SPN: This Is How It Is (gen)
Rating: PG for language, gen
Spoilers: through to 420, I guess.
Summary: You should know, first, that the world didn't end. In case you were wondering. What happened after. 1800 words.
Notes: Something of an experiment. I blame sophiap. And janissa11, for reasons which shall become obvious.
You should know, first, that the world didn't end. In case you were wondering.
Things did get a bit weird for a while, though: everyone on the planet named "Frank" or "Ivan" died at 8:13 GMT on June 21, 2009. Seventeen hundred bottlenose dolphins beached themselves around the world--and swam away again, three hours later. An immense green storm formed over the central United States, and when it was gone--at 8:13 AM CDT--every pond in twelve states was populated by small red frogs.
A year went by.
Nobody names any sons "Francis" or even "John", just in case. The frogs eat their body-weight in mosquito larvae, and it is the nicest summer anyone in Oklahoma can remember. Some weird change in the ocean currents results in a surge in the salmon population on the Pacific coast, and the fishermen (and women) in Oregon and California all go back to work.
So it's been a year, and the economy is stabilizing and while there are still some wars, they are small ones. And there hasn't been a mass murder or school shooting in North America since, well, June 21, 2009.
Don't think the Winchesters haven't noticed that.
Not that they'd say anything about it. Who would believe it? Little red frogs and the death of all the Franks and Ivans in the world are one thing: demons and a narrowly-averted apocalypse are another altogether.
~
A late summer day in Charleston, Oregon is unseasonably sunny and warm. A thirty-foot fishing boat, wallowing low despite the calm sea, makes its way past the bar and into the small but busy marina. Half a dozen men and women go to work unloading the catch, swearing at one another cheerfully. It was clearly a good day.
On the shore, next to the small shop that sells coffee and cigarettes and sodas, a man sits on a bench and watches the unloading. It goes on for a long time, and after an hour he gets up, tosses his long-empty coffee cup in the trash, and turns away.
He is remarkably tall, but none of the men and women working on the smack Claudia notice him climb into a dull grey Toyota pickup truck and drive away.
~
Brannan's is the closest bar to the marina: it's nearly walking distance, but nobody wants to walk after pulling a twelve-hour shift on the water before unloading. So the parking lot this summer afternoon is full of pickup trucks and SUVs, most of them a little battered, a little rusted. The salmon came back, but it's going to be a while before anyone can afford to replace these cars.
The one exception to the automobile population is a dusty black muscle car parked in the far corner.
The grey Toyota pickup pulls in, and is parked at the opposite end of the lot from the muscle car. You wouldn't be able to tell if the driver of the pickup even saw the muscle car.
But I can tell you, of course, that he did.
The bar is busy but not as loud as you would think: the crowd spills outside, onto a porch overlooking the water. It's rare enough in the summer to have this kind of weather that the porch is full. The inside of the bar is a bar, a working-man's bar: a little dim, smelling of spilled beer and cigarette smoke, and taps full of domestic lagers (and one local microbrew, because this is still Oregon, after all).
The bartender is a woman in her mid-50s, with bleached curls and too much eyeliner. She puts two bottles of Michelob on the counter for the tall guy who drove the Toyota--and let's just cut to the chase here, shall we? We'll call him Sam--and takes his money with a nod. A professional bartender, not in the habit of flirting with good-looking and very tall young men.
Sam takes his two beers and goes out onto the porch. It's louder out there, and the wind is picking up. A black-haired woman turns suddenly and bumps into him, spilling one of his beers.
"Oh, sorry! Didn't see you there!"
"It's okay," says Sam, and moves on, weaving with surprising grace through the crowd. He doesn't spill any more of his beer, mostly by dint of holding them over his head.
At length he gets to the south end of the porch, where the crowd is a little thinner. Two white men and a Latina woman are sitting together with their feet propped on the opposite bench, looking out over the bay. She is half-asleep, Sam suspects, a dull green baseball cap pulled low over her eyes. One of the men, a burly fellow in his fifties, is eating from a bag of potato chips.
The third man has the kind of tan only the very fair get: it's a reddish shade that doesn't hide the freckles splattered across his face. His sunglasses have slipped down, exposing the paler skin around his eyes, and there's a line where his t-shirt sleeve has ridden up. If you look really carefully, you can see there's a scar along his jaw, only partly hidden by the red-brown scruff of a three-day beard.
Sam hesitates, but just for a moment. He turns away briefly, grabs an empty chair, and pulls it over next to the guy with the freckles. Of course, you readers already know that his name is Dean. The Latina is Araceles, and the burly potato-chip eater is Pete. Not that you really care about Araceles or Pete, but I figured it would be polite to introduce them nonetheless.
Anyway, back to Sam and Dean. Sam sits down on the chair next to Dean, and hands a beer to Dean.
There is, one could say, a dramatic pause.
Dean doesn't look away from whatever it is he's staring at, out in the bay. Maybe it's that kayaker, or maybe he sees a sea lion in the water. After about six breaths, he takes the beer.
"So," says Sam, while Dean raises the beer to his lips. "Fishing."
Dean still doesn't look at him. He drinks, swallows the beer. Takes another sip. "Yeah," he replies.
Sam looks out at the water. "Nice town?" He's seen a lot of America this last year. He's not sure he remembers a day when the sun was this bright, though. He drinks some of his Michelob. Or when the beer tasted this good.
"Okay," Dean replies. "Rains like fuck in the winter, though."
"Uh-huh." Sam leans forward, looking past Dean at Araceles and Pete. "I'm Sam," he offers.
Araceles doesn't lift her head, but she gives a little wave of her hand. Pete stares at him skeptically, then smiles. "Brother!" he announces, and nudges Araceles with his elbow.
"The fuck!" she says, pushing her hat up and scowling.
Pete ignores her. "Didn't tell us you had a brother, dude!" he accuses Dean.
"Guess I didn't," says Dean. He still hasn't looked at Sam. But he waves a finger in the air, pointing from right to left to right. "Pete, Ari, Sam. Sam, Pete, Ari."
Sam nods, Pete and Ari nod back. Pete dives back into his potato chips, Ari pulls her hat back down, and Dean and Sam sit next to each other, not talking. Drinking their beers.
When both bottles are empty, the porch is beginning to clear out. Ari mutters something and leaves. Pete falls asleep, his chin on his chest.
It's summertime. The sun has a long way to go to the horizon. Sam's been driving for four days straight, stopping only for five or six hours of sleep a night. He dozes.
When he wakes up, there's a new beer next to him, and Dean is staring at his face.
Sam blinks and doesn't say anything.
"You look like shit," says Dean.
"Probably," admits Sam. He hasn't had clean underwear in a while, or a haircut. Dean looks like he's been working hard, but in a good way: he's put on muscle, his eyes are clear, his face doesn't have that drawn look it had before. He looks healthy.
Dean purses his lips, looks back at the bay, takes a long swig of his beer.
"I'm clean, Dean," says Sam, watching his brother's face. "I've been clean for a year." He's not going to plead: Sam Winchester still has some pride.
The label on Dean's beer now reads, "--chelob". He picks at the paper and curls the wet scraps between his fingers. "I've got a place in North Bend," he says, meeting Sam's eyes briefly and then looking away. "It's small, but I got a couch."
Readers, let us all pause here for a moment and ponder this: Dean Winchester owns a couch.
There is no soundtrack to this story, but you could probably conjure up some strings right now. They're soft, but they're swelling.
"Is it big enough for me?" Sam has a poor history with couches.
Dean shrugs, and his cheek bunches up, just a little bit. As if he were not allowing himself to smile. (Which is the truth.) "Bigger than the back seat of the Impala."
There's something caught in Sam's chest. To Sam, it feels like a sea monster, something with claws and teeth, and it's crawling upwards, and it hurts, but it's a good hurt. The kind of hurt when you pull off a scab.
"Cool." Sam lifts his bottle towards Dean's.
The necks of two half-empty beer bottles touch, and clink. A soft note, of no importance of itself, but signifying everything.
The strings swell, the curtain drops.
~
Oh, you want to know what happens after that? Jeez, so demanding. Okay, fine.
They drink a lot of beer. Dean takes Sam out fishing and laughs his head off when Sam gets sick into the bilge. Sam shows off his truck and doesn't punch Dean when Dean makes fun of the fact it's a Toyota.
Sam gets his back when he discovers that Dean's favorite local beer has raspberries in it.
They argue. No real punches are thrown, but there's some shoving. Angry words about trust, about locked doors, about blood and John and Mary and Jess and Bobby--and you know the score. Twenty-six years of family drama and averted apocalypses are spread out on the kitchen table and picked over.
Dean stomps out of the apartment more than once, and finds himself at the end of a pier with a bottle of beer and a pack of cigarettes he doesn't remember buying. Sam gets angry and drives halfway to Portland before he realizes he left his dufflebag on the couch in Dean's living room.
After three weeks of this, Ari's sister-in-law gets attacked in the woods while berry-picking. It's something big and black and not a bear.
Dean refuses to call it a hunt. Sam doesn't care: he can't hide the grin as Dean pulls the Impala into the parking spot at the trailhead. They come back bruised and scratched and hungry and triumphant.
Sam gets a job at the coffeeshop in downtown North Bend, and picks up a catalog for U of O. He rents an apartment three blocks from Dean's place.
Time moves forward. Some things change: other things don't. That's how life is, when the world doesn't end.
END
Note: Yeah, I don't know where that came from, either. Well, it's better than doing yard work, anyway.
Spoilers: through to 420, I guess.
Summary: You should know, first, that the world didn't end. In case you were wondering. What happened after. 1800 words.
Notes: Something of an experiment. I blame sophiap. And janissa11, for reasons which shall become obvious.
You should know, first, that the world didn't end. In case you were wondering.
Things did get a bit weird for a while, though: everyone on the planet named "Frank" or "Ivan" died at 8:13 GMT on June 21, 2009. Seventeen hundred bottlenose dolphins beached themselves around the world--and swam away again, three hours later. An immense green storm formed over the central United States, and when it was gone--at 8:13 AM CDT--every pond in twelve states was populated by small red frogs.
A year went by.
Nobody names any sons "Francis" or even "John", just in case. The frogs eat their body-weight in mosquito larvae, and it is the nicest summer anyone in Oklahoma can remember. Some weird change in the ocean currents results in a surge in the salmon population on the Pacific coast, and the fishermen (and women) in Oregon and California all go back to work.
So it's been a year, and the economy is stabilizing and while there are still some wars, they are small ones. And there hasn't been a mass murder or school shooting in North America since, well, June 21, 2009.
Don't think the Winchesters haven't noticed that.
Not that they'd say anything about it. Who would believe it? Little red frogs and the death of all the Franks and Ivans in the world are one thing: demons and a narrowly-averted apocalypse are another altogether.
~
A late summer day in Charleston, Oregon is unseasonably sunny and warm. A thirty-foot fishing boat, wallowing low despite the calm sea, makes its way past the bar and into the small but busy marina. Half a dozen men and women go to work unloading the catch, swearing at one another cheerfully. It was clearly a good day.
On the shore, next to the small shop that sells coffee and cigarettes and sodas, a man sits on a bench and watches the unloading. It goes on for a long time, and after an hour he gets up, tosses his long-empty coffee cup in the trash, and turns away.
He is remarkably tall, but none of the men and women working on the smack Claudia notice him climb into a dull grey Toyota pickup truck and drive away.
~
Brannan's is the closest bar to the marina: it's nearly walking distance, but nobody wants to walk after pulling a twelve-hour shift on the water before unloading. So the parking lot this summer afternoon is full of pickup trucks and SUVs, most of them a little battered, a little rusted. The salmon came back, but it's going to be a while before anyone can afford to replace these cars.
The one exception to the automobile population is a dusty black muscle car parked in the far corner.
The grey Toyota pickup pulls in, and is parked at the opposite end of the lot from the muscle car. You wouldn't be able to tell if the driver of the pickup even saw the muscle car.
But I can tell you, of course, that he did.
The bar is busy but not as loud as you would think: the crowd spills outside, onto a porch overlooking the water. It's rare enough in the summer to have this kind of weather that the porch is full. The inside of the bar is a bar, a working-man's bar: a little dim, smelling of spilled beer and cigarette smoke, and taps full of domestic lagers (and one local microbrew, because this is still Oregon, after all).
The bartender is a woman in her mid-50s, with bleached curls and too much eyeliner. She puts two bottles of Michelob on the counter for the tall guy who drove the Toyota--and let's just cut to the chase here, shall we? We'll call him Sam--and takes his money with a nod. A professional bartender, not in the habit of flirting with good-looking and very tall young men.
Sam takes his two beers and goes out onto the porch. It's louder out there, and the wind is picking up. A black-haired woman turns suddenly and bumps into him, spilling one of his beers.
"Oh, sorry! Didn't see you there!"
"It's okay," says Sam, and moves on, weaving with surprising grace through the crowd. He doesn't spill any more of his beer, mostly by dint of holding them over his head.
At length he gets to the south end of the porch, where the crowd is a little thinner. Two white men and a Latina woman are sitting together with their feet propped on the opposite bench, looking out over the bay. She is half-asleep, Sam suspects, a dull green baseball cap pulled low over her eyes. One of the men, a burly fellow in his fifties, is eating from a bag of potato chips.
The third man has the kind of tan only the very fair get: it's a reddish shade that doesn't hide the freckles splattered across his face. His sunglasses have slipped down, exposing the paler skin around his eyes, and there's a line where his t-shirt sleeve has ridden up. If you look really carefully, you can see there's a scar along his jaw, only partly hidden by the red-brown scruff of a three-day beard.
Sam hesitates, but just for a moment. He turns away briefly, grabs an empty chair, and pulls it over next to the guy with the freckles. Of course, you readers already know that his name is Dean. The Latina is Araceles, and the burly potato-chip eater is Pete. Not that you really care about Araceles or Pete, but I figured it would be polite to introduce them nonetheless.
Anyway, back to Sam and Dean. Sam sits down on the chair next to Dean, and hands a beer to Dean.
There is, one could say, a dramatic pause.
Dean doesn't look away from whatever it is he's staring at, out in the bay. Maybe it's that kayaker, or maybe he sees a sea lion in the water. After about six breaths, he takes the beer.
"So," says Sam, while Dean raises the beer to his lips. "Fishing."
Dean still doesn't look at him. He drinks, swallows the beer. Takes another sip. "Yeah," he replies.
Sam looks out at the water. "Nice town?" He's seen a lot of America this last year. He's not sure he remembers a day when the sun was this bright, though. He drinks some of his Michelob. Or when the beer tasted this good.
"Okay," Dean replies. "Rains like fuck in the winter, though."
"Uh-huh." Sam leans forward, looking past Dean at Araceles and Pete. "I'm Sam," he offers.
Araceles doesn't lift her head, but she gives a little wave of her hand. Pete stares at him skeptically, then smiles. "Brother!" he announces, and nudges Araceles with his elbow.
"The fuck!" she says, pushing her hat up and scowling.
Pete ignores her. "Didn't tell us you had a brother, dude!" he accuses Dean.
"Guess I didn't," says Dean. He still hasn't looked at Sam. But he waves a finger in the air, pointing from right to left to right. "Pete, Ari, Sam. Sam, Pete, Ari."
Sam nods, Pete and Ari nod back. Pete dives back into his potato chips, Ari pulls her hat back down, and Dean and Sam sit next to each other, not talking. Drinking their beers.
When both bottles are empty, the porch is beginning to clear out. Ari mutters something and leaves. Pete falls asleep, his chin on his chest.
It's summertime. The sun has a long way to go to the horizon. Sam's been driving for four days straight, stopping only for five or six hours of sleep a night. He dozes.
When he wakes up, there's a new beer next to him, and Dean is staring at his face.
Sam blinks and doesn't say anything.
"You look like shit," says Dean.
"Probably," admits Sam. He hasn't had clean underwear in a while, or a haircut. Dean looks like he's been working hard, but in a good way: he's put on muscle, his eyes are clear, his face doesn't have that drawn look it had before. He looks healthy.
Dean purses his lips, looks back at the bay, takes a long swig of his beer.
"I'm clean, Dean," says Sam, watching his brother's face. "I've been clean for a year." He's not going to plead: Sam Winchester still has some pride.
The label on Dean's beer now reads, "--chelob". He picks at the paper and curls the wet scraps between his fingers. "I've got a place in North Bend," he says, meeting Sam's eyes briefly and then looking away. "It's small, but I got a couch."
Readers, let us all pause here for a moment and ponder this: Dean Winchester owns a couch.
There is no soundtrack to this story, but you could probably conjure up some strings right now. They're soft, but they're swelling.
"Is it big enough for me?" Sam has a poor history with couches.
Dean shrugs, and his cheek bunches up, just a little bit. As if he were not allowing himself to smile. (Which is the truth.) "Bigger than the back seat of the Impala."
There's something caught in Sam's chest. To Sam, it feels like a sea monster, something with claws and teeth, and it's crawling upwards, and it hurts, but it's a good hurt. The kind of hurt when you pull off a scab.
"Cool." Sam lifts his bottle towards Dean's.
The necks of two half-empty beer bottles touch, and clink. A soft note, of no importance of itself, but signifying everything.
The strings swell, the curtain drops.
~
Oh, you want to know what happens after that? Jeez, so demanding. Okay, fine.
They drink a lot of beer. Dean takes Sam out fishing and laughs his head off when Sam gets sick into the bilge. Sam shows off his truck and doesn't punch Dean when Dean makes fun of the fact it's a Toyota.
Sam gets his back when he discovers that Dean's favorite local beer has raspberries in it.
They argue. No real punches are thrown, but there's some shoving. Angry words about trust, about locked doors, about blood and John and Mary and Jess and Bobby--and you know the score. Twenty-six years of family drama and averted apocalypses are spread out on the kitchen table and picked over.
Dean stomps out of the apartment more than once, and finds himself at the end of a pier with a bottle of beer and a pack of cigarettes he doesn't remember buying. Sam gets angry and drives halfway to Portland before he realizes he left his dufflebag on the couch in Dean's living room.
After three weeks of this, Ari's sister-in-law gets attacked in the woods while berry-picking. It's something big and black and not a bear.
Dean refuses to call it a hunt. Sam doesn't care: he can't hide the grin as Dean pulls the Impala into the parking spot at the trailhead. They come back bruised and scratched and hungry and triumphant.
Sam gets a job at the coffeeshop in downtown North Bend, and picks up a catalog for U of O. He rents an apartment three blocks from Dean's place.
Time moves forward. Some things change: other things don't. That's how life is, when the world doesn't end.
END
Note: Yeah, I don't know where that came from, either. Well, it's better than doing yard work, anyway.