Bring Me Home
Title: Bring Me Home
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters: Sam, Dean
Word Count: 4070
Rating: R
Warnings: language, reference to drug use
Summary: Dean gets a phone call from a broken little brother with a request.
Notes: Written for this prompt at the ohsam comment fic meme.
I’m in bed when the phone rings.
It’s Saturday morning, and I’ve got no leads, nothing to chase or hunt, so I’ve bought three breakfast burritos to eat in bed while I watch TV. Just as I’m settled, my cell phone goes.
I seriously consider not answering it.
But it’s my private phone, the one no one has the number for, which means this is most likely an important call. “Hello?”
“Dean?”
“Sam? Holy shit, where are you?” I pause. “Are you okay?”
There is a long silence on the other end of the line.
“Sam?”
“Dean,” His voice breaks, “I need to come home.”
“What do you mean? What’s going on?” Sam’s supposed to be at Stanford, enjoying his freedom from the life he never wanted. I never expected this phone call.
“I mean, I need to get out of Palo Alto.” He sounds out of it, and I realize he’s probably high. “I need…I need help.”
“Sam, you sound awful. Are you okay?”
“Not really.”
“Okay, dude, hang in there.” My instincts - developed on previous occasions of similar circumstance - begin kicking in. “Can you tell me where you are?”
“In Palo Alto,” he says, “A couple of blocks from the campus.”
“Okay, Sam,” I say, trying to sound like authority and confidence when in fact I’m shaking with nerves and a desire to not fuck this up. “I want to you go to the airport. Can you do that?”
“Go to the airport.”
“I’m going to buy you a ticket and have it held at the will-call counter. Get on a plane. I’ll meet you.”
“Okay.”
“Listen, man…” I can’t think what to say. It’s been so long. I’m so relieved to hear his voice. “Thanks for calling. It’s going to be okay.”
“Thanks, Dean.” He sounds hollow, haunted.
I end the call, look up the number for the Palo Alto Airport, and buy Sam a ticket. It’s not until I’ve thanked the Southwest Airlines representative and hung up that I stop to think about the reality of the situation.
The idea of seeing Sam again now is almost overwhelming. I wonder what’s happened to him these past three years, and what’s made him suddenly decide to resurface. I’m kind of selfishly thrilled that it’s me he’s coming to when he needs help. I don’t want Sam to be in trouble, but I do want to be the person who’s there for him when the inevitable happens.
I decide to head over to the airport early, with a view to making arrangements to meet Sam at the gate. Modern air travel has made this nearly impossible, but I don’t know what kind of mental state Sam will be in when the plane comes down. He sounded pretty messed up on the phone. I present myself to security and am told I’ve got to have something called a gate pass, which is typically only granted to the guardians of minor children traveling alone. I don’t want to tell them my little brother’s flying home on drugs, so I say he’s psychologically disturbed instead. Close enough.
It seems like thousands of passengers are coming in from Palo Alto. They trickle off the jetway in twos and threes, rushing off to baggage claim or their connecting flights or wherever they’re going. I don’t see Sam. I’m starting to worry that maybe he never made it to the airport, and I’m just thinking of calling Palo Alto Regional to see if his will-call ticket was collected, when I see him.
I hardly recognize him.
He’s gotten thin, so thin I can see the outline of his muscle where it wraps around the bone. He’s always been shorter than me, but he looks diminished now, tiny. His hair is long and uneven, and he’s got several days’ growth of stubble on his face. His eyes are vacant, dead. I want so much to grab him and hold on, never let him slip away like this again. I want to fix him.
He’s giving me this wary look, like he doesn’t know if I’m going to hurt him or not, and it’s heartwrenching. I lay a hand on his shoulder, hoping this contact will tell him what I can’t find the words to say. “I’m so glad you’re here,” I manage.
He’s shaking, crying. “Dean…I’m so sorry.”
I don’t know if he’s even really talking to me. I can tell he’s not sober. I don’t know where his head is. But goddammit, I’m not letting him walk away from me again, not this time.
“Christ, I’m so fucking sorry.” He kind of leans into my hand for support.
I realize he’s barely able to stand. “It’s okay,” I say hurriedly, anxious to get him home and to bed. “We’ll talk later.” I wrap an arm around him to help him stay upright. “Let’s go.”
He nods, leaning into me gratefully. I can feel how hard he’s shivering, so I shrug out of my hoodie and drape it around his shoulders. It does nothing to stop the violent tremors wracking his body.
I have to half-carry him to the car. It isn’t difficult. God, he weighs so little. I can’t manage him on the stairs, or even the escalator, so we take the elevator. I don’t think you’re supposed to do that unless you’re physically challenged in some way, but no one stops us. Sam is clearly unwell.
He kind of moans as I lead him outside into the sunlight. I give him my sunglasses, and it seems to help. He’s taking a little more of his own weight now, adjusting to the rhythm of our movement, so I try my best to hold a steady pace. When we reach the car, I help him into the backseat and he curls up on it, his face pressed against the backrest.
We don’t speak the whole way home. There’s far too much to say.
***
I’m shocked awake.
For a moment I can’t figure out where I am. Then I take in the familiar surroundings - parallel beds, cheap TV, the extraterrestrial glow of a neon sign out the window - and I remember I'm in Albion, Nebraska, and I've got Sam. I’ve got Sam.
What woke me?
And then I hear it: this awful moaning, retching sound, coming from the bathroom.
I go to investigate, and I find Sam sprawled on the bathroom floor, moaning softly. “Sammy?” I approach cautiously - he’s clearly sick. He’s curled up on his side, clutching his abdomen as if he’s been kicked. “Are you okay?”
“No,” he groans, turning his face to me. It’s slick with sweat, and his hair is plastered against his face, and yet he’s shivering. He looks feverish. “I’m dying.”
“No, you’re not,” I say automatically. I rummage in my duffel and find a thermometer, which I rinse off and hand over to him. “Let’s check your temperature.”
He slips the thermometer under his tongue, but yanks it back out an instant later and lunges for the toilet bowl. Huddled over it, he dry heaves violently, his entire torso convulsing, and I fall to my knees and grab his shoulders, holding him up. When nothing is forthcoming, he jams two fingers down his throat, gags, and then spews bile into the bowl. I’m horrified, but I try not to let him see - I reach around him and push his damp hair away from his face. After a minute or two of this, he falls back into my arms. I feel the heat coming off his skin and my fear ratchets up a notch.
“Try the thermometer again,” I instruct, fighting to keep my voice steady. He does, and this time manages to hold it in his mouth until it beeps, whereupon he passes it to me and turns back to the toilet for another round of heaving.
I look at the thermometer. A hundred and three. A thrill of fear passes through me - I’ve never seen such a high fever. I don’t know what to do. “Sammy, I think we need to go to the hospital.”
“No.” Sam has always hated doctors.
He’s adamant, but so am I. “Yes,” I insist. “You’re sick.”
He coughs again, retches, but there’s nothing in his stomach. “Dopesick.”
“Dope…” Oh. I’m appalled. I knew he was in deep with the drugs, but in my worst nightmares I didn’t think it would be like this. I don’t know what to do, and that scares me. I’m not equipped to handle it. “Um…will you be okay?”
He groans.
“Sam?”
His shoulders rise and fall arrhythmically with his breathing. How do I fix you, Sammy?
“I really think we should go to the hospital,” I say, feeling urgent.
“No.” His voice is just as urgent. He meets my eyes, and through the pain of illness I see a spark of determination. Goddammit. He’s so damn stubborn, he wouldn’t go to the hospital if his head caught fire. I should force him to go, I think. I should drag him there kicking and screaming.
But the fact is, he chose to call me for help. He knew he’d have to go through this, he must have known, but he made a choice. I know him well enough to know that finding his own way back means something to him. He’s doing something right here, something healthy and positive, and I’m willing to let him try it his way. But…
“If you get worse,” I say, “I’m taking you to the hospital.”
He doesn’t argue.
And so begins one of the most harrowing weeks of my life.
Leaving the bathroom is impossible at first. Sam can’t seem to stop vomiting for more than a few minutes at a time, even though he’s not eating and it’s nothing but bile he’s heaving up. I don’t know how to deal with detox, but I do know what to do for the flu, so I do my best to keep him hydrated. I bring juices and endless glasses of water with bendy straws - he always loved those when we were little - but they all meet the same fate. Nothing stays down.
Sam tries. He accepts and has a run at every drink I bring him, but one by one he pukes them all back up, and each time I can tell it’s a little more painful for him. Now and then we’ll think something’s working, and we’ll smile a little at this scrap of relief, and I’ll run to refill his glass. But invariably, I’ll return and find him kneeling over the bowl, purging, his face dripping snot and tears, his shoulders shaking. He’s exhausted from the effort, used up.
It’s warm Sprite that finally gets the job done. I’m getting pretty desperate and I find a two liter bottle in the back of the car, probably days old but unopened. I pour some into a cup for him. He shakes his head at first - he’s just too tired - but I insist, so he gulps it down quickly. I refill, and before we know it he’s put away three glasses. I call a halt and help him lie down on his back, letting it settle. He presses his palms into his eyes, groaning, digging his heels into the floor, but he doesn’t lunge for the toilet. An hour later, we take his temperature again and it’s gone down to ninety-nine.
I’m naïve enough to think the worst is over. Sam clearly knows differently. “I need to get out of here,” he groans, attempting to peel himself up off the tile. “Dean…it hurts…”
He can’t stand. I have to help him back to bed. He tries to wrap himself up in blankets, but he gives up halfway through. “My bones, man…”
“Your bones?” Surreptitiously, I check them, wondering if he’s got injuries I don’t know about. But everything seems intact. “What’s wrong with your bones?”
“I can’t move,” he groans. “Hurts.”
“Don’t move, then” I say softly. “I’ll do it.” I tuck the blanket in tightly to keep him warm because he’s shivering so damn hard I’m afraid he might fall off the bed. His muscles twitch spasmodically. “Oh, fuck, it hurts…” he moans, over and over. He’s starting to slip in and out of full consciousness. It’s like he’s barely aware I’m there.
“Sam?”
“God…hurts…”
“Sammy!”
“Oh my god…Dean…no…”
“Sam!” I get him sort of half-focused in on my face. “What can I do for you?” It’s torture, watching this and not being able to help.
Sam just groans and twitches.
I stay beside the bed all night, waiting for change. If this is all I can do, I’ll do it until it’s done.
He never sleeps. I haul my blanket and pillow off the other bed and lay them on the floor inches from him, catching the odd hour here and there, but Sam is always awake, always suffering.
“It fucking hurts…” he grinds out through clenched teeth. “I’m dying…”
I’m pretty sure by now that he isn’t, but I keep one hand on my cell phone just in case I need to call 911. Sam flops like a fish, restless and twitchy and unable to relax. He pulls his hair out, beats his fists against his thighs, scratches his scalp until his nails are bloody. Unable to take any more, I pull him into my arms and close my hands around his wrists, holding his hands still. “Don’t hurt yourself, Sammy,” I whisper, rocking him. “Please don’t.” I don’t know if he hears me.
On the third day of this nightmare, he begins demanding drugs. First he asks for money. When I tell him no, he screams at me. I’m sick with fear, but I stand my ground.
“Just let me go, then,” he wheedles. “I don’t need your money, fuck, I’ll get by. I always do. I just need a fucking fix.”
“No.” I steel myself.
He tries to push past me, but he’s so weak that I have an easy time pinning him down. He screams and shoves at me. I don’t move.
“Let me go!” Sam howls pathetically, flinging himself at me wildly, clearly desperate to leave.
I’m not going to let him. Not again. Not this time.
Sam screams again, scratching his nails down his arms, and then flings himself into violent convulsions. I let him. It’s all I can do.
When he’s calmer, the chills come back with a vengeance. I draw a hot bath and help him into it. He’s too far gone to even care when I pull off his clothes, he just huddles in the water, tears mingling with sweat on his face. I watch the bathwater ripple away from him, propelled by the force of his shuddering. I wet washcloths and drape them over the exposed skin of his shoulders and back, trying to warm him, but they dry cool in the air and I have to keep re-wetting them. I turn on some AC/DC and sing along softly, just above a whisper, and it actually seems to relax him. Slowly he eases down in the water, his rigors diminishing to just light shivering, and then even that disappears.
He’s asleep, I realize.
I know I can’t let him sleep in the bath, but it’s the first time he’s slept in days, and god, I just want to let him rest. So I sit beside him, my eyes glued to his face in case he slides under, and I watch over him as he sleeps right there in the tub.
Eventually the water starts to get cold, so I pull the drain. As the bathwater spirals out of the tub, Sam wakes up a little. He’s pretty out of it. I wrap him in the biggest towel I can find and half-lift him from the tub, and he manages to get his feet under him.
We make our way slowly over to the bed. Sam’s only half awake, so he just kind of grumbles when I drop him on the mattress, and I’m relieved to see him sink right back into sleep. I pile blankets on top of him to keep him warm. God, please let that be the worst of it.
I’m exhausted. I haven’t slept for more than two hours at a time in nearly three days. I collapse on the bed and don’t move for a long time.
***
I don’t think I’ll ever get to sleep. Despite my fatigue, I’m too keyed up from the intense drama we’ve just been through. But I must slip off at some point, because I find myself waking up.
Sam’s gone.
I’m instantly alert. Briefly, I panic, but then I hear the dull noise of the TV and I relax. I find Sam bundled up in a comforter on the other bed, watching the Spanish Channel. He’s so skinny that the big blanket nearly overwhelms him. I go over and sit beside him and we stare silently at the TV.
I’m relieved when Sam speaks first. “Sorry you had to see that.”
“How are you feeling?” I ask.
“Better. Not great.”
“Did you know…what was going to happen?”
He shrugs. “I did and I didn’t. It’s always different, you know?”
I can’t believe he can be so casual about it. “You’ve done this before?”
“Not exactly.” He sighs, pushing the lank hair out of his eyes. “I’ve tried to detox before. It was worse this time because of the heroin.”
“Jesus, heroin?” I’m revolted. “Like with needles?”
“Sometimes.”
He tilts his arm toward me, and for the first time I notice the bruises. My stomach turns. I feel decidedly in over my head. “How long have you been…”
“Shooting up?” He chuckles darkly. “I dunno, man. I lost track of time out there.”
My brain treats me to a random memory of Sammy at age six, so innocent and earnest and eager for life, and it’s a knife to my heart.
“Out where? Sammy…” I take a breath, “where have you been all this time?”
He averts his eyes. “In Palo Alto.”
“Why didn’t you ever call me?”
“I haven’t had a phone in a while,” he says vaguely.
“So…” I’m putting pieces together in my head, trying to reconstruct the missing years. “So when you detoxed before, you weren’t…on heroin?”
He shakes his head. “Acid, cocaine. Some crystal, that one’s rough. But it doesn’t, you know…” he hesitates. “It’s not as bad as this was.”
“It was pretty fucking scary,” I acknowledge.
“Yeah…” he drags a hand across his face. “Thanks for not making me go to the hospital.”
“I almost did.”
“I know."
I have to admit, he looks better than he did when I picked him up.. He’s got some color back in his face, some life in his eyes. For the first time since he returned, I can kind of see the old Sammy. “Thanks for..." I don't know what to say. "For calling,” I finish feebly.
He doesn’t respond, just stares at the TV screen.
“Should we get you some help?” I ask. I don’t know how this sort of thing works, apart from what I’ve seen in the movies.
He glances at me. “Help?”
“Yeah, you know, twelve steps, all that?”
Sam laughs dryly. “Fuck no.”
“But don’t you need some kind of support system or something?”
He scowls. “You don’t know anything about it.”
Well, fair enough. Still, I don’t want to let this go. “Sam, I mean…you need to stay clean.”
“Jesus.” He sounds so irritated that I back off. I’m intimidated by Sam, by the depth of his experience, no matter how horrible it is. For the thousandth time since he re-entered my life, I feel confused and helpless and I don’t know what to do.
I’m silent for so long that Sam eventually speaks. “I’m sorry,” he says, running his hands through his hair tiredly. “My nerves are shot.”
“It’s okay,” I say hurriedly.
“Nah, it’s not.” He pauses, searching for words. “I’m trying to act normal, man. I’m really sorry. You don’t know what it’s like…”
“No, I..."
He holds up a hand, a request to me to let him finish, and I fall silent again. “It’s like, everything is pissing me off right now. I know that doesn’t make sense. And the part of me that knows that is really grateful to you for even letting me be here. But Dean…” he sighs. “Listen, man, I want to use so bad, I can’t even tell you.”
His voice is tinged with desperation, and it’s chilling.
“But,” he says, “I’m not going to.”
I look at him. He sounds sincere, but how would I know?
“Dean, I can’t go to one of those group places and sit there and talk about entrusting my life to a higher power and whatever,” he says. “I couldn’t handle that. I’d be back on the street in a week.”
My mind sticks on one word. “You were living on the street?” Sammy…no.
He gives me a frustrated look, and I can tell he’s fighting not to snap at my shock over every new revelation about his former life. “Where’d you think I was shooting smack, a penthouse?”
“No, I…I guess I didn’t think about it…” I’m stunned. Somehow, this seems worse than anything else he’s told me. I can picture Sam getting stoned, hunched over with a needle in his arm, but for some reason I just can’t create a mental picture of my little brother as homeless on the streets of Palo Alto. It’s literally unthinkable.
“Relax,” Sam says, not unkindly. “It wasn’t so bad. There are worse things than sleeping under the stars.”
I wonder how many of those worse things he’s experienced firsthand. I decide not to ask.
“Can I stay with you?” he asks. “Just for a little while? I really need somewhere I can stay for a while, and just…level out.”
I want to let him stay, I really do. I can’t bear the thought of making him leave. But just as unbearable is the idea of letting him stay only to wake up in a week or a month and find he’s taken off again, back to the drugs and the life he’s trying to put behind him.
“Sammy…” I decide to be honest. “I don’t know how to help you. I’d let you stay here as long as you wanted if I thought it would do any good, but…well, you’ve never given me any reason to think that it would.”
His eyes slide shut. “I know.”
“Do you?” I look at him. “Do you know how hard it is not to know where your brother is, whether he’s alive or dead, from one day to the next?”
Sam doesn’t say anything.
“Do you remember when we were staying in Waco?” I ask him, “You were about sixteen, and you’d take off for days at a time and come back all messed up? Do you know what it was like for me, sitting around the motel alone waiting for you to come back?”
“I’m sorry.” He looks wretched.
“Sammy, it’s just…it’s more than I can handle. You’ve been god knows where for the past three years, on the streets, shooting smack…” I parrot his earlier phrase back at him.
“Jesus,” he croaks, pressing his face into his hands. A shudder passes through him and I think he might be crying. “Dean, I can’t live like that anymore, I can’t.”
“You need help,” I’m trying not to crumble. I don’t want to send him away.
“No,” he whispers.
“You need more than I can give you, Sammy.”
He shakes his head, meets my gaze. “I need...my big brother, Dean.”
Shit.
“Aw, Sammy.” I reach out, pull him into a hug. He resists for a moment, then falls against my shoulder. He feels so small in my arms. “All right.”
His face is a mask of disbelief. “Okay? Really?” I realize he really thought I’d say no.
“Yeah, we’ll give it a try. Hey, we got through withdrawal, right?” I hoist an encouraging smile onto my face.
He actually chuckles. “Just about.”
“But Sam…”
He shakes his head. “Don’t even say it. I won’t. I promise.”
He’s promised before. But this time, somehow, I really think he means it.
Or maybe it’s just that I so badly want him to.
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters: Sam, Dean
Word Count: 4070
Rating: R
Warnings: language, reference to drug use
Summary: Dean gets a phone call from a broken little brother with a request.
Notes: Written for this prompt at the ohsam comment fic meme.
I’m in bed when the phone rings.
It’s Saturday morning, and I’ve got no leads, nothing to chase or hunt, so I’ve bought three breakfast burritos to eat in bed while I watch TV. Just as I’m settled, my cell phone goes.
I seriously consider not answering it.
But it’s my private phone, the one no one has the number for, which means this is most likely an important call. “Hello?”
“Dean?”
“Sam? Holy shit, where are you?” I pause. “Are you okay?”
There is a long silence on the other end of the line.
“Sam?”
“Dean,” His voice breaks, “I need to come home.”
“What do you mean? What’s going on?” Sam’s supposed to be at Stanford, enjoying his freedom from the life he never wanted. I never expected this phone call.
“I mean, I need to get out of Palo Alto.” He sounds out of it, and I realize he’s probably high. “I need…I need help.”
“Sam, you sound awful. Are you okay?”
“Not really.”
“Okay, dude, hang in there.” My instincts - developed on previous occasions of similar circumstance - begin kicking in. “Can you tell me where you are?”
“In Palo Alto,” he says, “A couple of blocks from the campus.”
“Okay, Sam,” I say, trying to sound like authority and confidence when in fact I’m shaking with nerves and a desire to not fuck this up. “I want to you go to the airport. Can you do that?”
“Go to the airport.”
“I’m going to buy you a ticket and have it held at the will-call counter. Get on a plane. I’ll meet you.”
“Okay.”
“Listen, man…” I can’t think what to say. It’s been so long. I’m so relieved to hear his voice. “Thanks for calling. It’s going to be okay.”
“Thanks, Dean.” He sounds hollow, haunted.
I end the call, look up the number for the Palo Alto Airport, and buy Sam a ticket. It’s not until I’ve thanked the Southwest Airlines representative and hung up that I stop to think about the reality of the situation.
The idea of seeing Sam again now is almost overwhelming. I wonder what’s happened to him these past three years, and what’s made him suddenly decide to resurface. I’m kind of selfishly thrilled that it’s me he’s coming to when he needs help. I don’t want Sam to be in trouble, but I do want to be the person who’s there for him when the inevitable happens.
I decide to head over to the airport early, with a view to making arrangements to meet Sam at the gate. Modern air travel has made this nearly impossible, but I don’t know what kind of mental state Sam will be in when the plane comes down. He sounded pretty messed up on the phone. I present myself to security and am told I’ve got to have something called a gate pass, which is typically only granted to the guardians of minor children traveling alone. I don’t want to tell them my little brother’s flying home on drugs, so I say he’s psychologically disturbed instead. Close enough.
It seems like thousands of passengers are coming in from Palo Alto. They trickle off the jetway in twos and threes, rushing off to baggage claim or their connecting flights or wherever they’re going. I don’t see Sam. I’m starting to worry that maybe he never made it to the airport, and I’m just thinking of calling Palo Alto Regional to see if his will-call ticket was collected, when I see him.
I hardly recognize him.
He’s gotten thin, so thin I can see the outline of his muscle where it wraps around the bone. He’s always been shorter than me, but he looks diminished now, tiny. His hair is long and uneven, and he’s got several days’ growth of stubble on his face. His eyes are vacant, dead. I want so much to grab him and hold on, never let him slip away like this again. I want to fix him.
He’s giving me this wary look, like he doesn’t know if I’m going to hurt him or not, and it’s heartwrenching. I lay a hand on his shoulder, hoping this contact will tell him what I can’t find the words to say. “I’m so glad you’re here,” I manage.
He’s shaking, crying. “Dean…I’m so sorry.”
I don’t know if he’s even really talking to me. I can tell he’s not sober. I don’t know where his head is. But goddammit, I’m not letting him walk away from me again, not this time.
“Christ, I’m so fucking sorry.” He kind of leans into my hand for support.
I realize he’s barely able to stand. “It’s okay,” I say hurriedly, anxious to get him home and to bed. “We’ll talk later.” I wrap an arm around him to help him stay upright. “Let’s go.”
He nods, leaning into me gratefully. I can feel how hard he’s shivering, so I shrug out of my hoodie and drape it around his shoulders. It does nothing to stop the violent tremors wracking his body.
I have to half-carry him to the car. It isn’t difficult. God, he weighs so little. I can’t manage him on the stairs, or even the escalator, so we take the elevator. I don’t think you’re supposed to do that unless you’re physically challenged in some way, but no one stops us. Sam is clearly unwell.
He kind of moans as I lead him outside into the sunlight. I give him my sunglasses, and it seems to help. He’s taking a little more of his own weight now, adjusting to the rhythm of our movement, so I try my best to hold a steady pace. When we reach the car, I help him into the backseat and he curls up on it, his face pressed against the backrest.
We don’t speak the whole way home. There’s far too much to say.
***
I’m shocked awake.
For a moment I can’t figure out where I am. Then I take in the familiar surroundings - parallel beds, cheap TV, the extraterrestrial glow of a neon sign out the window - and I remember I'm in Albion, Nebraska, and I've got Sam. I’ve got Sam.
What woke me?
And then I hear it: this awful moaning, retching sound, coming from the bathroom.
I go to investigate, and I find Sam sprawled on the bathroom floor, moaning softly. “Sammy?” I approach cautiously - he’s clearly sick. He’s curled up on his side, clutching his abdomen as if he’s been kicked. “Are you okay?”
“No,” he groans, turning his face to me. It’s slick with sweat, and his hair is plastered against his face, and yet he’s shivering. He looks feverish. “I’m dying.”
“No, you’re not,” I say automatically. I rummage in my duffel and find a thermometer, which I rinse off and hand over to him. “Let’s check your temperature.”
He slips the thermometer under his tongue, but yanks it back out an instant later and lunges for the toilet bowl. Huddled over it, he dry heaves violently, his entire torso convulsing, and I fall to my knees and grab his shoulders, holding him up. When nothing is forthcoming, he jams two fingers down his throat, gags, and then spews bile into the bowl. I’m horrified, but I try not to let him see - I reach around him and push his damp hair away from his face. After a minute or two of this, he falls back into my arms. I feel the heat coming off his skin and my fear ratchets up a notch.
“Try the thermometer again,” I instruct, fighting to keep my voice steady. He does, and this time manages to hold it in his mouth until it beeps, whereupon he passes it to me and turns back to the toilet for another round of heaving.
I look at the thermometer. A hundred and three. A thrill of fear passes through me - I’ve never seen such a high fever. I don’t know what to do. “Sammy, I think we need to go to the hospital.”
“No.” Sam has always hated doctors.
He’s adamant, but so am I. “Yes,” I insist. “You’re sick.”
He coughs again, retches, but there’s nothing in his stomach. “Dopesick.”
“Dope…” Oh. I’m appalled. I knew he was in deep with the drugs, but in my worst nightmares I didn’t think it would be like this. I don’t know what to do, and that scares me. I’m not equipped to handle it. “Um…will you be okay?”
He groans.
“Sam?”
His shoulders rise and fall arrhythmically with his breathing. How do I fix you, Sammy?
“I really think we should go to the hospital,” I say, feeling urgent.
“No.” His voice is just as urgent. He meets my eyes, and through the pain of illness I see a spark of determination. Goddammit. He’s so damn stubborn, he wouldn’t go to the hospital if his head caught fire. I should force him to go, I think. I should drag him there kicking and screaming.
But the fact is, he chose to call me for help. He knew he’d have to go through this, he must have known, but he made a choice. I know him well enough to know that finding his own way back means something to him. He’s doing something right here, something healthy and positive, and I’m willing to let him try it his way. But…
“If you get worse,” I say, “I’m taking you to the hospital.”
He doesn’t argue.
And so begins one of the most harrowing weeks of my life.
Leaving the bathroom is impossible at first. Sam can’t seem to stop vomiting for more than a few minutes at a time, even though he’s not eating and it’s nothing but bile he’s heaving up. I don’t know how to deal with detox, but I do know what to do for the flu, so I do my best to keep him hydrated. I bring juices and endless glasses of water with bendy straws - he always loved those when we were little - but they all meet the same fate. Nothing stays down.
Sam tries. He accepts and has a run at every drink I bring him, but one by one he pukes them all back up, and each time I can tell it’s a little more painful for him. Now and then we’ll think something’s working, and we’ll smile a little at this scrap of relief, and I’ll run to refill his glass. But invariably, I’ll return and find him kneeling over the bowl, purging, his face dripping snot and tears, his shoulders shaking. He’s exhausted from the effort, used up.
It’s warm Sprite that finally gets the job done. I’m getting pretty desperate and I find a two liter bottle in the back of the car, probably days old but unopened. I pour some into a cup for him. He shakes his head at first - he’s just too tired - but I insist, so he gulps it down quickly. I refill, and before we know it he’s put away three glasses. I call a halt and help him lie down on his back, letting it settle. He presses his palms into his eyes, groaning, digging his heels into the floor, but he doesn’t lunge for the toilet. An hour later, we take his temperature again and it’s gone down to ninety-nine.
I’m naïve enough to think the worst is over. Sam clearly knows differently. “I need to get out of here,” he groans, attempting to peel himself up off the tile. “Dean…it hurts…”
He can’t stand. I have to help him back to bed. He tries to wrap himself up in blankets, but he gives up halfway through. “My bones, man…”
“Your bones?” Surreptitiously, I check them, wondering if he’s got injuries I don’t know about. But everything seems intact. “What’s wrong with your bones?”
“I can’t move,” he groans. “Hurts.”
“Don’t move, then” I say softly. “I’ll do it.” I tuck the blanket in tightly to keep him warm because he’s shivering so damn hard I’m afraid he might fall off the bed. His muscles twitch spasmodically. “Oh, fuck, it hurts…” he moans, over and over. He’s starting to slip in and out of full consciousness. It’s like he’s barely aware I’m there.
“Sam?”
“God…hurts…”
“Sammy!”
“Oh my god…Dean…no…”
“Sam!” I get him sort of half-focused in on my face. “What can I do for you?” It’s torture, watching this and not being able to help.
Sam just groans and twitches.
I stay beside the bed all night, waiting for change. If this is all I can do, I’ll do it until it’s done.
He never sleeps. I haul my blanket and pillow off the other bed and lay them on the floor inches from him, catching the odd hour here and there, but Sam is always awake, always suffering.
“It fucking hurts…” he grinds out through clenched teeth. “I’m dying…”
I’m pretty sure by now that he isn’t, but I keep one hand on my cell phone just in case I need to call 911. Sam flops like a fish, restless and twitchy and unable to relax. He pulls his hair out, beats his fists against his thighs, scratches his scalp until his nails are bloody. Unable to take any more, I pull him into my arms and close my hands around his wrists, holding his hands still. “Don’t hurt yourself, Sammy,” I whisper, rocking him. “Please don’t.” I don’t know if he hears me.
On the third day of this nightmare, he begins demanding drugs. First he asks for money. When I tell him no, he screams at me. I’m sick with fear, but I stand my ground.
“Just let me go, then,” he wheedles. “I don’t need your money, fuck, I’ll get by. I always do. I just need a fucking fix.”
“No.” I steel myself.
He tries to push past me, but he’s so weak that I have an easy time pinning him down. He screams and shoves at me. I don’t move.
“Let me go!” Sam howls pathetically, flinging himself at me wildly, clearly desperate to leave.
I’m not going to let him. Not again. Not this time.
Sam screams again, scratching his nails down his arms, and then flings himself into violent convulsions. I let him. It’s all I can do.
When he’s calmer, the chills come back with a vengeance. I draw a hot bath and help him into it. He’s too far gone to even care when I pull off his clothes, he just huddles in the water, tears mingling with sweat on his face. I watch the bathwater ripple away from him, propelled by the force of his shuddering. I wet washcloths and drape them over the exposed skin of his shoulders and back, trying to warm him, but they dry cool in the air and I have to keep re-wetting them. I turn on some AC/DC and sing along softly, just above a whisper, and it actually seems to relax him. Slowly he eases down in the water, his rigors diminishing to just light shivering, and then even that disappears.
He’s asleep, I realize.
I know I can’t let him sleep in the bath, but it’s the first time he’s slept in days, and god, I just want to let him rest. So I sit beside him, my eyes glued to his face in case he slides under, and I watch over him as he sleeps right there in the tub.
Eventually the water starts to get cold, so I pull the drain. As the bathwater spirals out of the tub, Sam wakes up a little. He’s pretty out of it. I wrap him in the biggest towel I can find and half-lift him from the tub, and he manages to get his feet under him.
We make our way slowly over to the bed. Sam’s only half awake, so he just kind of grumbles when I drop him on the mattress, and I’m relieved to see him sink right back into sleep. I pile blankets on top of him to keep him warm. God, please let that be the worst of it.
I’m exhausted. I haven’t slept for more than two hours at a time in nearly three days. I collapse on the bed and don’t move for a long time.
***
I don’t think I’ll ever get to sleep. Despite my fatigue, I’m too keyed up from the intense drama we’ve just been through. But I must slip off at some point, because I find myself waking up.
Sam’s gone.
I’m instantly alert. Briefly, I panic, but then I hear the dull noise of the TV and I relax. I find Sam bundled up in a comforter on the other bed, watching the Spanish Channel. He’s so skinny that the big blanket nearly overwhelms him. I go over and sit beside him and we stare silently at the TV.
I’m relieved when Sam speaks first. “Sorry you had to see that.”
“How are you feeling?” I ask.
“Better. Not great.”
“Did you know…what was going to happen?”
He shrugs. “I did and I didn’t. It’s always different, you know?”
I can’t believe he can be so casual about it. “You’ve done this before?”
“Not exactly.” He sighs, pushing the lank hair out of his eyes. “I’ve tried to detox before. It was worse this time because of the heroin.”
“Jesus, heroin?” I’m revolted. “Like with needles?”
“Sometimes.”
He tilts his arm toward me, and for the first time I notice the bruises. My stomach turns. I feel decidedly in over my head. “How long have you been…”
“Shooting up?” He chuckles darkly. “I dunno, man. I lost track of time out there.”
My brain treats me to a random memory of Sammy at age six, so innocent and earnest and eager for life, and it’s a knife to my heart.
“Out where? Sammy…” I take a breath, “where have you been all this time?”
He averts his eyes. “In Palo Alto.”
“Why didn’t you ever call me?”
“I haven’t had a phone in a while,” he says vaguely.
“So…” I’m putting pieces together in my head, trying to reconstruct the missing years. “So when you detoxed before, you weren’t…on heroin?”
He shakes his head. “Acid, cocaine. Some crystal, that one’s rough. But it doesn’t, you know…” he hesitates. “It’s not as bad as this was.”
“It was pretty fucking scary,” I acknowledge.
“Yeah…” he drags a hand across his face. “Thanks for not making me go to the hospital.”
“I almost did.”
“I know."
I have to admit, he looks better than he did when I picked him up.. He’s got some color back in his face, some life in his eyes. For the first time since he returned, I can kind of see the old Sammy. “Thanks for..." I don't know what to say. "For calling,” I finish feebly.
He doesn’t respond, just stares at the TV screen.
“Should we get you some help?” I ask. I don’t know how this sort of thing works, apart from what I’ve seen in the movies.
He glances at me. “Help?”
“Yeah, you know, twelve steps, all that?”
Sam laughs dryly. “Fuck no.”
“But don’t you need some kind of support system or something?”
He scowls. “You don’t know anything about it.”
Well, fair enough. Still, I don’t want to let this go. “Sam, I mean…you need to stay clean.”
“Jesus.” He sounds so irritated that I back off. I’m intimidated by Sam, by the depth of his experience, no matter how horrible it is. For the thousandth time since he re-entered my life, I feel confused and helpless and I don’t know what to do.
I’m silent for so long that Sam eventually speaks. “I’m sorry,” he says, running his hands through his hair tiredly. “My nerves are shot.”
“It’s okay,” I say hurriedly.
“Nah, it’s not.” He pauses, searching for words. “I’m trying to act normal, man. I’m really sorry. You don’t know what it’s like…”
“No, I..."
He holds up a hand, a request to me to let him finish, and I fall silent again. “It’s like, everything is pissing me off right now. I know that doesn’t make sense. And the part of me that knows that is really grateful to you for even letting me be here. But Dean…” he sighs. “Listen, man, I want to use so bad, I can’t even tell you.”
His voice is tinged with desperation, and it’s chilling.
“But,” he says, “I’m not going to.”
I look at him. He sounds sincere, but how would I know?
“Dean, I can’t go to one of those group places and sit there and talk about entrusting my life to a higher power and whatever,” he says. “I couldn’t handle that. I’d be back on the street in a week.”
My mind sticks on one word. “You were living on the street?” Sammy…no.
He gives me a frustrated look, and I can tell he’s fighting not to snap at my shock over every new revelation about his former life. “Where’d you think I was shooting smack, a penthouse?”
“No, I…I guess I didn’t think about it…” I’m stunned. Somehow, this seems worse than anything else he’s told me. I can picture Sam getting stoned, hunched over with a needle in his arm, but for some reason I just can’t create a mental picture of my little brother as homeless on the streets of Palo Alto. It’s literally unthinkable.
“Relax,” Sam says, not unkindly. “It wasn’t so bad. There are worse things than sleeping under the stars.”
I wonder how many of those worse things he’s experienced firsthand. I decide not to ask.
“Can I stay with you?” he asks. “Just for a little while? I really need somewhere I can stay for a while, and just…level out.”
I want to let him stay, I really do. I can’t bear the thought of making him leave. But just as unbearable is the idea of letting him stay only to wake up in a week or a month and find he’s taken off again, back to the drugs and the life he’s trying to put behind him.
“Sammy…” I decide to be honest. “I don’t know how to help you. I’d let you stay here as long as you wanted if I thought it would do any good, but…well, you’ve never given me any reason to think that it would.”
His eyes slide shut. “I know.”
“Do you?” I look at him. “Do you know how hard it is not to know where your brother is, whether he’s alive or dead, from one day to the next?”
Sam doesn’t say anything.
“Do you remember when we were staying in Waco?” I ask him, “You were about sixteen, and you’d take off for days at a time and come back all messed up? Do you know what it was like for me, sitting around the motel alone waiting for you to come back?”
“I’m sorry.” He looks wretched.
“Sammy, it’s just…it’s more than I can handle. You’ve been god knows where for the past three years, on the streets, shooting smack…” I parrot his earlier phrase back at him.
“Jesus,” he croaks, pressing his face into his hands. A shudder passes through him and I think he might be crying. “Dean, I can’t live like that anymore, I can’t.”
“You need help,” I’m trying not to crumble. I don’t want to send him away.
“No,” he whispers.
“You need more than I can give you, Sammy.”
He shakes his head, meets my gaze. “I need...my big brother, Dean.”
Shit.
“Aw, Sammy.” I reach out, pull him into a hug. He resists for a moment, then falls against my shoulder. He feels so small in my arms. “All right.”
His face is a mask of disbelief. “Okay? Really?” I realize he really thought I’d say no.
“Yeah, we’ll give it a try. Hey, we got through withdrawal, right?” I hoist an encouraging smile onto my face.
He actually chuckles. “Just about.”
“But Sam…”
He shakes his head. “Don’t even say it. I won’t. I promise.”
He’s promised before. But this time, somehow, I really think he means it.
Or maybe it’s just that I so badly want him to.