SPN FIC: Legos we Have Known
Title: Legos we Have Known
Characters: Sam, Dean, Bobby
Word count: 990
Summary: Coda to 6.22., sequel to “…and God has Turned his Back.”
Warnings: alcoholic!Dean, Sam!POV, angst
Disclaimer:Not my sandbox.
Notes: Two things: 1. I DID IT. I WHUMPED DEAN. 2. This is part 2 of a 3-part season 6 coda tentatively called The Lost Summer Trilogy.
Sam sits next to Dean. He doesn’t talk to Bobby. He sniffs every cup of coffee that Bobby hands him. He doesn’t trust anything that he hasn’t brewed himself.
Bobby’s never drugged Sam, but Sam doesn’t know that. The past few weeks are a hazy blur of night terrors and day terrors and tumblers full of whiskey; waking up with Dean’s arms tight around his waist, his voice low and insistent in his ear, “You’re okay. You’re okay.” Then there was Dean’s calloused hands holding his head up, smoothing his hair, sneaking sips from the glass he brought upstairs, pressing the same glass against Sam’s lips and saying, “Go slow,” when Sam gags on the bitter taste of bottom shelf liquor and pulverized Ambien.
He comes to in the afternoon with a fuzzy tongue and a throbbing head. Dean is already three sheets to the wind and Bobby asks, “Water or whiskey,” when Sam finally makes it down the stairs.
Sam croaks, “Whiskey,” and Bobby hands him water from the tap.
So it isn’t all Bobby’s fault. And Sam isn’t pissed at Bobby. Not really. He just…he thinks about all those times that Bobby could have handed Dean a glass of water when he asked for whiskey.
Sam doesn’t talk to Bobby, but he has plenty of words for Dean: a halting litany of “Asshole. Fucking s-stupid asshole,” and “P-p-please be okay.”
He tells Dean about dumping it all down the sink; every last bottle, even the good stuff, even the sacramental wine that Bobby kept in the cabinet next to the holy oil and the meadowsweet and the jar of pickled frogs. He tells Dean that when he gets better, they’re taking a v-vacation, a real one, to Vegas or Hollywood or maybe just some quiet cabin in the woods. Sam briefly considered signing them up to be fire lookouts in the middle-of-nowhere-Northern-Washington. He thought they could dry out up in the mountains. He thought maybe they’d get lucky and some hiker would steal a smoke on the side of a trail and they could figure out how to be heroes again.
Then Sam thinks about how his skin feels when it melts off, when it peels away, when it scabs over in thick, pink ridges…and he throws up in a trash bin next to Dean’s bed. He goes to the mirror across the room and looks for the scars that he knows should be there and when Bobby wordlessly takes his wrists and lowers his arms, leads him back to the chair next to Dean, Sam can’t find it in himself to say thank you, so he hangs his head and tries not to marvel at the unmarred skin on his hands.
He tells Dean about tripping over him in the bathroom when he rolled out of bed that afternoon and how he was too tired, too high, too screwed-up to do anything but scream until Bobby came up the steps with a shotgun. There was blood on Dean’s lips and Sam couldn’t even focus enough to take his pulse.
Sam thinks of the Legos John used to splurge on because Dean asked him to, all bright green eyes and promises not to let the baby stick them in his mouth. He thinks about thinking, indignantly, “I’m not a baby, I’m FOUR, DEAN,” and remembers when his wingspan was less than Dean’s and Dean loved it and dumped the little blocks out on the seat as they rumbled through Arkansas and Missouri and Iowa, when the cornstalks were taller than the Impala’s roof and it was like driving through a golden sea.
They would find renegade Legos crammed into the seats well into Sam’s teens and Dean said, “I would have appreciated that a lot more when I was eight” when Sam beaned one at his head. It landed in the seat between them and Dean scooped it up, crammed it into the vent in the dashboard with a victorious smile.
“And you wondered why Dad stopped buying them for you.”
“Aside from the fact that I hit puberty?”
“You were really good at building stuff with them. Chicks dig Legos, you know.”
Dean shot him a look and said, “And you keep wondering why no one wants to fuck you. And I totally sucked at building them. I don’t think I ever finished a single model.”
And it doesn’t matter that Sam’s memory is rife with nights spent on motel floors while Dean shoots balled-up candy wrappers at his army men on fully-functional miniature catapults. Dean wanted to build the spaceship on the front of the box. He wanted to follow the instruction manual.
Dean always liked knowing what he was supposed to do.
These days, it’s Sam who wishes someone would hand him a script.
Dean doesn’t have any lines here. Having a tube crammed down your throat tends to restrict your ability to deliver them.
The nurses act like Dean is some sort of addict, like he’s a dead man walking. They act like Sam is some sort of martyr with his hand anchored to Dean’s arm, halting voice spitting out stories about better days and promises that won’t mean much if Dean doesn’t want them when he wakes up.
Tomorrow, the doctors say. They’ll bring him out of it tomorrow. The hemorrhage site in Dean’s stomach is healing up nicely. His blood work looks good. It all looks good, and Sam can almost hear them thinking, until the moron gets released, gets plastered, gets himself all ready for another round of organ failure.
“I’m gonna t-take care of you.” Sam says and lays his head near Dean’s shoulder. Bobby looks away and Sam thinks right there, that’s the fucking problem. He drapes an arm over Dean’s chest and squeezes defiantly.
When Dean wakes up, Sam won’t tell him about going up to the roof with a bunch of candles and herbs and using an angel summons to talk to God.
He won’t tell him how the only thing that answered back was the traffic on the street below, or how a small part of him, the part that wakes up in the middle of the night and smells burnt hair in the living room and occasionally washes his hands four times in a row for no reason at all; the part that r-r-remembers, was a little bit relieved.