Fic: The Dudes
Title: The Dudes
Author: wave_obscura
Genre: H/C, gen, humor
Word count: 4,000
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Summary: Dean’s sick. Sam is too stoned to notice. A sequel of sorts to The Kissing Curve. You need to remember the story enough to recall the OCs (Jamie and Kevin?), but remembering the plot is not really required because this fic doesn't have one! Why do I keep posting this shit. I don't know.
Spoilers/Warnings: OCs, sick!respiratorily distressed!Dean, hurt!Sam, weed smokin'!Sam, Afrin addicted!Dean
Disclaimer: For the sick pleasure of myself and others. No copyright infringement intended.
The Dudes
by wave obscura
So Dean’s nose is broken. Not broken as in some monster threw him into an armoire and now Sam has to wrestle his septum back into place, but, like, broken. Like someone cut it right off his face and shoved two fat fingers into the collapsing holes. Nothing goes in; nothing comes out, except for a constant burning stream of god-knows-what-the-fuck that drips down the back of his throat.
When he swallows, his ears plug up. His throat is raw from breathing through his mouth and when he sleeps, he dreams that he’s holding a glass of water that he can’t goddamn swallow no matter how hard he tries. And what a shame, what a fucking shame because he is so so thirsty and the water is icy, icy cold. In the dream he pours it into his mouth and feels his teeth tingle, his tongue twitch in anticipation but all the tissue, all the hungry tastebuds stay as dry as a bone.
He wakes with yeasty slime in his mouth and white glop on his lips, which he wipes into two ridges that dry quickly on the back of his hand.
And the fucking wheezing. That fucking sponge-y, squeaky sound that is at least fifty percent of each exhale. Long after he feels like he’s blown a whole lungful out, the air keeps coming and coming and coming from somewhere in the lowest, most swampy bits of his lungs, a high-pitch lingering death rattle. He lies awake most nights half sitting up, and sometimes holds his breath just so he doesn’t have to listen to it anymore.
Luckily Sam’s got his own room, or he would have killed Dean several times over already.
Dean’s “room,” as Kevin calls it, is actually a daylight basement with windows that are nailed shut and probably haven’t been opened since 1950. A green-and-gray concrete floor so dusty it turns his bare feet black. One wall is cracked concrete, speckled with holes perfect for egg-laying spiders and cobwebs that cling right to the wall, dipping and peaking like velvet ropes.
His only source of air is the door to the drafty shit-filled garage. Kevin had been kind enough to supply him with a box fan, which sits in the doorway blowing the stale air and dust back and forth between the two rooms in a manner that almost feels like a breeze.
And in the middle of the room, Dean’s “bed,” which is a mattress pad on top of a pool table. The stains on the mattress pad are a mystery but the stains on the pool table are not; nothing but human urine could eat so thoroughly through felt.
So yeah, long story short, Dean can’t breathe worth a damn. They’ve been lounging around this shithole for almost a month now, Sam laid up with his fucking leg, again, because he’d needed surgery, again, and christ, everything would be just fine if Dean could have some nasal spray.
And some albuterol.
And a sleeping pill.
But mostly some nasal spray.
Okay mostly albuterol.
He unearths himself from his musty blanket and gazes longingly at the inhaler on the nightstand. It’s empty, he knows it’s empty because he’s been sucking uselessly on it all night and all day. He thinks about the Afrin, upstairs in Sam’s pocket, and how if he could just have a little, just one little squirt up one little nostril, he could sleep long and hard like his body to desperately, desperately needs.
He slides his legs off the edge of the pool table, pausing to bend over one of the side pockets to pant. His head is pounding, his muscles like sacks of sand. Just for shits he attempts to suck air through his traffic jam of a nose; nothing.
He doesn’t hear any noise until he stops halfway up the stairs for a breath. Some whiny, moaning college rock blares from one of the bedrooms, competing with the clink clink clink of what is probably Sam continuously beating something to death with a video game sword.
“Bring me a surprise, dickbag!” someone calls, just before the front door slams, and despite himself Dean jumps, his hand flying to his already heaving chest.
Christ, he can’t wait for Sam to heal so they can get the hell out of this place.
There are half a million dudes lying around the living room but his brother is easy to spot-- directly in front of the old school big screen TV, his splinted leg elevated on the coffee table under a pink pillow shaped like a Hershey's kiss. He’s got a game controller in his hand and eyes are on the TV while some guy-- they call him Beefy or something-- holds a bong to his mouth. Sam nods once the chamber is full of smoke; Beefy pulls the stem out of the carb and Sam sucks up the rest in one gulp, coughing spastically, which seems to please all the other guys. Sam barely acknowledges his accomplishment, though, he’s too busy whack-whack-whacking away at his video game.
Dean sags in the doorway, waiting for someone to notice him. There’s nowhere to sit anyhow.
After a moment Sam’s eyes flick in that direction, then again once he realizes he’s looking at his brother.
“Hey, brother,” he says lazily. He’s taken to calling Dean “bro” and “brother,” in the weeks they’ve been staying in this house. His eyes are rimmed pink.“Still feeling shitty?”
“Sam--”
“No.”
“Sam, just one--”
“No, Dean.” Sam holds the bong out. “Here, hit this. It’ll help you sleep.”
The curly redheaded guy with the red beard on Sam’s left-- they all call him Myrtle, for some reason, throws his head back in a burst of laughter. “Dude can barely breathe, dude, and he’s offerin’ him a fucking bong hit. HA.”
Sam’s mouth opens in a stupid smile. “Right. Right.” He looks at Dean. “Bro... you should. Why don’t you just use your uh... your uh...”
“My inhaler is empty,” Dean finishes for him. A few weeks ago he would have been too embarrassed to admit that there existed in this universe an inhaler with his name on it. But this is fucking serious. His headache is getting worse, his already destroyed nose is getting worse, which he didn’t even think was possible, but his sinuses seem to be shrinking and expanding all at once, pinching all along his nose and behind his eyes.
“Nasal spray is addictive,” Sam reminds him for at least the millionth time.
Dean knows and he doesn’t give a rat’s ass. He just wants to fucking breathe.
“Sam don’t make me...” fucking beat you , he was going say, but he knows threats aren’t going to do any damn good. He doesn’t even get the full threat out before half the other guys in the room tense up.
They like Sam. They’re impressed by the wounds and scars on his gnarly leg, how well he handles the pain. And lord knows his brand new laid back attitude-- thanks to the painkillers and pot-- meshes awesomely with their collective borderline retardation.
And the tales Kevin has told them about the ghost hunt up on Kissing Curve--which both brothers have vehemently denied over and over and over-- have all of his stupid roommates entranced.
So they’d kick Dean’s ass for laying a hand on Sam.
He sniffs an injured sniff. It’s unfair, that’s what is, to be trapped in a place where he can’t even beat up his own little brother.
Normally he would do it anyway, and with gusto. But today? Today he can barely stand up.
Plus they think all think Dean’s an uptight loser. They don’t understand that Sam needed another surgery because he wouldn’t listen to the doctors, wouldn’t go easy on his leg for even a moment. He’s going to be half-crippled now no matter what, best case scenario. He’s already looking at a permanent brace, maybe even a crutch or a cane. They don’t understand that Dean is not just a whiny pussy, that his chest problems have been going on for months, that he’s never quite recovered from the pneumonia.
Dean doesn’t have many courses of action, so he just stands there in the doorway and looks pitiful.
“Oh!” Myrtle shrieks, clutching Sam by the arm, “Oh God, ten more times! Do it, dude! Do it!”
“Dude!” Beefy agrees orgasmically. “Dude dude dude!”
Sam leans to one side, clenching his teeth together and pounding furiously on the controller. All the guys on the couch lean forward in anticipation. The little shaggy-headed girl on the video game and her oddly-shaped sword freeze for a moment, then explode with brightly colored green and gold balls, and the monster-thingy-whatever-it-is makes a hideous noise and begins the long process of dying.
A roar goes up among all the dudes, so loud it makes Dean’s congested ears pop.
Sam throws the controller on Beefy’s lap, heaving a victorious sigh. “Finally,” he says. The dudes take turns clapping him on the back-- hard enough to be manly but not hard enough to jostle his leg.
After a moment, Sam’s pink eyes fall back on Dean. “I got a doctor’s appointment at four today. Don’t forget.”
Dean nods. He slinks back downstairs and into his nest of blankets on top of the pool table. The room spins a little, and his head pounds in unison with his sinuses. The trip upstairs has left his chest tight and achy.
He reaches over and sucks on his inhaler one more time, lying to his lungs, whisper-grumbling there is medicine in here. There is medicine in here.
He doesn’t realize he feels sick to his stomach until he’s puking onto the eight ball in the corner pocket.
***
Finally Ursula is defeated. Sam passes off the controller to someone else, has Myrtle and Ox help him lay back on the couch. They arrange his leg on a stained body pillow and with a sigh he sinks into the overstuffed sofa. The weed and the painkillers creep up and down his body like soft tickling fingers.
Even then something nags at the back of his mind; a general feeling that something is off. It’s Dean, Dean doesn’t look well and hasn’t looked well for most of their time here.
But it’s his own damn fault, isn’t it? If he took his meds and used his inhaler and avoided hunts that involved filthy basements and dank caves like Sam had advised him, he wouldn’t be in this situation, would he? Addicted to nasal spray and keeping himself awake at night wheezing and hacking.
At least Sam assumes that’s still the problem. He hasn’t been able to get down to Dean's basement room, not on his supremely fucked up leg. He’s just now coming out of the haze of post-surgery pain to even consider it.
Maybe he should. It’s been a long while since he and Dean have been able to talk without scads of other people around. They’ve become like strangers, really, haven’t spoken more than a couple words to each other in probably three weeks. He should shuffle his way down there one of these days, make sure that Dean’s...
He loses his train of thought, cause man does he feel good, so relaxed. Time for sleep. Definitely time for sleep.
“Dude you have a text message,” Myrtle says, a freckled hand on Sam’s shoulder. “From your brother.”
“Wassit say,” Sam mutters, “read it.”
“Uh... it says, ‘can you get one of the dudes to take you to your appointment, not feeling so hot.'”
“S’wrong?”
He hears his phone beeping as Myrtle sends the message back. Good. Dean’s a slow texter, which means Sam has a little time to nod off again--
Almost no time goes by before Myrtle says, “he says, uh, he says ‘give Sam the fucking phone.’ Dude how’d he know?”
“He’s muh brother.” Sam waves at Myrtle for the phone. He opens his eyes, looks at the screen, closes his eyes again and lets his hand and the phone fall on his chest. “One of you got a car?”
“Gabe has a car,” says a deep, cave-manish voice that belongs to Monstro, a friendly, weak-chinned kid with a massive overbite. “He’s at work, though.”
Thanks Monstro, very helpful, Sam thinks, because he’s too lazy to say it out loud. “Where’s Kevin?”
“Right here.”
“Gimme a ride to the doctor.”
“No.”
“I saved your life once.”
“You did not.”
“Is that right?”
Sam waits for Kevin to catch up. He’s already not to happy to have them; it was only at Jamie’s insistence that he provide them with a place to say, an arrangement he never would have agreed to if he weren’t trying to get out of the doghouse and back home with her.
But if he doesn’t relent and offer a ride, he’ll tell everyone about how it all really happened, the kiss between Dean and Kevin that saved them all from the ghost. Kevin’s already embellished the story so badly that any form of the truth would be very embarrassing indeed.
So after a minute Kevin says “Jamie has the truck. I’ll call her.”
Sam fades in and out for a while then, waking every time one of the dudes screams at the video game or gets a phone call (phone calls around here are always very loud). He doesn’t come fully awake until he feels a soft hand on his forehead.
“Honey?” He hears Jamie say, and how nice it is to hear a woman’s voice after drowning in testosterone for so many weeks. “Sam. Wake up.”
Sam opens his eyes and smiles, but Jamie doesn’t smile back. “Where is your brother? He texted me earlier.”
“In his room.” Sam tries to sit up, but everything is wearing off and he’s starting to hurt again. “Umwake.”
“Which room?” She demands.
Sam looks around. No one is left but Kevin and Myrtle, as if everyone knew instinctively to hide from her. He finds himself shrugging, for some reason unwilling to be the one who tells her the truth.
“Kevin. Where the hell is Dean sleeping?” She crosses her arms.
“In the basement.”
“Is it time for my appointment yet?” Sam says quietly, while Jamie and Kevin have a staring contest.
“Tell me you didn’t honestly put him in that shithole,” she says.
“Where else was I supposed to put him?”
Jamie throws up her arms. “You put someone with his lungs in that room?”
“It’s not that bad! Poopy stayed down there for six months.”
“Poopy can barely spell his own name. Poopy allows his friends to refer to him as Poopy. Oh my god are you a fucking moron?” Jamie’s hands clench into fists at her sides. Her eyes dart around the room like maybe she’s looking for something to chuck at Kevin’s head.
She spins, and a second later Sam can hear her shoes clomping down the stairs.
“Jesus, is it really that bad down there?” Sam is suddenly brimming with panic. He feels like an idiot for not noticing before. Sam’s been resting, healing. Doesn’t that mean Dean should have been resting and healing too?
“Help me up,” he says. His leg is stiff and by now absolutely fucking on fire but he can just hear Jamie’s alarmed voice, calling out his brother’s name.
“Easy, dude,” Myrtle says, trying to hold him back. “She’ll bring him up here. Easy.”
“Let him go,” Kevin jumps up, knocking Myrtle’s hand away. “You don’t know how these two are. He wants to go downstairs, let him go downstairs.”
“Guys?” Jamie calls up the stairs. The panic in her voice is unmistakable. “Guys get down here! Oh fuck, get down here!”
Kevin and Myrtle bolt, leaving Sam pretty much helpless in the living room, propped up on his elbows with no idea how the hell he’s going to get up off the couch by himself. But he has to, he fucking has to. He inches his leg over the lip of the sofa, lowering it to the ground by clutching fistfuls of his jeans. He’s still in a splint, a leg full of plates and pins, and he has no idea, not one fucking clue where his crutches might have gone because it’s been hours and hours since the last time he got up off the couch.
The dudes, they love the crutches. Not a minute goes by when someone’s not testing them out, trying to walk on them without using their legs at all, marveling at how long they are; Sam’s height. He looks around frantically and sees them nowhere.
He’s going to have to hop, a damn stupid stunt even when he’s not in pain.
He hops about two steps before it’s clear that he’s going to black out if he keeps it up. So he lowers himself carefully to the floor, scooting across the kitchen linoleum and then the dusty hardwoods on his hip with his bad leg dragging behind him. When he reaches the basement steps, thank god there’s a railing on either side of the staircase. He swings himself down in two seconds flat, lowers himself back down to the floor and scoots the rest of the way.
There’s blood. Like some bizarre amnesiac deja vu, Dean is hanging over Jamie’s shoulder again, just like that night, all that mud, only this time blood dribbles down his chin, down the back of her dress. His face is a terrible gray, like a statue, like a corpse.
“Oh fuck,” Myrtle is saying, clutching big handfuls of his red curls. “Oh fuck, oh fuck oh fuck.”
For once Kevin isn’t being useless, he’s got a phone against his ear, pacing back and forth in front of the pool table.
Sam sits on the floor, helpless, the pain in his leg screaming right through the panic. He rubs his hand up and down the splint, like that’s going to help. From across the room he can see that Dean’s eyes are open, that he’s looking in Sam’s direction.
Bring him here, Sam wants to yell out to Jamie. Bring my brother here. But what’s Jamie gonna do, lay Dean down at his feet like a goddamn sacrificial lamb?
“Is he breathing?” Kevin says. “They want to know if he’s breathing.”
“He’s breathing,” Jamie answers, which is good news, sure, but it's more than Sam can handle. He calls Dean’s name, embarrassingly loud, the way he used to before all this shit started, a million years ago when they were hunters, before the neverending pneumonia and forever-broken leg.
We’re still hunters, Sam tries to tell himself. And this is just like anything else. Dean’s cracked his skull open against the proverbial headstone, and he’s going to bounce back just like he always does.
Myrtle turns and sees Sam sitting there on the floor. He holds out his arms, retracts them, holds them out again. Sam knows the feeling. He’s not sure if he wants off the floor either. What good would it do? Him here, Dean over there.
We’re still hunters.
“Myrtle. Help me up.”
Myrtle fidgets. His dudely machismo is gone now, in his place a jumpy, neurotic little kid. After a couple more false starts, he gets behind Sam and hooks his hands under Sam’s armpits. Next thing Sam knows he’s being lifted into the air, too fast, way to fucking fast, and it hurts like a son of a bitch, and he starts to fall over.
Jamie catches him. Over her shoulder Sam catches sight of Dean and breathes a sign of relief. The blood is dripping out his nose, which isn’t good, but better than out of his mouth. He’s heaving-- he obviously can’t breathe-- and there’s puke all down his shirt, but he’s sitting up on his own.
He’ll probably live.
***
The Lala Land Dean visits this time is really something else. He’s gotta laugh. He’s been knocked out so many times that he lucid-passes out like others lucid dream.
Sammy stands on a hill, with a cane, so far away that Dean just barely knows it’s him. He's guarded on all sides by Stonehenge, only the stones are shaped like men in cargo shorts and flip flops. The heavy-handed symbolism isn’t lost on Dean, though he's never passed an English class in his whole life.
He feels an ache, seeing his brother so far away, so surrounded. An ache that moves quickly to his chest, an ache he soon realizes is pulling him back to the real world.
Oh good. He'll probably live.
***
“Mold exposure,” the doctor says, “exacerbated his existing respiratory issues. Full recovery. Which one of you is his broth-- are you his brother? Make sure he stops hanging out in dank basements. That’ll be $3,000 please.”
Alright, not in so many words, but it was something like that. Sam's pain pill is definitely kicking in now.
“I’m sorry, Dean,” Kevin says. He’s standing on the other side of the bed-- a safe distance from Sam-- nervously twisting his baseball cap in both hands. “I’m really super sorry.”
Dean smiles sheepishly through the mask that’s forcing air into his lungs. Punctuates it with a “what’re ya gonna do” shrug. Like he was just in a bad sit-com episode instead of a life threatening situation.
“Why don’t you give me a minute with my brother,” Sam says.
“Right. I’ll go give Jamie and the guys an update,” Kevin says.
"You do that.”
Kevin nods but says nothing. He twists the shit out of the hat and looks at Sam pathetically.
Sam inches forward on his crutches. He’s pleasantly medicated and feeling merciful. “Don’t worry, I'll wait until my leg's healed to beat you into the ground. Enjoy the next two or three months.”
Kevin emits a decidedly unmasculine squeak.
From the bed, Dean pulls the mask off his mouth and tries to speak. A sand-papery grunt is all he can manage.
“Shut up, Dean. I'm just giving him crap.” Sam smiles wide and innocent but Kevin doesn’t buy it. He inches backward out of the room.
“Put that back on,” Sam orders his brother. He shoves the mask back up over Dean’s face.
They stare at each other.
Sam clears his throat.
Dean blinks and coughs a grotesque, gurgling cough.
“So,” Sam begins. “I guess... I guess I reverted back to my college days a little, didn’t I?”
Dean nods.
“I guess... I guess I just wanted to pretend... you know. Cause, it’s just because our job, man...”
They’ve had enough conversations about the job. He doesn’t need to finish his sentence.
“You’re my brother, Dean. And I shoulda been looking out for you dude. I’m so sorry.”
Sam sheds a few messy tears.
Dean rolls his eyes, turns his face away.
That’s how Sam knows he’s forgiven.
:::
The end.
Just as an aside... I know a guy called Poopy. Didn’t EVEN make it up.
Author: wave_obscura
Genre: H/C, gen, humor
Word count: 4,000
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Summary: Dean’s sick. Sam is too stoned to notice. A sequel of sorts to The Kissing Curve. You need to remember the story enough to recall the OCs (Jamie and Kevin?), but remembering the plot is not really required because this fic doesn't have one! Why do I keep posting this shit. I don't know.
Spoilers/Warnings: OCs, sick!respiratorily distressed!Dean, hurt!Sam, weed smokin'!Sam, Afrin addicted!Dean
Disclaimer: For the sick pleasure of myself and others. No copyright infringement intended.
The Dudes
by wave obscura
So Dean’s nose is broken. Not broken as in some monster threw him into an armoire and now Sam has to wrestle his septum back into place, but, like, broken. Like someone cut it right off his face and shoved two fat fingers into the collapsing holes. Nothing goes in; nothing comes out, except for a constant burning stream of god-knows-what-the-fuck that drips down the back of his throat.
When he swallows, his ears plug up. His throat is raw from breathing through his mouth and when he sleeps, he dreams that he’s holding a glass of water that he can’t goddamn swallow no matter how hard he tries. And what a shame, what a fucking shame because he is so so thirsty and the water is icy, icy cold. In the dream he pours it into his mouth and feels his teeth tingle, his tongue twitch in anticipation but all the tissue, all the hungry tastebuds stay as dry as a bone.
He wakes with yeasty slime in his mouth and white glop on his lips, which he wipes into two ridges that dry quickly on the back of his hand.
And the fucking wheezing. That fucking sponge-y, squeaky sound that is at least fifty percent of each exhale. Long after he feels like he’s blown a whole lungful out, the air keeps coming and coming and coming from somewhere in the lowest, most swampy bits of his lungs, a high-pitch lingering death rattle. He lies awake most nights half sitting up, and sometimes holds his breath just so he doesn’t have to listen to it anymore.
Luckily Sam’s got his own room, or he would have killed Dean several times over already.
Dean’s “room,” as Kevin calls it, is actually a daylight basement with windows that are nailed shut and probably haven’t been opened since 1950. A green-and-gray concrete floor so dusty it turns his bare feet black. One wall is cracked concrete, speckled with holes perfect for egg-laying spiders and cobwebs that cling right to the wall, dipping and peaking like velvet ropes.
His only source of air is the door to the drafty shit-filled garage. Kevin had been kind enough to supply him with a box fan, which sits in the doorway blowing the stale air and dust back and forth between the two rooms in a manner that almost feels like a breeze.
And in the middle of the room, Dean’s “bed,” which is a mattress pad on top of a pool table. The stains on the mattress pad are a mystery but the stains on the pool table are not; nothing but human urine could eat so thoroughly through felt.
So yeah, long story short, Dean can’t breathe worth a damn. They’ve been lounging around this shithole for almost a month now, Sam laid up with his fucking leg, again, because he’d needed surgery, again, and christ, everything would be just fine if Dean could have some nasal spray.
And some albuterol.
And a sleeping pill.
But mostly some nasal spray.
Okay mostly albuterol.
He unearths himself from his musty blanket and gazes longingly at the inhaler on the nightstand. It’s empty, he knows it’s empty because he’s been sucking uselessly on it all night and all day. He thinks about the Afrin, upstairs in Sam’s pocket, and how if he could just have a little, just one little squirt up one little nostril, he could sleep long and hard like his body to desperately, desperately needs.
He slides his legs off the edge of the pool table, pausing to bend over one of the side pockets to pant. His head is pounding, his muscles like sacks of sand. Just for shits he attempts to suck air through his traffic jam of a nose; nothing.
He doesn’t hear any noise until he stops halfway up the stairs for a breath. Some whiny, moaning college rock blares from one of the bedrooms, competing with the clink clink clink of what is probably Sam continuously beating something to death with a video game sword.
“Bring me a surprise, dickbag!” someone calls, just before the front door slams, and despite himself Dean jumps, his hand flying to his already heaving chest.
Christ, he can’t wait for Sam to heal so they can get the hell out of this place.
There are half a million dudes lying around the living room but his brother is easy to spot-- directly in front of the old school big screen TV, his splinted leg elevated on the coffee table under a pink pillow shaped like a Hershey's kiss. He’s got a game controller in his hand and eyes are on the TV while some guy-- they call him Beefy or something-- holds a bong to his mouth. Sam nods once the chamber is full of smoke; Beefy pulls the stem out of the carb and Sam sucks up the rest in one gulp, coughing spastically, which seems to please all the other guys. Sam barely acknowledges his accomplishment, though, he’s too busy whack-whack-whacking away at his video game.
Dean sags in the doorway, waiting for someone to notice him. There’s nowhere to sit anyhow.
After a moment Sam’s eyes flick in that direction, then again once he realizes he’s looking at his brother.
“Hey, brother,” he says lazily. He’s taken to calling Dean “bro” and “brother,” in the weeks they’ve been staying in this house. His eyes are rimmed pink.“Still feeling shitty?”
“Sam--”
“No.”
“Sam, just one--”
“No, Dean.” Sam holds the bong out. “Here, hit this. It’ll help you sleep.”
The curly redheaded guy with the red beard on Sam’s left-- they all call him Myrtle, for some reason, throws his head back in a burst of laughter. “Dude can barely breathe, dude, and he’s offerin’ him a fucking bong hit. HA.”
Sam’s mouth opens in a stupid smile. “Right. Right.” He looks at Dean. “Bro... you should. Why don’t you just use your uh... your uh...”
“My inhaler is empty,” Dean finishes for him. A few weeks ago he would have been too embarrassed to admit that there existed in this universe an inhaler with his name on it. But this is fucking serious. His headache is getting worse, his already destroyed nose is getting worse, which he didn’t even think was possible, but his sinuses seem to be shrinking and expanding all at once, pinching all along his nose and behind his eyes.
“Nasal spray is addictive,” Sam reminds him for at least the millionth time.
Dean knows and he doesn’t give a rat’s ass. He just wants to fucking breathe.
“Sam don’t make me...” fucking beat you , he was going say, but he knows threats aren’t going to do any damn good. He doesn’t even get the full threat out before half the other guys in the room tense up.
They like Sam. They’re impressed by the wounds and scars on his gnarly leg, how well he handles the pain. And lord knows his brand new laid back attitude-- thanks to the painkillers and pot-- meshes awesomely with their collective borderline retardation.
And the tales Kevin has told them about the ghost hunt up on Kissing Curve--which both brothers have vehemently denied over and over and over-- have all of his stupid roommates entranced.
So they’d kick Dean’s ass for laying a hand on Sam.
He sniffs an injured sniff. It’s unfair, that’s what is, to be trapped in a place where he can’t even beat up his own little brother.
Normally he would do it anyway, and with gusto. But today? Today he can barely stand up.
Plus they think all think Dean’s an uptight loser. They don’t understand that Sam needed another surgery because he wouldn’t listen to the doctors, wouldn’t go easy on his leg for even a moment. He’s going to be half-crippled now no matter what, best case scenario. He’s already looking at a permanent brace, maybe even a crutch or a cane. They don’t understand that Dean is not just a whiny pussy, that his chest problems have been going on for months, that he’s never quite recovered from the pneumonia.
Dean doesn’t have many courses of action, so he just stands there in the doorway and looks pitiful.
“Oh!” Myrtle shrieks, clutching Sam by the arm, “Oh God, ten more times! Do it, dude! Do it!”
“Dude!” Beefy agrees orgasmically. “Dude dude dude!”
Sam leans to one side, clenching his teeth together and pounding furiously on the controller. All the guys on the couch lean forward in anticipation. The little shaggy-headed girl on the video game and her oddly-shaped sword freeze for a moment, then explode with brightly colored green and gold balls, and the monster-thingy-whatever-it-is makes a hideous noise and begins the long process of dying.
A roar goes up among all the dudes, so loud it makes Dean’s congested ears pop.
Sam throws the controller on Beefy’s lap, heaving a victorious sigh. “Finally,” he says. The dudes take turns clapping him on the back-- hard enough to be manly but not hard enough to jostle his leg.
After a moment, Sam’s pink eyes fall back on Dean. “I got a doctor’s appointment at four today. Don’t forget.”
Dean nods. He slinks back downstairs and into his nest of blankets on top of the pool table. The room spins a little, and his head pounds in unison with his sinuses. The trip upstairs has left his chest tight and achy.
He reaches over and sucks on his inhaler one more time, lying to his lungs, whisper-grumbling there is medicine in here. There is medicine in here.
He doesn’t realize he feels sick to his stomach until he’s puking onto the eight ball in the corner pocket.
***
Finally Ursula is defeated. Sam passes off the controller to someone else, has Myrtle and Ox help him lay back on the couch. They arrange his leg on a stained body pillow and with a sigh he sinks into the overstuffed sofa. The weed and the painkillers creep up and down his body like soft tickling fingers.
Even then something nags at the back of his mind; a general feeling that something is off. It’s Dean, Dean doesn’t look well and hasn’t looked well for most of their time here.
But it’s his own damn fault, isn’t it? If he took his meds and used his inhaler and avoided hunts that involved filthy basements and dank caves like Sam had advised him, he wouldn’t be in this situation, would he? Addicted to nasal spray and keeping himself awake at night wheezing and hacking.
At least Sam assumes that’s still the problem. He hasn’t been able to get down to Dean's basement room, not on his supremely fucked up leg. He’s just now coming out of the haze of post-surgery pain to even consider it.
Maybe he should. It’s been a long while since he and Dean have been able to talk without scads of other people around. They’ve become like strangers, really, haven’t spoken more than a couple words to each other in probably three weeks. He should shuffle his way down there one of these days, make sure that Dean’s...
He loses his train of thought, cause man does he feel good, so relaxed. Time for sleep. Definitely time for sleep.
“Dude you have a text message,” Myrtle says, a freckled hand on Sam’s shoulder. “From your brother.”
“Wassit say,” Sam mutters, “read it.”
“Uh... it says, ‘can you get one of the dudes to take you to your appointment, not feeling so hot.'”
“S’wrong?”
He hears his phone beeping as Myrtle sends the message back. Good. Dean’s a slow texter, which means Sam has a little time to nod off again--
Almost no time goes by before Myrtle says, “he says, uh, he says ‘give Sam the fucking phone.’ Dude how’d he know?”
“He’s muh brother.” Sam waves at Myrtle for the phone. He opens his eyes, looks at the screen, closes his eyes again and lets his hand and the phone fall on his chest. “One of you got a car?”
“Gabe has a car,” says a deep, cave-manish voice that belongs to Monstro, a friendly, weak-chinned kid with a massive overbite. “He’s at work, though.”
Thanks Monstro, very helpful, Sam thinks, because he’s too lazy to say it out loud. “Where’s Kevin?”
“Right here.”
“Gimme a ride to the doctor.”
“No.”
“I saved your life once.”
“You did not.”
“Is that right?”
Sam waits for Kevin to catch up. He’s already not to happy to have them; it was only at Jamie’s insistence that he provide them with a place to say, an arrangement he never would have agreed to if he weren’t trying to get out of the doghouse and back home with her.
But if he doesn’t relent and offer a ride, he’ll tell everyone about how it all really happened, the kiss between Dean and Kevin that saved them all from the ghost. Kevin’s already embellished the story so badly that any form of the truth would be very embarrassing indeed.
So after a minute Kevin says “Jamie has the truck. I’ll call her.”
Sam fades in and out for a while then, waking every time one of the dudes screams at the video game or gets a phone call (phone calls around here are always very loud). He doesn’t come fully awake until he feels a soft hand on his forehead.
“Honey?” He hears Jamie say, and how nice it is to hear a woman’s voice after drowning in testosterone for so many weeks. “Sam. Wake up.”
Sam opens his eyes and smiles, but Jamie doesn’t smile back. “Where is your brother? He texted me earlier.”
“In his room.” Sam tries to sit up, but everything is wearing off and he’s starting to hurt again. “Umwake.”
“Which room?” She demands.
Sam looks around. No one is left but Kevin and Myrtle, as if everyone knew instinctively to hide from her. He finds himself shrugging, for some reason unwilling to be the one who tells her the truth.
“Kevin. Where the hell is Dean sleeping?” She crosses her arms.
“In the basement.”
“Is it time for my appointment yet?” Sam says quietly, while Jamie and Kevin have a staring contest.
“Tell me you didn’t honestly put him in that shithole,” she says.
“Where else was I supposed to put him?”
Jamie throws up her arms. “You put someone with his lungs in that room?”
“It’s not that bad! Poopy stayed down there for six months.”
“Poopy can barely spell his own name. Poopy allows his friends to refer to him as Poopy. Oh my god are you a fucking moron?” Jamie’s hands clench into fists at her sides. Her eyes dart around the room like maybe she’s looking for something to chuck at Kevin’s head.
She spins, and a second later Sam can hear her shoes clomping down the stairs.
“Jesus, is it really that bad down there?” Sam is suddenly brimming with panic. He feels like an idiot for not noticing before. Sam’s been resting, healing. Doesn’t that mean Dean should have been resting and healing too?
“Help me up,” he says. His leg is stiff and by now absolutely fucking on fire but he can just hear Jamie’s alarmed voice, calling out his brother’s name.
“Easy, dude,” Myrtle says, trying to hold him back. “She’ll bring him up here. Easy.”
“Let him go,” Kevin jumps up, knocking Myrtle’s hand away. “You don’t know how these two are. He wants to go downstairs, let him go downstairs.”
“Guys?” Jamie calls up the stairs. The panic in her voice is unmistakable. “Guys get down here! Oh fuck, get down here!”
Kevin and Myrtle bolt, leaving Sam pretty much helpless in the living room, propped up on his elbows with no idea how the hell he’s going to get up off the couch by himself. But he has to, he fucking has to. He inches his leg over the lip of the sofa, lowering it to the ground by clutching fistfuls of his jeans. He’s still in a splint, a leg full of plates and pins, and he has no idea, not one fucking clue where his crutches might have gone because it’s been hours and hours since the last time he got up off the couch.
The dudes, they love the crutches. Not a minute goes by when someone’s not testing them out, trying to walk on them without using their legs at all, marveling at how long they are; Sam’s height. He looks around frantically and sees them nowhere.
He’s going to have to hop, a damn stupid stunt even when he’s not in pain.
He hops about two steps before it’s clear that he’s going to black out if he keeps it up. So he lowers himself carefully to the floor, scooting across the kitchen linoleum and then the dusty hardwoods on his hip with his bad leg dragging behind him. When he reaches the basement steps, thank god there’s a railing on either side of the staircase. He swings himself down in two seconds flat, lowers himself back down to the floor and scoots the rest of the way.
There’s blood. Like some bizarre amnesiac deja vu, Dean is hanging over Jamie’s shoulder again, just like that night, all that mud, only this time blood dribbles down his chin, down the back of her dress. His face is a terrible gray, like a statue, like a corpse.
“Oh fuck,” Myrtle is saying, clutching big handfuls of his red curls. “Oh fuck, oh fuck oh fuck.”
For once Kevin isn’t being useless, he’s got a phone against his ear, pacing back and forth in front of the pool table.
Sam sits on the floor, helpless, the pain in his leg screaming right through the panic. He rubs his hand up and down the splint, like that’s going to help. From across the room he can see that Dean’s eyes are open, that he’s looking in Sam’s direction.
Bring him here, Sam wants to yell out to Jamie. Bring my brother here. But what’s Jamie gonna do, lay Dean down at his feet like a goddamn sacrificial lamb?
“Is he breathing?” Kevin says. “They want to know if he’s breathing.”
“He’s breathing,” Jamie answers, which is good news, sure, but it's more than Sam can handle. He calls Dean’s name, embarrassingly loud, the way he used to before all this shit started, a million years ago when they were hunters, before the neverending pneumonia and forever-broken leg.
We’re still hunters, Sam tries to tell himself. And this is just like anything else. Dean’s cracked his skull open against the proverbial headstone, and he’s going to bounce back just like he always does.
Myrtle turns and sees Sam sitting there on the floor. He holds out his arms, retracts them, holds them out again. Sam knows the feeling. He’s not sure if he wants off the floor either. What good would it do? Him here, Dean over there.
We’re still hunters.
“Myrtle. Help me up.”
Myrtle fidgets. His dudely machismo is gone now, in his place a jumpy, neurotic little kid. After a couple more false starts, he gets behind Sam and hooks his hands under Sam’s armpits. Next thing Sam knows he’s being lifted into the air, too fast, way to fucking fast, and it hurts like a son of a bitch, and he starts to fall over.
Jamie catches him. Over her shoulder Sam catches sight of Dean and breathes a sign of relief. The blood is dripping out his nose, which isn’t good, but better than out of his mouth. He’s heaving-- he obviously can’t breathe-- and there’s puke all down his shirt, but he’s sitting up on his own.
He’ll probably live.
***
The Lala Land Dean visits this time is really something else. He’s gotta laugh. He’s been knocked out so many times that he lucid-passes out like others lucid dream.
Sammy stands on a hill, with a cane, so far away that Dean just barely knows it’s him. He's guarded on all sides by Stonehenge, only the stones are shaped like men in cargo shorts and flip flops. The heavy-handed symbolism isn’t lost on Dean, though he's never passed an English class in his whole life.
He feels an ache, seeing his brother so far away, so surrounded. An ache that moves quickly to his chest, an ache he soon realizes is pulling him back to the real world.
Oh good. He'll probably live.
***
“Mold exposure,” the doctor says, “exacerbated his existing respiratory issues. Full recovery. Which one of you is his broth-- are you his brother? Make sure he stops hanging out in dank basements. That’ll be $3,000 please.”
Alright, not in so many words, but it was something like that. Sam's pain pill is definitely kicking in now.
“I’m sorry, Dean,” Kevin says. He’s standing on the other side of the bed-- a safe distance from Sam-- nervously twisting his baseball cap in both hands. “I’m really super sorry.”
Dean smiles sheepishly through the mask that’s forcing air into his lungs. Punctuates it with a “what’re ya gonna do” shrug. Like he was just in a bad sit-com episode instead of a life threatening situation.
“Why don’t you give me a minute with my brother,” Sam says.
“Right. I’ll go give Jamie and the guys an update,” Kevin says.
"You do that.”
Kevin nods but says nothing. He twists the shit out of the hat and looks at Sam pathetically.
Sam inches forward on his crutches. He’s pleasantly medicated and feeling merciful. “Don’t worry, I'll wait until my leg's healed to beat you into the ground. Enjoy the next two or three months.”
Kevin emits a decidedly unmasculine squeak.
From the bed, Dean pulls the mask off his mouth and tries to speak. A sand-papery grunt is all he can manage.
“Shut up, Dean. I'm just giving him crap.” Sam smiles wide and innocent but Kevin doesn’t buy it. He inches backward out of the room.
“Put that back on,” Sam orders his brother. He shoves the mask back up over Dean’s face.
They stare at each other.
Sam clears his throat.
Dean blinks and coughs a grotesque, gurgling cough.
“So,” Sam begins. “I guess... I guess I reverted back to my college days a little, didn’t I?”
Dean nods.
“I guess... I guess I just wanted to pretend... you know. Cause, it’s just because our job, man...”
They’ve had enough conversations about the job. He doesn’t need to finish his sentence.
“You’re my brother, Dean. And I shoulda been looking out for you dude. I’m so sorry.”
Sam sheds a few messy tears.
Dean rolls his eyes, turns his face away.
That’s how Sam knows he’s forgiven.
:::
The end.
Just as an aside... I know a guy called Poopy. Didn’t EVEN make it up.