Second Night of Jessakkuh
Title: Second Night of Jessakkuh
Summary: Dean goes to Stanford to spend Hanukkah with Jess and Sam. They're snowed in. Sam has a cold. Jess has a secret.
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Wordcount: 2,071
Author's Note: Sammyverse, part of an 8-part series with one bit a night through the end of Hanukkah. Happy 2nd night! I got a Boy Meets World DVD.
Night #1
Jess fusses and roots around the bathroom, saying she swears to God she brought Sam a fucking humidifier when he had that sinus infection in July (only Sam can get sick in the middle of the fucking summer-it's from his allergies, and it's really not fair) and did Sam throw it away, because he was a goddamn drama queen about using it and drove her fucking crazy, but would he really throw it away, goddamn it, Sam, etc. etc.
Sam and Dean are no fucking help because they're lying on Sam's bed and Dean's trying to wheeze and he's really bad at it.
“You're breathing out too fast. Listen.” Sam swipes his balled-up tissue under his nose and breathes out with a long, slow whistle. He's congested as all hell, and Dean can't imitate that no matter how hard he tries.
Dean freezes his chest and tries to breathe out slower.
“See, now you're just holding your breath,” Sam says.
“Fuck you.”
“You have to-” Sam stops and coughs. “Breathe hard. That's where the noise comes from.”
“If I breathe hard, it goes too fast.”
“Narrow your airways.”
“What the shit, Sam, I can't narrow my airways.”
“You're the worst asthmatic ever.”
“Yeah...”
“Hey, it's genetic. By all rights you should be an awesome asthmatic like me.”
“Explain how you're the only asthmatic in the family.” Dean sits up. “Jess. You need a hand?”
“I'm looking for Vicks...”
“No, not unless he has a fever. It's too cold on his chest.”
“He has a fever,” she says.
“What?”
She nods. “Look at him. Fever.”
Dean touches Sam's forehead and breathes out.
“Do I?” Sam says.
“Yeah.”
“Fuck.” He gets out of bed and pads out of the room, rubbing his eyes. He's in socks, sweatpants, and his scarf, because getting Sam to keep a shirt on when his asthma's bad is a struggle Dean doesn't feel like having, but now that the kid's running a fever he's probably going to fucking have to.
Sam comes back with the biggest glass of juice Dean's ever seen and leans against the doorway. He drains it in three swallows and then goes to the bathroom and wraps himself around Jess from behind.
She squirms. “You're like two hundred pounds of hot germs.”
“Yep.”
She stands up on her toes and kisses him. “You want soup? I made stock last night.”
He nods.
“Go teach Dean how to wheeze some more.” She nudges him towards the bed. “I'll be back in a minute. Use your damn inhaler.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Sam stands around looking kind of dazed after Jess leaves, and seriously, how did Dean not notice he had a fever?
The fucking problem is that Sam and Jess are acting like this is no big deal (does this happen? Sam gets fevers, they ignore them? Because that's not fucking okay) when really a feverish Sam is a Sam that needs to be hauled off to a clinic with his little “I'm a severe asthmatic” emergency bracelet to get his nose and throat and chest looked out and a diagnosis of some lame bullshit and a big pile of meds (and it never fucking helps and he ends up really sick and et cetera, et cetera, these are the hazards of knowing and loving Sam Winchester and and Dean vaults between feeling grateful that he can help at all and dreaming about running the fuck away).
But they're snowed in.
Sam climbs up onto the bed next to Dean, and guess which feeling Dean's at right now? He rests his hand on Sam's forehead and Sam leans into it.
“Sick for Hanukkah,” Dean says. “Sucks.”
“Nah. It's nice.” Sam snuggles with his pillow. “Snowed in. Nothing to do. Nowhere to be. Just candle-lighting and you and Jess.”
“And the junk in your chest.”
Sam shrugs. “Omelette, eggs.”
“That never fucking made sense to me. What the hell is wrong with breaking eggs? Breaking eggs isn't bad. You need them if you want the omelette.”
“Stalin said it.” Sam scoots over, rests his head on Dean's chest. “You're smart. Should have gone to school.”
It's stupid how warm that makes Dean. Or maybe, you know, it's Sam's hot fucking head. “You're such an octopus when you're sick.”
He sneezes. “I'm an octopus all the time.”
“Yeah, but I like you.”
Sam twists Dean's hand around until it hurts. “I like you too.”
**
Sam falls asleep, breathing like a tractor, so Dean prompts him up on some pillows and shoves the nebulizer in his mouth and sneaks out to go check on Jess. She's wearing Sam's clothes again, and Dean figures that she's probably worried. (After Sam had pneumonia freshman year, Dean spent the next two months wearing a sweatshirt of Sam's he stole, until John finally rolled the sleeves up over Dean's hands and told him it wasn't safe for him to be hunting in these freakishly-sized clothes and hugged him like he hadn't in years.)
So he says, “It's definitely not pneumonia. Not even in his chest yet, just the congestion draining.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“He'll be okay. He looks good, y'know? Despite the cold and being all skinny, he's looking good.”
And he is. Dean noticed from the first damn hug from him. Sam has new muscle and he seems strong, capable. Happy. Dean still sizes up Sam on whether or not he'd hunt with him, and he would, right now, even with the cold.
“He's been good, despite the cabin bullshit,” she says. “He bounced back fast. This is the first time he's been sick all semester.”
“He's just doing it to piss me off, then.” Dean points to a Bigfoot-sized pair of slippers in the corner. “Those are the ugliest fucking things I've ever seen.”
“Right? My parents got them for him for his birthday. I'm confused by whose parents get their daughter's boyfriend slippers. He fucking lives in them.”
“Yeah, he would.” Dean loves finding these touches of Sam around the apartment, which is so damn Jess even if Sam technically lives here alone. Sam's so damn tidy (and he lived eighteen years so fucking sparsely, how could he not?) that seeing this random junk of Sam's-a pack of his favorite gum half-finished on the coffee table, a fucking adorable damn hat hanging from the hook, the ugliest sweater in the world slung over a chair, his textbooks, an inhaler that was clearly crushed somehow sitting on the the side table because of course Sam thinks he can fix it-makes him...Jesus, it makes him believe in his kid, and this life that he wants, and it's all he can do not to go out and buy a diamond ring and drop it in Sam's head and shove him towards Jess right the fuck now.
Instead, he picks up the inhaler and sits on the arm of the couch and tries to fix it.
“We ran over one of these when he was a kid,” Dean says. “One of those bizarre sequences of events. He drops it, Dad starts the car. And we didn't have another one, so until the pharmacy opened he had to try to suck the meds in his lungs from this crushed fucking canister. It was a mess.”
“He never talks about your dad unless you're here.”
Dean looks up. “Really?”
“What happened there? Because you and your dad...you still live together, right? Work together?” She thinks John's a photographer of some kind, Dean's pretty sure that's what Sam said, and that Dean's his assistant, and they get themselves in dangerous situations to get the perfect shot (Dean: doing what, taking pictures of lions? I'm in fucking Oklahoma, oh my God, Sam, are you singing Oklahoma! right now, how are we friends) and it just figures Dean would choose something artsy when Dean can't even draw a stick figure. Sam does shit just to make Dean's life hard.
“Yeah.”
“But he and Sam...”
“Sam doesn't like traveling,” Dean says. “Sam wanted something stable and safe and he wanted to go to college, and Dad went military instead of finishing high school, so he's not exactly convinced of the value of a good education or whatever.”
“But you are?”
Dean shrugs. “I'm convinced of whatever Sammy wants. You know how we are. Bitch has me wrapped around his damn finger. He tells me he has a cough when I'm in Virginia and I'm halfway through Texas before I remember he always has a cough.” He's exaggerating, because of course he doesn't come every time Sam is sick.
He just comes every time Sam wants him.
“You know, he misses traveling,”
“What?”
“He talks about it. When Dean and I were in wherever the fuck.” She stirs the soup, wipes some steam off her cheek. “But maybe that's him missing being a kid more than missing traveling.”
“Sammy doesn't miss being a kid.”
Jess says, “Maybe you'd be surprised.” She clears her throat. “Hey. I've got to ask. The scars?”
“What scars?”
“Sam's. All of them.”
“Oh.” He scratches the back of his neck. “Job hazards, y'know? Photography accidents. What has he told you?”
“He just says he was in the hospital a lot when he was a kid.”
“True.”
“But that was...”
“He was a little daredevil,” Dean says. “Always falling off of shit, getting himself hurt. Impaling himself on shit at playgrounds. You know Sam.”
It all comes way too easily.
“So not asthma, really,” Jess says.
“No, I mean, some of the IVs. A chest tube or two. But no. Is that what he told you?”
She shakes her head.
Dean says, “Then...?”
There's this flurry of loud sneezes from the bedroom, and Jess says, “Okay, go get him, soup's almost ready. And it's almost sundown, he'll love that.”
Sam's sitting up in bed when Dean gets there, looking fifty times worse, and how the hell is that possible when he was asleep for all of ten minutes? His hair's goddamn everywhere, his eyes and nose are both running, and he's wheezing with his shoulders hunched up to his ears.
Sometimes Dean hates Sam's lungs.
“Ugh, look at you.” Dean presses a comb into Sam's hair and Sam sluggishly tries to tame the beast while Dean wipes his nose and cleans him up a little.
He feels Sam's cheeks to check the fever and can't fucking believe that they're out of Tylenol, what the hell is that? Dean has ibuprofen out in the car but Sam had this unbelievable asthma attack last time he took it (Dean was in Maine, and he talked Sam through it from the top of a fucking mountain and felt like he couldn't breathe) so fuck if Dean's getting that.
“You made the nebulizer,” Sam says, pointing to the machine.
“Yep. Built it myself.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Of course I set it up, you loon.”
Sam smiles at him.
“C'mon, kiddo. Soup.”
Sam nods heavily and gets to his feet.
“And then Hanukkah,” Dean says. “You fucking love Hanukkah.”
By the time Sam's had a bowl of soup, he's looking a little less like the dead, smiling up at Jess with all the love in the world and fuck, can Dean perform the goddamn ceremony?
Sam gets the candles and spends five minutes arranging them all perfect and straight in the menorah and Dean helps Jess wash dishes and whispers, “Thank you.”
She looks at him.
Dean says, very softly, “I don't worry about him when he's with you.”
And Jess says, “Thank you for getting him to me,” and Sam needs more tissues, yeah? Okay, Dean will just go get them. No problem.
Jess says it's Dean's turn to light the candles, and Sam has the Hebrew memorized already, of-fucking-course, and Dean thinks he remembers reading that kids are Jewish as long as the mom is.
Summary: Dean goes to Stanford to spend Hanukkah with Jess and Sam. They're snowed in. Sam has a cold. Jess has a secret.
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Wordcount: 2,071
Author's Note: Sammyverse, part of an 8-part series with one bit a night through the end of Hanukkah. Happy 2nd night! I got a Boy Meets World DVD.
Night #1
Jess fusses and roots around the bathroom, saying she swears to God she brought Sam a fucking humidifier when he had that sinus infection in July (only Sam can get sick in the middle of the fucking summer-it's from his allergies, and it's really not fair) and did Sam throw it away, because he was a goddamn drama queen about using it and drove her fucking crazy, but would he really throw it away, goddamn it, Sam, etc. etc.
Sam and Dean are no fucking help because they're lying on Sam's bed and Dean's trying to wheeze and he's really bad at it.
“You're breathing out too fast. Listen.” Sam swipes his balled-up tissue under his nose and breathes out with a long, slow whistle. He's congested as all hell, and Dean can't imitate that no matter how hard he tries.
Dean freezes his chest and tries to breathe out slower.
“See, now you're just holding your breath,” Sam says.
“Fuck you.”
“You have to-” Sam stops and coughs. “Breathe hard. That's where the noise comes from.”
“If I breathe hard, it goes too fast.”
“Narrow your airways.”
“What the shit, Sam, I can't narrow my airways.”
“You're the worst asthmatic ever.”
“Yeah...”
“Hey, it's genetic. By all rights you should be an awesome asthmatic like me.”
“Explain how you're the only asthmatic in the family.” Dean sits up. “Jess. You need a hand?”
“I'm looking for Vicks...”
“No, not unless he has a fever. It's too cold on his chest.”
“He has a fever,” she says.
“What?”
She nods. “Look at him. Fever.”
Dean touches Sam's forehead and breathes out.
“Do I?” Sam says.
“Yeah.”
“Fuck.” He gets out of bed and pads out of the room, rubbing his eyes. He's in socks, sweatpants, and his scarf, because getting Sam to keep a shirt on when his asthma's bad is a struggle Dean doesn't feel like having, but now that the kid's running a fever he's probably going to fucking have to.
Sam comes back with the biggest glass of juice Dean's ever seen and leans against the doorway. He drains it in three swallows and then goes to the bathroom and wraps himself around Jess from behind.
She squirms. “You're like two hundred pounds of hot germs.”
“Yep.”
She stands up on her toes and kisses him. “You want soup? I made stock last night.”
He nods.
“Go teach Dean how to wheeze some more.” She nudges him towards the bed. “I'll be back in a minute. Use your damn inhaler.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Sam stands around looking kind of dazed after Jess leaves, and seriously, how did Dean not notice he had a fever?
The fucking problem is that Sam and Jess are acting like this is no big deal (does this happen? Sam gets fevers, they ignore them? Because that's not fucking okay) when really a feverish Sam is a Sam that needs to be hauled off to a clinic with his little “I'm a severe asthmatic” emergency bracelet to get his nose and throat and chest looked out and a diagnosis of some lame bullshit and a big pile of meds (and it never fucking helps and he ends up really sick and et cetera, et cetera, these are the hazards of knowing and loving Sam Winchester and and Dean vaults between feeling grateful that he can help at all and dreaming about running the fuck away).
But they're snowed in.
Sam climbs up onto the bed next to Dean, and guess which feeling Dean's at right now? He rests his hand on Sam's forehead and Sam leans into it.
“Sick for Hanukkah,” Dean says. “Sucks.”
“Nah. It's nice.” Sam snuggles with his pillow. “Snowed in. Nothing to do. Nowhere to be. Just candle-lighting and you and Jess.”
“And the junk in your chest.”
Sam shrugs. “Omelette, eggs.”
“That never fucking made sense to me. What the hell is wrong with breaking eggs? Breaking eggs isn't bad. You need them if you want the omelette.”
“Stalin said it.” Sam scoots over, rests his head on Dean's chest. “You're smart. Should have gone to school.”
It's stupid how warm that makes Dean. Or maybe, you know, it's Sam's hot fucking head. “You're such an octopus when you're sick.”
He sneezes. “I'm an octopus all the time.”
“Yeah, but I like you.”
Sam twists Dean's hand around until it hurts. “I like you too.”
**
Sam falls asleep, breathing like a tractor, so Dean prompts him up on some pillows and shoves the nebulizer in his mouth and sneaks out to go check on Jess. She's wearing Sam's clothes again, and Dean figures that she's probably worried. (After Sam had pneumonia freshman year, Dean spent the next two months wearing a sweatshirt of Sam's he stole, until John finally rolled the sleeves up over Dean's hands and told him it wasn't safe for him to be hunting in these freakishly-sized clothes and hugged him like he hadn't in years.)
So he says, “It's definitely not pneumonia. Not even in his chest yet, just the congestion draining.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“He'll be okay. He looks good, y'know? Despite the cold and being all skinny, he's looking good.”
And he is. Dean noticed from the first damn hug from him. Sam has new muscle and he seems strong, capable. Happy. Dean still sizes up Sam on whether or not he'd hunt with him, and he would, right now, even with the cold.
“He's been good, despite the cabin bullshit,” she says. “He bounced back fast. This is the first time he's been sick all semester.”
“He's just doing it to piss me off, then.” Dean points to a Bigfoot-sized pair of slippers in the corner. “Those are the ugliest fucking things I've ever seen.”
“Right? My parents got them for him for his birthday. I'm confused by whose parents get their daughter's boyfriend slippers. He fucking lives in them.”
“Yeah, he would.” Dean loves finding these touches of Sam around the apartment, which is so damn Jess even if Sam technically lives here alone. Sam's so damn tidy (and he lived eighteen years so fucking sparsely, how could he not?) that seeing this random junk of Sam's-a pack of his favorite gum half-finished on the coffee table, a fucking adorable damn hat hanging from the hook, the ugliest sweater in the world slung over a chair, his textbooks, an inhaler that was clearly crushed somehow sitting on the the side table because of course Sam thinks he can fix it-makes him...Jesus, it makes him believe in his kid, and this life that he wants, and it's all he can do not to go out and buy a diamond ring and drop it in Sam's head and shove him towards Jess right the fuck now.
Instead, he picks up the inhaler and sits on the arm of the couch and tries to fix it.
“We ran over one of these when he was a kid,” Dean says. “One of those bizarre sequences of events. He drops it, Dad starts the car. And we didn't have another one, so until the pharmacy opened he had to try to suck the meds in his lungs from this crushed fucking canister. It was a mess.”
“He never talks about your dad unless you're here.”
Dean looks up. “Really?”
“What happened there? Because you and your dad...you still live together, right? Work together?” She thinks John's a photographer of some kind, Dean's pretty sure that's what Sam said, and that Dean's his assistant, and they get themselves in dangerous situations to get the perfect shot (Dean: doing what, taking pictures of lions? I'm in fucking Oklahoma, oh my God, Sam, are you singing Oklahoma! right now, how are we friends) and it just figures Dean would choose something artsy when Dean can't even draw a stick figure. Sam does shit just to make Dean's life hard.
“Yeah.”
“But he and Sam...”
“Sam doesn't like traveling,” Dean says. “Sam wanted something stable and safe and he wanted to go to college, and Dad went military instead of finishing high school, so he's not exactly convinced of the value of a good education or whatever.”
“But you are?”
Dean shrugs. “I'm convinced of whatever Sammy wants. You know how we are. Bitch has me wrapped around his damn finger. He tells me he has a cough when I'm in Virginia and I'm halfway through Texas before I remember he always has a cough.” He's exaggerating, because of course he doesn't come every time Sam is sick.
He just comes every time Sam wants him.
“You know, he misses traveling,”
“What?”
“He talks about it. When Dean and I were in wherever the fuck.” She stirs the soup, wipes some steam off her cheek. “But maybe that's him missing being a kid more than missing traveling.”
“Sammy doesn't miss being a kid.”
Jess says, “Maybe you'd be surprised.” She clears her throat. “Hey. I've got to ask. The scars?”
“What scars?”
“Sam's. All of them.”
“Oh.” He scratches the back of his neck. “Job hazards, y'know? Photography accidents. What has he told you?”
“He just says he was in the hospital a lot when he was a kid.”
“True.”
“But that was...”
“He was a little daredevil,” Dean says. “Always falling off of shit, getting himself hurt. Impaling himself on shit at playgrounds. You know Sam.”
It all comes way too easily.
“So not asthma, really,” Jess says.
“No, I mean, some of the IVs. A chest tube or two. But no. Is that what he told you?”
She shakes her head.
Dean says, “Then...?”
There's this flurry of loud sneezes from the bedroom, and Jess says, “Okay, go get him, soup's almost ready. And it's almost sundown, he'll love that.”
Sam's sitting up in bed when Dean gets there, looking fifty times worse, and how the hell is that possible when he was asleep for all of ten minutes? His hair's goddamn everywhere, his eyes and nose are both running, and he's wheezing with his shoulders hunched up to his ears.
Sometimes Dean hates Sam's lungs.
“Ugh, look at you.” Dean presses a comb into Sam's hair and Sam sluggishly tries to tame the beast while Dean wipes his nose and cleans him up a little.
He feels Sam's cheeks to check the fever and can't fucking believe that they're out of Tylenol, what the hell is that? Dean has ibuprofen out in the car but Sam had this unbelievable asthma attack last time he took it (Dean was in Maine, and he talked Sam through it from the top of a fucking mountain and felt like he couldn't breathe) so fuck if Dean's getting that.
“You made the nebulizer,” Sam says, pointing to the machine.
“Yep. Built it myself.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Of course I set it up, you loon.”
Sam smiles at him.
“C'mon, kiddo. Soup.”
Sam nods heavily and gets to his feet.
“And then Hanukkah,” Dean says. “You fucking love Hanukkah.”
By the time Sam's had a bowl of soup, he's looking a little less like the dead, smiling up at Jess with all the love in the world and fuck, can Dean perform the goddamn ceremony?
Sam gets the candles and spends five minutes arranging them all perfect and straight in the menorah and Dean helps Jess wash dishes and whispers, “Thank you.”
She looks at him.
Dean says, very softly, “I don't worry about him when he's with you.”
And Jess says, “Thank you for getting him to me,” and Sam needs more tissues, yeah? Okay, Dean will just go get them. No problem.
Jess says it's Dean's turn to light the candles, and Sam has the Hebrew memorized already, of-fucking-course, and Dean thinks he remembers reading that kids are Jewish as long as the mom is.