Two Hits
Title: Two Hits
Summary: For the 7.03 Comment Fic Meme. Prompt: "The cabin [in 7.03] is really dusty, so there's respiratory distress." This was the beginning of the end for me, obviously.
Warnings/Spoilers:Through 7.03.
Wordcount: 2,109
Author's Note: I don't even know if this thing is in the verse because who the hell knows where I'm going to be come season 7, so I'm leaving it out for now.
To Sam's credit, he's usually great about his asthma. A brutal, two-days-in-the-hospital-waiting-for-news attack when he was seven put it on the official Winchester list of Things We Do Not Fuck With, and a few bad attacks over the years made sure it stayed there. Sam's emo phase of alternating between "leave me alone, GOD" and "why did I have to be stuck with this burden?" (okay, so never those exact words, Dean thinks, but seriously, it DOES sound like something Sam would say, right?) came and went when he was fourteen, and since then, Dean has to admit, the kid's been kind of a superstar. Dean rarely has to nag him to take his meds or check his peak flow, and when he does, Sam takes it well and usually shuts up and listens to his older (smarter, better looking) brother. Aside from a few days after Jessica died, when coughing-up-a-lung, post-smoke-inhalation Sammy was "fine, it's nothing, it's no big deal," and the argument over whether or not Sam would be allergic to hellhounds a few days before Dean's deal ran out (Dean's side: Of course, they're fucking DOGS, and Sam's: Why the fuck are we discussing this?--Dean maintains that he won that one), it's never been a point of stress. Sam takes his meds, he has attacks, they deal. There's a nebulizer in the trunk of the Impala, next to the machetes. There's an emergency oxygen canister in the backseat somewhere. Somewhere in the wreckage of Bobby's house, there's the inhaler that used to live in his medicine cabinet.
So when they're a week out of the Leviathan-encrusted hospital and Dean's crashed on the couch in front of some talk show about some girl who can't decide whether to leave her husband (and seriously, the guy's beating her and she can't decide, did the world get stupider while he was laid up?) and Sam starts wheezing over in the kitchen, his first thought is, "He's got it."
Okay, actually, his first thought is "It's about damn time," because this cabin is some dusty, germy cesspool Dean's been bitching about on his brother's behalf since they get here, and Bobby, after God knows how many nights kept awake by Sam's coughing, really did not seem to understand what the big deal was. "Cleaning's a two man job," he said. "We'll handle it when you're on your feet." So, cool, his kid brother would just suffocate for a few weeks. Awesome. No big deal.
So, yeah, it's a long time coming.
He turns around on the couch to try to get a glimpse of tall, dark, and whistling back there, but all it does is jar his leg, and he winces and hunkers down further on the couch.
Two minutes later and he's still wheezing.
"Sam?"
No answer, but the wheezing snags halfway through an exhale and breaks into coughing. Dean winces. It sounds bad, but not bad enough that the kid shouldn't be able to answer him. He forces himself to turn fully around this time, but he still can't see anything but Sam's feet underneath the kitchen table.
"Sam, come on, you gonna make me get up? I think this chick is finally coming around. These tears look real." Come on, Sam. Respond to something. Bitch at me for talking about TV when you can't breathe. Say SOMETHING.
More coughing, and a wheeze so brutal he thinks he can hear it scraping at the bottoms of Sammy's lungs.
"Shit." He grabs the crutch and swings himself off the couch. He closes his eyes and steadies himself on the lamp, some weak piece of '70s throwback shit (or, knowing this place, actual '70s, which would maybe make him kind of happy except his damn kid isn't breathing so there's a very short list of things that could do that right now, maybe 1. Mary Winchester and 2. a fucking oxygen tank) and feels all the blood drain from his head down to his leg, then the one-two punch of dizziness and throbbing all the way down to his foot. Normally he'd take deep breaths to get through the pain. Right now even thinking about it feels cruel.
He gets himself into the kitchen. "All right, did you lose the inhaler or what? I'm not really fit for hide and seek right now."
Sam's sitting at the kitchen table, staring sort of at the refrigerator and sort of at the counter next to it but very definitely not at Dean.
"Hey," Dean says.
Sam doesn't look, doesn't even move except to duck his chin slightly into his shoulder to cough, and his chest is deflating so slowly, like a flat tire.
And his eyes are doing that wide, liquid thing that Dean just cannot fucking take, and his lips are a little open (and a little purple) and fuck, not now, okay?
"Hey." Dean picks Sam's hand off the table and pushes his thumb into mess on his palm. It's half-healed now and a pretty hideous rainbow of colors, and it's probably the slowest to heal of any injury they've ever had, counting the fucking tire iron Sam took to the head what, 362 hours ago? and counting that four-inch stab wound Dean got hunting that skinwalker when he was sixteen (though Sammy probably had something do with that quick healing, because there's nothing like pre-pubescent puppy eyes and the wheezy tears of a panicked virgin to make you want to take care of yourself right the fuck now) because neither of them will stop aggravating it. But if this is what it takes to bring Sam back to real life, hell, he'll rip the stitches open himself everyday, or leave some broken glass around for Sam to conveniently drop into. Whatever it takes to bring him out.
Except it's kind of not working. Meaning it kind of is, and at least Sammy's starting to look confused instead of just terrified, and he's blinking a lot through whatever kind of static Dean's pushing into his hallucination, but it looks like the wheezing is distracting him from the pain and he's not looking at Dean and he still isn't goddamn breathing.
And Dean looks down at the hand he's holding and sees the fingertips are kinda blue.
He pushes into his palm again, hard, and he feels a warm bubble of blood right as Sam startles, turns, and looks at him, and there he is, there's Sam. There's Sam gasping and choking and coughing on what sounds like every grain of dust in this place.
And he has this look on his face like he's noticing it for the first time, but also--and this is what scares Dean the most, more than the way his fucking leg is throbbing from this ridiculous angle he has leaning over the table, more than Sam's blue lips, more than those eyes that look like they might be about to cry and damn it Sammy don't you dare, even more than his nails digging into Dean's hand like he thinks he's going to leave him or something, is that moment when he realizes that Sam has no idea what's going on.
Because the kid's soul hasn't had a bad asthma attack in, what, a hundred and Dean-doesn't-like-to-count-how-many years, and the kid's brain is God knows where, and the Leviathans and his leg and the whole world and Lucifer over in the corner can just wait a fucking second, all right?
"Hey," Dean says. "We're focusing on me, got it?" He touches the bridge of Sam's nose, right between his eyes, then his own. "Not the asthma. Not Lucifer. Me. Got it?"
Sam nods and coughs. His eyes are on Dean's like they're magnetized.
"Good."
He lets himself sit down, finally, and finds Sam's inhaler halfway out of his pocket. Okay, so he was about to get a handle on this when Lucifer crashed the party. All right. That's fine. (That's the furthest fucking thing from fine.)
He shakes it. Sam startles a little at the sound.
"Yeah, that's normal, isn't it?" Dean says, quietly. "Your favorite word."
He gets a weak smile for this.
"All right." He takes Sam's good hand and wraps it around the inhaler. "You got this?"
Sam nods and takes a hit from it, which is good, because Dean hasn't given him his inhaler since he was in grade school, and he really doesn't need to bring back memories of waking up to Sam blue and helpless in the next bed, but after tonight he's wondering if he's going to be begging to shove the medicine down Sam's throat himself every time to get rid of thismemory, to try to shake off sitting her useless, hurting, scared out of his mind, watching his little brother locked inside a body that's just giving up on him every time he turns around.
The first hit helps but isn't enough, and it's just making Sam jumpier. Dean ends up playing with the hem of the kid's sleeve, just to give them both something to concentrate on while they wait a few minutes for the next hit.
"What happened?" Sam says, eventually, and God, Dean isn't a sap or anything (it's not crying if it's just one tear, bitch) but it's good to hear his voice.
"You're allergic to dust, and possibly Lucifer."
"Just my luck."
"Heh. Yeah."
He coughs into his elbow for a while.
"Is he still here?" Dean says.
Sam nods. "But just, like, in the background?"
Uptalking like he's some kind of kid. Sam.
"Yeah," Dean says. "Good."
Sam lowers his head to the table and closes his eyes, wheezes out a breath. He looks a lot better, even if he doesn't really sound it yet.
"You scared the shit out of me," Dean says.
"There was a lot going on. It wasn't just him. He, uh, brought props."
"Must have been pretty good ones if you didn't even notice..." for some reason the word 'asthma' sticks in his throat, and he just gestures towards Sam's lungs, touches them a little, because maybe he was just supposed to touch Sam just then. A little. The grip on his sleeve isn't really cutting it, and Sam's such a girl, he needs physical contact sometimes, it's totally his fault.
Sam gives him another one of those really heartbreaking (is the word Sam would use) smiles and shrugs up one shoulder. "Just the flames and shit, you know, it kind of blended in."
And Dean's sitting here wondering what the hell that means when his brain starts piecing images together like a collage--Sam smiling, laughing, wheezing, shouldering the shovel after what really was an easy salt and burn, Sam coughing in long, breathless strings at goddamn birthday candles, Sam after Jessica, Sam pale and breathless in the dark whenever a hunt was too far north, Sam's hacking in the middle of the night in motels when the air conditioning came on, Sam throwing a pillow at Dean because he's laughing that Sam, a fucking hunter, is gasping for breath from the goddamn Sixth Sense...
...and they all come together and there's his brother in a frozen cage full of thick smoke and his worst nightmares for a hundredsomethingDeanisNOTgoingtocountitout years, and Dean's thinking, did Sam have an inhaler when he fell in? which has got to be the stupidest thought he's ever had, because the kid goes through them like tissue boxes when he's up here so how the hell would one have helped him down there?
"Dean? Hey."
Dean isn't looking at him. "One second."
Sam coughs, Dean winces, and Sam says, "Sorry. I'll get you something for your leg."
He's really dense sometimes. "Leg's fine, Sam. Take another hit, all right?"
So he does, and a minute later he's sounding almost normal, and his head's out of his hands and his smiles don't make Dean consider suicide, so Dean will count it as a victory.
"This is your first time off the couch in ages," Sam says. "I'm getting you something. Since when do you turn down narcotics?"
"Since never. And I'm not starting now." Because really he just wants to see Sam move around, Sam get up, Sam not be trapped. Sam breathe.
He does all of the above, giving the back of Dean's head a little tap on his way out of the room to find Dean's pills.
The inhaler's still on the table. Dean picks it up, rolls it around in his hand.
Then he holds it up and sprays a hit in the corner, where Lucifer was.
He says, "Suck it, bitch." It helps a little.
Summary: For the 7.03 Comment Fic Meme. Prompt: "The cabin [in 7.03] is really dusty, so there's respiratory distress." This was the beginning of the end for me, obviously.
Warnings/Spoilers:Through 7.03.
Wordcount: 2,109
Author's Note: I don't even know if this thing is in the verse because who the hell knows where I'm going to be come season 7, so I'm leaving it out for now.
To Sam's credit, he's usually great about his asthma. A brutal, two-days-in-the-hospital-waiting-for-news attack when he was seven put it on the official Winchester list of Things We Do Not Fuck With, and a few bad attacks over the years made sure it stayed there. Sam's emo phase of alternating between "leave me alone, GOD" and "why did I have to be stuck with this burden?" (okay, so never those exact words, Dean thinks, but seriously, it DOES sound like something Sam would say, right?) came and went when he was fourteen, and since then, Dean has to admit, the kid's been kind of a superstar. Dean rarely has to nag him to take his meds or check his peak flow, and when he does, Sam takes it well and usually shuts up and listens to his older (smarter, better looking) brother. Aside from a few days after Jessica died, when coughing-up-a-lung, post-smoke-inhalation Sammy was "fine, it's nothing, it's no big deal," and the argument over whether or not Sam would be allergic to hellhounds a few days before Dean's deal ran out (Dean's side: Of course, they're fucking DOGS, and Sam's: Why the fuck are we discussing this?--Dean maintains that he won that one), it's never been a point of stress. Sam takes his meds, he has attacks, they deal. There's a nebulizer in the trunk of the Impala, next to the machetes. There's an emergency oxygen canister in the backseat somewhere. Somewhere in the wreckage of Bobby's house, there's the inhaler that used to live in his medicine cabinet.
So when they're a week out of the Leviathan-encrusted hospital and Dean's crashed on the couch in front of some talk show about some girl who can't decide whether to leave her husband (and seriously, the guy's beating her and she can't decide, did the world get stupider while he was laid up?) and Sam starts wheezing over in the kitchen, his first thought is, "He's got it."
Okay, actually, his first thought is "It's about damn time," because this cabin is some dusty, germy cesspool Dean's been bitching about on his brother's behalf since they get here, and Bobby, after God knows how many nights kept awake by Sam's coughing, really did not seem to understand what the big deal was. "Cleaning's a two man job," he said. "We'll handle it when you're on your feet." So, cool, his kid brother would just suffocate for a few weeks. Awesome. No big deal.
So, yeah, it's a long time coming.
He turns around on the couch to try to get a glimpse of tall, dark, and whistling back there, but all it does is jar his leg, and he winces and hunkers down further on the couch.
Two minutes later and he's still wheezing.
"Sam?"
No answer, but the wheezing snags halfway through an exhale and breaks into coughing. Dean winces. It sounds bad, but not bad enough that the kid shouldn't be able to answer him. He forces himself to turn fully around this time, but he still can't see anything but Sam's feet underneath the kitchen table.
"Sam, come on, you gonna make me get up? I think this chick is finally coming around. These tears look real." Come on, Sam. Respond to something. Bitch at me for talking about TV when you can't breathe. Say SOMETHING.
More coughing, and a wheeze so brutal he thinks he can hear it scraping at the bottoms of Sammy's lungs.
"Shit." He grabs the crutch and swings himself off the couch. He closes his eyes and steadies himself on the lamp, some weak piece of '70s throwback shit (or, knowing this place, actual '70s, which would maybe make him kind of happy except his damn kid isn't breathing so there's a very short list of things that could do that right now, maybe 1. Mary Winchester and 2. a fucking oxygen tank) and feels all the blood drain from his head down to his leg, then the one-two punch of dizziness and throbbing all the way down to his foot. Normally he'd take deep breaths to get through the pain. Right now even thinking about it feels cruel.
He gets himself into the kitchen. "All right, did you lose the inhaler or what? I'm not really fit for hide and seek right now."
Sam's sitting at the kitchen table, staring sort of at the refrigerator and sort of at the counter next to it but very definitely not at Dean.
"Hey," Dean says.
Sam doesn't look, doesn't even move except to duck his chin slightly into his shoulder to cough, and his chest is deflating so slowly, like a flat tire.
And his eyes are doing that wide, liquid thing that Dean just cannot fucking take, and his lips are a little open (and a little purple) and fuck, not now, okay?
"Hey." Dean picks Sam's hand off the table and pushes his thumb into mess on his palm. It's half-healed now and a pretty hideous rainbow of colors, and it's probably the slowest to heal of any injury they've ever had, counting the fucking tire iron Sam took to the head what, 362 hours ago? and counting that four-inch stab wound Dean got hunting that skinwalker when he was sixteen (though Sammy probably had something do with that quick healing, because there's nothing like pre-pubescent puppy eyes and the wheezy tears of a panicked virgin to make you want to take care of yourself right the fuck now) because neither of them will stop aggravating it. But if this is what it takes to bring Sam back to real life, hell, he'll rip the stitches open himself everyday, or leave some broken glass around for Sam to conveniently drop into. Whatever it takes to bring him out.
Except it's kind of not working. Meaning it kind of is, and at least Sammy's starting to look confused instead of just terrified, and he's blinking a lot through whatever kind of static Dean's pushing into his hallucination, but it looks like the wheezing is distracting him from the pain and he's not looking at Dean and he still isn't goddamn breathing.
And Dean looks down at the hand he's holding and sees the fingertips are kinda blue.
He pushes into his palm again, hard, and he feels a warm bubble of blood right as Sam startles, turns, and looks at him, and there he is, there's Sam. There's Sam gasping and choking and coughing on what sounds like every grain of dust in this place.
And he has this look on his face like he's noticing it for the first time, but also--and this is what scares Dean the most, more than the way his fucking leg is throbbing from this ridiculous angle he has leaning over the table, more than Sam's blue lips, more than those eyes that look like they might be about to cry and damn it Sammy don't you dare, even more than his nails digging into Dean's hand like he thinks he's going to leave him or something, is that moment when he realizes that Sam has no idea what's going on.
Because the kid's soul hasn't had a bad asthma attack in, what, a hundred and Dean-doesn't-like-to-count-how-many years, and the kid's brain is God knows where, and the Leviathans and his leg and the whole world and Lucifer over in the corner can just wait a fucking second, all right?
"Hey," Dean says. "We're focusing on me, got it?" He touches the bridge of Sam's nose, right between his eyes, then his own. "Not the asthma. Not Lucifer. Me. Got it?"
Sam nods and coughs. His eyes are on Dean's like they're magnetized.
"Good."
He lets himself sit down, finally, and finds Sam's inhaler halfway out of his pocket. Okay, so he was about to get a handle on this when Lucifer crashed the party. All right. That's fine. (That's the furthest fucking thing from fine.)
He shakes it. Sam startles a little at the sound.
"Yeah, that's normal, isn't it?" Dean says, quietly. "Your favorite word."
He gets a weak smile for this.
"All right." He takes Sam's good hand and wraps it around the inhaler. "You got this?"
Sam nods and takes a hit from it, which is good, because Dean hasn't given him his inhaler since he was in grade school, and he really doesn't need to bring back memories of waking up to Sam blue and helpless in the next bed, but after tonight he's wondering if he's going to be begging to shove the medicine down Sam's throat himself every time to get rid of thismemory, to try to shake off sitting her useless, hurting, scared out of his mind, watching his little brother locked inside a body that's just giving up on him every time he turns around.
The first hit helps but isn't enough, and it's just making Sam jumpier. Dean ends up playing with the hem of the kid's sleeve, just to give them both something to concentrate on while they wait a few minutes for the next hit.
"What happened?" Sam says, eventually, and God, Dean isn't a sap or anything (it's not crying if it's just one tear, bitch) but it's good to hear his voice.
"You're allergic to dust, and possibly Lucifer."
"Just my luck."
"Heh. Yeah."
He coughs into his elbow for a while.
"Is he still here?" Dean says.
Sam nods. "But just, like, in the background?"
Uptalking like he's some kind of kid. Sam.
"Yeah," Dean says. "Good."
Sam lowers his head to the table and closes his eyes, wheezes out a breath. He looks a lot better, even if he doesn't really sound it yet.
"You scared the shit out of me," Dean says.
"There was a lot going on. It wasn't just him. He, uh, brought props."
"Must have been pretty good ones if you didn't even notice..." for some reason the word 'asthma' sticks in his throat, and he just gestures towards Sam's lungs, touches them a little, because maybe he was just supposed to touch Sam just then. A little. The grip on his sleeve isn't really cutting it, and Sam's such a girl, he needs physical contact sometimes, it's totally his fault.
Sam gives him another one of those really heartbreaking (is the word Sam would use) smiles and shrugs up one shoulder. "Just the flames and shit, you know, it kind of blended in."
And Dean's sitting here wondering what the hell that means when his brain starts piecing images together like a collage--Sam smiling, laughing, wheezing, shouldering the shovel after what really was an easy salt and burn, Sam coughing in long, breathless strings at goddamn birthday candles, Sam after Jessica, Sam pale and breathless in the dark whenever a hunt was too far north, Sam's hacking in the middle of the night in motels when the air conditioning came on, Sam throwing a pillow at Dean because he's laughing that Sam, a fucking hunter, is gasping for breath from the goddamn Sixth Sense...
...and they all come together and there's his brother in a frozen cage full of thick smoke and his worst nightmares for a hundredsomethingDeanisNOTgoingtocountitout years, and Dean's thinking, did Sam have an inhaler when he fell in? which has got to be the stupidest thought he's ever had, because the kid goes through them like tissue boxes when he's up here so how the hell would one have helped him down there?
"Dean? Hey."
Dean isn't looking at him. "One second."
Sam coughs, Dean winces, and Sam says, "Sorry. I'll get you something for your leg."
He's really dense sometimes. "Leg's fine, Sam. Take another hit, all right?"
So he does, and a minute later he's sounding almost normal, and his head's out of his hands and his smiles don't make Dean consider suicide, so Dean will count it as a victory.
"This is your first time off the couch in ages," Sam says. "I'm getting you something. Since when do you turn down narcotics?"
"Since never. And I'm not starting now." Because really he just wants to see Sam move around, Sam get up, Sam not be trapped. Sam breathe.
He does all of the above, giving the back of Dean's head a little tap on his way out of the room to find Dean's pills.
The inhaler's still on the table. Dean picks it up, rolls it around in his hand.
Then he holds it up and sprays a hit in the corner, where Lucifer was.
He says, "Suck it, bitch." It helps a little.