Fic: Dinner Beneath a Hurricane
So! I need to do something productive asap because I'm mad at myself tonight for handling respiratory physiology so poorly. I knew cardio really well and could've gotten an A on that exam if I didn't screw up respiratory. I also need to stop waffling about this fic and its literary merit and post it already. (BUT I'm learning to put in sutures tomorrow, which is a definite highlight of the week \o/)
Here goes another timestamp for The Witch Is Dead, on the tail of some cool discussions of wincest with counteragent, and also because that San Juan location is stuck in my head. This follows To Run Into the Middle of the Room, and all you strictly need to know is that Dean got a love curse when he was nine and has been worried since that it'll surface and make him molest Sam. It hasn't so far. One day they went to San Juan, Puerto Rico to hunt some monsters. Now, with the job finished, they head to a wild beach to burn a dead monster and drink tequila in an abandoned restaurant.
Dinner Beneath a Hurricane
Sam/Dean, R. 2.6K
The first time Dean crossed the line with Sam, he had forgotten all about Sarah’s spell, again. He didn’t think about it most of the time, except bad weeks happened when his brain was stuck on a vicious loop, and he had just finished a bad week, calmed down and moved on. Nothing happened in the hotel room. He didn’t suddenly want to jump Sam. The witches never touched Sam, so whatever may or may not have passed between them on the first night in San Juan was likely a result of growing up too close, with too few boundaries. Fine. Dean could be a man about it, admit the moment of misguided desire at least to himself and let it go.
The job helped. They crawled through the entire hotel and combed the grounds, looking for where the monster might’ve dug a new cave for itself. It was a long and tedious task and one they had to do together, covering each other’s backs. It left no room for awkwardness over something that once overtook them for a moment. For a moment, Dean would repeat to himself. And, Get over it. So he did, and Sam did on his end, and then they got sucked into the case. Occasionally, Dean would bump the bite bruise on his hand against a bathroom counter or see The Jungle Book on Sam’s bed and everything would come back like a sick tide. But the bruise faded, and with it faded the weirdness, until all thoughts of the witch’s spell had left him again.
The monster, when they found it, turned out to be huge. Maybe the heat was good for it, or the fertile atmosphere of superstition that was too thin back in Minnesota, but the young beast was at least twice as large as its parent they put down back up north. Like hell the carcass was going to fit into the fireplace. They borrowed a truck and a good local map from Mike and took the dead monster down to the beach. Mike knew a good, private place - an abandoned seaside restaurant, destroyed by a hurricane some years back and never rebuilt, now swallowed by the forest. It sat on a narrow strip of beach that got covered almost entirely during high tides and wasn’t popular with vacationing college kids.
Dean could hear the college kids having a bonfire party a long ways down the shore. When the wind blew just right, he heard the distant bursts of their laughter. He saw the reflection of their fire in the water, like they could probably see the reflection of the monster’s funeral pyre. Dean wondered what they took it for.
Dean wasn’t drunk yet but was heading that way, and so was Sam. Whatever, they had an excuse. They had just cut up a dead monster, and the thing was two fucking stories tall. They had tequila set up on the outside bar of the former restaurant’s terrace, as well as some of the salt they brought for the fire and plenty of limes that Sam cut with his hunting knife. All bar stools were gone, so they stood, and if standing became too much, it was a sign to take a break and drink some water.
The monster crackled, almost merrily. Its long bones looked like tree trunks from where Dean was sitting on the broken-up end of the terrace with a missing piece of stone railing. Gotcha, Dean told the monster silently and saluted with his water bottle. Gotcha, fucker.
Sam had wandered thigh-deep into the sea, fully clothed, and was splashing around in there with his back to Dean.
“Sam! Don’t go far. You’ll drown, dumbass.”
“I’m just here. Not going further.” He leaned down and put his head under the waves. Dean twitched involuntarily, worried that he’ll overbalance, but Sam straightened up again fine.
“What are you doing back there?”
“I got monster juices all over me,” Sam said. “You should wash up too, before they get crusty.”
“Princess.”
Sam flipped him off. Dean cackled to himself and leaned back on his elbows, legs dangling off the edge of the tilted stone slab that was once a part of the restaurant. The sky was enormous and full of stars, and the full moon was just behind him and over the trees, held in the palms’ clutches. Dean threw his head back so that he could see it upside down. Out of nowhere, in the weird way of childhood memories, a song came back to him from - he could’ve sworn - middle school.
“Oh moon, shining in the night” Dean sang quietly under his breath to its pale face. “Oh moon, silvery and bright, come again tomorrow night.” He rubbed his head. He was sure he had missed something, but the rest of the lyrics were long gone.
He looked up, and Sam was right there, standing just two paces away, dripping water, with the firelight at his back. Dean thought about denying everything. Then again, there was tequila. He flopped down on his back and folded his arms under his head. From the new angle, he saw their glasses and the bottle on the bar, with the firelight trapped in them.
Without a word, Sam lay down next to him, and Dean shifted to make room. A little streak of water running off Sam’s hair touched Dean’s neck and soaked through the collar of his t-shirt.
“Are you listening?” Sam said.
“You didn’t say anything.”
“No, I mean the song. It goes, ‘Are you listening?’ After ‘shining in the night’.”
“Ah,” Dean said. He tipped his head back, rolling it against the concrete, to look at the moon again. Are you listening? He could’ve sworn that it was, and that maybe he could make a wish to it.
“I wish a beautiful woman would wander out of the jungle and fall in love with me for the night.”
Sam burst out laughing. He laughed so rarely and almost always had to be drunk for it, and now it settled warm in Dean’s chest. He wanted to keep making dumb wishes to the moon to keep Sam laughing, but his imagination ran dry.
“You know,” he said, struck by a sudden thought, “this is the first time I’m drinking tequila without a woman.” Tequila and margaritas used to be his favorite drinks to order for women in bars - so that he could watch them lick salt.
“You’re too drunk for any self-respecting woman to hang out with you.”
Dean snorted and thumped Sam on the stomach. “Shut the fuck up. I’m irresistible. You know, I’ve always wanted to try that trick from Point Break, the one with the lime?”
“I think they were drinking beer. Maybe.”
“Well, I don’t wanna be a copycat.”
He reached out blindly and found the top of Sam’s head, pulled it in on impulse to tuck it under his chin, like he used to do when Sam was still smaller than him. Sam went without resistance. His hair was wet and rough from the salt, but his breath was warm on Dean’s skin. Dean remembered, vaguely, some woman he used to know who loved tequila. Amy, was it?
“You better hope there are no patasolas in the woods,” Sam said. “Here you are, in the jungle, thinking about beautiful women. You’re gonna get both our asses in trouble.”
Dean shoved him away for that one.
“Or, you know what I’d do?” he said, patasolas be damned. “I’d lick tequila off her stomach. I’ve always wanted to.”
“I've done that.”
“Ha!” Dean patted him on the head. “I guess it’d have to wait for another night, seeing how I’m stuck with you.”
So Sam pulled up his shirt and threw his arms over his head in a dramatic gesture. “Do it.”
“Oh, you think I won’t?” He flipped over and got up on his hands and knees, crawling over to the bar. Everything went sideways, and Dean braced his elbows, before he remembered that the floor was angled. Sam was cracking up behind him, always a happy drunk when he didn’t have any darkness pressing on his mind. Dean grabbed the bottle off the bar, along with a wedge of lime, and crawled back. “Keep laughing.”
Kneeling over Sam, Dean paused with the tequila bottle raised. He thought the idea might’ve been to drink out of the woman’s bellybutton, which didn’t seem that appealing, seeing how this was Sam. Besides, Sam’s stomach was shaking too much from silent laughter, and Dean didn’t think it would hold the fluid. He shrugged and just poured, seeing the muscles jump at the contact, and then he leaned down and licked all the way up to the solar plexus. It tasted like alcohol and sea salt and skin. He did it again, this time catching the rivulets of tequila faster, licking up along Sam’s ribcage. It didn’t feel like a woman’s stomach at all. Dean wished silently for a swell of a breast to press his lips under, and then he gave up and just went with what was there.
“It tickles,” Sam complained, squirming. Then, of course, Dean had to tickle him more and blow a raspberry against his stomach, and Sam almost put his eye out, shoving him away.
Sea salt lingered on Sam’s skin, and Dean licked it clean. Sam pinched his shoulders if he got too close to ticklish spots, hard enough to leave bruises. The goddamn uneven floor of the terrace made Dean feel like he was tilting sideways all the time, ready to fall off the face of the earth and splash into the sea at any moment. He hung onto Sam’s belt to keep them both in place, or to keep them together at least if they were going to roll into the waves. The monster’s flesh was now all eaten away by the fire, and its bones smelled like burnt caramel, sharp and sweet. A gust of wind blew just right, and the smell was so strong that Dean could taste it on Sam for a moment.
He realized, distantly, that he was turned on and felt proud of himself for the stamina in the face of intoxication. It was good, he decided, to be here with Sam, for the two of them to have found a weird place in the world to crawl into and just be alone. It was good to lick and tickle the laughter out of Sam.
They couldn’t remember how the trick from Point Break went, so Sam bit into the lime wedge and made a hilarious face that almost made Dean snort out tequila. But he swallowed it and licked the acid out of Sam’s mouth.
The burnt caramel smell of monster bones kept blowing their way, so they stumbled inside the ruined restaurant and lay down on the floor on their spread jackets, in the comfortable semi-darkness. The moon stared through the blown out windows, and Dean asked it silently, Oh moon, are you watching? Sam rolled on his side was already making sleepy sounds. Dean wondered if it was the hurricane that smashed the windows, and if the tide was going to rise so high it would spill inside and drown the two stupid drunks in their sleep. It didn’t seem a likely prospect, not with the moon watching over them. Dean drew Sam’s head closer and tucked it under his chin and was asleep before he could finish his four-lines-long ballad to the moon.
He dreamed that the restaurant was underwater and that schools of fish swam behind its intact windows and above the domed skylight. On the surface, he knew, a hurricane was raging, but everything was quiet at the bottom of the sea. In the weird, greenish light the patrons’ scales shimmered violet and blue and purple. Fish, squid and crabs sat at the tables, eating seaweed soup and staring at the two humans at the corner table. Sam didn’t like seaweed soup. He was sitting with his back to Dean, shoulders hunched, a twelve-year-old in baggy clothes.
“Sam,” Dean tried to say, and the echo sent his voice bouncing off the walls, just like inside a filled bathtub. “Sammy, I’d never. I’d never do anything to you.”
The fish eyed them hatefully, and the crabs clacked their claws, rolling their stalked eyes round and round. Dean tried to touch his brother’s shoulder, but no matter how he turned, Sam’s back was always to him. Hating himself for something he couldn’t quite remember, Dean wanted to pick up a chair and smash the window so that he could swim up into the jaws of the hurricane. He pressed his hands against the glass. Behind it, in the dim underwater light, he could barely distinguish a forest of seaweed swaying off to the right, and in the heart of that forest sat a tiny cabin with yellow light spilling out the kitchen window.
It was the sickest awakening of his life. Dean woke up on the dirty floor with sand in his mouth, a headache and a distinct feeling that something awful happened. Then it came back, gradually - the taste of lime, salt and tequila and the slippery feel of Sam’s lips and tongue, and all the- Christ. Dean sat up, slowly. Some distant part of him was actually impressed with the magnitude of the clusterfuck. The rest of him was too busy wondering how to make it through the rest of the day.
He could hear the waves crushing outside and the sound of a shovel digging into sand. Dean got up slowly and wandered onto the terrace, pausing for a moment before he stepped out into sunlight. Sam was throwing sand over the charred remains of last night’s fire. Dean leaned on the railing and just looked, no idea what to do next. He felt empty, hollow, like one of those chocolate Easter bunnies that Sam used to get so disappointed in.
When Sam turned around, he looked pretty awful, with some ugly thought twisting up his mouth. Dean’s own misery was staring back at him through Sam’s eyes. Sam was laughing last night, and Dean wanted it back. Not knowing what else to do with any of it, how to make it go away, Dean cracked the fakest of smiles. Sam returned it, a little more real.
Dean said, “I had a weird dream.”
Sam nodded. He had a bruise at the base of his neck that Dean didn’t remember leaving there but was pretty sure he did. Sam saw him looking and raised his hand to rub at it or cover it, or both. “Yeah,” he said, “me too. I won’t tell Bobby if you don’t.”
It was a ridiculous thing to say, and it surprised Dean into a chuckle. Don’t tell Bobby - like they were kids again and just broke a bedside lamp, horsing around when they should’ve been asleep. Sam was smiling back at him, forever his co-conspirator, and the twisted thing was leaving his face, until it disappeared entirely, until he looked like the Sam who went out into the backyard with his brother at three in the morning to bury Bobby’s lamp.
On the drive back to the hotel, Dean put it all away and locked it up - the memory that made him shiver, of licking salt and alcohol off his brother’s skin. He let Sam pick the radio station and just drove, not thinking much. The thought of the witches came back briefly and went away again. Whatever the hell it was, Sam was with him in it, and the witches never touched Sam.
****
1. Oh Moon. I was rooting around on YouTube for something else, came across this one and liked it a lot.
2. There was a Russian language song about a man who dreams that he wakes up in his house with his wife (or so I like to think, because they apparently share a house and because no one ever sings about their wives) to discover that the house is completely submerged. Above them are "kilometers of water", above them "whales beat their tails". There is only so much air left, and he is trying to quit breathing to leave a little more for his wife.
3. The abandoned restaurant is based on this one:
I run past it five times a week and have headbutted it on one occasion.
4. A patasola is a Latin American monster that preys on loggers and hunters in the jungle who let themselves get carried away thinking about beautiful women.
Here goes another timestamp for The Witch Is Dead, on the tail of some cool discussions of wincest with counteragent, and also because that San Juan location is stuck in my head. This follows To Run Into the Middle of the Room, and all you strictly need to know is that Dean got a love curse when he was nine and has been worried since that it'll surface and make him molest Sam. It hasn't so far. One day they went to San Juan, Puerto Rico to hunt some monsters. Now, with the job finished, they head to a wild beach to burn a dead monster and drink tequila in an abandoned restaurant.
Dinner Beneath a Hurricane
Sam/Dean, R. 2.6K
The first time Dean crossed the line with Sam, he had forgotten all about Sarah’s spell, again. He didn’t think about it most of the time, except bad weeks happened when his brain was stuck on a vicious loop, and he had just finished a bad week, calmed down and moved on. Nothing happened in the hotel room. He didn’t suddenly want to jump Sam. The witches never touched Sam, so whatever may or may not have passed between them on the first night in San Juan was likely a result of growing up too close, with too few boundaries. Fine. Dean could be a man about it, admit the moment of misguided desire at least to himself and let it go.
The job helped. They crawled through the entire hotel and combed the grounds, looking for where the monster might’ve dug a new cave for itself. It was a long and tedious task and one they had to do together, covering each other’s backs. It left no room for awkwardness over something that once overtook them for a moment. For a moment, Dean would repeat to himself. And, Get over it. So he did, and Sam did on his end, and then they got sucked into the case. Occasionally, Dean would bump the bite bruise on his hand against a bathroom counter or see The Jungle Book on Sam’s bed and everything would come back like a sick tide. But the bruise faded, and with it faded the weirdness, until all thoughts of the witch’s spell had left him again.
The monster, when they found it, turned out to be huge. Maybe the heat was good for it, or the fertile atmosphere of superstition that was too thin back in Minnesota, but the young beast was at least twice as large as its parent they put down back up north. Like hell the carcass was going to fit into the fireplace. They borrowed a truck and a good local map from Mike and took the dead monster down to the beach. Mike knew a good, private place - an abandoned seaside restaurant, destroyed by a hurricane some years back and never rebuilt, now swallowed by the forest. It sat on a narrow strip of beach that got covered almost entirely during high tides and wasn’t popular with vacationing college kids.
Dean could hear the college kids having a bonfire party a long ways down the shore. When the wind blew just right, he heard the distant bursts of their laughter. He saw the reflection of their fire in the water, like they could probably see the reflection of the monster’s funeral pyre. Dean wondered what they took it for.
Dean wasn’t drunk yet but was heading that way, and so was Sam. Whatever, they had an excuse. They had just cut up a dead monster, and the thing was two fucking stories tall. They had tequila set up on the outside bar of the former restaurant’s terrace, as well as some of the salt they brought for the fire and plenty of limes that Sam cut with his hunting knife. All bar stools were gone, so they stood, and if standing became too much, it was a sign to take a break and drink some water.
The monster crackled, almost merrily. Its long bones looked like tree trunks from where Dean was sitting on the broken-up end of the terrace with a missing piece of stone railing. Gotcha, Dean told the monster silently and saluted with his water bottle. Gotcha, fucker.
Sam had wandered thigh-deep into the sea, fully clothed, and was splashing around in there with his back to Dean.
“Sam! Don’t go far. You’ll drown, dumbass.”
“I’m just here. Not going further.” He leaned down and put his head under the waves. Dean twitched involuntarily, worried that he’ll overbalance, but Sam straightened up again fine.
“What are you doing back there?”
“I got monster juices all over me,” Sam said. “You should wash up too, before they get crusty.”
“Princess.”
Sam flipped him off. Dean cackled to himself and leaned back on his elbows, legs dangling off the edge of the tilted stone slab that was once a part of the restaurant. The sky was enormous and full of stars, and the full moon was just behind him and over the trees, held in the palms’ clutches. Dean threw his head back so that he could see it upside down. Out of nowhere, in the weird way of childhood memories, a song came back to him from - he could’ve sworn - middle school.
“Oh moon, shining in the night” Dean sang quietly under his breath to its pale face. “Oh moon, silvery and bright, come again tomorrow night.” He rubbed his head. He was sure he had missed something, but the rest of the lyrics were long gone.
He looked up, and Sam was right there, standing just two paces away, dripping water, with the firelight at his back. Dean thought about denying everything. Then again, there was tequila. He flopped down on his back and folded his arms under his head. From the new angle, he saw their glasses and the bottle on the bar, with the firelight trapped in them.
Without a word, Sam lay down next to him, and Dean shifted to make room. A little streak of water running off Sam’s hair touched Dean’s neck and soaked through the collar of his t-shirt.
“Are you listening?” Sam said.
“You didn’t say anything.”
“No, I mean the song. It goes, ‘Are you listening?’ After ‘shining in the night’.”
“Ah,” Dean said. He tipped his head back, rolling it against the concrete, to look at the moon again. Are you listening? He could’ve sworn that it was, and that maybe he could make a wish to it.
“I wish a beautiful woman would wander out of the jungle and fall in love with me for the night.”
Sam burst out laughing. He laughed so rarely and almost always had to be drunk for it, and now it settled warm in Dean’s chest. He wanted to keep making dumb wishes to the moon to keep Sam laughing, but his imagination ran dry.
“You know,” he said, struck by a sudden thought, “this is the first time I’m drinking tequila without a woman.” Tequila and margaritas used to be his favorite drinks to order for women in bars - so that he could watch them lick salt.
“You’re too drunk for any self-respecting woman to hang out with you.”
Dean snorted and thumped Sam on the stomach. “Shut the fuck up. I’m irresistible. You know, I’ve always wanted to try that trick from Point Break, the one with the lime?”
“I think they were drinking beer. Maybe.”
“Well, I don’t wanna be a copycat.”
He reached out blindly and found the top of Sam’s head, pulled it in on impulse to tuck it under his chin, like he used to do when Sam was still smaller than him. Sam went without resistance. His hair was wet and rough from the salt, but his breath was warm on Dean’s skin. Dean remembered, vaguely, some woman he used to know who loved tequila. Amy, was it?
“You better hope there are no patasolas in the woods,” Sam said. “Here you are, in the jungle, thinking about beautiful women. You’re gonna get both our asses in trouble.”
Dean shoved him away for that one.
“Or, you know what I’d do?” he said, patasolas be damned. “I’d lick tequila off her stomach. I’ve always wanted to.”
“I've done that.”
“Ha!” Dean patted him on the head. “I guess it’d have to wait for another night, seeing how I’m stuck with you.”
So Sam pulled up his shirt and threw his arms over his head in a dramatic gesture. “Do it.”
“Oh, you think I won’t?” He flipped over and got up on his hands and knees, crawling over to the bar. Everything went sideways, and Dean braced his elbows, before he remembered that the floor was angled. Sam was cracking up behind him, always a happy drunk when he didn’t have any darkness pressing on his mind. Dean grabbed the bottle off the bar, along with a wedge of lime, and crawled back. “Keep laughing.”
Kneeling over Sam, Dean paused with the tequila bottle raised. He thought the idea might’ve been to drink out of the woman’s bellybutton, which didn’t seem that appealing, seeing how this was Sam. Besides, Sam’s stomach was shaking too much from silent laughter, and Dean didn’t think it would hold the fluid. He shrugged and just poured, seeing the muscles jump at the contact, and then he leaned down and licked all the way up to the solar plexus. It tasted like alcohol and sea salt and skin. He did it again, this time catching the rivulets of tequila faster, licking up along Sam’s ribcage. It didn’t feel like a woman’s stomach at all. Dean wished silently for a swell of a breast to press his lips under, and then he gave up and just went with what was there.
“It tickles,” Sam complained, squirming. Then, of course, Dean had to tickle him more and blow a raspberry against his stomach, and Sam almost put his eye out, shoving him away.
Sea salt lingered on Sam’s skin, and Dean licked it clean. Sam pinched his shoulders if he got too close to ticklish spots, hard enough to leave bruises. The goddamn uneven floor of the terrace made Dean feel like he was tilting sideways all the time, ready to fall off the face of the earth and splash into the sea at any moment. He hung onto Sam’s belt to keep them both in place, or to keep them together at least if they were going to roll into the waves. The monster’s flesh was now all eaten away by the fire, and its bones smelled like burnt caramel, sharp and sweet. A gust of wind blew just right, and the smell was so strong that Dean could taste it on Sam for a moment.
He realized, distantly, that he was turned on and felt proud of himself for the stamina in the face of intoxication. It was good, he decided, to be here with Sam, for the two of them to have found a weird place in the world to crawl into and just be alone. It was good to lick and tickle the laughter out of Sam.
They couldn’t remember how the trick from Point Break went, so Sam bit into the lime wedge and made a hilarious face that almost made Dean snort out tequila. But he swallowed it and licked the acid out of Sam’s mouth.
The burnt caramel smell of monster bones kept blowing their way, so they stumbled inside the ruined restaurant and lay down on the floor on their spread jackets, in the comfortable semi-darkness. The moon stared through the blown out windows, and Dean asked it silently, Oh moon, are you watching? Sam rolled on his side was already making sleepy sounds. Dean wondered if it was the hurricane that smashed the windows, and if the tide was going to rise so high it would spill inside and drown the two stupid drunks in their sleep. It didn’t seem a likely prospect, not with the moon watching over them. Dean drew Sam’s head closer and tucked it under his chin and was asleep before he could finish his four-lines-long ballad to the moon.
He dreamed that the restaurant was underwater and that schools of fish swam behind its intact windows and above the domed skylight. On the surface, he knew, a hurricane was raging, but everything was quiet at the bottom of the sea. In the weird, greenish light the patrons’ scales shimmered violet and blue and purple. Fish, squid and crabs sat at the tables, eating seaweed soup and staring at the two humans at the corner table. Sam didn’t like seaweed soup. He was sitting with his back to Dean, shoulders hunched, a twelve-year-old in baggy clothes.
“Sam,” Dean tried to say, and the echo sent his voice bouncing off the walls, just like inside a filled bathtub. “Sammy, I’d never. I’d never do anything to you.”
The fish eyed them hatefully, and the crabs clacked their claws, rolling their stalked eyes round and round. Dean tried to touch his brother’s shoulder, but no matter how he turned, Sam’s back was always to him. Hating himself for something he couldn’t quite remember, Dean wanted to pick up a chair and smash the window so that he could swim up into the jaws of the hurricane. He pressed his hands against the glass. Behind it, in the dim underwater light, he could barely distinguish a forest of seaweed swaying off to the right, and in the heart of that forest sat a tiny cabin with yellow light spilling out the kitchen window.
It was the sickest awakening of his life. Dean woke up on the dirty floor with sand in his mouth, a headache and a distinct feeling that something awful happened. Then it came back, gradually - the taste of lime, salt and tequila and the slippery feel of Sam’s lips and tongue, and all the- Christ. Dean sat up, slowly. Some distant part of him was actually impressed with the magnitude of the clusterfuck. The rest of him was too busy wondering how to make it through the rest of the day.
He could hear the waves crushing outside and the sound of a shovel digging into sand. Dean got up slowly and wandered onto the terrace, pausing for a moment before he stepped out into sunlight. Sam was throwing sand over the charred remains of last night’s fire. Dean leaned on the railing and just looked, no idea what to do next. He felt empty, hollow, like one of those chocolate Easter bunnies that Sam used to get so disappointed in.
When Sam turned around, he looked pretty awful, with some ugly thought twisting up his mouth. Dean’s own misery was staring back at him through Sam’s eyes. Sam was laughing last night, and Dean wanted it back. Not knowing what else to do with any of it, how to make it go away, Dean cracked the fakest of smiles. Sam returned it, a little more real.
Dean said, “I had a weird dream.”
Sam nodded. He had a bruise at the base of his neck that Dean didn’t remember leaving there but was pretty sure he did. Sam saw him looking and raised his hand to rub at it or cover it, or both. “Yeah,” he said, “me too. I won’t tell Bobby if you don’t.”
It was a ridiculous thing to say, and it surprised Dean into a chuckle. Don’t tell Bobby - like they were kids again and just broke a bedside lamp, horsing around when they should’ve been asleep. Sam was smiling back at him, forever his co-conspirator, and the twisted thing was leaving his face, until it disappeared entirely, until he looked like the Sam who went out into the backyard with his brother at three in the morning to bury Bobby’s lamp.
On the drive back to the hotel, Dean put it all away and locked it up - the memory that made him shiver, of licking salt and alcohol off his brother’s skin. He let Sam pick the radio station and just drove, not thinking much. The thought of the witches came back briefly and went away again. Whatever the hell it was, Sam was with him in it, and the witches never touched Sam.
****
1. Oh Moon. I was rooting around on YouTube for something else, came across this one and liked it a lot.
2. There was a Russian language song about a man who dreams that he wakes up in his house with his wife (or so I like to think, because they apparently share a house and because no one ever sings about their wives) to discover that the house is completely submerged. Above them are "kilometers of water", above them "whales beat their tails". There is only so much air left, and he is trying to quit breathing to leave a little more for his wife.
3. The abandoned restaurant is based on this one:
I run past it five times a week and have headbutted it on one occasion.
4. A patasola is a Latin American monster that preys on loggers and hunters in the jungle who let themselves get carried away thinking about beautiful women.