SPN Fic: If He Moves, Will He Fall?
Title: If He Moves, Will He Fall?
Characters: Sam, Dean
Genre: Gen or Sam/Dean, or, What you will.
Word-count: 2676
Spoilers: End of S3.
Disclaimer: Not mine; just hunting Kripke's textual deer.
Summary: Dean's spiking a fever and losing the ability to distinguish Iowa from Hell. Sam does what he can to help him remember.
Notes: Written for this prompt, without recourse to occult practices. Title and cut-text from Iron Man by Black Sabbath, because I am lazy about these things.
The internet's down.
It's been fading in and out all night, as though every half hour the guy next door's been downloading enough porn to eat up the bandwidth of the skimpy motel wifi. Sam flicks at the trackpad again, waiting impatiently for the half-loaded page of police reports to tip over the edge into visibility.
“Sam?”
He doesn't even bother looking up from the empty screen this time.
“Go back to sleep, Dean.” The heavy, itching smell of sweat intensifies.
“I - ” Sam can hear the thick swallow, knows the half-shuffle-half-wobble of bare feet against the tacky carpet.
The page comes up blank.
Sam scrapes his chair back from the table and stands. His back muscles ache, tense with the frustration of a shitty internet connection and a case with no leads and a brother who's apparently forgotten how to take care of his own basic fucking needs while he was in Hell.
He's told himself a hundred times it's stupid to be ticked off about something so unreasonable, something that Dean can't help, but irritation is a brotherly instinct almost as deep as love, and over the past year yelling's come more naturally to Sam than speaking.
He doesn't yell this time. He's breaking down that instinct, at least.
Dean's shoulders burn gently under his hands as he steers his brother back towards the chaotic tangle of sheets he's already made of the far bed. Dean's shivering this time, so Sam goes to the foot of the bed and drags the moth-eaten synthetic blanket up over him.
“You good now?” he asks, and Dean nods from halfway underneath the covers.
“Good,” Sam echoes himself, and goes back to sit at the table and watch his laptop gasp for a breath of wifi in the stifling, burnt-out motel air.
::: ::: :::
Dean's spent the whole day shivering, from the diner in the morning when he couldn't seem to get his hands wrapped securely enough around his coffee mug to the interview with the dead girl's mother, when Sam had to raise his voice a little just to drown out the noise of Dean's teeth chattering. And his color's been changing like a freaking mood ring, so it's pretty clear he's coming down with some nasty cold-flu hybrid, even if he keeps insisting that he's fine - like those words haven't lost all meaning by this point.
But whatever. Sam's content to let Dean Iron-Man his way through, if that's really what he wants, as long as he doesn't have to get involved.
By evening, though, Iron Man's rusting pretty fast. Dean's still shivering, even though he hasn't taken his boots or coat off since they got to the motel. He's sprawled on top of the covers, watching the weather channel through bleary, unfocused eyes and ignoring the open box of pizza lying on the table.
“Go to bed,” Sam tells him finally, when it's clear that Dean's prepared to sit up all night with his brain melting inside his skull and draining out his nose. Sam expects a stupid retort of some kind, but Dean just contemplates the suggestion silently for a few minutes, and then slowly sets about untying his boots.
It takes him about ten minutes, but he finally ends up underneath the covers, hunched into a blurred, shivering mound of polyester bedding. Sam listens to him coughing and groaning through the sheets as he scrolls through page after low-definition page on curse lore. Eventually Dean settles on deep, rasping breaths that blend easily into the motel soundtrack of loud drunks and semis rumbling past on the freeway, and Sam manages, in the relative peace, to translate half a page of badly transcribed Latin that tells him nothing whatsoever about the marks on the victim's body.
It lasts all of half an hour before Dean wakes up again, choking on his own lungs.
Sam readjusts the tilt of the laptop screen and waits. He still isn't used to being on this end of the equation. Dean's had nightmares before, sure, but they were the exception. Nightmares were Sam's job; stoic reassurance was Dean's. But - and it's starting to feel like the only thing he can count on anymore - things have changed since Hell. Now Dean's the one gasping in and out of dreams while Sam, who's been practically nocturnal for the last twelve months, watches numbly and tries to remember what Dean did all those nights that let Sam forget the nightmares almost before they were over.
He should ask what the nightmares are about, but doing that would make them somehow real, and Sam's coward enough to wish he could pretend it's all a fluke. He still hasn't gotten used to the idea that the anomaly that used to scare him almost as badly as his own bad dreams has become routine.
He looks up when Dean's breathing finally slows, but Dean just thrashes one hand out of the tangled sheets and drags the remote control under the covers with him, cutting off Sam's question before he's even figured out how to word it.
“…record lows today in the Northeast; accumulating snow as far south as High Point, New Jersey…”
The TV flickers listlessly through channel after channel, setting up a syncopated rhythm of blurting voices that lilts across the room until Sam finally throws a pair of socks at Dean's head.
“Dude, if you're gonna watch it, fine. But either turn something on or go to sleep. I'm trying to work here.”
“Not tired,” Dean slurs, and Sam feels a weird little surge of relief, like he's spent so long building up his own truckload of guilt that he's forgotten that he isn't the only one who lies.
“Go to sleep,” he repeats, a little less harshly this time, and Dean reluctantly burrows into the pillows again.
::: ::: :::
Sam's fingers are freezing. He only came out for a Coke and a few minutes of air that doesn't smell of fever and chewed-up Tylenol. But the soda machine, predictably enough, is broken, and Sam's spent the last ten minutes feeding the same fucking dollar bill into the slot and watching it spit blithely back out. He shifts from one foot to the other and tucks his arms in closer to his chest, blowing angrily over his numb fingertips. The weather girl wasn't kidding about those record lows. Sam just wants his damn Coke.
The dollar bill shoots out at him again, fluttering in the tingling neon light.
“Sam?”
Sam turns. Dean's standing there on the pavement, half-silhouetted in the light from the walkway and somehow much smaller without Dad's jacket. He's swaying with fatigue, and shit, barefoot, but Sam catches the relief that washes over his face and soaks into his shoulders when his squint finds Sam.
“You weren't there.”
“I was getting a soda, Dean.”
“I didn't know,” Dean says, and doesn't finish the sentence.
Sam crumples the dollar bill and shoves it back into his pocket before piloting Dean back into the room, swearing at him the whole time: dammit, Dean, what the hell is wrong with you?
It's not a fair question, and he knows it, but Sam stopped believing in fair months ago.
Dean lets Sam walk him over to the bed, and sits on the edge, shuddering with cold in a room that's probably hotter than the entire rest of the state.
“Sorry,” he mumbles towards the floor.
“Just stay in bed, man. It's not that complicated.”
Dean shakes his head, but he doesn't move. Sighing, Sam strips the blankets back for what feels like the hundredth time tonight, and waits for Dean to crawl back underneath.
::: ::: :::
An hour later, he nearly trips over Dean coming out of the bathroom.
“Jesus, Dean - ”
“Sam?”
That shouldn't be a question.
“It's me, man,” Sam confirms warily. Dean seems to buy it, but he grabs Sam's arm anyway, like he's making sure, and his grip burns through Sam's sleeve.
“Where are we?” Dean asks, voice only half there but the urgency coming through all the same, like the two of them are standing in the middle of a battlefield instead of a mildly infested motel room that's needed remodeling since the eighties.
“Iowa,” Sam tells him, wishing he had a better answer to give. “Black Hawk Motel, just out of Des Moines. Right off I-80.” Dean's grip on his arm relaxes finally, and Sam pulls back, feeling the hole that's permanently gnawing the bottom out of his stomach widen an inch or two. “Dean. Where did you think we were?”
Dean doesn't meet his eyes. “Iowa,” he whispers, nodding. “Shoulda known.” He stumbles, and leans into Sam for a moment as he tries to find his center of gravity again. “Only place with beds that fuckin' tiny.”
“Dean, where did you think - ” Sam gives up, his skin crawling, because he knows the answer and Dean won't admit it anyway. He's actually relieved that Dean won't say it out loud.
“Tylenol,” Sam orders. “Sleep.”
::: ::: :::
Dean sleeps for an hour and a half this time, while Sam kicks at the table leg and waits for the patchy wifi to grudgingly load the last few pages of the parchment scan Bobby sent over from Sioux Falls. He's finally starting to get sleepy, but it's only two o'clock, so he pours himself another cup of sour complimentary coffee, drags the Latin dictionary towards him and flips to the back.
He's wading through the declension of extatorum when the lull breaks.
Sam hasn't heard his brother scream in years, and he's in no way prepared for how fucking raw it sounds. It's over in a matter of seconds, and Dean's panting into the covers again, but that stark, pathetic syllable plays over and over in Sam's head like it's never going to stop. For some stupid, sick reason, he can feel rage boiling in his gut, at Dean for letting himself be torn to shreds and buried; at Lilith for making it happen.
At his idiotic stone-dead self, for being the reason Dean jumped at Hell like it was a trip to fucking Disneyland.
“Sam?”
It's a question again, and Sam wants to be sick.
“I'm right here, Dean.” He swallows. “Iowa, remember?”
Silence. Then, “Sorry.”
Anger snaps inside him, so hot that the pages on the screen burn black for a second. “It's okay, man.”
They listen to the highway for a minute. “Sam?” Dean asks again, thrashing up out of the covers.
“You're sick, Dean. You've got to get some sleep.” Dean shakes his head.
“I'm good.”
“You wanna look in a mirror and say that?”
“I said I'm good.”
And Sam should press the matter, but he doesn't, because he understands. Because it feels real.
Completely real, every time. Sam remembers that, even if he doesn't have the ghost of a clue what Dean's seeing every time he closes his eyes and can't bring himself to even ask yet. Every time, no matter how level-headed you are, no matter how many times you tell yourself while you're awake that none of it can hurt you, it always feels real.
Sam knows that better than he'd like to, and it's not just because of Jessica. Every night since Dean crawled out of that hole and showed up at that motel in Illinois, the only way Sam's been able to convince himself that it wasn't all a dream is by staying awake.
But he's tired right now, crumbling from weeks without sleep, and Dean's exhausted, and it's stupid to try to go on like this, bleeding gears and loose screws everywhere and swearing blind that everything's all right when really, nothing is. They're staring down the barrel of the apocalypse, and Sam's already fucked up just about everything it's possible to fuck up. Right now, he just wants to rest.
He slaps down the laptop screen and bends over to unlace his boots.
The sheets are nasty with sweat as Sam slips in beside Dean, but he pulls in close anyway, pressing an arm gently over Dean's shoulders when he starts to squirm away in alarm.
“Dude, calm down. We're not gonna spoon.”
“Did you go crazy while I was asleep or something?” Dean demands.
“It's freezing out there,” Sam lies. “I got tired of trying to warm my ass over the heater. This is easier. You're like a freaking furnace, man.”
“Not my fault.”
“Just relax and go to sleep, Dean.”
To Sam's surprise, he does. He bitches and he curls away from Sam into a tight, feverish ball, but eventually he's snoring again, limbs sprawled across the bed and nudging Sam gradually towards the edge. It makes it impossible to actually get any sleep, but Sam scoots himself carefully up underneath Dean's out-flung arm into a sitting position and turns on the TV. The laptop's still on the table across the room, but he can just reach over Dean to the bedside table to snag the corner of the pizza box, and he finishes off the rest of the now-cold pepperoni while his right hand sweats and cramps, pinned under the crazy heat of Dean's back.
Dean still doesn't sleep through the night - he grunts and mumbles and throws a punch at Sam that narrowly misses his nose, and near four A.M. he struggles abruptly up out of the covers to stare around the room with unfocused panic in his eyes.
“Hey,” Sam says, and the panic subsides instantly. Dean flops back onto the pillows, and by the time M*A*S*H hits the commercial break, he's asleep again. Satisfied, Sam slips down under the covers, settles his head and waits, feet sticking out off the end of the bed, for morning.
As the flat blue square of dawn slowly bleeds through the curtain, Sam feels Dean roll over. The sheets twist and slip off of Sam's feet, and a minute later Dean's curled up beside him, tucking his sweaty forehead against Sam's shoulder. He's shivering again, pressing instinctively in towards Sam's body heat, and Sam wonders how that's even possible when his own skin is dripping and itching with sweat underneath the sauna of polyester bedding.
“Dean?” Sam whispers, but Dean's head is a dead, burning weight at his side, and there's no answer.
It's been a year. They say that 21 days are enough to form a habit, and Sam's had 365 to rewrite himself into someone who doesn't need an older brother to look out for him. And he doesn't regret that decision - Sam's always wanted to be more than Dean's little brother; and besides, with Dean in hell, what other choice was there?
He's just disgusted at how easy it really was.
Dean shifts again beside him, grumbling unintelligibly into his shoulder. Sam freezes, because if Dean wakes up now and realizes that Sam's started crying he's not gonna hear the end of it, because Dean can be as pushy as Sam if he really thinks something's wrong - and Dean always knows. But Dean just presses closer and goes quiet, breathing in quick, shallow rasps against Sam's arm.
Sam lets his breath out slowly and dries his face with sharp, clumsy swipes with his left hand, the one that's not trapped against Dean's uncomfortably hot body. Gingerly, careful not to wake Dean as he shifts his weight on the mattress, he extricates his right arm from between them and throws it over Dean, holding a steady palm against Dean's clammy back as he shivers and ducks his head closer to Sam's side.
It's awkward and embarrassing, and in about ten minutes Sam's arm is going to go numb when the blood flow cuts off entirely. He falls asleep like that anyway, while Dean's fever subsides and a dull morning breaks on the motel parking lot outside.
Characters: Sam, Dean
Genre: Gen or Sam/Dean, or, What you will.
Word-count: 2676
Spoilers: End of S3.
Disclaimer: Not mine; just hunting Kripke's textual deer.
Summary: Dean's spiking a fever and losing the ability to distinguish Iowa from Hell. Sam does what he can to help him remember.
Notes: Written for this prompt, without recourse to occult practices. Title and cut-text from Iron Man by Black Sabbath, because I am lazy about these things.
The internet's down.
It's been fading in and out all night, as though every half hour the guy next door's been downloading enough porn to eat up the bandwidth of the skimpy motel wifi. Sam flicks at the trackpad again, waiting impatiently for the half-loaded page of police reports to tip over the edge into visibility.
“Sam?”
He doesn't even bother looking up from the empty screen this time.
“Go back to sleep, Dean.” The heavy, itching smell of sweat intensifies.
“I - ” Sam can hear the thick swallow, knows the half-shuffle-half-wobble of bare feet against the tacky carpet.
The page comes up blank.
Sam scrapes his chair back from the table and stands. His back muscles ache, tense with the frustration of a shitty internet connection and a case with no leads and a brother who's apparently forgotten how to take care of his own basic fucking needs while he was in Hell.
He's told himself a hundred times it's stupid to be ticked off about something so unreasonable, something that Dean can't help, but irritation is a brotherly instinct almost as deep as love, and over the past year yelling's come more naturally to Sam than speaking.
He doesn't yell this time. He's breaking down that instinct, at least.
Dean's shoulders burn gently under his hands as he steers his brother back towards the chaotic tangle of sheets he's already made of the far bed. Dean's shivering this time, so Sam goes to the foot of the bed and drags the moth-eaten synthetic blanket up over him.
“You good now?” he asks, and Dean nods from halfway underneath the covers.
“Good,” Sam echoes himself, and goes back to sit at the table and watch his laptop gasp for a breath of wifi in the stifling, burnt-out motel air.
::: ::: :::
Dean's spent the whole day shivering, from the diner in the morning when he couldn't seem to get his hands wrapped securely enough around his coffee mug to the interview with the dead girl's mother, when Sam had to raise his voice a little just to drown out the noise of Dean's teeth chattering. And his color's been changing like a freaking mood ring, so it's pretty clear he's coming down with some nasty cold-flu hybrid, even if he keeps insisting that he's fine - like those words haven't lost all meaning by this point.
But whatever. Sam's content to let Dean Iron-Man his way through, if that's really what he wants, as long as he doesn't have to get involved.
By evening, though, Iron Man's rusting pretty fast. Dean's still shivering, even though he hasn't taken his boots or coat off since they got to the motel. He's sprawled on top of the covers, watching the weather channel through bleary, unfocused eyes and ignoring the open box of pizza lying on the table.
“Go to bed,” Sam tells him finally, when it's clear that Dean's prepared to sit up all night with his brain melting inside his skull and draining out his nose. Sam expects a stupid retort of some kind, but Dean just contemplates the suggestion silently for a few minutes, and then slowly sets about untying his boots.
It takes him about ten minutes, but he finally ends up underneath the covers, hunched into a blurred, shivering mound of polyester bedding. Sam listens to him coughing and groaning through the sheets as he scrolls through page after low-definition page on curse lore. Eventually Dean settles on deep, rasping breaths that blend easily into the motel soundtrack of loud drunks and semis rumbling past on the freeway, and Sam manages, in the relative peace, to translate half a page of badly transcribed Latin that tells him nothing whatsoever about the marks on the victim's body.
It lasts all of half an hour before Dean wakes up again, choking on his own lungs.
Sam readjusts the tilt of the laptop screen and waits. He still isn't used to being on this end of the equation. Dean's had nightmares before, sure, but they were the exception. Nightmares were Sam's job; stoic reassurance was Dean's. But - and it's starting to feel like the only thing he can count on anymore - things have changed since Hell. Now Dean's the one gasping in and out of dreams while Sam, who's been practically nocturnal for the last twelve months, watches numbly and tries to remember what Dean did all those nights that let Sam forget the nightmares almost before they were over.
He should ask what the nightmares are about, but doing that would make them somehow real, and Sam's coward enough to wish he could pretend it's all a fluke. He still hasn't gotten used to the idea that the anomaly that used to scare him almost as badly as his own bad dreams has become routine.
He looks up when Dean's breathing finally slows, but Dean just thrashes one hand out of the tangled sheets and drags the remote control under the covers with him, cutting off Sam's question before he's even figured out how to word it.
“…record lows today in the Northeast; accumulating snow as far south as High Point, New Jersey…”
The TV flickers listlessly through channel after channel, setting up a syncopated rhythm of blurting voices that lilts across the room until Sam finally throws a pair of socks at Dean's head.
“Dude, if you're gonna watch it, fine. But either turn something on or go to sleep. I'm trying to work here.”
“Not tired,” Dean slurs, and Sam feels a weird little surge of relief, like he's spent so long building up his own truckload of guilt that he's forgotten that he isn't the only one who lies.
“Go to sleep,” he repeats, a little less harshly this time, and Dean reluctantly burrows into the pillows again.
::: ::: :::
Sam's fingers are freezing. He only came out for a Coke and a few minutes of air that doesn't smell of fever and chewed-up Tylenol. But the soda machine, predictably enough, is broken, and Sam's spent the last ten minutes feeding the same fucking dollar bill into the slot and watching it spit blithely back out. He shifts from one foot to the other and tucks his arms in closer to his chest, blowing angrily over his numb fingertips. The weather girl wasn't kidding about those record lows. Sam just wants his damn Coke.
The dollar bill shoots out at him again, fluttering in the tingling neon light.
“Sam?”
Sam turns. Dean's standing there on the pavement, half-silhouetted in the light from the walkway and somehow much smaller without Dad's jacket. He's swaying with fatigue, and shit, barefoot, but Sam catches the relief that washes over his face and soaks into his shoulders when his squint finds Sam.
“You weren't there.”
“I was getting a soda, Dean.”
“I didn't know,” Dean says, and doesn't finish the sentence.
Sam crumples the dollar bill and shoves it back into his pocket before piloting Dean back into the room, swearing at him the whole time: dammit, Dean, what the hell is wrong with you?
It's not a fair question, and he knows it, but Sam stopped believing in fair months ago.
Dean lets Sam walk him over to the bed, and sits on the edge, shuddering with cold in a room that's probably hotter than the entire rest of the state.
“Sorry,” he mumbles towards the floor.
“Just stay in bed, man. It's not that complicated.”
Dean shakes his head, but he doesn't move. Sighing, Sam strips the blankets back for what feels like the hundredth time tonight, and waits for Dean to crawl back underneath.
::: ::: :::
An hour later, he nearly trips over Dean coming out of the bathroom.
“Jesus, Dean - ”
“Sam?”
That shouldn't be a question.
“It's me, man,” Sam confirms warily. Dean seems to buy it, but he grabs Sam's arm anyway, like he's making sure, and his grip burns through Sam's sleeve.
“Where are we?” Dean asks, voice only half there but the urgency coming through all the same, like the two of them are standing in the middle of a battlefield instead of a mildly infested motel room that's needed remodeling since the eighties.
“Iowa,” Sam tells him, wishing he had a better answer to give. “Black Hawk Motel, just out of Des Moines. Right off I-80.” Dean's grip on his arm relaxes finally, and Sam pulls back, feeling the hole that's permanently gnawing the bottom out of his stomach widen an inch or two. “Dean. Where did you think we were?”
Dean doesn't meet his eyes. “Iowa,” he whispers, nodding. “Shoulda known.” He stumbles, and leans into Sam for a moment as he tries to find his center of gravity again. “Only place with beds that fuckin' tiny.”
“Dean, where did you think - ” Sam gives up, his skin crawling, because he knows the answer and Dean won't admit it anyway. He's actually relieved that Dean won't say it out loud.
“Tylenol,” Sam orders. “Sleep.”
::: ::: :::
Dean sleeps for an hour and a half this time, while Sam kicks at the table leg and waits for the patchy wifi to grudgingly load the last few pages of the parchment scan Bobby sent over from Sioux Falls. He's finally starting to get sleepy, but it's only two o'clock, so he pours himself another cup of sour complimentary coffee, drags the Latin dictionary towards him and flips to the back.
He's wading through the declension of extatorum when the lull breaks.
Sam hasn't heard his brother scream in years, and he's in no way prepared for how fucking raw it sounds. It's over in a matter of seconds, and Dean's panting into the covers again, but that stark, pathetic syllable plays over and over in Sam's head like it's never going to stop. For some stupid, sick reason, he can feel rage boiling in his gut, at Dean for letting himself be torn to shreds and buried; at Lilith for making it happen.
At his idiotic stone-dead self, for being the reason Dean jumped at Hell like it was a trip to fucking Disneyland.
“Sam?”
It's a question again, and Sam wants to be sick.
“I'm right here, Dean.” He swallows. “Iowa, remember?”
Silence. Then, “Sorry.”
Anger snaps inside him, so hot that the pages on the screen burn black for a second. “It's okay, man.”
They listen to the highway for a minute. “Sam?” Dean asks again, thrashing up out of the covers.
“You're sick, Dean. You've got to get some sleep.” Dean shakes his head.
“I'm good.”
“You wanna look in a mirror and say that?”
“I said I'm good.”
And Sam should press the matter, but he doesn't, because he understands. Because it feels real.
Completely real, every time. Sam remembers that, even if he doesn't have the ghost of a clue what Dean's seeing every time he closes his eyes and can't bring himself to even ask yet. Every time, no matter how level-headed you are, no matter how many times you tell yourself while you're awake that none of it can hurt you, it always feels real.
Sam knows that better than he'd like to, and it's not just because of Jessica. Every night since Dean crawled out of that hole and showed up at that motel in Illinois, the only way Sam's been able to convince himself that it wasn't all a dream is by staying awake.
But he's tired right now, crumbling from weeks without sleep, and Dean's exhausted, and it's stupid to try to go on like this, bleeding gears and loose screws everywhere and swearing blind that everything's all right when really, nothing is. They're staring down the barrel of the apocalypse, and Sam's already fucked up just about everything it's possible to fuck up. Right now, he just wants to rest.
He slaps down the laptop screen and bends over to unlace his boots.
The sheets are nasty with sweat as Sam slips in beside Dean, but he pulls in close anyway, pressing an arm gently over Dean's shoulders when he starts to squirm away in alarm.
“Dude, calm down. We're not gonna spoon.”
“Did you go crazy while I was asleep or something?” Dean demands.
“It's freezing out there,” Sam lies. “I got tired of trying to warm my ass over the heater. This is easier. You're like a freaking furnace, man.”
“Not my fault.”
“Just relax and go to sleep, Dean.”
To Sam's surprise, he does. He bitches and he curls away from Sam into a tight, feverish ball, but eventually he's snoring again, limbs sprawled across the bed and nudging Sam gradually towards the edge. It makes it impossible to actually get any sleep, but Sam scoots himself carefully up underneath Dean's out-flung arm into a sitting position and turns on the TV. The laptop's still on the table across the room, but he can just reach over Dean to the bedside table to snag the corner of the pizza box, and he finishes off the rest of the now-cold pepperoni while his right hand sweats and cramps, pinned under the crazy heat of Dean's back.
Dean still doesn't sleep through the night - he grunts and mumbles and throws a punch at Sam that narrowly misses his nose, and near four A.M. he struggles abruptly up out of the covers to stare around the room with unfocused panic in his eyes.
“Hey,” Sam says, and the panic subsides instantly. Dean flops back onto the pillows, and by the time M*A*S*H hits the commercial break, he's asleep again. Satisfied, Sam slips down under the covers, settles his head and waits, feet sticking out off the end of the bed, for morning.
As the flat blue square of dawn slowly bleeds through the curtain, Sam feels Dean roll over. The sheets twist and slip off of Sam's feet, and a minute later Dean's curled up beside him, tucking his sweaty forehead against Sam's shoulder. He's shivering again, pressing instinctively in towards Sam's body heat, and Sam wonders how that's even possible when his own skin is dripping and itching with sweat underneath the sauna of polyester bedding.
“Dean?” Sam whispers, but Dean's head is a dead, burning weight at his side, and there's no answer.
It's been a year. They say that 21 days are enough to form a habit, and Sam's had 365 to rewrite himself into someone who doesn't need an older brother to look out for him. And he doesn't regret that decision - Sam's always wanted to be more than Dean's little brother; and besides, with Dean in hell, what other choice was there?
He's just disgusted at how easy it really was.
Dean shifts again beside him, grumbling unintelligibly into his shoulder. Sam freezes, because if Dean wakes up now and realizes that Sam's started crying he's not gonna hear the end of it, because Dean can be as pushy as Sam if he really thinks something's wrong - and Dean always knows. But Dean just presses closer and goes quiet, breathing in quick, shallow rasps against Sam's arm.
Sam lets his breath out slowly and dries his face with sharp, clumsy swipes with his left hand, the one that's not trapped against Dean's uncomfortably hot body. Gingerly, careful not to wake Dean as he shifts his weight on the mattress, he extricates his right arm from between them and throws it over Dean, holding a steady palm against Dean's clammy back as he shivers and ducks his head closer to Sam's side.
It's awkward and embarrassing, and in about ten minutes Sam's arm is going to go numb when the blood flow cuts off entirely. He falls asleep like that anyway, while Dean's fever subsides and a dull morning breaks on the motel parking lot outside.