"Pepperonis do not spin like coins, no matter how much you try."

Dean reached for a wheel of sliced black olive, held it over the tabletop and flicked it. It flew away and smashed the wall. "Neither do black olives."

He looked up at Ray, expecting a reaction. Out. Head down against the table, mouth open against his arm, still holding on to the Pepsi bottle.

"You know, that's what I like the most about sharing this place with you," Dean said, leaning back and grabbing a slice of the Meat Lovers. "The company."

Upstairs, Wyatt was asleep too, Dean was sure. The old man was always asleep, even when it wasn't – he checked the clock – four in the morning.

Dean didn't like sleeping. From a young age, he had come to see time as a currency, and sleep as tax. He cherished his awake time as precious and scarce, something to hold on to for as long as possible. The way he saw things, every hour asleep was an hour less of life he'd never get back.

After Vanessa, his voluntary insomnia was all the more reinforced. Our time in this life is limited enough as it is without forgoing a third of it to the blurry realm of the unconscious mind.

A thud brought Dean's eyes to the glass doors. He got up.

A shoe. The toecap spread and tore open, no laces, banging against the glass with every new gush of wind outside.

Somewhere, someone's barefoot.

Dean was ready to sit back down when his eyes stopped on the neon sign outside, by the hinges. The 'D' in Desmond's Pizza Place was dead-dark. Blown up fuse.

He dragged himself to the glass doors and pulled the lock open.

"The world is ending, Dean," he heard. Ray, eyes half-open, head still against the tabletop, drawled, "You don't need to fix the sign every time it breaks."

Dean shrugged. "What will the regulars think?"

Ray's eyes fell closed again.

Dean stepped outside, bracing against the wind. The restaurant was incrusted against the back wall of a roofed alleyway sided by two mostly destroyed three-story building. Once a little hidden paradise of used bookstores and benches and even a fountain where people would drop coins and make wishes, the alley was now pretty much in ruins. All the front stores had perished in the first week, fallen victims of the Storm, and most of the others had been abandoned soon after, and now time and the constant rain were already starting to take its toll on them. But not Desmond's Pizza Place. The strategic position of the restaurant, at the very end of the cobblestone pathway, coped with Dean's fatherly dedication to keeping the place up and running no matter what, worked together to make it the last standing pizza place in California, and maybe the world.

Dean blinked the rain spray from his eyes and reached for the sign and pulled it down from its brackets. He turned, eyes half-shut against the wind, to face the rain hammering mercilessly on the sidewalk thirty feet away. Always. Always raining, not a day, not a minute of rest. The gutter in front of the alley was a constant river of rapid waters shin-high, strong enough to pull a grown man down to whatever urban ocean it flowed to. Car doors, clothes, chairs and wooden debris that once were houses were common vessels of the stream. In the worst days, the whole street would turn river, and Dean would sit with Ray and Wyatt by the door, the three of them side by side like a movie theater crowd, watching through the glass as rolling waves reached closer and closer and the water level rose, all three in silent wondering of if and when the Storm was coming for them at last.

He stepped back into the restaurant, rested the sign on the table and locked the door behind him and puffed his cheeks.

He'd try to fix the sign in the morning. If he couldn't, he'd paint a new one on plywood and hang that over the glass doors. Either way, Desmond's would not go without proper fronting for more than a night.

The way Dean figured, we all need a reason to be alive. Kids, a job, a call from God. A sense of purpose. His was making sure that, no matter what, there would still be one place in the world where you could get yourself a half decent slice of extra cheese and pepperoni if you applied yourself.

He went past the counter into the kitchen and grabbed a water bottle from the fridge. His eyes landed on the generator on the far end of the room, but he forced himself to look away. Looking at the generator made him think of the generator breaking or running out or something happening to it, and he could loop into this paranoia for hours if he let his mind wander like that. The generator was working fine tonight, and that's what mattered. One day at a time.

He pushed the thoughts of darkness and rotting food and starvation and death away and drank the water with his eyes closed.

A snore echoed loudly from the upstairs room. Wyatt. How could a person sleep so much with so little to do during the day? Even disregarding his voluntary sleep embargo, Dean's mind was still racing from midnight to five AM every night, whether he liked it or not. His body was constantly urging him to move around more than the few humble steps from kitchen to upstairs bedroom to main room of the restaurant. Boredom breeds insomnia. Sedentarism breeds insomnia. Dean, Ray and Wyatt had those two in abundance, and yet, it seemed like only Dean wasn't cut out for the life of doing jack shit all day.

And there were other side effects to being barricaded inside a pizza place for months. He was putting on weight. The pizza and rain water diet definitely didn't agree with Dean's body, used to the routine of four-times-a-week practices with the high school swim team and the almost psychotic concern with which he used to calculate the nutritional values of everything he ate, before the Storm. A whole-pizza-a-day diet would have been unthinkable for Dean, six months ago. Now it was a given, and his body was starting to show.

"Freaking Ray," Dean heard himself saying, though he knew it wasn't his friend's fault. Yes, Ray did the cooking, and yes, he always cooked pizza, but there wasn't a lot more you could cook when your list of ingredients only included a fuckton of dry yeast, flour, olive oil and assorted cold cuts. It was pretty much pizza or pie every day, and, frankly, neither would have made for Olympic-standards of healthiness, so why bother? At least Ray knew how to make good pizza.

A loud bang reached Dean's ear, and he turned around, startled. Clatter followed, like an avalanche of debris giving in somewhere. Then a low fizz, then silence.

Dean rested the water bottle. Through the kitchen door, he could see but a portion of the front counter and one table. Quiet.

He stepped out through the revolving doors into the main room and looked over the counter. Empty. Ray was gone. Out the glass doors, the forlorn shoe still hammered soft thuds with the wind.

"Ray?" Dean called. No answer.

Upstairs, the old man snored again.