The Mystery of the Squish
Disclaimer: Nope, not mine. No copyright infringment intended.
Summary: Sam and Dean get grumpy when they can’t find anything to hunt--throw in a tequila hangover and a raging chest cold and things are bound to get ugly. OneShot.
Warnings: Um… pointless hurtcomfort and lots of snot rags?
The Mystery of the Squish
When Sam woke up, someone was sawing his head in half. They were standing on his chest with one of those two-men tree saws, methodically slicing his brain right in two.
Also, something had died in his mouth. From the phlegmy texture he guessed it was something dripping with ectoplasm, the extremely pissed off ghost of a skunk, perhaps, dancing around in his disgestive tract.
To test his theory, Sam opened one eye. Of course, no lumberjacks or dead skunks-he could never be that lucky. It was just Dean, just goddamned Dean, snoring cataclysmically loud in the next bed, silhouetted by glaring rays of sunlight.
The taste in his mouth, Sam remembered as the previous night came flooding back, was merely a deadly mixture of cheap tequila and half-digested food from a far-too-authentic burrito cart.
Sam carefully rolled onto his stomach. He landed on something squishy, one arm knocked something to the floor, and his nose made contact with something smooth and cold and smelly.
Then he realized he was completely naked. And laying in a wet spot.
“Goddamn it,” he snarled at Dean, who spitefully slept on, peaceful as a newborn baby.
Clearly alone in his struggle, Sam hoisted himself to his hands and knees and, gazing blearily about, managed to solve the rest of the mystery.
The wet spot? A half empty bottle of Jarritos was lying in a big dark circle in the middle of the bed. The smooth, cold thing was a mostly-empty half gallon of Pepe Lopez, coated in a sticky film of mixer, dried booze, fuzz from the blankets and god knows what else. And the thing he’d knocked to the floor? A plastic puke bucket-and empty plastic puke bucket, thank christ.
Unpleasant, all of it. But the mystery of the squish-that was more than Sam could handle.
It was snot rags. Piles of snot rags. Mountains of snot rags, all over the bed, under his pillows, lodged between the already rancid bedspread and the not-so-clean sheets. Stuck between his goddamned toes.
“DEAN? DEAN WAKE UP!”
Dean didn’t move. Sam fumbled for the puke bucket and tossed it as his brother’s head.
“DEEEEANN!”
The bucket hit the lamp on the nightstand, making it totter. Dean flailed awake, throwing his blankets off and launching himself across the space between their beds before his eyes were even open. “Wha, Sammy? Wha goin’ on?”
Sam opened his mouth in preparation for a fantastic tirade, but Dean interrupted him with a sloppy, gurgling, chest-deep cough. One gooey hack turned into two, two turned into ten or eleven. Dean showed Sam a one-minute finger and bowed his head, coughing until he was blue, kneeling there between the two beds like a nervous groom about to propose.
“Jesus Christ,” Sam muttered, pushing his brother to one side so he could get up. “Where’s my jacket? I need some fucking aspirin.”
Dean grabbed a tissue from the nightstand, used it to scrape something off his tongue, threw it on the floor. “S’on the TV.”
Sam scanned the room, saw nothing but an empty shelf. “The TV. And where’d the TV go?”
“In the closet." Dean's eyes swept disapprovingly over his brother's nakedness. "And put some panties on while you're in there, Lady Godiva.”
Sam pounded across the room and threw open the closet door. The television was face down in the corner atop pieces of the shattered screen, blanketed in Sam’s tobacco-stinking clothes.
“What happened?”
Dean pulled himself off the floor, knees cracking, and threw himself back on the bed. “You kicked it in.”
“I kicked it in. Right.”
“You kicked the fucking thing in-Sam, I don’t feel good. Leave me alone.”
Broken glass crackled beneath Sam’s feet as he slipped into a pair of boxers. He searched his brain for a memory that involved detroying a television and came up with nothing. He remembered buying a bottle, sitting on the front stoop being pissed at Dean for, well, something he could no longer remember. He remembered heading to the bar down the road, matching drinks with some jackass and his girlfriend, who were from a nearby university. After that it was all black, with little snippets of lying on the bathroom floor, vomiting into a shrubbery… nothing unusual.
Not that it mattered. When it came to recounting Sam’s occasional benders, Dean was notoriously full of shit.
“That why you covered my bed in snotty Kleenex?" Sam said. "Cause I broke the goddamn TV?”
“Yeah, maybe.” Dean muttered.
Sam dug around in his jacket, fished out and dry-swallowed four aspirin. “Cause maybe it's a good thing, Dean. Maybe now instead of staring at Judge Judy all day and cleaning the one rifle we never ever use over and over and over, you could help me find a job.”
Dean violently fluffed his pillow. “It was my bed. You threw me out of it when you came lurching back into the cave at sunrise, Batboy.”
“I did, huh?”
“You did.”
Sam crossed his arms over his chest. “Well… what makes the bed closest to the bathroom automatically yours?”
“I’m going back to sleep now.” Dean rolled over, turning his back to Sam.
Sam stood for a moment, scowling at the scar of an old gunshot wound on Dean’s shoulder. An annoying voice in the back of his mind was telling him to let it go, to let Dean sleep, to admit that maybe he got a little way too drunk last night and acted like a huge asshole-and an asshole with bad timing, too, cause Dean had been feeling like shit for days.
When he opened his mouth, however, what came out was: “You’re honestly telling me that I stumbled in here, destroyed the television, threw it in the closet and force you out of your sickbed? Please. Why the hell would I do that, Dean?”
Dean flipped over, sat up and glowered at his brother. “Because you’re a dick. A huge dick who went out last night to find us a case and decided to research a bottle of tequila instead.”
He punctuated his accusation with another mighty coughing fit, one that shook his whole bed and then petered off into a weird, squeaky little wheeze.
An I’m-a-raging-asshole feeling began to creep over Sam. Ignoring the snotty tissues, he sat on the edge of his bed, facing Dean. “Hey. You okay, dude?”
“Like you give a rat’s ass.” Dean went to pluck another tissue from the box, found it empty and tossed it on the floor.
“What the fuck is that suppose to mean?”
“Nothing, Sam. Doesn’t mean nothing. Can I go back to sleep now?”
“Dean-“
Dean held up a hand to silence him, muffling another coughing fit with the crook of his elbow.
A yes-I-am-in-fact-a-giant-dick feeling washed over Sam in a roaring, dickish wave, and he leaned over to feel his brother’s forehead. Dean knocked it away quickly, giving him a death stare, but not fast enough that Sam couldn't detect the boiling heat radiating off his body.
“Shit man,” he said, “How long’ve you had a fever?”
“Dunno,” Dean replied shortly, turning his back to Sam again.
“You sore? You want some aspirin?”
Sam expected to be told to fuck off again, but Dean’s shoulders relaxed, then stiffened into a shrug.
“Kay, I’ll get you some aspirin.”
As some sort of gesture of peace, Dean rolled onto his back. Shivering a little, he pulled the blankets up to his chest.
For the first time Sam detected his brother’s misery, noticed how pale he was, the pinched expression he wore, how roughly and loudly he was breathing, like his lungs were filled pudding, how his nose was red and raw from his nostrils to his upper lip.
Sam put the aspirin on the nightstand next to a glass of water. Dean picked up the glass with a badly trembling hand, accidently splashing some of it on the bed.
“Jesus, I’m sorry, man,” Sam said sincerely, “I didn’t-I guess I didn’t realize you were so sick.”
“Really?” Dean growled, “Cause I was practically vomiting mucus last night when you decided to take off.”
Sam looked around him at the avalanche of snot rags. “I can see that, dude. You must be pretty miserable.”
Dean nodded forlornly, threw his arm over his eyes and went into another gurgling spasm of coughing. Sam could hear the crap shifting around in his lungs. His brother was shivering badly now, teeth chattering even as he tried to stoically set his jaw.
“Where’s the first aid kit?
“Dude-“
“Winchester protocol, Dean,” Sam replied, channeling their father, “‘Never underestimate a fever.’”
“He said that because you were hiding an infected boil, Sam.”
“Shut up.” Sam found the kit in Dean’s duffle under the bed, took out the thermometer the held it to Dean’s face. “Open up.”
“Dude, that boil was on your ass, too, wasn’t it?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Dean laughed congestedly, but didn’t protest when Sam put the thermometer under his tongue.
“You’re running pretty high.” Sam disappeared into the bathroom, came back out with an ice bucket of water and a washcloth folded into a strip.
“Seriously, Sam? You gonna bathe my face with that, sing to me while I convalesce?”
Sam rolled his eyes. “I’m gonna lay it on your forehead while you rest, dick. Get any hotter and you’re gonna be delirious. It’ll feel good. Trust me."
He put the cool rag on his brother’s burning forehead, and Dean let out a sigh of relief that quickly turned into another coughing fit. It seemed to go on forever this time, until Dean was gasping for air between the hacking. Sam moved to sit lightly on Dean’s bed, rubbing his brother's convulsing shoulders.
“Dude,” Sam said in a low, soothing voice as Dean tried to catch his breath, “I’m sorry I acted like such a ass. Why'd you let me act like such a ass, huh?”
Dean gave his brother a faraway gaze, his teeth clattering, and Sam wondered if he wasn’t starting to drift into feverish daze.
Then he flashed Sam an evil smile. “You didn’t, Sammy.”
“Didn’t what?”
“You didn’t throw me out of bed, dude."
The sympathetic expression fell from Sam’s face. "Huh?"
"Some frat guy dragged you to the door, said he found you outside a bar, puking into some bushes and whining that you had to go home because I was sick. He brought you home in tears, dude."
"What?"
"You fell into the TV and knocked it over. Then you puked for an hour and passed out in my bed while I was cleaning up the mess.”
"Dean," Sam said, his face aflame. "Tell me you're fucking joking."
Dean choked with laughter. Then he coughed up something yellowish and nasty, spit it into an already-used tissue and threw it at Sam with a shit-eating grin. "Then you decided to cover up all the broken glass with your clothes, just so I wouldn’t cut my little feet."
“I hate you,” Sam said a-matter-of-factly, “I fucking hate you.”
“That's not the song you were singing last night," Dean said fondly, adjusting himself on his pillows. “Last night you just luuuuuuuuvvvved big brother. Musta told me thirty times, at least. We had a good cuddle on the bathroom floor, too.”
“Where did the Jarritos come from?” Sam demanded, “Did you- did you pour it on me so I’d think I’d pissed myself?”
Dean sniggered. “Just like your sixteenth birthday. Oh, Sammy."
As Dean shook silently with laughter, Sam played with several scenarios in his head, most of which involved strangling his brother until all the crap in his lungs was leaking out his ears. He contemplated snaking the Impala’s keys and finding a nice big cliff to push it over, or washing Dean’s leather jacket with bleach…
Or just leaving, maybe, taking a two-day walk and not coming back until Dean was out of his mind with worry.
But instead he dipped the cloth back into the cool water, rang it out and replaced it gently on his brother’s forehead.
“Did I mention that I fucking hate you?” He murmured, pulling the covers up around Dean's chin.
Dean closed his eyes and sighed contentedly. “I hate you too, bro.”
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This way to the prequel-sequel (a fic about the night before)!