And When I See You (I Really See You Upside Down)
Title: And When I See You (I Really See You Upside Down)
Summary: Stanford has the flu. And now so does Sam's apartment.
Wordcount: 9,463
Author's Note: Jess Lives-verse, which I have decided to call THREEVERSE because it sounds like free verse and I like that. I beat up Dean a little again! But he doesn't get the flu, and also this turned out RIDICULOUSLY sappy which means I'm happy with it so yay. So far my naming convention is "first lines from Death Cab songs." Let's see if I can keep it up.
If you'd asked Dean last week, when he was huddled and drawn and detoxing on the bathroom floor because fuck you alcoholism, if he would have liked a side of company with his misery, he would have said yes the fuck please send someone else's suffering to my table immediately with the biggest bottle of wine you have but now it's six days later and hes's feeling a little better (but not completely because he has not drunk, thank you very much) and when he walks in to Sam shivering under a blanket on the couch, frantic, stuffed-up wheezes escaping his nose in his sleep, Dean's pretty fucking far from grateful. Damn it, Sam.
He grabs two bottles of water (water) from the fridge and flops down on the floor next to the couch, legs sprawled out. He hunts for the remote with one hand and stretches the palm of the other over Sam's forehead. Warm, too warm, but not hot. He'll let the kid sleep.
But ten minutes later Sam's stirring, making baby dinosaur noises into his pillow and kicking his feet a little as he wakes up. "Where's Jess?"
"It's Thursday, she's at rehearsal. I can make her come home if you need her? You can just do that wheeze into the phone, that'll convince her."
Sam ignores him, yawns, breaks off with a rough sneeze.
"No, sneezing won't convince her, that's just boring. That's just Sam."
Sam scratches the stubble on his cheek. "So's wheezing."
"Yeah, but you keep trying to die on us so we have to worry about that."
"If you'd just let me, just once, I'd never bother you again!"
"Cute."
Sam grins and works his fingers over his shoulder. His knuckles ripple and he pushes his fingertips into a knot behind his neck. "Ugh."
"Sick."
"Nah. Not really."
"Sure. Stop that. Turn around, let me get at it."
"Handsy today, you're all the fuck over me."
Dean turns him around. "Don't know what to tell you, Myrtle. Days alone under cars make me despondent. The hot embrace of steel and oil can only get you so far."
"Burning like an engine right now."
"Nah, like a bike bell. How high is this, hundred and a half? Get real. Cold?"
Sam shakes his head and then sneezes again, oh, very convincing, Sam, but he says "Flu shot," and coughs into his elbow for a minute.
"You're this sick from the SHOT?"
"Not sick, really. Just symptomy." He stretches out on his stomach and groans. "Rub my shoulders."
"No way, not babying you when you're not actually sick."
"Shouuuulders."
"Whatever. If you actually got the flu you'd be too fucking wrecked to be touched." His fingers find the sore spot tucked under Sam's shoulder blade.
Sam stretches and moans. "See, count your blessings then."
"Yeah, massaging your bony-ass shoulders, this is a highlight."
"I am healthy and alive!" Sam says, and he drives a long coughing fit into his pillow.
**
The flu's been moving from floor to floor like some sort of serial killer, but it's still on the third and they're up on seventh. That night after dinner Jess, who's been watching the whole thing like it's a fucking horror movie (except she watches those with her entire body tucked behind Sam and her eyes peering over his shoulder while she screams KILL IT! STAB IT!, for the love of God please get this girl a salt gun and a breezy hunt just for the fucking entertainment value) gets a text and announces there's a confirmed case on the fourth floor. Sam immediately starts boiling water.
She looks up. "I'm sorry, did you mishear me? I didn't say this is the 1800s and I'm in labor. Why the fuck are you boiling water?"
Dean's sitting on the counter sorting through the mail and gnawing on the fat end of a chicken bone because it's better than gnawing through his own fingers. A small growl escapes the back of his throat (thirsty thirsty) and Sam and Jess reach towards him and give him identical, affectionate little scratches on each knee because they are two parts of one (fucking incredible, Dean has to admit, when he's either strung out drunk or strung out detoxing or collapsed on top of them watching a movie or eating breakfast with one of them or rubbing Sam's back through an asthma attack or looking at his fucking life) machine.
"I never got what the boiled water even for," Dean says. "Do you put the fucking baby in it?"
Jess says, "In my case, it would be to produce some steam for the freaked out wheezing dad."
"Aw, poor Sammy."
"Could you knock me up, though, actually? I am fucking sick of microbiology. An infant would totally get me out of my final."
"You would not have an infant by then," Dean says, because Sam's clearly too up in his head to banter right now. "You wouldn't even be showing by then."
"There are two cherry pies in the fridge right now. I could totally fake showing. Give me a fork. Give me some semen, Sam."
"Dean's semen."
Jess makes this big show of looking for a cup, while Sammy frets that the water hasn't boiled yet.
"Embrace him," Dean says, and Jess stops and stands behind him and wraps his arms around his waist, cheek against his back. Sam reaches behind him and does a quick one-handed braid with a bit of her hair (the things you pick up when you're in a relationship, these tiny things, the fact that it's his fucking brother who grew up with salt and iron and dental floss stitches, of course he has the dexterity to braid one-handed and here he is doing it, loving it, Dean never thought about loving anything but Sam) but he doesn't take his eyes off the kettle.
"This kid," Dean says.
"Sammy, you had the shot." She kisses between his shoulder blades. "Dean and I had the shot. You're not gonna get sick."
"Asthmatics die when they get the flu," Sam says.
"All of them?"
"Yes. One hundred percent." Sam pours the water into a bowl and starts wiping down the counters, oh, Sam, what are you even doing?
"You know I have asthma too, right?"
He turns around, finally. "Of course."
"And I'm not freaking out."
Dean says, "I've seen you cough, like, twice."
"Shut up," Sam says, and he means it, he's using that concerned voice. "I don't want you sick either, asthmatic," he says to her, softly, and he is all big all of a sudden, gathering her up. "Don't get sick."
"I had the shot. Our apartment's like this nice little bubble."
"I know, but we're around people who didn't, we have to go to class and stuff..."
"Yes, but we got the shot. Simba."
Sam gives this whimper, this tiny thing in the back of his throat, and Dean goes to the fridge and takes out the pie and cuts it into extra-big slices.
"You're not going to get sick. Dean and I won't let you."
"I'll get pneumonia," Sam says. "I'll go to the hospital with the sick people and get sepsis and rubella and Dengue fever and die." At least he's joking around now, but he's still shaking.
Dean hands him a plate and shoves him towards the living room. "Go lie down."
"I can't eat lying down."
"Do it anyway."
Sam messes up Dean's hair and harrumphs himself to the couch.
"He better not get sick," Dean mumbles to Jess.
She laugh-groans, once. "Right?"
**
"Tell me a story," Dean groans, while Sam half-tucks half-wrestles him into his bed.
"Once upon a time far far away."
"Nnn."
"There was an awesome big brother who gave up drinking and his perfect, gorgeous, strikingly intelligent and always good-humored and VERY PERFECT, DID I MENTION little brother adored him forever and ever."
Dean pushes his face into his pillow. "That story was very short."
"You're very short."
Dean laughs despite himself.
**
He wakes up to coughing in the other room, dark and dry, asthma attack coughing. He rolls over and pulls his pillow over his head because little brother has a girlfriend and Dean's allowed to do this now.
The coughing keeps going long after Sam would usually have dissolved into wheezing, but that's kind of a blessing, at least when you're talking from-the-next-room, because coughing is at least proof that he's moving air. Dean mumbles "Sleep, Sammy, good Sammy," into his pillow and bunches up tighter.
There's a pause, silence, and Dean chooses to believe that this is a good sign, and when the coughing erupts again it's proof he was right. There's no respiratory arrest over there, just dramatic coughing with breaks of wheezing and hello his name is Sam Winchester nice to meet you.
But then the coughing keeps going and underneath it Dean hears a voice. Sam's voice.
Shit.
That's not Sam coughing.
**
"I'm not just going to dump her in some hotel room." Sam and Dean are standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, watching Jess twitch feverishly in her nap.
Dean says, "You've been panicking about getting sick for weeks. And now here's sick right in the apartment. One of you has to leave."
"I had the shot."
"Yeah, so did she." Dean can't believe they're having this conversation eighteen fucking hours after the one last night.
"I'm not leaving her."
"Sam..."
Sam scratches the stubble on his cheek--he's been too busy worrying about Jess to shave, or eat, or fucking sit down. He's managed to wash his hands about twenty hundred times, of course. His skin's red and raw.
"One of you needs to go," Dean says. "And you're Sam Accessories Not Included so I think it should be her."
"She's sick. She's not going to deliriously lie around a hotel room. That is not how this is fucking going to work, Dean."
"What good do you think you're going to be for her if you and your drama queen lungs are being pneumonaing all over the place?"
Jess coughs, and Sam actually physically flinches.
"Okay. Okay. Shhh." Dean lays his hand on Sam's arm. "Jess, honey, you awake?"
"No," she mumbles, hunkering further under her blanket.
"She needs more pillows..."
"Sam."
"Sh-she doesn't feel well, she needs an inhaler, can you give her..."
"Yeah. I'm on it. You go--" Dean starts, but Sam's already bolted to the kitchen sink to scrub his hands again, fuck, he's going to have half-cracked bleeding palms before the day's up if Dean doesn't get this taken care of.
He grabs Jess's little pink inhaler and sits at the end of the couch, tugging Jess's feet up and onto his lap. "Hey, Princess. You doing okay? Let me feel your head, come here."
She squirms to sitting so she can slump into him. She's hot, maybe a hundred and one, not too scary, but she's miserable and shivery.
"I gotta get out of here," she says. "My lungs feel like anvils, he can't take this."
"He feels terrible about it..."
"Then he can buy me a necklace or a new pair of shoes or a hypoallergenic pony when this is all over." She coughs for a minute, covering the fuck out of her mouth. "This isn't something for him to feel guilty about. This isn't negotiable. That's not what this is."
"I know." He rubs her back when she starts coughing again. "But we don't want you alone."
She rubs her temples and says, "I'll be fine."
Dean is quiet for a minute, watching her shiver and sweat.
"I'm gonna come with you."
**
Sam hugs her at the door as they're leaving. He's wearing oven mitts like when he was a little kid with chicken pox.
"If you need anything," he says, softly, lips against her hair.
"Then I'll tell Dean and leave you the fuck out of it. No one's mad." She stumbles a little and Sam catches her before Dean does.
"Whoa whoa whoa." He smooths her hair off her forehead with that fucking oven mitt, and then they're both laughing, weakly.
She gives his chest a few scratches, and he stiffens but lets her. "Don't get sick," she says.
"I won't." He looks at Dean. "You take care of her."
"Hey, I take good care of you, don't I? And I like her more."
"So," Sam completes.
"So."
He breathes out slowly. He's wheezing worse than she is. "Stay clean, okay?"
"Promise." Sam's allowed to say that. He just is.
Another slow wheeze from Sam.
"Take your inhaler," Jess says. "Don't give me that face. You're still the frail one around here."
"I'll take you more seriously when you're not feverish. God. Jess."
"I'll be fine."
"Okay." Sam takes a shitty deep breath. "Okay."
**
Obviously this hotel stay is on Sam's dime, so Dean follows his orders and takes her to the nicest place he can find. Looking around the lobby, he's gonna guess she's not the only sick Stanford kid here, except they're all with their rich parents who are saving their trust fund babies the horror of being sick in a dorm room.
"Piggy back." Dean hoists Jess's legs up. "Come on."
She's barely down and settled with an ice pack for a teddy bear and the complimentary silk robe around her shoulders when Sam calls. "How is she?"
"Sleeping." He says, voice low.
But Sam says, "You could have a fucking parade, she won't wake up," so Dean turns on the TV, thanks very much. Sure enough, she doesn't even roll over.
"Fever?" Sam says.
"She's staying under 102. Mostly it's the cough I'm worried about, but I'm keeping an eye on it. She isn't short of breath except right after. You, on the other hand, sound like shit, sir."
"I sound like a veritable symphony of wind instruments."
"Mmhmm."
"I'm okay. I'm nervous. I'm worried..."
"She's okay. This is like, everyday sick, y'know? You'd come home with this after school and be like I'm going to soccer practice and we'd roll our eyes at you."
"And a week later I'd have pneumonia."
"Yeah, but that's just you. You like to get pneumonia. It's your favorite."
"Pneumonia and candy apples, the Sam Winchester story."
"Any fever?"
"No. And I'm checking like every ten minutes. 98.3."
"Under normal! Alert the media."
"I tried to call the Stanford paper to announce it but everyone has the fucking flu."
"This sad balance of banter and paranoia is really tragic. Worried about you, kiddo."
"I'm fine I'm fine I'm fine."
"So this room has a minibar."
"Whaaat no."
"Jess and I opened it and threw everything out the window. I hope you like spending money on non-alcohol."
"It's my favorite."
"Candy apples, pneumonia, and invisible liquor."
"The Sam Winchester story."
"Exactly." Dean's quiet for a minute, listening to him wheeze. "The hell have you been up to, you sound like you've been marathon-running or flower-shopping or some shit."
"Cleaning."
"Should have guessed."
"Yeah, seriously. I bleached everything."
"Everything?"
"Everything. I'm blond and covered in chemical burns."
"Pics."
"Ha. Is she shivering?"
"Not right now, she's hot, I gave her an ice pack."
"She could still be shivering..."
"Saaaam."
"Do you have a fever?"
"Nope, I'm good. I'm Iron Man, I don't get sick."
"Iron Man is Iron Man BECAUSE he was sick."
"Can you be Iron Man?"
"Yeah. You can be Pepper Pots."
"Score. Wait, what's Jess?"
"Jarvis."
"Obviously."
"Yeah, get with the program."
"All right, preteen from the 90s, I'll do just that."
"...I was a preteen in the 90s..."
"Go lie down. Plug into the neb. Sweet dreams."
"Hmmph."
"Yeah, you."
Sam wheezes into a sigh. "You."
**
Jess, in the first good thing that's happened to them this week, gets sick like a human rather than an asthmatic, and even though it takes her a little above average to shake it, it's less than a week before she's still exhausted but ready to go back to some classes, with, with the looming microbiology test and lack of fetus is kind of unavoidable. They're still staying at the hotel to clear the last dregs of illness out of her, but so far so good and it's looking like this is going to wrap up all smooth and uneventful, save a scary night on the bathroom floor while Jess shook so hard she bruised herself, because Sam's checking in almost as obsessively as Dean imagines he's washing his hands and he's doing just fine, a little wheezier than usual but that's how he gets when he's tense and being alone always, always makes him tense, that doesn't have anything to do with anything so everything is pie and ice cream and everything is fine.
Except he wakes up one night and Jess isn't in her bed, and he's a little freaked out imagining her fainting again in the bathroom but then he hears her voice, low and slow, and please don't have a fever Sammy please.
He knocks quietly and the doorknob twists open, and there's Jess perched on the side of the tub, sweaty but okay, phone pressed to her ear. She mouths Sam unnecessarily and keeps up with her litany of "Okay, baby, okay."
And yeah, maybe it plucks something inside Dean that Sam called Jess and not him, but this is the price he pays for nights he sleeps all the way through and for his brother's damn happiness so he will take this, he will take this in spades.
Sick? Dean mouths.
Jess shakes her head and replies just asthma which should be a relief but he knows it's got to be a really bad night for Sam to wake up his recovering girlfriend in the middle of the night. He sits down at Jess's feet and she scratches the top of his head some and Dean listens to him reassure Sam with words he's not sure who learned from whom.
Eventually he gets the phone, and God, that wheeze. "Hi, asthma."
Sam sounds so tired. "Asthma says hi back."
"No fever, right?"
"No fever. Just chest."
"Cough."
Sam forces one and it doesn't sound very fucking forced, Sam.
"Can you sleep now?"
He pretty much hears Sam shrug, that one-shouldered thing, that bitten lip.
"You must be so tired," Dean tries.
"Just incredibly hard to catch my breath. Just sit with me for a few minutes and I'll be fine. I told Jess to go back to sleep..."
"Yeah, she's gone."
"Good. She needs to rest." Sam huffs out a breath and groans a little. "God, this sucks."
"We'll be home soon. Cover you in blankets. Poor little un-sick asthmatic."
He sits with Sam for a minute because Sam sounds so damn bad but eventually they both decide he's moving enough air to sleep and Dean creeps back to bed. Jess is awake, he can tell by the rhythm of her breathing, and that's probably a weird thing to know about his brother's girlfriend but when was this ever simple?
"He okay?" she whispers, like one of them is asleep or something."
Dean rolls over onto his back and cradles the back of his head. "Yeah. Just asthma."
"He just gets so desperate."
"I know. Freaks me out too."
The room is only half-dark because Dean forgot to turn off the bathroom light, and fuck if he's going to now because he's so damn tired and yeah, maybe he likes being able to see Jess. He's spent the last week worried about her and yeah, he thought that that would just be some of the worry he has for Sam transferred over, but no, apparently he can just produce more worry as needed like a fucking worry factory and he's so, so tired and so fucking glad to see her.
She's looking all healthy, just yawning and burrowing into her pillow. She's getting well.
This is a strange thing.
"I'm gonna marry that boy," she says, like it's some big announcement.
"Yeah, well, no shit." There's no ring, there's been no down-on-one-knee bullshit, nobody cares. Jess and Sam have been a foregone conclusion since the day Jess smiled at him after almost killing him at the coffee shop (and then they didn't see each other for a year and then they were at some party and they were like "oh, you look familiar, didn't I once give you an allergic reaction, oh, didn't I once cry in your coffee shop, let's go fuck in the closet," yeah, whatever, kids, you've been engaged for four years).
"Can I ask you something?" she says.
"He's going to propose, y'know? Don't worry."
"Not that. Assuming we someday have this baby who's genetically half-mine and half-yours. Are you going to...I mean, have an issue with that?"
"My sperms are going to be like avert our eyes! AVERT OUR EYES!"
"My uterus is going to claw its way up to my throat in an escape attempt."
"This is a weird conversation."
"I mean signing away parental rights. You'd have to, y'know? Sam would have to technically adopt."
"Seriously?"
"Yeah, you'd have to give the baby up and then Sam would snatch him from there."
"Huh. Okay."
"You'd sign the papers? That wouldn't be an issue?"
"Jess. I'd sign them so fast you'd think the pen was on fire."
"Yeah?"
"God, yeah. This is for you and Sam." He'd sign his fucking self over, he has fucking signed his life over, and she is not a hunter and there is a part of this that she will never, ever get. He has Sam's back, it's a thing completely outside of everything else, it's guns and spirits and torches, it's being there, it's giving Sam everything he needs to survive.
Sam needs his family.
"We left him alone," he realizes, quietly.
Jess rolls over and faces him. "Yeah."
"Simba..."
She yawns. "He's okay. We'll go home in two days. I need this rest, it's the first good night's sleep I've had since you guys went to see your dad."
"Yeah. Me too." (Bullshit, Dean doesn't sleep without that whistle, he's never fucking been able to sleep without that whistle.)
(Jess is getting well, Jess is breathing quietly again, and Dean doesn't sleep.)
**
Sam calls the next day looking for Jess but Jess is in class and if you wanted her you should have called her fucking phone, dumbass. Dean punishes him with a five-minute play-by-play explanation of the game he's watching.
"Listen to me," Sam says. "I called for a reason."
"Shoot."
"Fourteen down. Nine letters. 'Antiviral.' Seventh letter 'v'."
"Dig through your fucking pill drawer, numbskull. Acyclovir."
"Thaaank you."
"You're going to have a sick kid someday and you'll be all fuck, what was that crossword answer!"
"Good thing I'll always have you!"
"Oh, hey there, asthma, nice of you to join us."
Sam groans around the wheeze. "I know, it's set up camp. Here for a long vacation."
"Campfire, marshmallows."
"The whole nine."
"You okay?"
"I'm fine, I just--" and all of a sudden he's not talking, just coughing, and ugh, Sammy. "...Just doing that a lot."
"We'll be home tomorrow."
"Awesome."
"Are you eating? Can you even make food without her?"
"I would tell you to fuck off except Jesus Christ it is difficult. I have become accustomed to this woman."
"She's stealing stuff from the kitchen downstairs and making full meals with the hot plate and the coffee maker, you don't even know. This is a great set up I have going here."
"Okay, now fuck off."
"What are you eating?"
"Soup. My chest is cold, it feels nice."
"Put on a sweater."
"I'm already wearing two sweaters."
Dean sits up. "You're wearing two sweaters?"
"Um. Yes?"
"I'm coming."
**
Maybe the saddest part about Sam always getting super sick is that his body always seems completely baffled by it. He starts out normal-human sick and then it drags on and on and then he's suddenly slammed by it, and it makes Dean's kid resting on the couch with his cheek on Jess's head and a cup of tea cuddled into his chest and his normal, unscary wheeze and small, unscary fever so fucking tragic because Sam's poor fucking body, you know? It thinks it's going to have this normal flu. It wants to just have this normal flu.
"What the fuck was in those flu shots," Dean says, hunting around for honey.
"Flu virus," Sam says. He's red-nosed, sneezy, leaning into Jess like she's his life raft. "Dead flu virus."
"I'm thinking maybe only mostly dead."
Sam nods in that exhausted, open-mouthed way that gives away how stuffed-up he is.
Dean straightens up and gives Sam good once-over. "You should try to get some sleep while you can, kiddo. Oh hey, drugs first. Look, Acyclovir!"
Sam burrows into his scarf and nods some. "Drugs. Sleep."
"Here or in bed?" Dean starts to say, but he doesn't even finish because Sam curls up small on the couch and yanks the blanket up over his head. Jess kind of squirms on top of him like he's a pillow and kisses the exposed bit of his hair over and over. Dean watches to make sure Sam reaches his hand out for his meds and after that gives them some space, cleans the kitchen, doesn't drink, worries.
There's really nothing they can do, is the thing. Antivirals will stop it from multiplying but not from settling in his lungs like it always, always does, and Dean's across the damn apartment and he can still feel Sam's fever ratcheting up like he could when Sam was this sick little baby cradled in the crook of his arm while Dad (Mom) held masks over his tiny face and kissed that forehead again and again.
He checks in on them when he can't fucking stand stewing in his room any longer. Jess is asleep on top of him, curled up like a cat, and Sam has his head out now and he's half-asleep, kicking and wheezing like a fucking asthmatic baby dinosaur this time.
Dean crouches down and spreads his palm over Sam's forehead, more to calm him than anything. "How's your chest? Cough a little?"
Sam coughs. It's dry and hacking and normal. Dean holds up his cup of water and helps him sip.
"How do you feel?"
Sam blinks up at him, glass and so calm. "Not that bad. Want to watch something?"
"Mmmhmm." Dean settles in the arm chair and hoists his legs up to have something to hold. He flips through channels while Sam shifts a little to sit up, carefully holding Jess, keeping her as still as he can. He eases her into his lap and plays with her hair. He rubs a tissue under his nose and with the sniffling and the light flush of fever he looks almost like he's just really fucking allergic, not sick.
"I should eat something," Sam says a little while later, after he's choked out a cough that's congested in his sinuses and not his lungs. "I should really do that."
"Soup?"
"Something more substantial, probably, while I can stomach it."
"You're so fucking brave, you know that?"
Sam shrugs and adjusts his blanket. "This part's fine. I don't mind this."
"I know."
"Getting babied, getting Jess all over my lap. Good be a fuck of a lot worse."
"Well that's cool because it's fucking gonna be."
"Right?" He coughs some more. "Maybe not this time."
"Mmm. Yeah."
"I know."
"Nice deep breaths. Keep air moving, keep those lungs working."
Sam nods and tilts his head back, pulling in breaths that are long and slow and not all that bad.
"The thing is," he says, when Dean delivers him a plate of spaghetti. "The thing is that I really don't want pneumonia this time, okay?"
Dean sticks his hand in Sam's hair. "Okay. Eat."
**
And it doesn't get worse for a long time. It's so stupid, but by the end of the second damn week of this thing, it sort of becomes their baseline. Sammy goes back to school because seriously he can't miss this much, and they become accustomed to him coming home and flopping down on the couch with his stuffy nose and low fever and backaches. Dean goes back to work, because seriously, can't miss this much, and Jess has her flute recital and they don't even really think about not bringing Sam. They sit near the back so that Sam can nap with his head on Dean's shoulder through most of it, and they don't really think much about that either. This is what Sam does now. Hemingway essays, sonnet analyses, coughing jags, a hundred and one. This is just what Sammy does now.
Jess makes lasagna for for her and Dean and soup for Sam and Sam sneaks lasagna when he thinks no one's looking (because this kid is an idiot and sometimes you have to look behind you, Simba, how the fuck this kid didn't get killed on a hunt is anyone's guess) and Jess bitches at him that that's not going to help his throat Sam are you seriously eating garlic bread did you forget that you're sick and yeah maybe he kind of did.
The asthma's worse than usual, shocking, so they spend a lot of time camped out in Sam and Jess's room with the nebulizer. It's nine at night and it's not like any he would be asleep or anything, but Dean still feels fucking lulled, splayed out in the whatever chair (Jess keeps telling him the name for it, it's close to parmesan)in the corner of their room, running his fingers over some of the spines of the bookshelves. Some of these are children's books. Sammy took a class.
Jess and Sam are crashed out by the headboard talking cooking schools. "I have to get my application in really soon," she says. "And I have to specify pastry chef or general culinary chef, I have to do that right up front, and maybe if I can't make up my mind here this isn't the thing for me."
Sam takes a long pull on the nebulizer, eyebrow raised at her, then slowly lets it out. "What the hell does that have to do with whether it's the thing for you?"
"I clearly don't have some kind of calling pulling me either way. Everyone else in these programs, this is people who have wanted this their whole lives."
"So have you!"
"But I don't know which one to pick, and...maybe I should wait another year."
"And do what? Campus bookstore like me? As thrilling as it is..."
"Chef school is so expensive."
"We've been saving up. We can do the first year."
"And then what?"
"Well, then I'll have to kill off Dean and collect my inheritance, but that's not something we need to worry about right now."
Dean flips through My Father's Dragon. "I was worth one hundred and eighteen dollars as of this morning. Which of us is our father's dragon, do you think?"
"You, I'd cough up smoke."
"Yeah, but now you're allergic to me."
"Come on," Sam says to Jess. "Really think about it. Which do you see yourself doing? Close your eyes and imagine."
Jess does not close her eyes. "In a few months I'll have a fucking Chemistry degree. I could work in a lab and make actual money."
"I'm pretty sure you don't start off making money in a lab. I think you have to live off chemicals and lab mice."
"My mom wanted--"
"Your mom wanted you to get that fucking Chemistry degree. Dying wish achieved. Close your eyes, baby."
Jess does, dipping her temple down to Sam's shoulder. "Pastry," she says, after a minute.
Dean's seen Jess absolutely mesmerized by a measure cup and seen her impatiently soften butter between her hands and seen that look of sheer damn glee every time she's decorated a perfect cupcake. This is right, Jess. This is what you've wanted for a long time.
"So there you go. Perfect. Go do your application." Sam swings to his elbow for a coughing fit that leaves him wheezy and tired, fussing with his red nose, and Jess nudges him and sticks the mouthpiece of the nebulizer back in his mouth.
"Pastry chefs work weird hours," she says. "Like two to five, until the bakeries open."
"That's okay, you'll sleep during the day. I could have a Civil War reenactment in the living room and you wouldn't wake up."
"I want a cannon," Dean says.
"Don't lie, you want a machine gun to piss everyone off."
"Fuck. I do. I really do."
"I wouldn't be here if you were sick during the night." Jess kisses his shoulder. "You do that a lot."
"Uh-uh, you don't get to base your plans off asthma." He guides her head off her shoulder and turns her around a little so he can get at all her hair. His fingers make a weird braid, pulling in more hair as he goes. "If I did that, do you think I'd be playing soccer or studying in dusty libraries? Fuck, I wouldn't even have come to school."
"I'm not basing my plans off asthma." She tilts her head back to look at him. "I'm basing my plans off you."
He kisses her forehead and tips her forwards again to finish the braid, turning away for a second to smother a string of sneezes into his sleeve. He shakes his head a little and gives a stuffy sniffle, then turns back to the braid, sliding off one of the elastic bands he always has around his wrist to bind it at the end. "There."
She brings Sam's hand around and kisses it. "You're my plan."
"Yeah, well, I want cake." He wraps his whole self around her, chest against her back, and she giggles. "And pie and cream puffs and eclairs and napoleons and madeleines and snickerdoodles."
"Lots of peanut things."
"I don't want those."
"If you get sick..."
"Dean will take care of me. That's why he's here. We don't like him, really."
Dean growls and tugs on Sam's foot. Sam growls back and grins at him, then tucks his lips into Jess's hair.
"Wedding cake," he says, so softly Dean barely picks it up. "Zeved habat cake. First birthday cake. No peanuts in those, huh?"
She brings her arms to her chest and holds his wrists with both hands. "No."
"So."
She shakes free, turns around, kisses him. "I'm not making my own fucking wedding cake."
"Okay. Dean can make it."
"Duncan Hines," Dean says. "With bonus eggshell pieces."
Once again, he's ignored. He doesn't mind. Jess crawls all up in Sam's lap. "You're a manipulative son of a bitch, you know that?"
"So siiiick, you should be nicer."
"Fuck me now."
"Finish your application first."
She groans, but she's smiling. "Thank you."
"See, even sick, I'm fucking brilliant."
That night, the fever spikes.
**
Dean wakes up from Samsa-style unsettling dreams (so he was alone with Sam's Norton Anthologies all day for the two weeks before he found his job at the garage, so some of it was interesting, sue him) at four AM to Jess shaking him awake and smelling like Sam and that doesn't exactly do much to make him less confused. He sits up enough to blink at his pillow and shift his jaw and force some consciousness back into him. Bed. Pillow. Jess. Sammy. Why is everything so confusing? Why is this throwing him so much, and Jesus fuck why does she have to wake him up with those soft hands that fucking smell like Sam, wait, what's going on here?
It's his sweat that's on her, that's matting the sleeves of her sweatshirt onto her hands.
"He's a hundred and four and climbing," she says. "Fucking...soaring. I need you."
Dean's up, pulling on a shirt. "Is he awake?"
"Yeah."
"How's his breathing?"
"It's not. Hurry."
He is breathing but it's not was only rounding down a little because Jesus fuck, Sammy. He's got his feet planted at the side of the bed and he's drawing in these soaking wet breaths that stick and stay in the back of his throat, and then he's bent over and coughing with who the fuck knows what air because none's getting down there.
This is how it happens. This is how it fucking always happens.
Dean sits down next to him and tugs him close while Jess paces in small, frantic steps, hand wrapped around the phone, teeth working anxiously at the top of the antenna. "Do I call in?" They're not going to call a fucking ambulance or something, but they like to call in when they can and say they're on their way instead of just dragging Dean's broken puppy of a boy to the ER and expecting them just to know what to do with him (and despite the epithet this is a trick Dean learned from Jess and not vice-versa, which makes sense in one way because they were fucking hunters and Dean can count on one hand the number of times they had a spare second to call in and makes completely no fucking sense in the other because since when did he trust people to know what to do with Sam, this girl sneaked in some how, this girl is the sun and the moon and a whole damn militia).
"Dean?"
"I don't know." He doesn't know. He wishes suddenly and very desperately for his father. "Should we?"
She stops pacing and just watches him for a minute. "Maybe we should get the fever down and then see."
"His breathing..."
"I know. This sounds like shit. But if it's not actually as bad as it sounds than we're putting him at fucking astronomical risk, dragging him in to be exposed to God know's what. If it's not pneumonia now, it will be."
"Sam needs his own personal fucking hospital."
"You're in it," Jess says, and yeah, no shit, nebulizer, fucking oxygen tank in the closet just in case, pill bottles on the nightstand, peak flow meter with numbers written down, Jess's sexy nurse's costume from Halloween tucked away somewhere, you should have seen every inch of the fucking asthmatic's face light up when he saw her in that but yeah, this is Sammy square one and if they can't get him better here they can't do it anywhere.
"Come on," he says. "Let's get him in a bath."
**
So he ends up calling John while Jess is in the bathroom pouring lukewarm water over Sam's shoulders and Sam is wheeze-explaining his way through the subtle differences between the narrative techniques of Youth and Heart of something and Sam how the fuck do you snuggle this useless shit into your brain right up against the very un-useless how to kill stuff knowledge that used to be the absolute entirety of your fucking world and fuck how is Dean so happy that you've done it, you fever-talk the shit out of those narrative techniques, Sammy, but anyway Dean's calling John because being patient is what Jess does and being infuriatingly adorable is what Sam does and panicking the fuck out and acting like this is all new and exciting is what Dean does.
"He's spiking out," he tells John, who's now wide awake at fuck-it-all AM because Dean did not get his panicking gene from nowhere (Mary was so gentle, Mary was so patient, carefully holding cool washcloths to the shoulders of her tiny, shivering baby, fuck fuck fuck).
"Coughing up anything?"
"No, it's dry. He's breathing like he's sucking on a fucking sponge and then coughing bone-dry, it's the most fucking confusing thing I've ever heard."
"It's asthma," John says, and kind of fuck you a little John but this also means it's not pneumonia and Dean thinks that's a little hasty but whatever he'll fucking take it okay Daddy okay.
"No hospital tonight?"
"No hospital tonight. You know you'll be bringing him in in a few days no matter what the fuck you do, keep him home and comfortable for as long as you can."
"Right."
"Don't kill him."
"Aww, but I love killing him." He's calming down now. He has to, because it's almost time to go back to Sam.
In the bathroom, Jess and Sam are giggling a little.
John makes just this little sound. Pain.
"You okay?"
"Fucking poltergeist. What gives them the right, that's what I'd like to know." He's drunk off his ass. It's not like Dean didn't know.
He can taste it, is the thing.
The thing is that he is not supposed to kill Sam and he thinks that falling off the wagon would qualify.
"I'll keep him comfortable," Dean says, then he pauses and says, "Be comfortable."
"Not really part of the job, kid."
"Yeah, for him either."
And in the first bited comment of the whole fucking conversation (and Dean knows that's a fucking record and he really does appreciate it, okay?) John says, "Well, at least you're resting on your laurels over there."
The thing is, the thing is that Dean's back in the bathroom now going through the ridiculously familiar task of getting Sam back into a sweatsuit and rolling his eyes at Sam's dopey smile and trying to push aside the little voice in his head telling him not-pneumonia should not come with breathing this shitty and the thing is that he kind of is.
Dean isn't drinking anymore and Jess is going to be a chef and Sam is going to law school and the thing is that they've kind of forgotten how to fight and look here's Sam breathing all hard and fucking dedicated. It occurs to Dean that Sam's very allergic to laurel trees and not the fucking slightest allergic to scotch.
But anyway, Sam is hot and breathless and clingy, so he doesn't drink.
**
Sam's holding steady at a hundred and three the next morning, and Dean's appointment to replace an engine versus Jess's chemistry review session means Jess is the one who stays home with him through the day. Dean comes home to both of them crashed on the couch, he a little more awake than her. The clear coffee table announces the big news before Sam has to work the words out of his swollen throat--her culinary school application is finally signed, sealed, delivered.
Dean nudges Jess the Conquering Hero towards a shower and says he'll get Sam settled in bed, and he takes advantage of Jess's legendarily long showers to fuss over Sam some and stretch out next to him on the bed. Sam is his strange brand of lucid that only comes out at 103, and he leans against Dean's shoulder and asks questions about building an engine and breathes stuffed-up and softly gaspy in his ear.
"How long 'til we bring you in?" Dean says, because obviously John was right, at some point they're going to have to hospitalize the kid. He's a severe asthmatic with the flu. Statistically he should probably be dead already.
"Not tonight."
"Obviously not tonight. How long do you think? Not holding you to it, just curious how fucked in the head you are at this point."
Sam tips his head back to thin, his tongue clicking against the back of his throat to try to scratch back some of the irritation there. "Two days."
"Aw, that's it?"
Sam nods and wipes his nose on his sleeve. "Sick."
"We have tissues, buddy."
"I'm worried about you."
"I never get sick. Want my sleeve?"
He shakes his head and keeps rubbing his nose against that rough-as-fuck sweatshirt cuff, Sam, stooop. "When I'm in the hospital."
"You can use my sleeve when you're in the hospital too. I'm a very charitable person. They'll be like Sam, this is a hospital, we have the BEST tissues and I'll be like stay back and fight them off with a...Sam. Hospital related weapon."
"Nun-chuck."
"That's not even sort of hospital related. That's not even a good weapon. Pushing 104 over there, I guess."
Sam nods miserably.
"Come here."
Sam crawls in and pushes himself into Dean's chest. "I'm worried about you," he says again.
"All right, hit me. What are you so worried about?"
"Drinking."
He presses his lips to the top of Sam's head, just to do something with them. "I know."
"Will you?"
"No."
"H-how hard is it?"
It's funny, because Dean knows the stories, and he knows the cliches, and he knows the thing about how he's going to be an alcoholic forever and he's always going to want to drink, and he knows he's been incredibly stressed out lately and he can't reconcile it with the fact that since Sam starting running this fever it's been incredibly easy to ignore. Sam's sick and needy and present and that still drowns everything out. It still don't.
So Sam sick and untouchable and locked away behind IVs and maybe a ventilator and a bitchy ICU nurse, yes, that scares the shit out of him.
Fuck.
"I'm waiting for the other shoe," Dean says. "I'm like a fucking cartoon character and I think a big fucking giant is about to drop a shoe on me."
"That's what I always picture whenever anyone talks about that shoe dropping thing. Big giant dropping a shoe on you. You see the shadow get bigger and bigger and kersplat."
"Wait, you always picture giants?"
"Yeah."
"God, 104, Sam."
"Deeeean."
"I'm waiting for the other shoe."
"Why does that make me so sad?"
"I don't know, kid. You're the one who always gets sick in stages. You should be a huge fan of this giant shoe concept. Your whole life is giant other shoes." He grabs one of Sam's enormous fucking feet and cradles it between his hands.
Sam's quiet for a minute, thinking, then he says, "I think I just wish we could stop making excuses for why it's easy."
"What?"
"Living together. Being sick all the time. School. Not drinking."
"I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, y'know? You have panic attacks about school, I have night sweats about not drinking, here you are panting and shivering with this fever you earned all by yourself. I don't think this is easy."
"I think we're happy," Sam says. "I just wonder...at what point do we accept that our life is kind of fantastic now?"
"When things stop going wrong."
Sam shakes his head. "I'm ready to deserve to be happy."
"Sammy."
"I just want to stop looking for the giant shadow." He cuddles with his pillow. "I mean, I'm the giant shadow really."
"Sammy."
"I just love being me," Sam says, as he's drifting off to sleep. This fucking kid.
He stops breathing that night.
**
It sounds so much more dramatic than it is. Really, it's Jess in her nightgown, lips pressed to Sam's temple, while they decide to call 911 rather than wait for someone to run down to the parking lot and get the car. The hospital's close and an ambulance won't take long, and Sam's not in immediate danger of dying, they know that, and it's got to suck that they know how to evaluate this so easily and calmly, it's got to fucking suck. It has to.
Sam isn't calm, but he can't be. He's agitated and desperate and upset, arching his back and pulling on his shirt and Jess holds him as still as she can and holds the oxygen mask (God fucking bless this girl for having it) over his mouth and talks to him gently. Sam's blue around the lips and it's scary, but Dean knows that shade of blue and knows that he can last a few more minutes.
"Shh shh shh," Jess whispers to him, then she turns to Dean as he's hanging up the phone (he always tells them to hurry like otherwise they'll think he's calling for an ambulance just for his own shits and giggles or something) and says, "Let's give him an epi."
"Yeah, let's."
So they stab Sammy in the thigh and it gives him a handful of better breaths, but an epi can't do anything about how clogged-up his lungs are so it's not the relief he gets usually when he's just locked down, not sick, and that's scaring the shit out of him when come on, Sam, baby, we know what this is, if you weren't so fucking oxygen deprived and burning like toast you would understand that.
He's drowsy and dropping out and Dean whispers, "God, that poor fucking flu in there," and scratches Sam's back gently. "They'll be here soon, buddy. You want a tube?"
Sam nods, hard, and it does make Dean's stomach clench.
"No problem, kiddo."
Because the thing is that it really isn't a problem. (They can do tubes. They can sit by his head and soothe him when he's sedated and confused. They can play cards on his stomach and rub lotion on the hives he always gets from hospitals. This is not a big deal--where the fuck does the big deal come in?)
It's when they're loading Sam into the ambulance and Dean and Jess are arguing about who gets to ride and who should drive (you go with him, no, it's okay, really, you go) that he feels the weight of his phone in his pocket and remembers that's right, that's the big deal. Here it comes.
**
"Fuck." John's breathing about as hard as Sammy. "Fuck. God. What's his O2?"
Dean looks into Sam's room and glances at the numbers on the screen but really watches Jess play with Sam's sock, fussing with the seam on the toe, frowning at it like it's important.
"Dean. Oxygen."
"Uh, it's suspenseful."
"Fuck."
"I think it's rising."
"They intubating?"
"They don't want to when his fever's this high, they're worried about hitting him with double pneumonia here."
"He has half already?"
"I think that would be single..."
"Motherfuck."
"Dad." He can't think of a gentle way to phrase this next part. "This happens, you know? He'll be okay."
He watches Sam, drugged off his ass, give Jess a lazy smile around the tube. He fingerspells something and she watches carefully.
They're good at this. They've made Dean feel so fucking at home that sometimes he forgets the history they have before him. He flops down next to Sam after work and smells Sam sweaty and shivery with fever and he just forgets that it's the same Sam who drops his head to her shoulder and sweats on her for a very different (but how fucking different is it really god shut up brain is this really the fucking time to go down that road) and Jess smiles at him and calls him "Mr. Bitchcester," and it's so easy to forget that those smiles and that nickname did not used to be his.
It's easy to forget that his Dad, quiver-worried about Sam, rumble-angry about hospitals, is supposed to be his real life.
The thing is that this would be so much easier if Dean didn't love him so much.
But the thing is that the loves of his damn life are playing fucking scrabble in there when Sam's half an hour on a tube.
Sam was right (and isn't he fucking always). It's so easy to forget to be unhappy.
Maybe it's time he stops pretending it isn't.
**
Sam's off the tube in a day and a half and breathing without machines in another two. He's lost a pretty startling amount of weight and Jess brings him cookies that must be half-butter and the other half brown sugar as soon as he's back on solids and Sam lets them melt on his tongue until he needs to cough again.
"You're a saint," Dean tells her, once, when they've left Sam snoring in his bed to get some tea and an actual meal.
"You should see me when he wakes me up wheezing. I've made him sleep in the bathroom on occasion. Not a saint."
"We've all done that."
"So that's why he doesn't mind it!"
"He likes sleeping in weird places. When he was a kid he used to curl up on top of mini-fridges."
"I like him."
"How do you do this?" Dean says. "How do you volunteer for this?"
Jess is quiet, thinking, and she stirs her tea idly with her pinky.
"He doesn't have to be healthy," she says. "For a while I thought that was the goal. That it, like, had to be, you know? And then we keep dating and like...he does not give a shit about that. He really doesn't. He likes feeling good day-to-day but he doesn't have these aspirations to be Joe Normal-Breathing."
"No one would want to be him, he has a horrible name."
She kicks him under the table, then traps his ankle between hers and squeezes. "He makes me believe that I don't have to be anything else. People tell me I shouldn't want to stay home and bake for everyone forever. People tell me," she raises an eyebrow at him, "that I shouldn't want to play nurse for the rest of my life."
"Hey, I didn't say that."
"You thought it."
"Only because...people have always told me the same thing."
"He's not an obligation," Jess said. "We signed up for this. We...applied."
Well. Dean didn't.
(Dean didn't ask to exist, and Sam is the sun and the mountain rages and the cool water and the whole fucking world.)
"I do it because I don't fucking mind it," Jess says. "Sam makes me remember that I don't have to. I don't answer to fucking anyone."
Dean thinks about his father on the phone, his father who just worries, his father and his pure motives and his unbelievably piss-poor actions (seriously, come visit Sam, this is not rocket science) and he says, "Cheers."
"Cheers."
"You make him a better person," Dean says. "But you so do not make him more normal."
"Oh, like you do."
"I'm a beautiful and upstanding role model. You're some bohemian chef."
"I really love him," she says, dropping her voice like it's somehow a secret. "I don't like the implication that I'm too good for him just because he comes with hospital visits. I don't like when people...act like I should be surprised by how much work he is and get fed up and decide to leave, you know? Like people help him when he's freaking the fuck out over a 3 page paper--and like, they see that and don't use that as evidence that he's high-maintenance, have you noticed the world's getting more fucked up?--and then he has some normal asthma attack and people are all averting their eyes. It's such bullshit. So he's sick. So he's sick. He's also a pain in the ass and he's also beautiful and hilarious and braids my hair and calls my dad on his birthday and comes back sneezing his face off after camping trips with my brother and he likes french bread and Italian movies and The Wind in the Willows which is possibly the stupidest book known to man, and he loses all of his shit all the time and somehow still manages to freak out if stuff isn't in straight lines and if I wouldn't change the fact that he breaks a new dish every other week or forgets to record The Young and the Restless after I've reminded him fifty times or leaves his socks everywhere and why the fuck can't you be a little obsessive about that, Sam, if I wouldn't change any of that, why the fuck do people think I would make him breathe? He's happy how he is."
"People don't think he should be."
"Well," Jess says. "People told me I shouldn't make lemon-chocolate macarons. And then they tried them."
"The world's getting more fucked up."
"We're just keeping pace."
"I love our fucking kid."
Jess says, "You know what? I think I love hospitals."
"I do too a little."
"I think I love every fucking part of this fucking boy."
"I want a lemon chocolate macaron."
"God, they're divine."
Divine.
His Sam.
**
The day Sam gets discharged, Jess gets her acceptance letter.
"The fuck puts lemon and chocolate together?" Sam bitches from atop the (messy, unboiled) kitchen counter, and Dean smacks him with dishtowel and Sam says, "Whaaaat?" and later they find him on top of the refrigerator, fast asleep.
Dean and Jess lick lemon zest and chocolate off their fingers.
Summary: Stanford has the flu. And now so does Sam's apartment.
Wordcount: 9,463
Author's Note: Jess Lives-verse, which I have decided to call THREEVERSE because it sounds like free verse and I like that. I beat up Dean a little again! But he doesn't get the flu, and also this turned out RIDICULOUSLY sappy which means I'm happy with it so yay. So far my naming convention is "first lines from Death Cab songs." Let's see if I can keep it up.
If you'd asked Dean last week, when he was huddled and drawn and detoxing on the bathroom floor because fuck you alcoholism, if he would have liked a side of company with his misery, he would have said yes the fuck please send someone else's suffering to my table immediately with the biggest bottle of wine you have but now it's six days later and hes's feeling a little better (but not completely because he has not drunk, thank you very much) and when he walks in to Sam shivering under a blanket on the couch, frantic, stuffed-up wheezes escaping his nose in his sleep, Dean's pretty fucking far from grateful. Damn it, Sam.
He grabs two bottles of water (water) from the fridge and flops down on the floor next to the couch, legs sprawled out. He hunts for the remote with one hand and stretches the palm of the other over Sam's forehead. Warm, too warm, but not hot. He'll let the kid sleep.
But ten minutes later Sam's stirring, making baby dinosaur noises into his pillow and kicking his feet a little as he wakes up. "Where's Jess?"
"It's Thursday, she's at rehearsal. I can make her come home if you need her? You can just do that wheeze into the phone, that'll convince her."
Sam ignores him, yawns, breaks off with a rough sneeze.
"No, sneezing won't convince her, that's just boring. That's just Sam."
Sam scratches the stubble on his cheek. "So's wheezing."
"Yeah, but you keep trying to die on us so we have to worry about that."
"If you'd just let me, just once, I'd never bother you again!"
"Cute."
Sam grins and works his fingers over his shoulder. His knuckles ripple and he pushes his fingertips into a knot behind his neck. "Ugh."
"Sick."
"Nah. Not really."
"Sure. Stop that. Turn around, let me get at it."
"Handsy today, you're all the fuck over me."
Dean turns him around. "Don't know what to tell you, Myrtle. Days alone under cars make me despondent. The hot embrace of steel and oil can only get you so far."
"Burning like an engine right now."
"Nah, like a bike bell. How high is this, hundred and a half? Get real. Cold?"
Sam shakes his head and then sneezes again, oh, very convincing, Sam, but he says "Flu shot," and coughs into his elbow for a minute.
"You're this sick from the SHOT?"
"Not sick, really. Just symptomy." He stretches out on his stomach and groans. "Rub my shoulders."
"No way, not babying you when you're not actually sick."
"Shouuuulders."
"Whatever. If you actually got the flu you'd be too fucking wrecked to be touched." His fingers find the sore spot tucked under Sam's shoulder blade.
Sam stretches and moans. "See, count your blessings then."
"Yeah, massaging your bony-ass shoulders, this is a highlight."
"I am healthy and alive!" Sam says, and he drives a long coughing fit into his pillow.
**
The flu's been moving from floor to floor like some sort of serial killer, but it's still on the third and they're up on seventh. That night after dinner Jess, who's been watching the whole thing like it's a fucking horror movie (except she watches those with her entire body tucked behind Sam and her eyes peering over his shoulder while she screams KILL IT! STAB IT!, for the love of God please get this girl a salt gun and a breezy hunt just for the fucking entertainment value) gets a text and announces there's a confirmed case on the fourth floor. Sam immediately starts boiling water.
She looks up. "I'm sorry, did you mishear me? I didn't say this is the 1800s and I'm in labor. Why the fuck are you boiling water?"
Dean's sitting on the counter sorting through the mail and gnawing on the fat end of a chicken bone because it's better than gnawing through his own fingers. A small growl escapes the back of his throat (thirsty thirsty) and Sam and Jess reach towards him and give him identical, affectionate little scratches on each knee because they are two parts of one (fucking incredible, Dean has to admit, when he's either strung out drunk or strung out detoxing or collapsed on top of them watching a movie or eating breakfast with one of them or rubbing Sam's back through an asthma attack or looking at his fucking life) machine.
"I never got what the boiled water even for," Dean says. "Do you put the fucking baby in it?"
Jess says, "In my case, it would be to produce some steam for the freaked out wheezing dad."
"Aw, poor Sammy."
"Could you knock me up, though, actually? I am fucking sick of microbiology. An infant would totally get me out of my final."
"You would not have an infant by then," Dean says, because Sam's clearly too up in his head to banter right now. "You wouldn't even be showing by then."
"There are two cherry pies in the fridge right now. I could totally fake showing. Give me a fork. Give me some semen, Sam."
"Dean's semen."
Jess makes this big show of looking for a cup, while Sammy frets that the water hasn't boiled yet.
"Embrace him," Dean says, and Jess stops and stands behind him and wraps his arms around his waist, cheek against his back. Sam reaches behind him and does a quick one-handed braid with a bit of her hair (the things you pick up when you're in a relationship, these tiny things, the fact that it's his fucking brother who grew up with salt and iron and dental floss stitches, of course he has the dexterity to braid one-handed and here he is doing it, loving it, Dean never thought about loving anything but Sam) but he doesn't take his eyes off the kettle.
"This kid," Dean says.
"Sammy, you had the shot." She kisses between his shoulder blades. "Dean and I had the shot. You're not gonna get sick."
"Asthmatics die when they get the flu," Sam says.
"All of them?"
"Yes. One hundred percent." Sam pours the water into a bowl and starts wiping down the counters, oh, Sam, what are you even doing?
"You know I have asthma too, right?"
He turns around, finally. "Of course."
"And I'm not freaking out."
Dean says, "I've seen you cough, like, twice."
"Shut up," Sam says, and he means it, he's using that concerned voice. "I don't want you sick either, asthmatic," he says to her, softly, and he is all big all of a sudden, gathering her up. "Don't get sick."
"I had the shot. Our apartment's like this nice little bubble."
"I know, but we're around people who didn't, we have to go to class and stuff..."
"Yes, but we got the shot. Simba."
Sam gives this whimper, this tiny thing in the back of his throat, and Dean goes to the fridge and takes out the pie and cuts it into extra-big slices.
"You're not going to get sick. Dean and I won't let you."
"I'll get pneumonia," Sam says. "I'll go to the hospital with the sick people and get sepsis and rubella and Dengue fever and die." At least he's joking around now, but he's still shaking.
Dean hands him a plate and shoves him towards the living room. "Go lie down."
"I can't eat lying down."
"Do it anyway."
Sam messes up Dean's hair and harrumphs himself to the couch.
"He better not get sick," Dean mumbles to Jess.
She laugh-groans, once. "Right?"
**
"Tell me a story," Dean groans, while Sam half-tucks half-wrestles him into his bed.
"Once upon a time far far away."
"Nnn."
"There was an awesome big brother who gave up drinking and his perfect, gorgeous, strikingly intelligent and always good-humored and VERY PERFECT, DID I MENTION little brother adored him forever and ever."
Dean pushes his face into his pillow. "That story was very short."
"You're very short."
Dean laughs despite himself.
**
He wakes up to coughing in the other room, dark and dry, asthma attack coughing. He rolls over and pulls his pillow over his head because little brother has a girlfriend and Dean's allowed to do this now.
The coughing keeps going long after Sam would usually have dissolved into wheezing, but that's kind of a blessing, at least when you're talking from-the-next-room, because coughing is at least proof that he's moving air. Dean mumbles "Sleep, Sammy, good Sammy," into his pillow and bunches up tighter.
There's a pause, silence, and Dean chooses to believe that this is a good sign, and when the coughing erupts again it's proof he was right. There's no respiratory arrest over there, just dramatic coughing with breaks of wheezing and hello his name is Sam Winchester nice to meet you.
But then the coughing keeps going and underneath it Dean hears a voice. Sam's voice.
Shit.
That's not Sam coughing.
**
"I'm not just going to dump her in some hotel room." Sam and Dean are standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, watching Jess twitch feverishly in her nap.
Dean says, "You've been panicking about getting sick for weeks. And now here's sick right in the apartment. One of you has to leave."
"I had the shot."
"Yeah, so did she." Dean can't believe they're having this conversation eighteen fucking hours after the one last night.
"I'm not leaving her."
"Sam..."
Sam scratches the stubble on his cheek--he's been too busy worrying about Jess to shave, or eat, or fucking sit down. He's managed to wash his hands about twenty hundred times, of course. His skin's red and raw.
"One of you needs to go," Dean says. "And you're Sam Accessories Not Included so I think it should be her."
"She's sick. She's not going to deliriously lie around a hotel room. That is not how this is fucking going to work, Dean."
"What good do you think you're going to be for her if you and your drama queen lungs are being pneumonaing all over the place?"
Jess coughs, and Sam actually physically flinches.
"Okay. Okay. Shhh." Dean lays his hand on Sam's arm. "Jess, honey, you awake?"
"No," she mumbles, hunkering further under her blanket.
"She needs more pillows..."
"Sam."
"Sh-she doesn't feel well, she needs an inhaler, can you give her..."
"Yeah. I'm on it. You go--" Dean starts, but Sam's already bolted to the kitchen sink to scrub his hands again, fuck, he's going to have half-cracked bleeding palms before the day's up if Dean doesn't get this taken care of.
He grabs Jess's little pink inhaler and sits at the end of the couch, tugging Jess's feet up and onto his lap. "Hey, Princess. You doing okay? Let me feel your head, come here."
She squirms to sitting so she can slump into him. She's hot, maybe a hundred and one, not too scary, but she's miserable and shivery.
"I gotta get out of here," she says. "My lungs feel like anvils, he can't take this."
"He feels terrible about it..."
"Then he can buy me a necklace or a new pair of shoes or a hypoallergenic pony when this is all over." She coughs for a minute, covering the fuck out of her mouth. "This isn't something for him to feel guilty about. This isn't negotiable. That's not what this is."
"I know." He rubs her back when she starts coughing again. "But we don't want you alone."
She rubs her temples and says, "I'll be fine."
Dean is quiet for a minute, watching her shiver and sweat.
"I'm gonna come with you."
**
Sam hugs her at the door as they're leaving. He's wearing oven mitts like when he was a little kid with chicken pox.
"If you need anything," he says, softly, lips against her hair.
"Then I'll tell Dean and leave you the fuck out of it. No one's mad." She stumbles a little and Sam catches her before Dean does.
"Whoa whoa whoa." He smooths her hair off her forehead with that fucking oven mitt, and then they're both laughing, weakly.
She gives his chest a few scratches, and he stiffens but lets her. "Don't get sick," she says.
"I won't." He looks at Dean. "You take care of her."
"Hey, I take good care of you, don't I? And I like her more."
"So," Sam completes.
"So."
He breathes out slowly. He's wheezing worse than she is. "Stay clean, okay?"
"Promise." Sam's allowed to say that. He just is.
Another slow wheeze from Sam.
"Take your inhaler," Jess says. "Don't give me that face. You're still the frail one around here."
"I'll take you more seriously when you're not feverish. God. Jess."
"I'll be fine."
"Okay." Sam takes a shitty deep breath. "Okay."
**
Obviously this hotel stay is on Sam's dime, so Dean follows his orders and takes her to the nicest place he can find. Looking around the lobby, he's gonna guess she's not the only sick Stanford kid here, except they're all with their rich parents who are saving their trust fund babies the horror of being sick in a dorm room.
"Piggy back." Dean hoists Jess's legs up. "Come on."
She's barely down and settled with an ice pack for a teddy bear and the complimentary silk robe around her shoulders when Sam calls. "How is she?"
"Sleeping." He says, voice low.
But Sam says, "You could have a fucking parade, she won't wake up," so Dean turns on the TV, thanks very much. Sure enough, she doesn't even roll over.
"Fever?" Sam says.
"She's staying under 102. Mostly it's the cough I'm worried about, but I'm keeping an eye on it. She isn't short of breath except right after. You, on the other hand, sound like shit, sir."
"I sound like a veritable symphony of wind instruments."
"Mmhmm."
"I'm okay. I'm nervous. I'm worried..."
"She's okay. This is like, everyday sick, y'know? You'd come home with this after school and be like I'm going to soccer practice and we'd roll our eyes at you."
"And a week later I'd have pneumonia."
"Yeah, but that's just you. You like to get pneumonia. It's your favorite."
"Pneumonia and candy apples, the Sam Winchester story."
"Any fever?"
"No. And I'm checking like every ten minutes. 98.3."
"Under normal! Alert the media."
"I tried to call the Stanford paper to announce it but everyone has the fucking flu."
"This sad balance of banter and paranoia is really tragic. Worried about you, kiddo."
"I'm fine I'm fine I'm fine."
"So this room has a minibar."
"Whaaat no."
"Jess and I opened it and threw everything out the window. I hope you like spending money on non-alcohol."
"It's my favorite."
"Candy apples, pneumonia, and invisible liquor."
"The Sam Winchester story."
"Exactly." Dean's quiet for a minute, listening to him wheeze. "The hell have you been up to, you sound like you've been marathon-running or flower-shopping or some shit."
"Cleaning."
"Should have guessed."
"Yeah, seriously. I bleached everything."
"Everything?"
"Everything. I'm blond and covered in chemical burns."
"Pics."
"Ha. Is she shivering?"
"Not right now, she's hot, I gave her an ice pack."
"She could still be shivering..."
"Saaaam."
"Do you have a fever?"
"Nope, I'm good. I'm Iron Man, I don't get sick."
"Iron Man is Iron Man BECAUSE he was sick."
"Can you be Iron Man?"
"Yeah. You can be Pepper Pots."
"Score. Wait, what's Jess?"
"Jarvis."
"Obviously."
"Yeah, get with the program."
"All right, preteen from the 90s, I'll do just that."
"...I was a preteen in the 90s..."
"Go lie down. Plug into the neb. Sweet dreams."
"Hmmph."
"Yeah, you."
Sam wheezes into a sigh. "You."
**
Jess, in the first good thing that's happened to them this week, gets sick like a human rather than an asthmatic, and even though it takes her a little above average to shake it, it's less than a week before she's still exhausted but ready to go back to some classes, with, with the looming microbiology test and lack of fetus is kind of unavoidable. They're still staying at the hotel to clear the last dregs of illness out of her, but so far so good and it's looking like this is going to wrap up all smooth and uneventful, save a scary night on the bathroom floor while Jess shook so hard she bruised herself, because Sam's checking in almost as obsessively as Dean imagines he's washing his hands and he's doing just fine, a little wheezier than usual but that's how he gets when he's tense and being alone always, always makes him tense, that doesn't have anything to do with anything so everything is pie and ice cream and everything is fine.
Except he wakes up one night and Jess isn't in her bed, and he's a little freaked out imagining her fainting again in the bathroom but then he hears her voice, low and slow, and please don't have a fever Sammy please.
He knocks quietly and the doorknob twists open, and there's Jess perched on the side of the tub, sweaty but okay, phone pressed to her ear. She mouths Sam unnecessarily and keeps up with her litany of "Okay, baby, okay."
And yeah, maybe it plucks something inside Dean that Sam called Jess and not him, but this is the price he pays for nights he sleeps all the way through and for his brother's damn happiness so he will take this, he will take this in spades.
Sick? Dean mouths.
Jess shakes her head and replies just asthma which should be a relief but he knows it's got to be a really bad night for Sam to wake up his recovering girlfriend in the middle of the night. He sits down at Jess's feet and she scratches the top of his head some and Dean listens to him reassure Sam with words he's not sure who learned from whom.
Eventually he gets the phone, and God, that wheeze. "Hi, asthma."
Sam sounds so tired. "Asthma says hi back."
"No fever, right?"
"No fever. Just chest."
"Cough."
Sam forces one and it doesn't sound very fucking forced, Sam.
"Can you sleep now?"
He pretty much hears Sam shrug, that one-shouldered thing, that bitten lip.
"You must be so tired," Dean tries.
"Just incredibly hard to catch my breath. Just sit with me for a few minutes and I'll be fine. I told Jess to go back to sleep..."
"Yeah, she's gone."
"Good. She needs to rest." Sam huffs out a breath and groans a little. "God, this sucks."
"We'll be home soon. Cover you in blankets. Poor little un-sick asthmatic."
He sits with Sam for a minute because Sam sounds so damn bad but eventually they both decide he's moving enough air to sleep and Dean creeps back to bed. Jess is awake, he can tell by the rhythm of her breathing, and that's probably a weird thing to know about his brother's girlfriend but when was this ever simple?
"He okay?" she whispers, like one of them is asleep or something."
Dean rolls over onto his back and cradles the back of his head. "Yeah. Just asthma."
"He just gets so desperate."
"I know. Freaks me out too."
The room is only half-dark because Dean forgot to turn off the bathroom light, and fuck if he's going to now because he's so damn tired and yeah, maybe he likes being able to see Jess. He's spent the last week worried about her and yeah, he thought that that would just be some of the worry he has for Sam transferred over, but no, apparently he can just produce more worry as needed like a fucking worry factory and he's so, so tired and so fucking glad to see her.
She's looking all healthy, just yawning and burrowing into her pillow. She's getting well.
This is a strange thing.
"I'm gonna marry that boy," she says, like it's some big announcement.
"Yeah, well, no shit." There's no ring, there's been no down-on-one-knee bullshit, nobody cares. Jess and Sam have been a foregone conclusion since the day Jess smiled at him after almost killing him at the coffee shop (and then they didn't see each other for a year and then they were at some party and they were like "oh, you look familiar, didn't I once give you an allergic reaction, oh, didn't I once cry in your coffee shop, let's go fuck in the closet," yeah, whatever, kids, you've been engaged for four years).
"Can I ask you something?" she says.
"He's going to propose, y'know? Don't worry."
"Not that. Assuming we someday have this baby who's genetically half-mine and half-yours. Are you going to...I mean, have an issue with that?"
"My sperms are going to be like avert our eyes! AVERT OUR EYES!"
"My uterus is going to claw its way up to my throat in an escape attempt."
"This is a weird conversation."
"I mean signing away parental rights. You'd have to, y'know? Sam would have to technically adopt."
"Seriously?"
"Yeah, you'd have to give the baby up and then Sam would snatch him from there."
"Huh. Okay."
"You'd sign the papers? That wouldn't be an issue?"
"Jess. I'd sign them so fast you'd think the pen was on fire."
"Yeah?"
"God, yeah. This is for you and Sam." He'd sign his fucking self over, he has fucking signed his life over, and she is not a hunter and there is a part of this that she will never, ever get. He has Sam's back, it's a thing completely outside of everything else, it's guns and spirits and torches, it's being there, it's giving Sam everything he needs to survive.
Sam needs his family.
"We left him alone," he realizes, quietly.
Jess rolls over and faces him. "Yeah."
"Simba..."
She yawns. "He's okay. We'll go home in two days. I need this rest, it's the first good night's sleep I've had since you guys went to see your dad."
"Yeah. Me too." (Bullshit, Dean doesn't sleep without that whistle, he's never fucking been able to sleep without that whistle.)
(Jess is getting well, Jess is breathing quietly again, and Dean doesn't sleep.)
**
Sam calls the next day looking for Jess but Jess is in class and if you wanted her you should have called her fucking phone, dumbass. Dean punishes him with a five-minute play-by-play explanation of the game he's watching.
"Listen to me," Sam says. "I called for a reason."
"Shoot."
"Fourteen down. Nine letters. 'Antiviral.' Seventh letter 'v'."
"Dig through your fucking pill drawer, numbskull. Acyclovir."
"Thaaank you."
"You're going to have a sick kid someday and you'll be all fuck, what was that crossword answer!"
"Good thing I'll always have you!"
"Oh, hey there, asthma, nice of you to join us."
Sam groans around the wheeze. "I know, it's set up camp. Here for a long vacation."
"Campfire, marshmallows."
"The whole nine."
"You okay?"
"I'm fine, I just--" and all of a sudden he's not talking, just coughing, and ugh, Sammy. "...Just doing that a lot."
"We'll be home tomorrow."
"Awesome."
"Are you eating? Can you even make food without her?"
"I would tell you to fuck off except Jesus Christ it is difficult. I have become accustomed to this woman."
"She's stealing stuff from the kitchen downstairs and making full meals with the hot plate and the coffee maker, you don't even know. This is a great set up I have going here."
"Okay, now fuck off."
"What are you eating?"
"Soup. My chest is cold, it feels nice."
"Put on a sweater."
"I'm already wearing two sweaters."
Dean sits up. "You're wearing two sweaters?"
"Um. Yes?"
"I'm coming."
**
Maybe the saddest part about Sam always getting super sick is that his body always seems completely baffled by it. He starts out normal-human sick and then it drags on and on and then he's suddenly slammed by it, and it makes Dean's kid resting on the couch with his cheek on Jess's head and a cup of tea cuddled into his chest and his normal, unscary wheeze and small, unscary fever so fucking tragic because Sam's poor fucking body, you know? It thinks it's going to have this normal flu. It wants to just have this normal flu.
"What the fuck was in those flu shots," Dean says, hunting around for honey.
"Flu virus," Sam says. He's red-nosed, sneezy, leaning into Jess like she's his life raft. "Dead flu virus."
"I'm thinking maybe only mostly dead."
Sam nods in that exhausted, open-mouthed way that gives away how stuffed-up he is.
Dean straightens up and gives Sam good once-over. "You should try to get some sleep while you can, kiddo. Oh hey, drugs first. Look, Acyclovir!"
Sam burrows into his scarf and nods some. "Drugs. Sleep."
"Here or in bed?" Dean starts to say, but he doesn't even finish because Sam curls up small on the couch and yanks the blanket up over his head. Jess kind of squirms on top of him like he's a pillow and kisses the exposed bit of his hair over and over. Dean watches to make sure Sam reaches his hand out for his meds and after that gives them some space, cleans the kitchen, doesn't drink, worries.
There's really nothing they can do, is the thing. Antivirals will stop it from multiplying but not from settling in his lungs like it always, always does, and Dean's across the damn apartment and he can still feel Sam's fever ratcheting up like he could when Sam was this sick little baby cradled in the crook of his arm while Dad (Mom) held masks over his tiny face and kissed that forehead again and again.
He checks in on them when he can't fucking stand stewing in his room any longer. Jess is asleep on top of him, curled up like a cat, and Sam has his head out now and he's half-asleep, kicking and wheezing like a fucking asthmatic baby dinosaur this time.
Dean crouches down and spreads his palm over Sam's forehead, more to calm him than anything. "How's your chest? Cough a little?"
Sam coughs. It's dry and hacking and normal. Dean holds up his cup of water and helps him sip.
"How do you feel?"
Sam blinks up at him, glass and so calm. "Not that bad. Want to watch something?"
"Mmmhmm." Dean settles in the arm chair and hoists his legs up to have something to hold. He flips through channels while Sam shifts a little to sit up, carefully holding Jess, keeping her as still as he can. He eases her into his lap and plays with her hair. He rubs a tissue under his nose and with the sniffling and the light flush of fever he looks almost like he's just really fucking allergic, not sick.
"I should eat something," Sam says a little while later, after he's choked out a cough that's congested in his sinuses and not his lungs. "I should really do that."
"Soup?"
"Something more substantial, probably, while I can stomach it."
"You're so fucking brave, you know that?"
Sam shrugs and adjusts his blanket. "This part's fine. I don't mind this."
"I know."
"Getting babied, getting Jess all over my lap. Good be a fuck of a lot worse."
"Well that's cool because it's fucking gonna be."
"Right?" He coughs some more. "Maybe not this time."
"Mmm. Yeah."
"I know."
"Nice deep breaths. Keep air moving, keep those lungs working."
Sam nods and tilts his head back, pulling in breaths that are long and slow and not all that bad.
"The thing is," he says, when Dean delivers him a plate of spaghetti. "The thing is that I really don't want pneumonia this time, okay?"
Dean sticks his hand in Sam's hair. "Okay. Eat."
**
And it doesn't get worse for a long time. It's so stupid, but by the end of the second damn week of this thing, it sort of becomes their baseline. Sammy goes back to school because seriously he can't miss this much, and they become accustomed to him coming home and flopping down on the couch with his stuffy nose and low fever and backaches. Dean goes back to work, because seriously, can't miss this much, and Jess has her flute recital and they don't even really think about not bringing Sam. They sit near the back so that Sam can nap with his head on Dean's shoulder through most of it, and they don't really think much about that either. This is what Sam does now. Hemingway essays, sonnet analyses, coughing jags, a hundred and one. This is just what Sammy does now.
Jess makes lasagna for for her and Dean and soup for Sam and Sam sneaks lasagna when he thinks no one's looking (because this kid is an idiot and sometimes you have to look behind you, Simba, how the fuck this kid didn't get killed on a hunt is anyone's guess) and Jess bitches at him that that's not going to help his throat Sam are you seriously eating garlic bread did you forget that you're sick and yeah maybe he kind of did.
The asthma's worse than usual, shocking, so they spend a lot of time camped out in Sam and Jess's room with the nebulizer. It's nine at night and it's not like any he would be asleep or anything, but Dean still feels fucking lulled, splayed out in the whatever chair (Jess keeps telling him the name for it, it's close to parmesan)in the corner of their room, running his fingers over some of the spines of the bookshelves. Some of these are children's books. Sammy took a class.
Jess and Sam are crashed out by the headboard talking cooking schools. "I have to get my application in really soon," she says. "And I have to specify pastry chef or general culinary chef, I have to do that right up front, and maybe if I can't make up my mind here this isn't the thing for me."
Sam takes a long pull on the nebulizer, eyebrow raised at her, then slowly lets it out. "What the hell does that have to do with whether it's the thing for you?"
"I clearly don't have some kind of calling pulling me either way. Everyone else in these programs, this is people who have wanted this their whole lives."
"So have you!"
"But I don't know which one to pick, and...maybe I should wait another year."
"And do what? Campus bookstore like me? As thrilling as it is..."
"Chef school is so expensive."
"We've been saving up. We can do the first year."
"And then what?"
"Well, then I'll have to kill off Dean and collect my inheritance, but that's not something we need to worry about right now."
Dean flips through My Father's Dragon. "I was worth one hundred and eighteen dollars as of this morning. Which of us is our father's dragon, do you think?"
"You, I'd cough up smoke."
"Yeah, but now you're allergic to me."
"Come on," Sam says to Jess. "Really think about it. Which do you see yourself doing? Close your eyes and imagine."
Jess does not close her eyes. "In a few months I'll have a fucking Chemistry degree. I could work in a lab and make actual money."
"I'm pretty sure you don't start off making money in a lab. I think you have to live off chemicals and lab mice."
"My mom wanted--"
"Your mom wanted you to get that fucking Chemistry degree. Dying wish achieved. Close your eyes, baby."
Jess does, dipping her temple down to Sam's shoulder. "Pastry," she says, after a minute.
Dean's seen Jess absolutely mesmerized by a measure cup and seen her impatiently soften butter between her hands and seen that look of sheer damn glee every time she's decorated a perfect cupcake. This is right, Jess. This is what you've wanted for a long time.
"So there you go. Perfect. Go do your application." Sam swings to his elbow for a coughing fit that leaves him wheezy and tired, fussing with his red nose, and Jess nudges him and sticks the mouthpiece of the nebulizer back in his mouth.
"Pastry chefs work weird hours," she says. "Like two to five, until the bakeries open."
"That's okay, you'll sleep during the day. I could have a Civil War reenactment in the living room and you wouldn't wake up."
"I want a cannon," Dean says.
"Don't lie, you want a machine gun to piss everyone off."
"Fuck. I do. I really do."
"I wouldn't be here if you were sick during the night." Jess kisses his shoulder. "You do that a lot."
"Uh-uh, you don't get to base your plans off asthma." He guides her head off her shoulder and turns her around a little so he can get at all her hair. His fingers make a weird braid, pulling in more hair as he goes. "If I did that, do you think I'd be playing soccer or studying in dusty libraries? Fuck, I wouldn't even have come to school."
"I'm not basing my plans off asthma." She tilts her head back to look at him. "I'm basing my plans off you."
He kisses her forehead and tips her forwards again to finish the braid, turning away for a second to smother a string of sneezes into his sleeve. He shakes his head a little and gives a stuffy sniffle, then turns back to the braid, sliding off one of the elastic bands he always has around his wrist to bind it at the end. "There."
She brings Sam's hand around and kisses it. "You're my plan."
"Yeah, well, I want cake." He wraps his whole self around her, chest against her back, and she giggles. "And pie and cream puffs and eclairs and napoleons and madeleines and snickerdoodles."
"Lots of peanut things."
"I don't want those."
"If you get sick..."
"Dean will take care of me. That's why he's here. We don't like him, really."
Dean growls and tugs on Sam's foot. Sam growls back and grins at him, then tucks his lips into Jess's hair.
"Wedding cake," he says, so softly Dean barely picks it up. "Zeved habat cake. First birthday cake. No peanuts in those, huh?"
She brings her arms to her chest and holds his wrists with both hands. "No."
"So."
She shakes free, turns around, kisses him. "I'm not making my own fucking wedding cake."
"Okay. Dean can make it."
"Duncan Hines," Dean says. "With bonus eggshell pieces."
Once again, he's ignored. He doesn't mind. Jess crawls all up in Sam's lap. "You're a manipulative son of a bitch, you know that?"
"So siiiick, you should be nicer."
"Fuck me now."
"Finish your application first."
She groans, but she's smiling. "Thank you."
"See, even sick, I'm fucking brilliant."
That night, the fever spikes.
**
Dean wakes up from Samsa-style unsettling dreams (so he was alone with Sam's Norton Anthologies all day for the two weeks before he found his job at the garage, so some of it was interesting, sue him) at four AM to Jess shaking him awake and smelling like Sam and that doesn't exactly do much to make him less confused. He sits up enough to blink at his pillow and shift his jaw and force some consciousness back into him. Bed. Pillow. Jess. Sammy. Why is everything so confusing? Why is this throwing him so much, and Jesus fuck why does she have to wake him up with those soft hands that fucking smell like Sam, wait, what's going on here?
It's his sweat that's on her, that's matting the sleeves of her sweatshirt onto her hands.
"He's a hundred and four and climbing," she says. "Fucking...soaring. I need you."
Dean's up, pulling on a shirt. "Is he awake?"
"Yeah."
"How's his breathing?"
"It's not. Hurry."
He is breathing but it's not was only rounding down a little because Jesus fuck, Sammy. He's got his feet planted at the side of the bed and he's drawing in these soaking wet breaths that stick and stay in the back of his throat, and then he's bent over and coughing with who the fuck knows what air because none's getting down there.
This is how it happens. This is how it fucking always happens.
Dean sits down next to him and tugs him close while Jess paces in small, frantic steps, hand wrapped around the phone, teeth working anxiously at the top of the antenna. "Do I call in?" They're not going to call a fucking ambulance or something, but they like to call in when they can and say they're on their way instead of just dragging Dean's broken puppy of a boy to the ER and expecting them just to know what to do with him (and despite the epithet this is a trick Dean learned from Jess and not vice-versa, which makes sense in one way because they were fucking hunters and Dean can count on one hand the number of times they had a spare second to call in and makes completely no fucking sense in the other because since when did he trust people to know what to do with Sam, this girl sneaked in some how, this girl is the sun and the moon and a whole damn militia).
"Dean?"
"I don't know." He doesn't know. He wishes suddenly and very desperately for his father. "Should we?"
She stops pacing and just watches him for a minute. "Maybe we should get the fever down and then see."
"His breathing..."
"I know. This sounds like shit. But if it's not actually as bad as it sounds than we're putting him at fucking astronomical risk, dragging him in to be exposed to God know's what. If it's not pneumonia now, it will be."
"Sam needs his own personal fucking hospital."
"You're in it," Jess says, and yeah, no shit, nebulizer, fucking oxygen tank in the closet just in case, pill bottles on the nightstand, peak flow meter with numbers written down, Jess's sexy nurse's costume from Halloween tucked away somewhere, you should have seen every inch of the fucking asthmatic's face light up when he saw her in that but yeah, this is Sammy square one and if they can't get him better here they can't do it anywhere.
"Come on," he says. "Let's get him in a bath."
**
So he ends up calling John while Jess is in the bathroom pouring lukewarm water over Sam's shoulders and Sam is wheeze-explaining his way through the subtle differences between the narrative techniques of Youth and Heart of something and Sam how the fuck do you snuggle this useless shit into your brain right up against the very un-useless how to kill stuff knowledge that used to be the absolute entirety of your fucking world and fuck how is Dean so happy that you've done it, you fever-talk the shit out of those narrative techniques, Sammy, but anyway Dean's calling John because being patient is what Jess does and being infuriatingly adorable is what Sam does and panicking the fuck out and acting like this is all new and exciting is what Dean does.
"He's spiking out," he tells John, who's now wide awake at fuck-it-all AM because Dean did not get his panicking gene from nowhere (Mary was so gentle, Mary was so patient, carefully holding cool washcloths to the shoulders of her tiny, shivering baby, fuck fuck fuck).
"Coughing up anything?"
"No, it's dry. He's breathing like he's sucking on a fucking sponge and then coughing bone-dry, it's the most fucking confusing thing I've ever heard."
"It's asthma," John says, and kind of fuck you a little John but this also means it's not pneumonia and Dean thinks that's a little hasty but whatever he'll fucking take it okay Daddy okay.
"No hospital tonight?"
"No hospital tonight. You know you'll be bringing him in in a few days no matter what the fuck you do, keep him home and comfortable for as long as you can."
"Right."
"Don't kill him."
"Aww, but I love killing him." He's calming down now. He has to, because it's almost time to go back to Sam.
In the bathroom, Jess and Sam are giggling a little.
John makes just this little sound. Pain.
"You okay?"
"Fucking poltergeist. What gives them the right, that's what I'd like to know." He's drunk off his ass. It's not like Dean didn't know.
He can taste it, is the thing.
The thing is that he is not supposed to kill Sam and he thinks that falling off the wagon would qualify.
"I'll keep him comfortable," Dean says, then he pauses and says, "Be comfortable."
"Not really part of the job, kid."
"Yeah, for him either."
And in the first bited comment of the whole fucking conversation (and Dean knows that's a fucking record and he really does appreciate it, okay?) John says, "Well, at least you're resting on your laurels over there."
The thing is, the thing is that Dean's back in the bathroom now going through the ridiculously familiar task of getting Sam back into a sweatsuit and rolling his eyes at Sam's dopey smile and trying to push aside the little voice in his head telling him not-pneumonia should not come with breathing this shitty and the thing is that he kind of is.
Dean isn't drinking anymore and Jess is going to be a chef and Sam is going to law school and the thing is that they've kind of forgotten how to fight and look here's Sam breathing all hard and fucking dedicated. It occurs to Dean that Sam's very allergic to laurel trees and not the fucking slightest allergic to scotch.
But anyway, Sam is hot and breathless and clingy, so he doesn't drink.
**
Sam's holding steady at a hundred and three the next morning, and Dean's appointment to replace an engine versus Jess's chemistry review session means Jess is the one who stays home with him through the day. Dean comes home to both of them crashed on the couch, he a little more awake than her. The clear coffee table announces the big news before Sam has to work the words out of his swollen throat--her culinary school application is finally signed, sealed, delivered.
Dean nudges Jess the Conquering Hero towards a shower and says he'll get Sam settled in bed, and he takes advantage of Jess's legendarily long showers to fuss over Sam some and stretch out next to him on the bed. Sam is his strange brand of lucid that only comes out at 103, and he leans against Dean's shoulder and asks questions about building an engine and breathes stuffed-up and softly gaspy in his ear.
"How long 'til we bring you in?" Dean says, because obviously John was right, at some point they're going to have to hospitalize the kid. He's a severe asthmatic with the flu. Statistically he should probably be dead already.
"Not tonight."
"Obviously not tonight. How long do you think? Not holding you to it, just curious how fucked in the head you are at this point."
Sam tips his head back to thin, his tongue clicking against the back of his throat to try to scratch back some of the irritation there. "Two days."
"Aw, that's it?"
Sam nods and wipes his nose on his sleeve. "Sick."
"We have tissues, buddy."
"I'm worried about you."
"I never get sick. Want my sleeve?"
He shakes his head and keeps rubbing his nose against that rough-as-fuck sweatshirt cuff, Sam, stooop. "When I'm in the hospital."
"You can use my sleeve when you're in the hospital too. I'm a very charitable person. They'll be like Sam, this is a hospital, we have the BEST tissues and I'll be like stay back and fight them off with a...Sam. Hospital related weapon."
"Nun-chuck."
"That's not even sort of hospital related. That's not even a good weapon. Pushing 104 over there, I guess."
Sam nods miserably.
"Come here."
Sam crawls in and pushes himself into Dean's chest. "I'm worried about you," he says again.
"All right, hit me. What are you so worried about?"
"Drinking."
He presses his lips to the top of Sam's head, just to do something with them. "I know."
"Will you?"
"No."
"H-how hard is it?"
It's funny, because Dean knows the stories, and he knows the cliches, and he knows the thing about how he's going to be an alcoholic forever and he's always going to want to drink, and he knows he's been incredibly stressed out lately and he can't reconcile it with the fact that since Sam starting running this fever it's been incredibly easy to ignore. Sam's sick and needy and present and that still drowns everything out. It still don't.
So Sam sick and untouchable and locked away behind IVs and maybe a ventilator and a bitchy ICU nurse, yes, that scares the shit out of him.
Fuck.
"I'm waiting for the other shoe," Dean says. "I'm like a fucking cartoon character and I think a big fucking giant is about to drop a shoe on me."
"That's what I always picture whenever anyone talks about that shoe dropping thing. Big giant dropping a shoe on you. You see the shadow get bigger and bigger and kersplat."
"Wait, you always picture giants?"
"Yeah."
"God, 104, Sam."
"Deeeean."
"I'm waiting for the other shoe."
"Why does that make me so sad?"
"I don't know, kid. You're the one who always gets sick in stages. You should be a huge fan of this giant shoe concept. Your whole life is giant other shoes." He grabs one of Sam's enormous fucking feet and cradles it between his hands.
Sam's quiet for a minute, thinking, then he says, "I think I just wish we could stop making excuses for why it's easy."
"What?"
"Living together. Being sick all the time. School. Not drinking."
"I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, y'know? You have panic attacks about school, I have night sweats about not drinking, here you are panting and shivering with this fever you earned all by yourself. I don't think this is easy."
"I think we're happy," Sam says. "I just wonder...at what point do we accept that our life is kind of fantastic now?"
"When things stop going wrong."
Sam shakes his head. "I'm ready to deserve to be happy."
"Sammy."
"I just want to stop looking for the giant shadow." He cuddles with his pillow. "I mean, I'm the giant shadow really."
"Sammy."
"I just love being me," Sam says, as he's drifting off to sleep. This fucking kid.
He stops breathing that night.
**
It sounds so much more dramatic than it is. Really, it's Jess in her nightgown, lips pressed to Sam's temple, while they decide to call 911 rather than wait for someone to run down to the parking lot and get the car. The hospital's close and an ambulance won't take long, and Sam's not in immediate danger of dying, they know that, and it's got to suck that they know how to evaluate this so easily and calmly, it's got to fucking suck. It has to.
Sam isn't calm, but he can't be. He's agitated and desperate and upset, arching his back and pulling on his shirt and Jess holds him as still as she can and holds the oxygen mask (God fucking bless this girl for having it) over his mouth and talks to him gently. Sam's blue around the lips and it's scary, but Dean knows that shade of blue and knows that he can last a few more minutes.
"Shh shh shh," Jess whispers to him, then she turns to Dean as he's hanging up the phone (he always tells them to hurry like otherwise they'll think he's calling for an ambulance just for his own shits and giggles or something) and says, "Let's give him an epi."
"Yeah, let's."
So they stab Sammy in the thigh and it gives him a handful of better breaths, but an epi can't do anything about how clogged-up his lungs are so it's not the relief he gets usually when he's just locked down, not sick, and that's scaring the shit out of him when come on, Sam, baby, we know what this is, if you weren't so fucking oxygen deprived and burning like toast you would understand that.
He's drowsy and dropping out and Dean whispers, "God, that poor fucking flu in there," and scratches Sam's back gently. "They'll be here soon, buddy. You want a tube?"
Sam nods, hard, and it does make Dean's stomach clench.
"No problem, kiddo."
Because the thing is that it really isn't a problem. (They can do tubes. They can sit by his head and soothe him when he's sedated and confused. They can play cards on his stomach and rub lotion on the hives he always gets from hospitals. This is not a big deal--where the fuck does the big deal come in?)
It's when they're loading Sam into the ambulance and Dean and Jess are arguing about who gets to ride and who should drive (you go with him, no, it's okay, really, you go) that he feels the weight of his phone in his pocket and remembers that's right, that's the big deal. Here it comes.
**
"Fuck." John's breathing about as hard as Sammy. "Fuck. God. What's his O2?"
Dean looks into Sam's room and glances at the numbers on the screen but really watches Jess play with Sam's sock, fussing with the seam on the toe, frowning at it like it's important.
"Dean. Oxygen."
"Uh, it's suspenseful."
"Fuck."
"I think it's rising."
"They intubating?"
"They don't want to when his fever's this high, they're worried about hitting him with double pneumonia here."
"He has half already?"
"I think that would be single..."
"Motherfuck."
"Dad." He can't think of a gentle way to phrase this next part. "This happens, you know? He'll be okay."
He watches Sam, drugged off his ass, give Jess a lazy smile around the tube. He fingerspells something and she watches carefully.
They're good at this. They've made Dean feel so fucking at home that sometimes he forgets the history they have before him. He flops down next to Sam after work and smells Sam sweaty and shivery with fever and he just forgets that it's the same Sam who drops his head to her shoulder and sweats on her for a very different (but how fucking different is it really god shut up brain is this really the fucking time to go down that road) and Jess smiles at him and calls him "Mr. Bitchcester," and it's so easy to forget that those smiles and that nickname did not used to be his.
It's easy to forget that his Dad, quiver-worried about Sam, rumble-angry about hospitals, is supposed to be his real life.
The thing is that this would be so much easier if Dean didn't love him so much.
But the thing is that the loves of his damn life are playing fucking scrabble in there when Sam's half an hour on a tube.
Sam was right (and isn't he fucking always). It's so easy to forget to be unhappy.
Maybe it's time he stops pretending it isn't.
**
Sam's off the tube in a day and a half and breathing without machines in another two. He's lost a pretty startling amount of weight and Jess brings him cookies that must be half-butter and the other half brown sugar as soon as he's back on solids and Sam lets them melt on his tongue until he needs to cough again.
"You're a saint," Dean tells her, once, when they've left Sam snoring in his bed to get some tea and an actual meal.
"You should see me when he wakes me up wheezing. I've made him sleep in the bathroom on occasion. Not a saint."
"We've all done that."
"So that's why he doesn't mind it!"
"He likes sleeping in weird places. When he was a kid he used to curl up on top of mini-fridges."
"I like him."
"How do you do this?" Dean says. "How do you volunteer for this?"
Jess is quiet, thinking, and she stirs her tea idly with her pinky.
"He doesn't have to be healthy," she says. "For a while I thought that was the goal. That it, like, had to be, you know? And then we keep dating and like...he does not give a shit about that. He really doesn't. He likes feeling good day-to-day but he doesn't have these aspirations to be Joe Normal-Breathing."
"No one would want to be him, he has a horrible name."
She kicks him under the table, then traps his ankle between hers and squeezes. "He makes me believe that I don't have to be anything else. People tell me I shouldn't want to stay home and bake for everyone forever. People tell me," she raises an eyebrow at him, "that I shouldn't want to play nurse for the rest of my life."
"Hey, I didn't say that."
"You thought it."
"Only because...people have always told me the same thing."
"He's not an obligation," Jess said. "We signed up for this. We...applied."
Well. Dean didn't.
(Dean didn't ask to exist, and Sam is the sun and the mountain rages and the cool water and the whole fucking world.)
"I do it because I don't fucking mind it," Jess says. "Sam makes me remember that I don't have to. I don't answer to fucking anyone."
Dean thinks about his father on the phone, his father who just worries, his father and his pure motives and his unbelievably piss-poor actions (seriously, come visit Sam, this is not rocket science) and he says, "Cheers."
"Cheers."
"You make him a better person," Dean says. "But you so do not make him more normal."
"Oh, like you do."
"I'm a beautiful and upstanding role model. You're some bohemian chef."
"I really love him," she says, dropping her voice like it's somehow a secret. "I don't like the implication that I'm too good for him just because he comes with hospital visits. I don't like when people...act like I should be surprised by how much work he is and get fed up and decide to leave, you know? Like people help him when he's freaking the fuck out over a 3 page paper--and like, they see that and don't use that as evidence that he's high-maintenance, have you noticed the world's getting more fucked up?--and then he has some normal asthma attack and people are all averting their eyes. It's such bullshit. So he's sick. So he's sick. He's also a pain in the ass and he's also beautiful and hilarious and braids my hair and calls my dad on his birthday and comes back sneezing his face off after camping trips with my brother and he likes french bread and Italian movies and The Wind in the Willows which is possibly the stupidest book known to man, and he loses all of his shit all the time and somehow still manages to freak out if stuff isn't in straight lines and if I wouldn't change the fact that he breaks a new dish every other week or forgets to record The Young and the Restless after I've reminded him fifty times or leaves his socks everywhere and why the fuck can't you be a little obsessive about that, Sam, if I wouldn't change any of that, why the fuck do people think I would make him breathe? He's happy how he is."
"People don't think he should be."
"Well," Jess says. "People told me I shouldn't make lemon-chocolate macarons. And then they tried them."
"The world's getting more fucked up."
"We're just keeping pace."
"I love our fucking kid."
Jess says, "You know what? I think I love hospitals."
"I do too a little."
"I think I love every fucking part of this fucking boy."
"I want a lemon chocolate macaron."
"God, they're divine."
Divine.
His Sam.
**
The day Sam gets discharged, Jess gets her acceptance letter.
"The fuck puts lemon and chocolate together?" Sam bitches from atop the (messy, unboiled) kitchen counter, and Dean smacks him with dishtowel and Sam says, "Whaaaat?" and later they find him on top of the refrigerator, fast asleep.
Dean and Jess lick lemon zest and chocolate off their fingers.