Friday

Roman sighed as the rental car screeched up the dirt road.

The scenery was just as they left it, nearly two years prior. Trees cut off the skyline. Sunlight bounced off the ripples in the lake. A slight breeze blew leaves and twigs off the roof of the old cabin-like house. The dock reached out deep into the water. The water itself was a mix between blue and green. It looked like one of Brie's old photographs, which Roman had nearly memorized.

Dean turned the car off and checked his mirror, ensuring that Renee pulled up right behind him. "Gang's all here," he exclaimed with a sarcastic smile.

Seth opened the door and jumped out of the car, being the first one to feel the slightly humid air on his face. He, himself, had especially missed the lake house and all the memories that were glued to its establishment.

The image of his friend - eyes closed, arms stretched out - made Roman chuckle. "And so it begins," he muttered beneath his breath before exiting the car as well.

"It looks frozen in time." Seth took a deep whiff of the old lake air. "Still smells like shit, too."

"I came back for the first time earlier this week to stock up on some stuff," Renee explained. She dragged her own suitcase up the dirt path behind her, leaving Lana and Brie to unload the rest of the bags. "I hope you all brought enough stuff. I know you guys like travelling light, but one duffle bag?"

"It'll be more than enough," Seth said.

Dean nodded and wrapped his arms around both Seth and Roman, dropping his bag on the ground. "We don't need a month's worth of clothes to get us through the weekend."

Renee felt his sarcastic insult slap her across the face. She feigned an amused smile in his direction. "Girls on the north side, guys on the south."

The orders returned the slap, this time across Dean's sensitive cheek. He brought his hands back down, picked up his bag, and followed Renee as she began walking towards the front door of the house. "We aren't sharing a room? I thought you said-"

"I remember what I said, Babe." She stopped in front of the door to fetch the keys from her purse. "Then you reminded me of something: I need the extra space for my months' worth of clothes." A brighter smile spread on Renee's lips as she looked at her boyfriend while unlocking the front door.

Brie and Lana began walking up the dirt path while the rest of their friends entered the house. The weather was just warm enough that the girls both wore tank tops paired with denim shorts that cut-off mid-thigh.

As they made their way up the steady incline, Brie glanced down at Lana's legs. Normally she wouldn't, but Brie had noticed a bruise on the blonde-haired woman's inner thigh earlier in the car, and she wanted to get a better look. She wasn't sure where it came from, having been out of her friend's lives for nearly two years, but she couldn't help but wear concern on her face.

"That looks like it hurts. Where is it from?"

Lana looked up at Brie and followed her eyes down to her thigh. Her cheeks flushed upon sight; it came from her rendezvous with Paul.

"Oh, that?" Lana shook away suspicion with a flat tone. "It's nothing. Just a little battle wound from moving."

"You moved?"

"Furniture," she explained. It wasn't a total lie - she'd shuffled some boxes around in her apartment to clear some space in her closet. "One of the boxes I was moving slipped from my hands and it happened to hit me pretty well."

Brie nodded. It seemed convincing enough, so she opted not to dig deeper. "Tell me - what's the real reason you forced me to come up here this weekend?"

The two girls stopped at the front door before entering the house. Lana shrugged. "I told you! You can call me nostalgic, but I don't want to move onto the next chapters of our lives without one last memory to soothe us over." She smiled in her friend's direction. "You can't say that you haven't missed this old place."

"Depends," Brie began. "What does it look like on the inside?"

Lana raised her eyebrows. "Let's see." She opened the door slowly, allowing dramatic suspense to build, before both women could see the familiar interior of Renee's lake house.

The den was open; the ceiling high above them, and stairs ran along the furthest wall leading to the second story. The upstairs loft overlooked the entire first floor, which reminded Brie of the time Dean jumped from the top onto the couch below and broke his foot. There was a kitchen to the left of the front door, which was separated from the den by a bar.

Memories of holidays past flooded Brie's mind and heart, causing a quick surge of nostalgia to flood her veins.

"It's like we never left," Lana mentioned as she ran her hands along the wood-covered walls with her thin fingers. "I bet you that there's still a stain on that couch from where I spilled wine a few years back."

Brie watched Lana hurry off to check the couch. She glanced around, noticing how all of her old friends were looking around as if they could visualize their younger selves running around and stirring up trouble in each corner of the house. It was then that she noticed Roman dragging his bag up the stairs, ignoring the clamor beneath him.

For a brief second, as Roman felt like he was being watched, he looked down in Brie's direction and the two made eye contact. Their unspoken tension was the elephant in the room - not the odd statue of an actual elephant that was erected on the coffee table.

Brie closed the front door and sighed. It was going to be a long weekend.


"Alright," Lana said with a serious look on her face, "everybody needs to say hi to the camera!" She held up her camcorder in Seth and Dean's direction.

Both men were shirtless and rummaging through the kitchen cabinets for food. Despite Renee having stocked up the kitchen with enough food and water to get them through the weekend, both Dean and Seth were too picky to settle for what Renee had bought and they searched the cabinets relentlessly in hopes that something they liked would appear.

"Get that fucking thing outta my face!" Dean said to the camera in a feigned angry tone.

Lana laughed at his outburst and turned the camera towards Seth. "Your turn to try and save this video from being overtaken by Dean's asshole of a personality."

"What are you doing? Making a home movie? Isn't that Dean and Renee's job?"

The two men high-fived one another, causing Lana to roll her eyes. She turned the camera around so that it was facing her. "Note to future self - delete that from the final cut."

"Seriously," Seth continued, "I'm not gonna say hi unless you tell me what you're doing."

"I'm recording everything so that in a few years, when we're all old and gray, we can look back at our last trip to the lake house together." She smiled, her eyes being covered by the camcorder. "Now, tell the folks at home hello."

"Hello," he said with a forced wave. "I hope Lana gets some wonderful images of my tight ass for all of you."

"You're going to make the editing of this really difficult." Lana was about to shut the camera off when Renee charged into the kitchen, clothed in a black bikini, and jumped on Dean's back. "There is Renee Young, going in for the kill!"

Everyone was laughing as the couple playfully wrestled. Seth, who was skilled at making bad situations worse, shook up a new can of whipped cream and began spraying them with it. The slippery cream made it difficult for Renee to hold onto Dean and not fall onto the hard floor.

The noise of laughter and yelling suddenly stopped when Seth caught a glimpse of Brie standing just outside the kitchen. Once everybody else noticed Brie's presence as well, they quieted down and turned to face her.

Brie raised her eyebrows at the sight of Renee, wearing a small bikini and whipped cream, and she sighed. "I was just going to ask about what we were having for dinner."

Renee cleared her throat and shuffled her hands across her body, shedding some of the whipped cream from her skin. "I was planning on everybody making their own pizzas. Don't worry; I made sure that we have some vegan ingredients for you."

The brown-haired woman nodded with a thin smile. "Thanks," she breathed. "I'll let you get back to, uh, whatever it is that you all are doing."

Everyone watched as Brie walked away and Lana held up her camera to film the woman as she went up the stairs. "There goes the ghost of Brie Bella. Maybe we'll have a séance later to bring back the happier version of her."

"Lana," Renee warned.

"What? Obviously, we aren't going to have one. I don't know what spirits you have living in these walls."


A loud splash brought Brie, who had her nose stuffed in her notebook, back to reality.

She sat up from her bed and walked over to her window, which was in perfect view of the dock. Two tall, fire-fueled lanterns lit up the wooden walkway, which could hardly been seen in the moonlight.

Brie hadn't realized how dark it had gotten outside until that moment. She could see Lana standing at the edge of the dock, laughing after pushing Seth into the dark water below. She looked over to the right where their trusty gazebo stood tall. Lights were strung across the ceiling of the gazebo, so she could see Renee and Dean standing, intertwined with one another, watching Lana laugh as well.

The scene brought a smile to Brie's lips. It felt amazing to watch her friends goof around and each smile reminded her of every time they came up to this place.

She hadn't realized how long she'd been staring at her friends until a loud knock on her open door scared her enough to turn her around.

"Sorry," Roman apologized with his hands up. "I didn't mean to scare you."

Brie shook her head and took a deep breath to calm her heartbeat down. "No, no... You're fine. I just wasn't expecting anybody. Why aren't you out there with them?"

"I could ask you the same question." Roman stepped into the woman's room, but didn't bother closing the door behind him. "But, I'm assuming that we're both locking ourselves up here for the same reasons."

"What reasons are you staying in?"

"To avoid the past," he answered quickly. "All Lana wants to do is relive it, but she doesn't seem to realize that all I want to do is forget it."

His words stung Brie's chest, but she didn't know why. It wasn't until her mouth opened and her words came out that her mind registered what she'd said to be true. "You wish we never were together?"

Roman's face tightened. "That's not what I meant."

"That's what you said," she reminded.

"There was more to my past than just our relationship." Roman sighed. "Obviously, I don't regret our relationship."

Brie opted not to continue pushing the subject. She forced a thin smile, dissolving the remnants of tension. "What are the plans for tomorrow?"

Roman couldn't tell why she changed the topic of discussion so abruptly; whenever they argued as a couple she was never the first person to give up on a debate. He cleared his throat and ran a hand through his hair, his eyes tracing the floor for answers. "Probably just messing around. I wouldn't sleep in too late, though. Who knows what they'll do to you while you're sleeping."

"What are you two doing in here? You're going to miss the best part of the night!"

Both Brie and Roman turned around to see Lana, of course, still in her bikini. She was gesturing for them to follow her, and they did they weren't surprised at what they saw. Dean was standing at the top of the stairs, which had somehow been covered with cardboard, with his mattress in his hands.

"This," Dean began, "is the moment you have all been waiting for."

"What are you doing, man? You're going to kill yourself." Roman crossed his arms, unamused at the sight before him.

"He lost a bet with Seth," Renee called out from the bottom of the stairs.

"You're okay with this, Renee?" Brie asked, peering over the edge of the balcony from the upper level. "What if he dies?"

Renee shook her head with a chuckle. "He won't die! This is the same guy who jumped from where you're standing and landed on this couch, breaking his foot, remember? He's still walking."

Dean nodded and turned back to Roman, Brie, and Lana. "It's true. My foot hasn't felt the same since, and it aches when it rains, but I'm still walking."

The room grew quiet after Lana tossed her camera off the balcony for Seth to catch and film the event that was about to unfold. Dean took a deep breath, provoking a laugh from Lana that she muffled with the palm of her hand, before rolling his head around to warm his neck up.

"This...is...for...NARNIA!" Dean yelled out before flipping the mattress down and jumping onto it. He slid down the stairs so quickly that Brie could almost see flickers of fire on the backside of the mattress.

Before anyone had the chance to blink, Dean and his mattress hit the bottom of the stairs. However, the mattress got stuck on a broken wood plank, and Dean went flying into the air. It was in that moment that Lana was glad Seth was filming, because if not then nobody would believe them when they said that Dean flew like a bird that night. He just didn't land gracefully like one.

"I'm fine," Dean muttered in a painful groan.

Roman squinted to get a better look at the man, who was folded in a strange way. "Are you sure? Is a human supposed to bend that way?"

"I can," Seth said seductively before turning the camera on himself. "So, if you're a young lady looking for some fun, don't be shy! Seth Rollins will be sure to show you the time of your life."

Lana scoffed at the man's words. "He's a walking genital wart."


a/n: Here's the next chapter! I hope you all enjoyed. The next chapter or two will also be about the gang's time at the lake house so keep an eye out for the next update.

Also, please go vote on the poll on my profile. I'm debating on putting up a multi-chapter story that shows you the gang before Brie and Roman broke up! It will include all of the memories that I've mentioned, however in much more detail! Let me know what you think about that with either a review or a comment.

With love. :)