It happened before she even knew what it really entailed.
For God's sake, she was a nobody woman named Suzanne that owned a shabby little motorbike shop at the edge of town, she'd never expected something like this to happen in such a small place.
It began with a man; short hair, leather jacket, not too hard on the eyes–his eyes, oh, the most gorgeous green she'd ever seen, reminding her a bit of the Amazon rainforest. But, beautiful as they were, they were the part of him that made him look a little older than he was. She'd guessed that he had seen his fair share of bar fights and rough times, judging by his stone-cold demeanour.
If only she'd looked a little closer, she'd have seen that the hard shell was a facade, and the green orbs had been dulled by weariness and soul-crushing sadness.
He'd held out his keys, a shiny black Chevrolet Impala sitting proudly behind him as it's hood reflected the hot sun in the midday sky. The man told her he didn't have any money, that he didn't have anything, really, and all he wanted was a bike in exchange for that gorgeous classic.
"Here," he rasped. His voice was hoarse and cracking, like he had been screaming for hours on end. "I don't need two seats anymore."
Looking back, Suzanne might have realized the foreshadowing, but sales were sales and this man's problems were none of her business.
She held out her hand and the keys were dropped into her palm. "Don't usually trade, but I'll make an exception for such a beauty," she winked, "the car's nice too."
He gave her a brief tight lipped smile that didn't reach his eyes–she now remembered now how tired they were, how lost–and accepted the keys for the motorbike.
Waving him to the door, she led him around the back. "Just out here, sweetie."
Both of them squinted as the harsh light assaulted their eyes, reflecting off the sand and the bikes that were lined up behind the small building in the middle of nowhere. The man looked away from the bikes briefly, seemingly distracted.
"Nice view, hey?" His comment almost went unheard, but she turned to him and smiled.
"Yeah, it's real pretty out here. You can see the whole course of the river over that cliff." Suzanne pointed into the distance just over the cliff. If she had known what she knew now, she'd have pointed him in the other direction.
He hummed slightly in agreement, and she proceeded to show him to his new bike. She received a grunt of thanks before he started the ignition, and it wasn't until she was almost back in her store that she heard him crank the throttle and take off.
This wouldn't have been unsettling to her if the sound of the engine went in the direction of the road.
She whipped around just in time to see her green-eyed customer drive at full speed straight off the cliff.
In hindsight, she thought briefly, she should have seen this coming. But hindsight is 20/20, after all, and she wasted no time in whipping back into her store to dial 911.
The police and the paramedics got there much slower than she would have liked, which meant more time for her to frantically search the ground over the edge of the cliff for his body or the bike. With every passing minute, her hopes faded as she realized just how big of a drop that was.
She really should have seen this coming, or at least, that was the thought that continuously ran through her head as she relayed her story to the cops. When the paramedics finally recovered his body, he had long since left the realm of the living, and willingly too.
One of the medics seemed to be quite upset over this man's death. She was a young thing, couldn't have been at this job for too long now, wavy brown hair with soft brown eyes that she was trying to force not to fill with tears. Patricia was her name.
After speaking with Patricia for a while, Suzanne found out that this girl had seen the man–Dean–before, not too long ago. Said that he'd called for them frantically to get to his location. Gunshot wounds, blood loss, he'd screamed into the phone before hanging up. They came to him as quickly as they could, and it took three of them to get him to let go of the man that was bundled in his arms.
It hadn't been pretty, Patricia had told as the lump grew bigger in her throat. The young man, Sam, had been shot in the shoulder, the chest–almost in the dead centre of his heart–and knee. Even though Dean had applied pressure to all the wounds, there was just too much blood lost. But that hadn't stopped Dean from continuously shouting encouragements to the younger man, though they had gone from (barely) controlled to frantic begging in mere minutes.
They had been brothers, and from what the young paramedic could tell, very close ones at that. Dean had refused to leave Sam's side for all the days that he was there; didn't eat, didn't sleep, just continuously talked to him about random nonsense, but mostly begged and pleaded for him to wake up, keeping physical contact with the unconscious man the whole time.
And, when Sam's body simply couldn't hang on any longer, the older man had cried the most gut wrenching and horrible cries Patricia had ever heard in her life.
That was last night. No one had seen him since then, not until now.
After the cops left, Suzanne thought she might have been able to save him, that those rainforest green eyes would still have some light behind them–however dull.
But really, would he have been living? Or just existing?
She had no idea. The only thing she knew she could do was pray for those two young men to finally find peace.