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Dean has this memory-thing, one he doesn't prod too close at because he has this thought that might, might very vaguely resemble a superstition, picked up from one of Sammy's high school psych 101 textbooks that said something about recollections, and how if you thought about the past too much, all you remembered was the memory, not the original event itself.
So anyway. Dean has this memory-thing, and he treats it more like that dull tooth-ache he got when he was nineteen, not from having his head knocked against a wall by a poltergeist or anything, just a regular toothache that Dean didn't tongue at because there wasn't anything regular about the Winchesters, especially not dental insurance.
So Dean has this memory-thing. A recollection.
It usually pops up when he's dozing, or otherwise not concentrating or thinking on anything in particular. Or no, it doesn't pop up. Not like a sea-otter sticking its slick head above the silky surface of the water. Not like something freed from the sea-bed to rush up and bounce and splash like cork. It kinda emerges more slowly than that, eases its way out; or more like everything around it eases back so he can see it clearer. He doesn't even have to grasp for it, and it's there.
More like the tide going out, so freaking slow but inexorable, startlingly quick when he sees how far it's gone. And the memory-thing, this memory thing is like a goddamn rock, huge flat surface that he just knows is made of up sheet-layers of hardened silt, of fossilized time. The dark, salt-wet surface of it slowly becoming visible as the edges of the water lick at and pull away from the surface of it, until it’s there and he can see it and yeah.
He doesn't prod at it. Doesn't try to remember it, just likes for the dark tide of his thoughts to pull back every so often, maybe when he's least expecting it, and have it just sitting there, big freaking rock, just below the surface.
Sometimes he thinks he can trace where it comes from; the fine cracks fanning out from a bullet hole, the spread of arterials away from a city on a road map, the splay of Sam's hair against his temple, shower-wet and -dark. The pale veins beneath. Images without meaning, sloughed away gradually as he's drifting off to sleep until there it is, there: dark sand, the intricate water-tracks carved out where the waves drift back, back. Wading through the salt-sticky wind with a scratchy woolen hat pulled over his ears and eyes squinted to slits.
California in Winter, grey and solid and the Pacific Ocean huge and looking huger with Sammy in its foreground, a bundle of coat and scarf and wind-whipped hair and spindly legs connecting the rugged-up mass to the matte expanse of sand, water creeping towards him and away.
Dad, behind Dean, his head turned back when Dean turns to look for him, the wind pushing so fierce at Dad's hair that Dean can see the skin of Dad's scalp as if they're pink fissures amongst the tumbled black. The beach is long, buildings tiny and nestled safe away from the spike of sandy peninsula they're on, huge rocks looming, trapping them between the land and the true ocean, outside the bay.
Dean's perspective skewed but not uncomfortably so; Sammy seems to get bigger instead of just getting closer, and where their shoulders jostle a wind-break forms, a pocket of warm silence within which Sammy holds out his hand, opens it. He's shorter than Dean, hands are smaller, bone-white and clammy and dusted with clinging grains of dark sand. There's a sand dollar in his palm, uncrushed, perfectly shaped, symmetrical, with a pattern of delicate lines spread from the center in intricate randomness.
Sammy looks up at him and he can hear Sammy's breath, the whistle of his nose on the brink of a cold, and Dean takes the sand dollar and holds it in his pocket, palm cupped around it so's not to crush it.
Fingers curled loosely. Limbs easing as he drifts off to sleep. The feel of sand against his cold-taut skin, the pocket of silence and calm. He doesn't struggle for or against the memory-thing, just lets it lull him under, inexorable waves.