ‘didn’t have to watch him text with the number pad anymore’—and though he is determined not to spend the entire concert behind his camera, he is still desperate to prove to himself later that he did it. He, Castiel James Novak, went to a concert filled with sweaty strangers, stood in a crowd of thousands and saw Johnson Wisconsin perform.

All of a sudden, the lights go down, a low, rolling fog starts dancing across their vision and a hush falls over the crowd. The clack-clack-clack of cowboy boots can be heard all the way from backstage.
There’s dead, ringing silence for a moment.
And then Johnson comes out, acoustic guitar slung over his back, pale blue cowboy shirt under a big leather jacket, stretched over his wide shoulders.

The crowd goes insane. Cas joins in, yelling so loud he doesn’t think he’ll ever speak again, but it’s worth it, because Johnson grabs the microphone, yells, “What the fuck is up, New York!” and starts playing the first song on KAZ2Y5. The drums crash as he pulls the guitar around and strums the opening riff. Cas sings along at the top of his lungs, waving his arms in the air like a man possessed by demons, but he doesn’t care, for the first time in what feels like years. He’s been waiting months, listening to all the singles on repeat, and then when the album released just a few weeks ago, learning the words to every single song. He’s been waiting two decades to see Johnson live, and he’s here and he’s with friends and he’s right in the front row.

As the first song fades smoothly into the next, Cas watches Johnson’s fingers picking out the gentle melody on the guitar. He’s switched the acoustic out for a shiny black electric one, with pin badges covering the entire strap. Cas can make out a Ramones pin, the Metallica logo, Blondie’s face grinning from his chest. There’s a moment of dead silence after the song finishes and the lights go down, covering the venue in a blanket of darkness. A bassline starts, low and steady, and after a second the drums join in. Then the lights flash in wild strobes as Johnson strums the first chord of his most popular song Lazarus Rising, and the crowd goes wild. Johnson hears the screams, looks right into the crowd and gives an exaggerated wink.

And so it goes, song after song, as Johnson plays for the crowd of thousands songs that have been played in cars and bathrooms and from tinny iPhone speakers for decades. For some, the number of times they’ve seen him live is in the dozens. For others, like Cas, they’ve never had the chance. If he could go back and tell his twenty-three year old self he’d one day be seeing that gaudy cowboy shirt live, he doesn’t think he would, for fear of being too jealous of his future self.

The second to last song closes with the twang of guitar strings. Charlie turns around and starts mouthing song titles at him, trying to guess what his final song will be. The message boards had blown up after the first couple of shows with people sharing the set list, but Cas didn’t read any of them, determined to experience the concert without any preconceived notions of what it would be like. Besides, Johnson’s been on a bit of a chaos kick this tour, playing entirely different songs at every show, so it’s been anyone’s guess for weeks what each show would play out like.

The lights dim to a single, golden spotlight on Johnson, who takes off his jacket and throws it to the side. A dark haired roadie brings out a stool for him, and Johnson picks up the guitar he discarded after the first song and perches on the edge of it. He’s sweating slightly under the hot show lights, his forehead and chest glistening. Cas, sandwiched between strangers, feels much the same.
“I’ve been told this is the most relatable of my songs,” Johnson says, leaning forwards to hover near the microphone. “And, uh, guys… that’s kinda sad. I didn’t think I’d be playing this one tonight, but this tour’s supposed to be all about letting go. I couldn’t close out the show without playing it for y’all so here it is: Daddy Troubles.”
Cas feels more than hears the collective roar that explodes from the crowd around him. Johnson hasn’t played this song in public since a show about fifteen years ago that was cut short for reasons that never came to light. There was speculation he’d never play it again.

A little shiver runs down Cas’s spine as the familiar chords start up, that little guitar riff that Cas knows from the album notes came to Johnson in his sleep as a teenager. Cas could recreate this song from memory if he had to, right down to the drum beats and chord progressions, the little talking parts that intersperse the melody, the slight crackle on the original recording that came from being recorded in Johnson’s friend’s garage with a borrowed microphone and cardboard boxes taped on the wall as soundproofing. Cas has loved this song for almost half his life—he’d resigned himself to never seeing it live.

When Charlie realises what song it is, she immediately turns around and mouths ‘you okay?’; on his left, Stevie squeezes his shoulder tight. Cas, tears in his eyes, nods at them both and then swipes at his eyes. Johnson leads them through the dreamy melody of Daddy Troubles as though he is taking them, one by one, by the hand, and Cas feels as though the music is curling around him like warm, strong arms.

The show finishes at 10:34pm. Johnson does an encore of Last Call and Cas, shaking off the bittersweet melancholy of the previous song, loses his entire mind singing along at the top of his lungs. As everyone is filing out, Charlie grabs his and Stevie’s hands and pulls them towards the stage. Cas feels like a minnow in the sea, being squeezed on all sides by concert goers travelling the opposite direction, eager to get into the fresh evening air. When they reach the side of the stage, Charlie signals to one of the guys—a tall, skinny guy with a cowboy hat on—and holds up the VIP badge that’s been slung around her neck for hours. He nods, pulls the curtain aside and lets them through.

The area they enter is decidedly less glamorous than the glitz of the stage they’ve just left. They’re in a thin, beige-walled corridor, solid cinder block flanking them as they follow the guy along. Identical door after identical door passes by them until they reach one on the left, with a piece of printer paper reading ‘Wisconsin Management’ stuck on it. Charlie knocks, waits about half a second and then pulls the door open, dragging Stevie in behind her.

Cas hangs around in the corridor, frowning down at his phone. He only has about 20% of his battery life left, and Stevie had mentioned going for a drink after the show, so he’s closing every app he has open to try and eke out what little he can before they go. As he swipes on the screen, heavy footsteps come towards him, so he looks up, expecting to see Charlie and her big boots coming towards him. He’s practically knocked flat on his ass as someone crashes right into him. Before he can think or even die, two hands grasp his biceps and set him right on his feet.

The guy is tall—probably as tall as Johnson, give or take the couple of inches the guy adds with those cowboy boots—but he stoops a little, like he’s trying to fade into the shadows. His light brown hair is ruffled, half-gelled like his hedgehog spikes have been ruined by fingers running through it one too many times. His eyes are hidden behind sunglasses. By all measures, he is exactly Castiel’s type, right down to the fact that he is more than a little rude.

“Excuse me?” Cas says, as the guy makes to keep walking. He gestures down at the concert memorabilia spilled all over the floor—it belongs to Charlie and Stevie, because Cas is a strong believer in remembering things with his brain, not bits of paper (that didn’t stop him from buying a tshirt, but that was a purely economical decision). The dude’s eyebrows are at his hairline, raised above the sunglasses he takes off and puts on his head. He looks around him, searching, something hesitant in his gaze. Cas has seen that look before, in his sister long before she ran away. Johnson’s leather jacket is slung over his arm and Johnson’s guitar is on his back. Some sort of assistant, maybe, packing up Johnson’s things for the night? Cas just hopes beyond hope that he hasn’t inadvertently intercepted a thief. He doesn’t think he could live it down if Johnson Wisconsin’s guitar got stolen on his watch.
“What the hell are you doing back here, man?” The guy says, annoyingly handsome jaw clenching.
“My friends are meeting with Mr. Wisconsin’s management team,” Cas says, chin jutting up in defiance. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m, uh…” The guy runs a hand through his hair, pulling the strands to an upright standing position once again. Cas ignores the little voice in his head that tells him to pet that hair right down. “Let’s just say that Johnson couldn’t do what he does without me. Now, if it’s alright with you, pal, I gotta get going. Places to be, people to see, etcetera etcetera.”
Cas narrows his eyes and lets his gaze follow the guy—wide shoulders, bowlegged stance—as he heads down the corridor, taking one last shifty glance in Cas’s direction before he rounds the corner. Another few minutes pass, in which Cas scrolls through the videos he took, and then Charlie exits the room, Stevie in tow, and two people follow behind. The guy is alarmingly tall, broad and kind looking; the woman has her arm looped through his, and her eyes are bright and mischievous.
“Cas, this is Eilieen and her boyfriend, Sam,” Charlie says, and the two of them politely hold out their hands to shake. Sam looks down at Cas’s feet, where the concert programmes and tshirts still lie strewn on the floor. He raises an eyebrow and Cas grimaces.
“A man walked right into me while I was waiting,” he explains. “He just left with Johnson’s guitar. I think he was an assistant of some sort. He was tall, douchebag sunglasses on indoors, very handsome but nervous looking?”
“Oh, you mean Dean?” Sam blurts out, and in his peripheral vision, Cas sees Eileen step on Sam’s toes. Sam clamps his mouth shut so fast that his teeth click together. “He’s kind of a private guy,” Sam explains, but Cas can tell he’s not telling the whole truth, with the way that Sam is avoiding eye contact. Not that it matters, as Cas has no desire to see the rude Dean again. He changes the subject, if only to try and wipe that grimace off of Sam’s face.
“Now, I normally wouldn’t ask but…” He glances at Charlie, who makes a ‘why the fuck not’ kind of face and inclines her head. Cas goes for it—what’s he got to lose? “Is Johnson around? I’d love to meet him, and since we're already here…”
“Sorry, man, he shoots off pretty quick after the show ends.” Sam says, and he looks genuinely apologetic. “He likes to get right to bed—memory foam, y’know?” This is apparently an inside joke, because Eileen, whose gaze has been fixed on Sam’s face as he speaks, bursts into laughter.
“Some rockstar,” Charlie says, pulling Stevie’s arms around her waist. She laughs in agreement.
“Perhaps you should just put a wig on that guy—Dylan, was his name? He was around the right height.” Cas says, laughing at his own joke. Stevie and Charlie let out guffaws of laughter; though Sam and Eileen laugh too, it doesn’t quite seem natural.

In celebration of Cas, in Charlie’s words, ‘living out his 23 year old self’s wet dreams’, they decide to hit up a bar after the concert. Eileen and Sam join them, though they say they’re only coming for one drink, which makes Charlie boo them loudly and obnoxiously from the other side of the cab. Despite their one drink limit, they turn out to be an absolute riot. Cas enjoys them immensely.

“So, how long have you been working for Johnson, then?” Cas asks Sam, while Charlie and Stevie go to flirt outrageously with the bartender to secure another round of free drinks. Sam is still nursing a lite beer and Eileen is drinking one of those pink, frothy cocktails filled with fruit and sugar. They hold hands on top of the table, Sam’s thumb gently rubbing circles into Eileen’s palm, and the movement is so natural and unconscious that Cas’s heart aches, just a bit. He has to look away and instead shifts his glance to Sam’s face, who has caught him looking and smiles at him.
“I’ve been working with him since the beginning,” Sam says. “Well, nearly. He had a manager before me who, uh. Let’s say they weren’t a compatible business match. When he fired him, I knew there was no way in hell he should have to go through all that alone, so I volunteered.”
“You must have been very young at the time for all of that,” Cas replies, impressed. “Johnson was about twenty when he started, wasn’t he?”
Sam shrugs, accepting Cas’s implied compliment like he’s heard it before. He doesn’t seem aware of how much of an impact his client has made, or even how much of it has to do with him.
“Yeah, I was sixteen when he started. Eighteen when I started working with him. He was in—he went to college with my brother and they hit it off, you could say. Johnson eventually dropped out to do music full time. I did it pro bono until his second album actually started making money, then he started paying me. Twenty years later, here we are.”
Cas nods along, taking in the story. He can imagine Sam at eighteen—not the self assured, calm man he is now, but the spitfire of a boy he’s seen in the pictures from the album notes of Pilot, inches taller than Johnson and with nearly as much of a presence.
“Brother?” Cas says.
“Yeah, you met him earlier. Dean.”
Cas mentally tracks back to what he said after Dean nearly knocked him to the floor. Dear god, he’d called him rude. He’d said his indoor sunglasses made him look like a douchebag. There’s no force in the world that could stop the face he pulls, and Sam looks sympathetic and more than a little amused when Cas finally looks back up at him.
“Don’t worry about it, man,” he says, clapping a big hand on his shoulder. “Dean tends to have that effect on people.”
“I like Dean a lot,” Eileen pipes up, grinning up at Sam. He rolls his eyes.
“Yeah, of course you do,” he says, faux annoyed. “You’re the exact same brand of evil.” Still, he leans down to kiss her, smiling against her lips. Cas looks away, over to the bar where Charlie has her hand in Stevie’s back pocket, Stevie’s arm around her waist. He looks down at his phone, where there have been no new calls, texts or notifications since Charlie’s on way bitch nearly twelve hours ago now. He stashes his phone in his pocket and deliberately doesn’t think about his ex, who he hadn’t loved but he had liked, until the bitter end tore all that to shreds.

A deadly looking tray of shots slams onto the table in front of him, sloshing in varying shades of luminous yellow and green. Charlie and Stevie slide into the seats across from him, wearing twin grins of absolute chaos.
“We want four drink Cas!” Charlie says, voice that loud way it gets when she’s drank a lot in a short space of time. Cas suspects her and Stevie’s time at the bar might have been occupied with more than just chatting to the bartender.

Eyeing the tray warily, Sam and Eileen call it a night.
“Johnson’s got a radio interview tomorrow morning,” Sam groans, stretching so his back clicks like a rattlesnake. “He hates those, so it usually takes me literally flipping him off the mattress to get him up.”
“I thought Dermot was supposed to be his assistant?” Stevie says. “Can’t he get him up?”
“Dean,” Sam corrects, smirking. “And, no, Dean is the worst person on earth for rousing Johnson Wisconsin.”

They all exchange numbers as Sam and Eileen say their goodbyes. Charlie has shots pressed into Stevie and Cas’s hands before the others have even reached the door, and it all gets rather silly after that.

The bar closes at 3am, but Charlie, Cas and Stevie stumble out long before that, complaining of the aches and pains that come with being over 35, swaying like sailboats as they meander towards the taxi rank. All three tumble into the back of a taxi together and the driver gives them a tight smile as they giggle and sing Wisconsin songs at the top of their lungs. Finally, as the street lamps whip past them like shooting stars, he acquiesces to Cas’s request to connect to the bluetooth speakers, and Cas plays Lazarus Rising on repeat all the way home. Charlie and Stevie take a harmony each, warbling their way through the lyrics, and Cas sings the bass, an octave below the actual key of the song. By the time they reach Cas’s apartment building, they have it perfected. Cas considers calling Kimmel.

As he clambers out, he hands the driver a bunch of bills to cover his leg of the journey and throws in a bunch extra, totaling nearly a 100% tip. That puts a smile back on his face, and he’s practically whistling as Cas closes the car door on Stevie’s sprawled out form. Cas pats the car roof to signal he can drive away.

The light flickers in the lobby, illuminating the room in a bleary half-light every few seconds—he’s been requesting that maintenance look at it for months, but nothing has been done yet. He ignores the lift in favour of taking the stairs two at a time, and when he reaches his apartment door, he leans back against the door to open it as his eyes droop with sudden exhaustion.

He doesn’t bother switching on any lights as he enters the apartment. The low, yellow light from the street lights outside is enough to guide him through the living room, and muscle memory takes over once he enters his bedroom, which is already pitch dark from the blackout curtains he never opened that morning. His jeans and shirt get flung into the hamper, jacket folded carefully on the chair, and then he pulls on the Wisconsin t-shirt he bought in a fit of Charlie-induced hysteria and crawls into bed, still humming Last Call under his breath. That night, Wisconsin’s honey-sweet voice still ringing in his ears, he falls asleep smiling.