[fic] precipice

[steeplechasers]

Title: precipice
Genre: Gen
Pairing/Characters: Sam, Dean, Cas, an angel
Rating: G
Wordcount: ~4,000
Warnings: n/a
Summary: Two weeks by the beach where nothing happens--it just ain't long enough.
Notes: For savethisanimal, a belated Christmas gift. Luv u boo, I hope you like it. <3



Nothing happens here, which is the point. The sun rises in the same misty-blue off the waves every day, and sets in bloody reds like a vast organ in the sky, and the grey pebbles of the beach turn over and over and always settle into patterns that feel familiar, and the wind blows chilly from evening until morning, breaking flickers of firelight off the charcoals in the pit. Nothing happens here, which is the point, the reason they've come.

Cas has always loved the ocean, and Dean has always loved cold quiet mornings to himself, and Sam has always loved following them wherever their whims blow them, and so they landed here: two weeks of nothing-happening in a weatherbeaten cottage by the sea, waiting for glimmers of the sun, drinking by the fire-pit after dark.

The stars are brighter than they have ever been, Sam thinks, overhead, in this place. It's gloomy, chilly, perfect. When it rains in the afternoons they sit on the sagging front porch of grey driftwood, sharing one huge wool blanket, letting the spray hit their faces, saying nothing.

Nothing is the point.

Somehow Dean and Cas keep finding things to do. And Sam is content to let them do those things, mostly watching from afar, feeling golden inside, to see them so happy. Dean teaches Cas to float on his back and be rocked by the waves, and Cas coaxes pelicans to him, feeds them tiny fish plucked from the tide pools while Dean watches in awe; they race crabs across the pebbles and explore up the cliffsides, climbing in tangles of arms and legs, and when they find a spot over open water Sam watches them leap from the edge and go screaming, splashing down, heads popping up ringed in white foam and laughing.

As for him-he doesn't feel rushed. He'll find his own ways to occupy himself, he's sure. For now he's happy to sit on the wet boulders and watch his brother and their friend go awkward-running through the water, falling face-first into the surf, sitting with their legs outstretched in the water watching birds dip and dive in the distance.

He's fine, really. He's here for them. They all need a break, but privately he thinks they need it more than him.

Sam makes sure there's coffee in the kitchenette when they wake up, and scrambles eggs while Dean makes pancakes and Cas drags himself out of dreams. The ocean is shower enough. The cottage door is always open, a dark space at their backs, waiting for them to come back in when the sun goes down. The sun rarely shines here-sometimes it passes over, like the hand of God, and for the hour or so that it shows its face all three of them burrow their bodies flat into the grey rocks, like children making snow angels, to let it bake across their faces.

At night Sam goes back out onto the beach to stamp out the last coals of their campfire-they made it the first night in a hollow valley in the pebble dunes-and stands there for a while, wrapped haphazardly in a blanket taken from the cottage, listening to the wind and the water.

He starts to understand, one morning, when Dean leans over to prod Cas' arm with his syrupy fork at breakfast and says, “You know what we should do?”

Cas grunts, about as much as anyone will get from him this early.

“I bet there's some great places to cliff-jump,” Dean says, “over there.”

Sam looks at him over the rim of his coffee mug.

Cas musters a smile, dragging a piece of bacon to his mouth.

“Yeah,” Sam says, a little confused. “What happened to that one you found a few days ago? That one seemed good.”

Dean cocks an eyebrow at him, reaching over to steal a chocolate chip from Sam's plate. Sam doesn't protest. “We haven't been in the cliffs yet, dummy,” he says, throwing a look at Cas, dumb, right?

“You-”

“Need more coffee?” Dean says, scooting his chair back and plucking Sam's mug from his hand. He's humming to himself when he moves back to the counter.

Sam looks at Cas, who is drooping into his scrambled eggs, and at Dean, swaying gently by the coffeemaker.

They found the cliff-jump three days ago, he knows. He saw them. Kept yelling at them to look out for rocks on the way down.

“Sounds fine to me,” Cas says, an extremely belated response. He yawns, leans back, looking tired but content.

Sam finishes his pancakes silently.

He keeps a distance from them as they cross the shifting beach to the edge of the cliff, and sits in the hug of a boulder while they help each other up it, reaching for ledges and crags as if it's the first time they've done it, when Sam knows it isn't. They become little black shapes at the top, against the grey sky, and he watches them move toward the hollow in the cliff where the waves rush in, where it's perfect to jump from. Watches them cannonball off it, plummet into the water.

It was three days ago, but they don't remember.

Sam pulls his legs up onto the rock as the tide comes in, scattering tiny luminescent crabs under his feet.

There's a fog far out on the ocean that never seems to budge, and far to the east it wraps up against the shore and filters inland, and past it there is nothing to see.

Dean and Cas discover the cliffs again two days later, jogging eagerly past Sam, calling for him to join them, to look for a jump point.

Gulls come in at high tide, swooping down for stranded fish, and Cas sits among them, the picture of calm, watching them light and take off again all around him. For once Dean is sitting with Sam, a bottle in his hand, letting the spray wet his legs.

“Where'd you find this place, Sammy?” he says. The beach is warm from a passing hour of sun; he wiggles his toes into it, burying them. “It's pretty great.”

Sam shrugs. “You know,” he says.

“Man.” Dean sets his bottle down on the rocks between them, arching his back. Sam can hear his spine popping. “Two weeks ain't long enough.”

“I hear that,” Sam says, softly.

They watch Cas get up and disappear back into the dark doorway of the cottage and come back out with heels of bread from the package in the pantry. The gulls swoop down around him in a frenzy of wings and Dean laughs.

“Gonna fly away with you if you're not careful!” he shouts, kicking a spray of pebbles in Cas' direction.

Cas decides, over scrambled eggs and chocolate-chip pancakes, that he wants to walk down the east side of the shore and see what's what.

Sam feels a tinge of panic, but all he can do is walk alongside him, Dean trailing instead near the water.

The pebble beach stretches for a mile or two before it meets the fog, and it's hard to see beyond that. Sam hears them conspiring, wondering what's out here, calling back to him sometimes for answers that he doesn't have. “More beach?” he guesses, and they seem to be satisfied.

He looks back from time to time. He can still see the cottage, its greenish driftwood, far away behind them.

New cliffs loom up on their left after a while. Dean veers back onto the sand and bumps Cas with his shoulder. “Hey,” Sam hears him say. “When we get back we should check out those other cliffs, huh? By the house.”

Sam's worry doesn't last long; when the fog begins to encroach on their path through the beach, they start to slow down, more interested in the lichen creeping up the rocks or the tiny scuttling crabs around their feet than the way forward; they stop, sit down on an encrusting of boulders at the cliff-base, and Sam stands next to them, quietly, watching the mist from the corner of his eye.

Cas squints up at the sky. “Think it'll rain.”

“Yeah,” says Dean, yawning. He pitches a rock into the water just to hear the sound it makes.

“Just beach,” Cas says, sounding vaguely disappointed, peering at Sam.

“Yeah,” Sam says, shifting his weight. “Just more beach.”

“Let's go back,” Dean says. “I'm starving.”

After a moment's silence the two of them stand up, lazily, and turn their backs on the fog and the eastern shoreline, walking back the way they came as confidently as if they'd intended to move in that direction all along.

Sam breathes a sigh of relief, and follows after.

Cas feeds bread to the gulls. Dean jumps off the cliffs. Cas feeds fish to the pelicans and Dean bakes in the hour's breadth of sun; Cas races crabs and Dean floats on his back. And Sam watches all of it, his back to the dark cottage doorway.

Nothing happens here, which is the point.

“Two weeks ain't long enough,” Dean tells him, for the tenth time.

By now it's been a month, or maybe more, but Sam won't tell him that.

The loop is comforting. And neither of them seem to notice anything about it. Never bother to walk down the eastern shore again, or ask what's out there. Every few days the cliffs are a new and joyous discovery. And it rains in the afternoons, the wind is chilly at night, and in the dark Sam goes out to smother the campfire and listen to the water.

He's waiting to get bored, but he isn't, and he supposes that's part of the whole idea. There's nothing to worry about. Dean and Cas are so happy, happier than he thinks he's ever seen them. Why ruin that for them?

He waits for the fog to come in closer, but it never does. Waits for something to change, a crack to appear. But Dean floats on his back, and Cas feeds the gulls, and everything is the same.

“Two weeks ain't long enough,” Dean says, out of breath, his hand wrapped around Sam's wrist.

It's been six months, and Sam is climbing the cliffs for the first time, wondering what there is to see from the top. All the way up he's marveling at Dean's fearlessness, how easily he scales the crags and crannies.

He's not too fond of heights himself, but he can't just ask what it looks like from the edge of the cliff; they never remember.

Cas is waiting at the top, swinging his legs off the edge, seagrass waving softly at his elbows. He turns his head west.

“Might be a spot to jump from,” he says.

Dean peers over him. “Yeah?”

By now their conversations are so routine that Sam barely hears them. He stands a ways back from the cliff edge, peering through the wind toward the ocean, but the fog obscures everything.

“Sam!” Dean calls, suddenly on the move, following Cas through the tiny hillocks of sand and weeds. “You coming?”

“In a minute,” Sam calls back.

The jump-point is further than he'd thought. He watches them grow small in the seagrass, their voices whipped way on the wind.

Alone, he turns a circle on his heel, shielding his eyes from the hour's-worth of sun. Far back inland everything becomes a haze, and as far as he can see in any direction the sea gives way to fog, blotted out like a dream.

He waits to become discontent. He feels like it has to come sometime. But it's been a year, and every day has been more or less the same, and he still feels okay. Like he belongs, like he's comfortable.

When he thinks of anything other than this, he feels a pit of dread in his stomach.

The weather is shifting, ever so slightly, into something approaching winter; Sam knows full winter won't come, as it hasn't before, just as spring and summer and fall will all be the same-only varying degrees of warmth-but they cram close together at night anyway, Sam pinched in between them, listening to them breathe in their sleep. There's a hole in the roof through which no rain ever seems to fall, and Sam can see the stars-just as clear and bright as they were the first night, and every night.

He waits to become discontent, but any possibility of that disappears when their warm bodies are pressed in close to his, sleepy hands grasping innocently out every now and then, pulling at blankets and hair. Sam closes his eyes and lets himself savor it.

Sam finds himself lingering, longer and longer, at the campfire on the beach at night, sitting with the blanket wrapped around him, looking out at the dark heaving shadows of the ocean. He feels like he's waiting for someone, but he doesn't know who.

He wonders what it must be like for them. To wake up every day to coffee and scrambled eggs, to explore the cliffs and the beach and the water for the first time, over and over again. If they must feel-like children, loose and carefree, with no goal in mind but the perpetuation of their own happiness. Sometimes they remember things, and other things they lose-the cliff-jump is new practically every week, but sometimes Sam hears snatches of conversation about things they spoke of the day before, or a month ago; their existence here must be so strange, dreamlike, hazy-to be making memories and losing them in equal measure, but always to be so happy, so freshly overwhelmed by salt air and salt sunrise.

He had worried, for a while, that their happiness wasn't genuine. Some product of the environment, mechanical or artificial. But he's known Dean long enough to know when his smile is actual. Known Cas long enough to know when he's faking a laugh.

It both chills and comforts him to know that it's real.

Dean finds him by the campfire one early morning, still sitting wrapped in his blanket, watching the first grey tongues of the sun curl up over the distant fog. He nudges Sam's leg with his foot.

“Never came back to bed,” he says.

“Sorry.”

Dean shrugs. “There's coffee. You cold?” He follows Sam's gaze out onto the water. “What're you looking at?”

He realises he doesn't know. “I don't know,” he says.

“Come inside,” Dean says, and Sam wonders, briefly, if he's made a mistake, if this interruption in the endless loop of days will break something of the mechanism keeping them here; but Dean doesn't look troubled at all, only tired and bedheaded, and he helps Sam up off the slippery pebbles with a strong grip on his forearm, and sets to making chocolate-chip pancakes inside.

He realises-three and a half years in-that none of them are getting any older, and something about that makes him deliriously happy-to know that the faces he wakes up to are identical to the ones he fell asleep with, that none of them will ever feel sick or know injury ever again. They're stuck-but it's a good stuck , a moment turning itself inside out over and over again, perfect happiness on this beach. And he gets to live it, and live it with them.

“Two weeks ain't long enough,” Dean says, and Sam thinks of all the two-weeks they used to have-stretches of time in which they'd known they wouldn't see each other, lengths in which Cas was absent or missing, weeks of hurt and hospitals or anxiously awaiting outcomes, periods during which everything could change, and often did.

Nothing happens here, which is the point; and yet Sam thinks a great deal is happening, even if it is invisible to everyone but him.

Sam stamps out the fire.

Behind him, the cottage door is open, dark, inviting. Inside Dean and Cas are sleeping, separated by a Sam-shaped absence in the bed, pleasantly exhausted by a day of climbing brand-new cliffs and entering brand-new seas. To the east and west and all around the fog sits, unmoving, unassuming, exactly where it has always been.

He pulls his blanket a little closer around him and looks east, along the stretch of beach they'd wandered forever ago, curious about the wider world.

His feet crunch in the pebbles of the beach and the wind tugs at his hair and the moon hangs overhead in the same crescent shape it has held since day one, brighter than it should be, enough to show him where to place his feet. Tiny crabs, glowing faintly in the dark, scatter in front of him, and then watch him go, like sentinels.

Two miles down the beach the fog begins; he sees the boulders where they'd stopped on their last trek out here, and walks past them, letting the chill white veil envelop him.

Everything is blank inside the fog-when he looks down, he cannot see his feet. But it doesn't bother him.

He'd expected this.

There is no sound here, except the sounds he makes simply by existing within it. He can feel the beach under his feet but cannot see it. His breath clears the fog in front of him, dissipating it, until it swirls back in, touching his face, his arms, his legs.

Sam isn't sure which way is forward, but he keeps walking, careful not to twist his ankle in the beach beneath him, pulling his blanket tighter around him.

It seems to go on forever, until it doesn't; when it pulls away and fades back, he's faced with an empty void, a black plain that stretches out in front of him, forever.

This doesn't scare him, either. And maybe he should be scared, but he seems to have lost the ability to be afraid. It's a blessing of sorts.

Someone is sitting near him, crouched like a hunter. An angel's sword-something he hasn't seen or even thought about in these last ten years-is staked into the void at their feet, flaming silently. They turn their head to look at him-a woman, completely nondescript; he couldn't describe her face if he tried. Her suit is pressed and perfect.

She stands, adjusting her blazer, and rests one hand on the hilt of her fiery sword.

“How are things?” she says, as comfortable as if she's know him all his life.

“They're good,” he says. He can feel the fog curling and whispering at his back. Somewhere far beyond it, miles and miles back, or maybe only a moment's walk, Dean and Cas are sleeping, oblivious. “Better than I could have hoped.”

The woman doesn't smile, but he can tell she's pleased, in whatever solemn way angels show their pleasure. She nods-gestures for him to sit down with her; he doesn't.

“Anything we can do?” she says, going back down onto her haunches. There's something both animal and extremely graceful about her. “It can get boring, we know.” She isn't looking at him-she's scanning the void. Far way he sees tiny lights zip and hover and vanish, so dim against the blackness that they could be hallucinations. “We can change things, expand them.”

“Not right now,” Sam says, thoughtfully. “I think we're okay.”

The angel nods, more to herself than to him. She works her jaw, runs an absent hand up and down the length of her sword. The blue flames do absolutely nothing to her.

“Have they figured it out yet?” she says. She looks at him. “Or did you tell them?”

Sam swallows. Of all the negative emotions he's managed to shed over all this time, guilt is still a hard one to shake.

“No,” he says. “Or if they have, they haven't told me about it.”

She doesn't say anything.

“Is that gonna be a problem down the line?” he asks.

“It shouldn't be,” she says, turning her face back to the void. “They may like to know, though. In their own time.”

“Yeah.” Sam looks down at his feet. “Someday.”

The angel cracks half a smile-it's the first emotion she's shown, and it makes Sam feel immediately at ease. She rests her chin on the flaming hilt of her sword.

“So,” she says, “it isn't all that bad, is it? Being dead. For good. And here.”

Something about the way she says it-he feels tears welling up in his eyes, hot and unfamiliar; he hasn't cried since they got here; the last time he can remember crying, he was face-down on a cold floor staring into Dean's cold blank eyes, feeling his own life running out of the bullet wound in his throat, and he was reaching desperately for his brother's hand, focusing on the weight of Cas' body collapsed across his own, thinking desperately, we all go together, we all go together-

“Not bad at all,” he says, “no.”

She seems to go solemn, and Sam wonders briefly about her-who she is. What her story is. But it doesn't matter.

She looks at him out of the corner of her eye.

“Everyone deserves to rest at some point, Sam,” she says. “Own that.”

“I will.”

She doesn't say anything else. The conversation's over. Out in the darkness the dim blue lights hum and hover, blinking in and out of consciousness, like stars.

Dean finds him by the campfire, half-asleep, sitting on the beach. The sun is rising.

“Never came back to bed,” he says.

Sam looks up at him. He feels like a dream, like he's far away, behind a pane of glass-hazy, smoky around the edges-and hopelessly real at the same time. Bedheaded. Smells like salt air.

“Sorry,” Sam says.

Dean helps him up off the slippery beach, and they go inside.

Cas is still curled up on the far right edge of the bed, and Sam thinks about turning back, to get the coffee going. But he watches Dean climb back in, leaving that perfect him-sized spot in the middle.

Maybe today's the day they sleep until dark, and when the moon is up they can go outside, see the bioluminescent plankton lighting up the sea in waves of colour; they can rest their heads on one another's shoulders and be still.

Dean grumbles, stretching out, pushing his face into the pillow. He sighs, his exhalation ruffling the hair that falls down over his eyes.

“Two weeks ain't long enough.”

Not quite right, Sam thinks, climbing over the baseboard to lie down between them, the two best parts of his life, the two best things in his eternity. These two weeks will last forever.