SPN FIC - Wish They All Could Be...
This one's post-"Heart" and comes from a lot of things - the constant wish of a bunch of TWoP'ers for the boys to sing karaoke; answering the question "Will Sam ever have sex again?", listening to "Kokomo" on the radio. (And here's where I walk through wearing my disclaimer sign. No money, just fun.)
When Dean starts singing the Greatest Hits of the Beach Boys, Sam knows the night won't end well...
He thought of Dean working himself back to sobriety to discover that ducks had crapped all over the Impala. It made him snort softly.
"Kira," she said.
"Sam."
"Nice to meet you, Sam."
I killed the last woman who hit on me, he thought.
Length: 3,750 words
Pairings: Sam/OFC
Rating: PG for language
Spoilers: up through "Hollywood Babylon"
Wish They All Could Be…
By Carol Davis
The minute Dean started singing the Greatest Hits of the Beach Boys, Sam knew the night wouldn’t end well.
How exactly they’d landed here, in a bar a block east of the beach in Marina del Rey, he wasn’t sure. Dean, at the wheel of the Impala, had taken first one freeway and then another, and then another and another, finally zipping onto an off-ramp that took them into a semi-industrial neighborhood, then a commercial neighborhood, and at last - after Sam had lost track of which way was up, let alone north or south - to the beach.
Dean parked the Impala on an alley-like side street and parked himself in a plastic chair on the sidewalk outside a sandwich shop. A warm, late-spring sun had finally come out after two days of damp, drizzly chill, and with the sun came the sun worshippers. Armed with a cup of coffee and a hot dog, Dean had propped his feet on another plastic chair and spent three hours “soaking up the local color.”
Which meant ogling the endless parade of girls in string bikinis cruising down the street on rollerblades.
“I love this place,” he announced so many times that Sam was tempted to look for someone who could tattoo that on Dean’s forehead.
Sam had lunch. And a snack. And two cups of juice.
Wandered down the block to pick up a newspaper, then read it cover-to-cover.
Walked down the street in the other direction and spent a while studying the pictures taped to the display window of a one-hour photo lab.
“Did you want to go…” he ventured to Dean when he got back.
“Nope,” Dean said. “I’m good. Vacation, remember?”
Sam got a burger and fries for himself and a matching dinner for Dean, who ate it without paying much attention to what he was putting in his mouth.
To Sam’s relief, sundown put a chill in the air and brought an end to the parade of skaters. People who had rented bikes to ride up and down the boardwalk returned them to the bike shop, and the number of pedestrians strolling along the sidewalks dropped to a handful. The sandwich shop closed down for the night, leaving the Winchesters sitting alone in their plastic chairs.
“You figure on spending the night here?” Sam asked.
Dean gave him a withering look and stood up to consider his options. “There,” he said, pointing to a place on the other side of the street, about half a block down.
“There” had beer and nachos as an introductory course, harder stuff when Dean was ready to move on. When Dean ordered his third shot Sam walked back to the Impala and got his laptop out of the trunk. He found himself a quiet table in a corner of the bar where he could surf the Net and read his e‑mail without anyone being able to lean over to see what was on the screen.
“Yeah, man,” he heard Dean say. “Tara Benchley.”
The bar wasn’t crowded, and the music playing on the bartender’s boombox wasn’t loud. Sam could hear his brother painfully well as he entertained the people seated around him with the saga of his exploits as a P.A. on Hell Hazers II, currently in production up in Burbank.
“She hot?” asked the guy sitting to Dean’s left.
“Seriously.”
“I don’t know, man. She’s got that lazy eye thing. Kind of a buzzkill.”
Dean ordered another shot and tossed it down. “Who the hell cares about her eyes? She was” - he made a soft “heh” sound - “all over me.”
Sam winced.
At least, he thought wearily, the people who’d picked this place to hang out in were being treated to Happy Drunk Dean, a considerably better option than Surly Drunk Dean. Or, worse yet, I Screwed Something Up and I Want You to Kick the Shit Out of Me So I Can Forget What I Did Because You Broke a Couple Ribs and Bruised My Kidney Drunk Dean.
The trouble was, Happy Drunk Dean and good taste seldom crossed paths.
It was a little after ten when Dean carefully - though with an alarming amount of swaying - lowered himself into the only empty chair at Sam’s table. “Hey, Sammy,” he said gleefully.
“Hey, Dean.”
“I love this place.”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “I got that impression.”
“There are great people here.”
Sam glanced at the computer screen and opened up another e-mail. “You know,” he ventured after a minute, “you could be a little more discreet.”
“About what?”
“Tara Benchley.”
“What about her?”
“Dude,” Sam sighed. “You’ve told like fifteen people you had sex with her. You figure she’d want you telling that to a bunch of strangers?”
“Dude,” Dean protested. “She’s a public figure. People have a right to know.”
“Public figure? They’d have a right to know about her sex life if she was running for office, man. She’s a -” Sam cut himself off and sighed again. Given that it had been obvious to everybody standing within fifty feet of Tara Benchley’s dressing room trailer when Dean flung the door open that Tara and Dean had just done the nasty, he supposed he was defending her honor for no good reason. Whether Tara had an ounce of discretion herself was up for debate. Still, it wasn’t much like Dean to regale strangers with the details of anything he’d done, whether it involved quickies with the questionably talented star of three godawful horror movies or not.
You’re Spoiling My Fun Drunk Dean made a face at his brother. “You need a drink.”
“Doing just fine.” Sam gestured at his Coke.
“Crap, Sammy, lighten up.”
“Just…think, then talk, okay?”
Dean muttered something that seemed to include the word “jealous” as he swayed his way back to the bartender.
A few minutes later Sam heard the upbeat notes of the Beach Boys’ “Kokomo” coming out of the boombox. The music that had been playing up to that point had been innocuous enough that no one in the bar paid much attention to it; they were a drinking-and-talking crowd, not a dancing crowd, and the music was just background noise. Even Dean was in a good enough mood that he hadn’t griped about the bartender’s choice of radio stations. Still, “Kokomo” was way over the line - for Dean at least. Sam cocked his head a little and waited for the remark that was sure to come.
Instead, he heard one of Dean’s new drinking buddies start to sing along.
Then he heard Dean start to sing along.
It was like a nightmare. Or a vision of the Apocalypse. Not that Dean sounded bad; sober, he was a decent singer, and when half a dozen shots had loosened him up, he was downright impressive. He was impressive now. On key, and he seemed to know all the lyrics.
Okay, so it had to be a dream.
When Dean segued from “Kokomo” to “Little Deuce Coupe,” the bartender turned down the volume on the boombox. Halfway through “Deuce Coupe,” half the people in the bar were singing along.
When Dean got to “Help Me Rhonda,” they were all singing along.
Maybe, Sam thought, this would end up not being an evening of insults and fistfights. Maybe it would…
“Help me, Rhonda, yeah, get her outta my heart,” Dean wailed.
Get her…
Sam lowered his head and returned his attention to the computer. He’d found a report of disappearing livestock in western Colorado - not too bad of a drive, if they left early enough in the morning. Dean would be in no shape to pilot the Impala, but that was no big deal; Sam enjoyed driving in the early morning, watching the countryside wake up.
“Help Me Rhonda” faded out and Sam knew what was coming next. No psychic ability involved, although his head did start to ache as though a vision was coming. The Coke and the burger and fries and the other stuff he’d downed during the day churned in his stomach as he pushed up out of his chair and aimed himself at the door. He was outside, several steps away from the bar, by the time Dean began happily crooning, “Wish they all could be California giiiiiiirls…”
The beach, partially lit by the floodlights in the parking lot at its eastern border, was almost deserted. Sam stood at the edge of the asphalt for a minute, considering the dark, froth-capped expanse of the Pacific, then walked out onto the sand. By the time he reached the water his hands were buried in his pockets and his head hung low.
Wish they all could be California girls…
They were California girls, both of them - Jess and Madison. It hadn’t escaped him that he’d found Madison barely thirty miles from where he and Jess had lived and Jess had died. Maybe, he’d thought as he sat fidgeting in Madison’s living room, it was a sign that he was meant to go back to the beginning. Start fresh.
But Madison was dead now, just like Jess. Well, not just like Jess. Madison was dead because he had shot her.
Two weeks dead, and it seemed like two hours. Or two years. Painfully close, and painfully distant.
He walked the beach for a while, barely aware of the notion that there might be people out here looking for trouble. That irked him whenever he bothered to think about it - that in a world haunted by angry spirits like those that’d drawn him and Dean to the set of Hell Hazers II, and werewolves like her… like Madison, human beings were determined to wreak havoc on each other rather than band together against what lurked in the darkness.
Dean had meant no harm. It undoubtedly had not occurred to him that the lyrics he was singing had any relevance to anything other than girls in bikinis rollerblading down Washington Boulevard. Despite all the bad things Dean sometimes was - bossy and stubborn and thoughtless, sloppy and ill-tempered and rude - he was never cruel.
If he had noticed Sam had left the bar, he certainly had no idea why.
It took Sam half an hour to get rid of the image of Madison’s eyes in that last moment before he pulled the trigger. She’d looked at him, then looked down. Thank God for that, because he could not have pulled the trigger if her gaze had still been tied to his. But that last glance stuck with him. The surrender in it horrified him.
When he returned to the bar, someone was standing out front. Not Dean; it was one of the waitresses, leaning against the wall. He thought she might be smoking, but when he got close enough to see for sure, she wasn’t holding anything.
“I put your laptop behind the bar,” she told him.
“Thanks,” Sam said.
“I’m glad you came back. Your friend - we’ve been trying to decide whether to cut him off. He doesn’t plan to drive anyplace, does he?”
“My brother. And no.”
She smiled a little. “You working on a screenplay?”
“Pardon?”
“The website you were looking at. It’s a little…offbeat. You doing research for a screenplay?”
“Something like that,” Sam told her.
“Everybody in this town is writing a screenplay.” She said it with a small groan, making it clear that “everybody” did not include her. It made Sam return her smile. “They say it’s easier,” she added.
“Hmm?”
“Than acting. Nobody cares what you look like. Not that I mean -“
“That I’m not good-looking enough to act?”
“I should just glue my mouth shut, and have them feed me through a tube in my nose. God. Let me stand here and insult you.”
Sam shook his head. “No offense taken.”
“Can we start again?”
He looked off down the street, toward the dark swath of ocean beyond the parking lot floodlights. He could walk away again, he supposed; or go into the bar to retrieve Dean. He could end this conversation in a variety of ways that would ensure she wouldn’t try to start it up again. But before he could make a decision, a trio of honking ducks paraded into the street near the bar, aiming for the other side.
“They live in the canal,” she said. “Dozens of them. When the people aren’t around, they come up here and crap all over everything.”
He thought of Dean working himself back to sobriety to discover that ducks had crapped all over the Impala. It made him snort softly.
“Kira,” she said.
“Sam.”
“Nice to meet you, Sam.”
I killed the last woman who hit on me, he thought. He glanced at his watch, then cocked his head to listen to the sounds coming out of the bar. No one seemed to be singing now. “Maybe I should - is my brother -?“
“He’s slowed down a little.”
Sam went inside to check that out for himself. Dean was sitting at the table Sam had vacated, playing with a row of empty glasses and Sam’s half-full glass of Coke. He switched on a grin when Sam approached, but the wattage in it had dimmed a lot since the last time he’d flashed it. “They’re thinking about cutting you off,” Sam commented.
Dean snorted at that. “I can hold my liquor, Sammy.”
“Yours and several other people’s.”
“Damn straight.”
“You done yet?”
Dean pondered the question. “’S early.”
“It’s almost one-thirty.”
“Early.”
Kira slid in behind the bar, retrieved Sam’s laptop, and brought it over to him. Dean watched her return to the bar with a slow, wobbly nod. When he leaned over to Sam to whisper conspiratorially, the alcohol fumes rolling off of him made Sam’s nose hairs prickle.
“She likes you,” Dean told his brother.
“I gathered that,” Sam said.
“Aaaaaaand…what’re you gonna do about it?”
“What do you think I should do about it?”
A wrinkle appeared between Dean’s eyebrows. “You’re screwing with me,” he hissed. “’M not so drunk I can’t tell when you’re screwing with me.”
Sam shrugged and considered his Coke glass. A glance in Kira’s direction was all the prompting she needed to bring him a fresh drink.
“Hi,” Dean beamed at her. “My brother likes you.”
“Does he,” Kira said.
She went back to the bar and began wiping it down with a towel. Dean watched her with a remarkable amount of focus for someone as completely hammered as he was. “She’s very, very cute,” he told Sam after a minute.
“True.” Sam took a sip of his drink.
“So?”
“So what?”
“’S the problem with you, Sammy. You got to strike when the…the…”
“Iron’s hot?”
“When the opp…opportunity arises.” Dean seemed to be trying for “sly” and came up with something that was more “scarily psychotic.” “Is it?” he asked.
“Is what what?”
“Arising.”
“Jesus, Dean.”
Dean was at the point where, if he tried to stand, his legs were going to fold underneath him like a collapsible laundry rack. Sam let him sit where he was, pushing his row of empty shot glasses back and forth with one finger. To Sam’s relief Dean seemed to have decided to cut himself off, because he made no request of anyone for another drink.
The next time Kira passed by, Sam asked her quietly, “Is there a motel near here?”
Dean snorted at him.
“There’s a bunch of them,” Kira replied. “How fussy are you?”
“Clean. No bugs,” Sam said.
“Try the Marina Washington. About a mile down, on the left. They’re good about extra towels, and they have free coffee and donuts in the morning.” She glanced down at Dean, who beamed up at her like a kindergartener on Christmas morning. “You finished wrecking your liver, there, killer?”
That made Dean blink. “Huh?”
“Are you done drinking.”
“He’s done,” Sam told her. “Does he owe you anything?”
Kira shook her head. “We’re good.”
Dean tipped himself sideways, intending to get up out of his chair, but as Sam had predicted, his left leg started to fold the moment he put weight on it. Sam caught him before he hit the floor. Dean made a feeble attempt to extricate himself from Sam’s grasp but surrendered when it got through to him that he needed to use Sam as a crutch or spend the night on the floor of the bar. Shaking his head, Sam slung an arm around his brother, grabbed his laptop with his free hand and half-carried Dean to the door.
They were three steps past the door when Dean’s eyes closed and he slithered unceremoniously out of Sam’s grasp to the sidewalk.
“That went well,” Kira said from the doorway.
Sam sighed and ran a weary hand through his hair. “It doesn’t happen often.”
“Good thing. Give me a minute.” She disappeared inside the bar and returned the promised minute later minus her white apron. “The boss is a good Samaritan,” she explained as she crouched down to consider the tangled sprawl of Dean’s arms and legs. “Said I could take off a little early. I’ll give you a hand. Where’s your car?”
“That way. Three or four blocks. If you just keep an eye on him, I can -“
“There’s an alternative.”
Sam raised a brow, questioning.
“My house,” Kira told him quietly. “Right around the corner.”
Two weeks ago, Madison had dumped a basket of underwear onto the table in front of him. Kira was being a hair more subtle than that - and only a hair - but he was still momentarily flummoxed. “We should - I should -“
My brother is sound asleep on the sidewalk, he thought.
Past Kira, past the row of streetlamps leading down to the beach, past the floodlights, was the black ribbon of the Pacific. The local traffic had dropped off enough that Sam could hear the roar of the surf. It seemed to pulse like his heartbeat.
And it occurred to him then that maybe Dean was right.
A few years back, Dean had tried to love a girl named Cassie. Tried, and gambled a lot in the trying.
After Cassie, he went back to the system that had always worked for him: picking out a girl who was willing to be his for a couple of hours. No promises, no strings, nothing gambled, nothing lost. It seemed to make him happy, in a way. He had someone to hold for a little while, had the breathless release of sex.
But had no one who could be ripped away from him, no one he would need to cry over.
No one he would need to kill.
“We don’t -“ Sam began. “We’re not from here.”
Kira simply shrugged.
Her house fronted on one of the alley-like side streets near the canal. It was tiny, like something built for a child, with a front yard no bigger than the Impala. She unlocked the door and pushed it open all the way, then helped Sam haul the still-sleeping Dean over the threshold. They eased him down on the futon in the living room and without waking he squirmed over onto his side and shoved an arm up under his head. Smiling absently, Kira picked up the throw blanket that had been draped over the room’s only chair and draped it over Dean.
“He raised me,” Sam said for no reason he could think of.
Her bedroom had no door, but Dean was unconscious enough that an artillery barrage would not have roused him. Sam stayed with his brother just long enough to take Dean’s boots off, then followed Kira into the bedroom.
He was so much taller than Kira that he had to sit down on the bed with her to make kissing anywhere near comfortable.
Even then, it pretty much…wasn’t.
“Seems like this doesn’t happen often, either,” she said softly.
It would still be easy enough to leave. He could walk down to where they’d left the car, bring it back here, bull Dean into the back seat, and take off for Colorado. He doubted he could make it all the way there without falling asleep at the wheel, but there were plenty of motels along the way. Plenty of places to pull off the road and sleep in the car.
But Dean was right.
The shadow of Stanford, of his hopes for a normal life, had hung over Sam ever since he’d left there. It had stopped being a siren song a few weeks after Jess’s death, but it lingered anyway, teasing him with the possibility of being one of them - the people he and Dean cleaned up for, and around, and after. It told him he could still have the things he’d envisioned: a home, a family, a job that provided a paycheck and fringe benefits.
And that was as much a lie as anything a demon had ever told him.
Ahead of him, really, was the war Bobby had warned them about. The war in which he was meant to play a part - he and Ava and Andy, and others he hadn’t met. The more he considered that, the more it seemed unlikely he’d walk out the other side of it anything close to whole. Not that he was whole now; he’d lost his mother, his father, Jess. Had nothing to call his own except a duffel bag of clothing and a secondhand laptop he’d bought off eBay with a phony credit card. No home. Nothing to return to. No one to return to, except for Dean.
And it made sense, now, to stop pretending he was anything different from Dean. Because if you were going to be driven to the edge, if you were meant to be pushed off, then it made sense to dance until you got there.
Madison had been daylight, and need, and fever, and passion. Relief that the night had passed.
Kira was quiet night, the pulse of the surf, touching, joining. Kissing the back of her hand and the hollow at the small of her back. Needing to see her face, her eyes, looking at him as some guy she’d picked up in a bar, the way so many women saw Dean.
There would be no tomorrow, no next week. No plans, no future. Just now.
Warm bed, a little swaybacked in the middle, a clump of pillows he relaxed back into. Watching her face, enjoying her pleasure.
After, he fell quietly asleep.