SPN FIC - With Reckless Abandon
Okay, then: a bunch of you said you wanted Season 1.
Remember that scene towards the end of Wendigo when Sam cuts Dean down and asks if Dean's okay? And Dean grunts, "Yeah. Yeah. Whereisit?" Voice, body language, everything: Jensen sells that he's in pain. It's one of my favorite moments in SPN, because of that display of his mad skillz.
So here you go. Season 1, post-Wendigo.
CHARACTERS: Dean and Sam
GENRE: Gen; H/C
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: Has anybody not seen Wendigo?
LENGTH: 1863 words
WITH RECKLESS ABANDON
By Carol Davis
It's happened before. In fact, hearing Dean make noise like that in the middle of the night was Sam's first step toward The Talk.
That talk.
The one about the birds and the bees.
Of course, with Dean doing the talking, it had more to do with chicks and engines and (for a reason Sam never figured out) seaweed, but either way, Sam went through the second half of his growing-up years knowing exactly what those noises meant. Most of the time he heard them through the bathroom door, but most of the motel rooms and cheap apartments they lived in had hollow-core plywood doors. If anything, they amplified sound rather than muffling it. So they're familiar, those noises.
Still, he hasn't heard them in a long time, and his first thought as he shifts into wakefulness is Jeez, Dean. Could you be a little more discrete?
He moves around a little, changes position under the covers, thinking that if Dean realizes he's awake, he'll stop what he's doing, or at least relocate - and it works, because Dean crawls out of bed and shuffles into the bathroom. A moment after the door thumps shut the water kicks on in the shower.
It makes sense. She's pretty, "that Haley girl." And she and Dean had a little bit of a moment together, back at the ranger station. Finding Dad is still #1 on Sam's agenda, but he wouldn't have complained (much) if Dean had asked to stick around for a couple of days.
Haley and Dean would be a good fit, Sam thinks as he tries to slide back toward sleep.
He wakes again and something tells him some time has passed, even though he didn't look at the clock the first time and can't make any comparisons that way. The water in the shower's still running, and that seems…wrong, somehow. It wouldn't take more than a couple of minutes - if that long - for Dean to finish what he was doing. Frowning, Sam rolls onto his back and listens.
Hears a grunt from inside the bathroom. Oh, come ON, man, he thinks.
This time he does watch the clock. Two minutes, then three. Then five. Then that noise comes again - but there's something off about it, something that twigs the instincts that Dad and Dean drilled into him, the ones Sam could never lose, not even after three years of relative peace and quiet at Stanford. He and Dean laid the salt lines at the door and window leading outside, and there's no window in the bathroom, so unless something came in through the exhaust vent, Dean's by himself in there. Still, something's wrong.
He reaches the bathroom door in a couple of steps and eases it open a couple of inches. "Dean? You okay in there?"
A couple of seconds tick by, a long enough stretch of time for Sam to feel the kick of adrenaline pushing him towards doing whatever needs to be done. He's about to shove the door fully open when Dean says, "Yeah."
But it's in the same tone he used back in the wendigo's lair, right after Sam cut him down, when he was huddled on the floor sucking in breath in little hitchy gulps. Pain, Sam thinks. Sonofabitch. When he pushes the door open he finds Dean standing in the shower, in full view because he hasn't drawn the shower curtain, water pounding down onto his shoulders and back, his face contorted into a grimace that looks like it's been there a while.
"What's the matter?" Sam asks.
"Nothin'."
"It's three-thirty in the morning."
"Couldn't sleep. Too wound up."
Dean shivers then, and looks so completely miserable that for a moment Sam considers bagging this whole thing, calling a cab and making his way back to Stanford. It's the same old shit, he thinks. Dad's not here, not telling Dean what to do, but Dean's in the shower in the middle of the night, standing under a stream of water that's getting progressively colder, judging by the look on his face. He's suffering through something because he thinks he has to. Because this is how Winchesters do things.
Shaking his head, Sam grabs a bunch of towels off the rack - they're thin, but there's a lot of them - and holds them out to his brother.
"I'm all right," Dean protests.
"The hell you are. Look at yourself."
For a second, Dean seems to be winding up to argue, to bully Sam into going back to bed while he stands there trembling and naked under a sputtery stream of cold water. But before that happens, he turns away and stares at the wall underneath the shower head.
"You got hurt," Sam says. "Get out of there, before you turn into a popsicle."
He'll drag Dean out of the tub if he has to. But he doesn't have to. Dean slumps a little, and sighs, looking at the drain through half-lidded eyes. He gropes for the towels, and the movement's too fast; he grunts again and fumbles the towels onto the floor. Luckily, they fall outside the tub rather than in it.
Time was, Dean would help Sam - Sammy - dry off after a bath. Sam remembers that, remembers it with startling clarity even though the last time was probably seventeen or eighteen years ago. He was small then, and motel bath towels were big enough to wrap around him. These towels, although there's a lot of them, aren't big enough to wrap Dean up in, so Sam yanks the blanket off Dean's bed. He's about to fling it around his brother like a mustard-gold cloak when Dean flinches and tells him, "Shoulders."
"What?"
"Shoulders. Hurt like a mother."
"Both of them?"
"Yeah." That's a whisper, accompanied by a fleeting, and humorless, grin.
Sam has to grope for those memories, to figure out whether Dean's got a history of screwing up both shoulders or just one. He remembers one incident pretty clearly, the others not so much, but if it's true that he's injured both of them, maybe damaged the ligaments so they've never healed properly, being strung up like he was could've wrenched things pretty badly. Slowly, carefully, Sam drapes the blanket around Dean's body and releases it only when Dean gingerly grips it in front of him to hold it closed. He's moving like an old man as he makes his way to the bed and sits down, displaying with an uh-uh-uh of little breaths that even the small tug on the blanket when he sits causes him a nightmare of pain.
"Are they out?" Sam asks. "One of them? Both of them?"
"Don't know. Don't think so."
"Why didn't you say something to the paramedic?"
"Didn't hurt then."
Like hell it didn't, Sam thinks, but maybe Dean's telling the truth; his pain threshold is pretty high, and the adrenaline rush from stalking the wendigo would have helped distract him. "You got anything?" he asks, reaching for the duffel Dean abandoned on the floor near the TV stand. "Percocet? Anything?"
"No."
"You don't have any pain meds?"
"Advil."
"Jesus, man."
Dean doesn't say anything while Sam's rooting in the duffel for the bottle of ibuprofen. He's still shivering, though, probably getting shocky, if the pain's that bad. But it's three-thirty in the morning in a tiny town that - as near as Sam can remember - doesn't even have a drugstore, and certainly doesn't have a pharmacist on duty at this hour to whom Sam could hand a forged prescription. To get his hands on anything stronger than the Advil, he'd have to break in somewhere.
They might have gotten a pill or two out of the paramedics, enough to see them through till morning, if Dean had just said something.
No wonder Dean was so willing to let him drive.
"You're crazy, you know that?" Sam says as he dumps pills into his palm. "You're not invincible."
Dad would be telling him to suck it up, he thinks angrily. Telling him we'll take care of it in the morning, that it's nothing he can't tough his way through.
But Dad's not here.
There's nobody here but the two of them.
"Maybe it's just inflammation," he suggests. "Bursitis? Like tennis elbow? That'd hurt like a bitch, too. If we kick that down -"
This is what he hates worst of all. The expression Dean let slip through, when Sam was half-turned away, digging through the duffel. That look of beaten-down resignation. They got the wendigo, yeah, and "that Haley girl" got her brother back - but three people died. Tommy's gonna have nightmares for a long time. Haley and her kid brother, too, maybe. And tomorrow there's gonna be something else. Other people in trouble. More death, more pain. It just never ends.
Could go back, Sam thinks. Take the semester off. Get settled somewhere. Find a home. Have a life.
This time, take Dean with him.
Because this is what he hates worst of all: seeing his brother white with pain that he won't even admit to feeling. Seeing his brother dole out assignments: You take care of the civvies, and I'll go throw myself in front of that murdering fucker. Go scream at it to come get me.
Dean's been pulling that shit for years.
And nobody's ever protested.
Nobody.
Sam helps his brother lie down, tucking the blanket in around him as if Dean's a little kid, as if their positions have been suddenly reversed. As if time has wound itself backwards and, again, they have nothing to worry about but each other - but this time, it's Dean who needs some looking after.
"Get some sleep," Sam says quietly. "Let the pills kick in. If you need something stronger in the morning, I'll get it for you."
Dean looks at him for a long stretch of time, fierce and steady, as if he thinks Sam will disappear if he blinks or looks away. "Thanks," he says softly.
"Get some sleep."
Sam moves around quickly, shuts off the water in the shower (yes, it's ice-cold now), tosses the towels out of the way so Dean won't trip on them if he revisits the bathroom, switches off the bathroom light, then crawls back into bed. The room's dark except for the spill of light from the parking lot, but that's enough to allow him to see Dean's face, watch it gradually relax.
"Gon' fin' Dad," Dean mutters.
You should have said something, Sam thinks with something that tries to be anger but isn't. Knowing Dean's close to sleep, he offers, "You did good."
There's a small huff of amusement from the other bed. "'M awesome."
"Yeah," Sam says.
"Kicked that sumbitch's ass."
"You and me."
"Yeah," Dean agrees.
Maybe it wasn't the pills he needed so much as this other thing: the acknowledgment that what he did didn't go unnoticed. Haley thanked him, yes, but maybe it wasn't Haley's opinion that mattered. When they find Dad, Sam's got some questions to ask.
And some apologies to demand, because Dean would never demand them for himself.
"Dean?" Sam murmurs.
He doesn't get an answer. Just the quiet huff of Dean's breathing.
* * * * *
Remember that scene towards the end of Wendigo when Sam cuts Dean down and asks if Dean's okay? And Dean grunts, "Yeah. Yeah. Whereisit?" Voice, body language, everything: Jensen sells that he's in pain. It's one of my favorite moments in SPN, because of that display of his mad skillz.
So here you go. Season 1, post-Wendigo.
CHARACTERS: Dean and Sam
GENRE: Gen; H/C
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: Has anybody not seen Wendigo?
LENGTH: 1863 words
WITH RECKLESS ABANDON
By Carol Davis
It's happened before. In fact, hearing Dean make noise like that in the middle of the night was Sam's first step toward The Talk.
That talk.
The one about the birds and the bees.
Of course, with Dean doing the talking, it had more to do with chicks and engines and (for a reason Sam never figured out) seaweed, but either way, Sam went through the second half of his growing-up years knowing exactly what those noises meant. Most of the time he heard them through the bathroom door, but most of the motel rooms and cheap apartments they lived in had hollow-core plywood doors. If anything, they amplified sound rather than muffling it. So they're familiar, those noises.
Still, he hasn't heard them in a long time, and his first thought as he shifts into wakefulness is Jeez, Dean. Could you be a little more discrete?
He moves around a little, changes position under the covers, thinking that if Dean realizes he's awake, he'll stop what he's doing, or at least relocate - and it works, because Dean crawls out of bed and shuffles into the bathroom. A moment after the door thumps shut the water kicks on in the shower.
It makes sense. She's pretty, "that Haley girl." And she and Dean had a little bit of a moment together, back at the ranger station. Finding Dad is still #1 on Sam's agenda, but he wouldn't have complained (much) if Dean had asked to stick around for a couple of days.
Haley and Dean would be a good fit, Sam thinks as he tries to slide back toward sleep.
He wakes again and something tells him some time has passed, even though he didn't look at the clock the first time and can't make any comparisons that way. The water in the shower's still running, and that seems…wrong, somehow. It wouldn't take more than a couple of minutes - if that long - for Dean to finish what he was doing. Frowning, Sam rolls onto his back and listens.
Hears a grunt from inside the bathroom. Oh, come ON, man, he thinks.
This time he does watch the clock. Two minutes, then three. Then five. Then that noise comes again - but there's something off about it, something that twigs the instincts that Dad and Dean drilled into him, the ones Sam could never lose, not even after three years of relative peace and quiet at Stanford. He and Dean laid the salt lines at the door and window leading outside, and there's no window in the bathroom, so unless something came in through the exhaust vent, Dean's by himself in there. Still, something's wrong.
He reaches the bathroom door in a couple of steps and eases it open a couple of inches. "Dean? You okay in there?"
A couple of seconds tick by, a long enough stretch of time for Sam to feel the kick of adrenaline pushing him towards doing whatever needs to be done. He's about to shove the door fully open when Dean says, "Yeah."
But it's in the same tone he used back in the wendigo's lair, right after Sam cut him down, when he was huddled on the floor sucking in breath in little hitchy gulps. Pain, Sam thinks. Sonofabitch. When he pushes the door open he finds Dean standing in the shower, in full view because he hasn't drawn the shower curtain, water pounding down onto his shoulders and back, his face contorted into a grimace that looks like it's been there a while.
"What's the matter?" Sam asks.
"Nothin'."
"It's three-thirty in the morning."
"Couldn't sleep. Too wound up."
Dean shivers then, and looks so completely miserable that for a moment Sam considers bagging this whole thing, calling a cab and making his way back to Stanford. It's the same old shit, he thinks. Dad's not here, not telling Dean what to do, but Dean's in the shower in the middle of the night, standing under a stream of water that's getting progressively colder, judging by the look on his face. He's suffering through something because he thinks he has to. Because this is how Winchesters do things.
Shaking his head, Sam grabs a bunch of towels off the rack - they're thin, but there's a lot of them - and holds them out to his brother.
"I'm all right," Dean protests.
"The hell you are. Look at yourself."
For a second, Dean seems to be winding up to argue, to bully Sam into going back to bed while he stands there trembling and naked under a sputtery stream of cold water. But before that happens, he turns away and stares at the wall underneath the shower head.
"You got hurt," Sam says. "Get out of there, before you turn into a popsicle."
He'll drag Dean out of the tub if he has to. But he doesn't have to. Dean slumps a little, and sighs, looking at the drain through half-lidded eyes. He gropes for the towels, and the movement's too fast; he grunts again and fumbles the towels onto the floor. Luckily, they fall outside the tub rather than in it.
Time was, Dean would help Sam - Sammy - dry off after a bath. Sam remembers that, remembers it with startling clarity even though the last time was probably seventeen or eighteen years ago. He was small then, and motel bath towels were big enough to wrap around him. These towels, although there's a lot of them, aren't big enough to wrap Dean up in, so Sam yanks the blanket off Dean's bed. He's about to fling it around his brother like a mustard-gold cloak when Dean flinches and tells him, "Shoulders."
"What?"
"Shoulders. Hurt like a mother."
"Both of them?"
"Yeah." That's a whisper, accompanied by a fleeting, and humorless, grin.
Sam has to grope for those memories, to figure out whether Dean's got a history of screwing up both shoulders or just one. He remembers one incident pretty clearly, the others not so much, but if it's true that he's injured both of them, maybe damaged the ligaments so they've never healed properly, being strung up like he was could've wrenched things pretty badly. Slowly, carefully, Sam drapes the blanket around Dean's body and releases it only when Dean gingerly grips it in front of him to hold it closed. He's moving like an old man as he makes his way to the bed and sits down, displaying with an uh-uh-uh of little breaths that even the small tug on the blanket when he sits causes him a nightmare of pain.
"Are they out?" Sam asks. "One of them? Both of them?"
"Don't know. Don't think so."
"Why didn't you say something to the paramedic?"
"Didn't hurt then."
Like hell it didn't, Sam thinks, but maybe Dean's telling the truth; his pain threshold is pretty high, and the adrenaline rush from stalking the wendigo would have helped distract him. "You got anything?" he asks, reaching for the duffel Dean abandoned on the floor near the TV stand. "Percocet? Anything?"
"No."
"You don't have any pain meds?"
"Advil."
"Jesus, man."
Dean doesn't say anything while Sam's rooting in the duffel for the bottle of ibuprofen. He's still shivering, though, probably getting shocky, if the pain's that bad. But it's three-thirty in the morning in a tiny town that - as near as Sam can remember - doesn't even have a drugstore, and certainly doesn't have a pharmacist on duty at this hour to whom Sam could hand a forged prescription. To get his hands on anything stronger than the Advil, he'd have to break in somewhere.
They might have gotten a pill or two out of the paramedics, enough to see them through till morning, if Dean had just said something.
No wonder Dean was so willing to let him drive.
"You're crazy, you know that?" Sam says as he dumps pills into his palm. "You're not invincible."
Dad would be telling him to suck it up, he thinks angrily. Telling him we'll take care of it in the morning, that it's nothing he can't tough his way through.
But Dad's not here.
There's nobody here but the two of them.
"Maybe it's just inflammation," he suggests. "Bursitis? Like tennis elbow? That'd hurt like a bitch, too. If we kick that down -"
This is what he hates worst of all. The expression Dean let slip through, when Sam was half-turned away, digging through the duffel. That look of beaten-down resignation. They got the wendigo, yeah, and "that Haley girl" got her brother back - but three people died. Tommy's gonna have nightmares for a long time. Haley and her kid brother, too, maybe. And tomorrow there's gonna be something else. Other people in trouble. More death, more pain. It just never ends.
Could go back, Sam thinks. Take the semester off. Get settled somewhere. Find a home. Have a life.
This time, take Dean with him.
Because this is what he hates worst of all: seeing his brother white with pain that he won't even admit to feeling. Seeing his brother dole out assignments: You take care of the civvies, and I'll go throw myself in front of that murdering fucker. Go scream at it to come get me.
Dean's been pulling that shit for years.
And nobody's ever protested.
Nobody.
Sam helps his brother lie down, tucking the blanket in around him as if Dean's a little kid, as if their positions have been suddenly reversed. As if time has wound itself backwards and, again, they have nothing to worry about but each other - but this time, it's Dean who needs some looking after.
"Get some sleep," Sam says quietly. "Let the pills kick in. If you need something stronger in the morning, I'll get it for you."
Dean looks at him for a long stretch of time, fierce and steady, as if he thinks Sam will disappear if he blinks or looks away. "Thanks," he says softly.
"Get some sleep."
Sam moves around quickly, shuts off the water in the shower (yes, it's ice-cold now), tosses the towels out of the way so Dean won't trip on them if he revisits the bathroom, switches off the bathroom light, then crawls back into bed. The room's dark except for the spill of light from the parking lot, but that's enough to allow him to see Dean's face, watch it gradually relax.
"Gon' fin' Dad," Dean mutters.
You should have said something, Sam thinks with something that tries to be anger but isn't. Knowing Dean's close to sleep, he offers, "You did good."
There's a small huff of amusement from the other bed. "'M awesome."
"Yeah," Sam says.
"Kicked that sumbitch's ass."
"You and me."
"Yeah," Dean agrees.
Maybe it wasn't the pills he needed so much as this other thing: the acknowledgment that what he did didn't go unnoticed. Haley thanked him, yes, but maybe it wasn't Haley's opinion that mattered. When they find Dad, Sam's got some questions to ask.
And some apologies to demand, because Dean would never demand them for himself.
"Dean?" Sam murmurs.
He doesn't get an answer. Just the quiet huff of Dean's breathing.
* * * * *