SPN FIC - Would You Walk to the Edge of the Ocean (Part 1 of 2)
From this year's Summergen, from this prompt by verucasalt123:
"The Winchester brothers take a real live vacation, maybe during season 1 or 2. A grateful 'customer' gives them tickets to Disney or hooks them up with a weekend in Vegas or a beach house. Wherever they end up, they get a few days to kick back and not worry about hunts or cases, just enjoying each other's company, lots of brotherly banter and relaxing."
When I looked at the episode list for S2, the gap in between "Folsom Prison Blues" and "What Is and What Should Never Be" seemed like a good place in the timeline to set this story - and it got me thinking, how did the boys go from being scared and worried as they left Little Rock, to being upbeat and joking at the beginning of WIAWSNB? The result isn't quite as lighthearted as I imagine verucasalt123 had in mind, but I hope you'll all enjoy reading it.
CHARACTERS: Sam, Dean, OMC
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 12,000 words
"You need someplace to lie low," Deacon told the boys as they hit the road out of Little Rock. "Someplace the FBI won't be looking for you. I know just the place." The place? A beach house on Cape Cod. Quiet. Secluded. Someplace they can relax and rest. Forget that every law enforcement official in the country is probably looking for them.
WOULD YOU WALK TO THE EDGE OF THE OCEAN
By Carol Davis
Part One
"That's not it," Dean said.
After a solid twenty-four hours of driving - after they'd driven across half the damn country in a single day - he very much hoped this wasn't it: the refuge Deacon had told them about. The one Deacon had pretty much insisted they take advantage of, so they could avoid being re-arrested for at least a couple of weeks. Sure, Dean had had no solid reason to expect a million-dollar mega-mansion with an eye-popping ocean view, being that that kind of a thing was pretty much the polar opposite of "flying under the radar," but…
Still.
This?
"Sure it is," Sam muttered, squinting at the now badly stained and wrinkled sheet of motel notepaper on which he'd scribbled Deacon's directions. "He said there'd be a big blue rock out front."
Sam pointed, and Dean looked.
"Blue?" Dean said. "Where are you getting 'blue' from?"
"It's blue. Ish."
"You're out of your mind." Sputtering, Dean tapped the crumpled paper with his forefinger. "There's about eight thousand turns on there. If we messed up any one of 'em - or half of them - we could be in the wrong damn town. Hell, we could be in the wrong damn state. Did he ever actually say 'Massachusetts'?"
"We're not in the wrong town, Dean."
"That rock isn't blue."
"It could be blue. If the light hits it the right way."
A whole freaking day, Dean thought. Fifteen hundred miles. Sure, he'd done that kind of long haul before, had done it just a few months back, in fact, with that guy Henriksen hot on their tail (as he certainly was now, the obsessive SOB), but that didn't make twenty-four hours with his butt in the driver's seat any easier for him to endure.
He'd stopped being able to feel his spine somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania.
"Motel," he muttered. "There's a bunch of 'em back on the main road."
"And that would be 'staying out of sight' how, exactly?"
"They're not gonna be looking for us all the way out here, Sam."
"Dean," Sam said. "They've got our pictures out on the wire by now. Every law enforcement official from here to the moon is gonna be looking for us. We just busted out of prison. And we're still wanted for murder. We're interstate fugitives."
And… there it was. Bitchface Number 8467, a slight variation of the one Sam had worn pretty much the whole time they were stuck inside the walls of the Green River County Detention Center.
Sam did have a point, Dean supposed; they'd led Victor Henriksen (and, presumably, the rest of the FBI) straight to them with that half-assed museum "robbery." But what the hell. They'd rid Deacon's prison of a murderous ghost, had gotten themselves out of there safely - and if they hadn't gone to Little Rock at all, Henriksen would still be after them anyway.
They'd scored a win, the way he saw it.
"Look at it this way," he said with an upbeat note in his voice. "After we're gone, we're gonna be freakin' legends."
"And that's supposed to be a comfort."
"That rock isn't blue."
Muttering to himself, Sam shoved open the car door and climbed out, unfolding himself into the spotty spring sunlight like a newborn giraffe. Once he was on his feet, Dean could see nothing of him above the middle of his back. A plus, Dean figured, since it took the bitchface out of his field of view.
The house Deacon had sent them to (if this was indeed the right place) leaned noticeably to starboard, as if it had been in the path of a strong and very persistent wind for, say, the last fifty years. Its shingled walls had been weathered to a patchy silver-gray, and the roof boasted a hearty crop of moss. Beach house? Dean thought. Forget it having a luxurious master bedroom and a state-of-the-art entertainment center; they'd be lucky if it had plumbing.
Gonna kick your ass, Deacon. Thanks for this.
"I hate camping," he said to Sam through the open car window.
Sam made no sign of having heard him. Instead, he strolled over to the house, crouched down in front of that so-not-blue rock and tilted it backward. When he stood up again he had a key in his hand. Still ignoring his brother, he used the key to unlock the front door and disappeared inside.
Dean waited.
Sam didn't come back.
All right, so the damn rock had a slightly bluish cast to it. When Dean got out of the car and took a closer look, it was less blue than a sort of steely gray, but it was a rock, it lay to the right of the front door (as Deacon had said it would), and there'd been a key underneath.
Beyond that, if you were aiming to avoid attention, this would be the place to do it.
The house had an address of sorts, Deacon had said, but not one that would show up on Mapquest, being that it wasn't within the limits of a town, exactly, and wasn't on a road… exactly. The paved road had brought the Winchesters within about a hundred yards of the place; from there, Dean had had to maneuver the car along a dusty, beaten-down path between the trees. Had the house been anywhere other than Cape Cod, Dean would have suspected that the owner had slapped it together without permission from anyone, and that it had escaped notice ever since.
But here? In this place? No chance. Every square inch of real estate was accounted for, because every inch of ground around here was worth more than enough money to make accounting for it worthwhile.
Frowning, Dean climbed the three shallow steps to the door Sam had left half-open and peered inside. "Hey," he called out. "You in there?"
"No, Dean," Sam replied. "I vanished into another dimension."
The door creaked when Dean pushed it open the rest of the way. Stepping beyond it put him in what was obviously the living room - a surprisingly clean and orderly living room, given the appearance of the outside of the house. It was so tiny that an overstuffed couch filled almost a third of it; much of the rest was occupied by a fat plaid recliner, a low coffee table made of driftwood, and a rolling stand that supported a decent-sized TV, a DVD player, and several stacks of DVDs.
Sam, Dean could see from where he was standing, had moved on into the kitchen.
He didn't look happy.
"What?" Dean said.
Sam heaved a sigh and shoved a hand through his hair. "I think you were right," he admitted. "I think this is somebody's house. The kitchen's all stocked with food and supplies. Fresh meat. A couple pounds of hamburger, and a steak. Somebody had to have put it in there" - he nodded at the small, battered fridge - "no more than a day or two ago."
Or, maybe, right after they'd left Little Rock.
"That's -" Dean said. "Huh."
"We're in somebody's house. We need to get out of here."
"Maybe Deacon called somebody. Had them lay in some supplies for us."
Unconvinced, Sam nudged past Dean to examine the rest of the house - what little there was of it to examine. A bathroom, a bedroom. One closet. One more tiny room accessible by descending a couple of steps. While Sam was poking around, Dean stepped into the bathroom and wasn't surprised to find the medicine cabinet stocked with several essentials: Band-aids, Neosporin, a couple of disposable razors and some shaving cream, a bottle of aspirin.
The yelp he let out when he pulled aside the shower curtain brought Sam running.
"What?" Sam asked in a gasp, eyes wide, his gun in his hand.
"The hell is that?" Dean demanded. "Dude! In the damn shower. Do those things even come that big?"
Sam leaned in past him for a look.
"And don't even tell me," Dean said. "It's a centipede. But Jesus. Friggin' thing's the size of my arm. And it's in the damn tub."
Sam used the barrel of the gun to tease the thing down onto the floor of the tub, then stepped in and squashed it with the weight of one boot. Scraping its remains off the sole of his shoe with wads of toilet paper took a minute, and Dean noticed with some satisfaction that Sam seemed no more enthused about the presence of oversized wildlife in the bathroom than Dean himself was.
When they returned to the living room, they placed a call to Deacon.
"You find it?" their father's longtime friend asked.
"Baby Bear's house?" Dean asked. "Gray, with a thirty-degree tilt?"
"That's the one."
"Kinda remember you saying 'beach house'."
At the other end of the line, from somewhere within the confines of the Green River County Detention Center, Deacon chuckled softly. "It's there," he assured Dean. "Down through the trees. Look out the kitchen window and you'll be able to see a little bit of it, if the underbrush hasn't gotten too thick."
Phone in hand, Dean took the few steps to the window over the kitchen sink.
It was there, all right, out beyond the trees: the broad, gray blanket of the Atlantic Ocean.
"I see it," he told Deacon.
~~~~~~~~
The little room that lay two steps down from the rest of the house proved to be another bedroom of sorts: there was a daybed in it, a straight-backed wooden chair, and a tiny table that bore a seashell-themed lamp and a wind-up alarm clock. The bedroom located alongside the kitchen was twice its size, and featured a double bed, a dresser, and a slim upholstered chair.
"Rock-paper-scissors?" Sam suggested.
Dean considered the options, giving a lot of points to Sam's recent need to occupy a bunk in a prison cell for a couple of nights - a bunk that hadn't been designed for someone of Sam's height. Not to mention that Sam had shared the cell with someone even Dean had admitted was as creepy as hell, and that their being locked up at Green River in the first place had been Dean's idea.
"You take the big bedroom," he said.
"You sure?"
Dean tipped his head toward the little room, and the daybed that took up most of it. "Like you'd ever fit on that thing. Come on."
To his surprise, Sam didn't find further reason to complain. In fact, Sam's mood had mellowed considerably over the past half hour or so, to the point where he might well have forgotten that the whole Green River escapade had ever happened at all. After Deacon had assured them that they were in the right place, and that all the groceries were meant for them, Sam had fixed himself an enormous sandwich and settled into the clearly comfortable embrace of the plaid recliner to eat it, washing it down with a big glass of milk.
He'd been that way years ago, Dean mused, every time the Winchesters relocated: grouchy at first, then gradually less and less prickly, more willing to relax, and eventually ready to explore the features of their newest home.
Food had always helped.
"Yeah," Dean said. "I'm sure. The little room's in the front of the house. I can keep an eye on m' baby."
Sam shrugged an acknowledgment and gobbled down a handful of chocolate chip cookies from the sack he'd found in the kitchen. "Wanna walk downabeach?" he said around the mouthful.
"Nah. You go."
Sam peered across the room at Dean, one eyebrow arched.
"Oughta get the weapons cleaned," Dean said. "While things are quiet."
"Can't you can do that later?"
Dean shook his head. "Gonna eat. Crash for a while. I don't even remember the last time I had a solid night's sleep."
"It's the ocean, isn't it?"
"What? No."
"You don't want to go near the ocean."
"I want to take a nap. I just drove like eighty thousand miles."
"Dude," Sam said, with cookie crumbs still clinging to his upper lip. "You saw The Perfect Storm, what, five years ago? Seriously, man. And you make fun of me about the clowns."
"Andrea Gail, Sam. Those poor bastards are still down there. Bottom of the ocean. That was one hideous way to die."
"And I would say you had a point, if we were going out on a boat. Of any size at all. Into water of any reasonable depth. Really, man. I'm talking about a walk on the beach. The ocean is not going to reach in and grab you."
"Tsunami," Dean pointed out.
"Dude."
"Almost two hundred thousand dead in that thing in Indonesia, Sam. Never underestimate the power of water."
Sam spent a minute considering the sandwich and cookie crumbs that littered the legs of his jeans, then brushed the bits off onto the floor and levered himself up out of the recliner, which seemed rather reluctant to let him go. "Whatever, man," he sighed. "Stay here if you want to, and clean your guns. I'm gonna go for a walk on the beach and get some fresh air. I'll leave my phone on."
He paused at the door, giving Dean another chance to agree to tag along.
"Don't go far," Dean said, and Sam sighed again as he went on out.
Seriously, Dean thought as it all spun back through his mind - everything that had happened to the two of them during the past few months. The accident, and Dad. The crossroads demon. The "special kids." Gordon Walker. Meg hijacking Sam and using him to murder another hunter. The Trickster. Madison, and the horrible sound of the gunshot that had ended her life.
The look of heartbreak on Sam's face.
It seemed to be more and more true, as time went on: all they had, any more - all they might ever have - was each other.
In some sense, this was supposed to be a vacation, spending these few days near the beach. Not the type of vacation other people indulged in, of course - soaking up sun, cruising to exotic locations, laying out piles of cash so they could pose for pictures with Cinderella and Minnie Mouse.
This was… just an in-between. A little downtime. The best they could hope for, any more.
The front door creaked again as Dean pulled it open. He went as far as the foot of the three concrete steps that led down to the ground, then stood watching his brother weave through the trees toward the water's edge.
Sammy, he thought.
Don't go far.
~~~~~~~~
By the time Sam came back, Dean had made up the two beds with linens he'd found in the tiny house's only closet, and had mentally catalogued the supplies in the kitchen, putting together a simple, easy-to-prepare menu for dinner. There were any number of restaurants, ranging from greasy spoons to white-tablecloth bistros, within a fifteen or twenty minute drive, of course; but enough time had gone by since their departure from Little Rock that what Sam had said was probably correct: every law enforcement agency in the country had probably been supplied with their pictures and a description of the Impala, courtesy of the tireless Victor Henriksen.
Even fifteen hundred miles away from Little Rock, it was best not to attract attention.
Best not to be out there in the open.
"So - d'your ship come in?" Dean asked as Sam reclaimed his seat in the plaid recliner.
"Couple of boats," Sam said. "Beach is empty, though. Except for the gulls."
Dean smiled at that, remembering a much younger Sam (three years old; maybe four) frantically chasing gulls along the sand, determined to catch one and see what it looked like up close.
"You and the gulls," he said. "Remember? That time in Seaside? Some lady told you to throw bread to them if you wanted 'em to come in close, and off you went with half a loaf you swiped out of the kitchen. Friggin' things swooped in around you like something out of that Hitchcock movie. Had to be, what, about six million of 'em?"
"Which you remember as being really hilarious."
"Hell, no," Dean said. "If you'd gotten pecked to death, my ass would've been toast."
"Death by angry bird."
"We could've put it on your tombstone: 'He only wanted to give it a kiss.'"
Shaking his head, Sam pushed back in the recliner until he was lying almost fully horizontal, gazing up at the living room's water-stained ceiling. The chair didn't accommodate his crazily-long legs, of course; from about mid-calf down, they were hanging out in midair. Even with that, the chair seemed to earn an unconditional thumbs-up from Sam, and Dean would not have been at all surprised if Sam had suddenly nodded off to sleep.
He didn't, though. Instead, with his arms folded across his chest, he asked, "A week, you think? Maybe two?"
"For what?"
"Dropping out. Just… living. Ignoring what's going on. The job. All of it."
Dean pondered that as he settled into a corner of the couch and put his feet up on the driftwood coffee table. Two weeks? Sure, they'd taken time off before, but unless the downtime had been prompted by an emergency (one of them being hospitalized, for instance), they'd never stayed off the clock for more than a few days. As Dad would have been quick to point out, there were too many people in danger, too many potential casualties to ignore.
And you never knew when the ocean would reach out and grab you.
But now, after everything that had happened during the past few months?
"We could shoot for two," Dean told his brother.
~~~~~~~~
Sam came out of the bathroom the next morning with Dean's dripping-wet socks dangling from one hand.
"Hey," Dean said. "Tryin' to dry those."
"Clothesline?" Sam suggested. "There's one out back. And - why did you only wash one pair of socks?"
"They smelled."
"Dude. They still smell."
Flustered, Dean snatched them out of Sam's grasp. "You're sniffing my socks, now? For crying out loud."
"You didn't actually wash them, did you?"
"Why are you obsessed with my damn socks?"
"You wore them in the shower."
"And I'm supposed to put up with this for two weeks? What's next? You want to check out my shorts?"
"You wore them in the shower because of that centipede."
Two weeks, Dean thought with the same bubbling outrage he'd always felt as a kid, when Sam would snoop around their room until he'd managed to uncover whatever it was that Dean had tried his best to conceal from the world at large. Damn kid had always been too nosy for his own good, that was the problem - and there'd been certain things that deserved to stay private. The postcard from Debbie Gibson, for instance. The Kenny G CD, a fourteenth birthday gift from Melissa Ledbetter.
The little bag of weed.
Season One of The Golden Girls.
And. Well. The pink panties.
"Didn't you?" Sam pressed.
"And what if I did? Like I'd want to be standing there in the tub naked with those freakish mutant million-legged things coming up out of the drain and running across my feet. It'd be like some damn horror movie. And, hell. Like you'd put up with it."
Sam did nothing in response but smirk.
"Stand there and tell me you'd be good with that," Dean demanded. "Bugs running all over your bare feet."
"Clowns," Sam said.
"Oh, bite me," Dean told him.
~~~~~~~~
"Would you look at this? Guy's a genius," Dean said after a storm had rolled in, turning the daylight a deep gray and hammering the mossy roof with torrents of rain. He and Sam had decided that a movie or two would both pass the time and help drown out the noise of the storm, so he was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV stand, sorting through the stacks of DVDs. "This is awesome, man. All the Raiders movies. The good Star Wars. Wrath of Khan. Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, and hey, The Rifleman. Remember that? Dad loved the friggin' Rifleman."
"How do you know it's a guy?"
"What?"
"You said 'guy's a genius.' How do you know a guy collected all of those?"
"I -" Dean said, and stopped. "I'm using the… what do you call it. The generic name. How 'bout you get off me?"
"I'm just saying."
"Here we go. Sam Winchester, Stripping the Fun Out of Every Situation Since May of 1983."
Sam, once again settled in the recliner - with a supply of snacks near at hand - snorted a little, then asked, "So what are we watching?"
Dean held up a box. "Dude. Teenage Cat Girls in Heat."
"You're not serious."
"It's a classic, Sammy."
"I'm not watching porn with you, man."
"It's not porn. It's a comedy."
"And… moving right along," Sam said.
"What, it's porn just because there's a bunch of naked girls having sex?"
"Yeah, Dean. That would pretty much cover it."
"You watch Halloween. That has naked girls having sex." When Sam's eyebrows started to climb up underneath his bangs, Dean sighed and surrendered, setting the DVD box aside in favor of another one. "Iron Man? Does that pass your sniff test?"
"Jessica would have picked most of those movies," Sam said abruptly.
"What?"
"Raiders was one of her favorites. And she loved Bewitched."
That pretty much demolished Sam's good mood - what little of it had existed in the first place. Teeth clamped on his lower lip, he got up out of the recliner and disappeared into the bathroom, closing the door behind him.
"Awesome," Dean said, shaking his head.
He'd dozed off to sleep on the daybed by the time Sam came out of the bathroom, and woke to the smell of grilling meat. The rain had stopped, he noticed when he sat up and peered out the window; the sky had brightened somewhat, although there was still rainwater dripping off the trees.
He found Sam out back of the house, diligently tending to a small grill he'd unearthed from somewhere, on which he was cooking the steak they'd found in the fridge the day before.
"You hungry?" Sam asked.
"I - yeah. Since when do you grill anything?"
"It's not rocket science, man. You start a fire and cook the meat until it's done. Or do you mean, I'm threatening your status as Grill Master of the Universe?"
"Did you season the meat?"
"Salt and pepper."
"Don't turn your back on it."
"I'm not. You could make yourself useful, you know. Set out some plates."
Sam said he'd found the grill and the charcoal - as well as the pair of chaise lounges he'd set up - in the storage shed attached to the back of the house, a structure the size of a refrigerator lying on its side. The shed had been padlocked, but he'd found the key in the kitchen, hanging on a nail alongside the back door.
"Bunch of beach toys in there too," he commented.
Dean raised an eyebrow. "So - what? You gonna go build sand castles?"
"Don't know if it's worth it," Sam said. "If we're on tsunami watch."
"So funny. Every bit as hilarious as you breaking into a sweat when I sat you down in that clown chair at the circus."
"Clowns -"
"Yeah, I know. Clowns kill. And planes crash."
In addition to the thick steak, Sam had made room on the grill for a couple of foil-wrapped potatoes. He'd even put together a salad, making for an impressive spread compared to the simple burgers Dean had fried on the cottage's Seven Dwarves-sized stove the night before - all the more impressive when Dean realized that Sam had prepped the steak with more than just salt and pepper.
"You marinated it," he said, sniffing the air over the grill.
"I did."
"Dude. You did the authentic John Winchester marinate."
"I did."
"Dude."
When it was finally ready, Dean dug into his dinner with more enthusiasm than he'd felt in weeks. Yes, he'd made a show of enjoying the bland but reasonably plentiful Green River cuisine, but that display had been largely for Sam's benefit, an effort to convince his brother that prison life could be something other than an ongoing nightmare (the string of murders by a vicious dead nurse completely notwithstanding).
And this?
This was some fine, fine eating.
"You invented this, you know," he told Sam around a mouthful. "The marinate. That was all you, not Dad, first time around."
"It was?"
"Not deliberately. You were like, I don't know, two? You climbed up on the picnic table and crawled through the food. Everything got dumped. Beer all over the steak. I thought Dad was gonna have a stroke. We were finding potato salad in weird places for like a month after that."
"And you remember that."
"Like it was yesterday."
"You've got a very selective memory, man."
"Like I wouldn't remember the creation of the John Winchester Patented Spicy Beer Marinate."
"Sam and John Winchester, you mean."
"Right. Like he'd part with any of the royalties over something you did by accident when you were two." Dean chuckled softly as he scraped up a final forkful of flaky, buttery potato. "Didn't really get anywhere with the other combos. Beer and strawberry Jell-O. Potato salad and ear wax."
"Ear -" Sam said. "God, don't even go there."
"You seemed to think it was tasty."
Life was full of rewarding moments, if you knew where to look for them, Dean figured. For instance, the way Sam leaned over the side of his chair with his hand clamped to his mouth. By the time Sam had recovered his equilibrium, Dean had finished his dinner and sat with his hands folded over his belly, wondering about the possibility of dessert.
After a minute, Sam straightened up and settled back into his chair, still a little pale, but mellow - at least, as mellow as either of them was likely to get, given the circumstances. The sun hadn't yet gone down, and the afternoon was mild for mid-April. Henriksen was probably several states away, they'd gotten rid of Meg, the Trickster was dead…
"It ain't bad," Dean said quietly.
Sam looked at him, eyebrow raised.
"This. Here. Could be a lot worse. That weird little bed's pretty comfortable. Food's good."
"You said that about the jail," Sam reminded him.
"Yeah, well. I try to be flexible. Twenty-whatever years' worth of crap motels - it's all relative, right? You remember that trailer we lived in for a while, out in Missoula? Now, that was some prime accommodation. That big rust hole in the roof that let all the rain in? And remember, we found that possum living in the cabinet by the stove? I knew that thing's days were numbered when it went after Dad."
"It had a nest, didn't it? It was defending its young."
Dean shrugged that off. "This right here? Peace and quiet. Nothing breathing down our necks. Life is good, man."
The two of them fell silent then, listening to the muffled sound of the surf, the cries of the gulls, the murmur of the breeze in the trees. They might well have been the only two people on the planet, for the lack of evidence of anyone else being nearby. There were plenty of houses within a stone's throw, Dean recalled from the drive in, but most of them would be empty at this time of year, when the wind off the ocean was still chilly enough to discourage spending much time on the beach. The only people likely to be around were the diehards, the year-rounders.
And whoever it was who'd brought the groceries and supplies to the rundown little cottage before he and Sam arrived.
~~~~~~~~
Dean nearly shot the guy, early the next morning.
Not a hunter, he figured - anybody who was familiar with the life would know better than to come hiking up like that, to a place where two wanted fugitives were hiding out. Hell, it seemed like the guy wasn't familiar with any kind of reality.
Or maybe he thought he was bulletproof.
"Morning," the guy said amiably, and Dean stood there blinking at him, shivering in the early-morning chill but holding his aim true and steady. The guy was black, in the range of 70-ish, tall and slim, gray-white hair cut close to his scalp; he was dressed in jeans and spotless white sneakers and a beaten-soft green jacket. His arms were wrapped around a good-sized cardboard box of groceries, and a brown-and-white mutt fretted at his heels. "You Dean?" the guy wanted to know.
"Who's asking?"
"Name's Huck. Friend of Deacon's, as I imagine you've guessed." Nodding down at the dog, the guy added, "That's Yogi."
"You always make deliveries at six-thirty in the morning?"
"I do if I've got a whole list of things to be done by the end of the day. Though if you intend to kill me, I suppose the list is going to be somebody else's problem."
Dean let the gun drift down to his right hip.
"Better," Huck said. "Now - I'm gonna set this box down. Don't get twitchy."
Moving slowly and deliberately, he stepped toward Dean and set the box down on the small concrete stoop at the lip of the front door, as far from Dean's feet as was possible. Then he stepped back a little, reached down to pat the dog on the head and made a gesture that prompted the dog to sit. He was silent for a minute, and Dean expected him to break the silence by saying something along the lines of, "I knew your daddy."
He didn't. Instead, he offered, "Lot of miles between here and Green River."
"Yeah," Dean said. "There is."
"You'll be safe enough. Nobody around here really goes looking for trouble. They like it quiet. You boys keep to yourselves, and avoid setting anything on fire, and you'll be able to go on your way when the time comes without anybody being the wiser."
"Except you."
"Like I said," Huck said with a shrug. "Nobody around here goes looking for trouble. Unlike you boys, according to Deacon."
Look for it? Dean thought.
No - they'd never looked for it. More like, it looked for them.
"You bring any pie?" he asked Huck.
"Fond of pie, are you?"
The whole time, the dog had been watching the two of them with a happy, open expression. Purely dog-like, Dean thought. No demands, no expectations, other than an occasional scratch behind the ears, a bowl of Dog Chow and a warm place to sleep.
"Named him Yogi for a reason," Huck said. "He's smarter than the average bear." Which meant, of course, Don't underestimate him.
Or me.
"We didn't figure on staying long," Dean told him.
"Really. Deacon's take on it was, you boys would be staying until the heat dies down a little."
Dean shrugged, eyeing the dog. "We've got a pretty long list of things to do, too. Got somebody to find."
"Even if it means stepping right back into the line of fire?"
That rankled Dean for a moment - the implication that he wasn't capable of making a good decision, wasn't capable of doing the job properly and keeping himself and Sam safe at the same time. Dad had done both - and for more than twenty years, he thought furiously. Then something else drifted into his mind, a voice that sounded a little like his mother's, calm and soft, but authoritative. Who are you going to save if you're dead? Or locked up? Which was a valid point. Still, he figured, Huck was being mighty damned judgmental for somebody who didn't know him. Didn't know anything about the job.
Huck again crouched a little and ruffled the dog gently behind the ears. The movement allowed the rising sun to hit his face at a slightly different angle, and revealed something to Dean that he hadn't seen until then: the man had a glass eye. Had lost an eye, and something in his expression said it hadn't been because of disease, or a car accident, or a bar fight.
"You -" Dean murmured.
"It's not the Ritz," Huck said, nodding at the house. "But it's shelter. There'll be nobody much around here until Memorial Day. Folks come in off season now and then, so it won't raise any red flags that there's somebody in the house for a couple of weeks, or a month, or however long it takes. Don't make a lot of noise, don't draw any particular attention to yourselves, and you'll be fine. Your friend in the Bureau won't be able to trace you here, unless you left tracks along the way."
Dean didn't respond. Couldn't think of much to say.
"Go on, then," Huck concluded with a shrug. "There's a decent bakery in town. I'll bring you some pie later on."
He had disappeared half a minute later, gone off into the trees with the dog.
Not for the first time, Dean wondered how large the hunting community actually was. How many people his father had never seen fit to mention. How much help had been available that Dad had never taken advantage of.
~~~~~~~~
Somehow, Dean had felt more alive at Green River, and that was just idiotic, wasn't it? Being more content behind the towering walls of a prison than he was here, in a quiet little house a stone's throw from the beach.
"Purpose" had a lot to do with it, he supposed. Here, they were just biding their time.
Sam was content to stretch out in the recliner to continue reading a paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code he'd found on a shelf in his bedroom. He'd rebuffed Dean's suggestion that they bone up on some research via another review of Dad's journal, or going through the dozen-odd battered old books they'd been carrying around in the trunk of the car. "Downtime," he said. "Seriously, dude. Give it a rest."
Rest, Dean thought.
When the friggin' Yellow-Eyed Demon was out there. When Meg was out there, and Henriksen. When people were being terrorized and hurt and killed every single day by things they didn't understand - things they hadn't even known existed. Thinking about that created an all-too-real throb in Dean's shoulder, in the scar tissue of the gunshot wound Meg had inflicted.
Rubbing the shoulder made Sam blink at him.
"What?" Dean said crossly.
"I thought you said that was healed."
"It is."
"Then why are you doing that?"
"Massage," Dean said. "I'm keeping it flexible."
Twice in the past year, he'd come close to dying - near enough that the doctors had written him off. Yet here he was, sitting on a prickly striped couch in a ramshackle house midway out the southern shore of Cape Cod, watching his brother read a paperback book and munch on Oreo cookies.
He was wasting his time here. A lot of very precious time.
"Yoga," Sam said.
"What?"
"It helps you relax."
"Yeah. Like I'm gonna do frigging yoga. Like you do any frigging yoga."
"I'm relaxed," Sam replied. "You know - maybe you ought to go a little easier on the caffeine and the sugar. You're a giant peeled nerve, man."
"I'm alert."
To Dean's relief, Sam went back to his book, rather than argue the point any further. Sam couldn't have argued it, realistically, after everything that had happened during the past few months; in fact, it had been Sam who'd hauled the sack of rock salt out of the trunk the day they'd arrived here, so he could lay salt lines at all the doors and windows. And it was Sam who'd been carefully checking all the locks each night before they went to bed.
It was Sam who sighed now, index finger tucked inside his book to mark his place. "I know," he said after a minute. "We can't walk away from it. But we're both exhausted, Dean. Like you said - neither one of us has had a good night's sleep in I don't know how long, and we can't go on like that. We have to find a way to shut it off, at least for a few days, so we can rest, or we're not gonna make it through this."
"Dad did. Dad always did."
"You're seriously gonna use Dad as a poster child for survival under pressure?"
Sighing, Dean got up from the couch and paced around the living room, head pressed between his hands.
"Dean," Sam said.
"We'll get through this. Sammy. We will."
He thought of Sam's words of a few weeks ago, after they'd watched the tormented spirit of a woman named Molly disappear in a burst of bright light. Hope's kind of the whole point.
Thought of Sam confessing back in January that he prayed every day - presumably because he believed someone was listening.
And he thought of Mom, leaning down to kiss him as she whispered, "Angels are watching over you."
"I'm gonna take a walk," he told Sam.
He spent a long while meandering through the woods, poking at trees both live and fallen, nudging at rocks and tiny ferns and wildflowers with the toe of his boot, listening to the birds, following the trail of a small snake to its refuge in a heap of last October's leaves. True to what Huck had said, he saw no one; saw no evidence of anyone being anywhere nearby.
They'd just been skating along, he decided, the past six months or so.
Baltimore.
Milwaukee.
The Croatoan virus. Gordon Walker. Meg.
Maybe someone - or something - was watching over them. Was making sure they managed to get away, slip the noose, every single time something went pear-shaped. He'd called himself lucky any number of times over the years, had used it as a badge of honor now and then, but it was tough to believe in any serious kind of luck when things insisted on falling apart time after time after time.
Hell, had things ever gone right?
Would they ever?
He skirted around a rock half the size of the Impala, intending to keep walking, honestly not sure in which direction he was headed and not caring terribly much, as long as it took him away from both the house and that enormous gray ocean.
If he headed in a straight line and kept going, he'd eventually come out at the main road, or at one of the long rows of homes they'd passed on the way in.
Civilization.
People.
All of them going on with their lives, unaware of demons and shapeshifters, werewolves, tricksters, angry spirits.
When he lifted his head to make sure he wasn't headed toward the beach, Sam was maybe fifty feet away, hands in the pockets of his hoodie, an unreadable expression on his face. You couldn't just stick with the book? Dean thought.
"There's pie," Sam said. "Somebody left it on the stoop."
On to Part 2...
"The Winchester brothers take a real live vacation, maybe during season 1 or 2. A grateful 'customer' gives them tickets to Disney or hooks them up with a weekend in Vegas or a beach house. Wherever they end up, they get a few days to kick back and not worry about hunts or cases, just enjoying each other's company, lots of brotherly banter and relaxing."
When I looked at the episode list for S2, the gap in between "Folsom Prison Blues" and "What Is and What Should Never Be" seemed like a good place in the timeline to set this story - and it got me thinking, how did the boys go from being scared and worried as they left Little Rock, to being upbeat and joking at the beginning of WIAWSNB? The result isn't quite as lighthearted as I imagine verucasalt123 had in mind, but I hope you'll all enjoy reading it.
CHARACTERS: Sam, Dean, OMC
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 12,000 words
"You need someplace to lie low," Deacon told the boys as they hit the road out of Little Rock. "Someplace the FBI won't be looking for you. I know just the place." The place? A beach house on Cape Cod. Quiet. Secluded. Someplace they can relax and rest. Forget that every law enforcement official in the country is probably looking for them.
WOULD YOU WALK TO THE EDGE OF THE OCEAN
By Carol Davis
Part One
"That's not it," Dean said.
After a solid twenty-four hours of driving - after they'd driven across half the damn country in a single day - he very much hoped this wasn't it: the refuge Deacon had told them about. The one Deacon had pretty much insisted they take advantage of, so they could avoid being re-arrested for at least a couple of weeks. Sure, Dean had had no solid reason to expect a million-dollar mega-mansion with an eye-popping ocean view, being that that kind of a thing was pretty much the polar opposite of "flying under the radar," but…
Still.
This?
"Sure it is," Sam muttered, squinting at the now badly stained and wrinkled sheet of motel notepaper on which he'd scribbled Deacon's directions. "He said there'd be a big blue rock out front."
Sam pointed, and Dean looked.
"Blue?" Dean said. "Where are you getting 'blue' from?"
"It's blue. Ish."
"You're out of your mind." Sputtering, Dean tapped the crumpled paper with his forefinger. "There's about eight thousand turns on there. If we messed up any one of 'em - or half of them - we could be in the wrong damn town. Hell, we could be in the wrong damn state. Did he ever actually say 'Massachusetts'?"
"We're not in the wrong town, Dean."
"That rock isn't blue."
"It could be blue. If the light hits it the right way."
A whole freaking day, Dean thought. Fifteen hundred miles. Sure, he'd done that kind of long haul before, had done it just a few months back, in fact, with that guy Henriksen hot on their tail (as he certainly was now, the obsessive SOB), but that didn't make twenty-four hours with his butt in the driver's seat any easier for him to endure.
He'd stopped being able to feel his spine somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania.
"Motel," he muttered. "There's a bunch of 'em back on the main road."
"And that would be 'staying out of sight' how, exactly?"
"They're not gonna be looking for us all the way out here, Sam."
"Dean," Sam said. "They've got our pictures out on the wire by now. Every law enforcement official from here to the moon is gonna be looking for us. We just busted out of prison. And we're still wanted for murder. We're interstate fugitives."
And… there it was. Bitchface Number 8467, a slight variation of the one Sam had worn pretty much the whole time they were stuck inside the walls of the Green River County Detention Center.
Sam did have a point, Dean supposed; they'd led Victor Henriksen (and, presumably, the rest of the FBI) straight to them with that half-assed museum "robbery." But what the hell. They'd rid Deacon's prison of a murderous ghost, had gotten themselves out of there safely - and if they hadn't gone to Little Rock at all, Henriksen would still be after them anyway.
They'd scored a win, the way he saw it.
"Look at it this way," he said with an upbeat note in his voice. "After we're gone, we're gonna be freakin' legends."
"And that's supposed to be a comfort."
"That rock isn't blue."
Muttering to himself, Sam shoved open the car door and climbed out, unfolding himself into the spotty spring sunlight like a newborn giraffe. Once he was on his feet, Dean could see nothing of him above the middle of his back. A plus, Dean figured, since it took the bitchface out of his field of view.
The house Deacon had sent them to (if this was indeed the right place) leaned noticeably to starboard, as if it had been in the path of a strong and very persistent wind for, say, the last fifty years. Its shingled walls had been weathered to a patchy silver-gray, and the roof boasted a hearty crop of moss. Beach house? Dean thought. Forget it having a luxurious master bedroom and a state-of-the-art entertainment center; they'd be lucky if it had plumbing.
Gonna kick your ass, Deacon. Thanks for this.
"I hate camping," he said to Sam through the open car window.
Sam made no sign of having heard him. Instead, he strolled over to the house, crouched down in front of that so-not-blue rock and tilted it backward. When he stood up again he had a key in his hand. Still ignoring his brother, he used the key to unlock the front door and disappeared inside.
Dean waited.
Sam didn't come back.
All right, so the damn rock had a slightly bluish cast to it. When Dean got out of the car and took a closer look, it was less blue than a sort of steely gray, but it was a rock, it lay to the right of the front door (as Deacon had said it would), and there'd been a key underneath.
Beyond that, if you were aiming to avoid attention, this would be the place to do it.
The house had an address of sorts, Deacon had said, but not one that would show up on Mapquest, being that it wasn't within the limits of a town, exactly, and wasn't on a road… exactly. The paved road had brought the Winchesters within about a hundred yards of the place; from there, Dean had had to maneuver the car along a dusty, beaten-down path between the trees. Had the house been anywhere other than Cape Cod, Dean would have suspected that the owner had slapped it together without permission from anyone, and that it had escaped notice ever since.
But here? In this place? No chance. Every square inch of real estate was accounted for, because every inch of ground around here was worth more than enough money to make accounting for it worthwhile.
Frowning, Dean climbed the three shallow steps to the door Sam had left half-open and peered inside. "Hey," he called out. "You in there?"
"No, Dean," Sam replied. "I vanished into another dimension."
The door creaked when Dean pushed it open the rest of the way. Stepping beyond it put him in what was obviously the living room - a surprisingly clean and orderly living room, given the appearance of the outside of the house. It was so tiny that an overstuffed couch filled almost a third of it; much of the rest was occupied by a fat plaid recliner, a low coffee table made of driftwood, and a rolling stand that supported a decent-sized TV, a DVD player, and several stacks of DVDs.
Sam, Dean could see from where he was standing, had moved on into the kitchen.
He didn't look happy.
"What?" Dean said.
Sam heaved a sigh and shoved a hand through his hair. "I think you were right," he admitted. "I think this is somebody's house. The kitchen's all stocked with food and supplies. Fresh meat. A couple pounds of hamburger, and a steak. Somebody had to have put it in there" - he nodded at the small, battered fridge - "no more than a day or two ago."
Or, maybe, right after they'd left Little Rock.
"That's -" Dean said. "Huh."
"We're in somebody's house. We need to get out of here."
"Maybe Deacon called somebody. Had them lay in some supplies for us."
Unconvinced, Sam nudged past Dean to examine the rest of the house - what little there was of it to examine. A bathroom, a bedroom. One closet. One more tiny room accessible by descending a couple of steps. While Sam was poking around, Dean stepped into the bathroom and wasn't surprised to find the medicine cabinet stocked with several essentials: Band-aids, Neosporin, a couple of disposable razors and some shaving cream, a bottle of aspirin.
The yelp he let out when he pulled aside the shower curtain brought Sam running.
"What?" Sam asked in a gasp, eyes wide, his gun in his hand.
"The hell is that?" Dean demanded. "Dude! In the damn shower. Do those things even come that big?"
Sam leaned in past him for a look.
"And don't even tell me," Dean said. "It's a centipede. But Jesus. Friggin' thing's the size of my arm. And it's in the damn tub."
Sam used the barrel of the gun to tease the thing down onto the floor of the tub, then stepped in and squashed it with the weight of one boot. Scraping its remains off the sole of his shoe with wads of toilet paper took a minute, and Dean noticed with some satisfaction that Sam seemed no more enthused about the presence of oversized wildlife in the bathroom than Dean himself was.
When they returned to the living room, they placed a call to Deacon.
"You find it?" their father's longtime friend asked.
"Baby Bear's house?" Dean asked. "Gray, with a thirty-degree tilt?"
"That's the one."
"Kinda remember you saying 'beach house'."
At the other end of the line, from somewhere within the confines of the Green River County Detention Center, Deacon chuckled softly. "It's there," he assured Dean. "Down through the trees. Look out the kitchen window and you'll be able to see a little bit of it, if the underbrush hasn't gotten too thick."
Phone in hand, Dean took the few steps to the window over the kitchen sink.
It was there, all right, out beyond the trees: the broad, gray blanket of the Atlantic Ocean.
"I see it," he told Deacon.
~~~~~~~~
The little room that lay two steps down from the rest of the house proved to be another bedroom of sorts: there was a daybed in it, a straight-backed wooden chair, and a tiny table that bore a seashell-themed lamp and a wind-up alarm clock. The bedroom located alongside the kitchen was twice its size, and featured a double bed, a dresser, and a slim upholstered chair.
"Rock-paper-scissors?" Sam suggested.
Dean considered the options, giving a lot of points to Sam's recent need to occupy a bunk in a prison cell for a couple of nights - a bunk that hadn't been designed for someone of Sam's height. Not to mention that Sam had shared the cell with someone even Dean had admitted was as creepy as hell, and that their being locked up at Green River in the first place had been Dean's idea.
"You take the big bedroom," he said.
"You sure?"
Dean tipped his head toward the little room, and the daybed that took up most of it. "Like you'd ever fit on that thing. Come on."
To his surprise, Sam didn't find further reason to complain. In fact, Sam's mood had mellowed considerably over the past half hour or so, to the point where he might well have forgotten that the whole Green River escapade had ever happened at all. After Deacon had assured them that they were in the right place, and that all the groceries were meant for them, Sam had fixed himself an enormous sandwich and settled into the clearly comfortable embrace of the plaid recliner to eat it, washing it down with a big glass of milk.
He'd been that way years ago, Dean mused, every time the Winchesters relocated: grouchy at first, then gradually less and less prickly, more willing to relax, and eventually ready to explore the features of their newest home.
Food had always helped.
"Yeah," Dean said. "I'm sure. The little room's in the front of the house. I can keep an eye on m' baby."
Sam shrugged an acknowledgment and gobbled down a handful of chocolate chip cookies from the sack he'd found in the kitchen. "Wanna walk downabeach?" he said around the mouthful.
"Nah. You go."
Sam peered across the room at Dean, one eyebrow arched.
"Oughta get the weapons cleaned," Dean said. "While things are quiet."
"Can't you can do that later?"
Dean shook his head. "Gonna eat. Crash for a while. I don't even remember the last time I had a solid night's sleep."
"It's the ocean, isn't it?"
"What? No."
"You don't want to go near the ocean."
"I want to take a nap. I just drove like eighty thousand miles."
"Dude," Sam said, with cookie crumbs still clinging to his upper lip. "You saw The Perfect Storm, what, five years ago? Seriously, man. And you make fun of me about the clowns."
"Andrea Gail, Sam. Those poor bastards are still down there. Bottom of the ocean. That was one hideous way to die."
"And I would say you had a point, if we were going out on a boat. Of any size at all. Into water of any reasonable depth. Really, man. I'm talking about a walk on the beach. The ocean is not going to reach in and grab you."
"Tsunami," Dean pointed out.
"Dude."
"Almost two hundred thousand dead in that thing in Indonesia, Sam. Never underestimate the power of water."
Sam spent a minute considering the sandwich and cookie crumbs that littered the legs of his jeans, then brushed the bits off onto the floor and levered himself up out of the recliner, which seemed rather reluctant to let him go. "Whatever, man," he sighed. "Stay here if you want to, and clean your guns. I'm gonna go for a walk on the beach and get some fresh air. I'll leave my phone on."
He paused at the door, giving Dean another chance to agree to tag along.
"Don't go far," Dean said, and Sam sighed again as he went on out.
Seriously, Dean thought as it all spun back through his mind - everything that had happened to the two of them during the past few months. The accident, and Dad. The crossroads demon. The "special kids." Gordon Walker. Meg hijacking Sam and using him to murder another hunter. The Trickster. Madison, and the horrible sound of the gunshot that had ended her life.
The look of heartbreak on Sam's face.
It seemed to be more and more true, as time went on: all they had, any more - all they might ever have - was each other.
In some sense, this was supposed to be a vacation, spending these few days near the beach. Not the type of vacation other people indulged in, of course - soaking up sun, cruising to exotic locations, laying out piles of cash so they could pose for pictures with Cinderella and Minnie Mouse.
This was… just an in-between. A little downtime. The best they could hope for, any more.
The front door creaked again as Dean pulled it open. He went as far as the foot of the three concrete steps that led down to the ground, then stood watching his brother weave through the trees toward the water's edge.
Sammy, he thought.
Don't go far.
~~~~~~~~
By the time Sam came back, Dean had made up the two beds with linens he'd found in the tiny house's only closet, and had mentally catalogued the supplies in the kitchen, putting together a simple, easy-to-prepare menu for dinner. There were any number of restaurants, ranging from greasy spoons to white-tablecloth bistros, within a fifteen or twenty minute drive, of course; but enough time had gone by since their departure from Little Rock that what Sam had said was probably correct: every law enforcement agency in the country had probably been supplied with their pictures and a description of the Impala, courtesy of the tireless Victor Henriksen.
Even fifteen hundred miles away from Little Rock, it was best not to attract attention.
Best not to be out there in the open.
"So - d'your ship come in?" Dean asked as Sam reclaimed his seat in the plaid recliner.
"Couple of boats," Sam said. "Beach is empty, though. Except for the gulls."
Dean smiled at that, remembering a much younger Sam (three years old; maybe four) frantically chasing gulls along the sand, determined to catch one and see what it looked like up close.
"You and the gulls," he said. "Remember? That time in Seaside? Some lady told you to throw bread to them if you wanted 'em to come in close, and off you went with half a loaf you swiped out of the kitchen. Friggin' things swooped in around you like something out of that Hitchcock movie. Had to be, what, about six million of 'em?"
"Which you remember as being really hilarious."
"Hell, no," Dean said. "If you'd gotten pecked to death, my ass would've been toast."
"Death by angry bird."
"We could've put it on your tombstone: 'He only wanted to give it a kiss.'"
Shaking his head, Sam pushed back in the recliner until he was lying almost fully horizontal, gazing up at the living room's water-stained ceiling. The chair didn't accommodate his crazily-long legs, of course; from about mid-calf down, they were hanging out in midair. Even with that, the chair seemed to earn an unconditional thumbs-up from Sam, and Dean would not have been at all surprised if Sam had suddenly nodded off to sleep.
He didn't, though. Instead, with his arms folded across his chest, he asked, "A week, you think? Maybe two?"
"For what?"
"Dropping out. Just… living. Ignoring what's going on. The job. All of it."
Dean pondered that as he settled into a corner of the couch and put his feet up on the driftwood coffee table. Two weeks? Sure, they'd taken time off before, but unless the downtime had been prompted by an emergency (one of them being hospitalized, for instance), they'd never stayed off the clock for more than a few days. As Dad would have been quick to point out, there were too many people in danger, too many potential casualties to ignore.
And you never knew when the ocean would reach out and grab you.
But now, after everything that had happened during the past few months?
"We could shoot for two," Dean told his brother.
~~~~~~~~
Sam came out of the bathroom the next morning with Dean's dripping-wet socks dangling from one hand.
"Hey," Dean said. "Tryin' to dry those."
"Clothesline?" Sam suggested. "There's one out back. And - why did you only wash one pair of socks?"
"They smelled."
"Dude. They still smell."
Flustered, Dean snatched them out of Sam's grasp. "You're sniffing my socks, now? For crying out loud."
"You didn't actually wash them, did you?"
"Why are you obsessed with my damn socks?"
"You wore them in the shower."
"And I'm supposed to put up with this for two weeks? What's next? You want to check out my shorts?"
"You wore them in the shower because of that centipede."
Two weeks, Dean thought with the same bubbling outrage he'd always felt as a kid, when Sam would snoop around their room until he'd managed to uncover whatever it was that Dean had tried his best to conceal from the world at large. Damn kid had always been too nosy for his own good, that was the problem - and there'd been certain things that deserved to stay private. The postcard from Debbie Gibson, for instance. The Kenny G CD, a fourteenth birthday gift from Melissa Ledbetter.
The little bag of weed.
Season One of The Golden Girls.
And. Well. The pink panties.
"Didn't you?" Sam pressed.
"And what if I did? Like I'd want to be standing there in the tub naked with those freakish mutant million-legged things coming up out of the drain and running across my feet. It'd be like some damn horror movie. And, hell. Like you'd put up with it."
Sam did nothing in response but smirk.
"Stand there and tell me you'd be good with that," Dean demanded. "Bugs running all over your bare feet."
"Clowns," Sam said.
"Oh, bite me," Dean told him.
~~~~~~~~
"Would you look at this? Guy's a genius," Dean said after a storm had rolled in, turning the daylight a deep gray and hammering the mossy roof with torrents of rain. He and Sam had decided that a movie or two would both pass the time and help drown out the noise of the storm, so he was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV stand, sorting through the stacks of DVDs. "This is awesome, man. All the Raiders movies. The good Star Wars. Wrath of Khan. Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, and hey, The Rifleman. Remember that? Dad loved the friggin' Rifleman."
"How do you know it's a guy?"
"What?"
"You said 'guy's a genius.' How do you know a guy collected all of those?"
"I -" Dean said, and stopped. "I'm using the… what do you call it. The generic name. How 'bout you get off me?"
"I'm just saying."
"Here we go. Sam Winchester, Stripping the Fun Out of Every Situation Since May of 1983."
Sam, once again settled in the recliner - with a supply of snacks near at hand - snorted a little, then asked, "So what are we watching?"
Dean held up a box. "Dude. Teenage Cat Girls in Heat."
"You're not serious."
"It's a classic, Sammy."
"I'm not watching porn with you, man."
"It's not porn. It's a comedy."
"And… moving right along," Sam said.
"What, it's porn just because there's a bunch of naked girls having sex?"
"Yeah, Dean. That would pretty much cover it."
"You watch Halloween. That has naked girls having sex." When Sam's eyebrows started to climb up underneath his bangs, Dean sighed and surrendered, setting the DVD box aside in favor of another one. "Iron Man? Does that pass your sniff test?"
"Jessica would have picked most of those movies," Sam said abruptly.
"What?"
"Raiders was one of her favorites. And she loved Bewitched."
That pretty much demolished Sam's good mood - what little of it had existed in the first place. Teeth clamped on his lower lip, he got up out of the recliner and disappeared into the bathroom, closing the door behind him.
"Awesome," Dean said, shaking his head.
He'd dozed off to sleep on the daybed by the time Sam came out of the bathroom, and woke to the smell of grilling meat. The rain had stopped, he noticed when he sat up and peered out the window; the sky had brightened somewhat, although there was still rainwater dripping off the trees.
He found Sam out back of the house, diligently tending to a small grill he'd unearthed from somewhere, on which he was cooking the steak they'd found in the fridge the day before.
"You hungry?" Sam asked.
"I - yeah. Since when do you grill anything?"
"It's not rocket science, man. You start a fire and cook the meat until it's done. Or do you mean, I'm threatening your status as Grill Master of the Universe?"
"Did you season the meat?"
"Salt and pepper."
"Don't turn your back on it."
"I'm not. You could make yourself useful, you know. Set out some plates."
Sam said he'd found the grill and the charcoal - as well as the pair of chaise lounges he'd set up - in the storage shed attached to the back of the house, a structure the size of a refrigerator lying on its side. The shed had been padlocked, but he'd found the key in the kitchen, hanging on a nail alongside the back door.
"Bunch of beach toys in there too," he commented.
Dean raised an eyebrow. "So - what? You gonna go build sand castles?"
"Don't know if it's worth it," Sam said. "If we're on tsunami watch."
"So funny. Every bit as hilarious as you breaking into a sweat when I sat you down in that clown chair at the circus."
"Clowns -"
"Yeah, I know. Clowns kill. And planes crash."
In addition to the thick steak, Sam had made room on the grill for a couple of foil-wrapped potatoes. He'd even put together a salad, making for an impressive spread compared to the simple burgers Dean had fried on the cottage's Seven Dwarves-sized stove the night before - all the more impressive when Dean realized that Sam had prepped the steak with more than just salt and pepper.
"You marinated it," he said, sniffing the air over the grill.
"I did."
"Dude. You did the authentic John Winchester marinate."
"I did."
"Dude."
When it was finally ready, Dean dug into his dinner with more enthusiasm than he'd felt in weeks. Yes, he'd made a show of enjoying the bland but reasonably plentiful Green River cuisine, but that display had been largely for Sam's benefit, an effort to convince his brother that prison life could be something other than an ongoing nightmare (the string of murders by a vicious dead nurse completely notwithstanding).
And this?
This was some fine, fine eating.
"You invented this, you know," he told Sam around a mouthful. "The marinate. That was all you, not Dad, first time around."
"It was?"
"Not deliberately. You were like, I don't know, two? You climbed up on the picnic table and crawled through the food. Everything got dumped. Beer all over the steak. I thought Dad was gonna have a stroke. We were finding potato salad in weird places for like a month after that."
"And you remember that."
"Like it was yesterday."
"You've got a very selective memory, man."
"Like I wouldn't remember the creation of the John Winchester Patented Spicy Beer Marinate."
"Sam and John Winchester, you mean."
"Right. Like he'd part with any of the royalties over something you did by accident when you were two." Dean chuckled softly as he scraped up a final forkful of flaky, buttery potato. "Didn't really get anywhere with the other combos. Beer and strawberry Jell-O. Potato salad and ear wax."
"Ear -" Sam said. "God, don't even go there."
"You seemed to think it was tasty."
Life was full of rewarding moments, if you knew where to look for them, Dean figured. For instance, the way Sam leaned over the side of his chair with his hand clamped to his mouth. By the time Sam had recovered his equilibrium, Dean had finished his dinner and sat with his hands folded over his belly, wondering about the possibility of dessert.
After a minute, Sam straightened up and settled back into his chair, still a little pale, but mellow - at least, as mellow as either of them was likely to get, given the circumstances. The sun hadn't yet gone down, and the afternoon was mild for mid-April. Henriksen was probably several states away, they'd gotten rid of Meg, the Trickster was dead…
"It ain't bad," Dean said quietly.
Sam looked at him, eyebrow raised.
"This. Here. Could be a lot worse. That weird little bed's pretty comfortable. Food's good."
"You said that about the jail," Sam reminded him.
"Yeah, well. I try to be flexible. Twenty-whatever years' worth of crap motels - it's all relative, right? You remember that trailer we lived in for a while, out in Missoula? Now, that was some prime accommodation. That big rust hole in the roof that let all the rain in? And remember, we found that possum living in the cabinet by the stove? I knew that thing's days were numbered when it went after Dad."
"It had a nest, didn't it? It was defending its young."
Dean shrugged that off. "This right here? Peace and quiet. Nothing breathing down our necks. Life is good, man."
The two of them fell silent then, listening to the muffled sound of the surf, the cries of the gulls, the murmur of the breeze in the trees. They might well have been the only two people on the planet, for the lack of evidence of anyone else being nearby. There were plenty of houses within a stone's throw, Dean recalled from the drive in, but most of them would be empty at this time of year, when the wind off the ocean was still chilly enough to discourage spending much time on the beach. The only people likely to be around were the diehards, the year-rounders.
And whoever it was who'd brought the groceries and supplies to the rundown little cottage before he and Sam arrived.
~~~~~~~~
Dean nearly shot the guy, early the next morning.
Not a hunter, he figured - anybody who was familiar with the life would know better than to come hiking up like that, to a place where two wanted fugitives were hiding out. Hell, it seemed like the guy wasn't familiar with any kind of reality.
Or maybe he thought he was bulletproof.
"Morning," the guy said amiably, and Dean stood there blinking at him, shivering in the early-morning chill but holding his aim true and steady. The guy was black, in the range of 70-ish, tall and slim, gray-white hair cut close to his scalp; he was dressed in jeans and spotless white sneakers and a beaten-soft green jacket. His arms were wrapped around a good-sized cardboard box of groceries, and a brown-and-white mutt fretted at his heels. "You Dean?" the guy wanted to know.
"Who's asking?"
"Name's Huck. Friend of Deacon's, as I imagine you've guessed." Nodding down at the dog, the guy added, "That's Yogi."
"You always make deliveries at six-thirty in the morning?"
"I do if I've got a whole list of things to be done by the end of the day. Though if you intend to kill me, I suppose the list is going to be somebody else's problem."
Dean let the gun drift down to his right hip.
"Better," Huck said. "Now - I'm gonna set this box down. Don't get twitchy."
Moving slowly and deliberately, he stepped toward Dean and set the box down on the small concrete stoop at the lip of the front door, as far from Dean's feet as was possible. Then he stepped back a little, reached down to pat the dog on the head and made a gesture that prompted the dog to sit. He was silent for a minute, and Dean expected him to break the silence by saying something along the lines of, "I knew your daddy."
He didn't. Instead, he offered, "Lot of miles between here and Green River."
"Yeah," Dean said. "There is."
"You'll be safe enough. Nobody around here really goes looking for trouble. They like it quiet. You boys keep to yourselves, and avoid setting anything on fire, and you'll be able to go on your way when the time comes without anybody being the wiser."
"Except you."
"Like I said," Huck said with a shrug. "Nobody around here goes looking for trouble. Unlike you boys, according to Deacon."
Look for it? Dean thought.
No - they'd never looked for it. More like, it looked for them.
"You bring any pie?" he asked Huck.
"Fond of pie, are you?"
The whole time, the dog had been watching the two of them with a happy, open expression. Purely dog-like, Dean thought. No demands, no expectations, other than an occasional scratch behind the ears, a bowl of Dog Chow and a warm place to sleep.
"Named him Yogi for a reason," Huck said. "He's smarter than the average bear." Which meant, of course, Don't underestimate him.
Or me.
"We didn't figure on staying long," Dean told him.
"Really. Deacon's take on it was, you boys would be staying until the heat dies down a little."
Dean shrugged, eyeing the dog. "We've got a pretty long list of things to do, too. Got somebody to find."
"Even if it means stepping right back into the line of fire?"
That rankled Dean for a moment - the implication that he wasn't capable of making a good decision, wasn't capable of doing the job properly and keeping himself and Sam safe at the same time. Dad had done both - and for more than twenty years, he thought furiously. Then something else drifted into his mind, a voice that sounded a little like his mother's, calm and soft, but authoritative. Who are you going to save if you're dead? Or locked up? Which was a valid point. Still, he figured, Huck was being mighty damned judgmental for somebody who didn't know him. Didn't know anything about the job.
Huck again crouched a little and ruffled the dog gently behind the ears. The movement allowed the rising sun to hit his face at a slightly different angle, and revealed something to Dean that he hadn't seen until then: the man had a glass eye. Had lost an eye, and something in his expression said it hadn't been because of disease, or a car accident, or a bar fight.
"You -" Dean murmured.
"It's not the Ritz," Huck said, nodding at the house. "But it's shelter. There'll be nobody much around here until Memorial Day. Folks come in off season now and then, so it won't raise any red flags that there's somebody in the house for a couple of weeks, or a month, or however long it takes. Don't make a lot of noise, don't draw any particular attention to yourselves, and you'll be fine. Your friend in the Bureau won't be able to trace you here, unless you left tracks along the way."
Dean didn't respond. Couldn't think of much to say.
"Go on, then," Huck concluded with a shrug. "There's a decent bakery in town. I'll bring you some pie later on."
He had disappeared half a minute later, gone off into the trees with the dog.
Not for the first time, Dean wondered how large the hunting community actually was. How many people his father had never seen fit to mention. How much help had been available that Dad had never taken advantage of.
~~~~~~~~
Somehow, Dean had felt more alive at Green River, and that was just idiotic, wasn't it? Being more content behind the towering walls of a prison than he was here, in a quiet little house a stone's throw from the beach.
"Purpose" had a lot to do with it, he supposed. Here, they were just biding their time.
Sam was content to stretch out in the recliner to continue reading a paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code he'd found on a shelf in his bedroom. He'd rebuffed Dean's suggestion that they bone up on some research via another review of Dad's journal, or going through the dozen-odd battered old books they'd been carrying around in the trunk of the car. "Downtime," he said. "Seriously, dude. Give it a rest."
Rest, Dean thought.
When the friggin' Yellow-Eyed Demon was out there. When Meg was out there, and Henriksen. When people were being terrorized and hurt and killed every single day by things they didn't understand - things they hadn't even known existed. Thinking about that created an all-too-real throb in Dean's shoulder, in the scar tissue of the gunshot wound Meg had inflicted.
Rubbing the shoulder made Sam blink at him.
"What?" Dean said crossly.
"I thought you said that was healed."
"It is."
"Then why are you doing that?"
"Massage," Dean said. "I'm keeping it flexible."
Twice in the past year, he'd come close to dying - near enough that the doctors had written him off. Yet here he was, sitting on a prickly striped couch in a ramshackle house midway out the southern shore of Cape Cod, watching his brother read a paperback book and munch on Oreo cookies.
He was wasting his time here. A lot of very precious time.
"Yoga," Sam said.
"What?"
"It helps you relax."
"Yeah. Like I'm gonna do frigging yoga. Like you do any frigging yoga."
"I'm relaxed," Sam replied. "You know - maybe you ought to go a little easier on the caffeine and the sugar. You're a giant peeled nerve, man."
"I'm alert."
To Dean's relief, Sam went back to his book, rather than argue the point any further. Sam couldn't have argued it, realistically, after everything that had happened during the past few months; in fact, it had been Sam who'd hauled the sack of rock salt out of the trunk the day they'd arrived here, so he could lay salt lines at all the doors and windows. And it was Sam who'd been carefully checking all the locks each night before they went to bed.
It was Sam who sighed now, index finger tucked inside his book to mark his place. "I know," he said after a minute. "We can't walk away from it. But we're both exhausted, Dean. Like you said - neither one of us has had a good night's sleep in I don't know how long, and we can't go on like that. We have to find a way to shut it off, at least for a few days, so we can rest, or we're not gonna make it through this."
"Dad did. Dad always did."
"You're seriously gonna use Dad as a poster child for survival under pressure?"
Sighing, Dean got up from the couch and paced around the living room, head pressed between his hands.
"Dean," Sam said.
"We'll get through this. Sammy. We will."
He thought of Sam's words of a few weeks ago, after they'd watched the tormented spirit of a woman named Molly disappear in a burst of bright light. Hope's kind of the whole point.
Thought of Sam confessing back in January that he prayed every day - presumably because he believed someone was listening.
And he thought of Mom, leaning down to kiss him as she whispered, "Angels are watching over you."
"I'm gonna take a walk," he told Sam.
He spent a long while meandering through the woods, poking at trees both live and fallen, nudging at rocks and tiny ferns and wildflowers with the toe of his boot, listening to the birds, following the trail of a small snake to its refuge in a heap of last October's leaves. True to what Huck had said, he saw no one; saw no evidence of anyone being anywhere nearby.
They'd just been skating along, he decided, the past six months or so.
Baltimore.
Milwaukee.
The Croatoan virus. Gordon Walker. Meg.
Maybe someone - or something - was watching over them. Was making sure they managed to get away, slip the noose, every single time something went pear-shaped. He'd called himself lucky any number of times over the years, had used it as a badge of honor now and then, but it was tough to believe in any serious kind of luck when things insisted on falling apart time after time after time.
Hell, had things ever gone right?
Would they ever?
He skirted around a rock half the size of the Impala, intending to keep walking, honestly not sure in which direction he was headed and not caring terribly much, as long as it took him away from both the house and that enormous gray ocean.
If he headed in a straight line and kept going, he'd eventually come out at the main road, or at one of the long rows of homes they'd passed on the way in.
Civilization.
People.
All of them going on with their lives, unaware of demons and shapeshifters, werewolves, tricksters, angry spirits.
When he lifted his head to make sure he wasn't headed toward the beach, Sam was maybe fifty feet away, hands in the pockets of his hoodie, an unreadable expression on his face. You couldn't just stick with the book? Dean thought.
"There's pie," Sam said. "Somebody left it on the stoop."
On to Part 2...