I’ve Got a Fever
Here's another fic from
spnflashfic. Enjoy!
Title: I’ve Got a Fever, and the Only Prescription is MORE COWBELL
Author:
malcolm_stjay
Warnings: Kinda stupid. Kinda gross. HORRIBLY clichéd ending, which I apologise for in advance.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 800
Disclaimer: Not mine, and I’m making ZERO DOLLARS.
Summary: Sam is sick. Dean is Dean.
It came on fairly suddenly. On Friday, Sam was making out half-heartedly with an admittedly cute little Asian wearing pleather, garters, and fishnets while Dean peer-pressured him from the back of the bar, and on Saturday he was pretty sure he was running a fever.
He kept smushing his face on the car’s cool window, and surreptitiously laying the back of his hand on his forehead. Dean sang along to Zeppelin and didn’t notice, until they stopped at a gas station. Sam staggered back from the bathroom and smiled, with his teeth, and explained how the pattern of hauntings in Maryland were troubling him.
Dean heard something about trees and ghosts and the Cosbys. There were a lot of pauses for laughter that included Sam’s eyes rolling back into his head until there was a lot of white showing. He chalked it up to some weird bathroom fumes and a longing to belong to a rich black family with a crazy but loving dad, and made a note to piss at the side of the road instead of risking crazy-gas.
By Sunday, Sam had it under control, he was pretty sure. The fever was gone, and all that was left was a bit of pressure on his face. Which rapidly spiralled out of control and turned into a lot of pressure on his eyes and nose, like the mucus was pushing a bulge onto the front of his head. In the shower, he could feel it loosening up and blew it out to the drain with a mighty exhale of relief.
Ten minutes later he was dry, and the snot had exploded out of the tub and back into his head. His throat hurt and he had a headache and Dean was prancing around like a pretty little picture of perfect health. Sam eyed him enviously, until Dean handed him a packet of Halls and he almost, almost mind you, teared up. Until he looked at the remaining tabs and discovered they were covered in lint.
He spent the day horking out the window on the flat slice of Minnesota. Dean made a sympathetic noise every time, sometimes grunting encouragements like, “Ooh, good one Sammy. Get it all out,” and “Better out than in,” and, cryptically, “Take that, Lundegaard.” It made the whole thing less disgusting, which was sort of sad when he thought about it. After some careful consideration, Sam decided he was too sick to think about it, and rolled the window down again.
At night he listened to Dean sleep the sleep of the healthy. There seemed to be a lot of snoring and mumbles of, “Oh yeah Peaches, put it on the table” involved in the sleep of the healthy, and Sam was feeling pretty damn envious. When he was flat, the snot all bunched up in his head and settled heavily on his brain. When he sat up the mucus receded, accompanied with relief not unlike that experienced when he finally took a piss after holding it for three hours. It was like the tide, he told himself in lieu of crying when he laid back down and it all came flooding back.
Five horrible days after the diseased little Asian, he was breathing through his mouth and trying to stop his eyeballs from falling out of his head.
Dean kept stopping and buying chicken soup on fake credit cards, blowing on it until it was cool enough for Sam to drink with slitted eyes. He put a disused copy of the Temptations on, and took to rubbing Sam’s head until they both fell asleep. He suffered through the discarded Kleenex and growled threateningly at Sam when he dropped them on the mats instead of punching him in the face.
Sam sighed a lot, and made pained stuffy noises, and spent a lot of their down time with his face on the cool bathroom floor, breathing in Dean’s steam.
A week and a half after it all began, just as Dean was starting to look up questionable cold remedies on the internet, the cold was gone.
Sam cleaned the tissues out of the Impala under Dean’s watchful eye, and took pleasure in breathing. Dean pointed out missed Kleenex and took pleasure in making dumb cracks about Bird Flu. Sam rolled his eyes and smudged his shoes on the leather and grumbled comments about how did it take a guy 10 days to come up with Bird Flu jokes. Dean squawked at the leather and made rude gestures, and when they pulled out of the motel’s lot he slammed Blue Oyster Cult into the tape deck and bellowed, “MORE COWBELL” in Sam’s ear.
They both decided, unspoken and separate, that while normal was a relative concept, their normal was good to be back to.
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