My thought watching it the first time was that JP's drunk performance reeked. Dean confirms the next morning that Sam doesn't remember anything about the promise, so it still is just bad acting. However, and it's a big however, once Sam brings up the promise again, I think this is to show us that the drunk bit was an act. Then it becomes better acting. He may have even been drunk enough to be sick, but he wasn't drunk enough to be saying those things. Hell in college, I was there on more than one occasion. Now his performance had to be drunk to sell Dean on it, drunk enough to sell us that it was possible, and yet over the top enough that at the end, we knew it was an act.

That's my theory and I'm stickin' to it.

I don't have any doubt that without those constrictions, JP could do a realistic drunk.

OK, I feel like we are falling down on the job by not talking about the hurricane named Dean.

C'mon people! We can't let the Natter folks make all the good jokes!

Aww, Sam will have to wait until 2009 to have a storm named after him... [link]

Sam is always following after Dean. Oh, Sam.

We must be in the missing two years.

Ha! Fixed my computer (finally) and immediately found the HotH coda that I was yammering about last night.

now I lay me down to sleep by estrella30. Warning: It *IS* beautiful cake. The part that I think of though is the beginning...

Now that Dean knows about it, he keeps waiting to catch Sam doing it everywhere.

He watches Sam when they get dressed in the morning, skin and hair still damp from their showers and wonders: Did he do it just now? Did I miss it?

They leave the motel; winter air makes Dean lose his breath, his eyes tear up. He starts up the car and rubs his hands over the creaking heater, blowing into his fists and watching Sam from the corner of his eye.

Sam frowns and stares straight ahead. "What?"

I'm just waiting, Dean thinks. Are you doing it now?

He says, "Nothing," and pulls out of the parking lot with a roar when Sam looks like he's going to start asking questions.

Like with everything else in the world, Dean doesn't believe that Sam prays because he's never seen it. Until he finds Sam crouched on the floor with a string of rosary beads in one hand and a Gideon Bible in the other, in his head, Sam doesn't pray.

But he wonders, now, and it's pissing him off.

Warning: It *IS* beautiful cake.

I only figured out what that meant a third of the way through the story. Erk.

Oh, Anne. Erk indeed. Intro info is your friend!

That snippet is nice, though.

Where did the term "beautiful cake" come from, anyhow. I did enjoy the story, btw; I was just a bit taken aback by unexpected cake.

Anne, it's actually from Shrift--she has said "This is not my beautiful cake," with regards to stories or story-types that other people may like but she does not. It's a way of not saying "I hate that stuff," which can read as a dis on the people who do like it.

I saw Cass' rec and unpacked it, but didn't think to warn anyone more explicitly. Which I blame on a late dinner and some wank on LJ...