Paid my Fares
Title: Paid my Fares
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2300
Disclaimer: Not my boys. Kripke broke them way before I ever got to them.
Summary: 1992: Both boys come down with strep throat at the same time. Sammy gets the last antibiotics, Dean comes down with scarlet fever.
Written for the Dean-focused hurt/comfort comment-fic meme (#4)
John Winchester has fought his way through many a battle. He can hold his own against ghosts and wendigos and the occasional demon, but there is no challenge quite so demanding as a sick and cranky teenager who is adamant that he just fine.
Granted, Dean has never been an easy patient to begin with, but at thirteen he’s apparently gotten it into his head that he’s entirely too cool for popsicles or Cup A Soup and spending the day in bed and sleeping it off is completely beneath him.
So, John knows he’s not making the most sound of parenting decisions here, but he doesn’t think anyone could really blame him for choosing to spend today tending to his youngest, equally sick son who has the distinct advantage of not being filled to the brim with hormones that could put the entire cast of Beverly Hills 90210 to shame.
Sammy, God bless him, doesn’t complain about his father’s probing hands on his forehead or John’s measly attempts at comfort food. All he wants is his cherry cough drops and his daddy to cuddle up against and John is more than willing to provide that.
Dean on the other hand has been a constant assault of “get off me” and “geez, stop treating me like a little kid, already” and “I fucking hate cherry”. All brought forward in a hoarse, fever-high slur which is honestly the only reason John hasn’t busted the kid’s ass over his attitude yet.
“My throat hurts,” comes Sammy’s tearful rasp from somewhere under his heap of blankets.
“Yeah, I know, buddy,” John tries to coax the kid into opening his mouth. Some secretary from the boys’ school called yesterday, warning him that a couple kids had come down with strep throat. John initially laughed her off. Winchesters don’t get wrestled into submission by ordinary kid’s diseases, after all. The white built up on his youngest’s cherry red tongue proofs him wrong. “Okay, that’s it. You got strep, kiddo,” John informs him. “Want me to get you some medicine?”
“No, I want it to stop hurting!”
The boy’s high pitched whine draws a put-upon scoff from his brother. “Yeah, maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much if you’d stop yappin’ for one goddamn second.”
“Dean,” John warns, striding over his eldest who has occupied the couch.
“Well, his stupid voice hurts my hea- HEY!” Dean tries to defend himself before John manages to grab the kid’s chin and force a look into his throat. Great. Double strep.
John tries to ignore the huffs from the sofa and the sniffles from the bed and rummages through their frayed medi kit. Painkillers, leftover crap from Sammy’s bout of the chicken pox, prescription painkillers, empty box of Tylenol, seriously illegal eastern European painkillers (wow, that medi kit needs to be restacked ASAP) and score! Penicillin left over from John’s last infected black dog bite.
The moment of joy is quickly dumpted into a roaring pit of disappointment when John turns the little prescription bottle on its head and out tumbles a grand total of four pills. Fan-fucking-tastic.
“Dean,” he asks, shaking the half empty bottle in the boy’s direction. “Think you can fight this bug on your own?”
John is met with a long glower, before Dean huffs and throws himself back down onto the ratty cushion he dragged from the bed to the couch. “Sure. ‘m not sick, anyway.”
Fine. John figures if the boy doesn’t want the meds, he’s not gonna force him. Kid’s gotta learn sometime that taking medicine and admitting he’s sick is in no way the same as showing weakness. Maybe if he sees how his brother is getting better because of his meds he’ll finally get that little lesson through his thick skull.
And anyway, Sammy’s just a kid. A sniffling, miserable kid at that and strep’s a kid disease, so it makes all the sense in the world for him to be getting the last of their pharmaceutical aid.
Dean is strong and pretty close to grown and should be perfectly able to get over this shitty bug on his own, right?
Wrong.
Two days later, Sammy is bouncing on John’s bed, complaining that his brother won’t make him breakfast and worry for his eldest isn’t the first or even second thing that comes to John’s mind. His first thought is that at nine, Sammy should be up to pouring a bowl of cereal, not used to his big brother tending his every need. His second thought is to be annoyed with Dean, ‘cause looking after Sammy is the kid’s goddamn job and making breakfast certainly isn’t asking all that much.
“Dean,” John growls, hoping to get through the haze of sleep and teenager-ness without having to get up. Unfortunately all he’s met with is a rustle of blankets and a croaky groan.
“He’s been like that all morning,” Sammy complains. His voice is still hoarse from the last couple days, but the fever’s gone and he’s generally back to being his hyper self.
Sighing, John rolls out of his bed and flops down next to his eldest.
“Dean,” he tries again, shaking the kid’s shoulder under the thick layer of blankets. “Dean, get up, boy!” John roughly yanks the covers aside, pulling up Dean’s shirt in the process, only to reveal…
“Holy shit, Dean!”
The boy is covered in a thin layer of sweat, his entire back disappearing under a million tiny dark blotches of red. Suddenly in full-on worry mode, John quickly turns him over. Dean’s chest and face are just as bad. His skin is burning up, too. Not the low key fever they’ve both had going for a couple of days, but burning the fuck up.
“Dad?” Dean rasps, voice blown all the way to hell and back. “’m not feelin’ so hot.”
John curses quietly under his breath. This isn’t how this whole letting Dean fight this bug on his own thing was supposed to go down.
“You want some cough drops?” he asks helplessly and feels like crying when he gets a miserable shrug in return instead of a cranky ‘I fucking hate cherry’.
“You should give him the stuff you gave me,” Sam pipes up, still perched on the heap of blankets that is John’s bed. “Made me fell all better.”
“You got the last ones, kiddo,” John heaves another sigh.
“Get new ones then.”
John comes up short, trying to explain the concept of insurance fraud to his nine-year old and thank God, Dean saves him when he rasps, “don’t need any stupid pills, Sammy. I’m not the girl here, ‘member?”
The tired little chuckle quickly comes to a stuttering halt, when he tries to flop back onto his stomach and lets out an unhappy yelp when his rash rubs up against the rough sheets.
“I’ll get’cha something to make you feel better, buddy,” John whispers quietly to the back of the kid’s head.
Only, he doesn’t.
When it’s doesn’t involve knives or guns or running exercises, John is the most useless son of a bitch any father could possibly be. He carries around a busted insurance card and he buys cough drops that all but make one of his children puke and he manages to burn instant soup and his calloused fingers brushing over his son’s raw skin make the kid cry out in agony.
He finds himself wishing for Mary with a fierce desire that usually has him running to the nearest bar. She’d have known what to do. She wouldn’t have let it come this far in the first place. When it comes down to it, John’s whole Marine act is worth jack shit to his kids.
When Dean starts throwing up in tiny, pitiable spouts of watery bile, John decides to head out to the library - if only to give himself the illusion of doing something. It feels strange, giving Sammy the watch out for your brother speech, but the boy does his carbon copy impression of his big brother, nodding gravely in all the right places, so John doesn't feel quite so much like a failure.
The advice the medical books at the library have to offer is so incredibly fucking unhelpful, John just about manages to stop short of throwing them against the nearest wall (one or two or thirty pages get torn in the process of not throwing, but the half-blind librarian will have a hell of a hard time proving that had anything to do with John flipping through the books with increasing frustration.)
The most annoying thing about them? He fucking knows that the kid needs antibiotics. He’s looking for alternatives here, but those don’t seem to exist. And even though he repeatedly reads that scarlet fever usually resolves on its own, he reads just as often that the boy’s temperature can rise to life threatening levels and honestly, getting better on your own is worth a great shitload of nothing when your brain gets fried six ways from Sunday in the meantime.
John comes back to the motel room, finding a puke stained sheet balled up in front of the door and Dean quietly sobbing into his pillows.
“Jesus,” he whispers, running his hand carefully over the kid’s sweat slick hair, only to have him flinch and burry his face deeper into the mattress.
“I tried to get him to watch X-Men with me,” Sammy explains, sounding a weird combination of concerned and affronted. “But he said it made his head hurt. And then he threw up, so I got rid of the sheets and turned off the tv.”
“Good job,” John tells him absentmindedly, all the while trying to get Dean to turn around and please look at him.
“Hurts…” Dean slurs, finally lifting his red, sweat covered face to stare at John with fever bright, badly focused eyes. “Make it stop, Daddy.”
And that, right there pushes John over the edge. Dean hasn’t called him Daddy in almost a decade and John takes it as the death omen it probably is.
Pressing a quick kiss to the kid’s brow that has him whimpering in pain again, John makes a quick grab for the telephone on the nightstand.
“Bobby, this is John,” he grunts quietly, before the older man has had a chance to utter any sort of greeting. He prays that enough time has passed since their last falling out to have the aging mechanic at least hear him out before disconnecting his phone line. But then he remembers that he’s the self absorbed hard-ass who keeps burning his bridges and Bobby is the closest thing his boys have to extended family.
“What the matter, Johnny?”
John is hit with a wall of relief that is so real he doesn’t even have the presence of mind to correct him on the unacceptable nickname.
“Bobby listen, it’s Dean. You got any antibiotics at your place?”
“Uhm…I don’t think so, no.”
“Can you get any?”
“Sure.”
“Be there in five.”
He doesn’t explain any further. He’s got better things to do. Like packing up their stuff and getting his kids into the car and figuring out the quickest way from Ellsworth to South Dakota.
“Wha’s going on?” Dean slurs, when he finally realizes that he’s being carried out the door.
“We’re going to see Uncle Bobby, okay?” John whispers into his son’s hair. He can feel the heat radiating off of him.
“’kay…”
“He’s gonna make you all better,” Sam explains from where John put him in the front seat. His high voice has Dean burying his face in the upholstery.
The first three hours of their drive are pure torture. Sammy wants to know why he’s all better and Dean got really sick and then he wants to know why he got all the medicine and then he wants to know why John didn’t just get new medicine when Dean needed it and why can Uncle Bobby get the new meds when John can’t and John really misses yesterday, when the kid’s throat was still too sore to allow for the constant stream of twenty questions.
Dean for his part is a tiny ball in the backseat, whimpering with every chuckhole John doesn’t manage to avoid.
Still an hour out of Sioux Falls, Sammy manages to point out the Burger King they just passed, and the emergency blanket gets covered in its own layer of bile. At least the fast food joint is part of a rest station, so John can get his boy some bottled water and get him into a new shirt, ‘cause the old one is now soaked through with sweat and gall.
“What’s that?” John asks, when Dean mumbles unintelligibly into the wet cloth John’s wiping over his face.
“’m sorry,” Dean rasps back, voice now all but gone behind his fucked up throat and fever heavy tongue. “Should’a told you ‘t was bad…m’ own stupid fault ‘m sick.”
“Jesus, kid,” John sighs, manhandling the boy into the makeshift blanket that is his leather jacket. He can’t find the words to disagree, though.
“’m sorry I’m so much trouble,” he keeps mumbling, all but disappearing inside the huge heap of leather. “Sorry I’m a pain ‘n the ass.”
John hopes that the gentle brush of his lips against his son’s forehead is enough to put him off that ridiculous notion. He gets back into the front seat, hoping like fuck that they’ll get to Bobby’s place soon, so somebody can deal with his boy’s emo crap.
And once Singer’s nursed the kid back to health, John can take him out back and Dean can shoot a couple bulls eyes and John can establish that he’s still proud of his good little soldier.
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2300
Disclaimer: Not my boys. Kripke broke them way before I ever got to them.
Summary: 1992: Both boys come down with strep throat at the same time. Sammy gets the last antibiotics, Dean comes down with scarlet fever.
Written for the Dean-focused hurt/comfort comment-fic meme (#4)
John Winchester has fought his way through many a battle. He can hold his own against ghosts and wendigos and the occasional demon, but there is no challenge quite so demanding as a sick and cranky teenager who is adamant that he just fine.
Granted, Dean has never been an easy patient to begin with, but at thirteen he’s apparently gotten it into his head that he’s entirely too cool for popsicles or Cup A Soup and spending the day in bed and sleeping it off is completely beneath him.
So, John knows he’s not making the most sound of parenting decisions here, but he doesn’t think anyone could really blame him for choosing to spend today tending to his youngest, equally sick son who has the distinct advantage of not being filled to the brim with hormones that could put the entire cast of Beverly Hills 90210 to shame.
Sammy, God bless him, doesn’t complain about his father’s probing hands on his forehead or John’s measly attempts at comfort food. All he wants is his cherry cough drops and his daddy to cuddle up against and John is more than willing to provide that.
Dean on the other hand has been a constant assault of “get off me” and “geez, stop treating me like a little kid, already” and “I fucking hate cherry”. All brought forward in a hoarse, fever-high slur which is honestly the only reason John hasn’t busted the kid’s ass over his attitude yet.
“My throat hurts,” comes Sammy’s tearful rasp from somewhere under his heap of blankets.
“Yeah, I know, buddy,” John tries to coax the kid into opening his mouth. Some secretary from the boys’ school called yesterday, warning him that a couple kids had come down with strep throat. John initially laughed her off. Winchesters don’t get wrestled into submission by ordinary kid’s diseases, after all. The white built up on his youngest’s cherry red tongue proofs him wrong. “Okay, that’s it. You got strep, kiddo,” John informs him. “Want me to get you some medicine?”
“No, I want it to stop hurting!”
The boy’s high pitched whine draws a put-upon scoff from his brother. “Yeah, maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much if you’d stop yappin’ for one goddamn second.”
“Dean,” John warns, striding over his eldest who has occupied the couch.
“Well, his stupid voice hurts my hea- HEY!” Dean tries to defend himself before John manages to grab the kid’s chin and force a look into his throat. Great. Double strep.
John tries to ignore the huffs from the sofa and the sniffles from the bed and rummages through their frayed medi kit. Painkillers, leftover crap from Sammy’s bout of the chicken pox, prescription painkillers, empty box of Tylenol, seriously illegal eastern European painkillers (wow, that medi kit needs to be restacked ASAP) and score! Penicillin left over from John’s last infected black dog bite.
The moment of joy is quickly dumpted into a roaring pit of disappointment when John turns the little prescription bottle on its head and out tumbles a grand total of four pills. Fan-fucking-tastic.
“Dean,” he asks, shaking the half empty bottle in the boy’s direction. “Think you can fight this bug on your own?”
John is met with a long glower, before Dean huffs and throws himself back down onto the ratty cushion he dragged from the bed to the couch. “Sure. ‘m not sick, anyway.”
Fine. John figures if the boy doesn’t want the meds, he’s not gonna force him. Kid’s gotta learn sometime that taking medicine and admitting he’s sick is in no way the same as showing weakness. Maybe if he sees how his brother is getting better because of his meds he’ll finally get that little lesson through his thick skull.
And anyway, Sammy’s just a kid. A sniffling, miserable kid at that and strep’s a kid disease, so it makes all the sense in the world for him to be getting the last of their pharmaceutical aid.
Dean is strong and pretty close to grown and should be perfectly able to get over this shitty bug on his own, right?
Wrong.
Two days later, Sammy is bouncing on John’s bed, complaining that his brother won’t make him breakfast and worry for his eldest isn’t the first or even second thing that comes to John’s mind. His first thought is that at nine, Sammy should be up to pouring a bowl of cereal, not used to his big brother tending his every need. His second thought is to be annoyed with Dean, ‘cause looking after Sammy is the kid’s goddamn job and making breakfast certainly isn’t asking all that much.
“Dean,” John growls, hoping to get through the haze of sleep and teenager-ness without having to get up. Unfortunately all he’s met with is a rustle of blankets and a croaky groan.
“He’s been like that all morning,” Sammy complains. His voice is still hoarse from the last couple days, but the fever’s gone and he’s generally back to being his hyper self.
Sighing, John rolls out of his bed and flops down next to his eldest.
“Dean,” he tries again, shaking the kid’s shoulder under the thick layer of blankets. “Dean, get up, boy!” John roughly yanks the covers aside, pulling up Dean’s shirt in the process, only to reveal…
“Holy shit, Dean!”
The boy is covered in a thin layer of sweat, his entire back disappearing under a million tiny dark blotches of red. Suddenly in full-on worry mode, John quickly turns him over. Dean’s chest and face are just as bad. His skin is burning up, too. Not the low key fever they’ve both had going for a couple of days, but burning the fuck up.
“Dad?” Dean rasps, voice blown all the way to hell and back. “’m not feelin’ so hot.”
John curses quietly under his breath. This isn’t how this whole letting Dean fight this bug on his own thing was supposed to go down.
“You want some cough drops?” he asks helplessly and feels like crying when he gets a miserable shrug in return instead of a cranky ‘I fucking hate cherry’.
“You should give him the stuff you gave me,” Sam pipes up, still perched on the heap of blankets that is John’s bed. “Made me fell all better.”
“You got the last ones, kiddo,” John heaves another sigh.
“Get new ones then.”
John comes up short, trying to explain the concept of insurance fraud to his nine-year old and thank God, Dean saves him when he rasps, “don’t need any stupid pills, Sammy. I’m not the girl here, ‘member?”
The tired little chuckle quickly comes to a stuttering halt, when he tries to flop back onto his stomach and lets out an unhappy yelp when his rash rubs up against the rough sheets.
“I’ll get’cha something to make you feel better, buddy,” John whispers quietly to the back of the kid’s head.
Only, he doesn’t.
When it’s doesn’t involve knives or guns or running exercises, John is the most useless son of a bitch any father could possibly be. He carries around a busted insurance card and he buys cough drops that all but make one of his children puke and he manages to burn instant soup and his calloused fingers brushing over his son’s raw skin make the kid cry out in agony.
He finds himself wishing for Mary with a fierce desire that usually has him running to the nearest bar. She’d have known what to do. She wouldn’t have let it come this far in the first place. When it comes down to it, John’s whole Marine act is worth jack shit to his kids.
When Dean starts throwing up in tiny, pitiable spouts of watery bile, John decides to head out to the library - if only to give himself the illusion of doing something. It feels strange, giving Sammy the watch out for your brother speech, but the boy does his carbon copy impression of his big brother, nodding gravely in all the right places, so John doesn't feel quite so much like a failure.
The advice the medical books at the library have to offer is so incredibly fucking unhelpful, John just about manages to stop short of throwing them against the nearest wall (one or two or thirty pages get torn in the process of not throwing, but the half-blind librarian will have a hell of a hard time proving that had anything to do with John flipping through the books with increasing frustration.)
The most annoying thing about them? He fucking knows that the kid needs antibiotics. He’s looking for alternatives here, but those don’t seem to exist. And even though he repeatedly reads that scarlet fever usually resolves on its own, he reads just as often that the boy’s temperature can rise to life threatening levels and honestly, getting better on your own is worth a great shitload of nothing when your brain gets fried six ways from Sunday in the meantime.
John comes back to the motel room, finding a puke stained sheet balled up in front of the door and Dean quietly sobbing into his pillows.
“Jesus,” he whispers, running his hand carefully over the kid’s sweat slick hair, only to have him flinch and burry his face deeper into the mattress.
“I tried to get him to watch X-Men with me,” Sammy explains, sounding a weird combination of concerned and affronted. “But he said it made his head hurt. And then he threw up, so I got rid of the sheets and turned off the tv.”
“Good job,” John tells him absentmindedly, all the while trying to get Dean to turn around and please look at him.
“Hurts…” Dean slurs, finally lifting his red, sweat covered face to stare at John with fever bright, badly focused eyes. “Make it stop, Daddy.”
And that, right there pushes John over the edge. Dean hasn’t called him Daddy in almost a decade and John takes it as the death omen it probably is.
Pressing a quick kiss to the kid’s brow that has him whimpering in pain again, John makes a quick grab for the telephone on the nightstand.
“Bobby, this is John,” he grunts quietly, before the older man has had a chance to utter any sort of greeting. He prays that enough time has passed since their last falling out to have the aging mechanic at least hear him out before disconnecting his phone line. But then he remembers that he’s the self absorbed hard-ass who keeps burning his bridges and Bobby is the closest thing his boys have to extended family.
“What the matter, Johnny?”
John is hit with a wall of relief that is so real he doesn’t even have the presence of mind to correct him on the unacceptable nickname.
“Bobby listen, it’s Dean. You got any antibiotics at your place?”
“Uhm…I don’t think so, no.”
“Can you get any?”
“Sure.”
“Be there in five.”
He doesn’t explain any further. He’s got better things to do. Like packing up their stuff and getting his kids into the car and figuring out the quickest way from Ellsworth to South Dakota.
“Wha’s going on?” Dean slurs, when he finally realizes that he’s being carried out the door.
“We’re going to see Uncle Bobby, okay?” John whispers into his son’s hair. He can feel the heat radiating off of him.
“’kay…”
“He’s gonna make you all better,” Sam explains from where John put him in the front seat. His high voice has Dean burying his face in the upholstery.
The first three hours of their drive are pure torture. Sammy wants to know why he’s all better and Dean got really sick and then he wants to know why he got all the medicine and then he wants to know why John didn’t just get new medicine when Dean needed it and why can Uncle Bobby get the new meds when John can’t and John really misses yesterday, when the kid’s throat was still too sore to allow for the constant stream of twenty questions.
Dean for his part is a tiny ball in the backseat, whimpering with every chuckhole John doesn’t manage to avoid.
Still an hour out of Sioux Falls, Sammy manages to point out the Burger King they just passed, and the emergency blanket gets covered in its own layer of bile. At least the fast food joint is part of a rest station, so John can get his boy some bottled water and get him into a new shirt, ‘cause the old one is now soaked through with sweat and gall.
“What’s that?” John asks, when Dean mumbles unintelligibly into the wet cloth John’s wiping over his face.
“’m sorry,” Dean rasps back, voice now all but gone behind his fucked up throat and fever heavy tongue. “Should’a told you ‘t was bad…m’ own stupid fault ‘m sick.”
“Jesus, kid,” John sighs, manhandling the boy into the makeshift blanket that is his leather jacket. He can’t find the words to disagree, though.
“’m sorry I’m so much trouble,” he keeps mumbling, all but disappearing inside the huge heap of leather. “Sorry I’m a pain ‘n the ass.”
John hopes that the gentle brush of his lips against his son’s forehead is enough to put him off that ridiculous notion. He gets back into the front seat, hoping like fuck that they’ll get to Bobby’s place soon, so somebody can deal with his boy’s emo crap.
And once Singer’s nursed the kid back to health, John can take him out back and Dean can shoot a couple bulls eyes and John can establish that he’s still proud of his good little soldier.