SPN FIC - Love, It Is a Razor
Here ya go: a little bonus fic! (And never fear: part 2 of IN DREAMS is almost finished, and is in janissa11's capable beta-ing hands. It should be online tomorrow, as promised.)
Characters: Dean and Sam
Pairings: none
Length: 2850 words
Rating: PG for a bit of language
Spoilers: the Pilot and Route 666
Kleenex rating: 1
This year could have been good, because he and Sammy were back together. Handling the family business and all that. On their own, without Dad telling them what to do and when to go to bed and giving them that look when they screwed something up. The Winchester brothers on the road together. Good car, good music, a job to do. It’d been almost three months now, and things were going pretty much fine and dandy, so this day, January the twenty-fourth, could have been spectacular.
Except for that one wrinkle.
It was her birthday, too.
Love, It Is a Razor
By Carol Davis
So. 27.
Not a milestone, like 25. Or 30.
Hell, in three years he’d be thirty?
If he made it that far. This business didn’t make that a given. But Dad was (and it took him a moment to do the math) almost 52. And the rest of them - Pastor Jim, Caleb, Bobby - were all Dad’s age, give or take a little. That made the odds of survival better.
Sure. There were plenty of hunters who’d gotten past 30.
But 27 didn’t mean squat, really. Just another day in the neighborhood. Not that this day really stacked up to much in the scheme of things, no matter what year it was. There’d been a few good ones along the way, like the year they’d had some extra cash and Dad had taken him and Sammy to the amusement park for hot dogs and popcorn and ice cream and so many rides Sammy had ended up barfing alongside the car. That one had been pretty good.
And 15. That’d been excellent. He’d gotten laid, and Katie had baked him a cake. A real one, out of the oven. It was a little lopsided, but still. A cake.
And more sex, after the cake.
Yup, excellent.
Not like Dad didn’t try, the rest of the time. Sometimes he needed a reminder - Dean had seen a couple of the little notes in Sammy’s handwriting, wadded up into balls in the trash - but sometimes he remembered on his own. How they celebrated depended on what was going on at the time. One year Dad had been in the hospital, but Sam and Pastor Jim put together some stuff: a new jacket (okay, from Goodwill, but almost like brand-new), some comics, and cupcakes Pastor Jim liberated from the church bake sale.
All in all, it hadn’t been too bad.
This year could have been good, because he and Sammy were back together. Handling the family business and all that. On their own, without Dad telling them what to do and when to go to bed and giving them that look when they screwed something up. The Winchester brothers on the road together. Good car, good music, a job to do. It’d been almost three months now, and things were going pretty much fine and dandy, so this day, January the twenty-fourth, could have been spectacular.
Except for that one wrinkle.
It was her birthday, too.
The one she didn’t get to see.
Sammy’d gotten out of bed this morning looking like one of those dogs with about ten times too much skin for its face. He wouldn’t say anything, just wandered around the motel room making little sighing noises. Then he was in the bathroom for an hour and ten minutes, and who the hell took a shower for an hour and ten minutes? When he came out, he shook his head at the question of breakfast and took off by himself, muttering something about going for a walk. That lasted almost three hours, and when he came back, he said no - an actual word, this time - to lunch.
By then, Dean, who’d eaten the last remaining Pop Tart for breakfast, was about ready to break chunks off the furniture and gnaw on those, but staying in the room watching Sam mope wasn’t high on his hit list, birthday or no birthday. Leaving Sam to do his sighing on his own, since that did seem to be what Sam wanted, Dean walked down the road to the diner and ordered up the meat loaf special with extra gravy.
The waitress - Andi, according to her nametag - was pretty cute. He spent a while admiring her legs and her butt while she was taking somebody else’s order, but he’d gotten more than good enough at sizing up women to know she probably wouldn’t be up for a quickie. She pretty much had Nice Girl stamped all over her, like a watermark on fancy paper. He’d been wrong, now and then - the nice ones could surprise you sometimes, and that kind of surprise was totally okay in his book - but from the way she crouched down and beamed at the little girl who was sitting at that other table, he figured this time he was right.
No quickies from Andi, but you had to work the game any way you could. When she came back to his table to offer him a refill on his coffee, he smiled at her a little sheepishly and offered, “It’s m’ birthday.”
Andi’s eyes widened. “It is?”
“All day.”
She looked him over steadily for a minute, gnawing at her lower lip, and her examination was so intense it almost convinced him he had a chance. Then she broke into a grin that would have done a Miss America contestant proud and scurried off through the swinging doors into the kitchen. She came back maybe five minutes later bearing a miniature cake, the kind that was intended to serve two people. “Boston cream pie,” she said as she set the plate in front of him. “Am I right? You like that kind?”
“Yeah,” Dean told her. “I like that kind.”
“But no singing.”
“I can live without the singing.”
“Happy birthday. And many happy returns.”
She left him alone then, although every time he looked up from his cake she was somewhere nearby, smiling at him. Finally, when the cake was about half gone, she disappeared into the back - a good thing, because his jaw was starting to ache from smiling back. But bless her, she hadn’t asked why he was alone on his birthday, or whether he intended to “go do something fun later on.” He had to give her points for that.
The cake was good, not too sweet. The meat loaf had been good, too, something he’d anticipated because of the number of trucks parked outside. Dad had taught him and Sam that rule years ago: wherever the truckers go, the food’s good. By the time he finished, his belly was comfortably full, and he was content enough to ask for a sandwich to go to take back to Sam. He’d convince Sam to eat it, somehow, because Sam couldn’t just not eat.
There was a wrinkle in that, too: when he got back to the room, Sam was gone again.
But maybe that was good, since it relieved him of the responsibility of thinking of something to say, or not say; something to do, or not do. Maybe by tomorrow Sam would ease back out of his funk and they could get back to work.
Work, after all, was good for forgetting all kinds of shit.
He’d grabbed a six-pack, nice and cold, at the convenience store on the way back from the diner. Still pretty much content, he pulled off his boots, pushed his pillows into a mound against the headboard of his bed, and made himself comfortable with a beer in one hand and the TV remote in the other. He sat through most of an episode of Full House and was ten minutes into watching Dr. Phil tear a new one into some woman who liked to yell at her kids for no good reason when he noticed that Sam’s laptop was open and running. The screen was dark, but the blue lights that said it was still on were lit, and that wasn’t like Sam, who was freaking anal about turning the thing off to save the battery. Or the hard drive. Or both. Or what the hell ever.
Curious, Dean put down his beer and the remote and reached over to Sam’s bed to pick up the laptop. Sure enough, the battery was just about tapped, and it took him a minute to dig the power cord out of Sam’s duffel and plug the thing in.
What popped up on the screen when he brushed the touchpad made him grunt in dismay.
Her.
His birthday twin.
How Sam had found this thing, this website, he didn’t know, but there it was. Happy Birthday Jessie was written across the top and We Miss You and We Love You across the bottom. In the middle was a picture of her, the same one her family had put on her grave marker, which was a little perverse, but maybe it was everybody’s favorite.
Curious, Dean shifted the cursor around and clicked on the picture.
It wasn’t just one page, it was a whole bunch of them. Pictures of her as a baby, as a little girl with pigtails. She’d been a cheerleader in high school, it looked like, because there she was in a uniform, holding a set of pompoms. There was a shot of her in a bikini, too, sitting on a dock with a bunch of people, all of them laughing.
One of the people was Sam.
The picture was a link to a video.
Dean sat in the fading light of afternoon and watched his brother and Jessica Moore and a bunch of people he didn’t know laugh and splash each other and drop into the water to swim on a sunny day in a place he couldn’t identify. It only lasted a couple of minutes, but that was long enough: more than enough to give him a glimpse into the life that had belonged to Sam, that he had been no part of.
There were more pages: poems she had written, a picture she had drawn with crayons that was signed Jessie Moore Age 6. More pictures: high school graduation, Christmas, some little-kid birthday party complete with a fancy cake decorated to look like a merry-go-round. Some of them showed her with her parents, her grandparents, her sisters and brother. Dean looked at all of them.
Again and again, he watched the video. Watched his brother laughing on a day he had been no part of.
He was still holding the computer on his lap when the door creaked open. Sam stood in the doorway for a minute, silhouetted by the light outside, then made the kind of face that said his head hurt and came in. He didn’t seem to register the fact that Dean had the laptop until Dean switched it off and lowered the lid.
“Brought you a sandwich,” Dean said, nodding at the clamshell box he’d left on the table.
Sam shrugged an acknowledgment, sat down on the end of his bed and looked around as if he had no idea where he was.
“You okay?” Dean asked.
“I guess.”
He wasn’t sure admitting to looking at the website was a good idea, but Sam would put two and two together eventually, if he hadn’t already. “She was beautiful, man,” Dean said softly. “That’s nice, what they did for her.”
“Karen.”
Her sister. “Oh. Okay.” Dean got up off the bed and held the computer out to Sam. When Sam didn’t take it, he set it down on Sam’s bed. “Not much to do tonight, so we can pack it in early, then get an early start in the morning. If you want.”
“That’s fine.”
“Why don’t you eat your sandwich. There’s some cookies in there too.”
Sam didn’t say anything for a while. He glanced at the clamshell box, then gnawed for a minute at a hangnail on his thumb. Finally, he nodded, snuffled once and smudged at his nose with the back of his hand.
“Whatever you want to do,” Dean told him.
Instead of answering, Sam reached into the pocket of his hoodie and produced something that he held out to Dean: a two-pack of Hostess cupcakes, the chocolate kind with the squiggle of white frosting across the top. “Not your fault,” he murmured.
Dean took the package.
“When she was born, we were already on the road,” Sam said.
“Yeah. When I was five.”
“We were gonna… I thought maybe…”
“What?”
Sam shook his head. “Nothing.” He went back to gnawing at the hangnail until his thumb looked raw and sore. “I fucked up your birthday.”
“No big deal.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Okay, then. Come back with a bottle of Jack, a couple Laker Girls, and a steak dinner and we’ll call it square.”
Sam tried to laugh but it didn’t happen. Grimacing painfully, he got up from the bed and stared out the window into the parking lot. “I keep thinking I’m good, that I can deal. And then all of a sudden I can’t.”
And Sam’s face was an echo of Dad’s: on Mom’s birthday, their anniversary, Christmas, Thanksgiving. Countless other days that had meant something to them as a couple that Dad wouldn’t describe, wouldn’t talk about at all. Memories that Dad had to struggle through on his own because there was no time, no place, no circumstance that it made it all right to share what he was feeling.
They hadn’t owned a computer before Sam left for Stanford. Dad saw no need for it, and either way, there was no money for something like that, not when Sam could make do using the one at the library.
Dean had never touched a computer until Ohio, three years ago. Until a girl with dark hair and dark skin and dark eyes leaned close to him, close enough for him to feel her breath on his cheek, and said, “Here. Let me show you.”
He met Cassie on his birthday. Said goodbye to her on the day after Sam’s.
“I get it, man,” he told his brother. “Really. I get it. So you tell me what you want to do, and we’ll do it. Or we’ll do nothing. Whatever.”
Sam reached out and took the cupcakes back, tore open the cellophane package, handed one of the cakes to Dean and kept the other one.
“Can we -“ he began.
“What?”
“Nothing. I… happy birthday, man.”
Dean nodded a thank you and bit into the cupcake. It was crazy-sweet and a little stale, nothing like the cake Andi had given him. But there was nothing to complain about, not when he could have this birthday and Jessica Moore couldn’t.
Not when he could have this birthday with Sam.
“You want to go out somewhere?” Sam offered. “There’s a movie theater down a ways. I think they’re showing that Chuck Norris thing. Or…there’s a bar down past the movies. If you want to…you know. Hook up.”
Dean shook his head. “I’m gonna -“
“What?”
“Gonna try and call Dad. Then we can -“ He cut himself off long enough to finish the cupcake. “Let’s just drive. Get the hell out of here. I want to get rid of some miles.”
“Yeah,” Sam nodded. “Okay.”
“I pick the music.”
“You always pick the music.”
“Not always.”
“Yeah, man. Always.”
“Okay, then,” Dean grinned. “I’ll pick the music.”
Gathering their stuff together took less than five minutes. By full dark they had covered almost a hundred miles. Ten or twelve miles further on, they came to a scenic overlook from which, in the dark, almost nothing was visible. Dean pulled the car into the turnoff anyway, shut off the engine, pulled two bottles out of the six-pack he’d tucked into the footwell in the backseat, and got out of the car. When Sam joined him at the low stone wall from which, in theory, you could see three states, he popped the caps off the bottles using his ring as a bottle opener and handed one of the beers to Sam.
“To Jessica,” he offered. “And to the fact that when we find the thing that killed her, we’re going to kick its ass.”
Sam smiled wistfully at that, his expression visible in the car headlights Dean had left on. “To Jess,” he murmured.
They drank in silence for a couple of minutes, looking over the wall at nothing.
“Sammy?” Dean asked then. “You figure we’ll make sixty?”
“What? I don’t know, man. I guess so.”
“Because…sixty? When you get all that enlarged prostate and erectile dysfunction shit? I don’t know if I can deal with that.”
That made Sam snort beer through his nose and whimper at the burn of the alcohol. “Ow, man,” he moaned. “Don’t do that.”
“We’ll get that son of a bitch, whatever it is. And then -“
Sam gestured, palm out, to stop him. “Happy birthday, man. Do twenty-seven. Don’t worry about sixty. And…I’m sorry about the ones I missed.”
“Wasn’t much.”
“Yeah. Still.”
“You’re here now.”
“I’ll be here when you’re sixty,” Sam offered, and before Dean could chide him for being girly, added, “So I can laugh at you every time you can’t get it up.”
“That’s cold, Sammy.”
Sam’s expression went pensive again. “I wish you knew her, Dean.”
“Me too.”
Without preamble, Sam drew his arm back and hurled the beer bottle off into the darkness. They heard a rustle as it zipped through foliage, then, a couple of seconds later, a muffled thump.
“Now you’re fuckin’ littering America,” Dean scolded him.
“Your turn,” Sam said.
And Dean let the bottle fly.
Characters: Dean and Sam
Pairings: none
Length: 2850 words
Rating: PG for a bit of language
Spoilers: the Pilot and Route 666
Kleenex rating: 1
This year could have been good, because he and Sammy were back together. Handling the family business and all that. On their own, without Dad telling them what to do and when to go to bed and giving them that look when they screwed something up. The Winchester brothers on the road together. Good car, good music, a job to do. It’d been almost three months now, and things were going pretty much fine and dandy, so this day, January the twenty-fourth, could have been spectacular.
Except for that one wrinkle.
It was her birthday, too.
Love, It Is a Razor
By Carol Davis
So. 27.
Not a milestone, like 25. Or 30.
Hell, in three years he’d be thirty?
If he made it that far. This business didn’t make that a given. But Dad was (and it took him a moment to do the math) almost 52. And the rest of them - Pastor Jim, Caleb, Bobby - were all Dad’s age, give or take a little. That made the odds of survival better.
Sure. There were plenty of hunters who’d gotten past 30.
But 27 didn’t mean squat, really. Just another day in the neighborhood. Not that this day really stacked up to much in the scheme of things, no matter what year it was. There’d been a few good ones along the way, like the year they’d had some extra cash and Dad had taken him and Sammy to the amusement park for hot dogs and popcorn and ice cream and so many rides Sammy had ended up barfing alongside the car. That one had been pretty good.
And 15. That’d been excellent. He’d gotten laid, and Katie had baked him a cake. A real one, out of the oven. It was a little lopsided, but still. A cake.
And more sex, after the cake.
Yup, excellent.
Not like Dad didn’t try, the rest of the time. Sometimes he needed a reminder - Dean had seen a couple of the little notes in Sammy’s handwriting, wadded up into balls in the trash - but sometimes he remembered on his own. How they celebrated depended on what was going on at the time. One year Dad had been in the hospital, but Sam and Pastor Jim put together some stuff: a new jacket (okay, from Goodwill, but almost like brand-new), some comics, and cupcakes Pastor Jim liberated from the church bake sale.
All in all, it hadn’t been too bad.
This year could have been good, because he and Sammy were back together. Handling the family business and all that. On their own, without Dad telling them what to do and when to go to bed and giving them that look when they screwed something up. The Winchester brothers on the road together. Good car, good music, a job to do. It’d been almost three months now, and things were going pretty much fine and dandy, so this day, January the twenty-fourth, could have been spectacular.
Except for that one wrinkle.
It was her birthday, too.
The one she didn’t get to see.
Sammy’d gotten out of bed this morning looking like one of those dogs with about ten times too much skin for its face. He wouldn’t say anything, just wandered around the motel room making little sighing noises. Then he was in the bathroom for an hour and ten minutes, and who the hell took a shower for an hour and ten minutes? When he came out, he shook his head at the question of breakfast and took off by himself, muttering something about going for a walk. That lasted almost three hours, and when he came back, he said no - an actual word, this time - to lunch.
By then, Dean, who’d eaten the last remaining Pop Tart for breakfast, was about ready to break chunks off the furniture and gnaw on those, but staying in the room watching Sam mope wasn’t high on his hit list, birthday or no birthday. Leaving Sam to do his sighing on his own, since that did seem to be what Sam wanted, Dean walked down the road to the diner and ordered up the meat loaf special with extra gravy.
The waitress - Andi, according to her nametag - was pretty cute. He spent a while admiring her legs and her butt while she was taking somebody else’s order, but he’d gotten more than good enough at sizing up women to know she probably wouldn’t be up for a quickie. She pretty much had Nice Girl stamped all over her, like a watermark on fancy paper. He’d been wrong, now and then - the nice ones could surprise you sometimes, and that kind of surprise was totally okay in his book - but from the way she crouched down and beamed at the little girl who was sitting at that other table, he figured this time he was right.
No quickies from Andi, but you had to work the game any way you could. When she came back to his table to offer him a refill on his coffee, he smiled at her a little sheepishly and offered, “It’s m’ birthday.”
Andi’s eyes widened. “It is?”
“All day.”
She looked him over steadily for a minute, gnawing at her lower lip, and her examination was so intense it almost convinced him he had a chance. Then she broke into a grin that would have done a Miss America contestant proud and scurried off through the swinging doors into the kitchen. She came back maybe five minutes later bearing a miniature cake, the kind that was intended to serve two people. “Boston cream pie,” she said as she set the plate in front of him. “Am I right? You like that kind?”
“Yeah,” Dean told her. “I like that kind.”
“But no singing.”
“I can live without the singing.”
“Happy birthday. And many happy returns.”
She left him alone then, although every time he looked up from his cake she was somewhere nearby, smiling at him. Finally, when the cake was about half gone, she disappeared into the back - a good thing, because his jaw was starting to ache from smiling back. But bless her, she hadn’t asked why he was alone on his birthday, or whether he intended to “go do something fun later on.” He had to give her points for that.
The cake was good, not too sweet. The meat loaf had been good, too, something he’d anticipated because of the number of trucks parked outside. Dad had taught him and Sam that rule years ago: wherever the truckers go, the food’s good. By the time he finished, his belly was comfortably full, and he was content enough to ask for a sandwich to go to take back to Sam. He’d convince Sam to eat it, somehow, because Sam couldn’t just not eat.
There was a wrinkle in that, too: when he got back to the room, Sam was gone again.
But maybe that was good, since it relieved him of the responsibility of thinking of something to say, or not say; something to do, or not do. Maybe by tomorrow Sam would ease back out of his funk and they could get back to work.
Work, after all, was good for forgetting all kinds of shit.
He’d grabbed a six-pack, nice and cold, at the convenience store on the way back from the diner. Still pretty much content, he pulled off his boots, pushed his pillows into a mound against the headboard of his bed, and made himself comfortable with a beer in one hand and the TV remote in the other. He sat through most of an episode of Full House and was ten minutes into watching Dr. Phil tear a new one into some woman who liked to yell at her kids for no good reason when he noticed that Sam’s laptop was open and running. The screen was dark, but the blue lights that said it was still on were lit, and that wasn’t like Sam, who was freaking anal about turning the thing off to save the battery. Or the hard drive. Or both. Or what the hell ever.
Curious, Dean put down his beer and the remote and reached over to Sam’s bed to pick up the laptop. Sure enough, the battery was just about tapped, and it took him a minute to dig the power cord out of Sam’s duffel and plug the thing in.
What popped up on the screen when he brushed the touchpad made him grunt in dismay.
Her.
His birthday twin.
How Sam had found this thing, this website, he didn’t know, but there it was. Happy Birthday Jessie was written across the top and We Miss You and We Love You across the bottom. In the middle was a picture of her, the same one her family had put on her grave marker, which was a little perverse, but maybe it was everybody’s favorite.
Curious, Dean shifted the cursor around and clicked on the picture.
It wasn’t just one page, it was a whole bunch of them. Pictures of her as a baby, as a little girl with pigtails. She’d been a cheerleader in high school, it looked like, because there she was in a uniform, holding a set of pompoms. There was a shot of her in a bikini, too, sitting on a dock with a bunch of people, all of them laughing.
One of the people was Sam.
The picture was a link to a video.
Dean sat in the fading light of afternoon and watched his brother and Jessica Moore and a bunch of people he didn’t know laugh and splash each other and drop into the water to swim on a sunny day in a place he couldn’t identify. It only lasted a couple of minutes, but that was long enough: more than enough to give him a glimpse into the life that had belonged to Sam, that he had been no part of.
There were more pages: poems she had written, a picture she had drawn with crayons that was signed Jessie Moore Age 6. More pictures: high school graduation, Christmas, some little-kid birthday party complete with a fancy cake decorated to look like a merry-go-round. Some of them showed her with her parents, her grandparents, her sisters and brother. Dean looked at all of them.
Again and again, he watched the video. Watched his brother laughing on a day he had been no part of.
He was still holding the computer on his lap when the door creaked open. Sam stood in the doorway for a minute, silhouetted by the light outside, then made the kind of face that said his head hurt and came in. He didn’t seem to register the fact that Dean had the laptop until Dean switched it off and lowered the lid.
“Brought you a sandwich,” Dean said, nodding at the clamshell box he’d left on the table.
Sam shrugged an acknowledgment, sat down on the end of his bed and looked around as if he had no idea where he was.
“You okay?” Dean asked.
“I guess.”
He wasn’t sure admitting to looking at the website was a good idea, but Sam would put two and two together eventually, if he hadn’t already. “She was beautiful, man,” Dean said softly. “That’s nice, what they did for her.”
“Karen.”
Her sister. “Oh. Okay.” Dean got up off the bed and held the computer out to Sam. When Sam didn’t take it, he set it down on Sam’s bed. “Not much to do tonight, so we can pack it in early, then get an early start in the morning. If you want.”
“That’s fine.”
“Why don’t you eat your sandwich. There’s some cookies in there too.”
Sam didn’t say anything for a while. He glanced at the clamshell box, then gnawed for a minute at a hangnail on his thumb. Finally, he nodded, snuffled once and smudged at his nose with the back of his hand.
“Whatever you want to do,” Dean told him.
Instead of answering, Sam reached into the pocket of his hoodie and produced something that he held out to Dean: a two-pack of Hostess cupcakes, the chocolate kind with the squiggle of white frosting across the top. “Not your fault,” he murmured.
Dean took the package.
“When she was born, we were already on the road,” Sam said.
“Yeah. When I was five.”
“We were gonna… I thought maybe…”
“What?”
Sam shook his head. “Nothing.” He went back to gnawing at the hangnail until his thumb looked raw and sore. “I fucked up your birthday.”
“No big deal.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Okay, then. Come back with a bottle of Jack, a couple Laker Girls, and a steak dinner and we’ll call it square.”
Sam tried to laugh but it didn’t happen. Grimacing painfully, he got up from the bed and stared out the window into the parking lot. “I keep thinking I’m good, that I can deal. And then all of a sudden I can’t.”
And Sam’s face was an echo of Dad’s: on Mom’s birthday, their anniversary, Christmas, Thanksgiving. Countless other days that had meant something to them as a couple that Dad wouldn’t describe, wouldn’t talk about at all. Memories that Dad had to struggle through on his own because there was no time, no place, no circumstance that it made it all right to share what he was feeling.
They hadn’t owned a computer before Sam left for Stanford. Dad saw no need for it, and either way, there was no money for something like that, not when Sam could make do using the one at the library.
Dean had never touched a computer until Ohio, three years ago. Until a girl with dark hair and dark skin and dark eyes leaned close to him, close enough for him to feel her breath on his cheek, and said, “Here. Let me show you.”
He met Cassie on his birthday. Said goodbye to her on the day after Sam’s.
“I get it, man,” he told his brother. “Really. I get it. So you tell me what you want to do, and we’ll do it. Or we’ll do nothing. Whatever.”
Sam reached out and took the cupcakes back, tore open the cellophane package, handed one of the cakes to Dean and kept the other one.
“Can we -“ he began.
“What?”
“Nothing. I… happy birthday, man.”
Dean nodded a thank you and bit into the cupcake. It was crazy-sweet and a little stale, nothing like the cake Andi had given him. But there was nothing to complain about, not when he could have this birthday and Jessica Moore couldn’t.
Not when he could have this birthday with Sam.
“You want to go out somewhere?” Sam offered. “There’s a movie theater down a ways. I think they’re showing that Chuck Norris thing. Or…there’s a bar down past the movies. If you want to…you know. Hook up.”
Dean shook his head. “I’m gonna -“
“What?”
“Gonna try and call Dad. Then we can -“ He cut himself off long enough to finish the cupcake. “Let’s just drive. Get the hell out of here. I want to get rid of some miles.”
“Yeah,” Sam nodded. “Okay.”
“I pick the music.”
“You always pick the music.”
“Not always.”
“Yeah, man. Always.”
“Okay, then,” Dean grinned. “I’ll pick the music.”
Gathering their stuff together took less than five minutes. By full dark they had covered almost a hundred miles. Ten or twelve miles further on, they came to a scenic overlook from which, in the dark, almost nothing was visible. Dean pulled the car into the turnoff anyway, shut off the engine, pulled two bottles out of the six-pack he’d tucked into the footwell in the backseat, and got out of the car. When Sam joined him at the low stone wall from which, in theory, you could see three states, he popped the caps off the bottles using his ring as a bottle opener and handed one of the beers to Sam.
“To Jessica,” he offered. “And to the fact that when we find the thing that killed her, we’re going to kick its ass.”
Sam smiled wistfully at that, his expression visible in the car headlights Dean had left on. “To Jess,” he murmured.
They drank in silence for a couple of minutes, looking over the wall at nothing.
“Sammy?” Dean asked then. “You figure we’ll make sixty?”
“What? I don’t know, man. I guess so.”
“Because…sixty? When you get all that enlarged prostate and erectile dysfunction shit? I don’t know if I can deal with that.”
That made Sam snort beer through his nose and whimper at the burn of the alcohol. “Ow, man,” he moaned. “Don’t do that.”
“We’ll get that son of a bitch, whatever it is. And then -“
Sam gestured, palm out, to stop him. “Happy birthday, man. Do twenty-seven. Don’t worry about sixty. And…I’m sorry about the ones I missed.”
“Wasn’t much.”
“Yeah. Still.”
“You’re here now.”
“I’ll be here when you’re sixty,” Sam offered, and before Dean could chide him for being girly, added, “So I can laugh at you every time you can’t get it up.”
“That’s cold, Sammy.”
Sam’s expression went pensive again. “I wish you knew her, Dean.”
“Me too.”
Without preamble, Sam drew his arm back and hurled the beer bottle off into the darkness. They heard a rustle as it zipped through foliage, then, a couple of seconds later, a muffled thump.
“Now you’re fuckin’ littering America,” Dean scolded him.
“Your turn,” Sam said.
And Dean let the bottle fly.