Heart to Heart, Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
So it was a hunt.
Great.
After Sam’s big realization he and his brother lapse quickly into silence, because hooray, Sam isn’t a cop killer, but last night he was trapped in a delusion or hallucination or was driven temporarily insane by something, and that wasn’t necessarily better, was it?
It certainly doesn’t make Dean any less sick, or change the fact that they’re still standing in the middle of nowhere with a hundred and twenty-five bucks to their names and hardly any gas.
They have a thousand more pressing things to worry about, but all Sam can think of is the sound of his hysterical wailing, the way he clung to his brother, Dean’s skinny arms around him- he made his sickbrother hold him, for christ’s sake-and how ridiculous he must have looked pointing an imaginary gun at imaginary police officers, how scared shitless Dean must’ve been while Sam was wigging out, and he was so rough with Dean and he made Dean sleep in the car covered in his own blood and Jesus-Christ-in-a-casserole, did he really curl up in the dirt last night and cry himself to sleep?.
Dean just sits on the hood of the Impala, just sits there looking ill and cold and sleepy, stares at the ground, hugs his stomach, which makes him look more ill and skinnier and colder and sleepier and like he doesn’t care much about anything-in fact he looks like maybe he’s about to nod off, and Sam knows it’s his job, yet again, to answer the question of the year: what the hell do we do now?
Sam doesn’t understand it, he really doesn’t. For his whole life his brother has formed plans and barked orders at him while suffering from all sorts of injuries, gushing blood, holding dislocated limbs in place, applying pressure to his own gunshot wounds. “DON’T BURN IT YET, SAM,” he remembers Dean screaming once, “MY FUCKING PINKY IS STILL IN ITS MOUTH. JUST HOLD THE LOWER JAW, I’LL GET IT.” Dean had been mauled to shit that time-the creature had ripped away all the meat between his ribs and yet he still dove back into its drooling jaws to retrieve his bitten-off finger and then sat in the car and sewed the fucking thing back on by himself while bleeding from his ribs like a stuck fucking pig, but now he’s just gonna sit here and let Sam figure out what to do? Now it’s all up to Sam?
“So what the fuck do we do now?” Sam blurts aloud, and the acid in his voice surprises even him.
Dean flinches out of his trance, masking a sharp intake of breath with an airy cough. He straightens his shoulders a little, grimaces, shakes off his daze.
“Um. We got any money?”
“A little.”
“Food?”
Sam thinks for a minute about where the groceries might have gone. If there ever were any groceries. “I handed you a bag of food. I think. When I was roughing up that kid.”
Dean rolls his eyes toward the sky, trying to remember. “I don’t- I don’t know, dude.”
“Funny, I thought you were supposed to be the lucid one.”
Dean shrugs. “That fucking kid, man. I wasn’t feeling so great.”
“What about after that?”
“When I…fell over… I don’t know. All the blood rushed out of my head. Like I was in shock or something.”
“Then how did you know I was…” Sam doesn’t know how to finish the sentence. Crazy? Insane? Hallucinating? Being a spazzing flash-backing idiot?
His brother doesn’t answer. He rolls his neck, a dozen bones popping, and picks some glop out of his eyelashes before he says, “Let’s just take a minute, okay? We’ll clean up, find a place to wash clothes, sit down and figure this out.”
Sam scoffs outwardly but flutters with relief on the inside. “Dean, we should-“
“Whatever this thing is, Sam? It can wait. The hunt can wait. You need to clear you head, and we need a plan before… we need a plan before it gets bad again.”
Before my pain gets bad again. For a moment they’re both stunned into awkward silence by the statement. Sam clears his throat to say something but Dean beats him to it:
“We don’t clean this car out soon, fuckin’ dysentery is gonna get us before the whatever-it-is does.”
Dean’s delivery is all wrong, fatigued and half-assed, but Sam laughs anyway, maybe a little too hard but fuck it, he can’t remember the last time anything was funny.
“Okay,” he says, “I’m hungry. What should we eat?”
“Whatever you want.”
“Christ, Dean, just once will you eat without making me bully you into it?”
Dean arches his back a little and looks harassed, and Sam sighs in an overdone manner that doesn’t even begin to express how frustrated he is because yeah, his brother’s probably feeling like shit, what with the wholly unnecessary drama and bullshit of the last few days, but seriously. It’s bad enough that Sam has to fight the whole rest of the world to keep them alive, now he has to fight Dean too?
He thinks about saying this aloud until he realizes how lame and melodramatic it sounds, and so instead he glares at Dean, waiting for an answer.
Dean looks at him tiredly. “I tried, dude, and I’m sicka pukin’. Just. Lay off.”
“Try harder.”
“Believe it or not, Sam, I don’t do it just to piss you off,” Dean says with sudden venom, “And we’ll get to that, okay? We’ll get to all that, fuck, we’ll talk about whatever you want, we can play twenty questions about Dean’s Mysterious Heart Condition, Sam, but right now? The car smells like blood and puke and ball sweat and I’m already trying not to harf all down the front of this nice clean hoodie and I don’t want to fucking talk about it right now, you understand?”
Sam finds himself smiling. “Okay.”
“Okay.” Dean frowns suspiciously. “Okay,” he repeats, less growly this time, and puts his hand on Sam’s shoulder. “Help me up. Slow.”
Sam puts his arm around Dean’s back and starts to pull him off the hood of the Impala, but-
“OW! Ow, fuck, Sam, slow. You gotta go slow. Fuck.”
Slowly, very slowly, Sam pulls his brother up and Dean grips his shoulders, head hanging between their chests, cursing under his breath.
“Dude,” Dean pants with a breathless little laugh. “Dude. It’s almost funny sometimes.”
Sam doesn’t ask what Dean could possibly find funny. He doesn’t want to know.
He chews his lip against the urge to cross-exam his brother about what, exactly, is going on. He fears-no, he’s fucking terrified-of another full-body muscle spasm, jesus god they can’t go through that again, he can’t handle it if Dean goes away again, doesn’t see how Dean could even survive it when he’s already so worn out.
“Dean,” he says in what he hopes is a casual voice, “If you-we need to take care of it right away if...”
“No, it’s this shit.” Dean lifts his shirt, and the entire right side of his body is just black with bruises.
“Jesus. Did I-?”
“Nah,” Dean flicks at a piece of gravel stuck to his hip with the same kind of “ow” one would grant an annoying hangnail. “I was trying to-I fell. Don’t worry about it.”
“Fuck, Dean-“
“Don’t pout, it’s just a little sore.”
“You want me to…?”
“No. But could you. There should be some… in the. You know. By the thing.”
Sam nods and runs to the back seat, starts digging for a clean (cleaner) pair of jeans. Dean’s are still, well, crusty will bloody hand prints.
“And Sammy,” he hears Dean call, “toothbrush and deodorant, please. You stink like a truck stop waitress.”
Sam’s so out of practice when it comes to smiling that his cheeks ache.
OOOO
They decide to clean up a bit before they take off, go through their regular parked-in-the-middle-of-nowhere routine-scraping mud from boots and knees and elbows, brushing teeth without water, shaving blindly- and goddamn does it feel good to be doing something they always do.
Sam digs out the cassette adapter and makes Dean listen to Ray LaMontagne because it’s before noon on a Wednesday and they’re more than fifty miles from a town with a population over 2,000 and those are the terms under which he gets to choose the music (“I don’t wanna hear it, Dean-you said.”).
“Whooooo ammm IIIII to play-eee Goddddddd,” Dean half sings, half screeches along with the song in a high pitch, mocking whine, “I don’t know what’s for reaaallllll anymororororororoe! I just think if we can keep our hearts togetherrrrrrr… maybe we can make this last a liiiiiiiiiiifetiiiiiiiiiiiiiime. Yuck.”
Halfway through the song he changes it to CCR and mutter-sings to himself as he shaves in the rearview mirror, but instead of arguing over stereo rights, Sam elects to trek out across the middle of nowhere to burn Dean’s bloody clothes.
He stands downwind of the flames, breathes in the smoke, lets his eyes water, and from a distance perceives his brother with horror.
Dean is walking the length of the Impala, leaning heavily on the car, using its lines for balance. Sam hasn’t really been more than six feet from Dean since, well, since they left that place, at least not while still in eyeshot. He’s grown used to the skim-milk skin, the weary eyes, the hitching breath. But from here Dean is just silhouette, slight and tiny against the orange hills, a threadbare, two-dimensional projection that God could unceremoniously flick from the face of the earth with his thumb and forefinger.
And so skinny. Down forty, maybe even fifty pounds.
But Sam promised himself he wouldn’t think about stuff like that. Not today, when everything is quiet and kinda-sorta-almost normal and he and his brother are cleaning up last week’s mess. Together. Finally, together.
Like Scarlett O’Hara-and goddamn, would Dean laugh himself into seizures if he heard Sam make such a reference-but like Scarlett O’Hara Sam keeps telling himself, over and over, “I’ll think of it tomorrow,” because things will still be fucked tomorrow and they’ll still need need need tomorrow and if there’s no running from hopelessness and evil, why not just stop, just for a minute, take a breath and let the horror blow right past you?
Because sooner or later it’ll double back and bite you in the ass, he hears Dad say.
But Dad’s not here and isn’t ever going to be. And tomorrow is another fucking day.
OOOO
The hundred and twenty-five dollars apparently wasn’t real. Sam searches the pocket of every pair of jeans they have, including the ones his brother is wearing.
There’s no money.
He doesn’t say anything, lets Dean doze while he searches for a laundromat. He thinks maybe he should be looking for money before he looks for a laundromat, but before they left Dean said look for a laundromat so that’s what he’s doing, and he doesn’t want to wake Dean up, though he knows he needs to let go of the stupid idea that sleep is somehow going to help heal his brother, because Dean could sleep straight through a week and it wouldn’t make any fucking difference.
Then Sam finds a laundromat but they don’t have any quarters and Sam doesn’t know where to get any, besides robbing a convenience store, and he’s all done with that.
“Dean,” he says, gently shaking his brother, “Dean, we don’t have any quarters.”
“Huh?” Dean says, peering sluggishly through half-open eyes.
“Quarters. For laundry.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Dean makes a little breathy “ugghhhh” noise as he pulls himself upright. “Put the Axe in with my darks, would ya?”
“My aftershave?”
“Huh?” Dean’s eyes open all the way and he shoots Sam a look. “No, no stupid- the axe. The axe. The weapon?”
“Oh. Why?”
Dean struggles with the door. Finally it flies open and he climbs out. “Just. Do it.”
Sam doesn’t dare speculate about what Dean plans to do with an axe. Honestly he doesn’t care, he’s too thankful that Dean has any plan at all.
It’s sad, but Sam thinks that maybe being lifted of the responsibility of finding money for laundry makes him feel ten thousand times more relieved than the knowledge that he’s not a murder.
And that’s weird. But it’s also something he chooses not to think about right now, during this brief respite that God has been kind enough to grant them. I’ll think of it tomorrow.
His hysteria whips back at him with enough force to leave him breathless then, because that’s not true, they’ve been granted reprieve by something, something that made him hallucinate, or lose his mind, or maybe even controlled his mind, and holy fuck-
“Sam.” Dean calls from the doorway of the laundromat, “stop it. It’ll wait, okay? It’ll fucking wait.”
Sam’s not sure if that’s true. But Dean said it, so he knows it won’t do any harm to believe it anyway.
OOOO
“Alright, patrons,” Dean calls, clapping his hands together. A girl who can’t be more than twenty and an old man look up at him, and for a minute Sam thinks Dean is gonna whip out a gun or start hacking them up with the axe, and why not, that’s probably the best plan that Sam would have been able come up with.
But instead he clears his throat and continues: “there’s been an, uh, an uh, a terrorist threat. We have to evacuate this facility immediately-you can come back for your laundry in three hours.”
An impatient huff explodes from the woman, but she scurries at light speed to her car and screeches away. The old man scratches at the hair in his ears, grumbles to himself and spends many tedious minutes restacking his quarters before caning his way out of the building and down the street.
When he finally shuffles around the corner, Sam turns to his brother. “I can’t believe they bought that. I can’t believe you tried that.”
“Oh come on. We totally don’t use the terrorism explanation enough. Remember Dad and the bacterial warfare at the haunted sandwich shop at Iowa State? People always run screaming.”
“Jesus, Dean…”
“You bring the axe?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright. Let’s get some money.”
Ten minutes later Sam is leaning on the axe handle huffing and puffing, and Dean is looking at him with a self-satisfied grin on his face, waving over two hundred dollars in ones and fives, and there’s a hundred more dollars worth of quarters, easy, scattered at their feet.
Breaking into a quarter dispenser machine. Sam is enraged at himself for not thinking of it first, and he’s even more enraged when he learns that this whole time a little hunk of metal in a box of odds and ends in the trunk of the Impala-a little hunk of metal that he always assumed was useless-is actually a meter key.
“It’ll open almost any parking meter,” Dean says, “Good for emergencies. Of course, a lot of places use those solar-power pay station things now, and most of the time you can just stick your boot through those or pry it open with a crowbar if you wanna be more quiet about it. They pay better, too.”
“Dean,” Sam says, gritting his teeth. “Why didn’t you-“
“I told you. I told you about both a week ago. You were too busy fretting about the cheeseburger I threw up.”
Is Sam that bad of a person, that his mind immediately jumped to robbery when he needed money? He thinks back, thinks about all those vending machines he passed on the road, how maybe there’s 50 bucks, tops, in each of them, but fuck, 50 times 15 is $750, and they could have holed up for weeks on that much money.
“There difference is,” Dean says, reading Sam’s mind, “that you don’t know how to think like a scumbag, Sam. But that’s a good thing, okay? Most of the time. But you can’t try to abide by the law until you’re so desperate that you can’t think straight, or you’ll do something stupid, okay, like committing a felony where a misdemeanor will do. Right? You did something stupid cause you were desperate. And because you were alone. And I’m sorry for that.”
They stare at one another, jaws working, verging dangerously on a tender moment.
Then Dean clears his throat. “Get these quarters picked up, would you?”
OOOO
“I’m not dying, Sam,” Dean says, leaning toward him, elbow-to-knee in the cheap plastic laundromat chair. “You can’t keep treating me like I’m about to die.”
Sam watches his brother, how his body squirms like he’s in pain and he gets this sort of wide-eyed, blank expression on his face, like maybe he’s a little shocked about how bad it hurts.
He’s heard it too many times to be shocked or appalled. “That’s what you always say.”
“Well. Am I dead?”
Sam rolls his eyes. “No.”
“Then I mean what I say, right?”
“You’ve never been sick like this before, Dean.”
They’ve promised each other that they won’t have this conversation the hard way, with the code language and pride and embarrassment and denial, because they simply don’t have time for it. But merely agreeing to openness and honesty apparently doesn’t make all those barriers disappear. Dean’s expression goes dark and his chest begins to hitch, and Sam can seem him riling himself up to lie his ass off about how he’s been feeling, Sam can practically hear it before he says it: I’m fine.
“You’re not fine,” Sam says before Dean can open his mouth, “We don’t have time to talk about how you’re fine, Dean, we need to talk about how to keep you from starving to death. We need to figure out what sort of creature we’re dealing with.”
Dean holds up his hands, surrendering. “Okay-but what about the hunt in Milwaukie?”
“The hunt in Milwaukie is a fucking joke,” Sam barks. He can’t believe, after last night, after all this shit, that his brother would even ask. “The ghost hasn’t even killed anybody.”
“Then why-“
“So you could get this hunting shit out of your system!”
Dean falls back in his chair with a monumental sign and scrubs his hands over his face. “Sam. You gotta quit yelling at me.”
Not the reaction Sam was expecting. “What?”
“It’s like a stress ball, okay?” Dean says with a little laugh, putting his hand on his heart. “And it feels like someone is squeezing the shit out of it. Only it’s like… getting bigger? It’s the weirdest fucking feeling. Most of the time I can’t even tell if it’s-“ He stops midsentence, brows knitting in pain.
“Dean, what…?”
Dean shakes his head, holds out his arm to keep Sam from lunging at him.
“Dean-“
“Sam. Just…” Dean holds up a one second finger and bows his head while Sam looks on helplessly. They sit for a minute that way, Dean holding his breath, Sam holding his breath, washers whirring and sloshing behind them.
Gradually his brother starts breathing again, little sips at first, then finally an explosive sigh.
“Man,” he mutters.
“Tell me what the fuck is wrong, Dean.”
“The murmur’s ridiculous. It’s like the beat of the Banana Boat song or something.”
Sam raises his eyebrow; Dean waves his hand dismissively. “I can’t explain it, dude-here.” He takes Sam’s hand and presses it against his chest.
Sam is reminded of a Thanksgiving at Jessica’s parents, the awkward, icky feeling he’d gotten when Jessica’s massively pregnant sister had randomly caught his arm and said, “He’s kicking! Feel!”
But he recognizes that this is a rare moment for Dean, and almost unheard of moment, a moment that’ll probably never occur again in any form and so he tries to concentrate on the uneven rhythm of his brother’s heartbeat. It’s disgusting, there’s no better word for it, how his heart knocks haphazardly against his rib cage, like a prisoner running a coffee cup along the bars of his cell.
“Daylight come and me wan go home,” Dean sings with a smile.
Sam wrestles his hand away, fight goddamn tears again. “Not fucking funny-“
“Wait,” Dean snatches his hand again, holds it to his sickly beating heart, and Sam squirms because goddamn it, he doesn’t want to feel it, because it sounds like any minute it’s gonna stop.
“Sam, just cool it for a minute, okay? Do you feel it?”
“Yeah,” Sam replies, snorting back his tears. “I can fucking feel it, now let me go.”
“Yell at me,” Dean says.
“What?”
“Fucking yell at me. Get pissed. Seriously. Just do it, okay? Just do it.”
“YOU’RE BEING FUCKING CREEPY,” Sam yells.
And then he feels it. Dean’s heartbeat stops, and then something bucks, or maybe bubbles, or maybe… writhes? Under his hand. And then nothing. And then the heart starts beating again.
Sam digs his thumb into the spot over Dean’s chest. “What the fuck, Dean? What the fuck?”
“Ow, Sam. Stop.”
“What the fuck was that?”
“I don’t know. But it only happens when you get pissed. Or when I get pissed. Or when someone gets pissed.”
“Jesus Christ, Dean.”
“I’m not trying to freak you out, okay? I’m trying to prove a point here.”
“What point?”
“Doesn’t matter what my heart’s doing, or how bad it fucking hurts, okay? I ain’t dying. Something’s keeping me alive-something unnatural.”
Sam opens his mouth to speak, but Dean charges over him: “And we’ll deal with that. Just not right now. Right now you’re exhausted, and we got some sorta monster or spirit fucking with your head. So I’m begging you-let’s worry about me later. Cause I’m telling you-my heart can wait. I ain’t dying. You gotta forget about that, for now.”
Sam is too overwhelmed to respond but he doesn’t cry, doesn’t know if he has any cry left in him, but suddenly his head hurts so bad he can scarcely see what’s in front of him. He turns away from Dean, rests his head on the laundromat counter and just breathes. He feels his brother’s hand on the small of his back, petting, comforting, like Sam should be doing, if only he weren’t such a baby, but jesus Christ, he can feel muscles in Dean’s arms-what’s left of the muscle, anyway-twitching, pulsing, vibrating against his back. Another seizure of muscle spasms is on the way.
“It’s happening again, Dean.”
“I know, Sammy. That’s why you gotta believe me. Cause we have bigger things to worry about and not a lot of time.”
“I can’t go through that again, god, Dean, I can’t see you like that again-“
“Hey,” Dean says, laughing again, goddamn him, “If I can get through it, you sure as hell can too. Now stop. We got a couple hours, max, okay? So let’s keep it together, huh? Let’s make a plan.”
Sam nods. And he keeps it together. They watch their laundry dry, paw around in Dad’s journal, pull out the laptop and sift around on the internet and find absolutely nothing, but Sam keeps it together.
As far as plans, though, they don’t make it much passed “find a motel room” and “go to the bank, cash in quarters for cash” because Dean’s pain grips him a little faster than expected, and he has trouble concentrating, so Sam digs around in the Impala’s glovebox until he finds a few of ancient over-the-counter sleeping pills and a half-disintegrated Tylenol with codeine, all of which he feeds to his brother, praying silently that maybe Dean will be able to sleep through the worst of the spasms.
Sam pulls their clothes out of the dryer still damp, and carries his brother to the car.
Just like that, Sam is alone again. But he tries to stay positive-they have the money to hole up somewhere now, somewhere to make safe, if only for a little while, doorways and window sills to salt so that maybe Sam can get some honest-to-god sleep.
But most importantly he has his brother’s permission to stop fretting about the possibility of his death. And that’s something, something big.
Dean drifts, then falls into a fitful sleep, but he doesn’t wake up once when Sam pulls into their parking space and lifts him from the car, only cracks a sluggish eyelid when Sam slips in a greasy puddle and knocks his brother’s head against the Impala’s side mirror. He’s all ribs and vertebrae and skin in Sam’s arms, muscles trembling in rhythm with frantic, uneven thud thud thud of his heart.
An apple-shaped woman with breasts like sandbags is leaning in the doorway of a neighboring room, blowing torrents of cigarette smoke at the sky. Sam nods politely in her direction and she stares unabashedly, expression unchanging.
It’s not until Sam reaches the door, huffing and puffing, that he realizes he forgot to unlock it first. He fumbles on the door step for a minute, Dean’s limbs flopping lifelessly every which way.
“Come on, Dean,” Sam mutters, “help me out here.”
“Hey,” the woman says, “Need help?”
“Um,” Sam says. At first he thinks the woman wants him to hand his brother over to her like a bag of groceries, and the idea makes him sick, but then she gestures toward the keyring dangling from his pointer finger.
“Oh, would you?” Sam says as she takes the key. “Thanks.”
Something tingles up Sam’s back as he settles his brother on the bed. The woman is still behind him, standing in the doorway, watching. But it’s not her, there’s something else…
“He okay?” She says. “Looks like he been poisoned.”
“He’s just drunk.” Sam crosses the room in two strides and shuts the door in her face. He locks all the locks, then stands there with his hand still on the doorknob, listening, just listening. He hears nothing but Dean’s gulping breaths and the rustle of bedding as the pain makes his brother increasingly restless.
Sam supposes he should second guess himself, especially considering the very loose grip he’s had on reality lately, but that’s not the way he was raised, and he knows something’s there, and so pulling his gun from his waistband he spins, points it between the eyes of the person lurking up behind him.
It’s the kid from Hermiston, Blazers jersey and all.
::::
The song Dean was slaughtering is “Forever My Friend,” by Ray LaMontagne.
CHAPTER SEVEN