Small Pleasures

"YES!"

Sam, who had been verging on blissfully comatose, right shoulder snugged against the passenger door while his temple vibrated against the window, jerks from dead-weight slumped to bolt upright so quickly that he nearly loses his lunch.

He's never told his brother about that annoying autonomic reaction, because Dean no doubt would give him an endless supply of shit about it. But yes; when awakened too abruptly out of a hard sleep brought about because of sheer exhaustion, he sometimes wants to hurl.

Tamping down on the impulse with an almost frantic determination - spewing inside the Impala would end up with him the victim of fratricide - Sam turns his head and fixes his brother with a squinty, steely eye. "What the hell -?" Because the radio is off, so Dean has not responded to music or a talk show, or even a news broadcast. He's just shouted. Loudly.

"The sign," Dean explains, round-eyed in innocence, as if all is obvious.

Which actually explains nothing, as so often happens when Dean fixes his brain upon a thought Sam is not privy to. And in the aftermath of being startled out of sleep and the lingering desire to puke, Sam is feeling bitchy. "What sign? A sign? Like, a sign that the apocalypse is planning a sequel? Because I really don't want to go there."

Dean waves an arm. His hand comes perilously close to smacking the Impala's rearview mirror, but Sam is pretty sure Dean has all the distances inside his baby calibrated to fractions. "One of those computerized signs. Out there."

Out there indicates a vast, endless—and vastly, endlessly boring—horizon full of dry yellow grass and wire fencing along the interstate. Sam blinks away the slow-dying dregs of a hard sleep. "It's haunted? The sign? It's a shapeshifter? A trickster?"

"Dude, let's leave the trickster out of this, okay?" Dean shoots him a glance, narrows his eyes, then quirks his lips. "Sleeping Beauty, much?"

Sam automatically sticks a hand to his hair, realizes whole clumps are yearning to break free of his scalp and run off in several different directions. He combs fingers through it hastily and, still disgruntled, eyes his brother back. "You don't generally shout like that in the car unless something is attacking us."

"Or unless you irritate me."

"I was asleep. I can't be irritating you in my sleep."

Dean's grin blossoms. "Oh, but you can. Did I ever tell you about—"

"Dean. Stay on topic. Are we under attack?"

"No."

"Then why are you shouting loudly enough to wake the dead? Especially as all we're doing is driving down the freeway?"

Dean smirks out the windshield. "Priorities, Sammy."

Sam waits a beat, but his brother doesn't say anything more. "And -?"

Smiling, Dean lifts his foot off the accelerator and allows the car to slow, flips on the turn signal. "Gettin' off," he supplies.

Sam sighs, ignoring the impulse to respond to what might be a Deanic sexual innuendo. For a long time, as a kid, he fell into such traps with annoying regularity. These days, he's honed his brain to seek other avenues of thought.

"So to speak," Dean says, with an undisguised snicker.

So much for his brain being honed. Sam rolls his eyes.

Dean navigates the off-ramp, the turn back across the interstate, aims the car at the gas station. There is nothing else out here in the middle of the bastard stepchild of Nowhere bred to Anywhere.

"So?" Sam says, as they pull up to the pump.

Dean sends him a questioning glance. "So?"

"What were you yelling about?"

Dean considers him a moment, as if he's replaying Sam's tone in his head. Yeah, Sam realizes maybe he sounds a tad bitchy. But he's exhausted, and sore, and he needs sleep, dammit. And he'd been asleep, until his brother's shout.

And because he is feeling bitchy, Sam persists. "What were you yelling about?"

Dean looks contemplative. "Well, maybe it is a sign, Sammy. Of Apocalypse Now: Part Deux."

"Oh, God." Sam wonders how many people could possibly merge two entirely different movies staring Martin Sheen and Charlie Sheen into one title.

"Starred George Burns and John Denver," Dean mentions helpfully, then pulls back the handle and elbows the door open. "Gas," he says succinctly. "It's under $1.30 a gallon here."

Sam is incredulous. "You were shouting about gas prices?"

Dean is halfway out of the car. He stands up, turns, then bends down to peer inside the car. "My baby is many things," he says with the reverence typical of him when he discusses the Impala, "but she's not one of those chicks into nouvelle cuisine. This lady doesn't sip. She doesn't play with her food. She has a, well, robust appetite."

His brother knows what nouvelle cuisine is?

Gas guzzler, Sam translates, but he doesn't say it, because that would likely result in a whack on the back of his head for daring to impugn the Impala; but he nonetheless thinks it interesting that Dean refers to his beloved car as a lady, not a chick. Meanwhile, yeah. Gas under $1.30 a gallon, in a car with a massive engine and big gas tank. Sam gets it now. And he manages a faint cheer, just to show solidarity. "Yay."

"Damn right, 'yay,'" Dean says, clearly unappreciative of Sam's tepid response. "Now get your ass out of the car and go pay for it. It's your turn."

He's tired and sore and still muzzy in the head, but Sam motivates himself out of the car, rounds the hood, walks stiffly across concrete to the little store.

The door chimes as he opens it, and the skinny-ass kid behind the counter looks absolutely thrilled to see someone, anyone, in the middle of nowhere. "Full tank?"

Sam nods.

"Yeah, lots of people are filling up, now," the kid says. "Gas prices, you know."

When the kid tells him what the total is, which is far less than usual, Sam smiles as he hands over cash.

Okay, yeah. That's worth a brother's gleeful shout, even if it did wake him up. He slips his wallet into his pocket as he walks back out of the store.

His big brother doesn't ask for much. If, in the midst of chasing the Darkness, it makes him happy to see a sign along the interstate alerting him to good gas prices, Sam is glad. Because what with hosting the Mark of Cain for over a year, and now this Amara thing, Dean is due some relief.

"Yes," Sam says quietly, thinking about gas prices and other things for which he is thankful, such as a brother free of a curse, and folds himself down into the car even as Dean slides in behind the wheel.

~ end ~