SPN Fic: Midnight Zone
Title: Midnight Zone
Genre: Gen
Characters: Dean, Sam
Rating: PG
Word count: 2240
Spoilers: None
Disclaimer: None of the artists/characters/foodstuffs mentioned herein are my personal creation or property.
Summary: After a particularly stressful hunt, the boys unwind in an all-night diner. Except Dean has a little trouble unwinding. Food fights and narcolepsy ensue.
Notes: Not entitled Twilight Zone, because that's overused - the midnight zone is the next one down, oceans-wise. Not entitled Aftershave only because I have great strength of character. And maturity. Or something like that.
The tabletop had about four decades of coffee rings traced in faint whorls across its blond wood. Sam ran his fingertip around the stains beside his plate, wondering how long it would be before the whole surface of the table was covered, as if with some spidery, coffee-colored lace cloth. He shifted his mug one inch to the right, revealing another ring of darkened wood beneath, satisfying and shiny.
“Dude, if you're not gonna eat that pie…”
He looked up at Dean, who was chewing impatiently on the end of his fork, his own plate so clean Sam could see the gentle colors of the fan light reflected on its crumb-free porcelain. Without a word, he slid his own piece of strawberry rhubarb across the table, and Dean, who claimed rhubarb was a plot by alien subversives to take the beauty out of things like perfectly good strawberries, had his fork in the buttery crust almost before the plate had left Sam's hand. Tapping the utensil absentmindedly against the ceramic, he began to croon along with Jason Aldean through a mouthful of berry and pastry.
They'd been here for two hours - ever since, five miles down the road from the smoking ashes of George Owen, the Demon Barber of East Saline Street, Dean had swerved abruptly onto the off-ramp and pulled up outside the box-sized Forget-Me-Not Diner, right under the guttering pink fluorescent “24 Hours” in the plaid-curtained windows. “How about some pie, huh?” was all he'd said by way of explanation.
“How about some sleep,” Sam had said, but Dean declared that they needed pie, first, so here they were. Three o'clock in the morning, backed into a corner by the radio, staring at a room full of empty booths. Sam could still feel the slick of lighter fluid on his fingers, and Dean had a messy smear down the side of his neck where the barber's ghost had tried to begin his last shave, but the late-shift waitress didn't say anything, just brought them coffee and scrawled down their orders in silence, disappearing into the kitchen with a brief, wordless nod. They sat in silence, listening to the anthems of depressed truckers and the soft, faraway percussion of the kitchen, while Sam gazed brainlessly at the table and Dean burned with the adrenaline of a night's high-stakes grave desecration, his hands never stopping their constant rhythm against tabletop, silverware, thighs.
As soon as Sam had torched the bones and Dean had dropped, gasping, through the sudden sparks to lie panting on the dew-cold grass, they'd looked at each other and silently agreed to avoid the obvious puns.
Besides, it had never been that close at all. Sam had had the whole situation under control. Totally. So much so that, two hours later, Dean was still wired, still buzzing with the weird high that came with nearly having your head sliced from your neck by a dangerously zealous barber who'd overstayed his welcome in this life.
Every quarter of an hour or so, the waitress meandered in from the kitchen to check on their coffee, and Dean ordered another piece of pie (apple), or a bowl of the leftover Soup of the Day (potato sausage), or asked to check out the specials and looked disappointed when the waitress pointed out that they ran out around eleven o'clock last night.
“Any chance of some fries?” he asked, brightening, and she turned around and headed for the kitchen. Dean drummed on the edge of the table, staring aimlessly out through the curtains at the anonymous darkness beyond.
Sam didn't eat, even though Dean kept ordering him things he didn't ask for - a garden salad, some mashed potatoes and gravy. They sat next to his coffee mug like still-life museum exhibits, crafted out of cheap '80s rubber. He could feel Dean's foot tapping incessantly under the table, could hear his brother break into song every once in a while, unconsciously joining in with the local country station playing behind them - but the noise, which would have annoyed Sam on another night, seemed distant. Indistinct, like a fly buzzing lazily against the glass dessert case in the corner. When Dean had insisted on dragging him inside, he'd thought he was too tired to stay awake another minute, but now it was as though he'd slipped past exhaustion into a hidden stage of wakefulness, a secret world in between night and day.
Like something out of science fiction, he thought, trying and failing to follow the whirl of the ceiling fan with his gaze. He shook his head, dizzy, and looked back down at the spiderweb of coffee stains, the glittering jeweled lights of the broken jukebox, the panoramic oil painting on the far wall, deer and elk wading through a sunset forest. He sat perfectly still, mesmerized. Waiting. Anything could happen in a place like this, and Sam didn't want to miss it when it did.
What happened was a french fry in the eye.
After the initial shock wore off, he rubbed his stinging eye and squinted at Dean, who was sprawled back in his seat with an enormous self-congratulatory smile. Sam knew that look far too well: it was the look Dean wore when he set the shower to douse Sam with a burst of ice water the minute he turned the tap; when he'd draped every set of boxers Sam owned on the blades of the overhead fan and turned the whole thing on at the very instant Sam and Ellie Tomson, lying on the couch beneath, had just started to explore the inner surfaces of each other's mouths.
It was a look he hadn't seen in a while - and Sam suddenly remembered why he'd felt so lonely, sometimes, the past four years. Nobody threw food at Stanford. Sam looked down at the uneaten meal ranged in front of him, and grabbed a cherry tomato off the top of his salad.
Dean dodged to the left, but Sam knew his brother's reflexes better than he knew them himself, and the tomato smacked him in the cheek, leaving a trail of french dressing down his face. Dean blinked for a second, then dragged a palm over his cheek and snatched up another fry from the basket in front of him.
Their untimely dinners began to travel back and forth across the table - one french fry, one crouton at a time. Dean's aim was better, but stopping to eat everything Sam threw at him made him sloppy. Sam, on the other hand, ignored the food sailing past his face and concentrated on nailing his brother in the eye with the components of his salad. Tomatoes and croutons steadily jumped over Dean's shoulders and into his lap; a radish bounced off his head and fell to the darkness under the table. A well-placed french fry struck Sam's ear with a ketchupy splat, and he lobbed his final cucumber at Dean's nose.
“Truce?”
Dean wiped the smear of dressing off the end of his nose and sized up the remaining food. His french fries were almost gone, but Sam still had an entire untouched plate of mashed potatoes, a pool of rapidly cooling gravy nestled on top of the mound.
“Truce.” Sam left for the washroom to rinse the ketchup out of his hair.
When he came back, Dean had fallen asleep at the table, face planted solidly in the unfinished strawberry-rhubarb pie. Sam jostled his shoulder, but the adrenaline high that had pushed him through the last three restless hours had finally burned out, and Dean made about as much effort to sit up as the pile of potatoes.
“Hey, man,” Sam said, squatting beside the table and shaking Dean's leg, “wake up. If you're done eating, you wanna find a motel now?” No response. “Dean!”
Green eyes dragged themselves open and blinked sluggishly at Sam, uncomprehending. Dean shook his head, squinting into thin air in a laughable effort to focus.
“Sam?”
“Dude, you can't sleep here. Let's go, huh?”
The bright strawberry smear on Dean's left cheek gave the impression that half his face was blushing. On the other cheek, freckles stood out against pale, sleep-starved skin. The green eyes wavered wildly, wrestling against fear and sleep and exhaustion, seeking out Sam's face as though it might just drop off if he let it out of eyeshot. Sam had spent the last three years thinking of his brother as a kind of indistinct shadow of his old man, a cantankerous middle-aged hunter in a twenty-six-year-old body. He hadn't remembered how young Dean could look.
“Sam, I'm not letting that sonofabitch shave ya,” Dean slurred, the words struggling up through sleep like a message from the grave. “Not old enough to shave anyway,” he added contemplatively, scratching at the dried blood under his ear.
“We burned the bones, Dean,” Sam reminded him. Dean ignored him.
“Stay away from razors, okay, Sammy? Grow a goddamn beard.”
“I'll do that.”
“Good,” Dean said, and closed his eyes again.
Sam picked up a napkin from the stack on the table and began wiping the fruit off his brother's face. Dean squirmed and pulled away, but Sam pulled back, trying to clean the salad dressing off while he was at it. Finished, he balled the napkin up and dropped it on the table amid the scattered landscape of their comestible battlefield. Standing up, he stretched backwards, reaching until he felt every tight, rest-starved muscle in his body give way to the resigned dizziness of fatigue.
He glanced at his watch. Four fifteen, and twenty miles at least before they hit any place with a motel. For some reason, he didn't feel like wrestling with a sleepy Dean for the keys to the Impala: not when Dean was drained and disoriented and paranoid with memories of unsolicited stubble management.
Easier just to linger in the no-man's-land between midnight and daybreak, listening to Kenny Chesney murmur through the speakers of an ancient radio. Easier to watch the coffee rings sink into the tabletop, to see the cool reality of dawn sneak gently, unexpectedly across the booth until finally it drew them back into the world again from their unscheduled evening of exile. Easier to encamp for the duration of the small hours, waiting for breakfast and the early morning rush of truckers to break the seal on the lotus-land of the diner.
He knew he should be tired, but he wasn't: it was as if all his body's reactions - hunger, fatigue, agitation - had been disconnected for the night, put on hold until further notice. For a few hours, there was no hurry, no stress, no questions, no monsters to fight. No Jess; no Dad. Only the hush of the diner, the warm, buzzing glow of the fanlight overhead, a country song winding low among the empty tables - and Dean, slumped on the sticky maroon seat and breathing uncertainly in his sleep.
He bent down and shoved Dean's shoulder. “Move over, stupid.”
Dean grunted, and Sam pushed his brother bodily across the seat, squeezing in beside him on the tacky vinyl. He swung an arm around Dean's back and propped him up against him, his brother's cheek pressing into his shoulder and the top of his short hair just brushing Sam's jaw. Dean shifted in his slumber, frowning, then seemed to relax, leaning heavily into Sam's side.
“'Member what I told you, Sammy?” he mumbled through one side of his mouth, his voice almost swallowed in the folds of Sam's hoodie.
“Grow a beard?” Sam grinned into space. “I'm working on it, Dean.” Dean snorted softly.
“Gonna take you a freakin' decade, baby face.”
And that, it seemed, was Dean Winchester: Out. Everything was silence from the heavy weight pressing against Sam's left side. After a few moments of perfect stillness, he could feel the faint reverberations of snoring tingle through the muscles of his shoulder.
The waitress emerged from the kitchen again, hiding a yawn behind her fist and blinking blearily at the pile of dishes and the food strewn across the table, at Dean hunched against Sam, salad dressing in his hair and twitching with uneasy sleep.
“You boys puttin' up for the night?” was all she said. Sam shrugged.
“Something like that.” She stared for a minute, then returned the gesture with a lift of her shoulder. All kinds ended up in a diner like this - set just around the bend from the interstate, the only spot for miles around that wasn't open road or farmland. 24 hours, and a different brand of crazy for each one of them. If she'd ever had questions to ask, she'd run out years ago.
“I'll get you some more coffee,” she told Sam, and disappeared again.
And thank goodness, Sam thought, for that. He rolled Dean's empty mug around on its precarious rim. Only a few more hours until real life returned, until the next set of coordinates broke them out of this momentary dream prison, until Dean coughed and stretched and rolled out of the booth cracking the same old jokes he'd told for the last thousand miles.
A couple hundred minutes on the outside - and the coffee tablecloth was nowhere near finished.