fic: Life on Mars (Supernatural; Sam and Dean; pg)
Life on Mars
Supernatural; Sam and Dean; pg; 4,785 words
Sam finds that without hunting, without television, the internet, or saving the world, he's got a lot of time on his hands.
For luzdeestrellas on her birthday. Also for the West Wing title project. Thanks to angelgazing for handholding and to snacky for looking it over.
~*~
Life on Mars
Technically, the house belongs to Ellen--she inherited a number of hunting cabins and seaside bungalows when the Roadhouse burned down, and has spent a good deal of time and money turning them into safehouses for the hunters who are left--but she handed the deed over to them when the smoke had cleared and the world was still standing. It's small and old and a little raggedy, and it's everything Sam ever dreamt of when he was a kid who wanted to settle down and live in one place.
"Christ," Dean mutters. "It's like a Stepford house."
It's not, really. It's set at the end of a dirt road at what can only be called the ass-end of nowhere, a good twenty minutes from the nearest town. It needs a good cleaning and a few coats of paint, the fence around the backyard is falling apart, and the roof could use re-shingling, but it's theirs for as long as they want it.
Sam wants it for as long as possible.
He pulls out his phone and takes a quick picture of everything--the saggy fence, the decrepit roof, Dean giving him the finger as he unpacks the car--wanting to document the start of their new life.
They haul their bags inside, well, Sam does. Dean drops his inside the front door and goes exploring. Not that there's a whole lot to see. Two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, and, "Oh, thank God, there's indoor plumbing," Dean calls from the bathroom, and then Sam can hear him taking a piss.
"Very funny," Sam mumbles, knowing Dean can't hear him over the ridiculously loud gurgling in the pipes when he flushes the toilet.
"Bit of a fixer upper, though, huh?" Dean says, zipping himself up and looking around at the living room. He freezes, a look of horror on his face. "Sam. Sam. Sammy. We can't stay here."
Sam tenses, ignoring the pain in his side, hand already reaching for his gun. "Why not, Dean?"
"There's no TV!"
Dean makes a sweeping gesture with his arm and Sam takes a good look around. The furniture is old and crappy, the walls are lined with bookshelves, and Dean's right--there's no TV.
"We'll live."
"Speak for yourself."
"There's nothing good on in the summer anyway," Sam huffs.
"Porn knows no season, Sam." A sly grin curls across his face, and Sam is even warier than he was thirty seconds ago. "No TV means no cable. Which means no internet."
Sam swallows hard and then shrugs. "I'm sure there's dial-up. Or we can hijack someone's free wifi."
Dean snorts. "Yeah, I'm sure Cletus the slack-jawed yokel half a mile down the dirt road has wifi."
"Whatever, Dean." He's too happy to be here to let Dean ruin his good mood.
Dean lets it drop, but Sam can tell they're going to be having this argument more than once before dinner.
They unpack quickly--it's not like they've accumulated that much stuff--and Dean's already got a couple of beers opened and is scanning the bookshelves with a desperate look on his face.
"What?" he says when he catches Sam watching him. "There could be some old-school porn here."
Sam shakes his head and laughs.
They're retired, and it's going to be awesome.
*
They take a quick trip into town, stock up on essentials (Dean's cart is mostly beer and meat, and as much as Sam would like to argue with him, he finds he really can't), and shingles to fix the roof.
Since Dean's worked his share of construction over the years, Sam lets him take the lead. They spend the first couple of weeks re-shingling the roof, the warm spring sun a welcome touch on their skin. His stitches pull, and he's sure Dean's knee and his ribs are still hurting, but they take it slow--they're going to be here a while, and there's no need to rush, no job or apocalypse calling them away.
When they go to Home Depot, Sam doesn't even try to control Dean's manic Bob Vila tendencies. Dean fills the cart with hammers and nails, cordless drills and electric screwdrivers; Sam doesn't even flinch when he buys both a band saw and a circular saw (they still have the chainsaw in the trunk of the car). "I'm gonna need both," Dean says, and Sam just nods and writes off Chris Sharkey's MasterCard for good.
It all comes in handy when, after the roof is done, Dean decides to rebuild the front and back steps. He talks thoughtfully about building a wraparound porch, "and maybe a couple rocking chairs so we can sit outside and drink beer when the weather is nice."
Sam almost doesn't recognize him, but not in a bad way. He thinks this is who Dean's always been, underneath the hunter's bravado he wears like a second skin. Dean's always been able to make the most out of the places they lived, turning every rat trap apartment and cheap motel room into a place Sam wanted to call home.
They clear a lot of old bits of machinery out of the shed, and Dean eyes them speculatively. Sam wonders if he's going to come out here one day to find Dean building himself an Iron Man suit or a Tardis.
While Dean's busy with his mad scientist routine, Sam decides that he's going to try his hand at cultivating a garden. He makes Dean take him to Home Depot so he can buy seeds and topsoil and stuff. He doesn't know what he's doing, but the lady behind the counter tells him it's really not that hard, and gives him a beginner's guide to growing your own vegetables.
The yard is a mess, though, so they get started on that first.
Dean doesn't complain, does the hard work of weeding and mowing like he used to do the workouts Dad set up for them. When he's done, though, he puts his feet up in one of the creaky easy chairs, pops open a beer, and falls asleep reading one of the pile of old Popular Mechanics he found in the basement. They smell like mold and damp, but that doesn't seem to bother Dean. Sam supposes it wouldn't, considering.
He spends his time outside, digging little furrows and planting seeds--tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and cucumbers. He's also got something that he thinks is basil but turns out to be mint (it takes over the whole garden), and he comes inside each afternoon with an ache in his back and a crick in his neck, but he feels accomplished, relaxed, in a way he hasn't in years.
He plants the garden in neat rows, just like the book says. He finds a big rubber watering can when they clean out the shed out back--it's green, with a big flower embossed on it, and he uses it to water his garden each morning, ignoring Dean's mocking.
He finds the old reel of garden hose and a rusty old sprinkler beside it, and spends a good thirty minutes getting it all set up in the garden.
"I wouldn't, if I were you," Dean calls from the doorway.
Sam ignores him. "Just turn the water on when I say so, okay?"
Dean shrugs and gives him a smirk and a mocking salute. "Whatever you say, boss."
Sam looks over his little patch of green, fusses once or twice more with the placement of the sprinkler, and then yells, "Okay, Dean. Let 'er rip!"
He hears the faint squeak of the spigot turning and the muted rush of water in the pipes, and then there's a sad trickle of water spitting from the sprinkler, the kind he's only seen from public water fountains with really poor water pressure, where he's had to bend almost in half to suck the fountainhead to get a drink.
"I know the water pressure's better than that, Dean. Turn it on."
"Sam--"
"Just do it, Dean."
"Okay." He can hear the shrug in Dean's voice.
There's a gurgle, and then another, and then the hose is slithering wildly like a snake in the grass, shooting water everywhere. Cold water, Sam learns when he grabs hold of it and gets sprayed for his trouble. He wrestles with the hose, which has sprung so many leaks it's more leaks than hose, and he hears Dean laughing at him from the doorway.
He manages to get the sprinkler disconnected and holds the hose--now pouring cold water directly onto his hand--like a weapon. A weapon he points at Dean.
"Come on, Dean. Scared of a little water?"
"No. I just like being dry."
"Chicken." Sam starts clucking.
Dean shakes his head, like he's actually a mature adult, immune to the power of being called a chicken, and Sam turns the hose on him, soaking his t-shirt. Dean leaps and yowls like a cat, and then the chase is on. Sam leads him away from the carefully cultivated garden to the patch of bare dirt out by the back fence. They wrestle for control of the hose until they're both breathless from laughing and filthy from rolling around in the mud. Dean's got him pinned, but Sam's still got the hose, so he figures it's a draw.
"Little duct tape, we can fix that right up," Dean says.
"Or, we could just go to Home Depot."
Dean grins. "That, too."
After they clean up and shower, they go into town, and Sam gets a new hose and sprinkler.
*
Once they've taken care of all the necessary repairs, Sam's not sure what to do with himself. He tries to write, but the blank pages in the new notebook he bought for the purpose seem to mock him, and it doesn't go any better on the laptop, where he can distract himself with solitaire and minesweeper even if he still doesn't have internet access. He goes outside each morning to look over his garden, shielding his eyes from the sun and trying to will the seeds into growing.
"Staring at it ain't gonna make it grow any faster," Dean says from where he's sitting on the smooth wooden plank of the new top step. Sam's not imagining the relief he hears in Dean's voice.
He can't do anything anymore just by staring at it--well, except for maybe making someone really uncomfortable. During the final battle, the demon blood in his veins had been purged, burned away by angelic fire. Sam's got a high pain threshold, but that had almost killed him. It'd been worth it, though, because he and Dean both were still alive, if not exactly standing, at the end.
Dean takes another bite of--"Hey, that's my pineapple," Sam says. Dean ignores him and closes his eyes as if savoring the sweetness.
"S'good," he says.
"My pineapple."
Dean makes a show of examining the plastic container the fruit came in. "Doesn't have your name on it."
"You don't even like fruit."
"That is a dirty lie. I like this fruit." He cocks his head as if he's thinking about it. "And I finished the Doritos last night."
Sam laughs and joins him on the step, reaching into the bowl for a chunk of pineapple before Dean finishes it all.
*
Dean spends his days puttering around the workshop he set up in the shed, but Sam can only spend so much time fiddling with his garden. He waters it every morning (except the days it rains), and waits impatiently for his vegetables to grow.
It's while he's watering that he notices the birdfeeder set up by the back fence.
"A birdfeeder, Dean? Seriously?"
Dean looks up from his workbench in surprise, the goggles weirdly distorting and magnifying his eyes. "What?"
"You don't even like birds." Sam's not real fond of them either. Thank you, Alfred Hitchcock.
"You think I don't like a lot of things."
"You don't like a lot of things."
Dean shrugs. "Okay, it's true, I don't like birds. Nasty, dirty fuckers." He gives a theatrical shudder. "But I needed something simple to get back in the swing of things." He gestures at the wood he's got stacked up on the floor, the plans he's tacked up on the wall. Sam's not sure, but it looks like Dean's planning on building a table and a rocking chair. Or possibly a hydroplaning device. With Dean, he can never tell.
"As long as you're not planning to take up bird watching or leaf peeping or anything."
"Leaf peeping," Dean says incredulously. He snorts and turns back to work.
A few days later, Sam comes in from a run and discovers there's a new table in the kitchen, one that doesn't wobble when he looks at it, or feel like it's going to collapse when he leans on it. It's round and smooth and polished, with a beveled edge and a pedestal base.
"This is pretty cool," he says, knocking on the wood as they eat dinner that night.
Dean blushes and smiles. "Thanks."
The coffee table is next, and then the night table next to the bed where Dean keeps his stuff. That actually has a Greek key pattern carved into the tabletop, and an inlay of darker wood. It's not quite professional grade, but Sam's impressed anyway.
He's always thought of himself as the creative one, but he can't seem to get started on writing anything, and here's Dean making furniture that actually has some personality to it.
Sam decides to redouble his efforts to write, and continues to get nowhere.
*
With no words, no television and no internet (he has to grudgingly admit Dean is right about the wifi when NetStumbler turns up nothing every day), Sam is slowly going crazy.
"Cable don't go out that far," the guy in town tells him. "Could probably get you hooked up with DSL, though."
"When?"
"End of the month."
"What?" Sam doesn't mean to squawk; it just kind of happens.
"Don't get much call for service techs, so they only come out here last three days of the month."
"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
"Yessir. So can I put you down for an appointment?"
"Yes." Sam bites out the word and tries not to sound like a sullen teenager. "As soon as possible."
He heads outside to bitch to Dean, but Dean's underneath the car, singing along with Steven Tyler about love in an elevator, so Sam will just have to entertain himself.
The living room is lined with bookshelves, and Sam loves to read, especially now that he doesn't have to spend all his time reading about monsters and demons, because the fate of his family, the fate of the world, rests upon it. He eliminates the first set of shelves, though. They're all hunting-related, and he's done with that.
The true crime books are right at eye level, so Sam starts with In Cold Blood, and then moves on to Zodiac, The Search for the Green River Killer, Small Sacrifices, The Stranger Beside Me, and three books about Jack the Ripper. It takes him a week. He has no desire to reread Helter Skelter or Devil in the White City, so he moves onto the next shelf, where he finds the collected works of Larry Bond and Tom Clancy, and a book on submarine warfare in World War II.
It only gets worse as he speed-reads his way through the rest of the shelves. They're full of an odd mixture of bodice rippers, physics textbooks, and books with titles like Principles of Civil Engineering, Advanced Organic Chemistry, and Philosophical Cybernetics. He worries a little when he finds Theoretical Aerodynamics tucked in with the pile of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler novels Dean's got stacked up next to the bed.
"I'm reading that," Dean says when he comes inside to find Sam lying on the couch, engrossed in The Big Sleep.
Sam makes a show of examining the book. "I don't see your name on it."
"Fine." Dean washes up and comes back into the living room with The Genesis of Fluid Mechanics and starts reading it out loud.
Sam gives up the third time Dean mentions non-dimensional parameters and the resistance coefficient. He tosses the book at Dean and heads back to the bookshelves. Sometimes, after dinner, they'll read the romance novels out loud and crack themselves up, but that's only entertaining for so long. Sam finds that without hunting, without television, the internet, or saving the world, he's got a lot of time on his hands.
The next day, while looking for a can opener, he discovers a battered copy of the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook that's probably older than he is tucked into a drawer in the kitchen. He flips through it and finds recipes for fried chicken and dumplings that make his mouth water. He decides they've been living on Dean's utilitarian meat loaf and spaghetti with jarred sauce for too long.
"I'm going to learn to cook," he announces, and then takes the car into town to buy groceries before Dean can respond.
When the dumplings come out lumpy and leaden, and the chicken is burned on one side and uncooked on the other, Dean says, "Maybe you should start with something easier." He's not even being sarcastic, which makes it worse, makes Sam even more determined to cook.
He goes to the Stop and Shop in town and picks up more chicken, plus some stew meat and vegetables (though he's sure the vegetables from his garden will be much sweeter and more nutritious, if they ever freaking grow), thankful that none of the cashiers ever bother checking the signatures on their credit cards--the bored teenagers who work the check out at Home Depot and Target are usually too stunned by the smiles Dean flashes them to think of it. He gives this girl a shy smile and she blushes bright red while she rings him up.
It's Dean who discovers the collection of nineteenth century novels down on the bottom shelf. He takes The Three Musketeers and Ivanhoe for himself, but leaves the rest for Sam, who can't blame him.
It's a cool rainy afternoon, so Sam decides he's going to make beef stew. He follows the directions meticulously, and once everything's in the frying pan, he grabs The Count of Monte Cristo, and flops down on the couch.
He doesn't mean to fall asleep.
He wakes up to Dean shaking him in a smoke-filled living room. "What the hell is that stench?" he chokes out, still muzzy-headed.
Dean's face twists in disgust. "Your attempt at beef stew."
Sam scrambles off the couch and lunges towards the kitchen, which is even hazier and smells even worse. The smoking skillet is sitting haphazardly in the sink, where Dean must have tossed it, the charred remains of stew burned onto the bottom of the pan.
"Dude, don't think you're not cleaning that up." He shakes his head and laughs. "How did you even eat when I wasn't around?"
Sam blames the smoke for the foul taste in his mouth, even now not up for joking about the time Dean was gone.
The windows are flung wide, but the smoke clings to the humidity in the air, and there's no breeze to carry it away. Sam can smell it in his hair and his clothes as he cleans the kitchen. He spends a good forty minutes scrubbing the pan until Dean takes pity on him and shows him how to deglaze it. Not that they're going to be making any kind of anything with the blackened remains of his beef stew.
"Come on, kiddo," Dean says when they're done and the pan is back in the cabinet and Sam's fingers are pruney from washing it. His fingers are warm and comforting on the back of Sam's neck. "I could use a burger."
Dean drives through town and past it, out to the roadhouse a few miles down the highway, the kind of place he always finds, with sawdust and peanut shells on the floor and the lingering smell of stale beer in the air as the Allman Brothers rock out on the jukebox.
After a couple of beers and a big juicy burger, the smell of charred food is finally out of Sam's nose and throat. Dean is lounging against the corner of the booth, eyeing the pool table thoughtfully. He gives Sam a big, shit-eating grin, the kind that makes his eyes light up and the corners crinkle, and Sam thinks about how long it's been since they ran a hustle, and how much longer even than that that they did it just for fun and not with the fate of the world hanging over them. He feels the slow smile spread across his own face, and it feels good.
Things are going well until this one wannabe tough guy calls Sam a fag. Dean calls the guy a homophobic white trash motherfucker, and everything after that is a blur of adrenaline and movement.
Sam's still buzzing with it on the ride home, laughing and replaying the fight in a loud voice that makes him think maybe he's a little drunker than he thought he was. Dean grins back at him, teeth bloody from the split lip he's wearing, but Sam doesn't even feel the sting of his own bloody knuckles, and what he knows will be a ginormous bruise across his back from where he got hit with a chair.
He misses this, he thinks, the thrill of fighting, of putting it all out there and not knowing how it's going to turn out (though after beating both heaven and hell, he has to tamp down the not-so-tiny suspicion that he and Dean are an invincible team). He can admit that on nights like this, when they've come out on top and there's no need for stitches or frantic drives to the ER while whispering useless prayers.
"Dude," he says, realizing Dean's stopped talking and is waiting for some kind of response.
Dean glances at him, eyes bright with laughter. "Yeah."
*
Dean's usually the one who goes into town to pick up the mail--he's settled in pretty well (better than Sam expected, actually), but he still gets restless, needs to move, and the drive into town seems to calm him down when that happens.
Sam is hovering over his garden, wondering why the shoots peeking out of the ground are so small and pale, and why there's what looks like mold growing in the dirt, when Dean gets back.
He eyes the garden critically and says, "Maybe you should go easy on the water, Sammy."
"How do you even know that? The book said--" He's going to go inside and grab the book, because he doesn't actually remember what the book said; he'd been so excited about aerating the soil and making the rows perfect that he skimmed the rest of it.
Dean stops him by slapping a small cardboard Amazon box against his chest. Sam's hands come up automatically to catch it.
"Let the garden dry out, Sam. Try something else for a while."
He goes into the house and Sam follows slowly, puzzling over the box.
There's a digital camera inside, along with a copy of Photography for Dummies, and it hits him that Dean doesn't know he took photography at Stanford (that he met Jess in that class), but Dean knows him well enough to know he'll be better at this than at cooking. Or gardening, apparently. Sam feels a fleeting sadness for his vegetables, hopes they're not too far gone and that he can still turn the garden around, but he's excited about the camera, too.
He spends the next few days learning how to use it; there's a way to make all the settings manual, and he does that, plays with the F-stops and zooms. He ends up with a collection of photos of Dean's face, Dean's hands, and finally, Dean's middle finger when he gets fed up with the flash going off every five seconds.
Sam photographs the garden from various angles, then the bookshelves, the kitchen, and Dean's workshop. He loads them onto the computer along with the pictures he took the first day, can see how Dean's tanned and lost that starved, haunted look he'd had, how the house has perked up, too, since they've been living in it--new roof and new stoop and the grass all green and mown.
He starts taking drives into town to photograph the buildings and the people. When he's done with that, he goes further afield, finds a small lake where kids from two towns over go swimming, fills the camera's memory with pictures of water and sun and sky, getting the feel for it again. He even saves his mistakes, the pictures obscured by his thumb or the ones of his own feet, feels his way back towards composing shots and using what light's available to make them interesting.
Once he's got pictures, he finds the words start coming more easily. He still can't seem to tell his own story, or Dean's, but he manages to write about the kids at the lake, the lady who runs the bed and breakfast in town, the old guys who sit outside the VFW Hall and shoot the shit all day. They're not even real stories, just character sketches, but he figures if Dean had to get back into the swing of making things, then so does he.
The garden is growing slowly, the plants all wan and half-hearted, as if they're aware of his defection. He leaves the cooking up to Dean now, though he's sure he'd be good at it if he spent more time on it. Dean's not willing to put up with another smoke condition to find out though.
"Thought the house was on fire," he says one night, looking out at the car instead of at Sam. "Was glad it was just your stupid cooking experiment, but still..." He trails off, gives Sam a sideways glance that makes his heart clench.
Sam has to clear his throat before he can speak. "Yeah. I know."
*
The DSL gets hooked up, and Sam finds himself falling back into old habits, surfing paranormal websites and messageboards, reading through his Google alerts and RSS feeds, looking for possible jobs, like he always has. When he was only getting half an hour every couple of days at the internet café in town, he'd made it count, read the New York Times or Salon or, lately, photography blogs, but now that he's got regular access again, he feels himself being sucked back in.
Strangely, he finds he doesn't really mind.
"So," he says one morning while Dean is reading the paper and drinking his coffee. "I've been thinking."
"This oughta be good."
"Shut up."
"You shut up."
"I've taken pictures of everything in the house--"
"At least twice."
Sam ignores him and continues, "And everything in town, and in the next two towns over in either direction. I've pretty much taken a picture of everything there is to take a picture of in a fifty mile radius. So, I've been thinking," he takes a deep breath, "maybe it's time for a road trip."
Dean's surprised face appears from behind the newspaper. "Seriously?"
"Yeah."
"What'd you have in mind?"
"Heading to Tuscaloosa, maybe." He hesitates, then, "There's something that looks like a haunting on the way."
The surprised look on Dean's face changes to pleasure. "I saw that in the paper. I was gonna check it out this weekend, but if you wanna--You wanna get back on the horse, Sammy?"
"I think I do, Dean." He shrugs a shoulder. "I want to come back here. I like this place, this house, but," he laughs sheepishly, "I am bored out of my freaking mind."
Dean's smile is wide and bright. "I know."
"Then what are you waiting for? Let's go. We're burning daylight."
Dean laughs. "Take it easy, cowboy. We'll get there. I'm gonna finish my coffee and crossword first, though."
Sam takes the time to pack a bag, and to water the garden one last time, though he knows he probably shouldn't. He doesn't feel as bad as he thinks he should about abandoning his vegetables to their fate. He'll be back, he promises (complete with accent, since Dean can't hear him), but he's sure they'll be fine on their own.
Dean's waiting in the driver's seat when he's done. Sam slides in beside him, pulls the door shut, and it's like finally, truly coming home.
end
~*~
Feedback is adored.
~*~
Supernatural; Sam and Dean; pg; 4,785 words
Sam finds that without hunting, without television, the internet, or saving the world, he's got a lot of time on his hands.
For luzdeestrellas on her birthday. Also for the West Wing title project. Thanks to angelgazing for handholding and to snacky for looking it over.
~*~
Life on Mars
Technically, the house belongs to Ellen--she inherited a number of hunting cabins and seaside bungalows when the Roadhouse burned down, and has spent a good deal of time and money turning them into safehouses for the hunters who are left--but she handed the deed over to them when the smoke had cleared and the world was still standing. It's small and old and a little raggedy, and it's everything Sam ever dreamt of when he was a kid who wanted to settle down and live in one place.
"Christ," Dean mutters. "It's like a Stepford house."
It's not, really. It's set at the end of a dirt road at what can only be called the ass-end of nowhere, a good twenty minutes from the nearest town. It needs a good cleaning and a few coats of paint, the fence around the backyard is falling apart, and the roof could use re-shingling, but it's theirs for as long as they want it.
Sam wants it for as long as possible.
He pulls out his phone and takes a quick picture of everything--the saggy fence, the decrepit roof, Dean giving him the finger as he unpacks the car--wanting to document the start of their new life.
They haul their bags inside, well, Sam does. Dean drops his inside the front door and goes exploring. Not that there's a whole lot to see. Two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, and, "Oh, thank God, there's indoor plumbing," Dean calls from the bathroom, and then Sam can hear him taking a piss.
"Very funny," Sam mumbles, knowing Dean can't hear him over the ridiculously loud gurgling in the pipes when he flushes the toilet.
"Bit of a fixer upper, though, huh?" Dean says, zipping himself up and looking around at the living room. He freezes, a look of horror on his face. "Sam. Sam. Sammy. We can't stay here."
Sam tenses, ignoring the pain in his side, hand already reaching for his gun. "Why not, Dean?"
"There's no TV!"
Dean makes a sweeping gesture with his arm and Sam takes a good look around. The furniture is old and crappy, the walls are lined with bookshelves, and Dean's right--there's no TV.
"We'll live."
"Speak for yourself."
"There's nothing good on in the summer anyway," Sam huffs.
"Porn knows no season, Sam." A sly grin curls across his face, and Sam is even warier than he was thirty seconds ago. "No TV means no cable. Which means no internet."
Sam swallows hard and then shrugs. "I'm sure there's dial-up. Or we can hijack someone's free wifi."
Dean snorts. "Yeah, I'm sure Cletus the slack-jawed yokel half a mile down the dirt road has wifi."
"Whatever, Dean." He's too happy to be here to let Dean ruin his good mood.
Dean lets it drop, but Sam can tell they're going to be having this argument more than once before dinner.
They unpack quickly--it's not like they've accumulated that much stuff--and Dean's already got a couple of beers opened and is scanning the bookshelves with a desperate look on his face.
"What?" he says when he catches Sam watching him. "There could be some old-school porn here."
Sam shakes his head and laughs.
They're retired, and it's going to be awesome.
*
They take a quick trip into town, stock up on essentials (Dean's cart is mostly beer and meat, and as much as Sam would like to argue with him, he finds he really can't), and shingles to fix the roof.
Since Dean's worked his share of construction over the years, Sam lets him take the lead. They spend the first couple of weeks re-shingling the roof, the warm spring sun a welcome touch on their skin. His stitches pull, and he's sure Dean's knee and his ribs are still hurting, but they take it slow--they're going to be here a while, and there's no need to rush, no job or apocalypse calling them away.
When they go to Home Depot, Sam doesn't even try to control Dean's manic Bob Vila tendencies. Dean fills the cart with hammers and nails, cordless drills and electric screwdrivers; Sam doesn't even flinch when he buys both a band saw and a circular saw (they still have the chainsaw in the trunk of the car). "I'm gonna need both," Dean says, and Sam just nods and writes off Chris Sharkey's MasterCard for good.
It all comes in handy when, after the roof is done, Dean decides to rebuild the front and back steps. He talks thoughtfully about building a wraparound porch, "and maybe a couple rocking chairs so we can sit outside and drink beer when the weather is nice."
Sam almost doesn't recognize him, but not in a bad way. He thinks this is who Dean's always been, underneath the hunter's bravado he wears like a second skin. Dean's always been able to make the most out of the places they lived, turning every rat trap apartment and cheap motel room into a place Sam wanted to call home.
They clear a lot of old bits of machinery out of the shed, and Dean eyes them speculatively. Sam wonders if he's going to come out here one day to find Dean building himself an Iron Man suit or a Tardis.
While Dean's busy with his mad scientist routine, Sam decides that he's going to try his hand at cultivating a garden. He makes Dean take him to Home Depot so he can buy seeds and topsoil and stuff. He doesn't know what he's doing, but the lady behind the counter tells him it's really not that hard, and gives him a beginner's guide to growing your own vegetables.
The yard is a mess, though, so they get started on that first.
Dean doesn't complain, does the hard work of weeding and mowing like he used to do the workouts Dad set up for them. When he's done, though, he puts his feet up in one of the creaky easy chairs, pops open a beer, and falls asleep reading one of the pile of old Popular Mechanics he found in the basement. They smell like mold and damp, but that doesn't seem to bother Dean. Sam supposes it wouldn't, considering.
He spends his time outside, digging little furrows and planting seeds--tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and cucumbers. He's also got something that he thinks is basil but turns out to be mint (it takes over the whole garden), and he comes inside each afternoon with an ache in his back and a crick in his neck, but he feels accomplished, relaxed, in a way he hasn't in years.
He plants the garden in neat rows, just like the book says. He finds a big rubber watering can when they clean out the shed out back--it's green, with a big flower embossed on it, and he uses it to water his garden each morning, ignoring Dean's mocking.
He finds the old reel of garden hose and a rusty old sprinkler beside it, and spends a good thirty minutes getting it all set up in the garden.
"I wouldn't, if I were you," Dean calls from the doorway.
Sam ignores him. "Just turn the water on when I say so, okay?"
Dean shrugs and gives him a smirk and a mocking salute. "Whatever you say, boss."
Sam looks over his little patch of green, fusses once or twice more with the placement of the sprinkler, and then yells, "Okay, Dean. Let 'er rip!"
He hears the faint squeak of the spigot turning and the muted rush of water in the pipes, and then there's a sad trickle of water spitting from the sprinkler, the kind he's only seen from public water fountains with really poor water pressure, where he's had to bend almost in half to suck the fountainhead to get a drink.
"I know the water pressure's better than that, Dean. Turn it on."
"Sam--"
"Just do it, Dean."
"Okay." He can hear the shrug in Dean's voice.
There's a gurgle, and then another, and then the hose is slithering wildly like a snake in the grass, shooting water everywhere. Cold water, Sam learns when he grabs hold of it and gets sprayed for his trouble. He wrestles with the hose, which has sprung so many leaks it's more leaks than hose, and he hears Dean laughing at him from the doorway.
He manages to get the sprinkler disconnected and holds the hose--now pouring cold water directly onto his hand--like a weapon. A weapon he points at Dean.
"Come on, Dean. Scared of a little water?"
"No. I just like being dry."
"Chicken." Sam starts clucking.
Dean shakes his head, like he's actually a mature adult, immune to the power of being called a chicken, and Sam turns the hose on him, soaking his t-shirt. Dean leaps and yowls like a cat, and then the chase is on. Sam leads him away from the carefully cultivated garden to the patch of bare dirt out by the back fence. They wrestle for control of the hose until they're both breathless from laughing and filthy from rolling around in the mud. Dean's got him pinned, but Sam's still got the hose, so he figures it's a draw.
"Little duct tape, we can fix that right up," Dean says.
"Or, we could just go to Home Depot."
Dean grins. "That, too."
After they clean up and shower, they go into town, and Sam gets a new hose and sprinkler.
*
Once they've taken care of all the necessary repairs, Sam's not sure what to do with himself. He tries to write, but the blank pages in the new notebook he bought for the purpose seem to mock him, and it doesn't go any better on the laptop, where he can distract himself with solitaire and minesweeper even if he still doesn't have internet access. He goes outside each morning to look over his garden, shielding his eyes from the sun and trying to will the seeds into growing.
"Staring at it ain't gonna make it grow any faster," Dean says from where he's sitting on the smooth wooden plank of the new top step. Sam's not imagining the relief he hears in Dean's voice.
He can't do anything anymore just by staring at it--well, except for maybe making someone really uncomfortable. During the final battle, the demon blood in his veins had been purged, burned away by angelic fire. Sam's got a high pain threshold, but that had almost killed him. It'd been worth it, though, because he and Dean both were still alive, if not exactly standing, at the end.
Dean takes another bite of--"Hey, that's my pineapple," Sam says. Dean ignores him and closes his eyes as if savoring the sweetness.
"S'good," he says.
"My pineapple."
Dean makes a show of examining the plastic container the fruit came in. "Doesn't have your name on it."
"You don't even like fruit."
"That is a dirty lie. I like this fruit." He cocks his head as if he's thinking about it. "And I finished the Doritos last night."
Sam laughs and joins him on the step, reaching into the bowl for a chunk of pineapple before Dean finishes it all.
*
Dean spends his days puttering around the workshop he set up in the shed, but Sam can only spend so much time fiddling with his garden. He waters it every morning (except the days it rains), and waits impatiently for his vegetables to grow.
It's while he's watering that he notices the birdfeeder set up by the back fence.
"A birdfeeder, Dean? Seriously?"
Dean looks up from his workbench in surprise, the goggles weirdly distorting and magnifying his eyes. "What?"
"You don't even like birds." Sam's not real fond of them either. Thank you, Alfred Hitchcock.
"You think I don't like a lot of things."
"You don't like a lot of things."
Dean shrugs. "Okay, it's true, I don't like birds. Nasty, dirty fuckers." He gives a theatrical shudder. "But I needed something simple to get back in the swing of things." He gestures at the wood he's got stacked up on the floor, the plans he's tacked up on the wall. Sam's not sure, but it looks like Dean's planning on building a table and a rocking chair. Or possibly a hydroplaning device. With Dean, he can never tell.
"As long as you're not planning to take up bird watching or leaf peeping or anything."
"Leaf peeping," Dean says incredulously. He snorts and turns back to work.
A few days later, Sam comes in from a run and discovers there's a new table in the kitchen, one that doesn't wobble when he looks at it, or feel like it's going to collapse when he leans on it. It's round and smooth and polished, with a beveled edge and a pedestal base.
"This is pretty cool," he says, knocking on the wood as they eat dinner that night.
Dean blushes and smiles. "Thanks."
The coffee table is next, and then the night table next to the bed where Dean keeps his stuff. That actually has a Greek key pattern carved into the tabletop, and an inlay of darker wood. It's not quite professional grade, but Sam's impressed anyway.
He's always thought of himself as the creative one, but he can't seem to get started on writing anything, and here's Dean making furniture that actually has some personality to it.
Sam decides to redouble his efforts to write, and continues to get nowhere.
*
With no words, no television and no internet (he has to grudgingly admit Dean is right about the wifi when NetStumbler turns up nothing every day), Sam is slowly going crazy.
"Cable don't go out that far," the guy in town tells him. "Could probably get you hooked up with DSL, though."
"When?"
"End of the month."
"What?" Sam doesn't mean to squawk; it just kind of happens.
"Don't get much call for service techs, so they only come out here last three days of the month."
"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
"Yessir. So can I put you down for an appointment?"
"Yes." Sam bites out the word and tries not to sound like a sullen teenager. "As soon as possible."
He heads outside to bitch to Dean, but Dean's underneath the car, singing along with Steven Tyler about love in an elevator, so Sam will just have to entertain himself.
The living room is lined with bookshelves, and Sam loves to read, especially now that he doesn't have to spend all his time reading about monsters and demons, because the fate of his family, the fate of the world, rests upon it. He eliminates the first set of shelves, though. They're all hunting-related, and he's done with that.
The true crime books are right at eye level, so Sam starts with In Cold Blood, and then moves on to Zodiac, The Search for the Green River Killer, Small Sacrifices, The Stranger Beside Me, and three books about Jack the Ripper. It takes him a week. He has no desire to reread Helter Skelter or Devil in the White City, so he moves onto the next shelf, where he finds the collected works of Larry Bond and Tom Clancy, and a book on submarine warfare in World War II.
It only gets worse as he speed-reads his way through the rest of the shelves. They're full of an odd mixture of bodice rippers, physics textbooks, and books with titles like Principles of Civil Engineering, Advanced Organic Chemistry, and Philosophical Cybernetics. He worries a little when he finds Theoretical Aerodynamics tucked in with the pile of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler novels Dean's got stacked up next to the bed.
"I'm reading that," Dean says when he comes inside to find Sam lying on the couch, engrossed in The Big Sleep.
Sam makes a show of examining the book. "I don't see your name on it."
"Fine." Dean washes up and comes back into the living room with The Genesis of Fluid Mechanics and starts reading it out loud.
Sam gives up the third time Dean mentions non-dimensional parameters and the resistance coefficient. He tosses the book at Dean and heads back to the bookshelves. Sometimes, after dinner, they'll read the romance novels out loud and crack themselves up, but that's only entertaining for so long. Sam finds that without hunting, without television, the internet, or saving the world, he's got a lot of time on his hands.
The next day, while looking for a can opener, he discovers a battered copy of the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook that's probably older than he is tucked into a drawer in the kitchen. He flips through it and finds recipes for fried chicken and dumplings that make his mouth water. He decides they've been living on Dean's utilitarian meat loaf and spaghetti with jarred sauce for too long.
"I'm going to learn to cook," he announces, and then takes the car into town to buy groceries before Dean can respond.
When the dumplings come out lumpy and leaden, and the chicken is burned on one side and uncooked on the other, Dean says, "Maybe you should start with something easier." He's not even being sarcastic, which makes it worse, makes Sam even more determined to cook.
He goes to the Stop and Shop in town and picks up more chicken, plus some stew meat and vegetables (though he's sure the vegetables from his garden will be much sweeter and more nutritious, if they ever freaking grow), thankful that none of the cashiers ever bother checking the signatures on their credit cards--the bored teenagers who work the check out at Home Depot and Target are usually too stunned by the smiles Dean flashes them to think of it. He gives this girl a shy smile and she blushes bright red while she rings him up.
It's Dean who discovers the collection of nineteenth century novels down on the bottom shelf. He takes The Three Musketeers and Ivanhoe for himself, but leaves the rest for Sam, who can't blame him.
It's a cool rainy afternoon, so Sam decides he's going to make beef stew. He follows the directions meticulously, and once everything's in the frying pan, he grabs The Count of Monte Cristo, and flops down on the couch.
He doesn't mean to fall asleep.
He wakes up to Dean shaking him in a smoke-filled living room. "What the hell is that stench?" he chokes out, still muzzy-headed.
Dean's face twists in disgust. "Your attempt at beef stew."
Sam scrambles off the couch and lunges towards the kitchen, which is even hazier and smells even worse. The smoking skillet is sitting haphazardly in the sink, where Dean must have tossed it, the charred remains of stew burned onto the bottom of the pan.
"Dude, don't think you're not cleaning that up." He shakes his head and laughs. "How did you even eat when I wasn't around?"
Sam blames the smoke for the foul taste in his mouth, even now not up for joking about the time Dean was gone.
The windows are flung wide, but the smoke clings to the humidity in the air, and there's no breeze to carry it away. Sam can smell it in his hair and his clothes as he cleans the kitchen. He spends a good forty minutes scrubbing the pan until Dean takes pity on him and shows him how to deglaze it. Not that they're going to be making any kind of anything with the blackened remains of his beef stew.
"Come on, kiddo," Dean says when they're done and the pan is back in the cabinet and Sam's fingers are pruney from washing it. His fingers are warm and comforting on the back of Sam's neck. "I could use a burger."
Dean drives through town and past it, out to the roadhouse a few miles down the highway, the kind of place he always finds, with sawdust and peanut shells on the floor and the lingering smell of stale beer in the air as the Allman Brothers rock out on the jukebox.
After a couple of beers and a big juicy burger, the smell of charred food is finally out of Sam's nose and throat. Dean is lounging against the corner of the booth, eyeing the pool table thoughtfully. He gives Sam a big, shit-eating grin, the kind that makes his eyes light up and the corners crinkle, and Sam thinks about how long it's been since they ran a hustle, and how much longer even than that that they did it just for fun and not with the fate of the world hanging over them. He feels the slow smile spread across his own face, and it feels good.
Things are going well until this one wannabe tough guy calls Sam a fag. Dean calls the guy a homophobic white trash motherfucker, and everything after that is a blur of adrenaline and movement.
Sam's still buzzing with it on the ride home, laughing and replaying the fight in a loud voice that makes him think maybe he's a little drunker than he thought he was. Dean grins back at him, teeth bloody from the split lip he's wearing, but Sam doesn't even feel the sting of his own bloody knuckles, and what he knows will be a ginormous bruise across his back from where he got hit with a chair.
He misses this, he thinks, the thrill of fighting, of putting it all out there and not knowing how it's going to turn out (though after beating both heaven and hell, he has to tamp down the not-so-tiny suspicion that he and Dean are an invincible team). He can admit that on nights like this, when they've come out on top and there's no need for stitches or frantic drives to the ER while whispering useless prayers.
"Dude," he says, realizing Dean's stopped talking and is waiting for some kind of response.
Dean glances at him, eyes bright with laughter. "Yeah."
*
Dean's usually the one who goes into town to pick up the mail--he's settled in pretty well (better than Sam expected, actually), but he still gets restless, needs to move, and the drive into town seems to calm him down when that happens.
Sam is hovering over his garden, wondering why the shoots peeking out of the ground are so small and pale, and why there's what looks like mold growing in the dirt, when Dean gets back.
He eyes the garden critically and says, "Maybe you should go easy on the water, Sammy."
"How do you even know that? The book said--" He's going to go inside and grab the book, because he doesn't actually remember what the book said; he'd been so excited about aerating the soil and making the rows perfect that he skimmed the rest of it.
Dean stops him by slapping a small cardboard Amazon box against his chest. Sam's hands come up automatically to catch it.
"Let the garden dry out, Sam. Try something else for a while."
He goes into the house and Sam follows slowly, puzzling over the box.
There's a digital camera inside, along with a copy of Photography for Dummies, and it hits him that Dean doesn't know he took photography at Stanford (that he met Jess in that class), but Dean knows him well enough to know he'll be better at this than at cooking. Or gardening, apparently. Sam feels a fleeting sadness for his vegetables, hopes they're not too far gone and that he can still turn the garden around, but he's excited about the camera, too.
He spends the next few days learning how to use it; there's a way to make all the settings manual, and he does that, plays with the F-stops and zooms. He ends up with a collection of photos of Dean's face, Dean's hands, and finally, Dean's middle finger when he gets fed up with the flash going off every five seconds.
Sam photographs the garden from various angles, then the bookshelves, the kitchen, and Dean's workshop. He loads them onto the computer along with the pictures he took the first day, can see how Dean's tanned and lost that starved, haunted look he'd had, how the house has perked up, too, since they've been living in it--new roof and new stoop and the grass all green and mown.
He starts taking drives into town to photograph the buildings and the people. When he's done with that, he goes further afield, finds a small lake where kids from two towns over go swimming, fills the camera's memory with pictures of water and sun and sky, getting the feel for it again. He even saves his mistakes, the pictures obscured by his thumb or the ones of his own feet, feels his way back towards composing shots and using what light's available to make them interesting.
Once he's got pictures, he finds the words start coming more easily. He still can't seem to tell his own story, or Dean's, but he manages to write about the kids at the lake, the lady who runs the bed and breakfast in town, the old guys who sit outside the VFW Hall and shoot the shit all day. They're not even real stories, just character sketches, but he figures if Dean had to get back into the swing of making things, then so does he.
The garden is growing slowly, the plants all wan and half-hearted, as if they're aware of his defection. He leaves the cooking up to Dean now, though he's sure he'd be good at it if he spent more time on it. Dean's not willing to put up with another smoke condition to find out though.
"Thought the house was on fire," he says one night, looking out at the car instead of at Sam. "Was glad it was just your stupid cooking experiment, but still..." He trails off, gives Sam a sideways glance that makes his heart clench.
Sam has to clear his throat before he can speak. "Yeah. I know."
*
The DSL gets hooked up, and Sam finds himself falling back into old habits, surfing paranormal websites and messageboards, reading through his Google alerts and RSS feeds, looking for possible jobs, like he always has. When he was only getting half an hour every couple of days at the internet café in town, he'd made it count, read the New York Times or Salon or, lately, photography blogs, but now that he's got regular access again, he feels himself being sucked back in.
Strangely, he finds he doesn't really mind.
"So," he says one morning while Dean is reading the paper and drinking his coffee. "I've been thinking."
"This oughta be good."
"Shut up."
"You shut up."
"I've taken pictures of everything in the house--"
"At least twice."
Sam ignores him and continues, "And everything in town, and in the next two towns over in either direction. I've pretty much taken a picture of everything there is to take a picture of in a fifty mile radius. So, I've been thinking," he takes a deep breath, "maybe it's time for a road trip."
Dean's surprised face appears from behind the newspaper. "Seriously?"
"Yeah."
"What'd you have in mind?"
"Heading to Tuscaloosa, maybe." He hesitates, then, "There's something that looks like a haunting on the way."
The surprised look on Dean's face changes to pleasure. "I saw that in the paper. I was gonna check it out this weekend, but if you wanna--You wanna get back on the horse, Sammy?"
"I think I do, Dean." He shrugs a shoulder. "I want to come back here. I like this place, this house, but," he laughs sheepishly, "I am bored out of my freaking mind."
Dean's smile is wide and bright. "I know."
"Then what are you waiting for? Let's go. We're burning daylight."
Dean laughs. "Take it easy, cowboy. We'll get there. I'm gonna finish my coffee and crossword first, though."
Sam takes the time to pack a bag, and to water the garden one last time, though he knows he probably shouldn't. He doesn't feel as bad as he thinks he should about abandoning his vegetables to their fate. He'll be back, he promises (complete with accent, since Dean can't hear him), but he's sure they'll be fine on their own.
Dean's waiting in the driver's seat when he's done. Sam slides in beside him, pulls the door shut, and it's like finally, truly coming home.
end
~*~
Feedback is adored.
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