After The Fall

"Remember me? I sure remember you, Clarence."

She's worked in this bar since she was eighteen, and she's well used to the looks by now. The leers, the wolf whistles; the flirtations of lonely, drunken men who never want to go home just yet. She's seen it all, and after six years of it, it doesn't bother her a whole lot anymore.

But the unflinching, thousand yard stare of this man is a little much, even for her and her nerves of stainless steel.

She'd noticed him an hour or so ago. If she hadn't grown up in this backwater town with the name of every local face imprinted in the back of her eyes, he probably wouldn't have stood out so much. Maybe it was the tan coloured trench coat. Maybe it was the presence of the two greying men who sat in the booth with him - probably his uncles, or perhaps one of them was his father. As it happens, she had never seen them around here before, and somehow, through the roar of drunken laughter and the taste of desperation in the air around her, they cut through it all and stood out to her in the strangest way.

One of the older guys had approached the bar soon after their arrival, and she saw he wasn't so old. The strong, chiselled features of his face and the dimple in his smile somewhat betrayed the crows feet around his green eyes and the silver in his hair. He winked at her and asked for three beers. And as she nodded her acknowledgement and turned to collect three glasses and pull the tap, she found herself a little amused that there was such a thing as young old men. In this town, there were none. The old came here to die, and the young tended to avoid the place altogether. She placed the three pints on the scarred oak surface of the bar as he handed the money over, and with a world-weary smile and a thank you he had turned and headed back over towards his booth, with who appeared to be his brother and the young man with the tan coloured trench coat and sad eyes.

Her shift wears on. Drunk old men ask for whiskey, call her sweet cheeks; the few that don't look at her like a piece of meat ask her how her father. She gives a tight lipped smile and tells them she doesn't know, and boredly stares out at the darkening sky from the left window.

She hears a voice from behind her left shoulder asking for three more beers, please. It's deep and gravely, and something about it makes her ache. It sounds a little familiar, even though she's sure it's not the voice of any of the locals. She turns around to tell him she's on it, and before she can even form the words, her voice dies in her throat.

The man in the tan coat is standing on the other side of this bar, and the look he's giving her is one of the most unfathomable she's ever seen. His features are sharp, with high cheekbones and a well-defined jaw covered with slight stubble. His mouth's hanging open slightly, and she thinks somehow, maybe, she already knows the feel of his lips against hers.

His eyes are a dark blue. She knows because they're looking down at her with such profound intensity that, irrationally, she wants to both look away and drown in them. They're like oceans under stormy skies.

And she can see it. Those eyes, they howl. There is some untended pain there; a sort of grief in the way he looks at her that she doesn't understand. He looks like he's seen a ghost, and if she could just find her breath and remember herself, she would snap her fingers at him and tell him to cut it out.

The strangest thing about this is that she knows she's probably looking at him in exactly the same way. There's a terrible sense of finality; of loose ends left untied and good left undone in the air between them - herself and this stranger - and she can't put her finger on what it is.

But now she feels a twist on her lips and the quirk of her eyebrow, and hears her own voice cut through the roaring in her ears.

"If you keep looking at me like that, sugar, you'll make me all dewy." And with shaking hands she turns away and busies herself with pouring three beers. Her smirk still rests on her face when she turns back to place the drinks on the bar between them, and the man, this stranger, seems to have followed her example and has crafted his expression into something like distant politeness. She thinks it's maybe his default expression.

And so she tells him how much that'll be, and he hands her the money, and she runs it through the till before handing him back his change. He thanks her slowly before carrying his drinks back to his table, and she thinks with a degree of sardonic amusement that it's the most honest gratitude she's ever heard.

They've been looking at her, she realizes. Between serving customers and discreetly painting her nails beneath the sambuca shelf, she's occasionally glanced up at their table and noticed them deep in conversation.

They look pretty serious, she muses. One of the older guys, the tallest one with long-ish, grey-brown hair looks surprised. His mouth's hanging open and his big, wide eyes are flickering between the tan-coat man and her own direction. The other one, who came up to the bar earlier tonight, looks concerned. The smile she saw on his tired face earlier has been replaced by furrowed eyebrows and a fast moving mouth. She can't hear what he's saying, but it looks pretty damn serious. He keeps looking at her too.

She'd be annoyed, usually. She's used to the lecherous looks and the way the gears turn in men's heads when she's the only girl in the bar. And if it were any other time, her legs would be stalking towards their table and her sharp silver tongue would be ripping them to pieces before her mind had a chance to catch up with her mouth.

But the man with the ocean blue eyes looks like he's had the ground pulled out from beneath his feet, and she's got the strangest feeling in the pit of her stomach that this is an entirely different kind of conversation altogether.

"Could I have a Disaronno, please?"

She pulls her dark head away from the soft comfort of her forearms and straightens up. "Sure," she replies, and looks at those blue eyes for the most fleeting of seconds before she closes her calloused little fingers around a glass and thinks, why not, and pours him a double.

When she turns to hand him the glass, she's surprised to see he's taken a seat at one of the bar stools, and sits just close enough that she can taste his last beer on his breath. He doesn't look drunk in the slightest. The grief she saw in him earlier is less pronounced now, and instead he's looking at her with a measure of curiosity.

"Double's on me," she says, and feels a corner of her mouth tugging upwards involuntarily.

He tilts his head slightly, and something in her chest twists and turns. "Why?" he asks, dark brows furrowing just a little and his too blue eyes searching her face.

She shrugs. "Why not?" she replies, and shoots him a quick wink. She thinks his face softens a little, then, but his careful politeness returns before she can discern it.

"I'll have a Southern Comfort and coke as well, please," he says slowly, and he looks a little anxious, as if he's testing waters she can't see.

"You got good taste, sweet pea. That's my favourite."

"I know." She turns to look at him from over her shoulder, eyebrow quirked and eyes glittering, and he shakes his head a little, correcting the slip. "Lucky guess. It's on me."

Despite herself, she's utterly intrigued. "Well, thanks sugar." She pours herself the drink and takes a long sip, eyeing him over the glass. He's looking at her and his expression is unreadable. She sets the glass down on the scarred oak surface of the bar and rests her elbows down in front of him, dark curls settling on her arms. "What's your name anyway, stranger?"

He takes a drink from his glass, and she wonders if he's hesitating, before he sets it back down and replies. "Castiel," he says, and she feels an eyebrow raise before she can stop herself.

"Castiel? Really? That's one weird name, sugar, no offence." And she can see in his face that he's taken none. He looks kind of amused more than anything else.

"That's nothing. This one girl used to call me Clarence." He's looking at her sort of expectantly, and she wonders if he's waiting for some sort of reaction.

"Why Clarence?" she asks. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she feels the name slide off her tongue in the strangest way, her mouth forming the syllables as if it was what she was born to do. It feels nice.

The man – Castiel - looks down at his glass and a corner of his mouth turns up a little, almost a smile, and there's a sadness in it that moves something in her. "An obsession with an old movie," he says, and his deep voice is laced with fondness. She finds herself wondering who this girl was that had such an obvious hold on him, and wonders where she is now. "I don't see the fuss. I watched it myself and wasn't impressed." And he looks back up at her, and asks what her name is.

She tells him her name is Megan, and she wonders what exactly he sees in her when he smiles – a real smile, not a polite, obligatory one or a sad half smile, but a real, full faced grin – and says, "I thought you looked like a Meg."

And he orders another drink and stays still in his seat. Megan takes care of other customers as more locals pile through the door, occasionally glancing at Castiel as she busies herself between pouring drinks and managing the cash till.

He watches her too.

A/N: To chapter fic or not to chapter fic? Hmmm. One-shots are my thing, but I've deliberately left it at this point here so it can go either way. I hate doing this, but feedback in the form of reviews would be seriously helpful. I've got a skeleton plot to work on if I decide to add more chapters.

This was in response to a review I got from a guest reviewer called 'Elise' on another Megstiel story, asking if I could write a Megstiel fic in the style of another fan fiction I've written for Bleach. In that fanfic, one character finds another reincarnated and there's sunshine, lollipops and rainbows everywhere. So I thought, what the hell, and tried it out. Hopefully this works as a good piece of writing in it's own right, without brutalising the other fan fiction. I don't want it to be like the other fic. It needs to be something altogether different, and that's where the idea of making it a fully fledged chapter fic comes in.

Anyway, enough self-absorbed rambling. Hope you enjoyed this, and thanks for being wee gems and reading it this far!