Make Thick My Blood (5/5)
Dean swings the Impala round into the forecourt of the motel, a long low single-storey building painted with slot machine motifs. The woman behind the desk raises an eyebrow when Dean asks for the room on the far end, but shrugs her shoulders and slides him the key, never removing the cigarette that hangs from her lips. Her nails are painted a bright, shocking shade of mauve that reminds Dean suddenly of the bruise on Sam’s cheek, the colour it had been when he stepped into the library and saw Sam spread there under Castiel’s hands.
When he gets back to the car, Sam’s curled over in the front seat, clutching his knees. His hair is already damp with sweat and when Dean puts a hand on his back, he flinches.
“Sorry, Sammy,” says Dean. “I need to get you into the room, OK?”
Sam nods, but his hands don’t leave his knees and Dean has to lean over to pry the fingers open and off. He offers his own hand to Sam then, pulls him up, steadies him as he sways unsteady on the asphalt and props him up against the car as Dean grabs all their shit from the trunk. Once he’s got the bags slung over his shoulders, he takes Sam by the elbow and steers him along to their room. Thank God for this place being in the middle of nowhere. There’s no sign of movement from any of the other rooms and Dean’s hoping, hoping they won’t be disturbed. The other couple of times they’ve done this, Sam got kinda loud.
“OK.” The door swings open on a dispiriting twin-bedded room, grey-green wallpaper with an indistinguishable swirly pattern and garish red-orange linens on the beds. There are two windows, but they’re not large and even in the afternoon light the room is pretty dark. Dean leads Sam to the nearest bed, sits him down on the edge of it, steps back to assess. The colour of Sam’s face concerns him. Sam’s white where he’s not flushed a hectic pink, bright spots on his cheeks and dark circles already forming under his eyes. While Dean is watching, Sam lifts a trembling hand, pinches hard at the bridge of his nose. A headache, then.
Dean inwardly curses himself. He’s an idiot for not having thought this through.
“Hey, Sam,” he says.
Sam looks up at him, just for a moment - then his gaze skitters away, until he’s staring off into the distance somewhere beyond the bathroom door.
“Sorry,” he says. “Sorry. I was hoping we’d be able to get back home before this began.”
“You don’t gotta apologise, Sam,” Dean says.
Sam smiles, brief and painful. He wrings his hands tight in his lap. “Maybe it’s the shock of all of it at once, out of nowhere. It took longer before.”
“Well,” Dean says, useless. “We just gotta deal with it, I suppose. We’re here now.”
“Yes,” Sam says.
“About that…” Dean looks towards the window. “We might be stuck in this place for a while. If I’m gonna go get supplies, I better do it sooner rather than later. Right?”
Sam nods, but there’s an absence to the movement. Dean’s not sure how much he’s hearing.
“I won’t be long,” Dean tells him, backing hurriedly out of the door.
The nearest decent-sized store proves to be around thirty miles away, so it’s the best part of an hour before he returns, heart pounding an urgent rhythm in his chest. It’s crazy. Last time this happened he locked Sam in a metal room and pretty much sat on the key, so why he's now so desperate to get back to it he can’t quite say. Still, he feels a warm wave of relief when the motel’s battered sign finally makes its appearance between the trees at the side of the road; and he almost fumbles the keys in his hurry to close up the car and get back to their room.
He unlocks the door to find the room dark and oppressive, curtains drawn and windows closed and the air already turning stale. Sam is lying on the bed in the far corner of the room, curled up in a fetal position on top of the blankets. He is still wearing his shoes.
Dean approaches cautiously, hoping Sam’s asleep. But as he steps closer, Sam lifts his head. He makes a soft, indistinct noise.
Dean gestures with the bags he’s still holding. “Got some stuff,” he says. “Food. Painkillers. Gatorade.”
Sam nods, drops his head back down; and Dean hovers for a moment, uncertain, before he turns to unpack. He’s trying to be quiet, which of course means that every plastic packet or paper bag rattles like goddamn gunfire.
Once he finally gets everything out, Dean feels a sense of relief that’s almost comically fleeting. Now what? At a loss, he lines up everything neatly, all the groceries in two smart rows. It takes about thirty seconds. Okay. Well. He’ll just stand there quietly and think about his next move.
“You can put the television on,” Sam says. He’s still facing the other way.
“Your head’s hurting,” says Dean.
With an effort, Sam hoists himself up, shifts around so he’s leaning on one elbow and looking at Dean. His colour is terrible; his hair is sticking to his face.
“It’s not… it’s gonna be a long time before things get dramatic,” he says. “I’m just gonna be low-level miserable for the next twelve hours.”
Dean is quiet.
“Seriously,” says Sam. “If you want to get another room, it’s okay. Then you can watch TV, or whatever, without worrying about my head.”
“Oh come on,” Dean says. “I’m not leaving you here on your own.”
Sam opens his mouth, closes it. He takes a deep breath. Then he twists back over, flops down on his stomach onto the bed. He says, to the wall, “I’m not going to leave.”
“Huh?”
“It’s not… you don’t have to keep an eye on me. Lock me down. Whatever. I don’t… It’s not like the first time. I’m not going to go out and look for more of it. I’m not trying to save the world.” Silence. Then, “Fuck,” says Sam wearily. “I don’t even care. Chain me to the bed if it will make you less worried about it. It’s hardly going to make me feel worse.”
Hell if that doesn’t make Dean feel like shoe-shined shit. But he chokes down his anger and apology both, and rattles the aspirin in its plastic bottle. “No chains, no TV,” he says. “Now take some painkillers. And try to sleep.”
Sam swallows the tablets obediently, hoisting himself awkwardly up on his elbow to do so, sipping at the bottle of water Dean holds to his lips. He might say it’s not kicked in yet but he’s already half-helpless, letting Dean baby him like he’d never normally allow.
“Okay,” says Dean, and he bends over to pull off Sam’s boots. He tucks Sam under the scratchy motel blanket, settles an understuffed pillow under Sam’s head, and retreats to his own bed. Digging around in his bag, he comes up with an old, battered copy of The Fellowship of the Ring. “I’ll just be right here,” he says.
“Me too,” says Sam, and they settle into silence.
Dean can tell that Sam’s not really sleeping: his breathing’s too careful, not quite regular. But somewhere in between Rivendell and Lothlorien, Dean himself dozes off.
He shakes awake some hours later to the sound of Sam vomiting into the carpet. He’s on his hands and knees, on the small patch of floor between the beds and the bathroom door. When Dean sits up, Sam swings around, face guilty and flushed.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t -” he gestures with his hand, towards the bathroom; but the movement cuts short as he folds back over, coughing out bile.
“Hey,” says Dean, “hey, hey, hey,” and scrambles uncoordinated off the bed (his limbs still stiff with sleep) to kneel beside his brother. He rubs a careful hand over Sam’s upper back, a slow tick-tock between bony shoulders that used to be solid. “You done?” he says.
“Maybe,” says Sam. “I hope so. I don’t even…” and he coughs again, but his stomach must be empty because he’s just retching nothing, choking painfully on the air.
“Okay,” says Dean, soothing, and he tugs at Sam’s shoulder, settles his brother in a sitting position with his legs out straight in front of him and his back against the end of the bed. “I’m gonna get you some water. Stay here.”
Sam drinks the water, but he can’t hold it down for more than a few minutes. As he throws up into the trashcan, Dean holds back his hair and starts to think about the other times that Sam went through this. The Lucky Strike is hardly fucking Caesar’s Palace, he knows, but it’s a helluva a lot more comfortable than Bobby’s iron-lined panic room. And down there, Sam was doing this all alone.
Dean helped to clear the room out afterward, both times. He knows that shit got messy. It’s just different, seeing things up close.
Eventually, Sam stops being sick (or maybe it’s just that he stops really drinking the water that Dean’s trying to feed him); so Dean lifts him carefully, hands under Sam’s shoulders, and arranges him back on top of the uncomfortable bed.
“You okay?” he asks and Sam nods, twisting his face in painful imitation of a smile.
“It’ll pass.”
“Yeah,” says Dean.
Sam’s boiling up, stripped down to a T-shirt that’s stuck sweaty against his skin, so once he’s lying there quietly Dean ventures out to the motel forecourt to get some ice, stopping off at the dented vending machine for some drinks that are actually cold. As the bottles rattle down into the dispenser, he leans against the wall, presses his face into the concrete. The fresh air is a relief from the fetid, nauseating smell inside their room; the silence, the distance from Sam’s suffering a relief as well.
He picks up his drinks, the plastic chill and sterile and smooth, and he heads back toward the bedroom.
As he approaches the door, he hears an almighty crash. He throws it open just in time to see Sam fly through the air and go smack into the corner of the wall where the bathroom extends into the room. The sharp edge connects with the side of Sam’s head, a wince-inducing blow, but Dean at least is able to hurry forward in time to break Sam’s fall. Even thin as he is, Sam’s heavy, dead-weight like this, and they tumble to the floor together in an awkward slump. Dean dabs his fingers across the cut in Sam’s temple. It’s already swelling. It’s gonna bruise like a bitch.
That’s when Sam’s muscles go rigid. His head flings back and his mouth drops open and his arms lift stiffly before him. Horrified, Dean can only look on as Sam starts shaking with the tremors of a full-on seizure, gargling some ghastly sound at the back of his throat. It’s not like this hasn’t happened before. Dean should know better by now, should know how to deal with this, but everything he’s ever tried to read goes out of his head. He tries to make himself soft, leans away from Sam’s flailing fists and watches to make sure that Sam doesn’t slam into anything else that will bruise him. He thinks about Sam in the panic room, muscles straining against the leather belts binding him to Bobby’s rusty camp bed.
The seizure doesn’t last long, maybe thirty seconds; but Sam is effectively out of it for a long while after, groggy and disoriented and scared. Dean tries to lift him back onto his bed, but the last thing he wants is to drop Sam and hurt him, so in the end he settles for piling the comforters from both beds, along with their sleeping bags, onto the floor; making a kind of nest where Sam can lay down and where he’s in no danger of hurting himself if (God forbid) he starts seizing again.
Curled up among the blankets, Sam seems to sleep, and Dean finds himself exhausted. Climbing onto his bare mattress, he lies down with his head at the foot of the bed, close to his brother. He closes his eyes.
~~~
Dean’s looking at himself in a mirror, something that he’s done often enough before. His hair is longer than usual, soft not spiky, and his shirt is red. If he were to blink his eyes, he knows they’d shift sharply to black. But he doesn’t do that. Instead, he tips back his head, opens his mouth and unfurls in a great gush of smoke. He can feel it, his atoms expanding, shaking loose. It’s a strange sensation, loaded with a weird kind of urgency; he has to make a conscious effort to keep himself together, to stop himself diffusing into ever more vaporous mist.
Down on the floor below him, his body slumps, empty, dead-eyed. Dean doesn’t need it any more: it’s time to find some new meat.
He gathers himself together in roiling clouds, whizzes out and up as the ceiling opens and transforms into sky. It’s a big, empty space but by now he knows where he’s going, and the stars around him blur rapidly into the green-grey tiles of the bunker. He speeds along the corridor, coils into an air vent and into Sam’s room; where his brother is lying on the bed, feet hanging off the too-short frame.
Yes, Dean thinks. He focuses himself down to an arrow of darkness, shooting with the force of a tight-strung bow into Sam’s soft, open mouth. He takes possession of what’s inside.
Dean strings himself out over his brother’s skeleton, settles himself into muscles and organs and stretches to feel his power. Somewhere very quietly, far away (somewhere like a panic room, down in the dark of the earth), Sam raises his voice in protest. Dean isn’t having any of it; forcing Sam down and silent with dazzling, dizzying ease.
It’s kind of wonderful, being able to make Sam do whatever he chooses. It’s what Dean’s wanted for a long, long time. Lift your hand, Sammy. Lift your leg, Do as your brother tells you, Sammy. Don’t do that. Do this. Do this. It’s wonderful, also, being inside Sam’s body; being beautiful, powerful, strong. Dean can’t keep his hands off it, Sam’s hands, whichever. He wants to touch himself all over; does.
Then the scene blurs, and Dean’s standing in a crowd. They’re jeering, hostile, and without even looking, he shoots out a hand and grabs onto the neck of the guy beside him. The guy’s choking, coughing, but Sam’s hands are huge and relentless. The man's eyes bulge, his skin shifting into purple. Dean squeezes harder.
At the back of his mind, Sam starts screaming. “Stop! I don’t want this, stop!”
The guy’s mouth is moving, opening and closing like a fish, and his struggling limbs are getting weaker. Dean squeezes on and Sam is still screaming, “please,” as the man turns darker, indigo-violet, and his eyes roll back in his head.
Dean wakes up at the exact same second that the corpse hits the floor.
What a horrible nightmare. But the relief is short-lived, because although it’s the motel room around him, although there’s no body on the floor beside his bed, Sam is sitting up in his blankets underneath him and he’s crying out just as Dean heard him doing in a dream not a moment ago.
“I’m sorry,” Sam’s saying. “I’m sorry I’m sorry please stop.”
Dean grinds his knuckles into his own eyes, squeezing himself awake. Jesus. This thing is relentless.
His hand must be only an inch away from Sam’s shoulder when “Please, Dean,” Sam says.
Dean stops dead.
Sam’s still speaking, an incessant low murmur that rises occasionally into a sob. His eyes are open, glassy; it’s clear that he’s seeing something that is not there.
“Please get out,” Sam says.
Dean’s spine turns to ice.
“Please get out, take it out of me, please,” and the tears are streaming down Sam’s face, “I just gotta, I don’t even, please just let me die, I don’t want to hurt anybody. Please. Not any more. I can’t.”
“Okay,” says Dean, although he’s not sure that Sam can hear him; and then Sam looks down, Dean follows his gaze, away from his brother’s blank white face to where his hands are laid in his lap.
“Jesus, Sam!”
There are long scratches down the length of Sam’s inner arms, startling and angry and Sam’s still scrabbling, gouging away with his fingernails into his flesh. God only knows how long he’s been doing it, and Dean curses himself for sleeping. Bright rivulets of blood run down to Sam’s elbow and drip dark onto the bedspread. What a fucking mess.
“Please,” Sam is saying, still. “Please, I don’t want it. I don’t want it. Get out.”
Dean goes to the bathroom, soaks a pair of hand towels in warm water, steps back in. He rests his hand on Sam’s shoulder, and Sam looks up. His face is blurry with tears.
“It’s in me, Dean,” he says. “I can’t get clean.”
Dean’s throat closes, suddenly: he can’t speak. But he takes Sam’s wrist in his own right hand, drapes a towel over Sam’s arm and wraps it tight. The blood soaks immediately into the dampened fabric. Sam looks down, confused.
“The blood,” he says.
“It’s OK,” says Dean, finding his voice. He binds the other arm. Sam flinches, this time, at the touch. “I’m sorry, Sammy,” Dean says.
“I don’t want it,” Sam says again, quietly.
“I know,” says Dean. “I know.”
~~~
Sam’s seeing things for the next few hours, different things, saying stuff that makes Dean want to climb out of his skin. But the worst, the worst happens when Dean comes out of the bathroom with a washcloth and Sam cowers right up against the wall, away.
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” Dean says. God knows who Sam’s seeing. Lucifer, Azazel. Him.
“Don’t kill me,” Sam says. “Dean will be angry.”
Yes, Dean thinks. Dean would be angry. And sad. Does Sam know that he’d be sad?
Sam beckons to him, fast and secret. He cups his hand very carefully over the shell of Dean’s ear, and whispers to him in a soft tiny ghost of a voice.
“I think he wants to do it himself.” As soon as he’s said it he claps his hand hard over his mouth. His eyes go big. “Don’t tell Dean I said that,” he says.
“I don’t - he doesn’t want to kill you,” Dean says. How could you, Sammy? he wants to say. But it’s been how many days since he held a knife between Sam’s shoulderblades? how many months since he swung that hammer with all the intention to kill? It’s not like those are the only times he wished Sam dead. When he got his brother’s soul back, he’d had nightmares for weeks, thinking about how close he came to butchering the shell that was still half-Sam.
“Don’t worry,” Sam tells him. “I know it’s confusing. But there are definitely rules.”
Dean swallows.
“Let’s just try to be good,” Sam says.
Okay. No. Dean can’t do this any more.
He’s probably crying when he runs out to the car; probably crying or else his eyes are melting down, burning up like he deserves to for what Sam’s been saying.
He makes it as far as the driver’s seat, keys in the ignition, feet braced on the pedals below. He could. He could start it up, peel off and peel out, leave Sam here until the worst of it's over and send Cas to mop up the mess. It's pretty obvious that he's not making much difference to Sam. Kid doesn't even recognise him. Hell, if anything he’s probably making it worse, his face in Sam’s nightmares while he’s right there beside him blurring the lines between hallucination and what’s real.
Cas might be Sam’s friend, now, but Dean could really do with having him here; even if all he’d be able to do is to look concerned and to say to Dean, “That isn’t your brother in there.”
Of course, that’s exactly the problem. It is Sam. All of it. The good bits and the bad bits and the really fucking annoying bits, the stuff Dean wants to exorcise to get back to some mythical core which will turn out to be the real Sam, who he’s been missing for so long. It’s a joke, right? It’s impossible. It’s a lie. This is Sam. This is Sam. And Dean has to find a way to stop searching for some imaginary little brother who’s maybe never been there, and to try to find out how to be big enough and good enough for the man who is.
And that means… that means not walking out. Dean’s done it before, often enough: turned tail and left Sam desperate or near-suicidal behind him. He left Sam alone in the panic room at Bobby’s, because he couldn’t handle watching the kid suffer. He left Sam spiralling and isolated after what happened with Gadreel, left because he was wrestling his own guilt and couldn’t stand to have Sam add more. But it’s more than that. He might not always run away, not physically, not every time, but he’s master of the emotional withdrawal. Even he knows that. Sam’ll come to him with those big worried eyes and he’ll try to say something comforting, offer up his tender belly and Dean will say something sardonic, shift into mocking and prickly where Sam’s been vulnerably sincere.
Dean closes his eyes. The image of Sam, chugging down demon blood for Dean’s sake, presents itself.
“Fuck,” he says. “Fuck, okay,” and gets out of the car.
~~~
The hallucinations finally let up about two days later, leaving Sam mute and miserable, sweating and shivery in turn. This, though, Dean feels better able to manage; finds himself finally confident bringing Sam water and sugar and soup.
“You’re doing awesome, kiddo,” he says.
“I’m not a baby,” Sam mumbles, but he lets Dean baby him; lets Dean run him a bath and even, shamefaced, asks Dean to wash his hair. “All my joints hurt when I try to lift my arms,” he says.
Dean doesn’t quibble (doesn’t mention, either, the more intimate care he’s had to take of his brother these last few days), just pulls up a chair beside the bathtub and does as he’s told, watches the grime and the sweat and the vomit of the past few days bleed out of Sam’s hair and into the water and down the drain.
Sam’s so beaten up. He’s skinny, even skinnier, that’s what three days without eating will do. He’s bruised all over; and where he isn’t bruised, he’s cut, the scratches down his arms still dark and stark against his pale while skin. But he’s here, and it could be worse.
This isn’t a fix. Dean knows that down the road ahead of them is the bunker, with the blood that he spilt soaked into the floorboards and the bedrooms where they both lie awake. It isn’t a fix. But he did stick through this, saw Sam through this, and that has to count for something.
When Sam gets out of the bath he puts on his jeans, notches his belt a couple holes tighter around his waist, and then pulls Dean’s grey hoodie over his head. It’s big on him, which is disorientating.
“Okay,” Sam says, and he walks stiffly out of the door to the car. Dean’s loaded it already, but he stays just a second to look over the room, make sure they left nothing behind them.
Leaning against the doorframe, looking back into the bedroom, Dean runs a steadying hand down over his face. The soiled sheets, all of them, are piled in the centre of the room; and despite his best efforts with the open window, the whole place reeks of vomit and blood. He’s gonna be glad to leave. There were a good few moments over the past few days when he thought that Sam might die here; might die thinking that he was alone, too out of his mind to know that Dean was there.
“Hey,” says Sam, behind him.
Dean turns. His brother is standing beside the Impala, the sunlight making a halo of his hair.
“You okay?” Sam says.
“Yeah,” says Dean. “Yeah.”
He closes the motel door behind him, walks towards where Sam is standing. Their eyes meet, and Dean steps closer, giving into the urge to run his fingers through the sun-golden curls behind Sam’s ear. Sam catches his hand, brings it up to his mouth. He touches his lips to the inside of Dean's wrist, the pulse-point.
"Thanks for staying with me," Sam says.
Dean smiles, reclaims his hand. He knocks his fist against Sam's still-wobbly shoulder: gently, gently, so his brother doesn't break. "Hey, bro. Don't need to thank me. Just returning the favour,” he says.
Sam nods, almost imperceptibly, and then turns away, heads around the car to climb into his seat. Dean watches him. ‘Not never’, Sam had said. And looking at him, Dean starts to believe it. It isn’t never. It’s just ‘not yet’.
