SPN FIC - Sammy's Most Excellent California Adventure (Part 1 of 2)
Here it is, gang: my contribution to the summer_sam_love fic exchange, in answer to the following prompt from
princess_schez : "While in southern California on a hunt, little Sammy finds out that SoCal is the home of one Mickey Mouse - his favorite cartoon character. John promises to take the boys to Disneyland if Sammy behaves while in Dean's watch."
I tried writing the story solely from Wee!Sammy's POV, but Big!Sam kept tapping me on the shoulder, and what we ended up with is two stories in one: Sam and Dean, post-Heart; and Sammy, Dean, and John, 20 years earlier, January 1987.
To my surprise and delight, the very talented elliejane volunteered to do art for the story. Many, many kudos to her for coming up with all the illos you see here, which make the story so much more fun.
Now ... on with the fic!
And that was a memory Sam had trouble accepting as real: the three of them at the Magic Kingdom, eating hot dogs and ice cream, visiting the Haunted Mansion, posing for pictures with Disney characters that they never bothered to pick up. The three of them, having fun.
CHARACTERS: John, Sam (age 3 and 23), and Dean (age 8 and 28)
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language
SPOILERS: If you've seen Heart, you're good to go
LENGTH: 10,000 words
SAMMY'S MOST EXCELLENT CALIFORNIA ADVENTURE
By Carol Davis
"Seriously, man," Sam said as he dropped his duffel on the floor. "How do you have any idea at all that this is the same place? It's been twenty years. And there's, what, eight million motels in this part of Orange County?"
Over his shoulder, Dean gave his brother an offended look that would have done an eighty-year-old woman proud. "Who do you think navigated for Dad before you decided you were map king of the known universe? Besides, I remember this place like it was laser-etched on my brain. It's the same motel. Trust me."
And, for Dean, that was apparently enough to settle the question, because he face-planted himself on the bed, grunted once, and in pure Dean fashion seemed to drop straight from awake to asleep without passing Go or collecting the two hundred bucks. A minute later he started snoring, a wet, rattling sound that was both irritating and enormously comforting. Familiar. A sign that all was right with the world.
Their world, at least.
Less than a week ago, up in San Francisco, Sam had pulled a trigger and ended the life of a woman who'd begged him to give her that peace. Dean had offered to do it for him - had offered, as he'd done a thousand other times, to bear the load in place of Sam - but Sam had turned him down. Had accepted the burden, and everything that went with it (the feel of his finger tightening on the trigger, the sound of the gunshot, the image of Madison crumpling to the floor) as his own. Entirely his own.
Which wasn't to say that Dean had given up trying to make things right, as best he could. He'd attempted to distract Sam with that old-school haunting on the movie set - and that had worked pretty well, not because of the job, but because watching Dean step gleefully into life as a P.A., complete with headphones and on-set jargon and mini cheesesteak sandwiches, had been so…
So…
Fun.
Yeah. It'd been fun.
When the job was over Sam had figured they'd hit the road, head back east. Maybe check in with Bobby, or Ellen, and find something else that needed doing. With luck, he'd thought, the new job would take them out of California, take them far enough away that he could try to put aside the idea that California was nothing more than an entire state full of pain. He'd even put up with clowns, he thought, if it would get him out of California. But instead of calling anyone, instead of pointing the Impala toward the rising sun, Dean had brought them here: to a "family style" motel in Buena Park, a place he - in a tone that made him sound like the guy who hosted Masterpiece Theatre - announced they had once stayed at with Dad.
The place they'd stayed at the week Dad took them to Disneyland.
And that was a memory Sam had trouble accepting as real: the three of them at the Magic Kingdom, eating hot dogs and ice cream, visiting the Haunted Mansion, posing for pictures with Disney characters that they never bothered to pick up.
The three of them, having fun.
"Good times, Sammy," Dean had chuckled. "Pretty lame-ass, yeah, but -"
The two of them, and Dad. Laughing. Being a family.
With a small sigh Sam sat down at the end of the other bed and took a long look around at the room Dean had checked them into with an idiotic amount of glee.
Could it really be the same place?
Really?
If you came right down to it, whether it was the same motel or not made no difference. It was a motel in Orange County, and Dean could have picked it out at random with a pretty solid assurance that Sam would have no memory of it whatsoever - because back then, when they'd come here with Dad, Sam had been not quite four years old. He could have been pretty safe in assuming that if Sam remembered anything from back then, it was probably more a tapestry of things Dean had told him over the years than an actual memory.
Dean could have pulled this place out of a hat.
If anything, it was a step up from a lot of the places they'd stayed in. A little bit cleaner, a little bit less creepy. Of course that didn't mean it was in any way classy - it dated back to the Fifties, possibly the early Sixties, and didn't seem to have been redecorated since its grand opening. Gold shag carpet dulled with age, swag lamps, gilded wallpaper on the wall behind the heads of the beds, pale golden-yellow paint elsewhere. A swaybacked couch upholstered in gold and green brocade. From where he was sitting Sam could see into the tiny kitchen with its chrome table and two chairs and its avocado green appliances. When he got up and peered into the bathroom he found matching green fixtures (tub, sink, toilet) and more gilded wallpaper.
Through the big window that flanked the outside door he could see the big neon sign.
Yes, he thought.
Dean's assumptions aside, when Sam looked out that window, he remembered.
~~~~~~~~~~
"Dad," Sammy chirped. "Hey, Dad."
He could see everything from the big window: the parking lot with all the shiny cars, the newspaper machine, the gas station next door, the office where the nice lady had given them the key to the room and told Dad about a good place to eat supper. Their room was way down at the end of the row, so he couldn't see the swimming pool, but the lady had said there was one.
"Dad?"
Behind him, Dad and Dean were all stretched out on the two big beds. Dad had his arm over his eyes like he did sometimes when he was tired.
"Dad, what's this place?"
He liked to know the names of where they went. Some of the names were funny, and sometimes Dad told him they came from things that had happened a long time ago, or a word in another language. The sign out front said MOTEL - Dean had taught him to know that word, but he couldn't read the other ones. Oh, except for HBO. That meant movies.
"California," Dean said in a crabby voice. "We told you that." Then he sneezed, because he had a cold.
Out in the parking lot there were people in shorts. And t-shirts. And flip-flops. There was one man in a bathing suit. He had a beach towel with him, so maybe where he was walking was where the pool was.
"How come it's not cold out?" Sammy asked. "It was cold in the other place. It's winter time, you said."
It had even snowed a little in that other place, up in the mountains. That You-tah place. And it was only just Christmas a little while ago. Remembering that made Sammy look at the sneakers Santa had brought him. He had to turn his head to do it, because he was kneeling on the chair, not standing. He had stood on a chair one time to look out the window but the chair had wheels and he had banged his head on the window. That had hurt bad.
"How come?" he asked.
Dad sighed. That was another thing that meant he was tired. "Some places are warm in the winter, son."
"Why?"
"Because they are," Dean said, and sneezed again.
"But -"
"Sam." Dad sighed a bigger sigh and sat up on the bed. "Look, son. I need you to do me a favor. Can you sit and look at your comics? Can you be quiet and let me sleep for a little while? Can you do that?"
He had a serious face. When he got up off the bed he smiled, but it wasn't a happy smile. Sammy watched as he picked up some stuff: some shiny, folded papers the lady in the office had given him, and some magazines that were laying by the TV. "Here, you look at these. Look at the pictures. Be a good boy and be quiet for a while, okay?"
"Are you tired out, Dad?"
"Yeah, Sammy. I'm pretty tired out." Dad laid all the papers and books on the table, then reached over and ruffled Sammy's hair. Sammy smiled at him and gave him what Pastor Jim called his "angel" smile. It made Dad chuckle a little.
And Dean sneezed again.
This California place didn't look too fun, Sammy thought as he looked at the books and papers while Dad snored and Dean snuffled and coughed and sneezed. There were lots of pictures of stores and people eating in restaurants or wearing fancy clothes. A few pictures showed rides - roller coasters and that kind of stuff - but he was too little to go on anything but merry-go-rounds and even then Dad or Dean had to hold on to him. Dean would like the rides, for sure, but he couldn't go on them by himself and if Dad went with him, there was no one left to watch Sammy. So rides were just a bad idea all around.
Some of the pictures showed the ocean. Dad might let them go there, because they had gone to the ocean three times before. They found seashells and an old bottle and a dead jellyfish and one time, Dean got so sunburned he puked.
That had been a pretty good day.
Dean was sleeping now, kind of curled up in a ball. He had had the cold since before they left the You-tah place and he'd used up two whole boxes of Kleenex on the way here. When he coughed he sounded like the seals on TV but when Sammy told him that, Dean told him to shut up. Dean wasn't a good patient, according to Pastor Jim. Being sick made him crabby and hard to get along with.
Frowning, Sammy climbed down from the chair and went into the bathroom to see if there was Kleenex, because some motels had Kleenex and some didn't. This one did but the box was built inside the thing where the sink was, so you could pull out some Kleenex but not the whole box. After some thought Sammy pulled out six (he could count all the way to ten, but six was enough) and laid them on the bed close to Dean's hand. If Dean used up the whole box, he figured, they could call the lady in the office and ask her to bring more. He could even call the lady himself, because Dad had taught him how to use his polite voice and call up and ask for stuff, like more towels or toilet paper. He knew exactly how to dial "O" on the phone and get what they needed, just like Dad and Dean, because he wasn't a baby any more, he was four whole years old and he could help out when stuff needed to get done. Using the phone would be making noise, though, and might wake up Dad or Dean, so instead of calling anybody he walked quietly back to his chair.
What happened next was almost like magic.
When he climbed back up onto his chair and turned the next page of his magazine, he found a picture of Mickey Mouse smiling right at him.
Mickey seemed to be saying That was a nice thing you did. You're a good boy, Sammy.
He was a good boy. Dad said so, and so did Pastor Jim and Uncle Bobby. This morning, so did the lady in the restaurant where they had their breakfast. He was kind of used to hearing that he was a good boy.
But right now Mickey Mouse was saying he was.
That was awesome.
He sat for a long time looking at the picture. There were other guys in it with Mickey - Goofy and Donald, and Tinkerbell was up at the top, flying over a castle and scattering fairy dust. Goofy and Donald were pointing and waving like they were saying, Come on over.
But…come where?
The words on the picture didn't say HBO or MOTEL or FOOD or GAS. They didn't say SAM or DEAN or JOHN. There were lots of words, some big and some little, but even though he looked at them for a long time he couldn't find any that told him where the castle place was. Which made him kind of mad, so he looked some more, but it was no use.
Then he looked at Dad and Dean, looked hard at them. If he looked at them hard enough, for sure they'd wake up and he could ask them where the place was. But they didn't. They just went on sleeping.
The lady in the office could tell him, maybe, but if he called her on the phone he couldn't show her the picture. And if he went out of the room with the magazine, without Dad or Dean, he'd get his hide tanned. That had happened one time and Sammy could almost still feel it. Dad had been really mad, even though Pastor Jim said no, he wasn't mad, he was scared. Why Dad would be scared of Sammy going to the office didn't make any sense. It wasn't like there was anything bad in there. Just chairs and those racks of papers and a coffee thing and a box of donuts and the nice lady with the white hair. Besides, Dean went to the office all the time.
But making Dad mad was a mean thing to do, and waking him up when he said he was all tired out wasn't much better. So Sammy sat in his chair studying the picture of Mickey and wishing Mickey would just start talking like he did sometimes on TV and wishing he would get big so he could read all the words all by himself, without anybody's help at all, until finally finally FINALLY Dad woke up. He went in and used the bathroom and when he came back out he looked okay, not crabby or anything.
"Dad?" Sammy asked him then, pointing to his magazine. "What's this place?"
Dad took a look and ruffled Sammy's hair again. "That's Disneyland, kiddo."
Disneyland. Maybe that was one of the big words, the ones with lots of letters. Sammy traced some of them with his finger but couldn't figure out which word it might be. "Does Mickey Mouse live there?"
"Yep."
"He does?"
"So I've heard. Never been there myself."
Disneyland. That seemed like it might be a whole place, like a state or a country or something. A big place, not little like a motel or a restaurant or Pastor Jim's church. It was a whole land. Which was a huge, amazing thing. "Can we go there?" Sammy squeaked.
"It's a ways, son. And I have some work to do."
"A big ways?"
Mickey was still smiling at him. And waving. He was looking right at him. Come on over, it seemed like he was saying.
A long time ago, when Sammy was real, real little, Santa brought him a pair of soft pajamas. They were the softest pajamas in the whole world, and they were the best thing to put on after a bath because they made him feel sleepy and safe and warm. All over them, on the tops and the bottoms, were lots and lots of Mickey Mouse faces. He liked looking down and seeing Mickey on his arms and legs and his belly and all the way around onto his back - he could look in the mirror and see Mickey on his back and his butt and it made him laugh. After that, people gave him more Mickey stuff: a cup, and a bank to put pennies in, and a shirt, and some comics. No matter what the thing was, Mickey always looked happy. He wasn't like Dad or Dean or Uncle Bobby or Pastor Jim - he never looked sad or mad or tired or hurt or crabby.
Mickey was really cool that way.
Dad sat down on the end of the bed and rubbed his chin with his hand. He looked over at Dean a couple of times, but what he was thinking, Sammy couldn't figure out. Finally he said, "No, not a big ways."
"Then could we go there?"
Sammy made his very best face. The one that meant he wasn't going to whine or be bad or keep asking the question until Dad got mad. The ladies at Pastor Jim's church liked that face. It made them smile at him and give him candy.
Dad didn't say anything for a while. He looked over at Dean, who was still asleep, and at the pile of Kleenex Sammy had left on the bed. He rubbed his chin with his hand and took a big deep breath and he seemed to be thinking a lot of really serious thoughts.
Finally, he said, "I think we could."
That was so awesome that Sammy scrambled down off his chair and climbed up on the bed next to Dad and gave him a big huge hug. He was still hugging when Dad said, "We can do it, if you do something for me. I have to go out for a while and see somebody. If you're a good boy for Dean until I come back, we can go."
"I will!" Sammy squealed.
"I'm gonna get a full report when I get back."
"Gonna be good," he promised. "Hundred percent."
"We'll see," Dad said.
~~~~~~~~~~
Sam left Dean sleeping noisily and walked across the parking lot to the office. Of course there was a rack of brochures, just inside the door; the worst roach-infested ratholes he'd ever set foot in had had a rack of tourist brochures. Why that was, he'd never bothered to figure out. Maybe they thought people needed something to read that didn't call for too much concentration - or sobriety. Maybe there was payment involved. Who the hell knew. With a nod at the pimple-speckled kid behind the desk Sam crouched down in front of the black metal rack and scanned the rows of bright-colored pamphlets, looking at them from a four-year-old's height.
Medieval Times. Ripley's Believe It Or Not. The wax museum. The Orange County Zoo. Mission San Juan Capistrano.
"Help you with something?" the kid asked.
"Just looking," Sam told him.
The Discovery Science Center. Knott's Berry Farm. Boomer's Kiddie Playland. Dana Point Ocean Institute. Whale watching. Miniature golf. Hollywood. Universal Studios.
And Disneyland.
When he saw Mickey Mouse beaming at him from one of the brochures, he lifted it out of the rack.
"Takin' the kids?" the clerk asked.
"Don't have any," Sam replied without turning.
"Girlfriend?"
Something tightened in Sam's gut. Don't have one of those, either, he thought but didn't say. He shrugged, dismissively enough to make the kid shut up, he hoped, and knelt there on the office's mottled-gray, water-stained indoor-outdoor carpet, gaze fixed on the eternally smiling face of Mickey Mouse.
Disneyland had changed, of course - new attractions at the original park, and they'd added a whole new one, California Adventure - but the concept hadn't.
The Magic Kingdom.
The happiest place on earth.
And all he'd had to do to get there was be a good boy. Millions of parents had probably extracted the same promise from their kids that Dad had secured from him: be good. Behave. Some of the kids had actually followed though on their promise, and some hadn't, he supposed. He'd seen plenty of little-kid meltdowns in restaurants and supermarkets and department stores over the years; they probably happened every day at Disneyland, particularly if too much sun, too many snacks, and too much of being bumped into by crowds of strangers were stirred into the mix. The place was huge, after all.
For a little kid it seemed like a whole world.
The happiest place on earth.
~~~~~~~~~~
How he was supposed to be a good boy for Dean when Dean wouldn't even stay awake for more than a few minutes, Sammy wasn't sure. He had offered to bring Dean some juice out of the fridge, or some crackers, but Dean had told him to clam up and leave him alone. Then he offered to find a good show on TV for Dean to watch but Dean said he didn't want to watch TV, not even if Back to the Future was on HBO.
"I can't make you soup," Sammy told him. "I'm not s'posed to use the stove."
"I don't want soup. Just leave me alone."
"Can I watch TV?"
"I don't care what you do."
Dean sneezed again, a big one that sounded like he had sneezed out half his brains. He groped around for the Kleenexes and used some of them to wipe off his nose, then blew his nose hard and dropped the dirty Kleenexes on the floor.
"What?" he complained when Sammy frowned at him.
"That's gross."
"What're you, the clean police?"
Still frowning, Sammy carried the big wastebasket out of the kitchen and set it down alongside Dean's bed.
"You're a pain in my butt, you know it?" Dean said, and sneezed again.
Sammy was watching cartoons on TV with the sound off (that was another word he knew, MUTE) when someone knocked at the door. A peek out the window told him who was there: a lady with a push-cart of towels and toilet paper and little bottles of stuff for the bathroom.
They never let maids into the room. They didn't need somebody to make their beds and clean up after them, Dad said, but he usually would open the door and let the maid give him towels and some of that other stuff. He let Dean do it too, as long as Dean was sure it was the maid and not somebody else, like a murderer or something.
They might need more towels, he thought. There were only two big ones in the bathroom. When Dad came back, it might be late at night and he might need extra towels to take a shower. If Dean wanted to take a shower too, there definitely wouldn't be enough.
When he opened the door the lady said, "Hi there!"
"Hi," he told her. "We don't need nobody cleaning up."
Up close, she really didn't look like a lady. She looked more like a high school kid. "Okay, whatever," she said, and she didn't seem upset about it at all. "You need anything? Towels? More soap?"
She was looking past him at Dean, all huddled up on the bed. "He's sick," Sammy said.
"Yeah? What with?"
"He gots a cold."
"Well, that sucks. Poor guy."
"If he gets all better, we can go see Mickey."
She gave Sammy a big, big smile. When she did that he could see the braces on her teeth. "You know what?" she said, and reached down into the back side of her cart. "You give him these. They're way better than that cheap stuff we put in the rooms."
It was a box of Kleenex.
"Ultra soft," she said. "If he's blowin' his nose a lot, they won't take all the skin off. How old is he, anyway?"
"Eight."
"Poor guy. Tell him, Pirates of the Caribbean. It rocks."
"What's that?" Sammy frowned.
"You don't know Pirates of the Caribbean? Oh, little man. You gotta go on Pirates of the Caribbean."
Sammy was skeptical. "Can I go on it if I'm four?"
"You bet. As long as a grownup goes with you. You ride in this thing, see, kind of like a boat but it's on tracks. You go ZOOM down this ramp and then you're underground and there are pirates and things that move and sing and all that. It's exceptionally cool." Grinning so all her braces showed, she patted the top of Sammy's head, then stepped away from the door and gave her cart a push. "You'll love it."
"Towels," Sammy blurted out.
She gave him a whole huge pile.
~~~~~~~~~~
They hadn't brought groceries with them - never did, really; if they kept anything in a kitchenette these days it was leftover pizza and a couple sixes of beer. Back then, though, they'd almost always had a box of food in the car that was dutifully carried from motel room to fleabag apartment to motel room to mobile home to motel room and put away in whatever passed for a kitchen. Same shit all the time, Sam thought as he pushed open the office door and headed back across the parking lot. Spaghetti-Os, soup, a couple boxes of cereal, peanut butter, saltine crackers. Milk and bread and juice Dad bought fresh, or Dean did.
There was a small supermarket a couple of doors down from the motel that they'd driven past on the way in. After checking the cash in his wallet Sam headed that way and came back twenty minutes later toting his purchases in white plastic bags. Dean was still asleep, sprawled spread-eagled, face down on the bed, and Sam shook his head indulgently as he walked quietly past his brother into the kitchen.
Something came to mind as he unpacked the bags, lining the groceries up neatly on the countertop: an image of Dad crouched in front of the tiny gas stove, trying to light the oven with a rolled-up newspaper he'd turned into a torch.
Nothing but first class all the way, Sam thought, but it wasn't a criticism.
It was…
I miss you, he thought.
This had to be a different stove. It was nowhere near new, but surely it couldn't be the same stove that had been outdated and battered and almost nonfunctional twenty years ago. Curious for a reason he couldn't name, Sam opened the oven door, crouched down and peered inside. Hell, maybe it was the same stove. If this was the same motel, and the same room - and it made him roll his eyes to think Dean had gone to the trouble of getting them the same damned room - then maybe this stove had been sitting here since well before January of 1987.
Slowly, he rose to his feet and stepped away from the thing, stopping only when he bumped into the wobbly chrome table.
He had to stop then and scrub tears off his face with the heel of his hand.
Damn you, I miss you.
He had no idea what Dad might have needed to use the oven for. To bake a turkey? The thought of that produced a hiccup of wry laughter. More than likely, he'd been trying to dry something out.
The window over the sink was open a little, and a breeze pushed its way in, seasoned with the smell of asphalt, car exhaust, overheated garbage. Something sweet: dryer sheets, maybe. With it, too, came the sound of children laughing.
Had they laughed here? He and Dean and Dad?
Had they laughed, ever?
He put his purchases away one item at a time, as if he and Dean had decided to live here, in southern California, a few miles from the happiest place on earth.
~~~~~~~~~~
There was a playground out in back of the motel, some swings and a slide and a climbing rope with knots in it. Sammy could see it after he had climbed on a kitchen chair and sat on the counter next to the sink.
Some kids were out there playing. One of them, a boy a little bigger than Sammy, was wearing a red Mickey t-shirt. "I gots one of those," Sammy wanted to yell out to him, but it wasn't true - his shirt had gotten messed up a long time ago, and Dad had thrown it out. He was going to use it as a rag for when he worked on the car, but Sammy had cried, so Dad had thrown the shirt away.
Maybe Dad would buy him another one.
The kids were having a great time swinging and climbing and sliding. They were only right there, right out in back of the room. If he asked Dean about it, asked him, "Can I go out there?", maybe Dean would say, "I don't care what you do."
But he was supposed to be a good boy.
After a while he climbed down off the counter and carefully poured himself a cup of juice. It wasn't his favorite kind and it tasted a little funny, but Dad hadn't bought new milk yet, or soda, so the only other thing to drink was water.
Juice was better than water, by a mile.
When he went back into the other room Dean had his hand pushed up against his face like he was sucking his thumb. He wasn't, but it looked kind of funny anyway. He'd gotten all sweaty, and his hair was wet and stuck to his face.
Looks like crap on toast, Uncle Bobby liked to say sometimes. That was pretty gross, and thinking of it made Sammy hope Uncle Bobby had never actually seen that, crap on a piece of toast. Why somebody would do that - put it on a piece of toast - Sammy had no idea. But people did some pretty weird stuff sometimes. He'd seen some of it on TV.
Dean made a funny noise then, and tried to roll over, which made him make an even weirder noise, like moving hurt him. He hadn't gotten into the bed, under the covers - he said it was daytime and he wasn't going to bed, he was just going to lay down. But when he fell asleep again it looked like he should have put his pajamas on and pulled up the covers so he could sleep for real, maybe right up until tomorrow. Just laying on top of the bed like that didn't look like it would help him get better, and he'd need to feel better so they could go see Mickey. Whatever that land was where Mickey lived, if there were grownups in charge they might not let sick kids come in. And Dad wouldn't want to leave Dean here all by himself if he was sick.
There was medicine for when you had a cold; Sammy had seen it on TV, but there wasn't any of it in the duffel where Dad kept all the first aid stuff. He wasn't allowed to touch anything in the first aid kit anyway, not without Dad or Dean helping him and telling him which bottle of pills or what other thing they wanted.
He knew the word for cold: COLD. None of the packages in the first aid kit said that word. Dad had let him re-arrange the things in the kit enough times that he knew that for sure.
That was dumb, he thought. They should get some of that medicine. On TV it made people feel better and start smiling.
All Dean had been doing all day was sneeze out snot.
He could do one thing, he realized: he could put some covers over Dean to keep him warm. That was a good plan. Smiling happily, he pulled the bedspread on Dad's bed down off the pillows and dragged it toward the bottom of the bed. The stupid thing weighed about sixty tons, though, and when he pulled it off the bed onto the floor he started to think he'd never be able to get it up onto Dean's bed without standing on the bed to pull, and that would wake Dean up. The blanket was a better choice, and weighed a lot less. He did have to crawl up onto Dean's bed to lay it in place, but he did that slowly and carefully and Dean didn't wake up.
Then Dean did wake up, and sneezed again.
He sounded bad.
"Dean?" he said.
"I told you, I don't want nothin'," Dean mumbled, kind of whiny, but it was different from the way he'd been whiny before. He sounded like he felt really puke-nasty sick, like maybe he was going to cry. The last time Sammy had felt like that, Dad had held him in his lap all night long, rocking him and rubbing his back and telling him he was going to be okay. Dean was way bigger than Sammy, so there was no way Sammy could hold Dean on his lap and rock him, but there was something else Dad had done that Sammy could do.
There were lots of washcloths in the bathroom. Sammy took two of them off the pile and, standing on his tiptoes, wet them at the sink with water that was just a little bit cool, then wrung them out carefully so they wouldn't drip. Then he crawled up onto the bed, settled himself cross-legged close to Dean, and began to wipe Dean's hot, sweaty face with one of the cloths. For a minute he thought Dean was going to tell him to get lost, but all Dean did was close his eyes.
"Are you real sick?" he whispered to Dean.
Dean mumbled something back. Sammy wasn't a hundred percent sure, but it sounded like he said Want Mom.
That was a big problem.
"Dad's coming back soon," he said, hoping that would be good enough to cheer Dean up a little, but all Dean did was shove his face into a pillow and go back to sleep.
On to Part 2...