This Charming Sam
Title: This Charming Sam
Summary: Stanford-era: Dean has been looking forward to Sam's spring break for a long time. And nothing's going to ruin it. Not Sam's asthma, not John, and definitely not this thing they've managed to avoid talking about until now. Definitely not that.
Warnings/Spoilers: No spoilers, bad language.
Wordcount: 10,118, but it goes fast, seriously.
Author's Note: Sammy-verse, so: Dean's POV, Sam has bad asthma, the boys are badasses. I kind of cheated on the title, I know. It's a present for wave_obscura, and the title is obviously a bastardization of "This Charming Man,' by The Smiths. Beyond that...I don't want to talk too much about this one. I just really, really want to know what you think.
This Charming Sam
--
It's not like Dean's been counting, but it's been seven months and three weeks since he's seen Sam. Dean had pulled him out of his stupid summer class (seriously, who the fuck takes summer classes, and he's doing it again this summer, and Dean asked him why and Sam said “What else am I going to do during the summer?” and he has a point) and dragged him to one of Palo Alto's shitty beach motels for a weekend, and they pretended they knew how to surf and ate snowcones and Sam helped him fabricate the story Dean was going to tell Dad about the ghost in California that he had to take care of and it was simple, easy salt and burn, and no, he didn't even think about going to see Sam, I wonder how he's doing. They fell asleep on towels by the ocean and cruised sisters in matching bikinis and drove fifty miles to a different beach when they heard a rumor there would be fireworks there (and there were, and they were shitty, and they didn't care, and it gave them an excuse to buy their own and set them off on the roof of the motel).
But now Sam has a giiiiiiirlfriend, and he spent Christmas with her (and how was Dean supposed to get to Sam for it anyway, tell Dad he had to hunt Santa Claus?) but she's in Peru for spring break. “Community service,” Sam told him, and Dean could hear him smile through the phone and all right, if Sam's happy he's happy, even though it means Sam now talks to him out in the hallway while she's sleeping like he's fucking embarrassed (“No, I'm not, Dean, it's just easier, okay?”) but with her gone that means Sam had nothing to do for spring break, so, to put it crudely, mine.
Dad thinks he's investigating something in Nevada. Little does he know, rumors of something supernatural will turn out to be false, and Dean will decide as long as he's out here to spend a few days in Vegas. Playing blackjack, fucking strippers, seeing magic shows and shit. All things his dad would rather he do than spend time with his brother.
Whatever. He's pulling into Stanford's campus, Zepplin roaring through his baby's speakers, and there's Sammy and his duffel bag standing on the steps of his dorms, and Jesus, nothing like a few months off to turn Dean into some granny bragging about her young'uns, but his kid's grown, man. Dean parks and gets out and Sam wraps him in one of his girlyass hugs.
“Dude,” Dean groans. “Let a guy piss first.” He palms the back of Sam's head.
“Fuck you, I get three more seconds at least.”
“Why are you such a chick?”
“Shhhhhh. Just let it happen. Be a Buddhist monk. A Buddhist monk of hugs.”
“I seriously have to pee, though. Is that the point? Are you into that? I think I've dated you.”
Sam swats him and lets him go. “Once we're on the road. Let's get moving.”
“What?”
“My place is a shithole.”
This comment is baffling for a number of reasons, the first one being, obviously, that he and Sam lived on top of each other for eighteen years so what the fuck could possibly be in there that Dean hasn't seen, the second one being that Sam folds his socks.
“It's my girlfriend,” Sam says, quickly. “Her stuff, I mean. She's a slob.”
“The hot ones always are.”
“Come on.”
“I can't believe you think I'm going to judge you on your place.” But he unlocks the car.
“It's just that it's her stuff. I don't want you going through her bras and trying to imagine what she looks like naked, or crawling through her closet looking for her vibrators, or-”
“Why does your girlfriend have vibrators? Why do you suck?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“We're making things awkward already. And we have miles to go before we sleep or whatever.”
Sam practically fucking bounces. (Jesus, Sammy, give Dean a second to fucking process that you're here, okay?) “Where are we going?”
“Somewhere with a bathroom, first. You hungry?”
Sam shakes his head and coughs for a minute, then he says, “You are not seriously giving me that look because I fucking coughed, are you?”
“You're not hungry...”
“Because I just ate. Jesus, I'm fine.”
Dean rolls his eyes. “The cough was fucking ugly.”
Sam sticks out his hand (the one he just fucking coughed into, who raised this kid? Oh right-Dean likes to make those jokes to himself, he isn't quite sure why) and says, “Hi, I'm Sam Winchester, sophomore English major, Taurus. I run a four and a half minute mile, I just do not lose at Monopoly, and I have astonishingly bad asthma. Have we met?”
“You don't seriously introduce yourself that way, do you?”
“No. No one knows I run a four and a half minute mile. They'd be confused.”
“Bet you can't even anymore.”
“Take me back to the beach and I'll race you.”
“Not going back to the beach.” (Plus the kid's legs have five inches on his that's not fucking fair) “We already did that.”
“So where? Where? Where? Where?”
“Christ, you're a fucking five year old. Get in the car.”
And he does. Grinning his fucking face off. Grumbling something bitchy about Dean's music. Filling up his car with his duffel bag and his ratty old hoodie and the smell of twenty-year-old boy that Dean remembers his father bitching about four years ago that he never understood until it was riding shotgun and his wheezy goddamn laughter and Christ this kid.
**
The problem is that they both want to hear everything and they want to hear it immediately, so they're at the diner and Sam keeps interrupting his stories about Stanford parties to go “No so wait tell me about the Baba Yaga hunt,” and Dean keeps stopping at the fucking good parts where he and Dad are about to go in salt guns ablazing because suddenly it's way more exciting to him what Sam ended up getting on that history exam.
And it's not until Sam tells him that he did a shitty job on the history exam because he was up all night keeping his asthma company that Dean feels like he can finally ask, “Hey, so how have you been?”
Sam is quiet for a while, which gives Dean way too much information.
“Hey, Sammy, come on. Tell me.”
“Better now that I'm with youuuuuu, Dean.”
“God, fuck you.”
Sam grins and takes a massive bite of his sandwich. Dean knew the kid would eat. “No, seriously, it's been better,” he says. “Beginning of spring was rough. Last few weeks, way better.”
“New meds?”
“Yeah, these white ones. They're rectangular. It's weird.”
Dean gives him a small smile around his coffee mug.
“Ughhh,” Sam says. “Don't be like that. I'm fine. We're fine to talk about this, right? I hate when I haven't seen you in a while and you decide to get all serious about asthma while I'm gone. It's a drag. Have you been reading the blogs? Don't read the blogs, Dean.”
“You irritate the motherfucking shit out of me.”
Sam starts coughing, and Dean trades his coffee mug for Sam's empty one and signals the waitress for a refill while Sam gulps down his.
“Yeah, you're the picture of health,” Dean says.
“Tell me where we're going.”
“Iceland.”
“Only if they built a bridge.”
“The zoo.”
“Fuck you.”
“Arizona. Good for lungs.”
“Are you serious?”
“Ugh, no, Arizona? I'm not fucking serious.”
Sam throws a French fry at him.
**
Dean really wanted to see Sam light up when he saw the roller coaster tracks arcing across the sky, but by the time they get to the shitty hotel by the shitty amusement park, Sam's fast asleep against the window. Dean decides his satisfaction is more important than Sam's beauty sleep and nudges him with his elbow until he wakes up. Sam startles and blinks at him.
“Look.”
Sam coughs and looks up and Jesus fucking Christ does he light up, like a fucking comet.
“Roller coasters!?”
“You know it, bitch.”
“Shit. No way. Fuck.” He's grinning so hard it makes Dean's face hurt. “Remember that time-” he starts.
“Of course I remember that time,” Dean says, because that's why they're fucking here, the time when Dad told them they could do a day at Six Flags when they were in some shitty nowhere city for a hunt, he promised that on the way out of town they'd get four hours there at least and Dean and Sammy sat down with a map and plotted out exactly where they were going and how long it would take to walk from place to place and they made a yardstick out of paper so they could measure Sam and figure out what he could get on, and then they tore the paper yardstick in two and folded it up and stuffed it in Sam's shoes to make him taller and then there was another hunt in the opposite fucking direction and John told Sam to stop crying like a fucking six year old and Sam said “I'm five!” and actually he was seven but Dean thinks it says something that John believed him for a minute.
A timer goes off on Sam's watch, and he shakes his inhaler while he looks out the window.
“Are we going tonight?” Sam says.
“It closes early on weeknights.”
“Damn.”
“Nah, it's okay, we'll sleep a lot tonight so we can go all day tomorrow. Don't fucking pout at me.”
“Like a fucking six-year-old?”
“I can't believe you remember that,” Dean says, but Sam makes it a habit to remember every shitty thing Dad has ever done and Dean would bet all his imaginary earnings from his imaginary Vegas trip that Sam doesn't remember the model roller coaster Dad bought him a month later.
But then Sam says, “Remember when you bought me that roller coaster?” and come on, Sam, why are you dumb, Dean was eleven, he wasn't fucking buying anyone anything, and why does Sam have to go and say these fucking moronic things that make Dean feel all this stuff?
He says, “Dean, remember?”
“Think that was Dad, Sammy.”
“No, Dean, it was you. Remember, you found that five dollar bill a few days before and you were all excited, and then Dad let us go into that weird dollar store while he was at his P.O. box, and it was this shitty little plastic thing and it broke? It was like a month after Dad didn't take us to Six Flags. You wrapped it up in a tissue and gave it to me.”
Oh.
Well.
Shit.
**
Dean would feel like such a fucking loser for getting a kick out of brushing his teeth side-by-side with Sam again except that he can totally tell that Sam's kind of into it too, and just like always he shaves (him at night, Sam in the morning, one razor, saves time, they're good at routines) while Sam takes his pills and the steroid inhaler and then brushes his teeth again because he has to do it before and after. It used to drive Dean fucking insane. (Dean: It doesn't make sense! Sam: Fuck off. They like routines.)
It's just that it's been a really fucking long time since he's gone to bed like this, Sammy in the next bed instead of Dad, Sam telling stupid jokes and stories and not shutting up and saying “Okay okay I'm quiet we're going to bed now” and then fucking laughing about something Dean said two hours ago and Dean missed his kid and wants to fucking slap him and he this is exactly how he remembered it, but then the next thing he knows it's 3 AM and he wakes up (so apparently Sam did stop talking at some point, it's like a fucking miracle every time he does) because Sam's wheezing, deep and low, bad, snagging at the tops of his lungs. It's this stuffed-up bullshit that Dean hates, because it makes Sammy sound sick, and this is worse than he remembered, it always is.
“Y'kay?” Dean mumbles. No answer. He's asleep.
Dean gets up and gets a glass of water, brings it back into the room and shakes Sam's foot. “Hey. Just for a minute, okay?”
Sam's a fucking ball in the middle of his bed, all the covers pushed to the bottom, his whole body hugging the pillow to his chest. He spasms up with coughs and rolls over onto his back. Dean thinks about hauling him up but he's not a fucking child, so he lets Sam sit himself up and rub his chest and cough into his elbow.
He hands him the glass of water and says, “What do you need?”
Sam takes a few sips before he goes for his inhaler. “M'okay,” he says as he shakes it.
“Yeah?”
Sam takes his hit from it, nods, yawns, wheezes. Dean hits the light and Sam whines and rubs his eyes. His hair's sticking up everywhere.
Dean says, “You sound like crap, kid. Allergies?”
Sam nods and sneezes, like he's only doing it because Dean gave him permission, and like shit, Sam, you can sneeze, you know? Whatever. Dean won't fucking freak out. He's not the kid's overbearing mom, you know?
“You're on some prescription shit for that, yeah?” He waits for Sam's nod. “Do you want another one or something?”
He coughs. “Doesn't work like that.” Another sneeze, then he rubs the base of his throat. “Ugh. I'm stuffed up.”
Dean would feel bad and start blaming himself for the shitty motel, except Sam's goddamn princess lungs freak out anywhere short of a 4-star place with satin sheets and a butler or whatever those places come with, so he's not beating himself up about it. (of course he's not. No way. Not at all.)
Sam coughs and pushes the flat of his hand into his chest. “Damn, I wish you'd let me sleep through this.”
“Yeah, well, I didn't want to stay up counting breaths. Do another hit. Coffee?”
“Uh-uh.” But he shakes the inhaler again. “I just want to go back to sleep, Dean. I'm fine. You're out of practice, man.”
“I think you're the one out of practice. This is what happens when you wake me up wheezing. I become the boss of you.”
“How I missed your bedside manner.”
“You totally did.”
“I sleep with a woman, Dean. Do you want to know how she wakes me up from asthma attacks?”
“No.” No.
“Didn't think so.” Sam breathes from the inhaler, sets it down, and curls back up. “G'night, Dean.”
“Fuck you.”
“Goodnight, Dean. Sleep well. Hey, dream about music. Flutes and accordions and things that make stuffed up whistling noises.”
“Ugh, Sammy.”
Sam chuckles. “I'm fine,” he says, and he reaches up to turn off the light. “Sleep. We have a big day tomorrow!”
**
In the morning, Dean sees Sam considering his asthma scarf while he gets dressed. He decides against it, eventually, and then looks up and notices Dean watching him. “Hey look, no scarf!” he says, and shoots him this ridiculous smile.
In the car, he texts while Dean drives the two miles to the park. “Jess is nagging me about my asthma,” he says. “It's like there's two of you.”
“Did you tell her you had a rough night?” Because if he did, it might mean it was worse than Dean thought, and Dean definitely does not want it to be worse than he thought.
“Nah, she checked the pollen count or something. Oh hey look. She says, Tell Dean to watch you 'cause the pollen's high. Dean.”
“Sam.”
“Watch me,” he says, with astounding sincerity. “The pollen's high.”
“You're a douchebag, y'know?
“Yeah, but I'm your douchebag.” He yawns.
“Does she usually nag you this much? I think I like this girl.”
“You would like her. And yeah, but she has a sense of humor about it. Like...oh, you'll like this. So this is before we were dating all that long, and I was vacuuming or something-”
“-Who the fuck vacuums on a date?”
“--and got fucking slammed in the face with all this dust, and by this point she kind of knew the drill, and I'm sneezing and she says, 'Hey, Sam!' and I hold up my hand, like, wait a minute, and she's like 'No no no, Sam. What do you call a Sam with a face full of dust!' and I can't talk, I just sneeze, and she's like, 'exaaaactly.'”
“Yeah, I definitely think I like her.”
“You would,” Sam says. Softly.
“So she's checking pollen counts for you from Peru?”
“What? Yeah.”
Dean looks at him.
“What?”
“Just out of the blue?” Dean says.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Are you hiding something from me, here?”
“What?”
“Don't bullshit me. Were you sick before you left?”
“What? Dean, no.”
“Is that why you wouldn't let me come in? Like, nebulizer everywhere or something? And now she's all nervous about you?”
“How everywhere can a nebulizer even be...”
“Just tell me. It's fine.”
“Dean. No. Hayfever, wheezing, nothing out of the ordinary. Not in weeks.” And what this should do is reassure Dean but instead it gives him a big fat reminder that he's fucking crazy because he doesn't think oh so he has a good thing going, way to go Sammy he thinks oh so that means it's time for me to mess up his good streak.
Sam says, “Dude, you've got to calm down.”
“Fuck you.”
“I mean it. You're going to make yourself sick worrying about this.”
Dean looks at him and raises an eyebrow, and Sam raises one right back and says, “What? I should know.”
**
And then they're standing in line to get in the park and Dean's not even fucking saying anything and Sammy says, “Man, I hope I don't stub my toe or something later this week.”
“What?”
“Because you're going to have reached your fuss-over-Sammy quota by like 3 PM today at the latest.”
“I don't have a quota. And it's not my fault you're fucking wheezing.”
“It's so you can find me in the crowd.”
“That's not really a problem with you, Jolly Green.”
“Just trying to make your job easy.”
“I'd like if you'd do that. For one day. Could you do that?”
Sam kicks the ground and doesn't say anything and wow, way to go on that one, Dean, fucking A plus, remind me again why you aren't the one in college?
“Hey. Bitch? I didn't mean it.”
“Sorry. I'm getting annoyed at myself.”
“You annoy me on a regular basis. Right now you're not. Do you have actual money?”
“What? Yeah.”
“Tickets on you.”
**
They get a map at the ticket booth and Sam fucking geeks out and starts trying to find the most efficient ways to get from one thing to the other and Dean says, “You know we have as long as we want, right?” but Sam makes his shut up I'm planning things face and all right, if it makes him that goddamn happy. Especially when Sammy's master plan has them starting the biggest and baddest roller in the place, all right, the kid can stay.
They go to the middle of the park (and okay, maybe by 'go' Dean means 'race the fuck over there,' but racing with obstacles is fucking fun, and they always loved it when they were kids, even though Sam has this major advantage now because people see an eight-and-a-half foot manbeast and get the fuck out of the way so they don't get trampled, and Sam's asthma has always been pretty okay about exercise but he is wheezing a little harder by the time they get there but he's also grinning because he won, bastard, and that's worth it because Dean needs to save up these smiles, okay? He needs to get a lot of them because he doesn't know when he's going to see Sam again, it might not be until this time next year and fuck) and they stand in line and Sam coughs and it's normal.
Dean points to the sign with the warnings for people with every medical condition fucking ever so the park doesn't get sued in case a kid with no arms falls out of the restraints or whatever and says, “Sorry, Sammy, asthma. You can't go.”
“Oh noooo,” Sam says, reinventing the word 'dryly.'
“I'll tell you all about it.” This is an old joke because it's not exactly like Sam spent the first eighteen years of his life living an asthma-approved lifestyle, and now a fucking roller coaster is telling him what to do? Yeah, Sam doesn't do well with orders.
Exhibit A: that if you walk out that door, you're never seeing Dean and me again thing.
Sam does his annoying mind-reading again and says, “So how's Dad?”
“He's all right. Broke his wrist.”
“It's always his wrist. Right one?”
“Yep.”
“Of course.” Sam looks down. “Does he ask about me?”
Dean very definitely does not say he came and creeped on you three weeks ago. “Why would he ask me? What the fuck am I supposed to know about how you're doing?”
“I guess. He knows you talk to me.”
“Yeah, he thinks I send an email once a month.” Dean shrugs and wishes he had a cigarette, but obviously not in front of Sam and if Sam even found out he smokes-and it's not fucking regularly or anything-it would be this whole damn thing about Dean don't you know what you're doing to yourself, let me make you some graphs of what lungs look like before and after smoking and he would do the whole thing without ever mentioning asthma or himself and that would make it a hundred times more tragically convincing and Sammy would fucking know it and own it. “Dad calls the hospital every once in a while and makes sure you're not there. And I think he figured out your password for school or whatever so now he can see what grades you get on your geeky papers.”
“I get awesome grades on my geeky papers.” He coughs for a minute.
“So nothing to worry about, then.”
“Wasn't worried, screw you.”
And he knows what Sam wants to hear, he wants Dean to say no one's forgetting you but give him a break with the sappy shit, because clearly he hasn't forgotten Sam, he's standing here sweating next to him in line for a roller coaster like they're fucking regular people when there are ghosts to gank and people dying.
But then they get onto the roller coaster and there's a chest restraint, this heavy thing that comes down and presses against them, and Sam's a little nervous about it and trying to hide it and seriously, you're going to tell Dean he's supposed to be somewhere else?
“Hey.” He hits Sam's restraint so he'll look at him. “You're fine.”
Sam clears his throat and looks at him. “So the plan is that this thing is just going to fucking throw air into my lungs,” and Dean chuckles.
The thing is tall and the way up to the first drop is ridiculous and Dean remembers about halfway up that he's never been on a roller coaster before and probably Sam hasn't either and it turns out they're both little bitches about it and cursing and and grabbing at each other's safety bars and rolling their heads around and Dean is so scared he's fucking laughing and Sam is fucking laughing at him and they go down the first drop and holy shit Dean's going to come loose, it's just too steep and his body can't fucking compute it and he doesn't weigh anything and he has absolutely no power over what happens to him and his little brother and on paper he would have thought this would scare him, that he has to know what's going on every fucking moment but he finds out he kind of loves it, that this idea of going nowhere he knows with Sam and having to just fucking deal with it is kind of amazing, like they're falling into something together and there's no point in fighting any of it or trying to protect his kid, and he's spent his whole life pulling Sam out of metaphorical fires so it's weird, this isn't something Dean's supposed to be feeling, but Sammy's laughing and screaming like a fucking chick and he's just so much a person right now, a freaking adult, and, seriously, when the hell did this happen and how is his kid making it look so damn easy when Dean can't even get out of bed some mornings? How is Sam just so good at fucking being and why is the fact that Sam is Sam still the most incredible fucking thing in Dean's life when the kid's a zillion miles away? Jesus, these fucking head rushes, they'll kill you.
Also Sam's not awesome at breathing, proven when they get off and he's hacking like some old lady smoker.
“Dried my throat out,” he explains.
“''cause you screamed like a little bitch.”
“Yes, because you were a stoic man about the whole thing.”
“I'll buy you some water.”
Dean assumes he's going to drink while they walk, but instead Sam grabs a bench and watches people for a while, leaning forwards onto his knees. He closes his eyes and tilts his head back for a minute to catch the sun.
Dean says, “So, Peru, huh?”
Sam nods and takes a swig from his bottle. “Building houses for sick kids.” He offers the bottle to Dean, who shakes his head.
“All yours, kid. So she should have just stayed home and built you a house.”
“See, I totally made that joke, and she was not into it.”
“Where to next?”
Sam unfolds the map and points at a wooden roller coaster all the way the fuck over on the other side. “Then we hit everything around that area.”
“You ready to go?”
Sam clears his throat and looks down and messes up his hair with his palm.
Dean settles back on the bench. “Hey, it's no problem.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Can you not do that? The apologizing for the asthma thing? It's fucking boring. We only have a week. I don't want to spend it bored.”
Sam laughs a little and ducks his head, then he turns away and sneezes a couple of times.
“Now you're just showing off,” Dean says.
“Eh, screw you.”
“Seriously, there are no plants here. This is like an industrial wasteland.”
Sam pinches his nose and gestures vaguely to his left, where two people are smoking a few feet from him and you've got to be kidding, seriously.
“Do not embarrass me,” Sam says. “You embarrass me, you die. We'll just move.” He coughs. A lot.
“Can I embarrass you just a little?”
“Aw, you do that all the time, Dean, don't worry. Come on. Up.”
The thing is that it's all familiar in a way that should make Dean feel a lot less okay than he does, but after eighteen years of wheezy Sam during salt and burns this is just routine, this what the way it is, and he's not a fucking sadist because he missed this because this is a facet of Sam and it's been seven goddamn months and three weeks, but it still makes him feel like a fucking asshole, who the fuck is happy when their little brother isn't? (Except Sam seems really happy.)
After the ride they can both hear the cough turning deep and junky and Dean says, “Lunch break?”
He gets this relieved little smile that's like, first of all come fucking on, Sammy, you don't have to wait for Dean to suggest a break, but also did you think Dean wasn't going to notice you sound like shit? You're not exactly subtle, kid.
“I saw this place on the map,” Sam says. “Don't get all brotherly proud about this, okay, but there's a place that doesn't do anything with peanuts so...maybe there.”
He's so fucking brotherly proud it's like chewing up his insides. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Let's do it.”
**
Dean suggests that Sam get them a table while he gets them food, and by the time he comes back with a tray (he even got Sammy fucking salad) the kid's kind of pale, and Dean ninjas in and touches his forehead when Sam reaches for his drink (more water, just more water all the time).
Sam says, “Dude, always with the forehead.”
“No fever.”
“I'm aware. You could always ask, you know?”
“Yeah, well.”
“Just 'cause you and Dad are such shitty patients.” He drinks and pours dressing all over his salad. He acts like such a health freak and then he dresses this shit within an inch of its life.
“You're the one who gets stomach bugs and tries to stealth-puke.”
Sam rolls his eyes and has no comeback.
But he clearly feels like crap, and it sucks. He's picking at his salad and trying to force a few mouthfuls and Dean appreciates it, seriously, but not as much as he'd appreciate his kid getting some fucking oxygen, so he says, “Can I do something?”
Sam shakes his head. “I'm sorry. I don't know why it's hitting me so hard. It's not even that bad, it's just wiping me out.”
“You didn't sleep well.”
He wheezes and nods.
“Plus,” Dean says. “It sounds kinda bad, Sam.”
Sam rubs his eyes and sneezes. “Maybe I'll sit the next one out. Watch you ride it.”
“That's not what this is.”
“This what?”
“This trip. Look, we have all fucking week. Let's go back to the hotel and you can get some rest. We can come back tonight.”
“I don't want to leave,” Sam says, and then coughs for three minutes.
Dean raises an eyebrow, and Sam groans and sinks his head down to the table.
“It's one day, Sam. We have seven. This is enough for now.”
Sam rubs his eyes again until Dean swats his hands away and says, “Yeah, okay.”
First thing he does when they get back to the room is put the asthma scarf on, and Dean definitely does not hover (really, he doesn't, he's not kidding on this one. This is his kid he's talking about, and he's a fucking badass and doesn't need babying once he's back here and safe) and lies back on his bed and reads the newspaper again.
He realizes he's looking for a hunt while simultaneously timing Sam's breaths. Old habits and all that.
**
Dean spends his evening tearing through a Top Gear marathon and Sam spends his getting steadily worse, until he's lying on his bed looking longingly at the bathroom and Dean's like, “Jesus, dude, you can make it to the bathroom.”
“It's faaaaar.”
“Does Jess put up with this shit?”
“She totally does.”
“Go pee, bitch. I'll hear you if you collapse. The whole fucking hotel will hear you if you collapse.”
Sam goes to the bathroom and comes back in near-normal time and Dean smiles to himself as he adjusts the volume.
“You're so fucking proud of me,” Sam says, crawling back into bed. “How embarrassing for you.”
“I'm proud of myself for not falling for your bullshit.”
“Mmmhmm.”
“Get some sleep.”
**
Dean wakes up in the middle of the night to whistling and Sammy shaking his shoulder. He sits up and drags a hand across his eyes. “You want help?”
He can just make out Sam nodding.
“Okay. Get the light.”
It always makes him nervous (understandably, come on) when Sam wakes him up, but he's looked a lot worse. He's sitting on the edge of his bed with his knees tugged up this chin, arms around himself, eyes closed. He's getting a decent amount of air in and out, it's just loud and slow.
“Did you pack a nebulizer?”
“Yeah.”
The truth is there's not really that much he can do, but he sits next to Sam and watches him do the treatment because he knows how much Sam hates when people avert their eyes like he's a car crash (John was always really good at that, treating Sam like a human even when he was covered in wires and bulky masks) and Sammy is sleepy and a little lightheaded and traces patterns on the knee of Dean's sweatpants.
He's just so fucking worn out.
“So it's been bad, huh?” Dean says. Quietly.
Sam gives up and nods.
“Why didn't you tell me?”
He moves the nebulizer away from his mouth for a second. “I didn't want to ruin this week.”
“You're so full of shit, you know? This is part of the Sam-package. It's not like I've been dreading this.”
Sam shrugs a little.
And Dean says one of those sappy things he only says at 3 AM, something like, “It's been a long time since I got to take care of you” but he says it all quiet so maybe he doesn't say it at all, like, prove it, and Sam to his credit pretends like he didn't hear but a minute later brings his cheek down to rest on Dean's shoulder, just for a second. Dean feels things.
**
Sam wants to go to the park the next morning, so he wears his scarf and drinks coffee and generally looks like hell in the passenger seat. But there's a lot to do that isn't going to be too rough on him, and this is his choice, so Dean checks out the bulletin board at the front of the park while Sam rubs his chest and looks sad and they sit in the little theater and watch a few shows. Dean talks him into staying for the one with the animals who do tricks, as long as they stay in the back, because he knows Sam will fucking adore and would never do it on his own. Sam sneezes a few times but loves it and seems no worse for wear. They head back to the hotel at eleven when Sam gets too worn out, and he sleeps with his head against the window. It's a good morning, it's enough for now.
**
That evening, Jess calls while Sam's doing exceptionally hideously, hideously to the extent that he's holding the nebulizer with one hand and gripping the fuck out of his chest with the other and his phone is cradled between his shoulder and his ear and Dean's staring at the coffee pot cursing it for going so fucking slowly because seriously, his little brother.
Sam's not talking much, but Dean can tell whatever Jess is saying is calming him down a little. Whenever Sam does talk, it's a question about how she is and what she's up to. He sounds quiet and interested and...lonely. But it's just the wheezing, right?
Dean pours a cup of coffee and motions for Sam to scoot over, then he takes the hand wrapped his chest and presses the cup into it. “Here,” he says, and he takes the phone so that Sam can hold his neck at a fucking normal angle and get some air in, and he holds it to Sam's ear himself.
Sam waits until the nebuilzer cuts out before he downs the coffee in a few swallows.
Jessica obviously asks how he's feeling, because he says, “Not great,” and coughs for a minute, then says, “Yeah, Dean's got me. I'll be fine.” But then wheezes and does this deep cough that echoes, and he's trying to tell Jess something and he can't, so Dean takes the phone away and says, “Jess?”
“Oh, wow, hey.”
“He's busy coughing. By the sound of it you would have been waiting a while.” He puts his hand on the back of Sam's neck. He's hot, but it's just because he's been working so hard for so damn long, and ugh, Sammy.
“I hate that cough,” she says. She has a really pretty voice, and Dean's seen pictures of her but something about her voice is making her a real person in Dean's head. This smiley, adorable person who loves his brother, and he looks at Sam watching him, all nervous and squinty-eyed and ugly as fuck like he thinks Dean's going to tell her all his secrets, and he thinks of course. I mean, of course.
“Tell me about it.”
“It's good to talk to you finally,” she says. “Sam's all buttoned-up about his family.”
Dean makes a goofy face at Sam, who makes one back.
“Yeah, he does that,” Dean says.
“I didn't mean...I mean, you know Sam. He's like that about everything. Holds his cards close to his chest and all that.”
And Dean thinks what the hell? because here's his kid all sprawled out everywhere during an asthma attack with his freakish limbs taking up the whole bed and he's rolling around whining for Dean to pay attention him when it's like I've been on the fuck phone for all of thirty seconds you demanding little shit and seriously, cards close to his chest? The kid's so fucking obvious, seriously, he hits you in the face with everything, the kid is just everywhere all the time filling up every single fucking empty space.
“Yeah,” Dean says. “Yeah, of course. So, uh, how's Peru?”
Sam sits up. “Gimme the phone.”
Jess says, “Uh, what? Probably about the same as always...”
Sam groans and hugs his pillow and rolls onto his stomach.
Dean stares at him. He says, slowly, “Sammy said you were in Peru.”
“Uh...that's...weird.”
“Yeah.”
“I'm just here. Our dorm.”
Dean raises an eyebrow at Sammy, but he's still hiding in his pillow. And Dean honestly cannot figure out what the hell this means. Until he can, and it's that Sam didn't want him to meet Jessica. Because he's embarrassed.
And isn't that just fucking awesome. He spends his whole life wrapped around Sammy's world and now he's embarrassed of him.
Sam takes the phone back without looking at Dean and talks to Jessica for a minute. Dean gathers that she's pissed. Sam hangs up and rakes his hand through his hair.
“Seriously, Sam?”
Sam wheezes out a sigh. “If you'd known she was around you would have martyred the fuck out and said I should spend spring break with her instead. I didn't want to do spring break with her. I wanted to do it with you.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“Yeah.”
“What the hell, Sam? This is weird. You lie to me about your girlfriend to spend time with me?”
“Oh, hey there, how's your high horse doing? What does Dad think you're doing right now?”
“That's not the fucking same.”
“I know it's not the same! It's a hundred times goddamn worse because Dad knows me and he still thinks that we shouldn't see each other, and that's just a whole fucking enormous can of worms there, and that's not what this is. Jess has no problem with me seeing you. It's just easier this way. If you didn't feel like I was choosing you. If you didn't get to fucking freak about me choosing you and what it means and how you're not worth it all the other places I know your head is going to take you.”
“Just shut up, all right?”
Sam does, but he's still so loud. That fucking breathing.
Dean doesn't know what to think. He isn't thinking.
“We don't have to talk about this,” Sam says.
“Yeah, well, what the fuck else is there to do? You can't fucking breathe, Sam, so I can't exactly stick to the itinerary, okay?”
Shit.
Sam runs his hand down his face. It looks so familiar that Dean almost feels his hand (too big to be Dean's hand) doing the same on his own.
“Did you really have to say that?” Sammy says. So quietly. “Seriously?”
Dean bites his cheek and looks away. He picks up Sam's empty coffee cup and runs his finger around the rim.
“All right,” Sam says. “Just leave me alone for a while.”
Dean keeps the volume up on the TV for the rest of the evening, and Sam lies facing away from Dean and nurses his asthma on his own and texts. Dean checks his phone every once in a while, just in case one of the messages is for him. It's not.
They still brush their teeth together.
**
He should have figured out the pattern after the first few nights, but for some reason he's surprised that it's Sam's breathing and not Sam's voice or his hand on his shoulder that wakes him up. He should know this pattern. First night, wheezing in his sleep, second night, asking for help, third night, not even bothering to ask him for help because he knows his breathing will do it for him and he doesn't want to move.
He's a ball on his side, knees to his chest, t-shirt sticky with sweat, driving cough after cough into the mattress. He draws in a breath that sounds wet and thick and painful.
Dean turns on the light and gives Sam's back a quick rub on his way to the bathroom. “S'okay,” he tells him.
When he comes out of the bathroom, Sam hasn't moved but he isn't coughing, and his eyes are open and focused on Dean. Dean comes back to the bed and puts a hand on Sammy's shoulder to nudge him over a little. Sam makes room for Dean behind him, and Dean pulls up the hem on the back of his t-shirt and puts a washcloth soaked in hot water against his back. He hears something in Sam's breath immediately loosen, and he starts coughing again.
“There you go,” he says. “It's okay.” He rubs a hand up and down Sam's arm, because Sam needs to be touched when he's like this. He wonders if Jess knows that and figures she probably does.
Sam takes a hit or two on his inhaler and wheezes out a thank you.
“Hey, it's fine.”
He sneezes and then he starts coughing again, and it's wracking his whole body. He's shaking down to his bones.
It's like Sam hears Dean thinking and he says, “D'we have to do ER?”
“Is it getting worse?”
He shakes his head. “I think it's gonna stick here for a while.”
“Then no. Not unless you want to.”
“Don't.”
“Okay. If you get tired we can.”
Sam nods, but Dean thinks it's really fucking unlikely they'll end up going today, because if Sam doesn't want to go then Dean either has to be scared out of his mind or fucking tired of nursemaiding to bring him in, and he doesn't think either of those is in the cards for tonight. “We can handle this,” he says. “C'mere.” He hauls Sam up and leans him against the headboard. Sam's always really resistant to moving during attacks, but it always helps to get him propped up or just to get him in a different fucking position from where he was when it started, and sometimes stupid little mind tricks like this are all you can fucking do.
Dean rubs his back. Sammy whimpers with the next breath in and coughs some more.
“One more night,” Dean says, which is this bullshit thing that he always ends up saying without thinking it, and he doesn't even know what it's supposed to mean. One more night until what? How many fucking times has he told Sam one more night and then it happens the next night and the next night and Sam just deals with it, and here's Dean feeling like he's someday going to snap and just not be able to take it anymore, that he's going to see Sam wheezing like this one too many times and something in him is just going to say I can't, I can't and it's been a long time and it's harder now that it used to be, it's harder every single fucking time because they'd pretend Sam was going to grow out of it and now he's eight and a half feet of wheezing clingy kid and what the hell, how does he expect Dean to be able to take this forever and ever, who does he think Dean is?
He coughs just a little, and holds onto Den's sleeve with both hands.
“One more night,” he tells Dean. He's hoarse.
And Dean whispers, “I missed this.” And hates himself.
But Sammy looks up at him and doesn't say anything and Dean can't read his face but it's not mad, Dean doesn't know what the fuck it is or how he's supposed to feel but it's not mad, and then Sam leans against Dean and fusses with his sleeve until he falls asleep and Jesus fucking Christ, just...one more night.
**
Dad calls. Sam's in the shower.
Dean doesn't pick up.
**
“Are you going to call him back?” Sam says. He's jeans, no shirt, toweling his hair, coughing.
“I have to.”
“He left a message?”
“Yeah. There's a hunt somewhere in Pittsburgh. He wants me there to figure out the situation, he's going to meet up in a few days.”
Sam doesn't say anything.
“I'm not going,” Dean says.
“Seriously?”
“This is your week.”
“I'm just lying around coughing, Dean. I wouldn't blame you. It's fine.”
“Fucking stop it. I'm not going.”
“Okay, so if it's that simple, explain why you look like you're about to flip the fuck out? I'm a little slow today.” He coughs, once, into his wrist.
“Because I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to lie to Dad about spending time with my fucking brother, and it's just so...what the fuck is this? What's the big fucking deal if I come and see you? Why the fuck is it every time you have a break Dad has something for me to do on the other fucking side of the country, and how the hell does he expect me to...”
“Dean, come on,” Sam says. So softly.
“Like it's such a big fucking that you went to school. He's not even mad about it anymore, you know? He's not mad at you.”
“I know.”
“And he holds onto this fucking thing about how I can't come visit, and I don't know why, and-”
“Dean.”
For a variety of reasons, Dean is just not going to fucking look at him right now, okay?
“You know why,” Sam says.
“No.”
“Come on.”
“No, I don't.”
“The...” Sam wheezes and sits down on his bed. “The same reason he made us stop sleeping in the same bed before we were out of elementary school. The same reason he'd make that face when we shared drinks. Fuck, Dean, the same reason I lied to you about Jess.”
It's like Dean hears everything in the room all of a sudden, the air conditioner, the high-pitched sound the TV makes, the vacuum cleaner down the hall, fucking Sam, and it's so much easier to hear and to to think because shit, shit.
Dean puts his head in his hands and rubs his temples and Jesus Christ they are not doing this, they are not supposed to ever, ever talk about this, he made that rule for himself a long fucking time ago and now Sam's sitting here and the fact that he's half-naked should have something to do with it but it doesn't because this was never about how Sam looked or about Jess or about fucking anything but Sammy, this fucking Sammy-ness his kid has inside of him and pouring out of him every fucking second all of over goddamn everything and Jesus, Jesus fuck God shit.
“Oh, God, Dean,” Sam says. “Are you just seeing this now? Shit.”
“No, I just...” He rubs his forehead. “Jesus.”
Sam “ummm”s and puts on a shirt and starts coughing again, and of course that's when Dean's phone rings, and Dean checks it and motions at Sam to shut up, and Sam nods and freezes his chest and swallows a few times. Gives Dean a thumbs-up.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Dean. I left you a message.”
“I know, sorry. I was in the shower. I got it.”
“How soon can you be in Pittsburgh?”
Dean looks up at Sam. Sam shrugs one shoulder.
“Next week,” Dean says.
“What?”
“I'm in the middle of something here.”
“It can wait. This is important.”
“So's this.”
“I thought you were in Vegas. What could possibly be more important in Vegas? People are dying, Dean.”
“I'm not in Vegas. I'm in California.”
Sam mouths, you don't have to.
“I'm with Sam,” he says.
Sam sucks in his lips.
What's funny is that Dean expects John to fly off the handle, to have some ridiculous, overblown response, when that's never been how John's acted about Sam, about the possibility of Dean seeing Sam. It would be so much fucking easier if it were, if his dad would explicitly forbid him from seeing Sam, because then they'd at least know they were breaking a rule instead of...this but that's not what this is (that's not what this will ever be).
“Dean,” he says, quietly.
“It's his spring break. We're at an amusement park. I can be in Pittsburgh next week.”
“Sam knows how important these hunts are. He'll understand.”
“I don't care if he understands. He's not doing great and I'm not leaving him.”
John pauses. “Is he all right?”
Dean mouths, worried about you, and Sam squirms and twists his blanket between his fingers and pretends he's not smiling.
Dean says, “He will be, but it's been a rough few days and he shouldn't be alone.”
“Where's that girlfriend?”
“Peru,” Dean says, and Jesus God that smile, that smile, his fucking kid.
**
There's fireworks at the park on Saturday night, so they dress Sammy up in too many layers and head over. He's feeling like shit.
“We should leave tonight,” Dean says.
Sam looks up. “What?”
“I'm blaming the hotel on this one, Sammy. We should go.”
“Mmm.” He closes his eyes and leans against the window. “Back to Stanford?” he says, after a minute.
“No, no. Not yet. I get you for four more days.”
“Yaaay,” he says, and even though he's clearly just fucking with him, Dean rolls his eyes and makes the obligatory comment about what a chick he is because come on, he's not going to let Sam get away with that.
They park and climb onto the hood of the car rather than try to trudge their way into the park. Families with little kids have the same idea, and Sam watches a mom and a dad and two little girls tailgate out of an SUV with the vaguest, saddest smile Dean has ever seen.
“That'll be you someday,” Dean says.
“Yeah?”
“Of course. Wife, kids.”
“What about you?”
“Eh, I'll be with Dad. Out in the shadows, keeping you and the missus safe, that kinda thing.” He takes a swig of his beer.
“I could live with that.”
“I know you could, Sammy.”
Sam starts wheezing again right when the fireworks start, so Dean can barely hear it. Sam doesn't seem to notice, and Dean reaches around and just rubs Sam's back a little, and he's wearing so many fucking layers of clothing that he probably can't feel it, but it's halfway through the damn show that Dean realizes he's been watching the fireworks but Sam has been watching him, and what a fucking trip that is. Dean feels small and embarrassed and really fucking taken care of, which is stupid because the kid here is the one coughing into his scarf and Dean's the one with his hand on the back of Sam's head but this is it, and maybe it will always make him feel like a ridiculously shitty person that Sam's wheezing, just when it's soft like this, is one of his favorite fucking sounds but that's conditioning for you, that's what this fucking does, John, okay, and that's their lives, and they fucking love routine, Dean and his kid.
“This is enough for now,” Sam says when the fireworks are over.
**
They're in the car and Sam's supposed to be sleeping, but instead he's wheeze-singing along to Metallica and churning his way through a box of tissues. Dean's going to be picking the used ones off the floor for a fucking week because Sam is disgusting.
“At least you're breathing better,” Dean says.
Sam nods and sneezes.
“Something to tell Dad. He texted me saying you should go back on prednisone.”
Sam makes a face and blows his nose. “I get sick every time I'm on it.”
“He knows that and says he's sorry but it sounds like you need it. And he told me to tell you that Bobby's working something in San Francisco that looks like it might take a while. Dad's letting him know you've been a little rough, so f this doesn't clear up, he can come get you and take you to the hospital or whatever.”
He sneezes and says, “I have Jess.”
“I know, but...”
“No, no, I appreciate it.” He swallows. “Tell him thanks.” Sam looks out the window for a while, then says, “You know, I hate myself for this, but I'm kind of surprised he didn't ask to talk to me. I mean, after you told him I wasn't doing great.” He looks at Dean. “Are we going to talk about this?”
Dean counts his teeth with his tongue.
“Should we?”
“Probably.”
“How are you so cool about this?”
“I'm just awesome, I guess. I don't know, Dean. I came to terms with a long time ago, and I decided people can try whatever they want and try to get in the way of it but it's just not a big deal, at the root of it. It just...is what it is. It's this.”
“It doesn't fucking scare you to death?”
“Of course it does. How could it not? But...” Sam plays with his feet on the dashboard and squirrels his tongue in his cheek while he thinks. He looks up and says, “The alternative is not seeing you. And I want to see you. “
Dean takes a breath as deep as four of Sammy's and lets it settle in the back of his throat. Next to him, Sammy sneezes twenty billion times and Jesus, how many days does Dean go out and kill evil SOBs and pretend to be a policeman or a fireman or a scientist and go back to the motel and wash off the blood like it's nothing and get drunk in front of Mythbusters marathons and how much of the time does he just go through the motions and never really feel anything and how the fuck can one snot-nosed twenty-year-old who thinks he knows fucking anything about anything say six fucking words and monster-truck slam him with everything he hasn't been feeling in seven months and three weeks, seriously, how the fuck does he do that, and how does Sam just keep on living like he doesn't fucking know exactly what the hell he's doing, how could he not know, and do people who see him everyday, the chick in his philosophy class or the guy he buys his coffee from, do they realize who they're dealing with, here, the totality of Sam, here?
“Jeez, bitch, I was talking about your asthma,” Dean says.
Sam punches him in the leg and coughs. “So where the fuck are we going?”
“Arizona.”
“Ha,” Sam says, but then Dean doesn't answer and he goes, “You're kidding me, seriously?”
“Listen to your fucking chest.”
Sam breathes in and out, slowly, sounding like a leaky tire.
“All right, all right,” he says. “Arizona.”
**
Four days later, they're pulling up outside Sam's dorm.
“So, you have classes tomorrow?”
He groans and coughs. “Don't remind me. I might take the day off.”
“Fucking slacker.”
“Ugh, I can't breathe.” He's drama-queening, because Arizona did help, but yeah, he's not exactly a hundred percent. Dean can take solace in the fact that he clearly wasn't when he left, either, no matter what he tried to pretend at the time, so at least he's returning him no worse than he found him.
“Tell Jess hey,” he says.
“I will. Same to Dad.”
“Yeah. Call me when this clears up. Or if it doesn't.”
“I know.”
They're just sitting there in the car.
They hug hello and never goodbye. Dean's doesn't really think about it but Sammy, who's usually the chick about these things, never tries for it so he doesn't either.
“June,” Sam says. “I have a week off in June.”
“Oh. Good.”
“Three months.”
“All right.”
“Two months, three weeks, two days. I worked that out about an hour ago.” Sam hauls his bag out of the car and leans back through his window. “Be safe, okay? In Pittsburgh.”
“Yeah. You too.”
“In my dorm.”
“Yeah.”
Sam gives him a big smile and starts towards his dorm. A few steps from the stairs, he turns around, gives Dean a wave, and walks backwards for a second, just looking.
Then a tall blond blur comes running from the top step and wraps her legs around Sam's waist and her mouth around his mouth and Sam's laughing and letting his bag drop to the ground, and Dean smiles a little (maybe the way Sam smiled at the family).
Sam deserves it. Sam deserves fucking everything.
Dean intends to make sure he gets it.
He knows Sam will try to give him another wave after the kiss is over, maybe bring Jess over and introduce her, but Dean intends to be long gone by then. He has a bitch of a drive ahead of him. He figures he can make it to Pittsburgh in three days.
Then two months, two weeks, six days.
This is enough for now.
Summary: Stanford-era: Dean has been looking forward to Sam's spring break for a long time. And nothing's going to ruin it. Not Sam's asthma, not John, and definitely not this thing they've managed to avoid talking about until now. Definitely not that.
Warnings/Spoilers: No spoilers, bad language.
Wordcount: 10,118, but it goes fast, seriously.
Author's Note: Sammy-verse, so: Dean's POV, Sam has bad asthma, the boys are badasses. I kind of cheated on the title, I know. It's a present for wave_obscura, and the title is obviously a bastardization of "This Charming Man,' by The Smiths. Beyond that...I don't want to talk too much about this one. I just really, really want to know what you think.
This Charming Sam
--
It's not like Dean's been counting, but it's been seven months and three weeks since he's seen Sam. Dean had pulled him out of his stupid summer class (seriously, who the fuck takes summer classes, and he's doing it again this summer, and Dean asked him why and Sam said “What else am I going to do during the summer?” and he has a point) and dragged him to one of Palo Alto's shitty beach motels for a weekend, and they pretended they knew how to surf and ate snowcones and Sam helped him fabricate the story Dean was going to tell Dad about the ghost in California that he had to take care of and it was simple, easy salt and burn, and no, he didn't even think about going to see Sam, I wonder how he's doing. They fell asleep on towels by the ocean and cruised sisters in matching bikinis and drove fifty miles to a different beach when they heard a rumor there would be fireworks there (and there were, and they were shitty, and they didn't care, and it gave them an excuse to buy their own and set them off on the roof of the motel).
But now Sam has a giiiiiiirlfriend, and he spent Christmas with her (and how was Dean supposed to get to Sam for it anyway, tell Dad he had to hunt Santa Claus?) but she's in Peru for spring break. “Community service,” Sam told him, and Dean could hear him smile through the phone and all right, if Sam's happy he's happy, even though it means Sam now talks to him out in the hallway while she's sleeping like he's fucking embarrassed (“No, I'm not, Dean, it's just easier, okay?”) but with her gone that means Sam had nothing to do for spring break, so, to put it crudely, mine.
Dad thinks he's investigating something in Nevada. Little does he know, rumors of something supernatural will turn out to be false, and Dean will decide as long as he's out here to spend a few days in Vegas. Playing blackjack, fucking strippers, seeing magic shows and shit. All things his dad would rather he do than spend time with his brother.
Whatever. He's pulling into Stanford's campus, Zepplin roaring through his baby's speakers, and there's Sammy and his duffel bag standing on the steps of his dorms, and Jesus, nothing like a few months off to turn Dean into some granny bragging about her young'uns, but his kid's grown, man. Dean parks and gets out and Sam wraps him in one of his girlyass hugs.
“Dude,” Dean groans. “Let a guy piss first.” He palms the back of Sam's head.
“Fuck you, I get three more seconds at least.”
“Why are you such a chick?”
“Shhhhhh. Just let it happen. Be a Buddhist monk. A Buddhist monk of hugs.”
“I seriously have to pee, though. Is that the point? Are you into that? I think I've dated you.”
Sam swats him and lets him go. “Once we're on the road. Let's get moving.”
“What?”
“My place is a shithole.”
This comment is baffling for a number of reasons, the first one being, obviously, that he and Sam lived on top of each other for eighteen years so what the fuck could possibly be in there that Dean hasn't seen, the second one being that Sam folds his socks.
“It's my girlfriend,” Sam says, quickly. “Her stuff, I mean. She's a slob.”
“The hot ones always are.”
“Come on.”
“I can't believe you think I'm going to judge you on your place.” But he unlocks the car.
“It's just that it's her stuff. I don't want you going through her bras and trying to imagine what she looks like naked, or crawling through her closet looking for her vibrators, or-”
“Why does your girlfriend have vibrators? Why do you suck?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“We're making things awkward already. And we have miles to go before we sleep or whatever.”
Sam practically fucking bounces. (Jesus, Sammy, give Dean a second to fucking process that you're here, okay?) “Where are we going?”
“Somewhere with a bathroom, first. You hungry?”
Sam shakes his head and coughs for a minute, then he says, “You are not seriously giving me that look because I fucking coughed, are you?”
“You're not hungry...”
“Because I just ate. Jesus, I'm fine.”
Dean rolls his eyes. “The cough was fucking ugly.”
Sam sticks out his hand (the one he just fucking coughed into, who raised this kid? Oh right-Dean likes to make those jokes to himself, he isn't quite sure why) and says, “Hi, I'm Sam Winchester, sophomore English major, Taurus. I run a four and a half minute mile, I just do not lose at Monopoly, and I have astonishingly bad asthma. Have we met?”
“You don't seriously introduce yourself that way, do you?”
“No. No one knows I run a four and a half minute mile. They'd be confused.”
“Bet you can't even anymore.”
“Take me back to the beach and I'll race you.”
“Not going back to the beach.” (Plus the kid's legs have five inches on his that's not fucking fair) “We already did that.”
“So where? Where? Where? Where?”
“Christ, you're a fucking five year old. Get in the car.”
And he does. Grinning his fucking face off. Grumbling something bitchy about Dean's music. Filling up his car with his duffel bag and his ratty old hoodie and the smell of twenty-year-old boy that Dean remembers his father bitching about four years ago that he never understood until it was riding shotgun and his wheezy goddamn laughter and Christ this kid.
**
The problem is that they both want to hear everything and they want to hear it immediately, so they're at the diner and Sam keeps interrupting his stories about Stanford parties to go “No so wait tell me about the Baba Yaga hunt,” and Dean keeps stopping at the fucking good parts where he and Dad are about to go in salt guns ablazing because suddenly it's way more exciting to him what Sam ended up getting on that history exam.
And it's not until Sam tells him that he did a shitty job on the history exam because he was up all night keeping his asthma company that Dean feels like he can finally ask, “Hey, so how have you been?”
Sam is quiet for a while, which gives Dean way too much information.
“Hey, Sammy, come on. Tell me.”
“Better now that I'm with youuuuuu, Dean.”
“God, fuck you.”
Sam grins and takes a massive bite of his sandwich. Dean knew the kid would eat. “No, seriously, it's been better,” he says. “Beginning of spring was rough. Last few weeks, way better.”
“New meds?”
“Yeah, these white ones. They're rectangular. It's weird.”
Dean gives him a small smile around his coffee mug.
“Ughhh,” Sam says. “Don't be like that. I'm fine. We're fine to talk about this, right? I hate when I haven't seen you in a while and you decide to get all serious about asthma while I'm gone. It's a drag. Have you been reading the blogs? Don't read the blogs, Dean.”
“You irritate the motherfucking shit out of me.”
Sam starts coughing, and Dean trades his coffee mug for Sam's empty one and signals the waitress for a refill while Sam gulps down his.
“Yeah, you're the picture of health,” Dean says.
“Tell me where we're going.”
“Iceland.”
“Only if they built a bridge.”
“The zoo.”
“Fuck you.”
“Arizona. Good for lungs.”
“Are you serious?”
“Ugh, no, Arizona? I'm not fucking serious.”
Sam throws a French fry at him.
**
Dean really wanted to see Sam light up when he saw the roller coaster tracks arcing across the sky, but by the time they get to the shitty hotel by the shitty amusement park, Sam's fast asleep against the window. Dean decides his satisfaction is more important than Sam's beauty sleep and nudges him with his elbow until he wakes up. Sam startles and blinks at him.
“Look.”
Sam coughs and looks up and Jesus fucking Christ does he light up, like a fucking comet.
“Roller coasters!?”
“You know it, bitch.”
“Shit. No way. Fuck.” He's grinning so hard it makes Dean's face hurt. “Remember that time-” he starts.
“Of course I remember that time,” Dean says, because that's why they're fucking here, the time when Dad told them they could do a day at Six Flags when they were in some shitty nowhere city for a hunt, he promised that on the way out of town they'd get four hours there at least and Dean and Sammy sat down with a map and plotted out exactly where they were going and how long it would take to walk from place to place and they made a yardstick out of paper so they could measure Sam and figure out what he could get on, and then they tore the paper yardstick in two and folded it up and stuffed it in Sam's shoes to make him taller and then there was another hunt in the opposite fucking direction and John told Sam to stop crying like a fucking six year old and Sam said “I'm five!” and actually he was seven but Dean thinks it says something that John believed him for a minute.
A timer goes off on Sam's watch, and he shakes his inhaler while he looks out the window.
“Are we going tonight?” Sam says.
“It closes early on weeknights.”
“Damn.”
“Nah, it's okay, we'll sleep a lot tonight so we can go all day tomorrow. Don't fucking pout at me.”
“Like a fucking six-year-old?”
“I can't believe you remember that,” Dean says, but Sam makes it a habit to remember every shitty thing Dad has ever done and Dean would bet all his imaginary earnings from his imaginary Vegas trip that Sam doesn't remember the model roller coaster Dad bought him a month later.
But then Sam says, “Remember when you bought me that roller coaster?” and come on, Sam, why are you dumb, Dean was eleven, he wasn't fucking buying anyone anything, and why does Sam have to go and say these fucking moronic things that make Dean feel all this stuff?
He says, “Dean, remember?”
“Think that was Dad, Sammy.”
“No, Dean, it was you. Remember, you found that five dollar bill a few days before and you were all excited, and then Dad let us go into that weird dollar store while he was at his P.O. box, and it was this shitty little plastic thing and it broke? It was like a month after Dad didn't take us to Six Flags. You wrapped it up in a tissue and gave it to me.”
Oh.
Well.
Shit.
**
Dean would feel like such a fucking loser for getting a kick out of brushing his teeth side-by-side with Sam again except that he can totally tell that Sam's kind of into it too, and just like always he shaves (him at night, Sam in the morning, one razor, saves time, they're good at routines) while Sam takes his pills and the steroid inhaler and then brushes his teeth again because he has to do it before and after. It used to drive Dean fucking insane. (Dean: It doesn't make sense! Sam: Fuck off. They like routines.)
It's just that it's been a really fucking long time since he's gone to bed like this, Sammy in the next bed instead of Dad, Sam telling stupid jokes and stories and not shutting up and saying “Okay okay I'm quiet we're going to bed now” and then fucking laughing about something Dean said two hours ago and Dean missed his kid and wants to fucking slap him and he this is exactly how he remembered it, but then the next thing he knows it's 3 AM and he wakes up (so apparently Sam did stop talking at some point, it's like a fucking miracle every time he does) because Sam's wheezing, deep and low, bad, snagging at the tops of his lungs. It's this stuffed-up bullshit that Dean hates, because it makes Sammy sound sick, and this is worse than he remembered, it always is.
“Y'kay?” Dean mumbles. No answer. He's asleep.
Dean gets up and gets a glass of water, brings it back into the room and shakes Sam's foot. “Hey. Just for a minute, okay?”
Sam's a fucking ball in the middle of his bed, all the covers pushed to the bottom, his whole body hugging the pillow to his chest. He spasms up with coughs and rolls over onto his back. Dean thinks about hauling him up but he's not a fucking child, so he lets Sam sit himself up and rub his chest and cough into his elbow.
He hands him the glass of water and says, “What do you need?”
Sam takes a few sips before he goes for his inhaler. “M'okay,” he says as he shakes it.
“Yeah?”
Sam takes his hit from it, nods, yawns, wheezes. Dean hits the light and Sam whines and rubs his eyes. His hair's sticking up everywhere.
Dean says, “You sound like crap, kid. Allergies?”
Sam nods and sneezes, like he's only doing it because Dean gave him permission, and like shit, Sam, you can sneeze, you know? Whatever. Dean won't fucking freak out. He's not the kid's overbearing mom, you know?
“You're on some prescription shit for that, yeah?” He waits for Sam's nod. “Do you want another one or something?”
He coughs. “Doesn't work like that.” Another sneeze, then he rubs the base of his throat. “Ugh. I'm stuffed up.”
Dean would feel bad and start blaming himself for the shitty motel, except Sam's goddamn princess lungs freak out anywhere short of a 4-star place with satin sheets and a butler or whatever those places come with, so he's not beating himself up about it. (of course he's not. No way. Not at all.)
Sam coughs and pushes the flat of his hand into his chest. “Damn, I wish you'd let me sleep through this.”
“Yeah, well, I didn't want to stay up counting breaths. Do another hit. Coffee?”
“Uh-uh.” But he shakes the inhaler again. “I just want to go back to sleep, Dean. I'm fine. You're out of practice, man.”
“I think you're the one out of practice. This is what happens when you wake me up wheezing. I become the boss of you.”
“How I missed your bedside manner.”
“You totally did.”
“I sleep with a woman, Dean. Do you want to know how she wakes me up from asthma attacks?”
“No.” No.
“Didn't think so.” Sam breathes from the inhaler, sets it down, and curls back up. “G'night, Dean.”
“Fuck you.”
“Goodnight, Dean. Sleep well. Hey, dream about music. Flutes and accordions and things that make stuffed up whistling noises.”
“Ugh, Sammy.”
Sam chuckles. “I'm fine,” he says, and he reaches up to turn off the light. “Sleep. We have a big day tomorrow!”
**
In the morning, Dean sees Sam considering his asthma scarf while he gets dressed. He decides against it, eventually, and then looks up and notices Dean watching him. “Hey look, no scarf!” he says, and shoots him this ridiculous smile.
In the car, he texts while Dean drives the two miles to the park. “Jess is nagging me about my asthma,” he says. “It's like there's two of you.”
“Did you tell her you had a rough night?” Because if he did, it might mean it was worse than Dean thought, and Dean definitely does not want it to be worse than he thought.
“Nah, she checked the pollen count or something. Oh hey look. She says, Tell Dean to watch you 'cause the pollen's high. Dean.”
“Sam.”
“Watch me,” he says, with astounding sincerity. “The pollen's high.”
“You're a douchebag, y'know?
“Yeah, but I'm your douchebag.” He yawns.
“Does she usually nag you this much? I think I like this girl.”
“You would like her. And yeah, but she has a sense of humor about it. Like...oh, you'll like this. So this is before we were dating all that long, and I was vacuuming or something-”
“-Who the fuck vacuums on a date?”
“--and got fucking slammed in the face with all this dust, and by this point she kind of knew the drill, and I'm sneezing and she says, 'Hey, Sam!' and I hold up my hand, like, wait a minute, and she's like 'No no no, Sam. What do you call a Sam with a face full of dust!' and I can't talk, I just sneeze, and she's like, 'exaaaactly.'”
“Yeah, I definitely think I like her.”
“You would,” Sam says. Softly.
“So she's checking pollen counts for you from Peru?”
“What? Yeah.”
Dean looks at him.
“What?”
“Just out of the blue?” Dean says.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Are you hiding something from me, here?”
“What?”
“Don't bullshit me. Were you sick before you left?”
“What? Dean, no.”
“Is that why you wouldn't let me come in? Like, nebulizer everywhere or something? And now she's all nervous about you?”
“How everywhere can a nebulizer even be...”
“Just tell me. It's fine.”
“Dean. No. Hayfever, wheezing, nothing out of the ordinary. Not in weeks.” And what this should do is reassure Dean but instead it gives him a big fat reminder that he's fucking crazy because he doesn't think oh so he has a good thing going, way to go Sammy he thinks oh so that means it's time for me to mess up his good streak.
Sam says, “Dude, you've got to calm down.”
“Fuck you.”
“I mean it. You're going to make yourself sick worrying about this.”
Dean looks at him and raises an eyebrow, and Sam raises one right back and says, “What? I should know.”
**
And then they're standing in line to get in the park and Dean's not even fucking saying anything and Sammy says, “Man, I hope I don't stub my toe or something later this week.”
“What?”
“Because you're going to have reached your fuss-over-Sammy quota by like 3 PM today at the latest.”
“I don't have a quota. And it's not my fault you're fucking wheezing.”
“It's so you can find me in the crowd.”
“That's not really a problem with you, Jolly Green.”
“Just trying to make your job easy.”
“I'd like if you'd do that. For one day. Could you do that?”
Sam kicks the ground and doesn't say anything and wow, way to go on that one, Dean, fucking A plus, remind me again why you aren't the one in college?
“Hey. Bitch? I didn't mean it.”
“Sorry. I'm getting annoyed at myself.”
“You annoy me on a regular basis. Right now you're not. Do you have actual money?”
“What? Yeah.”
“Tickets on you.”
**
They get a map at the ticket booth and Sam fucking geeks out and starts trying to find the most efficient ways to get from one thing to the other and Dean says, “You know we have as long as we want, right?” but Sam makes his shut up I'm planning things face and all right, if it makes him that goddamn happy. Especially when Sammy's master plan has them starting the biggest and baddest roller in the place, all right, the kid can stay.
They go to the middle of the park (and okay, maybe by 'go' Dean means 'race the fuck over there,' but racing with obstacles is fucking fun, and they always loved it when they were kids, even though Sam has this major advantage now because people see an eight-and-a-half foot manbeast and get the fuck out of the way so they don't get trampled, and Sam's asthma has always been pretty okay about exercise but he is wheezing a little harder by the time they get there but he's also grinning because he won, bastard, and that's worth it because Dean needs to save up these smiles, okay? He needs to get a lot of them because he doesn't know when he's going to see Sam again, it might not be until this time next year and fuck) and they stand in line and Sam coughs and it's normal.
Dean points to the sign with the warnings for people with every medical condition fucking ever so the park doesn't get sued in case a kid with no arms falls out of the restraints or whatever and says, “Sorry, Sammy, asthma. You can't go.”
“Oh noooo,” Sam says, reinventing the word 'dryly.'
“I'll tell you all about it.” This is an old joke because it's not exactly like Sam spent the first eighteen years of his life living an asthma-approved lifestyle, and now a fucking roller coaster is telling him what to do? Yeah, Sam doesn't do well with orders.
Exhibit A: that if you walk out that door, you're never seeing Dean and me again thing.
Sam does his annoying mind-reading again and says, “So how's Dad?”
“He's all right. Broke his wrist.”
“It's always his wrist. Right one?”
“Yep.”
“Of course.” Sam looks down. “Does he ask about me?”
Dean very definitely does not say he came and creeped on you three weeks ago. “Why would he ask me? What the fuck am I supposed to know about how you're doing?”
“I guess. He knows you talk to me.”
“Yeah, he thinks I send an email once a month.” Dean shrugs and wishes he had a cigarette, but obviously not in front of Sam and if Sam even found out he smokes-and it's not fucking regularly or anything-it would be this whole damn thing about Dean don't you know what you're doing to yourself, let me make you some graphs of what lungs look like before and after smoking and he would do the whole thing without ever mentioning asthma or himself and that would make it a hundred times more tragically convincing and Sammy would fucking know it and own it. “Dad calls the hospital every once in a while and makes sure you're not there. And I think he figured out your password for school or whatever so now he can see what grades you get on your geeky papers.”
“I get awesome grades on my geeky papers.” He coughs for a minute.
“So nothing to worry about, then.”
“Wasn't worried, screw you.”
And he knows what Sam wants to hear, he wants Dean to say no one's forgetting you but give him a break with the sappy shit, because clearly he hasn't forgotten Sam, he's standing here sweating next to him in line for a roller coaster like they're fucking regular people when there are ghosts to gank and people dying.
But then they get onto the roller coaster and there's a chest restraint, this heavy thing that comes down and presses against them, and Sam's a little nervous about it and trying to hide it and seriously, you're going to tell Dean he's supposed to be somewhere else?
“Hey.” He hits Sam's restraint so he'll look at him. “You're fine.”
Sam clears his throat and looks at him. “So the plan is that this thing is just going to fucking throw air into my lungs,” and Dean chuckles.
The thing is tall and the way up to the first drop is ridiculous and Dean remembers about halfway up that he's never been on a roller coaster before and probably Sam hasn't either and it turns out they're both little bitches about it and cursing and and grabbing at each other's safety bars and rolling their heads around and Dean is so scared he's fucking laughing and Sam is fucking laughing at him and they go down the first drop and holy shit Dean's going to come loose, it's just too steep and his body can't fucking compute it and he doesn't weigh anything and he has absolutely no power over what happens to him and his little brother and on paper he would have thought this would scare him, that he has to know what's going on every fucking moment but he finds out he kind of loves it, that this idea of going nowhere he knows with Sam and having to just fucking deal with it is kind of amazing, like they're falling into something together and there's no point in fighting any of it or trying to protect his kid, and he's spent his whole life pulling Sam out of metaphorical fires so it's weird, this isn't something Dean's supposed to be feeling, but Sammy's laughing and screaming like a fucking chick and he's just so much a person right now, a freaking adult, and, seriously, when the hell did this happen and how is his kid making it look so damn easy when Dean can't even get out of bed some mornings? How is Sam just so good at fucking being and why is the fact that Sam is Sam still the most incredible fucking thing in Dean's life when the kid's a zillion miles away? Jesus, these fucking head rushes, they'll kill you.
Also Sam's not awesome at breathing, proven when they get off and he's hacking like some old lady smoker.
“Dried my throat out,” he explains.
“''cause you screamed like a little bitch.”
“Yes, because you were a stoic man about the whole thing.”
“I'll buy you some water.”
Dean assumes he's going to drink while they walk, but instead Sam grabs a bench and watches people for a while, leaning forwards onto his knees. He closes his eyes and tilts his head back for a minute to catch the sun.
Dean says, “So, Peru, huh?”
Sam nods and takes a swig from his bottle. “Building houses for sick kids.” He offers the bottle to Dean, who shakes his head.
“All yours, kid. So she should have just stayed home and built you a house.”
“See, I totally made that joke, and she was not into it.”
“Where to next?”
Sam unfolds the map and points at a wooden roller coaster all the way the fuck over on the other side. “Then we hit everything around that area.”
“You ready to go?”
Sam clears his throat and looks down and messes up his hair with his palm.
Dean settles back on the bench. “Hey, it's no problem.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Can you not do that? The apologizing for the asthma thing? It's fucking boring. We only have a week. I don't want to spend it bored.”
Sam laughs a little and ducks his head, then he turns away and sneezes a couple of times.
“Now you're just showing off,” Dean says.
“Eh, screw you.”
“Seriously, there are no plants here. This is like an industrial wasteland.”
Sam pinches his nose and gestures vaguely to his left, where two people are smoking a few feet from him and you've got to be kidding, seriously.
“Do not embarrass me,” Sam says. “You embarrass me, you die. We'll just move.” He coughs. A lot.
“Can I embarrass you just a little?”
“Aw, you do that all the time, Dean, don't worry. Come on. Up.”
The thing is that it's all familiar in a way that should make Dean feel a lot less okay than he does, but after eighteen years of wheezy Sam during salt and burns this is just routine, this what the way it is, and he's not a fucking sadist because he missed this because this is a facet of Sam and it's been seven goddamn months and three weeks, but it still makes him feel like a fucking asshole, who the fuck is happy when their little brother isn't? (Except Sam seems really happy.)
After the ride they can both hear the cough turning deep and junky and Dean says, “Lunch break?”
He gets this relieved little smile that's like, first of all come fucking on, Sammy, you don't have to wait for Dean to suggest a break, but also did you think Dean wasn't going to notice you sound like shit? You're not exactly subtle, kid.
“I saw this place on the map,” Sam says. “Don't get all brotherly proud about this, okay, but there's a place that doesn't do anything with peanuts so...maybe there.”
He's so fucking brotherly proud it's like chewing up his insides. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Let's do it.”
**
Dean suggests that Sam get them a table while he gets them food, and by the time he comes back with a tray (he even got Sammy fucking salad) the kid's kind of pale, and Dean ninjas in and touches his forehead when Sam reaches for his drink (more water, just more water all the time).
Sam says, “Dude, always with the forehead.”
“No fever.”
“I'm aware. You could always ask, you know?”
“Yeah, well.”
“Just 'cause you and Dad are such shitty patients.” He drinks and pours dressing all over his salad. He acts like such a health freak and then he dresses this shit within an inch of its life.
“You're the one who gets stomach bugs and tries to stealth-puke.”
Sam rolls his eyes and has no comeback.
But he clearly feels like crap, and it sucks. He's picking at his salad and trying to force a few mouthfuls and Dean appreciates it, seriously, but not as much as he'd appreciate his kid getting some fucking oxygen, so he says, “Can I do something?”
Sam shakes his head. “I'm sorry. I don't know why it's hitting me so hard. It's not even that bad, it's just wiping me out.”
“You didn't sleep well.”
He wheezes and nods.
“Plus,” Dean says. “It sounds kinda bad, Sam.”
Sam rubs his eyes and sneezes. “Maybe I'll sit the next one out. Watch you ride it.”
“That's not what this is.”
“This what?”
“This trip. Look, we have all fucking week. Let's go back to the hotel and you can get some rest. We can come back tonight.”
“I don't want to leave,” Sam says, and then coughs for three minutes.
Dean raises an eyebrow, and Sam groans and sinks his head down to the table.
“It's one day, Sam. We have seven. This is enough for now.”
Sam rubs his eyes again until Dean swats his hands away and says, “Yeah, okay.”
First thing he does when they get back to the room is put the asthma scarf on, and Dean definitely does not hover (really, he doesn't, he's not kidding on this one. This is his kid he's talking about, and he's a fucking badass and doesn't need babying once he's back here and safe) and lies back on his bed and reads the newspaper again.
He realizes he's looking for a hunt while simultaneously timing Sam's breaths. Old habits and all that.
**
Dean spends his evening tearing through a Top Gear marathon and Sam spends his getting steadily worse, until he's lying on his bed looking longingly at the bathroom and Dean's like, “Jesus, dude, you can make it to the bathroom.”
“It's faaaaar.”
“Does Jess put up with this shit?”
“She totally does.”
“Go pee, bitch. I'll hear you if you collapse. The whole fucking hotel will hear you if you collapse.”
Sam goes to the bathroom and comes back in near-normal time and Dean smiles to himself as he adjusts the volume.
“You're so fucking proud of me,” Sam says, crawling back into bed. “How embarrassing for you.”
“I'm proud of myself for not falling for your bullshit.”
“Mmmhmm.”
“Get some sleep.”
**
Dean wakes up in the middle of the night to whistling and Sammy shaking his shoulder. He sits up and drags a hand across his eyes. “You want help?”
He can just make out Sam nodding.
“Okay. Get the light.”
It always makes him nervous (understandably, come on) when Sam wakes him up, but he's looked a lot worse. He's sitting on the edge of his bed with his knees tugged up this chin, arms around himself, eyes closed. He's getting a decent amount of air in and out, it's just loud and slow.
“Did you pack a nebulizer?”
“Yeah.”
The truth is there's not really that much he can do, but he sits next to Sam and watches him do the treatment because he knows how much Sam hates when people avert their eyes like he's a car crash (John was always really good at that, treating Sam like a human even when he was covered in wires and bulky masks) and Sammy is sleepy and a little lightheaded and traces patterns on the knee of Dean's sweatpants.
He's just so fucking worn out.
“So it's been bad, huh?” Dean says. Quietly.
Sam gives up and nods.
“Why didn't you tell me?”
He moves the nebulizer away from his mouth for a second. “I didn't want to ruin this week.”
“You're so full of shit, you know? This is part of the Sam-package. It's not like I've been dreading this.”
Sam shrugs a little.
And Dean says one of those sappy things he only says at 3 AM, something like, “It's been a long time since I got to take care of you” but he says it all quiet so maybe he doesn't say it at all, like, prove it, and Sam to his credit pretends like he didn't hear but a minute later brings his cheek down to rest on Dean's shoulder, just for a second. Dean feels things.
**
Sam wants to go to the park the next morning, so he wears his scarf and drinks coffee and generally looks like hell in the passenger seat. But there's a lot to do that isn't going to be too rough on him, and this is his choice, so Dean checks out the bulletin board at the front of the park while Sam rubs his chest and looks sad and they sit in the little theater and watch a few shows. Dean talks him into staying for the one with the animals who do tricks, as long as they stay in the back, because he knows Sam will fucking adore and would never do it on his own. Sam sneezes a few times but loves it and seems no worse for wear. They head back to the hotel at eleven when Sam gets too worn out, and he sleeps with his head against the window. It's a good morning, it's enough for now.
**
That evening, Jess calls while Sam's doing exceptionally hideously, hideously to the extent that he's holding the nebulizer with one hand and gripping the fuck out of his chest with the other and his phone is cradled between his shoulder and his ear and Dean's staring at the coffee pot cursing it for going so fucking slowly because seriously, his little brother.
Sam's not talking much, but Dean can tell whatever Jess is saying is calming him down a little. Whenever Sam does talk, it's a question about how she is and what she's up to. He sounds quiet and interested and...lonely. But it's just the wheezing, right?
Dean pours a cup of coffee and motions for Sam to scoot over, then he takes the hand wrapped his chest and presses the cup into it. “Here,” he says, and he takes the phone so that Sam can hold his neck at a fucking normal angle and get some air in, and he holds it to Sam's ear himself.
Sam waits until the nebuilzer cuts out before he downs the coffee in a few swallows.
Jessica obviously asks how he's feeling, because he says, “Not great,” and coughs for a minute, then says, “Yeah, Dean's got me. I'll be fine.” But then wheezes and does this deep cough that echoes, and he's trying to tell Jess something and he can't, so Dean takes the phone away and says, “Jess?”
“Oh, wow, hey.”
“He's busy coughing. By the sound of it you would have been waiting a while.” He puts his hand on the back of Sam's neck. He's hot, but it's just because he's been working so hard for so damn long, and ugh, Sammy.
“I hate that cough,” she says. She has a really pretty voice, and Dean's seen pictures of her but something about her voice is making her a real person in Dean's head. This smiley, adorable person who loves his brother, and he looks at Sam watching him, all nervous and squinty-eyed and ugly as fuck like he thinks Dean's going to tell her all his secrets, and he thinks of course. I mean, of course.
“Tell me about it.”
“It's good to talk to you finally,” she says. “Sam's all buttoned-up about his family.”
Dean makes a goofy face at Sam, who makes one back.
“Yeah, he does that,” Dean says.
“I didn't mean...I mean, you know Sam. He's like that about everything. Holds his cards close to his chest and all that.”
And Dean thinks what the hell? because here's his kid all sprawled out everywhere during an asthma attack with his freakish limbs taking up the whole bed and he's rolling around whining for Dean to pay attention him when it's like I've been on the fuck phone for all of thirty seconds you demanding little shit and seriously, cards close to his chest? The kid's so fucking obvious, seriously, he hits you in the face with everything, the kid is just everywhere all the time filling up every single fucking empty space.
“Yeah,” Dean says. “Yeah, of course. So, uh, how's Peru?”
Sam sits up. “Gimme the phone.”
Jess says, “Uh, what? Probably about the same as always...”
Sam groans and hugs his pillow and rolls onto his stomach.
Dean stares at him. He says, slowly, “Sammy said you were in Peru.”
“Uh...that's...weird.”
“Yeah.”
“I'm just here. Our dorm.”
Dean raises an eyebrow at Sammy, but he's still hiding in his pillow. And Dean honestly cannot figure out what the hell this means. Until he can, and it's that Sam didn't want him to meet Jessica. Because he's embarrassed.
And isn't that just fucking awesome. He spends his whole life wrapped around Sammy's world and now he's embarrassed of him.
Sam takes the phone back without looking at Dean and talks to Jessica for a minute. Dean gathers that she's pissed. Sam hangs up and rakes his hand through his hair.
“Seriously, Sam?”
Sam wheezes out a sigh. “If you'd known she was around you would have martyred the fuck out and said I should spend spring break with her instead. I didn't want to do spring break with her. I wanted to do it with you.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“Yeah.”
“What the hell, Sam? This is weird. You lie to me about your girlfriend to spend time with me?”
“Oh, hey there, how's your high horse doing? What does Dad think you're doing right now?”
“That's not the fucking same.”
“I know it's not the same! It's a hundred times goddamn worse because Dad knows me and he still thinks that we shouldn't see each other, and that's just a whole fucking enormous can of worms there, and that's not what this is. Jess has no problem with me seeing you. It's just easier this way. If you didn't feel like I was choosing you. If you didn't get to fucking freak about me choosing you and what it means and how you're not worth it all the other places I know your head is going to take you.”
“Just shut up, all right?”
Sam does, but he's still so loud. That fucking breathing.
Dean doesn't know what to think. He isn't thinking.
“We don't have to talk about this,” Sam says.
“Yeah, well, what the fuck else is there to do? You can't fucking breathe, Sam, so I can't exactly stick to the itinerary, okay?”
Shit.
Sam runs his hand down his face. It looks so familiar that Dean almost feels his hand (too big to be Dean's hand) doing the same on his own.
“Did you really have to say that?” Sammy says. So quietly. “Seriously?”
Dean bites his cheek and looks away. He picks up Sam's empty coffee cup and runs his finger around the rim.
“All right,” Sam says. “Just leave me alone for a while.”
Dean keeps the volume up on the TV for the rest of the evening, and Sam lies facing away from Dean and nurses his asthma on his own and texts. Dean checks his phone every once in a while, just in case one of the messages is for him. It's not.
They still brush their teeth together.
**
He should have figured out the pattern after the first few nights, but for some reason he's surprised that it's Sam's breathing and not Sam's voice or his hand on his shoulder that wakes him up. He should know this pattern. First night, wheezing in his sleep, second night, asking for help, third night, not even bothering to ask him for help because he knows his breathing will do it for him and he doesn't want to move.
He's a ball on his side, knees to his chest, t-shirt sticky with sweat, driving cough after cough into the mattress. He draws in a breath that sounds wet and thick and painful.
Dean turns on the light and gives Sam's back a quick rub on his way to the bathroom. “S'okay,” he tells him.
When he comes out of the bathroom, Sam hasn't moved but he isn't coughing, and his eyes are open and focused on Dean. Dean comes back to the bed and puts a hand on Sammy's shoulder to nudge him over a little. Sam makes room for Dean behind him, and Dean pulls up the hem on the back of his t-shirt and puts a washcloth soaked in hot water against his back. He hears something in Sam's breath immediately loosen, and he starts coughing again.
“There you go,” he says. “It's okay.” He rubs a hand up and down Sam's arm, because Sam needs to be touched when he's like this. He wonders if Jess knows that and figures she probably does.
Sam takes a hit or two on his inhaler and wheezes out a thank you.
“Hey, it's fine.”
He sneezes and then he starts coughing again, and it's wracking his whole body. He's shaking down to his bones.
It's like Sam hears Dean thinking and he says, “D'we have to do ER?”
“Is it getting worse?”
He shakes his head. “I think it's gonna stick here for a while.”
“Then no. Not unless you want to.”
“Don't.”
“Okay. If you get tired we can.”
Sam nods, but Dean thinks it's really fucking unlikely they'll end up going today, because if Sam doesn't want to go then Dean either has to be scared out of his mind or fucking tired of nursemaiding to bring him in, and he doesn't think either of those is in the cards for tonight. “We can handle this,” he says. “C'mere.” He hauls Sam up and leans him against the headboard. Sam's always really resistant to moving during attacks, but it always helps to get him propped up or just to get him in a different fucking position from where he was when it started, and sometimes stupid little mind tricks like this are all you can fucking do.
Dean rubs his back. Sammy whimpers with the next breath in and coughs some more.
“One more night,” Dean says, which is this bullshit thing that he always ends up saying without thinking it, and he doesn't even know what it's supposed to mean. One more night until what? How many fucking times has he told Sam one more night and then it happens the next night and the next night and Sam just deals with it, and here's Dean feeling like he's someday going to snap and just not be able to take it anymore, that he's going to see Sam wheezing like this one too many times and something in him is just going to say I can't, I can't and it's been a long time and it's harder now that it used to be, it's harder every single fucking time because they'd pretend Sam was going to grow out of it and now he's eight and a half feet of wheezing clingy kid and what the hell, how does he expect Dean to be able to take this forever and ever, who does he think Dean is?
He coughs just a little, and holds onto Den's sleeve with both hands.
“One more night,” he tells Dean. He's hoarse.
And Dean whispers, “I missed this.” And hates himself.
But Sammy looks up at him and doesn't say anything and Dean can't read his face but it's not mad, Dean doesn't know what the fuck it is or how he's supposed to feel but it's not mad, and then Sam leans against Dean and fusses with his sleeve until he falls asleep and Jesus fucking Christ, just...one more night.
**
Dad calls. Sam's in the shower.
Dean doesn't pick up.
**
“Are you going to call him back?” Sam says. He's jeans, no shirt, toweling his hair, coughing.
“I have to.”
“He left a message?”
“Yeah. There's a hunt somewhere in Pittsburgh. He wants me there to figure out the situation, he's going to meet up in a few days.”
Sam doesn't say anything.
“I'm not going,” Dean says.
“Seriously?”
“This is your week.”
“I'm just lying around coughing, Dean. I wouldn't blame you. It's fine.”
“Fucking stop it. I'm not going.”
“Okay, so if it's that simple, explain why you look like you're about to flip the fuck out? I'm a little slow today.” He coughs, once, into his wrist.
“Because I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to lie to Dad about spending time with my fucking brother, and it's just so...what the fuck is this? What's the big fucking deal if I come and see you? Why the fuck is it every time you have a break Dad has something for me to do on the other fucking side of the country, and how the hell does he expect me to...”
“Dean, come on,” Sam says. So softly.
“Like it's such a big fucking that you went to school. He's not even mad about it anymore, you know? He's not mad at you.”
“I know.”
“And he holds onto this fucking thing about how I can't come visit, and I don't know why, and-”
“Dean.”
For a variety of reasons, Dean is just not going to fucking look at him right now, okay?
“You know why,” Sam says.
“No.”
“Come on.”
“No, I don't.”
“The...” Sam wheezes and sits down on his bed. “The same reason he made us stop sleeping in the same bed before we were out of elementary school. The same reason he'd make that face when we shared drinks. Fuck, Dean, the same reason I lied to you about Jess.”
It's like Dean hears everything in the room all of a sudden, the air conditioner, the high-pitched sound the TV makes, the vacuum cleaner down the hall, fucking Sam, and it's so much easier to hear and to to think because shit, shit.
Dean puts his head in his hands and rubs his temples and Jesus Christ they are not doing this, they are not supposed to ever, ever talk about this, he made that rule for himself a long fucking time ago and now Sam's sitting here and the fact that he's half-naked should have something to do with it but it doesn't because this was never about how Sam looked or about Jess or about fucking anything but Sammy, this fucking Sammy-ness his kid has inside of him and pouring out of him every fucking second all of over goddamn everything and Jesus, Jesus fuck God shit.
“Oh, God, Dean,” Sam says. “Are you just seeing this now? Shit.”
“No, I just...” He rubs his forehead. “Jesus.”
Sam “ummm”s and puts on a shirt and starts coughing again, and of course that's when Dean's phone rings, and Dean checks it and motions at Sam to shut up, and Sam nods and freezes his chest and swallows a few times. Gives Dean a thumbs-up.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Dean. I left you a message.”
“I know, sorry. I was in the shower. I got it.”
“How soon can you be in Pittsburgh?”
Dean looks up at Sam. Sam shrugs one shoulder.
“Next week,” Dean says.
“What?”
“I'm in the middle of something here.”
“It can wait. This is important.”
“So's this.”
“I thought you were in Vegas. What could possibly be more important in Vegas? People are dying, Dean.”
“I'm not in Vegas. I'm in California.”
Sam mouths, you don't have to.
“I'm with Sam,” he says.
Sam sucks in his lips.
What's funny is that Dean expects John to fly off the handle, to have some ridiculous, overblown response, when that's never been how John's acted about Sam, about the possibility of Dean seeing Sam. It would be so much fucking easier if it were, if his dad would explicitly forbid him from seeing Sam, because then they'd at least know they were breaking a rule instead of...this but that's not what this is (that's not what this will ever be).
“Dean,” he says, quietly.
“It's his spring break. We're at an amusement park. I can be in Pittsburgh next week.”
“Sam knows how important these hunts are. He'll understand.”
“I don't care if he understands. He's not doing great and I'm not leaving him.”
John pauses. “Is he all right?”
Dean mouths, worried about you, and Sam squirms and twists his blanket between his fingers and pretends he's not smiling.
Dean says, “He will be, but it's been a rough few days and he shouldn't be alone.”
“Where's that girlfriend?”
“Peru,” Dean says, and Jesus God that smile, that smile, his fucking kid.
**
There's fireworks at the park on Saturday night, so they dress Sammy up in too many layers and head over. He's feeling like shit.
“We should leave tonight,” Dean says.
Sam looks up. “What?”
“I'm blaming the hotel on this one, Sammy. We should go.”
“Mmm.” He closes his eyes and leans against the window. “Back to Stanford?” he says, after a minute.
“No, no. Not yet. I get you for four more days.”
“Yaaay,” he says, and even though he's clearly just fucking with him, Dean rolls his eyes and makes the obligatory comment about what a chick he is because come on, he's not going to let Sam get away with that.
They park and climb onto the hood of the car rather than try to trudge their way into the park. Families with little kids have the same idea, and Sam watches a mom and a dad and two little girls tailgate out of an SUV with the vaguest, saddest smile Dean has ever seen.
“That'll be you someday,” Dean says.
“Yeah?”
“Of course. Wife, kids.”
“What about you?”
“Eh, I'll be with Dad. Out in the shadows, keeping you and the missus safe, that kinda thing.” He takes a swig of his beer.
“I could live with that.”
“I know you could, Sammy.”
Sam starts wheezing again right when the fireworks start, so Dean can barely hear it. Sam doesn't seem to notice, and Dean reaches around and just rubs Sam's back a little, and he's wearing so many fucking layers of clothing that he probably can't feel it, but it's halfway through the damn show that Dean realizes he's been watching the fireworks but Sam has been watching him, and what a fucking trip that is. Dean feels small and embarrassed and really fucking taken care of, which is stupid because the kid here is the one coughing into his scarf and Dean's the one with his hand on the back of Sam's head but this is it, and maybe it will always make him feel like a ridiculously shitty person that Sam's wheezing, just when it's soft like this, is one of his favorite fucking sounds but that's conditioning for you, that's what this fucking does, John, okay, and that's their lives, and they fucking love routine, Dean and his kid.
“This is enough for now,” Sam says when the fireworks are over.
**
They're in the car and Sam's supposed to be sleeping, but instead he's wheeze-singing along to Metallica and churning his way through a box of tissues. Dean's going to be picking the used ones off the floor for a fucking week because Sam is disgusting.
“At least you're breathing better,” Dean says.
Sam nods and sneezes.
“Something to tell Dad. He texted me saying you should go back on prednisone.”
Sam makes a face and blows his nose. “I get sick every time I'm on it.”
“He knows that and says he's sorry but it sounds like you need it. And he told me to tell you that Bobby's working something in San Francisco that looks like it might take a while. Dad's letting him know you've been a little rough, so f this doesn't clear up, he can come get you and take you to the hospital or whatever.”
He sneezes and says, “I have Jess.”
“I know, but...”
“No, no, I appreciate it.” He swallows. “Tell him thanks.” Sam looks out the window for a while, then says, “You know, I hate myself for this, but I'm kind of surprised he didn't ask to talk to me. I mean, after you told him I wasn't doing great.” He looks at Dean. “Are we going to talk about this?”
Dean counts his teeth with his tongue.
“Should we?”
“Probably.”
“How are you so cool about this?”
“I'm just awesome, I guess. I don't know, Dean. I came to terms with a long time ago, and I decided people can try whatever they want and try to get in the way of it but it's just not a big deal, at the root of it. It just...is what it is. It's this.”
“It doesn't fucking scare you to death?”
“Of course it does. How could it not? But...” Sam plays with his feet on the dashboard and squirrels his tongue in his cheek while he thinks. He looks up and says, “The alternative is not seeing you. And I want to see you. “
Dean takes a breath as deep as four of Sammy's and lets it settle in the back of his throat. Next to him, Sammy sneezes twenty billion times and Jesus, how many days does Dean go out and kill evil SOBs and pretend to be a policeman or a fireman or a scientist and go back to the motel and wash off the blood like it's nothing and get drunk in front of Mythbusters marathons and how much of the time does he just go through the motions and never really feel anything and how the fuck can one snot-nosed twenty-year-old who thinks he knows fucking anything about anything say six fucking words and monster-truck slam him with everything he hasn't been feeling in seven months and three weeks, seriously, how the fuck does he do that, and how does Sam just keep on living like he doesn't fucking know exactly what the hell he's doing, how could he not know, and do people who see him everyday, the chick in his philosophy class or the guy he buys his coffee from, do they realize who they're dealing with, here, the totality of Sam, here?
“Jeez, bitch, I was talking about your asthma,” Dean says.
Sam punches him in the leg and coughs. “So where the fuck are we going?”
“Arizona.”
“Ha,” Sam says, but then Dean doesn't answer and he goes, “You're kidding me, seriously?”
“Listen to your fucking chest.”
Sam breathes in and out, slowly, sounding like a leaky tire.
“All right, all right,” he says. “Arizona.”
**
Four days later, they're pulling up outside Sam's dorm.
“So, you have classes tomorrow?”
He groans and coughs. “Don't remind me. I might take the day off.”
“Fucking slacker.”
“Ugh, I can't breathe.” He's drama-queening, because Arizona did help, but yeah, he's not exactly a hundred percent. Dean can take solace in the fact that he clearly wasn't when he left, either, no matter what he tried to pretend at the time, so at least he's returning him no worse than he found him.
“Tell Jess hey,” he says.
“I will. Same to Dad.”
“Yeah. Call me when this clears up. Or if it doesn't.”
“I know.”
They're just sitting there in the car.
They hug hello and never goodbye. Dean's doesn't really think about it but Sammy, who's usually the chick about these things, never tries for it so he doesn't either.
“June,” Sam says. “I have a week off in June.”
“Oh. Good.”
“Three months.”
“All right.”
“Two months, three weeks, two days. I worked that out about an hour ago.” Sam hauls his bag out of the car and leans back through his window. “Be safe, okay? In Pittsburgh.”
“Yeah. You too.”
“In my dorm.”
“Yeah.”
Sam gives him a big smile and starts towards his dorm. A few steps from the stairs, he turns around, gives Dean a wave, and walks backwards for a second, just looking.
Then a tall blond blur comes running from the top step and wraps her legs around Sam's waist and her mouth around his mouth and Sam's laughing and letting his bag drop to the ground, and Dean smiles a little (maybe the way Sam smiled at the family).
Sam deserves it. Sam deserves fucking everything.
Dean intends to make sure he gets it.
He knows Sam will try to give him another wave after the kiss is over, maybe bring Jess over and introduce her, but Dean intends to be long gone by then. He has a bitch of a drive ahead of him. He figures he can make it to Pittsburgh in three days.
Then two months, two weeks, six days.
This is enough for now.