[FIC] Father's Gun (2/?)
Title: Father's Gun
Authors: diana_lucifera & tersichore
Pairing: Dean/Sam
Rating: Mature
Warnings: minor character death, mentions of torture, the slowest of burns, and excessive bed-sharing
Summary: After the events of " Brother's Blood," Sam and Dean are faced with teaming up with John to hunt the Yellow-Eyed Demon, all while keeping Sam's powers a secret and dodging their dad's questions about just why things between them are so... different.
Previous Chapter | Master Post
Dean’s wanted to get the family back together for a long damn time now. He hates to admit it, but this isn’t really going like he’d pictured.
The second they get into the motel, Dad orders Dean to get the place protected and disappears into the bathroom with a handful of supplies from the med kit. Sam, who spent the entire drive here and the time he was helping Dean set up the salt lines in a tense, tight-lipped silence, submits to his own medical treatment with only a moderate amount of bitching.
“Hurry up!” he presses, squirming impatiently while Dean puts a stitch into the gash across his lower back.
“Shuddup,” Dean grumbles, smacking him across the back of the head with the hand that’s not still attached to Sam’s skin with a needle and dental floss, “and stop moving around.”
“Come on,” Sam grumbles, craning his neck to look him in the eye. “That’s just a scratch, and you look like your face is about to fall off. You can’t tell me that isn’t hurting you.”
Dean slides the needle in again and watches Sam’s face crinkle.
“Matter of fact, it stings like a sumbitch,” he tells Sam’s shoulder blade, “and the sooner you quit whining and let me patch you up, the sooner I can get a bandage on it and take a mountain of pain killers.”
Sure enough, that stops the wiggling. Nothing keeps the kid in line quite like good, old-fashioned emotional blackmail. Dean should probably feel guiltier about that thought than he does. He’s put up with Sam’s mother-henning for the last eight months, even the frankly embarrassing levels he’d hit during that case with the Reaper, but there’s a pecking order, dammit. The day Dean just lies back and lets his baby brother fuss over him without giving just as good back is the day Hell freezes over.
He’s finished mopping Sam up in another ten minutes, and Sam takes just a moment to pull his shirt and hoodie back on before trying to pounce.
“I got it,” Dean waves him off, digging a couple of butterfly bandages out of the first aid kit. “Go check on Dad, would you?”
Sam scoffs.
“Dad can take care of himself.”
“So can I,” Dean counters.
“Can you stitch your own forehead shut?" Sam asks, glaring. “'Cause otherwise you're gonna look like that guy from Monster.”
Dean regards himself in the mirror. Okay, Sam’s probably right on that one, although it’s completely against the big brother code to admit it.
“Fine,” he says, tossing the hodgepodge of gauze and bandages at Sam. “I’ll go check on Dad.”
He gets about a half-dozen steps before Sam steps in front of him.
“Could you stow the stoic man-pain crap?” he says sharply. “What, Dad’s here, so suddenly you’ve gotta be Wolverine?”
Dean rolls his eyes.
“Sam-”
“You know, he doesn’t appreciate that crap any more than I do,” Sam presses. “It endangers his precious mission.”
“God, can you lay off?” Dean snaps, sidestepping him. “We’ve been back together for, what, an hour? Could you at least try not to start shit?”
Sam looks pained.
“Well, I didn’t shoot at him, so believe it or not, this is me trying. Sorry, but I’m still a little upset about the fact that he left my brother to die.”
Dean opens his mouth to protest… something about that. He still hasn’t come up with a solid counterargument to that line of thinking, and anyway, every time he tries, Sam ends up with that look like Dean just punched him in the kidneys.
“And stop deflecting,” Sam adds, grabbing a handful of Dean’s jacket and trying to drag him over to the bed. “You’re acting like a jerk.”
“Well, you’re being a little bitch,” Dean returns, making another move towards the bathroom.
Sam sets his jaw.
“Dad!” he says loudly. “Dean won’t let me patch him up!”
Dean blanches as John swings the bathroom door open, glaring at both of them.
“Dean, let your brother clean up those injuries now,” he barks. “Sam, stop chasing him around the damn room; you’re tracking blood. It looks like a goddamn murder scene in here.”
“Yes, sir,” Dean says.
John shuts the door with a click, and Dean turns to shoot Sam a dirty look.
“Did you just friggin’ tattle on me? What are you, nine?”
Sam tosses Dean a distinctly little brotherish smirk.
“You heard the man,” he says, wiggling the needle at Dean.
Awesome.
Forty-five minutes later, Dean looks like Frankenstein’s sexy cousin, Dad has finally emerged from the bathroom, and Sam’s mood seems to have picked up enough that Dean feels comfortable offering him pain killers instead of Midol. Dean watches Sam swallow the pills before tossing his back along with the fifth of whiskey he’s been nursing since Sam started stitching. He tugs his jacket and shirt off and tosses them across the room, regarding himself in the mirror as he gives Sam's impeccable line of sutures an experimental poke.
“Just so you know, if this shit scars, I’m telling people we fought off a mountain lion.”
“That’s a lot less impressive that what actually happened, isn’t it?” John says, looking faintly amused over the notes he’s scribbling on hotel stationary.
“You didn’t let me finish,” Dean tells him. “There was a school bus full of kids involved. And a chainsaw.”
John looks up at him and smiles for a second before it dies. He gives Dean a once-over, eyebrows furrowing, and then turns to grab something from one of their suitcases. Dean raises an eyebrow, glances over to see what Sammy’s making of that and catches him spitting the pills he’d apparently tongued into the fake palm tree in the corner like a goddamn alpaca.
“What the hell?” Dean mouths at him, glancing nervously at their dad’s back.
“He’s going to try to leave,” Sam says in a whisper. “I’m not going to be stoned into complacency again when he does.”
“Sam, he’s not going to-”
The look that Sam’s giving him is just too close to pitying for Dean to sit here and take it. He stomps briskly into the bathroom, kneels at the toilet, and sticks a couple of fingers down his throat.
It does approximately jack shit.
"Oh, come on!" Dean whines, trying again with absolutely no luck.
Sam shoulders his way into the bathroom, not looking particularly surprised to find Dean with his head shoved in the commode. Dean makes a third attempt and gets nothing but a sore throat and a mouth full of spit. He frowns down at his stupid, traitor fingers.
"That whole 'no gag reflex' thing not so cool now, is it?" Sam asks smugly, squeezing out a precise line of Crest on his toothbrush. "Don't worry. I'll keep an eye on dad. You get some rest."
Dean glares at him as Sam pops the toothbrush in his mouth and starts scrubbing it along his teeth, making even the hushed 'scritch-scritch' of the bristles sound smug and self-satisfied.
Itching to wipe the snotty grin off his little brother's face, Dean tries to think of another way to toss the pills and hits on the answer with a smirk right as Sammy's eyebrow quirks.
Salt.
Dean's eyes dart to the bags at the same time as Sam's, toothbrush drooping in his mouth.
"Don't even-" he starts, only to get cut off by Dean's hip check, which would have been as brilliant as it was graceful if Sam hadn't been endowed with freakish Yeti limbs. As it is, they end up tangled in a vicious, elbow-y wresting match in the doorway before John pounds on the wall.
"Boys! Knock it off,” he barks as Sam sends Dean stumbling against the tub and elbows past him to the sink to spit.
That's just as well anyway, because the tiles in the bathroom are getting cool and way too blurry for Dean to try and half-nelson anyone.
"Finally," Sam sighs, seeing Dean leaning against the bathroom wall like it's the only solid thing in the room. "You know, just once, I wish you'd take it easy after a hunt WITHOUT being stoned off your ass."
"I'm not stoned, you're just blurry," Dean insists to the bending, wavy Sams in front of him.
"Sure, Cheech, whatever you say," Sam agrees from far away, towing Dean out of the bathroom and tipping him onto the bed, and Dean means to resist, really he does, but someone's swapped out their crappy motel beds with the softest and most awesome mountain of pillows on the planet, so really, he's not rolling over. He's prioritizing.
Besides, his face really hurts.
~
"Dean," Sam sighs, poking his brother in the side to no avail. "Move, Dean. You're taking up the whole bed… Dean!"
"Mmmyu're not the boss of me," Dean mumbles into his pillow, flinging and arm out and giving a lazy, insolent wiggle into the mess of hotel sheets.
"Dude, come on," Sam grumbles, mentally kicking himself for not at least getting Dean showered and out of his boots before drugging him to the gills on illicit pain meds. "You've still got your shoes on."
Dean's only response is to clumsily plant a boot in Sam's solar plexus and scrunch his face into the pillows at a more comfortable angle. Really, Sam probably deserves at least a little of this for doping his brother up to get his way, but in Sam's defense, Dean is prone to running himself ragged on the best days, and no matter how macho he played it tonight, he lost a lot of blood on top of scaling a fucking building and getting tossed across a warehouse into a fuck-ton of crates.
And then, on top of all that, their dad had to show up. Sam knows how much it had to take out of Dean to hang back like he did, to let Sam vent even a little bit of the John-centered rage he's pent up for these past eight months before stepping in and pulling them apart.
"You don't move, I'm just gonna have to sleep on top of you," Sam shrugs, unlacing the boot digging into the waistband of his jeans with a few, efficient jerks.
"Take the other bed," John orders absently, pile of hotel stationary notes in front of him rustling as he moves a seemingly arbitrary piece of paper form one stack to the next.
"Then where would you sleep, Dad?" Sam asks archly, snatching Dean's other foot from the tangle of grimy, grit-scattered sheets and making quick work of the laces. "Unless you're planning on taking off in the middle of the night. Again."
Sam drops Dean's boots to the floor as he turns to face his father.
"That's what you were planning to do, wasn't it?" he demands, striding to tower over John at the dinette. "Dump us here, take of as soon as we were out? Disappear for another eight months? Fuck off and screen our calls until-”
"Sammy."
Sam turns to see Dean propping himself up on the bed, bleary-eyed, but determined.
"That's enough," he enunciates, slow but steady.
"But Dean-" Sam protests, flailing an arm angrily at John, still stoic and unmoved at the table.
"He'll wait," Dean interrupts firmly, turning his hazy but focused glare at John. "Right?"
"We'll head back to the truck in the morning, plan from there," John rumbles, capping his pen in a swift, short motion and striding past Sam into the bathroom.
"Bastard," Sam mutters, shucking his hoodie and shoving at Dean's shoulder until he scoots over on the bed with a whine.
"Evil Dragon, be nice," his older brother moans into the pillow, aiming a clumsy kick at Sam's ankle.
"Faker," Sam mutters, flopping into the pillows. "I know what you sound like when you're stoned, Dean. Stop hamming it up and get some sleep."
“Don’t tell me what to do, Ms. Frizzle,” Dean slurs; Sam can see the corner of his mouth quirking up against the pillow. “I don’t want to go on your magic school bus.”
“Shut up, jackass,” Sam says, trying not to grin. “And don’t sleep on your stomach, you’re gonna aggravate your stitches.”
“Yessir,” Dean replies sarcastically, trying to mock-salute and instead slapping himself lightly in the ear.
Sam is so not finding this funny. At all.
To prove the point, he grabs onto Dean’s shoulder and pulls, making his brother flop over onto his back with a beleaguered moan. Dean glares at him blearily before making a move to turn over again.
“Stop that,” Sam grouses, grabbing at Dean again.
“Make me,” Dean says with perfect clarity, because go figure, drugs or no drugs, Dean still has it in him to be a stubborn ass.
And Sam, who can never resist throwing around the fact that he outweighs his brother by a good fifteen pounds now, does just that and pins him down, careful not to put too much pressure on the massive pattern of bruises mottling Dean’s torso.
“Oof,” he brother exhales, warm puff of whiskey-soaked breath against Sam’s chin. He blinks up at Sam, eyes crossing a little at the proximity of their faces. “Hey, get off me.”
“Hey,” Sam says, “don’t sleep on your stitches.”
“Wasn’t gonna,” Dean tells him, ignoring the fact that he clearly was.
Sam slides a little bit off of him, so he’s half laying on the bed, right arm and leg thrown over Dean to keep him where he is. He lets his head droop onto his brother’s shoulder.
It’s been a long day for him, too. It’s not just the fact that he’s nearly as bad off as Dean, and with none of the happy-drugs to numb the pain. It’s also the fact that he’s been riding an intense emotional rollercoaster, running the gamut of hope, anticipation, fear and rage, and now he’s left bone-tired and the only thing he feels about John’s sure attempt to slip out of their grasp again is a dull, angry acceptance. They’ll be having that fight when it happens, but Sam’s not exactly looking forward to it. He’d rather drug himself up and collapse along with Dean, but of course, he can’t. He’s not going to let John Winchester abandon his brother again. This time, Sam’s going to be ready for him.
He sighs, scrubbing his brow across Dean’s shoulder blade.
“What’d you eat for dinner?” Dean asks after a moment, voice a deep rumble against Sam’s ear.
He already knows the answer to that, Sam thinks grumpily. Of course, he’s gonna ask anyway.
“Nothing.”
Dean huffs disapprovingly.
“No lunch either.”
“I had a salad,” Sam defends.
“No,” Dean slurs purposefully, eyes still closed. “I paid for you to have a salad. You ate two bites before you found this case and stopped eating.”
How does he remember this stuff when even Sam can’t?
“Fine,” Sam grumbles. “Then go to sleep, and tomorrow morning we’ll go to whatever grease factory you want, and I’ll let you feed me eggs and bacon until I explode. Happy?”
Dean snorts.
“Be happier if you’d just take care of yourself.”
“Hypocrite,” Sam accuses without any bite.
“Maybe,” Dean allows.
He runs a hand over the arm Sam has splayed across his chest, which Sam realizes belatedly is the one still proudly bearing the scar from his emergency blood transfusion eight months ago. Dean gets his thumb up against it, tracing the raised skin from elbow to wrist. Sam tries to snatch his arm away, but Dean holds him tight by the wrist, opening one eye to fix Sam with a bleary look.
This is why Sam always wears long sleeves these days, throws hoodies on top of his tees even on the warmest days. It’s not that he’s ashamed of the scar. In fact, on the rare occasions that he actually remembers it’s there, he’s kind of perversely proud of it. But after he’d got the bandages off, he’d figured out pretty quick that letting Dean catch a glimpse of it leaves him maudlin and strange for hours - sometimes even days - afterwards. Sam guesses he can’t blame Dean for that. It took months of watching Dean parade around in his boxers before Sam stopped getting hit with that sucker punch of paralyzing guilt every time he saw the scars from the vampire bites that still mar his brother’s skin.
But whether Dean realizes it or not, he’s pretty damn extreme around it, and Sam’s learned to be careful. He doesn’t like that Dean can’t seem to see it like Sam does, as a symbol of how much Sam would do for him, and not as a reminder of some imaginary screw-up. But until Dean’s guilt stops being so fresh (or maybe until he magically transforms into a different person, Sam thinks grimly), it’s better to keep it covered up whenever possible.
The thing is, Sam forgets. He’s got dozens of scars, and though most of them are admittedly less obvious, at the end of the day, a scar is a scar. He still pushes up his sleeves when Dean’s not around, still leaves his hoodies in the car if it’s too hot. He’s gotten his share of stares, sure, a handful of comments; nothing bad. There was a diner parking lot in Fayetteville where a teenager had called it ‘awesome’ and asked him if it was from a skateboard accident (‘No, biking,’ Sam had told him). He’d had an old man stop him in the drug store to compare their artery removal scars and ask whether or not Sam found the local hospital to be as incompetent as he had. In a rusty, dust-encrusted gas station in rural Mississippi, he’d given the cashier a fifty and gotten a wide-eyed stare and a crumpled old pamphlet on suicide prevention along with his change.
It didn’t bother him, just like it didn’t bother him when, two or three months into his and Dean’s little monster-killing road trip, he’d unthinkingly shoved his shirtsleeves up to his elbows in a bar and gotten a long, appraising look from the bottle-blonde Dean had been plying with booze for the last half hour.
“It must be so hard with your brother,” he’d heard her simper once Sam excused himself to go to the restroom. “You know, my cousin tried to kill herself once. It can it be such a burden.”
And the next the Sam knew, he was frantically shoving his sleeves down while Dean stood up abruptly, gathered all of their stuff up under one arm and manhandled Sam right out of the bar with the other.
They’d driven back to the motel in uncomfortable silence, and once they’d gotten back, Dean had cracked open his own alcohol stash.
“Rather stay in tonight anyway,” he’d said, pouring Sam a glass. “S’not really your scene in the first place, right?”
Sam had nursed his own drink, watching Dean put away three of his own, totally not understanding why Dean was as upset as he obviously was.
“So,” Sam finally says awkwardly. “Guess you decided not to hook up with Alicia, then.”
“Her name was Amber,” Dean corrects, despite the fact that Sam knows for a fact it wasn’t. “And no way. Not happening.”
He tipped his drink back.
“Dumb bitch,” Dean slurred. “What does she know?”
“It was just a mistake,” Sam told him, despite the fact that he didn’t really enjoy the idea of white knighting one of Dean’s hook-ups. “I don’t think she was trying to insult me or anything. I mean, depression’s a legitimate illness. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
Dean uncapped a beer and took a swig before looking Sam over for a long moment.
“You ever felt like that, Sammy?”
“What, depressed? Hasn’t everyone?” Sam deflected, reaching over to grab his own glass and take a shallow gulp.
Dean paused, drink halfway to his mouth, giving Sam an indecipherable look.
“But you wouldn’t ever do that,” Dean said. “I mean, kill yourself. Right?”
Sam shrugged. He was pretty sure the answer that Dean was looking for wasn’t ‘Only for you.’
“Would you?” he asked, twirling his glass to watch the ice click together.
Dean shrugged.
Sam really didn’t want to think about that that meant.
“I worry,” Dean says now, plain and simple, hand still trapping Sam’s wrist, fingernail scratching against the edge of the scar tissue.
“I know,” says Sam baldy. “Me, too.”
“C’n take care of myself,” Dean tells him definitively, eyelid twitching a little from the effort of keeping it open. “So quit it.”
“You first,” Sam whispers, smiling a little.
Yeah, right. The day Dean stops clucking over him like a butch, leather-clad mother bear will be the day Sam knows they’ve picked up another shifter.
“I’m tired,” he says, cheating shamelessly. “Can we sleep now, please?”
“Yeah,” Dean exhales. “Yes, finally, thank you.”
Sam tries not to laugh.
“Dun punch Dad while ‘m ‘sleep,” Dean murmurs, both eyes finally sliding shut.
“I’ll do my best,” Sam tells him, which sounds a lot more like a promise than it actually is.
He shuffles down on the bed, tugging the scratchy, seashell-emblazoned comforter up over them. He reaches over his brother and clicks off the lamps between the beds. He doesn’t bother with the one standing beside the desk John’s been working at, knowing their father’s just going to turn it back on once he finally emerges from the bathroom. He flops down heavily, throwing his arm back over Dean’s chest, one leg finding its way between his brother’s legs to hook his ankle around Dean’s own.
“Dun hafta pin me, Sammy,” Dean mumbles. “M’not goin’ anywhere.”
“Neither am I,” Sam says pointedly, flexing his wrist where Dean has - apparently unconsciously - resumed his death grip.
Dean grunts and let him go, but Sam stays where he is. This feels nice. Comforting, like when he was younger and they used to share space like it was air, back when he could snuggle up against Dean whenever he wanted without anyone accusing him of being girly or acting like a baby. His first instinct as a little kid had always been to plaster himself up against his big brother every time he was upset. He hates to admit it, but he guesses it kind of still is; he’d just learned how to hold himself back once John and, eventually, Dean started telling him to quit it. Some part of Sam has always wondered if he’d feel this same yearning for comfort from Dean if he’d grown up having a mom giving him baths and fixing his scrapes and making his lunches instead of his brother. He guesses he’ll never know.
Anyway, girly or not, Sam’s not moving until Dean physically makes him, and his brother’s definitely not up to that task right now if the snores that are starting to thunder through his chest are any indicator. Sam rests his head against Dean’s shoulder, wincing as he puts pressure on his own stitches. But the pain will keep him awake and ready, keep him from slipping too deeply into the sleep his body is so desperately craving. He’s got John’s bed and the door in his eye line. He’ll be ready for it, when it comes.
He shifts closer into the warmth of Dean’s body, lets his eyes drift closed, and waits.
Chapter 3
Authors: diana_lucifera & tersichore
Pairing: Dean/Sam
Rating: Mature
Warnings: minor character death, mentions of torture, the slowest of burns, and excessive bed-sharing
Summary: After the events of " Brother's Blood," Sam and Dean are faced with teaming up with John to hunt the Yellow-Eyed Demon, all while keeping Sam's powers a secret and dodging their dad's questions about just why things between them are so... different.
Previous Chapter | Master Post
Dean’s wanted to get the family back together for a long damn time now. He hates to admit it, but this isn’t really going like he’d pictured.
The second they get into the motel, Dad orders Dean to get the place protected and disappears into the bathroom with a handful of supplies from the med kit. Sam, who spent the entire drive here and the time he was helping Dean set up the salt lines in a tense, tight-lipped silence, submits to his own medical treatment with only a moderate amount of bitching.
“Hurry up!” he presses, squirming impatiently while Dean puts a stitch into the gash across his lower back.
“Shuddup,” Dean grumbles, smacking him across the back of the head with the hand that’s not still attached to Sam’s skin with a needle and dental floss, “and stop moving around.”
“Come on,” Sam grumbles, craning his neck to look him in the eye. “That’s just a scratch, and you look like your face is about to fall off. You can’t tell me that isn’t hurting you.”
Dean slides the needle in again and watches Sam’s face crinkle.
“Matter of fact, it stings like a sumbitch,” he tells Sam’s shoulder blade, “and the sooner you quit whining and let me patch you up, the sooner I can get a bandage on it and take a mountain of pain killers.”
Sure enough, that stops the wiggling. Nothing keeps the kid in line quite like good, old-fashioned emotional blackmail. Dean should probably feel guiltier about that thought than he does. He’s put up with Sam’s mother-henning for the last eight months, even the frankly embarrassing levels he’d hit during that case with the Reaper, but there’s a pecking order, dammit. The day Dean just lies back and lets his baby brother fuss over him without giving just as good back is the day Hell freezes over.
He’s finished mopping Sam up in another ten minutes, and Sam takes just a moment to pull his shirt and hoodie back on before trying to pounce.
“I got it,” Dean waves him off, digging a couple of butterfly bandages out of the first aid kit. “Go check on Dad, would you?”
Sam scoffs.
“Dad can take care of himself.”
“So can I,” Dean counters.
“Can you stitch your own forehead shut?" Sam asks, glaring. “'Cause otherwise you're gonna look like that guy from Monster.”
Dean regards himself in the mirror. Okay, Sam’s probably right on that one, although it’s completely against the big brother code to admit it.
“Fine,” he says, tossing the hodgepodge of gauze and bandages at Sam. “I’ll go check on Dad.”
He gets about a half-dozen steps before Sam steps in front of him.
“Could you stow the stoic man-pain crap?” he says sharply. “What, Dad’s here, so suddenly you’ve gotta be Wolverine?”
Dean rolls his eyes.
“Sam-”
“You know, he doesn’t appreciate that crap any more than I do,” Sam presses. “It endangers his precious mission.”
“God, can you lay off?” Dean snaps, sidestepping him. “We’ve been back together for, what, an hour? Could you at least try not to start shit?”
Sam looks pained.
“Well, I didn’t shoot at him, so believe it or not, this is me trying. Sorry, but I’m still a little upset about the fact that he left my brother to die.”
Dean opens his mouth to protest… something about that. He still hasn’t come up with a solid counterargument to that line of thinking, and anyway, every time he tries, Sam ends up with that look like Dean just punched him in the kidneys.
“And stop deflecting,” Sam adds, grabbing a handful of Dean’s jacket and trying to drag him over to the bed. “You’re acting like a jerk.”
“Well, you’re being a little bitch,” Dean returns, making another move towards the bathroom.
Sam sets his jaw.
“Dad!” he says loudly. “Dean won’t let me patch him up!”
Dean blanches as John swings the bathroom door open, glaring at both of them.
“Dean, let your brother clean up those injuries now,” he barks. “Sam, stop chasing him around the damn room; you’re tracking blood. It looks like a goddamn murder scene in here.”
“Yes, sir,” Dean says.
John shuts the door with a click, and Dean turns to shoot Sam a dirty look.
“Did you just friggin’ tattle on me? What are you, nine?”
Sam tosses Dean a distinctly little brotherish smirk.
“You heard the man,” he says, wiggling the needle at Dean.
Awesome.
Forty-five minutes later, Dean looks like Frankenstein’s sexy cousin, Dad has finally emerged from the bathroom, and Sam’s mood seems to have picked up enough that Dean feels comfortable offering him pain killers instead of Midol. Dean watches Sam swallow the pills before tossing his back along with the fifth of whiskey he’s been nursing since Sam started stitching. He tugs his jacket and shirt off and tosses them across the room, regarding himself in the mirror as he gives Sam's impeccable line of sutures an experimental poke.
“Just so you know, if this shit scars, I’m telling people we fought off a mountain lion.”
“That’s a lot less impressive that what actually happened, isn’t it?” John says, looking faintly amused over the notes he’s scribbling on hotel stationary.
“You didn’t let me finish,” Dean tells him. “There was a school bus full of kids involved. And a chainsaw.”
John looks up at him and smiles for a second before it dies. He gives Dean a once-over, eyebrows furrowing, and then turns to grab something from one of their suitcases. Dean raises an eyebrow, glances over to see what Sammy’s making of that and catches him spitting the pills he’d apparently tongued into the fake palm tree in the corner like a goddamn alpaca.
“What the hell?” Dean mouths at him, glancing nervously at their dad’s back.
“He’s going to try to leave,” Sam says in a whisper. “I’m not going to be stoned into complacency again when he does.”
“Sam, he’s not going to-”
The look that Sam’s giving him is just too close to pitying for Dean to sit here and take it. He stomps briskly into the bathroom, kneels at the toilet, and sticks a couple of fingers down his throat.
It does approximately jack shit.
"Oh, come on!" Dean whines, trying again with absolutely no luck.
Sam shoulders his way into the bathroom, not looking particularly surprised to find Dean with his head shoved in the commode. Dean makes a third attempt and gets nothing but a sore throat and a mouth full of spit. He frowns down at his stupid, traitor fingers.
"That whole 'no gag reflex' thing not so cool now, is it?" Sam asks smugly, squeezing out a precise line of Crest on his toothbrush. "Don't worry. I'll keep an eye on dad. You get some rest."
Dean glares at him as Sam pops the toothbrush in his mouth and starts scrubbing it along his teeth, making even the hushed 'scritch-scritch' of the bristles sound smug and self-satisfied.
Itching to wipe the snotty grin off his little brother's face, Dean tries to think of another way to toss the pills and hits on the answer with a smirk right as Sammy's eyebrow quirks.
Salt.
Dean's eyes dart to the bags at the same time as Sam's, toothbrush drooping in his mouth.
"Don't even-" he starts, only to get cut off by Dean's hip check, which would have been as brilliant as it was graceful if Sam hadn't been endowed with freakish Yeti limbs. As it is, they end up tangled in a vicious, elbow-y wresting match in the doorway before John pounds on the wall.
"Boys! Knock it off,” he barks as Sam sends Dean stumbling against the tub and elbows past him to the sink to spit.
That's just as well anyway, because the tiles in the bathroom are getting cool and way too blurry for Dean to try and half-nelson anyone.
"Finally," Sam sighs, seeing Dean leaning against the bathroom wall like it's the only solid thing in the room. "You know, just once, I wish you'd take it easy after a hunt WITHOUT being stoned off your ass."
"I'm not stoned, you're just blurry," Dean insists to the bending, wavy Sams in front of him.
"Sure, Cheech, whatever you say," Sam agrees from far away, towing Dean out of the bathroom and tipping him onto the bed, and Dean means to resist, really he does, but someone's swapped out their crappy motel beds with the softest and most awesome mountain of pillows on the planet, so really, he's not rolling over. He's prioritizing.
Besides, his face really hurts.
~
"Dean," Sam sighs, poking his brother in the side to no avail. "Move, Dean. You're taking up the whole bed… Dean!"
"Mmmyu're not the boss of me," Dean mumbles into his pillow, flinging and arm out and giving a lazy, insolent wiggle into the mess of hotel sheets.
"Dude, come on," Sam grumbles, mentally kicking himself for not at least getting Dean showered and out of his boots before drugging him to the gills on illicit pain meds. "You've still got your shoes on."
Dean's only response is to clumsily plant a boot in Sam's solar plexus and scrunch his face into the pillows at a more comfortable angle. Really, Sam probably deserves at least a little of this for doping his brother up to get his way, but in Sam's defense, Dean is prone to running himself ragged on the best days, and no matter how macho he played it tonight, he lost a lot of blood on top of scaling a fucking building and getting tossed across a warehouse into a fuck-ton of crates.
And then, on top of all that, their dad had to show up. Sam knows how much it had to take out of Dean to hang back like he did, to let Sam vent even a little bit of the John-centered rage he's pent up for these past eight months before stepping in and pulling them apart.
"You don't move, I'm just gonna have to sleep on top of you," Sam shrugs, unlacing the boot digging into the waistband of his jeans with a few, efficient jerks.
"Take the other bed," John orders absently, pile of hotel stationary notes in front of him rustling as he moves a seemingly arbitrary piece of paper form one stack to the next.
"Then where would you sleep, Dad?" Sam asks archly, snatching Dean's other foot from the tangle of grimy, grit-scattered sheets and making quick work of the laces. "Unless you're planning on taking off in the middle of the night. Again."
Sam drops Dean's boots to the floor as he turns to face his father.
"That's what you were planning to do, wasn't it?" he demands, striding to tower over John at the dinette. "Dump us here, take of as soon as we were out? Disappear for another eight months? Fuck off and screen our calls until-”
"Sammy."
Sam turns to see Dean propping himself up on the bed, bleary-eyed, but determined.
"That's enough," he enunciates, slow but steady.
"But Dean-" Sam protests, flailing an arm angrily at John, still stoic and unmoved at the table.
"He'll wait," Dean interrupts firmly, turning his hazy but focused glare at John. "Right?"
"We'll head back to the truck in the morning, plan from there," John rumbles, capping his pen in a swift, short motion and striding past Sam into the bathroom.
"Bastard," Sam mutters, shucking his hoodie and shoving at Dean's shoulder until he scoots over on the bed with a whine.
"Evil Dragon, be nice," his older brother moans into the pillow, aiming a clumsy kick at Sam's ankle.
"Faker," Sam mutters, flopping into the pillows. "I know what you sound like when you're stoned, Dean. Stop hamming it up and get some sleep."
“Don’t tell me what to do, Ms. Frizzle,” Dean slurs; Sam can see the corner of his mouth quirking up against the pillow. “I don’t want to go on your magic school bus.”
“Shut up, jackass,” Sam says, trying not to grin. “And don’t sleep on your stomach, you’re gonna aggravate your stitches.”
“Yessir,” Dean replies sarcastically, trying to mock-salute and instead slapping himself lightly in the ear.
Sam is so not finding this funny. At all.
To prove the point, he grabs onto Dean’s shoulder and pulls, making his brother flop over onto his back with a beleaguered moan. Dean glares at him blearily before making a move to turn over again.
“Stop that,” Sam grouses, grabbing at Dean again.
“Make me,” Dean says with perfect clarity, because go figure, drugs or no drugs, Dean still has it in him to be a stubborn ass.
And Sam, who can never resist throwing around the fact that he outweighs his brother by a good fifteen pounds now, does just that and pins him down, careful not to put too much pressure on the massive pattern of bruises mottling Dean’s torso.
“Oof,” he brother exhales, warm puff of whiskey-soaked breath against Sam’s chin. He blinks up at Sam, eyes crossing a little at the proximity of their faces. “Hey, get off me.”
“Hey,” Sam says, “don’t sleep on your stitches.”
“Wasn’t gonna,” Dean tells him, ignoring the fact that he clearly was.
Sam slides a little bit off of him, so he’s half laying on the bed, right arm and leg thrown over Dean to keep him where he is. He lets his head droop onto his brother’s shoulder.
It’s been a long day for him, too. It’s not just the fact that he’s nearly as bad off as Dean, and with none of the happy-drugs to numb the pain. It’s also the fact that he’s been riding an intense emotional rollercoaster, running the gamut of hope, anticipation, fear and rage, and now he’s left bone-tired and the only thing he feels about John’s sure attempt to slip out of their grasp again is a dull, angry acceptance. They’ll be having that fight when it happens, but Sam’s not exactly looking forward to it. He’d rather drug himself up and collapse along with Dean, but of course, he can’t. He’s not going to let John Winchester abandon his brother again. This time, Sam’s going to be ready for him.
He sighs, scrubbing his brow across Dean’s shoulder blade.
“What’d you eat for dinner?” Dean asks after a moment, voice a deep rumble against Sam’s ear.
He already knows the answer to that, Sam thinks grumpily. Of course, he’s gonna ask anyway.
“Nothing.”
Dean huffs disapprovingly.
“No lunch either.”
“I had a salad,” Sam defends.
“No,” Dean slurs purposefully, eyes still closed. “I paid for you to have a salad. You ate two bites before you found this case and stopped eating.”
How does he remember this stuff when even Sam can’t?
“Fine,” Sam grumbles. “Then go to sleep, and tomorrow morning we’ll go to whatever grease factory you want, and I’ll let you feed me eggs and bacon until I explode. Happy?”
Dean snorts.
“Be happier if you’d just take care of yourself.”
“Hypocrite,” Sam accuses without any bite.
“Maybe,” Dean allows.
He runs a hand over the arm Sam has splayed across his chest, which Sam realizes belatedly is the one still proudly bearing the scar from his emergency blood transfusion eight months ago. Dean gets his thumb up against it, tracing the raised skin from elbow to wrist. Sam tries to snatch his arm away, but Dean holds him tight by the wrist, opening one eye to fix Sam with a bleary look.
This is why Sam always wears long sleeves these days, throws hoodies on top of his tees even on the warmest days. It’s not that he’s ashamed of the scar. In fact, on the rare occasions that he actually remembers it’s there, he’s kind of perversely proud of it. But after he’d got the bandages off, he’d figured out pretty quick that letting Dean catch a glimpse of it leaves him maudlin and strange for hours - sometimes even days - afterwards. Sam guesses he can’t blame Dean for that. It took months of watching Dean parade around in his boxers before Sam stopped getting hit with that sucker punch of paralyzing guilt every time he saw the scars from the vampire bites that still mar his brother’s skin.
But whether Dean realizes it or not, he’s pretty damn extreme around it, and Sam’s learned to be careful. He doesn’t like that Dean can’t seem to see it like Sam does, as a symbol of how much Sam would do for him, and not as a reminder of some imaginary screw-up. But until Dean’s guilt stops being so fresh (or maybe until he magically transforms into a different person, Sam thinks grimly), it’s better to keep it covered up whenever possible.
The thing is, Sam forgets. He’s got dozens of scars, and though most of them are admittedly less obvious, at the end of the day, a scar is a scar. He still pushes up his sleeves when Dean’s not around, still leaves his hoodies in the car if it’s too hot. He’s gotten his share of stares, sure, a handful of comments; nothing bad. There was a diner parking lot in Fayetteville where a teenager had called it ‘awesome’ and asked him if it was from a skateboard accident (‘No, biking,’ Sam had told him). He’d had an old man stop him in the drug store to compare their artery removal scars and ask whether or not Sam found the local hospital to be as incompetent as he had. In a rusty, dust-encrusted gas station in rural Mississippi, he’d given the cashier a fifty and gotten a wide-eyed stare and a crumpled old pamphlet on suicide prevention along with his change.
It didn’t bother him, just like it didn’t bother him when, two or three months into his and Dean’s little monster-killing road trip, he’d unthinkingly shoved his shirtsleeves up to his elbows in a bar and gotten a long, appraising look from the bottle-blonde Dean had been plying with booze for the last half hour.
“It must be so hard with your brother,” he’d heard her simper once Sam excused himself to go to the restroom. “You know, my cousin tried to kill herself once. It can it be such a burden.”
And the next the Sam knew, he was frantically shoving his sleeves down while Dean stood up abruptly, gathered all of their stuff up under one arm and manhandled Sam right out of the bar with the other.
They’d driven back to the motel in uncomfortable silence, and once they’d gotten back, Dean had cracked open his own alcohol stash.
“Rather stay in tonight anyway,” he’d said, pouring Sam a glass. “S’not really your scene in the first place, right?”
Sam had nursed his own drink, watching Dean put away three of his own, totally not understanding why Dean was as upset as he obviously was.
“So,” Sam finally says awkwardly. “Guess you decided not to hook up with Alicia, then.”
“Her name was Amber,” Dean corrects, despite the fact that Sam knows for a fact it wasn’t. “And no way. Not happening.”
He tipped his drink back.
“Dumb bitch,” Dean slurred. “What does she know?”
“It was just a mistake,” Sam told him, despite the fact that he didn’t really enjoy the idea of white knighting one of Dean’s hook-ups. “I don’t think she was trying to insult me or anything. I mean, depression’s a legitimate illness. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
Dean uncapped a beer and took a swig before looking Sam over for a long moment.
“You ever felt like that, Sammy?”
“What, depressed? Hasn’t everyone?” Sam deflected, reaching over to grab his own glass and take a shallow gulp.
Dean paused, drink halfway to his mouth, giving Sam an indecipherable look.
“But you wouldn’t ever do that,” Dean said. “I mean, kill yourself. Right?”
Sam shrugged. He was pretty sure the answer that Dean was looking for wasn’t ‘Only for you.’
“Would you?” he asked, twirling his glass to watch the ice click together.
Dean shrugged.
Sam really didn’t want to think about that that meant.
“I worry,” Dean says now, plain and simple, hand still trapping Sam’s wrist, fingernail scratching against the edge of the scar tissue.
“I know,” says Sam baldy. “Me, too.”
“C’n take care of myself,” Dean tells him definitively, eyelid twitching a little from the effort of keeping it open. “So quit it.”
“You first,” Sam whispers, smiling a little.
Yeah, right. The day Dean stops clucking over him like a butch, leather-clad mother bear will be the day Sam knows they’ve picked up another shifter.
“I’m tired,” he says, cheating shamelessly. “Can we sleep now, please?”
“Yeah,” Dean exhales. “Yes, finally, thank you.”
Sam tries not to laugh.
“Dun punch Dad while ‘m ‘sleep,” Dean murmurs, both eyes finally sliding shut.
“I’ll do my best,” Sam tells him, which sounds a lot more like a promise than it actually is.
He shuffles down on the bed, tugging the scratchy, seashell-emblazoned comforter up over them. He reaches over his brother and clicks off the lamps between the beds. He doesn’t bother with the one standing beside the desk John’s been working at, knowing their father’s just going to turn it back on once he finally emerges from the bathroom. He flops down heavily, throwing his arm back over Dean’s chest, one leg finding its way between his brother’s legs to hook his ankle around Dean’s own.
“Dun hafta pin me, Sammy,” Dean mumbles. “M’not goin’ anywhere.”
“Neither am I,” Sam says pointedly, flexing his wrist where Dean has - apparently unconsciously - resumed his death grip.
Dean grunts and let him go, but Sam stays where he is. This feels nice. Comforting, like when he was younger and they used to share space like it was air, back when he could snuggle up against Dean whenever he wanted without anyone accusing him of being girly or acting like a baby. His first instinct as a little kid had always been to plaster himself up against his big brother every time he was upset. He hates to admit it, but he guesses it kind of still is; he’d just learned how to hold himself back once John and, eventually, Dean started telling him to quit it. Some part of Sam has always wondered if he’d feel this same yearning for comfort from Dean if he’d grown up having a mom giving him baths and fixing his scrapes and making his lunches instead of his brother. He guesses he’ll never know.
Anyway, girly or not, Sam’s not moving until Dean physically makes him, and his brother’s definitely not up to that task right now if the snores that are starting to thunder through his chest are any indicator. Sam rests his head against Dean’s shoulder, wincing as he puts pressure on his own stitches. But the pain will keep him awake and ready, keep him from slipping too deeply into the sleep his body is so desperately craving. He’s got John’s bed and the door in his eye line. He’ll be ready for it, when it comes.
He shifts closer into the warmth of Dean’s body, lets his eyes drift closed, and waits.
Chapter 3