“Jesus, Sammy,” he hisses, his heart pounding, but then he catches sight of Sam’s round sweet face in the weak light of the street soaking through the flimsy window shade and calms himself down. “Did you have a nightmare?” he asks, reaching for his brother in the dark. He wouldn’t mind Sam sleeping in the bed with him, even in this heat. Maybe the familiar feeling of Sam’s warm weight against his would actually trick his brain back a few years, allow him to sleep.
“No,” says Sam, a little indignant, like he’s too big for such treatment. “Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I sleep backwards.”
Dean keeps himself from saying, I thought when you couldn’t sleep you came into the bed with me, and instead hoists himself up a little further, squints at his brother, and says, “Backwards?”
Sam nods, fervently, then points to the foot of the bed. “Put your head there,” he says, then points to the pillows, “and your feet there. Leave the blankets where they are, ’cause it’s hot still.” He pauses, studies the bed and Dean for a moment before adding, “You can take a pillow down with you, if you want.”
Dean stares at him, a little nonplussed, standing there in his hand-me-down boxers and his white socks and nothing else. He looks small, but there’s something unsettlingly adultish about his posture and the way he’s not wearing a t-shirt or anything, and the way he’s looking and Dean, assessing him, almost parentally. The illusion is shattered but those bright white socks though, practically glowing in the darkness, scrunched around his ankles.
“Okay,” says Dean, and rearranges himself to his head rests on the foot of the bed. The mattress is cheap and unyielding, but he doesn’t care. He turns his head and sees Sam still watching him, his skinny arms crossed over his chest. The clock behind him reads 1:48. “Okay, well, here I am. Thank you, Sammy. Go to sleep now.”
Sam nods and Dean turns his head back to the ceiling, listens as Sam climbs back into bed. Something about the rustle of the sheets and the way Sam snuffles a little makes Dean’s chest ache, because Sam is twelve and still so young, in his way, but such a far cry from the little boy who used to fall asleep wrapped around Dean like a monkey in the back of the car.
He tries to hold onto that memory, of Sam’s little shallow baby breaths and fine hair and sweet smell all cushioned up in Dean, that little boy he’s supposed to protect, and he must drift for a while because when he next blinks the clock says 2:23.
“Maybe try spinning around,” comes a voice from nearby, and Dean turns his head to see Sam is also lying with his head at the edge of the bed, though his little socked feet don’t reach the pillow.
“Sammy, go to sleep,” says Dean.
“You’re not asleep,” huffs Sam, annoyed, and Dean wants to tell him that he’d be asleep if he could. Instead he settles for turning his eyes back to the pitted plaster ceiling he’s become so familiar with and reminding Sam that he’s older.
“But it’s late, Dean,” says Sam, and then he says, “Try spinning.”
“Spinning?”
Sam sits up. “Get up and twirl around and around till you fall, then fall on the bed and close your eyes and don’t open them.”
Dean snorts. “I’m sorry, Sammy, but that is stupid.”
Sam makes a little prissy noise and Dean knows he’s pursing his lips, exasperated. “Try it, Dean.”
“Sam.”
“Dean. Try.”
And so he pushes himself off the bed and stands in the space between his bed and Sam’s, braces himself, and then turns around once, twice, three times. He stops and sits back on the bed, feeling stupid.
Fill part threesparrow_latelyAugust 30 2012, 05:15:56 UTC
“No, Dean,” says Sam, in his do-I-have-to-do-everything voice, and he stands and crosses over to his brother, takes his hand and pulls him up. It’s been very long time since Dean and Sam have held hands, and Sam seems to remember this and snatches his hand away. “Spin,” he orders, and Dean, fuzzy-headed and seized with a sudden urge to make Sam grin, begins to spin in earnest, like when he was much younger and used to make himself trip over nothing to make Sammy giggle. Now Sam is encouraging him, nearly chanting, “Keep going till you fall,” and so Dean whirls himself in a tight circle until his head feels like it’s going to fly off like a spinning top on a table and the room feels like it’s tilting over. He flops onto the bed and thinks he hears Sam laughing, softly into his hand in that shy, almost embarrassed way of his, when Dean is making him forget his maturity and his composure and surrender to silliness.
But he squeezes his eyes shut and tries to ignore the feeling that the bed is going to tip over, and suddenly all this airlessness and light-headedness is a little too familiar, and he knows there’s no big hand crushing his throat closed while he scrambles uselessly and mentally screams for his dad, but he’s finding it hard to catch his breath all the same. He forces himself to lie still and hopes he’s not imagining the sounds of Sam climbing back into bed.
He’d like to slide into sleep, and for a moment he thinks he might, but two thoughts force their way forward into his mind at once-first, the memory of Dad dragging him off the dirty floor while he eyes streamed and he tried to breathe, Dad shaking him like he was a poorly behaved dog and asking him if it was so hard to just keep watch-and second, the idea that maybe Sam isn’t in bed, that maybe his little brother is standing vigil over him at three in the morning, worrying in a way he never wanted Sam to worry.
His eyes fly open. He’s still dizzy and the ceiling is still sort of tilting halfheartedly in his vision, but Sam is back in the bed. Dean swallows, stares up, picking out new shapes in the ceiling from this slightly different angle. He can see a cartoonish man with a big nose, a train, a Jack Russell terrier, a rifle. The dizziness is abating now, draining from him, leaving him still more tired and still more unable to sleep. He almost whines with the misery of it, hears his father’s derisive snort in his head. He can’t even fall asleep right.
He’s not sure how long he lies there, hot and miserable, old thoughts and fears-thoughts of fire, of his dad never returning, of CPS when they were younger, and of teachers whose eyes lingered too long on his bruises and the bags under his eyes, of being too stupid and useless to matter to Sam or Dad anymore, of letting Sam down so badly he leaves forever-clawing up to the surface of his thoughts. God, he was so hot.
“What if I poured salt and water in your eyes?” comes a soft voice from across the room. Dean starts, looks at the clock. 3:12. Sam ought to be sleeping.
Also, what Sam just said was insane.
His brother seems to sense more explanation was necessary. “Y’know when you cry, and then you get sleepy?” he says, a little shyly. “Maybe-maybe that would make you tired. I don’t know, what else might work?”
Dean searches for how to respond to this. He wants to tell Sam it isn’t his job to worry about Dean. What he says instead is, “I am tired.”
“But you can’t sleep.”
“Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Go to bed, Sam.”
Instead Sam is getting out of bed. “Maybe not salt water,” he’s saying, making his way to the feeble excuse for a kitchenette. “What else makes you tired?”
“Sammy, it’s fine,” says Dean, opening his eyes a little wider as the dark swells against them. He wants to sit up but can’t muster the energy. “Go to sleep, everything’s okay.”
“Everything is not okay,” says Sam, and then he’s standing over Dean with a glass of water in his hands. “Go to sleep,” he adds, like a petulant toddler, and dumps the water right into Dean’s face. It’s lukewarm and leaves him feeling like he’s stuck to the damp sheets.
“There wasn’t any salt in that,” says Sam sheepishly, after a moment. “Maybe it’ll help you cool down.”
Fill part four, last partsparrow_latelyAugust 30 2012, 05:16:58 UTC
Sam huffs and backs away, lies back down on the bed, still with his feet by the pillows and his head at the foot. “Maybe hang your head down to the floor,” he says, and suddenly Dean wants to scream. Go to sleep, he thinks, go to sleep and stop worrying about me and just let me be.
“Sam,” he says instead, “that’ll just send all the blood to my head.”
“Hold your breath until you pass out and then sleep.”
“No, Sam.”
Sam makes an annoyed noise in the dark, and then he’s so quiet Dean thinks he might have dropped off to sleep. “Count sheep?” he suggests, very softly, and Dean doesn’t bother responding to that. There’s another long silence, wherein Dean’s mind is overtaken with the memory of his father’s stony silence as they drove back to the motel, the sheer weight of his disappointment suffocating the car, and then with the image of his father’s face streaked with blood as the little demon bitch smashed his head against the wall. He shudders.
“Maybe you could make a blindfold?” says Sammy, even more quietly. “Or-or-or-”
“Sam, let me worry about it. You go to sleep,” says Dean, and then suddenly Sam is all the way on top of him, his hot skin pressed to Dean’s, and he’s squeezing his fingers-which suddenly seem startlingly unlike the little baby fingers that used to wrap around Dean’s own-over Dean’s eyelids. What the hell.
“Go to sleep!” Sam says, loud, frustrated, and he takes his hands from Dean’s eyes and presses them to the sides of his head. “I’ll pull the nightmares out,” he says, and Dean thinks he might have said the same thing to Sam, a very, very long time ago, and then Sam goes kind of boneless and flops on top of his brother. His socked feet scrub against Dean’s shins and their bare chests stick together miserably in the late-night heat. Sam lets out a little sigh against Dean’s neck, and his voice comes up right beside Dean’s ear.
“Can’t sleep if you don’t,” he mumbles, embarrassed, and Dean’s hand comes up automatically and settles on Sam’s shoulder. Sam is too heavy and way too big, shrimp that he is, to lie right on top of him like this, but the weight is actually relaxing him in increments, sending him a little deeper into the hard mattress. He closes his eyes, and by the time Sam snuffles a little and tucks himself into Dean’s shoulder and presses his nose into Dean’s neck, the movement is enough to jerk Dean from something deeper, like he was hovering right on the edge of sleep. He curls his body a little around Sam, on pure instinct, letting himself remember a time when Sam was smaller and clingy, never embarrassed or ashamed by his brother, or his need for his brother. He ducks his head, presses his nose to Sam’s dirty hair, remembers when he and Sam went from place to place holding hands, before their Dad began to wince and roll his eyes when they did it.
Dad would probably not think very highly of this, of Sam treating Dean like a pillow and Dean treating Sam like a teddy bear, and it’s too hot for this sort of thing anyway, and Dean’s eyes pop open again as a wave of heat and shame crash over him, but then it’s easy for Dean to match his breaths to Sam’s deep, even ones, and easier still to close his eyes and drift away.
Re: Fill part four, last partkallielAugust 30 2012, 21:14:30 UTC
You again! :DDD And un-anon! And ohhhhhh, I just adore this. Sam's various strategies make me feel like he's channeling Luna Lovegood before her time, ahahaha. XD Just adorable. But I especially love the way Dean thinks about Sam, here, and those rifts between young and younger, no longer a child, still very much a child--both in relation to Sam and himself, actually. Excellent, excellent work. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR FILLING THIS!!!!!!!! Epic Thursday made epic!
Re: Fill part four, last partsparrow_latelyAugust 30 2012, 21:41:45 UTC
*blushes* Well I'm so glad you liked it! I'm really attached to the idea that Sam was a weird, weird kid in his own quiet way, and also omg is that a Luna Lovegood comparison I see? *squee*
Re: Fill part four, last partsailoreyes67September 2 2012, 01:26:07 UTC
YES. YES. Oh my God, sweetest thing ever is right. :D
I love Sam so much here. SO---SO---ADORABLE! <3 And this:
He’s not sure how long he lies there, hot and miserable, old thoughts and fears-thoughts of fire, of his dad never returning, of CPS when they were younger, and of teachers whose eyes lingered too long on his bruises and the bags under his eyes, of being too stupid and useless to matter to Sam or Dad anymore, of letting Sam down so badly he leaves forever-clawing up to the surface of his thoughts. God, he was so hot.
“No,” says Sam, a little indignant, like he’s too big for such treatment. “Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I sleep backwards.”
Dean keeps himself from saying, I thought when you couldn’t sleep you came into the bed with me, and instead hoists himself up a little further, squints at his brother, and says, “Backwards?”
Sam nods, fervently, then points to the foot of the bed. “Put your head there,” he says, then points to the pillows, “and your feet there. Leave the blankets where they are, ’cause it’s hot still.” He pauses, studies the bed and Dean for a moment before adding, “You can take a pillow down with you, if you want.”
Dean stares at him, a little nonplussed, standing there in his hand-me-down boxers and his white socks and nothing else. He looks small, but there’s something unsettlingly adultish about his posture and the way he’s not wearing a t-shirt or anything, and the way he’s looking and Dean, assessing him, almost parentally. The illusion is shattered but those bright white socks though, practically glowing in the darkness, scrunched around his ankles.
“Okay,” says Dean, and rearranges himself to his head rests on the foot of the bed. The mattress is cheap and unyielding, but he doesn’t care. He turns his head and sees Sam still watching him, his skinny arms crossed over his chest. The clock behind him reads 1:48. “Okay, well, here I am. Thank you, Sammy. Go to sleep now.”
Sam nods and Dean turns his head back to the ceiling, listens as Sam climbs back into bed. Something about the rustle of the sheets and the way Sam snuffles a little makes Dean’s chest ache, because Sam is twelve and still so young, in his way, but such a far cry from the little boy who used to fall asleep wrapped around Dean like a monkey in the back of the car.
He tries to hold onto that memory, of Sam’s little shallow baby breaths and fine hair and sweet smell all cushioned up in Dean, that little boy he’s supposed to protect, and he must drift for a while because when he next blinks the clock says 2:23.
“Maybe try spinning around,” comes a voice from nearby, and Dean turns his head to see Sam is also lying with his head at the edge of the bed, though his little socked feet don’t reach the pillow.
“Sammy, go to sleep,” says Dean.
“You’re not asleep,” huffs Sam, annoyed, and Dean wants to tell him that he’d be asleep if he could. Instead he settles for turning his eyes back to the pitted plaster ceiling he’s become so familiar with and reminding Sam that he’s older.
“But it’s late, Dean,” says Sam, and then he says, “Try spinning.”
“Spinning?”
Sam sits up. “Get up and twirl around and around till you fall, then fall on the bed and close your eyes and don’t open them.”
Dean snorts. “I’m sorry, Sammy, but that is stupid.”
Sam makes a little prissy noise and Dean knows he’s pursing his lips, exasperated. “Try it, Dean.”
“Sam.”
“Dean. Try.”
And so he pushes himself off the bed and stands in the space between his bed and Sam’s, braces himself, and then turns around once, twice, three times. He stops and sits back on the bed, feeling stupid.
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But he squeezes his eyes shut and tries to ignore the feeling that the bed is going to tip over, and suddenly all this airlessness and light-headedness is a little too familiar, and he knows there’s no big hand crushing his throat closed while he scrambles uselessly and mentally screams for his dad, but he’s finding it hard to catch his breath all the same. He forces himself to lie still and hopes he’s not imagining the sounds of Sam climbing back into bed.
He’d like to slide into sleep, and for a moment he thinks he might, but two thoughts force their way forward into his mind at once-first, the memory of Dad dragging him off the dirty floor while he eyes streamed and he tried to breathe, Dad shaking him like he was a poorly behaved dog and asking him if it was so hard to just keep watch-and second, the idea that maybe Sam isn’t in bed, that maybe his little brother is standing vigil over him at three in the morning, worrying in a way he never wanted Sam to worry.
His eyes fly open. He’s still dizzy and the ceiling is still sort of tilting halfheartedly in his vision, but Sam is back in the bed. Dean swallows, stares up, picking out new shapes in the ceiling from this slightly different angle. He can see a cartoonish man with a big nose, a train, a Jack Russell terrier, a rifle. The dizziness is abating now, draining from him, leaving him still more tired and still more unable to sleep. He almost whines with the misery of it, hears his father’s derisive snort in his head. He can’t even fall asleep right.
He’s not sure how long he lies there, hot and miserable, old thoughts and fears-thoughts of fire, of his dad never returning, of CPS when they were younger, and of teachers whose eyes lingered too long on his bruises and the bags under his eyes, of being too stupid and useless to matter to Sam or Dad anymore, of letting Sam down so badly he leaves forever-clawing up to the surface of his thoughts. God, he was so hot.
“What if I poured salt and water in your eyes?” comes a soft voice from across the room. Dean starts, looks at the clock. 3:12. Sam ought to be sleeping.
Also, what Sam just said was insane.
His brother seems to sense more explanation was necessary. “Y’know when you cry, and then you get sleepy?” he says, a little shyly. “Maybe-maybe that would make you tired. I don’t know, what else might work?”
Dean searches for how to respond to this. He wants to tell Sam it isn’t his job to worry about Dean. What he says instead is, “I am tired.”
“But you can’t sleep.”
“Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Go to bed, Sam.”
Instead Sam is getting out of bed. “Maybe not salt water,” he’s saying, making his way to the feeble excuse for a kitchenette. “What else makes you tired?”
“Sammy, it’s fine,” says Dean, opening his eyes a little wider as the dark swells against them. He wants to sit up but can’t muster the energy. “Go to sleep, everything’s okay.”
“Everything is not okay,” says Sam, and then he’s standing over Dean with a glass of water in his hands. “Go to sleep,” he adds, like a petulant toddler, and dumps the water right into Dean’s face. It’s lukewarm and leaves him feeling like he’s stuck to the damp sheets.
“There wasn’t any salt in that,” says Sam sheepishly, after a moment. “Maybe it’ll help you cool down.”
“Sam. Go to bed.”
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“Sam,” he says instead, “that’ll just send all the blood to my head.”
“Hold your breath until you pass out and then sleep.”
“No, Sam.”
Sam makes an annoyed noise in the dark, and then he’s so quiet Dean thinks he might have dropped off to sleep. “Count sheep?” he suggests, very softly, and Dean doesn’t bother responding to that. There’s another long silence, wherein Dean’s mind is overtaken with the memory of his father’s stony silence as they drove back to the motel, the sheer weight of his disappointment suffocating the car, and then with the image of his father’s face streaked with blood as the little demon bitch smashed his head against the wall. He shudders.
“Maybe you could make a blindfold?” says Sammy, even more quietly. “Or-or-or-”
“Sam, let me worry about it. You go to sleep,” says Dean, and then suddenly Sam is all the way on top of him, his hot skin pressed to Dean’s, and he’s squeezing his fingers-which suddenly seem startlingly unlike the little baby fingers that used to wrap around Dean’s own-over Dean’s eyelids. What the hell.
“Go to sleep!” Sam says, loud, frustrated, and he takes his hands from Dean’s eyes and presses them to the sides of his head. “I’ll pull the nightmares out,” he says, and Dean thinks he might have said the same thing to Sam, a very, very long time ago, and then Sam goes kind of boneless and flops on top of his brother. His socked feet scrub against Dean’s shins and their bare chests stick together miserably in the late-night heat. Sam lets out a little sigh against Dean’s neck, and his voice comes up right beside Dean’s ear.
“Can’t sleep if you don’t,” he mumbles, embarrassed, and Dean’s hand comes up automatically and settles on Sam’s shoulder. Sam is too heavy and way too big, shrimp that he is, to lie right on top of him like this, but the weight is actually relaxing him in increments, sending him a little deeper into the hard mattress. He closes his eyes, and by the time Sam snuffles a little and tucks himself into Dean’s shoulder and presses his nose into Dean’s neck, the movement is enough to jerk Dean from something deeper, like he was hovering right on the edge of sleep. He curls his body a little around Sam, on pure instinct, letting himself remember a time when Sam was smaller and clingy, never embarrassed or ashamed by his brother, or his need for his brother. He ducks his head, presses his nose to Sam’s dirty hair, remembers when he and Sam went from place to place holding hands, before their Dad began to wince and roll his eyes when they did it.
Dad would probably not think very highly of this, of Sam treating Dean like a pillow and Dean treating Sam like a teddy bear, and it’s too hot for this sort of thing anyway, and Dean’s eyes pop open again as a wave of heat and shame crash over him, but then it’s easy for Dean to match his breaths to Sam’s deep, even ones, and easier still to close his eyes and drift away.
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Thank YOU so much for all your kind feedback!
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Your Sam is the most amazing thing everrr. I love him, and the way you've written Dean's anxiety. Wonderful fill!
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Thank you so much! Strange!wee!Sam is more fun than I anticipated. :)
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I love Sam so much here. SO---SO---ADORABLE! <3 And this:
He’s not sure how long he lies there, hot and miserable, old thoughts and fears-thoughts of fire, of his dad never returning, of CPS when they were younger, and of teachers whose eyes lingered too long on his bruises and the bags under his eyes, of being too stupid and useless to matter to Sam or Dad anymore, of letting Sam down so badly he leaves forever-clawing up to the surface of his thoughts. God, he was so hot.
♥ ♥
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I've discovered I like weird!wee!Sam, who wants to repay Dean for everything he does but is also still pretty much dependent on him.
Thanks for commenting, I'm so glad you liked it!
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