I am currently in the midst of a somewhat convoluted multi-chapter fic, but this just came flying out of the blue and whapped me upside the head.

Deanic Viewpoint

"Dean, c'mon."

"No time, Sam. Got house-cleaning to do." Dean, behind the wheel, shoots his brother a quick glance along with a twitch of a grin. "You know—house-cleaning Winchester style."

Sam shakes his head. "The ghost has been hanging around that house for over one hundred years. Arriving a few hours later won't hurt anything."

Another glance from his brother, and a downward slant of disapproving brows. "Sammy—you know in this business 'a few hours later' might be a life-or-death situation."

"The house is abandoned, Dean. There's even chain-link construction fencing around it sporting all kinds of CAUTION—DEMOLITION—DO NOT ENTER signs. It's not like a mother, father, a dog, and 2.5 kids are in any danger."

"Sam, you know damn good and well those kinds of signs are invitations to morons. Hell, it doesn't stop us!"

Sam slants him a startled glance with eyebrows in full ascendance. He seriously considers pointing out to Dean that his sentence could well be construed as suggesting they are morons. But that way lies almost certain death-by-withering-retort, so Sam holds his tongue.

Apparently his thinking processes aren't as shielded against Dean's extrapolations as he expected. Because his brother glowers at him with narrowed eyes, waves a hand in a gesture that Sam is pretty sure is intended to be a withering retort, or an acknowledgment of the verbal misstep, which Dean doesn't always do very well.

"I mean—you know," Dean mutters. "We're heroes, not morons."

Since they are apparently going to entertain a discussion about this after all, instead of Dean ignoring the entire matter, Sam notes, "You have been known to say that people—morons—who ignore such signs at their own peril deserve what they get, so long as it's not fatal."

Dean hitches a shoulder. "Well, yeah—sometimes. A little, maybe. Not real harm. I mean, people really can be morons."

"We can take a few hours for ourselves, Dean. It's daylight. Not many people, even morons, enter a fenced-off, derelict house scheduled for demolition when all sorts of other people can see them. We don't generally enter fenced-off, derelict houses scheduled for demolition during the day—"

"We do sometimes."

Sam continues unabated, "—and these people tend to act moronic at night. So we can stop off, get to the house at dusk, take care of things then."

Dean shoots him an incredulous look. "It's a museum, Sam."

Sam stares out the windshield and nods. "Yes. It is."

"You do museums. I don't do museums—well, unless it's a case. You know that."

"I know that," Sam agrees, "except you're full of it, and you damn well know it. We went to that car museum, remember?"

"It was a case."

"No, it wasn't. It was next door to a case."

Dean squints down the interstate. "You can do museums on your day off."

"We don't get days off."

"Well—but you do plenty of museum visits while we're waiting on something we need for a case and have nothing better to do. Hell, for all I know you do museums when I'm off—"

"—doing a chick?" Sam finishes, and shakes his head. "Maybe you ought to open a Chick Museum."

Dean shouts a single guffaw and pokes a forefinger into the air. "Hey, now that's a great idea, Sammy! A whole museum dedicated to the lively, lovely ladies of small town diners and interstate truck stops. I could call it—" He waits a beat, makes a flourishing gesture with his hand, as if indicating a sign hanging somewhere in midair across the windshield, "Chick Fillet. Get it? Chick Fillet." Dean looks for appreciation, but Sam doesn't give him any. "You know, kind of a play on—"

Sam rolls his eye skyward and cuts in. "I know what it's a play on."

"—that restaurant chain. C'mon, Sammy, it's a little funny."

Sam, summoning his 12-year-old self, back when he decided he didn't wish to be called Sammy anymore (not that this wish had any effect on father or brother) fixes his sibling with a narrow-eyed stare. What Dean calls 'Puppy Dog Eyes' can be very effective, but he only trots those out for serious shit. So now, he reverts to pre-teen stubbornness, which his older brother will recognize instantly. "I want to go to the museum. We have the time. The morons can wait."

Dean stares at him briefly in something akin to surprise and speculation, until he realizes he'd better watch where he's driving lest he slam his baby into the back-end of an 18-wheeler. "Seriously?"

"Seriously."

"It's that important to you, this museum?"

Not as important, now, as the principle of the matter, which is establishing that Sam has needs, too. And deserves to act upon them sometimes.

"It's a part of American history, Dean. It matters. It was, basically—in its own unique way—part of World War II. It helped the war effort."

Dean's expression now approximates an amalgam of extravagant disbelief and horror. "It's not a weapon, Sam! Hell, they didn't even drop it out of airplanes, though I guess that might have been another use for it. Yeah, clonk a few Germans on the head with some of those babies, and Yahtzee! Dead bad guys."

"Napoleon once said an army marches on its stomach," Sam continues relentlessly.

Dean's eyeroll is so dramatic Sam thinks his eyes might levitate out of the top of his head. "Look, you wanna go to a full-on military museum one of these days, I'm right there with ya. But this? This?" Dean waves a hand again. "We're in the middle of Minnesota, in the middle of a job, and you want to visit a museum dedicated to meat?"

"It's SPAM," Sam notes, who declines to add that some don't believe it actually is meat, but he won't mention that to his brother. "It's food, Dean. You like food."

"I don't like SPAM!"

"I've never even seen you eat SPAM, Dean! You probably haven't actually tried it. In fact, I'm willing to bet you've never actually tried it." He fixes his brother with a challenging stare. "So, tell me what's in it, if you're so familiar with it."

Dean's comeback is swift and emphatic. "You don't have to know what's in it to know you don't like it."

Sam just stares at him, waiting for the realization of how moronic that pronouncement is.

Dean arrives at this realization, levels a hard side-eye stare at his brother when no face-saving retreat is apparent. "Okay, I haven't actually tried it, no."

"We could buy some at the museum. They have a gift shop."

Without warning, Dean lurches sideways, slaps a hand against Sam's forehead with startling swiftness, then shifts back behind the wheel before Sam can level a blow. "Okay, no fever. So—Christo? Huh, no black eyes." But now there's a glint in Dean's. "You really, truly, desperately want to visit a museum dedicated to canned mystery meat?"

"It's never been 'mystery meat," Sam protests. "It's pork shoulder meat, and ham. Plus some other ingredients to preserve it. That's why they used it in the Army. It keeps."

"Well, if you know all this shit already, why do you want to go to a museum? Or do you have some genius-y desire to show off your knowledge to people who are, like, paid to exhibit knowledge. You don't get paid, Sam. You just—exhibit when the urge comes upon you. Kind of like puking."

Sam promptly opens his mouth to protest that imagery, but then reflects that possibly his occasional fits of I-want-to-share-this-knowledge-with-my-brother might indeed be a form of educational puking.

But knowledge is power.

"Dean, it's become a staple of the Pacific Islanders' diets, thanks to the US Army being stationed all over Guam, Okinawa, the Philippines. Even Hawaii. It's traditional. It's served in an amazing variety of ways—"

"So are cheeseburgers."

"There's such a thing as a SPAMburger, you know."

Dean looks vaguely nauseated. "But it's not beef."

"Pork is not generally beef, no," Sam agrees reasonably. "There is a genotypical and phenotypical difference between a pig and a cow."

And take that for educational puking.

Dean emits a moan. "Oh, God. There's a sign for it."

Indeed there is. A nice bright billboard advertising the SPAM Museum in Austin, Minnesota, but mere minutes up the road.

Austin, Minnesota, which also hosts a ghost-inhabited house.

"Not even out of our way," Sam notes complacently.

Dean's sigh is prodigious. "Okay, but I'm dropping you off, and then I'm going to seek out the fattest, greasiest, onioniest and baconiest cheeseburger I can find. You can hang out at a museum and eat canned pig."

"Fine."

"Fine."

On that note, Dean points the Impala onto the off-ramp, mutters privately to himself all the way to downtown as Sam plays navigator with the GPS—'Find me a burger joint,' he demands at one point, so Sam does—and eventually pulls into the parking lot.

The motor is idling as Sam opens the door and slides out on a squeal of hinge-metal. He ducks down to tell Dean to give him a couple of hours—more likely it'll be three, because Sam likes to read museum signs and educational displays, but he's not going to give his brother more to bitch about—and then notes that Dean, leaning low across the seat to look up at his brother, is no longer paying him the least bit of attention.

In fact, he's looking at something beyond Sam with a fixed, avid intensity that strongly suggests he is not reading a museum sign.

"Oh," Dean says, in That Tone. "Now that's what I call a scenic viewpoint."

Sam turns to look, because of course he has to.

Young women. Probably, Sam decides, an athletic team of some kind, because they are all tall, clearly healthy and fit, devoid of makeup with varying shades of hair pulled back in ponytails or affixed to the top of their heads in messy bun-like arrangements that speak of priorities other than hours spent in front of a mirror. They are laughing, moving in a cluster, striding on long legs bared by shorts directly toward the entrance, wearing an assortment of team t-shirts. Without staring fixedly, which he feels would be rude—that's his brother's default—Sam can't get a good look at the logo or name, but he suspects it's a college team of some kind. Maybe volleyball, or basketball, going by the heights. Probably stopping off on their way to a game somewhere, to break up the road trip.

"Hang on," Dean announces crisply, "gotta park my baby."

Sam stands there blinking after his brother as he angles the car into a parking space, then climbs out. Dean is smiling cheerfully as he swings the door closed.

He pauses only briefly as he catches Sam staring at him. "What? I can't have a desire to expand my mind?"

"That's not exactly what you'd like to expand," Sam says dryly.

Dean, ever the incorrigible, grins at him. "Chick Fillet, Sammy. Chick Fillet. Gotta love museums."

Sam emits a long-suffering sigh. "We've got a ghost to catch, remember."

"Tomorrow's soon enough," Dean asserts, and strides hastily toward the entrance.

Sam stares after him. "I thought you wanted a cheeseburger!"

Dean turns to face him, walking backward, arms spread. His eyes are alight. "I think I'll try me some SPAM, Sam. It's a part of American history!"

Sam scrunches his face, closes one eye, and waits, knowing it's only going to take a minute for Dean to revert to childhood.

Sure enough.

"Sam the SPAM!" Dean shouts.

Maybe it was a good thing Dean specialized in cooking Mac & Cheese when they were kids. Because otherwise Sam would have been stuck with that nickname for the rest of his known life.

"SPAMmy Sammy!"

Sam heaves a sigh and follows his brother.

~ end ~

For readers not in the U.S., there is a restaurant chain here called Chick-Fil-A. And yes, SPAM was packaged in cans (still is) and shipped off to American soldiers by the planeload. The food was so ubiquitous because of WWII that it eventually led to the hysterical Monty Python skit (available on YouTube), and the internet term for unsolicited e-mails. (And there is my educational puking for the day!)