Fic: Wonders of His Love
Title: Wonders of His Love
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: G
Summary: When Sam was in kindergarten, they spent Christmas in Blue Earth.
Notes: Written for spn_j2_xmas for weesta. She prompted SPN - hurt/sick!Dean and brotherly bonding is always awesome; I tend to go for character studies over case fics... weeChesters; fatherly John.
Sammy liked his school in Blue Earth well enough and his teacher Miss Kovar was nice to him, nicer than Ms MacDonald back in Bethlehem. She was pretty and smart and she didn’t let the other kids make fun of him because Dad bought his clothes at Good Will and he lived with Pastor Jim at the church down the street. She wasn’t like Dean’s teacher, Mr Allen, who made him miss recess for fighting with the other boys and sometimes even called Pastor Jim at the church.
But, as nice and smart as Miss Kovar was, Sammy didn’t really like her, not totally. It didn’t keep him from bragging when she gave his drawing that week’s gold star or said nice things about his reading, but it did mean that Sammy didn’t trust her. Something wasn’t right with someone who didn’t like Dean.
Dean liked Miss Kovar as much as he liked any kind of a teacher. Dean liked her as long as he thought she was treating Sammy right. If he thought she wasn’t, if he thought she was like Ms MacDonald, then he’d do his best to ruin her classroom as long as they were in Blue Earth. Sammy knew he’d bribe the littler kids to pitch tantrums or throw things or just refuse to do their work. He’d been surprised at the girl in Bethlehem who knew how to throw up on command, but so had Ms MacDonald.
Sammy knew Dean would do it. And he’d do it because Dean wanted to prove to everyone that Sammy was his Sammy and they’d do right by him, even if Dean was all the way in the third grade on the other side of the school. Dean would make sure Sammy was safe and happy.
But Miss Kovar, as nice and smart as she was, didn’t get it. Sammy had heard her talking to Pastor Jim, except she called him Father Murphy, and she said Dean was “a bad influence” and “might lead the boy down the wrong path.” Sammy wasn’t totally sure what all of that meant, but he heard how she said it and he saw how she looked at Dean when he came to pick him up for lunch or at the end of the day. It wasn’t a nice look and it wasn’t even the kind of look Dad would give Dean when he did something wrong. And Sammy couldn’t really like or trust anyone who could look at Dean like that.
Sammy’s face lit up with delight when, only seconds after the bell, Dean showed up at the door to Miss Kovar’s room. He was always the first one there, before even Eileen’s older sister or the Buckland twins’ mom in her nurses scrubs. Sammy didn’t care that a lot of the other kids were a little scared of Dean, he was always Sammy’s big brother.
“Hey, Sammy.” Dean grabbed him a gentle headlock and gave him a noogie, exactly like he’d done everyday since Sammy told him only babies got hugs at the end of the day, back in Bethlehem.
Sammy wriggled out of Dean’s grasp and asked, exactly like he had everyday since they’d been in Minnesota, “Do you think Dad will be home tonight?”
“Dunno.” Dean didn’t look at Sammy when he said it; he always watched Mrs Kovar instead, just like he’d always watched Mrs MacDonald before. “Pastor Jim says we’re gonna do Christmas anyway, even if Dad’s still out, uh, sellin’ stuff.”
Miss Kovar smiled at Sammy and reminded him of his homework when Dean signed them out of the classroom, but Sammy saw that she didn’t smile at Dean, not really, not with her eyes the way she did for Pastor Jim or Sammy. He wasn’t a stupid kid, even if he wasn’t half as smart and grown up as Dean. He knew she couldn’t see Dean, not really.
“Do you think Dad will be home for Christmas?” Sam asked as they walked to Pastor Jim’s church. “He shouldn’t work on Christmas.”
“I dunno,” Dean told him, making sure to hold his hand as they crossed the street. “Pastor Jim hasn’t talked to Dad in, like, a week. But it’ll be okay. We’ll have a great Christmas, I promise.”
Sammy nodded and didn’t let go of Dean’s hand all the way across the housing development next to the big old church. It was nice to just hold on and Dean would punch any kid who laughed at him for it, Sammy knew.
And then, more than a week before Christmas, Dean got sick.
Sammy noticed when he woke up in the middle of the night and went to the bathroom for a glass of water. Normally, the minute Sammy was out of bed, his brother was up, making sure he was okay. That night, though, he wasn’t and when Sam came back from the narrow hallway, Dean was coughing and coughing. And it didn’t sound like coughing because Charlie bet Dean he couldn’t swallow a bug, but bad coughing, like there was something inside Dean that he couldn’t get out, no matter how hard he tried.
Sammy didn’t know how to get him to stop coughing, but it sounded bad and a little scary and Dean’s face was getting red and his skin felt hot. So he did what Dean always did when he had nightmares and Dad wasn’t there to protect them. He crawled into Dean’s bed, huddled up behind him, and tried to hum the song that Dean told him Mom used to sing to get them to fall asleep, back when she was alive and they all lived in Kansas.
That was where Pastor Jim found them in the morning when they didn’t come downstairs for breakfast. He smiled when he saw them wrapped around each other under his old plaid blanket, reminded of when he met John and Sammy was still just a baby and Dean never said anything at all, but never let his brother sleep alone. He told Sammy that later, when Sammy was worried about Dean and Pastor Jim wouldn’t let him crawl in bed with him.
“Pastor Jim!” Sam didn’t get out of the bed when he saw the priest standing over them. “Dean doesn’t feel good.”
“Is that right?” Pastor Jim asked, smiling in the nice way he did. “Well, why doesn’t Dean tell me about it?”
“No. Dean just got to sleep. We gotta leave him alone.”
Sammy made sure that Pastor Jim knew that Dean was sick and coughing and didn’t feel good and that he needed to sleep lots, just like Sammy did when he had the fluey last year. And when Pastor Jim sat him down at the old table in his house and made him eat his oatmeal and hot cocoa, Sam let him do it becuase he also promised that he’d give Dean honey and lemon juice and maybe even let him watch cartoons and eat chicken soup.
He promised Pastor Jim that he was a big boy now and he could watch to school with Mikey, who was in Miss Linden’s class, and his old sister, Kelly. Pastor Jim didn’t believe him and made sure to call their mom, but Sammy didn’t mind. Dad didn’t believe him most of the time either and neither did his teachers. Dean did, though, and that was enough.
Sammy didn’t get worried until Dean was sick even on the last day of school. He missed holding his big brother’s hand on their way to school and he missed hearing Dean talk about what he had done to piss of Mr Allen that day and what the sixth grade bullies planned to do at lunch. He even missed Dean making him do push ups and run around the yard like Dad always did.
Worse, though, was holding Kelly Li’s too-small hand because Dean couldn’t be there to do it. Worse was waking up in the middle of the night because Dean was coughing and couldn’t wake up himself, not until Sammy got him water and stayed up with him until they both fell asleep in his bed. Worse was coming home from school with his own cardboard Santa, one he gave a knife just like Dean’s, only to have Pastor Jim tell him he couldn’t see Dean, that Father McBride had taken him to see the doctor because he wasn’t getting better.
The next morning was Christmas Eve and, since Dean had to stay in bed and had to drink his juice and eat his soup and stay warm and sleep, Sammy told Pastor Jim he’d help him out at the the church. Pastor Jim and Father McBride, who was as nice as Pastor Jim and older and liked to give them candies and helped Dean with training, did the important priest things that Sammy couldn’t do. But Sammy helped them with the big pointsettas and the altar cloths and making sure all the candles were ready for Midnight Mass.
Sammy took a nap that afternoon, same as everyone else in the house. Pastor Jim wanted him to sleep on the couch downstairs, the lumpy orange one near the kitchen. And Sammy snuggled up under the big plaid blanket and he waited until all the grown ups were asleep and snoring, just like Dean taught him.
Then he snuck upstairs, just wearing his thick, fuzzy socks so he wouldn’t make any noise and he made sure to skip the last step because it always made a squeaky noise, no matter where he stepped on it. Sammy knew how to be quiet, to be like the little mice that sometimes lived in their motel rooms and made Dean curse and swear so Dad would wash his mouth with soap if he was ever around to hear.
Dean made it a game, knew how to make everything a game, but Sammy was old enough to know that some things were serious. He knew how to be quiet and pretend like they weren’t there at all when the people from social services knocked on the door and he knew how to pretend he was seven years old and he knew how to lie and tell the grown ups that Dad was always there, he was just out buying food right now. And he knew that Dean had to get better, he just had to, just like he knew Dad had to come home and the sun had to rise and he and Dean had to fight over seats in the Impala.
He crawled into Dean’s bed, exactly where he’d been sleeping for almost a week, just in case Dean needed anything. He would have been able to take a nap, too, just like Pastor Jim wanted, if Dean wasn’t already awake and reading one of his old Batman comics.
“What’re you doing?”
“You’re awake!” Sammy kept his voice down to a whisper; he didn’t want the grown-ups to know he was upstairs bothering Dean when they both should have been asleep. “You’re not supposed to be awake.”
Dean rolled his eyes at him and Sammy felt better than he had all week, except maybe when he was working with Billy on making sure all of Santa’s reindeer got named and accidentally forgot that Dean wasn’t down the hall in Mr Allen’s class. “Didja think I was gonna sleep all day, stupid?”
“Maybe.” Sammy looked down at the old quilt, just like the ones that covered all the other beds in St Jude’s Rectory. “Pastor Jim says that’s what you’ve been doing since Father McBride took you to the doctor.”
Dean reached over a gave him a noogie. Sammy squirmed, trying to pull out of it, but Dean’s headlock was too strong for him. They rolled around on the bed, wrinkling the stiff old blanket and Sam felt the Batman comic book, the one Dad bought for Dean back in Akron, bend and curl under his back as his big brother pinned him down the lumpy mattress.
“Don’t wake ‘em up, Dean!” he hissed when he realised Dean had pinned him well enough that he couldn’t get up, not until he let him. “We’ve all got to go to Midnight Mass!”
“Then why aren’t you sleeping like all little good boys should?”
“I’m not little!” Sammy protested.
“Littler than me,” Dean told him with a little cough.
Sammy went limp under him, just like Dad taught him to do when someone was trying to hold him down. “D’you need more water? Should I get Pastor Jim?”
“Naw.” Dean rolled off of Sammy and grabbed the glass of water by the bed. He drank it slowly, just like he had since that first night he started coughing. “I’ll live.”
Sammy could feel his eyes go big and worried even though he was a big boy and he could help Dean and write his own name and even though he was the one helping Dean every night. And even when Sammy couldn’t help Dean, even when Sammy could’t save Dean the way Dean always, always saved him, Sammy knew how to get Pastor Jim and Pastor Jim would know how to get Dad and Dad would know how to help Dean if something was going really, really wrong.
“I’m okay, Sammy,” Dean said, grabbing Sammy by both his shoulders, making him look right at him. “The medicine’s working and I’m okay.”
Sammy just stared at his big brother, remembering the stories that Dad sometimes told about Mommy when he drank too much and about the stories Dad’s friends talk about, the ones where people die - they really die - and about watching A Christmas Carol with Uncle Bobby before they moved to Blue Earth and about Tiny Tim and he didn’t want Dean to be Tiny Tim.
This time, Dean pinned Sammy easy, just like Dad and Uncle Caleb taught him, with his knees holding down Sammy’s arms. “Dude! Breathe! Sammy, come on! I’m gonna be ok.”
“Are you sure?” Sammy knew he sounded like a baby and his voice was even high pitched and whiny and he would never ever tell anyone, but he didn’t know what he would do if Dean ended up like Mommy. Or even like Tiny Tim, who seemed nice in the movie, but he probably couldn’t use a knife or a gun like Dean and Dad and Uncle Caleb and Pastor Jim and all smart grown ups did.
“Yeah, I’m sure.” Dean hauled Sammy up by the shoulder and shoved him, gently, against the pillows and headboard. He followed a little bit after, his crumpled up Batman comic in one hand and pushed and pulled Sammy until he was all wrapped up in Dean and pillows and blankets, just like Dean did whenever Sammy was sick. And then he opened up the comic and started reading it out loud, back at the beginning, so Sammy could know what was going on.
Sammy sat right beside Dean, who wore three layers of plaid shirts, in the second pew of St Jude’s Church for Midnight Mass. Old Mrs Kovar, who was Miss Kovar’s mom, sat on Sammy’s other side and Dean sat right next to the aisle. Sammy didn’t mind; he knew Dean hated being crowded in by strangers, especially since he was still coughing a little.
It was really nice, though, to be able to hold Dean’s hand for the entire Mass, even if Dean’s hand was colder than Kelly Li’s. And it was even better to hear Dean trying to sing with everyone else, especially all of the hallelujahs, even if Dean started coughing halfway through most of the carols. Sammy didn’t understand most of the Mass or why Pastor Jim and Father McBride were lighting all of the candles and burning the smelly incense, but it made him happy to see everyone smiling and to hear the story about the baby Jesus and he knew it was Christmas.
He’d stopped asking when Dad would be home, if Dad would be home for Christmas, when Dean got sick. It didn’t matter and Sammy didn’t like bothering grown-ups. It was one thing to ask Dean everyday; he asked Dean lots of things everyday and he’d heard Dad tell Dean that Sammy was his job. Sammy wasn’t Pastor Jim’s job or Miss Kovar’s job or Uncle Bobby’s job - he was Dean’s job and that meant that he asked Dean questions, not anybody else.
On the letter Miss Kovar told them to write to Santa Claus, he’d asked for a Bowie knife and a new pack of playing cards and, since he’d been really really good this year, a stuffed puppy that wouldn’t be forgotten in a truck stop in Texas, but that was because Miss Kovar was going to read it. He’d given Father McBride another letter, a real one, that he’d written himself to send to Santa. He’d borrowed some of Pastor Jim’s paper and one of his pens and he’d made sure it was real short - he just wanted Dad and home for Christmas with Sammy and Dean.
But, as he sat there in the second pew in the too-cold church, watching Pastor Jim and Father McBride and holding Dean’s hand and singing, at the top of his lungs, “Repeat the sounding joy! Repeat, repeat the sounding joy!” along with everyone else, Sammy thought it might be okay if Dad and the car didn’t make it home with Sammy and Dean for Christmas. He had Dean and Pastor Jim promised Dean wasn’t going to be like Mommy or Tiny Tim and that was enough of a Christmas gift for Sammy.
And that meant that when they walked back from Mass, across the old churchyard to the rectory, with Sammy holding hands with Dean and Pastor Jim and Father McBride on Dean’s other side, and it started to snow just as Sammy saw the Impala in the driveway and the lights on in the kitchen, Sammy decided it was a Christmas miracle.
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: G
Summary: When Sam was in kindergarten, they spent Christmas in Blue Earth.
Notes: Written for spn_j2_xmas for weesta. She prompted SPN - hurt/sick!Dean and brotherly bonding is always awesome; I tend to go for character studies over case fics... weeChesters; fatherly John.
Sammy liked his school in Blue Earth well enough and his teacher Miss Kovar was nice to him, nicer than Ms MacDonald back in Bethlehem. She was pretty and smart and she didn’t let the other kids make fun of him because Dad bought his clothes at Good Will and he lived with Pastor Jim at the church down the street. She wasn’t like Dean’s teacher, Mr Allen, who made him miss recess for fighting with the other boys and sometimes even called Pastor Jim at the church.
But, as nice and smart as Miss Kovar was, Sammy didn’t really like her, not totally. It didn’t keep him from bragging when she gave his drawing that week’s gold star or said nice things about his reading, but it did mean that Sammy didn’t trust her. Something wasn’t right with someone who didn’t like Dean.
Dean liked Miss Kovar as much as he liked any kind of a teacher. Dean liked her as long as he thought she was treating Sammy right. If he thought she wasn’t, if he thought she was like Ms MacDonald, then he’d do his best to ruin her classroom as long as they were in Blue Earth. Sammy knew he’d bribe the littler kids to pitch tantrums or throw things or just refuse to do their work. He’d been surprised at the girl in Bethlehem who knew how to throw up on command, but so had Ms MacDonald.
Sammy knew Dean would do it. And he’d do it because Dean wanted to prove to everyone that Sammy was his Sammy and they’d do right by him, even if Dean was all the way in the third grade on the other side of the school. Dean would make sure Sammy was safe and happy.
But Miss Kovar, as nice and smart as she was, didn’t get it. Sammy had heard her talking to Pastor Jim, except she called him Father Murphy, and she said Dean was “a bad influence” and “might lead the boy down the wrong path.” Sammy wasn’t totally sure what all of that meant, but he heard how she said it and he saw how she looked at Dean when he came to pick him up for lunch or at the end of the day. It wasn’t a nice look and it wasn’t even the kind of look Dad would give Dean when he did something wrong. And Sammy couldn’t really like or trust anyone who could look at Dean like that.
Sammy’s face lit up with delight when, only seconds after the bell, Dean showed up at the door to Miss Kovar’s room. He was always the first one there, before even Eileen’s older sister or the Buckland twins’ mom in her nurses scrubs. Sammy didn’t care that a lot of the other kids were a little scared of Dean, he was always Sammy’s big brother.
“Hey, Sammy.” Dean grabbed him a gentle headlock and gave him a noogie, exactly like he’d done everyday since Sammy told him only babies got hugs at the end of the day, back in Bethlehem.
Sammy wriggled out of Dean’s grasp and asked, exactly like he had everyday since they’d been in Minnesota, “Do you think Dad will be home tonight?”
“Dunno.” Dean didn’t look at Sammy when he said it; he always watched Mrs Kovar instead, just like he’d always watched Mrs MacDonald before. “Pastor Jim says we’re gonna do Christmas anyway, even if Dad’s still out, uh, sellin’ stuff.”
Miss Kovar smiled at Sammy and reminded him of his homework when Dean signed them out of the classroom, but Sammy saw that she didn’t smile at Dean, not really, not with her eyes the way she did for Pastor Jim or Sammy. He wasn’t a stupid kid, even if he wasn’t half as smart and grown up as Dean. He knew she couldn’t see Dean, not really.
“Do you think Dad will be home for Christmas?” Sam asked as they walked to Pastor Jim’s church. “He shouldn’t work on Christmas.”
“I dunno,” Dean told him, making sure to hold his hand as they crossed the street. “Pastor Jim hasn’t talked to Dad in, like, a week. But it’ll be okay. We’ll have a great Christmas, I promise.”
Sammy nodded and didn’t let go of Dean’s hand all the way across the housing development next to the big old church. It was nice to just hold on and Dean would punch any kid who laughed at him for it, Sammy knew.
And then, more than a week before Christmas, Dean got sick.
Sammy noticed when he woke up in the middle of the night and went to the bathroom for a glass of water. Normally, the minute Sammy was out of bed, his brother was up, making sure he was okay. That night, though, he wasn’t and when Sam came back from the narrow hallway, Dean was coughing and coughing. And it didn’t sound like coughing because Charlie bet Dean he couldn’t swallow a bug, but bad coughing, like there was something inside Dean that he couldn’t get out, no matter how hard he tried.
Sammy didn’t know how to get him to stop coughing, but it sounded bad and a little scary and Dean’s face was getting red and his skin felt hot. So he did what Dean always did when he had nightmares and Dad wasn’t there to protect them. He crawled into Dean’s bed, huddled up behind him, and tried to hum the song that Dean told him Mom used to sing to get them to fall asleep, back when she was alive and they all lived in Kansas.
That was where Pastor Jim found them in the morning when they didn’t come downstairs for breakfast. He smiled when he saw them wrapped around each other under his old plaid blanket, reminded of when he met John and Sammy was still just a baby and Dean never said anything at all, but never let his brother sleep alone. He told Sammy that later, when Sammy was worried about Dean and Pastor Jim wouldn’t let him crawl in bed with him.
“Pastor Jim!” Sam didn’t get out of the bed when he saw the priest standing over them. “Dean doesn’t feel good.”
“Is that right?” Pastor Jim asked, smiling in the nice way he did. “Well, why doesn’t Dean tell me about it?”
“No. Dean just got to sleep. We gotta leave him alone.”
Sammy made sure that Pastor Jim knew that Dean was sick and coughing and didn’t feel good and that he needed to sleep lots, just like Sammy did when he had the fluey last year. And when Pastor Jim sat him down at the old table in his house and made him eat his oatmeal and hot cocoa, Sam let him do it becuase he also promised that he’d give Dean honey and lemon juice and maybe even let him watch cartoons and eat chicken soup.
He promised Pastor Jim that he was a big boy now and he could watch to school with Mikey, who was in Miss Linden’s class, and his old sister, Kelly. Pastor Jim didn’t believe him and made sure to call their mom, but Sammy didn’t mind. Dad didn’t believe him most of the time either and neither did his teachers. Dean did, though, and that was enough.
Sammy didn’t get worried until Dean was sick even on the last day of school. He missed holding his big brother’s hand on their way to school and he missed hearing Dean talk about what he had done to piss of Mr Allen that day and what the sixth grade bullies planned to do at lunch. He even missed Dean making him do push ups and run around the yard like Dad always did.
Worse, though, was holding Kelly Li’s too-small hand because Dean couldn’t be there to do it. Worse was waking up in the middle of the night because Dean was coughing and couldn’t wake up himself, not until Sammy got him water and stayed up with him until they both fell asleep in his bed. Worse was coming home from school with his own cardboard Santa, one he gave a knife just like Dean’s, only to have Pastor Jim tell him he couldn’t see Dean, that Father McBride had taken him to see the doctor because he wasn’t getting better.
The next morning was Christmas Eve and, since Dean had to stay in bed and had to drink his juice and eat his soup and stay warm and sleep, Sammy told Pastor Jim he’d help him out at the the church. Pastor Jim and Father McBride, who was as nice as Pastor Jim and older and liked to give them candies and helped Dean with training, did the important priest things that Sammy couldn’t do. But Sammy helped them with the big pointsettas and the altar cloths and making sure all the candles were ready for Midnight Mass.
Sammy took a nap that afternoon, same as everyone else in the house. Pastor Jim wanted him to sleep on the couch downstairs, the lumpy orange one near the kitchen. And Sammy snuggled up under the big plaid blanket and he waited until all the grown ups were asleep and snoring, just like Dean taught him.
Then he snuck upstairs, just wearing his thick, fuzzy socks so he wouldn’t make any noise and he made sure to skip the last step because it always made a squeaky noise, no matter where he stepped on it. Sammy knew how to be quiet, to be like the little mice that sometimes lived in their motel rooms and made Dean curse and swear so Dad would wash his mouth with soap if he was ever around to hear.
Dean made it a game, knew how to make everything a game, but Sammy was old enough to know that some things were serious. He knew how to be quiet and pretend like they weren’t there at all when the people from social services knocked on the door and he knew how to pretend he was seven years old and he knew how to lie and tell the grown ups that Dad was always there, he was just out buying food right now. And he knew that Dean had to get better, he just had to, just like he knew Dad had to come home and the sun had to rise and he and Dean had to fight over seats in the Impala.
He crawled into Dean’s bed, exactly where he’d been sleeping for almost a week, just in case Dean needed anything. He would have been able to take a nap, too, just like Pastor Jim wanted, if Dean wasn’t already awake and reading one of his old Batman comics.
“What’re you doing?”
“You’re awake!” Sammy kept his voice down to a whisper; he didn’t want the grown-ups to know he was upstairs bothering Dean when they both should have been asleep. “You’re not supposed to be awake.”
Dean rolled his eyes at him and Sammy felt better than he had all week, except maybe when he was working with Billy on making sure all of Santa’s reindeer got named and accidentally forgot that Dean wasn’t down the hall in Mr Allen’s class. “Didja think I was gonna sleep all day, stupid?”
“Maybe.” Sammy looked down at the old quilt, just like the ones that covered all the other beds in St Jude’s Rectory. “Pastor Jim says that’s what you’ve been doing since Father McBride took you to the doctor.”
Dean reached over a gave him a noogie. Sammy squirmed, trying to pull out of it, but Dean’s headlock was too strong for him. They rolled around on the bed, wrinkling the stiff old blanket and Sam felt the Batman comic book, the one Dad bought for Dean back in Akron, bend and curl under his back as his big brother pinned him down the lumpy mattress.
“Don’t wake ‘em up, Dean!” he hissed when he realised Dean had pinned him well enough that he couldn’t get up, not until he let him. “We’ve all got to go to Midnight Mass!”
“Then why aren’t you sleeping like all little good boys should?”
“I’m not little!” Sammy protested.
“Littler than me,” Dean told him with a little cough.
Sammy went limp under him, just like Dad taught him to do when someone was trying to hold him down. “D’you need more water? Should I get Pastor Jim?”
“Naw.” Dean rolled off of Sammy and grabbed the glass of water by the bed. He drank it slowly, just like he had since that first night he started coughing. “I’ll live.”
Sammy could feel his eyes go big and worried even though he was a big boy and he could help Dean and write his own name and even though he was the one helping Dean every night. And even when Sammy couldn’t help Dean, even when Sammy could’t save Dean the way Dean always, always saved him, Sammy knew how to get Pastor Jim and Pastor Jim would know how to get Dad and Dad would know how to help Dean if something was going really, really wrong.
“I’m okay, Sammy,” Dean said, grabbing Sammy by both his shoulders, making him look right at him. “The medicine’s working and I’m okay.”
Sammy just stared at his big brother, remembering the stories that Dad sometimes told about Mommy when he drank too much and about the stories Dad’s friends talk about, the ones where people die - they really die - and about watching A Christmas Carol with Uncle Bobby before they moved to Blue Earth and about Tiny Tim and he didn’t want Dean to be Tiny Tim.
This time, Dean pinned Sammy easy, just like Dad and Uncle Caleb taught him, with his knees holding down Sammy’s arms. “Dude! Breathe! Sammy, come on! I’m gonna be ok.”
“Are you sure?” Sammy knew he sounded like a baby and his voice was even high pitched and whiny and he would never ever tell anyone, but he didn’t know what he would do if Dean ended up like Mommy. Or even like Tiny Tim, who seemed nice in the movie, but he probably couldn’t use a knife or a gun like Dean and Dad and Uncle Caleb and Pastor Jim and all smart grown ups did.
“Yeah, I’m sure.” Dean hauled Sammy up by the shoulder and shoved him, gently, against the pillows and headboard. He followed a little bit after, his crumpled up Batman comic in one hand and pushed and pulled Sammy until he was all wrapped up in Dean and pillows and blankets, just like Dean did whenever Sammy was sick. And then he opened up the comic and started reading it out loud, back at the beginning, so Sammy could know what was going on.
Sammy sat right beside Dean, who wore three layers of plaid shirts, in the second pew of St Jude’s Church for Midnight Mass. Old Mrs Kovar, who was Miss Kovar’s mom, sat on Sammy’s other side and Dean sat right next to the aisle. Sammy didn’t mind; he knew Dean hated being crowded in by strangers, especially since he was still coughing a little.
It was really nice, though, to be able to hold Dean’s hand for the entire Mass, even if Dean’s hand was colder than Kelly Li’s. And it was even better to hear Dean trying to sing with everyone else, especially all of the hallelujahs, even if Dean started coughing halfway through most of the carols. Sammy didn’t understand most of the Mass or why Pastor Jim and Father McBride were lighting all of the candles and burning the smelly incense, but it made him happy to see everyone smiling and to hear the story about the baby Jesus and he knew it was Christmas.
He’d stopped asking when Dad would be home, if Dad would be home for Christmas, when Dean got sick. It didn’t matter and Sammy didn’t like bothering grown-ups. It was one thing to ask Dean everyday; he asked Dean lots of things everyday and he’d heard Dad tell Dean that Sammy was his job. Sammy wasn’t Pastor Jim’s job or Miss Kovar’s job or Uncle Bobby’s job - he was Dean’s job and that meant that he asked Dean questions, not anybody else.
On the letter Miss Kovar told them to write to Santa Claus, he’d asked for a Bowie knife and a new pack of playing cards and, since he’d been really really good this year, a stuffed puppy that wouldn’t be forgotten in a truck stop in Texas, but that was because Miss Kovar was going to read it. He’d given Father McBride another letter, a real one, that he’d written himself to send to Santa. He’d borrowed some of Pastor Jim’s paper and one of his pens and he’d made sure it was real short - he just wanted Dad and home for Christmas with Sammy and Dean.
But, as he sat there in the second pew in the too-cold church, watching Pastor Jim and Father McBride and holding Dean’s hand and singing, at the top of his lungs, “Repeat the sounding joy! Repeat, repeat the sounding joy!” along with everyone else, Sammy thought it might be okay if Dad and the car didn’t make it home with Sammy and Dean for Christmas. He had Dean and Pastor Jim promised Dean wasn’t going to be like Mommy or Tiny Tim and that was enough of a Christmas gift for Sammy.
And that meant that when they walked back from Mass, across the old churchyard to the rectory, with Sammy holding hands with Dean and Pastor Jim and Father McBride on Dean’s other side, and it started to snow just as Sammy saw the Impala in the driveway and the lights on in the kitchen, Sammy decided it was a Christmas miracle.