[fic] Such a Lovely Place
Title: Such a Lovely Place
Rating: PG-13
Summary: The Impala is stuck in traffic, Dean has food poisoning, and Sam is being a teenager. Or, sometimes John really hates his life.
Notes: Written for the prompt "Nausea" on my hc_bingo card. Title is taken from the song Hotel California.
John Winchester is starting to think that the people of Yreka, California can just go and deal with their damn shellycoat problem by themselves. After all, it’s there fault for living in fucking California, with its smoggy cities and its impossible-to-pass streets.
Damn Bobby for telling him about this hunt. You’re in California, you’re the closest who can get there? Cali is a fucking long state. He can’t just pack up and drive across it in a day, much as Singer expects him to do.
And damn the Impala for having fucked-up air conditioning. In California. In August.
“Are we almost there?” Sam deadpans from the backseat.
John glances up in the mirror and glares. “Shut it, Sam.” His youngest is sitting there and scowling, his too-long legs stretched and crossed. Since his growth spurt a year ago, Sam hasn’t been able to really appreciate the joy of being able to see America up close. Not that John blames him, not after they’ve been sitting in traffic for hours.
And not that hunting is exactly a road trip. Sometimes it helps to think about it like that, though, when he doesn’t want to focus on the whole killing thing. Like they’re just on a journey to see what farm really has the longest corn maze in the country, not on a quest to systematically wipe out every single piece of evil shit that’s still alive.
Right now, though? Now John envies the bastards with office jobs even more than he usually does. Unless they’re office bastards in California. John can’t feel anything but bad for them, because it takes a certain level of stupidity to actually want to live here.
The car in front of them inches forward, and John makes up the difference. “Fucking traffic,” he growls, leaning back and closing his eyes. The air inside the car smells like gasoline and smog, like the Impala’s windows aren’t all rolled up tightly in an attempt to ward off exactly that. “Fucking gridlocked state-”
“Dad?” Dean interrupts.
“Yes?” he snaps tersely. He glares at the beat-up bumper of the dusty blue minivan in front of them and wills it to move ahead. Predictably, it doesn’t do any good.
“I, uh. How long is it until we stop for the night?” Dean asks hesitantly.
“Jesus Christ, Dean, I asked you if you had to piss at the last exit!” It’s only around six-thirty, so they can still get a good three hours of driving in before stopping for the evening. Maybe even more than that, depending on how John feels.
And depending on how close they are to Yreka by then. John’s willing to bet that they’ll have moved, say, a mile? That sounds about on par with how things have been going.
“It’s…it’s not about that. I don’t need to piss.”
“Well, then, how about you stop talking in riddles and tell me what the hell you do need?”
Part of John is aware that he’s being overly harsh, but honestly, this isn’t exactly a good time to sit around and think about his parenting skills. Although, really, not too many times are. It’s just that traffic jams are worse than usual, because now he doesn’t have a bottle of Jack to contemplate things with.
“I. Um. I feel kind of sick. Kinda like I’m going to throw up. Sir.”
Oh, for the love of-
“Dean, are you seriously tellin’ me that you’ve gotten carsick now? For Christ’s sake, I think there has to actually be motion for you to get motion sickness.” He grits his teeth together and squeezes the wheel beneath his hands, trying to count to ten, but he keeps getting stuck in his anger right around the time that he hits seven.
That’s just the sort of frigging day it is today: wake up with his knees killing him from running after that black dog last night (and maybe that’s a sign that he isn’t as young as he once was, but damned if that’s ever going to stop him) and wanting just one day to rest before hitting the road, until goddamn Bobby Singer decides to call and tell him about a hunt upstate that John really can’t refuse, since he owes the bastard a hundred times over or something - Singer’s probably keeping proper track. Probably carves a notch in his bedpost every time he does something to put John in his debt. In any case, that meant that he had to get the boys packed up real quick, listen to Sam complain about a girl or some movie he’d been planning to see with friends, listen to Dean’s wisecracks, and then spend the rest of the day crossing grand ol’ Cali.
And now here they are, two hours after setting out (damn Bobby again for telling him about this practically right at rush hour). Moving an inch for every five minutes that they wait.
“I don’t think it’s carsickness so much as it is ‘What the fuck possessed us to stop and grab some grub at a truck stop?’ sickness,” Deans deadpans, despite his supposed urge to chuck his guts up all over the car.
“I told you that they probably left all of their meat out,” says Sam from the backseat, and even as John keeps his eyes closed, he can picture Sam’s mildly smug expression at having outsmarted his brother by eating a slightly-wilted salad. He doesn’t sound overly proud, though. Probably because he realizes that if Dean pukes, he’s going to be as stuck with it as the rest of them.
When John finally trusts himself not to completely bite Dean’s head off, he opens his eyes and actually looks at his son as he moves forward another two centimeters. Come to think of it, Dean doesn’t look like he’s doing too great. He’s sweating (which, to be fair, they all are) and his skin is a sort of sickly grey-green color. He swallows tightly and meets John’s eyes. “Sorry about this.”
“Not your fault,” John grumbles, looking away from him. Pissed or not, he can’t pretend like Dean wants to throw up all over the car. “We’ll get off at the next exit; find a place to hole up then.”
“Maybe we don’t have to,” offers Dean feebly. His voice is lower than usually, as if he’s afraid that every word that comes out will be accompanied by his lunch. John is really, really glad that he just grabbed some fries to eat on the road instead of going for the full-course meal like Dean. “It’s still light. Once traffic starts moving, we’ll probably make good time. Besides, give me a bit of clean air and I’ll be just fine.”
“You really think there’s clean air in Los Angeles?” John shakes his head. “There’s no point risking you tossing your cookies all over my car’s interior any more than we have to.”
“Nice to know what you really care about,” Dean cracks, leaning against the glass of the Impala’s window. John doubts he’s going to find any coolness there; without a working air conditioner, the temperature inside isn’t much lower than the one out, and he honestly doesn’t think that the windows are going to be any better than the leather seats. But Dean really does look like crap, so he decides not to tell him that.
Instead, he glances behind at Sam. “There a bag back there?”
Sam looks around, leaning under the seats to check (and if he finds that the boys have been leaving their trash under the back bench, there’s going to be hell to pay). “Just the one from lunch.”
“That’ll do. Pass it up here.”
It’s a greasy paper bag, and part of the bottom is translucent with the mark of the earlier lunch. Still, it’s better than nothing, so John tosses it into Dean’s lap. Dean stares at it and makes a small sound in his throat, something that John would probably categorize as a whimper, if he thought that Dean was capable of whimpering.
“I know you’re not exactly looking forward to having to aim in that small a bag, but the alternative is cleaning your puke off of my car.” John reaches over and claps Dean’s shoulder, driving one-handed as the car in front of him blessedly advances for a span of more than his smallest finger. “But try to hang in there either way, okay?”
“Course I’ll try,” Dean says, leaning unconsciously into John’s hand. “But having a bag that smells like the crap I’m trying not to let back up isn’t exactly helping.”
“Good point.” John settles both hands back on the wheel. “You got a better idea?”
“He could lean out the window,” pipes up Sam from the back. “It’s not like the car on his side could get much messier.”
John glances over and, despite himself, a small smile quirks at his lips. Sam’s got a point; the neighboring car is all covered in dust and dirt, like the owner can’t even be bothered to spend five minutes getting a quick scrub at a carwash. “I don’t think we want to piss off the guy we’ve gotta ride out this traffic jam with,” he tells Sam. “He’s probably got a damn good case of road rage pent up at this point.”
“Better on his car than ours,” replies Sam. John doesn’t disagree with him.
“God, Sam, you’re talking now?” Dean mutters. “Figures you’d decide to open your big mouth when I’m trying not to throw up.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asks Sam. Ahead of them, traffic finally starts to move more than an inch, and John does his best not to get his hopes up.
“Your voice ain’t helping.” Dean wrinkles his nose and looks back at Sam. John, as relishes the experience of not having to break as soon as he starts driving forward, can’t tell how much he’s joking and how much he’s saying sincerely, only disguising it under the humor. “It just makes me want to throw up more.”
“Maybe I should sing,” says Sam, and to John’s surprise, he actually sounds kind of like he’s grinning. He never noticed before how much he misses hearing the boys banter during the periods when everything is all tense and tight. And no, it’s not a good thing that it takes Dean nearly puking all over the Impala to bring them back together, but at this point, he’ll take whatever he can.
“Do that and I swear, you’re gonna be stuck on laundry duty for the rest of your life, Sammy,” Dean grumbles. “Especially when we’ve been running through mud and stuff and our clothes are all disgusting. That’s when you’re going to have to go down to the Laundromat carrying that big, heavy bag all by yourself. Then you’re going to have to stay there and wait with all of the stoned college students and people who haven’t taken a bath in years. Alone.”
“Least I won’t have to look at your ugly mug while I’m there,” Sam shoots back, but there’s an underlying tone of congeniality there. John can’t bring himself to intervene, although he knows that he shouldn’t encourage the boys to talk to each other like that.
Dean concedes the fight with a moan. A glance in his direction lets John know that he’s looking even sicker than before. His skin is damp, and he’s swallowing hard, hands clenched into fists with nails that are digging into his palms.
“Hang in there,” John says as gently as he can without taking it to a place where he knows Dean would start rolling his eyes. He reaches out and claps Dean’s knee. “Traffic’s moving now, at least. We’ll be at a motel soon enough.”
He gets an indistinct mumble in return. Not something he would usually accept, but he lets it slide under the circumstances.
They reach an exit soon enough, find a little roadside motel soon after. They’re just outside of Los Angeles now, but the smog and pollution still linger in the air, and even the motel room feels cramped and crowded, reminding John why he fucking hates big cities. It’s something, though. Anyway, the important thing is that there’re three beds and a bathroom, into which Dean disappears almost as soon as their bags have hit the floor.
The sound of retching comes from it almost immediately. John winces sympathetically. Beside him, Sam turns a green shade of his own, and John remembers that Sam isn’t one who really enjoys hearing other people throw up. Still, he’s fourteen, and even though he’s a pain in the ass half the time, John knows he’s responsible. When it comes to the family’s safety, he trusts Sam not to half-ass it. “Sam, get the room set up. Salt circles, the usual.”
Sam looks at him, a wary sort of eagerness on his face. That’s a task that either John or Dean usually does, and although Sam’s helped out, he’s never actually done it by himself. But John figures that there’s a first time for everything, and since Dean is currently preoccupied in the bathroom, and John knows that he should probably look in on him, now seems as good a time as any for Sam to step up to the plate. “Really?”
“Do I look like I’m kidding? Get on it, Sam.”
“Yes, sir,” Sam says, and for once he doesn’t sound like he’s using sir sarcastically. He goes to get the rock salt, and John nods in approval. Sam can do this on his own. He, on the other hand, needs to go and be fatherly.
“Dean?” he calls, knocking at the bathroom door. “Can I come in?”
From inside, Dean gives a low moan. “I ain’t going to stop you. Sir.”
John takes that as a yes and opens the door. The bathroom is about the size of a postage stamp, but he still pulls it shut behind him, giving Dean what privacy he can. Which isn’t much, but it’s the thought that counts.
His elder son is kneeling in front of the ancient toilet; worshipping the porcelain god, as they say. His hair, which he usually spends an inordinate amount of time preening into spikes for the benefit of any girls that might be looking, is limp and plastered to his forehead. Which is currently pressed against the rim of the toilet, seeking, John imagines whatever coolness it can get.
“You know, I’m no hygiene freak myself, but that toilet is probably covered with germs.” John stands behind his son’s prone form for a moment, debating what to do. “You’re probably just gonna make yourself sicker.”
Dean answers with an intelligible sound that John thinks might have actually been made of words, ones that doubtlessly made a profane yet witty response to his statement. Dean is still Dean, even on his sickbed.
Still, John makes the parental decision to kneel down behind him and carefully rest a hand on his back. Dean relaxes at the touch. “How you holding up?”
“I’m thinking that I’m just gonna go vegetarian and never have a burger again,” Dean mumbles.
John chuckles and starts to slowly rub circles on Dean’s back. “Come on. You’re not gonna give Sam that satisfaction, are you?”
“I think this is all the satisfaction he can get. I doubt--” before Dean can finish, he arches up and spits something into the toilet. John stills his hand and waits until he’s slumped over again to resume his touches. “-doubt that he’ll get any glee out of me stealing his green salad crap.”
“You’re overestimating him,” John replies, passing his thumb over Dean’s spinal cord. “You know that he’ll take whatever he can get.”
“I will not!” Sam yells from outside, and Dean and John both laugh at that, more than they’ve laughed in a very long time. And John thinks that maybe despite Bobby calling at the worst of times, maybe despite the traffic jams, the food poisoning, the stress of having two teenage sons trapped in one place - maybe in spite of all that, today doesn’t suck as bad as it possibly could.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: The Impala is stuck in traffic, Dean has food poisoning, and Sam is being a teenager. Or, sometimes John really hates his life.
Notes: Written for the prompt "Nausea" on my hc_bingo card. Title is taken from the song Hotel California.
John Winchester is starting to think that the people of Yreka, California can just go and deal with their damn shellycoat problem by themselves. After all, it’s there fault for living in fucking California, with its smoggy cities and its impossible-to-pass streets.
Damn Bobby for telling him about this hunt. You’re in California, you’re the closest who can get there? Cali is a fucking long state. He can’t just pack up and drive across it in a day, much as Singer expects him to do.
And damn the Impala for having fucked-up air conditioning. In California. In August.
“Are we almost there?” Sam deadpans from the backseat.
John glances up in the mirror and glares. “Shut it, Sam.” His youngest is sitting there and scowling, his too-long legs stretched and crossed. Since his growth spurt a year ago, Sam hasn’t been able to really appreciate the joy of being able to see America up close. Not that John blames him, not after they’ve been sitting in traffic for hours.
And not that hunting is exactly a road trip. Sometimes it helps to think about it like that, though, when he doesn’t want to focus on the whole killing thing. Like they’re just on a journey to see what farm really has the longest corn maze in the country, not on a quest to systematically wipe out every single piece of evil shit that’s still alive.
Right now, though? Now John envies the bastards with office jobs even more than he usually does. Unless they’re office bastards in California. John can’t feel anything but bad for them, because it takes a certain level of stupidity to actually want to live here.
The car in front of them inches forward, and John makes up the difference. “Fucking traffic,” he growls, leaning back and closing his eyes. The air inside the car smells like gasoline and smog, like the Impala’s windows aren’t all rolled up tightly in an attempt to ward off exactly that. “Fucking gridlocked state-”
“Dad?” Dean interrupts.
“Yes?” he snaps tersely. He glares at the beat-up bumper of the dusty blue minivan in front of them and wills it to move ahead. Predictably, it doesn’t do any good.
“I, uh. How long is it until we stop for the night?” Dean asks hesitantly.
“Jesus Christ, Dean, I asked you if you had to piss at the last exit!” It’s only around six-thirty, so they can still get a good three hours of driving in before stopping for the evening. Maybe even more than that, depending on how John feels.
And depending on how close they are to Yreka by then. John’s willing to bet that they’ll have moved, say, a mile? That sounds about on par with how things have been going.
“It’s…it’s not about that. I don’t need to piss.”
“Well, then, how about you stop talking in riddles and tell me what the hell you do need?”
Part of John is aware that he’s being overly harsh, but honestly, this isn’t exactly a good time to sit around and think about his parenting skills. Although, really, not too many times are. It’s just that traffic jams are worse than usual, because now he doesn’t have a bottle of Jack to contemplate things with.
“I. Um. I feel kind of sick. Kinda like I’m going to throw up. Sir.”
Oh, for the love of-
“Dean, are you seriously tellin’ me that you’ve gotten carsick now? For Christ’s sake, I think there has to actually be motion for you to get motion sickness.” He grits his teeth together and squeezes the wheel beneath his hands, trying to count to ten, but he keeps getting stuck in his anger right around the time that he hits seven.
That’s just the sort of frigging day it is today: wake up with his knees killing him from running after that black dog last night (and maybe that’s a sign that he isn’t as young as he once was, but damned if that’s ever going to stop him) and wanting just one day to rest before hitting the road, until goddamn Bobby Singer decides to call and tell him about a hunt upstate that John really can’t refuse, since he owes the bastard a hundred times over or something - Singer’s probably keeping proper track. Probably carves a notch in his bedpost every time he does something to put John in his debt. In any case, that meant that he had to get the boys packed up real quick, listen to Sam complain about a girl or some movie he’d been planning to see with friends, listen to Dean’s wisecracks, and then spend the rest of the day crossing grand ol’ Cali.
And now here they are, two hours after setting out (damn Bobby again for telling him about this practically right at rush hour). Moving an inch for every five minutes that they wait.
“I don’t think it’s carsickness so much as it is ‘What the fuck possessed us to stop and grab some grub at a truck stop?’ sickness,” Deans deadpans, despite his supposed urge to chuck his guts up all over the car.
“I told you that they probably left all of their meat out,” says Sam from the backseat, and even as John keeps his eyes closed, he can picture Sam’s mildly smug expression at having outsmarted his brother by eating a slightly-wilted salad. He doesn’t sound overly proud, though. Probably because he realizes that if Dean pukes, he’s going to be as stuck with it as the rest of them.
When John finally trusts himself not to completely bite Dean’s head off, he opens his eyes and actually looks at his son as he moves forward another two centimeters. Come to think of it, Dean doesn’t look like he’s doing too great. He’s sweating (which, to be fair, they all are) and his skin is a sort of sickly grey-green color. He swallows tightly and meets John’s eyes. “Sorry about this.”
“Not your fault,” John grumbles, looking away from him. Pissed or not, he can’t pretend like Dean wants to throw up all over the car. “We’ll get off at the next exit; find a place to hole up then.”
“Maybe we don’t have to,” offers Dean feebly. His voice is lower than usually, as if he’s afraid that every word that comes out will be accompanied by his lunch. John is really, really glad that he just grabbed some fries to eat on the road instead of going for the full-course meal like Dean. “It’s still light. Once traffic starts moving, we’ll probably make good time. Besides, give me a bit of clean air and I’ll be just fine.”
“You really think there’s clean air in Los Angeles?” John shakes his head. “There’s no point risking you tossing your cookies all over my car’s interior any more than we have to.”
“Nice to know what you really care about,” Dean cracks, leaning against the glass of the Impala’s window. John doubts he’s going to find any coolness there; without a working air conditioner, the temperature inside isn’t much lower than the one out, and he honestly doesn’t think that the windows are going to be any better than the leather seats. But Dean really does look like crap, so he decides not to tell him that.
Instead, he glances behind at Sam. “There a bag back there?”
Sam looks around, leaning under the seats to check (and if he finds that the boys have been leaving their trash under the back bench, there’s going to be hell to pay). “Just the one from lunch.”
“That’ll do. Pass it up here.”
It’s a greasy paper bag, and part of the bottom is translucent with the mark of the earlier lunch. Still, it’s better than nothing, so John tosses it into Dean’s lap. Dean stares at it and makes a small sound in his throat, something that John would probably categorize as a whimper, if he thought that Dean was capable of whimpering.
“I know you’re not exactly looking forward to having to aim in that small a bag, but the alternative is cleaning your puke off of my car.” John reaches over and claps Dean’s shoulder, driving one-handed as the car in front of him blessedly advances for a span of more than his smallest finger. “But try to hang in there either way, okay?”
“Course I’ll try,” Dean says, leaning unconsciously into John’s hand. “But having a bag that smells like the crap I’m trying not to let back up isn’t exactly helping.”
“Good point.” John settles both hands back on the wheel. “You got a better idea?”
“He could lean out the window,” pipes up Sam from the back. “It’s not like the car on his side could get much messier.”
John glances over and, despite himself, a small smile quirks at his lips. Sam’s got a point; the neighboring car is all covered in dust and dirt, like the owner can’t even be bothered to spend five minutes getting a quick scrub at a carwash. “I don’t think we want to piss off the guy we’ve gotta ride out this traffic jam with,” he tells Sam. “He’s probably got a damn good case of road rage pent up at this point.”
“Better on his car than ours,” replies Sam. John doesn’t disagree with him.
“God, Sam, you’re talking now?” Dean mutters. “Figures you’d decide to open your big mouth when I’m trying not to throw up.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asks Sam. Ahead of them, traffic finally starts to move more than an inch, and John does his best not to get his hopes up.
“Your voice ain’t helping.” Dean wrinkles his nose and looks back at Sam. John, as relishes the experience of not having to break as soon as he starts driving forward, can’t tell how much he’s joking and how much he’s saying sincerely, only disguising it under the humor. “It just makes me want to throw up more.”
“Maybe I should sing,” says Sam, and to John’s surprise, he actually sounds kind of like he’s grinning. He never noticed before how much he misses hearing the boys banter during the periods when everything is all tense and tight. And no, it’s not a good thing that it takes Dean nearly puking all over the Impala to bring them back together, but at this point, he’ll take whatever he can.
“Do that and I swear, you’re gonna be stuck on laundry duty for the rest of your life, Sammy,” Dean grumbles. “Especially when we’ve been running through mud and stuff and our clothes are all disgusting. That’s when you’re going to have to go down to the Laundromat carrying that big, heavy bag all by yourself. Then you’re going to have to stay there and wait with all of the stoned college students and people who haven’t taken a bath in years. Alone.”
“Least I won’t have to look at your ugly mug while I’m there,” Sam shoots back, but there’s an underlying tone of congeniality there. John can’t bring himself to intervene, although he knows that he shouldn’t encourage the boys to talk to each other like that.
Dean concedes the fight with a moan. A glance in his direction lets John know that he’s looking even sicker than before. His skin is damp, and he’s swallowing hard, hands clenched into fists with nails that are digging into his palms.
“Hang in there,” John says as gently as he can without taking it to a place where he knows Dean would start rolling his eyes. He reaches out and claps Dean’s knee. “Traffic’s moving now, at least. We’ll be at a motel soon enough.”
He gets an indistinct mumble in return. Not something he would usually accept, but he lets it slide under the circumstances.
They reach an exit soon enough, find a little roadside motel soon after. They’re just outside of Los Angeles now, but the smog and pollution still linger in the air, and even the motel room feels cramped and crowded, reminding John why he fucking hates big cities. It’s something, though. Anyway, the important thing is that there’re three beds and a bathroom, into which Dean disappears almost as soon as their bags have hit the floor.
The sound of retching comes from it almost immediately. John winces sympathetically. Beside him, Sam turns a green shade of his own, and John remembers that Sam isn’t one who really enjoys hearing other people throw up. Still, he’s fourteen, and even though he’s a pain in the ass half the time, John knows he’s responsible. When it comes to the family’s safety, he trusts Sam not to half-ass it. “Sam, get the room set up. Salt circles, the usual.”
Sam looks at him, a wary sort of eagerness on his face. That’s a task that either John or Dean usually does, and although Sam’s helped out, he’s never actually done it by himself. But John figures that there’s a first time for everything, and since Dean is currently preoccupied in the bathroom, and John knows that he should probably look in on him, now seems as good a time as any for Sam to step up to the plate. “Really?”
“Do I look like I’m kidding? Get on it, Sam.”
“Yes, sir,” Sam says, and for once he doesn’t sound like he’s using sir sarcastically. He goes to get the rock salt, and John nods in approval. Sam can do this on his own. He, on the other hand, needs to go and be fatherly.
“Dean?” he calls, knocking at the bathroom door. “Can I come in?”
From inside, Dean gives a low moan. “I ain’t going to stop you. Sir.”
John takes that as a yes and opens the door. The bathroom is about the size of a postage stamp, but he still pulls it shut behind him, giving Dean what privacy he can. Which isn’t much, but it’s the thought that counts.
His elder son is kneeling in front of the ancient toilet; worshipping the porcelain god, as they say. His hair, which he usually spends an inordinate amount of time preening into spikes for the benefit of any girls that might be looking, is limp and plastered to his forehead. Which is currently pressed against the rim of the toilet, seeking, John imagines whatever coolness it can get.
“You know, I’m no hygiene freak myself, but that toilet is probably covered with germs.” John stands behind his son’s prone form for a moment, debating what to do. “You’re probably just gonna make yourself sicker.”
Dean answers with an intelligible sound that John thinks might have actually been made of words, ones that doubtlessly made a profane yet witty response to his statement. Dean is still Dean, even on his sickbed.
Still, John makes the parental decision to kneel down behind him and carefully rest a hand on his back. Dean relaxes at the touch. “How you holding up?”
“I’m thinking that I’m just gonna go vegetarian and never have a burger again,” Dean mumbles.
John chuckles and starts to slowly rub circles on Dean’s back. “Come on. You’re not gonna give Sam that satisfaction, are you?”
“I think this is all the satisfaction he can get. I doubt--” before Dean can finish, he arches up and spits something into the toilet. John stills his hand and waits until he’s slumped over again to resume his touches. “-doubt that he’ll get any glee out of me stealing his green salad crap.”
“You’re overestimating him,” John replies, passing his thumb over Dean’s spinal cord. “You know that he’ll take whatever he can get.”
“I will not!” Sam yells from outside, and Dean and John both laugh at that, more than they’ve laughed in a very long time. And John thinks that maybe despite Bobby calling at the worst of times, maybe despite the traffic jams, the food poisoning, the stress of having two teenage sons trapped in one place - maybe in spite of all that, today doesn’t suck as bad as it possibly could.