SPN FIC - Sammy's Most Excellent California Adventure (Part 2 of 2)
The story began here.
Thank you once again to the incomparable elliejane for the beautiful illustrations!
SAMMY'S MOST EXCELLENT CALIFORNIA ADVENTURE
By Carol Davis
Part 2
The bathroom had a window, pasted over with textured opaque film but large enough to make the room bright and…well, California-ish. Sam collected an armful of towels from the rack, piled them within reach of the tub, and took a long shower, left the water summer-rain tepid, scrubbed his hair with shampoo that reeked of vanilla (Gonna come out smelling like friggin' cake batter, he thought), stood under the shower head until the prickling stream of water had taken some of the tension out of his shoulders and back.
The towels, to his surprise, were thick and reasonably soft and bore no hint of bleach. He stood on one of them and let himself drip for a minute, let himself remember showering on California afternoons and wandering into the bedroom still damp, feeling no sense of urgency, no sense of things left undone.
No sense of needing to reclaim something that had been stolen from him.
When he came out of the bathroom, barefoot, in jeans and t-shirt, Dean was awake, sitting on the bed propped up by a small mountain of pillows, power-surfing through the TV's limited range of available channels. "Four news channels," he complained to Sam. "Who the hell comes here to watch the news?"
"Intelligent people?" Sam suggested.
Dean let that go by. "Gotta go somewhere. I need beer."
"Fridge," Sam said, which made Dean's eyes widen noticeably.
"No shit?" he squeaked. "They provide beer? Damn, Sammy, I like this place."
"Yeah, Dean," Sam replied, almost reluctant to spoil his brother's simple glee. "Plus a couple two-liters of Coke, four deluxe subs, a big bag of Fritos, a quart of potato salad, an apple pie and a half gallon of rocky road ice cream."
"You're screwin' with me," Dean scowled. But rather than make more of it than he already had, he hauled himself off the bed, went into the kitchen - continuing to scowl at Sam over his shoulder as he did so - and opened the refrigerator.
"I think there's a twenty-buck service fee for stocking the kitchen," Sam said.
"You can't just say 'I got stuff to eat'?"
"Where's the fun in that?" Sam shrugged.
They ate at the rickety table, the containers and packages of food all lying open on the countertops as if it were a junk food buffet. Once he had banished his initial annoyance, Dean moved cheerfully from package to package, filling and refilling his plate, slurping noisily from a bottle of beer in between huge bites of sandwich and salad. His main course out of the way, he moved on to dessert, assembling a plateful of pie a la mode so enormous it made Sam queasy to look at it.
"I'm offending your delicate sensibilities?" Dean asked, one eyebrow cocked.
"You could eat a little…slower?"
"Where's the fun in that?" Dean mocked.
A few minutes later, his plate finally cleaned, Dean pushed back his chair. To Sam's unending relief he seldom indulged the urge to unleash a table-rattling belch in restaurants, but Dean without the discouragement of public scrutiny could be a problem.
Was a problem.
"Whaddaya think?" he grinned after the echoes had faded. "They feel that on the seismographs up at CalTech, ya think?"
"We could call and ask," Sam sighed.
Chuckling to himself, Dean seized another beer and retreated to the other room, where he settled himself on the couch and resumed his channel surfing.
"We're leaving in the morning?" Sam called out to him after a minute.
He got no answer.
"Dean?" he prodded.
Still nothing, which meant Dean had either been suddenly struck deaf or was ignoring the question. With a glance at the disastrous remains of their meal - a flock of buzzards would have made less of a mess, he figured - he moved to the kitchen doorway and repeated, "We're heading out in the morning?"
Dean gave him a look he was at a loss to interpret.
"Yeah," Dean said. "Whatever."
"We could call Bobby. Or Ellen. See if anything's going on that we're close enough to check out."
"If you want."
"What do you want?"
Dean held on to that inscrutable look for a minute, then got up off the couch. "Goin' out for a while," he told his brother, and left the room before Sam could put his thoughts together enough to come up with a reply.
~~~~~~~~~~
Dad came back a little while after it got dark, opening the door to find Sammy sitting cross-legged on the bed next to Dean. He'd been there for a while, with a little stack of things beside him - some comics, the TV remote, and a big pile of Kleenex - and a cup of water and one of juice on the night table.
He wanted to smile, to make Dad feel like Sammy was glad to see him, but when he tried, all he could manage to do was sigh.
"What's goin' on, buddy?" Dad asked him.
"He's sick," Sammy said, and sighed again. "I tried to make him feel better but he just kepts telling me to knock it off."
Dad moved in close to the bed and felt Dean's forehead with his hand. "Dean," he said. "Up and at 'em, dude."
It took some jiggling, and Dad saying his name a few more times, but finally Dean opened his eyes.
"Up," Dad said.
Dean didn't look too good when he sat up.
"Is he gonna barf?" Sammy asked worriedly.
Dad didn't answer. Instead, he got Dean undressed, then wiped all the sweat off of him with wet washcloths, dried him off with one of the big towels, and got him into his pajamas. Then he got the thermometer out of the first aid kit and took Dean's temperature. When he was done with all that he scooted Sammy off the bed and made Dean drink a little juice before he tucked him in under the covers.
"I asked him did he want me to call Pastor Jim," Sammy said.
Dad nodded a little bit and turned off the light next to Dean's bed.
"Does he gots to go to the hospital?" Sammy asked.
"No," Dad said, and took a few minutes to put back the blanket and bedspread Sammy had pulled off the other bed.
He didn't seem to want to talk. He looked very tired.
"I tried to be good," Sammy said softly. "I did."
Dad turned around then and looked at Sammy. For a second Sammy thought he looked like he wanted to cry. But that was dumb, because Dad didn't ever cry. Only little kids cried, and sometimes ladies.
"Come on, buddy," Dad said. "I'll make you some supper."
Sammy was very, very quiet and ate everything Dad put on his plate. He ate both of his hot dogs even though he stopped being hungry when he had only taken one or two bites of the second one. It didn't seem right, eating supper without Dean. Dad seemed to think that too, because he kept looking into the other room as if he thought Dean might want him to come and do something, and he only ate one hot dog and only a little bit of potato salad.
Potato salad was one of Dad's favorite things in the whole world.
"Did you go see that guy?" Sammy asked after a while.
"Guy?"
"You said you were gonna go see somebody and talk."
Dad smiled a little bit but he didn't seem to think anything was all that funny. "Yeah, I did. I saw the guy."
"Do you gotta see him again tomorrow?"
It surprised Sammy a whole lot when Dad picked him up and carried him into the other room, then sat down on the couch with Sammy on his lap. He held Sammy tight, in a way that made Sammy remember the way he used to hold his teddy bear. For a long time he didn't say anything; he just held on to Sammy and kept looking at Dean.
"No," he said finally. "I don't need to go see him again tomorrow."
~~~~~~~~~~
Sam found his brother a little after dark, sitting on a chair out by the pool. Whether Dean had been there the whole time or not wasn't clear. He was alone out there, though - or had been, until Sam showed up - and was idly peeling paint off the arm of the chair with his thumbnail. He glanced up when Sam opened the gate to the pool area and walked in, then returned his attention to the flaking paint.
"Talked to Bobby," Sam said. "Things are kinda quiet."
"Which means what?"
"It means…things are quiet. We can hit the road. Or not."
Sam sat in the chair closest to Dean's, which still left a good three or four feet between them. For a moment Dean looked as if he intended to say something, then thought better of it and began to watch the breeze-rippled surface of the water in the pool.
"It's up to you, man," Sam told him. "Whatever you want to do."
"Why's that?" Dean asked, still studying the pool.
"Because -" Sam was lost for an answer. "I don't know. Whatever you want to do, I'm amenable."
"You're amenable."
"Yeah."
"This was a seriously fucked-up idea, Sammy. Coming here."
He said it in the same tone he would have used to say There's a dead lizard floating in the pool. There was; it was bobbing around on the surface of the water like some kid's abandoned toy. Sam was tempted for a moment to go fish it out, then decided to leave it be, at least for now. If somebody got freaked out by finding it there in the morning, that was their problem, not his. He'd been involved with far too many dead things already, this past couple of weeks.
"Because of Dad?" Sam guessed.
That was Dean. That was so Dean. It'd been entirely his idea to come here, and he'd been as giddy as a teenage girl the whole drive down from L.A. All day long he'd given away almost nothing of what he was thinking, or feeling, or remembering. He'd slept, he'd eaten, and then he'd walked away. Maybe he wanted to drive away now, or maybe he didn't. You can't go home again, Sam thought ruefully. Even when what passed for home was a family-style motel on one of the main drags in Buena Park, California.
Dean had had the flu the last time they were here, Sam recalled, though he was sure that that had nothing to do with Dean's growing melancholy.
Or maybe it did. Who the hell knew.
"It's supposed to be the happiest freaking place on earth," Sam told his brother.
Dean blinked at that, then got up from his chair, took down the pool-cleaning net from its hooks on the fence, and used it to fish the dead lizard out of the water. "Don't think this sorry little son of a bitch thinks so," he commented, dangling the lizard by its tail.
Having the thing dropped in his lap was the best he could hope for, Sam figured, grateful that he hadn't brought food or a drink out with him. Then again, the lizard wasn't bleeding, or oozing its innards, so maybe it wasn't worth bothering him with. Even at the ripe old age of not-quite-24, a few things could still flip Sam's squick meter, but having a dead four-inch lizard drip pool water onto his jeans wasn't one of them.
He would, however, need to pay careful attention to his breakfast tomorrow before putting any of it into his mouth.
"We were here for a while, weren't we?" he asked Dean. "Because you were sick."
"Almost a week."
"And we swam in here, right?"
"I swam. You did a lot of bitching about the water being too cold."
"Somebody gave us a pie. Is that right? There was some kind of big to-do about a pie."
"From Knott's Berry Farm," Dean nodded.
"Which is -"
"Down the street."
"You upchucked it," Sam said, fascinated by the bits of memory that had begun to surface, one after the other. "Dad told you to wait, but you wanted pie, so you ate it, and you barfed all over… something. The bed?"
"The bed, the rug, my clothes. All the way into the bathroom. I was like Lardass freakin' Hogan."
Maybe it was a genuine memory. Maybe it was a picture his mind had put together out of Dean's relating of the story somewhere along the line (probably, several somewheres along the line, because Dean was never reluctant to re-tell a good puking story, even with next to no provocation). Either way, the image was there, and it made Sam grin foolishly.
"Yeah, laugh it up," Dean said. "You weren't the one who heard about it from Dad for months, every time I burped."
"It must have been…impressive."
"Not the word I'd use."
"Waste of good pie?"
"Closer to being accurate."
"What kind was it?"
"Cherry. Looked kinda like I'd barfed out my intestines."
They sat for a while, watching the last lingering bits of sunlight give way to the amber glow of the pool lights and the parking lot's security lamps. Eventually Dean laid the dead lizard down on the cement at his feet and sat pondering it with the same level of interest a dog would give it.
"You want to salt and burn that?" Sam asked him.
Dean ignored the question and sat back in the chair, hands laced together on his belly. "I don't know why he came here," he said without looking at Sam. "If there was a job, or he just went and talked to somebody - he never said. I remember him sitting out here, watching us goof around in the pool. Seemed like -"
"What?"
"Seemed like he was happy," Dean said softly. "Just hanging out here. With us."
That idea was so very, very foreign that Sam sat wondering at it while Dean went back to studying his lizard, nudging it with the toe of his boot as if he thought enough prodding would make it change its mind and spring back to life.
"He took us to Disneyland," Sam murmured.
"Yeah."
"And…not under duress."
"No, Sam," Dean replied. "Not under duress."
"He -"
"He laughed. Took me on the Matterhorn and got soaking wet. Left you sitting with this woman with a couple little kids. Only time I remember him doing that, leaving you like that. He was freaking soaking wet and I thought he was gonna get mad, because nobody told him that was gonna happen. But he laughed."
"Happy," Sam marveled, with the rising breeze ruffling his hair.
"Yeah," Dean said. "Who the hell woulda thought."
~~~~~~~~~~
There was about six or ten million cars in the parking lot. Sammy thought they might have to drive around all day to find a place to park. Then he thought they might not find a place to park at all, not in this whole huge parking lot.
"Dad?" he said, leaning against the back of the front seat.
"Got it under control, Sam," Dad told him.
It took a long time, but Dad found a place. It wasn't a good place, though, because Dad had to squeeze the Impala in between two other cars and when he was done, they could only open the doors on one side of the car and then squoosh out.
"Where is it, Dad?" Sammy asked when they were out, because all he could see was cars.
Dad picked him up, and pointed.
To the castle that was in the picture with Mickey. It was a huge far ways away, like the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, but Dad could take big steps, Sammy remembered. They could get there for sure, even without a Yellow Brick Road, as long as Dean could keep up with Dad's big steps. As Dad started to walk towards the castle, Sammy let out a big cheer that made Dad groan, "Easy there, foghorn. I think they heard that in Alaska."
They were finally finally finally almost there when Dad put him down and let him run on ahead. He didn't go all the way, because there were lots of places to buy tickets and all of them had people in line, lots of people and kids and baby strollers and even some people in wheelchairs. He was trying to decide which line to pick when Dean took his hand and said, "You aren't gonna pee your pants or anything, are you? This is no big deal, you know. It's just like that Six Flags place, only bigger."
"Is not."
"If you pee your pants, you're gonna stay wet. We don't have clean clothes."
"Am not gonna -"
Dad was there then. With tickets. Sammy made a face at Dean and pulled his hand loose so he could take Dad's hand instead.
"Nobody's pissing themselves," Dad said. "You got that?"
"It's just stupid Disneyland," Dean told him.
"And you have no interest in being here."
"It's for little kids."
A couple of people 'scused themselves to get past. Dad and Dean and Sammy all looked at them. They were pretty old, maybe even older than Dad, and they were both wearing Mickey t-shirts.
"Some of those little kids look to be pretty tall," Dad said to Dean.
That was the thing about Dean: sometimes he said he hated something when he didn't hate it at all. It had something to do with trying to be cool, Sammy figured, because he did it mostly when they were around other people, especially other kids. But Sammy had lived with Dean his whole life and knew Dean better than he knew anybody in the whole world, even Dad.
Dean wanted to be here, and would stay for a long time, even if he got sunburned so bad it made him puke. He wanted to have fun today, because he was finally not sick any more. He had eaten all his breakfast and took his shower and straightened up his bed without Dad even asking him to do any of those things.
He definitely wanted to be here.
"It's for everybody," Sammy said. "Big people and kids and everybody. 'Cause there's pirates and stuff. And everything."
Dean made a face like he thought Sammy was full of baloney. But he was looking up ahead, at the fancy street, like he wanted to see what that was all about.
They went through the turn-thing one at a time, Sammy first, then Dad, and then Dean.
"Stay with me, bud," Dad said.
And Sammy reached back, took Dad's big hand in his own. Then he took Dean's. For a second he thought Dean might pull his hand away, but he didn't.
Dean looked kind of amazed by the whole thing, and that was a sure sign that he'd changed his mind about this place being a whole lot different from Six Flags. Which was true, for sure. After all, Mickey lived here. And Donald, and Goofy, and all those guys. It had all kinds of stores, he saw as they walked along. An ice cream store, and a store for t-shirts and hats, and one with watches in the window, and one with glass things. Up ahead he could see a horse pulling a wagon, and a man in a funny old-fashioned suit. Up past that there was tons and tons of flowers, like a big garden. And…and…
"Cinderella!" he squealed.
This was an awesome place.
~~~~~~~~~~
"You wanna go in there?" Dean asked mildly.
He'd found a parking space, had taken a ticket at the gate that would end up costing him twelve bucks and in response to Sam's silent query had shrugged, "Screw it, I'll put it on the card," then made a couple of loops around and tucked the Impala into a narrow spot between a minivan and a white Hummer.
"No," Sam said absently.
"Okay, that's convincing."
Sam turned to look at his brother. A lot of Dean's expression was hidden behind his sunglasses; the part of it that was visible was noncommittal, relaxed, a little pragmatic. It was the kind of look that said Dean was willing to play along.
"I don't know," Sam told him.
With a shrug Dean settled back, rolled the kinks out of his shoulders. "Lemme know when you make up your mind."
"We can't go in there."
"Sam. It's a public place. We buy tickets, we can go in."
"It's -"
"What? They're gonna think we're freaks?"
"It's a place for kids, Dean."
And Sam remembered, as clearly as if it had happened an hour ago, his father smiling with one corner of his mouth and saying, "Some of those little kids look to be pretty tall."
"I? Am a kid at heart," Dean said, and popped his door open.
When Sam got out of the car a minute later, Dean was standing silent as a garden gnome, face tipped to the sun, arms folded loosely across his chest. He tracked Sam without moving his head more than a twitch, let Sam stand holding on to the passenger door, staring across the parking lot at the big broad entrance to the Magic Kingdom.
"We had a good time," Sam said after a while.
"Yeah. We did."
"We went in the Haunted Mansion, didn't we?"
"Yeah," Dean said.
"Pirates of the Caribbean."
"Yup."
"We went everywhere."
Dean let his sunglasses slide down his nose a little and followed Sam's gaze to the entrance. "Stayed until real late. Dad had to carry you, after a while. You fell asleep, and we sat on a bench watching the people go by."
"He bought us a shirt."
"Bought both of us a shirt. Never wore mine. Friggin' things cost a fortune. Figured I should've had it framed instead of wearing it."
"What did you do with it?"
Dean's expression shifted, and he poked the sunglasses back into place. "Dunno," he said, but his tone said he did know, and wished he didn't.
Twenty years, Sam thought. Twenty years ago, they'd stood here with their father. They'd gone into this place with their father, and had laughed and played and had fun together.
Maybe he'd only pieced that together out of things Dean had told him. Maybe he had no actual memories of his own; maybe his mind had conjured them up, like a finished jigsaw puzzle, out of the bits and pieces Dean had provided.
He started to walk, slowly, toward the entrance. Dean followed, a step or two behind, trailed him until he stopped twenty or thirty yards from the ticket booths. When Sam turned to look at him, Dean was waiting patiently, his posture loose and relaxed, the smallest hint of a smile curving up the corner of his mouth. Sam followed his brother's gaze then: tracked it past the ticket booths, past the entry turnstiles, onto the long stretch of Main Street.
And remembered a big, warm hand holding his.
Remembered his father saying, "Stay with me, bud."
Remembered his father relaxed and smiling and looking for all the world as if he wanted to be here, as if he himself wanted to explore this place that'd been built the year he was born. That he wanted to leave behind whatever it was that had brought him to Southern California in favor of spending a day with his children in the sunshine, surrounded by other families, other people who had no clue what John Winchester's life had become.
"Stay with me, bud."
Sam swiped a hand across his face, scrubbed away tears that had been too quick in coming.
"You want to go in?" Dean asked him. "Screw what people think. It's a public place."
Magic, Sam thought. There'd been magic here once. For him, for Dean, for their father. Maybe Walt Disney had known what he was talking about. Maybe calling it the Happiest Place on Earth wasn't that far off the mark.
Maybe.
"I remember," Sam told his brother. "I remember coming here."
A moment went by, Dean's face betraying no hint of what he was thinking. Then he smiled lazily, without disdain or mockery or criticism or weary tolerance or any of the thousand less-than-positive things Sam had seen his brother display in the last couple of years. He smiled, and there was nothing in it but a pure wash of affection that made Sam want to hold that moment in his mind, preserve it in amber, keep it forever as something more valuable than all the red Mickey Mouse t-shirts in the world.
"I'm glad," Dean said.
"Yeah," Sam replied quietly, grateful beyond the telling of it that he could be here, standing in the warm California early-spring sunshine with Dean. Grateful that he could be anywhere with Dean, really - with the brother who had said, "I'll do it," to try to spare Sam the pain of fulfilling Madison's last wish, when Dean certainly would have suffered from pulling that trigger every bit as much as Sam still was.
"So? You wanna go in, or what?"
Sam looked again down that long stretch ahead of them: the row of shops, the flowers, the people in costume.
At the Happiest Place on Earth.
"No," he said. "I think I'm just gonna let it ride."
Dean hiked a brow at that, then shrugged. "Fair enough. I was kinda looking forward to a revisit to the Haunted Mansion, personally."
"You're kidding."
"Yeah, I kind of am."
They turned away from the wide entry arch almost simultaneously.
Then Dean said, "Although -"
Sam had known him far too long. Or maybe, just long enough. "Knott's Berry Farm?" he said with a small huff of amusement.
"Dude. Pie."
"Not cherry."
"Peach," Dean mused. "Or…boysenberry."
They kept walking, Dean rattling off a long list of possible varieties. They were within sight of the car when Sam stopped and turned. Looked back toward that broad entryway with letters that spelled out DISNEYLAND that he could read even from this distance.
For a moment he saw his father standing near the arch.
Saw him lift a hand and wave.
He was tempted to wave back. Tempted to acknowledge the lingering of that particular spirit in this particular place.
But he settled for thinking, Always.
Then he fell back into step with his brother and aimed his path away.
* * * * *
(Click on the picture to see it full-sized)
Thank you once again to the incomparable elliejane for the beautiful illustrations!
SAMMY'S MOST EXCELLENT CALIFORNIA ADVENTURE
By Carol Davis
Part 2
The bathroom had a window, pasted over with textured opaque film but large enough to make the room bright and…well, California-ish. Sam collected an armful of towels from the rack, piled them within reach of the tub, and took a long shower, left the water summer-rain tepid, scrubbed his hair with shampoo that reeked of vanilla (Gonna come out smelling like friggin' cake batter, he thought), stood under the shower head until the prickling stream of water had taken some of the tension out of his shoulders and back.
The towels, to his surprise, were thick and reasonably soft and bore no hint of bleach. He stood on one of them and let himself drip for a minute, let himself remember showering on California afternoons and wandering into the bedroom still damp, feeling no sense of urgency, no sense of things left undone.
No sense of needing to reclaim something that had been stolen from him.
When he came out of the bathroom, barefoot, in jeans and t-shirt, Dean was awake, sitting on the bed propped up by a small mountain of pillows, power-surfing through the TV's limited range of available channels. "Four news channels," he complained to Sam. "Who the hell comes here to watch the news?"
"Intelligent people?" Sam suggested.
Dean let that go by. "Gotta go somewhere. I need beer."
"Fridge," Sam said, which made Dean's eyes widen noticeably.
"No shit?" he squeaked. "They provide beer? Damn, Sammy, I like this place."
"Yeah, Dean," Sam replied, almost reluctant to spoil his brother's simple glee. "Plus a couple two-liters of Coke, four deluxe subs, a big bag of Fritos, a quart of potato salad, an apple pie and a half gallon of rocky road ice cream."
"You're screwin' with me," Dean scowled. But rather than make more of it than he already had, he hauled himself off the bed, went into the kitchen - continuing to scowl at Sam over his shoulder as he did so - and opened the refrigerator.
"I think there's a twenty-buck service fee for stocking the kitchen," Sam said.
"You can't just say 'I got stuff to eat'?"
"Where's the fun in that?" Sam shrugged.
They ate at the rickety table, the containers and packages of food all lying open on the countertops as if it were a junk food buffet. Once he had banished his initial annoyance, Dean moved cheerfully from package to package, filling and refilling his plate, slurping noisily from a bottle of beer in between huge bites of sandwich and salad. His main course out of the way, he moved on to dessert, assembling a plateful of pie a la mode so enormous it made Sam queasy to look at it.
"I'm offending your delicate sensibilities?" Dean asked, one eyebrow cocked.
"You could eat a little…slower?"
"Where's the fun in that?" Dean mocked.
A few minutes later, his plate finally cleaned, Dean pushed back his chair. To Sam's unending relief he seldom indulged the urge to unleash a table-rattling belch in restaurants, but Dean without the discouragement of public scrutiny could be a problem.
Was a problem.
"Whaddaya think?" he grinned after the echoes had faded. "They feel that on the seismographs up at CalTech, ya think?"
"We could call and ask," Sam sighed.
Chuckling to himself, Dean seized another beer and retreated to the other room, where he settled himself on the couch and resumed his channel surfing.
"We're leaving in the morning?" Sam called out to him after a minute.
He got no answer.
"Dean?" he prodded.
Still nothing, which meant Dean had either been suddenly struck deaf or was ignoring the question. With a glance at the disastrous remains of their meal - a flock of buzzards would have made less of a mess, he figured - he moved to the kitchen doorway and repeated, "We're heading out in the morning?"
Dean gave him a look he was at a loss to interpret.
"Yeah," Dean said. "Whatever."
"We could call Bobby. Or Ellen. See if anything's going on that we're close enough to check out."
"If you want."
"What do you want?"
Dean held on to that inscrutable look for a minute, then got up off the couch. "Goin' out for a while," he told his brother, and left the room before Sam could put his thoughts together enough to come up with a reply.
~~~~~~~~~~
Dad came back a little while after it got dark, opening the door to find Sammy sitting cross-legged on the bed next to Dean. He'd been there for a while, with a little stack of things beside him - some comics, the TV remote, and a big pile of Kleenex - and a cup of water and one of juice on the night table.
He wanted to smile, to make Dad feel like Sammy was glad to see him, but when he tried, all he could manage to do was sigh.
"What's goin' on, buddy?" Dad asked him.
"He's sick," Sammy said, and sighed again. "I tried to make him feel better but he just kepts telling me to knock it off."
Dad moved in close to the bed and felt Dean's forehead with his hand. "Dean," he said. "Up and at 'em, dude."
It took some jiggling, and Dad saying his name a few more times, but finally Dean opened his eyes.
"Up," Dad said.
Dean didn't look too good when he sat up.
"Is he gonna barf?" Sammy asked worriedly.
Dad didn't answer. Instead, he got Dean undressed, then wiped all the sweat off of him with wet washcloths, dried him off with one of the big towels, and got him into his pajamas. Then he got the thermometer out of the first aid kit and took Dean's temperature. When he was done with all that he scooted Sammy off the bed and made Dean drink a little juice before he tucked him in under the covers.
"I asked him did he want me to call Pastor Jim," Sammy said.
Dad nodded a little bit and turned off the light next to Dean's bed.
"Does he gots to go to the hospital?" Sammy asked.
"No," Dad said, and took a few minutes to put back the blanket and bedspread Sammy had pulled off the other bed.
He didn't seem to want to talk. He looked very tired.
"I tried to be good," Sammy said softly. "I did."
Dad turned around then and looked at Sammy. For a second Sammy thought he looked like he wanted to cry. But that was dumb, because Dad didn't ever cry. Only little kids cried, and sometimes ladies.
"Come on, buddy," Dad said. "I'll make you some supper."
Sammy was very, very quiet and ate everything Dad put on his plate. He ate both of his hot dogs even though he stopped being hungry when he had only taken one or two bites of the second one. It didn't seem right, eating supper without Dean. Dad seemed to think that too, because he kept looking into the other room as if he thought Dean might want him to come and do something, and he only ate one hot dog and only a little bit of potato salad.
Potato salad was one of Dad's favorite things in the whole world.
"Did you go see that guy?" Sammy asked after a while.
"Guy?"
"You said you were gonna go see somebody and talk."
Dad smiled a little bit but he didn't seem to think anything was all that funny. "Yeah, I did. I saw the guy."
"Do you gotta see him again tomorrow?"
It surprised Sammy a whole lot when Dad picked him up and carried him into the other room, then sat down on the couch with Sammy on his lap. He held Sammy tight, in a way that made Sammy remember the way he used to hold his teddy bear. For a long time he didn't say anything; he just held on to Sammy and kept looking at Dean.
"No," he said finally. "I don't need to go see him again tomorrow."
~~~~~~~~~~
Sam found his brother a little after dark, sitting on a chair out by the pool. Whether Dean had been there the whole time or not wasn't clear. He was alone out there, though - or had been, until Sam showed up - and was idly peeling paint off the arm of the chair with his thumbnail. He glanced up when Sam opened the gate to the pool area and walked in, then returned his attention to the flaking paint.
"Talked to Bobby," Sam said. "Things are kinda quiet."
"Which means what?"
"It means…things are quiet. We can hit the road. Or not."
Sam sat in the chair closest to Dean's, which still left a good three or four feet between them. For a moment Dean looked as if he intended to say something, then thought better of it and began to watch the breeze-rippled surface of the water in the pool.
"It's up to you, man," Sam told him. "Whatever you want to do."
"Why's that?" Dean asked, still studying the pool.
"Because -" Sam was lost for an answer. "I don't know. Whatever you want to do, I'm amenable."
"You're amenable."
"Yeah."
"This was a seriously fucked-up idea, Sammy. Coming here."
He said it in the same tone he would have used to say There's a dead lizard floating in the pool. There was; it was bobbing around on the surface of the water like some kid's abandoned toy. Sam was tempted for a moment to go fish it out, then decided to leave it be, at least for now. If somebody got freaked out by finding it there in the morning, that was their problem, not his. He'd been involved with far too many dead things already, this past couple of weeks.
"Because of Dad?" Sam guessed.
That was Dean. That was so Dean. It'd been entirely his idea to come here, and he'd been as giddy as a teenage girl the whole drive down from L.A. All day long he'd given away almost nothing of what he was thinking, or feeling, or remembering. He'd slept, he'd eaten, and then he'd walked away. Maybe he wanted to drive away now, or maybe he didn't. You can't go home again, Sam thought ruefully. Even when what passed for home was a family-style motel on one of the main drags in Buena Park, California.
Dean had had the flu the last time they were here, Sam recalled, though he was sure that that had nothing to do with Dean's growing melancholy.
Or maybe it did. Who the hell knew.
"It's supposed to be the happiest freaking place on earth," Sam told his brother.
Dean blinked at that, then got up from his chair, took down the pool-cleaning net from its hooks on the fence, and used it to fish the dead lizard out of the water. "Don't think this sorry little son of a bitch thinks so," he commented, dangling the lizard by its tail.
Having the thing dropped in his lap was the best he could hope for, Sam figured, grateful that he hadn't brought food or a drink out with him. Then again, the lizard wasn't bleeding, or oozing its innards, so maybe it wasn't worth bothering him with. Even at the ripe old age of not-quite-24, a few things could still flip Sam's squick meter, but having a dead four-inch lizard drip pool water onto his jeans wasn't one of them.
He would, however, need to pay careful attention to his breakfast tomorrow before putting any of it into his mouth.
"We were here for a while, weren't we?" he asked Dean. "Because you were sick."
"Almost a week."
"And we swam in here, right?"
"I swam. You did a lot of bitching about the water being too cold."
"Somebody gave us a pie. Is that right? There was some kind of big to-do about a pie."
"From Knott's Berry Farm," Dean nodded.
"Which is -"
"Down the street."
"You upchucked it," Sam said, fascinated by the bits of memory that had begun to surface, one after the other. "Dad told you to wait, but you wanted pie, so you ate it, and you barfed all over… something. The bed?"
"The bed, the rug, my clothes. All the way into the bathroom. I was like Lardass freakin' Hogan."
Maybe it was a genuine memory. Maybe it was a picture his mind had put together out of Dean's relating of the story somewhere along the line (probably, several somewheres along the line, because Dean was never reluctant to re-tell a good puking story, even with next to no provocation). Either way, the image was there, and it made Sam grin foolishly.
"Yeah, laugh it up," Dean said. "You weren't the one who heard about it from Dad for months, every time I burped."
"It must have been…impressive."
"Not the word I'd use."
"Waste of good pie?"
"Closer to being accurate."
"What kind was it?"
"Cherry. Looked kinda like I'd barfed out my intestines."
They sat for a while, watching the last lingering bits of sunlight give way to the amber glow of the pool lights and the parking lot's security lamps. Eventually Dean laid the dead lizard down on the cement at his feet and sat pondering it with the same level of interest a dog would give it.
"You want to salt and burn that?" Sam asked him.
Dean ignored the question and sat back in the chair, hands laced together on his belly. "I don't know why he came here," he said without looking at Sam. "If there was a job, or he just went and talked to somebody - he never said. I remember him sitting out here, watching us goof around in the pool. Seemed like -"
"What?"
"Seemed like he was happy," Dean said softly. "Just hanging out here. With us."
That idea was so very, very foreign that Sam sat wondering at it while Dean went back to studying his lizard, nudging it with the toe of his boot as if he thought enough prodding would make it change its mind and spring back to life.
"He took us to Disneyland," Sam murmured.
"Yeah."
"And…not under duress."
"No, Sam," Dean replied. "Not under duress."
"He -"
"He laughed. Took me on the Matterhorn and got soaking wet. Left you sitting with this woman with a couple little kids. Only time I remember him doing that, leaving you like that. He was freaking soaking wet and I thought he was gonna get mad, because nobody told him that was gonna happen. But he laughed."
"Happy," Sam marveled, with the rising breeze ruffling his hair.
"Yeah," Dean said. "Who the hell woulda thought."
~~~~~~~~~~
There was about six or ten million cars in the parking lot. Sammy thought they might have to drive around all day to find a place to park. Then he thought they might not find a place to park at all, not in this whole huge parking lot.
"Dad?" he said, leaning against the back of the front seat.
"Got it under control, Sam," Dad told him.
It took a long time, but Dad found a place. It wasn't a good place, though, because Dad had to squeeze the Impala in between two other cars and when he was done, they could only open the doors on one side of the car and then squoosh out.
"Where is it, Dad?" Sammy asked when they were out, because all he could see was cars.
Dad picked him up, and pointed.
To the castle that was in the picture with Mickey. It was a huge far ways away, like the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, but Dad could take big steps, Sammy remembered. They could get there for sure, even without a Yellow Brick Road, as long as Dean could keep up with Dad's big steps. As Dad started to walk towards the castle, Sammy let out a big cheer that made Dad groan, "Easy there, foghorn. I think they heard that in Alaska."
They were finally finally finally almost there when Dad put him down and let him run on ahead. He didn't go all the way, because there were lots of places to buy tickets and all of them had people in line, lots of people and kids and baby strollers and even some people in wheelchairs. He was trying to decide which line to pick when Dean took his hand and said, "You aren't gonna pee your pants or anything, are you? This is no big deal, you know. It's just like that Six Flags place, only bigger."
"Is not."
"If you pee your pants, you're gonna stay wet. We don't have clean clothes."
"Am not gonna -"
Dad was there then. With tickets. Sammy made a face at Dean and pulled his hand loose so he could take Dad's hand instead.
"Nobody's pissing themselves," Dad said. "You got that?"
"It's just stupid Disneyland," Dean told him.
"And you have no interest in being here."
"It's for little kids."
A couple of people 'scused themselves to get past. Dad and Dean and Sammy all looked at them. They were pretty old, maybe even older than Dad, and they were both wearing Mickey t-shirts.
"Some of those little kids look to be pretty tall," Dad said to Dean.
That was the thing about Dean: sometimes he said he hated something when he didn't hate it at all. It had something to do with trying to be cool, Sammy figured, because he did it mostly when they were around other people, especially other kids. But Sammy had lived with Dean his whole life and knew Dean better than he knew anybody in the whole world, even Dad.
Dean wanted to be here, and would stay for a long time, even if he got sunburned so bad it made him puke. He wanted to have fun today, because he was finally not sick any more. He had eaten all his breakfast and took his shower and straightened up his bed without Dad even asking him to do any of those things.
He definitely wanted to be here.
"It's for everybody," Sammy said. "Big people and kids and everybody. 'Cause there's pirates and stuff. And everything."
Dean made a face like he thought Sammy was full of baloney. But he was looking up ahead, at the fancy street, like he wanted to see what that was all about.
They went through the turn-thing one at a time, Sammy first, then Dad, and then Dean.
"Stay with me, bud," Dad said.
And Sammy reached back, took Dad's big hand in his own. Then he took Dean's. For a second he thought Dean might pull his hand away, but he didn't.
Dean looked kind of amazed by the whole thing, and that was a sure sign that he'd changed his mind about this place being a whole lot different from Six Flags. Which was true, for sure. After all, Mickey lived here. And Donald, and Goofy, and all those guys. It had all kinds of stores, he saw as they walked along. An ice cream store, and a store for t-shirts and hats, and one with watches in the window, and one with glass things. Up ahead he could see a horse pulling a wagon, and a man in a funny old-fashioned suit. Up past that there was tons and tons of flowers, like a big garden. And…and…
"Cinderella!" he squealed.
This was an awesome place.
~~~~~~~~~~
"You wanna go in there?" Dean asked mildly.
He'd found a parking space, had taken a ticket at the gate that would end up costing him twelve bucks and in response to Sam's silent query had shrugged, "Screw it, I'll put it on the card," then made a couple of loops around and tucked the Impala into a narrow spot between a minivan and a white Hummer.
"No," Sam said absently.
"Okay, that's convincing."
Sam turned to look at his brother. A lot of Dean's expression was hidden behind his sunglasses; the part of it that was visible was noncommittal, relaxed, a little pragmatic. It was the kind of look that said Dean was willing to play along.
"I don't know," Sam told him.
With a shrug Dean settled back, rolled the kinks out of his shoulders. "Lemme know when you make up your mind."
"We can't go in there."
"Sam. It's a public place. We buy tickets, we can go in."
"It's -"
"What? They're gonna think we're freaks?"
"It's a place for kids, Dean."
And Sam remembered, as clearly as if it had happened an hour ago, his father smiling with one corner of his mouth and saying, "Some of those little kids look to be pretty tall."
"I? Am a kid at heart," Dean said, and popped his door open.
When Sam got out of the car a minute later, Dean was standing silent as a garden gnome, face tipped to the sun, arms folded loosely across his chest. He tracked Sam without moving his head more than a twitch, let Sam stand holding on to the passenger door, staring across the parking lot at the big broad entrance to the Magic Kingdom.
"We had a good time," Sam said after a while.
"Yeah. We did."
"We went in the Haunted Mansion, didn't we?"
"Yeah," Dean said.
"Pirates of the Caribbean."
"Yup."
"We went everywhere."
Dean let his sunglasses slide down his nose a little and followed Sam's gaze to the entrance. "Stayed until real late. Dad had to carry you, after a while. You fell asleep, and we sat on a bench watching the people go by."
"He bought us a shirt."
"Bought both of us a shirt. Never wore mine. Friggin' things cost a fortune. Figured I should've had it framed instead of wearing it."
"What did you do with it?"
Dean's expression shifted, and he poked the sunglasses back into place. "Dunno," he said, but his tone said he did know, and wished he didn't.
Twenty years, Sam thought. Twenty years ago, they'd stood here with their father. They'd gone into this place with their father, and had laughed and played and had fun together.
Maybe he'd only pieced that together out of things Dean had told him. Maybe he had no actual memories of his own; maybe his mind had conjured them up, like a finished jigsaw puzzle, out of the bits and pieces Dean had provided.
He started to walk, slowly, toward the entrance. Dean followed, a step or two behind, trailed him until he stopped twenty or thirty yards from the ticket booths. When Sam turned to look at him, Dean was waiting patiently, his posture loose and relaxed, the smallest hint of a smile curving up the corner of his mouth. Sam followed his brother's gaze then: tracked it past the ticket booths, past the entry turnstiles, onto the long stretch of Main Street.
And remembered a big, warm hand holding his.
Remembered his father saying, "Stay with me, bud."
Remembered his father relaxed and smiling and looking for all the world as if he wanted to be here, as if he himself wanted to explore this place that'd been built the year he was born. That he wanted to leave behind whatever it was that had brought him to Southern California in favor of spending a day with his children in the sunshine, surrounded by other families, other people who had no clue what John Winchester's life had become.
"Stay with me, bud."
Sam swiped a hand across his face, scrubbed away tears that had been too quick in coming.
"You want to go in?" Dean asked him. "Screw what people think. It's a public place."
Magic, Sam thought. There'd been magic here once. For him, for Dean, for their father. Maybe Walt Disney had known what he was talking about. Maybe calling it the Happiest Place on Earth wasn't that far off the mark.
Maybe.
"I remember," Sam told his brother. "I remember coming here."
A moment went by, Dean's face betraying no hint of what he was thinking. Then he smiled lazily, without disdain or mockery or criticism or weary tolerance or any of the thousand less-than-positive things Sam had seen his brother display in the last couple of years. He smiled, and there was nothing in it but a pure wash of affection that made Sam want to hold that moment in his mind, preserve it in amber, keep it forever as something more valuable than all the red Mickey Mouse t-shirts in the world.
"I'm glad," Dean said.
"Yeah," Sam replied quietly, grateful beyond the telling of it that he could be here, standing in the warm California early-spring sunshine with Dean. Grateful that he could be anywhere with Dean, really - with the brother who had said, "I'll do it," to try to spare Sam the pain of fulfilling Madison's last wish, when Dean certainly would have suffered from pulling that trigger every bit as much as Sam still was.
"So? You wanna go in, or what?"
Sam looked again down that long stretch ahead of them: the row of shops, the flowers, the people in costume.
At the Happiest Place on Earth.
"No," he said. "I think I'm just gonna let it ride."
Dean hiked a brow at that, then shrugged. "Fair enough. I was kinda looking forward to a revisit to the Haunted Mansion, personally."
"You're kidding."
"Yeah, I kind of am."
They turned away from the wide entry arch almost simultaneously.
Then Dean said, "Although -"
Sam had known him far too long. Or maybe, just long enough. "Knott's Berry Farm?" he said with a small huff of amusement.
"Dude. Pie."
"Not cherry."
"Peach," Dean mused. "Or…boysenberry."
They kept walking, Dean rattling off a long list of possible varieties. They were within sight of the car when Sam stopped and turned. Looked back toward that broad entryway with letters that spelled out DISNEYLAND that he could read even from this distance.
For a moment he saw his father standing near the arch.
Saw him lift a hand and wave.
He was tempted to wave back. Tempted to acknowledge the lingering of that particular spirit in this particular place.
But he settled for thinking, Always.
Then he fell back into step with his brother and aimed his path away.
* * * * *
(Click on the picture to see it full-sized)