SPN FIC - Breaking Point
I had something in mind to work on, but the Muse handed me this instead. Hope you like. 'Tis speculative future!fic, a few months after Dean's deal comes due. (No, no one went to Hell.) HC by the bucketload, because y'all seem to like that.
Dean doesn't protest - much - being poked and prodded. He drinks a little water at Sam's request, then huddles back down into the bed like he wants it to swallow him. He doesn't seem likely to die in the next few hours. Neither does Sam. But still, in a perfect world, they'd be getting some proper medical care.
Characters: Dean and Sam
Pairings: none
Spoilers: none
Rating: PG, for language
Length: 3987 words
Disclaimer: No money. You know the drill.
BREAKING POINT
By Carol Davis
When the smoke clears, the first thing Sam sees is his brother, sprawled on the floor like he fell there from a hundred feet up.
There's blood on the shirt Dean bought two days ago.
He said it was about time he had something new. New as in brand-new, not Goodwill.
Sam tries to sit up, but the hammering that sets off in his head forces him to reconsider. He lies still for a moment, letting himself breathe, asking the room to stop spinning, please, so he can go to Dean, make sure Dean's just stunned and not something worse.
"Dean?" Sam ventures, and coughs.
The demon on its own would have been bad enough. But a demon with a couple of poltergeists as…what, pets? Lackeys? Disciples? That was a disaster counting down toward launch. Sam and Dean both knew that, coming in here. In a perfect world they would've been able to call in reinforcements - but as things are, they've never really had the luxury of reinforcements. There's Bobby, sometimes, but he's in Nashville. Ellen's in Texas, Sam thinks. Jo? She was in Texas, too, a couple of weeks ago. She's probably been three other places since then.
So that's how it was: him and Dean or nothing. And nothing wasn't an option, because way too many people had already died.
"That son of a bitch's number is up," Dean said on the way here.
He's not saying anything, now.
On his hands and knees, gritting his teeth against the pain in his head, Sam crosses the bare wood floor to his brother. His left hip feels like somebody hit it with a mallet, and every bit of ground he gains costs him a nasty lurch of his stomach.
"Dean," he says again, more sharply.
Dean's breathing. He looks like he's breathing.
What seems like an hour later, Sam reaches his brother and shifts himself around to a sit, keeping as much weight off his left hip as he can. Dean doesn't respond when Sam tugs up the new shirt and looks underneath. There's a wound, a gash that opened from the inside instead of the outside, but it's not worrisome.
Of course, that doesn't mean there's nothing worse inside, where Sam can't see.
He's checking Dean's pulse with two fingers pressed to his throat when Dean finally stirs. Lets out a long, shuddering moan that makes Sam grimace and draw his hand away. Sam waits for a second, repeating Dean's name, and finally Dean's eyes flutter open.
"Dude," Sam rasps. "You okay?"
Dean tries to say something that's lost in a fit of coughing and choking. Sam has to help him roll onto his side, which seems to make it easier for Dean to breathe, but also makes him start to curl up into a ball.
"It's gone," Sam says.
Dean doesn't look like he believes that. His face contorts into something that looks like denial.
"We did it," Sam insists. "It's gone."
Dean grunts something that sounds like, "All?"
"The poltergeists too."
What Azazel gave him, and what happened a few months ago, when Dean's deal came due - maybe you could say that resulted in a New And Improved Sam, but Sam doesn't feel either new or improved. Right now he feels pretty much beat to shit. The demon and his lackeys drew him and Dean in here figuring they were going to have a serious, Pay Per View-worthy Winchester smackdown, and that pretty much happened - but Sam held onto things long enough to jabber out the Latin he'd imprinted on his brain well enough to be able to chant it in his sleep. The demon shrieked a bunch of nonsense back at him, trying to break his rhythm, but New And Improved or old and worn right the hell out, Sam finished what he started.
Had to. Because Dean's never gotten any Special Added Ingredients, and if Sam had passed out without finishing the exorcism, Dean would have been…
But he's not. He's alive.
"We need to get out of here, man," Sam says.
He doesn't want to get out of here. He wants to lie down on the now pretty much destroyed hardwood floor and sleep for a week. Until his hip and his head stop screaming at him, at least. But sleeping's not gonna happen.
"Dean," he pleads.
Dean mutters something that sounds like "fucker," but whether he means Sam, or the demon, or some indeterminate third party isn't clear.
Sam doesn't have a whole lot of options. He sets the pain aside, puts it on the table like a package and turns his back on it, like Dad taught him to (or maybe it was Bruce Wayne, in some comic book he cadged from Dean fifteen years ago), and hauls his brother out of what used to be someone's home and is now empty in every way you want to name.
After he finishes bundling Dean into the passenger seat of the Impala, he sinks to his knees and vomits on the pavement alongside the car.
* * * * *
In a perfect world, both of them would be in the hospital.
There's a midnight-purple bruise on Sam's hip that's so above and beyond anything he's ever gotten before that he fleetingly considers taking a picture of it. His vision doesn't quite focus; it's at ninety percent, maybe, and that missing ten percent is a problem, not only because he can't see, but because the fuzziness that overlays everything he looks at makes him woozy.
Plus, it's that much tougher to decide how badly Dean is hurt.
Dean's conscious, mostly; enough to keep pushing Sam's hands away and to keep trying to shrink into a ball, knees pulled up to protect his middle. He's got internal injuries, Sam's pretty sure, but how bad they are, he's got no way to determine.
He could call Bobby, he thinks, but it would take Bobby two days to get here, even if he drove straight through.
Ellen's closer, but she's in the middle of a mess of her own.
He checked Dean over before he dragged him out of that house: made sure (at least, as sure as he could be) Dean could move his fingers and his feet, that he knew who Sam was, that there wasn't anything leaking out his ears. Once they were safely back inside the motel (and moving London Bridge to Arizona must have been simpler) he took a closer look through the haze of his unfocused vision. Dean's covered with bruises, covered with them, like a full-body tattoo. He's scraped and scratched and cut, all of it from the inside out, like the wound on his ribs.
It's like what Azazel did to him, in the cabin, before Dad died.
Two years ago? It seems like forever.
Dean doesn't protest - much - being poked and prodded. He drinks a little water at Sam's request, then huddles back down into the bed like he wants it to swallow him. He doesn't seem likely to die in the next few hours. Neither does Sam. But still, in a perfect world, they'd be getting some proper medical care.
They wouldn't need to keep doing this. Being each other's field medic, taking their best guess at things and hoping they're right.
Just to quiet the screaming in his head and his hip, Sam gulps down a couple of ibuprofen. He lies down on top of the covers on the other bed because he can't find the wherewithal to undress and pull down the blankets.
Five minutes later he's asleep.
* * * * *
When he wakes up, Dean's looking at him. They look like a matched set of cheap pictures you'd buy in Wal-Mart, one for each side of the fireplace. Eyes at half-mast, forehead scrunched, skin pale and mottled.
"You okay?" Sam grinds out.
"Nuh," Dean mumbles, and that might be yes or no, or both, or neither.
Sam lies there in silence for a while, looking at his brother, until the need to find the toilet outweighs everything else. He struggles off the bed, shambles into the bathroom, stares blearily at the shower while he uses the toilet.
The hot water would feel good, he thinks.
But it might hurt.
In the end, the shower wins.
He comes out of the bathroom a while later, wrapped in towels, to find Dean clutching a pillow to his chest as if it's a teddy bear. Dean's trembling like he's cold, so Sam takes the bedspread off his own bed and lays it out on top of Dean's covers. That drops the shaking down a couple of notches but Dean doesn't loosen up on the pillow.
Hospital, Sam thinks.
It's a little easier to dress than it was to undress. His muscles have loosened up a little, and the ibuprofen tamped the pain in his hip way down. His vision's still not a hundred percent, but he can read now, he figures.
Not that he plans to do much reading.
He sits down on the edge of his bed, hands clasped between his knees, and looks at his brother. Dean's eyes are closed. He might be awake, or he might not. The thought of hauling him back out to the Impala, to go to a doctor, to go anywhere, makes Sam's empty stomach hitch. He sits there for a minute, then leans toward the other bed and rests a hand against Dean's face, feeling for fever. Dean flinches at the touch, so maybe he's awake.
"Hospital?" Sam says.
"Nuh," Dean mutters.
"You sure?"
"Lea' me 'lone, Sam."
"You gonna live through this?" Sam asks, aware of how assy it sounds.
Dean cracks an eye and tells Sam to go fuck himself, then buries his face in his teddy bear pillow.
At least Sam got a reaction.
* * * * *
They've been back at the motel almost 36 hours when Dean finally agrees to eat something. He's downed a couple of cups of water at Sam's insistence, and he's made the journey to the bathroom under his own power a few times. He hasn't got enough steam in him to shower, though he seems to be aware that he's getting pretty rank.
"I can -" Sam says once.
The look he gets from Dean puts him off volunteering again.
Finally, in the middle of the movie Sam turned on just to have some noise in the room, Dean lifts his head a little and peers at what Sam's eating: a bowl of fruit cocktail. Sam went across to the coffee shop a while ago and got himself some lunch, ate half of it, shoved the rest aside. Fruit cocktail, for some reason, came with the day's lunch special.
Dean can't possibly see what it is, not from that angle, and he can't be smelling it.
"You want this?" Sam asks him.
Dean doesn't say no, so Sam takes that as a yes. He sets the bowl down on the night table, helps Dean maneuver around to a sit - the little bit that Dean will him help - then holds the bowl out to his brother. If Dean felt like himself at all, he'd be making some crack about Sam getting the bowl full of spit or eating all the cherries or whatever, but he doesn't say anything at all. He holds the bowl close under his chin and a little bit at a time spoons the fruit into his mouth.
There's half a sandwich left, and some cole slaw. Sam shows it to Dean and gets a grimace in return.
"What do you want?" Sam asks. "I'll get you whatever you want."
Dean shakes his head.
"Come on, man. Some toast? Soup?"
Another no.
Sam leaves Dean sitting there holding the empty bowl and goes back to the coffee shop. He returns a few minutes later with chicken noodle soup and crackers, and some milk in a Styrofoam cup. He sits on the bed next to Dean and urges him to eat like Dean's five years old. What he gets back isn't stubbornness, isn't Dean telling him to go fuck himself. It's…
He's not sure what it is.
"Talk to me, man," he says, with milk from the cup he's not holding straight up dribbling down onto his hand.
Dean looks down at his bare arms, at the bruises that have started to go a little yellow around the edges, and shakes his head.
"Dean," Sam says.
Dean's gaze falls, as if he's praying to his knees.
"Can't do this any more, Sammy," he mutters.
"What?"
"'M sorry."
That's barely loud enough to hear, barely more than a whisper. Dean's gaze slides around like he's taking inventory of the room, of the blue and green wallpaper, the battered dresser, the TV that only gets six channels. Maybe he took a tour of something inside himself as well, because he turns back to Sam wearing a grief as terrible as when he was trying to say goodbye to Dad and says, "I can't do it. I can't -"
"You mean the job?"
"Can't -"
Pressing away the food, Dean crawls out of bed and takes refuge in the bathroom, shoving the door shut behind him.
* * * * *
Nothing's changed at the end of the week. Sam pays for the room through the weekend, hoping Gene Osborne's credit card won't suddenly decide to turn to dust, leaving him with sixty bucks in his wallet and no way to get more unless his pool skills suddenly, radically improve.
All Dean wants to do is watch TV. He sits propped up on the bed with half a dozen pillows behind him, mindlessly thumbing the remote, surfing up and down the six channels. He'll eat a little, three times a day, and he did shower. He'll change clothes if Sam lays out different ones for him.
The bruises that blanket Dean's body make Sam cringe every time he gets a glimpse of them. Whether anything inside of Dean still hurts, Sam isn't sure; Dean does walk around a little gingerly, and still curls up at night like he's protecting his belly, but he doesn't say anything, doesn't complain, doesn't look for the ibuprofen.
He just seems…wrecked.
He didn't go to Hell a few months ago, but what he's stuck with isn't all that great, either. Henriksen took them off the FBI's radar, but that doesn't mean they can go where they please, do what they want. Everywhere they go, they look over their shoulders. They've gotten more careful about the credit cards, about letting anyone get too close.
Neither one of them died, a few months ago. But that doesn't mean they have much of a life.
"We could go to Bobby's," Sam suggests.
"Thought he wasn't there," Dean says without looking at him.
"He's not. But he won't care if we stay at the house."
Dean half-shrugs, wobbles his head.
It's pretty much a no.
* * * * *
Sam wakes up in the middle of the night, Saturday going into Sunday. For a moment he's not sure what woke him.
Then he hears Dean choke out a sob.
"Can't," Dean mutters, and he sounds like a little kid, one whose heart's been broken all to pieces. "Please. Can't, any more."
No dreamroot necessary; Sam knows who Dean's talking to in his sleep.
"Hurts." It's a prayer, an entreaty. A plea for clemency.
He should have taken Dean to the hospital. Maybe it's too late for that now; the bruises are healing, inch by inch, but what's left inside is worse than anything Azazel ever did. His brother is like Wyle E. Coyote, Sam thinks: he's been shot half a dozen times, thrown into walls, burned and cut and torn, and he keeps getting up and throwing himself back into the arena, as if he's too stupid to figure out that maybe that's not the best choice in the world.
They're saving people, he says. Sometimes there's anger in his voice.
Sometimes he sits with a beer close at hand, or something stronger, and he says, "We're saving people, Sam," like it's himself he's trying to convince and not Sam.
They didn't save anybody at that house. They got there much too late for that. There won't be any more deaths, because the demon's gone, and so are his lackeys, but everyone who died before the Winchesters got there lives on as a black mark on the tally sheet Dean keeps inside his head. Somewhere in Dean's mind they're all saying, "Why didn't you come sooner? Why didn't you know? Why did you let me go?"
They can't save everyone.
Sometimes, they can't save anyone at all.
It's a lopsided balance sheet: the saved versus the lost. Too many lost. Sam knows his brother; he doesn't need to be told that to Dean's mind, one lost is one too many.
Sam doesn't go back to sleep.
As Saturday passes into Sunday, he sits in bed, watching his brother shift restlessly, talking to someone who's been dead for two and a half years.
One lost, he thinks, is one too many.
* * * * *
Dean doesn't protest leaving the motel, which is what Sam hoped for. He seems to have lost the fire necessary to protest anything with more than a mild frown, so when Sam says the credit card's no good any more and they need to move on, Dean just shrugs and listlessly pushes his belongings into his duffel.
He's mildly surprised when he gets to the car and finds that Sam has filled the back seat with pillows and blankets.
"Whassat?" he asks, but without much interest.
"Figured you'd be more comfortable," Sam says.
He waits for Dean to say what the hell, did Sam think he was gonna take over the driving? But he doesn't. He shrugs.
He falls asleep in the back of the car before they've gone ten miles, which is what Sam hoped for, because he doctored Dean's coffee with Ambien. Dean needs some honest sleep, sleep without dreams, and beyond that, Sam doesn't want him to know where they're going.
The driving makes his hip hurt like a bastard, but that's a small price to pay for what he's buying.
It's the middle of the night when they get there. The darkness doesn't matter too much; Sam searched maps and aerial photos for hours while Dean was staring at the TV, and knows exactly where he's going. He has to go slow, make sure he's not taking any wrong turns. He's wary of hitting anything that might run out in front of the car, because the body count this week is already too damn high. To his relief, he gets where he's going without incident. The place he was aiming for is right where he thought it would be.
And Dean's still asleep.
He really would like to wrestle Dean back out of the car, settle him in to a sleeping bag under the stars, but he's afraid of the Ambien wearing off and Dean thinking the bathroom's somewhere nearby. There's only one thing nearby, and Dean stumbling into that wouldn't be good. So Sam gets out of the car by himself, finds a spot close by where he can sit with his back propped against a rock, his knees drawn up, and listen to the night.
He waits until the sky has grown pale, until the night has begun to retreat. He tries not to look, because he wants Dean to have first dibs, but it's there in the corner of his eye and it takes his breath away.
He pulls open the back door of the Impala and leans in.
"Dean," he says.
Dean stirs a little and mutters, "Nuh."
"Need to wake up, man." That gets a little more of a reaction, but not enough. "Dude," Sam says firmly.
Dean cracks an eye and says, complaining, "Sam."
"Seriously, man. This one time. Get it together."
"Where're we?"
Sam reaches into the car and curls his hand around his brother's arm. "Come on."
Dean shudders once, like he's on his way to be punished (by Dad? The principal? The cops?), but he acquiesces. Squirms out of his nest of pillows and blankets and crawls out of the car, eyes puffy, face Technicolor with healing bruises. He seems to acknowledge that he's outside, but beyond that, he doesn't have a clue.
Then he looks past Sam and blinks.
Blinks again.
"The fuck?" he says, and it's hilarious in its innocent bewilderment.
He looks past Sam at dawn rising over the Grand Canyon and his chin wobbles.
"Not bad, huh?" Sam asks.
It looks fake, Sam thinks. It's so enormous that it looks like a painted backdrop for a movie, like something done up on a huge stretch of canvas to fool the camera, fool the eye. But it's real: a pastel haze stretching off into the distance in three directions. Behind them, there's a dirt road, a bluff, a lot of scrub and pine trees. It was a bitch of a job finding a spot where he could drive the car right up to the rim, and he doesn't think they can stick around too long, because somebody's going to notice. That's how things go, for him and Dean. The good stuff never lasts.
Dean takes a couple of steps away from the car and sits down on the dirt like his legs have decided they're done working for the day.
After a minute, Sam sits down beside him. "Should have listened to you," he says softly. "When you said this was what you wanted to do." He pauses, but Dean doesn't say anything. "I'm sorry, man," Sam murmurs. "I should have listened."
Dean's shoulders twitch.
"We can stop," Sam says. "If that's what you want. If that's what you need. We'll stop."
"Can't -"
"Yeah," Sam says.
They sit there in silence. Maybe it's just a few minutes; maybe it's an hour. Time doesn't seem to mean much out here. The sun climbs higher, though, washing the canyon with light. There's a little bit of a breeze blowing.
The air out here is like a drug, Sam thinks.
He reaches over and rests a hand on Dean's back. For a moment, no more; all he's saying is, "I'm here."
Dean glances at him, then looks away.
"You know how you always said Dad was a superhero?" Sam says after a while, his voice low, soft enough to be part of what's around them. Dean doesn't acknowledge the question, but he heard it. He's waiting for the rest. Instead of continuing, Sam picks up a pinecone and examines it, turning it over and over in his hands, then sets it back down. They can sit here, he thinks, as long as they don't disturb anything.
As long as they're part of all this, by some grace of God.
"That's kind of what I always figured you are," Sam says.
Dean goes on looking at the canyon. But he heard. He closes his eyes for a moment and breathes, his palms lying flat against the dirt on either side of him. He seems awake now, in a way he wasn't back at the motel. In a way he hasn't been since they went into that house. Maybe, Sam thinks, Dean suspected they wouldn't come back out of there. Maybe he thought the demon was too much to take on, the two of them, all alone - but there was no way he could refuse the job. No way he could back off.
He had to let the son of a bitch break him, because for him there was no other choice.
"Tell me where you want to go," Sam says to his brother.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dean doesn't protest - much - being poked and prodded. He drinks a little water at Sam's request, then huddles back down into the bed like he wants it to swallow him. He doesn't seem likely to die in the next few hours. Neither does Sam. But still, in a perfect world, they'd be getting some proper medical care.
Characters: Dean and Sam
Pairings: none
Spoilers: none
Rating: PG, for language
Length: 3987 words
Disclaimer: No money. You know the drill.
BREAKING POINT
By Carol Davis
When the smoke clears, the first thing Sam sees is his brother, sprawled on the floor like he fell there from a hundred feet up.
There's blood on the shirt Dean bought two days ago.
He said it was about time he had something new. New as in brand-new, not Goodwill.
Sam tries to sit up, but the hammering that sets off in his head forces him to reconsider. He lies still for a moment, letting himself breathe, asking the room to stop spinning, please, so he can go to Dean, make sure Dean's just stunned and not something worse.
"Dean?" Sam ventures, and coughs.
The demon on its own would have been bad enough. But a demon with a couple of poltergeists as…what, pets? Lackeys? Disciples? That was a disaster counting down toward launch. Sam and Dean both knew that, coming in here. In a perfect world they would've been able to call in reinforcements - but as things are, they've never really had the luxury of reinforcements. There's Bobby, sometimes, but he's in Nashville. Ellen's in Texas, Sam thinks. Jo? She was in Texas, too, a couple of weeks ago. She's probably been three other places since then.
So that's how it was: him and Dean or nothing. And nothing wasn't an option, because way too many people had already died.
"That son of a bitch's number is up," Dean said on the way here.
He's not saying anything, now.
On his hands and knees, gritting his teeth against the pain in his head, Sam crosses the bare wood floor to his brother. His left hip feels like somebody hit it with a mallet, and every bit of ground he gains costs him a nasty lurch of his stomach.
"Dean," he says again, more sharply.
Dean's breathing. He looks like he's breathing.
What seems like an hour later, Sam reaches his brother and shifts himself around to a sit, keeping as much weight off his left hip as he can. Dean doesn't respond when Sam tugs up the new shirt and looks underneath. There's a wound, a gash that opened from the inside instead of the outside, but it's not worrisome.
Of course, that doesn't mean there's nothing worse inside, where Sam can't see.
He's checking Dean's pulse with two fingers pressed to his throat when Dean finally stirs. Lets out a long, shuddering moan that makes Sam grimace and draw his hand away. Sam waits for a second, repeating Dean's name, and finally Dean's eyes flutter open.
"Dude," Sam rasps. "You okay?"
Dean tries to say something that's lost in a fit of coughing and choking. Sam has to help him roll onto his side, which seems to make it easier for Dean to breathe, but also makes him start to curl up into a ball.
"It's gone," Sam says.
Dean doesn't look like he believes that. His face contorts into something that looks like denial.
"We did it," Sam insists. "It's gone."
Dean grunts something that sounds like, "All?"
"The poltergeists too."
What Azazel gave him, and what happened a few months ago, when Dean's deal came due - maybe you could say that resulted in a New And Improved Sam, but Sam doesn't feel either new or improved. Right now he feels pretty much beat to shit. The demon and his lackeys drew him and Dean in here figuring they were going to have a serious, Pay Per View-worthy Winchester smackdown, and that pretty much happened - but Sam held onto things long enough to jabber out the Latin he'd imprinted on his brain well enough to be able to chant it in his sleep. The demon shrieked a bunch of nonsense back at him, trying to break his rhythm, but New And Improved or old and worn right the hell out, Sam finished what he started.
Had to. Because Dean's never gotten any Special Added Ingredients, and if Sam had passed out without finishing the exorcism, Dean would have been…
But he's not. He's alive.
"We need to get out of here, man," Sam says.
He doesn't want to get out of here. He wants to lie down on the now pretty much destroyed hardwood floor and sleep for a week. Until his hip and his head stop screaming at him, at least. But sleeping's not gonna happen.
"Dean," he pleads.
Dean mutters something that sounds like "fucker," but whether he means Sam, or the demon, or some indeterminate third party isn't clear.
Sam doesn't have a whole lot of options. He sets the pain aside, puts it on the table like a package and turns his back on it, like Dad taught him to (or maybe it was Bruce Wayne, in some comic book he cadged from Dean fifteen years ago), and hauls his brother out of what used to be someone's home and is now empty in every way you want to name.
After he finishes bundling Dean into the passenger seat of the Impala, he sinks to his knees and vomits on the pavement alongside the car.
* * * * *
In a perfect world, both of them would be in the hospital.
There's a midnight-purple bruise on Sam's hip that's so above and beyond anything he's ever gotten before that he fleetingly considers taking a picture of it. His vision doesn't quite focus; it's at ninety percent, maybe, and that missing ten percent is a problem, not only because he can't see, but because the fuzziness that overlays everything he looks at makes him woozy.
Plus, it's that much tougher to decide how badly Dean is hurt.
Dean's conscious, mostly; enough to keep pushing Sam's hands away and to keep trying to shrink into a ball, knees pulled up to protect his middle. He's got internal injuries, Sam's pretty sure, but how bad they are, he's got no way to determine.
He could call Bobby, he thinks, but it would take Bobby two days to get here, even if he drove straight through.
Ellen's closer, but she's in the middle of a mess of her own.
He checked Dean over before he dragged him out of that house: made sure (at least, as sure as he could be) Dean could move his fingers and his feet, that he knew who Sam was, that there wasn't anything leaking out his ears. Once they were safely back inside the motel (and moving London Bridge to Arizona must have been simpler) he took a closer look through the haze of his unfocused vision. Dean's covered with bruises, covered with them, like a full-body tattoo. He's scraped and scratched and cut, all of it from the inside out, like the wound on his ribs.
It's like what Azazel did to him, in the cabin, before Dad died.
Two years ago? It seems like forever.
Dean doesn't protest - much - being poked and prodded. He drinks a little water at Sam's request, then huddles back down into the bed like he wants it to swallow him. He doesn't seem likely to die in the next few hours. Neither does Sam. But still, in a perfect world, they'd be getting some proper medical care.
They wouldn't need to keep doing this. Being each other's field medic, taking their best guess at things and hoping they're right.
Just to quiet the screaming in his head and his hip, Sam gulps down a couple of ibuprofen. He lies down on top of the covers on the other bed because he can't find the wherewithal to undress and pull down the blankets.
Five minutes later he's asleep.
* * * * *
When he wakes up, Dean's looking at him. They look like a matched set of cheap pictures you'd buy in Wal-Mart, one for each side of the fireplace. Eyes at half-mast, forehead scrunched, skin pale and mottled.
"You okay?" Sam grinds out.
"Nuh," Dean mumbles, and that might be yes or no, or both, or neither.
Sam lies there in silence for a while, looking at his brother, until the need to find the toilet outweighs everything else. He struggles off the bed, shambles into the bathroom, stares blearily at the shower while he uses the toilet.
The hot water would feel good, he thinks.
But it might hurt.
In the end, the shower wins.
He comes out of the bathroom a while later, wrapped in towels, to find Dean clutching a pillow to his chest as if it's a teddy bear. Dean's trembling like he's cold, so Sam takes the bedspread off his own bed and lays it out on top of Dean's covers. That drops the shaking down a couple of notches but Dean doesn't loosen up on the pillow.
Hospital, Sam thinks.
It's a little easier to dress than it was to undress. His muscles have loosened up a little, and the ibuprofen tamped the pain in his hip way down. His vision's still not a hundred percent, but he can read now, he figures.
Not that he plans to do much reading.
He sits down on the edge of his bed, hands clasped between his knees, and looks at his brother. Dean's eyes are closed. He might be awake, or he might not. The thought of hauling him back out to the Impala, to go to a doctor, to go anywhere, makes Sam's empty stomach hitch. He sits there for a minute, then leans toward the other bed and rests a hand against Dean's face, feeling for fever. Dean flinches at the touch, so maybe he's awake.
"Hospital?" Sam says.
"Nuh," Dean mutters.
"You sure?"
"Lea' me 'lone, Sam."
"You gonna live through this?" Sam asks, aware of how assy it sounds.
Dean cracks an eye and tells Sam to go fuck himself, then buries his face in his teddy bear pillow.
At least Sam got a reaction.
* * * * *
They've been back at the motel almost 36 hours when Dean finally agrees to eat something. He's downed a couple of cups of water at Sam's insistence, and he's made the journey to the bathroom under his own power a few times. He hasn't got enough steam in him to shower, though he seems to be aware that he's getting pretty rank.
"I can -" Sam says once.
The look he gets from Dean puts him off volunteering again.
Finally, in the middle of the movie Sam turned on just to have some noise in the room, Dean lifts his head a little and peers at what Sam's eating: a bowl of fruit cocktail. Sam went across to the coffee shop a while ago and got himself some lunch, ate half of it, shoved the rest aside. Fruit cocktail, for some reason, came with the day's lunch special.
Dean can't possibly see what it is, not from that angle, and he can't be smelling it.
"You want this?" Sam asks him.
Dean doesn't say no, so Sam takes that as a yes. He sets the bowl down on the night table, helps Dean maneuver around to a sit - the little bit that Dean will him help - then holds the bowl out to his brother. If Dean felt like himself at all, he'd be making some crack about Sam getting the bowl full of spit or eating all the cherries or whatever, but he doesn't say anything at all. He holds the bowl close under his chin and a little bit at a time spoons the fruit into his mouth.
There's half a sandwich left, and some cole slaw. Sam shows it to Dean and gets a grimace in return.
"What do you want?" Sam asks. "I'll get you whatever you want."
Dean shakes his head.
"Come on, man. Some toast? Soup?"
Another no.
Sam leaves Dean sitting there holding the empty bowl and goes back to the coffee shop. He returns a few minutes later with chicken noodle soup and crackers, and some milk in a Styrofoam cup. He sits on the bed next to Dean and urges him to eat like Dean's five years old. What he gets back isn't stubbornness, isn't Dean telling him to go fuck himself. It's…
He's not sure what it is.
"Talk to me, man," he says, with milk from the cup he's not holding straight up dribbling down onto his hand.
Dean looks down at his bare arms, at the bruises that have started to go a little yellow around the edges, and shakes his head.
"Dean," Sam says.
Dean's gaze falls, as if he's praying to his knees.
"Can't do this any more, Sammy," he mutters.
"What?"
"'M sorry."
That's barely loud enough to hear, barely more than a whisper. Dean's gaze slides around like he's taking inventory of the room, of the blue and green wallpaper, the battered dresser, the TV that only gets six channels. Maybe he took a tour of something inside himself as well, because he turns back to Sam wearing a grief as terrible as when he was trying to say goodbye to Dad and says, "I can't do it. I can't -"
"You mean the job?"
"Can't -"
Pressing away the food, Dean crawls out of bed and takes refuge in the bathroom, shoving the door shut behind him.
* * * * *
Nothing's changed at the end of the week. Sam pays for the room through the weekend, hoping Gene Osborne's credit card won't suddenly decide to turn to dust, leaving him with sixty bucks in his wallet and no way to get more unless his pool skills suddenly, radically improve.
All Dean wants to do is watch TV. He sits propped up on the bed with half a dozen pillows behind him, mindlessly thumbing the remote, surfing up and down the six channels. He'll eat a little, three times a day, and he did shower. He'll change clothes if Sam lays out different ones for him.
The bruises that blanket Dean's body make Sam cringe every time he gets a glimpse of them. Whether anything inside of Dean still hurts, Sam isn't sure; Dean does walk around a little gingerly, and still curls up at night like he's protecting his belly, but he doesn't say anything, doesn't complain, doesn't look for the ibuprofen.
He just seems…wrecked.
He didn't go to Hell a few months ago, but what he's stuck with isn't all that great, either. Henriksen took them off the FBI's radar, but that doesn't mean they can go where they please, do what they want. Everywhere they go, they look over their shoulders. They've gotten more careful about the credit cards, about letting anyone get too close.
Neither one of them died, a few months ago. But that doesn't mean they have much of a life.
"We could go to Bobby's," Sam suggests.
"Thought he wasn't there," Dean says without looking at him.
"He's not. But he won't care if we stay at the house."
Dean half-shrugs, wobbles his head.
It's pretty much a no.
* * * * *
Sam wakes up in the middle of the night, Saturday going into Sunday. For a moment he's not sure what woke him.
Then he hears Dean choke out a sob.
"Can't," Dean mutters, and he sounds like a little kid, one whose heart's been broken all to pieces. "Please. Can't, any more."
No dreamroot necessary; Sam knows who Dean's talking to in his sleep.
"Hurts." It's a prayer, an entreaty. A plea for clemency.
He should have taken Dean to the hospital. Maybe it's too late for that now; the bruises are healing, inch by inch, but what's left inside is worse than anything Azazel ever did. His brother is like Wyle E. Coyote, Sam thinks: he's been shot half a dozen times, thrown into walls, burned and cut and torn, and he keeps getting up and throwing himself back into the arena, as if he's too stupid to figure out that maybe that's not the best choice in the world.
They're saving people, he says. Sometimes there's anger in his voice.
Sometimes he sits with a beer close at hand, or something stronger, and he says, "We're saving people, Sam," like it's himself he's trying to convince and not Sam.
They didn't save anybody at that house. They got there much too late for that. There won't be any more deaths, because the demon's gone, and so are his lackeys, but everyone who died before the Winchesters got there lives on as a black mark on the tally sheet Dean keeps inside his head. Somewhere in Dean's mind they're all saying, "Why didn't you come sooner? Why didn't you know? Why did you let me go?"
They can't save everyone.
Sometimes, they can't save anyone at all.
It's a lopsided balance sheet: the saved versus the lost. Too many lost. Sam knows his brother; he doesn't need to be told that to Dean's mind, one lost is one too many.
Sam doesn't go back to sleep.
As Saturday passes into Sunday, he sits in bed, watching his brother shift restlessly, talking to someone who's been dead for two and a half years.
One lost, he thinks, is one too many.
* * * * *
Dean doesn't protest leaving the motel, which is what Sam hoped for. He seems to have lost the fire necessary to protest anything with more than a mild frown, so when Sam says the credit card's no good any more and they need to move on, Dean just shrugs and listlessly pushes his belongings into his duffel.
He's mildly surprised when he gets to the car and finds that Sam has filled the back seat with pillows and blankets.
"Whassat?" he asks, but without much interest.
"Figured you'd be more comfortable," Sam says.
He waits for Dean to say what the hell, did Sam think he was gonna take over the driving? But he doesn't. He shrugs.
He falls asleep in the back of the car before they've gone ten miles, which is what Sam hoped for, because he doctored Dean's coffee with Ambien. Dean needs some honest sleep, sleep without dreams, and beyond that, Sam doesn't want him to know where they're going.
The driving makes his hip hurt like a bastard, but that's a small price to pay for what he's buying.
It's the middle of the night when they get there. The darkness doesn't matter too much; Sam searched maps and aerial photos for hours while Dean was staring at the TV, and knows exactly where he's going. He has to go slow, make sure he's not taking any wrong turns. He's wary of hitting anything that might run out in front of the car, because the body count this week is already too damn high. To his relief, he gets where he's going without incident. The place he was aiming for is right where he thought it would be.
And Dean's still asleep.
He really would like to wrestle Dean back out of the car, settle him in to a sleeping bag under the stars, but he's afraid of the Ambien wearing off and Dean thinking the bathroom's somewhere nearby. There's only one thing nearby, and Dean stumbling into that wouldn't be good. So Sam gets out of the car by himself, finds a spot close by where he can sit with his back propped against a rock, his knees drawn up, and listen to the night.
He waits until the sky has grown pale, until the night has begun to retreat. He tries not to look, because he wants Dean to have first dibs, but it's there in the corner of his eye and it takes his breath away.
He pulls open the back door of the Impala and leans in.
"Dean," he says.
Dean stirs a little and mutters, "Nuh."
"Need to wake up, man." That gets a little more of a reaction, but not enough. "Dude," Sam says firmly.
Dean cracks an eye and says, complaining, "Sam."
"Seriously, man. This one time. Get it together."
"Where're we?"
Sam reaches into the car and curls his hand around his brother's arm. "Come on."
Dean shudders once, like he's on his way to be punished (by Dad? The principal? The cops?), but he acquiesces. Squirms out of his nest of pillows and blankets and crawls out of the car, eyes puffy, face Technicolor with healing bruises. He seems to acknowledge that he's outside, but beyond that, he doesn't have a clue.
Then he looks past Sam and blinks.
Blinks again.
"The fuck?" he says, and it's hilarious in its innocent bewilderment.
He looks past Sam at dawn rising over the Grand Canyon and his chin wobbles.
"Not bad, huh?" Sam asks.
It looks fake, Sam thinks. It's so enormous that it looks like a painted backdrop for a movie, like something done up on a huge stretch of canvas to fool the camera, fool the eye. But it's real: a pastel haze stretching off into the distance in three directions. Behind them, there's a dirt road, a bluff, a lot of scrub and pine trees. It was a bitch of a job finding a spot where he could drive the car right up to the rim, and he doesn't think they can stick around too long, because somebody's going to notice. That's how things go, for him and Dean. The good stuff never lasts.
Dean takes a couple of steps away from the car and sits down on the dirt like his legs have decided they're done working for the day.
After a minute, Sam sits down beside him. "Should have listened to you," he says softly. "When you said this was what you wanted to do." He pauses, but Dean doesn't say anything. "I'm sorry, man," Sam murmurs. "I should have listened."
Dean's shoulders twitch.
"We can stop," Sam says. "If that's what you want. If that's what you need. We'll stop."
"Can't -"
"Yeah," Sam says.
They sit there in silence. Maybe it's just a few minutes; maybe it's an hour. Time doesn't seem to mean much out here. The sun climbs higher, though, washing the canyon with light. There's a little bit of a breeze blowing.
The air out here is like a drug, Sam thinks.
He reaches over and rests a hand on Dean's back. For a moment, no more; all he's saying is, "I'm here."
Dean glances at him, then looks away.
"You know how you always said Dad was a superhero?" Sam says after a while, his voice low, soft enough to be part of what's around them. Dean doesn't acknowledge the question, but he heard it. He's waiting for the rest. Instead of continuing, Sam picks up a pinecone and examines it, turning it over and over in his hands, then sets it back down. They can sit here, he thinks, as long as they don't disturb anything.
As long as they're part of all this, by some grace of God.
"That's kind of what I always figured you are," Sam says.
Dean goes on looking at the canyon. But he heard. He closes his eyes for a moment and breathes, his palms lying flat against the dirt on either side of him. He seems awake now, in a way he wasn't back at the motel. In a way he hasn't been since they went into that house. Maybe, Sam thinks, Dean suspected they wouldn't come back out of there. Maybe he thought the demon was too much to take on, the two of them, all alone - but there was no way he could refuse the job. No way he could back off.
He had to let the son of a bitch break him, because for him there was no other choice.
"Tell me where you want to go," Sam says to his brother.
~~~~~~~~~~~~