Roses in December (2/14)
The Experiment in Fanfiction™ continues. Not much happening in this chapter, alas. This is me getting a feel for the character I haven't paid attention to, yet. So, uh, yeah. It's a) a whole lot introspective and b) a whole lot of nothing happens.
There'll be more action later, I promise. :)
Master Post
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Jess smoked her first cigarette when she was twelve years old. She was in the girl's washroom with her then best friend Marcia Harris when they stumbled onto a bunch of the senior girls lighting up a cigarette and passing it between them, standing by the window to make sure all the smoke blew away. They smirked at the shell-shocked look on the younger girls' faces, and the leader, Cindy Johnson, who was pretty and popular and was dating the captain of the basketball team, casually blew a cloud of smoke in their direction.
“Marcia, isn't it? Marcia Marcia Marcia,” she said, as though she was the first to come up with that particular joke. “You still a square, Marcia?” she held out the cigarette, ignoring the feeble protests of her cronies. What Cindy wanted, Cindy got, and apparently what she wanted was for Marcia and Jess to show that they weren't too chicken to have a smoke.
The girls laughed when Marcia choked and coughed, and Jess was determined not to give them the satisfaction, and thus began an eight-year relationship with nicotine that was furtive and smouldering and frustrating and exciting in its illicitness. When she was fifteen it made her cool, a rebel. When she was eighteen it made her sexy and attractive to the bad boys in school. When she was not-quite-twenty it made her arty and approachable, until she met Sam Winchester. All six feet and four inches of very handsome, very earnest dork, who never said anything to her about the cigarettes except to diffidently offer her a stick of mint gum before they'd make out, and couldn't quite manage to hide the fact that he'd start to wheeze a little if she smoked too long in the same room with him.
So she quit, and to his credit he put up with the crankiness, the mood swings, the random cravings, and the ten pounds she gained and didn't lose for well over six months. He bought her gum and nicotine patches and a ridiculously cute teddy bear with a little heart sewn on its chest that was so corny she put it on their chest of drawers and mocked him for being a girl for the better part of a year. He blushed, laughed under his bangs, and didn't argue with her.
Now she finds herself sitting on the steps of a hospital, undoing a year's worth of hard work, with the brother of the man for whom she thought it was worth it to quit a habit she'd had almost half a lifetime.
“I don't smoke around Sammy either,” Dean says one evening, seemingly out of nowhere, staring at the sky where she can barely make out a few stars because of the light pollution. “Hearing him get all wheezy makes me feel guilty as hell. Plus, he gives me this look, like I've drowned a basketful of kittens.”
Jess makes a sound that's somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “I know exactly what you mean. It's why I quit. I can't stomach the thought of the thousands of kittens I must have murdered in my lifetime when he's around.”
She looks over at him, cigarette dangling between his index and middle fingers, silver ring glinting dully in the evening light. His hands are smaller than Sam's, the fingers a bit more delicate-looking -though Sam's hands are beautiful themselves- but they've seen harder usage, covered in tiny scars, and a few of the fingers are crooked, as though they broke and didn't heal properly. She doesn't know this man at all, knows less about him than she does about Sam, and that's saying something. Right here, sitting next to her, is a huge chunk of Sam that she's been missing this whole time, and she never realized it was missing until it barged into the hospital and made itself known, loudly.
He laughs too, quietly. “I'm going to get the most epic bitchface in all history when he catches us smelling of smoke. He'll probably accuse me of corrupting you.”
If he ever wakes up, she thinks, but doesn't say it aloud. “He knows I'm not easily corrupted.”
He glances at her, just a slight tilt of the head, eyes sliding toward her, and the gesture is so Sam that her breath catches in her throat. “Yeah, I guess you wouldn't be.”
*
For all that Dean manages to swagger his way through the hospital as though he owns the place, handles nurses and doctors and candy stripers with the same casual arrogance combined with a strange cocky charm that seems to compel them to do whatever he wants, he falls apart entirely when it comes to dealing with her friends -Sam's friends too, she reminds herself. He retreats, doesn't quite stammer, but he loses all his ability to weasel his way in and out of conversations he doesn't want.
After the first awkward conversation she finds herself stepping in, almost protectively. Charlie Wells has him backed into a metaphorical corner, demanding to know why he's here after all this time when it was clear Sam didn't want him around, and she can see pain and anger warring on Dean's face. She steps in as much to save Dean as she does to prevent him from decking Charlie right then and there, puts a hand on Charlie's arm.
“Charlie, this isn't the time. You think Sam wants you picking a fight with his brother here? Now? Get a grip.”
Charlie relaxes a fraction, steps back, blows out a breath. “Whatever. You need anything, Jess? All you gotta do is ask.”
“Thanks, Charlie. Not much to do right now except wait. Why don't you get going, and I'll keep you guys posted, okay?”
He directs a glare at Dean. “Fine. You gonna be okay here?”
“We're fine,” she stresses the words a bit, making sure he understands that Dean isn't going anywhere, that she won't put up with this sort of bullshit, and she's lucky that Charlie is sensitive enough to get it. He nods.
“You got my number. Anytime you want, anything you need. Same goes for all of us.”
She gets up on her toes, kisses his cheek. “I know. Thank you.”
When she turns back, Dean has spun on his heel and is stalking toward the fire escape. She lets him go, returns to Sam's side. His hand is lying exactly where she left it the last time, and she strokes it with the tips of her fingers.
“Your brother's a good guy, Sam,” she says, watching his face. “I wish you'd told me more about him before. All I know now is that he's Dean, he chain-smokes when he's nervous -and we're both nervous now- and he looks the same as you do when he's embarrassed. You never even told me what he does for a living.”
She tells herself she imagined the twitch when she said Dean's name.
*
Dean won't tell her anything about himself, not at first. Doesn't explain the limp, shrugs off her attempt to ask about the scar at his hairline. Eventually he mutters something about an accident on a construction site.
“You work construction?”
“Sometimes. Depends.”
“Wow. Overshare, much?”
He snorts. “Sorry. I'm not in the habit of talking about my life.”
She toys with the idea of another cigarette, decides against it. She'll never quit again at this rate. “You and Sam both. You get hold of your father yet?”
He shakes his head. “Voicemail's full. Must not be any reception where he's at.”
“Uh-huh. So you said.”
“What's that supposed to mean?” he sounds defensive, and she raises her hands in a pacifying gesture.
“Nothing. I just... Sam told me he and your Dad didn't get along, that your Dad basically disowned him-”
“He said what?” Dean bounces to his feet like a coiled spring, face flushed, and she recoils, suddenly fearful. He moves like a tiger, and she has the vivid, unshakeable impression that if he wanted her dead, she'd be gone before she hit the floor. He catches her expression, visibly forces himself to be calmer, and she feels her heartbeat slow a bit. “It wasn't like that.”
“He didn't tell Sam not to come back if he went to college?”
Dean bites his lip, rubs the back of his neck. “Yeah, okay, he did, but he didn't mean it. Not like that.”
She nods. “So it was a fight, he said something he didn't mean, and Sam took him at his word. What's so bad about college, anyway?”
He just shakes his head. “Nothing. College is great,” he says, but she can hear the unspoken for other people at the end of his sentence. He doesn't volunteer why he and Sam aren't supposed to go to college.
“Did you ever want to go?”
He smirks, leans against the stair railing, the anxiety and barely-concealed anger suddenly gone beneath the mask of cool competency he usually wears. “Not my thing, sugar. I barely passed my GED, got other things to do.”
“What do you do, anyway?”
He shrugs. “I get by.”
She scowls, pulls a cigarette from the pack she bought for herself once it was obvious she wasn't going to stop right off. “And I thought Sam was evasive. I just want to know how long you can stay.”
“As long as I have to.”
“What about your father?”
“He'll come when he gets my messages.”
“Will he?”
He shrugs, and the look on his face makes her chest constrict a bit, because she can tell that he wants to say 'of course,' and can't bring himself to lie about it. “He will if he can. Anyway, what about your parents?”
“I asked them not to come. He's not their son, and I can't deal with the extra crazy of having my mother come in and criticize my housekeeping and my father trying to take charge of everything.”
“You think of staying with them for a while? If Sam... uh. If this lasts a lot longer.”
“No. We're settled in, and I wasn't planning on going home for the summer.”
“You okay for money?”
She tilts her head at him. “This from a guy who looks like he lives out of his car.”
“That's just the job.”
“The job you won't tell me about.”
“That's right.”
“We're fine, don't worry.”
To her surprise, he smiles, a little sadly. “I always worry about Sam.”
*
Two days turn into five, into a week, and Dean slots himself seamlessly into her life. She has to insist, at first, but once he's grudgingly accepted the cot in the tiny spare room she and Sam use as a study space, he settles a bit, allows himself to relax, and doesn't once complain about the fact that they're on a third-floor walk-up, even though there are days when she can tell it's a bitch for him to make it to the front door.
To her surprise, she finds he's a fanatically neat roommate. She's always assumed that Sam's obsessive-compulsive neatness was a trait singular to him, but Dean is just the same, almost military in his routines. The way he keeps his cot made, his toiletries in one very tiny zip-up bag, his duffel tucked under the foot of the cot, all remind her of her uncle Josh who was in the Corps for all those years. He was just the same, whenever he'd come to spend a weekend with them.
“So were you in the army or something?” she asks on the fourth day, watching him make up the cot with practised hands, making perfect hospital corners without so much as thinking about it.
“Nope.”
She sighs. “If I give you bacon, will you tell me more than that?”
He looks up, gives her a grin that makes him look all of five years old for a moment. “Maybe. There's not much I wouldn't do for bacon.”
“I'll throw in eggs, too,” she shakes her head, trying not to laugh and failing. But she makes good on her promise, and to her surprise he makes good on his.
“My Dad was a marine,” he says around a mouthful of bacon. “He taught me and Sammy everything he knows.”
“Everything?” she asks, earning herself a sharp look.
“Everything.”
She tries to imagine Sam wielding a gun, can't quite manage it. She keeps picturing him hunched over his desk, ankles hooked around the legs of his chair, hair askew as he studies for a philosophy midterm, chewing on the end of his pen.
“What will you do if -after he wakes up?”
He mops up egg yolk with a bit of toast, doesn't look at her. “Depends on Sammy. If he wants me to stick around for a while, I will. If not... I dunno. I guess I haven't thought about it much.”
“You can stay as long as you like,” she surprises herself by offering, and he looks just as surprised as she feels, eyebrows shooting up to his hairline, but he just nods, and she thinks that's probably as close as he ever gets to thanking people for favours for which he's too embarrassed to ask.
*
Dean surprises her by spending a lot of time researching comas and how they work, by peppering the doctors and nurses with questions. She wouldn't have thought him the type to have the patience or the willingness to do that sort of work, but does it, and ends up being surprisingly knowledgeable, absorbing the technical details like a sponge. He keeps her grounded, tells her when things are normal and when they aren't. She finds herself listening to him more than to the doctors sometimes, and she knows it should feel wrong, but it doesn't. Sometimes he feels like the only real lifeline she has, the only person she knows who really cares about Sam and not just because Sam is an extension of her. All of their friends are her friends, she knows it and Sam knew it -knows it, she corrects herself- but never seemed to mind, never resented the time she spent alone with them.
It's painful, watching Sam struggle out of his coma. It's strange, seeing him twitch and whimper on the bed. On television, coma patients just lie there, unresponsive, but it actually looks sometimes as though he's dreaming. He responds a bit to Dean's voice, rarely to hers, and she tries to pretend that the spike of jealousy she feels at that never happened. They've been brothers much longer than she and Sam have been dating, after all, it's only natural that Dean would be able to get through to him where she can't. She tells herself she doesn't resent him worming his way into their world, all affable and charming even when he's obviously worried out of his mind. It's weird, really, how good he is under the unrelenting pressure. Dean is the first to notice something's wrong -well, more wrong than it already is.
“He feels too warm,” he says, reaching up to brush the backs of his fingers against Sam's cheek. Sam's eyes are moving beneath the lids, but otherwise there's no indication that he's even alive. “I'm going to get someone.”
Ten minutes later they're banished from the room while the doctor and a bunch of nurses fuss over Sam, adjusting equipment and adding countless medications to his IV drip. The verdict comes back: ventilator-associated pneumonia. Then it's three days of mind-numbing anxiety, waiting to see if the infection will clear up, of watching Sam's flushed face, of wiping sweat away from him with a disinfected facecloth. Dean isn't as good about the waiting as she is, spends a lot of time pacing in the hallway, until he's limping so badly that she practically has to sit on him to get him to sit down.
“Hurting yourself isn't going to help him,” she says, as gently as she can, ignores the anger flashing in his eyes -the same colour as Sam's. They look nothing alike, except for their eyes.
“I'm not-”
“Look, I don't know why you're punishing yourself, here, but you need to stop, okay? I need you to hold it together. Sam needs you to hold it together,” she adds, because it's been long enough that she's figured out that the name Sam works like the bell on Pavlov's dogs with Dean. He jerks away, but he nods, face grey with pain and exhaustion. “He's okay for now. Why don't you go home, take a shower, grab some sleep. Come back tonight, and I'll do the same then, okay? Go on,” she says. “Don't make me order you.”
His head snaps up, expression unreadable, and he nods. “Right. Call me if there's anything, okay?”
“Of course.”
It's the same promise she's made every single time she's persuaded him to take a break, and she means it, every time. Or at least, she thinks she means it, until the first time Sam opens his eyes unprovoked, and she finds herself hesitating, wanting to be the first face that Sam sees. It's selfish and she knows it, but for a moment she lets herself think that maybe it's best if she leaves Dean where he is, because he's exhausted -they both are- and it's not like Sam is really all that responsive. She stays trapped in that loop of terrible, selfish thoughts for a good thirty seconds, and it feels like forever, until finally she tears herself away and runs to find Dean before her legs betray her and carry her right back to Sam's side.
*
Sam doesn't remember going to sleep, but he finds himself waking up again to walls that are that sickly green colour that only hospitals seem to think is a good idea. The ventilator tube is long gone, replaced by a nasal canula. He stares at the ceiling, which is white, at least, made up of those panels you find in hospitals and office buildings and especially dentists' offices. The kind that's easily removed so that maintenance staff can get to the air ducts without too much difficulty. It's a bitch to crawl around in them, because they're always full of dust, and he's kind of surprised that he knows that, because who the hell thinks about crawling around in ducts anyway? He tries to follow the train of thought to somewhere useful -maybe he's a maintenance guy or something, but none of it feels right. Even the name he has feels a little wrong, alien.
Retrograde amnesia. He remembers the term, remembers reading about it, or maybe hearing about it somewhere. Televison, maybe. That's what this is. Procedural memory is intact, so he remembers how to talk and about stuff he's read, but who he is, his whole life, is gone. Pfft. Just like that. His core is gone, and now he's just an empty, Sam-shaped shell. The thought makes something inside his chest clench so hard he thinks he might pass out.
His throat hurts, he realizes after a moment, his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth with thirst. He turns his head to see if there's water, flinches as even that small movement sends pain radiating through him. The room is empty, but there's a call button tied to the high bar on his bed, and after a moment of fumbling he manages to squeeze it in his fist. A moment later a nurse clad in scrubs that match the hospital walls is by his bed. Her name tag reads 'Sonia.' At least he can still read.
“Hi, Sam,” she smiles at him. “How're you feeling? Any pain?”
He nods. It's strange, having all these people call him by a name he doesn't recognize. “I'm thirsty, too.” His voice sounds harsh in his ears, and he's not sure if that's normal.
“Okay. You can have some water, and I'll show you how to work what one of my patients likes to call the 'magic machine.'”
He grins. “Morphine pump?” he looks over at the new machine next to the bed, one he hasn't noticed up until now.
“Can't get anything by you, can I?” she picks up a glass with a straw and hands it to him, keeping her own hand on it to steady him while he drinks. “You ever use one before? Small sips,” she reminds him.
“I don't remember,” the water feels fantastic on his throat, and his voice smooths out a bit. “I mean, I don't think so. Would I remember if I had?”
Sonia smiles sadly at him. “I don't know, sweetie. Memory's a tricky thing. Do you remember anything at all?”
He shakes his head slowly. “I don't even know what questions to ask. How can I ask about things I don't know I've even forgotten? It's like I don't exist.”
She puts the glass down, shows him how to use the morphine dispenser, which isn't much more difficult than pushing a button. The machine beeps, which is kind of funny. “It's like the machine in 'The Meaning of Life,'” he says. “It goes 'ping!'” and she laughs.
“See? You do remember something.”
“Just not the important stuff,” he bites his lip. The pain's already starting to fade. “The guy who was here -my brother. What's his name?”
“It's Dean, sweetie.”
“What about the girl?”
“Jessica, but Dean calls her Jess.”
“Is she his girlfriend?”
He gets another sad smile from her. “No, Sam,” she says gently, “she's your girlfriend. Oh, sweetie,” she reaches out with one hand and brushes it against his cheek, and he feels a wet warmth there. “It's okay. It'll come back to you, you'll see. Don't cry.”
He nods, breath hitching, scrubs at his eyes with the hand that's not hooked up to the IV, but the tears don't stop for a very long time.
Chapter 3
There'll be more action later, I promise. :)
Master Post
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Jess smoked her first cigarette when she was twelve years old. She was in the girl's washroom with her then best friend Marcia Harris when they stumbled onto a bunch of the senior girls lighting up a cigarette and passing it between them, standing by the window to make sure all the smoke blew away. They smirked at the shell-shocked look on the younger girls' faces, and the leader, Cindy Johnson, who was pretty and popular and was dating the captain of the basketball team, casually blew a cloud of smoke in their direction.
“Marcia, isn't it? Marcia Marcia Marcia,” she said, as though she was the first to come up with that particular joke. “You still a square, Marcia?” she held out the cigarette, ignoring the feeble protests of her cronies. What Cindy wanted, Cindy got, and apparently what she wanted was for Marcia and Jess to show that they weren't too chicken to have a smoke.
The girls laughed when Marcia choked and coughed, and Jess was determined not to give them the satisfaction, and thus began an eight-year relationship with nicotine that was furtive and smouldering and frustrating and exciting in its illicitness. When she was fifteen it made her cool, a rebel. When she was eighteen it made her sexy and attractive to the bad boys in school. When she was not-quite-twenty it made her arty and approachable, until she met Sam Winchester. All six feet and four inches of very handsome, very earnest dork, who never said anything to her about the cigarettes except to diffidently offer her a stick of mint gum before they'd make out, and couldn't quite manage to hide the fact that he'd start to wheeze a little if she smoked too long in the same room with him.
So she quit, and to his credit he put up with the crankiness, the mood swings, the random cravings, and the ten pounds she gained and didn't lose for well over six months. He bought her gum and nicotine patches and a ridiculously cute teddy bear with a little heart sewn on its chest that was so corny she put it on their chest of drawers and mocked him for being a girl for the better part of a year. He blushed, laughed under his bangs, and didn't argue with her.
Now she finds herself sitting on the steps of a hospital, undoing a year's worth of hard work, with the brother of the man for whom she thought it was worth it to quit a habit she'd had almost half a lifetime.
“I don't smoke around Sammy either,” Dean says one evening, seemingly out of nowhere, staring at the sky where she can barely make out a few stars because of the light pollution. “Hearing him get all wheezy makes me feel guilty as hell. Plus, he gives me this look, like I've drowned a basketful of kittens.”
Jess makes a sound that's somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “I know exactly what you mean. It's why I quit. I can't stomach the thought of the thousands of kittens I must have murdered in my lifetime when he's around.”
She looks over at him, cigarette dangling between his index and middle fingers, silver ring glinting dully in the evening light. His hands are smaller than Sam's, the fingers a bit more delicate-looking -though Sam's hands are beautiful themselves- but they've seen harder usage, covered in tiny scars, and a few of the fingers are crooked, as though they broke and didn't heal properly. She doesn't know this man at all, knows less about him than she does about Sam, and that's saying something. Right here, sitting next to her, is a huge chunk of Sam that she's been missing this whole time, and she never realized it was missing until it barged into the hospital and made itself known, loudly.
He laughs too, quietly. “I'm going to get the most epic bitchface in all history when he catches us smelling of smoke. He'll probably accuse me of corrupting you.”
If he ever wakes up, she thinks, but doesn't say it aloud. “He knows I'm not easily corrupted.”
He glances at her, just a slight tilt of the head, eyes sliding toward her, and the gesture is so Sam that her breath catches in her throat. “Yeah, I guess you wouldn't be.”
*
For all that Dean manages to swagger his way through the hospital as though he owns the place, handles nurses and doctors and candy stripers with the same casual arrogance combined with a strange cocky charm that seems to compel them to do whatever he wants, he falls apart entirely when it comes to dealing with her friends -Sam's friends too, she reminds herself. He retreats, doesn't quite stammer, but he loses all his ability to weasel his way in and out of conversations he doesn't want.
After the first awkward conversation she finds herself stepping in, almost protectively. Charlie Wells has him backed into a metaphorical corner, demanding to know why he's here after all this time when it was clear Sam didn't want him around, and she can see pain and anger warring on Dean's face. She steps in as much to save Dean as she does to prevent him from decking Charlie right then and there, puts a hand on Charlie's arm.
“Charlie, this isn't the time. You think Sam wants you picking a fight with his brother here? Now? Get a grip.”
Charlie relaxes a fraction, steps back, blows out a breath. “Whatever. You need anything, Jess? All you gotta do is ask.”
“Thanks, Charlie. Not much to do right now except wait. Why don't you get going, and I'll keep you guys posted, okay?”
He directs a glare at Dean. “Fine. You gonna be okay here?”
“We're fine,” she stresses the words a bit, making sure he understands that Dean isn't going anywhere, that she won't put up with this sort of bullshit, and she's lucky that Charlie is sensitive enough to get it. He nods.
“You got my number. Anytime you want, anything you need. Same goes for all of us.”
She gets up on her toes, kisses his cheek. “I know. Thank you.”
When she turns back, Dean has spun on his heel and is stalking toward the fire escape. She lets him go, returns to Sam's side. His hand is lying exactly where she left it the last time, and she strokes it with the tips of her fingers.
“Your brother's a good guy, Sam,” she says, watching his face. “I wish you'd told me more about him before. All I know now is that he's Dean, he chain-smokes when he's nervous -and we're both nervous now- and he looks the same as you do when he's embarrassed. You never even told me what he does for a living.”
She tells herself she imagined the twitch when she said Dean's name.
*
Dean won't tell her anything about himself, not at first. Doesn't explain the limp, shrugs off her attempt to ask about the scar at his hairline. Eventually he mutters something about an accident on a construction site.
“You work construction?”
“Sometimes. Depends.”
“Wow. Overshare, much?”
He snorts. “Sorry. I'm not in the habit of talking about my life.”
She toys with the idea of another cigarette, decides against it. She'll never quit again at this rate. “You and Sam both. You get hold of your father yet?”
He shakes his head. “Voicemail's full. Must not be any reception where he's at.”
“Uh-huh. So you said.”
“What's that supposed to mean?” he sounds defensive, and she raises her hands in a pacifying gesture.
“Nothing. I just... Sam told me he and your Dad didn't get along, that your Dad basically disowned him-”
“He said what?” Dean bounces to his feet like a coiled spring, face flushed, and she recoils, suddenly fearful. He moves like a tiger, and she has the vivid, unshakeable impression that if he wanted her dead, she'd be gone before she hit the floor. He catches her expression, visibly forces himself to be calmer, and she feels her heartbeat slow a bit. “It wasn't like that.”
“He didn't tell Sam not to come back if he went to college?”
Dean bites his lip, rubs the back of his neck. “Yeah, okay, he did, but he didn't mean it. Not like that.”
She nods. “So it was a fight, he said something he didn't mean, and Sam took him at his word. What's so bad about college, anyway?”
He just shakes his head. “Nothing. College is great,” he says, but she can hear the unspoken for other people at the end of his sentence. He doesn't volunteer why he and Sam aren't supposed to go to college.
“Did you ever want to go?”
He smirks, leans against the stair railing, the anxiety and barely-concealed anger suddenly gone beneath the mask of cool competency he usually wears. “Not my thing, sugar. I barely passed my GED, got other things to do.”
“What do you do, anyway?”
He shrugs. “I get by.”
She scowls, pulls a cigarette from the pack she bought for herself once it was obvious she wasn't going to stop right off. “And I thought Sam was evasive. I just want to know how long you can stay.”
“As long as I have to.”
“What about your father?”
“He'll come when he gets my messages.”
“Will he?”
He shrugs, and the look on his face makes her chest constrict a bit, because she can tell that he wants to say 'of course,' and can't bring himself to lie about it. “He will if he can. Anyway, what about your parents?”
“I asked them not to come. He's not their son, and I can't deal with the extra crazy of having my mother come in and criticize my housekeeping and my father trying to take charge of everything.”
“You think of staying with them for a while? If Sam... uh. If this lasts a lot longer.”
“No. We're settled in, and I wasn't planning on going home for the summer.”
“You okay for money?”
She tilts her head at him. “This from a guy who looks like he lives out of his car.”
“That's just the job.”
“The job you won't tell me about.”
“That's right.”
“We're fine, don't worry.”
To her surprise, he smiles, a little sadly. “I always worry about Sam.”
*
Two days turn into five, into a week, and Dean slots himself seamlessly into her life. She has to insist, at first, but once he's grudgingly accepted the cot in the tiny spare room she and Sam use as a study space, he settles a bit, allows himself to relax, and doesn't once complain about the fact that they're on a third-floor walk-up, even though there are days when she can tell it's a bitch for him to make it to the front door.
To her surprise, she finds he's a fanatically neat roommate. She's always assumed that Sam's obsessive-compulsive neatness was a trait singular to him, but Dean is just the same, almost military in his routines. The way he keeps his cot made, his toiletries in one very tiny zip-up bag, his duffel tucked under the foot of the cot, all remind her of her uncle Josh who was in the Corps for all those years. He was just the same, whenever he'd come to spend a weekend with them.
“So were you in the army or something?” she asks on the fourth day, watching him make up the cot with practised hands, making perfect hospital corners without so much as thinking about it.
“Nope.”
She sighs. “If I give you bacon, will you tell me more than that?”
He looks up, gives her a grin that makes him look all of five years old for a moment. “Maybe. There's not much I wouldn't do for bacon.”
“I'll throw in eggs, too,” she shakes her head, trying not to laugh and failing. But she makes good on her promise, and to her surprise he makes good on his.
“My Dad was a marine,” he says around a mouthful of bacon. “He taught me and Sammy everything he knows.”
“Everything?” she asks, earning herself a sharp look.
“Everything.”
She tries to imagine Sam wielding a gun, can't quite manage it. She keeps picturing him hunched over his desk, ankles hooked around the legs of his chair, hair askew as he studies for a philosophy midterm, chewing on the end of his pen.
“What will you do if -after he wakes up?”
He mops up egg yolk with a bit of toast, doesn't look at her. “Depends on Sammy. If he wants me to stick around for a while, I will. If not... I dunno. I guess I haven't thought about it much.”
“You can stay as long as you like,” she surprises herself by offering, and he looks just as surprised as she feels, eyebrows shooting up to his hairline, but he just nods, and she thinks that's probably as close as he ever gets to thanking people for favours for which he's too embarrassed to ask.
*
Dean surprises her by spending a lot of time researching comas and how they work, by peppering the doctors and nurses with questions. She wouldn't have thought him the type to have the patience or the willingness to do that sort of work, but does it, and ends up being surprisingly knowledgeable, absorbing the technical details like a sponge. He keeps her grounded, tells her when things are normal and when they aren't. She finds herself listening to him more than to the doctors sometimes, and she knows it should feel wrong, but it doesn't. Sometimes he feels like the only real lifeline she has, the only person she knows who really cares about Sam and not just because Sam is an extension of her. All of their friends are her friends, she knows it and Sam knew it -knows it, she corrects herself- but never seemed to mind, never resented the time she spent alone with them.
It's painful, watching Sam struggle out of his coma. It's strange, seeing him twitch and whimper on the bed. On television, coma patients just lie there, unresponsive, but it actually looks sometimes as though he's dreaming. He responds a bit to Dean's voice, rarely to hers, and she tries to pretend that the spike of jealousy she feels at that never happened. They've been brothers much longer than she and Sam have been dating, after all, it's only natural that Dean would be able to get through to him where she can't. She tells herself she doesn't resent him worming his way into their world, all affable and charming even when he's obviously worried out of his mind. It's weird, really, how good he is under the unrelenting pressure. Dean is the first to notice something's wrong -well, more wrong than it already is.
“He feels too warm,” he says, reaching up to brush the backs of his fingers against Sam's cheek. Sam's eyes are moving beneath the lids, but otherwise there's no indication that he's even alive. “I'm going to get someone.”
Ten minutes later they're banished from the room while the doctor and a bunch of nurses fuss over Sam, adjusting equipment and adding countless medications to his IV drip. The verdict comes back: ventilator-associated pneumonia. Then it's three days of mind-numbing anxiety, waiting to see if the infection will clear up, of watching Sam's flushed face, of wiping sweat away from him with a disinfected facecloth. Dean isn't as good about the waiting as she is, spends a lot of time pacing in the hallway, until he's limping so badly that she practically has to sit on him to get him to sit down.
“Hurting yourself isn't going to help him,” she says, as gently as she can, ignores the anger flashing in his eyes -the same colour as Sam's. They look nothing alike, except for their eyes.
“I'm not-”
“Look, I don't know why you're punishing yourself, here, but you need to stop, okay? I need you to hold it together. Sam needs you to hold it together,” she adds, because it's been long enough that she's figured out that the name Sam works like the bell on Pavlov's dogs with Dean. He jerks away, but he nods, face grey with pain and exhaustion. “He's okay for now. Why don't you go home, take a shower, grab some sleep. Come back tonight, and I'll do the same then, okay? Go on,” she says. “Don't make me order you.”
His head snaps up, expression unreadable, and he nods. “Right. Call me if there's anything, okay?”
“Of course.”
It's the same promise she's made every single time she's persuaded him to take a break, and she means it, every time. Or at least, she thinks she means it, until the first time Sam opens his eyes unprovoked, and she finds herself hesitating, wanting to be the first face that Sam sees. It's selfish and she knows it, but for a moment she lets herself think that maybe it's best if she leaves Dean where he is, because he's exhausted -they both are- and it's not like Sam is really all that responsive. She stays trapped in that loop of terrible, selfish thoughts for a good thirty seconds, and it feels like forever, until finally she tears herself away and runs to find Dean before her legs betray her and carry her right back to Sam's side.
*
Sam doesn't remember going to sleep, but he finds himself waking up again to walls that are that sickly green colour that only hospitals seem to think is a good idea. The ventilator tube is long gone, replaced by a nasal canula. He stares at the ceiling, which is white, at least, made up of those panels you find in hospitals and office buildings and especially dentists' offices. The kind that's easily removed so that maintenance staff can get to the air ducts without too much difficulty. It's a bitch to crawl around in them, because they're always full of dust, and he's kind of surprised that he knows that, because who the hell thinks about crawling around in ducts anyway? He tries to follow the train of thought to somewhere useful -maybe he's a maintenance guy or something, but none of it feels right. Even the name he has feels a little wrong, alien.
Retrograde amnesia. He remembers the term, remembers reading about it, or maybe hearing about it somewhere. Televison, maybe. That's what this is. Procedural memory is intact, so he remembers how to talk and about stuff he's read, but who he is, his whole life, is gone. Pfft. Just like that. His core is gone, and now he's just an empty, Sam-shaped shell. The thought makes something inside his chest clench so hard he thinks he might pass out.
His throat hurts, he realizes after a moment, his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth with thirst. He turns his head to see if there's water, flinches as even that small movement sends pain radiating through him. The room is empty, but there's a call button tied to the high bar on his bed, and after a moment of fumbling he manages to squeeze it in his fist. A moment later a nurse clad in scrubs that match the hospital walls is by his bed. Her name tag reads 'Sonia.' At least he can still read.
“Hi, Sam,” she smiles at him. “How're you feeling? Any pain?”
He nods. It's strange, having all these people call him by a name he doesn't recognize. “I'm thirsty, too.” His voice sounds harsh in his ears, and he's not sure if that's normal.
“Okay. You can have some water, and I'll show you how to work what one of my patients likes to call the 'magic machine.'”
He grins. “Morphine pump?” he looks over at the new machine next to the bed, one he hasn't noticed up until now.
“Can't get anything by you, can I?” she picks up a glass with a straw and hands it to him, keeping her own hand on it to steady him while he drinks. “You ever use one before? Small sips,” she reminds him.
“I don't remember,” the water feels fantastic on his throat, and his voice smooths out a bit. “I mean, I don't think so. Would I remember if I had?”
Sonia smiles sadly at him. “I don't know, sweetie. Memory's a tricky thing. Do you remember anything at all?”
He shakes his head slowly. “I don't even know what questions to ask. How can I ask about things I don't know I've even forgotten? It's like I don't exist.”
She puts the glass down, shows him how to use the morphine dispenser, which isn't much more difficult than pushing a button. The machine beeps, which is kind of funny. “It's like the machine in 'The Meaning of Life,'” he says. “It goes 'ping!'” and she laughs.
“See? You do remember something.”
“Just not the important stuff,” he bites his lip. The pain's already starting to fade. “The guy who was here -my brother. What's his name?”
“It's Dean, sweetie.”
“What about the girl?”
“Jessica, but Dean calls her Jess.”
“Is she his girlfriend?”
He gets another sad smile from her. “No, Sam,” she says gently, “she's your girlfriend. Oh, sweetie,” she reaches out with one hand and brushes it against his cheek, and he feels a wet warmth there. “It's okay. It'll come back to you, you'll see. Don't cry.”
He nods, breath hitching, scrubs at his eyes with the hand that's not hooked up to the IV, but the tears don't stop for a very long time.
Chapter 3