SPN FIC - Would You Walk to the Edge of the Ocean (Part 2 of 2)
CHARACTERS: Sam, Dean, OMC
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 12,000 words
Part 1 is here.
WOULD YOU WALK TO THE EDGE OF THE OCEAN
By Carol Davis
Part Two
Their fourth day there, Dean noticed the collection of stuff spread across the top of Sam's dresser: seashells, a sand dollar, bits of sea glass, and some small, colorful stones. "What's all that for?" he asked when Sam came back from yet another trip to the beach.
"Nothing," Sam said. "Just thought they were interesting."
And he produced from his pocket another handful of odds and ends.
"You did that when you were little," Dean told him. "You were always picking up stuff off the ground." After a moment of thought, during which he fingered a piece of brown sea glass that had likely originally been part of a beer bottle, he added, "Kinda think you got it wrong. Studying to be a lawyer. You should've been one of those CSI guys. You always could go into a place - any place at all - and find something to pick up off the floor. Or the ground."
Sam's forehead wrinkled a little. "Hmm," he said.
"Don't you think?"
"Maybe."
"You're good at that. Finding stuff. Clues."
"So are you."
"Nah," Dean said.
"We could have a contest. Come down to the beach with me, and - say thirty minutes. We'll see who finds the most interesting stuff."
"You kidding me?" Dean scoffed. "You've already stripped that beach."
"I haven't, man. It's a big beach."
"I gotta wash the car."
Sam stood where he was for a moment, frowning at his brother; then he sighed and wandered off. Of course he headed for the recliner - the whole time they'd been there, he'd either been in the battered plaid chair, in bed, or walking on the beach.
Yesterday, he'd finished The Da Vinci Code and had moved on to a hardback copy of Stephen King's Dreamcatcher.
"Thought you swore off reading King," Dean said. "Did he stop getting things wrong?"
"Not a lot of options," Sam muttered. "Forty DVDs, and three books."
"What's the other one?"
"The South Beach Diet."
"Oh. Well - leave a note. Out on the door or something. You find a bucket anywhere around here?"
That roused Sam's suspicions. "What do you need a bucket for?"
"Told you. I'm gonna wash the car."
They did it together. The day had turned warm enough for t-shirts, which meant it was warm enough to work with pails of water. The Impala had collected a lot of road dust on the way from Little Rock; really, she hadn't been properly washed and detailed since California - the other side of the damn country, Dean reflected as he reached up into the driver's side wheel well to scrub at a stubborn clump of something sticky and gritty.
He'd almost gotten it out when cold water splashed the back of his head.
"HEY!" he yelped.
He struggled to his feet to find Sam grinning ear to ear, the house's ragged garden hose in hand, his thumb on the trigger.
"Don't you -" Dean warned him.
He got a faceful of water for his trouble.
A minute later they were both drenched, chasing each other around the car armed with sopping-wet sponges the size of bricks, name-calling, wrestling, struggling for possession of the hose - something they hadn't done since long before Sam left for Stanford, back in what had begun to seem like another lifetime. Washing the car had never been a sedate activity back then, unless one of them was being punished for something; there'd always been music involved (from the car radio, or a boom box set up nearby), soaked clothing, a lot of mud.
They were making enough noise to attract attention, Dean realized. But… what the hell.
By the time they stopped, they were both breathless and muddy, and the car was a long way from being clean. If anything, it looked worse than it had when he'd first turned on the hose.
He'd gotten that gunk out of the wheel well, though.
"You cooking dinner, or am I?" Sam asked.
Dean took a moment to consider the situation. "You messed up my car, asshat. You not only oughta cook, you ought to feed it to me."
"Really."
"Hell, yeah."
Grinning, Sam crouched down just long enough to scoop up a handful of mud. "You want me to feed it to you."
It took Dean almost twenty minutes - and some very diligent flossing - to get all the sand out of his teeth. Though it might have been his imagination, he tasted the particular tang of Cape Cod mud throughout dinner, and took great care to wash it down with the excellent micro-brewed beer Huck had dropped off with the latest box of groceries.
"He's spending a lot of money on all this food," Sam observed.
"Deacon told him to take care of us, I guess."
"Still."
"So - what? You want to pay him back? We're not exactly rolling in cash, and I'm thinking he doesn't take credit cards."
Sam was silent for a minute as he devoured another piece of fried chicken, part of the dinner that had mysteriously appeared on their doorstep while the two of them were cleaning up after what Dean would think of later on as The Epic Mud Battle. "I kind of want to thank him," Sam said finally. "He's done a lot for us. And he only showed up that one time so you could talk to him. Every other time - jeez, man, he's like the Stealth Grocery Service."
Dean shook his head. "I don't think he meant to let me talk to him. I was coming out of the can and I saw something move outside."
"And what's the point in that? Not saying hello?"
"Dunno," Dean said with a shrug. "Does it matter?"
"I just - have we ever met a hunter who wasn't kind of… weird?"
"Pastor Jim."
"Not really a hunter."
"I don't know. Ellen's pretty sensible."
"Again - not really a hunter. More kind of… you know. An information clearinghouse."
They both considered the question.
Said "Ash!" in unison and burst out laughing.
They cleaned up their dishes and the remains of their dinner together, both of them recalling the monumental invasion of ants at that disastrous trailer outside Missoula that had been their home for a couple of weeks, back when Sam was in middle school and Dean was failing to find any good reason to remain in high school. The floor and countertops had turned almost fully black with tiny, milling bodies, a situation the three Winchesters had finally resolved by packing up and leaving.
Spotting a couple of bugs doing reconnaissance in the kitchen that afternoon had been enough to convince both Sam and Dean to keep the place clean of crumbs and food spills, lest they wake up in the morning at the center of another massive attack.
"Dad would laugh," Dean said as he dried a clean plate with a checkered cloth. "You and me, doing the frigging dishes."
"And not under duress."
"It's adorable."
"Not the word I would have used, but - yeah. Pretty funny."
"Just so you know - nobody's gonna dust. Agreed?"
They were settling in to watch Wrath of Khan when Sam asked suddenly, "Could you live in a place like this?"
"I don't know. Why?"
"If there wasn't anything to hunt any more. After we find the yellow-eyed demon and kill it. And - if we could just… stop. And have a normal life. Could you live in a place like this?"
"Kind of a moot question, isn't it? There's never gonna be 'nothing to hunt any more'."
"If there was."
That was the kind of question that, more often than not over the years, had resulted in a loud, bitter argument between the two of them. Accusations. Slammed doors. One of them walking out on the other. But there was an earnestness in Sam's expression that Dean hadn't seen for a while - one that reminded him of the Sam he'd known a long time ago. The one who'd looked to him with admiration and trust. The Sam who'd been quick to hug Dean when he was pleased.
"Could you?" he asked Sam quietly.
"I don't know. The quiet is kind of nice."
"Long term, though? For, like, months? Or years?"
Sam stared off into the distance for a minute. "It'd be good, in a way. After everything we've been through."
"Not seeing anybody else? Not being part of the world?"
"It has a certain appeal."
Dean couldn't argue that - at least, not within the privacy of his own head. The last couple of years had definitely piled the crap high, wide and deep. But the whole desert island concept, for the duration?
They'd never really had friends, he and Sam. They'd been a community of two, and for the most part, that had been okay.
But for the long term?
"Not what I'd pick," he said with a small smile. "Out here with nothing much to do? Besides, dude - it's way too close to -"
"The tsunamis."
"You got it."
"You do know nobody's ever been swept away from here."
"Doesn't mean it'll never happen."
Sam groaned and sat down in his recliner. "Okay, then," he said. "We'll pick someplace else."
Where? Dean wondered, as onscreen, James T. Kirk pondered age and infirmity and death with Bones McCoy. If, somehow, the job ended tomorrow - where would they go? Sam could return to school, maybe, though nothing said he needed to go back to Stanford. (Why Sam had picked Stanford in the first place, Dean had never been sure.) He could choose from any one of a dozen schools, assuming, of course, that their status as fugitives vanished along with the world's seemingly endless supply of monsters.
Maybe he'd decide to pursue something other than the law.
They could find a place to live. A small house, maybe, or an apartment. Become part of a community. Meet people. Make friends.
Eventually, maybe, get married. Have kids.
Go back to Lawrence?
"You want to watch something else?" Sam asked.
"I - what?"
"You're not paying any attention to the movie. We can pick a different one if you want."
"No," Dean said. "I'm watching."
~~~~~~~~
He found Huck again two days later, this time not quite so much by accident. The old man and the dog were walking along the road side by side, Huck whistling softly and the dog listening intently, as if each note conveyed something that only the dog understood. Dean, again wandering through the woods, stopped when he saw them and waited to see if Huck would notice him.
Huck did, although he was some distance away.
Somehow, that was not a surprise.
"You boys doing all right?" Huck asked as he came closer, the dog at his heels.
"Kind of bored," Dean told him.
"We could get you a job if you like," the old man chuckled. "There's a garage in town looking for some help."
Back in the day, Dean would have taken him up on that; he'd taken plenty of part-time jobs to bring in some cash, either to supplement Dad's income or to provide the three of them with an income, period.
But these days?
"You're wishing you could," Huck said softly, with a layer of sympathy in his voice.
Dean stood for a long while with his hands in his pockets, looking both at Huck and past him, into the stretch of not-much-of-anything that lay behind the old man. He'd never been much of one for confessing things to strangers (Dad having been unbendingly strict about that, and Dean had absorbed the lesson well), but there was a kindness in Huck's face that wasn't a common thing in Dean's life - particularly, not any more.
"Yeah," he said.
"You might be able to pull it off. But it's a risk."
In his head, Dean heard himself telling the old man everything: about Dad's last words, about the Croatoan virus and his fear that Sam would die, about the demon's "special kids", about Meg, and Gordon.
About the hand of God.
But he could also hear his father's voice. So he said nothing.
"What can I bring you?" Huck asked.
A miracle? Dean thought.
"I don't mind a drive," Huck said. "And my boon companion, here, loves a good excursion. If I need to go into Boston to get it, so be it."
"Sam wants more books."
"Does he. And what do you want?"
"I -" Dean said.
He cut himself off, because there was far too much kindness in the old man's face, and it reminded him far too much of people who had been cut out of his life, of things he hadn't seen, or heard, or felt in a very long time.
"I'm good," he said finally, his voice barely above a whisper.
"Are you sure?"
Dean had never been much of a dog lover - didn't seek them out the way Sam did, never found much delight in their company. Of course, that had a lot to do with the pointlessness of yearning for things you couldn't have, something he'd tried to explain to Sam over and over again since Sam was maybe four years old and had demanded they bring home the frantic, noisy puppy they'd seen in a neighbor's yard. More than that, there was no special communication between Dean and animals of pretty much any variety. There'd never been.
But he crouched down in front of Yogi, which took Huck's face well out of his sight line, and he rested a hand on the dog's mottled brown-and-white head.
"You want to take him for a walk?" Huck asked. "He'll walk along with you."
Dean could not have said, at that moment, what it was he really wanted. He could not have put everything, or anything, that was going through his head right then into words, even in answer to the compassionate question of a grizzled, one-eyed old man.
He told me I might need to kill my brother, he thought; that much of the sudden storm in his mind was clear.
He told me I might need to kill Sammy.
"Did you know my dad?" he asked Huck with a rasp in his voice.
"No," Huck said. "But I know Deacon. When he says somebody's worth bothering about, I'll give up some time to do that."
When Dean shifted to his knees, the dog moved in close, pressing his head into Dean's chest, asking in the particular way of dogs to be embraced and acknowledged and loved. Dean held onto him for a long time, his face pressed into the dog's soft fur, and when he finally let go and leaned back a little, Huck reached down and rested a hand on his shoulder.
"Don't lose sight of what you have, son," he said softly. "Don't forget there's a now."
Rather than respond to that - or deal with it in any way at all - Dean scrambled to his feet and stumbled off into the woods.
~~~~~~~~
"You said you wanted to go to the Grand Canyon," Sam said. "Do you want to go there now?"
"Other side of the country," Dean replied.
"Yeah, but -"
"I drove a million miles to get here. No, I don't want to drive to the Grand Canyon."
Sam was silent for a minute, gnawing on his thumbnail. His book lay abandoned on his lap, and he'd stopped grabbing handfuls of chips out of the bag. "Did we -" he said finally. "I kind of feel like we might have gone there once? With Dad. Did that happen, or am I imagining it?"
"Long time ago," Dean murmured.
"Were there… mules?"
"Yeah."
"Why the hell did Dad take us into the Grand Canyon on mules?"
"Job."
"Oh."
Dean let the copy of Motor Trend Huck had brought drop shut, forgotten. It was brand-new, had some great articles, but for all it was holding his interest, it might as well have been his freshman year algebra textbook. Eyes on the toes of his boots, he remembered a hot, dry day, a downhill trail that seemed to be a thousand miles long, Sam's continual jabbering about mules, and a couple of Native American men who were every bit as skeptical of John Winchester as Dad was of them.
"Didn't really see the canyon," he said quietly. "Long drive. A shitload of trees, coming in, and a lot of roadkill. I felt like -"
"What?"
"Like it might be good to see it now. You know. See it."
Sam pondered that for a moment, then said, "We can go. I can drive if you want."
Shaking his head, Dean got up from the couch and roamed around the tiny living room, stopping for a minute to peer out the window set into the top of the front door. As he'd expected, no one was out there. Nothing was out there except trees, and the Impala.
"Too much to do," he told his brother.
He expected Sam to disagree with him, to remind him that people took vacations. Shut off the needs of the rest of the world for a while. But Sam didn't. So… for all that he'd pretended otherwise, reading and sleeping and walking on the beach - maybe Sam was no more at ease here than Dean was.
Maybe neither of them was any more at ease than Dad had ever been.
"Someday," Dean said. "We'll go, huh? After we've got that yellow-eyed son of a bitch taken care of."
When he turned to look at Sam, Sam was smoothing the pages of his book with the palm of his hand, even though they weren't wrinkled. Even though they wouldn't respond to his touch, as the dog had to Dean's. His expression was a far cry from the one he'd worn almost the whole time they'd been at the Grand Canyon all those years ago, when heat and dirt, a trio of stinking, ill-tempered mules and a blanket on the ground serving as a bed had seemed to him to be a fantastic adventure - one that, apparently, Sam remembered very little of.
Sam lifted his head and smiled. Then he sighed.
"Got a lot of things we can do," Dean said. "After we kill that son of a bitch. We'll do the whole list. Sound good?"
"Sure, Dean. Sounds great."
"Take pictures and everything. On a real camera."
"Yeah."
Nodding, Dean pushed the door open and stumbled down the steps to his car.
He almost got in. Almost fumbled the keys out of his pocket so he could start the engine and drive. He had no place in mind to go - although he certainly would not have headed for the Grand Canyon - and nothing in mind to do when he got there. The driving itself would have been enough. He'd wondered some years ago whether, because he'd spent so many thousands of hours inside that car (and, occasionally, someone else's car, or truck), being inside a moving vehicle was his "normal."
It felt like that now.
Like standing still, not moving, was wrong somehow.
Wrong, and at the same time, incredibly, astonishingly screwed up.
So he brought himself up short, a few paces short of the car. He covered the rest of the distance at a shuffle and stood leaning against her solid, cool-to-the-touch bulk, head bowed, feeling a headache beginning to crawl its way up his spine.
To his surprise, when a subtle movement made him glance down, the dog was sitting at his feet.
Huck was nowhere nearby, and the dog seemed neither distressed by that nor anxious to return home, wherever home might be. (Nearby? Twenty miles away? Dean had no idea.) Yogi simply sat quietly alongside the car, tongue lolling off his lower lip, tail gently thumping out a rhythm against the dirt.
"You want something?" Dean muttered.
The dog cocked his head.
"Walk? That what you want? Then you oughta talk to Sam."
The dog glanced toward the house, as if he knew exactly who "Sam" was, and where he could be found, but he made no move in that direction. Instead, he took a step away from the car, then another, and looked back over his shoulder, clearly expecting Dean to follow.
"That old man?" Dean said. "He ain't anybody's friggin' Obi Wan Kenobi. He's an old man with one eye, and apparently, a lot of disposable cash. So if either one of you figures you can manipulate me like this, you got the wrong guy."
Unimpressed, the dog kept walking.
Every few yards, he'd pause and look back.
He'd gone about a hundred feet when Dean shoved his hands into his pockets and started to follow.
They walked for about an hour, through parts of the woods Dean had seen a dozen times, and some he hadn't seen at all. They passed a handful of small houses, all of them with a mid-century look, tucked in close together, and all of them closed up and dark; and what looked to have once been a snack bar or convenience store of some sort, probably offering a few necessary items to the tourists, now boarded up and abandoned.
Somehow, they came nowhere near the main road, though Dean could hear the faint hum of traffic in the distance.
You could say the day was silent, but it wasn't. The whisper of the traffic, the songs and cries of a dozen kinds of birds, the rustle of the breeze in the trees - it was a music of sorts, one Dean hadn't paid attention to for years. As he pushed his way through the trees, trailing along in the wake of Huck's mongrel dog, he became more aware of the middle-of-spring warmth in the breeze and the brilliance of the sun filtering down through the branches.
After a while, he began to feel some small sense of comfort, a minute lessening of the load he'd been carrying since the summer before, when he'd stood in a woods a long way from here, watching what was left of the man who had always been his compass be consumed by a funeral pyre.
Finally, he and the dog came within sight of the beach.
It was too rocky to be of much interest to the general public, Dean noted as the dog led him closer to the water: the strip of sand was narrow and coarse and sharply sloped, not really suitable for sunbathing or beach volleyball or any other sort of leisure activity, so what Sam had been doing down here all that time, he couldn't imagine. Walking, he supposed. That was the one thing you could do here. Walk.
Pick out a rock and sit.
Stare out across the water.
At… what? England? Africa?
That was way too much nothing for him. Had been for the best part of four years now, ever since the last time he'd set foot on a beach. The spring of 2003, Sam gone for a year, contact between them cut off after a bitter, terrible conversation. Not coming back, Sam said over a bad cell phone connection, not for the summer, not ever.
Live your own frigging life, would you?
Let it go, Dean. Just let it go.
The dog nudged up against Dean's leg and he sat down hard on the damp sand, jarring his spine enough to make his teeth ache.
He'd thought, back then, that he ought to walk right on out into the surf and keep going. The bottom dropped off sharply after fifty feet or so, someone had told him; beyond that, there was a fairly deep trench, and more often than not, an undertow. He thought about that for a good long while: the likelihood that his body would insist that he swim until he was exhausted, and after that, he'd be able to sink beneath the surface.
And let it go.
He could still hunt, of course. He'd been hauled from place to place for a year, from one hunt to another, backing Dad up, backing other people up, salting and burning, shooting, dismembering, turning destruction into a solution for other people's problems. He would have liked to stay in a place for a little while, now and then - long enough for someone to offer a thank you that was more than a few mumbled words - but Dad was having no part of that.
Dad, who seemed to have forgotten that he had tasked Dean with one thing, just one thing, the night of the fire.
Take care of Sammy.
Sam, who had hung the hell up on him. Who'd told him not to call again.
"What do you do, when it's all gone?" he asked the dog, who was sitting dutifully by his side, tail sweeping the sand. "The fuck do you do, when you got one job your whole life, and then you don't have it any more?"
~~~~~~~~
He spent a good five hours at the beach, interrupted, briefly, by a trip back to the house. He fully expected Sam to show up at some point, but Sam didn't.
That was just as well.
~~~~~~~~
When Sam got up the next morning, Dean greeted him with a full breakfast of bacon and scrambled eggs, hash browns, freshly squeezed orange juice and sandwich steaks - not something Sam normally indulged in, and occasionally grumbled loudly over when Dean ordered it on the road, but this particular morning Sam accepted it with a smile and tucked into it as if he hadn't eaten anything decent in a week.
"Good," he said several times, each time around a hearty mouthful of food.
"Awesome," Dean told him.
After they'd finished eating and had dropped the dishes and pans and cups into a sinkful of soapy water, Sam headed for the recliner.
"Dude," Dean said before he could sit.
Sam raised a brow.
"Nice out. Thought you might wanna walk off some of those calories."
"Maybe later."
"Nah," Dean said. "Nice out. And we oughta - you know. Get moving pretty soon. Been here long enough. Still got a job to do, you know. People in trouble. Ugly shit to gank. Dad 'd have a word or two to say about how long we been here already, since neither one of us has a busted leg, or, you know. That blight you had that time in Oklahoma."
Obviously suspicious of all that, Sam frowned.
"Whaddaya say?" Dean prodded. "Walk? Then we clean up and get the hell out of here."
Sam took a good long look at the recliner, then nodded. His reluctance couldn't have been plainer if he'd written it out on his forehead with a Sharpie marker, but he didn't argue. Instead, he grabbed his jacket off the rack beside the door and led the way outside, stopping midway between the house and the car.
"You have a destination in mind?" he asked then.
"Kinda do," Dean told him.
The dog had gone home - wherever the hell that was - sometime after dark the night before, so the two of them were alone. His absence left somewhat of a void for Dean, who'd grown accustomed to Yogi's steadfast presence at his side, to the sense of support and acceptance the dog provided - but, he told himself, he didn't need that right now. He made a small show of ambling through the woods for a couple of minutes, choosing a course that would lead subtly but inevitably to the beach.
"We - what are we doing?" Sam asked when they were almost there.
"Going to the beach. You've been after my ass for a week to go to the damn beach, so we're going to the beach."
"And then we're leaving."
"Right."
Sam had no idea, Dean thought with some satisfaction.
And the look on Sam's face when they arrived at the small, sandy cove fifty yards or so to the east of the house…
Well, that was frigging priceless.
"That's -" Sam said. "What is that?"
The afternoon before, Dean had returned to the house long enough to spirit out of the storage shed alongside the kitchen door the set of sand toys Sam said he'd discovered. The cache included several plastic buckets of varying sizes, a trio of plastic sifters, a half-dozen neon-colored foam noodles, and a giant inflatable seahorse. Because Sam had dozed off in the recliner, he was able to tote the whole collection (together with the shovel they customarily used to dig up graves, and some chunks of scrap wood that had also been stashed in the shed) down to the beach without attracting Sam's attention (or, thank goodness, anyone else's).
"Sand castle," Dean said.
"That's -"
"Kind of leaves you speechless, doesn't it?"
Once upon a time, the two of them had delighted in creating castles on the beach, some of them constructed only of sand, others employing odds and ends of wood, plastic, metal, whatever they were able to put together. A few times, the competition had resulted in tears and outrage. Other times, prizes were awarded.
This right here, Dean figured, was worth a gold medal.
It stood about four feet high, partially formed by the arc of jagged rocks that lined one small part of the beach. He'd erected walls of sand and wood, had dug an impressive moat and filled it with pebbles, and laid a road bordered by small plants and foam noodles. The turrets had turned out particularly nice, he thought - especially the one on the left, from the towering window of which a naked Malibu Barbie trailed her long (and somewhat mildewed) hair, Rapunzel style.
"You -" Sam said. "When -"
"While you were sleeping."
Sam got closer, treading cautiously through the sand, and bent toward the thing, frowning.
"Admit it," Dean said. "King of Sandcastles. Huh? Nobody can friggin' touch me."
He knew what Sam would say, eventually. At least, he hoped he did. He'd left one entire side of the castle unfinished.
"That's -" Sam said. "What's up with that?"
"Left it for you."
"For me."
"And there's all that stuff." With a nod Dean indicated the collection of toys and paraphernalia he hadn't yet incorporated into the castle or its surroundings, more than enough to double the size of the structure and decorate it nicely.
"So I'm supposed to - Dean, I'm not five."
"Really? 'Cause I have my doubts."
"You suck. You know that? Jesus, man. Look at this mess. We're gonna have to drag all this back up to the house."
"Says who?"
"You can't just leave this here."
"I repeat."
Sam stood back from the castle, hands buried in the pockets of his jacket, and shook his head. "Seriously? You want me to goof around with a bunch of plastic toys you dug out of the shed. That's your plan."
"Not you," Dean said.
Again, Sam hiked a brow.
"Us," Dean told him. "Kinda thought we'd work on it together. Been a while, you know. Since we did this. Used to have a lot of fun with it. Collecting broken stuff out of people's sheds or wherever and building something out of it."
"There's a naked doll in there, man."
"Yep."
"And -"
Suddenly, as if the direction of the wind had changed, an enormous grin broke out across Sam's face and he started to laugh. It was just a chuckle at first, but it grew quickly until it had taken over his entire body, making him shudder and convulse as tears began to roll down his face. He lost his footing after a minute and dropped to his knees in the sand, howling with laughter.
"That's kinda over the top," Dean told him. "It ain't that funny."
But Sam was already lost. He kept laughing as he toppled over onto his side, hands pressed to his face, and went on guffawing through his fingers.
"Dude," Dean said. "Overkill."
When Sam finally settled into a hiccuppy giggle, and had worked himself up into a sit, Dean sat down beside him.
They were looking out across the water.
Toward England. Or Africa. Or whatever the hell was out there.
"I'm glad," Sam said finally. "That Deacon sent us here, instead of to some motel. Or some cabin out in the woods."
"You do know that recliner won't fit in the car."
"Yeah. I kind of figured that."
There was a one-eyed old man somewhere nearby, Dean figured. An old man and a dog who was smarter than the average bear. Boon companions, the old man had said, and that was good - that they had each other. That they could deal with whatever needed dealing with, together. That whatever they had going was comfortable enough that they could afford to take care of a couple of strangers who'd come rolling in from Green River.
"Wouldn't be all that bad, would it?" he said after a minute.
"Hmm?" Sam said.
"Place like this. Some peace and quiet."
"No," Sam said quietly. "It wouldn't be bad at all."
* * * * *
(The original Summergen entry is here.
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 12,000 words
Part 1 is here.
WOULD YOU WALK TO THE EDGE OF THE OCEAN
By Carol Davis
Part Two
Their fourth day there, Dean noticed the collection of stuff spread across the top of Sam's dresser: seashells, a sand dollar, bits of sea glass, and some small, colorful stones. "What's all that for?" he asked when Sam came back from yet another trip to the beach.
"Nothing," Sam said. "Just thought they were interesting."
And he produced from his pocket another handful of odds and ends.
"You did that when you were little," Dean told him. "You were always picking up stuff off the ground." After a moment of thought, during which he fingered a piece of brown sea glass that had likely originally been part of a beer bottle, he added, "Kinda think you got it wrong. Studying to be a lawyer. You should've been one of those CSI guys. You always could go into a place - any place at all - and find something to pick up off the floor. Or the ground."
Sam's forehead wrinkled a little. "Hmm," he said.
"Don't you think?"
"Maybe."
"You're good at that. Finding stuff. Clues."
"So are you."
"Nah," Dean said.
"We could have a contest. Come down to the beach with me, and - say thirty minutes. We'll see who finds the most interesting stuff."
"You kidding me?" Dean scoffed. "You've already stripped that beach."
"I haven't, man. It's a big beach."
"I gotta wash the car."
Sam stood where he was for a moment, frowning at his brother; then he sighed and wandered off. Of course he headed for the recliner - the whole time they'd been there, he'd either been in the battered plaid chair, in bed, or walking on the beach.
Yesterday, he'd finished The Da Vinci Code and had moved on to a hardback copy of Stephen King's Dreamcatcher.
"Thought you swore off reading King," Dean said. "Did he stop getting things wrong?"
"Not a lot of options," Sam muttered. "Forty DVDs, and three books."
"What's the other one?"
"The South Beach Diet."
"Oh. Well - leave a note. Out on the door or something. You find a bucket anywhere around here?"
That roused Sam's suspicions. "What do you need a bucket for?"
"Told you. I'm gonna wash the car."
They did it together. The day had turned warm enough for t-shirts, which meant it was warm enough to work with pails of water. The Impala had collected a lot of road dust on the way from Little Rock; really, she hadn't been properly washed and detailed since California - the other side of the damn country, Dean reflected as he reached up into the driver's side wheel well to scrub at a stubborn clump of something sticky and gritty.
He'd almost gotten it out when cold water splashed the back of his head.
"HEY!" he yelped.
He struggled to his feet to find Sam grinning ear to ear, the house's ragged garden hose in hand, his thumb on the trigger.
"Don't you -" Dean warned him.
He got a faceful of water for his trouble.
A minute later they were both drenched, chasing each other around the car armed with sopping-wet sponges the size of bricks, name-calling, wrestling, struggling for possession of the hose - something they hadn't done since long before Sam left for Stanford, back in what had begun to seem like another lifetime. Washing the car had never been a sedate activity back then, unless one of them was being punished for something; there'd always been music involved (from the car radio, or a boom box set up nearby), soaked clothing, a lot of mud.
They were making enough noise to attract attention, Dean realized. But… what the hell.
By the time they stopped, they were both breathless and muddy, and the car was a long way from being clean. If anything, it looked worse than it had when he'd first turned on the hose.
He'd gotten that gunk out of the wheel well, though.
"You cooking dinner, or am I?" Sam asked.
Dean took a moment to consider the situation. "You messed up my car, asshat. You not only oughta cook, you ought to feed it to me."
"Really."
"Hell, yeah."
Grinning, Sam crouched down just long enough to scoop up a handful of mud. "You want me to feed it to you."
It took Dean almost twenty minutes - and some very diligent flossing - to get all the sand out of his teeth. Though it might have been his imagination, he tasted the particular tang of Cape Cod mud throughout dinner, and took great care to wash it down with the excellent micro-brewed beer Huck had dropped off with the latest box of groceries.
"He's spending a lot of money on all this food," Sam observed.
"Deacon told him to take care of us, I guess."
"Still."
"So - what? You want to pay him back? We're not exactly rolling in cash, and I'm thinking he doesn't take credit cards."
Sam was silent for a minute as he devoured another piece of fried chicken, part of the dinner that had mysteriously appeared on their doorstep while the two of them were cleaning up after what Dean would think of later on as The Epic Mud Battle. "I kind of want to thank him," Sam said finally. "He's done a lot for us. And he only showed up that one time so you could talk to him. Every other time - jeez, man, he's like the Stealth Grocery Service."
Dean shook his head. "I don't think he meant to let me talk to him. I was coming out of the can and I saw something move outside."
"And what's the point in that? Not saying hello?"
"Dunno," Dean said with a shrug. "Does it matter?"
"I just - have we ever met a hunter who wasn't kind of… weird?"
"Pastor Jim."
"Not really a hunter."
"I don't know. Ellen's pretty sensible."
"Again - not really a hunter. More kind of… you know. An information clearinghouse."
They both considered the question.
Said "Ash!" in unison and burst out laughing.
They cleaned up their dishes and the remains of their dinner together, both of them recalling the monumental invasion of ants at that disastrous trailer outside Missoula that had been their home for a couple of weeks, back when Sam was in middle school and Dean was failing to find any good reason to remain in high school. The floor and countertops had turned almost fully black with tiny, milling bodies, a situation the three Winchesters had finally resolved by packing up and leaving.
Spotting a couple of bugs doing reconnaissance in the kitchen that afternoon had been enough to convince both Sam and Dean to keep the place clean of crumbs and food spills, lest they wake up in the morning at the center of another massive attack.
"Dad would laugh," Dean said as he dried a clean plate with a checkered cloth. "You and me, doing the frigging dishes."
"And not under duress."
"It's adorable."
"Not the word I would have used, but - yeah. Pretty funny."
"Just so you know - nobody's gonna dust. Agreed?"
They were settling in to watch Wrath of Khan when Sam asked suddenly, "Could you live in a place like this?"
"I don't know. Why?"
"If there wasn't anything to hunt any more. After we find the yellow-eyed demon and kill it. And - if we could just… stop. And have a normal life. Could you live in a place like this?"
"Kind of a moot question, isn't it? There's never gonna be 'nothing to hunt any more'."
"If there was."
That was the kind of question that, more often than not over the years, had resulted in a loud, bitter argument between the two of them. Accusations. Slammed doors. One of them walking out on the other. But there was an earnestness in Sam's expression that Dean hadn't seen for a while - one that reminded him of the Sam he'd known a long time ago. The one who'd looked to him with admiration and trust. The Sam who'd been quick to hug Dean when he was pleased.
"Could you?" he asked Sam quietly.
"I don't know. The quiet is kind of nice."
"Long term, though? For, like, months? Or years?"
Sam stared off into the distance for a minute. "It'd be good, in a way. After everything we've been through."
"Not seeing anybody else? Not being part of the world?"
"It has a certain appeal."
Dean couldn't argue that - at least, not within the privacy of his own head. The last couple of years had definitely piled the crap high, wide and deep. But the whole desert island concept, for the duration?
They'd never really had friends, he and Sam. They'd been a community of two, and for the most part, that had been okay.
But for the long term?
"Not what I'd pick," he said with a small smile. "Out here with nothing much to do? Besides, dude - it's way too close to -"
"The tsunamis."
"You got it."
"You do know nobody's ever been swept away from here."
"Doesn't mean it'll never happen."
Sam groaned and sat down in his recliner. "Okay, then," he said. "We'll pick someplace else."
Where? Dean wondered, as onscreen, James T. Kirk pondered age and infirmity and death with Bones McCoy. If, somehow, the job ended tomorrow - where would they go? Sam could return to school, maybe, though nothing said he needed to go back to Stanford. (Why Sam had picked Stanford in the first place, Dean had never been sure.) He could choose from any one of a dozen schools, assuming, of course, that their status as fugitives vanished along with the world's seemingly endless supply of monsters.
Maybe he'd decide to pursue something other than the law.
They could find a place to live. A small house, maybe, or an apartment. Become part of a community. Meet people. Make friends.
Eventually, maybe, get married. Have kids.
Go back to Lawrence?
"You want to watch something else?" Sam asked.
"I - what?"
"You're not paying any attention to the movie. We can pick a different one if you want."
"No," Dean said. "I'm watching."
~~~~~~~~
He found Huck again two days later, this time not quite so much by accident. The old man and the dog were walking along the road side by side, Huck whistling softly and the dog listening intently, as if each note conveyed something that only the dog understood. Dean, again wandering through the woods, stopped when he saw them and waited to see if Huck would notice him.
Huck did, although he was some distance away.
Somehow, that was not a surprise.
"You boys doing all right?" Huck asked as he came closer, the dog at his heels.
"Kind of bored," Dean told him.
"We could get you a job if you like," the old man chuckled. "There's a garage in town looking for some help."
Back in the day, Dean would have taken him up on that; he'd taken plenty of part-time jobs to bring in some cash, either to supplement Dad's income or to provide the three of them with an income, period.
But these days?
"You're wishing you could," Huck said softly, with a layer of sympathy in his voice.
Dean stood for a long while with his hands in his pockets, looking both at Huck and past him, into the stretch of not-much-of-anything that lay behind the old man. He'd never been much of one for confessing things to strangers (Dad having been unbendingly strict about that, and Dean had absorbed the lesson well), but there was a kindness in Huck's face that wasn't a common thing in Dean's life - particularly, not any more.
"Yeah," he said.
"You might be able to pull it off. But it's a risk."
In his head, Dean heard himself telling the old man everything: about Dad's last words, about the Croatoan virus and his fear that Sam would die, about the demon's "special kids", about Meg, and Gordon.
About the hand of God.
But he could also hear his father's voice. So he said nothing.
"What can I bring you?" Huck asked.
A miracle? Dean thought.
"I don't mind a drive," Huck said. "And my boon companion, here, loves a good excursion. If I need to go into Boston to get it, so be it."
"Sam wants more books."
"Does he. And what do you want?"
"I -" Dean said.
He cut himself off, because there was far too much kindness in the old man's face, and it reminded him far too much of people who had been cut out of his life, of things he hadn't seen, or heard, or felt in a very long time.
"I'm good," he said finally, his voice barely above a whisper.
"Are you sure?"
Dean had never been much of a dog lover - didn't seek them out the way Sam did, never found much delight in their company. Of course, that had a lot to do with the pointlessness of yearning for things you couldn't have, something he'd tried to explain to Sam over and over again since Sam was maybe four years old and had demanded they bring home the frantic, noisy puppy they'd seen in a neighbor's yard. More than that, there was no special communication between Dean and animals of pretty much any variety. There'd never been.
But he crouched down in front of Yogi, which took Huck's face well out of his sight line, and he rested a hand on the dog's mottled brown-and-white head.
"You want to take him for a walk?" Huck asked. "He'll walk along with you."
Dean could not have said, at that moment, what it was he really wanted. He could not have put everything, or anything, that was going through his head right then into words, even in answer to the compassionate question of a grizzled, one-eyed old man.
He told me I might need to kill my brother, he thought; that much of the sudden storm in his mind was clear.
He told me I might need to kill Sammy.
"Did you know my dad?" he asked Huck with a rasp in his voice.
"No," Huck said. "But I know Deacon. When he says somebody's worth bothering about, I'll give up some time to do that."
When Dean shifted to his knees, the dog moved in close, pressing his head into Dean's chest, asking in the particular way of dogs to be embraced and acknowledged and loved. Dean held onto him for a long time, his face pressed into the dog's soft fur, and when he finally let go and leaned back a little, Huck reached down and rested a hand on his shoulder.
"Don't lose sight of what you have, son," he said softly. "Don't forget there's a now."
Rather than respond to that - or deal with it in any way at all - Dean scrambled to his feet and stumbled off into the woods.
~~~~~~~~
"You said you wanted to go to the Grand Canyon," Sam said. "Do you want to go there now?"
"Other side of the country," Dean replied.
"Yeah, but -"
"I drove a million miles to get here. No, I don't want to drive to the Grand Canyon."
Sam was silent for a minute, gnawing on his thumbnail. His book lay abandoned on his lap, and he'd stopped grabbing handfuls of chips out of the bag. "Did we -" he said finally. "I kind of feel like we might have gone there once? With Dad. Did that happen, or am I imagining it?"
"Long time ago," Dean murmured.
"Were there… mules?"
"Yeah."
"Why the hell did Dad take us into the Grand Canyon on mules?"
"Job."
"Oh."
Dean let the copy of Motor Trend Huck had brought drop shut, forgotten. It was brand-new, had some great articles, but for all it was holding his interest, it might as well have been his freshman year algebra textbook. Eyes on the toes of his boots, he remembered a hot, dry day, a downhill trail that seemed to be a thousand miles long, Sam's continual jabbering about mules, and a couple of Native American men who were every bit as skeptical of John Winchester as Dad was of them.
"Didn't really see the canyon," he said quietly. "Long drive. A shitload of trees, coming in, and a lot of roadkill. I felt like -"
"What?"
"Like it might be good to see it now. You know. See it."
Sam pondered that for a moment, then said, "We can go. I can drive if you want."
Shaking his head, Dean got up from the couch and roamed around the tiny living room, stopping for a minute to peer out the window set into the top of the front door. As he'd expected, no one was out there. Nothing was out there except trees, and the Impala.
"Too much to do," he told his brother.
He expected Sam to disagree with him, to remind him that people took vacations. Shut off the needs of the rest of the world for a while. But Sam didn't. So… for all that he'd pretended otherwise, reading and sleeping and walking on the beach - maybe Sam was no more at ease here than Dean was.
Maybe neither of them was any more at ease than Dad had ever been.
"Someday," Dean said. "We'll go, huh? After we've got that yellow-eyed son of a bitch taken care of."
When he turned to look at Sam, Sam was smoothing the pages of his book with the palm of his hand, even though they weren't wrinkled. Even though they wouldn't respond to his touch, as the dog had to Dean's. His expression was a far cry from the one he'd worn almost the whole time they'd been at the Grand Canyon all those years ago, when heat and dirt, a trio of stinking, ill-tempered mules and a blanket on the ground serving as a bed had seemed to him to be a fantastic adventure - one that, apparently, Sam remembered very little of.
Sam lifted his head and smiled. Then he sighed.
"Got a lot of things we can do," Dean said. "After we kill that son of a bitch. We'll do the whole list. Sound good?"
"Sure, Dean. Sounds great."
"Take pictures and everything. On a real camera."
"Yeah."
Nodding, Dean pushed the door open and stumbled down the steps to his car.
He almost got in. Almost fumbled the keys out of his pocket so he could start the engine and drive. He had no place in mind to go - although he certainly would not have headed for the Grand Canyon - and nothing in mind to do when he got there. The driving itself would have been enough. He'd wondered some years ago whether, because he'd spent so many thousands of hours inside that car (and, occasionally, someone else's car, or truck), being inside a moving vehicle was his "normal."
It felt like that now.
Like standing still, not moving, was wrong somehow.
Wrong, and at the same time, incredibly, astonishingly screwed up.
So he brought himself up short, a few paces short of the car. He covered the rest of the distance at a shuffle and stood leaning against her solid, cool-to-the-touch bulk, head bowed, feeling a headache beginning to crawl its way up his spine.
To his surprise, when a subtle movement made him glance down, the dog was sitting at his feet.
Huck was nowhere nearby, and the dog seemed neither distressed by that nor anxious to return home, wherever home might be. (Nearby? Twenty miles away? Dean had no idea.) Yogi simply sat quietly alongside the car, tongue lolling off his lower lip, tail gently thumping out a rhythm against the dirt.
"You want something?" Dean muttered.
The dog cocked his head.
"Walk? That what you want? Then you oughta talk to Sam."
The dog glanced toward the house, as if he knew exactly who "Sam" was, and where he could be found, but he made no move in that direction. Instead, he took a step away from the car, then another, and looked back over his shoulder, clearly expecting Dean to follow.
"That old man?" Dean said. "He ain't anybody's friggin' Obi Wan Kenobi. He's an old man with one eye, and apparently, a lot of disposable cash. So if either one of you figures you can manipulate me like this, you got the wrong guy."
Unimpressed, the dog kept walking.
Every few yards, he'd pause and look back.
He'd gone about a hundred feet when Dean shoved his hands into his pockets and started to follow.
They walked for about an hour, through parts of the woods Dean had seen a dozen times, and some he hadn't seen at all. They passed a handful of small houses, all of them with a mid-century look, tucked in close together, and all of them closed up and dark; and what looked to have once been a snack bar or convenience store of some sort, probably offering a few necessary items to the tourists, now boarded up and abandoned.
Somehow, they came nowhere near the main road, though Dean could hear the faint hum of traffic in the distance.
You could say the day was silent, but it wasn't. The whisper of the traffic, the songs and cries of a dozen kinds of birds, the rustle of the breeze in the trees - it was a music of sorts, one Dean hadn't paid attention to for years. As he pushed his way through the trees, trailing along in the wake of Huck's mongrel dog, he became more aware of the middle-of-spring warmth in the breeze and the brilliance of the sun filtering down through the branches.
After a while, he began to feel some small sense of comfort, a minute lessening of the load he'd been carrying since the summer before, when he'd stood in a woods a long way from here, watching what was left of the man who had always been his compass be consumed by a funeral pyre.
Finally, he and the dog came within sight of the beach.
It was too rocky to be of much interest to the general public, Dean noted as the dog led him closer to the water: the strip of sand was narrow and coarse and sharply sloped, not really suitable for sunbathing or beach volleyball or any other sort of leisure activity, so what Sam had been doing down here all that time, he couldn't imagine. Walking, he supposed. That was the one thing you could do here. Walk.
Pick out a rock and sit.
Stare out across the water.
At… what? England? Africa?
That was way too much nothing for him. Had been for the best part of four years now, ever since the last time he'd set foot on a beach. The spring of 2003, Sam gone for a year, contact between them cut off after a bitter, terrible conversation. Not coming back, Sam said over a bad cell phone connection, not for the summer, not ever.
Live your own frigging life, would you?
Let it go, Dean. Just let it go.
The dog nudged up against Dean's leg and he sat down hard on the damp sand, jarring his spine enough to make his teeth ache.
He'd thought, back then, that he ought to walk right on out into the surf and keep going. The bottom dropped off sharply after fifty feet or so, someone had told him; beyond that, there was a fairly deep trench, and more often than not, an undertow. He thought about that for a good long while: the likelihood that his body would insist that he swim until he was exhausted, and after that, he'd be able to sink beneath the surface.
And let it go.
He could still hunt, of course. He'd been hauled from place to place for a year, from one hunt to another, backing Dad up, backing other people up, salting and burning, shooting, dismembering, turning destruction into a solution for other people's problems. He would have liked to stay in a place for a little while, now and then - long enough for someone to offer a thank you that was more than a few mumbled words - but Dad was having no part of that.
Dad, who seemed to have forgotten that he had tasked Dean with one thing, just one thing, the night of the fire.
Take care of Sammy.
Sam, who had hung the hell up on him. Who'd told him not to call again.
"What do you do, when it's all gone?" he asked the dog, who was sitting dutifully by his side, tail sweeping the sand. "The fuck do you do, when you got one job your whole life, and then you don't have it any more?"
~~~~~~~~
He spent a good five hours at the beach, interrupted, briefly, by a trip back to the house. He fully expected Sam to show up at some point, but Sam didn't.
That was just as well.
~~~~~~~~
When Sam got up the next morning, Dean greeted him with a full breakfast of bacon and scrambled eggs, hash browns, freshly squeezed orange juice and sandwich steaks - not something Sam normally indulged in, and occasionally grumbled loudly over when Dean ordered it on the road, but this particular morning Sam accepted it with a smile and tucked into it as if he hadn't eaten anything decent in a week.
"Good," he said several times, each time around a hearty mouthful of food.
"Awesome," Dean told him.
After they'd finished eating and had dropped the dishes and pans and cups into a sinkful of soapy water, Sam headed for the recliner.
"Dude," Dean said before he could sit.
Sam raised a brow.
"Nice out. Thought you might wanna walk off some of those calories."
"Maybe later."
"Nah," Dean said. "Nice out. And we oughta - you know. Get moving pretty soon. Been here long enough. Still got a job to do, you know. People in trouble. Ugly shit to gank. Dad 'd have a word or two to say about how long we been here already, since neither one of us has a busted leg, or, you know. That blight you had that time in Oklahoma."
Obviously suspicious of all that, Sam frowned.
"Whaddaya say?" Dean prodded. "Walk? Then we clean up and get the hell out of here."
Sam took a good long look at the recliner, then nodded. His reluctance couldn't have been plainer if he'd written it out on his forehead with a Sharpie marker, but he didn't argue. Instead, he grabbed his jacket off the rack beside the door and led the way outside, stopping midway between the house and the car.
"You have a destination in mind?" he asked then.
"Kinda do," Dean told him.
The dog had gone home - wherever the hell that was - sometime after dark the night before, so the two of them were alone. His absence left somewhat of a void for Dean, who'd grown accustomed to Yogi's steadfast presence at his side, to the sense of support and acceptance the dog provided - but, he told himself, he didn't need that right now. He made a small show of ambling through the woods for a couple of minutes, choosing a course that would lead subtly but inevitably to the beach.
"We - what are we doing?" Sam asked when they were almost there.
"Going to the beach. You've been after my ass for a week to go to the damn beach, so we're going to the beach."
"And then we're leaving."
"Right."
Sam had no idea, Dean thought with some satisfaction.
And the look on Sam's face when they arrived at the small, sandy cove fifty yards or so to the east of the house…
Well, that was frigging priceless.
"That's -" Sam said. "What is that?"
The afternoon before, Dean had returned to the house long enough to spirit out of the storage shed alongside the kitchen door the set of sand toys Sam said he'd discovered. The cache included several plastic buckets of varying sizes, a trio of plastic sifters, a half-dozen neon-colored foam noodles, and a giant inflatable seahorse. Because Sam had dozed off in the recliner, he was able to tote the whole collection (together with the shovel they customarily used to dig up graves, and some chunks of scrap wood that had also been stashed in the shed) down to the beach without attracting Sam's attention (or, thank goodness, anyone else's).
"Sand castle," Dean said.
"That's -"
"Kind of leaves you speechless, doesn't it?"
Once upon a time, the two of them had delighted in creating castles on the beach, some of them constructed only of sand, others employing odds and ends of wood, plastic, metal, whatever they were able to put together. A few times, the competition had resulted in tears and outrage. Other times, prizes were awarded.
This right here, Dean figured, was worth a gold medal.
It stood about four feet high, partially formed by the arc of jagged rocks that lined one small part of the beach. He'd erected walls of sand and wood, had dug an impressive moat and filled it with pebbles, and laid a road bordered by small plants and foam noodles. The turrets had turned out particularly nice, he thought - especially the one on the left, from the towering window of which a naked Malibu Barbie trailed her long (and somewhat mildewed) hair, Rapunzel style.
"You -" Sam said. "When -"
"While you were sleeping."
Sam got closer, treading cautiously through the sand, and bent toward the thing, frowning.
"Admit it," Dean said. "King of Sandcastles. Huh? Nobody can friggin' touch me."
He knew what Sam would say, eventually. At least, he hoped he did. He'd left one entire side of the castle unfinished.
"That's -" Sam said. "What's up with that?"
"Left it for you."
"For me."
"And there's all that stuff." With a nod Dean indicated the collection of toys and paraphernalia he hadn't yet incorporated into the castle or its surroundings, more than enough to double the size of the structure and decorate it nicely.
"So I'm supposed to - Dean, I'm not five."
"Really? 'Cause I have my doubts."
"You suck. You know that? Jesus, man. Look at this mess. We're gonna have to drag all this back up to the house."
"Says who?"
"You can't just leave this here."
"I repeat."
Sam stood back from the castle, hands buried in the pockets of his jacket, and shook his head. "Seriously? You want me to goof around with a bunch of plastic toys you dug out of the shed. That's your plan."
"Not you," Dean said.
Again, Sam hiked a brow.
"Us," Dean told him. "Kinda thought we'd work on it together. Been a while, you know. Since we did this. Used to have a lot of fun with it. Collecting broken stuff out of people's sheds or wherever and building something out of it."
"There's a naked doll in there, man."
"Yep."
"And -"
Suddenly, as if the direction of the wind had changed, an enormous grin broke out across Sam's face and he started to laugh. It was just a chuckle at first, but it grew quickly until it had taken over his entire body, making him shudder and convulse as tears began to roll down his face. He lost his footing after a minute and dropped to his knees in the sand, howling with laughter.
"That's kinda over the top," Dean told him. "It ain't that funny."
But Sam was already lost. He kept laughing as he toppled over onto his side, hands pressed to his face, and went on guffawing through his fingers.
"Dude," Dean said. "Overkill."
When Sam finally settled into a hiccuppy giggle, and had worked himself up into a sit, Dean sat down beside him.
They were looking out across the water.
Toward England. Or Africa. Or whatever the hell was out there.
"I'm glad," Sam said finally. "That Deacon sent us here, instead of to some motel. Or some cabin out in the woods."
"You do know that recliner won't fit in the car."
"Yeah. I kind of figured that."
There was a one-eyed old man somewhere nearby, Dean figured. An old man and a dog who was smarter than the average bear. Boon companions, the old man had said, and that was good - that they had each other. That they could deal with whatever needed dealing with, together. That whatever they had going was comfortable enough that they could afford to take care of a couple of strangers who'd come rolling in from Green River.
"Wouldn't be all that bad, would it?" he said after a minute.
"Hmm?" Sam said.
"Place like this. Some peace and quiet."
"No," Sam said quietly. "It wouldn't be bad at all."
* * * * *
(The original Summergen entry is here.