Call A Man Cold
Title: Call A Man Cold
Summary: Part of the After the End ‘verse. While Cas is away on a supply run, Sam has a seizure outside in the middle of winter. This was written for rainylemons’ prompt at the ohsam Sam-centric h/c challenge. She asked for hypothermia, so that’s what she got. Hypothermic!Sam, with a side order of Sam/Cas cuddling.
Characters: Sam/Castiel
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 3,151
Warnings: None.
Neurotic Author’s Note # 1: I’ve been meaning to get back to this ‘verse (along with pretty much all my other ‘verses), so it was nice to get a kick in the pants with this prompt. After the End was always meant to be about rebuilding and less about the apocalypse, and I’m glad I got a chance to start showing that here.
Neurotic Author’s Note # 2: Um, someone once said that my Cas is very mean in this ‘verse, and, well, I’m afraid nothing has changed. Cas is very, very broken, and he’s unlikely to get “fixed” and start writing sonnets for Sam. Sorry. (Only, I’m not really sorry. If I was really sorry, I’d write him nicer, wouldn’t I?)
Neurotic Author’s Note # 3: The title is taken from a quote by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.” I thought it was pretty apt, when it came to Cas.
The conclusion Cas has come to, after all these years, is that humans are the most resilient creatures he has ever encountered in his entire existence. Not three years ago Lucifer walked the Earth (using Sam Winchester's body to do so), the Croatoan virus had infected more than sixty percent of the population and was still spreading like wildfire, and most of the modernized world was a smoldering ruin.
Then Sam kicked the Devil out of his body, and it was like life got breathed back into the fouled earth. When he'd first dragged Sam, half-dead from his ordeal, back to the ramshackle cabins at Camp Chitaqua, Cas was convinced that this was it. It was the beginning of the end, and all they had to do was wait it out until all of humanity slowly faded out of existence.
Except nothing of the sort had happened. The infected had recovered, and all the survivors had slowly begun to trickle back to the homes they remembered. Many of those homes didn't exist any longer, but that hardly seemed to deter anyone. People began to rebuild, first their houses and then their businesses. Towns began to take on colour and life again, and after two and a half years the first barrels of oil began making their way back along supply lines. People didn't exactly pick up where they left off, but it seemed like they were trying hard to get back to a semblance of the normalcy they'd had before.
As late as nine months ago Camp Chitaqua felt isolated and remote, but now the road is increasingly well traveled, and it makes Cas uneasy whenever he spots cars in the distance. There are enough people who remember the face that Lucifer wore during the dark times that if any of them got it in their minds to form a lynch mob, they could pose a serious threat. Sam is better than he was when they first arrived, but he'll never be able to fight again, and Cas suspects that, if it came to it, he wouldn't put up any resistance to anyone coming over to claim his head anyway.
They're too close to civilization for his liking, but Cas has to admit the proximity has its advantages, too. Every so often he takes the old camp jeep into town for supplies, to stock up on the few things they can't grow or make for themselves on their new makeshift farm-cigarettes and liquor for him, medication for Sam's inexplicable seizures. The medication is difficult to obtain, mostly because it's incredibly scarce. Eventually, Cas knows it will become difficult to obtain more due to the expense and Sam's lack of medical insurance, but he supposes they'll cross that bridge when they come to it. At least the local doctor seems willing enough to write out prescriptions for them without asking too many questions. He finds it unsettling, how invisible he is in this town. Before he couldn’t walk ten feet without everyone knowing who he was, without people pestering him for answers he couldn’t give them about Dean, about Lucifer, about the end of the world. Now no one spares him a second glance.
He's standing in the town's only and poorly stocked drugstore, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot while he waits for the pharmacist, a rotund, grey-haired woman who seems to view him as the bane of her existence, to pour all the relevant blue pills into a tiny plastic container for him to take home. He's anxious to get home, ostensibly because the weather has taken a turn for the worse over the course of the day. When he left this morning it was just beginning to snow, and by now he's sure the roads must be a mess. Besides, though he scarcely admits this to himself these days, he doesn't like leaving Sam alone that long, not for any reason.
He clears his throat and shuffles his feet, only to be rewarded with a steely-eyed glare from the woman behind the counter. She drops the pill bottle in front of him with a clatter-there are still no tiny paper bags available, not that he sees the necessity for them-and holds out a meaty palm.
"That'll be thirty-seven fifty," she says, and Cas digs in the pockets of his jacket to pull out four crumpled ten dollar bills, which he hands over. He has no idea how she knows the prices for all these medications, but even if she's making them up on the spot, there's not much he can do about it. "Make sure your boyfriend takes 'em with food, and keeps to his schedule," she adds, face impassive.
Cas nods and doesn't try to object to the term 'boyfriend.' There doesn't seem to be any point, and the term is as good as any other, if one were to try to define the sexual relationship between a junkie fallen angel and the broken remains of Lucifer's former vessel.
"Thank you."
"Drive safe, now, the roads are hell," she says mechanically, and he nods again before retreating through the front door. The bells chime musically over his head as he heads out into the driving snow.
The drive back is a difficult one. The jeep is a sturdy enough vehicle, and holds the road better than most cars. Long before Dean died, he gave Cas detailed instruction on vehicle maintenance and repair, and repeatedly stressed the importance of installing good winter tires whenever they became available. Still, it takes all of his concentration to prevent an accident, peering through the windshield at the barely visible road before him, and the drive back takes twice as long as it normally would. By the time he jumps out of the jeep to struggle with the gate that closes off the private road to the camp his chest is tight with anxiety, and he has to force himself to remain calm as he drives the last mile and a half up to the cabin. It would be ridiculous to drive off the path now, he tells himself sternly, but he can't shake the sense of foreboding that keeps threatening to overwhelm him.
The cabin is quiet when he pushes the door open and takes a moment to knock the excess snow from his boots. Renegade, Sam’s pet cat, comes prowling up to the door and winds himself around Cas’ ankles yowling for food, or attention, or whatever else it is that cats want. Cas like him better when he was a kitten, but it’s not like he can prevent creatures from aging. He himself doesn’t appear to have aged much in the past five years, even though as far as he knows the body he’s inhabiting is entirely human. Sam’s hair is turning white in what he once described to Cas as a “badger’s streak.” It makes Cas wonder if he’s not going to outlive everyone on this planet, in spite of his best efforts to the contrary.
“Sam? I’m back!” he calls out.
It wouldn’t be the first time he’s come back to an empty house. There are always chores to be performed outdoors, but Sam has more sense than to stay outside in weather like this. If nothing else, he should have gone out to feed the animals in their makeshift barn and come straight back. There are at least three inches of snow on the ground already, and the storm shows no sign of abating.
“Sam!”
He might have had a seizure. Cas sighs with a mixture of irritation and resignation, then kicks off his boots and pads toward the back room of the cabin in his socked feet. With any luck Sam will have made it to the bed or at least a clear portion of the floor without falling over. He isn’t particularly relishing the thought of being on seizure watch yet again, but he supposes it’s a small price to pay for the world no longer ending.
Sam isn’t in the bedroom, either. That’s when Cas feels his pulse speed up a little. He scans the room again, as though he somehow missed all six feet, six inches of Sam Winchester lying sprawled somewhere in this tiny room. If he isn’t in the main area or the kitchen, and he’s not here, then he can only be outside.
Shit.
Cas hurries back to the front room and jams his feet back into his boots without bothering to tie the laces. Sam likes to remind him that if he never does up his laces, he’ll end up breaking his neck at an inopportune time, and when he’s feeling particularly out of sorts he likes to remind Sam that maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. That usually shuts Sam up, and Cas tells himself that he doesn’t care about the look on Sam’s face at those times, that a little cruelty never killed anyone, after all.
He pulls open the door and steps back out into the swirling snow. “Sam!”
It’s not even thirty feet to the small wooden shack that serves them as a barn. He and Sam built it two summers ago, and in spite of their combined lack of knowledge, it’s a pretty sturdy little building, if uglier than sin. It’s also empty, so long as you don’t count the twenty-odd chickens they have in there, the rabbit hutch and their four goats, who stare at him balefully, their mouths full of hay. Sam has been here today, that much is obvious: the stalls have been cleaned out, the chickens and rabbits fed, a new bale of hay set out for the goats.
“I don’t suppose any of you saw where Sam went?”
Five years ago, they would have answered him. Now, though, all he gets are indifferent looks, a twitching of leporine ears, and a low, ominous clucking from some of the broody hens. He’s actually a little impressed that Sam has managed to keep the hens laying even in winter, when they are notorious for not producing anything except copious amounts of guano. Must be some sort of gift, he supposes.
“Fine, I’ll look for him myself.”
He finds Sam five minutes later. He must have walked right by where he fell without realising it. It’s only because he’s looking now that he catches sight of the tip of his boot sticking out of the snow. There’s no telling how long he’s been there. He might have collapsed not ten minutes after Cas left, for all he knows, but he’s all but invisible under the snow that’s been falling all morning, so Cas guesses it’s been at least an hour, if not more.
He drops to one knee and uses his hands to brush away the snow from where he thinks Sam’s head must be, then away from his shoulders and rolls him onto his back.
“Sam! Sam, can you hear me?”
Sam’s eyes are closed, lashes dark against his cheeks. He’s deathly pale, but that’s hardly new. They haven’t properly seen the sun in months. There’s a white patch under his left eye, his lips are blue, and he doesn’t rouse at all when Cas shakes him. It could mean anything, and Cas isn’t anywhere close to being a doctor, though he has enough recreational drugs stashed in various places around the property to stock his own very eclectic drugstore. Sam isn’t necessarily unconscious, he tells himself. This could just be the postictal sleep after a seizure, after all. At least he’s breathing, and he’s wearing his winter clothing, so it can’t be all bad.
“Sam, wake up! I’m not carrying you into the house. Come on, wake up!”
He pats Sam’s cheeks, then unzips his jacket in order to rake his knuckles over Sam’s sternum. It has the desired effect. A few breathless moments later and Sam groans softly. His eyelids flick open, and Cas smiles in spite of himself when Sam turns a confused look on him.
“You need to get up. Hold onto me, okay?”
Sam nods jerkily and holds out both hands for Cas to take, completely trusting. If Cas was rhe sort of person to get mushy over things, it would probably break his heart a little. He hauls Sam to his feet, and for a moment they both stagger in the ankle-deep snow until Cas finds his balance.
“I’m putting you on a diet, starting tomorrow.”
All of Sam’s weight is leaning on him now, and Sam nods as if he’s speaking perfect sense. “Where’s Dean?” he asks, his voice even hoarser than usual, and fuck. Fuck, but Cas was not expecting that, and he stumbles and almost takes them both down again.
“Never mind that, just move!” he snaps, and Sam ducks his head and obeys, just like that.
It’s a hassle to get Sam inside and lying down on the bed. Sam keeps stopping in his tracks and looking around, probably for his damn dead brother, and it takes the remainder of Cas’ patience not to yell at him while he’s obviously not in his right mind. Sam does his best, though, and even tries to help when Cas pulls off first his boots, then his gloves and coat, and then sets about removing the rest of his clothing, all of which is soaking wet.
“Keep still,” he orders. “You’re fucking freezing, and you’ve probably got frostbite and I want to make sure your damned nose isn’t going to fall off your face or something.”
“Sorry.”
Cas sighs. “Don’t be sorry. Does anything hurt?”
“‘m cold.”
“Hypothermia will do that to you. Can you feel this?” he squeezes Sam’s hands, then his feet, one by one, and Sam nods. He’s not shivering, which is a bad sign, but at least his extremities haven’t frozen off. “What were you doing out there, anyway? It’s not like the animals couldn’t have waited a few hours for the snow to stop, you fuckwit.”
“Is Dean okay?”
Still addled, then. Who knows how badly Sam scrambled his brains this time. At least he doesn’t seem concussed, but that hardly means anything anymore. This time, Cas has been bracing himself for the question.
“Dean’s fine.” As fine as he can be, considering he’s been dead for nearly three years. Sam’s fingernails are bluer than his lips. Shit. There’s no way Cas is driving them through the blizzard back to town, the way he drives, he’ll end up killing them both. He nudges Sam with one knee. “Shove over.”
Sam doesn’t move, just watches, his brows knitting together, as Cas takes of his own shirt and lets his pants pool around his ankles. “Cas?”
He rolls his eyes and crawls into the bed next to Sam, pulling the covers over them. “What? I thought you liked to cuddle?”
Sam shudders as Cas pulls him close. His skin is cold to the touch, though not as cold as Cas had feared it might be. Still, it’s not the most pleasant sensation in the world. After a moment, though, Sam seems to get with the program and turns on his side, and for a moment it feels like he might actually be trying to burrow right into Cas’ ribcage. When he does settle, it’s with his nose buried in Cas’ collarbone, breath hot and humid against Cas’ skin.
“I forgot, for a minute,” he says, voice muffled, and Cas sighs. He frees one hand from under the covers and pets Sam’s hair clumsily.
“Yeah, I know. You’re going to be fine, though.”
“I didn’t know you knew about body heat,” Sam murmurs, trying to shift even closer to him, which is pretty much physically impossible.
“Dean showed me. It was a long time ago.”
Another lifetime ago.
“I don’t remember. Was it… after?”
After Lucifer, is what Sam means. It always boils down to that one moment in time. Before Lucifer. After Lucifer. It’s what defines Sam these days, the person he is now, the person he thinks he was before. Cas is pretty sure even Sam doesn’t know which of the two versions of himself he loathes more.
Cas doesn’t want to discuss this, but Sam has a way of worrying at subjects like this one, like poking at a sore tooth. Not that Cas has ever had a sore tooth, but in another life Jimmy Novak had a mild phobia of going to the dentist, so he thinks he might know what he’s talking about.
“Right after. I crashed in a snowbank. I was there for a long time before Dean found me.”
There’s a long silence while Sam just breathes against his skin. Then he stirs a little.
“When you became human.”
He nods jerkily. “That’s right. I was mid-flight, coming back from D--” he stops himself, but it’s too late. Sam flinches in his arms.
“You were there.”
It seems pointless to deny it.
“I picked the day on purpose, you know,” Sam says, voice barely above a whisper. He’s warming up in Cas’ embrace, starting to shiver. “It was Dean’s birthday. I didn’t know what the promise really meant, but he never lied. He never did.”
It shouldn’t make sense, but it does. Sam rarely talks about Lucifer, but then, he doesn’t need to. Cas knows all too well what it’s like, living with that. “I never knew what Dean’s birthday was. He never wanted to mark the day.”
Sam lets out a mirthless chuckle. “Your brother ends the world and your best f-friend nearly dies in the snow. Happy f-fucking birthday.”
“Anything hurt?” Sam is shivering hard now, enough that it would probably be shaking the bed if it was anything other than a mattress on the floor, but he shakes his head.
“F-fucking freezing, though.”
“Yeah, well, hypothermia will do that. You’re lucky you’re not worse off, given that you decided to have a seizure in the middle of a snowstorm. You’ve got frostbite on your face, but it doesn’t look bad, and you’re not going to lose any important appendages.”
“You’re obsessed with sex,” Sam snorts quietly.
“I was thinking of your hands and feet,” Cas lies smoothly, and Sam laughs. “Who’s obsessed now?”
There’s a muffled thump, and a moment later Renegade, heedless of exposed skin and anyone’s dignity, including his own, hops over Cas’ hip and burrows into the hollow left between his stomach and Sam’s. He settles on the mattress, paws tucked under his chest, purring lustily, tail twitching just to prove that he’s not entirely domesticated.
“You’re not fooling anyone, you know,” Cas tells the cat, who ignores him in favour of heabutting Sam’s chin.
Sam brings up one hand to scratch the cat somewhat awkwardly behind the ears, his movements made clumsy by the cold. He looks up at Cas, a small smile on his face.
“Not fooling anyone at all,” he agrees.
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Summary: Part of the After the End ‘verse. While Cas is away on a supply run, Sam has a seizure outside in the middle of winter. This was written for rainylemons’ prompt at the ohsam Sam-centric h/c challenge. She asked for hypothermia, so that’s what she got. Hypothermic!Sam, with a side order of Sam/Cas cuddling.
Characters: Sam/Castiel
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 3,151
Warnings: None.
Neurotic Author’s Note # 1: I’ve been meaning to get back to this ‘verse (along with pretty much all my other ‘verses), so it was nice to get a kick in the pants with this prompt. After the End was always meant to be about rebuilding and less about the apocalypse, and I’m glad I got a chance to start showing that here.
Neurotic Author’s Note # 2: Um, someone once said that my Cas is very mean in this ‘verse, and, well, I’m afraid nothing has changed. Cas is very, very broken, and he’s unlikely to get “fixed” and start writing sonnets for Sam. Sorry. (Only, I’m not really sorry. If I was really sorry, I’d write him nicer, wouldn’t I?)
Neurotic Author’s Note # 3: The title is taken from a quote by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.” I thought it was pretty apt, when it came to Cas.
The conclusion Cas has come to, after all these years, is that humans are the most resilient creatures he has ever encountered in his entire existence. Not three years ago Lucifer walked the Earth (using Sam Winchester's body to do so), the Croatoan virus had infected more than sixty percent of the population and was still spreading like wildfire, and most of the modernized world was a smoldering ruin.
Then Sam kicked the Devil out of his body, and it was like life got breathed back into the fouled earth. When he'd first dragged Sam, half-dead from his ordeal, back to the ramshackle cabins at Camp Chitaqua, Cas was convinced that this was it. It was the beginning of the end, and all they had to do was wait it out until all of humanity slowly faded out of existence.
Except nothing of the sort had happened. The infected had recovered, and all the survivors had slowly begun to trickle back to the homes they remembered. Many of those homes didn't exist any longer, but that hardly seemed to deter anyone. People began to rebuild, first their houses and then their businesses. Towns began to take on colour and life again, and after two and a half years the first barrels of oil began making their way back along supply lines. People didn't exactly pick up where they left off, but it seemed like they were trying hard to get back to a semblance of the normalcy they'd had before.
As late as nine months ago Camp Chitaqua felt isolated and remote, but now the road is increasingly well traveled, and it makes Cas uneasy whenever he spots cars in the distance. There are enough people who remember the face that Lucifer wore during the dark times that if any of them got it in their minds to form a lynch mob, they could pose a serious threat. Sam is better than he was when they first arrived, but he'll never be able to fight again, and Cas suspects that, if it came to it, he wouldn't put up any resistance to anyone coming over to claim his head anyway.
They're too close to civilization for his liking, but Cas has to admit the proximity has its advantages, too. Every so often he takes the old camp jeep into town for supplies, to stock up on the few things they can't grow or make for themselves on their new makeshift farm-cigarettes and liquor for him, medication for Sam's inexplicable seizures. The medication is difficult to obtain, mostly because it's incredibly scarce. Eventually, Cas knows it will become difficult to obtain more due to the expense and Sam's lack of medical insurance, but he supposes they'll cross that bridge when they come to it. At least the local doctor seems willing enough to write out prescriptions for them without asking too many questions. He finds it unsettling, how invisible he is in this town. Before he couldn’t walk ten feet without everyone knowing who he was, without people pestering him for answers he couldn’t give them about Dean, about Lucifer, about the end of the world. Now no one spares him a second glance.
He's standing in the town's only and poorly stocked drugstore, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot while he waits for the pharmacist, a rotund, grey-haired woman who seems to view him as the bane of her existence, to pour all the relevant blue pills into a tiny plastic container for him to take home. He's anxious to get home, ostensibly because the weather has taken a turn for the worse over the course of the day. When he left this morning it was just beginning to snow, and by now he's sure the roads must be a mess. Besides, though he scarcely admits this to himself these days, he doesn't like leaving Sam alone that long, not for any reason.
He clears his throat and shuffles his feet, only to be rewarded with a steely-eyed glare from the woman behind the counter. She drops the pill bottle in front of him with a clatter-there are still no tiny paper bags available, not that he sees the necessity for them-and holds out a meaty palm.
"That'll be thirty-seven fifty," she says, and Cas digs in the pockets of his jacket to pull out four crumpled ten dollar bills, which he hands over. He has no idea how she knows the prices for all these medications, but even if she's making them up on the spot, there's not much he can do about it. "Make sure your boyfriend takes 'em with food, and keeps to his schedule," she adds, face impassive.
Cas nods and doesn't try to object to the term 'boyfriend.' There doesn't seem to be any point, and the term is as good as any other, if one were to try to define the sexual relationship between a junkie fallen angel and the broken remains of Lucifer's former vessel.
"Thank you."
"Drive safe, now, the roads are hell," she says mechanically, and he nods again before retreating through the front door. The bells chime musically over his head as he heads out into the driving snow.
The drive back is a difficult one. The jeep is a sturdy enough vehicle, and holds the road better than most cars. Long before Dean died, he gave Cas detailed instruction on vehicle maintenance and repair, and repeatedly stressed the importance of installing good winter tires whenever they became available. Still, it takes all of his concentration to prevent an accident, peering through the windshield at the barely visible road before him, and the drive back takes twice as long as it normally would. By the time he jumps out of the jeep to struggle with the gate that closes off the private road to the camp his chest is tight with anxiety, and he has to force himself to remain calm as he drives the last mile and a half up to the cabin. It would be ridiculous to drive off the path now, he tells himself sternly, but he can't shake the sense of foreboding that keeps threatening to overwhelm him.
The cabin is quiet when he pushes the door open and takes a moment to knock the excess snow from his boots. Renegade, Sam’s pet cat, comes prowling up to the door and winds himself around Cas’ ankles yowling for food, or attention, or whatever else it is that cats want. Cas like him better when he was a kitten, but it’s not like he can prevent creatures from aging. He himself doesn’t appear to have aged much in the past five years, even though as far as he knows the body he’s inhabiting is entirely human. Sam’s hair is turning white in what he once described to Cas as a “badger’s streak.” It makes Cas wonder if he’s not going to outlive everyone on this planet, in spite of his best efforts to the contrary.
“Sam? I’m back!” he calls out.
It wouldn’t be the first time he’s come back to an empty house. There are always chores to be performed outdoors, but Sam has more sense than to stay outside in weather like this. If nothing else, he should have gone out to feed the animals in their makeshift barn and come straight back. There are at least three inches of snow on the ground already, and the storm shows no sign of abating.
“Sam!”
He might have had a seizure. Cas sighs with a mixture of irritation and resignation, then kicks off his boots and pads toward the back room of the cabin in his socked feet. With any luck Sam will have made it to the bed or at least a clear portion of the floor without falling over. He isn’t particularly relishing the thought of being on seizure watch yet again, but he supposes it’s a small price to pay for the world no longer ending.
Sam isn’t in the bedroom, either. That’s when Cas feels his pulse speed up a little. He scans the room again, as though he somehow missed all six feet, six inches of Sam Winchester lying sprawled somewhere in this tiny room. If he isn’t in the main area or the kitchen, and he’s not here, then he can only be outside.
Shit.
Cas hurries back to the front room and jams his feet back into his boots without bothering to tie the laces. Sam likes to remind him that if he never does up his laces, he’ll end up breaking his neck at an inopportune time, and when he’s feeling particularly out of sorts he likes to remind Sam that maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. That usually shuts Sam up, and Cas tells himself that he doesn’t care about the look on Sam’s face at those times, that a little cruelty never killed anyone, after all.
He pulls open the door and steps back out into the swirling snow. “Sam!”
It’s not even thirty feet to the small wooden shack that serves them as a barn. He and Sam built it two summers ago, and in spite of their combined lack of knowledge, it’s a pretty sturdy little building, if uglier than sin. It’s also empty, so long as you don’t count the twenty-odd chickens they have in there, the rabbit hutch and their four goats, who stare at him balefully, their mouths full of hay. Sam has been here today, that much is obvious: the stalls have been cleaned out, the chickens and rabbits fed, a new bale of hay set out for the goats.
“I don’t suppose any of you saw where Sam went?”
Five years ago, they would have answered him. Now, though, all he gets are indifferent looks, a twitching of leporine ears, and a low, ominous clucking from some of the broody hens. He’s actually a little impressed that Sam has managed to keep the hens laying even in winter, when they are notorious for not producing anything except copious amounts of guano. Must be some sort of gift, he supposes.
“Fine, I’ll look for him myself.”
He finds Sam five minutes later. He must have walked right by where he fell without realising it. It’s only because he’s looking now that he catches sight of the tip of his boot sticking out of the snow. There’s no telling how long he’s been there. He might have collapsed not ten minutes after Cas left, for all he knows, but he’s all but invisible under the snow that’s been falling all morning, so Cas guesses it’s been at least an hour, if not more.
He drops to one knee and uses his hands to brush away the snow from where he thinks Sam’s head must be, then away from his shoulders and rolls him onto his back.
“Sam! Sam, can you hear me?”
Sam’s eyes are closed, lashes dark against his cheeks. He’s deathly pale, but that’s hardly new. They haven’t properly seen the sun in months. There’s a white patch under his left eye, his lips are blue, and he doesn’t rouse at all when Cas shakes him. It could mean anything, and Cas isn’t anywhere close to being a doctor, though he has enough recreational drugs stashed in various places around the property to stock his own very eclectic drugstore. Sam isn’t necessarily unconscious, he tells himself. This could just be the postictal sleep after a seizure, after all. At least he’s breathing, and he’s wearing his winter clothing, so it can’t be all bad.
“Sam, wake up! I’m not carrying you into the house. Come on, wake up!”
He pats Sam’s cheeks, then unzips his jacket in order to rake his knuckles over Sam’s sternum. It has the desired effect. A few breathless moments later and Sam groans softly. His eyelids flick open, and Cas smiles in spite of himself when Sam turns a confused look on him.
“You need to get up. Hold onto me, okay?”
Sam nods jerkily and holds out both hands for Cas to take, completely trusting. If Cas was rhe sort of person to get mushy over things, it would probably break his heart a little. He hauls Sam to his feet, and for a moment they both stagger in the ankle-deep snow until Cas finds his balance.
“I’m putting you on a diet, starting tomorrow.”
All of Sam’s weight is leaning on him now, and Sam nods as if he’s speaking perfect sense. “Where’s Dean?” he asks, his voice even hoarser than usual, and fuck. Fuck, but Cas was not expecting that, and he stumbles and almost takes them both down again.
“Never mind that, just move!” he snaps, and Sam ducks his head and obeys, just like that.
It’s a hassle to get Sam inside and lying down on the bed. Sam keeps stopping in his tracks and looking around, probably for his damn dead brother, and it takes the remainder of Cas’ patience not to yell at him while he’s obviously not in his right mind. Sam does his best, though, and even tries to help when Cas pulls off first his boots, then his gloves and coat, and then sets about removing the rest of his clothing, all of which is soaking wet.
“Keep still,” he orders. “You’re fucking freezing, and you’ve probably got frostbite and I want to make sure your damned nose isn’t going to fall off your face or something.”
“Sorry.”
Cas sighs. “Don’t be sorry. Does anything hurt?”
“‘m cold.”
“Hypothermia will do that to you. Can you feel this?” he squeezes Sam’s hands, then his feet, one by one, and Sam nods. He’s not shivering, which is a bad sign, but at least his extremities haven’t frozen off. “What were you doing out there, anyway? It’s not like the animals couldn’t have waited a few hours for the snow to stop, you fuckwit.”
“Is Dean okay?”
Still addled, then. Who knows how badly Sam scrambled his brains this time. At least he doesn’t seem concussed, but that hardly means anything anymore. This time, Cas has been bracing himself for the question.
“Dean’s fine.” As fine as he can be, considering he’s been dead for nearly three years. Sam’s fingernails are bluer than his lips. Shit. There’s no way Cas is driving them through the blizzard back to town, the way he drives, he’ll end up killing them both. He nudges Sam with one knee. “Shove over.”
Sam doesn’t move, just watches, his brows knitting together, as Cas takes of his own shirt and lets his pants pool around his ankles. “Cas?”
He rolls his eyes and crawls into the bed next to Sam, pulling the covers over them. “What? I thought you liked to cuddle?”
Sam shudders as Cas pulls him close. His skin is cold to the touch, though not as cold as Cas had feared it might be. Still, it’s not the most pleasant sensation in the world. After a moment, though, Sam seems to get with the program and turns on his side, and for a moment it feels like he might actually be trying to burrow right into Cas’ ribcage. When he does settle, it’s with his nose buried in Cas’ collarbone, breath hot and humid against Cas’ skin.
“I forgot, for a minute,” he says, voice muffled, and Cas sighs. He frees one hand from under the covers and pets Sam’s hair clumsily.
“Yeah, I know. You’re going to be fine, though.”
“I didn’t know you knew about body heat,” Sam murmurs, trying to shift even closer to him, which is pretty much physically impossible.
“Dean showed me. It was a long time ago.”
Another lifetime ago.
“I don’t remember. Was it… after?”
After Lucifer, is what Sam means. It always boils down to that one moment in time. Before Lucifer. After Lucifer. It’s what defines Sam these days, the person he is now, the person he thinks he was before. Cas is pretty sure even Sam doesn’t know which of the two versions of himself he loathes more.
Cas doesn’t want to discuss this, but Sam has a way of worrying at subjects like this one, like poking at a sore tooth. Not that Cas has ever had a sore tooth, but in another life Jimmy Novak had a mild phobia of going to the dentist, so he thinks he might know what he’s talking about.
“Right after. I crashed in a snowbank. I was there for a long time before Dean found me.”
There’s a long silence while Sam just breathes against his skin. Then he stirs a little.
“When you became human.”
He nods jerkily. “That’s right. I was mid-flight, coming back from D--” he stops himself, but it’s too late. Sam flinches in his arms.
“You were there.”
It seems pointless to deny it.
“I picked the day on purpose, you know,” Sam says, voice barely above a whisper. He’s warming up in Cas’ embrace, starting to shiver. “It was Dean’s birthday. I didn’t know what the promise really meant, but he never lied. He never did.”
It shouldn’t make sense, but it does. Sam rarely talks about Lucifer, but then, he doesn’t need to. Cas knows all too well what it’s like, living with that. “I never knew what Dean’s birthday was. He never wanted to mark the day.”
Sam lets out a mirthless chuckle. “Your brother ends the world and your best f-friend nearly dies in the snow. Happy f-fucking birthday.”
“Anything hurt?” Sam is shivering hard now, enough that it would probably be shaking the bed if it was anything other than a mattress on the floor, but he shakes his head.
“F-fucking freezing, though.”
“Yeah, well, hypothermia will do that. You’re lucky you’re not worse off, given that you decided to have a seizure in the middle of a snowstorm. You’ve got frostbite on your face, but it doesn’t look bad, and you’re not going to lose any important appendages.”
“You’re obsessed with sex,” Sam snorts quietly.
“I was thinking of your hands and feet,” Cas lies smoothly, and Sam laughs. “Who’s obsessed now?”
There’s a muffled thump, and a moment later Renegade, heedless of exposed skin and anyone’s dignity, including his own, hops over Cas’ hip and burrows into the hollow left between his stomach and Sam’s. He settles on the mattress, paws tucked under his chest, purring lustily, tail twitching just to prove that he’s not entirely domesticated.
“You’re not fooling anyone, you know,” Cas tells the cat, who ignores him in favour of heabutting Sam’s chin.
Sam brings up one hand to scratch the cat somewhat awkwardly behind the ears, his movements made clumsy by the cold. He looks up at Cas, a small smile on his face.
“Not fooling anyone at all,” he agrees.
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