shangrilada
in
ohsam
On Guard (Complete)
Title: On Guard
Author: shangrilada
Rating: R just for language
Genre/pairing: Gen
Characters: Dean, Sam, some bad guy for a second or two
Word count: 2689 (complete)
Summary: Sam takes deep breaths and reminds himself that he's twenty-two and a hunter, for fuck's sake, and that looking out the window and worrying about something he could fit in his hand (oh God Jesus no) is is absolutely ridiculous.
Written for the current ohsam fic challenge, prompt left by running_hot: Sam has a crippling, crippling phobia. It doesn't matter what it is, only that it's fairly irrational and incredibly intense. On a hunt, they encounter a MotW that uses/involves that thing of which he is petrified, and he freezes up, which lets Dean get hurt. All of a sudden, Sam's not only terrified by the object of his phobia, he's also incredibly guilty. He keeps trying to expose himself to the object of his phobia when Dean's not looking, which makes him freaked out and exhausted and constantly afraid. Dean takes way too long to figure it out, but when he does, it's up to him to fix his little brother, as usual.
“So she controls the elements? Like some kind of earth goddess?”
Sam nudges the book across the table. “Not really. It's more like the elements control her. What she can do depends on where she is. The environment controls her powers. She just...harnesses whatever's around. Blasts you with it.”
Dean scans the page. “So we catch her on a mountain, she gives us an avalanche?”
“Something like that.”
“All right, so avoid mountains. Easy enough.” Dean watches Sam drink. “You all right?”
“What?”
Dean says, “Uh, you're shaking.”
“I'm not.”
“You've been on edge since we got here. C'mon, beautiful sticky disgusting day in sticky disgusting Florida. What's not to love? We need a hunt in Hawaii, man. Puerto Rico. Somewhere.”
“Yeah, once they build a bridge.” Sam drains his water glass. “I'm fine.”
In the car, Sam takes deep breaths and reminds himself that he's twenty-two and a hunter, for fuck's sake, and that looking out the window and worrying about something he could fit in his hand (oh God Jesus no) is is absolutely ridiculous. And that just because they're in Florida doesn't mean he's at risk of being covered by the things.
It's fine.
All of this is fine.
Dean belts out AC/DC and seems blissfully unaware that Sam's having a personal therapy session a foot and a half away from him.
It's stupid. It's so stupid. But he's here, right? The fact that he even agreed to a hunt in Florida, this swampy fucking state that's full of...shit, he doesn't even like to think the word. Frogs, okay? Frogs. He can think the word. He could even say it out loud. Probably.
The fact that he even agreed to come is a sign of some kind of progress. Dean probably thinks he outgrew this years ago, but it's a process. Coming here's a good step. Way to go, champ.
He swallows and closes his eyes and they set off to find the bitch.
**
The hunt is a fucking blur and he barely remembers any of it.
He remembers the wraith, all ten feet of her, sucking up the swamp water and baring her teeth. He remembers that he had the stake and Dean had the worthless gun, and then he remembers the empty, muddy ground, drained of water, and he remembers frogs.
Dozenshundredsthoussands--
And now he's here.
“Sam. Damn it, Sam.”
He feels a jerk on the back of his collar and he's hauled to his feet. Dean's breathing hard through clenched teeth, cradling one arm against his stomach. A few feet away, the wraith is staked and dead. Sam doesn't remember Dean grabbing the stake, but he must have, because Sam feels like he's been nothing but a huddled ball of sweat and panic for days now and no fucking way was he the one to kill her, no fucking way has ever done anything but panted and shook and swallowed back vomit.
There are no frogs. Where did the frogs go? Dean's hand makes him jump. (It's not cold. Not slimy. It's fine.)
“We've got to go,” Dean says. God, he sounds pissed.
Sam swallows. “Your arm, 's it broken?”
“Yeah. Come on.”
They're halfway to the car when something croaks a few feet away from them. Dean gives Sam a quick look, and Sam starts to say he's okay, he can handle this, he's fine, and then he's clinging to a tree branch and vomiting like he's never going to stop.
“Jesus.” Dean's hand rubs circles on his back. “All right. It's okay.”
“W-we've got to...” Sam closes his eyes against another bitchslap of nausea. “...get you to a hospital.”
“It's not getting any more broken. Whatever. You all right?”
Sam nods and promptly pukes on Dean's shoes.
“Shit. All right.” Dean scrapes his boots against the tree and hauls Sam up with that hand on his collar again. “I didn't know it was still this bad. Jesus, need two fucking hands...” He leans Sam back against the tree and scrapes his sleeve over Sam's mouth. “All right. Any better?”
“I'm so sorry.”
“God, shut up. You're fine.” He pushes Sam's hair back. “Okay? Maybe they'll give you something at the ER to help calm you down, that'd be nice, huh?”
Sam nods a little. He's watching Dean. There's nothing in the whole world but Dean. This is fine.
Dean isn't dead, and if he hates Sam for letting him get fucking broken, he's doing a good job of hiding it, and that's all Sam really needs right now, is for him to hide it long enough for Sam to pull himself the fuck together, Jesus Christ, Sam.
“Think you can drive?” Dean says.
He isn't sure, but he nods anyway.
“All right. Let's get going. This hurts like a bitch.”
**
Two days later, Dean's whacked out on painkillers and seems willing to shrug off the whole thing, and Sam's still walking around feeling like his insides went through a wood-chipper.
Dean could have fucking died. If she'd thrown him at a slightly different angle, or if Dean hadn't stabbed her between the right two ribs, or if Sam had been an inch too far away for Dean to rescue the stake in time, he could have died, and Sam stayed in place like a goddamn pinned butterfly because of some frogs.
Jess used to tease him about it, because he mentioned it in passing the first time it came up, made it sound like no big deal. Chuckled and shrugged a shoulder. “I'm so afraid of frogs.”
“Frogs are cute!” she said.
He shivered down to his damn bones and she laughed and hugged him and told him he was cuter than a hundred frogs and kissed him when he kept shuddering. It wasn't until a few months later, when she turned a page in her biology book and he cringed, stood up, and went straight to the fridge for a drink, that she realized Sam wasn't really overstating the thing. When he went to her parents' house for Christmas and they started talking about eating frogs' legs in France, Jess made some excuse and pulled him outside and coached him through slow, deep breaths.
She'd still tease him about it sometimes, gently, and that was okay, because they're fucking frogs for God's sake, and because it was never really a problem. It was okay that he was scared to death of the fucking things. It didn't change his life. Dissections weren't exactly a crucial part of his pre-law program, and Palo Alto's beaches weren't quite crawling with amphibians.
He should have known that it would come up in a hunt someday. He's only been back with Dean for two months, not even, and apparently he'd forgotten that bad guys will eventually find every single crack in you and use the hell out of it. They scrape down into you and dredge everything out. He needs two hands to count how many monsters have looked at Dean for all of five seconds before knowing enough to taunt him about abandonment issues, and both hands and both feet for how many times Dad's been kicked in his bad knee. And then this, a fucking coincidence, a hunt in a swamp, breaks Sam.
“You're not broken,” Dean says. “Shut up.”
Sam didn't even say anything. He's just sitting here, doing web searches, for the billionth time in his life, on how to get rid of phobias.
“You're hallucinating,” Sam says, vaguely. “Pain meds.”
“Oh.”
“Mmmhmm. Go back to sleep.”
He doesn't type in 'frog phobia,' because he found out a few years ago some asshole at Google decided it's funny that pictures of frogs come up as soon as you type that in, so he reads all these accounts of people who are afraid of legitimate, boring things-heights, small spaces, diseases, shit that could legitimately kill them-and rests his chin on his knees.
Dean resumes his interrputed early-midafternon nap and Sam types in the fucking word and makes it through a minute and a page and a half of pictures before he has to stumble to the bathroom and pound down glasses of water.
A minute and a half. All right. At least now he has a time to beat. Now he has a number.
Sam likes numbers. Numbers make sense.
Being afraid of frogs does not, so it has to go.
That night, Dean flips past the nature channel fast as hell like he always does, and Sam says, “Hey, no, what was that?”
“What was what?”
“Go back.”
Dean looks at him sideways and goes back a few channels.
It's just lions and gazelles, but Sam doesn't look away from the screen for half an hour, barely fucking blinks. This is a challenge. His heart, for the entire half hour, beats so hard it's practically vibrating, because his brain's convinced that any second the nature channel's going to fuck with him and interrupt this lioness gnawing on an antler to flash pictures of tree frogs. He's worn completely out by the time the show's over, and as he crawls between the covers he notices he's feeling really dizzy.
It's okay. It's going to be fine.
**
“Sam.”
“Sammy.”
“Hey, come on, Sam, wake up.”
He's sitting up, somehow, and air is pouring itself down his throat. He coughs and pants and curls his fingers around the sheets.
“Hey,” Dean says. “Hey. You all right?”
His hand is tugged loose and a glass of water is pushed into his palm. He nods, breathes thank you, drinks.
“Thought you were getting over this,” Dean says. “It's been a while, yeah?”
Sam realizes before he says something stupid that Dean's talking about the nightmares. The nightmares about Jess. Real things.
“Sorry,” Sam says.
“What? Shut up. Catch your breath. You're fine.”
Sam gulps some more water and nods.
“Think you can go back to sleep?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Of course.”
He tries. He really does. But he closes his eyes and hears croaking and sees Dean's arm snapping and feels Jess's breath against his ear while she teases him and he wraps his arms around his chest and spends the night convincing himself that he's not having a heart attack.
**
He's looking at diagrams of frogs, staring at the way the legs connect to the freakish goddamn body, when Dean taps on the car window, a cup of coffee in each hand. Sam flinches and slams the laptop shut, scoots over and unlocks the door.
Dean studies him with one eyebrow raised.
“What?” Sam drinks half the coffee in one gulp. He's so goddamn tired.
“A little jumpy at a knock on the window, there, sparky? You know we fight monsters, right?”
“Ha. Yeah.”
“You should sleep,” Dean says. “We're not stopping 'til North Carolina. Caleb said this spirit was a nasty-ass son of a bitch, so we need to get our shit together, all right?”
Sam catches his breath. “Yeah. Sure. Of course.”
He gets another look from Dean.
“Jesus, what?”
Dean says, “Don't you want to know about the spirit? Get started on your little research? Nag me? Anything?”
“Fuck off, I'm getting to it.” He breathes in, out, resembles a normal person. “So tell me about-”
“Forget it. I don't want to hear your voice for the next two-hundred miles. Sleep.”
He doesn't sleep. He drains his coffee and, when Dean's is still half-full twenty minutes later, takes the rest of Dean's and drinks it down.
Dean sucks on the inside of his cheek and doesn't say anything.
That evening, he comes out of the shower to see Dean on his laptop. He's immediately on edge, thinking Dean's gone into his history and looked at the dozens of frog websites he's torn through, but then he figures Dean probably doesn't know what a history is.
He definitely doesn't know how to clear one, because while Dean's showering, Sam opens it up and sees that Dean was looking on articles about how to help someone through the holidays after they've lost a loved one.
“Jesus, Dean,” he whispers.
**
“It's a rough time of year, huh?” Dean says, vaguely, while they're brushing their teeth.
“It's fine.” Sam claps him on the shoulder. Tries to get out of the bathroom. Tries to shut this conversation the hell down before Dean makes an ass out of himself.
“You shouldn't feel pressured to participate in holiday stuff,” Dean says.
“Oh my God, Dean, don't quote the sites directly.”
Dean pouts around his mouthwash cup and Sam grins at him.
**
While Dean's loading the car the next morning, Sam watches frog videos on YouTube and feels shaky but decent. Dean comes in and says, “You packed, finally, princess?”
“Fuck you,” Sam says, with a smile.
“Of course you're in a good mood on library day. Days I have to sit and talk to you all day, you're a surly bitch, but now you're going to be all silent and happy next to me and waste the shit out of it.”
“How selfish of me.”
“Car, bitch.”
They've been driving for two minutes when Sam's head flashes to the video-to the part where one of the frogs fucking jumped on another frog, throat swollen, legs twitching, sounds like it's dying-and his heart slams, once, like a fucking car crash in his chest, and then they're not moving and he doesn't think he's breathing but the paper bag over his mouth is puffing out over and over so he must be and there's Dean with his cast resting on Sam's shoulder and his other hand holding the bag to Sam's mouth, whispering these gentle things that Sam can't even hear over his own blood in his ears and over the noise of the fucking bag.
He shuts his eyes and holds his chest and breathes. Breathes. Breathes.
“Jesus,” Dean says. “Jesus, Sammy. You with me?”
He nods, and Dean moves his hand from the bag to touch Sam's neck for his pulse. Christ, Sam's just so tired, and every time Dean moves it makes him jump.
“What the hell is up with you?” Dean says, but he says it all fucking gently. “Is this about Jess? Dude, if it's this bad again all of a sudden, we need to talk about it.”
“No, it's...”
Sam stops, swallows.
He's just staring at Dean's cast.
“It's what?” Dean says.
Sam covers his face and Dean makes confused noises for a minute and then says, “Shit, Sam, is it the fucking frogs?”
Sam probably nods, but he's too busy drowning in his own humiliation to be sure. It's embarrassing, and it's incredibly frightening, and it almost got his brother killed, and shit would he rather be in the library researching some spirit, hell, he'd rather be having nightmares about Jess, about something real and reasonable and important, he'd rather be anyone but this fucking person.
And now Dean's going to tease him for the rest of his damn life, if he's not too busy hating Sam for breaking him in the first place.
“Fuck,” Dean says. “I didn't know it was this bad.”
“I don't think I can fix this,” Sam says, and he hates how small his voice is.
He feels Dean's hand come down on the top of his head and run its way down to his back.
“Aw, Sammy,” Dean says.
He feels terrified and pathetic and so, so safe.
“It's okay, you know?” Dean says. “Because this?” He tugs at the hair on the back of Sam's neck. “I can absolutely ten million percent protect you from this, Sam.”
Author: shangrilada
Rating: R just for language
Genre/pairing: Gen
Characters: Dean, Sam, some bad guy for a second or two
Word count: 2689 (complete)
Summary: Sam takes deep breaths and reminds himself that he's twenty-two and a hunter, for fuck's sake, and that looking out the window and worrying about something he could fit in his hand (oh God Jesus no) is is absolutely ridiculous.
Written for the current ohsam fic challenge, prompt left by running_hot: Sam has a crippling, crippling phobia. It doesn't matter what it is, only that it's fairly irrational and incredibly intense. On a hunt, they encounter a MotW that uses/involves that thing of which he is petrified, and he freezes up, which lets Dean get hurt. All of a sudden, Sam's not only terrified by the object of his phobia, he's also incredibly guilty. He keeps trying to expose himself to the object of his phobia when Dean's not looking, which makes him freaked out and exhausted and constantly afraid. Dean takes way too long to figure it out, but when he does, it's up to him to fix his little brother, as usual.
“So she controls the elements? Like some kind of earth goddess?”
Sam nudges the book across the table. “Not really. It's more like the elements control her. What she can do depends on where she is. The environment controls her powers. She just...harnesses whatever's around. Blasts you with it.”
Dean scans the page. “So we catch her on a mountain, she gives us an avalanche?”
“Something like that.”
“All right, so avoid mountains. Easy enough.” Dean watches Sam drink. “You all right?”
“What?”
Dean says, “Uh, you're shaking.”
“I'm not.”
“You've been on edge since we got here. C'mon, beautiful sticky disgusting day in sticky disgusting Florida. What's not to love? We need a hunt in Hawaii, man. Puerto Rico. Somewhere.”
“Yeah, once they build a bridge.” Sam drains his water glass. “I'm fine.”
In the car, Sam takes deep breaths and reminds himself that he's twenty-two and a hunter, for fuck's sake, and that looking out the window and worrying about something he could fit in his hand (oh God Jesus no) is is absolutely ridiculous. And that just because they're in Florida doesn't mean he's at risk of being covered by the things.
It's fine.
All of this is fine.
Dean belts out AC/DC and seems blissfully unaware that Sam's having a personal therapy session a foot and a half away from him.
It's stupid. It's so stupid. But he's here, right? The fact that he even agreed to a hunt in Florida, this swampy fucking state that's full of...shit, he doesn't even like to think the word. Frogs, okay? Frogs. He can think the word. He could even say it out loud. Probably.
The fact that he even agreed to come is a sign of some kind of progress. Dean probably thinks he outgrew this years ago, but it's a process. Coming here's a good step. Way to go, champ.
He swallows and closes his eyes and they set off to find the bitch.
**
The hunt is a fucking blur and he barely remembers any of it.
He remembers the wraith, all ten feet of her, sucking up the swamp water and baring her teeth. He remembers that he had the stake and Dean had the worthless gun, and then he remembers the empty, muddy ground, drained of water, and he remembers frogs.
Dozenshundredsthoussands--
And now he's here.
“Sam. Damn it, Sam.”
He feels a jerk on the back of his collar and he's hauled to his feet. Dean's breathing hard through clenched teeth, cradling one arm against his stomach. A few feet away, the wraith is staked and dead. Sam doesn't remember Dean grabbing the stake, but he must have, because Sam feels like he's been nothing but a huddled ball of sweat and panic for days now and no fucking way was he the one to kill her, no fucking way has ever done anything but panted and shook and swallowed back vomit.
There are no frogs. Where did the frogs go? Dean's hand makes him jump. (It's not cold. Not slimy. It's fine.)
“We've got to go,” Dean says. God, he sounds pissed.
Sam swallows. “Your arm, 's it broken?”
“Yeah. Come on.”
They're halfway to the car when something croaks a few feet away from them. Dean gives Sam a quick look, and Sam starts to say he's okay, he can handle this, he's fine, and then he's clinging to a tree branch and vomiting like he's never going to stop.
“Jesus.” Dean's hand rubs circles on his back. “All right. It's okay.”
“W-we've got to...” Sam closes his eyes against another bitchslap of nausea. “...get you to a hospital.”
“It's not getting any more broken. Whatever. You all right?”
Sam nods and promptly pukes on Dean's shoes.
“Shit. All right.” Dean scrapes his boots against the tree and hauls Sam up with that hand on his collar again. “I didn't know it was still this bad. Jesus, need two fucking hands...” He leans Sam back against the tree and scrapes his sleeve over Sam's mouth. “All right. Any better?”
“I'm so sorry.”
“God, shut up. You're fine.” He pushes Sam's hair back. “Okay? Maybe they'll give you something at the ER to help calm you down, that'd be nice, huh?”
Sam nods a little. He's watching Dean. There's nothing in the whole world but Dean. This is fine.
Dean isn't dead, and if he hates Sam for letting him get fucking broken, he's doing a good job of hiding it, and that's all Sam really needs right now, is for him to hide it long enough for Sam to pull himself the fuck together, Jesus Christ, Sam.
“Think you can drive?” Dean says.
He isn't sure, but he nods anyway.
“All right. Let's get going. This hurts like a bitch.”
**
Two days later, Dean's whacked out on painkillers and seems willing to shrug off the whole thing, and Sam's still walking around feeling like his insides went through a wood-chipper.
Dean could have fucking died. If she'd thrown him at a slightly different angle, or if Dean hadn't stabbed her between the right two ribs, or if Sam had been an inch too far away for Dean to rescue the stake in time, he could have died, and Sam stayed in place like a goddamn pinned butterfly because of some frogs.
Jess used to tease him about it, because he mentioned it in passing the first time it came up, made it sound like no big deal. Chuckled and shrugged a shoulder. “I'm so afraid of frogs.”
“Frogs are cute!” she said.
He shivered down to his damn bones and she laughed and hugged him and told him he was cuter than a hundred frogs and kissed him when he kept shuddering. It wasn't until a few months later, when she turned a page in her biology book and he cringed, stood up, and went straight to the fridge for a drink, that she realized Sam wasn't really overstating the thing. When he went to her parents' house for Christmas and they started talking about eating frogs' legs in France, Jess made some excuse and pulled him outside and coached him through slow, deep breaths.
She'd still tease him about it sometimes, gently, and that was okay, because they're fucking frogs for God's sake, and because it was never really a problem. It was okay that he was scared to death of the fucking things. It didn't change his life. Dissections weren't exactly a crucial part of his pre-law program, and Palo Alto's beaches weren't quite crawling with amphibians.
He should have known that it would come up in a hunt someday. He's only been back with Dean for two months, not even, and apparently he'd forgotten that bad guys will eventually find every single crack in you and use the hell out of it. They scrape down into you and dredge everything out. He needs two hands to count how many monsters have looked at Dean for all of five seconds before knowing enough to taunt him about abandonment issues, and both hands and both feet for how many times Dad's been kicked in his bad knee. And then this, a fucking coincidence, a hunt in a swamp, breaks Sam.
“You're not broken,” Dean says. “Shut up.”
Sam didn't even say anything. He's just sitting here, doing web searches, for the billionth time in his life, on how to get rid of phobias.
“You're hallucinating,” Sam says, vaguely. “Pain meds.”
“Oh.”
“Mmmhmm. Go back to sleep.”
He doesn't type in 'frog phobia,' because he found out a few years ago some asshole at Google decided it's funny that pictures of frogs come up as soon as you type that in, so he reads all these accounts of people who are afraid of legitimate, boring things-heights, small spaces, diseases, shit that could legitimately kill them-and rests his chin on his knees.
Dean resumes his interrputed early-midafternon nap and Sam types in the fucking word and makes it through a minute and a page and a half of pictures before he has to stumble to the bathroom and pound down glasses of water.
A minute and a half. All right. At least now he has a time to beat. Now he has a number.
Sam likes numbers. Numbers make sense.
Being afraid of frogs does not, so it has to go.
That night, Dean flips past the nature channel fast as hell like he always does, and Sam says, “Hey, no, what was that?”
“What was what?”
“Go back.”
Dean looks at him sideways and goes back a few channels.
It's just lions and gazelles, but Sam doesn't look away from the screen for half an hour, barely fucking blinks. This is a challenge. His heart, for the entire half hour, beats so hard it's practically vibrating, because his brain's convinced that any second the nature channel's going to fuck with him and interrupt this lioness gnawing on an antler to flash pictures of tree frogs. He's worn completely out by the time the show's over, and as he crawls between the covers he notices he's feeling really dizzy.
It's okay. It's going to be fine.
**
“Sam.”
“Sammy.”
“Hey, come on, Sam, wake up.”
He's sitting up, somehow, and air is pouring itself down his throat. He coughs and pants and curls his fingers around the sheets.
“Hey,” Dean says. “Hey. You all right?”
His hand is tugged loose and a glass of water is pushed into his palm. He nods, breathes thank you, drinks.
“Thought you were getting over this,” Dean says. “It's been a while, yeah?”
Sam realizes before he says something stupid that Dean's talking about the nightmares. The nightmares about Jess. Real things.
“Sorry,” Sam says.
“What? Shut up. Catch your breath. You're fine.”
Sam gulps some more water and nods.
“Think you can go back to sleep?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Of course.”
He tries. He really does. But he closes his eyes and hears croaking and sees Dean's arm snapping and feels Jess's breath against his ear while she teases him and he wraps his arms around his chest and spends the night convincing himself that he's not having a heart attack.
**
He's looking at diagrams of frogs, staring at the way the legs connect to the freakish goddamn body, when Dean taps on the car window, a cup of coffee in each hand. Sam flinches and slams the laptop shut, scoots over and unlocks the door.
Dean studies him with one eyebrow raised.
“What?” Sam drinks half the coffee in one gulp. He's so goddamn tired.
“A little jumpy at a knock on the window, there, sparky? You know we fight monsters, right?”
“Ha. Yeah.”
“You should sleep,” Dean says. “We're not stopping 'til North Carolina. Caleb said this spirit was a nasty-ass son of a bitch, so we need to get our shit together, all right?”
Sam catches his breath. “Yeah. Sure. Of course.”
He gets another look from Dean.
“Jesus, what?”
Dean says, “Don't you want to know about the spirit? Get started on your little research? Nag me? Anything?”
“Fuck off, I'm getting to it.” He breathes in, out, resembles a normal person. “So tell me about-”
“Forget it. I don't want to hear your voice for the next two-hundred miles. Sleep.”
He doesn't sleep. He drains his coffee and, when Dean's is still half-full twenty minutes later, takes the rest of Dean's and drinks it down.
Dean sucks on the inside of his cheek and doesn't say anything.
That evening, he comes out of the shower to see Dean on his laptop. He's immediately on edge, thinking Dean's gone into his history and looked at the dozens of frog websites he's torn through, but then he figures Dean probably doesn't know what a history is.
He definitely doesn't know how to clear one, because while Dean's showering, Sam opens it up and sees that Dean was looking on articles about how to help someone through the holidays after they've lost a loved one.
“Jesus, Dean,” he whispers.
**
“It's a rough time of year, huh?” Dean says, vaguely, while they're brushing their teeth.
“It's fine.” Sam claps him on the shoulder. Tries to get out of the bathroom. Tries to shut this conversation the hell down before Dean makes an ass out of himself.
“You shouldn't feel pressured to participate in holiday stuff,” Dean says.
“Oh my God, Dean, don't quote the sites directly.”
Dean pouts around his mouthwash cup and Sam grins at him.
**
While Dean's loading the car the next morning, Sam watches frog videos on YouTube and feels shaky but decent. Dean comes in and says, “You packed, finally, princess?”
“Fuck you,” Sam says, with a smile.
“Of course you're in a good mood on library day. Days I have to sit and talk to you all day, you're a surly bitch, but now you're going to be all silent and happy next to me and waste the shit out of it.”
“How selfish of me.”
“Car, bitch.”
They've been driving for two minutes when Sam's head flashes to the video-to the part where one of the frogs fucking jumped on another frog, throat swollen, legs twitching, sounds like it's dying-and his heart slams, once, like a fucking car crash in his chest, and then they're not moving and he doesn't think he's breathing but the paper bag over his mouth is puffing out over and over so he must be and there's Dean with his cast resting on Sam's shoulder and his other hand holding the bag to Sam's mouth, whispering these gentle things that Sam can't even hear over his own blood in his ears and over the noise of the fucking bag.
He shuts his eyes and holds his chest and breathes. Breathes. Breathes.
“Jesus,” Dean says. “Jesus, Sammy. You with me?”
He nods, and Dean moves his hand from the bag to touch Sam's neck for his pulse. Christ, Sam's just so tired, and every time Dean moves it makes him jump.
“What the hell is up with you?” Dean says, but he says it all fucking gently. “Is this about Jess? Dude, if it's this bad again all of a sudden, we need to talk about it.”
“No, it's...”
Sam stops, swallows.
He's just staring at Dean's cast.
“It's what?” Dean says.
Sam covers his face and Dean makes confused noises for a minute and then says, “Shit, Sam, is it the fucking frogs?”
Sam probably nods, but he's too busy drowning in his own humiliation to be sure. It's embarrassing, and it's incredibly frightening, and it almost got his brother killed, and shit would he rather be in the library researching some spirit, hell, he'd rather be having nightmares about Jess, about something real and reasonable and important, he'd rather be anyone but this fucking person.
And now Dean's going to tease him for the rest of his damn life, if he's not too busy hating Sam for breaking him in the first place.
“Fuck,” Dean says. “I didn't know it was this bad.”
“I don't think I can fix this,” Sam says, and he hates how small his voice is.
He feels Dean's hand come down on the top of his head and run its way down to his back.
“Aw, Sammy,” Dean says.
He feels terrified and pathetic and so, so safe.
“It's okay, you know?” Dean says. “Because this?” He tugs at the hair on the back of Sam's neck. “I can absolutely ten million percent protect you from this, Sam.”