SPN Fic: Incipient
Title: Incipient
Characters: Sam, Dean
Genre: Gen
Rating: G
Word Count: 452
Spoilers: None. Has a S2 flavor, but no plot references.
Summary: April has a weird effect on Sam. Mainly, it makes him happy.
Notes: Although the summary says April, this was actually written on an unseasonably balmy March evening. Also, as it was my second Supernatural fic, I think it really marked the moment when I began to translate all my experiences into, "Now supposing Sam and Dean were working a case on an evening like this..."
All Sam could feel was summer.
That gentle remembering of past energies, past hopes that never came to be but got shaken out each year nonetheless. That low, electric thrill that felt a lot like thunderstorms waiting to happen but had more to do with a certain expectation of the kind of happiness no one actually felt. Christmas had never held much promise of joy for Sam, certainly not since the year their father just plain hadn't been there on the twenty-fifth, but summer - somehow, that scent of mud and newly heated concrete always stirred some kind of conviction in his stomach that something genuinely perfect was on the way.
Of course it never happened. Hunts got harder over the summer, more frequent, with shorter rests in between. Whatever home they'd clung to for the past month or two gave way to a string of crappy hotels, and the comforting warmth of the Impala became a gut-melting, skull-crushing furnace of body heat and the intolerable odors of family. Sam had never had a summer anything short of terrible - yet every year, his brain seemed to switch off, and all he could see as Dean dug in the muddy grass behind the backstop was the lush green of the soccer fields beyond them, and the brilliant fuchsia-rose streak of the sunset over the high school.
“Dude, if you wanna paint a picture or something, don't let me stop you.” Dean waved a muddy hand at him from the torn-up ground. “It's just I thought we were, you know, trying to find this chick's hair thing. Which turns out to not be looking like a piece of cake. Shoot, I don't even know what the damn thing looks like.” He stood up, stretching his back. “Be a hell of a lot easier if we were looking for an actual barmaid,” he complained.
“Dean, I told you. It's a barrette. And you saw the picture.”
“Yeah, well, I got nothing here. C'mon, Sammy, get down here with those magic eyes of yours and see if you strike pay dirt.”
He was an idiot, he knew, to think summer might mean anything other than looking for the personal accessories of dead softball players in the soft swampland of an athletic field. All the same, as Sam dropped to his knees to pat over the squelchy earth in search of the buried snippet of plastic, he took another deep breath of new grass and old sports equipment and wood chips from the playground.
That irrepressible smell of summer.
Smiling as his fingers touched something long and hard and hopefully flammable, Sam decided it couldn't hurt to pretend for an evening.
Characters: Sam, Dean
Genre: Gen
Rating: G
Word Count: 452
Spoilers: None. Has a S2 flavor, but no plot references.
Summary: April has a weird effect on Sam. Mainly, it makes him happy.
Notes: Although the summary says April, this was actually written on an unseasonably balmy March evening. Also, as it was my second Supernatural fic, I think it really marked the moment when I began to translate all my experiences into, "Now supposing Sam and Dean were working a case on an evening like this..."
All Sam could feel was summer.
That gentle remembering of past energies, past hopes that never came to be but got shaken out each year nonetheless. That low, electric thrill that felt a lot like thunderstorms waiting to happen but had more to do with a certain expectation of the kind of happiness no one actually felt. Christmas had never held much promise of joy for Sam, certainly not since the year their father just plain hadn't been there on the twenty-fifth, but summer - somehow, that scent of mud and newly heated concrete always stirred some kind of conviction in his stomach that something genuinely perfect was on the way.
Of course it never happened. Hunts got harder over the summer, more frequent, with shorter rests in between. Whatever home they'd clung to for the past month or two gave way to a string of crappy hotels, and the comforting warmth of the Impala became a gut-melting, skull-crushing furnace of body heat and the intolerable odors of family. Sam had never had a summer anything short of terrible - yet every year, his brain seemed to switch off, and all he could see as Dean dug in the muddy grass behind the backstop was the lush green of the soccer fields beyond them, and the brilliant fuchsia-rose streak of the sunset over the high school.
“Dude, if you wanna paint a picture or something, don't let me stop you.” Dean waved a muddy hand at him from the torn-up ground. “It's just I thought we were, you know, trying to find this chick's hair thing. Which turns out to not be looking like a piece of cake. Shoot, I don't even know what the damn thing looks like.” He stood up, stretching his back. “Be a hell of a lot easier if we were looking for an actual barmaid,” he complained.
“Dean, I told you. It's a barrette. And you saw the picture.”
“Yeah, well, I got nothing here. C'mon, Sammy, get down here with those magic eyes of yours and see if you strike pay dirt.”
He was an idiot, he knew, to think summer might mean anything other than looking for the personal accessories of dead softball players in the soft swampland of an athletic field. All the same, as Sam dropped to his knees to pat over the squelchy earth in search of the buried snippet of plastic, he took another deep breath of new grass and old sports equipment and wood chips from the playground.
That irrepressible smell of summer.
Smiling as his fingers touched something long and hard and hopefully flammable, Sam decided it couldn't hurt to pretend for an evening.