FIC: The Cloak (Sangre de Cristo remix)
Dean doesn’t say anything to Sam about it. It’s stupid and crazy and he’d probably come across sounding like some little kid scared of monsters under his bed, and fuck, would Sammy have a field day with that one. It’s probably the morphine. Probably a combination of morphine and exhaustion and stress. Has to be.
It was definitely never a thing, a real-life shadowy animal thing glaring at him through the window of his hospital room with big, round owl-eyes. Because that would be ridiculous. After all, he just woke up from having his leg impaled in a bear trap, so he’s bound to be a little edgy, and he’s entitled to a teensy bit of paranoia.
He’s still pretty out of it when Sam shows up at his bedside, all sad smiles and reassuring pats on the shoulder. So it’s a miracle Dean doesn’t just let it slip out. No, it’s a testament to how even when he’s out of it, he can still hold his shit together. He’s that fucking cool.
Doesn’t change the fact that the leg hurts like a son of a bitch, and he can’t stop glaring out the damn window, like he half-expects the Skinwalker that Sam assures him is dead to come crashing through the glass and finish Dean off like it intended to, up there in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
“Wha ‘bout the body, Sammy?” he asks, the words slurred out like a slushie from the 7-Eleven.
Sam pulls over a cheap plastic chair from the corner of the room and sits on it backwards, his knees jutting out on either side like some hot-shot basketball player who’s too cool for school.
“Dean, it’s taken care of. I dismembered and gutted the damn thing. You’re welcome, by the way. It was about as fun as looking for a retainer in a cafeteria trash dump.”
“That all it takes?”
“What? That’s not enough? Look, man. Stop worrying about the hunt and start worrying about you. Your leg is not in good shape.”
“Noticed,” Dean says, and strains his neck to take a look at it because he’s noticed the pain for sure, but he isn’t actually sure what the hell is going on down there.
“Fractured fibula, they said. Can’t put the cast on until your wounds heal up some.”
Dean takes it all in and swallows hard. Christ. It’s a fucking mess: mounds of thick white gauze, blood already spotting through at his shin, an enormous plastic splint cradling his leg from toes to mid-thigh and fugly brown tension bandages holding all the junk together. The bulkiness of the entire set-up is plain nerve-wracking, and suddenly Dean feels like he’s at sea and the waves are picking up.
“Hey. Lie back,” Sam tells him, one hand on his chest, another at the back of his neck, like Dean needs help finding his way to the goddamn pillow. Just because he suddenly can’t tell up from down doesn’t mean he’s not willing to take the 50/50 chance he’ll guess right.
“Nhghh,” Dean mutters by way of protest, and he’s clearly made the wrong choice, because something in his leg tightens like a violin string that’s about to snap, and Dean can hear the high-pitched vibrations in his blood.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Sam blithers, pressing back harder now, with both hands on his shoulders until Dean’s lying back completely. He squeezes his eyes shut against the pain and takes a deep breath and Sam holds his hand. That’s okay too. Because, fuck, it hurts, and he would never ask for anyone to hold his hand but he thinks it’s one of those exceptions-that-prove-the-rule situations. Then Sam goes and sets a little box into his palm and tells him to press the button and Dean doesn’t think much about anything for a while.
_+_+_+_
The next time it happens, he hears long squeaky scratching sounds, like fingers running slowly down a foggy window. He’s swimming up from under a haze of IV painkillers, just starting to make sense of his surroundings for the second time. He’s alone, and the room is dark, save for a thin rectangle of light streaming through the nearly-closed door. At first he thinks it’s coming from out in the hallway; a janitor mopping the floors or a nurse rearranging furniture. Something normal.
But then the squeaking turns to scratching and the scratching turns to thumping and it’s definitely coming from outside, from the side of the building on the fourth floor. And it doesn’t fucking stop.
Breathe. He needs to breathe. There’s a rational explanation for this. Just because he’s high as a goddamn kite doesn’t mean he can’t slow the fuck down and think. Think.
Thump.
Thump.
Right. The only way he’s going to get some peace of mind is if he looks out that window and sees for himself that it’s just a stupid tree branch, or a pigeon or something. Problem is, there’s an IV and a huge mass of pain where his leg used to be blocking the way like two very pissed off storm troopers. And Dean’s fresh out of Jedi mind tricks.
What he’s not fresh out of, however, is chutzpah. See, he can do this. The pain isn’t that bad and the machine dosing out his morphine and antibiotics is on wheels. The window is only about eight feet away from the bed, and he can lean on the plastic chair. It’s child’s play.
Every scratch and thump propels him a little bit further, until, with some controlled breathing, he’s positioned his splinted leg at the edge of the bed. All he needs to do now is slide his ass off the lumpy mattress, and plant all his weight on his good side.
Easy as pie.
_+_+_+_
When he comes to, the nurse who’s reinserting his IV is literally calling shenanigans, what with Dean having collapsed in agony, causing him to fall flat on his face and the IV to be yanked free of his forearm, spilling his antibiotics and precious morphine uselessly onto the tiles. At least Dean manages to convince her not to tell Sam, in return for his promise that he’ll stay off his feet for a whole ten days, until the stitches in his legs can come out and he gets a proper cast.
It’s a tall order, but Dean is a man of his word. Besides, now that he knows what it feels like to stand on the gimp leg, he’s not exactly keen on an encore.
Today’s the day he gets busted out-AMA, of course, since the insurance card he’s using is about as legitimate as Roger Clemens’ pitching stats-and all the fussing and gabbing with Sam and the doctor about how to change the dressings and when to take his painkillers and antibiotics keeps him from thinking about the strange sounds he heard the night before, the eyes he’d seen in the window. He’s just glad to be leaving, even if it is in a stupid wheelchair.
At least the nurse who’s pushing it is hot. That’s something.
_+_+_+_
They pick up crutches, codeine and antibiotics at the drugstore in downtown Espanola, and Sam drives them over to the Little Adobe Motel. While Dean’s stretched out in the back seat, Sam pops in to administration to switch out for a room on the ground floor. Dean would be a liar if he said it wasn’t humiliating.
As if the universe finds it necessary to chide him for his hubris, it takes all the energy he’s got to make it from the car to the bed in the motel room. The crutches help some, but his leg is still heavy and full of raw nerve endings that scratch around inside his flesh like sugar in iced tea. Basically, it hurts, and once Sam helps him onto the bed, all he can do is lie there and try to get a grip, close his eyes, indifferent as he lets Sam prop his leg up on a pile of pillows, like it’s not even attached to his body. Which is wishful thinking on his part.
He sleeps in fits and starts as the IV morphine from the hospital wears off more and more. He swallows a couple of the codeine pills, but it’s like the difference between a fine Scotch and a Vodka cranberry at happy hour. Watered down bullshit.
“Sorry, man,” Sam says, because apparently, his misery is seeping from his pores and stinking up the joint. “Is there anything I can get you?”
“Whiskey,” Dean growls, and Sam smiles a little and shakes his head. Whatever. As long as he gets the damn whiskey.
“With these puppies?” Sam plucks the bottle of antibiotics from the night table and shakes them at Dean like they’re going to cause some kind of Pavlovian response. “That’s a negative. How about some kind of, I dunno, nourishment?” Smart ass.
“Fine. Philly cheese-steak sub.”
“Hey, we’re in New Mexico. How ‘bout a quesadilla,” Sam suggests, with that perky fake-helpful tone that he usually saves for squeezing info out of civilians. Like Dean should be worrying about embracing the culture. Likes he’s never had a fucking quesadilla before.
“Cheese. Steak. Sam,” he says, and Sam sighs and grabs his coat.
The door slams shut just as Dean spots the TV remote on the breakfast table at the other end of the room. Awesome. His leg is throbbing and he’s desperate for some distraction. He reaches over to the nightstand to see what’s available to him, but all he finds is a local Yellow Pages and a black Gideon’s bible. It’s a toss up, but he goes for the bible in the end, because even though it doesn’t have pictures, it’s got sex. Sort of.
He finally finds the bit about Lot’s Daughters, and is about three verses in when, out of the corner of his eye, he sees a shadow flash by outside the room.
He slams the bible shut as his gut twists into a knot. Crap. He thought he was past all this, thought it was the morphine.
“Fuck!” Something smacks against the back of the building, and it sounds like someone throwing their whole body up against a wall. Little pattering noises climb the wall and move to the roof. Dean squirms in his bed, hissing as his leg is jostled, following the freaky sounds with his eyes. It’s like some wild animal is running in circles directly on top of him. He reaches for his jacket at the end of the bed, and pulls out his knife, his cell. Grips one in one hand, one in the other.
It stops, and Dean stays alert for a few minutes, his breath silent and controlled. Eventually, his hold loosens on the knife, and he rubs his thumb and fingers over his eyes. Maybe the morphine hasn’t worn off. Which would be really unfair, since the thing it’s supposed to be doing wore off about three hours ago.
Or maybe there’s something out there, another Skinwalker. The angry lover of the one Sam tore to pieces in the woods. But then it would go after Sam, wouldn’t it? Sam. Fuck.
Dean flicks open his phone, and hits Sam’s number. It rings twice. Three times.
“Come on, Sammy. Pick up. Pick up…”
Five.
“Change your mind about the quesadilla?”
“Jesus Christ, Sam! Your hands tied behind your back?” Dean blurts out, letting himself breathe for the fist time in minutes. He runs his hand over the back of his head and leans on the headboard, staring vacantly at the dead flies inside the ceiling lamp.
“What? No. I was trying to parallel park,” Sam tells him. “What’s up? You okay?”
Jesus. Good question. Maybe? Maybe he’s being stalked by another goddamn Skinwalker. Maybe he’s losing his mind. Maybe… he’d better keep it to himself.
“Yeah. Yeah, I just… get some fries, alright?”
“Uh, sure. No problem. You sure you’re okay? ‘Cause you sounded a little tense there for a second.”
“Fine. Just. It’s just the leg. It’s nothin’.”
“Ugh. Shit. Well, when I get back maybe we can artistically re-interpret your dosage. Just hang in there, man.”
“Yeah. It’s cool. See ya in a few.”
When Sam gets back Dean manages a few bites of his sub so he can at least justify his stubborn request, and pops an extra codeine before passing out. He’s blearily aware of Sam prying an empty Jarritos bottle from his fingers and carefully changing his bandages, but he can’t be sure about the hand that settles on his chest and rubs it for a good minute. He kinda prays he’s hallucinating that part.
_+_+_+_
Over the next couple of days, Dean learns to ignore the disconcerting noises that plague the motel room every time Sam isn’t around. It doesn’t ever amount to more than his nerves being rattled anyway, so what’s the point? He just turns up the volume on the TV (he keeps the remote under his pillow now, thank you very much) and pretends that he really does loves the theme song from Matlock that much.
Then, when Sam insists on checking out the Skinwalker’s apartment for Navajo witchcraft shit Dean tries to act nonchalant about it.
“What, you think there could be more of ‘em?” he asks quietly.
“Nope. It’s been five days, and the attacks have stopped. I’m pretty sure the guy was flying solo,” Sam says, tossing Dean a fresh bundle of ice for his leg. The swelling’s gone up a little, and his flesh feels tight and hot. Dean gingerly arranges the ice and squints up at his brother.
“So what’s got you all fidgety?”
“Just figure I should do a sweep of his place, make sure nothing volatile falls into the wrong hands.”
“You mean we.”
_+_+_+_
Sam only lets him come because Dean swears he’ll stay in the car. Of course, once they get there, it’s impossible to keep him from following Sam up to the apartment. Not because he’s particularly unstoppable, physically speaking. Fucking far from it. It’s more that Sam’s not about to watch him cripple himself further trying to follow unaided, and Dean counts on his past record of pig-headedness to work in his favor this time around. It does, and Sam spots him-if somewhat resentfully- with a hand glancing the small of his back as he hobbles up the five measly steps.
The small apartment reveals that the Skinwalker, Andrew Collins, aside from being a wolf-man murderer, is a total pack-rat.
“Dude. It’s like an episode of Hoarders in here,” Dean says, navigating his way slowly around a half dozen piles of books and old newspapers to get to the couch.
Sam sighs and rakes his hair back with a tense hand. “No kidding. I thought Bobby was bad. It’s gonna take hours to find anything in this dump.”
He’s probably right.
Dean, however, sifts through what’s in arm’s reach of the couch in less than 40 minutes, and it’s mostly bogus first-hand accounts of peyote-induced spirit-walks and brochures for anthro-tourism sweat lodge retreats. It all seems kind of weird and wrong somehow. For people to allow their culture’s sacred traditions to be exploited for profit like that, they must be pretty fucking desperate for cash.
Then again, what the hell is Christmas all about?
Speaking of December, Dean starts to notice a chill up his spine like winter just decided to pay a surprise visit to 34b Del Verde Drive. He sags into the couch, shivers and squirrels around in his coat pocket for his medication. His leg is throbbing again, the pain worse than it’s been since he first got back from the hospital. Probably pushed his luck today, but Christ, he’s seeing spots. That’s not good.
“Wanna grab me some water there Sammy,” he hollers into the kitchen, where Sam’s been rifling through a pile of older-looking books on the cluttered table. “Or maybe a beer…”
“Seriously, Dean? Like, I’ll just check his fridge and see if he’s got your brand of… huh.”
Dean watches as the little white pills begin to dissolve into his hot palm. “Sam? These drugs aren’t gonna swallow themselves,” he says, aware of how little sense the expression makes in this context, and hopes Sam won’t call him on it. He’s just not on top of his game today. “Sammy?”
“Guess what I found in the fridge,” Sam says, leaning on the archway to the kitchen, a hand hiding something behind his back.
Dean blinks up at his brother, trying to un-blurry his vision. “Miller High Life?”
“Nope. A tome on ancient Navajo witchcraft,” Sam tells him, swinging something out in front of him like it’s a report card full of straight A’s. “Handwritten.”
Dean squeezes his eyes shut and opens them again, waits for the book, or whatever it is, to come into focus. “You get that water?”
“Huh? Oh. Oh, hey. Are you feeling okay? Jesus, Dean,” Sam says, and suddenly he’s on him like fly-paper, a hand pressed to his forehead, another grabbing at his arm like a mom afraid of losing their kid in a big department store.
“Dean, man, you’re really hot.”
“Drugs. Drugs might help,” Dean mutters. He watches a Sam-shaped blur disappear back into the kitchen, and hears the sound of water running. Soon enough, Sam’s holding a glass out and Dean takes a decent swig, and pops the sweaty pills into his mouth. Then Sam takes the glass away, and starts investigating Dean’s leg, poking around the splint.
“Dean, I don’t like this. The swelling’s up even more, and you’re running a fever… could be an infection.”
“Nah. Drugs’ll kick in soon ‘n I’ll be fine.”
Sam looks up at him from where he’s still examining Dean’s bandages, frowns and shakes his head like he knows something Dean doesn’t. “I don’t think so, man. I think… I think we need to get you to the hospital. Like, now.” And with that look, and those words, Sam is kind of scaring the shit out of him.
_+_+_+_
By the time they get to the ER, the pain is bad enough that it’s starting to distort time and space, and everything happens in messy blurry flashes; being hauled onto a stretcher from the back seat of the Impala, being poked at under bright lights by uninvited hands. Strangers yelling orders at each other, saying his name, saying “Try to stay still, Dean,” or “Your brother’s right outside Mr. Ginsberg.” Watching a needle plunge through the tender flesh of his arm, feeling the whole world melt like a hot fudge sundae as the syringe is depressed and the drugs work their way into his bloodstream.
When he wakes, things are slow and quiet. There’s the beep of a heart monitor and a soft whirr that sounds like an old humidifier. He can feel his broken leg still throbbing mercilessly, and something new pinching his calf in the same way the IVs in his arms do. There are two of those now. And something tickling his nose, too. Oxygen? Jesus. He’s hooked up to a lot more junk than he was the first time around. What the fuck happened there?
“Dean? Hey. Hey. Look at me. You awake?”
Sam’s hand is on his shoulder. He’s not sure how long it’s been there. He rolls his head toward his brother’s voice-the room spins as a result, and he feels his stomach lurch. Sam’s face is close, inches from the bed, and when it comes into focus, Dean can tell Sam’s been awake for far too long, which means he’s been out of it for just as long.
“Hey. You with me?”
Dean nods. Anything more elaborate seems beyond his capabilities at this point.
“It’s a bone infection. There’s a name for it but I… acute osteo-something-something… I don’t know. It’s bad. They’re draining shit out of your leg, and pumping you full of heavy duty antibiotics,” Sam explains sharply, glaring at the medical equipment that crowns the bed like it’s out to get the both of them. Like a gang of malevolent spirits. “And they won’t tell me shit,” he adds, his voice cracking harshly, a hand swiped swiftly across his eyes.
Jesus. This is messed up. Hadn’t he been taking antibiotics to prevent exactly this from happening? What the fuck? That’s totally unfair.
Right. Like their lives are prime examples of the justness of the universe. It fucking figures.
Sam sits there with him silently and they listen to the symphony of beeps and sibilant whirrs, tracking his heart rate and draining infected pus out of his leg, respectively. It’s about as soothing as nails on a chalk-board.
A nurse comes in and she talks to Sam at the foot of the bed in a sweet hushed tone.
“He wake up for you?” she asks. She sounds older, her voice raspy from yelling at her kids for years.
“Yeah.”
“That’s good. He’ll be in and out. His fever’s still very high.”
“Are the drugs working?”
“We might not know for a while. Let’s keep our fingers crossed, though, okay hon?”
Keep their fingers crossed? That’s what he’s got to count on? Dumb luck? This place is just teeming with professionalism. God damn.
_+_+_+_
He dreams he’s back up in the Sangre de Cristos with the Skinwalker. It sniffs his bloody broken leg with its wet black wolf-nose, staring him down with eyes like two glowing harvest moons. Dean’s cheek presses into dead pine needles on the forest floor as he grapples at shrubs to drag himself away from the creature.
But the jaws of the trap hold him in place and the pain is so fierce a howl escapes from his belly, a reaction so basic and animal that he barely feels human anymore himself.
“Do you feel it? Do you feel the Ant’j?” the Skinwalker growls, appearing now as a man standing mud-caked and naked except for the hide of grey fur draped over his back like a cape. The man crouches down and leans close to Dean’s face, and past the dirt and the wildness of his eyes Dean can see someone who was once just a normal guy. Young and fair-skinned with a pierced eyebrow and bleached tips.
A crooked smile creeps across his face and he breathes into Dean’s ear, the humid air slithering down Dean’s neck. “It’s inside you,” he whispers, pressing an ice cold hand to Dean’s chest, something rough and gravelly rubbing between the man’s skin and his own. Dean’s lungs constrict and he struggles helplessly to pull air into his body as the Skinwalker disappears.
_+_+_+_
He knows this feeling, this choking sensation, like a football shoved down his throat, and he hates it. Hates that he fucking knows there’s a machine breathing for him, because it’s happened before. Twice.
A guy could seriously end up with a complex over this shit.
“…any higher than 105. The Zyvox just isn’t fighting the infection like we thought,” someone says. It’s like listening from underwater, the man’s voice is low and muffled, but Dean can tell he’s someone official. A doctor, maybe. “This cocktail is the only option left.”
“And if… if it doesn’t….” Sam. Sam’s here. That's good.
“Then it’s going to be entirely up to your brother to fight this infection off. And he’s strong, but I have to be frank with you, if it’s weakened him this much, he’s looking at a real uphill battle.”
“He’s fought plenty of those.”
“Then he’s got a leg up already. And, look. Maybe this’ll be the one. Third time’s a charm, right?”
“Yeah. Right.”
A door closes quietly and Dean blinks at the ceiling, prays that Sam hasn’t left.
“Fuck. Fuck!” Yeah, he’s still here alright. “Motherfucker!” Sam hisses, tossing something clanky and metallic across the room.
Dean digs up some strength from deep down, tiny fragments of the stuff he’s been saving up for a rainy day, and raises his hand, clings to the railing and gives it a rattle. There’s silence for a moment, then:
“Dean?”
Sam is above him now, a hand hovering over his forehead, alighting slowly. And Dean’s not sure what Sam’s afraid of touching him for.
Sam’s eyes are lined bright pink, and he seems shocked to even be making eye contact. It’s all Dean can do, but it’s still somehow more than is expected of him. There’s no doubt in his mind now; he’s deathly sick.
“Hey. I’m right here, Dean. You’re gonna be okay, you hear me?”
Sam squeezes his hand, and Dean tries to think of a way to tell his brother what he needs to say without a voice. He lets Sam’s hand go, and tries his best to mime holding a pen and scribbling with it.
Sam shakes his head a little, tries to read the subtle twist of Dean’s eyebrows. Dean feels a vague sense of frustration when Sam refuses to look down, and the feeling gives him a new strength, with which he proceeds to thwack Sam in the arm.
_+_+_+_
Five minutes later, Dean’s trying his damnedest to scrawl two words onto a yellow legal pad. He takes a pass on a few vowels, and prays the end result is vaguely legible.
Sam takes the pen and paper back, and sounds the words out like a Sesame Street muppet. “Skna-wo-kar? Skywalker?” Christ. Dean rolls his eyes. Of course he’s on his deathbed and has an important message about fucking Star Wars. Obviously.
“Snake? Skin? Skinwalker?” Finally. Dean awards Sam with a thumbs up.
“Okay. What about the Skinwalker, man? We’re a little beyond that at this point, no?” Dean blinks up at him, a little teary-eyed from the white-hot pain that his right leg has come to embody, a little dazed from the fever of what, 105?
“Okay. Okay. Skinwalker… pizza… pistol… piston… poison. Poison. Poison? What?”
Thumbs up. Yay.
“You mean… you think this,” Sam says, waving a timorous hand over all the contraptions Dean’s plugged into, “this isn’t just… normal sick?”
Thumbs up again.
“So what? Back in the woods, something happened? It did something to you? Before I… Crap, Dean! Why didn’t you say something?”
That’s low. Jesus, he’s stubborn but he’s not an idiot. Dean closes his eyes and thinks about the dream again. About how it wasn’t really a dream at all, but a bona fide memory, and he feels a hand smooth across his forehead slow and steady.
Sam’s voice softens. “You didn’t remember. Fuck.”
A horrible relief floods though Dean then, as all the puzzle pieces fall into place. The hallucinations. The infection. All of it. And now that they can actually do something about it, Dean feels all his fears rising to the surface as he lets go, like bodies floating up from an ocean plane crash.
It’s too much. His leg and the drugs and the tube shoved down his throat. He can barely move and he’s so fucking cold and tired and weak, and he hates feeling weak and he hates trying to talk to Sammy with his eyes because where do you hide? Your eyes can’t lie or sugar-coat things. Your eyes give it all away, and it’s no fucking good. No good at all.
“Hey. Hey. It’s okay. I’m right here, bro. We can fix this,” Sam tells him, and he really wants to believe it, but he’s so tired and his head hurts from all this communicating and his eyes aren’t working so good anymore anyways, so he might as well keep them shut. Just for a little while.
_+_+_+_
When he wakes up, the ventilator is gone, and the desert sun is gleaming through the window. Sam is asleep in a chair at the foot of his bed, his head resting on the mattress, his arm strewn over Dean’s good leg. Another man, in his sixties maybe, with jet-black and silver hair and red-rimmed bifocals, is rubbing something into Dean’s chest, and mumbling some kind of chant.
“What…”
“Quiet. I’m almost finished,” he says. “May it be beautiful behind you. May it be beautiful below you. May it be beautiful above you. May it be beautiful all around you. In beauty it is finished. In beauty it is finished.”
“Finished?”
“Finished.”
Sam blinks up at him blearily, lifts his hand to rub the sleep from his eyes. “Dean? Hey. How you feeling?”
“Better. Breathing’s awesome.”
“Yeah. Yeah. God… it’s good to hear your voice.”
“How long-”
“Four days. You seized. Fever was kind of insanely high.”
Dean nods. He doesn’t remember shit, and he’s glad. “You gonna… introduce us?” he manages, learning the hard way how much a complete sentence takes out of him.
“Right. Uh, this is Luke Wallace. The guy who saved your life.”
“Howdy Dean,” the man says, offering a handshake. Dean raises a trembling hand in return and Luke does him the courtesy of reaching out for it and holding it between both of his, steadying it there. “You’re lucky this Skinwalker was such an amateur. Clearly didn’t know Jack about the Witchery Way. Otherwise you’d probably be dead.”
“Thanks.”
“Luke’s a Navajo medicine man.”
“Hey. I’m also part owner of Wallace Brothers Hardware in La Puebla. But that’s more for the ladies than anything. Women love a man who knows how to hold a power tool. Cowabunga.”
“Sammy… did the medicine man… just say… cowabunga?” Dean asks, a little concerned he’s hallucinating again.
“It’s cool,” Sam assures him, patting his arm. “He’s sort of unconventional.”
Dean lets out a short sigh of relief. Unconventional’s fine. It’s great. Whatever gets the job done.
“What was it? The p-p-poison.”
“Corpse powder. Probably made from babies’ bones,” Luke says plainly.
“Ugh. Dude. How d’you… get it out?”
“That’s a company secret I’m afraid. You know, you hunters can’t co-opt every gosh-darn religion’s magic just for your own convenience. “
Dean gets it. Hell, he wishes every religion had guys like this, leaders willing to step up to the plate and acknowledge that all the stuff people write off as archaic and superstitious is fucking true, leaders willing to take some responsibility for it, own it.
Instead, the Judeo-Christians are stuck with his sorry ass. The only stories he remembers from the bible are the kinky ones, and the ones that got made into movies with Chuck Heston.
When Luke’s finished gathering his supplies, he has a hushed conversation with Sam in the hallway. Dean imagines them talking about Andrew Collins and the baby he possibly killed and doesn’t really care if he’s left out of that little tête-à-tête.
Luke comes back into his room a few minutes later, without Sam, and he looks at Dean with this strange expression, like he’s fascinated with him somehow. It’s a little disconcerting, but Dean tries to let it go because, hi, this is the guy who saved his life.
“Seriously. Thank you,” Dean tells him, looks him straight in the eyes as Luke-the medicine man/home hardware entrepreneur in khakis and a black linen shirt-takes his hand again, holds it in midair, and for the first time seems to Dean like a holy man.
“Dean. Have you ever heard of the Slayer of Alien Gods?”
“No Sir.”
“Well Google him. Trust me, you’ll appreciate his work.”
_+_+_+_
Even though the infection is gone, Dean continues to feel like crap for weeks. The doctors insist he keep taking these knock-down, drag-out antibiotics for their full course, even though they give him migraines and make him ridiculously nauseous. And even though he and Sam are 99.5% sure his recovery has nothing to do with modern medicine, Sam’s not willing to bet Dean’s life on that .5%. So for ten days they keep him pinned down with two IVs and that stupid nasal cannula that itches like crazy, while he pukes into a stainless steel bowl every two hours. It’s fucking exhausting.
When Sam finally springs his ass out of there, he’s got a real cast on his leg-though the promise of it ending under his knee has been dramatically broken-and the headaches aren’t so bad that he can’t watch a few hours of TV a day.
Sam manages the DIY IV the hospital gave them like a pro, and it makes for some great male nurse cracks. Dean gets a little worried Sam’ll retaliate though, when one night, once Sam hauls his ass to bed after a long bout of nausea, Dean clings to his younger brother like he’s the last life jacket on the Titanic.
Of course, Sam does no such thing. Dean wakes up with his face pressed into the crook of Sam’s shoulder, a wet spot on Sam’s t-shirt that is either drool or tears, and Dean’s not sure which is worse. But when Sam wakes, he only slides out from under his brother, and pats him on the head. He never says a word about any of it.
_+_+_+_
The last day of antibiotics, Dean wants to throw a fucking party he’s so relieved.
“How ‘bout some quesadillas?” he suggests, as Sam carefully removes the port from his bruised arm.
Sam laughs his head off at this, and come back a few hours later with a bottle of Patron Silver and four hot, gooey chicken quesadillas that are possibly the most delicious thing Dean has ever eaten not counting the peach-melba pie from Sue Anne’s Pie Palace in Athens, Georgia.
“Tell me, Sammy,” he asks, after his fourth shot of tequila, “Who’d he kill?” He knows Sam knows who he’s talking about.
In between the debilitating headaches and vomit free-for-alls, Dean’s squeezed in a little research on Corpse powder and the Witchery Way, has made it almost all the way through that old tome Sam brought back from the apartment. He knows Andrew Collins had to have killed a member of his own family to become a Skinwalker.
Sam, sitting cross-legged on the bed next to his brother, shakes his head and pours Dean and himself another shot. “Forget it, man. It’s over.”
“Sam. I need to know,” he tells him, refusing the shot Sam holds out to him.
“Fine. You wanna know who Collins slaughtered to become a goddamn wolf-man? His girlfriend.”
“His girlfriend?”
“Yeah,” Sam says. He stares at the two shots in his hands and downs one after the other. “She was seven months pregnant.”
“What. What the fuck,” Dean breathes, and suddenly his chest aches right where the Skinwalker rubbed the corpse powder into his skin. His hand clutches at the spot in question and he slumps down in the bed, squeezing his eyes shut as he tries to block out the images flooding his mind.
He can hear Sam set the bottle of Patron on the night stand, feel him shift his weight around on the bed.
“It’s done, right? He was an evil bastard, and we got him and... and it's over with.”
“It’s not over with, Sam. There’s plenty more terrible shit out there and it’s never gonna be enough, and it’s never fucking finished.”
“I know.”
_+_+_+_
The next morning, Dean drags the laptop into bed and looks up this Slayer of Alien Gods person. According to Navajo myth, he’s the world’s first child. The eldest of two brothers, who hunts and destroys evil beings who have no regard for human life. He’s also known as the Monster Slayer.
Thanks, Luke. What an ego booster.
Dean slams the laptop shut, drags himself out of bed and lopes into the bathroom on his neglected crutches. He stares at himself in the mirror, at his three days’ worth of beard and the bags under his eyes and the crutches under his arms and wonders, not for the first time, what the hell the universe was on when it slapped him special.
Obviously, some kind of hallucinogenic.
FIN
A/N 2: The chant Luke is reciting is the last part of the Navajo Night Chant, a healing ceremony that takes four nights to complete. (It's way more involved that how I've portrayed it.)You can read more of it HERE. Additionally, you should check out the myth of the Slayer of Alien Gods. It's pretty badass. It's HERE.
It was definitely never a thing, a real-life shadowy animal thing glaring at him through the window of his hospital room with big, round owl-eyes. Because that would be ridiculous. After all, he just woke up from having his leg impaled in a bear trap, so he’s bound to be a little edgy, and he’s entitled to a teensy bit of paranoia.
He’s still pretty out of it when Sam shows up at his bedside, all sad smiles and reassuring pats on the shoulder. So it’s a miracle Dean doesn’t just let it slip out. No, it’s a testament to how even when he’s out of it, he can still hold his shit together. He’s that fucking cool.
Doesn’t change the fact that the leg hurts like a son of a bitch, and he can’t stop glaring out the damn window, like he half-expects the Skinwalker that Sam assures him is dead to come crashing through the glass and finish Dean off like it intended to, up there in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
“Wha ‘bout the body, Sammy?” he asks, the words slurred out like a slushie from the 7-Eleven.
Sam pulls over a cheap plastic chair from the corner of the room and sits on it backwards, his knees jutting out on either side like some hot-shot basketball player who’s too cool for school.
“Dean, it’s taken care of. I dismembered and gutted the damn thing. You’re welcome, by the way. It was about as fun as looking for a retainer in a cafeteria trash dump.”
“That all it takes?”
“What? That’s not enough? Look, man. Stop worrying about the hunt and start worrying about you. Your leg is not in good shape.”
“Noticed,” Dean says, and strains his neck to take a look at it because he’s noticed the pain for sure, but he isn’t actually sure what the hell is going on down there.
“Fractured fibula, they said. Can’t put the cast on until your wounds heal up some.”
Dean takes it all in and swallows hard. Christ. It’s a fucking mess: mounds of thick white gauze, blood already spotting through at his shin, an enormous plastic splint cradling his leg from toes to mid-thigh and fugly brown tension bandages holding all the junk together. The bulkiness of the entire set-up is plain nerve-wracking, and suddenly Dean feels like he’s at sea and the waves are picking up.
“Hey. Lie back,” Sam tells him, one hand on his chest, another at the back of his neck, like Dean needs help finding his way to the goddamn pillow. Just because he suddenly can’t tell up from down doesn’t mean he’s not willing to take the 50/50 chance he’ll guess right.
“Nhghh,” Dean mutters by way of protest, and he’s clearly made the wrong choice, because something in his leg tightens like a violin string that’s about to snap, and Dean can hear the high-pitched vibrations in his blood.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Sam blithers, pressing back harder now, with both hands on his shoulders until Dean’s lying back completely. He squeezes his eyes shut against the pain and takes a deep breath and Sam holds his hand. That’s okay too. Because, fuck, it hurts, and he would never ask for anyone to hold his hand but he thinks it’s one of those exceptions-that-prove-the-rule situations. Then Sam goes and sets a little box into his palm and tells him to press the button and Dean doesn’t think much about anything for a while.
_+_+_+_
The next time it happens, he hears long squeaky scratching sounds, like fingers running slowly down a foggy window. He’s swimming up from under a haze of IV painkillers, just starting to make sense of his surroundings for the second time. He’s alone, and the room is dark, save for a thin rectangle of light streaming through the nearly-closed door. At first he thinks it’s coming from out in the hallway; a janitor mopping the floors or a nurse rearranging furniture. Something normal.
But then the squeaking turns to scratching and the scratching turns to thumping and it’s definitely coming from outside, from the side of the building on the fourth floor. And it doesn’t fucking stop.
Breathe. He needs to breathe. There’s a rational explanation for this. Just because he’s high as a goddamn kite doesn’t mean he can’t slow the fuck down and think. Think.
Thump.
Thump.
Right. The only way he’s going to get some peace of mind is if he looks out that window and sees for himself that it’s just a stupid tree branch, or a pigeon or something. Problem is, there’s an IV and a huge mass of pain where his leg used to be blocking the way like two very pissed off storm troopers. And Dean’s fresh out of Jedi mind tricks.
What he’s not fresh out of, however, is chutzpah. See, he can do this. The pain isn’t that bad and the machine dosing out his morphine and antibiotics is on wheels. The window is only about eight feet away from the bed, and he can lean on the plastic chair. It’s child’s play.
Every scratch and thump propels him a little bit further, until, with some controlled breathing, he’s positioned his splinted leg at the edge of the bed. All he needs to do now is slide his ass off the lumpy mattress, and plant all his weight on his good side.
Easy as pie.
_+_+_+_
When he comes to, the nurse who’s reinserting his IV is literally calling shenanigans, what with Dean having collapsed in agony, causing him to fall flat on his face and the IV to be yanked free of his forearm, spilling his antibiotics and precious morphine uselessly onto the tiles. At least Dean manages to convince her not to tell Sam, in return for his promise that he’ll stay off his feet for a whole ten days, until the stitches in his legs can come out and he gets a proper cast.
It’s a tall order, but Dean is a man of his word. Besides, now that he knows what it feels like to stand on the gimp leg, he’s not exactly keen on an encore.
Today’s the day he gets busted out-AMA, of course, since the insurance card he’s using is about as legitimate as Roger Clemens’ pitching stats-and all the fussing and gabbing with Sam and the doctor about how to change the dressings and when to take his painkillers and antibiotics keeps him from thinking about the strange sounds he heard the night before, the eyes he’d seen in the window. He’s just glad to be leaving, even if it is in a stupid wheelchair.
At least the nurse who’s pushing it is hot. That’s something.
_+_+_+_
They pick up crutches, codeine and antibiotics at the drugstore in downtown Espanola, and Sam drives them over to the Little Adobe Motel. While Dean’s stretched out in the back seat, Sam pops in to administration to switch out for a room on the ground floor. Dean would be a liar if he said it wasn’t humiliating.
As if the universe finds it necessary to chide him for his hubris, it takes all the energy he’s got to make it from the car to the bed in the motel room. The crutches help some, but his leg is still heavy and full of raw nerve endings that scratch around inside his flesh like sugar in iced tea. Basically, it hurts, and once Sam helps him onto the bed, all he can do is lie there and try to get a grip, close his eyes, indifferent as he lets Sam prop his leg up on a pile of pillows, like it’s not even attached to his body. Which is wishful thinking on his part.
He sleeps in fits and starts as the IV morphine from the hospital wears off more and more. He swallows a couple of the codeine pills, but it’s like the difference between a fine Scotch and a Vodka cranberry at happy hour. Watered down bullshit.
“Sorry, man,” Sam says, because apparently, his misery is seeping from his pores and stinking up the joint. “Is there anything I can get you?”
“Whiskey,” Dean growls, and Sam smiles a little and shakes his head. Whatever. As long as he gets the damn whiskey.
“With these puppies?” Sam plucks the bottle of antibiotics from the night table and shakes them at Dean like they’re going to cause some kind of Pavlovian response. “That’s a negative. How about some kind of, I dunno, nourishment?” Smart ass.
“Fine. Philly cheese-steak sub.”
“Hey, we’re in New Mexico. How ‘bout a quesadilla,” Sam suggests, with that perky fake-helpful tone that he usually saves for squeezing info out of civilians. Like Dean should be worrying about embracing the culture. Likes he’s never had a fucking quesadilla before.
“Cheese. Steak. Sam,” he says, and Sam sighs and grabs his coat.
The door slams shut just as Dean spots the TV remote on the breakfast table at the other end of the room. Awesome. His leg is throbbing and he’s desperate for some distraction. He reaches over to the nightstand to see what’s available to him, but all he finds is a local Yellow Pages and a black Gideon’s bible. It’s a toss up, but he goes for the bible in the end, because even though it doesn’t have pictures, it’s got sex. Sort of.
He finally finds the bit about Lot’s Daughters, and is about three verses in when, out of the corner of his eye, he sees a shadow flash by outside the room.
He slams the bible shut as his gut twists into a knot. Crap. He thought he was past all this, thought it was the morphine.
“Fuck!” Something smacks against the back of the building, and it sounds like someone throwing their whole body up against a wall. Little pattering noises climb the wall and move to the roof. Dean squirms in his bed, hissing as his leg is jostled, following the freaky sounds with his eyes. It’s like some wild animal is running in circles directly on top of him. He reaches for his jacket at the end of the bed, and pulls out his knife, his cell. Grips one in one hand, one in the other.
It stops, and Dean stays alert for a few minutes, his breath silent and controlled. Eventually, his hold loosens on the knife, and he rubs his thumb and fingers over his eyes. Maybe the morphine hasn’t worn off. Which would be really unfair, since the thing it’s supposed to be doing wore off about three hours ago.
Or maybe there’s something out there, another Skinwalker. The angry lover of the one Sam tore to pieces in the woods. But then it would go after Sam, wouldn’t it? Sam. Fuck.
Dean flicks open his phone, and hits Sam’s number. It rings twice. Three times.
“Come on, Sammy. Pick up. Pick up…”
Five.
“Change your mind about the quesadilla?”
“Jesus Christ, Sam! Your hands tied behind your back?” Dean blurts out, letting himself breathe for the fist time in minutes. He runs his hand over the back of his head and leans on the headboard, staring vacantly at the dead flies inside the ceiling lamp.
“What? No. I was trying to parallel park,” Sam tells him. “What’s up? You okay?”
Jesus. Good question. Maybe? Maybe he’s being stalked by another goddamn Skinwalker. Maybe he’s losing his mind. Maybe… he’d better keep it to himself.
“Yeah. Yeah, I just… get some fries, alright?”
“Uh, sure. No problem. You sure you’re okay? ‘Cause you sounded a little tense there for a second.”
“Fine. Just. It’s just the leg. It’s nothin’.”
“Ugh. Shit. Well, when I get back maybe we can artistically re-interpret your dosage. Just hang in there, man.”
“Yeah. It’s cool. See ya in a few.”
When Sam gets back Dean manages a few bites of his sub so he can at least justify his stubborn request, and pops an extra codeine before passing out. He’s blearily aware of Sam prying an empty Jarritos bottle from his fingers and carefully changing his bandages, but he can’t be sure about the hand that settles on his chest and rubs it for a good minute. He kinda prays he’s hallucinating that part.
_+_+_+_
Over the next couple of days, Dean learns to ignore the disconcerting noises that plague the motel room every time Sam isn’t around. It doesn’t ever amount to more than his nerves being rattled anyway, so what’s the point? He just turns up the volume on the TV (he keeps the remote under his pillow now, thank you very much) and pretends that he really does loves the theme song from Matlock that much.
Then, when Sam insists on checking out the Skinwalker’s apartment for Navajo witchcraft shit Dean tries to act nonchalant about it.
“What, you think there could be more of ‘em?” he asks quietly.
“Nope. It’s been five days, and the attacks have stopped. I’m pretty sure the guy was flying solo,” Sam says, tossing Dean a fresh bundle of ice for his leg. The swelling’s gone up a little, and his flesh feels tight and hot. Dean gingerly arranges the ice and squints up at his brother.
“So what’s got you all fidgety?”
“Just figure I should do a sweep of his place, make sure nothing volatile falls into the wrong hands.”
“You mean we.”
_+_+_+_
Sam only lets him come because Dean swears he’ll stay in the car. Of course, once they get there, it’s impossible to keep him from following Sam up to the apartment. Not because he’s particularly unstoppable, physically speaking. Fucking far from it. It’s more that Sam’s not about to watch him cripple himself further trying to follow unaided, and Dean counts on his past record of pig-headedness to work in his favor this time around. It does, and Sam spots him-if somewhat resentfully- with a hand glancing the small of his back as he hobbles up the five measly steps.
The small apartment reveals that the Skinwalker, Andrew Collins, aside from being a wolf-man murderer, is a total pack-rat.
“Dude. It’s like an episode of Hoarders in here,” Dean says, navigating his way slowly around a half dozen piles of books and old newspapers to get to the couch.
Sam sighs and rakes his hair back with a tense hand. “No kidding. I thought Bobby was bad. It’s gonna take hours to find anything in this dump.”
He’s probably right.
Dean, however, sifts through what’s in arm’s reach of the couch in less than 40 minutes, and it’s mostly bogus first-hand accounts of peyote-induced spirit-walks and brochures for anthro-tourism sweat lodge retreats. It all seems kind of weird and wrong somehow. For people to allow their culture’s sacred traditions to be exploited for profit like that, they must be pretty fucking desperate for cash.
Then again, what the hell is Christmas all about?
Speaking of December, Dean starts to notice a chill up his spine like winter just decided to pay a surprise visit to 34b Del Verde Drive. He sags into the couch, shivers and squirrels around in his coat pocket for his medication. His leg is throbbing again, the pain worse than it’s been since he first got back from the hospital. Probably pushed his luck today, but Christ, he’s seeing spots. That’s not good.
“Wanna grab me some water there Sammy,” he hollers into the kitchen, where Sam’s been rifling through a pile of older-looking books on the cluttered table. “Or maybe a beer…”
“Seriously, Dean? Like, I’ll just check his fridge and see if he’s got your brand of… huh.”
Dean watches as the little white pills begin to dissolve into his hot palm. “Sam? These drugs aren’t gonna swallow themselves,” he says, aware of how little sense the expression makes in this context, and hopes Sam won’t call him on it. He’s just not on top of his game today. “Sammy?”
“Guess what I found in the fridge,” Sam says, leaning on the archway to the kitchen, a hand hiding something behind his back.
Dean blinks up at his brother, trying to un-blurry his vision. “Miller High Life?”
“Nope. A tome on ancient Navajo witchcraft,” Sam tells him, swinging something out in front of him like it’s a report card full of straight A’s. “Handwritten.”
Dean squeezes his eyes shut and opens them again, waits for the book, or whatever it is, to come into focus. “You get that water?”
“Huh? Oh. Oh, hey. Are you feeling okay? Jesus, Dean,” Sam says, and suddenly he’s on him like fly-paper, a hand pressed to his forehead, another grabbing at his arm like a mom afraid of losing their kid in a big department store.
“Dean, man, you’re really hot.”
“Drugs. Drugs might help,” Dean mutters. He watches a Sam-shaped blur disappear back into the kitchen, and hears the sound of water running. Soon enough, Sam’s holding a glass out and Dean takes a decent swig, and pops the sweaty pills into his mouth. Then Sam takes the glass away, and starts investigating Dean’s leg, poking around the splint.
“Dean, I don’t like this. The swelling’s up even more, and you’re running a fever… could be an infection.”
“Nah. Drugs’ll kick in soon ‘n I’ll be fine.”
Sam looks up at him from where he’s still examining Dean’s bandages, frowns and shakes his head like he knows something Dean doesn’t. “I don’t think so, man. I think… I think we need to get you to the hospital. Like, now.” And with that look, and those words, Sam is kind of scaring the shit out of him.
_+_+_+_
By the time they get to the ER, the pain is bad enough that it’s starting to distort time and space, and everything happens in messy blurry flashes; being hauled onto a stretcher from the back seat of the Impala, being poked at under bright lights by uninvited hands. Strangers yelling orders at each other, saying his name, saying “Try to stay still, Dean,” or “Your brother’s right outside Mr. Ginsberg.” Watching a needle plunge through the tender flesh of his arm, feeling the whole world melt like a hot fudge sundae as the syringe is depressed and the drugs work their way into his bloodstream.
When he wakes, things are slow and quiet. There’s the beep of a heart monitor and a soft whirr that sounds like an old humidifier. He can feel his broken leg still throbbing mercilessly, and something new pinching his calf in the same way the IVs in his arms do. There are two of those now. And something tickling his nose, too. Oxygen? Jesus. He’s hooked up to a lot more junk than he was the first time around. What the fuck happened there?
“Dean? Hey. Hey. Look at me. You awake?”
Sam’s hand is on his shoulder. He’s not sure how long it’s been there. He rolls his head toward his brother’s voice-the room spins as a result, and he feels his stomach lurch. Sam’s face is close, inches from the bed, and when it comes into focus, Dean can tell Sam’s been awake for far too long, which means he’s been out of it for just as long.
“Hey. You with me?”
Dean nods. Anything more elaborate seems beyond his capabilities at this point.
“It’s a bone infection. There’s a name for it but I… acute osteo-something-something… I don’t know. It’s bad. They’re draining shit out of your leg, and pumping you full of heavy duty antibiotics,” Sam explains sharply, glaring at the medical equipment that crowns the bed like it’s out to get the both of them. Like a gang of malevolent spirits. “And they won’t tell me shit,” he adds, his voice cracking harshly, a hand swiped swiftly across his eyes.
Jesus. This is messed up. Hadn’t he been taking antibiotics to prevent exactly this from happening? What the fuck? That’s totally unfair.
Right. Like their lives are prime examples of the justness of the universe. It fucking figures.
Sam sits there with him silently and they listen to the symphony of beeps and sibilant whirrs, tracking his heart rate and draining infected pus out of his leg, respectively. It’s about as soothing as nails on a chalk-board.
A nurse comes in and she talks to Sam at the foot of the bed in a sweet hushed tone.
“He wake up for you?” she asks. She sounds older, her voice raspy from yelling at her kids for years.
“Yeah.”
“That’s good. He’ll be in and out. His fever’s still very high.”
“Are the drugs working?”
“We might not know for a while. Let’s keep our fingers crossed, though, okay hon?”
Keep their fingers crossed? That’s what he’s got to count on? Dumb luck? This place is just teeming with professionalism. God damn.
_+_+_+_
He dreams he’s back up in the Sangre de Cristos with the Skinwalker. It sniffs his bloody broken leg with its wet black wolf-nose, staring him down with eyes like two glowing harvest moons. Dean’s cheek presses into dead pine needles on the forest floor as he grapples at shrubs to drag himself away from the creature.
But the jaws of the trap hold him in place and the pain is so fierce a howl escapes from his belly, a reaction so basic and animal that he barely feels human anymore himself.
“Do you feel it? Do you feel the Ant’j?” the Skinwalker growls, appearing now as a man standing mud-caked and naked except for the hide of grey fur draped over his back like a cape. The man crouches down and leans close to Dean’s face, and past the dirt and the wildness of his eyes Dean can see someone who was once just a normal guy. Young and fair-skinned with a pierced eyebrow and bleached tips.
A crooked smile creeps across his face and he breathes into Dean’s ear, the humid air slithering down Dean’s neck. “It’s inside you,” he whispers, pressing an ice cold hand to Dean’s chest, something rough and gravelly rubbing between the man’s skin and his own. Dean’s lungs constrict and he struggles helplessly to pull air into his body as the Skinwalker disappears.
_+_+_+_
He knows this feeling, this choking sensation, like a football shoved down his throat, and he hates it. Hates that he fucking knows there’s a machine breathing for him, because it’s happened before. Twice.
A guy could seriously end up with a complex over this shit.
“…any higher than 105. The Zyvox just isn’t fighting the infection like we thought,” someone says. It’s like listening from underwater, the man’s voice is low and muffled, but Dean can tell he’s someone official. A doctor, maybe. “This cocktail is the only option left.”
“And if… if it doesn’t….” Sam. Sam’s here. That's good.
“Then it’s going to be entirely up to your brother to fight this infection off. And he’s strong, but I have to be frank with you, if it’s weakened him this much, he’s looking at a real uphill battle.”
“He’s fought plenty of those.”
“Then he’s got a leg up already. And, look. Maybe this’ll be the one. Third time’s a charm, right?”
“Yeah. Right.”
A door closes quietly and Dean blinks at the ceiling, prays that Sam hasn’t left.
“Fuck. Fuck!” Yeah, he’s still here alright. “Motherfucker!” Sam hisses, tossing something clanky and metallic across the room.
Dean digs up some strength from deep down, tiny fragments of the stuff he’s been saving up for a rainy day, and raises his hand, clings to the railing and gives it a rattle. There’s silence for a moment, then:
“Dean?”
Sam is above him now, a hand hovering over his forehead, alighting slowly. And Dean’s not sure what Sam’s afraid of touching him for.
Sam’s eyes are lined bright pink, and he seems shocked to even be making eye contact. It’s all Dean can do, but it’s still somehow more than is expected of him. There’s no doubt in his mind now; he’s deathly sick.
“Hey. I’m right here, Dean. You’re gonna be okay, you hear me?”
Sam squeezes his hand, and Dean tries to think of a way to tell his brother what he needs to say without a voice. He lets Sam’s hand go, and tries his best to mime holding a pen and scribbling with it.
Sam shakes his head a little, tries to read the subtle twist of Dean’s eyebrows. Dean feels a vague sense of frustration when Sam refuses to look down, and the feeling gives him a new strength, with which he proceeds to thwack Sam in the arm.
_+_+_+_
Five minutes later, Dean’s trying his damnedest to scrawl two words onto a yellow legal pad. He takes a pass on a few vowels, and prays the end result is vaguely legible.
Sam takes the pen and paper back, and sounds the words out like a Sesame Street muppet. “Skna-wo-kar? Skywalker?” Christ. Dean rolls his eyes. Of course he’s on his deathbed and has an important message about fucking Star Wars. Obviously.
“Snake? Skin? Skinwalker?” Finally. Dean awards Sam with a thumbs up.
“Okay. What about the Skinwalker, man? We’re a little beyond that at this point, no?” Dean blinks up at him, a little teary-eyed from the white-hot pain that his right leg has come to embody, a little dazed from the fever of what, 105?
“Okay. Okay. Skinwalker… pizza… pistol… piston… poison. Poison. Poison? What?”
Thumbs up. Yay.
“You mean… you think this,” Sam says, waving a timorous hand over all the contraptions Dean’s plugged into, “this isn’t just… normal sick?”
Thumbs up again.
“So what? Back in the woods, something happened? It did something to you? Before I… Crap, Dean! Why didn’t you say something?”
That’s low. Jesus, he’s stubborn but he’s not an idiot. Dean closes his eyes and thinks about the dream again. About how it wasn’t really a dream at all, but a bona fide memory, and he feels a hand smooth across his forehead slow and steady.
Sam’s voice softens. “You didn’t remember. Fuck.”
A horrible relief floods though Dean then, as all the puzzle pieces fall into place. The hallucinations. The infection. All of it. And now that they can actually do something about it, Dean feels all his fears rising to the surface as he lets go, like bodies floating up from an ocean plane crash.
It’s too much. His leg and the drugs and the tube shoved down his throat. He can barely move and he’s so fucking cold and tired and weak, and he hates feeling weak and he hates trying to talk to Sammy with his eyes because where do you hide? Your eyes can’t lie or sugar-coat things. Your eyes give it all away, and it’s no fucking good. No good at all.
“Hey. Hey. It’s okay. I’m right here, bro. We can fix this,” Sam tells him, and he really wants to believe it, but he’s so tired and his head hurts from all this communicating and his eyes aren’t working so good anymore anyways, so he might as well keep them shut. Just for a little while.
_+_+_+_
When he wakes up, the ventilator is gone, and the desert sun is gleaming through the window. Sam is asleep in a chair at the foot of his bed, his head resting on the mattress, his arm strewn over Dean’s good leg. Another man, in his sixties maybe, with jet-black and silver hair and red-rimmed bifocals, is rubbing something into Dean’s chest, and mumbling some kind of chant.
“What…”
“Quiet. I’m almost finished,” he says. “May it be beautiful behind you. May it be beautiful below you. May it be beautiful above you. May it be beautiful all around you. In beauty it is finished. In beauty it is finished.”
“Finished?”
“Finished.”
Sam blinks up at him blearily, lifts his hand to rub the sleep from his eyes. “Dean? Hey. How you feeling?”
“Better. Breathing’s awesome.”
“Yeah. Yeah. God… it’s good to hear your voice.”
“How long-”
“Four days. You seized. Fever was kind of insanely high.”
Dean nods. He doesn’t remember shit, and he’s glad. “You gonna… introduce us?” he manages, learning the hard way how much a complete sentence takes out of him.
“Right. Uh, this is Luke Wallace. The guy who saved your life.”
“Howdy Dean,” the man says, offering a handshake. Dean raises a trembling hand in return and Luke does him the courtesy of reaching out for it and holding it between both of his, steadying it there. “You’re lucky this Skinwalker was such an amateur. Clearly didn’t know Jack about the Witchery Way. Otherwise you’d probably be dead.”
“Thanks.”
“Luke’s a Navajo medicine man.”
“Hey. I’m also part owner of Wallace Brothers Hardware in La Puebla. But that’s more for the ladies than anything. Women love a man who knows how to hold a power tool. Cowabunga.”
“Sammy… did the medicine man… just say… cowabunga?” Dean asks, a little concerned he’s hallucinating again.
“It’s cool,” Sam assures him, patting his arm. “He’s sort of unconventional.”
Dean lets out a short sigh of relief. Unconventional’s fine. It’s great. Whatever gets the job done.
“What was it? The p-p-poison.”
“Corpse powder. Probably made from babies’ bones,” Luke says plainly.
“Ugh. Dude. How d’you… get it out?”
“That’s a company secret I’m afraid. You know, you hunters can’t co-opt every gosh-darn religion’s magic just for your own convenience. “
Dean gets it. Hell, he wishes every religion had guys like this, leaders willing to step up to the plate and acknowledge that all the stuff people write off as archaic and superstitious is fucking true, leaders willing to take some responsibility for it, own it.
Instead, the Judeo-Christians are stuck with his sorry ass. The only stories he remembers from the bible are the kinky ones, and the ones that got made into movies with Chuck Heston.
When Luke’s finished gathering his supplies, he has a hushed conversation with Sam in the hallway. Dean imagines them talking about Andrew Collins and the baby he possibly killed and doesn’t really care if he’s left out of that little tête-à-tête.
Luke comes back into his room a few minutes later, without Sam, and he looks at Dean with this strange expression, like he’s fascinated with him somehow. It’s a little disconcerting, but Dean tries to let it go because, hi, this is the guy who saved his life.
“Seriously. Thank you,” Dean tells him, looks him straight in the eyes as Luke-the medicine man/home hardware entrepreneur in khakis and a black linen shirt-takes his hand again, holds it in midair, and for the first time seems to Dean like a holy man.
“Dean. Have you ever heard of the Slayer of Alien Gods?”
“No Sir.”
“Well Google him. Trust me, you’ll appreciate his work.”
_+_+_+_
Even though the infection is gone, Dean continues to feel like crap for weeks. The doctors insist he keep taking these knock-down, drag-out antibiotics for their full course, even though they give him migraines and make him ridiculously nauseous. And even though he and Sam are 99.5% sure his recovery has nothing to do with modern medicine, Sam’s not willing to bet Dean’s life on that .5%. So for ten days they keep him pinned down with two IVs and that stupid nasal cannula that itches like crazy, while he pukes into a stainless steel bowl every two hours. It’s fucking exhausting.
When Sam finally springs his ass out of there, he’s got a real cast on his leg-though the promise of it ending under his knee has been dramatically broken-and the headaches aren’t so bad that he can’t watch a few hours of TV a day.
Sam manages the DIY IV the hospital gave them like a pro, and it makes for some great male nurse cracks. Dean gets a little worried Sam’ll retaliate though, when one night, once Sam hauls his ass to bed after a long bout of nausea, Dean clings to his younger brother like he’s the last life jacket on the Titanic.
Of course, Sam does no such thing. Dean wakes up with his face pressed into the crook of Sam’s shoulder, a wet spot on Sam’s t-shirt that is either drool or tears, and Dean’s not sure which is worse. But when Sam wakes, he only slides out from under his brother, and pats him on the head. He never says a word about any of it.
_+_+_+_
The last day of antibiotics, Dean wants to throw a fucking party he’s so relieved.
“How ‘bout some quesadillas?” he suggests, as Sam carefully removes the port from his bruised arm.
Sam laughs his head off at this, and come back a few hours later with a bottle of Patron Silver and four hot, gooey chicken quesadillas that are possibly the most delicious thing Dean has ever eaten not counting the peach-melba pie from Sue Anne’s Pie Palace in Athens, Georgia.
“Tell me, Sammy,” he asks, after his fourth shot of tequila, “Who’d he kill?” He knows Sam knows who he’s talking about.
In between the debilitating headaches and vomit free-for-alls, Dean’s squeezed in a little research on Corpse powder and the Witchery Way, has made it almost all the way through that old tome Sam brought back from the apartment. He knows Andrew Collins had to have killed a member of his own family to become a Skinwalker.
Sam, sitting cross-legged on the bed next to his brother, shakes his head and pours Dean and himself another shot. “Forget it, man. It’s over.”
“Sam. I need to know,” he tells him, refusing the shot Sam holds out to him.
“Fine. You wanna know who Collins slaughtered to become a goddamn wolf-man? His girlfriend.”
“His girlfriend?”
“Yeah,” Sam says. He stares at the two shots in his hands and downs one after the other. “She was seven months pregnant.”
“What. What the fuck,” Dean breathes, and suddenly his chest aches right where the Skinwalker rubbed the corpse powder into his skin. His hand clutches at the spot in question and he slumps down in the bed, squeezing his eyes shut as he tries to block out the images flooding his mind.
He can hear Sam set the bottle of Patron on the night stand, feel him shift his weight around on the bed.
“It’s done, right? He was an evil bastard, and we got him and... and it's over with.”
“It’s not over with, Sam. There’s plenty more terrible shit out there and it’s never gonna be enough, and it’s never fucking finished.”
“I know.”
_+_+_+_
The next morning, Dean drags the laptop into bed and looks up this Slayer of Alien Gods person. According to Navajo myth, he’s the world’s first child. The eldest of two brothers, who hunts and destroys evil beings who have no regard for human life. He’s also known as the Monster Slayer.
Thanks, Luke. What an ego booster.
Dean slams the laptop shut, drags himself out of bed and lopes into the bathroom on his neglected crutches. He stares at himself in the mirror, at his three days’ worth of beard and the bags under his eyes and the crutches under his arms and wonders, not for the first time, what the hell the universe was on when it slapped him special.
Obviously, some kind of hallucinogenic.
FIN
A/N 2: The chant Luke is reciting is the last part of the Navajo Night Chant, a healing ceremony that takes four nights to complete. (It's way more involved that how I've portrayed it.)You can read more of it HERE. Additionally, you should check out the myth of the Slayer of Alien Gods. It's pretty badass. It's HERE.