Chapter 4 : Every Episode Has an Ending
Paddy's Pub, South Philadelphia — August, 2005
Charlie is explaining the concept of fatherhood to a woman Griffin has never met, and the explanation involves a drawing on a napkin that looks like two stick figures arguing inside a whale.
"So the BABY," Charlie says, jabbing the napkin with a pen that's running dry, "is like— it's in there, right? And I'm out HERE. And the question is— the question— is it even my baby? Because I don't— the timing is weird, and I was very drunk, and—"
"You said you remembered the night," the woman says. She's in her twenties, blond, sitting at the bar with the specific patience of someone who has already decided this conversation is a mistake but can't figure out how to leave.
"I remember PARTS of the night. Important parts. The pizza. The walk. The— listen, I remember the pizza very clearly."
Griffin wipes down the taps and keeps his mouth shut.
Season one, episode two. Charlie Wants an Abortion.
The woman — her name might be Stacy, or might not be, Griffin's memory of the episode details is sharper on outcomes than on guest character names — lays out her case. Charlie's case involves the napkin drawing, a misunderstanding of basic biology, and Mac's intervention when Mac discovers the woman is pro-choice, which activates Mac's deeply confused relationship with Catholicism and launches a parallel subplot about Mac dating a pro-life protester to prove a point he can't articulate.
Griffin pours. Watches. Catalogs.
By Thursday, both schemes have collapsed. Charlie's potential fatherhood resolves into awkwardness and mutual avoidance. Mac's girlfriend dumps him after he reveals he has no actual position on the issue and was using her for access to her protest group's free pizza. Dennis circled the edges of both situations like a shark deciding neither piece of chum was worth the effort.
Ninety-five percent accurate. The woman showed up on Tuesday instead of Monday — timing off by a day. Mac's breakup happened at lunch instead of dinner. The pizza detail was the same. Everything else: exactly as Griffin remembered watching it on a laptop screen in a different life.
He marks it mentally. Two for two.
---
The third episode hits the following week. Underage drinking at Paddy's — a group of high schoolers with fake IDs that Charlie can't read anyway, Dennis reliving his college glory days with uncomfortable intensity, Dee trying to be the "cool" adult and failing in the specific way Dee always fails, which is loudly and without self-awareness.
Griffin cards the kids at the door. Three of the fakes are obvious — wrong lamination, wrong font, one of them is clearly printed on a home inkjet. He turns them away.
"Dude," Mac says from behind him. "You're killing the vibe."
"They're seventeen."
"They're CUSTOMERS."
"They're seventeen-year-old customers."
"When I was seventeen—"
"Mac, I don't want to know what you did when you were seventeen."
Mac's face does the thing it does when he's caught between wanting to tell a story and realizing the story might incriminate him. He retreats to the bar. Griffin lets the kids leave and locks the door behind them, which means the ones who snuck in through the back — the ones the show requires to be here for the plot to work — are already inside.
The episode plays out. Dennis hits on a high schooler, doesn't realize she's a high schooler, then realizes and handles the revelation with the grace of a man who has never once been wrong about anything. Dee befriends the girls, gets rejected by the girls, drinks alone. Charlie eats something from behind the ice machine.
Three for three. Timing variance: one scene happened in the afternoon instead of the morning. Otherwise, frame-perfect.
The accuracy should be comforting. It isn't. It's the opposite — a confirmation that the tracks are laid, the train is on schedule, and Griffin is standing on the platform watching it come.
---
The Waitress works at a coffee shop four blocks from Paddy's.
Griffin knows this because the show told him, and the show told him because Charlie's obsession with her is a load-bearing beam of the narrative. But seeing her in person for the first time is different from knowing she exists the way seeing a dead man in a booth is different from reading a coroner's report.
Charlie has cancer. He doesn't — it's a scam, a desperate play for sympathy aimed at the one woman who wants nothing to do with him, and the execution involves Charlie standing outside the coffee shop in the late afternoon sun pretending to be dying while the Waitress tries to serve a line of customers who don't care about the man performing tragedy on the sidewalk.
Griffin walks past on his way to buy groceries. He stops because the bodega is next door, not because he's looking for her, but the window of the coffee shop frames the scene like a painting of exhaustion: the Waitress behind the counter, jaw tight, eyes fixed on the espresso machine, refusing to look outside where Charlie is coughing into his elbow with the conviction of a man who has never researched what cancer actually looks like.
Griffin catches her eye.
It's accidental — he's standing on the sidewalk with a plastic bag of off-brand cereal and canned soup, and she's looking up from the register, and the line between them is about twelve feet of glass and whatever shared frequency allows two people to recognize in each other the specific fatigue of being adjacent to insanity without participating in it.
Neither speaks. The look lasts maybe two seconds. The Waitress goes back to the espresso machine. Griffin goes back to the bodega. Charlie continues dying on the sidewalk with the commitment of a man who has never let facts interfere with a performance.
She's real. She's tired. She's been dealing with this for years and it hasn't even gotten bad yet.
Four for four. Charlie's cancer scheme collapses exactly on schedule. The Waitress doesn't take him back. Nobody learns anything.
---
Then the bar gets robbed.
Griffin knows it's coming — Gun Fever, Season 1, Episode 5. A man walks into Paddy's with a handgun, takes the register, and leaves. Nobody gets hurt. The scheme that follows — the Gang buying guns, Dennis waving a pistol around, Charlie treating a shotgun like a pet — is D-tier embarrassment, forgotten by the following week.
Knowing this does not help when the robber is standing six feet away with a .38 pointed at Griffin's chest.
"Register. Now."
The gun is smaller than Griffin expected. Black. The man's hand isn't shaking, which means he's done this before. His eyes are steady. His jacket is too heavy for August. The door is still open behind him and the evening traffic on 8th Street continues like nothing is happening because from the outside, nothing is.
Griffin opens the register. His hands are steady and his pulse is somewhere around a hundred and forty. The knowledge that nobody gets shot in this episode lives in one part of his brain; the knowledge that a gun is a gun is a gun regardless of what a TV show says lives in a different, louder part.
He puts the cash in the bag. The robber takes it. Leaves. No thank you, no threats, just business.
The Gang arrives twenty minutes later and discovers the robbery not through the empty register but through Griffin's expression, which apparently communicates "something happened" loudly enough that even Mac notices.
What follows is three days of the Gang being armed and paranoid and exactly as dangerous to themselves as Griffin predicted. Dennis buys a handgun and treats it like a fashion accessory. Mac buys a knife because "blades are more personal." Charlie acquires a shotgun through channels Griffin doesn't want to know about. Dee purchases mace and accidentally deploys it inside the bar, which clears the building for two hours and permanently damages whatever the bar rag had been holding together in the back corner.
Griffin stays behind the bar with a damp cloth over his face and waits for the mace to dissipate, and does not think about the .38, and does not think about the twelve feet between the barrel and his sternum, and does not think about how the word "nobody" in "nobody gets shot" provides exactly zero comfort when you're the nobody.
Five for five. And I need a coffee.
The next morning he goes to the Waitress's shop. Orders a large black coffee. Pays with exact change. She rings him up without conversation — professional, efficient, a wall of polite distance between herself and every customer because the alternative is engagement and engagement in this neighborhood leads to complications.
Their eyes meet again. Brief. She hands him the cup.
"Thanks," Griffin says.
"Mm-hm."
He takes his coffee and walks to work. The cup is warm against his fingers. The coffee is good — better than anything he could make in the apartment, better than the sludge Charlie brews in the back of Paddy's using a machine that violates at least three health codes.
Small things. Hold onto the small things.
Charlie is eating something from under the bar when Griffin arrives. It isn't food. It might have been food at some point in its molecular history, but that point is long past.
"Charlie. What is that."
"Protein."
"That is not protein."
"It's got a chewy part and a crunchy part. That's protein."
Griffin sets down his coffee and decides not to argue. Some battles aren't worth fighting. Some battles aren't even battles — they're just Charlie Kelly interacting with the concept of nutrition.
Frank Reynolds arrives in a few months. And when he does, the D-tier disasters upgrade to B-tier with a bullet. Literally.
To supporting Me in Pateron .
with exclusive access to more chapters (based on tiers more chapters for each tiers) on my Patreon, you get more chapters if you ask for more (in few days), plus new fanfic every week! Your support starting at just $6/month helps me keep crafting the stories you love across epic universes.
By joining, you're not just getting more chapters—you're helping me bring new worlds, twists, and adventures to life. Every pledge makes a huge difference!
👉 Join now at patreon.com/TheFinex5 and start reading today!