SPN FIC - Take a Breath
*looks around*
Anybody still here? Want a fic? 'Cause I wrote one. :)
Just a little interim moment, somewhere... oh, I guess Season 9. Wherever you feel like it fits.
The thing is...he's pretty sure he fell asleep in the car.
CHARACTERS: Dean and Sam
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 4271 words
DISCLAIMER: I make a teeny bit of money from writing fiction these days, but not from this stuff. This all belongs to Kripke, Warner Brothers, the CW... everybody who's not me.
TAKE A BREATH
By Carol Davis
His first thought is that somebody's been dicking with him again.
That's the only conclusion he can reach, because the bed he's lying on - he's positive it's a bed, even without opening his eyes - is firm but pliant, but has an entirely different feel from his bed in the bunker. The sheets are soft and smell clean, without any particular fragrance, not Rain Shower or April Fresh or, God help him, lavender.
It's not a hospital bed.
Mostly because he's lying on his belly. And because of the aforementioned: this bed is really comfortable, and it doesn't smell weird.
He'd like very much to go back to sleep, to just drift off again and get a couple more hours of shuteye. His Spidey senses aren't tingling, and no part of him hurts… although maybe he's a little thirsty. And a little hungry. And yeah, he could stand to take a leak. But none of that's urgent. He won't be risking anything dire if he ignores (a), (b), and/or (c). Seize the moment, he thinks. Just seize the friggin' moment.
The thing is, he's pretty sure he fell asleep in the car.
So… what?
Sam booked them into the Hilton, and carried him in here? Pulled off his boots and socks and jeans and his button-down, and tucked him into bed? Like so much hell. If Sam dragged him in anywhere, he would have just dumped him on top of the bed. Maybe - best case scenario - Sam would have tossed a comforter over him.
"Sam?"
It comes out soft, a garbled mutter.
No one answers. Not Sam, or anyone else. The room's fully quiet; it doesn't have the feel of being occupied by someone other than Dean.
You know that ain't right.
But come ON. I can't just forget about it, and go back to sleep? How 'bout you give me a friggin' break for a change?
Fabulous. Now he's having an argument with himself.
Groaning, he shifts around and rolls up into a sit. He'll just make sure things are copacetic, he tells himself; he'll just ensure that this is a secure location, hit the can, get a drink of water. Then he can go back to bed.
After he figures out where the hell he is.
And where Sam…
For what feels like about five minutes he can't process anything at all, because none of what he's looking at makes any sense. Yes, he's sitting in a bed - a big one, a king - and the room he's in is clearly a bedroom. But it's not part of a hotel, Hilton or otherwise. It's somebody's bedroom. In somebody's house. Girl, he thinks. I picked somebody up? Or she picked me up? And this is her house.
But he's not hung over. Having no memory whatsoever of how he got here - or whom he got here with - would pretty much point to his having been mostly blind drunk at the time, but he's not hung over, and he doesn't smell of booze.
Also?
This bedroom's missing a wall.
Three of its walls are entirely normal. The wall to his right has a doorway that seems to lead into the bathroom, and another that might lead into a closet. The double doors in the wall to his left probably lead to the rest of the house.
Where the fourth wall should be - dead ahead - there's…
Well.
What he's pretty sure is an ocean.
When he fell asleep in the car, the car was in eastern Wyoming. And his education might have been sketchy, but he's driven back and forth across the entire continental United States something in the neighborhood of eighty-four billion times, and he's really pretty sure that there's no friggin' ocean anywhere near eastern Wyoming. Nor is there an ocean close enough for Sam to have driven to while Dean was sleeping.
"Cas?" he rasps. "Cas, was this your idea?"
There's an ocean breeze blowing into the room. Warm, a tiny bit muggy, tangy with salt. And he can hear the surf lapping against the shore. The water line is some distance away - on the far side of a stretch of lawn, and then a beach - but it's visible. The sky's a clear, vibrant blue, almost cloud-free. Looks like a beautiful day.
Here in Where The Fuck Am I.
"CAS!" he bellows. Then, "SAM?"
But there's still no answer, so he scrambles out of bed and scowls out at the world, at that whole world lying out there that sure as hell looks like it's real. Three-dimensional. Solid. Full of sound and smell and…
Twilight Zone.
Sweet mother of God, it'd be nice if people would just stop dicking with him.
Yes, that doorway leads to a bathroom, one that's got to be five times the size of his bedroom in the bunker. Giant walk-in shower, tub you could fit four people in, about twenty running feet of counter space. For a minute he's completely boggled again, because there seems to be no toilet, and how in the world do you build a bathroom with no toilet? But no, it's over there, in its own little room. For privacy, and maybe a nice bout of claustrophobia while you're doing your business. The little room has a door, but he doesn't close it. Whoever's out there can just listen to him pee.
There's a sink (two of them, in fact), but no cups, so he has to duck his head close to the faucet and drink from it like it's a fountain in the park. Satisfying his thirst that way takes a while, and results in his getting the front of his t-shirt wet.
That's okay, because there's…
Clothes.
Not some rich person's clothes. (This is clearly, undeniably, a rich person's house. Which means… some rich chick brought him home?)
They're his clothes.
But not really. They're not the clothes he's pretty sure he had on when he fell asleep. More like, they're his type of clothes. Underwear, a pair of jeans, socks, and a nice, soft-looking button-down, all folded up nice and neat on the countertop. He'd swear they weren't there a minute ago, but it's possible he overlooked them, because there's all this other shit to look at. Friggin' bathrooms even got trees growing in it, two pretty good-sized ones, in a pair of wood-sided planter things set on either side of the door to the outside.
There's a door. To the outside.
In the bathroom.
A thought breaks through suddenly. Dad would have kicked his ass six ways to Sunday for letting it slide this long, but it occurs to him now, for the first time, that he's got no weapons. He was in bed in his briefs and t-shirt, his duffels nowhere in sight. That pile of clothing isn't lumpy enough to be concealing anything useful, and there's no sign of his boots. So: no gun. No knives. No holy water. Silver, though… there's likely to be some silver in the house, because rich people always have silver kicking around somewhere. For a minute he can hear Dad's voice issuing orders - from some distance away, and very staticky, like a badly tuned-in radio station - but you know what? Dad's been gone for a long time now.
And that colossal-ass shower has multiple jets.
He remembers racing Sammy to any number of bodies of water: creeks, ponds, rivers, lakes of all sizes. Sometimes a swim was meant to wash off blood, or creature guts, or some other variety of nasty slime, but other times it was just a swim. A break in the action, or the boredom. He remembers running down gravel access roads and grassy hillsides, through groves of little trees and underbrush, hooting in time with Sam as they stripped off whatever sweaty, smelly stuff they'd been wearing, preparing for that plunge into the water. The memory is powerful enough to make him lean against the edge of the countertop and shove a hand through his hair.
Sam's not here. He can feel it, the way he can feel the cool dampness of the tile floor underneath his bare feet.
Sam's not here.
Neither is anybody else.
For a while, that makes him feel enormously sad. Yes, somebody has clearly been messing with him, and may go on messing with him for some indeterminate amount of time. Hours. Maybe for days. Hell, maybe he's here for the duration. And he's never been one to think, This mess would be a lot easier to put up with if somebody else was stuck in here with me. There's no point in punishing other people. But you know… this sure isn't Hell.
For one thing, it smells a lot better.
Okay: shower. He could stand to smell better, so he strips off his briefs and t-shirt, makes sure there are towels within reach (there are; a whole bunch of them, big and thick and fluffy), then steps into that room-sized shower and fires up the jets. Something's been pre-set, he figures, because the water doesn't start out cold and gradually become warm; it's the perfect temperature right off the bat, and the water pressure is astonishing - which is all that much more amazing because there are sixteen (count 'em!) shower heads, four in the ceiling and four in each of the three walls that aren't glass. In a sense it's like standing naked in the middle of a hurricane, because there's water pumping at him from every possible angle, including one that manages to massage the family jewels in a very Casa Erotica way.
Rich people HAVE this? he wonders. They just… HAVE this?
It must use up a thousand gallons of water a minute. And the water never stops being the perfect temperature.
On a narrow shelf built into one wall there's a row of toiletries: a fresh bar of soap, bottles of shampoo, conditioner, body wash - all labeled with a brand he doesn't recognize, but it's obviously expensive - along with a razor and a loofah thing.
Sam would be beside himself.
Although no matter what kind of product Sam uses, his hair never quite stops looking like ass.
Amused by that, Dean pours a healthy dollop of shampoo into his palm, sniffs at it (the fragrance isn't bad; it's subtle, and fresh), then scrubs it into his hair. He's humming along with the scrubbing when he realizes that the movements are all coming easily, with nothing pinching or grabbing or shrieking in outrage. And that shouldn't be the case, because when he fell asleep in the car, his left shoulder was throbbing like a mother. He's also pretty sure there was a sizeable gouge in his scalp.
They healed him again, apparently.
Friggin' angels.
Not that it's not good to be healed. Dad used to seem almost pleased to get the shit kicked out of him, like it was some kind of badge of honor. Like it proved he'd done something. But Dean has never been a fan of that stuff.
This right here? Nice hot shower? Non-achy body parts?
It pretty much makes up for the general douchery involved in grabbing him out of his CAR - his CAR, for crying out loud; it had better be safe and sound, is all he can say about that - and dumping him here all by his lonesome.
Sam never lets him sing in the shower. He claims it makes baby kittens cry.
A little Led Zep's good for the occasion.
When he finally climbs out of the shower (some six million gallons of water and the entirety of Zeppelin IV later), he's delightfully squeaky clean. His skin's as soft, smooth and moisturized as a baby's butt, and his hair…
He's got to find a way to steal a bunch of that shampoo.
Those aren't his clothes, sitting all nicely folded on the countertop, but they fit him like they are. The jeans are nicely broken in, some way, somehow, just the way he likes them, so they feel like a second skin. And they're clean in a way his laundry never really gets any more, which makes him wonder, do rich people hire someone to break in new jeans for them? Or do they just launder them fifty or a hundred times, until they're soft?
He'll go with just one layer on top, just the t-shirt. It's too warm for a button-down.
Warm, because he's…
In Hawaii.
That's why this place seems vaguely familiar. He's never been here before, of course, but he's seen places like this on TV, on those shows where people with more money than he'll ever see in his life shop around for vacation homes. Or maybe it was part of an episode of Magnum, or Hawaii Five-0 (the classic one, thanks, although he does have a certain fondness for the way that Catherine chick can kick ass, even when she's wearing nothing but a bikini). Either way… yeah. His certainly only increases when he moves toward the glass-paneled door that opens to the outside, to a vista that involves a bunch of palm trees and a beach that seems to run for about eighty miles.
He's been to Florida. This ain't Florida.
Stretching catlike inside his new but meticulously broken-in clothes, he steps out onto the lanai, a wide swath of terrace that's furnished with a pair of cushy chaise lounges and a small round table with four bright fabric chairs.
There's food on the table, and some dishes. A stack of croissants, a plate of diced-up fruit, and a gleaming steel coffee carafe.
Okay, sure.
Like he's a croissant guy.
But what the hell. It's just sitting there, and there's nobody else around. The clothes were clearly meant for him, so the breakfast must be, too. And it's not like he'll refuse to eat a croissant. As long as there's coffee to go with it.
There is. The carafe is full.
And it's not diner coffee, either. It's the good stuff. The kind that was probably hand-picked by nuns, who then carried the beans down the side of the mountain wrapped tenderly in pure white… you know. Towels or something. Or maybe in the pockets of those nun-things they wear. But his bet's on pristine white cloth, held in the palms of their hands all the way down the mountain - which isn't a precarious way to descend a mountain, at all, because nuns don't trip.
There's just something all wrong about a nun rolling down the side of a mountain.
Besides, it would bruise the coffee beans.
Rich people do this, he supposes: sit out on the lanai sipping their coffee and eating their croissants and fresh fruit while they check stuff on their phones. Big business deals or whatever, or finding out when they need to catch their plane to Rome. His phone's MIA (it's wherever his damn CAR is, he figures), so there's nothing for him to check while he has his breakfast.
Just as well. There's been way too much shit going on lately. It's good to have a break, to sit in a nice cushy lounge chair and watch the surf.
HEY.
There's something out there, something that makes him sit upright and peer out across the water.
DUDE. It's dolphins. There's a… what do you call it, a whole school of dolphins right out there just offshore. Fleetingly he remembers feeding ducks as a kid, at some place he and Dad and Sammy were staying, ducks that would swim right up to where he was and accept chunks of stale bread out of his hand.
Dolphins don't do that, do they?
Come around every morning to see if there's a handout?
God damn, Sam should see this. Sam would get all excited about it. Might even wade right on out there.
So come on: this is just stupid. Why would he get plucked out of the car and not Sam? They were in there together. It's true, the angels have always been a little bit fonder of dicking around with Dean than they have with Sam (though he supposes Sam would argue that, because Sam always argues everything; he'd probably insist that hell yes, his life is just as miserable as Dean's is, because the angels won't leave him alone) - but still. Why take one of them, and not the other, for something like this? There's divide and conquer, sure, but what exactly is this conquering?
Unless this place has another bedroom, and Sam's still asleep.
Certainly it's got another bedroom. Who'd build a place like this with only one bedroom?
It's a sin to gulp down coffee this good, but better that than to put the cup down and have it disappear, so he drains the cup in a couple of big swallows, returns what's left of his plate of fruit and an uneaten corner of croissant to the table, brushes crumbs off his new, diaper-soft jeans and crosses the lanai to that big open area where the bedroom's fourth wall should be. Yes, that's the bedroom he was sleeping in.
Walking the perimeter of the house takes more time than he figured. The house isn't all that big - not Downton Abbey big, by a long shot - but it's surrounded by a lot of little flower beds and crushed-stone borders and low walls and annoyingly placed palm trees. He started out pretty sure that there'd be a bedroom alongside his, because what would be the point of putting a bedroom (or any room at all) in a place where you couldn't see the ocean? For crying out loud, even the bathroom's got a view.
Okay, maybe the wine cellar wouldn't have one.
But alongside his bedroom is what looks like (when he peers through the window, stabbing the shit out of his bare feet because there's crushed stone underneath it) an exercise room. Or a…
Shit, is that a POOL in there?
There's a pool. In the HOUSE.
Next there's a kitchen, and it's bigger than the entire ground floor of their house back in Lawrence. He half expected to find more food laid out in there, or at least some sign of prep work, but there's nothing. It's tidy and spotless.
Next, there's a living room. Great room, family room, whatever you want to call it. That fucker's bigger than the entire city of Lawrence.
And it's got a TV the size of a barn door.
You want to talk about stuff that makes baby kittens weep.
That TV almost stops him in his tracks, because… come ON. Look at that thing. There's a big leather sectional couch arranged in front of it, with a gigantic ottoman in the middle, the kind you can use as a coffee table if you're careful not to jiggle stuff. It's the i-freakin'-deal place to watch some TV, to have a whole action movie marathon.
No Casa Erotica, though. Porn on a screen that big would be intimidating.
Movin' right along, he tells himself.
To his dismay, rounding the corner brings him to the front of the house. There's a wide, curving driveway there, but no cars - not his or anybody else's. Nor can he see a sign of anyone else's house, which he supposes makes sense, because who'd build a place like this cheek-to-jowl with the people next door? For a moment he thinks that seeing some small sign of other people would be a comfort, but it's not random other people he's interested in. What would he do with a bunch of random other people? Invite them over for croissants?
Opposite the living/family/great room is a formal dining room. Huge table, big enough to seat a couple dozen.
Yeah, no thanks.
The next room looks like an office.
Then he's back to the bathroom.
It is a one-person house, then. Or one couple, maybe. A couple that enjoys inviting bunches of people to dinner or to hang out in front of the TV - as long as nobody wants to stay over. That strikes him as weird. But who's to say what makes sense to rich people. It'd be kind of nice to live here, right smack on the edge of the ocean, where you can eat your breakfast and watch dolphins, then go watch some TV. It's quiet. No traffic noise, no sirens, no screaming in the middle of the night… and he's willing to bet the pipes don't clank. If you had the right person to hang out with, this wouldn't be a bad place at all.
Because, seriously. HAWAII.
If you had the right person with you.
He thinks fleetingly of Lisa. Of Jamie. Of Mom. Then he thinks of Cas and immediately tells himself that some construction would be needed - another whole wing, because there's that staring business.
And the flatulence.
He thinks of Dad, and Bobby, of Ellen and Jo. Kevin. Jody Mills is still around, of course, but for some reason he can't see Jody enjoying herself in a place like this. It doesn't suit her. Not that it would really suit Dad or Bobby, either. Jo would've adapted, maybe.
Jo in a tiny bikini is worth thinking about.
Then he starts to wonder again how long whoever it is that dropped him here figures on keeping him here. Because solitary is solitary, even when it's got dolphins and big TVs. Even if there's deluxe-spectrum cable, or DISH, or whatever.
Even if there's all kinds of food.
God, it's quiet here.
That coffee tasted good going down, but it's sour now. The soles of his feet are sore, and his head has started to ache.
Maybe he should go back to bed.
Maybe that's the trick. Crawl back in bed, fall asleep, and wake up back in the car. He's not at all sleepy, but he knows some tricks. He's John Winchester's kid. He can fall asleep pretty much anywhere, pretty much on command.
"Dean?"
He doesn't turn his head. He's not really sure he heard anything.
"Dean? Hey, Dean! Come on! You gotta come check this out!"
He sees a blur of color out of the corner of his eye. Then there's someone rushing up to him, all arms and legs and floppy moppy hair.
Sam.
Not Sam-now, not Sam who's six-foot-seventeen, the one who hit thirty a while back, the guy who can't get clothes to fit and drives either too fast or like an old lady. Not the Sam who bitches about Dean's singing, the one who won't call the bunker home, the one who spent so many months looking like death on a cracker.
This Sam is… what? Ten? Eleven?
"Dean!" he crows. "Oh my God, have you seen this place? We need to go to the beach, like, right now."
Not really a beach guy, Dean thinks distantly.
But Sam - Sammy - is tugging at him, hands wrapped around Dean's forearm, pulling like he's the horse and Dean's the cart. They used to do that, Dean remembers, when Sam was little. He'd plant himself in a spot and let Sammy haul on him with all the strength he could muster. For a long time, it was a game, one that would make Sam turn bright red, would make his nose run.
Funny…
The arm that Sam is clutching looks different. Smaller. The muscles in it are less defined than they were a few minutes ago.
"How old am I?" Dean whispers.
"What? You're fourteen, dummy."
Fourteen.
So Sam is ten.
It's after that Christmas, the one in Broken Bow, so this Sam is carrying the burden of Dad's journal inside him. That friggin' book killed him, Dean thinks sometimes; no matter what Sam knew or suspected before he got his hands on it, what was in that book obliterated Sam's childhood. But there were moments, now and then. Moments when Sam's eyes would shine like they are right now, when he would bubble over with enthusiasm and glee, like a littler kid. Like a happier kid. Like a kid with a regular life.
"We can just swim in our underwear, right?" Sam asks. "There's nobody around."
Nodding, Dean looks down at his clothes. They're the same, jeans and dark blue t-shirt, but they're smaller. He's smaller.
Fourteen.
What is this? he wonders.
It seems too detailed to be a dream. So maybe it's a construct, something the angels whipped together. They seem to like to do that: make fake stuff. But again… level of detail. Good coffee. Soft sheets.
A shower with sixteen shower heads.
So is this Sam? His Sam, just smaller? Or is he a fake?
Without really deciding to do it, he steps forward and wraps his arms around his brother, tugging Sam in close and thumping his head gently against Sam's. Sam resists him at first, then relaxes and relocates his own arms so he can return the hug.
It's not a fake.
He's not sure how he knows, but he knows.
Because of that, he's got no illusion that this will last any great length of time. They haven't been put here for the duration. Maybe not even overnight. Whoever put them here will retrieve them before they're ready to go, because that's how things happen for him and Sam, because for them, the good stuff just never lasts.
But for now… there are dolphins out there. Maybe they'll come closer, if he and Sam wade into the surf.
Maybe he and Sam will just swim. Either one would be okay.
No… more than okay.
Even if it doesn't last.
"You good, Sammy?" Dean asks in a whisper.
"I am now," his brother whispers back.
* * * * *
Anybody still here? Want a fic? 'Cause I wrote one. :)
Just a little interim moment, somewhere... oh, I guess Season 9. Wherever you feel like it fits.
The thing is...he's pretty sure he fell asleep in the car.
CHARACTERS: Dean and Sam
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 4271 words
DISCLAIMER: I make a teeny bit of money from writing fiction these days, but not from this stuff. This all belongs to Kripke, Warner Brothers, the CW... everybody who's not me.
TAKE A BREATH
By Carol Davis
His first thought is that somebody's been dicking with him again.
That's the only conclusion he can reach, because the bed he's lying on - he's positive it's a bed, even without opening his eyes - is firm but pliant, but has an entirely different feel from his bed in the bunker. The sheets are soft and smell clean, without any particular fragrance, not Rain Shower or April Fresh or, God help him, lavender.
It's not a hospital bed.
Mostly because he's lying on his belly. And because of the aforementioned: this bed is really comfortable, and it doesn't smell weird.
He'd like very much to go back to sleep, to just drift off again and get a couple more hours of shuteye. His Spidey senses aren't tingling, and no part of him hurts… although maybe he's a little thirsty. And a little hungry. And yeah, he could stand to take a leak. But none of that's urgent. He won't be risking anything dire if he ignores (a), (b), and/or (c). Seize the moment, he thinks. Just seize the friggin' moment.
The thing is, he's pretty sure he fell asleep in the car.
So… what?
Sam booked them into the Hilton, and carried him in here? Pulled off his boots and socks and jeans and his button-down, and tucked him into bed? Like so much hell. If Sam dragged him in anywhere, he would have just dumped him on top of the bed. Maybe - best case scenario - Sam would have tossed a comforter over him.
"Sam?"
It comes out soft, a garbled mutter.
No one answers. Not Sam, or anyone else. The room's fully quiet; it doesn't have the feel of being occupied by someone other than Dean.
You know that ain't right.
But come ON. I can't just forget about it, and go back to sleep? How 'bout you give me a friggin' break for a change?
Fabulous. Now he's having an argument with himself.
Groaning, he shifts around and rolls up into a sit. He'll just make sure things are copacetic, he tells himself; he'll just ensure that this is a secure location, hit the can, get a drink of water. Then he can go back to bed.
After he figures out where the hell he is.
And where Sam…
For what feels like about five minutes he can't process anything at all, because none of what he's looking at makes any sense. Yes, he's sitting in a bed - a big one, a king - and the room he's in is clearly a bedroom. But it's not part of a hotel, Hilton or otherwise. It's somebody's bedroom. In somebody's house. Girl, he thinks. I picked somebody up? Or she picked me up? And this is her house.
But he's not hung over. Having no memory whatsoever of how he got here - or whom he got here with - would pretty much point to his having been mostly blind drunk at the time, but he's not hung over, and he doesn't smell of booze.
Also?
This bedroom's missing a wall.
Three of its walls are entirely normal. The wall to his right has a doorway that seems to lead into the bathroom, and another that might lead into a closet. The double doors in the wall to his left probably lead to the rest of the house.
Where the fourth wall should be - dead ahead - there's…
Well.
What he's pretty sure is an ocean.
When he fell asleep in the car, the car was in eastern Wyoming. And his education might have been sketchy, but he's driven back and forth across the entire continental United States something in the neighborhood of eighty-four billion times, and he's really pretty sure that there's no friggin' ocean anywhere near eastern Wyoming. Nor is there an ocean close enough for Sam to have driven to while Dean was sleeping.
"Cas?" he rasps. "Cas, was this your idea?"
There's an ocean breeze blowing into the room. Warm, a tiny bit muggy, tangy with salt. And he can hear the surf lapping against the shore. The water line is some distance away - on the far side of a stretch of lawn, and then a beach - but it's visible. The sky's a clear, vibrant blue, almost cloud-free. Looks like a beautiful day.
Here in Where The Fuck Am I.
"CAS!" he bellows. Then, "SAM?"
But there's still no answer, so he scrambles out of bed and scowls out at the world, at that whole world lying out there that sure as hell looks like it's real. Three-dimensional. Solid. Full of sound and smell and…
Twilight Zone.
Sweet mother of God, it'd be nice if people would just stop dicking with him.
Yes, that doorway leads to a bathroom, one that's got to be five times the size of his bedroom in the bunker. Giant walk-in shower, tub you could fit four people in, about twenty running feet of counter space. For a minute he's completely boggled again, because there seems to be no toilet, and how in the world do you build a bathroom with no toilet? But no, it's over there, in its own little room. For privacy, and maybe a nice bout of claustrophobia while you're doing your business. The little room has a door, but he doesn't close it. Whoever's out there can just listen to him pee.
There's a sink (two of them, in fact), but no cups, so he has to duck his head close to the faucet and drink from it like it's a fountain in the park. Satisfying his thirst that way takes a while, and results in his getting the front of his t-shirt wet.
That's okay, because there's…
Clothes.
Not some rich person's clothes. (This is clearly, undeniably, a rich person's house. Which means… some rich chick brought him home?)
They're his clothes.
But not really. They're not the clothes he's pretty sure he had on when he fell asleep. More like, they're his type of clothes. Underwear, a pair of jeans, socks, and a nice, soft-looking button-down, all folded up nice and neat on the countertop. He'd swear they weren't there a minute ago, but it's possible he overlooked them, because there's all this other shit to look at. Friggin' bathrooms even got trees growing in it, two pretty good-sized ones, in a pair of wood-sided planter things set on either side of the door to the outside.
There's a door. To the outside.
In the bathroom.
A thought breaks through suddenly. Dad would have kicked his ass six ways to Sunday for letting it slide this long, but it occurs to him now, for the first time, that he's got no weapons. He was in bed in his briefs and t-shirt, his duffels nowhere in sight. That pile of clothing isn't lumpy enough to be concealing anything useful, and there's no sign of his boots. So: no gun. No knives. No holy water. Silver, though… there's likely to be some silver in the house, because rich people always have silver kicking around somewhere. For a minute he can hear Dad's voice issuing orders - from some distance away, and very staticky, like a badly tuned-in radio station - but you know what? Dad's been gone for a long time now.
And that colossal-ass shower has multiple jets.
He remembers racing Sammy to any number of bodies of water: creeks, ponds, rivers, lakes of all sizes. Sometimes a swim was meant to wash off blood, or creature guts, or some other variety of nasty slime, but other times it was just a swim. A break in the action, or the boredom. He remembers running down gravel access roads and grassy hillsides, through groves of little trees and underbrush, hooting in time with Sam as they stripped off whatever sweaty, smelly stuff they'd been wearing, preparing for that plunge into the water. The memory is powerful enough to make him lean against the edge of the countertop and shove a hand through his hair.
Sam's not here. He can feel it, the way he can feel the cool dampness of the tile floor underneath his bare feet.
Sam's not here.
Neither is anybody else.
For a while, that makes him feel enormously sad. Yes, somebody has clearly been messing with him, and may go on messing with him for some indeterminate amount of time. Hours. Maybe for days. Hell, maybe he's here for the duration. And he's never been one to think, This mess would be a lot easier to put up with if somebody else was stuck in here with me. There's no point in punishing other people. But you know… this sure isn't Hell.
For one thing, it smells a lot better.
Okay: shower. He could stand to smell better, so he strips off his briefs and t-shirt, makes sure there are towels within reach (there are; a whole bunch of them, big and thick and fluffy), then steps into that room-sized shower and fires up the jets. Something's been pre-set, he figures, because the water doesn't start out cold and gradually become warm; it's the perfect temperature right off the bat, and the water pressure is astonishing - which is all that much more amazing because there are sixteen (count 'em!) shower heads, four in the ceiling and four in each of the three walls that aren't glass. In a sense it's like standing naked in the middle of a hurricane, because there's water pumping at him from every possible angle, including one that manages to massage the family jewels in a very Casa Erotica way.
Rich people HAVE this? he wonders. They just… HAVE this?
It must use up a thousand gallons of water a minute. And the water never stops being the perfect temperature.
On a narrow shelf built into one wall there's a row of toiletries: a fresh bar of soap, bottles of shampoo, conditioner, body wash - all labeled with a brand he doesn't recognize, but it's obviously expensive - along with a razor and a loofah thing.
Sam would be beside himself.
Although no matter what kind of product Sam uses, his hair never quite stops looking like ass.
Amused by that, Dean pours a healthy dollop of shampoo into his palm, sniffs at it (the fragrance isn't bad; it's subtle, and fresh), then scrubs it into his hair. He's humming along with the scrubbing when he realizes that the movements are all coming easily, with nothing pinching or grabbing or shrieking in outrage. And that shouldn't be the case, because when he fell asleep in the car, his left shoulder was throbbing like a mother. He's also pretty sure there was a sizeable gouge in his scalp.
They healed him again, apparently.
Friggin' angels.
Not that it's not good to be healed. Dad used to seem almost pleased to get the shit kicked out of him, like it was some kind of badge of honor. Like it proved he'd done something. But Dean has never been a fan of that stuff.
This right here? Nice hot shower? Non-achy body parts?
It pretty much makes up for the general douchery involved in grabbing him out of his CAR - his CAR, for crying out loud; it had better be safe and sound, is all he can say about that - and dumping him here all by his lonesome.
Sam never lets him sing in the shower. He claims it makes baby kittens cry.
A little Led Zep's good for the occasion.
When he finally climbs out of the shower (some six million gallons of water and the entirety of Zeppelin IV later), he's delightfully squeaky clean. His skin's as soft, smooth and moisturized as a baby's butt, and his hair…
He's got to find a way to steal a bunch of that shampoo.
Those aren't his clothes, sitting all nicely folded on the countertop, but they fit him like they are. The jeans are nicely broken in, some way, somehow, just the way he likes them, so they feel like a second skin. And they're clean in a way his laundry never really gets any more, which makes him wonder, do rich people hire someone to break in new jeans for them? Or do they just launder them fifty or a hundred times, until they're soft?
He'll go with just one layer on top, just the t-shirt. It's too warm for a button-down.
Warm, because he's…
In Hawaii.
That's why this place seems vaguely familiar. He's never been here before, of course, but he's seen places like this on TV, on those shows where people with more money than he'll ever see in his life shop around for vacation homes. Or maybe it was part of an episode of Magnum, or Hawaii Five-0 (the classic one, thanks, although he does have a certain fondness for the way that Catherine chick can kick ass, even when she's wearing nothing but a bikini). Either way… yeah. His certainly only increases when he moves toward the glass-paneled door that opens to the outside, to a vista that involves a bunch of palm trees and a beach that seems to run for about eighty miles.
He's been to Florida. This ain't Florida.
Stretching catlike inside his new but meticulously broken-in clothes, he steps out onto the lanai, a wide swath of terrace that's furnished with a pair of cushy chaise lounges and a small round table with four bright fabric chairs.
There's food on the table, and some dishes. A stack of croissants, a plate of diced-up fruit, and a gleaming steel coffee carafe.
Okay, sure.
Like he's a croissant guy.
But what the hell. It's just sitting there, and there's nobody else around. The clothes were clearly meant for him, so the breakfast must be, too. And it's not like he'll refuse to eat a croissant. As long as there's coffee to go with it.
There is. The carafe is full.
And it's not diner coffee, either. It's the good stuff. The kind that was probably hand-picked by nuns, who then carried the beans down the side of the mountain wrapped tenderly in pure white… you know. Towels or something. Or maybe in the pockets of those nun-things they wear. But his bet's on pristine white cloth, held in the palms of their hands all the way down the mountain - which isn't a precarious way to descend a mountain, at all, because nuns don't trip.
There's just something all wrong about a nun rolling down the side of a mountain.
Besides, it would bruise the coffee beans.
Rich people do this, he supposes: sit out on the lanai sipping their coffee and eating their croissants and fresh fruit while they check stuff on their phones. Big business deals or whatever, or finding out when they need to catch their plane to Rome. His phone's MIA (it's wherever his damn CAR is, he figures), so there's nothing for him to check while he has his breakfast.
Just as well. There's been way too much shit going on lately. It's good to have a break, to sit in a nice cushy lounge chair and watch the surf.
HEY.
There's something out there, something that makes him sit upright and peer out across the water.
DUDE. It's dolphins. There's a… what do you call it, a whole school of dolphins right out there just offshore. Fleetingly he remembers feeding ducks as a kid, at some place he and Dad and Sammy were staying, ducks that would swim right up to where he was and accept chunks of stale bread out of his hand.
Dolphins don't do that, do they?
Come around every morning to see if there's a handout?
God damn, Sam should see this. Sam would get all excited about it. Might even wade right on out there.
So come on: this is just stupid. Why would he get plucked out of the car and not Sam? They were in there together. It's true, the angels have always been a little bit fonder of dicking around with Dean than they have with Sam (though he supposes Sam would argue that, because Sam always argues everything; he'd probably insist that hell yes, his life is just as miserable as Dean's is, because the angels won't leave him alone) - but still. Why take one of them, and not the other, for something like this? There's divide and conquer, sure, but what exactly is this conquering?
Unless this place has another bedroom, and Sam's still asleep.
Certainly it's got another bedroom. Who'd build a place like this with only one bedroom?
It's a sin to gulp down coffee this good, but better that than to put the cup down and have it disappear, so he drains the cup in a couple of big swallows, returns what's left of his plate of fruit and an uneaten corner of croissant to the table, brushes crumbs off his new, diaper-soft jeans and crosses the lanai to that big open area where the bedroom's fourth wall should be. Yes, that's the bedroom he was sleeping in.
Walking the perimeter of the house takes more time than he figured. The house isn't all that big - not Downton Abbey big, by a long shot - but it's surrounded by a lot of little flower beds and crushed-stone borders and low walls and annoyingly placed palm trees. He started out pretty sure that there'd be a bedroom alongside his, because what would be the point of putting a bedroom (or any room at all) in a place where you couldn't see the ocean? For crying out loud, even the bathroom's got a view.
Okay, maybe the wine cellar wouldn't have one.
But alongside his bedroom is what looks like (when he peers through the window, stabbing the shit out of his bare feet because there's crushed stone underneath it) an exercise room. Or a…
Shit, is that a POOL in there?
There's a pool. In the HOUSE.
Next there's a kitchen, and it's bigger than the entire ground floor of their house back in Lawrence. He half expected to find more food laid out in there, or at least some sign of prep work, but there's nothing. It's tidy and spotless.
Next, there's a living room. Great room, family room, whatever you want to call it. That fucker's bigger than the entire city of Lawrence.
And it's got a TV the size of a barn door.
You want to talk about stuff that makes baby kittens weep.
That TV almost stops him in his tracks, because… come ON. Look at that thing. There's a big leather sectional couch arranged in front of it, with a gigantic ottoman in the middle, the kind you can use as a coffee table if you're careful not to jiggle stuff. It's the i-freakin'-deal place to watch some TV, to have a whole action movie marathon.
No Casa Erotica, though. Porn on a screen that big would be intimidating.
Movin' right along, he tells himself.
To his dismay, rounding the corner brings him to the front of the house. There's a wide, curving driveway there, but no cars - not his or anybody else's. Nor can he see a sign of anyone else's house, which he supposes makes sense, because who'd build a place like this cheek-to-jowl with the people next door? For a moment he thinks that seeing some small sign of other people would be a comfort, but it's not random other people he's interested in. What would he do with a bunch of random other people? Invite them over for croissants?
Opposite the living/family/great room is a formal dining room. Huge table, big enough to seat a couple dozen.
Yeah, no thanks.
The next room looks like an office.
Then he's back to the bathroom.
It is a one-person house, then. Or one couple, maybe. A couple that enjoys inviting bunches of people to dinner or to hang out in front of the TV - as long as nobody wants to stay over. That strikes him as weird. But who's to say what makes sense to rich people. It'd be kind of nice to live here, right smack on the edge of the ocean, where you can eat your breakfast and watch dolphins, then go watch some TV. It's quiet. No traffic noise, no sirens, no screaming in the middle of the night… and he's willing to bet the pipes don't clank. If you had the right person to hang out with, this wouldn't be a bad place at all.
Because, seriously. HAWAII.
If you had the right person with you.
He thinks fleetingly of Lisa. Of Jamie. Of Mom. Then he thinks of Cas and immediately tells himself that some construction would be needed - another whole wing, because there's that staring business.
And the flatulence.
He thinks of Dad, and Bobby, of Ellen and Jo. Kevin. Jody Mills is still around, of course, but for some reason he can't see Jody enjoying herself in a place like this. It doesn't suit her. Not that it would really suit Dad or Bobby, either. Jo would've adapted, maybe.
Jo in a tiny bikini is worth thinking about.
Then he starts to wonder again how long whoever it is that dropped him here figures on keeping him here. Because solitary is solitary, even when it's got dolphins and big TVs. Even if there's deluxe-spectrum cable, or DISH, or whatever.
Even if there's all kinds of food.
God, it's quiet here.
That coffee tasted good going down, but it's sour now. The soles of his feet are sore, and his head has started to ache.
Maybe he should go back to bed.
Maybe that's the trick. Crawl back in bed, fall asleep, and wake up back in the car. He's not at all sleepy, but he knows some tricks. He's John Winchester's kid. He can fall asleep pretty much anywhere, pretty much on command.
"Dean?"
He doesn't turn his head. He's not really sure he heard anything.
"Dean? Hey, Dean! Come on! You gotta come check this out!"
He sees a blur of color out of the corner of his eye. Then there's someone rushing up to him, all arms and legs and floppy moppy hair.
Sam.
Not Sam-now, not Sam who's six-foot-seventeen, the one who hit thirty a while back, the guy who can't get clothes to fit and drives either too fast or like an old lady. Not the Sam who bitches about Dean's singing, the one who won't call the bunker home, the one who spent so many months looking like death on a cracker.
This Sam is… what? Ten? Eleven?
"Dean!" he crows. "Oh my God, have you seen this place? We need to go to the beach, like, right now."
Not really a beach guy, Dean thinks distantly.
But Sam - Sammy - is tugging at him, hands wrapped around Dean's forearm, pulling like he's the horse and Dean's the cart. They used to do that, Dean remembers, when Sam was little. He'd plant himself in a spot and let Sammy haul on him with all the strength he could muster. For a long time, it was a game, one that would make Sam turn bright red, would make his nose run.
Funny…
The arm that Sam is clutching looks different. Smaller. The muscles in it are less defined than they were a few minutes ago.
"How old am I?" Dean whispers.
"What? You're fourteen, dummy."
Fourteen.
So Sam is ten.
It's after that Christmas, the one in Broken Bow, so this Sam is carrying the burden of Dad's journal inside him. That friggin' book killed him, Dean thinks sometimes; no matter what Sam knew or suspected before he got his hands on it, what was in that book obliterated Sam's childhood. But there were moments, now and then. Moments when Sam's eyes would shine like they are right now, when he would bubble over with enthusiasm and glee, like a littler kid. Like a happier kid. Like a kid with a regular life.
"We can just swim in our underwear, right?" Sam asks. "There's nobody around."
Nodding, Dean looks down at his clothes. They're the same, jeans and dark blue t-shirt, but they're smaller. He's smaller.
Fourteen.
What is this? he wonders.
It seems too detailed to be a dream. So maybe it's a construct, something the angels whipped together. They seem to like to do that: make fake stuff. But again… level of detail. Good coffee. Soft sheets.
A shower with sixteen shower heads.
So is this Sam? His Sam, just smaller? Or is he a fake?
Without really deciding to do it, he steps forward and wraps his arms around his brother, tugging Sam in close and thumping his head gently against Sam's. Sam resists him at first, then relaxes and relocates his own arms so he can return the hug.
It's not a fake.
He's not sure how he knows, but he knows.
Because of that, he's got no illusion that this will last any great length of time. They haven't been put here for the duration. Maybe not even overnight. Whoever put them here will retrieve them before they're ready to go, because that's how things happen for him and Sam, because for them, the good stuff just never lasts.
But for now… there are dolphins out there. Maybe they'll come closer, if he and Sam wade into the surf.
Maybe he and Sam will just swim. Either one would be okay.
No… more than okay.
Even if it doesn't last.
"You good, Sammy?" Dean asks in a whisper.
"I am now," his brother whispers back.
* * * * *