Another stand alone ficlet written for the 30 snapshots challenge community on LJ. This is #6 of 30 and the prompt was 'Tears'.
Disclaimer applies: I don't own the car, the boys or anything to do with the Supernatural show. Just taking them for a little joyride through my imagination.
Hope you enjoy the read!
Salt Water
Salt is a commodity in the Winchester way of life. Whether it's packed into shells to make rock salt rounds or shaken out of a bag or cardboard box to form protective circles and line doors and windows. There was rarely a day that went by the stuff didn't play a pretty major role in their lives. It was often the difference between a person living or dying.
Salt water, on the other hand, was a different story altogether.
They'd been to the ocean once; they'd stood on the shore at dusk and just watched the tide roll in. "Hard not to feel so small next to something so enormous, huh?" Sam had been pretty impressed. Dean might've played it cool, but he had been too. In their line of work it wasn't every day Mother Nature managed to put them in their place. Usually it was the other way around.
They used boiled salt water to cleanse wounds sometimes. It wasn't anywhere near ideal. Never a first choice, hell it wasn't even their tenth choice but if they had to disappear and that was all there was on hand… Well, it did in a pinch until a real antiseptic could be had.
Dean liked to swear a blue streak when they went North in the winter because the salty slush liked to cake up in the Impala's wheel wells. It ate away at the paint on the lower half of his baby and that was enough reason to hate the stuff. Winter never had been his favorite time of year anyway. Too cold, too many holidays and it made work a lot harder than it already was.
Tears were the hardest to deal with. The eyes were the windows to a person's soul and when the grief from within found a way out it became something akin to kryptonite. On a job, if tears were involved it never failed to become personal. Sometimes they flowed freely, coursing down Sam's face openly painting his features with his pain. Other times they were nothing more than salt tracks, dried and forgotten in Dean's five o'clock shadow. Tears usually meant the world was about to come to an end. They were tiny droplets that held unrivaled power. Salt water didn't always come from the ocean to have an undertow and it was never, ever to be taken lightly.