SPN FIC - Looking for a Good Time
Sssssshhhh. The Muse and I, we made fic. Stealthily. You like outsider POVs? Dean, over the course of 20 years, through the eyes of one of Bobby's neighbors. Is there angst? Butofcourse.
Dean stood there for a second with one of those giant-sized boxes of cereal in his hands. Looked like he was counting to ten in his head, trying to come up with reasons why he shouldn't smack his brother a good one. He looked at me for a second, and I thought, Wow. I'd never seen a kid with eyes like that. Bright green. Luminous, like something that wasn't natural. I was thinking he probably didn't like people telling him he had beautiful eyes when Sam muttered at his pickles, "Ro's not a name."
Characters: Dean, Sam, Bobby, OFC
Genre: Gen
Rating: PG
Spoilers: 3.16
Length: 4094 words
LOOKING FOR A GOOD TIME
By Carol Davis
First time I met him, I'm gonna say I was 17. He was maybe 8 or 9, and I probably wouldn't have paid him any attention at all if he hadn't been connected with Bobby Singer. He would've been just another kid, and we had 'em by the dozens in the market, coming in to get soda or candy or buy cigarettes for their folks. Or themselves, because Stevie Hasselback never did care a whole lot about what the government told him he couldn't sell, or to who - after he lost the fingers, he figured anybody in authority could just go take a running shit.
Anyway, I heard Dean Winchester before I saw him, that first time. It was no kind of a trick, because the market was small, and the whole place was like that Whispering Wall at the Capitol. Even if you kept your voice low, everybody could hear you, no matter where you were standing or where they were. Try taking the cellophane off of something, and…
Well, it wasn't like he was keeping his voice low. "I SAID QUIT it, Sammy."
And he got back, "DEEEEEEAN. I SAID I want -"
"Dad said only get what's on the LIST."
"But I WANT it."
"You QUIT it, or I'm gonna tell them to grind you up in the HAMBURGER thing."
"What hamburger thing?"
"The thing that grinds the HAMBURGER."
"You will not."
"Will so."
"Will NOT."
"You wanna TRY it?"
"You WILL NOT."
I started tracking them through the store, what of it I could see from the register. Up one aisle and down the other, Dean pushing the cart and his brother riding inside, while they went on arguing over whatever it was their dad had said they couldn't buy. Looked like they were getting a few days' worth of stuff: toilet paper and paper towels and Band-aids, plus the food. Cereal, milk, hamburger and buns and pickles. Some cans of soup. When they finally came up to the register, the littler one - Sammy - was holding the jar of pickles in his lap and muttering at it like it was a cat or a dog that had peed all over him.
"You gotta get out of there," Dean told him. He started piling things up on the conveyor belt, and after a minute Sam turned his head and stared at me instead of the pickles.
"I know my letters," he said, and pointed at my nametag. "R. O."
"You know about five of 'em," Dean complained.
"I know them ALL. R, O. That spells -"
And he stopped, because it had him stumped. "Ro," I said.
"That's not a name."
"Shut up, dork," Dean said. "Leave her alone."
"Dad SAID -"
Dean stood there for a second with one of those giant-sized boxes of cereal in his hands. Looked like he was counting to ten in his head, trying to come up with reasons why he shouldn't smack his brother a good one. He looked at me for a second, and I thought, Wow. I'd never seen a kid with eyes like that. Bright green. Luminous, like something that wasn't natural. I was thinking he probably didn't like people telling him he had beautiful eyes when Sam muttered at his pickles, "Ro's not a name."
"Short for Roberta," I said.
"Like Robert?"
"Yeah," I told him, and reached over to grab the pickles.
"Uncle Bobby's name is Robert. Robert Singer."
Like I said, that got my attention right off, because I'd turned over more of my pay at Bobby Singer's junkyard than anyplace else in town (or any other town, except that one time Mom hauled us down to Denver). Had to, because that piece of crap pickup needed parts replaced every other thing and I sure didn't have the money to buy 'em new. Dad'd thought he was doing me some huge favor by giving me the thing, but it was a ball of rust on wheels, and turning the key was like an exercise in How Many Miracles Does One Person Get.
"Bobby's your uncle?" I asked.
Dean shrugged and started peeling money out of his jeans pocket. "Not really," he muttered. "It's like -"
"Friend of your mom and dad's?"
"We don't got a mom," Sam announced.
Dean turned the Laser Death Glare on him and Sam snapped his mouth shut.
For a second, anyway. Then he chirped, "Do you got kids?"
"Nope," I said.
"Do you want kids?"
Dean held out a handful of wrinkled-up money and told me, serious as a judge, "You can have HIM."
That was the first time.
* * *
Can't say I really remember the second time, or the third, or whatever. Hasselback's was the market closest to Bobby Singer's place, so I saw the boys every now and then as time went on, either in the store or someplace else around town. There was a pretty decent arcade down at the end of the block, back then, and I'd see them in there, Dean working the machines like they were Vegas slots and money was gonna pour out if he hit high score. For a while, Sam was too short to reach the controls, but I looked in one time and he was standing on top of an upturned pail, Dean standing right beside him with a hand on his back so he wouldn't fall. It was one of those places that gave out tickets - the more points you scored, the more tickets you'd get. Then you could redeem the tickets for a toy of some kind, a car or a stuffed animal or whatever. Every time I saw them come out of there, Sammy was holding the toy. They were all junk, nothing you'd really want. You had to be a pretty little kid to think they were worth something.
Or maybe you had to be the big brother of a really little kid.
It got to be that I could tell the Winchesters were in town, or were gonna be in town, just by seeing Bobby. He wasn't what you could call a real fun-loving guy - which was understandable when you think about what happened to his wife - but he always brightened up when those kids were around. "They're good boys," he'd say. And he was right.
I went out to the junkyard one time to get something for the damn truck, a sideview or whatever, and Bobby said to me, "Dean'll put it on for you."
He nodded, and there was Dean. Had to be a foot taller than the last I'd seen him, even though it hadn't been that long ago, or I didn't think it had.
"Hey, Ro," he said.
That was all he said. He had the old mirror pulled off and the new one in place within a couple minutes. He was almost done when he turned a particular way and I could see that there were bandages under his t-shirt, on his back, about midway down. If the shirt hadn't been white, I probably wouldn't have noticed, but a cheap white t-shirt's not good for hiding much of anything.
"What happened?" I asked him.
He looked back over his shoulder, like he'd forgotten all about it. Then he shrugged. He was like a musician, with the shrugs. "Fell," he said.
And he didn't seem guilty about it, or ashamed, or worried, like he'd be if somebody'd hit him. I've seen a lot of people that've been on the wrong end of somebody's temper, and he wasn't one of those. He looked me right in the eye and acted like it was no big deal. And it either wasn't a big deal, or he was Oscar material. He was 13, then.
"You got engaged," he said.
We both looked at the ring. Grain of rock salt's bigger than that diamond was. "Yeah," I said.
"To Hen?"
"I think so."
That made him flinch. He frowned at me for a minute, standing there with a screwdriver in his hand.
"Yeah, to Hen," I told him. "My Prince Charming."
"Tell him he should buy you a new truck."
"After we've gone and rebuilt this one from the ground up?"
We both looked at the truck. It was kind of a mud brown that coordinated pretty well with the rust. Had about the same number of miles on it as if I'd driven it to the moon, but they were all Dakota miles. The dust and grime and grease on it was all Dakota, because that was my life, a circle of territory a few hundred miles across. Over past the truck I could see Dean's daddy's car, that old black Impala, sitting in the sun like it was waiting for somebody. Ten years older than the truck but gleaming like it was brand-new. Dean's doing, more than likely; there was a buffing rag hanging out of the back pocket of his jeans.
He cracked a grin at me. "You ought to send that truck off a cliff. I can show you how to do it."
"How much insurance you think I've got?"
He glanced down at the ring, Hen's ring, again, and for some reason it made him sigh. Or something did.
"No charge," he said. "For the mirror. Bobby said."
"What about the labor?"
He was 13. And God, those eyes would kill you in your tracks. "No charge," he said.
* * *
It was all over with, me and Hen, when I saw Dean outside the Black Boot. I was leaning against the wall a few steps from the door, tired of the noise and the smoke and trying to be civil to anybody, when he pulled up in the Impala, all by himself. No sign of Sam, or their dad, or Bobby. And no girl. Sometimes, when he was around, he'd buy somebody a drink or three, but word had gotten around that he wanted no part of getting tied down. Traveled too much, he said. By the time he turned 18 he'd been to every state except Hawaii and Alaska and one other I can't remember. Rhode Island, maybe, because it's stuck way out there and you don't need to go through it to get to someplace else.
He seemed surprised to see me standing there. "Are you okay?" he asked.
"Peachy."
He'd walked close enough to the lights around the door that I could see he was in no better of a mood than I was. Different kind of a bad mood, though. Sorrowful, instead of pissed off. "Drive me somewhere," I said.
"Where?"
"Anywhere. Not Bobby's."
"You okay?" he asked again.
"Just drive. I'll pay for the gas."
"Where's your truck?"
The passenger door of the old Impala was unlocked, so I opened it and got in. It'd been his for a while, a present from his daddy the way the truck had been for me. Hell of a bigger deal for him, because it was the only car the Winchesters had, and there weren't a lot of occasions when my family had less than half a dozen old shitheap pickups sitting out back of the house. I had to push aside a cardboard box of cassette tapes so I could stretch my legs into the footwell; other than that, there wasn't any junk in the car that I could see.
He loved that car something fierce. Loved something else more, but it was hard to get him to say so.
We rode for three or four hours. Stopped once to get gas, at an all-night place Dean seemed to know about before we saw it. Picked up a six, nice and cold, and drank one apiece right there in the lot of the gas station, leaning against the car, listening to night sounds and not really looking at each other.
"You here for long?" I asked him after a while.
"Don't know."
There was a slump to his shoulders that hurt to see. Some girl, I thought. Somebody he wanted who said no. He was mid-twenties then, older than a lot of the guys I knew who'd settled down in one way or another, whether it was their own decision or not. Okay, so he'd been to 47 states, but even when the road's rolling away underneath you, it's good to have somebody riding shotgun.
He stared at the dirt in front of his feet - down at the end of the lot, where we were, it was dirt instead of blacktop - and played his thumb over the label on the beer bottle. Scuffed one boot against the ground. Seemed to be wondering what he was doing there, like he'd been sleepwalking and had come to a little bit.
"Thought he'd come back," he mumbled, so soft I almost didn't hear him.
"What?"
"M'brother."
Bobby had told me: Sam had gone off to college. To Stanford, on scholarship. They were all real proud of him, Bobby said.
Dean didn't seem very proud, right then.
"Thought he'd come back for the summer," he whispered.
Then he got back into the driver's seat - almost threw himself in - and cranked the car to life. I think if I hadn't gotten in alongside him as fast as I did, he would have left me there at the gas station and wouldn't have realized what he'd done for a good couple of hours. He drove twenty or thirty miles before he pulled off the road, dumped the car down into park, and lay his head against his hands, still gripping the steering wheel.
Maybe we were both sleepwalking. Seems like it, now. All I did was lay my hand on his shoulder, and somehow we ended up in the back seat, him sitting in the middle of it with his head thrown back and me straddling him. Maybe it lasted five minutes, or maybe half an hour. I remember him fumbling with his wallet, squirming so he could fish it out of his back pocket, then pushing a condom into my hand like it was automatic for him, like he could do that much sound asleep. All those states, all those miles, obviously he'd found company here and there, a lot of women in a lot of places, enough to make him travel with Trojans the way I traveled with Kleenex and Hershey bars. He didn't seem at all concerned that we were pulled off onto the shoulder of a county road, that there was traffic going by, although there wasn't much of it and it was moving too fast for anybody to really see what we were doing.
I suppose I didn't much care, either.
When we were done, we put ourselves back together without saying anything. Dean looked at what was left of the six but didn't touch it.
"Gonna take you back," he muttered after a minute.
We switched seats, climbed back up front. He had his hand on the key but didn't start the car, just sat there staring out the windshield at the not much of anything that lay around us.
"I hate my fucking life," he said. Not to me. Not to anybody, really.
"I'm not crazy about mine, either," I told him.
He glanced at me then. And twisted the key in the ignition.
* * *
Sam was there, the next time I saw Dean. In fact, I saw Sam first, and the way he looked made me back up half a step: his head and his arms - everything that wasn't covered by his shirt and jeans - were patchworks of cuts and bruises.
"What -" I said.
He smiled at me, head lowered a little. No humor or pleasure in that smile. "We were in a car accident."
"Oh, Sam."
That was pretty helpful. Yeah, that was extremely helpful. Sam's face twitched a little, and he looked over toward the junkyard. I reached out toward him, then pulled my hand back. Sam noticed the gesture, though, and gave me another one of those humorless smiles. "My dad died," he said, and it sounded like he was trying the words on for size, to see how they'd feel in his mouth, on his lips. Then he turned toward the house and said over his shoulder, "I'll send Bobby out," as he walked away.
I could see it then - what he'd been looking at. Broken glass, crumpled metal. What they'd been in an accident with, I didn't know, but it had to have been something big. You could only make out what that car used to be if you'd seen it before. I started walking toward it and almost tripped over something. Took me a second to steady myself.
Dean was standing near the car, his back to me, still and silent, like he'd been there a long time.
"What now?" he said.
I couldn't work up anything to say, and the lack of an answer made him turn. Obviously, he'd thought I was Sam, and my not being Sam didn't bring out any kind of an apology for the raw edge in his voice. There being anybody around to interrupt his staring was enough of a reason for him to go on being mad, I guess. I got five or six seconds of attention from him, then he turned away again.
"I'm sorry," I told him.
His shoulders hitched. One time, up and down. "You need something for the truck?"
"The seat-back handle broke off."
"Bobby's in the house."
"It's no big deal. I'll -"
Something had laid open his forehead. The cut was starting to heal, but it was there enough to make me stare.
"Bobby's in the house," he said again.
"I can look around. See if I can find one."
He didn't argue, so I left him there with what was left of the old Impala and went wandering around the junkyard, looking for something that might have the same kind of handle as that piece of shit truck and not finding anything, although you could definitely question how hard I was looking. This summer, it seemed like, Sam was back from Stanford, but there was no joy in it. And summers are short - I learned that as a kid. They're a long stretch of blank space in June, but when you're inching up on August...
Something moved into view down near my left elbow. The handle I needed, lying on Dean's open palm.
"Thanks," I told him.
Again, he shrugged, the maestro of shrugging. "No charge." He passed the handle off to me, then buried his hands in the pockets of his jeans and began to walk away.
"Dean?"
He stopped, but he didn't turn.
"I'm sorry," I said.
He didn't answer me.
* * *
Bobby came into the market a few days back. He wandered around for a few minutes, putting things into a cart. He'd been acting funny for months, and people around town had started saying maybe this was it - that maybe he'd gone on beyond filling up that house with books and old, strange junk, that maybe pushing on toward 60 was making him figure it wasn't worth the trouble to try to act normal any more. Of course, everybody says you couldn't much help being crazy if you stabbed your own wife to death, self-defense or not, but you know how it is in small towns. If Bobby Singer's crazy, it's a kind of crazy they want to keep at arm's length. They'll stop going out to the junkyard, as time goes on. If they see him in town, they'll start steering clear.
When he came up to the deli counter, there was a look on his face I'd never seen before, not in thirty years of knowing him.
"Make me some sandwiches, Ro?" he asked quietly.
"What kind you want?"
"You pick. Whatever you think's good."
There was nothing in his expression that said a joke would be good, that any kind of light-hearted thing would fit in. Goin' on a picnic? I couldn't ask that. Because I couldn't think of anything that would fit, I started putting sandwiches together, one at a time, figuring he'd stop me when I'd made enough for whatever it was he was doing.
"There soup there?" he asked, nodding at the urns on the shelf behind me.
"Beef barley and chicken noodle."
"Give me some of that, too."
He let me make four sandwiches. Gave a nod to some potato salad and cole slaw to go along with them. I scooped soup into two containers and put lids on, then passed them across the top of the deli case to him.
His hands stayed steady long enough to put everything in the cart. Then he put one hand flat against the glass front of the case and shut his eyes. He wasn't crazy, never had been crazy, I'd lay money on that, but he didn't look good. In thirty years I'd never seen him look like that.
"You okay, Bobby?" I asked. "You want me to call somebody?"
He shook his head.
"Maybe you want to sit down."
His eyes were full when he opened them, and in thirty years I had never before seen Bobby Singer cry. You have kids, you have elderly parents, you have a brother who hasn't got the brain God gave a turnip, you know how to just do things, to help somebody whether they think they need help or not, so I came around the deli case and took hold of Bobby's arm and steered him around to the chair Stevie Hasselback keeps back there because he's too damn fat to stay on his own feet for more than ten minutes at a rip. Bobby sat down, kind of sank onto the chair like he was giving something up, and buried his face in his hands. He went on crying, I think, but it was silent, nothing involved in it but tears dripping between his fingers.
After a minute I crouched down close to the chair, close enough for him to know I was there. His chest hitched once, and he said, "Ohhhhhh," into his hands in a way that sounded like Nooooo.
There was nobody I could call. People came and went, out to Bobby's place, but as far as I knew he had no family.
Just...
"We lost him," Bobby whispered, and there was more hopeless in it than pretty much anything I'd ever heard come out of a man.
I couldn't see out the front window when I was standing up, because of the posters Stevie likes to paste up there. But crouched down, I could. Something made me look that way, and out in the lot I could see that old black Impala parked up close to the store, its driver waiting for Bobby to come out with the groceries.
Too big to be Dean. It was Sam.
You hear echoes of things, sometimes, and I could hear 'em in the store that afternoon, coming from a summer twenty years back.
I said QUIT it, Sammy.
I SAID I want...
Dad said...
I'm gonna tell them...
I felt empty then, the kind of empty I figured Bobby was feeling, even though Bobby had a lot more reason to grieve Dean Winchester than I did. Most people around town would mark Dean down as somebody they saw now and then, somebody who helped them at the junkyard or passed them on the street. They'd remember his eyes, maybe, if they'd had the occasion to see them, to notice them - that unusual, luminous green. There was more to him than that, certainly more than he'd let me or anybody else in this town see, no matter that there'd been more than twenty years' worth of visits involved. He kept himself to himself. But love's a hard thing to hide - when you've got it, or when you've lost it.
"What happened?" I asked. "What happened to him?"
Bobby didn't answer me, and I didn't much need him to. It didn't much matter what exactly had happened to Dean, but hunkered up there alongside that beat-up wooden chair, stuck in next to Stevie Hasselback's deli counter, I could tell you the why of it.
The why of it was sitting out in that old Impala, his hands on the wheel, so tall that the top of his head was up close to the ceiling of the car.
"You can have him," Dean told me a long time ago.
But that was never true.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dean stood there for a second with one of those giant-sized boxes of cereal in his hands. Looked like he was counting to ten in his head, trying to come up with reasons why he shouldn't smack his brother a good one. He looked at me for a second, and I thought, Wow. I'd never seen a kid with eyes like that. Bright green. Luminous, like something that wasn't natural. I was thinking he probably didn't like people telling him he had beautiful eyes when Sam muttered at his pickles, "Ro's not a name."
Characters: Dean, Sam, Bobby, OFC
Genre: Gen
Rating: PG
Spoilers: 3.16
Length: 4094 words
LOOKING FOR A GOOD TIME
By Carol Davis
First time I met him, I'm gonna say I was 17. He was maybe 8 or 9, and I probably wouldn't have paid him any attention at all if he hadn't been connected with Bobby Singer. He would've been just another kid, and we had 'em by the dozens in the market, coming in to get soda or candy or buy cigarettes for their folks. Or themselves, because Stevie Hasselback never did care a whole lot about what the government told him he couldn't sell, or to who - after he lost the fingers, he figured anybody in authority could just go take a running shit.
Anyway, I heard Dean Winchester before I saw him, that first time. It was no kind of a trick, because the market was small, and the whole place was like that Whispering Wall at the Capitol. Even if you kept your voice low, everybody could hear you, no matter where you were standing or where they were. Try taking the cellophane off of something, and…
Well, it wasn't like he was keeping his voice low. "I SAID QUIT it, Sammy."
And he got back, "DEEEEEEAN. I SAID I want -"
"Dad said only get what's on the LIST."
"But I WANT it."
"You QUIT it, or I'm gonna tell them to grind you up in the HAMBURGER thing."
"What hamburger thing?"
"The thing that grinds the HAMBURGER."
"You will not."
"Will so."
"Will NOT."
"You wanna TRY it?"
"You WILL NOT."
I started tracking them through the store, what of it I could see from the register. Up one aisle and down the other, Dean pushing the cart and his brother riding inside, while they went on arguing over whatever it was their dad had said they couldn't buy. Looked like they were getting a few days' worth of stuff: toilet paper and paper towels and Band-aids, plus the food. Cereal, milk, hamburger and buns and pickles. Some cans of soup. When they finally came up to the register, the littler one - Sammy - was holding the jar of pickles in his lap and muttering at it like it was a cat or a dog that had peed all over him.
"You gotta get out of there," Dean told him. He started piling things up on the conveyor belt, and after a minute Sam turned his head and stared at me instead of the pickles.
"I know my letters," he said, and pointed at my nametag. "R. O."
"You know about five of 'em," Dean complained.
"I know them ALL. R, O. That spells -"
And he stopped, because it had him stumped. "Ro," I said.
"That's not a name."
"Shut up, dork," Dean said. "Leave her alone."
"Dad SAID -"
Dean stood there for a second with one of those giant-sized boxes of cereal in his hands. Looked like he was counting to ten in his head, trying to come up with reasons why he shouldn't smack his brother a good one. He looked at me for a second, and I thought, Wow. I'd never seen a kid with eyes like that. Bright green. Luminous, like something that wasn't natural. I was thinking he probably didn't like people telling him he had beautiful eyes when Sam muttered at his pickles, "Ro's not a name."
"Short for Roberta," I said.
"Like Robert?"
"Yeah," I told him, and reached over to grab the pickles.
"Uncle Bobby's name is Robert. Robert Singer."
Like I said, that got my attention right off, because I'd turned over more of my pay at Bobby Singer's junkyard than anyplace else in town (or any other town, except that one time Mom hauled us down to Denver). Had to, because that piece of crap pickup needed parts replaced every other thing and I sure didn't have the money to buy 'em new. Dad'd thought he was doing me some huge favor by giving me the thing, but it was a ball of rust on wheels, and turning the key was like an exercise in How Many Miracles Does One Person Get.
"Bobby's your uncle?" I asked.
Dean shrugged and started peeling money out of his jeans pocket. "Not really," he muttered. "It's like -"
"Friend of your mom and dad's?"
"We don't got a mom," Sam announced.
Dean turned the Laser Death Glare on him and Sam snapped his mouth shut.
For a second, anyway. Then he chirped, "Do you got kids?"
"Nope," I said.
"Do you want kids?"
Dean held out a handful of wrinkled-up money and told me, serious as a judge, "You can have HIM."
That was the first time.
* * *
Can't say I really remember the second time, or the third, or whatever. Hasselback's was the market closest to Bobby Singer's place, so I saw the boys every now and then as time went on, either in the store or someplace else around town. There was a pretty decent arcade down at the end of the block, back then, and I'd see them in there, Dean working the machines like they were Vegas slots and money was gonna pour out if he hit high score. For a while, Sam was too short to reach the controls, but I looked in one time and he was standing on top of an upturned pail, Dean standing right beside him with a hand on his back so he wouldn't fall. It was one of those places that gave out tickets - the more points you scored, the more tickets you'd get. Then you could redeem the tickets for a toy of some kind, a car or a stuffed animal or whatever. Every time I saw them come out of there, Sammy was holding the toy. They were all junk, nothing you'd really want. You had to be a pretty little kid to think they were worth something.
Or maybe you had to be the big brother of a really little kid.
It got to be that I could tell the Winchesters were in town, or were gonna be in town, just by seeing Bobby. He wasn't what you could call a real fun-loving guy - which was understandable when you think about what happened to his wife - but he always brightened up when those kids were around. "They're good boys," he'd say. And he was right.
I went out to the junkyard one time to get something for the damn truck, a sideview or whatever, and Bobby said to me, "Dean'll put it on for you."
He nodded, and there was Dean. Had to be a foot taller than the last I'd seen him, even though it hadn't been that long ago, or I didn't think it had.
"Hey, Ro," he said.
That was all he said. He had the old mirror pulled off and the new one in place within a couple minutes. He was almost done when he turned a particular way and I could see that there were bandages under his t-shirt, on his back, about midway down. If the shirt hadn't been white, I probably wouldn't have noticed, but a cheap white t-shirt's not good for hiding much of anything.
"What happened?" I asked him.
He looked back over his shoulder, like he'd forgotten all about it. Then he shrugged. He was like a musician, with the shrugs. "Fell," he said.
And he didn't seem guilty about it, or ashamed, or worried, like he'd be if somebody'd hit him. I've seen a lot of people that've been on the wrong end of somebody's temper, and he wasn't one of those. He looked me right in the eye and acted like it was no big deal. And it either wasn't a big deal, or he was Oscar material. He was 13, then.
"You got engaged," he said.
We both looked at the ring. Grain of rock salt's bigger than that diamond was. "Yeah," I said.
"To Hen?"
"I think so."
That made him flinch. He frowned at me for a minute, standing there with a screwdriver in his hand.
"Yeah, to Hen," I told him. "My Prince Charming."
"Tell him he should buy you a new truck."
"After we've gone and rebuilt this one from the ground up?"
We both looked at the truck. It was kind of a mud brown that coordinated pretty well with the rust. Had about the same number of miles on it as if I'd driven it to the moon, but they were all Dakota miles. The dust and grime and grease on it was all Dakota, because that was my life, a circle of territory a few hundred miles across. Over past the truck I could see Dean's daddy's car, that old black Impala, sitting in the sun like it was waiting for somebody. Ten years older than the truck but gleaming like it was brand-new. Dean's doing, more than likely; there was a buffing rag hanging out of the back pocket of his jeans.
He cracked a grin at me. "You ought to send that truck off a cliff. I can show you how to do it."
"How much insurance you think I've got?"
He glanced down at the ring, Hen's ring, again, and for some reason it made him sigh. Or something did.
"No charge," he said. "For the mirror. Bobby said."
"What about the labor?"
He was 13. And God, those eyes would kill you in your tracks. "No charge," he said.
* * *
It was all over with, me and Hen, when I saw Dean outside the Black Boot. I was leaning against the wall a few steps from the door, tired of the noise and the smoke and trying to be civil to anybody, when he pulled up in the Impala, all by himself. No sign of Sam, or their dad, or Bobby. And no girl. Sometimes, when he was around, he'd buy somebody a drink or three, but word had gotten around that he wanted no part of getting tied down. Traveled too much, he said. By the time he turned 18 he'd been to every state except Hawaii and Alaska and one other I can't remember. Rhode Island, maybe, because it's stuck way out there and you don't need to go through it to get to someplace else.
He seemed surprised to see me standing there. "Are you okay?" he asked.
"Peachy."
He'd walked close enough to the lights around the door that I could see he was in no better of a mood than I was. Different kind of a bad mood, though. Sorrowful, instead of pissed off. "Drive me somewhere," I said.
"Where?"
"Anywhere. Not Bobby's."
"You okay?" he asked again.
"Just drive. I'll pay for the gas."
"Where's your truck?"
The passenger door of the old Impala was unlocked, so I opened it and got in. It'd been his for a while, a present from his daddy the way the truck had been for me. Hell of a bigger deal for him, because it was the only car the Winchesters had, and there weren't a lot of occasions when my family had less than half a dozen old shitheap pickups sitting out back of the house. I had to push aside a cardboard box of cassette tapes so I could stretch my legs into the footwell; other than that, there wasn't any junk in the car that I could see.
He loved that car something fierce. Loved something else more, but it was hard to get him to say so.
We rode for three or four hours. Stopped once to get gas, at an all-night place Dean seemed to know about before we saw it. Picked up a six, nice and cold, and drank one apiece right there in the lot of the gas station, leaning against the car, listening to night sounds and not really looking at each other.
"You here for long?" I asked him after a while.
"Don't know."
There was a slump to his shoulders that hurt to see. Some girl, I thought. Somebody he wanted who said no. He was mid-twenties then, older than a lot of the guys I knew who'd settled down in one way or another, whether it was their own decision or not. Okay, so he'd been to 47 states, but even when the road's rolling away underneath you, it's good to have somebody riding shotgun.
He stared at the dirt in front of his feet - down at the end of the lot, where we were, it was dirt instead of blacktop - and played his thumb over the label on the beer bottle. Scuffed one boot against the ground. Seemed to be wondering what he was doing there, like he'd been sleepwalking and had come to a little bit.
"Thought he'd come back," he mumbled, so soft I almost didn't hear him.
"What?"
"M'brother."
Bobby had told me: Sam had gone off to college. To Stanford, on scholarship. They were all real proud of him, Bobby said.
Dean didn't seem very proud, right then.
"Thought he'd come back for the summer," he whispered.
Then he got back into the driver's seat - almost threw himself in - and cranked the car to life. I think if I hadn't gotten in alongside him as fast as I did, he would have left me there at the gas station and wouldn't have realized what he'd done for a good couple of hours. He drove twenty or thirty miles before he pulled off the road, dumped the car down into park, and lay his head against his hands, still gripping the steering wheel.
Maybe we were both sleepwalking. Seems like it, now. All I did was lay my hand on his shoulder, and somehow we ended up in the back seat, him sitting in the middle of it with his head thrown back and me straddling him. Maybe it lasted five minutes, or maybe half an hour. I remember him fumbling with his wallet, squirming so he could fish it out of his back pocket, then pushing a condom into my hand like it was automatic for him, like he could do that much sound asleep. All those states, all those miles, obviously he'd found company here and there, a lot of women in a lot of places, enough to make him travel with Trojans the way I traveled with Kleenex and Hershey bars. He didn't seem at all concerned that we were pulled off onto the shoulder of a county road, that there was traffic going by, although there wasn't much of it and it was moving too fast for anybody to really see what we were doing.
I suppose I didn't much care, either.
When we were done, we put ourselves back together without saying anything. Dean looked at what was left of the six but didn't touch it.
"Gonna take you back," he muttered after a minute.
We switched seats, climbed back up front. He had his hand on the key but didn't start the car, just sat there staring out the windshield at the not much of anything that lay around us.
"I hate my fucking life," he said. Not to me. Not to anybody, really.
"I'm not crazy about mine, either," I told him.
He glanced at me then. And twisted the key in the ignition.
* * *
Sam was there, the next time I saw Dean. In fact, I saw Sam first, and the way he looked made me back up half a step: his head and his arms - everything that wasn't covered by his shirt and jeans - were patchworks of cuts and bruises.
"What -" I said.
He smiled at me, head lowered a little. No humor or pleasure in that smile. "We were in a car accident."
"Oh, Sam."
That was pretty helpful. Yeah, that was extremely helpful. Sam's face twitched a little, and he looked over toward the junkyard. I reached out toward him, then pulled my hand back. Sam noticed the gesture, though, and gave me another one of those humorless smiles. "My dad died," he said, and it sounded like he was trying the words on for size, to see how they'd feel in his mouth, on his lips. Then he turned toward the house and said over his shoulder, "I'll send Bobby out," as he walked away.
I could see it then - what he'd been looking at. Broken glass, crumpled metal. What they'd been in an accident with, I didn't know, but it had to have been something big. You could only make out what that car used to be if you'd seen it before. I started walking toward it and almost tripped over something. Took me a second to steady myself.
Dean was standing near the car, his back to me, still and silent, like he'd been there a long time.
"What now?" he said.
I couldn't work up anything to say, and the lack of an answer made him turn. Obviously, he'd thought I was Sam, and my not being Sam didn't bring out any kind of an apology for the raw edge in his voice. There being anybody around to interrupt his staring was enough of a reason for him to go on being mad, I guess. I got five or six seconds of attention from him, then he turned away again.
"I'm sorry," I told him.
His shoulders hitched. One time, up and down. "You need something for the truck?"
"The seat-back handle broke off."
"Bobby's in the house."
"It's no big deal. I'll -"
Something had laid open his forehead. The cut was starting to heal, but it was there enough to make me stare.
"Bobby's in the house," he said again.
"I can look around. See if I can find one."
He didn't argue, so I left him there with what was left of the old Impala and went wandering around the junkyard, looking for something that might have the same kind of handle as that piece of shit truck and not finding anything, although you could definitely question how hard I was looking. This summer, it seemed like, Sam was back from Stanford, but there was no joy in it. And summers are short - I learned that as a kid. They're a long stretch of blank space in June, but when you're inching up on August...
Something moved into view down near my left elbow. The handle I needed, lying on Dean's open palm.
"Thanks," I told him.
Again, he shrugged, the maestro of shrugging. "No charge." He passed the handle off to me, then buried his hands in the pockets of his jeans and began to walk away.
"Dean?"
He stopped, but he didn't turn.
"I'm sorry," I said.
He didn't answer me.
* * *
Bobby came into the market a few days back. He wandered around for a few minutes, putting things into a cart. He'd been acting funny for months, and people around town had started saying maybe this was it - that maybe he'd gone on beyond filling up that house with books and old, strange junk, that maybe pushing on toward 60 was making him figure it wasn't worth the trouble to try to act normal any more. Of course, everybody says you couldn't much help being crazy if you stabbed your own wife to death, self-defense or not, but you know how it is in small towns. If Bobby Singer's crazy, it's a kind of crazy they want to keep at arm's length. They'll stop going out to the junkyard, as time goes on. If they see him in town, they'll start steering clear.
When he came up to the deli counter, there was a look on his face I'd never seen before, not in thirty years of knowing him.
"Make me some sandwiches, Ro?" he asked quietly.
"What kind you want?"
"You pick. Whatever you think's good."
There was nothing in his expression that said a joke would be good, that any kind of light-hearted thing would fit in. Goin' on a picnic? I couldn't ask that. Because I couldn't think of anything that would fit, I started putting sandwiches together, one at a time, figuring he'd stop me when I'd made enough for whatever it was he was doing.
"There soup there?" he asked, nodding at the urns on the shelf behind me.
"Beef barley and chicken noodle."
"Give me some of that, too."
He let me make four sandwiches. Gave a nod to some potato salad and cole slaw to go along with them. I scooped soup into two containers and put lids on, then passed them across the top of the deli case to him.
His hands stayed steady long enough to put everything in the cart. Then he put one hand flat against the glass front of the case and shut his eyes. He wasn't crazy, never had been crazy, I'd lay money on that, but he didn't look good. In thirty years I'd never seen him look like that.
"You okay, Bobby?" I asked. "You want me to call somebody?"
He shook his head.
"Maybe you want to sit down."
His eyes were full when he opened them, and in thirty years I had never before seen Bobby Singer cry. You have kids, you have elderly parents, you have a brother who hasn't got the brain God gave a turnip, you know how to just do things, to help somebody whether they think they need help or not, so I came around the deli case and took hold of Bobby's arm and steered him around to the chair Stevie Hasselback keeps back there because he's too damn fat to stay on his own feet for more than ten minutes at a rip. Bobby sat down, kind of sank onto the chair like he was giving something up, and buried his face in his hands. He went on crying, I think, but it was silent, nothing involved in it but tears dripping between his fingers.
After a minute I crouched down close to the chair, close enough for him to know I was there. His chest hitched once, and he said, "Ohhhhhh," into his hands in a way that sounded like Nooooo.
There was nobody I could call. People came and went, out to Bobby's place, but as far as I knew he had no family.
Just...
"We lost him," Bobby whispered, and there was more hopeless in it than pretty much anything I'd ever heard come out of a man.
I couldn't see out the front window when I was standing up, because of the posters Stevie likes to paste up there. But crouched down, I could. Something made me look that way, and out in the lot I could see that old black Impala parked up close to the store, its driver waiting for Bobby to come out with the groceries.
Too big to be Dean. It was Sam.
You hear echoes of things, sometimes, and I could hear 'em in the store that afternoon, coming from a summer twenty years back.
I said QUIT it, Sammy.
I SAID I want...
Dad said...
I'm gonna tell them...
I felt empty then, the kind of empty I figured Bobby was feeling, even though Bobby had a lot more reason to grieve Dean Winchester than I did. Most people around town would mark Dean down as somebody they saw now and then, somebody who helped them at the junkyard or passed them on the street. They'd remember his eyes, maybe, if they'd had the occasion to see them, to notice them - that unusual, luminous green. There was more to him than that, certainly more than he'd let me or anybody else in this town see, no matter that there'd been more than twenty years' worth of visits involved. He kept himself to himself. But love's a hard thing to hide - when you've got it, or when you've lost it.
"What happened?" I asked. "What happened to him?"
Bobby didn't answer me, and I didn't much need him to. It didn't much matter what exactly had happened to Dean, but hunkered up there alongside that beat-up wooden chair, stuck in next to Stevie Hasselback's deli counter, I could tell you the why of it.
The why of it was sitting out in that old Impala, his hands on the wheel, so tall that the top of his head was up close to the ceiling of the car.
"You can have him," Dean told me a long time ago.
But that was never true.
~~~~~~~~~~~~