Fic: Capture the Flag 20/24
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: Magic fingers, anger, and go time.
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 / Chapter 16 / Chapter 17 / Chapter 18 / Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Screw the Pooch
It was kind of stupid, Dean thought, that the motel bed was way more restful than the hospital's. Fair to say he would be more relaxed if his brother would actually go to sleep. Instead, Sam had forced all the pillows in the room behind Dean's back, and two from Bobby's room. He asked his dear baby brother what he was going to rest his head on. Sam just shrugged and handed him the mouthpiece of the freaking nebulizer thing Doogie had stolen for them.
It was also stupid that Sam was refusing to give him more quarters for the Magic Fingers.
Bobby had initially hung out for awhile, long enough to wipe him out of laundromat coinage too. He managed to get the IV in with less tries than it had taken the douche EMT, then left to his own room for the night with the admonition to wake him up if anything happened.
Sam had removed the ugly framed landscape that had hung above Dean's bed and was busy hanging a new bag of saline on the picture hooks and taking down the empty bag of antibiotics.
"That was the good stuff, right?" Dean asked.
"I'm not putting Jim Beam through your IV." Sam joked. "What good stuff?"
"The antibiotic. The one that didn't make me hurl. Leviathan or whatever."
"Leviathan is supposed to be either a sea beast or a prince of Hell, dude. Levaquin is what they put you on," Sam spoke in his usual know-it-all tone before shrugging. "Considering how often we've been reading the Bible this year, I'm not surprised your mind made the leap."
"Whatever, geek." Dean squirmed uncomfortably. The sight of his brother adjusting his IV was just wrong. Maybe Sam knew it too, because he seemed to quicken up the pace and then turned his back to Dean, facing the dinette table littered with various medical paraphernalia.
Sam picked up an amber bottle. "Huh, I didn't even know they made cough syrup with codeine."
"You wouldn't remember." Dean grinned. "You had it when you were…eleven, I think? Looped you out real good."
"Was that when I tried to steal Dad's truck?" Sam squinted, trying to recall the hazy memory that was coming to the surface.
"Yeah, because you wanted to go the library - of all the nerdy reasons. He was pissed, but told me later he was proud you snaked the keys so easily." Dean gave a wry smile that perfectly matched the expression on Sam's face. It was strange the memories they had of their childhood - that being a good thief brought a smile to their dad's face. Still, it was nice that at this point they could smile about it.
"Aren't I not s'posed to have cough medicine?" Dean asked.
Sam looked up from reading the instructions on the label in surprise. "You actually read the aftercare instructions?"
"I'll care about what damage I cause your face, after I give you a beat down." Dean rolled his eyes, bringing a fist up to his lips, trying to stifle a cough.
"If you read them then you'd know they want you to cough," Sam said dryly.
"Then don't gimme cough syrup," Dean spluttered wretchedly, laying one arm across his eyes, his chest heaving in irregular bursts, the words leaving his body aching for more air.
Sam pondered explaining the difference between cough suppressants and expectorants, but he caught the fleeting look of misery that had been allowed to cross his brother's face. Only mere hours out of the hospital and the flush of increased fever was reddening Dean's skin.
Sam sat himself on the edge of the bed next to Dean. "Hey, seriously, this'll help. It'll be easier to cough shit up and it won't hurt as much."
Dean removed his arm to give Sam a quick glance and surveyed the bottle with disdain. "Taste bad?"
"Jesus, Dean! Are you that much of a child that you still need to have candy-flavored cough syrup?"
"Shuddup." Dean smacked at Sam's arm with one hand and then used the immovable Gigantor's t-shirt to help pull himself into a sitting position. "Somethin' to drink?"
Sam made sure Dean was able to sit upright on his own before standing up, making his way across the room to grab a room-temperature Coke. While he had his back turned, Dean started coughing - hard, wrenching coughs that must have been shifting tectonic plates, nevermind mucus.
He turned, popping the top of the soda can, nearly saying some shit about how good it was for Dean to continue the coughing when he noticed Dean was blotchy purple, seemingly trying to cough, choking on whatever was trying to crawl its way out of his lungs.
In an instant, Sam slammed the soda down so hard on the bedside table that the sugary drink splashed out. He began thwapping Dean on the back with his huge hands, increasing the force when the first blows didn't seem to dislodge whatever was in Dean's throat. Finally one hard smack did something and Dean pulled at edge of the comforter they were sitting on to spit out the hideous gob in his mouth.
In the secret way most people are about their bodily fluids, you have to look. Dean did, as he was inhaling great rattling gusts of air from the room, tears falling from his eyes unbidden as the pain on his left side cranked up. Painful breathing was still breathing, though.
Sam continued to lightly clap on his brother's back a couple more times , then slowed as he realized Dean was breathing, or at least wheezing again. "You alright?"
His older brother just said, "Sam," and raised the corner of the blanket so that he could see the gross wad of disgusting crap his sibling had just managed to uproot from his airway.
"Dude!" Sam protested, shoving the offending mess away.
"Sam." Dean rasped, apparently serious, and raised the quilted cover toward him again.
Sam pursed his lips unhappily and eyed the puddle of mucus Dean was holding as if it were of international importance. Upon a second inspection, maybe it was.
The yellow-green color was standard lung infection, the smears of rust which indicated blood were frightening, but that wasn't what was wrong here.
No, it was the black specks of ooze suspended there that were wrong.
Sam pulled the comforter out of his brother's hands, disgust fading to the background as he examined the specimen closer.
"Clot?" Dean asked hopefully.
Sam swallowed hard. "Ya think?"
They both sounded doubtful.
"Knife?" Dean rasped.
Sam knew the one to grab from the duffel, the hand-forged iron dirk that Dean had bought for a song at a haunted Renaissance Faire. He carefully laid the handle of the sharp blade into his brother's waiting palm and watched as Dean stuck the thin point of the iron into the largest bit of dark ooze.
It sizzled.
"Ectoplasm." Dean said - matter-of-fact, as if it didn't just come out of him.
Sam's felt the blood drain from his face. "I'll get Bobby."
:::
:::
"We need to go now!" Sam shouted, already packing what little had made its way out of their bags.
"Son, just calm down..." Bobby took the current duffel Sam was stuffing out of his hands so he'd have to stop the frantic packing.
"Don't do that, don't make this sound like I'm freaking out about nothing! Antibiotics aren't gonna work on ectoplasm! We can't eject it if it isn't true ghost possession - so our only other option is to gank the sonovabitch!"
"Sam-" Dean started, but apparently his brother had yet to run out of steam. It made him feel breathless just listening to Sam yammer on.
"We aren't going to be able to keep him stable no matter how much crap we have here, Bobby. Hell, we don't even know if salt lines are gonna work if the goddamn thing is already inside him!" One of the inhalers was hurled across the room with fury, bouncing off the wall and landing at the foot of the Dean's bed.
"Sam-" Dean tried again and was again ignored. Now he just felt annoyed.
"I can't just sit here while it gets worse and worse. I can't. I just - can't. Not when I can do something about it."
There it was again - that 'I' that Sam kept on using, that 'I' that Sam apparently must have shoved up his ass nowadays. Dean wasn't the only one who noticed, either.
"You ain't the only one in this, Sam. You ain't the only one who's trying to help." Bobby chimed in, eyes narrowing slightly.
Sam's nostrils flared wide. "Then why don't you?"
"HEY!"
Dean's shout started a hack that ricocheted mucus around his chest like bullets, but at least he had their attention. Problem was, now that he had it, Dean didn't know what to say. He just knew he'd seen that same crazed look in Sam's eyes before - and no way was he going to let the attitude that came with it be thrown at Bobby.
Fortunately, Sam did seem to realize he had crossed a line, his legs folding beneath him as he sat heavily on the drab beige duvet, the mattress squeaking. He reached one of his ape-ishly long arms out and snatched the tossed inhaler from the floor, handing it to Dean wearily.
Dean placed his lips in front of the mouthpiece and sucked in the chemicals just to show Sam how to compromise.
"We planned for tomorrow." Dean rasped, breathless yet eerily calm. He cautioned a glance over to Bobby in the hopes that he would finish the thought.
"He's right, Sam." Bobby rolled up the sleeves of his ever-plaid shirt in an effort to calm himself. "She'll be out of the house, the alarms will be disarmed, and there won't be neighbors poking around. If we go in and get busted by the cops, it won't help your brother."
Sam sat up a bit straighter, put the face on that Dean always thought he would have worn in the courtroom. Samuel Winchester, Attorney at Law.
"So, then we improvise. We get her out of the house. We have the drugs for the dog, right? And the dog is in the yard until morning. Tranq the pooch, give her a call and pretext as an animal shelter."
Sam glanced at Bobby uncertainly. "Does she seem the type to run out and get her dog?"
Bobby nodded. "In a heartbeat."
"Alarm?" Dean raised his eyebrows.
"You still have the blueprints of the unit?" Sam asked.
It wasn't an apology, not by a long shot, but planning was better than seething in rage, in any case. Bobby walked stiffly over to a bag that held a cardboard tube that held the rolled designs, carefully unfurled them and spread them out on the table in front of Sam.
The younger Winchester didn't ignore the olive branch and hunched over the intricate plans, taking a moment to study them before he spoke.
"Motion sensors are laid out toward the front of the house, not where the dog is kept - it looks like."
"We take out Spud McKenzie, check. What next?" Dean asked.
"Main access box is back here." Sam pointed a long finger toward the entrance from the yard. "I should be able to disarm it, get us into the rest of the house. There's a separate unit for the case with flag, but once we're inside I should be able to figure it out."
Sam looked up, his gaze pleading with both Bobby and his brother. "We're not new to stealth operations. We can do this...get it over with, Bobby, get him better..."
Sam's gaze fell, his voice tight and choked. "I have to do something."
Dean stared at Bobby over the top of his brother's bowed head who nodded slightly in return.
"Alright, we go in."
...
Part 21
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: Magic fingers, anger, and go time.
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 / Chapter 16 / Chapter 17 / Chapter 18 / Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Screw the Pooch
It was kind of stupid, Dean thought, that the motel bed was way more restful than the hospital's. Fair to say he would be more relaxed if his brother would actually go to sleep. Instead, Sam had forced all the pillows in the room behind Dean's back, and two from Bobby's room. He asked his dear baby brother what he was going to rest his head on. Sam just shrugged and handed him the mouthpiece of the freaking nebulizer thing Doogie had stolen for them.
It was also stupid that Sam was refusing to give him more quarters for the Magic Fingers.
Bobby had initially hung out for awhile, long enough to wipe him out of laundromat coinage too. He managed to get the IV in with less tries than it had taken the douche EMT, then left to his own room for the night with the admonition to wake him up if anything happened.
Sam had removed the ugly framed landscape that had hung above Dean's bed and was busy hanging a new bag of saline on the picture hooks and taking down the empty bag of antibiotics.
"That was the good stuff, right?" Dean asked.
"I'm not putting Jim Beam through your IV." Sam joked. "What good stuff?"
"The antibiotic. The one that didn't make me hurl. Leviathan or whatever."
"Leviathan is supposed to be either a sea beast or a prince of Hell, dude. Levaquin is what they put you on," Sam spoke in his usual know-it-all tone before shrugging. "Considering how often we've been reading the Bible this year, I'm not surprised your mind made the leap."
"Whatever, geek." Dean squirmed uncomfortably. The sight of his brother adjusting his IV was just wrong. Maybe Sam knew it too, because he seemed to quicken up the pace and then turned his back to Dean, facing the dinette table littered with various medical paraphernalia.
Sam picked up an amber bottle. "Huh, I didn't even know they made cough syrup with codeine."
"You wouldn't remember." Dean grinned. "You had it when you were…eleven, I think? Looped you out real good."
"Was that when I tried to steal Dad's truck?" Sam squinted, trying to recall the hazy memory that was coming to the surface.
"Yeah, because you wanted to go the library - of all the nerdy reasons. He was pissed, but told me later he was proud you snaked the keys so easily." Dean gave a wry smile that perfectly matched the expression on Sam's face. It was strange the memories they had of their childhood - that being a good thief brought a smile to their dad's face. Still, it was nice that at this point they could smile about it.
"Aren't I not s'posed to have cough medicine?" Dean asked.
Sam looked up from reading the instructions on the label in surprise. "You actually read the aftercare instructions?"
"I'll care about what damage I cause your face, after I give you a beat down." Dean rolled his eyes, bringing a fist up to his lips, trying to stifle a cough.
"If you read them then you'd know they want you to cough," Sam said dryly.
"Then don't gimme cough syrup," Dean spluttered wretchedly, laying one arm across his eyes, his chest heaving in irregular bursts, the words leaving his body aching for more air.
Sam pondered explaining the difference between cough suppressants and expectorants, but he caught the fleeting look of misery that had been allowed to cross his brother's face. Only mere hours out of the hospital and the flush of increased fever was reddening Dean's skin.
Sam sat himself on the edge of the bed next to Dean. "Hey, seriously, this'll help. It'll be easier to cough shit up and it won't hurt as much."
Dean removed his arm to give Sam a quick glance and surveyed the bottle with disdain. "Taste bad?"
"Jesus, Dean! Are you that much of a child that you still need to have candy-flavored cough syrup?"
"Shuddup." Dean smacked at Sam's arm with one hand and then used the immovable Gigantor's t-shirt to help pull himself into a sitting position. "Somethin' to drink?"
Sam made sure Dean was able to sit upright on his own before standing up, making his way across the room to grab a room-temperature Coke. While he had his back turned, Dean started coughing - hard, wrenching coughs that must have been shifting tectonic plates, nevermind mucus.
He turned, popping the top of the soda can, nearly saying some shit about how good it was for Dean to continue the coughing when he noticed Dean was blotchy purple, seemingly trying to cough, choking on whatever was trying to crawl its way out of his lungs.
In an instant, Sam slammed the soda down so hard on the bedside table that the sugary drink splashed out. He began thwapping Dean on the back with his huge hands, increasing the force when the first blows didn't seem to dislodge whatever was in Dean's throat. Finally one hard smack did something and Dean pulled at edge of the comforter they were sitting on to spit out the hideous gob in his mouth.
In the secret way most people are about their bodily fluids, you have to look. Dean did, as he was inhaling great rattling gusts of air from the room, tears falling from his eyes unbidden as the pain on his left side cranked up. Painful breathing was still breathing, though.
Sam continued to lightly clap on his brother's back a couple more times , then slowed as he realized Dean was breathing, or at least wheezing again. "You alright?"
His older brother just said, "Sam," and raised the corner of the blanket so that he could see the gross wad of disgusting crap his sibling had just managed to uproot from his airway.
"Dude!" Sam protested, shoving the offending mess away.
"Sam." Dean rasped, apparently serious, and raised the quilted cover toward him again.
Sam pursed his lips unhappily and eyed the puddle of mucus Dean was holding as if it were of international importance. Upon a second inspection, maybe it was.
The yellow-green color was standard lung infection, the smears of rust which indicated blood were frightening, but that wasn't what was wrong here.
No, it was the black specks of ooze suspended there that were wrong.
Sam pulled the comforter out of his brother's hands, disgust fading to the background as he examined the specimen closer.
"Clot?" Dean asked hopefully.
Sam swallowed hard. "Ya think?"
They both sounded doubtful.
"Knife?" Dean rasped.
Sam knew the one to grab from the duffel, the hand-forged iron dirk that Dean had bought for a song at a haunted Renaissance Faire. He carefully laid the handle of the sharp blade into his brother's waiting palm and watched as Dean stuck the thin point of the iron into the largest bit of dark ooze.
It sizzled.
"Ectoplasm." Dean said - matter-of-fact, as if it didn't just come out of him.
Sam's felt the blood drain from his face. "I'll get Bobby."
:::
:::
"We need to go now!" Sam shouted, already packing what little had made its way out of their bags.
"Son, just calm down..." Bobby took the current duffel Sam was stuffing out of his hands so he'd have to stop the frantic packing.
"Don't do that, don't make this sound like I'm freaking out about nothing! Antibiotics aren't gonna work on ectoplasm! We can't eject it if it isn't true ghost possession - so our only other option is to gank the sonovabitch!"
"Sam-" Dean started, but apparently his brother had yet to run out of steam. It made him feel breathless just listening to Sam yammer on.
"We aren't going to be able to keep him stable no matter how much crap we have here, Bobby. Hell, we don't even know if salt lines are gonna work if the goddamn thing is already inside him!" One of the inhalers was hurled across the room with fury, bouncing off the wall and landing at the foot of the Dean's bed.
"Sam-" Dean tried again and was again ignored. Now he just felt annoyed.
"I can't just sit here while it gets worse and worse. I can't. I just - can't. Not when I can do something about it."
There it was again - that 'I' that Sam kept on using, that 'I' that Sam apparently must have shoved up his ass nowadays. Dean wasn't the only one who noticed, either.
"You ain't the only one in this, Sam. You ain't the only one who's trying to help." Bobby chimed in, eyes narrowing slightly.
Sam's nostrils flared wide. "Then why don't you?"
"HEY!"
Dean's shout started a hack that ricocheted mucus around his chest like bullets, but at least he had their attention. Problem was, now that he had it, Dean didn't know what to say. He just knew he'd seen that same crazed look in Sam's eyes before - and no way was he going to let the attitude that came with it be thrown at Bobby.
Fortunately, Sam did seem to realize he had crossed a line, his legs folding beneath him as he sat heavily on the drab beige duvet, the mattress squeaking. He reached one of his ape-ishly long arms out and snatched the tossed inhaler from the floor, handing it to Dean wearily.
Dean placed his lips in front of the mouthpiece and sucked in the chemicals just to show Sam how to compromise.
"We planned for tomorrow." Dean rasped, breathless yet eerily calm. He cautioned a glance over to Bobby in the hopes that he would finish the thought.
"He's right, Sam." Bobby rolled up the sleeves of his ever-plaid shirt in an effort to calm himself. "She'll be out of the house, the alarms will be disarmed, and there won't be neighbors poking around. If we go in and get busted by the cops, it won't help your brother."
Sam sat up a bit straighter, put the face on that Dean always thought he would have worn in the courtroom. Samuel Winchester, Attorney at Law.
"So, then we improvise. We get her out of the house. We have the drugs for the dog, right? And the dog is in the yard until morning. Tranq the pooch, give her a call and pretext as an animal shelter."
Sam glanced at Bobby uncertainly. "Does she seem the type to run out and get her dog?"
Bobby nodded. "In a heartbeat."
"Alarm?" Dean raised his eyebrows.
"You still have the blueprints of the unit?" Sam asked.
It wasn't an apology, not by a long shot, but planning was better than seething in rage, in any case. Bobby walked stiffly over to a bag that held a cardboard tube that held the rolled designs, carefully unfurled them and spread them out on the table in front of Sam.
The younger Winchester didn't ignore the olive branch and hunched over the intricate plans, taking a moment to study them before he spoke.
"Motion sensors are laid out toward the front of the house, not where the dog is kept - it looks like."
"We take out Spud McKenzie, check. What next?" Dean asked.
"Main access box is back here." Sam pointed a long finger toward the entrance from the yard. "I should be able to disarm it, get us into the rest of the house. There's a separate unit for the case with flag, but once we're inside I should be able to figure it out."
Sam looked up, his gaze pleading with both Bobby and his brother. "We're not new to stealth operations. We can do this...get it over with, Bobby, get him better..."
Sam's gaze fell, his voice tight and choked. "I have to do something."
Dean stared at Bobby over the top of his brother's bowed head who nodded slightly in return.
"Alright, we go in."
...
Part 21