Fic: Capture the Flag 15/24
Title: Capture the Flag
Author: triquetralmoon
Rating: R
Genre: H/C (respiratory illness, PTSD)
Warnings: Swearing, violence, flashbacks of graphic torture
Spoilers: Season 4, this is set in between Criss Angel Is a Douchebag and Sex and Violence.
Summary: A soldier in the war to stop the apocalypse, Dean is running himself into the ground as he runs away from his time in Hell. What he pegs as a simple sickness soon becomes something much more deadly. The Winchesters can never catch a break. For some soldiers, the war is never over.
Author's Note: Time for some answers.
Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7 / Chapter 8 / Chapter 9 / Chapter 10 / Chapter 11 / Chapter 12 / Chapter 13 / Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Breakfast of Champions
Glad to have something to do besides wheeze, Dean picked up the research with enthusiasm. The hours ticked by, Sam already having gotten permission for Bobby and himself to stick around past visiting hours, using untapped lawyering ability to argue in their favor. They only realized how many hours had gone by when Dean began to look green around the gills again, heralding the need for more anti-nausea medication. Sam tried to pull the file in Dean’s hands away from him.
"Hey, man. Time to get some rest."
"You two are looking worse than I am. Least I can do is join the party." Dean said unconvincingly, swallowing back the acrid taste of bile as his fingers clutched more firmly on the pages.
"Dude, you can re-join the party after you get some meds and some sleep. It isn't going to bode well for the research if you hurl all over it."
True enough. Dean had been fighting sleep for a bit anyway, the push to keep reading making his headache worse. Dean handed his stack with his accompanying notes to Sam with a sigh. "Lemme know if you find anything?"
"Who else am I going to gloat to when I find the answer before Bobby does?" Sam grinned impishly at Dean.
A mumbled 'we'll see about that, kid' came from the other side of the room where Bobby was sitting with several stacks of paper in front of him.
Sam and Bobby worked in silence, going back and forth to the nurse’s station for cups of coffee they were told that they were welcome to. Occasionally, one of their heads would pop up to mention some random fact about Michael Cole. They spoke quietly, not wanting to wake Dean up - he already was waking himself up every thirty minutes from the coughing. When the wheezing and gasping had gotten particularly bad, the nurse came in to force another nebulizer on Dean, which kept him awake and coughing for another hour, but it was more productive coughing and he seemed to sleep more deeply after that.
The plan of attack the two hunters were using didn’t seem to be working, although they had a pretty good outline of various hospitalizations, all psychiatric. Sam felt bad for the guy. It wasn’t like Cole had been an evil person. He'd been a troubled young man before he even enlisted in the army, but had come back from Vietnam broken.
Sam sat up straighter, trying to work out the soreness caused by slouching for hours in the uncomfortable chair, and blew out a huff of frustration. They were sitting there listening to his big brother struggle for breath and seemed no closer to an answer. He rubbed his eyes, blinking blearily at the notes in front of him.
"Maybe if we look at it from another angle?" Sam suggested. "There’s just too much stuff to go through here to figure out motive. When he was manic and off his meds, the guy saw everyone as a threat."
"So, what’s the new angle?" Bobby's voice was rough from disuse and lack of sleep.
"Well, we said we were going to look at all the people that weren’t soldiers - see what they had in common. You had that list, right?"
"Um, yeah, here." Bobby pulled one folder. "We can split it. Five in all, not counting Dean."
They sat in silence for a moment, each making their own notes on the profiles of the various deceased. "Bobby, how often does post traumatic stress come up in the records of all the enlisted men?"
"Often?" Bobby replied, not really looking up from his own notes.
"How often is often?" Sam lowered his pen.
Bobby flipped through his paperwork. "More than half. Maybe all of them. It wasn't listed as a diagnosis until the early 1980s, so folks before then wouldn't necessarily have it listed as the syndrome itself - but the flashbacks, the paralyzing fear, that's in their records. But, like I said before, Sam, that wasn't uncommon for soldiers, especially the men who saw action."
"Okay, well - there’s something. Jeremy Bishop, firefighter who got caught in a blaze and stayed out of the workforce for two years on psychiatric leave. Vera Strathmore, a police officer needed intensive therapy after she was, ouch, beaten and gangraped. You have any like that?"
Bobby sucked in a breath, eyes skimming the profiles in front of him. "Well, I’ll be damned! They all have something."
"Okay, so all our victims had some tragedy in their life, something severe enough to mess them up. Not all of them ended up in hospitals or on medication, but I’m sure we could argue PTSD."
"Wait a minute!" Bobby exclaimed, heart thumping in his chest. "Wait just a damn minute…" He spent a few minutes flipping through Cole’s files. "C’mon, c’mon…"
"What, Bobby?" Sam asked, confused.
"Shhh, don’t want to lose my train of thought…." Several long minutes later, Bobby finally found what he was looking for and began reading aloud. "Patient apathetic, severely depressed. States 'no one should have to remember things like I remember. The only way to end the memories is to die. I wish I could save us all. End all the pain for everyone.'" Bobby looked up at Sam meaningfully.
"So, his spirit is picking people with Post Traumatic Stress, or close to it…"
"Not only that, Sam, but they all fit a certain archetype. Soldiers, obviously. But even the civilians have jobs that are about protecting people and heading into dangerous situations to do it. Firefighters, police..."
"Suppose we know why he picked Dean, then. A hunter who is constantly willing to give above and beyond, and who remembers actual Hell." Sam sighed sadly.
He knew about the nightmares Dean had nearly every night, the drinking to forget, the single-minded pursuit of hunting - to find some peace, some distraction. He’d never stopped to equate it with something as - big - as PTSD. Sam held in his hands the files of people who were shattered by the things they had gone through, who would have never been the same - even if they had been given the opportunity to live full lives. Was his brother among them?
There was a part of him which immediately answered yes. It was Hell and it wasn’t going to be something anyone just got over. More and more, Dean didn’t seem to be the brother he knew, the brother who was always impossibly strong. Maybe it was the last ghost sickness that was nudging Sam toward that judgment and he felt terribly guilty about that. It was horribly unfair to judge Dean on the basis of reactions that were well out of his control. But, maybe that wasn't the only reason Sam felt that way. For awhile now, he had been feeling like he was the stronger one. Hell, Ruby was implying it constantly. The one time she had just outright said it to him, he stopped talking to her for a week.
And no, it wasn't just that Dean's fear had found its way to the surface time and time again. It was the utter exhaustion that seemed to follow him around (that Dean even seemed to embrace). World-weary, as an entry in the dictionary, would absolutely have one of Dean's mugshots next to it. So, yeah - part of Sam came very close to concluding that Dean very well could be shattered beyond recognition.
There was the other part of Sam, however, the part that would always doggedly look up to his older brother, the part of himself that made him stop talking to Ruby for that week, that desperately clung to the idea that Dean was okay, strong - stronger than most - and if anyone could face Hell and come out intact - it was him.
Still, here it was. This ghost only picked on folks it wanted to save from the horrible memories that punished them daily, people it felt were truly better off dead than reliving their pasts. And it chose Dean. It was evidence enough.
When Sam came out of his reverie, Bobby was looking at him, wearing the same sort of sad realization on his grizzled face, so he didn't ask whether Sam was okay. He simply clapped him on the shoulder as he passed by, mumbling something about how he was going to the motel to get some rest and how Sam should do the same.
Sam fell asleep, his body draped heavily across Dean's bed, oblivious to the nurses that kept coming in to check his brother's vitals or give him more medication. Eventually he woke up to the rumble of Dean trying to stifle his coughing so that he wouldn't jostle Sam around. Sam sat up slowly, checking the time on his cell phone, swore to himself when he realized he had slept way longer than he had intended. He glanced up at Dean to find he was being laughed at, the laugh setting the held-back cough loose.
"You have waffle-face, Sammy!" Dean crowed in glee in between the disease-ridden bursts of air.
Sam brought a hand up to his face, grinning as he felt the lines embedded in his skin. It was an old family joke from the many hospital visits they'd all had. One Winchester was always falling asleep at another one's side, face pressed sweatily into the pattern of the woven thermal blanket, and coming up looking like they'd been branded personally by the Eggo company.
"Seems I do. How're you feeling?"
"Better. Little less Pukey McPukerson. They got rid of that horrible crap from yesterday, started me on something new…Levitate? Something like that."
"I'll find out when I talk to the doctor later." Sam replied, shaking his head. Trust Dean to give modern medicine supernatural names. Sam gazed at his older brother, taking him in. "You sound better."
And he did. The dying accordion wheeze was still horribly present, the terrible thick coughing, but Dean seemed able to string together a sentence now without pausing to gasp for air.
"Just finished one of those nebu-whats-its bong things 'bout ten minutes ago." Dean explained. "Bobby stopped by earlier, said to call him. That guy's widow lives forty-five minutes away." Dean was panting by the end of the message and put the oxygen mask back over his nose and mouth with an eye roll before Sam could say a word about it. So, maybe he was only slightly better.
"He didn't go to finish it off by himself, did he?" Sam frowned.
"Naw, he said he was going to get some firm intel on where the flag is." Dean gave Sam a pained look. "Are we sure it's the flag…?"
"Fairly sure. From the checking we could do, she definitely brings it with her to every Legion event, so unless Cole is hitching a ride on something in her purse…" Sam trailed off. "It's our only solid lead on it. Why?"
Dean chuckled to himself the sound muffled behind the rubbery plastic. "I just feel like I expect Dad to come back from the beyond just to beat our asses for burning Ol' Glory like that."
"Yeah." Sam said soberly. "It does seem wrong. But, if it'll save your life, I'll take a little wrong." It was a statement that was meant to be comforting, a testament that they both were willing to bend over backwards, sacrifice personal morals, as long as it was for each other. Instead Dean regarded him quietly, as if trying to unearth how much wrong Sam was willing to give himself over to.
In the end, it was still Dean who broke the awkward silence. "So, why me?"
Sam bit his lip. "The jist of it is …soldiers who have been through a lot, who have been through more than most people can handle - we think that Cole is trying to end their misery." Sam idly rubbed at a coffee spill darkening his worn jeans, not meeting Dean's eyes.
"Jist…?" Dean let the unsaid question hang there - since when did he not get the full story?
And since when are you looking at me like I'm a goddamn drowning kitten?
"I dunno, man, I'm tired. Bobby and I were up pretty late last night."
"Uh-huh." Dean replied, the disbelief solid in his still crackling voice. "Go back to the motel for a bit, shower, get a little more sleep, some food."
All those things sounded good to Sam. Bobby would be gone for at least a couple of hours. Maybe it would be enough time to get Ruby here, to get his edge back - so that he felt like he could face his brother, nevermind face Lilith. He wanted to deny the urge, to immediately protest, sincerely, that he'd rather hang out with Dean, but the words just weren't coming. All he could think of was the possibility, however remote, that Ruby would get here and he'd feel her thick metallic heat dripping down the back of his throat, the controlled drip-drip-drip of the blood when she playfully held her arm out, giving him back the feeling that it was within his power to fix the world, fix his brother. It caught him at odd moments, the realization that fixing himself never came up. Either way, the urge was there - now - nearly taunting him.
"You sure?" Sam asked, bringing a hand up to scratch the back of his greasy head. "A shower sounds pretty good."
"Yeah, man." Dean's eyes were firmly on Sam's every fidget. "Just, leave the research with me. I can help while I'm awake."
"Yeah, sure." Sam said, because it was all he could say. To not have to have the "are you a broken shell of a man" conversation, frankly, was a bit of a relief. Cowardly, maybe, but he'd rather have Dean piece it together on his own than have to flat out tell him…'Gee, the ghost's vics are people who have been severely traumatized. By the way, brother, you fit that profile' and have an angry Dean denying everything anyway.
"Okay, well, I'm gonna go talk to one of your nurses - let them know to call me if anything changes. If you need anything, call. We'll see if you can keep down a burger later?"
"Sounds good." Dean replied, his mouth still in a firm line. He knew damn well something was up with his sibling. The way Sam was looking at him - it was near pitying, and Dean didn't do that from anyone, least of all his baby brother.
"Okay, then." Sam nodded, collecting the key files and notes that had brought the crucial information to light and handing them to Dean. "Back in a few hours."
Dean just nodded.
As soon as Sam left the room, Dean muttered under his breath. "Tell Ruby I said hello."
Part 16
Author: triquetralmoon
Rating: R
Genre: H/C (respiratory illness, PTSD)
Warnings: Swearing, violence, flashbacks of graphic torture
Spoilers: Season 4, this is set in between Criss Angel Is a Douchebag and Sex and Violence.
Summary: A soldier in the war to stop the apocalypse, Dean is running himself into the ground as he runs away from his time in Hell. What he pegs as a simple sickness soon becomes something much more deadly. The Winchesters can never catch a break. For some soldiers, the war is never over.
Author's Note: Time for some answers.
Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7 / Chapter 8 / Chapter 9 / Chapter 10 / Chapter 11 / Chapter 12 / Chapter 13 / Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Breakfast of Champions
Glad to have something to do besides wheeze, Dean picked up the research with enthusiasm. The hours ticked by, Sam already having gotten permission for Bobby and himself to stick around past visiting hours, using untapped lawyering ability to argue in their favor. They only realized how many hours had gone by when Dean began to look green around the gills again, heralding the need for more anti-nausea medication. Sam tried to pull the file in Dean’s hands away from him.
"Hey, man. Time to get some rest."
"You two are looking worse than I am. Least I can do is join the party." Dean said unconvincingly, swallowing back the acrid taste of bile as his fingers clutched more firmly on the pages.
"Dude, you can re-join the party after you get some meds and some sleep. It isn't going to bode well for the research if you hurl all over it."
True enough. Dean had been fighting sleep for a bit anyway, the push to keep reading making his headache worse. Dean handed his stack with his accompanying notes to Sam with a sigh. "Lemme know if you find anything?"
"Who else am I going to gloat to when I find the answer before Bobby does?" Sam grinned impishly at Dean.
A mumbled 'we'll see about that, kid' came from the other side of the room where Bobby was sitting with several stacks of paper in front of him.
Sam and Bobby worked in silence, going back and forth to the nurse’s station for cups of coffee they were told that they were welcome to. Occasionally, one of their heads would pop up to mention some random fact about Michael Cole. They spoke quietly, not wanting to wake Dean up - he already was waking himself up every thirty minutes from the coughing. When the wheezing and gasping had gotten particularly bad, the nurse came in to force another nebulizer on Dean, which kept him awake and coughing for another hour, but it was more productive coughing and he seemed to sleep more deeply after that.
The plan of attack the two hunters were using didn’t seem to be working, although they had a pretty good outline of various hospitalizations, all psychiatric. Sam felt bad for the guy. It wasn’t like Cole had been an evil person. He'd been a troubled young man before he even enlisted in the army, but had come back from Vietnam broken.
Sam sat up straighter, trying to work out the soreness caused by slouching for hours in the uncomfortable chair, and blew out a huff of frustration. They were sitting there listening to his big brother struggle for breath and seemed no closer to an answer. He rubbed his eyes, blinking blearily at the notes in front of him.
"Maybe if we look at it from another angle?" Sam suggested. "There’s just too much stuff to go through here to figure out motive. When he was manic and off his meds, the guy saw everyone as a threat."
"So, what’s the new angle?" Bobby's voice was rough from disuse and lack of sleep.
"Well, we said we were going to look at all the people that weren’t soldiers - see what they had in common. You had that list, right?"
"Um, yeah, here." Bobby pulled one folder. "We can split it. Five in all, not counting Dean."
They sat in silence for a moment, each making their own notes on the profiles of the various deceased. "Bobby, how often does post traumatic stress come up in the records of all the enlisted men?"
"Often?" Bobby replied, not really looking up from his own notes.
"How often is often?" Sam lowered his pen.
Bobby flipped through his paperwork. "More than half. Maybe all of them. It wasn't listed as a diagnosis until the early 1980s, so folks before then wouldn't necessarily have it listed as the syndrome itself - but the flashbacks, the paralyzing fear, that's in their records. But, like I said before, Sam, that wasn't uncommon for soldiers, especially the men who saw action."
"Okay, well - there’s something. Jeremy Bishop, firefighter who got caught in a blaze and stayed out of the workforce for two years on psychiatric leave. Vera Strathmore, a police officer needed intensive therapy after she was, ouch, beaten and gangraped. You have any like that?"
Bobby sucked in a breath, eyes skimming the profiles in front of him. "Well, I’ll be damned! They all have something."
"Okay, so all our victims had some tragedy in their life, something severe enough to mess them up. Not all of them ended up in hospitals or on medication, but I’m sure we could argue PTSD."
"Wait a minute!" Bobby exclaimed, heart thumping in his chest. "Wait just a damn minute…" He spent a few minutes flipping through Cole’s files. "C’mon, c’mon…"
"What, Bobby?" Sam asked, confused.
"Shhh, don’t want to lose my train of thought…." Several long minutes later, Bobby finally found what he was looking for and began reading aloud. "Patient apathetic, severely depressed. States 'no one should have to remember things like I remember. The only way to end the memories is to die. I wish I could save us all. End all the pain for everyone.'" Bobby looked up at Sam meaningfully.
"So, his spirit is picking people with Post Traumatic Stress, or close to it…"
"Not only that, Sam, but they all fit a certain archetype. Soldiers, obviously. But even the civilians have jobs that are about protecting people and heading into dangerous situations to do it. Firefighters, police..."
"Suppose we know why he picked Dean, then. A hunter who is constantly willing to give above and beyond, and who remembers actual Hell." Sam sighed sadly.
He knew about the nightmares Dean had nearly every night, the drinking to forget, the single-minded pursuit of hunting - to find some peace, some distraction. He’d never stopped to equate it with something as - big - as PTSD. Sam held in his hands the files of people who were shattered by the things they had gone through, who would have never been the same - even if they had been given the opportunity to live full lives. Was his brother among them?
There was a part of him which immediately answered yes. It was Hell and it wasn’t going to be something anyone just got over. More and more, Dean didn’t seem to be the brother he knew, the brother who was always impossibly strong. Maybe it was the last ghost sickness that was nudging Sam toward that judgment and he felt terribly guilty about that. It was horribly unfair to judge Dean on the basis of reactions that were well out of his control. But, maybe that wasn't the only reason Sam felt that way. For awhile now, he had been feeling like he was the stronger one. Hell, Ruby was implying it constantly. The one time she had just outright said it to him, he stopped talking to her for a week.
And no, it wasn't just that Dean's fear had found its way to the surface time and time again. It was the utter exhaustion that seemed to follow him around (that Dean even seemed to embrace). World-weary, as an entry in the dictionary, would absolutely have one of Dean's mugshots next to it. So, yeah - part of Sam came very close to concluding that Dean very well could be shattered beyond recognition.
There was the other part of Sam, however, the part that would always doggedly look up to his older brother, the part of himself that made him stop talking to Ruby for that week, that desperately clung to the idea that Dean was okay, strong - stronger than most - and if anyone could face Hell and come out intact - it was him.
Still, here it was. This ghost only picked on folks it wanted to save from the horrible memories that punished them daily, people it felt were truly better off dead than reliving their pasts. And it chose Dean. It was evidence enough.
When Sam came out of his reverie, Bobby was looking at him, wearing the same sort of sad realization on his grizzled face, so he didn't ask whether Sam was okay. He simply clapped him on the shoulder as he passed by, mumbling something about how he was going to the motel to get some rest and how Sam should do the same.
Sam fell asleep, his body draped heavily across Dean's bed, oblivious to the nurses that kept coming in to check his brother's vitals or give him more medication. Eventually he woke up to the rumble of Dean trying to stifle his coughing so that he wouldn't jostle Sam around. Sam sat up slowly, checking the time on his cell phone, swore to himself when he realized he had slept way longer than he had intended. He glanced up at Dean to find he was being laughed at, the laugh setting the held-back cough loose.
"You have waffle-face, Sammy!" Dean crowed in glee in between the disease-ridden bursts of air.
Sam brought a hand up to his face, grinning as he felt the lines embedded in his skin. It was an old family joke from the many hospital visits they'd all had. One Winchester was always falling asleep at another one's side, face pressed sweatily into the pattern of the woven thermal blanket, and coming up looking like they'd been branded personally by the Eggo company.
"Seems I do. How're you feeling?"
"Better. Little less Pukey McPukerson. They got rid of that horrible crap from yesterday, started me on something new…Levitate? Something like that."
"I'll find out when I talk to the doctor later." Sam replied, shaking his head. Trust Dean to give modern medicine supernatural names. Sam gazed at his older brother, taking him in. "You sound better."
And he did. The dying accordion wheeze was still horribly present, the terrible thick coughing, but Dean seemed able to string together a sentence now without pausing to gasp for air.
"Just finished one of those nebu-whats-its bong things 'bout ten minutes ago." Dean explained. "Bobby stopped by earlier, said to call him. That guy's widow lives forty-five minutes away." Dean was panting by the end of the message and put the oxygen mask back over his nose and mouth with an eye roll before Sam could say a word about it. So, maybe he was only slightly better.
"He didn't go to finish it off by himself, did he?" Sam frowned.
"Naw, he said he was going to get some firm intel on where the flag is." Dean gave Sam a pained look. "Are we sure it's the flag…?"
"Fairly sure. From the checking we could do, she definitely brings it with her to every Legion event, so unless Cole is hitching a ride on something in her purse…" Sam trailed off. "It's our only solid lead on it. Why?"
Dean chuckled to himself the sound muffled behind the rubbery plastic. "I just feel like I expect Dad to come back from the beyond just to beat our asses for burning Ol' Glory like that."
"Yeah." Sam said soberly. "It does seem wrong. But, if it'll save your life, I'll take a little wrong." It was a statement that was meant to be comforting, a testament that they both were willing to bend over backwards, sacrifice personal morals, as long as it was for each other. Instead Dean regarded him quietly, as if trying to unearth how much wrong Sam was willing to give himself over to.
In the end, it was still Dean who broke the awkward silence. "So, why me?"
Sam bit his lip. "The jist of it is …soldiers who have been through a lot, who have been through more than most people can handle - we think that Cole is trying to end their misery." Sam idly rubbed at a coffee spill darkening his worn jeans, not meeting Dean's eyes.
"Jist…?" Dean let the unsaid question hang there - since when did he not get the full story?
And since when are you looking at me like I'm a goddamn drowning kitten?
"I dunno, man, I'm tired. Bobby and I were up pretty late last night."
"Uh-huh." Dean replied, the disbelief solid in his still crackling voice. "Go back to the motel for a bit, shower, get a little more sleep, some food."
All those things sounded good to Sam. Bobby would be gone for at least a couple of hours. Maybe it would be enough time to get Ruby here, to get his edge back - so that he felt like he could face his brother, nevermind face Lilith. He wanted to deny the urge, to immediately protest, sincerely, that he'd rather hang out with Dean, but the words just weren't coming. All he could think of was the possibility, however remote, that Ruby would get here and he'd feel her thick metallic heat dripping down the back of his throat, the controlled drip-drip-drip of the blood when she playfully held her arm out, giving him back the feeling that it was within his power to fix the world, fix his brother. It caught him at odd moments, the realization that fixing himself never came up. Either way, the urge was there - now - nearly taunting him.
"You sure?" Sam asked, bringing a hand up to scratch the back of his greasy head. "A shower sounds pretty good."
"Yeah, man." Dean's eyes were firmly on Sam's every fidget. "Just, leave the research with me. I can help while I'm awake."
"Yeah, sure." Sam said, because it was all he could say. To not have to have the "are you a broken shell of a man" conversation, frankly, was a bit of a relief. Cowardly, maybe, but he'd rather have Dean piece it together on his own than have to flat out tell him…'Gee, the ghost's vics are people who have been severely traumatized. By the way, brother, you fit that profile' and have an angry Dean denying everything anyway.
"Okay, well, I'm gonna go talk to one of your nurses - let them know to call me if anything changes. If you need anything, call. We'll see if you can keep down a burger later?"
"Sounds good." Dean replied, his mouth still in a firm line. He knew damn well something was up with his sibling. The way Sam was looking at him - it was near pitying, and Dean didn't do that from anyone, least of all his baby brother.
"Okay, then." Sam nodded, collecting the key files and notes that had brought the crucial information to light and handing them to Dean. "Back in a few hours."
Dean just nodded.
As soon as Sam left the room, Dean muttered under his breath. "Tell Ruby I said hello."
Part 16