Pax Prompt Fic!
Awhile back I snagged a prompt from the lovely paxlux. My writer-fu is at a low ebb, so it took some time, but at last I have finished the story the prompt whispered in my ear. The prompt was a Snow Patrol song, from which I took the title and the atmosphere (I hope) but nothing more specific than that; i.e., I don't think this is what is called songfic, although I'm not entirely sure how that's defined anyway(!) So, without further ado:
Title: Headlights on Dark Roads
Author: Riverbella
Rating: R for language
Pairings/Characters: Gen; Dean, Sam, random OC's, mention of Castiel and Uriel
Disclaimer: Not mine. Oh, woe.
Summary: Who will save the world from him?
Spoilers: No specific spoilers, but knowledge of S4 through 4.16 assumed
Warning: Possibly distressing event I can't reveal without spoiling the story
A/N: The lyrics for Snow Patrol's "Headlights on a Dark Road" can be found here:
Lyrics
Headlights On a Dark Road
In the end, Sam saves the world. From Lucifer. From Hell on Earth. With powers grown from merely strong to utterly appalling, he annihilates Lilith before she can open the final few seals and release the Son of Morning. He sees no other choice, and he doesn’t regret it.
But there are consequences.
One does not unleash power like that and expect to simply rein it back in. He tries. Sam tries. But it thrums in his head like tinnitus in a bass register, sizzles through his veins like electrified wire, twitches under his skin like a million spiders. He wants to dig at himself until muscle and bone are exposed to the air, blood evaporates, and he feels nothing at all any longer. He wants to scream until the world cracks.
And she is at him, all the time. Ruby. Now is your time, Sam. Hell is in chaos. It’s all yours (ours) for the taking. Lucifer is still bound. Become our new Satan, our new Morning Star. He sees the desire-and the greed-in her every-color (black) eyes. She will follow him, fuck him, worship him if that’s what he wants, but she can’t love him. And Hell will never be enough for her. (Or for him.)
His eyes flicker with yellow lightning, stroboscopic vision of the world in shades of ochre, jaundice, urine.
Help me, he says.
Who will save the world from him?
*********
Sam talks to himself as he works-a low-voiced litany of self-instruction, interspersed with snatches of Latin, marking each step in the advancement of his task. His sole audience does not interrupt, sits motionless and silent in the chair where Sam put him.
Only Dean’s eyes move.
The empty garage where Sam labors is dim with dusk and dust. Cold as well. Winter is lingering in South Dakota this year, retreating slowly northward like a receding tide with the advance of spring. A breeze rattles loose bits of metal and hums through broken car windows outside. Other than this, Singer’s Salvage Yard is still.
Bobby is gone, a victim of the battle before the end. Dean and Sam had burned his body just as they did their father’s. It’d seemed fitting. Afterwards, Dean had been surprised to learn that Bobby had left everything he owned to the Winchester brothers. Sam had not, but he had been grateful. Everything he needs is here.
Sam pauses for a moment to survey his handiwork thus far. A double circle is inscribed on the concrete floor of the garage. The inner circle is divided into six parts, while the thinner outer ring is divided into twelve. Sigils and phrases in old Latin decorate the inner segments. The signs of the zodiac are scribed neatly in the outer. Sam does not need to check the accuracy of his work. He can feel the power of the circle like the silent rush in the eye of a storm.
After a moment, he returns to work, placing candles in the twelve segments of the outer ring-four for the elements, four for the cardinal points and four for the turn of the seasons. Dean in his chair marks the center of the circle. As he marks the center of my world, Sam thinks.
Sam does not light the candles yet. Instead, he takes a black bowl and carefully mixes a selection of herbs within it-comfrey, mandrake, sage, cinnamon, other things less recognizable. When he is satisfied with the concoction, he takes a silver knife from a sheath at his waist and slashes the palm of his left hand. He makes a fist and squeezes a thin stream of his blood into the bowl.
Without bothering to bind the wound, Sam approaches Dean and crouches in front of him. He places the bowl on Dean’s leg and reaches for Dean’s left hand. Sam neither expects nor encounters any resistance as he slashes the knife across Dean’s palm and coaxes Dean’s blood into the bowl. As the red testimony of Dean’s life mingles with his own, Sam’s eyes flash yellow for an instant and he shudders. He glances at his brother, but he sees no fear in Dean’s eyes.
Sam blends their blood with the point of the knife, then stands and places the bowl at Dean’s feet. He stares at his brother for a long time and his face softens. Leaning over, he places a gentle kiss on Dean’s lips, just a brush of his mouth free of lust or need. A benediction.
The ritual is almost anticlimactic. Sam lights the candles in the prescribed order, chanting in Latin, in Gaelic, in languages that belong to no living race in the history of the world. He finishes the incantation standing behind Dean, the bowl set alight and held above his head. The small flame flares and flickers out. Sam feels a rush of icy heat roll through his body, feels a tightness as if his chest has been wrapped in bands of steel, then feels them break and all sensation flows away.
Sam circles the chair to stand in front of his brother. “Dean,” he says, “it’s time.”
Still silent, Dean stands and follows Sam out of the building.
*********
In the end, Dean saves Sam. Sort of. It’s all in the way you look at it, he guesses, or maybe he should say, how Sam looks at it. As far as Dean is concerned, it’s the outcome that counts, and if he and Sam see it the same way, that’s good enough for Dean.
Heaven’s intention all along had been to use Hell’s own greatest weapon-Sam-against it. Dean’s job, stopping the apocalypse, meant triggering that weapon and absorbing the recoil. Dean’s choices along the way had ended up being different paths to the same destination. In the aftermath, though, all his choices had narrowed down to one.
Stop Sam, Castiel had said. If he had still been around, Uriel, more honest if less tactful, would have said, Kill Sam. Cas held out to Dean the gratitude of Heaven, whatever the fuck that meant.
Yeah, fuck that, Dean had thought. Fucking angels. Let ‘em keep Heaven’s gratitude. Dean would keep his brother, thank you very much, and Heaven could go jack itself off on its own righteousness.
You’re being childish, Castiel had pointed out. The Lord has placed great trust in you and you have not disappointed Him. We are your family now. Your Father, and your father before him, told you what must be done. Would you put one life, one dangerous and demon-stained soul, up against all the world and Heaven, too?
Dean hadn’t bothered to answer. If God (assuming he actually was up there somewhere and Cas and the other angels weren’t just a bunch of self-deluded feather-heads) really was omniscient, He could figure out the answer to that one for Himself.
Dean had walked away from Heaven. Walked to Sam.
*********
The Impala waits outside the garage. Dean goes to the driver’s side automatically, slides in and waits as Sam settled into the passenger’s seat. It is full dark now, but when Dean turns to look at his brother, Sam’s eyes flash, lit from within.
“Sammy,” Dean says, a little hoarse because he has not spoken in hours. “This is it. No take backs. Once we…. Are you sure you got it right?”
“Yes,” Sam replies. “I’m sure. We won’t hurt anyone.” He hesitates. “Second thoughts, Dean?”
Dean shakes his head quickly. No, he isn’t having second thoughts. He wishes there had been some other way, but there isn’t, so he is all right with it. “You?” he asks.
“How could I?” Sam asks. “I’m hanging on by a thread, Dean. It’s getting harder and harder to control all the time. You’re the only thing holding me in. Any longer and even you won’t be enough. We have to do this now, while I’m still able to care about that.”
“Yeah,” Dean answers. “Yeah.”
Dean starts the car then, feels the familiar vibration travel from the soles of his boots through the backs of his thighs and up his spine. It’s good. Better than sex. Better than food. Better than almost anything in the world except for maybe Sam’s laugh. He wonders if he will be able to keep this feeling, when it’s done.
Before he pulls the car out of Bobby’s yard, Dean switches on the tape deck. Zeppelin is playing, the last tape he’d listened to before the end of the world didn’t happen. It seems right, so he leaves it in, turns up the volume.
“Okay with you?” Dean asks Sam, glancing at his still form in the passenger’s seat.
“You’re the driver,” Sam answers. Dean can almost feel Sam smiling.
“Damn straight,” Dean says.
They drive for a long time in silence. They have chosen a destination, more or less, and it’s only a few hours away. They stick to county roads and rural highways for the most part. Traffic is almost non-existent. Dean drives with a heavy foot. He isn’t worried about cops cruising the back roads. Even in their lives, there is such a thing as too much irony.
Zeppelin, the faint growl of the engine barely discernable beneath, the shadowless density of trees along the roadway, the white lines in the Impala’s headlights like tracks through a dark, otherworldly landscape, Sam’s big, solid presence by his side-all these things so strange and yet so familiar and comforting at the same time. I could do this forever, Dean thinks, and then laughs at himself because, after all….
“We’re almost there, Dean,” Sam breaks the silence at last.
“I know,” Dean replies.
“You can do this, right?”
“I can do this. We can do this, Sammy.”
“I’m sorry, Dean,” Sam says. His voice is full of regret. “You shouldn’t have to. I’m sorry I couldn’t do it alone.”
“Fuck that, dude,” Dean snarls. “Come on, Sammy, even if you could, you really think I woulda let you? You and me, man. That’s how it’s supposed to be, right? You and me.”
“Dean, I….”
“I know, Sammy. Me, too.”
Sam falls silent and Dean finds himself thinking back over his life, their lives, flipping through the memories like a deck of cards, stopping every now and then to give one more than a passing glance. A lot of bad cards in the deck, and they’d been dealt every one. But there’d been a few good ones, too, and they shine golden in his mind’s eye, golden like the sun on a cloudless spring day, golden like the color of Mom’s hair.
“This is it,” Sam says. “This is the place. Anywhere along here.”
Dean nods and then surprises them both with a laugh. “You know what I just realized, Sammy? We’re fucking some poor hump of a Reaper over again. Story of our lives, huh?”
Sam chuckles a little, too. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is.”
“All right, little brother,” Dean yells, and he’s suddenly so happy he’s not sure he can stand it. He reaches over and wraps his right hand around the back of Sam’s neck and grins when Sam’s left hand tangles in his shirt. “Let’s rock.”
The Impala is going exactly 112.85 miles per hour when it crashes into the tree.
*********
In the end…
Full dark, winter early and it’s the evening lull in the bar. The after-work crowd has gone home to dinner and the nighttime regulars are just beginning to filter in. George, the bartender, swipes desultorily at the bar with a limp towel for lack of anything much better to do between pouring shots and pulling beers.
The door opens and a stranger walks in, or maybe “staggers” would be a better word, George thinks. Guy is white around the eyes and sweating despite the chill weather.
“You okay, fella?” George asks as the guy stumbles over to the bar.
“Whiskey,” he rasps out in answer.
George pours him one quickly and hands it over, watches as the guys gulps it down, and pours him another.
“Thanks,” the guy says.
“Sure,” George shrugs, asks again, “you okay?”
“Yeah, I just…had a shock is all.”
George raises an eyebrow encouragingly. He’s been a bartender for a long time.
“I’m on my way to Linville. I heard on the radio there was a big pile-up on the interstate, so I took a short cut, and…”
“Wait,” George is nodding already. “You cut across Dobbins Road to Old State 22, didn’t ya?”
The guy looks nonplussed. “I did. How’d you know?”
“You ain’t the first person not from around here who’s come in here looking like they seen a ghost.” George fills his glass once more and hands it to him with a sympathetic grin. “Saw the black car, am I right?”
“It passed right in front of me just before I turned onto 22,” the guy agreed, gaze wandering away from George’s face like he’s watching something far off. “Saw the headlights coming, watched it pass, heard its engine, heard music, some old rock song, pouring out the window, saw the driver and another guy. Looked like they were laughing and whooping it up, but I don’t think they were drunk because that car was hugging the road smooth as glass. I made my turn and followed them for a few miles. They were going fast. And then they were just gone. Right in front of me and not a place to turn off in sight. Just…gone.”
“Yep,” George says. “That car, those boys, they been on that piece a road for years. Lots of folks have seen ‘em, so don’t get scared you’re losing your mind or something. Story is they were a couple of brothers on a road trip and they ran off the road into a tree on that stretch of 22. They been driving that stretch ever since.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” the guy says, but it sounds like knee-jerk to George.
“Nobody does, mister. ‘Til they see something like you did.”
“Can’t anyone do something about it?” the guy asks weakly.
George laughs. “Like what? They ain’t never hurt no one, ‘cept for scarin’ ‘em a bit. ‘Sides, we kinda like knowin’ they’re out there, our own urban legend, ‘cept it’s for real. Couple of ghost boys in a ghost car, drivin’ and laughin’ like they ain’t got a care in the world.”
The guy finishes off his whiskey and shakes his head. “Man, I don’t know,” he says. “The world just seems to get weirder all the time.”
“Guess so,” George agrees. “But what the hell? Could be a whole hell of a lot worse. Am I right?”
Title: Headlights on Dark Roads
Author: Riverbella
Rating: R for language
Pairings/Characters: Gen; Dean, Sam, random OC's, mention of Castiel and Uriel
Disclaimer: Not mine. Oh, woe.
Summary: Who will save the world from him?
Spoilers: No specific spoilers, but knowledge of S4 through 4.16 assumed
Warning: Possibly distressing event I can't reveal without spoiling the story
A/N: The lyrics for Snow Patrol's "Headlights on a Dark Road" can be found here:
Lyrics
Headlights On a Dark Road
In the end, Sam saves the world. From Lucifer. From Hell on Earth. With powers grown from merely strong to utterly appalling, he annihilates Lilith before she can open the final few seals and release the Son of Morning. He sees no other choice, and he doesn’t regret it.
But there are consequences.
One does not unleash power like that and expect to simply rein it back in. He tries. Sam tries. But it thrums in his head like tinnitus in a bass register, sizzles through his veins like electrified wire, twitches under his skin like a million spiders. He wants to dig at himself until muscle and bone are exposed to the air, blood evaporates, and he feels nothing at all any longer. He wants to scream until the world cracks.
And she is at him, all the time. Ruby. Now is your time, Sam. Hell is in chaos. It’s all yours (ours) for the taking. Lucifer is still bound. Become our new Satan, our new Morning Star. He sees the desire-and the greed-in her every-color (black) eyes. She will follow him, fuck him, worship him if that’s what he wants, but she can’t love him. And Hell will never be enough for her. (Or for him.)
His eyes flicker with yellow lightning, stroboscopic vision of the world in shades of ochre, jaundice, urine.
Help me, he says.
Who will save the world from him?
*********
Sam talks to himself as he works-a low-voiced litany of self-instruction, interspersed with snatches of Latin, marking each step in the advancement of his task. His sole audience does not interrupt, sits motionless and silent in the chair where Sam put him.
Only Dean’s eyes move.
The empty garage where Sam labors is dim with dusk and dust. Cold as well. Winter is lingering in South Dakota this year, retreating slowly northward like a receding tide with the advance of spring. A breeze rattles loose bits of metal and hums through broken car windows outside. Other than this, Singer’s Salvage Yard is still.
Bobby is gone, a victim of the battle before the end. Dean and Sam had burned his body just as they did their father’s. It’d seemed fitting. Afterwards, Dean had been surprised to learn that Bobby had left everything he owned to the Winchester brothers. Sam had not, but he had been grateful. Everything he needs is here.
Sam pauses for a moment to survey his handiwork thus far. A double circle is inscribed on the concrete floor of the garage. The inner circle is divided into six parts, while the thinner outer ring is divided into twelve. Sigils and phrases in old Latin decorate the inner segments. The signs of the zodiac are scribed neatly in the outer. Sam does not need to check the accuracy of his work. He can feel the power of the circle like the silent rush in the eye of a storm.
After a moment, he returns to work, placing candles in the twelve segments of the outer ring-four for the elements, four for the cardinal points and four for the turn of the seasons. Dean in his chair marks the center of the circle. As he marks the center of my world, Sam thinks.
Sam does not light the candles yet. Instead, he takes a black bowl and carefully mixes a selection of herbs within it-comfrey, mandrake, sage, cinnamon, other things less recognizable. When he is satisfied with the concoction, he takes a silver knife from a sheath at his waist and slashes the palm of his left hand. He makes a fist and squeezes a thin stream of his blood into the bowl.
Without bothering to bind the wound, Sam approaches Dean and crouches in front of him. He places the bowl on Dean’s leg and reaches for Dean’s left hand. Sam neither expects nor encounters any resistance as he slashes the knife across Dean’s palm and coaxes Dean’s blood into the bowl. As the red testimony of Dean’s life mingles with his own, Sam’s eyes flash yellow for an instant and he shudders. He glances at his brother, but he sees no fear in Dean’s eyes.
Sam blends their blood with the point of the knife, then stands and places the bowl at Dean’s feet. He stares at his brother for a long time and his face softens. Leaning over, he places a gentle kiss on Dean’s lips, just a brush of his mouth free of lust or need. A benediction.
The ritual is almost anticlimactic. Sam lights the candles in the prescribed order, chanting in Latin, in Gaelic, in languages that belong to no living race in the history of the world. He finishes the incantation standing behind Dean, the bowl set alight and held above his head. The small flame flares and flickers out. Sam feels a rush of icy heat roll through his body, feels a tightness as if his chest has been wrapped in bands of steel, then feels them break and all sensation flows away.
Sam circles the chair to stand in front of his brother. “Dean,” he says, “it’s time.”
Still silent, Dean stands and follows Sam out of the building.
*********
In the end, Dean saves Sam. Sort of. It’s all in the way you look at it, he guesses, or maybe he should say, how Sam looks at it. As far as Dean is concerned, it’s the outcome that counts, and if he and Sam see it the same way, that’s good enough for Dean.
Heaven’s intention all along had been to use Hell’s own greatest weapon-Sam-against it. Dean’s job, stopping the apocalypse, meant triggering that weapon and absorbing the recoil. Dean’s choices along the way had ended up being different paths to the same destination. In the aftermath, though, all his choices had narrowed down to one.
Stop Sam, Castiel had said. If he had still been around, Uriel, more honest if less tactful, would have said, Kill Sam. Cas held out to Dean the gratitude of Heaven, whatever the fuck that meant.
Yeah, fuck that, Dean had thought. Fucking angels. Let ‘em keep Heaven’s gratitude. Dean would keep his brother, thank you very much, and Heaven could go jack itself off on its own righteousness.
You’re being childish, Castiel had pointed out. The Lord has placed great trust in you and you have not disappointed Him. We are your family now. Your Father, and your father before him, told you what must be done. Would you put one life, one dangerous and demon-stained soul, up against all the world and Heaven, too?
Dean hadn’t bothered to answer. If God (assuming he actually was up there somewhere and Cas and the other angels weren’t just a bunch of self-deluded feather-heads) really was omniscient, He could figure out the answer to that one for Himself.
Dean had walked away from Heaven. Walked to Sam.
*********
The Impala waits outside the garage. Dean goes to the driver’s side automatically, slides in and waits as Sam settled into the passenger’s seat. It is full dark now, but when Dean turns to look at his brother, Sam’s eyes flash, lit from within.
“Sammy,” Dean says, a little hoarse because he has not spoken in hours. “This is it. No take backs. Once we…. Are you sure you got it right?”
“Yes,” Sam replies. “I’m sure. We won’t hurt anyone.” He hesitates. “Second thoughts, Dean?”
Dean shakes his head quickly. No, he isn’t having second thoughts. He wishes there had been some other way, but there isn’t, so he is all right with it. “You?” he asks.
“How could I?” Sam asks. “I’m hanging on by a thread, Dean. It’s getting harder and harder to control all the time. You’re the only thing holding me in. Any longer and even you won’t be enough. We have to do this now, while I’m still able to care about that.”
“Yeah,” Dean answers. “Yeah.”
Dean starts the car then, feels the familiar vibration travel from the soles of his boots through the backs of his thighs and up his spine. It’s good. Better than sex. Better than food. Better than almost anything in the world except for maybe Sam’s laugh. He wonders if he will be able to keep this feeling, when it’s done.
Before he pulls the car out of Bobby’s yard, Dean switches on the tape deck. Zeppelin is playing, the last tape he’d listened to before the end of the world didn’t happen. It seems right, so he leaves it in, turns up the volume.
“Okay with you?” Dean asks Sam, glancing at his still form in the passenger’s seat.
“You’re the driver,” Sam answers. Dean can almost feel Sam smiling.
“Damn straight,” Dean says.
They drive for a long time in silence. They have chosen a destination, more or less, and it’s only a few hours away. They stick to county roads and rural highways for the most part. Traffic is almost non-existent. Dean drives with a heavy foot. He isn’t worried about cops cruising the back roads. Even in their lives, there is such a thing as too much irony.
Zeppelin, the faint growl of the engine barely discernable beneath, the shadowless density of trees along the roadway, the white lines in the Impala’s headlights like tracks through a dark, otherworldly landscape, Sam’s big, solid presence by his side-all these things so strange and yet so familiar and comforting at the same time. I could do this forever, Dean thinks, and then laughs at himself because, after all….
“We’re almost there, Dean,” Sam breaks the silence at last.
“I know,” Dean replies.
“You can do this, right?”
“I can do this. We can do this, Sammy.”
“I’m sorry, Dean,” Sam says. His voice is full of regret. “You shouldn’t have to. I’m sorry I couldn’t do it alone.”
“Fuck that, dude,” Dean snarls. “Come on, Sammy, even if you could, you really think I woulda let you? You and me, man. That’s how it’s supposed to be, right? You and me.”
“Dean, I….”
“I know, Sammy. Me, too.”
Sam falls silent and Dean finds himself thinking back over his life, their lives, flipping through the memories like a deck of cards, stopping every now and then to give one more than a passing glance. A lot of bad cards in the deck, and they’d been dealt every one. But there’d been a few good ones, too, and they shine golden in his mind’s eye, golden like the sun on a cloudless spring day, golden like the color of Mom’s hair.
“This is it,” Sam says. “This is the place. Anywhere along here.”
Dean nods and then surprises them both with a laugh. “You know what I just realized, Sammy? We’re fucking some poor hump of a Reaper over again. Story of our lives, huh?”
Sam chuckles a little, too. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is.”
“All right, little brother,” Dean yells, and he’s suddenly so happy he’s not sure he can stand it. He reaches over and wraps his right hand around the back of Sam’s neck and grins when Sam’s left hand tangles in his shirt. “Let’s rock.”
The Impala is going exactly 112.85 miles per hour when it crashes into the tree.
*********
In the end…
Full dark, winter early and it’s the evening lull in the bar. The after-work crowd has gone home to dinner and the nighttime regulars are just beginning to filter in. George, the bartender, swipes desultorily at the bar with a limp towel for lack of anything much better to do between pouring shots and pulling beers.
The door opens and a stranger walks in, or maybe “staggers” would be a better word, George thinks. Guy is white around the eyes and sweating despite the chill weather.
“You okay, fella?” George asks as the guy stumbles over to the bar.
“Whiskey,” he rasps out in answer.
George pours him one quickly and hands it over, watches as the guys gulps it down, and pours him another.
“Thanks,” the guy says.
“Sure,” George shrugs, asks again, “you okay?”
“Yeah, I just…had a shock is all.”
George raises an eyebrow encouragingly. He’s been a bartender for a long time.
“I’m on my way to Linville. I heard on the radio there was a big pile-up on the interstate, so I took a short cut, and…”
“Wait,” George is nodding already. “You cut across Dobbins Road to Old State 22, didn’t ya?”
The guy looks nonplussed. “I did. How’d you know?”
“You ain’t the first person not from around here who’s come in here looking like they seen a ghost.” George fills his glass once more and hands it to him with a sympathetic grin. “Saw the black car, am I right?”
“It passed right in front of me just before I turned onto 22,” the guy agreed, gaze wandering away from George’s face like he’s watching something far off. “Saw the headlights coming, watched it pass, heard its engine, heard music, some old rock song, pouring out the window, saw the driver and another guy. Looked like they were laughing and whooping it up, but I don’t think they were drunk because that car was hugging the road smooth as glass. I made my turn and followed them for a few miles. They were going fast. And then they were just gone. Right in front of me and not a place to turn off in sight. Just…gone.”
“Yep,” George says. “That car, those boys, they been on that piece a road for years. Lots of folks have seen ‘em, so don’t get scared you’re losing your mind or something. Story is they were a couple of brothers on a road trip and they ran off the road into a tree on that stretch of 22. They been driving that stretch ever since.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” the guy says, but it sounds like knee-jerk to George.
“Nobody does, mister. ‘Til they see something like you did.”
“Can’t anyone do something about it?” the guy asks weakly.
George laughs. “Like what? They ain’t never hurt no one, ‘cept for scarin’ ‘em a bit. ‘Sides, we kinda like knowin’ they’re out there, our own urban legend, ‘cept it’s for real. Couple of ghost boys in a ghost car, drivin’ and laughin’ like they ain’t got a care in the world.”
The guy finishes off his whiskey and shakes his head. “Man, I don’t know,” he says. “The world just seems to get weirder all the time.”
“Guess so,” George agrees. “But what the hell? Could be a whole hell of a lot worse. Am I right?”