An Attribute of the Strong Part III, A Supernatural Fanfiction
Title: An Attribute of the Strong (3/3)
Rating: PG-13 for language
Characters: Dean, Sam, mentions of Benny. Gen.
Word Count: This part, 5648.
Summary: Written for the prompt at hoodie-time: Whatever Dean was eating in Purgatory, it wasn't what you'd call well-balanced meals. And adjusting back to 'real' food is harder than he expected. Dean's thin, borderline underweight (despite Sam's bitching at him to eat something), and his immune system really isn't up to dealing with flu season...
Part I
Part II
Part III
The gun was in his hand, cocked and trigger half-pulled, aimed right between Sam’s eyes before Dean’s were even open. When he pried them open, blinking blearily, Sam’s face, slightly exasperated, a little sad, but remarkably unphased, stared back at him. Dean loosened his grip, lowered the gun, flipped the safety back on.
“Jesus, Sam. Fuck,” he croaked, rubbing one hand over his eyes as the other dropped his gun on the bedside table.
“I thought you were asleep enough I could slip out for a minute,” Sam said, sounding more resigned than perturbed. “I mean, fuck, Dean, I didn’t even get the door open yet.”
Dean peered between his fingers to look at Sam’s hand, still resting on the unturned door knob. He just almost put a bullet through his brother’s brain for the sin of touching the damn doorknob, and the fact that Sam was neither surprised nor concerned was a testament to just how fucked up their lives actually are, and possibly just how paranoid Dean had been since Purgatory. In place of some kind of apology, Dean offered a strangled sort of wheeze before doubling over to cough, a gasping, gurgling hack.
Sam was at his side in an instant, patting gently at his back as Dean pressed his face against his blanketed knees and tried to tell his lungs to calm the fuck down. When the coughing finally died to a low, rumbling gasp, he spat into a tissue Sam handed to him, balled it up and tossed it toward the side of the room he thought the trash can might be on, and rested his forehead against his knees again. “Where were you going, anyway?” he tried to say, but it came out more as a piteous rasp. Sam understood anyway.
“I’m gonna ask the office for some more blankets,” Sam murmured. He gave Dean one last awkward pat before Dean felt his weight lift from the bed and he nearly toppled with the lack of support. “The cold is making you worse.”
“This was your fucking idea,” Dean grumbled accusingly, finally uncurling long enough to flop back against the mattress, cautiously, trying to avoid jarring anything else loose in his lungs.
“I’ll be right back,” Sam said, but hesitated at the door. “Try not to fall asleep before I get back, okay? If you’re going to shoot someone for leaving, I don’t even want to know what you’d do to someone who tried to come in.”
“Ha ha,” Dean coughed humorlessly. He burrowed under the blankets as Sam opened the door, feeling the temperature drop several degrees in the seconds it took Sam to get outside and tug the door shut against the wind.
The snow kept the world dark outside the window. Dean hunted around for the clock, for some indication of what time it was, how long he had been dead to the world. The clock blinked twelve o’clock, four searing red digits repeated every second and he stared at it so long he still saw them etched into his vision when he redirected his vision to the black television. It irritated him, not knowing, like he was existing outside of time against his will. Even Purgatory had time, a light and a dark, a time when you could see predators and a time when they could see prey, eyes glowing through the night. Hell, even Hell had time, Dean thought darkly, a time for torturing and a time for nightmares, seconds between counted by how many times he died and came back before Alastair started talking deals with the devil. He hated not knowing night from day, one minute from the next, how many demons had crawled out of Hell in the time since he last opened his eyes.
Whatever the hell time it was, it was time to get out of bed and stop acting like an invalid. Dean threw his blankets back and nearly tumbled into the other bed as the vertigo hit. He blinked, slowly, but the room persisted in wavering maddeningly. He clenched his teeth hard, felt his way along the edge of the bed to walk forward, but at the foot of the bed, with nothing left to hold onto, he misestimated the location of the floor, lurched to his left, found said floor with a jarring impact to his shoulder, and decided there was nothing wrong with crawling as long as no one saw him.
He only made it to the trash can, not even on the side of the room he thought it was on, before he threw up, coughing haltingly between heaves, scarcely able to draw breath. There wasn’t even anything left to throw up, he thought in an admittedly whiny tone, but the goddamn room was rocking like a ship in his vision and he was more than a little motion sick. He was still collapsed there on the floor, legs folded awkwardly beneath him and trash can hugged to his chest, trying and failing, miserably, to bring anything up, when another gust of wind signaled Sam’s return.
“Shit, Dean,” Sam dropped a heap of blankets just inside the door, kicked it shut, and knelt next to his brother, rubbing a warm hand up and down his arm, right over the newly blossoming bruise on his shoulder, muttering some stupid shit about it’s okay and let it out like Dean was a hysterical woman instead of a slightly incapacitated warrior.
Dean spat one last time and leaned heavily against the wall next to him, eyes dropping closed. He felt Sam tug the trash can away from him, so he let go, hugging his arms to his chest instead. Sam was back in just a minute, kneeling next to him, hands on Dean’s shoulders.
“Dean? Do you need to go to the bathroom? Is that why you were out of bed?”
Dean nodded without opening his eyes, and immediately stopped because he could feel the goddamn world spinning.
“Okay. I’m going to help you, okay?” Dean didn’t do much toward starting to move, despite Sam tugging at him. “Can you stand if I help you? C’mon,” Sam muttered, hauling Dean bodily up from the floor. Dean fumblingly got his feet under him, most of his weight leaning against his brother. Sam looped an arm around his waist and guided him into the bathroom, still mumbling a series of questions and encouragements and other random disjointed words Dean wasn’t really listening to until, “Can you stand here on your own? Do I need to hold you up?”
Dean waved his arm at Sam. “Got it from here,” he said with more confidence than he really felt, and for good measure, “Been doing this since before you were born.”
“Open your eyes before you start,” Sam suggested, and Dean flipped him off, eyes still closed. Dean heard him back away, pulling the door most of the way shut. Dean carefully opened one eye, relieved to find the only light coming from the cracked door, the spinning slowing somewhat in the darkness. He did his business as quickly as possible, stumbled the one step to the sink and sort of draped himself over it so he could splash some water on his face and rinse his mouth without actually supporting his own weight.
Sam apparently decided Dean didn’t need any more privacy and walked back in, steering Dean back to the bed, depositing him gently under several new layers of blankets. He tucked them in all around Dean’s shivering body, then handed him the TV remote.
“Why is it so fucking cold?” Dean griped, and he could feel the cold air whistling into his lungs through narrowed passages. He looked at the remote but couldn’t make his frozen fingers press the buttons, so he dropped it onto the bed and put his hands in his armpits.
“The power’s been flickering,” Sam said. He dug through one of the many grocery bags that still sat out on the table, pulling out flashlights and batteries and hand warmers and all kinds of crap like he had known this was coming and Dean was very suddenly and very powerfully pissed off.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Sam,” he started, before a cough cut him off, crackly and loud and fucking productive to use the word he always heard doctors use, like he was making some kind of great contribution to the world by hacking up bits of phlegm and blood into the handful of tissues Sam was holding in front of his face. The interruption only served to fuel his rage and by the time he was done spitting gunk into the tissues and catching his breath, he was ready.
“This is why we don’t take jobs in fucking Montana and we don’t do it in the goddamn winter with the snow and the ice and the fucking power outages,” Dean exploded, as loud as his stupid sore throat and cough would let him, which was exactly one hoarse notch above a whisper. “Now we’re fucking stuck here in the cold and I feel like absolute shit and Baby is out there getting scratched up by the goddamn ice crystals, all to save the four people in the world who don’t have enough goddamn sense not to live in fucking Montana!”
Sam started to roll his eyes, looked like he thought better of it, and just sighed instead, sitting on the edge of the bed and patting Dean’s back through the next coughing fit. “I’m pretty sure more than four people live in Montana, Dean.”
“Nobody lives in Montana,” Dean countered almost literally breathlessly between coughs. “Because there is nothing here.”
“This motel,” Sam started but Dean interrupted.
“Is owned by some slumlord living in California. The bastard that owns this motel is probably laying on the beach right now counting his cash out to some hooker, and it’s your fault, Sam.”
“It’s my fault he lives in California, or it’s my fault she’s a hooker?” Sam asked, eyebrows raised.
“All of it,” Dean insisted. The power flickered again, the lights of the room resuming with a dull hum, the heat kicking on with a disheartening clatter. “And so is that.” Because Sam was the one who had wanted this hunt to begin with, and he was the one who chose a motel with power lines that were obviously above ground, the one place in all of Montana that apparently didn’t think they got snow.
Sam sighed, loudly, but Dean could practically hear the smile in it and he wanted to be pissed off at that too, damn it all, but he had really fucking missed this, being an asshole and listening to his brother’s put-upon sigh even as he cared and comforted and stayed. “You got something to say?” he demanded.
Sam sighed again. “Did you know you’re really kind of bitchy when you’re sick?”
“I’m not the bitch here, bitch,” Dean retorted, but he had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep a straight face.
Sam did roll his eyes at that, and stood up. “I think we should get some fluids in you. You’ve got to be dehydrated, and maybe it’ll help your fever too. And maybe if we can get your fever down, you won’t be so nauseated. Or cranky, Christ.”
Dean started to snap that he was not cranky, but the irony of that was too much even for him. He huffed instead, hacked a couple of times for good measure, and nodded his assent.
Sam frowned at him thoughtfully, then moved back to the heap of blankets by the door, gathering it all up in a tangled bundle and tossed it on the other bed, and extracted a couple of flat motel pillows. “Come here, sit up.”
He didn’t actually wait for Dean to coordinate his limbs into a concerted effort, just forced an arm behind Dean’s shoulders and tugged him up to sitting. Dean found himself propped against Sam’s chest as he created a precarious mountain of pillows behind him, and thought briefly on the fact that he had had more contact with his brother in the last twenty-four hours than he had in probably the whole year before Purgatory.
“I think you have pneumonia,” Sam said when Dean was settled against the pillows, breathing a little easier.
Dean coughed miserably by way of agreeing with Sam’s assessment, bringing his elbow up to catch the little flecks of blood, then held his arm out to show Sam.
“I know. Hence the diagnosis.” Sam put a hand on Dean’s forehead like he hadn’t been all over him enough in the last few minutes, and Dean swatted his hand away irritably. “Fever’s up.”
Dean flipped him off and muffled another cough into Sam’s hoodie. Sam rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything. He moved to the little kitchen, put some water to boil on the tiny stove and dug in the small refrigerator to pull out a bottle of Gatorade. “Think you could do some broth, too?”
Dean grunted something sounding vaguely negative and pulled the blankets higher. Sam shook his head and brought the Gatorade over, twisting the cap to break the seal before handing it to Dean to drink.
“I hate this shit,” Dean grumbled, but took an obedient sip anyway. The cold soothed his throat for the first half second, then made it ache all the more.
“Really? I wouldn’t know from the way you bitch about it every time you get sick,” Sam said lightly, not even sparing his brother a glance as he retrieved the hot water bottle from under the bed and moved to the kitchen to refill it.
“What the hell is this flavor, anyway?” Dean continued, pretending pointedly that he hadn’t heard Sam’s sass at all. “It’s white. It looks like I’m drinking fog.” He paused. “Or a ghost.”
“It’s cherry,” Sam said, instead of telling Dean to read the goddamn bottle like he usually would have. “You like cherry.” He lifted the edge of the covers and settled the water bottle next to his brother.
“No, I don’t.” Dean coughed abruptly, sloshing some Gatorade over his hand. “Fuck.” He swiped at the fluid with a corner of the sheets.
“You like cherry pie,” Sam countered, sitting on the bed next to Dean, laptop settled on his knees.
“That’s pie, Sam. This is a bottle of chemicals.”
“Yeah, and here’s some more,” Sam said, dropping a bunch of pills into Dean’s hand. “We’ve got some antibiotics still. Should get you through til we can get to a clinic and get you a new scrip.”
Much as he hated tapping into their limited store of medication, coughing blood was a little much even for him to just brush off. He knocked the pills back with another sip of Gatorade, let the closed bottle fall onto the bed somewhere, and slouched further into his pillows, pressing his frozen fingers against the hot water bottle, letting his eyes fall closed and trying to doze off again. After a couple of minutes of no success, he leaned over to peer at the laptop screen. Sam was researching pneumonia. Dean didn’t know which was sadder, the fact that Sam was researching it, or the fact that Dean hadn’t expected anything else.
“You know we’ve both had this like six times, right?” Dean coughed again and Sam passed him a tissue without even looking up.
“You’ve had it six times. I only had it twice.”
Dean rolled his eyes. “Thanks, Sam. I needed to feel worse about my lungs.”
“Shouldn’t have smoked so much as a teenager,” Sam murmured absently, scrolling quickly through the page.
“I didn’t smoke that much,” Dean said. He let his head drop back to the pillow and shivered a little. In the quiet, he could hear the wind picking up, and the room shook a little with a particularly strong gust. Sam glanced up at the ceiling like he expected it to cave in, and then promptly went back to his research, as only a geek could.
Dean found the remote and the TV flicked on, reception fuzzy with static, all the voices muffled and distorted. “Sam, what time is it?”
“Three in the afternoon,” Sam replied. He glanced over at Dean, the corners of his lips quirking up in a tiny smile. “Oprah isn’t on yet.”
“How would you even know that?” Dean asked, raising his eyebrows. “Were you a stay at home mom to that dog you hit? Did you watch The View, too?”
Just as Sam opened his mouth to reply, the room went black, the static of the TV replaced with the psithurism of the storm. “Coming from the guy who watches Dr. Sexy MD,” Sam offered weakly, far too late for a retort.
“Fucking perfect,” Dean wheezed, then broke into a coughing fit, rolling onto his side away from Sam. He coughed so hard he thought he would throw up, and Sam seemed to have the same thought, because he was suddenly crouched in front of Dean, trash can in one hand, the other on Dean’s shoulder.
“Come on, Dean. Breathe. It’s okay. Come on,” Sam murmured and Dean glared at him even though he was certain Sam couldn’t see it in the darkness, but slowly gained control of his lungs, finally able to draw a breath. He slowly uncurled his body, settling back into his pillows, breathing rapidly and shallowly.
Sam let out a deep breath and Dean irrationally felt that his brother was mocking him with his healthy lungs. He scowled.
Sam left the trash can on the floor by the bed, reached over Dean and grabbed the Gatorade. He twisted the cap off and held it to Dean’s lips, not even bothering to offer to let him do it himself. Dean took as tiny a sip as he could, and shook his head when Sam tried to offer more.
“Gotta,” he paused to clear his throat and wheeze a little. “Gotta keep the antibiotics down.”
There was a pause. “You might need something on your stomach, or the antibiotics will make it worse. And you’re dehydrated.”
“Sam, if I eat anything else, it’s definitely going to be worse.”
Sam sighed and shook his head. Dean saw the outline of Sam stand in the darkness, shift around to the other side of the bed, and heard the click of a flashlight.
Dean glanced over at his brother, who stared straight ahead at the circle of light on the wall, chewing his lip.
“Fucking Montana,” Dean offered, and Sam quirked one corner of his mouth, before settling back into his decidedly worried face.
“C’mon, Sam…” Dean trailed off, unsure what to say. Unsure what exactly Sam was upset about. “Dirty shadow puppets?” he asked, weakly.
Sam glanced over at him, raised his eyebrows. Dean grinned. Sam rolled his eyes and flipped Dean off, hand in front of the flashlight. Dean watched the shadow of it form on the wall, remembered all the nights of motel power outages, teaching Sam how to make an eagle, a dog, a duck, a swamp monster. “It’s on, bitch.”
Needless to say Dean won. And not just because Sam surrendered, saying Dean looked too tired, which he was. He was already winning way before that.
They sat quietly side by side, Sam still resting against the headboard, Dean propped on his mountain of pillows. Without the distraction of coming up with obscene hand contortions, he had nothing to focus on but the roiling of his stomach, the whistling in his lungs, the body-wide aching. Dean doubted the temperature in the room had dropped that much, but his hot water bottle was no longer hot and he was starting to shiver again. He rolled onto his side, facing away from Sam and toward the trash can again, just in case. He felt Sam shift over, heard his spine pop as he slid down and under the pile of blankets Dean was currently inhabiting.
“What are you -“ Dean started to demand, ready to protest even more cuddling, but a cough cut him off and in the time it took for him to stop gasping for breath, Sam was pressed up against his back, and he was so fucking warm that Dean immediately stopped shivering.
“I’m cold,” Sam lied, blatantly.
“Just trying to mooch off my fever,” Dean muttered, but accepted Sam’s excuse. He closed his eyes and tried to focus on breathing shallowly, not coughing, and not throwing up.
He wasn’t doing a very good job. Every two minutes or so, another cough rumbled up from his chest and he hunched forward with the force of the coughing. His stomach was cramping intermittently and between that and the coughing, Dean found himself so curled up his knees were pressing against his chest within twenty minutes. Sam shifted closer, and his hand crept over the tower of pillows to palm Dean’s forehead.
“Jesus, Dean,” he muttered. “Can you drink a little more? Please?”
Dean shook his head, jaw clenched tight. He was shaking, hard, muscles aching with exertion, and he was so close to being sick again that he was afraid to open his mouth at all. Sam squeezed his shoulder carefully.
Dean shuffled closer to the edge of the bed as they next wave of coughing hit, hanging over the side to lose the three sips of Gatorade and the antibiotics into the trash can. Sam rubbed his back lightly as Dean continued to cough and gag, before slumping back, exhausted.
“Dean…” Sam said, his voice small. Dean remembered this voice from their childhood, from the time just after Sam had learned about monsters, from the time their father was almost killed on a job, from the night Jessica had died. That small, scared, broken voice, the one that said Sam’s world was crumbling, and Dean hated that he was causing it. He unwrapped his arm from his stomach to fumble for Sam’s hand, squeezed it as reassuringly as he could, trying to send his words in some shorthand one-beep Morse code: it’s okay, I’m okay, we’re okay, please, just don’t use that voice.
Sam cleared his throat and squeezed Dean’s hand back, then dropped it. “Guess the antibiotics weren’t good on an empty stomach,” he murmured, voice hoarse.
Dean shrugged with one shoulder. “Guess not.”
“I’m sure,” Sam’s voice caught, and he cleared his throat again. “I’m sure the snow will stop soon and we can get you some drugs.”
Dean hummed something vaguely affirmative, trying to suppress another shiver. He felt Sam’s forehead press against the back of his shoulder, breath ghosting over the fabric of his hoodie, Sam’s hand land on his side. Dean inhaled deeply, feeling his skin stretch over his ribs, Sam’s fingers slotting between the bones. Two points of contact, not quite a hug, nothing compared to Sam’s earlier snuggle attacks, but Dean was suddenly desperately uncomfortable, hemmed in by the brother who had been his constant companion for thirty years. He allowed the next wave of coughing so he could curl away from his brother, letting Sam’s hand slip off his ribs, stop fondling his bones.
Sam rolled away suddenly and Dean just barely managed to keep his hold on the blankets. There was a moment of cold as Sam escaped, and then his brother was tucking him in again, before stomping around the bed to his pile of storm supplies. Dean felt Sam drape the last couple of blankets over him, muttering something about “no insulation” that Dean took to be a statement on the building rather than his own pitiful physique, even though he knew better.
“Did you eat anything at all in Purgatory, Dean?” Sam groused, but he sounded more worried than angry and Dean mentally sighed that they were back to this weird game Sam liked with the masks and sniping at each other. Because angry is easier than worried or scared or jealous, betrayed, hurt. He rustled the covers in a semblance of a shrug.
“Bet Benny didn’t go hungry,” Sam mumbled, with enough actual venom to make it audible.
“What?” Dean snapped, and paid for it with a full minute of wheezing coughs and flecks of blood he couldn’t make out in the darkness, though he could feel them on his lips.
Sam had his hand on Dean’s shoulder, then his cheek, then brushing his hair back to palm his forehead, sliding gently through his hair. “Nothing. I’m sorry.” And it was easier. Angry is so much easier than sitting under an undoubtedly pitying gaze, and Dean was too exhausted for anything but the easy way.
“If you’ve got something to say, then say it,” Dean insisted, pushing Sam’s hand away. “You’re not a teenager anymore, okay, Sam? You’re too old for this muttering under your breath bullshit.”
“Fine,” Sam said it flatly, refusing to rise to Dean’s anger. “Fine. I won’t say anything.”
“No, go ahead.” Dean paused to cough again, and after regaining his breath. “I want to know why you’re so gung-ho to let monsters go when they’re your friends, or hell, people you don’t even know, but the second I think a guy deserves a chance after saving my fucking life, you’re all for killing him!”
“It’s not like that!” Sam protested.
“Then what is it?”
“Maybe I just don’t like the idea of some vampire riding my brother out of Purgatory like a goddamn meatsuit!” Sam kicked something and stomped a few steps away from the bed. “Maybe I don’t like the idea of somebody calling you ‘brother’ one minute and sucking your blood the next!”
“Why do you have such a problem with it?” Dean retorted. “What’s it matter what I did for him?”
“Because he’s using you, Dean!” Sam exploded. “You don’t think it’s suspicious that he wants to be ‘brothers’ with the only thing in Purgatory that can get him out? That doesn’t make him your brother!” So much easier than worried, hurt, jealous, betrayed.
“Everybody uses everybody, Sam,” Dean said tiredly, rubbing a hand over his face, trying to quell the ache behind his eyes. “Brothers included.”
“What kind of fucked up worldview is that?” Sam demanded.
“All anyone cares about is what you can do for them,” Dean said, his tone haunted even to his own ears. “They do stuff for you so you do stuff for them. And when you aren’t around or they don’t need you, it’s over. That’s all it is, Sam. That’s all any of it is.”
“Dean, that’s not…” Sam paused and Dean could hear him pace a few steps. “That’s not how it is. Maybe some people, but not everybody. Not your family.”
Dean shook his head, started to speak, but a cough bubbled up, and the rest of his words were swallowed in the strangled gagging as he tried not to choke as he wheezed. He felt Sam’s hands hauling him up to sitting, propping him against the headboard, patting his back, voice issuing a rapid-fire stream of something apologetic.
Dean finally stopped coughing in order to better gasp for breath. Suddenly he was pulled forward, face pressed into Sam’s shirt, Sam’s chin resting on top of his head, arms trapped between their torsos.
“Jesus Christ, Dean,” Sam admonished. “Look, just forget I said it, okay? Benny’s fine. He’s great. I love vampires. I read all the Twilight books or whatever. Just don’t do that again, okay?”
Dean squirmed. “If that line about Twilight was true, I’m gonna need you to let go of me,” he said, weakly.
Sam chuckled, the relief evident, and Dean could feel it rumble from Sam’s chest to his own. “Seriously, Sam. You’ve hit your chick flick moment quota for the decade. Lemme go.”
Sam loosened his arms and helped Dean back under the heap of blankets, but stayed seated on the edge of bed, pressed against Dean’s hip.
“I meant it, though, Dean. Not everyone is like that. You’re not like that,” Sam said, voice low but firm. “I’m not…” he paused. “Look, if this is about you and me…”
“Enough, Sam,” Dean groaned. He was suddenly far too exhausted for this argument. “I can’t fight off pneumonia and your hormones at the same time.”
“Dean, I’m serious.”
Dean thought about making another joke, pushing Sam off the side of the bed, turning on the stupid flashlight and making another dirty shadow puppet. But Sam’s voice was that small, broken, little kid voice that had no business coming out of his gargantuan brother, and God or whoever help him, he couldn’t let Sam’s voice sound like that.
“Maybe I need you for stuff, and maybe sometimes you need me too,” Sam murmured. “But it doesn’t have to be us using each other. We’re not. I would do everything I could for you even if you never did anything back. I know…I know, I didn’t look for you and I wasn’t the one who brought you back from Hell and I couldn’t break your deal and I’m sorry, but I would go to the ends of the Earth for you, if I knew how to save you. And you’ve already proved you’d do the same for me, and you didn’t get anything back at all. So how can you think that’s all any of it is?”
“I wasn’t trying to...Look, I’m…” Dean fumbled uncomfortably, because what could he even say? Sure, Sammy, everything is all better, the world is brighter and I have hope again? No. He cleared his throat, coughed painfully, and finally said, “Would it make you feel better if I use you as a heater and promise not to ever try to do anything in return?”
Sam snorted. “I guess it’s a start.” He pushed at Dean’s hip until he scooted over enough for Sam to stretch out, then he ducked under the covers with Dean so they were laying side by side.
He listened to Sam breathing for a while, waiting until it has almost evened out in sleep before he said, “I wasn’t talking about you, you know. I wasn’t even saying…I don’t know what I was saying. I know you’re not…whatever.”
“I know you’re not whatever too,” Sam mumbled, shifted to get more comfortable. “Think the storm stopped. Probably can go to the hospital in the morning.”
Dean grunted his agreement, turned his head to cough into Sam’s shirt.
“Don’t get any worse before then, okay?” Sam said, sounding worried. He felt Dean’s forehead for the five hundredth time.
“Sure, I’ll just tell the bacteria in my lungs to pause all reproduction until tomorrow. I’m sure they’ll be happy to help out.” Dean shivered, inched incrementally closer to Sam.
“Did you know King David, from the Bible, had one wife who was just a space heater?” Sam asked, tucking the blankets a little more securely around Dean.
“What the fuck, Sam?”
“It’s true, I read it. He got old and couldn’t stay warm, so they found a virgin, this chick named Abishag, and she kept his bed warm. He never even fucked her, just used her for her heat.”
“If he didn’t fuck her, who the fuck cares if she was a virgin?” Dean coughed into Sam’s shirt again.
“She was hot, too,” Sam said, not answering the question at all.
“Well, of course,” Dean said.
“Of course?”
“Even if he’s not fucking her, he’s still got to look at her.”
“There’s something wrong with you.” Dean could almost hear Sam rolling his eyes.
“Yeah, there is. I’m fucking freezing. What do you say you make like Abishag and help a guy out?”
Sam pulled Dean even closer, wrapped his arms around his brother tightly. Dean’s face was pressed into Sam’s chest, and he drew his knees up and curled a little to keep certain parts of his body from being a little too intimate with his brother. He shivered one more time and Sam held him even tighter, enveloping Dean in the scent of Sam, the sound of his breathing, the heat of his body, and Dean relaxed, let it lull him to sleep.
In the morning, as soon as it was light enough to see, Sam was awake and bundling Dean into enough layers that he could no longer move his arms, packing him into the Impala and driving to the hospital. Dean used his brother as a pillow in the waiting room of the ER, drooling on his shoulder because he couldn’t breathe through his nose. He used Sam as a crutch to hobble his way to an exam room, and then he used Sam as a coat rack for most of his layers so the doctor could listen. He let Sam explain away his prominent bones, his pale skin and weak immune system. He let Sam hold all the brochures he was given about eating disorders, trauma, and vitamin C. He used Sam as a chauffeur to the pharmacy, and from there out of town, bidding farewell to that godforsaken motel that still didn’t have any fucking power. He let Sam ply him with medications and sports drinks and snacks.
Dean used Sam over and over again as a brother, and all Sam asked in return was for Dean to be his brother back. And Dean realized his theory didn’t account for everything. It didn’t account for Sam being his Abishag, or Sam buying him pie when he finally worked up to real food. It didn’t account for Dean selling his soul way back when, and it didn’t account for him stopping the trials to save his brother again. It didn’t account for brothers who cared and comforted and stayed even when the rest of the world had left.
Turns out, Dean’s theory didn’t account for much of anything real.
“Because brothers don’t let each other wander in the dark alone.” - Jolene Perry
End.
Rating: PG-13 for language
Characters: Dean, Sam, mentions of Benny. Gen.
Word Count: This part, 5648.
Summary: Written for the prompt at hoodie-time: Whatever Dean was eating in Purgatory, it wasn't what you'd call well-balanced meals. And adjusting back to 'real' food is harder than he expected. Dean's thin, borderline underweight (despite Sam's bitching at him to eat something), and his immune system really isn't up to dealing with flu season...
Part I
Part II
Part III
The gun was in his hand, cocked and trigger half-pulled, aimed right between Sam’s eyes before Dean’s were even open. When he pried them open, blinking blearily, Sam’s face, slightly exasperated, a little sad, but remarkably unphased, stared back at him. Dean loosened his grip, lowered the gun, flipped the safety back on.
“Jesus, Sam. Fuck,” he croaked, rubbing one hand over his eyes as the other dropped his gun on the bedside table.
“I thought you were asleep enough I could slip out for a minute,” Sam said, sounding more resigned than perturbed. “I mean, fuck, Dean, I didn’t even get the door open yet.”
Dean peered between his fingers to look at Sam’s hand, still resting on the unturned door knob. He just almost put a bullet through his brother’s brain for the sin of touching the damn doorknob, and the fact that Sam was neither surprised nor concerned was a testament to just how fucked up their lives actually are, and possibly just how paranoid Dean had been since Purgatory. In place of some kind of apology, Dean offered a strangled sort of wheeze before doubling over to cough, a gasping, gurgling hack.
Sam was at his side in an instant, patting gently at his back as Dean pressed his face against his blanketed knees and tried to tell his lungs to calm the fuck down. When the coughing finally died to a low, rumbling gasp, he spat into a tissue Sam handed to him, balled it up and tossed it toward the side of the room he thought the trash can might be on, and rested his forehead against his knees again. “Where were you going, anyway?” he tried to say, but it came out more as a piteous rasp. Sam understood anyway.
“I’m gonna ask the office for some more blankets,” Sam murmured. He gave Dean one last awkward pat before Dean felt his weight lift from the bed and he nearly toppled with the lack of support. “The cold is making you worse.”
“This was your fucking idea,” Dean grumbled accusingly, finally uncurling long enough to flop back against the mattress, cautiously, trying to avoid jarring anything else loose in his lungs.
“I’ll be right back,” Sam said, but hesitated at the door. “Try not to fall asleep before I get back, okay? If you’re going to shoot someone for leaving, I don’t even want to know what you’d do to someone who tried to come in.”
“Ha ha,” Dean coughed humorlessly. He burrowed under the blankets as Sam opened the door, feeling the temperature drop several degrees in the seconds it took Sam to get outside and tug the door shut against the wind.
The snow kept the world dark outside the window. Dean hunted around for the clock, for some indication of what time it was, how long he had been dead to the world. The clock blinked twelve o’clock, four searing red digits repeated every second and he stared at it so long he still saw them etched into his vision when he redirected his vision to the black television. It irritated him, not knowing, like he was existing outside of time against his will. Even Purgatory had time, a light and a dark, a time when you could see predators and a time when they could see prey, eyes glowing through the night. Hell, even Hell had time, Dean thought darkly, a time for torturing and a time for nightmares, seconds between counted by how many times he died and came back before Alastair started talking deals with the devil. He hated not knowing night from day, one minute from the next, how many demons had crawled out of Hell in the time since he last opened his eyes.
Whatever the hell time it was, it was time to get out of bed and stop acting like an invalid. Dean threw his blankets back and nearly tumbled into the other bed as the vertigo hit. He blinked, slowly, but the room persisted in wavering maddeningly. He clenched his teeth hard, felt his way along the edge of the bed to walk forward, but at the foot of the bed, with nothing left to hold onto, he misestimated the location of the floor, lurched to his left, found said floor with a jarring impact to his shoulder, and decided there was nothing wrong with crawling as long as no one saw him.
He only made it to the trash can, not even on the side of the room he thought it was on, before he threw up, coughing haltingly between heaves, scarcely able to draw breath. There wasn’t even anything left to throw up, he thought in an admittedly whiny tone, but the goddamn room was rocking like a ship in his vision and he was more than a little motion sick. He was still collapsed there on the floor, legs folded awkwardly beneath him and trash can hugged to his chest, trying and failing, miserably, to bring anything up, when another gust of wind signaled Sam’s return.
“Shit, Dean,” Sam dropped a heap of blankets just inside the door, kicked it shut, and knelt next to his brother, rubbing a warm hand up and down his arm, right over the newly blossoming bruise on his shoulder, muttering some stupid shit about it’s okay and let it out like Dean was a hysterical woman instead of a slightly incapacitated warrior.
Dean spat one last time and leaned heavily against the wall next to him, eyes dropping closed. He felt Sam tug the trash can away from him, so he let go, hugging his arms to his chest instead. Sam was back in just a minute, kneeling next to him, hands on Dean’s shoulders.
“Dean? Do you need to go to the bathroom? Is that why you were out of bed?”
Dean nodded without opening his eyes, and immediately stopped because he could feel the goddamn world spinning.
“Okay. I’m going to help you, okay?” Dean didn’t do much toward starting to move, despite Sam tugging at him. “Can you stand if I help you? C’mon,” Sam muttered, hauling Dean bodily up from the floor. Dean fumblingly got his feet under him, most of his weight leaning against his brother. Sam looped an arm around his waist and guided him into the bathroom, still mumbling a series of questions and encouragements and other random disjointed words Dean wasn’t really listening to until, “Can you stand here on your own? Do I need to hold you up?”
Dean waved his arm at Sam. “Got it from here,” he said with more confidence than he really felt, and for good measure, “Been doing this since before you were born.”
“Open your eyes before you start,” Sam suggested, and Dean flipped him off, eyes still closed. Dean heard him back away, pulling the door most of the way shut. Dean carefully opened one eye, relieved to find the only light coming from the cracked door, the spinning slowing somewhat in the darkness. He did his business as quickly as possible, stumbled the one step to the sink and sort of draped himself over it so he could splash some water on his face and rinse his mouth without actually supporting his own weight.
Sam apparently decided Dean didn’t need any more privacy and walked back in, steering Dean back to the bed, depositing him gently under several new layers of blankets. He tucked them in all around Dean’s shivering body, then handed him the TV remote.
“Why is it so fucking cold?” Dean griped, and he could feel the cold air whistling into his lungs through narrowed passages. He looked at the remote but couldn’t make his frozen fingers press the buttons, so he dropped it onto the bed and put his hands in his armpits.
“The power’s been flickering,” Sam said. He dug through one of the many grocery bags that still sat out on the table, pulling out flashlights and batteries and hand warmers and all kinds of crap like he had known this was coming and Dean was very suddenly and very powerfully pissed off.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Sam,” he started, before a cough cut him off, crackly and loud and fucking productive to use the word he always heard doctors use, like he was making some kind of great contribution to the world by hacking up bits of phlegm and blood into the handful of tissues Sam was holding in front of his face. The interruption only served to fuel his rage and by the time he was done spitting gunk into the tissues and catching his breath, he was ready.
“This is why we don’t take jobs in fucking Montana and we don’t do it in the goddamn winter with the snow and the ice and the fucking power outages,” Dean exploded, as loud as his stupid sore throat and cough would let him, which was exactly one hoarse notch above a whisper. “Now we’re fucking stuck here in the cold and I feel like absolute shit and Baby is out there getting scratched up by the goddamn ice crystals, all to save the four people in the world who don’t have enough goddamn sense not to live in fucking Montana!”
Sam started to roll his eyes, looked like he thought better of it, and just sighed instead, sitting on the edge of the bed and patting Dean’s back through the next coughing fit. “I’m pretty sure more than four people live in Montana, Dean.”
“Nobody lives in Montana,” Dean countered almost literally breathlessly between coughs. “Because there is nothing here.”
“This motel,” Sam started but Dean interrupted.
“Is owned by some slumlord living in California. The bastard that owns this motel is probably laying on the beach right now counting his cash out to some hooker, and it’s your fault, Sam.”
“It’s my fault he lives in California, or it’s my fault she’s a hooker?” Sam asked, eyebrows raised.
“All of it,” Dean insisted. The power flickered again, the lights of the room resuming with a dull hum, the heat kicking on with a disheartening clatter. “And so is that.” Because Sam was the one who had wanted this hunt to begin with, and he was the one who chose a motel with power lines that were obviously above ground, the one place in all of Montana that apparently didn’t think they got snow.
Sam sighed, loudly, but Dean could practically hear the smile in it and he wanted to be pissed off at that too, damn it all, but he had really fucking missed this, being an asshole and listening to his brother’s put-upon sigh even as he cared and comforted and stayed. “You got something to say?” he demanded.
Sam sighed again. “Did you know you’re really kind of bitchy when you’re sick?”
“I’m not the bitch here, bitch,” Dean retorted, but he had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep a straight face.
Sam did roll his eyes at that, and stood up. “I think we should get some fluids in you. You’ve got to be dehydrated, and maybe it’ll help your fever too. And maybe if we can get your fever down, you won’t be so nauseated. Or cranky, Christ.”
Dean started to snap that he was not cranky, but the irony of that was too much even for him. He huffed instead, hacked a couple of times for good measure, and nodded his assent.
Sam frowned at him thoughtfully, then moved back to the heap of blankets by the door, gathering it all up in a tangled bundle and tossed it on the other bed, and extracted a couple of flat motel pillows. “Come here, sit up.”
He didn’t actually wait for Dean to coordinate his limbs into a concerted effort, just forced an arm behind Dean’s shoulders and tugged him up to sitting. Dean found himself propped against Sam’s chest as he created a precarious mountain of pillows behind him, and thought briefly on the fact that he had had more contact with his brother in the last twenty-four hours than he had in probably the whole year before Purgatory.
“I think you have pneumonia,” Sam said when Dean was settled against the pillows, breathing a little easier.
Dean coughed miserably by way of agreeing with Sam’s assessment, bringing his elbow up to catch the little flecks of blood, then held his arm out to show Sam.
“I know. Hence the diagnosis.” Sam put a hand on Dean’s forehead like he hadn’t been all over him enough in the last few minutes, and Dean swatted his hand away irritably. “Fever’s up.”
Dean flipped him off and muffled another cough into Sam’s hoodie. Sam rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything. He moved to the little kitchen, put some water to boil on the tiny stove and dug in the small refrigerator to pull out a bottle of Gatorade. “Think you could do some broth, too?”
Dean grunted something sounding vaguely negative and pulled the blankets higher. Sam shook his head and brought the Gatorade over, twisting the cap to break the seal before handing it to Dean to drink.
“I hate this shit,” Dean grumbled, but took an obedient sip anyway. The cold soothed his throat for the first half second, then made it ache all the more.
“Really? I wouldn’t know from the way you bitch about it every time you get sick,” Sam said lightly, not even sparing his brother a glance as he retrieved the hot water bottle from under the bed and moved to the kitchen to refill it.
“What the hell is this flavor, anyway?” Dean continued, pretending pointedly that he hadn’t heard Sam’s sass at all. “It’s white. It looks like I’m drinking fog.” He paused. “Or a ghost.”
“It’s cherry,” Sam said, instead of telling Dean to read the goddamn bottle like he usually would have. “You like cherry.” He lifted the edge of the covers and settled the water bottle next to his brother.
“No, I don’t.” Dean coughed abruptly, sloshing some Gatorade over his hand. “Fuck.” He swiped at the fluid with a corner of the sheets.
“You like cherry pie,” Sam countered, sitting on the bed next to Dean, laptop settled on his knees.
“That’s pie, Sam. This is a bottle of chemicals.”
“Yeah, and here’s some more,” Sam said, dropping a bunch of pills into Dean’s hand. “We’ve got some antibiotics still. Should get you through til we can get to a clinic and get you a new scrip.”
Much as he hated tapping into their limited store of medication, coughing blood was a little much even for him to just brush off. He knocked the pills back with another sip of Gatorade, let the closed bottle fall onto the bed somewhere, and slouched further into his pillows, pressing his frozen fingers against the hot water bottle, letting his eyes fall closed and trying to doze off again. After a couple of minutes of no success, he leaned over to peer at the laptop screen. Sam was researching pneumonia. Dean didn’t know which was sadder, the fact that Sam was researching it, or the fact that Dean hadn’t expected anything else.
“You know we’ve both had this like six times, right?” Dean coughed again and Sam passed him a tissue without even looking up.
“You’ve had it six times. I only had it twice.”
Dean rolled his eyes. “Thanks, Sam. I needed to feel worse about my lungs.”
“Shouldn’t have smoked so much as a teenager,” Sam murmured absently, scrolling quickly through the page.
“I didn’t smoke that much,” Dean said. He let his head drop back to the pillow and shivered a little. In the quiet, he could hear the wind picking up, and the room shook a little with a particularly strong gust. Sam glanced up at the ceiling like he expected it to cave in, and then promptly went back to his research, as only a geek could.
Dean found the remote and the TV flicked on, reception fuzzy with static, all the voices muffled and distorted. “Sam, what time is it?”
“Three in the afternoon,” Sam replied. He glanced over at Dean, the corners of his lips quirking up in a tiny smile. “Oprah isn’t on yet.”
“How would you even know that?” Dean asked, raising his eyebrows. “Were you a stay at home mom to that dog you hit? Did you watch The View, too?”
Just as Sam opened his mouth to reply, the room went black, the static of the TV replaced with the psithurism of the storm. “Coming from the guy who watches Dr. Sexy MD,” Sam offered weakly, far too late for a retort.
“Fucking perfect,” Dean wheezed, then broke into a coughing fit, rolling onto his side away from Sam. He coughed so hard he thought he would throw up, and Sam seemed to have the same thought, because he was suddenly crouched in front of Dean, trash can in one hand, the other on Dean’s shoulder.
“Come on, Dean. Breathe. It’s okay. Come on,” Sam murmured and Dean glared at him even though he was certain Sam couldn’t see it in the darkness, but slowly gained control of his lungs, finally able to draw a breath. He slowly uncurled his body, settling back into his pillows, breathing rapidly and shallowly.
Sam let out a deep breath and Dean irrationally felt that his brother was mocking him with his healthy lungs. He scowled.
Sam left the trash can on the floor by the bed, reached over Dean and grabbed the Gatorade. He twisted the cap off and held it to Dean’s lips, not even bothering to offer to let him do it himself. Dean took as tiny a sip as he could, and shook his head when Sam tried to offer more.
“Gotta,” he paused to clear his throat and wheeze a little. “Gotta keep the antibiotics down.”
There was a pause. “You might need something on your stomach, or the antibiotics will make it worse. And you’re dehydrated.”
“Sam, if I eat anything else, it’s definitely going to be worse.”
Sam sighed and shook his head. Dean saw the outline of Sam stand in the darkness, shift around to the other side of the bed, and heard the click of a flashlight.
Dean glanced over at his brother, who stared straight ahead at the circle of light on the wall, chewing his lip.
“Fucking Montana,” Dean offered, and Sam quirked one corner of his mouth, before settling back into his decidedly worried face.
“C’mon, Sam…” Dean trailed off, unsure what to say. Unsure what exactly Sam was upset about. “Dirty shadow puppets?” he asked, weakly.
Sam glanced over at him, raised his eyebrows. Dean grinned. Sam rolled his eyes and flipped Dean off, hand in front of the flashlight. Dean watched the shadow of it form on the wall, remembered all the nights of motel power outages, teaching Sam how to make an eagle, a dog, a duck, a swamp monster. “It’s on, bitch.”
Needless to say Dean won. And not just because Sam surrendered, saying Dean looked too tired, which he was. He was already winning way before that.
They sat quietly side by side, Sam still resting against the headboard, Dean propped on his mountain of pillows. Without the distraction of coming up with obscene hand contortions, he had nothing to focus on but the roiling of his stomach, the whistling in his lungs, the body-wide aching. Dean doubted the temperature in the room had dropped that much, but his hot water bottle was no longer hot and he was starting to shiver again. He rolled onto his side, facing away from Sam and toward the trash can again, just in case. He felt Sam shift over, heard his spine pop as he slid down and under the pile of blankets Dean was currently inhabiting.
“What are you -“ Dean started to demand, ready to protest even more cuddling, but a cough cut him off and in the time it took for him to stop gasping for breath, Sam was pressed up against his back, and he was so fucking warm that Dean immediately stopped shivering.
“I’m cold,” Sam lied, blatantly.
“Just trying to mooch off my fever,” Dean muttered, but accepted Sam’s excuse. He closed his eyes and tried to focus on breathing shallowly, not coughing, and not throwing up.
He wasn’t doing a very good job. Every two minutes or so, another cough rumbled up from his chest and he hunched forward with the force of the coughing. His stomach was cramping intermittently and between that and the coughing, Dean found himself so curled up his knees were pressing against his chest within twenty minutes. Sam shifted closer, and his hand crept over the tower of pillows to palm Dean’s forehead.
“Jesus, Dean,” he muttered. “Can you drink a little more? Please?”
Dean shook his head, jaw clenched tight. He was shaking, hard, muscles aching with exertion, and he was so close to being sick again that he was afraid to open his mouth at all. Sam squeezed his shoulder carefully.
Dean shuffled closer to the edge of the bed as they next wave of coughing hit, hanging over the side to lose the three sips of Gatorade and the antibiotics into the trash can. Sam rubbed his back lightly as Dean continued to cough and gag, before slumping back, exhausted.
“Dean…” Sam said, his voice small. Dean remembered this voice from their childhood, from the time just after Sam had learned about monsters, from the time their father was almost killed on a job, from the night Jessica had died. That small, scared, broken voice, the one that said Sam’s world was crumbling, and Dean hated that he was causing it. He unwrapped his arm from his stomach to fumble for Sam’s hand, squeezed it as reassuringly as he could, trying to send his words in some shorthand one-beep Morse code: it’s okay, I’m okay, we’re okay, please, just don’t use that voice.
Sam cleared his throat and squeezed Dean’s hand back, then dropped it. “Guess the antibiotics weren’t good on an empty stomach,” he murmured, voice hoarse.
Dean shrugged with one shoulder. “Guess not.”
“I’m sure,” Sam’s voice caught, and he cleared his throat again. “I’m sure the snow will stop soon and we can get you some drugs.”
Dean hummed something vaguely affirmative, trying to suppress another shiver. He felt Sam’s forehead press against the back of his shoulder, breath ghosting over the fabric of his hoodie, Sam’s hand land on his side. Dean inhaled deeply, feeling his skin stretch over his ribs, Sam’s fingers slotting between the bones. Two points of contact, not quite a hug, nothing compared to Sam’s earlier snuggle attacks, but Dean was suddenly desperately uncomfortable, hemmed in by the brother who had been his constant companion for thirty years. He allowed the next wave of coughing so he could curl away from his brother, letting Sam’s hand slip off his ribs, stop fondling his bones.
Sam rolled away suddenly and Dean just barely managed to keep his hold on the blankets. There was a moment of cold as Sam escaped, and then his brother was tucking him in again, before stomping around the bed to his pile of storm supplies. Dean felt Sam drape the last couple of blankets over him, muttering something about “no insulation” that Dean took to be a statement on the building rather than his own pitiful physique, even though he knew better.
“Did you eat anything at all in Purgatory, Dean?” Sam groused, but he sounded more worried than angry and Dean mentally sighed that they were back to this weird game Sam liked with the masks and sniping at each other. Because angry is easier than worried or scared or jealous, betrayed, hurt. He rustled the covers in a semblance of a shrug.
“Bet Benny didn’t go hungry,” Sam mumbled, with enough actual venom to make it audible.
“What?” Dean snapped, and paid for it with a full minute of wheezing coughs and flecks of blood he couldn’t make out in the darkness, though he could feel them on his lips.
Sam had his hand on Dean’s shoulder, then his cheek, then brushing his hair back to palm his forehead, sliding gently through his hair. “Nothing. I’m sorry.” And it was easier. Angry is so much easier than sitting under an undoubtedly pitying gaze, and Dean was too exhausted for anything but the easy way.
“If you’ve got something to say, then say it,” Dean insisted, pushing Sam’s hand away. “You’re not a teenager anymore, okay, Sam? You’re too old for this muttering under your breath bullshit.”
“Fine,” Sam said it flatly, refusing to rise to Dean’s anger. “Fine. I won’t say anything.”
“No, go ahead.” Dean paused to cough again, and after regaining his breath. “I want to know why you’re so gung-ho to let monsters go when they’re your friends, or hell, people you don’t even know, but the second I think a guy deserves a chance after saving my fucking life, you’re all for killing him!”
“It’s not like that!” Sam protested.
“Then what is it?”
“Maybe I just don’t like the idea of some vampire riding my brother out of Purgatory like a goddamn meatsuit!” Sam kicked something and stomped a few steps away from the bed. “Maybe I don’t like the idea of somebody calling you ‘brother’ one minute and sucking your blood the next!”
“Why do you have such a problem with it?” Dean retorted. “What’s it matter what I did for him?”
“Because he’s using you, Dean!” Sam exploded. “You don’t think it’s suspicious that he wants to be ‘brothers’ with the only thing in Purgatory that can get him out? That doesn’t make him your brother!” So much easier than worried, hurt, jealous, betrayed.
“Everybody uses everybody, Sam,” Dean said tiredly, rubbing a hand over his face, trying to quell the ache behind his eyes. “Brothers included.”
“What kind of fucked up worldview is that?” Sam demanded.
“All anyone cares about is what you can do for them,” Dean said, his tone haunted even to his own ears. “They do stuff for you so you do stuff for them. And when you aren’t around or they don’t need you, it’s over. That’s all it is, Sam. That’s all any of it is.”
“Dean, that’s not…” Sam paused and Dean could hear him pace a few steps. “That’s not how it is. Maybe some people, but not everybody. Not your family.”
Dean shook his head, started to speak, but a cough bubbled up, and the rest of his words were swallowed in the strangled gagging as he tried not to choke as he wheezed. He felt Sam’s hands hauling him up to sitting, propping him against the headboard, patting his back, voice issuing a rapid-fire stream of something apologetic.
Dean finally stopped coughing in order to better gasp for breath. Suddenly he was pulled forward, face pressed into Sam’s shirt, Sam’s chin resting on top of his head, arms trapped between their torsos.
“Jesus Christ, Dean,” Sam admonished. “Look, just forget I said it, okay? Benny’s fine. He’s great. I love vampires. I read all the Twilight books or whatever. Just don’t do that again, okay?”
Dean squirmed. “If that line about Twilight was true, I’m gonna need you to let go of me,” he said, weakly.
Sam chuckled, the relief evident, and Dean could feel it rumble from Sam’s chest to his own. “Seriously, Sam. You’ve hit your chick flick moment quota for the decade. Lemme go.”
Sam loosened his arms and helped Dean back under the heap of blankets, but stayed seated on the edge of bed, pressed against Dean’s hip.
“I meant it, though, Dean. Not everyone is like that. You’re not like that,” Sam said, voice low but firm. “I’m not…” he paused. “Look, if this is about you and me…”
“Enough, Sam,” Dean groaned. He was suddenly far too exhausted for this argument. “I can’t fight off pneumonia and your hormones at the same time.”
“Dean, I’m serious.”
Dean thought about making another joke, pushing Sam off the side of the bed, turning on the stupid flashlight and making another dirty shadow puppet. But Sam’s voice was that small, broken, little kid voice that had no business coming out of his gargantuan brother, and God or whoever help him, he couldn’t let Sam’s voice sound like that.
“Maybe I need you for stuff, and maybe sometimes you need me too,” Sam murmured. “But it doesn’t have to be us using each other. We’re not. I would do everything I could for you even if you never did anything back. I know…I know, I didn’t look for you and I wasn’t the one who brought you back from Hell and I couldn’t break your deal and I’m sorry, but I would go to the ends of the Earth for you, if I knew how to save you. And you’ve already proved you’d do the same for me, and you didn’t get anything back at all. So how can you think that’s all any of it is?”
“I wasn’t trying to...Look, I’m…” Dean fumbled uncomfortably, because what could he even say? Sure, Sammy, everything is all better, the world is brighter and I have hope again? No. He cleared his throat, coughed painfully, and finally said, “Would it make you feel better if I use you as a heater and promise not to ever try to do anything in return?”
Sam snorted. “I guess it’s a start.” He pushed at Dean’s hip until he scooted over enough for Sam to stretch out, then he ducked under the covers with Dean so they were laying side by side.
He listened to Sam breathing for a while, waiting until it has almost evened out in sleep before he said, “I wasn’t talking about you, you know. I wasn’t even saying…I don’t know what I was saying. I know you’re not…whatever.”
“I know you’re not whatever too,” Sam mumbled, shifted to get more comfortable. “Think the storm stopped. Probably can go to the hospital in the morning.”
Dean grunted his agreement, turned his head to cough into Sam’s shirt.
“Don’t get any worse before then, okay?” Sam said, sounding worried. He felt Dean’s forehead for the five hundredth time.
“Sure, I’ll just tell the bacteria in my lungs to pause all reproduction until tomorrow. I’m sure they’ll be happy to help out.” Dean shivered, inched incrementally closer to Sam.
“Did you know King David, from the Bible, had one wife who was just a space heater?” Sam asked, tucking the blankets a little more securely around Dean.
“What the fuck, Sam?”
“It’s true, I read it. He got old and couldn’t stay warm, so they found a virgin, this chick named Abishag, and she kept his bed warm. He never even fucked her, just used her for her heat.”
“If he didn’t fuck her, who the fuck cares if she was a virgin?” Dean coughed into Sam’s shirt again.
“She was hot, too,” Sam said, not answering the question at all.
“Well, of course,” Dean said.
“Of course?”
“Even if he’s not fucking her, he’s still got to look at her.”
“There’s something wrong with you.” Dean could almost hear Sam rolling his eyes.
“Yeah, there is. I’m fucking freezing. What do you say you make like Abishag and help a guy out?”
Sam pulled Dean even closer, wrapped his arms around his brother tightly. Dean’s face was pressed into Sam’s chest, and he drew his knees up and curled a little to keep certain parts of his body from being a little too intimate with his brother. He shivered one more time and Sam held him even tighter, enveloping Dean in the scent of Sam, the sound of his breathing, the heat of his body, and Dean relaxed, let it lull him to sleep.
In the morning, as soon as it was light enough to see, Sam was awake and bundling Dean into enough layers that he could no longer move his arms, packing him into the Impala and driving to the hospital. Dean used his brother as a pillow in the waiting room of the ER, drooling on his shoulder because he couldn’t breathe through his nose. He used Sam as a crutch to hobble his way to an exam room, and then he used Sam as a coat rack for most of his layers so the doctor could listen. He let Sam explain away his prominent bones, his pale skin and weak immune system. He let Sam hold all the brochures he was given about eating disorders, trauma, and vitamin C. He used Sam as a chauffeur to the pharmacy, and from there out of town, bidding farewell to that godforsaken motel that still didn’t have any fucking power. He let Sam ply him with medications and sports drinks and snacks.
Dean used Sam over and over again as a brother, and all Sam asked in return was for Dean to be his brother back. And Dean realized his theory didn’t account for everything. It didn’t account for Sam being his Abishag, or Sam buying him pie when he finally worked up to real food. It didn’t account for Dean selling his soul way back when, and it didn’t account for him stopping the trials to save his brother again. It didn’t account for brothers who cared and comforted and stayed even when the rest of the world had left.
Turns out, Dean’s theory didn’t account for much of anything real.
“Because brothers don’t let each other wander in the dark alone.” - Jolene Perry
End.