comment-fic: I'm home again in my old narrow bed (R, Dean, Sam, gen)
ETA: This was posted for maypoles, who didn't have a personal LJ at the time of the original posting.
So, this was written for our latest comment-fic meme here at the comm. I posted it anon to begin with, as it’s REALLY self-indulgent in the sense that I essentially wrote the exact h/c scenario I’ve been craving for aaages, but roque_clasique found me out and convinced me not to be so weird, haha. So, here it is, cleaned up and edited a bit!
I’m home again in my old narrow bed by maypoles
Written for an anonymous prompt at hoodie_time's third Dean-focused hurt/comfort comment-fic meme: (Somewhat) Dissociative Dean. In response to the reason of your choice (stress, guilt, specific trauma etc.), Dean begins crumbling emotionally and suffers from what looks like dissociation. Not full-on losing time/memory, more like becoming disoriented, zoning out, being alarmingly unfocused and even unresponsive. This, of course, worries Sam out of his mind. Enter protective!brother mode, angst, and hopefully also moments of tenderness in which Sam attempts to help, to get Dean to focus and be himself again. Set at some vague point post-s5, after Sam’s back. Warnings: mental illness. 7,000 words. R (for language.) Dean, Sam, gen.
I’m home again in my old narrow bed
Dean wasn’t hungry.
It wasn’t much of a surprise by this point. Dean rarely ate with the same reverence he once had, something Sam had only really started to take note of after their run-in with Famine but had been unable to escape ever since, regardless of how much he wanted to. On good days, Dean would wake him up in the morning grinning that shit-eating grin of his, and Sam would think wonderingly, he’s fine, we’re both fine. The truth was, though, his brother was living on adrenaline and hard liquor and that was about it.
If Sam was honest with himself, he wasn’t much better. A little more beer, a little less vodka, maybe.
But there was just something unsettling about Dean’s languishing appetite, always had been, a sure-fire reminder that something wasn’t right with him, no matter how big the smile plastered across his face.
Not that he was even bothering to fake it on this particular day.
They’d stopped at a mom and pop style diner tonight, and Sam had ordered them both the special when Dean was in the bathroom. It was good, solid home-cooking, which Sam had hoped would pique Dean’s interest. Instead he saw that his brother was twirling a fork haphazardly through his mashed potatoes. It reminded Sam of something a kid would do, rearrange food on his plate so that it looked like he’d eaten more than he had, although he knew it was more of a nervous habit than anything. Dean had more of those than you’d initially expect.
“Don’t come crying to me when you get scurvy, man,” Sam said.
Dean seemed to get that it wasn’t entirely a joke, because he said, “I won’t,” in a flat, vaguely annoyed kind of way.
Sam took a sip of water to keep himself from saying anything else, putting it down for the waitress when she came to fill them back up. Dean’s water glass was still full, his coffee untouched. This was worse than usual, since even this beaten-down version of Dean never said no to coffee.
“You feelin’ all right?” Sam said then, frowning.
Dean seemed to balk at the question, falling back in the booth with a grimace. Sam looked at him questioningly until he broke into a spasm of coughing, burying his face in his elbow just in time.
Whether or not that was an answer, it was the only one Sam was going to get. When he was done hacking up a lung, Dean popped his collar and stood in one smooth motion.
“Meet you out front,” he rasped.
“Dean-” Sam said, but Dean was already gone. Sam could see him out the window, so he didn’t follow right away, watched as his brother made his way across the parking lot to the Impala and then leaned there, blowing into his hands. Sam took a few more hasty gulps of water.
Dean was coughing again when Sam joined him. It sounded throat-scrapingly painful.
“What’s up?” Sam said, but Dean only shrugged, non-communicative.
He was making Sam nervous, more so lately. But he tried not to worry too much, or to get angry. When Dean got like this, it was like the worst parts of after dad had died and after Dean had first come back from hell combined, and yeah, it could be hard to deal with, but he’d found the best thing to do was to wait it out. Dean would bounce back. He always did.
Just not as well as he used to, lately.
More often than not, his mood veered between nauseatingly bright and sunny, and this. Whatever this was. Some kind of shutting down.
“Well,” Sam said. “You wanna go back to the motel?”
Dean’s eyes rolled his way, and just then they were honestly blank with confusion.
“Or you wanna stand out here freezing our asses off for awhile longer?” Sam said lightly, as a strange, crawling fear crept over him.
After a few seconds, Dean patted at his pockets. Another few seconds went by before he said, “Uh.”
“What?” Sam said, anxious.
“I mighta left the keys back at the table,” Dean said, with the smallest, sheepish smile now.
It was something Dean had never done before in Sam’s recollection, and the shit he’d give Sam over doing the same thing would be endless, he knew. But, “I’ll go get them,” was all he said. He jogged back towards the restaurant where he found the keys on Dean’s side of the booth, abandoned on the Formica table, behind the salt shaker.
Dean didn’t protest when Sam got in the driver’s seat, just hunkered down on the passenger’s side with his take-out box on his lap. He seemed content in the car whether he was the one driving or not, even opened up the box and picked at his dinner a little more.
At the motel, though, he was too quiet again, wandering around the room and picking things up like he didn’t know what to do with himself.
Sam kept one eye on him, kicked his boots off, thumbed the remote on. “Dean,” he said. “C’mon, siddown, would you? You wanna watch-” He faltered, flipping from infomercial to grainy news-cast to The Golden Girls. “Something?”
“Nah,” Dean said. “Think I’m gonna go out again for a bit, have a beer or two.”
“A beer or two, huh?” Sam said sceptically. “All right, well, just let me-”
“No, man, you’re settled,” Dean said, waving a hand at him. “You might as well just stay here.”
It wasn't that Sam didn't get it. Living in each other’s pockets the way they did, they needed a night apart once in awhile. Still, something made him hesitate to let Dean walk out that door on his own at that moment, the same something that was always tugging at him these days.
“You sure you wanna go out, man?” he said. “You don’t look so hot.”
This was true, a valid reason Dean shouldn't be going anywhere or doing anything except putting his ass to bed. He was even paler than usual, white-lipped, at least as run-down looking as Sam felt. His lungs sounded like crap. “I dunno about that. I’d pick me up,” he drawled just the same.
“No accounting for taste,” Sam said.
Dean graced him with a lopsided smirk, then abruptly seemed to deflate, perhaps the blustering only serving to remind him, as it did Sam, that meaningless sex was another thing he didn’t seem to hunger for anymore.
He ended up staying in.
*
Dean woke him up the next morning, somewhere just past dawn going by the light at the window. “Sam,” he said, backlit by the early sun so that Sam could hardly make out his face. “You were dreamin’.”
Sam sighed, pulled the blankets he’d kicked off in his sleep back onto the bed.
“Was it about-” Dean began, serious.
“Nah,” Sam said, cutting him off. “It was just one of those falling dreams, you know. I have them all the time now, I guess because-”
“Yeah,” Dean said.
“Hey,” Sam said, and he meant to ask if Dean had slept okay, but what came out was, “You okay?”
Dean shrugged. “Y’all right now?” he wanted to know.
“Yeah,” Sam said, and after a few seconds, rolled over and went back to sleep.
*
They both slept in the next morning, not because they’d slept like shit the night before, (that was par for the course) but because they’d just wrapped up a case the day before. Dean was awake by the time Sam got back to their room with coffee and bagels, but barely by the looks of him.
“’Morning, sunshine!” Sam said as obnoxiously as he could, because this was what they did, this was their life. Dean waking Sam up from nightmares, Sam waking Dean up from nightmares, and then waking each other up again in the morning, keeping each other going.
Dean gave a bleary salute in response. “Yeah, screw you too,” he said, and then he sort of huddled half-upright against the headboard, like anything else would be too much effort.
“You hungry?” Sam asked, as neutrally as possible.
Dean paled further, said, “Uh, no.” Sam could make his freckles out from across the room. His mouth worked. “Think I’m sick,” he said.
“What’s wrong?” Sam demanded, setting their breakfast down on the top of the TV. He started towards Dean, who held up a wary hand as if bracing himself for something.
“Just a cold or something, come on, Sam. Don’t get all huffy on me.”
“Just a cold,” Sam repeated in surprise. He’d figured from all the coughing that Dean was coming down with something, but his brother didn’t usually cop to having just a cold; neither of them did. Their lives didn’t allow it. They’d take some shit from the first aid kit and get on with it. Dean might use his illness to get him a little sympathy from the waitresses - or he used to - but that was it, and that was their modus apparatus for anything up to and including a gunshot wound.
If it was a clean shot through the shoulder or something, that is. Bullet to the belly and it was time to haul ass to the fucking hospital.
“Mmm,” Dean said, and coughed hard into a raised elbow.
Sam studied him. “I don’t get huffy, jackass,” he said.
Dean rolled his shoulders, winced. “Sure,” he said.
“Well, we have some time. Wanna take a couple days off?” Sam suggested now, and was surprised again by how hopeful Dean looked. “Yeah, okay,” Sam said. “We’ll do that. Get some rest, dude.”
He ended up killing the afternoon by taking a run in the brisk November air, then a shower. This particular motel had amazingly good water pressure, which was so much of a rarity that it made his day, and wasn’t that sad. Evening he spent on the laptop looking for possible hunts while Dean snuffled into his pile of blankets.
*
It really was just a cold. That was the problem.
It was barely even that. Dean was markedly better by the next night. His voice had thickened with congestion, but most of his colour was back. There was no fever. But, while he showed perfunctory interest in Sam’s theory that there was a Wendigo two states over and agreed that they should pack up and leave town in the morning, he seemed entirely disinclined to leave the room until then, or to move much at all from the bed.
It wasn’t laziness. That had never been on Dean’s laundry list of issues.
Depression, Sam’s mind supplied helpfully.
Well, sure, depression had pulled both of them under at different times, and why wouldn’t it? Sam would just wait it out, like always. But he was exhausted. Horrifying himself, he wished that at least Dean was his usual brand of depressed, the kind that resembled functionality. It seemed to be a bit more serious than that this time around.
He rubbed a hand across his forehead and gestured to the glass of water on the nightstand. “You should drink some more of that, man,” he said. Dad had drilled into them the importance of keeping hydrated, and Dean hadn’t needed to be reminded of this stuff since he was a kid, had in fact been the one to remind Sam of it. “Dean.”
Dean was staring intently in the direction of a documentary on the mating habits of mountain gorillas as if it were the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen.
“Dean,” Sam said, and Dean jerked a little, squinted at him. “Drink your water. I haven’t even seen you get up to take a piss all day, what’s that about?”
“Jesus, Sam,” Dean said. “You’re keeping track of my bathroom habits now?” Sam just looked at him until he rolled his eyes and took a few obedient sips. “There. Happy?”
“Ecstatic,” Sam said, and dragged himself vertical, dredged a smile up. “Let’s go out for dinner. That place again. It was good, right?”
“Yeah,” Dean said slowly. “Okay.”
*
The next morning, there was a note scribbled in Dean’s blockish, almost childish scrawl that he was out getting them breakfast, and informing Sam that he was a bitch.
Sam tried calling him to let him know he was up, but it went straight to voice-mail. At the half-hour mark he got restless and wondering and went outside. And saw the Impala first thing. Dean was in the driver’s seat, his hair unmistakable even from across the parking lot, spiky the way it always was in the mornings. He was just sitting there. Well, what the hell.
Sam went over and rapped on the windshield, and Dean opened his car door but didn’t get out right away. He sat there silently, silent the way he often was now. Sam hadn’t pressed him too much on it yet, like Dean hadn’t pressed him on anything - neither of them wanted to mess with the old, easy rhythm they’d fallen back into after so long spent starving for it - but he was seriously beginning to think that might be a good idea.
“Dean?” he said, consideringly.
Dean shook a brown paper bag at Sam jerkily, a reanimated doll. “Yogurt with granola for you, you hippie bastard.”
“Well, get in here already then, asshole,” Sam said.
Dean hmmed as he climbed out of the car. Uncharacteristically clumsy, he seemed to stumble over his own feet in the process. He was able to catch himself on the hood of the car, but the bag fell to the ground, it’s contents spilling out onto the gravel.
Sam would have laughed at him, but couldn’t seem to manage it right then. “Whoah, you okay?” he said.
Dean was staring at the ground, as shocked as if someone had stabbed him in the spine. He didn’t say a word.
“Dean, man, you okay?”
He wondered briefly if Dean were drunk this early in the morning, if they were starting up with that again, but Sam couldn’t smell alcohol on him. And that didn’t seem right, anyway.
Dean had gone pale again, his eyes burned down to just pupil.
“C’mon, it’s not a big deal,” Sam tried, but he could see that Dean wasn’t angry. Oddly, his face was a mask of fear, his breath tight, almost panicky. “What-?” Sam started, looking all around them for the source of that look.
That was about the time when Dean turned, pulled his gun, and bashed it into the window of the Impala.
Glass exploded like confetti all around them.
Sam had seen Dean go ape-shit on the car before - and since the car was basically an extension of Dean, it had freaked him out to no end - but not over a goddamn lost breakfast, and not like this, with just his hands and feet. When Dean started kicking the door in with his steel-toed work-boots, Sam's brain finally caught up to itself and he reacted, snagged Dean around the middle and worked on dragging him backwards. All muscle and sinew and raw emotion, Dean managed to jerk away from him, but dropped the gun in the process.
Sam snatched it up quickly and shoved it in the waistband of his jeans. “Dean!”
After a fruitless effort, he gave up on dragging Dean anywhere and just pressed him up over the hood of the car, like the police would if they showed up and got a look at the armoury in the trunk of this thing, which was likely to happen if Dean didn’t snap out of it in the next ten seconds. “Stop it!” Sam hissed as Dean bucked under him. “Just stop it. Stop. Someone’s gonna call the cops and we’ll be screwed in about ten different ways. You hear me?”
After a few terrifying minutes of this, Dean went limp.
Sam kept his hands firm on him, just in case, hustled him back to the motel room and sat him on the bed and pulled their duffels out, trembling all over.
“What’re you doing?” Dean said. He was as docile as anything now.
“I’m packing our shit up,” Sam told him flatly.
“Oh,” Dean said, eyelashes struggling weakly against pale cheeks. “I think I gotta go to sleep for a little while.” He listed to the side. Sam packed faster, opened the door to bring their stuff to the car and his stomach bottomed out when he got a good look at it.
He didn’t let himself dwell on it, made time hurrying back to his brother. “Dean, hey, hey, open your eyes. Open ‘em up. There you go.” He patted at Dean’s clammy neck, found his pulse. It was much too quick, but steady enough. “Stand up. Can you stand up for me? We’re out of here.”
Dean stood up under his own power, but let Sam manhandle him into the passenger seat.
Miles away in a gas station parking lot bathroom, Sam locked the door and did what he could for Dean, which he could see with dawning fear, wasn’t nearly enough. Put alcohol on his cuts, stitched up a gouge in his right arm, pressed a wet washcloth, stolen from another motel three states back, to Dean’s neck and face. A lukewarm bottle of water from the car he poured down Dean’s throat.
“Is my baby okay?” Dean said at some point. Some water dribbled unchecked off the bottom of his chin.
“She’s busted up a little,” Sam told him, tenuously calm. “But you’ll fix her up, no problem.” He saw Dean’s eyes getting heavy again. “You tired? Hold on just a bit longer, okay? I’m going to have to put a splint on these two fingers here.”
“They’re fine.”
“They’re really not,” Sam said, harsher than he meant to, although Dean didn’t seem to notice that, or much of anything. His head kept dipping down; he was falling asleep propped up against a dirty wall in this pit. Sam wanted to hit him, to hold him, to not let go of him for fucking ever. “Wake up, Dean. I’m resetting the bones now, all right?”
“S’okay,” Dean said with sleepy gentleness. “Just do it.”
So Sam picked up Dean’s shattered hand.
*
Sam had checked them into another motel as soon as they crossed state-lines, and Dean had crashed hard, not even twitching when Sam lost himself for a moment and slammed the bathroom door so hard against the doorjamb that the paint cracked. But now he was waking up; Sam could tell from his breathing.
Dean slowly untangled himself from the bed-sheets. “What’s goin’ on?” he husked, coughing against his uninjured wrist.
“Seriously?” Sam said shortly.
Dean sat gingerly on the edge of the bed, saw that Sam had taken off his boots for him, his jeans. His gaze roamed the room, restless. “Where are my pants?” he said. “Gimme my pants, man.”
“Sure,” Sam said. “After you tell me what the hell happened this morning.”
“Oh, goddamn it,” Dean said, lurching off the bed and heading for the door and the Impala, like maybe he really hadn't known what was going on until Sam had reminded him.
Sam caught him around the shoulders and pushed him towards the window instead. “Dean, god, you’re not even dressed. You don’t wanna scare the children, c’mon.”
“Fuck,” Dean said. “Fuck. Fuck.” Abruptly, he slapped a hand against the wall.
“Hey,” Sam said. “You’re not gonna trash the room too, are you?” He was half joking, but his alarm was genuine.
Dean yanked the curtain back so the parking lot was in view, moaned low in the back of his throat when he saw the damage.
Sam snapped his fingers at him. “What’s going on with you, Dean?”
Dean shrugged a one-shouldered shrug, still looking pained. “I don’t think I’m getting enough sleep, is all,” he said, which wasn’t exactly a newsflash.
“Neither of us sleep through the night half the time, man,” Sam said, incredulous. “But you don’t see me having a meltdown over some freakin’ doughnuts.”
There was nothing Dean could really say to that.
Sam braced himself. “You remember after you came back from the pit,” he said after a few beats, “and I tried to tell you maybe you had something going on, like PTSD, or-”
Dean cut him off. “Stay the fuck off the internet, Sam, and stay the fuck out of my head,” he said, weariness taking some of the sting out of the words.
“Dean, c’mon,” Sam said, frowning.
“If I have this thing, then why the hell don’t you have it too?” Dean demanded unexpectedly.
“What, you want me to?” Sam demanded back, softening when Dean flinched at his words. “I don’t know, man,” he said. “Maybe because I finally made some kind of peace with all this - our lives - when I jumped in that hole, and you didn’t get a chance to do that, or maybe because some people just- get it, you know?”
“Because they’re weak, right,” Dean said with a mean curl to his mouth. “And you’re not.”
Sam breathed in and out, deeply, once, twice. “Okay, okay,” Sam said, and he’d been meaning to say this to Dean for ages, wasn’t sure he had the words for it, but now was gonna have to be the time to try. “Look, when I said that about you- I just had to believe that I could do something, be someone who could actually do something about anything, because I couldn’t save Jess, and I couldn’t get you out of the pit, Dean, and I was just so angry all the time, at myself because I couldn’t do shit for you when it mattered the most-“
“Sam, you don’t have to say all this shit,” Dean said, softer now too. “Seriously, man, we’re over it.”
“I don’t think we are,” Sam said.
“Look, I know you tried. It went wrong. But I know you tried, real hard. I always knew that.”
“Just let me get this out, okay? I was angry at myself, and I was angry at you, for just not getting that you dying would hurt me just as bad as me dying hurt you. I mean, you still don’t get that, do you?”
Dean looked sick again.
“When I thought about it all, Dean, I felt- I’d wake up in the morning and it would be like I was paralyzed. That was how it felt. But now I know that I’m not, that I don’t have to be. That at least I can move when it’s time to move. Do what needs to be done.” Sam made himself keep going. “Is that how you feel, man?” he asked. “Like you’re-”
“Don’t.”
“You’re angry,” Sam said. “And you’re scared, right? Dean, give me something here.”
Dean was quiet for nearly a full minute. Sam waited him out. Finally, he said, “No.”
“No?”
There was another long pause.
“You can talk to me, Dean. It isn’t like before,” Sam said.
Dean, despite his aversion to talking shit over, had always been easier to split wide open than Sam, because he waited until all the emotions inside of him had built up to seismic levels that just couldn’t be contained any longer, every time. And then he’d lose it, just a little, just enough to keep on going the way he was going. Sam didn’t have to talk as much. He got angry before it got to that point. It was the one good thing about the anger that had been hounding him his whole life. When it wasn’t screwing him over, it kept him sane.
Of course, mostly it just screwed him over.
Not that now was really the time to contemplate who’s coping skills were shittier.
“Talk to me, Dean,” he said. “Please.”
“I dunno,” Dean said suddenly. “I freak out over random shit. I never used to- Like this morning, I felt so bad, man, and then I dropped that friggin’ bag, and I felt so bad, I felt so bad-” Shockingly, Dean’s face began to slowly crumple in on itself. “I’m just so tired, Sammy.”
It was something Dean had been telling him for years now, since after dad, and Sam had heard it, yeah, but he hadn’t heard it this clear, hadn’t wanted to associate his big brother with it, hadn’t been able to, honestly, with everything else they’d had going on, demanding their attention. But there was no missing it now.
“Dean,” he said, daring to reach out and clasp his brother around the shoulders, almost, but not quite a hug. “Hey, Dean.”
But Dean was already gathering himself back together.
“Maybe we should go to Bobby’s for awhile,” Sam suggested. It probably wasn’t a solution, but it was the quickest one he could think of, and the only one Dean might agree to. “Take some actual time off.”
Dean started shaking his head before Sam had even finished talking.
“You need a break, man. Don’t tell me you don’t. We need a break.”
Dean looked towards the window again.
“Hey,” Sam said. “Don’t worry about it. You can fix everything up when we get to Bobby’s, okay?”
“We can’t just drop a case,” Dean said, voice hardening again. “That’s not what we do. And we’re damn sure not going to start now, because I need my beauty sleep or whatever. No fucking way.”
“Dean.”
“No.”
Dean looked so stupid, standing there in his underwear. He was infuriating. Sam loved him so much. So, he reluctantly gave in. “Then we’ll go to the shop,” he said, “and you’ll just have to deal with someone else putting their hands on your baby. But we are taking a break after this case, do you hear me?”
“Can I have my pants now or what?” Dean said, subdued.
“I don’t know,” Sam said.
“You bossy bastard,” Dean said. “Yes, okay? Yes, I hear you.”
“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Sam said.
Dean ignored this. “I gotta see her,” he said plaintively, meaning the car, so Sam got him his goddamn pants.
*
It was a good hunt, as far as hunts went, and Dean was in a good mood afterward, the pyromaniac. Salt and burns almost always put him in a good mood. He didn’t even mind grave-digging so long as he got to light some shit up in the end.
Since their talk last week, he’d been better anyway - more animated, brighter-eyed. Sam let himself relax, a little. That was a mistake. But he didn’t know that yet.
They made a liquor store run that night, played the extremely bastardized version of Texas Hold ‘Em they’d made up as kids late into the night, and for one of the only times in his life Sam drank Dean under the table. “You,” Dean said. ’S’cheating. Imma make up a new rule.”
“Yeah?” Sam said, amused.
“Yeah,” Dean said. “No giants allowed. You weigh like, fifty times more than me, man, what the hell. You remember when you were little-” He trailed off, blinking.
Sam picked up the thread for him. “Hey,” he said. “Remember when we made up this game? Dad was so pissed. If he was gonna raise a couple of hustlers, we’d better play by the rules, right? That still doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Dean brightened back up. “’S a good game, though. We should market it, like Monopoly or some shit. Get a patent pending.”
“Great idea,” Sam said. “You get on that in the morning.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Dean said.
*
Dean was sick again.
At first they both assumed he was just hungover, but he was still throwing up at regular intervals into the early evening and Sam called foul.
It was some kind of virus. When the cough started, Sam hoped against hope for another cold, a relapse, something relatively easy, but by midnight Dean was feverish and coughing relentlessly, his eyelids weighted down by illness as much as by the rest of it.
“This came on pretty quick,” Sam said conversationally, watchful. “Sounds like the flu.”
Dean nodded blankly, and Sam knew he hadn’t heard a word. He pressed the tissues Sam had brought him from the bathroom to his face and coughed and coughed and coughed, but seemed incapable of much else. If he dropped one he was lost wheezing into his chest until he caught Sam staring at him. Then he’d go for the tissue box, fingers fumbling clumsily.
He was shutting down, again.
For awhile, Sam sat in front of his lap-top and re-read all the shit he’d previously looked up about trauma survivors, depression, PTSD, trying to calm himself the fuck down.
It didn’t work, and when Dean gasped, Sam looked at him sharply. Dean was propped up on pillows, mouth twisted down. At first Sam wasn’t sure what he was going to do, but then he directed a sneeze at the waiting tissue, and then a few more for good measure. He followed them up with a coughing fit, wet and crackling, and then one last miserable sneeze. He dropped the tissue in his lap afterward, sat there panting like a dog, his eyes and nose running unchecked.
Sam couldn’t stand it. He climbed off his bed and went over to Dean’s. “Here, man,” Sam said, gently pressing a fresh tissue at him. Dean took it, but he did nothing with it this time, just clenched his fist around it.
Sam reached out again and guided his brother’s hand, hot with fever, to his dampened face.
*
Dean’s fever was soaring in the morning, his lips and nose chapped pink. He didn’t sit up when Sam pushed water at him, just blinked up at him with a vacant countenance. “Dean, you have to drink something,” Sam said sternly, and Dean, thank god, struggled his way into a vertical position at the tone of voice. Then immediately bent at the waist, wheezing. Holding his head up fully seemed difficult for him.
More so than it should have been, high fever or not.
This isn’t fair, Sam thought, something he’d avoided thinking his whole life because it would do nothing but make him crazy. But it wasn’t fair, after everything, all of it, goddamn it, for Dean to feel like this, like he had to check out like this all the time in order to survive.
“I’m gonna take your temp,” Sam said with determination.
“’S fine,” Dean roused himself to say. “’M fine. Not that sick.”
It was the first thing Sam had heard him say in nearly 24 hours. “Yeah, well,” he said, and went and got the first aid kit.
It was 102, which was bad, but not that bad. Of course it wasn’t really the fever that had Sam worried anyway. It was all the rest of it.
Dean was winding up again for a sneeze, breath hitching. He mashed a palm against his nose this time around, resulting in an indefinable sound.
“You sound fucking awful,” Sam said, handing him a tissue. “Here you go.”
Dean hmmed his thanks, but he was clearly struggling in more ways than one, couldn’t even lift the tissue halfway to his face before he let his arm fall back onto the mattress in apathy. Then he sneezed again.
“I want to dip your face in a vat of Purell,” Sam tried to joke, voice shaking.
“Ha ha,” Dean said, and coughed, and yawned.
“Yeah, you go back to sleep,” Sam said. “I’ll be here.”
“Don’t stare at me when I’m sleepin’ anymore, man,” Dean told him before he dropped off. “It’s freakin’ creepy.”
But Sam kept staring. He couldn’t help it.
*
“Where are we?” Dean said when he woke up the second time, and Sam didn’t think much of it at first. It wasn’t uncommon when they were in between cases for them to lose track of their bearings.
“Colorado,” Sam said without missing a beat. He was reading the Bible from the night-table for something to do, which was a stupid idea because it pissed him off, made him sad, made him too many things all at once.
“Sammy?” Dean said, and he sounded so strange, voice wrecked and low from fever, but weirdly high too, the way Sam remembered him sounding when they were both teenagers.
Sam dropped the Bible onto his bed. “What’s going on, kiddo?” he said, but Dean didn’t answer him. He looked as terrible as he sounded, apple-red splotches high on his cheeks. He was shaking his head like he had water in his ears.
Sam went over and felt his forehead, but couldn’t tell if it was any warmer. He didn’t think so. Dean didn’t try to duck the touch, just blinked at him, eyes wide, but dreamy, wandering. He didn’t seem at all scared when he said, “Something’s wrong.”
“What?” Sam said, a surge of adrenaline making him a bit lightheaded. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s all wrong.”
“What is?” Sam said.
“I can’t- I just can’t think. Why are we in California. I don’t even like California.”
“Dean, we’re not in California,” Sam told him, beyond unsettled. “We’re in Colorado. We were hunting a Wendigo. We finished the hunt, and then you got sick. You remember that?”
“I’m sick?” Dean said.
“Yeah, you sure are,” Sam said, stroking his hand through Dean’s sweat-soaked hair to re-check his temperature, frowning hard.
“That’s why it’s all wrong, then,” Dean said.
“Hey. Let’s try this again,” Sam said, holding the thermometer in front of his brother’s face. “You know the drill.”
His temperature was down to 100. It should have been good news, but the fact that none of this crap could be explained by delirium made Sam feel sick himself. What was this? What the hell was this? Could PTSD do this?
Or maybe Dean was having a brain aneurysm.
Either way, Sam was about ready to lose his mind.
“Dean,” he said, and made a split-second decision, took the option that was usually reserved for bullets to the belly, bleeding out, impending death. “We’re going to the hospital. Get up, c’mon.”
He was expecting Dean to shoot this idea down, even now, but Dean stood as ordered, sick legs trembling, knees knocking.
“Okay,” Sam said, flustered. “Sit back down. We should get your shoes on. Can you get your shoes on?”
“We shouldn’t be going to the hospital. Dad’ll kill us,” Dean said, which probably meant no, he couldn’t get his shoes on.
“I know,” Sam said with grim resolve. “But we’re going anyway.”
*
When they asked Dean his name at the hospital, he said, “Winchester, Dean,” like he was in the goddamn army.
It seemed to be about the only thing he was sure of, and Sam felt like the biggest asshole on earth, saying, “That’s not his name,” and having Dean peer at him with wounded confusion. He held his brother’s current fake ID out for inspection. “He’s not making any sense. I don’t- What's happening? Please."
Has he ingested any drugs? the doctors wanted to know. Has he been diagnosed with anything? Has he been depressed lately, withdrawn? Has he gone through any kind of trauma recently?
Sam wanted to laugh and never stop, but figured that wouldn’t go over so well. And Dean-
Dean needed him to keep it together.
He managed to keep it halfway together, at least, through a plethora of tests that freaked him out more than they did Dean.
The preliminary diagnosis, after all physical causes had been ruled out, was that Dean was in a dissociative state. This was explained to them both while Sam nodded in all the wrong places, stricken, watching out of the corner of his eye as Dean absently pulled his hospital bracelet tight enough to cut off circulation and held it there.
As evening crept back around, his brother started throwing up at regular intervals again, and every time he was through, he’d stay flopped over his own knees like a ragdoll until Sam re-arranged him back against the pillows. His limbs were oddly malleable and would stay wherever they were moved.
The doctors had a name for that too. Waxy flexibility. Whatever the fuck that meant. Sam couldn't even think right now, about what it meant. He couldn’t think about catatonic signs either. He actually physically couldn’t. Every time he did, his heartbeat would stutter alarmingly. His ears would start ringing. His thought processes would grind to a stop.
“I wanna wake up,” was the first and only thing Dean said during that long, nightmarish night.
“It’s okay, Dean, you’re okay, you’re awake,” Sam soothed, running a hand up and down Dean’s arm, where goosebumps kept rising up despite his best efforts. “Hey. You back with me now?”
Dean’s head lolled forward in a nod. It was clear that he wasn’t, not all the way, but Sam found he could usually get his attention if he tapped him gently and repeatedly on the inside of his wrist.
At first he’d tried to keep his distance, give his brother some space, but he wasn’t sure that that was what Dean needed, if he should stick close instead. So after Dean round up for another bout of vomiting, Sam tried wrapping his arms around him, holding him while Dean spit bile and the nothing that was in his stomach into the pink emesis basin a nurse kindly held in front of his face. “I got it, thank-you,” Sam said, taking it from her. “Just give us a few minutes, okay?”
Dean retched until they was nothing left and then stayed there, hunched over himself.
Sam rearranged him back against the pillows. “There you go,” he said, and then stopped dead, at a loss.
Later, the nurse came back and wiped Dean’s face off with a cloth, gentle and efficient. That was good. Sam couldn’t think, but he should have thought of that.
*
In the deadest part of the night, Sam stood in the hospital parking lot, a zombie. They said that there was always something in your head - even when you were thinking about nothing you were thinking about something - but he didn’t know about that.
He had no idea how long he’d been standing there before he called Bobby.
“Dean’s in the hospital,” he said bluntly. “He’s all right. I mean- except- he’s-” His mind went blank again. Dumbly, he wondered if catatonia was catching.
“Talk to me, son,” Bobby said.
“He’s out of it, Bobby. Like, completely- not even on this planet. I’m so out of my league here I don’t even-”
“Start at the beginning,” Bobby interjected, very quietly.
“I can’t,” Sam said. “I really can’t right now, I’m sorry. But uh- he’s not doing so good. Mentally. Or physically either, actually. Goddamn it.”
Bobby paused. Then, “Is this something supernatural?”
“It’s- no, it’s not,” Sam admitted, and he felt so fucking terrible saying it, worse even than he thought he had room for feeling at that moment.
“I’m coming down there,” Bobby said. “You tell him I’m coming down there.”
“We should have come to see you the other week,” Sam said. “We were going to. But I thought he was okay.”
“He will be,” Bobby said.
“I thought we were okay,” Sam said helplessly.
“Sammy,” Bobby said, like he never did.
Sam took a deep breath. “Don’t come down here,” he said. “I thought maybe we could come to you instead. We gotta split soon anyway. Our insurance- Uh, would that be- okay?”
“You better haul ass, boy,” was Bobby’s answer.
“Yes, sir,” Sam said. He disconnected, sat on the curb and listened as ambulance sirens shrieked closer. Thought of absolutely nothing.
*
Halfway to Bobby’s, Dean started crying, and didn’t stop. This was only marginally better than the frightening emptiness that had threatened to swallow them both whole the past couple of days.
Sam pulled the car over, and Dean was hiding his face with one shaking arm. Sam tugged it down, too easily. “It’s going to be okay, Dean,” he said. “Once we get to Bobby’s-”
Dean sniffed, wiped his nose with his sleeve, then his splotchy face, only succeeding in smearing the tears around. “You know, that’s what you said, right before you jumped. In that hole,” he said, voice cracking from a lethal combination of sadness, infection, profound exhaustion.
“I know,” Sam said, blinking back tears himself. “But I was talking about the world then. Now I’m talking about you. Just you. And me. And I’m telling you it’s gonna be okay.”
“Where are we going again?” Dean asked wetly.
“Oh, shit, Dean. Dean,” Sam said, hooking him around the neck with an arm and dragging him in. He’d never been the physically demonstrative one out of the two of them, but there was nothing to do for this - his big brother in so many pieces in front of him - but to reach out, hold on. He’d hold on forever if Dean needed him to.
Dean kept crying.
*
At Bobby’s, Sam usually slept on the sofa, Dean on the floor, but this time they stayed in the room they’d shared as children. And just like when they were children, Sam pushed their cots together. It seemed like the thing to do.
“What’re you doing?” Dean said. He stood dazedly in the doorway, muffling a coughing fit into the hem of his shirt.
“What’s it look like I’m doing?” Sam said.
Dean shuffled over, flopped down. He’d ceased to care.
“Here, get under the covers, why don’t you,” Sam said. “Get some sleep. And later I’ll bring you a pudding cup, and you’re gonna eat it.”
“Oh, yeah?” Dean said after one too many seconds. “And then what’s on the agenda, boss?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Sam said. “I’m gonna take care of you.”
Sam was just saying whatever he could think of to keep Dean in the present, with him where he belonged, but somehow it seemed he’d stumbled onto the one perfect thing to say to Dean right now, the one thing no one had ever said to him before, because when Dean started crying this time, it wasn’t the choked-off sobbing of before. It was unrestrained, and all the lighter for it. Relieved.
It was the middle of the afternoon, but Sam crawled right into their makeshift bed. Settled in next to his brother’s familiar warmth.
So, this was written for our latest comment-fic meme here at the comm. I posted it anon to begin with, as it’s REALLY self-indulgent in the sense that I essentially wrote the exact h/c scenario I’ve been craving for aaages, but roque_clasique found me out and convinced me not to be so weird, haha. So, here it is, cleaned up and edited a bit!
I’m home again in my old narrow bed by maypoles
Written for an anonymous prompt at hoodie_time's third Dean-focused hurt/comfort comment-fic meme: (Somewhat) Dissociative Dean. In response to the reason of your choice (stress, guilt, specific trauma etc.), Dean begins crumbling emotionally and suffers from what looks like dissociation. Not full-on losing time/memory, more like becoming disoriented, zoning out, being alarmingly unfocused and even unresponsive. This, of course, worries Sam out of his mind. Enter protective!brother mode, angst, and hopefully also moments of tenderness in which Sam attempts to help, to get Dean to focus and be himself again. Set at some vague point post-s5, after Sam’s back. Warnings: mental illness. 7,000 words. R (for language.) Dean, Sam, gen.
I’m home again in my old narrow bed
Dean wasn’t hungry.
It wasn’t much of a surprise by this point. Dean rarely ate with the same reverence he once had, something Sam had only really started to take note of after their run-in with Famine but had been unable to escape ever since, regardless of how much he wanted to. On good days, Dean would wake him up in the morning grinning that shit-eating grin of his, and Sam would think wonderingly, he’s fine, we’re both fine. The truth was, though, his brother was living on adrenaline and hard liquor and that was about it.
If Sam was honest with himself, he wasn’t much better. A little more beer, a little less vodka, maybe.
But there was just something unsettling about Dean’s languishing appetite, always had been, a sure-fire reminder that something wasn’t right with him, no matter how big the smile plastered across his face.
Not that he was even bothering to fake it on this particular day.
They’d stopped at a mom and pop style diner tonight, and Sam had ordered them both the special when Dean was in the bathroom. It was good, solid home-cooking, which Sam had hoped would pique Dean’s interest. Instead he saw that his brother was twirling a fork haphazardly through his mashed potatoes. It reminded Sam of something a kid would do, rearrange food on his plate so that it looked like he’d eaten more than he had, although he knew it was more of a nervous habit than anything. Dean had more of those than you’d initially expect.
“Don’t come crying to me when you get scurvy, man,” Sam said.
Dean seemed to get that it wasn’t entirely a joke, because he said, “I won’t,” in a flat, vaguely annoyed kind of way.
Sam took a sip of water to keep himself from saying anything else, putting it down for the waitress when she came to fill them back up. Dean’s water glass was still full, his coffee untouched. This was worse than usual, since even this beaten-down version of Dean never said no to coffee.
“You feelin’ all right?” Sam said then, frowning.
Dean seemed to balk at the question, falling back in the booth with a grimace. Sam looked at him questioningly until he broke into a spasm of coughing, burying his face in his elbow just in time.
Whether or not that was an answer, it was the only one Sam was going to get. When he was done hacking up a lung, Dean popped his collar and stood in one smooth motion.
“Meet you out front,” he rasped.
“Dean-” Sam said, but Dean was already gone. Sam could see him out the window, so he didn’t follow right away, watched as his brother made his way across the parking lot to the Impala and then leaned there, blowing into his hands. Sam took a few more hasty gulps of water.
Dean was coughing again when Sam joined him. It sounded throat-scrapingly painful.
“What’s up?” Sam said, but Dean only shrugged, non-communicative.
He was making Sam nervous, more so lately. But he tried not to worry too much, or to get angry. When Dean got like this, it was like the worst parts of after dad had died and after Dean had first come back from hell combined, and yeah, it could be hard to deal with, but he’d found the best thing to do was to wait it out. Dean would bounce back. He always did.
Just not as well as he used to, lately.
More often than not, his mood veered between nauseatingly bright and sunny, and this. Whatever this was. Some kind of shutting down.
“Well,” Sam said. “You wanna go back to the motel?”
Dean’s eyes rolled his way, and just then they were honestly blank with confusion.
“Or you wanna stand out here freezing our asses off for awhile longer?” Sam said lightly, as a strange, crawling fear crept over him.
After a few seconds, Dean patted at his pockets. Another few seconds went by before he said, “Uh.”
“What?” Sam said, anxious.
“I mighta left the keys back at the table,” Dean said, with the smallest, sheepish smile now.
It was something Dean had never done before in Sam’s recollection, and the shit he’d give Sam over doing the same thing would be endless, he knew. But, “I’ll go get them,” was all he said. He jogged back towards the restaurant where he found the keys on Dean’s side of the booth, abandoned on the Formica table, behind the salt shaker.
Dean didn’t protest when Sam got in the driver’s seat, just hunkered down on the passenger’s side with his take-out box on his lap. He seemed content in the car whether he was the one driving or not, even opened up the box and picked at his dinner a little more.
At the motel, though, he was too quiet again, wandering around the room and picking things up like he didn’t know what to do with himself.
Sam kept one eye on him, kicked his boots off, thumbed the remote on. “Dean,” he said. “C’mon, siddown, would you? You wanna watch-” He faltered, flipping from infomercial to grainy news-cast to The Golden Girls. “Something?”
“Nah,” Dean said. “Think I’m gonna go out again for a bit, have a beer or two.”
“A beer or two, huh?” Sam said sceptically. “All right, well, just let me-”
“No, man, you’re settled,” Dean said, waving a hand at him. “You might as well just stay here.”
It wasn't that Sam didn't get it. Living in each other’s pockets the way they did, they needed a night apart once in awhile. Still, something made him hesitate to let Dean walk out that door on his own at that moment, the same something that was always tugging at him these days.
“You sure you wanna go out, man?” he said. “You don’t look so hot.”
This was true, a valid reason Dean shouldn't be going anywhere or doing anything except putting his ass to bed. He was even paler than usual, white-lipped, at least as run-down looking as Sam felt. His lungs sounded like crap. “I dunno about that. I’d pick me up,” he drawled just the same.
“No accounting for taste,” Sam said.
Dean graced him with a lopsided smirk, then abruptly seemed to deflate, perhaps the blustering only serving to remind him, as it did Sam, that meaningless sex was another thing he didn’t seem to hunger for anymore.
He ended up staying in.
*
Dean woke him up the next morning, somewhere just past dawn going by the light at the window. “Sam,” he said, backlit by the early sun so that Sam could hardly make out his face. “You were dreamin’.”
Sam sighed, pulled the blankets he’d kicked off in his sleep back onto the bed.
“Was it about-” Dean began, serious.
“Nah,” Sam said, cutting him off. “It was just one of those falling dreams, you know. I have them all the time now, I guess because-”
“Yeah,” Dean said.
“Hey,” Sam said, and he meant to ask if Dean had slept okay, but what came out was, “You okay?”
Dean shrugged. “Y’all right now?” he wanted to know.
“Yeah,” Sam said, and after a few seconds, rolled over and went back to sleep.
*
They both slept in the next morning, not because they’d slept like shit the night before, (that was par for the course) but because they’d just wrapped up a case the day before. Dean was awake by the time Sam got back to their room with coffee and bagels, but barely by the looks of him.
“’Morning, sunshine!” Sam said as obnoxiously as he could, because this was what they did, this was their life. Dean waking Sam up from nightmares, Sam waking Dean up from nightmares, and then waking each other up again in the morning, keeping each other going.
Dean gave a bleary salute in response. “Yeah, screw you too,” he said, and then he sort of huddled half-upright against the headboard, like anything else would be too much effort.
“You hungry?” Sam asked, as neutrally as possible.
Dean paled further, said, “Uh, no.” Sam could make his freckles out from across the room. His mouth worked. “Think I’m sick,” he said.
“What’s wrong?” Sam demanded, setting their breakfast down on the top of the TV. He started towards Dean, who held up a wary hand as if bracing himself for something.
“Just a cold or something, come on, Sam. Don’t get all huffy on me.”
“Just a cold,” Sam repeated in surprise. He’d figured from all the coughing that Dean was coming down with something, but his brother didn’t usually cop to having just a cold; neither of them did. Their lives didn’t allow it. They’d take some shit from the first aid kit and get on with it. Dean might use his illness to get him a little sympathy from the waitresses - or he used to - but that was it, and that was their modus apparatus for anything up to and including a gunshot wound.
If it was a clean shot through the shoulder or something, that is. Bullet to the belly and it was time to haul ass to the fucking hospital.
“Mmm,” Dean said, and coughed hard into a raised elbow.
Sam studied him. “I don’t get huffy, jackass,” he said.
Dean rolled his shoulders, winced. “Sure,” he said.
“Well, we have some time. Wanna take a couple days off?” Sam suggested now, and was surprised again by how hopeful Dean looked. “Yeah, okay,” Sam said. “We’ll do that. Get some rest, dude.”
He ended up killing the afternoon by taking a run in the brisk November air, then a shower. This particular motel had amazingly good water pressure, which was so much of a rarity that it made his day, and wasn’t that sad. Evening he spent on the laptop looking for possible hunts while Dean snuffled into his pile of blankets.
*
It really was just a cold. That was the problem.
It was barely even that. Dean was markedly better by the next night. His voice had thickened with congestion, but most of his colour was back. There was no fever. But, while he showed perfunctory interest in Sam’s theory that there was a Wendigo two states over and agreed that they should pack up and leave town in the morning, he seemed entirely disinclined to leave the room until then, or to move much at all from the bed.
It wasn’t laziness. That had never been on Dean’s laundry list of issues.
Depression, Sam’s mind supplied helpfully.
Well, sure, depression had pulled both of them under at different times, and why wouldn’t it? Sam would just wait it out, like always. But he was exhausted. Horrifying himself, he wished that at least Dean was his usual brand of depressed, the kind that resembled functionality. It seemed to be a bit more serious than that this time around.
He rubbed a hand across his forehead and gestured to the glass of water on the nightstand. “You should drink some more of that, man,” he said. Dad had drilled into them the importance of keeping hydrated, and Dean hadn’t needed to be reminded of this stuff since he was a kid, had in fact been the one to remind Sam of it. “Dean.”
Dean was staring intently in the direction of a documentary on the mating habits of mountain gorillas as if it were the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen.
“Dean,” Sam said, and Dean jerked a little, squinted at him. “Drink your water. I haven’t even seen you get up to take a piss all day, what’s that about?”
“Jesus, Sam,” Dean said. “You’re keeping track of my bathroom habits now?” Sam just looked at him until he rolled his eyes and took a few obedient sips. “There. Happy?”
“Ecstatic,” Sam said, and dragged himself vertical, dredged a smile up. “Let’s go out for dinner. That place again. It was good, right?”
“Yeah,” Dean said slowly. “Okay.”
*
The next morning, there was a note scribbled in Dean’s blockish, almost childish scrawl that he was out getting them breakfast, and informing Sam that he was a bitch.
Sam tried calling him to let him know he was up, but it went straight to voice-mail. At the half-hour mark he got restless and wondering and went outside. And saw the Impala first thing. Dean was in the driver’s seat, his hair unmistakable even from across the parking lot, spiky the way it always was in the mornings. He was just sitting there. Well, what the hell.
Sam went over and rapped on the windshield, and Dean opened his car door but didn’t get out right away. He sat there silently, silent the way he often was now. Sam hadn’t pressed him too much on it yet, like Dean hadn’t pressed him on anything - neither of them wanted to mess with the old, easy rhythm they’d fallen back into after so long spent starving for it - but he was seriously beginning to think that might be a good idea.
“Dean?” he said, consideringly.
Dean shook a brown paper bag at Sam jerkily, a reanimated doll. “Yogurt with granola for you, you hippie bastard.”
“Well, get in here already then, asshole,” Sam said.
Dean hmmed as he climbed out of the car. Uncharacteristically clumsy, he seemed to stumble over his own feet in the process. He was able to catch himself on the hood of the car, but the bag fell to the ground, it’s contents spilling out onto the gravel.
Sam would have laughed at him, but couldn’t seem to manage it right then. “Whoah, you okay?” he said.
Dean was staring at the ground, as shocked as if someone had stabbed him in the spine. He didn’t say a word.
“Dean, man, you okay?”
He wondered briefly if Dean were drunk this early in the morning, if they were starting up with that again, but Sam couldn’t smell alcohol on him. And that didn’t seem right, anyway.
Dean had gone pale again, his eyes burned down to just pupil.
“C’mon, it’s not a big deal,” Sam tried, but he could see that Dean wasn’t angry. Oddly, his face was a mask of fear, his breath tight, almost panicky. “What-?” Sam started, looking all around them for the source of that look.
That was about the time when Dean turned, pulled his gun, and bashed it into the window of the Impala.
Glass exploded like confetti all around them.
Sam had seen Dean go ape-shit on the car before - and since the car was basically an extension of Dean, it had freaked him out to no end - but not over a goddamn lost breakfast, and not like this, with just his hands and feet. When Dean started kicking the door in with his steel-toed work-boots, Sam's brain finally caught up to itself and he reacted, snagged Dean around the middle and worked on dragging him backwards. All muscle and sinew and raw emotion, Dean managed to jerk away from him, but dropped the gun in the process.
Sam snatched it up quickly and shoved it in the waistband of his jeans. “Dean!”
After a fruitless effort, he gave up on dragging Dean anywhere and just pressed him up over the hood of the car, like the police would if they showed up and got a look at the armoury in the trunk of this thing, which was likely to happen if Dean didn’t snap out of it in the next ten seconds. “Stop it!” Sam hissed as Dean bucked under him. “Just stop it. Stop. Someone’s gonna call the cops and we’ll be screwed in about ten different ways. You hear me?”
After a few terrifying minutes of this, Dean went limp.
Sam kept his hands firm on him, just in case, hustled him back to the motel room and sat him on the bed and pulled their duffels out, trembling all over.
“What’re you doing?” Dean said. He was as docile as anything now.
“I’m packing our shit up,” Sam told him flatly.
“Oh,” Dean said, eyelashes struggling weakly against pale cheeks. “I think I gotta go to sleep for a little while.” He listed to the side. Sam packed faster, opened the door to bring their stuff to the car and his stomach bottomed out when he got a good look at it.
He didn’t let himself dwell on it, made time hurrying back to his brother. “Dean, hey, hey, open your eyes. Open ‘em up. There you go.” He patted at Dean’s clammy neck, found his pulse. It was much too quick, but steady enough. “Stand up. Can you stand up for me? We’re out of here.”
Dean stood up under his own power, but let Sam manhandle him into the passenger seat.
Miles away in a gas station parking lot bathroom, Sam locked the door and did what he could for Dean, which he could see with dawning fear, wasn’t nearly enough. Put alcohol on his cuts, stitched up a gouge in his right arm, pressed a wet washcloth, stolen from another motel three states back, to Dean’s neck and face. A lukewarm bottle of water from the car he poured down Dean’s throat.
“Is my baby okay?” Dean said at some point. Some water dribbled unchecked off the bottom of his chin.
“She’s busted up a little,” Sam told him, tenuously calm. “But you’ll fix her up, no problem.” He saw Dean’s eyes getting heavy again. “You tired? Hold on just a bit longer, okay? I’m going to have to put a splint on these two fingers here.”
“They’re fine.”
“They’re really not,” Sam said, harsher than he meant to, although Dean didn’t seem to notice that, or much of anything. His head kept dipping down; he was falling asleep propped up against a dirty wall in this pit. Sam wanted to hit him, to hold him, to not let go of him for fucking ever. “Wake up, Dean. I’m resetting the bones now, all right?”
“S’okay,” Dean said with sleepy gentleness. “Just do it.”
So Sam picked up Dean’s shattered hand.
*
Sam had checked them into another motel as soon as they crossed state-lines, and Dean had crashed hard, not even twitching when Sam lost himself for a moment and slammed the bathroom door so hard against the doorjamb that the paint cracked. But now he was waking up; Sam could tell from his breathing.
Dean slowly untangled himself from the bed-sheets. “What’s goin’ on?” he husked, coughing against his uninjured wrist.
“Seriously?” Sam said shortly.
Dean sat gingerly on the edge of the bed, saw that Sam had taken off his boots for him, his jeans. His gaze roamed the room, restless. “Where are my pants?” he said. “Gimme my pants, man.”
“Sure,” Sam said. “After you tell me what the hell happened this morning.”
“Oh, goddamn it,” Dean said, lurching off the bed and heading for the door and the Impala, like maybe he really hadn't known what was going on until Sam had reminded him.
Sam caught him around the shoulders and pushed him towards the window instead. “Dean, god, you’re not even dressed. You don’t wanna scare the children, c’mon.”
“Fuck,” Dean said. “Fuck. Fuck.” Abruptly, he slapped a hand against the wall.
“Hey,” Sam said. “You’re not gonna trash the room too, are you?” He was half joking, but his alarm was genuine.
Dean yanked the curtain back so the parking lot was in view, moaned low in the back of his throat when he saw the damage.
Sam snapped his fingers at him. “What’s going on with you, Dean?”
Dean shrugged a one-shouldered shrug, still looking pained. “I don’t think I’m getting enough sleep, is all,” he said, which wasn’t exactly a newsflash.
“Neither of us sleep through the night half the time, man,” Sam said, incredulous. “But you don’t see me having a meltdown over some freakin’ doughnuts.”
There was nothing Dean could really say to that.
Sam braced himself. “You remember after you came back from the pit,” he said after a few beats, “and I tried to tell you maybe you had something going on, like PTSD, or-”
Dean cut him off. “Stay the fuck off the internet, Sam, and stay the fuck out of my head,” he said, weariness taking some of the sting out of the words.
“Dean, c’mon,” Sam said, frowning.
“If I have this thing, then why the hell don’t you have it too?” Dean demanded unexpectedly.
“What, you want me to?” Sam demanded back, softening when Dean flinched at his words. “I don’t know, man,” he said. “Maybe because I finally made some kind of peace with all this - our lives - when I jumped in that hole, and you didn’t get a chance to do that, or maybe because some people just- get it, you know?”
“Because they’re weak, right,” Dean said with a mean curl to his mouth. “And you’re not.”
Sam breathed in and out, deeply, once, twice. “Okay, okay,” Sam said, and he’d been meaning to say this to Dean for ages, wasn’t sure he had the words for it, but now was gonna have to be the time to try. “Look, when I said that about you- I just had to believe that I could do something, be someone who could actually do something about anything, because I couldn’t save Jess, and I couldn’t get you out of the pit, Dean, and I was just so angry all the time, at myself because I couldn’t do shit for you when it mattered the most-“
“Sam, you don’t have to say all this shit,” Dean said, softer now too. “Seriously, man, we’re over it.”
“I don’t think we are,” Sam said.
“Look, I know you tried. It went wrong. But I know you tried, real hard. I always knew that.”
“Just let me get this out, okay? I was angry at myself, and I was angry at you, for just not getting that you dying would hurt me just as bad as me dying hurt you. I mean, you still don’t get that, do you?”
Dean looked sick again.
“When I thought about it all, Dean, I felt- I’d wake up in the morning and it would be like I was paralyzed. That was how it felt. But now I know that I’m not, that I don’t have to be. That at least I can move when it’s time to move. Do what needs to be done.” Sam made himself keep going. “Is that how you feel, man?” he asked. “Like you’re-”
“Don’t.”
“You’re angry,” Sam said. “And you’re scared, right? Dean, give me something here.”
Dean was quiet for nearly a full minute. Sam waited him out. Finally, he said, “No.”
“No?”
There was another long pause.
“You can talk to me, Dean. It isn’t like before,” Sam said.
Dean, despite his aversion to talking shit over, had always been easier to split wide open than Sam, because he waited until all the emotions inside of him had built up to seismic levels that just couldn’t be contained any longer, every time. And then he’d lose it, just a little, just enough to keep on going the way he was going. Sam didn’t have to talk as much. He got angry before it got to that point. It was the one good thing about the anger that had been hounding him his whole life. When it wasn’t screwing him over, it kept him sane.
Of course, mostly it just screwed him over.
Not that now was really the time to contemplate who’s coping skills were shittier.
“Talk to me, Dean,” he said. “Please.”
“I dunno,” Dean said suddenly. “I freak out over random shit. I never used to- Like this morning, I felt so bad, man, and then I dropped that friggin’ bag, and I felt so bad, I felt so bad-” Shockingly, Dean’s face began to slowly crumple in on itself. “I’m just so tired, Sammy.”
It was something Dean had been telling him for years now, since after dad, and Sam had heard it, yeah, but he hadn’t heard it this clear, hadn’t wanted to associate his big brother with it, hadn’t been able to, honestly, with everything else they’d had going on, demanding their attention. But there was no missing it now.
“Dean,” he said, daring to reach out and clasp his brother around the shoulders, almost, but not quite a hug. “Hey, Dean.”
But Dean was already gathering himself back together.
“Maybe we should go to Bobby’s for awhile,” Sam suggested. It probably wasn’t a solution, but it was the quickest one he could think of, and the only one Dean might agree to. “Take some actual time off.”
Dean started shaking his head before Sam had even finished talking.
“You need a break, man. Don’t tell me you don’t. We need a break.”
Dean looked towards the window again.
“Hey,” Sam said. “Don’t worry about it. You can fix everything up when we get to Bobby’s, okay?”
“We can’t just drop a case,” Dean said, voice hardening again. “That’s not what we do. And we’re damn sure not going to start now, because I need my beauty sleep or whatever. No fucking way.”
“Dean.”
“No.”
Dean looked so stupid, standing there in his underwear. He was infuriating. Sam loved him so much. So, he reluctantly gave in. “Then we’ll go to the shop,” he said, “and you’ll just have to deal with someone else putting their hands on your baby. But we are taking a break after this case, do you hear me?”
“Can I have my pants now or what?” Dean said, subdued.
“I don’t know,” Sam said.
“You bossy bastard,” Dean said. “Yes, okay? Yes, I hear you.”
“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Sam said.
Dean ignored this. “I gotta see her,” he said plaintively, meaning the car, so Sam got him his goddamn pants.
*
It was a good hunt, as far as hunts went, and Dean was in a good mood afterward, the pyromaniac. Salt and burns almost always put him in a good mood. He didn’t even mind grave-digging so long as he got to light some shit up in the end.
Since their talk last week, he’d been better anyway - more animated, brighter-eyed. Sam let himself relax, a little. That was a mistake. But he didn’t know that yet.
They made a liquor store run that night, played the extremely bastardized version of Texas Hold ‘Em they’d made up as kids late into the night, and for one of the only times in his life Sam drank Dean under the table. “You,” Dean said. ’S’cheating. Imma make up a new rule.”
“Yeah?” Sam said, amused.
“Yeah,” Dean said. “No giants allowed. You weigh like, fifty times more than me, man, what the hell. You remember when you were little-” He trailed off, blinking.
Sam picked up the thread for him. “Hey,” he said. “Remember when we made up this game? Dad was so pissed. If he was gonna raise a couple of hustlers, we’d better play by the rules, right? That still doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Dean brightened back up. “’S a good game, though. We should market it, like Monopoly or some shit. Get a patent pending.”
“Great idea,” Sam said. “You get on that in the morning.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Dean said.
*
Dean was sick again.
At first they both assumed he was just hungover, but he was still throwing up at regular intervals into the early evening and Sam called foul.
It was some kind of virus. When the cough started, Sam hoped against hope for another cold, a relapse, something relatively easy, but by midnight Dean was feverish and coughing relentlessly, his eyelids weighted down by illness as much as by the rest of it.
“This came on pretty quick,” Sam said conversationally, watchful. “Sounds like the flu.”
Dean nodded blankly, and Sam knew he hadn’t heard a word. He pressed the tissues Sam had brought him from the bathroom to his face and coughed and coughed and coughed, but seemed incapable of much else. If he dropped one he was lost wheezing into his chest until he caught Sam staring at him. Then he’d go for the tissue box, fingers fumbling clumsily.
He was shutting down, again.
For awhile, Sam sat in front of his lap-top and re-read all the shit he’d previously looked up about trauma survivors, depression, PTSD, trying to calm himself the fuck down.
It didn’t work, and when Dean gasped, Sam looked at him sharply. Dean was propped up on pillows, mouth twisted down. At first Sam wasn’t sure what he was going to do, but then he directed a sneeze at the waiting tissue, and then a few more for good measure. He followed them up with a coughing fit, wet and crackling, and then one last miserable sneeze. He dropped the tissue in his lap afterward, sat there panting like a dog, his eyes and nose running unchecked.
Sam couldn’t stand it. He climbed off his bed and went over to Dean’s. “Here, man,” Sam said, gently pressing a fresh tissue at him. Dean took it, but he did nothing with it this time, just clenched his fist around it.
Sam reached out again and guided his brother’s hand, hot with fever, to his dampened face.
*
Dean’s fever was soaring in the morning, his lips and nose chapped pink. He didn’t sit up when Sam pushed water at him, just blinked up at him with a vacant countenance. “Dean, you have to drink something,” Sam said sternly, and Dean, thank god, struggled his way into a vertical position at the tone of voice. Then immediately bent at the waist, wheezing. Holding his head up fully seemed difficult for him.
More so than it should have been, high fever or not.
This isn’t fair, Sam thought, something he’d avoided thinking his whole life because it would do nothing but make him crazy. But it wasn’t fair, after everything, all of it, goddamn it, for Dean to feel like this, like he had to check out like this all the time in order to survive.
“I’m gonna take your temp,” Sam said with determination.
“’S fine,” Dean roused himself to say. “’M fine. Not that sick.”
It was the first thing Sam had heard him say in nearly 24 hours. “Yeah, well,” he said, and went and got the first aid kit.
It was 102, which was bad, but not that bad. Of course it wasn’t really the fever that had Sam worried anyway. It was all the rest of it.
Dean was winding up again for a sneeze, breath hitching. He mashed a palm against his nose this time around, resulting in an indefinable sound.
“You sound fucking awful,” Sam said, handing him a tissue. “Here you go.”
Dean hmmed his thanks, but he was clearly struggling in more ways than one, couldn’t even lift the tissue halfway to his face before he let his arm fall back onto the mattress in apathy. Then he sneezed again.
“I want to dip your face in a vat of Purell,” Sam tried to joke, voice shaking.
“Ha ha,” Dean said, and coughed, and yawned.
“Yeah, you go back to sleep,” Sam said. “I’ll be here.”
“Don’t stare at me when I’m sleepin’ anymore, man,” Dean told him before he dropped off. “It’s freakin’ creepy.”
But Sam kept staring. He couldn’t help it.
*
“Where are we?” Dean said when he woke up the second time, and Sam didn’t think much of it at first. It wasn’t uncommon when they were in between cases for them to lose track of their bearings.
“Colorado,” Sam said without missing a beat. He was reading the Bible from the night-table for something to do, which was a stupid idea because it pissed him off, made him sad, made him too many things all at once.
“Sammy?” Dean said, and he sounded so strange, voice wrecked and low from fever, but weirdly high too, the way Sam remembered him sounding when they were both teenagers.
Sam dropped the Bible onto his bed. “What’s going on, kiddo?” he said, but Dean didn’t answer him. He looked as terrible as he sounded, apple-red splotches high on his cheeks. He was shaking his head like he had water in his ears.
Sam went over and felt his forehead, but couldn’t tell if it was any warmer. He didn’t think so. Dean didn’t try to duck the touch, just blinked at him, eyes wide, but dreamy, wandering. He didn’t seem at all scared when he said, “Something’s wrong.”
“What?” Sam said, a surge of adrenaline making him a bit lightheaded. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s all wrong.”
“What is?” Sam said.
“I can’t- I just can’t think. Why are we in California. I don’t even like California.”
“Dean, we’re not in California,” Sam told him, beyond unsettled. “We’re in Colorado. We were hunting a Wendigo. We finished the hunt, and then you got sick. You remember that?”
“I’m sick?” Dean said.
“Yeah, you sure are,” Sam said, stroking his hand through Dean’s sweat-soaked hair to re-check his temperature, frowning hard.
“That’s why it’s all wrong, then,” Dean said.
“Hey. Let’s try this again,” Sam said, holding the thermometer in front of his brother’s face. “You know the drill.”
His temperature was down to 100. It should have been good news, but the fact that none of this crap could be explained by delirium made Sam feel sick himself. What was this? What the hell was this? Could PTSD do this?
Or maybe Dean was having a brain aneurysm.
Either way, Sam was about ready to lose his mind.
“Dean,” he said, and made a split-second decision, took the option that was usually reserved for bullets to the belly, bleeding out, impending death. “We’re going to the hospital. Get up, c’mon.”
He was expecting Dean to shoot this idea down, even now, but Dean stood as ordered, sick legs trembling, knees knocking.
“Okay,” Sam said, flustered. “Sit back down. We should get your shoes on. Can you get your shoes on?”
“We shouldn’t be going to the hospital. Dad’ll kill us,” Dean said, which probably meant no, he couldn’t get his shoes on.
“I know,” Sam said with grim resolve. “But we’re going anyway.”
*
When they asked Dean his name at the hospital, he said, “Winchester, Dean,” like he was in the goddamn army.
It seemed to be about the only thing he was sure of, and Sam felt like the biggest asshole on earth, saying, “That’s not his name,” and having Dean peer at him with wounded confusion. He held his brother’s current fake ID out for inspection. “He’s not making any sense. I don’t- What's happening? Please."
Has he ingested any drugs? the doctors wanted to know. Has he been diagnosed with anything? Has he been depressed lately, withdrawn? Has he gone through any kind of trauma recently?
Sam wanted to laugh and never stop, but figured that wouldn’t go over so well. And Dean-
Dean needed him to keep it together.
He managed to keep it halfway together, at least, through a plethora of tests that freaked him out more than they did Dean.
The preliminary diagnosis, after all physical causes had been ruled out, was that Dean was in a dissociative state. This was explained to them both while Sam nodded in all the wrong places, stricken, watching out of the corner of his eye as Dean absently pulled his hospital bracelet tight enough to cut off circulation and held it there.
As evening crept back around, his brother started throwing up at regular intervals again, and every time he was through, he’d stay flopped over his own knees like a ragdoll until Sam re-arranged him back against the pillows. His limbs were oddly malleable and would stay wherever they were moved.
The doctors had a name for that too. Waxy flexibility. Whatever the fuck that meant. Sam couldn't even think right now, about what it meant. He couldn’t think about catatonic signs either. He actually physically couldn’t. Every time he did, his heartbeat would stutter alarmingly. His ears would start ringing. His thought processes would grind to a stop.
“I wanna wake up,” was the first and only thing Dean said during that long, nightmarish night.
“It’s okay, Dean, you’re okay, you’re awake,” Sam soothed, running a hand up and down Dean’s arm, where goosebumps kept rising up despite his best efforts. “Hey. You back with me now?”
Dean’s head lolled forward in a nod. It was clear that he wasn’t, not all the way, but Sam found he could usually get his attention if he tapped him gently and repeatedly on the inside of his wrist.
At first he’d tried to keep his distance, give his brother some space, but he wasn’t sure that that was what Dean needed, if he should stick close instead. So after Dean round up for another bout of vomiting, Sam tried wrapping his arms around him, holding him while Dean spit bile and the nothing that was in his stomach into the pink emesis basin a nurse kindly held in front of his face. “I got it, thank-you,” Sam said, taking it from her. “Just give us a few minutes, okay?”
Dean retched until they was nothing left and then stayed there, hunched over himself.
Sam rearranged him back against the pillows. “There you go,” he said, and then stopped dead, at a loss.
Later, the nurse came back and wiped Dean’s face off with a cloth, gentle and efficient. That was good. Sam couldn’t think, but he should have thought of that.
*
In the deadest part of the night, Sam stood in the hospital parking lot, a zombie. They said that there was always something in your head - even when you were thinking about nothing you were thinking about something - but he didn’t know about that.
He had no idea how long he’d been standing there before he called Bobby.
“Dean’s in the hospital,” he said bluntly. “He’s all right. I mean- except- he’s-” His mind went blank again. Dumbly, he wondered if catatonia was catching.
“Talk to me, son,” Bobby said.
“He’s out of it, Bobby. Like, completely- not even on this planet. I’m so out of my league here I don’t even-”
“Start at the beginning,” Bobby interjected, very quietly.
“I can’t,” Sam said. “I really can’t right now, I’m sorry. But uh- he’s not doing so good. Mentally. Or physically either, actually. Goddamn it.”
Bobby paused. Then, “Is this something supernatural?”
“It’s- no, it’s not,” Sam admitted, and he felt so fucking terrible saying it, worse even than he thought he had room for feeling at that moment.
“I’m coming down there,” Bobby said. “You tell him I’m coming down there.”
“We should have come to see you the other week,” Sam said. “We were going to. But I thought he was okay.”
“He will be,” Bobby said.
“I thought we were okay,” Sam said helplessly.
“Sammy,” Bobby said, like he never did.
Sam took a deep breath. “Don’t come down here,” he said. “I thought maybe we could come to you instead. We gotta split soon anyway. Our insurance- Uh, would that be- okay?”
“You better haul ass, boy,” was Bobby’s answer.
“Yes, sir,” Sam said. He disconnected, sat on the curb and listened as ambulance sirens shrieked closer. Thought of absolutely nothing.
*
Halfway to Bobby’s, Dean started crying, and didn’t stop. This was only marginally better than the frightening emptiness that had threatened to swallow them both whole the past couple of days.
Sam pulled the car over, and Dean was hiding his face with one shaking arm. Sam tugged it down, too easily. “It’s going to be okay, Dean,” he said. “Once we get to Bobby’s-”
Dean sniffed, wiped his nose with his sleeve, then his splotchy face, only succeeding in smearing the tears around. “You know, that’s what you said, right before you jumped. In that hole,” he said, voice cracking from a lethal combination of sadness, infection, profound exhaustion.
“I know,” Sam said, blinking back tears himself. “But I was talking about the world then. Now I’m talking about you. Just you. And me. And I’m telling you it’s gonna be okay.”
“Where are we going again?” Dean asked wetly.
“Oh, shit, Dean. Dean,” Sam said, hooking him around the neck with an arm and dragging him in. He’d never been the physically demonstrative one out of the two of them, but there was nothing to do for this - his big brother in so many pieces in front of him - but to reach out, hold on. He’d hold on forever if Dean needed him to.
Dean kept crying.
*
At Bobby’s, Sam usually slept on the sofa, Dean on the floor, but this time they stayed in the room they’d shared as children. And just like when they were children, Sam pushed their cots together. It seemed like the thing to do.
“What’re you doing?” Dean said. He stood dazedly in the doorway, muffling a coughing fit into the hem of his shirt.
“What’s it look like I’m doing?” Sam said.
Dean shuffled over, flopped down. He’d ceased to care.
“Here, get under the covers, why don’t you,” Sam said. “Get some sleep. And later I’ll bring you a pudding cup, and you’re gonna eat it.”
“Oh, yeah?” Dean said after one too many seconds. “And then what’s on the agenda, boss?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Sam said. “I’m gonna take care of you.”
Sam was just saying whatever he could think of to keep Dean in the present, with him where he belonged, but somehow it seemed he’d stumbled onto the one perfect thing to say to Dean right now, the one thing no one had ever said to him before, because when Dean started crying this time, it wasn’t the choked-off sobbing of before. It was unrestrained, and all the lighter for it. Relieved.
It was the middle of the afternoon, but Sam crawled right into their makeshift bed. Settled in next to his brother’s familiar warmth.