SPN Fic: Got A Hold On Me
Title: Got A Hold on Me
Characters: John, Dean, Sam
Genre: Gen
Rating: G
Word-count: 900
Spoilers: None
Disclaimer: Title from Whitesnake's “Is This Love,” which, along with a lush May evening, inspired this fic.
Summary: Sometimes peace takes you by surprise and knocks you flat, and all you can do is go down laughing.
Notes: Written for John's character spotlight at spn_bigpretzel.
Summer jumps at him when he least expects it.
Friday he was stuck in traffic on I-95, cranking up the heat until the whole car smelled of burnt plastic and closing his ears to the lecture from his resident eight-year-old weatherman, who spent forty miles educating his father and brother on the mechanics of cold fronts until Dean started accompanying frequent orders to “Shut up” with physical reinforcement in the form of Indian burns. As the yellow-tinged evening deepened into night, John pulled off the highway to find a tiny restaurant, where sloppy bowls of bland New England chili barely melted the film of winter that had settled around their shoulders. Sam went to bed that night drowning in his brother's sweatshirt, the two small bodies drawn closer than usual in the middle of the bed, smothered in cigarette-stained paisley.
But now it's Saturday, and all day has been sun and seventy-plus degrees and the bright, hot scent of mowed lawns as inner New York State wakes up to find that May has arrived in full force and there are appearances to be kept up. John's seen high school kids trudging shirtless and careful across neighbors' yards, old guys with too much belly fat sprawled across the seats of ride-ons to clip a narrow band between tulips and asphalt, and one rawboned stranger lazily guiding a rusty reel mower through deep yellow strands of flowering weeds outside a pale blue two-story. Somewhere around Binghamton, they caught the sound of an outdoor concert through the open window, people sprawled on the grass with picnic blankets as a handful of amateur musicians stumbled merrily through Vivaldi from the cool security of a peeling gazebo.
The boys have felt the change too: sticking hands and heads out of windows (until John's story about a kid who stuck his head out of the car and met an unexpected telephone pole brought them ducking inside again, turtle-like), making loud remarks every time an ice cream stand comes into view, shucking off sweatshirts and rolling up baggy pant legs until the backseat is so full of discarded garments it resembles a tiny Goodwill. About lunchtime, Dean drags his T-shirt over his head and sprawls bare-chested against the seat, swaggering for the next fifty miles in the freedom of his own skin and glancing down every once in a while to check on his fledgling biceps.
The T-shirt's back on now, showing a little dark trail where Sam's mouth has dragged drool across it. Dean doesn't seem to mind be used as a pillow; he's sleeping as heavily as his brother, the two of them stretched out across the back seat, unbuckled to keep the belts from cutting awkwardly into their middles. Dean's mumbling in his sleep, a smear of mustard marking his cheek from the hot dogs he wolfed down so eagerly that John, two bites into his first, went ahead and ordered a third out of sheer surprise.
They're the only car on a road so far from Anywhere it doesn't even show up on John's map, winding over low hills and through thick maple forests past farmhouses so tangy with manure he can smell it even with the windows rolled safely up. He's got the feeling they're probably irreparably lost, and at some point there's going to have to be some reconnaissance, some unfolding of maps and studying of county lines, some asking for directions from the old guy parked in front of the general store - but right now, he's content just to wait and see if things sort themselves out, to let the Impala follow the twists and side roads like a horse following its instincts home through the twilight.
It's not home, nothing like it - he's never even been this far north of Buffalo, isn't used to the size of the trees or the sudden parties of deer that tiptoe into the Impala's path; he doesn't recognize the name of a single town on the intermittent green signs. But he knows this kind of evening so well it feels like a rerun of some forgotten summer night: a world blending into a hundred different shades of leaf and sky, rich color filling in the blank book of April, sunset just a breath away but not hurrying with the darkness. The air's so thick with the energy of unexpected life that he has to resist a stupid impulse to reach outside the window and grab handfuls of it as it rushes past.
Some cheesy love song's pouring out of the car radio, but it's quiet enough not to disturb the sleepers, and he doesn't bother switching it off. He ought to be searching out a motel, trying to set up camp for the night in some place with reasonable rates and running water and a serviceable color television to keep Sam out of everyone's hair, but he has more pressing obligations to attend to right now.
Some evenings are meant to be savored. Some roads need to be driven to the end, for no other reason than to watch the pavement stream away under your wheels and feel the engine seething under you. Sometimes peace takes you by surprise and knocks you flat, and all you can do is go down laughing.
Pulling up to an intersection, he takes the turn to nowhere, and summer closes silently in behind them.