WHO: John & Dean Winchester WHERE: the beach WHEN: Sunday, January 15, 2006; evening WHAT: Sometimes the only person who can understand Hell is the one who suffered through it too. RATING: PG-13 at least for content STATUS: thread; in-progress
After getting Dean to agree to spend the evening away from the house, John hadn't launched right into the talk, because it wasn't his style unless pushed into it, and right now he wasn't pushed. He knew he needed to do this for Dean. Instead, they'd gone to a small sports bar, had dinner and a beer each and talked about other things, from hunts on the table to everything going on with Ben.
They were topics that there weren't pressure for, as hunt talk was natural and getting Dean to talk about Ben was easy. Watching him, John wondered if that was how he'd looked long ago, and in the moments where fatherly pride had broken through the hardness of the years, proud and excited and, most of all, alive. Seeing that left John with hope that Dean had something to get him through this. He had more, of course, family and friends, but it needed to be something Dean acknowledge as a thing he couldn't do without, that he had to focus the humanity he felt he had left on. For John, that'd been Mary and his sons. For Dean that was clearly Ben.
The ride from the bar to the beach was quiet and John still didn't say much as they got out of the truck. It was a deserted place, off the beaten track for most vehicles, but there was still the ocean. White noise, that thing they said would settle the mind. John didn't buy it though – he'd just picked the spot for the privacy.
Dropping the six-pack case on the sand, he moved to take a seat next to it and then gestured for Dean to join him.