SPN Fanfic: I Can Still Hear You When You Drown
Title: I Can Still Hear You When You Drown
Genre/pairing: Gen
Rating: R? For language?
Word count: ~1300
Summary: Sam is a lifeguard the summer before his senior year.
Warnings: Death of a child
Disclaimer: Please don’t sue me.
Prompts: Wildcard (“drowning”) square for my dark_bingo card and also maybe the grief square for hc_bingo.
Summary: What could be more normal than sitting in a lifeguard chair slathered in sunscreen, watching little kids throw soppy nerf balls at each other?
(AO3)
It’s August in Indiana, and it could only be more humid if it were actually raining. Dean wipes green pepper juice from his hands and shakes out a cigarette from the pack of generics he’s keeping in his back pocket. He’s off in an hour and the day can’t end fast enough as far as he’s concerned. He’s fed up with Indiana, sick of watching out for his little brother, tired of being left behind to work the line at Harry’s Bar & Grill while his father saves the world, and finally convinced after weeks of laying groundwork that he’s never gonna get in the pants of Celeste, the curvy prep cook.
Indiana, man. There’s more than corn, but not much more.
Celeste plops down next to him and pulls out her own pack of cigarettes, legs swinging over the end of the loading dock.
“Light?”
He hands over his Zippo, looking wistfully at her Camels.
A sated fly buzzes around listlessly and lands on Celeste’s boot. The air behind the restaurant reeks of dumpster juice, a sickening blend of fermenting vegetables and rotten table scraps.
“Hey, so your brother works at Lyons Lake, right?”
“Why?” he asks, sitting up a little straighter.
“Just, Q92, they said that a kid drowned out there today.”
Fuck. Sammy. “Yeah, he’s a lifeguard. Did they say who …what happened?”
She shakes her head but he’s already on his feet, heading to the phone in the manager’s office.
The lake must be a complete clusterfuck, nobody’s answering the main line. After five minutes of busy signals and unanswered rings, he throws his apron towards the hamper in the corner of the kitchen and goes to clock out.
----------------------------------------------------
Sam trudges down the two lane blacktop towards their house on County Line Road, convinced that the next car to round the bend will be the one that sends him toes up to meet his maker. Nobody walks in Indiana, everybody has cars, and most of the cars that pass by honk at him in irritation for trying to share the road. It’s 95 degrees at 4 in the afternoon and the asphalt is baking through his sneakers.
Dean was supposed to pick him up after work but the cops had closed down the Lake to question the staff, and he’d decided he’d rather walk the four miles back to their house than stick around after making his statement. Twenty minutes of staring at the splintered surface of a picnic table while Jordan Creed’s mom sobbed at the edge of the water was all he could take.
Fucking hell, he’d thought this job would be easy, would be safe. What could be more normal than sitting in a lifeguard chair slathered in sunscreen, watching little kids throw soppy nerf balls at each other? That’s what he’d thought anyway, until he’d had to pull the blue body of an eight-year-old boy from the bottom of the lake.
He tenses as another car pulls up behind him, but this time it slows to a crawl and Sam is relieved when he looks up to see Dean waving at him from the 1980 El Camino he’d picked up in Iowa a few months ago.
Sam slides onto the cracked seats, wincing as the blistering leather hits the back of his thighs.
Back at the house Sam is grateful, not for the first time, that their tiny furnished rental is small enough that the lone AC window unit is enough to cool off the inside of the house. He stands in front of the window, eyes closed, letting the cold air dry the sweat from his skin. He stands there long enough for Dean to complain, “Dude, you’re just spreading your stink through the whole fucking house,” before he heads toward the shower.
Under water as hot as he can stand it, Sam scrubs his skin with a threadbare washcloth, trying to remove the feel of the kid in his arms, cold and still, the feel of his rubbery lips as Sam tried and failed to breathe life back into him.
Fuck.
He’s suddenly shoving his way through the mildewy plastic shower liner, collapsing onto the chipped pink tiles of the bathroom floor. He throws up the cheese fries he’d eaten at noon, keeps heaving until his stomach is shriveled and empty and his throat is burning.
When he finally emerges from the bathroom half an hour later, Dean hands him a ham sandwich and a can of MGD. He pushes the sandwich back, stomach shifting unpleasantly, and pops the top of the beer.
Outside on the cement steps leading to the front door, Sam studies his bare feet while Dean smokes and watches the sky.
“You wanna talk about it?”
Sam exhales. “I really don’t.”
They’re silent again for a while. Sam reaches for Dean’s pack of cigarettes and Dean smacks his hand away.
“You know it’s not your fault,” Dean says finally.
Sam was one of the first guards to hit the water when the shrill all-hands-on-deck whistle started blowing. Coming off his break at a sprint, he raced into the lake, diving and resurfacing in his assigned grid until his grasping hand finally brushed Jordan’s hair, the only part of him that was still moving, waving in the water like the lake weeds.
“I know,” Sam says finally. He studies the clouds for a few minutes. “How do you know?”
“I talked to Cynthia when I went to pick you up.”
Sam pictures the head lifeguard, no-nonsense, frizzy-haired, pushing 40. She’s a Lyons-her grandfather opened the place in the ’60s-and she’s worked there since she was a teenager. She’d been remarkably calm in the aftermath of the accident. Sam supposes you don’t manage a recreational lake that’s been operating for 45 years without knowing how to handle a few dead kids.
He laughs, and it’s an awful sound. Beside him Dean’s hand twitches and then stills.
Dean is remembering how Sam had campaigned to be allowed to get a regular job for the summer, how he’d given Dad a fucking presentation complete with handouts about how he already knew a lot of first aid, and how helpful lifeguard training would be-how it would “complement his hunter training,” of all things-and, how easy it would be to switch shifts around if John needed both boys for a job.
Dad had watched Sam’s dog and pony show with an amused glint in his eye, pretending to think about it. Dean thought he’d probably been ready to say yes from the start; money was tight and it seemed as good a way as any for Sam to contribute to the family fund and keep out of trouble.
It was one of the few times Dean could remember Sam getting his way when he butted heads with Dad.
----------------------------------------------------
“I don’t think I’m cut out for this,” Sam says some time later as they’re watching the sun disappear behind the trees. It’s gone from hellishly hot to uncomfortably hot but Dean keeps smoking and they still haven’t moved back inside to the cool dark of the house.
“Lifeguarding?”
“Saving people.”
Dean snorts, wonders how Sam can think he’s not cut out for something he was raised into.
“I told you, it’s not your fault.”
“It feels like... if I can’t stop something like this from happening…” he trails off, drops his head into his hands, miserable.
Dean hears what Sam doesn’t say. If I can’t stop a regular old accident, how can I stop a kelpie? A werewolf? An angry spirit?
Dean puts an arm around Sam’s shoulders, even though it’s way too hot for hugging.
He thinks it will just take some time to convince Sam that bad things happen no matter what they do, how hard they fight, what they’re up against. That it’s worth it in the end.
Sam thinks about the sheaf of college applications he’s been carrying around in his backpack since school let out in June.