Sammy On His Own
Title: Sammy On His Own
Summary: Pre-Stanford: John, Dean, and Sam are each doing their own hunts. John keeps in touch with his boys...particularly the one who isn't doing well. Sam is 18 and Dean is 22 or 23.
Warnings/Spoilers: You've seen the pilot, yes?
Wordcount: 3,052
Author's Note: Doing something a little different with this one. Originally posted, pre-edit, under the title You over at 27_jaredjensen's meme.
--
It never fails; they'll spend weeks stuck in po-dunk nowhere, waiting for the faintest whisper of a possible hunt, and hear nothing, but as soon as they finish one that has them wrung completely out, not one, but two, but three are all of sudden nipping at their heels.
They plan it out quickly and unemotionally. The demon infestation in Cleveland looks the most brutal, the djinn in Los Angeles is the longest drive, and the spirit in Duluth needs thirty loads of research. John, Dean, Sam. It isn't hard to work out. John gives the Impala to Dean, hot wires a pick-up for himself, and leaves his Jeep with Sammy. Duluth's only twenty miles out of where they've been stationed this past month. Sam can stay in school, which John knows makes him happy, even if Sam's been quiet about school lately.
Truth is, Sam's been quiet about everything lately, and John worries that it's because he can't breathe.
He pulls on his coat and wraps Sam in a hug. "I hate leaving you alone."
"You're getting sappy in your old age." Sam pushes his face into John's chest for just a second. "I'll be fine."
"Watch your back out there. Take care of your lungs."
"You know I will."
"Call every night."
Whenever they're separated, both boys are always under orders to call John and check in before they go to bed. Dean always forgets, so John ends up calling him, which is fine.
Sam never forgets.
**
John is buying drinks for the widow, trying to find out where her husband had been spending his evenings, trying to find a common link in the possessions, when his phone lights up with Sam's name and a picture of his boy, thirteen years old, birthday cake smushed around the world's biggest smile.
"Sorry," John says. "I've got to take this." He pauses. She has kids. This might work in his favor. "It's my youngest. He's a little sick." It's hardly the first time John's described Sam as a little sick; it keeps him safe from people that would use it against him, and John doesn't trust fucking anyone not to hurt his boys, not anymore, and it's easy to simplify than to try to explain how his son is saving the world one minute and breathless from a speck of dust the next.
"Oh. Sure. Of course."
John snaps his phone open. "How's my boy?"
"Good." Sam's panting. "Just got in. Bones weren't where they should have been, but I tried this spell Bobby told me, summoned this other spirit who told me--"
"Whoa whoa whoa." Shit. This was supposed to be an easy one. This is his eighteen-year-old, alone.
"No, no, it's okay. So the spell--" he breaks off and coughs. "It worked really well. But the sun was coming up and I--" more coughing, "--I'm wheezing, so I had to get back."
"You're all right?"
"I'm fine. Not a scratch. You? Dean?"
"Both doing well." He's quiet for a minute, listening to Sam breathe. "Do a neb treatment before bed, all right?"
"All right."
"Call me if you're up in the middle of the night. You're sounding rough."
"I'm okay. Really." He wheezes a little harder. "Okay. Gonna go."
"Love you."
"You."
That's what Sam always says. It takes less air.
John sets his phone down and looks at it for a minute, and then he looks up at the widow and swallows. “He's, uh, chronically ill, this one. Likes to give his dad heart attacks.”
“Oh.” She softens, leans against the bar. “I'm so sorry.”
“No, no, don't be. He's not anything to feel sorry for. Not a martyr. Just this kid. This really great kid.”
He doesn't tell her how much easier it is to accept Sam as he is, lungs and all, than it is to try to plan for what will happen if he becomes (that thing, that monster, that demon) that he is so fucking afraid might take over his boy.
He doesn't tell anyone that.
Because he's a really great kid.
Talking about Sam works. She tells him about her husband, and he forces himself to pay attention. His head is still on the phone, tracking Sam's wheeze.
The truth is, John's boy can't breathe, and it is not that easy to accept.
**
Sam doesn't call in the middle of the night, but John wakes up with a heavy, sticky feeling in his chest, and his fingers are halfway through dialing before he's even sitting up.
Dean's fucked in the head if he thinks he's the only one with Sammy-telepathy.
Sam answers with a stuttered, clogged half-breath, and John says, "Hey, Simba. You all right?" and listens while Sam coughs and coughs and coughs. He can just picture Sam, hunched over on his bed, feet jittery on the floor, hand pressed to the chest he never lets anyone else touch. "Oh, Sam. Try to get a few breaths in without coughing? I need to hear you."
"I'm okay, I can breathe," Sam wheezes, and then he takes a few leaky breaths in and out that prove that he really, really cannot.
John gets up and paces, rubbing his chest with one hand. "Sammy. Hey. Stay with me. Did you take your inhaler?"
"Yeah. Waiting."
"Do another hit now. Can you get up? Can you set the neb up, or is that ship sailed?" If he's too breathless to see straight or shaking too hard to measure out the meds, it's a lost cause, and this is why he doesn't like Sam alone, damn it. Sometimes his lungs fuck him up past the point where he can take care of himself, and it doesn't matter that he's tough as all hell. He cannot physically do this on his own.
Sam isn't supposed to be away from them.
"Can do it,” Sam says, quickly, while he has air.
"That's my boy. I'm going to be right here. Don't talk, just work." He keeps pacing and holds his damn breath until he hears the grumble of the nebulizer starting up. "Fuck, way to go, Sam."
Sam gives a weak laugh and sneezes a few times. Fucking shack that he left Sam in. He thought it would be better than some crappy motel room, but listen to him.
"Get comfy, Sammy." He sits on the bed and re-imagines Sam, now that he's doing better. He's curled up in his pajamas, one arm around his chest, one clutching the mouthpiece for dear damn life. "It's story time."
He tells Sam stories about his hunt and about the time Dean lost his first tooth in the middle of a salt and burn. He tells him about houses in the country and the life he wished they'd had and about before Sam was born, the nights he fell asleep next to eight-month-pregnant Mary with his cheek on her belly and Dean cuddled into his hip, and he talks and talks until his throat hurts and the neb treatment ends.
He tells Sam to sleep and to call him in the morning and Sam, voice always unnervingly breathy after an asthma attack, agrees.
John needs five drinks before he can go back to bed, before he can get the image of that country house and that beautiful woman out of his mind. Fuck, he misses living.
**
Dean's hunt is going well, Sam is feeling better and looking up ghost-hunting strategies during his free periods, but John's hitting a wall. He comes back bloody to his room night after night with no damn idea where the fuck these demons are getting their in.
He's stitching up a bone-deep cut on his ankle on one such night, a week and a half since he's been gone, when Sam calls and tells him he has a fever.
"A hundred and three," Sam says. "I'm sorry, Dad. Really sorry. Out of nowhere."
He bites off the dental floss and ties a knot. "You need a doctor, Sam."
"I made an appointment for after school tomorrow. And then I'll go kill the ghost. I promise. It'll be fine."
"Don't worry about that right now. Are you breathing?"
"Yessir. But it's tough. I'm sorry."
"Sam. Stop apologizing. Just sleep." He winds a bandage around his foot. "Wait, set up the neb first. I'm calling you in three hours, and you're getting your ass up and on it and taking your temperature. All right?"
"Okay."
"Hey. You scared?" He feels like shit, and fevers tend to make Sam's lungs stop without a moment's notice.
Sam hesitates. "Yeah."
"Don't be. Remember why?"
"Nothing bad is allowed to happen to me."
"Exactly."
**
So now it's past eleven the next night and John's exorcised four demons and coached Dean through some spell work and he'd just like to hear how his baby's doctor's appointment went, all right, but Sam won't answer his phone and John's about to lose his mind. First thing in the morning, he'll call the school and get them to track Sam the hell down and make sure he's not passed out on the fucking floor, but that's seven hours from now and John has no goddamn reason to believe he's going to make it that long.
Twenty minutes later, Sam finally fucking calls.
He's laughing. He's coughing so much that it's hard to tell, but yes, he's laughing.
"Killed it, dad," he says. "Shot it and...and burned it salted it, everything. It's gone. I did it. Home now."
"God. Fuck. Listen to you. Did you go to the doctor?"
"Yes!"
"What'd he say?"
Sam coughs and coughs and coughs and John holds his head.
"Bronchitis," Sam says, eventually.
"God." Why the fuck the kid can't ever get sick with something that isn't a chest infection, John will never know. "How do you feel?"
"Awesome. Killed the ghost, Dad."
John pushes his fist into his eye. "I'm going to list out meds, okay? And I want them all lined up on your nightstand, and then you can go to sleep. Don't you even think about school tomorrow, you understand me?"
"Yeah." Sam's voice is small.
John ticks off meds on his fingers, listing names and dosages, and he barely hears Sam say, "I thought you'd be proud of me."
**
John never fails to be surprised that he can still unravel.
But he doesn't know how else to feel when Dean's hunt still isn't done and demons are coming at him left and right and his battered soldier of a kid calls him at five-thirty AM, absolutely breathlessly telling him that he's feeling so much better, that the fever's under 104 and look, he almost made it through that whole sentence without coughing. He's only seeing spots when he stands up and his lips are only kind of purple, definitely not blue, no way, and he thinks tomorrow he'll be well enough to go back to school, John closes his eyes and drives his knife into the surface of the nightstand. He carves a notch every time Sam stops to suck down a breath. By the time Sam's said three sentences, he's up to twenty.
"Sammy," he says. "You think maybe you should go to a hospital?"
"But I feel okay," Sam says. Purple-lipped Sam says.
Purple-lipped Sam says sincerely.
And then John's police scanner announces a massacre, and he barely has time to say please go to a hospital, this is not bronchitis, I love you to death before he hangs up. (But he does, and he doesn't leave until he hears Sam's wheezy little "you" and Sam, don't you dare love fucking anyone to death.)
**
John breaks his arm in three places and spends the night in the ER, and it's 5 AM by the time he stumbles back to the motel room half-drunk on Percocet and whisky and a shitty hunt and realizes Sam hasn't called.
He tries him four times and he doesn't pick up, and neither does Dean, and John paces for ten minutes before he calls Caleb, tells him everything he knows about these fucking demons, and loads himself and his cast into the car. He drives one-handed.
Sam calls when he's twenty minutes out of Cleveland.
"It hurts, Dad." His coughs are dark and crackly, and he's breathing hard and fast like he's crying, but John knows he isn't, because the sicker Sam is, the less likely he is to cry. That kid could have a fever of a hundred and six (please, God, please no) and his first priority would be conserving his fucking air, and this is the kind of bullshit that comes with Sam's life, hideous lungs and a father waiting for you to turn evil, and John is just so, so sorry.
"I'm on my way. You need an ambulance?"
"No."
"Can you set the neb up?"
He coughs for a solid minute before he says, "No."
"All right. All right, kiddo. You hold on."
"Please come."
"I'm coming." He presses on the gas. "I'm coming."
**
Sam is making soup when he comes in.
He's purple around his lips and up to the middle of his hands, and he can't stand up straight, and John can tell from a few feet off that he's as hot and dry as a desert, but he's making soup.
He has meds and tissues lined up on the counter. He has a thermometer and a pad of paper where he was tracking his temperature (shit) and his peak flow readings (shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit).
He's just trying to get better.
It's all he does.
He's making fucking tomato rice soup.
John knows he needs a hospital, and he's about to bring him, but for a minute he needs to turn off the stove and sit at the table and gather his boy up into his lap and kiss his cheek over and over and rub his poor sick back and tell him how sorry he is. "You should never be alone," he says. "You're too fucking precious. You're just too goddamn important." You just scare the fucking hell out of me.
**
Sam gets IV antibiotics and an oxygen mask.
Sam gets pets on the head from concerned nurses and a papa bear of a dad when they try to give him something without asking if he's allergic. Sam's sick and scared, damn it, you ask him before you stick something in him. Sam gets to decide what happens to him, okay?
Sam gets a room far away from the nurse's station because fuck if you're keeping John's boy awake. He pets his hair and Sam sets alarms so he knows when John gets his painkillers.
"Don't," John says. "Don't take care of me."
"Let me for a little while," Sam says. "I've been really lonely.”
He lets Sam draw on his cast, a cardinal damn sin, and stays awake watching his chest rise and fall and never stop.
**
Dean comes back a few days before Sam's going to be released, and he sits by the bed and tangles his fingers in Sam's hair while John goes out for coffee. They're deep in conversation when John gets back, so he stops and waits outside the door.
"You scared him to death," Dean's saying. "How are you going to tell him?"
"I don't know."
"He's going to be scared for four fucking years, Sam. What are you going to do if something like this happens to you while you're gone?"
No. No.
John knows what four fucking years means.
It means Sam unsafe and alone.
It means Sam unwatched.
It means Sam still doesn't get what they're fighting for. (For that house in the country, Sam. For a world without evil in it. For a place where he can come to terms with the fact that he brought two kids into this shithole version of reality.)
For a world without demons and demon blood and dead mothers.
He pushes his forehead against the walls and cries like Sam died.
**
"What's wrong, Dad?" It's late at night, and Dean's bringing the car around, and Sam, slowly changing into his real clothes, is looking at John with these wet scared eyes.
"Nothing, Sammy. Everything's fine." He helps Sam into his coat and listens to that constant fucking wheeze of his breathing, the ones that made the doctors purse their lips. He shouldn't always sound like that, they said, and Simba gave them the growl that earned him his nickname.
"Tell me what's wrong," Sam says, and he's starting to panic. This is one of the rules of Sam. You don't lie to him. You don't keep things from him.
Apparently it doesn't go both ways.
And Sam is the most frustrating fucking kid in the world, and he and Dean have spoiled him within an inch of that tenuous life, and what John wouldn't fucking give to keep doing it forever, and Jesus Christ, Sam, goddamn it. How could you go?
Sam runs his fingers over John's cast, frowns at the swelling in his fingers, and what the fuck is John going to do without the constant goddamn concern of Sammy's? How is he supposed to reign himself and Dean in when there isn't this fucking breathless kid waiting at home, this kid who needs him to be okay?
This is about you, Sam. This was always about you, and John can't fucking risk this. He can't lose track of what he's fighting for, or he might stop, and fuck if he's stopping now, when he's gotten so close, when he's already ruined both of his boys' lives. Fuck if he's going to stop right when his goddamn sick kid who needed him to stop eighteen goddamn years ago is leaving him.
And there. That. That's what's fucking wrong.
Because...Sam.
He kneels in front of him and forces his voice steady. "I'm going to miss you," John says. "I just don't know if I'm going to be able to stand how much I'm going to miss you."
Sam freezes, blinks, and then folds himself into John's arms.
And John is so angry and afraid and so in love with his goddamn boy.
"You," Sam says.
Summary: Pre-Stanford: John, Dean, and Sam are each doing their own hunts. John keeps in touch with his boys...particularly the one who isn't doing well. Sam is 18 and Dean is 22 or 23.
Warnings/Spoilers: You've seen the pilot, yes?
Wordcount: 3,052
Author's Note: Doing something a little different with this one. Originally posted, pre-edit, under the title You over at 27_jaredjensen's meme.
--
It never fails; they'll spend weeks stuck in po-dunk nowhere, waiting for the faintest whisper of a possible hunt, and hear nothing, but as soon as they finish one that has them wrung completely out, not one, but two, but three are all of sudden nipping at their heels.
They plan it out quickly and unemotionally. The demon infestation in Cleveland looks the most brutal, the djinn in Los Angeles is the longest drive, and the spirit in Duluth needs thirty loads of research. John, Dean, Sam. It isn't hard to work out. John gives the Impala to Dean, hot wires a pick-up for himself, and leaves his Jeep with Sammy. Duluth's only twenty miles out of where they've been stationed this past month. Sam can stay in school, which John knows makes him happy, even if Sam's been quiet about school lately.
Truth is, Sam's been quiet about everything lately, and John worries that it's because he can't breathe.
He pulls on his coat and wraps Sam in a hug. "I hate leaving you alone."
"You're getting sappy in your old age." Sam pushes his face into John's chest for just a second. "I'll be fine."
"Watch your back out there. Take care of your lungs."
"You know I will."
"Call every night."
Whenever they're separated, both boys are always under orders to call John and check in before they go to bed. Dean always forgets, so John ends up calling him, which is fine.
Sam never forgets.
**
John is buying drinks for the widow, trying to find out where her husband had been spending his evenings, trying to find a common link in the possessions, when his phone lights up with Sam's name and a picture of his boy, thirteen years old, birthday cake smushed around the world's biggest smile.
"Sorry," John says. "I've got to take this." He pauses. She has kids. This might work in his favor. "It's my youngest. He's a little sick." It's hardly the first time John's described Sam as a little sick; it keeps him safe from people that would use it against him, and John doesn't trust fucking anyone not to hurt his boys, not anymore, and it's easy to simplify than to try to explain how his son is saving the world one minute and breathless from a speck of dust the next.
"Oh. Sure. Of course."
John snaps his phone open. "How's my boy?"
"Good." Sam's panting. "Just got in. Bones weren't where they should have been, but I tried this spell Bobby told me, summoned this other spirit who told me--"
"Whoa whoa whoa." Shit. This was supposed to be an easy one. This is his eighteen-year-old, alone.
"No, no, it's okay. So the spell--" he breaks off and coughs. "It worked really well. But the sun was coming up and I--" more coughing, "--I'm wheezing, so I had to get back."
"You're all right?"
"I'm fine. Not a scratch. You? Dean?"
"Both doing well." He's quiet for a minute, listening to Sam breathe. "Do a neb treatment before bed, all right?"
"All right."
"Call me if you're up in the middle of the night. You're sounding rough."
"I'm okay. Really." He wheezes a little harder. "Okay. Gonna go."
"Love you."
"You."
That's what Sam always says. It takes less air.
John sets his phone down and looks at it for a minute, and then he looks up at the widow and swallows. “He's, uh, chronically ill, this one. Likes to give his dad heart attacks.”
“Oh.” She softens, leans against the bar. “I'm so sorry.”
“No, no, don't be. He's not anything to feel sorry for. Not a martyr. Just this kid. This really great kid.”
He doesn't tell her how much easier it is to accept Sam as he is, lungs and all, than it is to try to plan for what will happen if he becomes (that thing, that monster, that demon) that he is so fucking afraid might take over his boy.
He doesn't tell anyone that.
Because he's a really great kid.
Talking about Sam works. She tells him about her husband, and he forces himself to pay attention. His head is still on the phone, tracking Sam's wheeze.
The truth is, John's boy can't breathe, and it is not that easy to accept.
**
Sam doesn't call in the middle of the night, but John wakes up with a heavy, sticky feeling in his chest, and his fingers are halfway through dialing before he's even sitting up.
Dean's fucked in the head if he thinks he's the only one with Sammy-telepathy.
Sam answers with a stuttered, clogged half-breath, and John says, "Hey, Simba. You all right?" and listens while Sam coughs and coughs and coughs. He can just picture Sam, hunched over on his bed, feet jittery on the floor, hand pressed to the chest he never lets anyone else touch. "Oh, Sam. Try to get a few breaths in without coughing? I need to hear you."
"I'm okay, I can breathe," Sam wheezes, and then he takes a few leaky breaths in and out that prove that he really, really cannot.
John gets up and paces, rubbing his chest with one hand. "Sammy. Hey. Stay with me. Did you take your inhaler?"
"Yeah. Waiting."
"Do another hit now. Can you get up? Can you set the neb up, or is that ship sailed?" If he's too breathless to see straight or shaking too hard to measure out the meds, it's a lost cause, and this is why he doesn't like Sam alone, damn it. Sometimes his lungs fuck him up past the point where he can take care of himself, and it doesn't matter that he's tough as all hell. He cannot physically do this on his own.
Sam isn't supposed to be away from them.
"Can do it,” Sam says, quickly, while he has air.
"That's my boy. I'm going to be right here. Don't talk, just work." He keeps pacing and holds his damn breath until he hears the grumble of the nebulizer starting up. "Fuck, way to go, Sam."
Sam gives a weak laugh and sneezes a few times. Fucking shack that he left Sam in. He thought it would be better than some crappy motel room, but listen to him.
"Get comfy, Sammy." He sits on the bed and re-imagines Sam, now that he's doing better. He's curled up in his pajamas, one arm around his chest, one clutching the mouthpiece for dear damn life. "It's story time."
He tells Sam stories about his hunt and about the time Dean lost his first tooth in the middle of a salt and burn. He tells him about houses in the country and the life he wished they'd had and about before Sam was born, the nights he fell asleep next to eight-month-pregnant Mary with his cheek on her belly and Dean cuddled into his hip, and he talks and talks until his throat hurts and the neb treatment ends.
He tells Sam to sleep and to call him in the morning and Sam, voice always unnervingly breathy after an asthma attack, agrees.
John needs five drinks before he can go back to bed, before he can get the image of that country house and that beautiful woman out of his mind. Fuck, he misses living.
**
Dean's hunt is going well, Sam is feeling better and looking up ghost-hunting strategies during his free periods, but John's hitting a wall. He comes back bloody to his room night after night with no damn idea where the fuck these demons are getting their in.
He's stitching up a bone-deep cut on his ankle on one such night, a week and a half since he's been gone, when Sam calls and tells him he has a fever.
"A hundred and three," Sam says. "I'm sorry, Dad. Really sorry. Out of nowhere."
He bites off the dental floss and ties a knot. "You need a doctor, Sam."
"I made an appointment for after school tomorrow. And then I'll go kill the ghost. I promise. It'll be fine."
"Don't worry about that right now. Are you breathing?"
"Yessir. But it's tough. I'm sorry."
"Sam. Stop apologizing. Just sleep." He winds a bandage around his foot. "Wait, set up the neb first. I'm calling you in three hours, and you're getting your ass up and on it and taking your temperature. All right?"
"Okay."
"Hey. You scared?" He feels like shit, and fevers tend to make Sam's lungs stop without a moment's notice.
Sam hesitates. "Yeah."
"Don't be. Remember why?"
"Nothing bad is allowed to happen to me."
"Exactly."
**
So now it's past eleven the next night and John's exorcised four demons and coached Dean through some spell work and he'd just like to hear how his baby's doctor's appointment went, all right, but Sam won't answer his phone and John's about to lose his mind. First thing in the morning, he'll call the school and get them to track Sam the hell down and make sure he's not passed out on the fucking floor, but that's seven hours from now and John has no goddamn reason to believe he's going to make it that long.
Twenty minutes later, Sam finally fucking calls.
He's laughing. He's coughing so much that it's hard to tell, but yes, he's laughing.
"Killed it, dad," he says. "Shot it and...and burned it salted it, everything. It's gone. I did it. Home now."
"God. Fuck. Listen to you. Did you go to the doctor?"
"Yes!"
"What'd he say?"
Sam coughs and coughs and coughs and John holds his head.
"Bronchitis," Sam says, eventually.
"God." Why the fuck the kid can't ever get sick with something that isn't a chest infection, John will never know. "How do you feel?"
"Awesome. Killed the ghost, Dad."
John pushes his fist into his eye. "I'm going to list out meds, okay? And I want them all lined up on your nightstand, and then you can go to sleep. Don't you even think about school tomorrow, you understand me?"
"Yeah." Sam's voice is small.
John ticks off meds on his fingers, listing names and dosages, and he barely hears Sam say, "I thought you'd be proud of me."
**
John never fails to be surprised that he can still unravel.
But he doesn't know how else to feel when Dean's hunt still isn't done and demons are coming at him left and right and his battered soldier of a kid calls him at five-thirty AM, absolutely breathlessly telling him that he's feeling so much better, that the fever's under 104 and look, he almost made it through that whole sentence without coughing. He's only seeing spots when he stands up and his lips are only kind of purple, definitely not blue, no way, and he thinks tomorrow he'll be well enough to go back to school, John closes his eyes and drives his knife into the surface of the nightstand. He carves a notch every time Sam stops to suck down a breath. By the time Sam's said three sentences, he's up to twenty.
"Sammy," he says. "You think maybe you should go to a hospital?"
"But I feel okay," Sam says. Purple-lipped Sam says.
Purple-lipped Sam says sincerely.
And then John's police scanner announces a massacre, and he barely has time to say please go to a hospital, this is not bronchitis, I love you to death before he hangs up. (But he does, and he doesn't leave until he hears Sam's wheezy little "you" and Sam, don't you dare love fucking anyone to death.)
**
John breaks his arm in three places and spends the night in the ER, and it's 5 AM by the time he stumbles back to the motel room half-drunk on Percocet and whisky and a shitty hunt and realizes Sam hasn't called.
He tries him four times and he doesn't pick up, and neither does Dean, and John paces for ten minutes before he calls Caleb, tells him everything he knows about these fucking demons, and loads himself and his cast into the car. He drives one-handed.
Sam calls when he's twenty minutes out of Cleveland.
"It hurts, Dad." His coughs are dark and crackly, and he's breathing hard and fast like he's crying, but John knows he isn't, because the sicker Sam is, the less likely he is to cry. That kid could have a fever of a hundred and six (please, God, please no) and his first priority would be conserving his fucking air, and this is the kind of bullshit that comes with Sam's life, hideous lungs and a father waiting for you to turn evil, and John is just so, so sorry.
"I'm on my way. You need an ambulance?"
"No."
"Can you set the neb up?"
He coughs for a solid minute before he says, "No."
"All right. All right, kiddo. You hold on."
"Please come."
"I'm coming." He presses on the gas. "I'm coming."
**
Sam is making soup when he comes in.
He's purple around his lips and up to the middle of his hands, and he can't stand up straight, and John can tell from a few feet off that he's as hot and dry as a desert, but he's making soup.
He has meds and tissues lined up on the counter. He has a thermometer and a pad of paper where he was tracking his temperature (shit) and his peak flow readings (shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit).
He's just trying to get better.
It's all he does.
He's making fucking tomato rice soup.
John knows he needs a hospital, and he's about to bring him, but for a minute he needs to turn off the stove and sit at the table and gather his boy up into his lap and kiss his cheek over and over and rub his poor sick back and tell him how sorry he is. "You should never be alone," he says. "You're too fucking precious. You're just too goddamn important." You just scare the fucking hell out of me.
**
Sam gets IV antibiotics and an oxygen mask.
Sam gets pets on the head from concerned nurses and a papa bear of a dad when they try to give him something without asking if he's allergic. Sam's sick and scared, damn it, you ask him before you stick something in him. Sam gets to decide what happens to him, okay?
Sam gets a room far away from the nurse's station because fuck if you're keeping John's boy awake. He pets his hair and Sam sets alarms so he knows when John gets his painkillers.
"Don't," John says. "Don't take care of me."
"Let me for a little while," Sam says. "I've been really lonely.”
He lets Sam draw on his cast, a cardinal damn sin, and stays awake watching his chest rise and fall and never stop.
**
Dean comes back a few days before Sam's going to be released, and he sits by the bed and tangles his fingers in Sam's hair while John goes out for coffee. They're deep in conversation when John gets back, so he stops and waits outside the door.
"You scared him to death," Dean's saying. "How are you going to tell him?"
"I don't know."
"He's going to be scared for four fucking years, Sam. What are you going to do if something like this happens to you while you're gone?"
No. No.
John knows what four fucking years means.
It means Sam unsafe and alone.
It means Sam unwatched.
It means Sam still doesn't get what they're fighting for. (For that house in the country, Sam. For a world without evil in it. For a place where he can come to terms with the fact that he brought two kids into this shithole version of reality.)
For a world without demons and demon blood and dead mothers.
He pushes his forehead against the walls and cries like Sam died.
**
"What's wrong, Dad?" It's late at night, and Dean's bringing the car around, and Sam, slowly changing into his real clothes, is looking at John with these wet scared eyes.
"Nothing, Sammy. Everything's fine." He helps Sam into his coat and listens to that constant fucking wheeze of his breathing, the ones that made the doctors purse their lips. He shouldn't always sound like that, they said, and Simba gave them the growl that earned him his nickname.
"Tell me what's wrong," Sam says, and he's starting to panic. This is one of the rules of Sam. You don't lie to him. You don't keep things from him.
Apparently it doesn't go both ways.
And Sam is the most frustrating fucking kid in the world, and he and Dean have spoiled him within an inch of that tenuous life, and what John wouldn't fucking give to keep doing it forever, and Jesus Christ, Sam, goddamn it. How could you go?
Sam runs his fingers over John's cast, frowns at the swelling in his fingers, and what the fuck is John going to do without the constant goddamn concern of Sammy's? How is he supposed to reign himself and Dean in when there isn't this fucking breathless kid waiting at home, this kid who needs him to be okay?
This is about you, Sam. This was always about you, and John can't fucking risk this. He can't lose track of what he's fighting for, or he might stop, and fuck if he's stopping now, when he's gotten so close, when he's already ruined both of his boys' lives. Fuck if he's going to stop right when his goddamn sick kid who needed him to stop eighteen goddamn years ago is leaving him.
And there. That. That's what's fucking wrong.
Because...Sam.
He kneels in front of him and forces his voice steady. "I'm going to miss you," John says. "I just don't know if I'm going to be able to stand how much I'm going to miss you."
Sam freezes, blinks, and then folds himself into John's arms.
And John is so angry and afraid and so in love with his goddamn boy.
"You," Sam says.