SPN FIC - 48 HRS
It's New Year's Day, 2001, and Sam's got the flu. Good thing he's got a brother who's a magician -- and who's there to catch him before he faceplants.
CHARACTERS: Dean and Sam
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2232 words
48 HRS
By Carol Davis
"Dude," Dean said. "That's - wow. How much did you drink?"
Drink?
Oh… yeah.
Last night. New Year's Eve, in a town that offered one bar, a bowling alley (closed four nights a week) and a video rental store by way of entertainment. Sam and Dean had discovered early on that for most of the locals, a "real good evening" meant (a) staying home to get hammered, (b) going to Lucky Bob's to get hammered, or (c) driving down middle of the main road while hammered, preferably at the wheel of a pickup, with as many other locals as possible loaded into the bed of the truck.
Sam couldn't recall having done any of that. At least, not last night.
Which left the question: what had he done last night?
"Seriously, dude," Dean persisted. "You look like bottled crap. You sneak off somewhere while I wasn't looking? 'Cause I only remember you drinking like, what, two beers? I didn't have eyes on you the whole time, but -"
"Pfffnnnuuhhh," Sam muttered.
Lucky Bob's. That was it. Dean had hauled the two of them over there, insisting that there was no way they'd be spending New Year's alone in a motel room with shitty cable. Bad enough he'd been stuck doing that on the damn Millennium, he'd announced, and had ended up drunk-dialing everybody on his contact list for something to do.
"Goin' backabed," Sam said.
Two beers sounded right, and something told him he hadn't finished the second one. He hadn't felt well, all of a sudden - had felt like the room was closing in on him. Too much noise, too many people jammed in cheek-to-jowl.
Too freakin' warm.
He had a fuzzy memory of approaching Dean, asking that they go back to the motel, and being rebuffed.
So he'd walked back.
Was that right? He'd walked.
Noise and smells and beer, music banging at his skull, loud loopy girls sitting down alongside him uninvited. Dean laughing and whooping and singing along with whatever was playing on the juke, or the TV.
Really, Sam had felt kind of iffy all week, ever since Christmas. Not much of an appetite, a little wobbly, more in need of sleep than he usually was.
Then he remembered: the flu had been going around school since mid-December. Lots of kids and a few teachers absent. It was a tougher bug than usual, one that had laid a lot of people low for a week or more. He'd avoided it until now - or had told himself he had, caving to Dean's insistence that Winchester men didn't waste time being sick, particularly not during Sam's Christmas break, with Dad out of town, and the two of them free to do any damn thing they pleased.
In a town where people amused themselves by driving up and down the middle of the road for hours at a time.
Shivering, Sam shuffled back across the motel room, crawled into bed inches at a time, then struggled to pull the covers up to his ears.
"Sam?" Dean said.
"Lea' me 'lone."
"Are you sick? I mean - I'm hung over up to my freakin' eyeballs. But you, man, you look like hell."
"Bite me," Sam muttered.
~~~~~~~~~~
Coughing woke him up. Not just a tickle, either; this was a full-on cough or you will EXPLODE kind of a thing that seized his body and rattled him like a handful of cutlery being tossed around inside a clothes dryer. He struggled to sit but couldn't, couldn't even pull in a full breath before the next spasm hit.
Then Dean was there, pulling the covers loose and hoisting Sam upright.
Sam tried to bat him away, just on general principle, but Dean held on, and from somewhere produced a cup of water.
Sam got two sips down before the coughing went Defcon One.
"Jesus," Dean said.
He tried patting Sam on the back. Tried rubbing Sam's back, all of it with Sam trying to yank himself free. He produced a fresh cup of water that Sam didn't even attempt to drink. By the time the coughing finally eased up, Sam was drenched with sweat, hair stuck to his skull, t-shirt, shorts and sweatpants clinging to him like they were pasted on - and deep in his chest, he could feel the slow but steady build-up of another round of coughing.
That went on for what was certainly several hours.
He got a bit of rest, shuddering underneath the covers, interrupted over and over by coughing, dry and racking, none of it productive.
"Here," Dean said.
He had a spoon and a small bottle. Not gonna work, Sam thought muzzily; the over-the-counter stuff never really did. Not for something like this. But Dean sat down on the edge of the bed anyway, poured a spoonful and maneuvered it toward Sam's mouth. "Don't jerk," he said firmly. "Gotta get this down your gullet, because you're driving me outta my mind. Hung over, dude. Remember? Every time you cough, it's like a friggin' machine gun going off next to my head."
"N' gonna work," Sam told him.
"Oh yeah it is. It's the good stuff. Don't even ask me about the gyrations I had to go through to get this. You spill it and I'm gonna come upside your head with a bat."
Good stuff.
In a town with no drugstore.
Had Dean even been gone?
The syrup had an odd honey-cherry taste to it. So… what? Home-brewed?
By whom? And where?
"You good?" Dean said. "Really, man. Swallow that down. You can't have any more for four hours."
"Whass -"
"Sleep. Because if you don't quiet down, I'm gonna either shoot you, or myself."
~~~~~~~~~~
He woke the next time to the soft sound and flicker of the TV and the buzz of Dean snoring in the other bed. The lack of light seeping in around the room's cheap drapes told him it was after dark, but that could mean any time after about 4:30 in the afternoon.
Hungry.
That was a good sign, he supposed, though he felt completely drained, as absent of energy as if it had bled out of him along with about eight gallons of sweat. The whole bed felt damp, smelled sour. Lying in that was less appealing than lying out in the parking lot in the snow, so he pushed the covers aside and groped his way up to a sit. The room swayed alarmingly when he tried to stand, so he sank back down onto the bed, wondering if he could reach the bathroom and pee before his strength gave out entirely.
Or before he faceplanted on the rug.
"You doin'?" Dean asked blearily.
"Bathroom."
It was only a few steps away. With a grunt Sam hoisted himself to his feet, grabbing for support when his legs threatened to buckle.
Dean caught him before he could fall.
~~~~~~~~~~
Daylight and the aroma of fresh coffee roused him; when he peeled his eyelids open and peered across the room, he found Dean sitting on the other bed, propped against a hill of pillows, sipping from a big paper cup and nibbling on a Danish.
"Morning," Dean said warily.
"Hnnnhuh," Sam replied.
"You good? At all?"
Winchester men, Sam thought. Friggin' WINCHESTER MEN.
In no sense at all was he "good." Yes, he'd slept for a while, and yes, after three doses of the cherry-honey (moonshine?) syrup the coughing had finally died down (though thinking about it seemed to give it all the nudge it needed to spring back to life) - but every muscle in his body was vibrating at what seemed to be a sub-atomic level. His head felt huge, his eyes way too big for their sockets.
His friggin' hair ached.
The only positive side to this was that Dad wasn't here.
Bad enough that Dean was.
Without saying anything further, Dean got up off his bed and padded into the bathroom; a moment later Sam could hear water running, the full, noisy rush that meant Dean was filling the tub. That went on for a while, then Dean came back out, flipped back Sam's covers and slid an arm underneath him. Sam did his best to fight him off, but that was a waste of effort, given that the only person he could possibly best at that particular moment would have be under the age of five, or unconscious.
"Minnie Carl and LouAnne," Dean said. "Said a warm bath'll soothe you. Epsom salts."
Epsom… what?
"Don' wanna bath," Sam shrilled.
As it turned out, he did. Twenty minutes of soaking in the warm water (aided by the two Extra-StrengthTylenol Dean fished out of the first aid kit) took the edge off the aches. Dean used the twenty minute to strip and re-make Sam's bed - though where he'd gotten hold of another set of sheets, without leaving the room, Sam wasn't sure - and when Sam was ready to struggle up out of the tub, Dean had a fresh set of clothes waiting for him.
"Stop tryin' a' be my mother," Sam complained.
That made Dean grimace for a moment. "Dress yourself, then."
The clean, crisp sheets felt good.
Felt like Nirvana good.
~~~~~~~~~~
Oprah! was playing on the TV when Sam opened his eyes the next time. This time, Dean was sitting at the little round table near the window that overlooked the parking lot, making faces at the TV as he worked his way through the biggest burger Sam had ever seen. From the smell of things, there was an order of fries to go with it, sitting somewhere among the collection of debris on the table.
Pie, too, more than likely.
Hungry.
It had to be dinnertime. Lunchtime, at least - though, no, Oprah! was always on in the late afternoon. Early dinner, then, which meant it had been… almost two days since he'd last eaten anything.
As if he'd been mind-reading, Dean licked a blob of orangish Special Sauce off his upper lip and informed Sam with a frown, "Tried givin' you some applesauce, but you told me I was a shit and a pain in your ass and I was supposed to leave you alone. Tried the Jell-O too. Strawberry. And toast. Gonna remember all that next time you ask me to give you a ride somewhere."
Applesauce?
Jell-O?
"Did not," Sam said.
"The hell I didn't. Even tried the airplane thing to get you to eat it."
"You - no you did not."
Dean shrugged that off and went back to eating his burger and watching Oprah commiserate with…
Some girl.
"You got fries?" Sam murmured.
"Yeah I got fries. You think I'm gonna give any of 'em to you, Mr. I Hate Strawberry Jell-O And You Know It, You Stupid Grabby-hands Turd, you got another guess coming."
"Did not."
"Did."
"I did not call you a 'grabby-hands turd'."
"A stupid grabby-hands turd," Dean replied. "And what, you want it on video? Not givin' you any of my fries, Typhoid Mary. Because you'd probably chuck 'em right back up, and that'd be two-forty-nine right down the drain."
"Sick," Sam muttered.
"Whiny," Dean said.
Instead of fries, there was a container of potato soup, not too thick, broth-based, not cream. After Dean had warmed it up in the microwave, it smelled like the food of the gods. Crackers to go with it, and juice, all of which Dean laid out on a plastic tray with a grinning blue cartoon dog on it. Where Dean had gotten all that stuff - hell, any of it - Sam couldn't imagine. Damn town didn't have a real store, just a mini-mart alongside the gas station.
"'D'you get all this?" he muttered.
"Like it matters? Eat."
"But -"
"Still not givin' you any of my fries," Dean said.
~~~~~~~~~~
He slept through the night. Must have, because when he opened his eyes the clock on the bedside table said 7:49 and sunlight was flooding through the wide gap in the drapes that Dean had apparently neglected to close all the way. In the other bed, Dean was snoring at chain-saw levels, one arm flung over his eyes, palm-up, as if he intended to catch something that might come flying his way at any moment.
Sam shifted up to a sit, squirmed a little, then stretched.
Nothing ached. Nothing protested.
Two days.
Forty-eight hours.
Strange, because the kids at school who'd come down with this flu had been down for the count for a week or more.
Winchester men, Sam thought with some amusement.
At least it's good for something.
Carefully, he got out of bed, testing his balance before he committed to walking the rest of the way to the bathroom. Peering at himself in the mirror made him cringe; his hair was skewed every which-way, and his t-shirt looked like the rags Dean used to polish the car. Rather than face the day that way, Sam stripped out of his shirt and sweats, fired up the shower and sighed in pleasant relief as he stepped underneath the hot, steady spray.
His hair was foamy with shampoo when he realized he hadn't brought clean clothes into the bathroom with him.
Somehow, though, a fresh shirt, underwear, socks and jeans were lying on the edge of the sink when he pulled the shower curtain aside.
"Thanks, man," he called out.
But Dean simply went on snoring.
* * * * *
CHARACTERS: Dean and Sam
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2232 words
48 HRS
By Carol Davis
"Dude," Dean said. "That's - wow. How much did you drink?"
Drink?
Oh… yeah.
Last night. New Year's Eve, in a town that offered one bar, a bowling alley (closed four nights a week) and a video rental store by way of entertainment. Sam and Dean had discovered early on that for most of the locals, a "real good evening" meant (a) staying home to get hammered, (b) going to Lucky Bob's to get hammered, or (c) driving down middle of the main road while hammered, preferably at the wheel of a pickup, with as many other locals as possible loaded into the bed of the truck.
Sam couldn't recall having done any of that. At least, not last night.
Which left the question: what had he done last night?
"Seriously, dude," Dean persisted. "You look like bottled crap. You sneak off somewhere while I wasn't looking? 'Cause I only remember you drinking like, what, two beers? I didn't have eyes on you the whole time, but -"
"Pfffnnnuuhhh," Sam muttered.
Lucky Bob's. That was it. Dean had hauled the two of them over there, insisting that there was no way they'd be spending New Year's alone in a motel room with shitty cable. Bad enough he'd been stuck doing that on the damn Millennium, he'd announced, and had ended up drunk-dialing everybody on his contact list for something to do.
"Goin' backabed," Sam said.
Two beers sounded right, and something told him he hadn't finished the second one. He hadn't felt well, all of a sudden - had felt like the room was closing in on him. Too much noise, too many people jammed in cheek-to-jowl.
Too freakin' warm.
He had a fuzzy memory of approaching Dean, asking that they go back to the motel, and being rebuffed.
So he'd walked back.
Was that right? He'd walked.
Noise and smells and beer, music banging at his skull, loud loopy girls sitting down alongside him uninvited. Dean laughing and whooping and singing along with whatever was playing on the juke, or the TV.
Really, Sam had felt kind of iffy all week, ever since Christmas. Not much of an appetite, a little wobbly, more in need of sleep than he usually was.
Then he remembered: the flu had been going around school since mid-December. Lots of kids and a few teachers absent. It was a tougher bug than usual, one that had laid a lot of people low for a week or more. He'd avoided it until now - or had told himself he had, caving to Dean's insistence that Winchester men didn't waste time being sick, particularly not during Sam's Christmas break, with Dad out of town, and the two of them free to do any damn thing they pleased.
In a town where people amused themselves by driving up and down the middle of the road for hours at a time.
Shivering, Sam shuffled back across the motel room, crawled into bed inches at a time, then struggled to pull the covers up to his ears.
"Sam?" Dean said.
"Lea' me 'lone."
"Are you sick? I mean - I'm hung over up to my freakin' eyeballs. But you, man, you look like hell."
"Bite me," Sam muttered.
~~~~~~~~~~
Coughing woke him up. Not just a tickle, either; this was a full-on cough or you will EXPLODE kind of a thing that seized his body and rattled him like a handful of cutlery being tossed around inside a clothes dryer. He struggled to sit but couldn't, couldn't even pull in a full breath before the next spasm hit.
Then Dean was there, pulling the covers loose and hoisting Sam upright.
Sam tried to bat him away, just on general principle, but Dean held on, and from somewhere produced a cup of water.
Sam got two sips down before the coughing went Defcon One.
"Jesus," Dean said.
He tried patting Sam on the back. Tried rubbing Sam's back, all of it with Sam trying to yank himself free. He produced a fresh cup of water that Sam didn't even attempt to drink. By the time the coughing finally eased up, Sam was drenched with sweat, hair stuck to his skull, t-shirt, shorts and sweatpants clinging to him like they were pasted on - and deep in his chest, he could feel the slow but steady build-up of another round of coughing.
That went on for what was certainly several hours.
He got a bit of rest, shuddering underneath the covers, interrupted over and over by coughing, dry and racking, none of it productive.
"Here," Dean said.
He had a spoon and a small bottle. Not gonna work, Sam thought muzzily; the over-the-counter stuff never really did. Not for something like this. But Dean sat down on the edge of the bed anyway, poured a spoonful and maneuvered it toward Sam's mouth. "Don't jerk," he said firmly. "Gotta get this down your gullet, because you're driving me outta my mind. Hung over, dude. Remember? Every time you cough, it's like a friggin' machine gun going off next to my head."
"N' gonna work," Sam told him.
"Oh yeah it is. It's the good stuff. Don't even ask me about the gyrations I had to go through to get this. You spill it and I'm gonna come upside your head with a bat."
Good stuff.
In a town with no drugstore.
Had Dean even been gone?
The syrup had an odd honey-cherry taste to it. So… what? Home-brewed?
By whom? And where?
"You good?" Dean said. "Really, man. Swallow that down. You can't have any more for four hours."
"Whass -"
"Sleep. Because if you don't quiet down, I'm gonna either shoot you, or myself."
~~~~~~~~~~
He woke the next time to the soft sound and flicker of the TV and the buzz of Dean snoring in the other bed. The lack of light seeping in around the room's cheap drapes told him it was after dark, but that could mean any time after about 4:30 in the afternoon.
Hungry.
That was a good sign, he supposed, though he felt completely drained, as absent of energy as if it had bled out of him along with about eight gallons of sweat. The whole bed felt damp, smelled sour. Lying in that was less appealing than lying out in the parking lot in the snow, so he pushed the covers aside and groped his way up to a sit. The room swayed alarmingly when he tried to stand, so he sank back down onto the bed, wondering if he could reach the bathroom and pee before his strength gave out entirely.
Or before he faceplanted on the rug.
"You doin'?" Dean asked blearily.
"Bathroom."
It was only a few steps away. With a grunt Sam hoisted himself to his feet, grabbing for support when his legs threatened to buckle.
Dean caught him before he could fall.
~~~~~~~~~~
Daylight and the aroma of fresh coffee roused him; when he peeled his eyelids open and peered across the room, he found Dean sitting on the other bed, propped against a hill of pillows, sipping from a big paper cup and nibbling on a Danish.
"Morning," Dean said warily.
"Hnnnhuh," Sam replied.
"You good? At all?"
Winchester men, Sam thought. Friggin' WINCHESTER MEN.
In no sense at all was he "good." Yes, he'd slept for a while, and yes, after three doses of the cherry-honey (moonshine?) syrup the coughing had finally died down (though thinking about it seemed to give it all the nudge it needed to spring back to life) - but every muscle in his body was vibrating at what seemed to be a sub-atomic level. His head felt huge, his eyes way too big for their sockets.
His friggin' hair ached.
The only positive side to this was that Dad wasn't here.
Bad enough that Dean was.
Without saying anything further, Dean got up off his bed and padded into the bathroom; a moment later Sam could hear water running, the full, noisy rush that meant Dean was filling the tub. That went on for a while, then Dean came back out, flipped back Sam's covers and slid an arm underneath him. Sam did his best to fight him off, but that was a waste of effort, given that the only person he could possibly best at that particular moment would have be under the age of five, or unconscious.
"Minnie Carl and LouAnne," Dean said. "Said a warm bath'll soothe you. Epsom salts."
Epsom… what?
"Don' wanna bath," Sam shrilled.
As it turned out, he did. Twenty minutes of soaking in the warm water (aided by the two Extra-StrengthTylenol Dean fished out of the first aid kit) took the edge off the aches. Dean used the twenty minute to strip and re-make Sam's bed - though where he'd gotten hold of another set of sheets, without leaving the room, Sam wasn't sure - and when Sam was ready to struggle up out of the tub, Dean had a fresh set of clothes waiting for him.
"Stop tryin' a' be my mother," Sam complained.
That made Dean grimace for a moment. "Dress yourself, then."
The clean, crisp sheets felt good.
Felt like Nirvana good.
~~~~~~~~~~
Oprah! was playing on the TV when Sam opened his eyes the next time. This time, Dean was sitting at the little round table near the window that overlooked the parking lot, making faces at the TV as he worked his way through the biggest burger Sam had ever seen. From the smell of things, there was an order of fries to go with it, sitting somewhere among the collection of debris on the table.
Pie, too, more than likely.
Hungry.
It had to be dinnertime. Lunchtime, at least - though, no, Oprah! was always on in the late afternoon. Early dinner, then, which meant it had been… almost two days since he'd last eaten anything.
As if he'd been mind-reading, Dean licked a blob of orangish Special Sauce off his upper lip and informed Sam with a frown, "Tried givin' you some applesauce, but you told me I was a shit and a pain in your ass and I was supposed to leave you alone. Tried the Jell-O too. Strawberry. And toast. Gonna remember all that next time you ask me to give you a ride somewhere."
Applesauce?
Jell-O?
"Did not," Sam said.
"The hell I didn't. Even tried the airplane thing to get you to eat it."
"You - no you did not."
Dean shrugged that off and went back to eating his burger and watching Oprah commiserate with…
Some girl.
"You got fries?" Sam murmured.
"Yeah I got fries. You think I'm gonna give any of 'em to you, Mr. I Hate Strawberry Jell-O And You Know It, You Stupid Grabby-hands Turd, you got another guess coming."
"Did not."
"Did."
"I did not call you a 'grabby-hands turd'."
"A stupid grabby-hands turd," Dean replied. "And what, you want it on video? Not givin' you any of my fries, Typhoid Mary. Because you'd probably chuck 'em right back up, and that'd be two-forty-nine right down the drain."
"Sick," Sam muttered.
"Whiny," Dean said.
Instead of fries, there was a container of potato soup, not too thick, broth-based, not cream. After Dean had warmed it up in the microwave, it smelled like the food of the gods. Crackers to go with it, and juice, all of which Dean laid out on a plastic tray with a grinning blue cartoon dog on it. Where Dean had gotten all that stuff - hell, any of it - Sam couldn't imagine. Damn town didn't have a real store, just a mini-mart alongside the gas station.
"'D'you get all this?" he muttered.
"Like it matters? Eat."
"But -"
"Still not givin' you any of my fries," Dean said.
~~~~~~~~~~
He slept through the night. Must have, because when he opened his eyes the clock on the bedside table said 7:49 and sunlight was flooding through the wide gap in the drapes that Dean had apparently neglected to close all the way. In the other bed, Dean was snoring at chain-saw levels, one arm flung over his eyes, palm-up, as if he intended to catch something that might come flying his way at any moment.
Sam shifted up to a sit, squirmed a little, then stretched.
Nothing ached. Nothing protested.
Two days.
Forty-eight hours.
Strange, because the kids at school who'd come down with this flu had been down for the count for a week or more.
Winchester men, Sam thought with some amusement.
At least it's good for something.
Carefully, he got out of bed, testing his balance before he committed to walking the rest of the way to the bathroom. Peering at himself in the mirror made him cringe; his hair was skewed every which-way, and his t-shirt looked like the rags Dean used to polish the car. Rather than face the day that way, Sam stripped out of his shirt and sweats, fired up the shower and sighed in pleasant relief as he stepped underneath the hot, steady spray.
His hair was foamy with shampoo when he realized he hadn't brought clean clothes into the bathroom with him.
Somehow, though, a fresh shirt, underwear, socks and jeans were lying on the edge of the sink when he pulled the shower curtain aside.
"Thanks, man," he called out.
But Dean simply went on snoring.
* * * * *