Pour a Little Salt, Sam Was Never Here (PART 1)
Title: Pour a Little Salt, Sam Was Never Here (PART 1)
Summary: Stanford-era. Dean isn't that hurt and Sam isn't that sick. But it's enough.
Warnings/Spoilers: You'll appreciate it way more if you've seen through season 2. Language.
Wordcount: 9,774
Author's Note: It's Sammyverse--Sam has asthma, the boys are best friends forever, sing along if you know it!
Really this is a standalone. But it's a pair with one that will hopefully go up soonish, hence the Part 1. I don't want to give anything away about that one at this point, just...pray that I can make the two work together the way I want them to, okay? If I can turn it out...it will be cool. And horrifying. Title is butchered from Bon Iver's "Skinny Love."
--
Sammy's leaning over him, and Dean's not an idiot, he knows it's not real, just a desperate fucking narcotic dream, but there is Sam, smiling at him, telling him it's going to be okay when the doctors tug Dean's shoulder and he yelps.
“How are you, Sammy?” Dean manages to grunt out, and the doctors look at him like he's crazy, but DreamSam, NotSam, smiles.
“I'm fine, Dean. I'm always fine.”
“I miss you,” he says.
“You'll see me soon.”
Dean loves DreamSam.
**
Dean ignores the doctors when they say something stupid like “Get more blood work on Winchester in 319,” because he's not even on the third floor, fucking morons. They'll figure it out. Not his problem. He has morphine.
Then it's “Winchester's O2 is still low” and that's when he realizes they shouldn't even know his name is Winchester so why the fuck are they running around calling him that, plus his oxygen doesn't fucking feel low-but there has to be a logical explanation. It's the meds, gotta be, time to go back to sleep.
But then he's signing himself out at the front desk, his arm floppy in the sling and a little sore but he's not really feeling much besides static and bubbling and maybe he should call a cab, and one nurse asks another something about a Winchester and, okay, Dean's standing right in front of them, first of all, and he has this paperwork in his hand and his name is not Winchester, so time to get the fuck up to 319, he figures, and then he walks into the room and there's fucking Sam, who should be in his second week of his junior year right now, but he's fucking here, asleep in a bed in some hospital in fucking Montana, what the hell?
“Doctor Dean,” he mumbles to himself, and he unhooks the kid's chart from the bottom of the bed and takes a look. Took a fucking ambulance here a few hours ago, low blood pressure, hives all over, barely breathing, the whole she-bang. He was shit for an hour or two but now all the arrows are pointing in the right direction and he looks okay, still sweaty and pale and a little swollen, but he has an oxygen mask on, just a light one, the regular one, and he's breathing well.
So now that he knows the kid's not dying he can focus on the fact that this is ridiculous, because what the hell are the chances they both would be in Bozeman, Montana, and that they'd both end up in the same fucking hospital on the same fucking night and Jesus it's Sam, SamSamSamSam.
He probably needs to sleep. Fuck it. “Hey.” Dean shakes his foot. “Hey. Hey. Sammy.”
Sam stirs and blinks and drags an arm over his eyes. “...the fuck?”
“Hey, tiger.”
Sam sits up and grabs Dean's arm to pull him over, brings him into a rough hug. He's careful of the sling. “Jesus, did they call you? Fuck, hi.” He's hoarse.
“Hey.” He breaks out of the hug to push Sam's head back and feel around his throat, checking his glands and shit. Sam lifts his chin automatically, but he winces when Dean presses too hard.
“Sore?”
“A little. Fine. Dean. Hey. How'd they find you?”
Dean laughs. “Hey. They didn't, I was here anyway. Nurses won't stop talking about you, finally put the pieces together. How are you?”
“Fine.” He touches Dean's sling. “This is new? What happened?”
“Just dislocated, it's fine.”
Sam nods a little, touches Dean's shoulder. Feels around and makes sure they did it right. He or Dad could have popped it in easy, but Dean was alone and exhausted and an hour or two in the ER just seemed easier, and fuck if he isn't glad he came.
“What about you?” Dean says. “What'd you eat?”
“Gumbo. Apparently I'm allergic to shrimp now. Life is exciting. Does it hurt?”
“I got drugs. Did you pass out?”
“This is like Guess Who. Nah, I stayed awake. I didn't know where the hospital was so I called 911 like a bitch.”
“You're supposed to. Plus I came to the ER with a dislocated soldier, so I'm not exactly one to fucking judge.”
Sam licks his finger, draws a line in the air, gives himself a point.
“Fuck you. So what the hell are you doing here?”
“Oh, you know, sightseeing. Did you know Bozeman's motto is, the most liveable place? Seriously. Do you think there was a vote involved?”
“Sam.”
“Two world-class ski areas, too. They like to brag the fuck out of those. In September. To an asthmatic. I'm wheezing at the fucking motel desk, and they're like, want a brochure about skiing?”
“Where are you staying?” Dean says, and Sam smiles, the little shit, because he thinks he's gotten out of telling Dean why he's here, because he's a fucking idiot, apparently. (Seriously, you're allergic to fucking everything and you're like hey, let's try some shrimp while I'm alone! Fucking full ride to college, seriously.) He'll be answering, mind Dean's fucking words.
“Overpriced place two blocks over, but I can breathe there.”
“Mine's a shithole. Can't wait to get out of this fucking town. I want a hunt in Los fuck Angeles. Or around you's nice. Find a ghost at Stanford.”
“I'll keep my eyes open,” Sam says, which is funny because he's fucking falling asleep while he's talking. “What was the hunt? You're done?”
“Yeah. You want to sleep?”
“Tell me about the hunt.”
“Centaur. Creepy son of a bitch, running around kidnapping women. Just needed a silver arrow through the spine, I found out. Not until after he threw me, of fucking course.”
Sam rubs his eyes. “Don't they travel in pairs?”
“What? No.”
“Hmmm. Are you with Dad?”
“No, he's in Utah. Spirit at some state park has been pissing everyone off. Big bad one.”
“Oh.” Sam wheezes out a breath and scratches the insides of his arms. He's still kind of hivey.
Dean cups Sam's chin, looks at him like he's a fucking horse. “You really okay now? You look sick still.”
“Just tired. It's been a long week.” He rolls his eyes. “You're so goddamn transparent. I'll tell you all about it. Later. I'm beat.”
“Yeah.” He grabs Sam's chart again and looks through it. Sam lies down and watches him, plays with the strap of Dean's sling. It hurts a little, but Dean lets him.
“You were in bad shape, kid.”
Sam shrugs. “No worse than usual for a reaction.”
“Kinda sick going in?” Because this fucking is worse than usual for a reaction, Sam, because it shouldn't have taken fucking this much epinephrine for his lungs to give in, and, oh yeah, what the fuck is he doing in Montana so excuse Dean if he's looking for anything weird, okay? He's a fucking hunter and something's up with his kid.
“'That's part of the long story.” He's rubbing his eyes again, yawning. He has enough air for it. “I'll tell you all about it. Do you have to meet Dad?”
“Yeah.”
“You get a weekend off, though. Reward for finishing. Yeah?”
“Yeah.” The truth is, Dean was about to go back to the motel and pull out the map, see if he could make it to Palo Alto for a few hours before he had to head east. He hadn't seen Sam in months. “Don't know how the fuck to spend it. Strippers or just drink the whole thing away? Remember when you said life was exciting?”
“I was being sarcastic.”
“Hmm,” Dean says, just because Sam says it.
Sam yawns again and coughs a bit this time. “You should hang out here with me,” he says. “We can recover. After all, this is a liveable place.”
“Except I'm not really that hurt and you're not really that sick.”
Sam grins. “No one has to know that.”
“Does Jess even know where you are?”
“She thinks I'm spending the weekend with you.”
“Oh. Then...I mean, it's not good to lie to your girlfriend.”
“Exactly.”
“So...”
“So.” Sam nods. “So.”
He falls asleep with his face still in Dean's hand, and yeah, look, the boy's been sick. He needs a weekend to recover. And it's not like he can be left alone. That's not safe. That's just bad brothering. So.
So.
**
Sam's had a reaction or two at school but it's been a while since Dean was around for one, and he'd forgotten how much they just wipe the kid out. They're walking out of the hospital and Sam's a mess, walking in these uneven steps and rubbing his eyes with the bandage on his IV hand. He gives the roof of the Impala a sleepy pat as Dean unlocks her. “She looks good.”
Dean's smiling like a fucking idiot. “Thanks, Sam.”
Sam then loses all his points by making a face and turning down the music as soon as Dean starts the car.
Dean swings the car out of the parking space without fucking thinking and shit, shit, he's an idiot, fuck that hurts, and Sam says, “Whoa whoa whoa, shhhh,” and puts his hand, really fucking gently on Dean's fucked up shoulder. “Let's switch.”
“You're sick.”
“Just tired. It's fine. Out.” He starts to slide over, and if Dean doesn't get out the kid's going to be on his damn lap, so, fine. All right. He gets out and moves to the passenger seat, and, damn, it's been a while since he was here. Dad grabbed an old Jeep as soon as they started splitting up, so it's been a while since Dean's been in the passenger seat. It's been about since Sammy left.
Sam fools him into thinking he's any shape to drive Dean's baby by acting all capable for the first half of the trip and then sneezing like a bitch the whole second half. Dean digs around in the glove box for tissues but he doesn't always pack anymore, and he probably hasn't bought any since the last time he was with Sammy. He digs through his pockets. “I have a receipt,” he offers.
Sam sneezes into his elbow. “For what?”
“It matters?”
“Of course.”
“Uh, M&Ms and porn.”
“I'm good, thanks.”
“Yeah, fair.”
They stop at Dean's motel room so they can gather up his shit, and Dean is weirdly embarrassed of his unmade bed, his shit everywhere, the completely untouched other half of the room. Sam looks at the perfect bed. “They didn't have a king?”
Dean shrugs. “Habit.”
“Mine's a double, too.”
“Oh. Good.”
Sam ends up crashing on the bed (on Dean's bed) while Dean gets his shit together. Dean's all ready to wait around a little if Sam's sleeping, but he stays awake, just watching, asking all these fucking questions about the hunt. “Why do you care?” Dean says eventually, and he sounds like asshole which wasn't exactly the point but why the fuck not, right? Every single time he sees Sam he throws in some fucking comment about how glad he is to be out of the game so why's he asking more than he has to? It's not like Dean wants Sam's fucking class notes or some shit. They ask because they give a shit about each other, because they want to see the other one light up, and Dean's tired (Dean doesn't need to be lit up, everything is okay, Sam is resting).
Sam just shrugs.
“All right. Up. You can sleep at the clean motel.”
Sam laughs a little and coughs while he gets himself up. He stops Dean when he starts to sling his bag over his shoulder and says, “Hey. I've got it. Don't be an idiot.”
Dean growls and snatches the keys out of Sam's pocket and says, “I'm driving, Sneezy.” Sam bitches, but he's practically fucking asleep by the time they pull out of the parking lot, so yeah, he made the right call. He can do it one-armed.
“Hey,” Dean says as he parks. Sam mumbles and stirs a little, so he's the perfect level of awake for Dean to ask, all casually,“What the fuck are you doing here?”
Sam sighs (wheezes) and cuddles against the window. “Huntin'.”
“What?”
“They travel in pairs, moron.”
**
Dean was the one who told Sam, a few months before he left for Stanford, when Sam pulled him aside and told him what was going on, asked for his blessing (that night: fuck no, a month later: Sam fucking please I'm begging you, a month after that: just be safe, okay?) that “You're going to get back in. Nobody gets out of this for good.”
And now look at him. No one even had to drag him.
And he's telling Dean this big long story about how the first girl the centaurs captured was some distant step half second cousin of Jess's and Jess told him about it all upset and showed him the article and Sam's alarms went up.
Dean parks at the motel and says, “Then why didn't you call me about it?” because it wouldn't have been the first time Sam's rung Dean at weird fucking hours to babble about something he saw online that looks vaguely suspicious and Dean please go check it out and Dean pisses and moans and says that it probably isn't supernatural (it always fucking is) but that he'll go check it out, just for Sam (he always fucking does).
Sam shrugs. “'S for Jess.” He's still scrunched up with his head on the window and glaring at Dean every time he talks. Like he still thinks Dean's going to let him fall asleep before this conversation's over (not to mention while they're still in the fucking car when bed's right there.)
“You were bored,” Dean says.
“Nah.”
“You missed hunting.”
“Noooo.”
“You knew I would be here.”
“I totally didn't.”
“You thought Dad might be here.”
“No. But the thought crossed my mind and I didn't hate it.”
“Something bad happened at school.”
“No.”
“Something...”
“Something about me being sick. No.”
“Came to go skiing.”
Sam laughs.
“Come on, tell me. Why the fuck did you break your streak for this? You had a good thing going, there, Sammy. Two years, zero hunts, what the fuck gives?”
“Dunno.” He coughs into his fist. “Seriously. Was just doing some research, looking into it, kept doing more and more and then it was just all right in front of me and it already felt like my case so I figured, eh, what the hell, one weekend, there was nothing going on at school anyway and at least it'd be something to talk about with you once it was all over.”
“So...you missed me.”
“That's seriously what you heard?”
“Yeah, missed deep conversations with me about killing things and shit, that's what I heard.”
“All right, Dean, if you say so. I missed you.”
“If I say so is fucking right.” Dean gives him a rough clap on the shoulder. “Let's get you some sleep.”
**
The motel room is pretty damn nice. It has a kitchenette and a couch and shit. But Sam has a shitty bookstore job and is probably paying for this with real money. Kind of ridiculous.
Sam waves at the kitchen while he's changing from the hospital gown into some sweatpants. “Can you, uh...”
The gumbo's in a styrofoam container open on the counter because, what, was he supposed to do the fucking dishes while his throat was closing up or something?
“On it.” He throws the soup out and wipes down the counters, scrubs his hands. Sam sits on the foot of the bed and shoots him this sleepy smile. “God, don't get teary,” Dean says.
“You fucking glow when you take care of me, it's hilarious.”
“I'm cleaning a fucking kitchen, not exactly feeding you ice chips on your deathbed, Myrtle. Take your fucking meds.”
“Did already. When do you get yours?”
“Uh, two hours. Don't set a fucking alarm. Stop it. I can do it on my own.”
“Mmm. No.”
“Sam.”
Sam just smiles at him, and fuck, it's worse than those fucking puppy eyes, how is Dean not the fuck used to that smile.
“God, just...fuck you. Fine, Catherine, nurse me back to health. Are we going to paint our toenails, now? Play truth or dare?”
Sam pulls his pillow over his head. “Goodnight, Dean. I hate you. See you in two hours.”
**
It hurts it hurts why the fuck does it hurt so much what the fuck, Jesus, stop moving him--
“It's okay. It's okay. Fuck, you got yourself twisted all the hell around, didn't you? It's all right. Here we go.” Sam is so quiet and calm and his hands are really big and cool and fuckithurts
“S'mmy...”
“Shhh.” There's something cool and wet against his cheek. “There you go. Open your mouth.” Then the pill, then some water.
A minute later, the alarm goes off, and Sammy, why were you awake before the alarm? How'd you know?
Sam's hand on his forehead, wiping off the sweat, back to sleep.
**
Dean wakes up alone and pretty sure that Montana Sam was all a hallucination he created to get him through this epic suck of a dislocation. He pushes himself up, wincing, and looks around the room. The other bed is fucking made. But this is Sam's motel. So Sam must exist. Probably.
Then the door opens and there he is, all eight and a half feet of him, with two cups of coffee and a stupid ratty Stanford hoodie. “Rise and shine.” He hands Dean a coffee cup. “How you feelin'?”
“Jesus Christ, your voice,” Dean says, because he thought Sam sounded bad yesterday, but now he's talking like he was gargling gravel all night. He's an octave too low and croaking in and out between words.
“I know. It's just the reaction, fucked with my throat.”
“You sound like me.”
“Yeah? Uh...hunting evil. Banging bitches. Take your meds, Sammy. I'm hungry.”
“Yeah, you definitely sound like me.”
Sam grins and drinks. “It's going away. How are you?”
He takes off the sling, carefully stretches out his arm. “Sore. Fine.”
“Yeah. You had a rough night.”
“You?”
“No, I was fine. Slept hard. Didn't wake you up, did I?”
Dean shakes his head. “Would have slept through anything with those fucking pills you gave me.”
“Just codeine. It was my touching bedside manner, obviously. Speaking of-” He takes another pull from his coffee and sets the cup on Dean's nightstand. “Let me see that shoulder.”
“It's fine.”
“Yeah, but I'm getting rusty. Jess doesn't get thrown against shit much. So do me a favor.”
Dean mumbles and growls and fucking sounds like he's imitating Sam, here, with that croak in Sam's throat, and Sam moves behind him and crawls his fingers around Dean's shoulder.
He says, “You look okay, but it was really hurting you. Freaked me out.”
“Fucking humiliate the shit out of me, why don't you.”
Sam puts his hand on the back of of his head and scratches him a little like he's a fucking cat. Dean tries really hard not to loll his head back. Really fucking hard. Jesus, he's a fucking girl, he knows, but no one outside of a few fucking doctors last night has fucking touched him in God knows how long. Sam used to complain of the same thing when Dean came to visit him at Stanford, that he'd been fucking locked in the library for a week and a half and he missed goddamn human contact, but now he has Jess and it's just fucking Dean here alone staying a foot and a half way from John all the damn time, and the truth is one of the things he most misses about hunting with Sam was feeling someone else's shoulder bump his every once in a while or maybe a hand on his back now and then when John wasn't watching and now here's all six hundred pounds of mythical Sam-beast complete with his utter lack of understanding of personal space and Christ, it's just...it just is, that's kind of the point, it's just this constant is, this buzz in his head that he isn't fucking alone.
Sam gives Dean's healthy shoulder a squeeze and helps him back into the sling. “You want breakfast?”
“God, yeah.”
**
This coffee's not as good than the stuff Sam brought back, but after the past few days, Dean would fucking swim in it. He orders half the menu and idly pours in a few packets of sugar. Sam takes his black, like always (every time Dean sees someone drink black coffee, he wonders if they have asthma) and is quiet, stabbing his fork with his napkin and pulling his hands into his sleeves. He's been twitchy since they got here. Too much caffeine too early, probably.
“So you took out the other centaur all on your own, huh?” Dean says.
Sam rolls his eyes.
“Nah, don't, it's impressive. When'd you do it?”
“Like three hours before you did, sounds like.” He gives Dean one of those smirks that crinkles his eyes and fuck. This. Kid.
Dean clears his throat. “All right, but if you knew there were two, why not kill two? Why didn't you finish the job?”
Sam mumbles and drives his fork further into his napkin.
“You fucked up?” Dean says. “Got yourself hurt? You hurt?”
“Not hurt, didn't fuck up.” He wheezes and takes a pull from his coffee mug.
“Hey, you've never done a hunt on your own before. I hadn't when I was your age.”
“All those many years ago.”
“Yeah, bite me.”
“I didn't fuck up.”
“So what happened, then?”
Sam smiles at the waitress as she sets the plates down, then turns away and coughs into his elbow for a while. It's just normal coughing, but it sounds like shit on his sore throat. Dean offers his coffee cup, and Sam shakes his head, still coughing, and holds up his, half-full. The fit lasts longer than Dean expects and, by the look of Sammy, than he did too. He leans back in the booth to catch his breath.
“Fucking asthma. Wish it would leave me alone for just a minute,” he says.
“I know.”
“When things are really awesome otherwise, you know? I just wish it would fuck off.” He clears his throat a few times to get somewhat of a voice back. “The hunt. There were some complications. Let's just say-” his voice cracks-more like fucking crumbles-again and he coughs for a minute.
“Sam.”
“I know it sounds bad. It's just my throat.” He drinks some water. “Let's just say it's not the right hunt for me to do solo.”
“Just...”
“No. I didn't get hurt.”
“Okay.”
Dean attacks his pancakes and fuck, pancakes, he will never get over fucking pancakes, not for as long as he fucking lives, not if he had them for every meal, pancakes, and he's having a moment here, so it takes him a minute to realize that Sam's just pushing his food around. Not normal Sammy dawdling, what-the-fuck pushing his food around, but genuine not-one-bite-passes-those-lips pushing his food around, cutting his scrambled eggs into tiny bits and shredding his toast (shredding his toast with his sleeves pulled over his hands, getting all greasy), that kind of pushing around.
“Sam.”
Sam's head snaps up.
“What's up over there?”
“Nothing. Sorry.”
“Breathing that bad?”
He shakes his head. “No, just...”
Then Dean gets it, because Sam's eating has been his responsibility for a long fucking time; back when Sam was little and sick the asthma was John's (John kept a tight leash on that until Sam started fighting him tooth and nail and John gave up and sulked because John does not fucking get Sam, when you are fighting with Sam the last thing you want to do is act like Sam) but making sure Sammy ate, making sure what Sammy ate didn't make him sick, that was Dean's, and he's done a pretty good fucking job all in all because his kid's a hundred feet tall and not wasting away and generally not dying from food allergies and would still be eating playground dirt if not for Dean, so yeah, he knows what this is right here and knows it's not fucking fun.
Dean reaches his fork across the table and steals someone of Sam's eggs, then takes a bite of his toast. He chews, swallows, then drinks from his water glass, turns the glass around, hands it to Sam.
Sam takes it and drinks. He knows the drill. If there's something in his food that would kill him, drinking after Dean would definitely let them know, but just with tingling lips and a few hives (at least that's the fucking hope, but Dean's hand is on the EpiPen in his pocket anyway). This is what they do when Sam gets skittish. It's been a while. Who the fuck knows what he does at Stanford (doesn't fucking eat, probably).
Sam sits on his hands and waits to see if something happens, and Dean doesn't fucking hover. He eats, ten nice slow bites, before he glances up at Sam.
Sam gives him a small nod.
“Awesome. Eat.”
He pushes his food around, but in his normal weirdo way. He chews for a long time. “I can take down a centaur but not eat a plate of eggs.”
“Yeah you can, Sammy.”
“And I could barely take down the centaur. And left one behind. Jesus.”
Dean shoves his tongue into his cheek. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened, I just...I mean, surprise surprise, centaurs have fur. You saw me sneezing in your car just from what you tracked in. I was kind of a mess actually out there. And it was just wet and cold so I was wheezing. And I was okay, seriously, but I knew I couldn't finish the hunt. I'd pass out and get myself killed. So I bailed in the middle of a hunt so I'd have enough energy to get myself fed and to sleep and come finish it tomorrow. When hopefully another girl wouldn't have been killed off because of me, Jesus.”
Dean swallows. “And the feeding yourself didn't exactly work out how you planned.”
“Yeah. And fucking flying here with peanuts and shit on the plane. I've just been wheezing a lot for days. It's exhausting. This was a mistake.”
“Can we go back in time a few hours? I miss manic happy Sammy.”
Sam laughs a little. “Right? Ugh.”
“A fucking centaur by yourself, Sam. This was a rough one for me, and I've been hunting on my own for three years. And my lungs don't fucking suck.”
“Hey. Don't insult my lungs. They try their hardest. I just...”
“What?”
Sam shrugs. “It was nice security, telling myself that if I ever had to, I could handle a hunt.”
“Are you a fucking idiot, here, seriously. You did.”
“I didn't finish it.”
“So maybe you shouldn't be hunting on your own. Because frankly, Sam...I don't like it.”
“I'm not hunting.” He pauses. “Because of the asthma?”
“Because you're my kid brother” (he says brother) “and this shit's dangerous. You always had Dad and me watching your back. Fuck, I don't like hunting alone, y'know? You don't have to like it. You don't even fucking have to be able to do it.”
Sam takes another bite and wipes his mouth on his napkin. “It's not anything you have to worry about, because I'm not hunting. This was just...”
“Hunting.”
“Yes. Temporarily. Once.” He coughs.
“Sure.” Sam's back, Dean fucking knows he is. No one ever gets out of this, not really. Dean wonders what Sam's going to tell Jess. Maybe the fucking truth. It's about time.
Sam gives him that disapproving tight-lipped little asshole face Dean will sometimes try to do in the mirror when he's bored and never can, no, that shit is just Sam.
“Besides,” Sam says, quietly. “This is is just more proof that I'm not up to it. That...you know. It's a good thing I left.”
It's like everything goes quiet for Dean then. The waitress yelling to the bus boy, the girl at the next booth arguing with her boyfriend, the baby crying in the corner, the hiss of the espresso machine. It's just quiet.
“Sam,” Dean says. “Is that why you left?'
Sam shakes his head, but he doesn't look up. “It was a factor. I wanted to go to school and I fucking hated hunting, but...part of that was because it was getting too hard.”
“You should have told me.”
“Telling you now.” He rubs his cheek. He hasn't shaved. “I don't know. It's just...at Stanford, I'm in control. I'm...overwhelmed as hell, but...” he shakes his head. “But at least I know I'm not going to get trapped without meds for three days like that time with the Lady in White. And there's nowhere that I could potentiality get myself or Dad or you killed if I can't catch my breath in time.” He's rubbing his chest and he probably doesn't even fucking realize it. “I just...needed that control. Away from Dad fucking bossing me around. Away from monsters choking me against walls.”
“Away from the asthma.”
“Yeah.”
“And how's that one been working out for you?”
Sam pushes his thumb into the tines of his fork and looks away.
Dean finishes his pancakes, sets down his silverware. “We have this whole weekend together,” he says. “I want to do a hunt with you.”
“What?”
“I'll find us something easy. Caleb's been texting me fucking constantly, there's like a hundred fucking hunts on the table right now. We'll go check one out. Just you and me. You always used to talk about that, doing one just you and me.”
Sam chews on his lip and looks up at him.
Dean says, “See, yeah? You want to. And you'll see how fucking badass you are.”
“It doesn't mean I'm coming back, Dean.”
Yeah, sure, he'll fucking humor the kid. “Of course not. One hunt, and then you'll go back to Stanford with all your renewed confidence and channel it into your sociology classes.”
“English. English major.”
“Yeah, okay. So?”
“Just one. One, o-n-e-fucking-one, just you and me.”
Dean tries not to look totally fucking smug, but when is he ever wrong about Sam?
**
He wants an easy hunt, because the point is to build up Sam's confidence, so he's scanning through Cody's texts looking for some nearby wimpy vengeful spirit while Sam camps out with his nebulizer and his complete works of Shakespeare. It's kind of nice, honestly, lying here on the couch, glancing up every once in a while and just watching Sam and his pen and his textbook like he's some fucking normal kid. (He'll ignore the fucking machine his kid's sucking from for the time being, cool?)
His phone buzzes and he pulls it out of his pocket. “Hello?”
“Dean.”
John has that one voice (John has several fucking voices that will do it, really) that freezes every part of Dean. “Dad. What's wrong?”
Sam sits up straight, and Dean holds up a hand for him to wait.
John's breathing hard. “I need you here,” he says. “Something...it's gone wrong. I need backup.”
Dean hits the button for speakerphone and vaults his way to the table and places the phone between him and Sam. “What happened?”
“It's stronger than I thought. Threw me down in this ravine. I've broken something. Bad. How soon can you get here?”
Dean glances at Sam, who presses his finger over the speaker and whispers, “If you think you can do this better without me, go. I mean it. I'll get back to Stanford. Don't let me fuck this up.”
Dean licks his lips. He'll feel a million fucking times safer with Sam there, because Sam has his back and because Dean hasn't forgotten, even if Sam apparently has, that he's a fucking fantastic hunter, quick-witted and dextrous and fast, but this is asking a lot of Sam a day out of the fucking hospital and two years out of hunting, and when the kid's already doubting himself...
He swallows and moves Sam's hand off the phone.
“Dad, do we need backup on this one? I have Sam.”
Sam looks at him with big eyes.
John hesitates for all of two seconds. “Good. Bring him.”
“Yes sir,” Sam says. Old fucking habits.
**
Sam's fucking sneezing as soon as they're in the car, so they stop at the first gas station to blast the car clean with the air hose. The fur flying everywhere turns out to be a barrel of laughs for Sammy, so Dean finishes the job while Sam sits on the trunk and finishes mapping out the route.
“Looks like...350, 400 miles,” he says. “Maybe six hours.”
“We can do faster than that.”
“He's a demon on wheels...”
Dean laughs.
“Hey, Dean?”
“Hey, Sammy?”
“You think Dad's okay?'
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, he's fine.” He's not fine. Of course he's not fucking fine, but they both know that, and what Sam needs to hear is that Dad's going to be fucking alive when they get to him and Sam's out of practice, Sam needs some reassuring, it's fine (and Dad fucking better be alive when they get to him because Dean really doesn't like lying to Sam).
“Didn't...you know, break his back or anything, do you think?”
“No, no, just a leg, I bet. He'll be up in no time. He's going to make us cover a lot of hunts while he's recovering, though.”
Sam's quiet. “You, Dean.”
“What?”
“He's going to make you cover a lot of hunts. I'll be at school.”
“Right.”
Sam chews the inside of his cheek. “If he...you know. If he needs someone to take care of him. I can take time off for that, it's no problem.”
Dean snorts. “Yeah, I'm sure he'd go for that.”
“Yeah.”
“Come on, you. I've decontaminated the thing. Let's get going.”
“I choose music.”
“Mmmm no.”
Sam steals the air hose and blasts in the back of Dean's neck on his way to the passenger seat. As soon as he's climbed in, Dean shoves Sam hard against his door and Sam grins and knocks Dean's head to the side. John never let them fuck around like this. John gave them looks. John bit his tongue.
John isn't fucking here, so Dean elbows Sam in the side until he laughs and Sam grabs Dean's hand and twists it around until Dean yells uncle and Sam licks his finger and gives himself another point.
Yeah, Dean doesn't like hunting alone.
**
Dean takes his hand off the volume dial. “New rule.”
Sam looks up from the map. “Hmm?”
“If you're wheezing so hard I have to turn up the music, you're wheezing too damn hard. Do you want to stop?”
Sam looks at his inhaler in his hand like he didn't just fucking take it, like he hasn't been hitting it hard all day.
“Stopping won't help,” he says.
“We could find somewhere to set the nebulizer up, I don't know.”
He shakes his head. “I'm okay.”
“You need new meds, man.”
“I'll let you know when they invent something.” He pulls his feet up on the dashboard and messes with his shoelaces, then glances at Dean. “Aw, fuck, don't look at me like that.”
“I'm not looking at you like fucking anything.”
“It's that Tiny Tim look. I'm not dying.”
“I know that.”
“I'm not here to make you feel guilty.”
“I know that, too.”
“I'm happy the way I am.”
Okay, so now maybe Dean is looking at him like that, so what, because how the fuck can Sam be happy like this, is that something that's even possible? (Are people really happy the way the are?)
Sam watches him and laughs. “Yeah, it drives me fucking crazy sometimes. It hurts and it's scary. It makes you fucking freak out. But I didn't, like, turn into the sad little sick kid while I've been gone, okay? It's still fine and I'm still dealing. I'm the same happy little sick kid I always was.”
“Yeah, I don't know about little.”
Sam smiles at him and starts shaking the inhaler again.
**
They play the game where you look for all the letters of the alphabet. They switch off when Dean's shoulder starts to hurt. They switch back when Sam nearly sneezes them into a guardrail. Sam sleeps and Dean puts on Metallica's softer stuff for them, then Sam wakes up and teaches him the Stanford fight song. They take each other's meds by mistake and Sam doesn't go into anaphylactic shock, glory hallelujah, and Dean, much to both of their disappointments, doesn't develop any superhuman breathing skills (Dean: Are you sure these things work? Sam: BREATHE HARDER!) but he does enjoy Sam all fucking loopy on codeine (seriously, he's eleven feet tall and has the drug tolerance of a six-year-old) counting cows whenever they pass a farm and fucking asking Dean shit like “is that cow one cow or two cows?” and fucking leaning towards him with that enormous skull that somehow feels like the perfect size for Dean's hand.
John's in a fucking ravine on the other side so it all feels like blasphemy, but Dean has his fucking band back together, okay, and he still believes, he still fucking thinks, that Sammy's here to stay. And if he isn't? Well, they'll fucking deal. He can go back to school and get his fancy piece of paper and go off to fucking law school if he gets in (which he will because have you met Dean's kid?) and go wear suits and counsel people-family law, he wants to do fucking family law, and Dean has no idea what that is but shit, if you have to be a lawyer, right?--and he and John will fucking kidnap him on the weekends and make him kill shit and feel alive and Sam won't even have to do any fucking homework in the passenger seat then, so it'll work out. No matter what, it'll work out.
And maybe sometimes he'll visit Sam at his apartment or whatever, not for hunting, and they'll just fucking be, play goddamn fucking house for a few days, and Dean will get a good night's sleep and do his fucking laundry and make Sam cook. Maybe Sam will have a wife and some kids by then.
Sam's knee taps his.
Maybe not.
Doesn't matter. In the end it just doesn't fucking matter, because in the end it's always going to be him and Sam. They'll go down bloody together or they'll lie around Palm Beach when they're eighty and eighty-four and roll each other out to sit in the son. They'll get there. All roads lead to there.
Sam can choose whichever the fuck road he wants. The point is that Sam chooses.
**
“Remember how to shoot a gun?” Dean asks, once they're parked as close to the haunted state park as they can get and are grabbing their salt guns and shit from the back.
Sam gives him a look.
“Remember, you put even pressure on the trigger-”
“How about I shoot you for practice?”
**
It's a state park, so it's fucking full of ravines, and John isn't answering his cell phone or their shouts for him, and they're both getting nervous but Dean's trying to stay cool for Sam's sake. Sam's wheezing quietly but consistently and, well, he always fucking wheezes, but it's been a while since Dean always fucking heard it, so give him a break for worrying, y'know?
“You good?” he asks, softly.
Sam nods. “I'm going to check that way.”
“All right. I'll cover you.” He gets his gun on his shoulder and makes arc around Sam, because fuck if he's letting his kid get killed by some angry spirit on his first fucking hunt back, but then Sam yells, “Dean! I got him!” and starts running down this steep slope. Dean's after him in a fucking second.
Sam's kneeling in front of John, tapping his cheek. “Hey, hey, Dad. He's warm, Dean, don't worry.”
Dean wasn't fucking worrying, he was just breathing hard 'cause he's fucking tired, okay, or...just fuck off.
“Dad,” Sam says, and John sputters himself awake. He groans and puts his head back, then says, “Sam. God, Sammy, look at you,” and he's not saying look at you, wheezing, exhausted, still pale he's saying here, taller, saving my ass. “It's good to see you.”
“Y-you too. I'm going to look at that leg, okay?”
“Where's your brother?”
“Here, Dad, I'm right here,” Dean says while Sam grabs his hand and presses it into John's.
John breathes out and closes his eyes. “My boys.”
“Drug him up, Dean,” Sam says, making his way down to John's foot, and Dean his painkillers out of his pocket, and he sees John looking him over for the reason he's packing.
“Dislocated shoulder,” he says. “I'm fine.” He hands John two pills and the water bottle, because as long his Dad's fucking conscious no one's fucking feeding him, all right?
He takes them himself. “You got it fixed?”
“Yeah.”
Sam turns his head with a few sudden, stuttered coughs that he's trying to hold back, and John says, “You all right?”
Sam nods.
Dean says, “How's it looking down there, Sammy?”
“Looks like ankle and femur are broken. Other leg seems okay. You take the brunt of it on one side, Dad?”
John nods and grimaces. “We need to get out of here before the fucking spirit comes out again.”
Dean says, “On it” and slips his hands under his dad's arms, but Sam says, “Dean, don't be an idiot, let me splint this.”
“With what?”
Sam gives him a look and unloads his gun.
“Oh.”
It's kind of a shitty splint, just this gun attached to their dad's leg by Dean and Sam's jackets, but it'll do. Except now they're shivering and that's exactly what Sam and his asthma and Dean and his sore shoulder need, right?
“Let's move,” Dean says, and Sam nods. He gets under one John's left side so Dean can use his good shoulder on his other, and John grits his teeth when they pull him up but doesn't fucking pass out, so Dean's impressed. He and Sam have both caved for less.
They fucking drag him out of the ravine and it's brutal and John looks like he is dropping out now and Dean doesn't fucking blame him but he keeps his eyes half-open and says, “Dean, keep that rifle ready, the spirt's a nasty son of-” just as it appears out of fucking nowhere and slams Sam against the nearest boulder. John falls and takes Dean with him.
Dean scrambles to his feet. “Fuck. Sammy!”
Sam shakes his head fast. “Fine. Where the fuck'd he go?”
“I don't know. Dad. Hey. Dad. What needs burning?”
“It's...a hat. In the lodge.”
“Okay. I'm going. Sam! Get Dad's gun.”
Sam nods and runs over and starts going through John's jacket, looking for his gun, and shit, they're out of practice working with three people, why the fuck didn't Sam splint him up with John's fucking gun instead of his own?
Sam loads it and frowns. “It's jammed.”
“What?”
“He fucking fell on it, Dean.”
“Shit. Okay, switch the splint out-”
And then Sam gets thrown, a-fucking-gain, and shit, why is it always Sammy? Sam swings the butt of the jammed gun at the spirit and unloads the shells into his hand. “Dean, go, I've got this!” He runs back to John and stands guard over him, and Dean's ten feet away and can fucking hear him breathing.
So he hesitates.
“Dean, go!” Sam starts laying a salt ring, but he doesn't have time to get it even halfway finished before he's fucking thrown again. Dean gets his gun out in time to shoot the bastard this time, and he freezes and then starts towards Dean.
Dean runs up the hill to the lodge, turning every fifty yards to fire another shot at the asshole, but the last time he turns around it's gone, and there it is, back down the hill, charging towards John (who's on the ground fucking working on the salt circle, way to go, Dad) and Sam, who Dean can see up here has his making a fucking plan face on (and he's fucking wheezing like hell but Dean's not going to concentrate on that part right now, Sam's got this.)
He kicks down the door of the lodge and tears the main office and the break room until he finally finds a row of display cases in the president general director what the fuck do you call the head of a state fucking park's office. He smashes the case with the butt of his gun, grabs three hats in there, and sprints them out of the house so he can fucking see which will waste the spirit (see if Dad and Sammy are okay).
And there's fucking Sam, and it takes Dean a minute to figure out what he's doing, but he has the salt shells from his gun and he's fucking hurling them at the spirit, one after the fucking other, and the spirit's stuttering and falling back with each one and Sam just keeps going whipping them like he's in the fucking major leagues, and Dean salts and sets one hat on fire and nothing but the second one, the second one does it, and the spirit blazes up and disappears.
Dean runs down the hill and drags himself to a stop a few feet away from Sam. “You okay?”
Sam flicks his sweaty hair out of his eyes. He's breathing like shit, shoulders heaving.
He's smiling.
“Let's get Dad out of here,” he says.
**
Dean harasses the doctors and gives them the insurance information. Sam's doing all right. There are different doctors from the night before, so he doesn't get any shit about taking better care of himself or whatever the hell the doctors like to throw at him when he comes two nights in a row (and when Sam has to do the ER more than once a month, it's almost always two nights in a row because these things aren't fucking easy to shake) and they just set him up with a nebulizer in John's room and leave him the hell alone.
John doesn't need surgery because John's fucking invincible. They give him a fuckload of morphine and set him and give him a real splint, and they're making him lie here and wait for a few hours for someone to cast him. So now Dean comes back in from the hallway and John and Sam are just there, awkward again now that there's nothing to kill. Sam has a pulse ox on (his numbers are good, but that doesn't mean a whole lot; unless he's doing hideously, his numbers are good) and John's glancing at the reading every once in a while, and when Sam takes the mouthpiece out to cough, John puts his hand on his shoulder to help hold him still. Dean wants to smile at him, give John this nod to tell him he's doing it right, but he wouldn't like that (he's my son, of course I'm doing it right). And honestly, he's not doing it fucking right, he's not holding tight enough and his thumb is too close to Sam'd windpipe and Dean could do a better job, but...Dean and Sam don't make physical contact, not even those fucking shoulder nudges, not even fucking colliding with each other at the bottom of the hill after a hunt, when John's around, not if they can possibly help it.
And Dean can't even count how many times he's wanted to scream at John that John doesn't fucking get it, that he is completely fucking misunderstanding what's going on with Sam and the idea that Dean would fucking...with Sam completely misses the goddamn point which is that Sam is fucking precious and he would cut off his fucking hands before he'd do anything to screw him up and fuck you, John, fuck you, you raised them in fucking isolation from the rest of that world and you shoved Sam in Dean's fucking pocket and have you seen that kid's fucking smile and nineteen years just the two of them and Sam never fucking worrying about it and now he can't put his hand on his fucking kid's shoulder while he's wheezing and Jesus, he needs to calm down, that was a great hunt.
Sam finishes coughing and rubs his chest and John watches him and says, “So...how did this happen?”
“What?”
“How did you end up in Montana?”
Sam opens his mouth, looks at Dean, and Dean gets it, he sees it all over his face. Because if Sam tells the truth, John's going to pounce, John's going to try to drag him back, and this is going to end in screaming, and John's stoned and Sam can't breathe and Dean's getting a headache and everyone is in the same fucking room together and can they not tonight? Can they just not?
So he says, “I dragged him. Centaurs come in pairs and I wanted backup. Practically had to threaten him to get him out here.”
Sam watches him. He's expressionless and he's saying everything anyway.
“And he had a shitty allergic reaction and now this,” Dean says.
“Dean. I'm fine.”
Dean raises his eyebrows.
John says, “You all right now, Sam?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, we have some time to get you all the way up to snuff,” he says, with this smile that can always convince Dean to do fucking anything. “I think we all deserve a little time off after this one. But as soon as I'm up, Bobby has this lead-”
“Dad-” Dean says.
Sam holds up his hand. “Dad. I'm not staying.”
John looks at him and doesn't say anything and tries to look surprised.
“I have school, Dad. I have a girlfriend. I...have a paper due Monday. And I have a shitty lung disease that's not going to let me keep doing this forever.”
“No one's talking about forever.”
“I am. And I'm done with this. Forever.” He wheezes out a breath. “I'm glad I could help tonight. Really glad that you and Dean are okay. But I can't keep doing this. I don't want to keep doing this. I wish we could all just fucking stop doing this.”
There isn't any warmth in John anymore, not right now. “Sam, your mother-”
Sam puts up his hands. “I know. I know.”
He's getting upset which means he's breathing like shit. Dean picks the mouthpiece off the nightstand and holds it out to Sam. Sam shakes his head and says, “Let me finish this.”
John says, “We need you, Sam. We need you out there.”
“You don't need me, Dad, you need another fucking gun. That's not me. I never wanted this to be me.”
“Then why did you come?” John barks. “You think you can just keep coming back to us and leaving again? How many times do you think I can stand seeing you walk out that door, Sam? You think that doesn't rip me apart?”
Dean says, “Both of you. Stop. Please?”
Sam says, “I will die doing this, Dad. You know me. I'll get angry and obsessed and I won't know how to stop.”
Dean breathes. “Sam. Shut up.”
“Then go,” John says. “But don't expect us to just be around every time you need us. Don't demand that Dean come visit you every time you have an asthma attack. That's not how family works. We can't just be here when you need us. You're a part of this family, you have responsibilities. You've never understood that. Never.”
“I have to breathe, Dad! I have to do that before I can do anything!”
Dean says, “And right now you barely fucking are, so can we cool down for a minute?”
“You're breathing!” John says. “Look at you.”
Sam closes his eyes. “I can't get into that argument again, Dad, I can't. This isn't breathing, this is shit, and you couldn't handle this, okay? You fucking try this.”
Dean says, “Sam. Stop.”
“You fought it for nineteen years, Sam,” John says. “You can keep going.”
“This is going to fucking kill me. This isn't a joke. Do you get that I could have died on any single one of those hunts? I'm a fucking missed dose away from drowning in my own chest, how can you ask me to do this?”
Dean can't fucking help it, okay, he has his hands all over Sam's shoulders and he's saying “Sam, okay, come on. Breathe.”
John barks “Dean, stay out of this.”
Sam's on his feet. “Don't fucking talk to Dean like that!”
“It's fine, Sam.” Dean grits his teeth. “I'm not a part of this.”
Sam whirls on him. “You're not a part of this? I keep hunting, who the fuck's arms do you think I'm going to die in?”
Shut up Sam shut up Sam shut up Sam.
John yells Sam's name but he's looking at Dean and Sam yells, “When you fucking wise up and get the fuck out of this game, when you want a normal life, when you're both torn up and fucked over and missing your fucking limbs, I'm going to be there. You can come live in my fucking house with Jess and our three fucking kids. I'm going to be there for you, which means I need to stay fucking alive.”
His voice is still so fucking hoarse.
He still sounds like Dean.
He's still fucking barely breathing.
John says, “That's not how this is going to be, Sam. I'm done.”
Sam stands up and backs up a few feet, arms out. “Watch me leave,” he says.
Dean squeezes his eyes shut.
“Fucking watch me!” Sam yells, and then he backs up a few more steps and takes off. He's gone.
Dean and John stare at each other and fuck if he knows what to say, fuck if he has any clue, but he goes back to the motel a few hours later while John's asleep and there's Sam, Sam hunched over his LSAT study book, Sam and his coffee mug and that painful wheeze and his hand pushing into his forehead.
Dean puts his hand on Sam's back and Sam doesn't startle. He relaxes a little.
“Sammy,” Dean says. “You know you call the shots, right? You always call the fucking shots.”
He gives Dean this tired smile.
“I'm glad we did the hunt,” Sam says. “It was fun. And saving Dad was a bonus, I guess.”
“Ha. Yeah.”
“You get why I can't do this though, right?”
“We don't have to talk about this.”
“I'm just...I need to be in control.” He's staring down at his hands. “It's not just the asthma, you know? I get so fucking anxious and angry and I just...I have to just be where I can watch myself.”
“I know.” Dean pulls up a chair and sits down. “And that's what's going to happen because this...this isn't how it's going to work out, you know? This...thing. The you feeling trapped thing. That's not how I'm going to let this work out for you.”
“I'm not going to die in your arms.”
“See, then? We have a deal.”
Sam takes Dean's hand and twists it around some more, waits for Dean to yell.
He doesn't.
They look at each other for a minute, just fucking look at each other, and then Dean stands up says, “Let's get some rest, all right? I've got to check on Dad in the morning, then we have to get you back home. You're driving, okay?'
Sam's looking up at him
The thing about this fucking kid is that sometimes he doesn't have to fucking smile.
“Okay,” he says, and then he smiles anyway, Jesus. Jesus, Dean would give him anything.
Summary: Stanford-era. Dean isn't that hurt and Sam isn't that sick. But it's enough.
Warnings/Spoilers: You'll appreciate it way more if you've seen through season 2. Language.
Wordcount: 9,774
Author's Note: It's Sammyverse--Sam has asthma, the boys are best friends forever, sing along if you know it!
Really this is a standalone. But it's a pair with one that will hopefully go up soonish, hence the Part 1. I don't want to give anything away about that one at this point, just...pray that I can make the two work together the way I want them to, okay? If I can turn it out...it will be cool. And horrifying. Title is butchered from Bon Iver's "Skinny Love."
--
Sammy's leaning over him, and Dean's not an idiot, he knows it's not real, just a desperate fucking narcotic dream, but there is Sam, smiling at him, telling him it's going to be okay when the doctors tug Dean's shoulder and he yelps.
“How are you, Sammy?” Dean manages to grunt out, and the doctors look at him like he's crazy, but DreamSam, NotSam, smiles.
“I'm fine, Dean. I'm always fine.”
“I miss you,” he says.
“You'll see me soon.”
Dean loves DreamSam.
**
Dean ignores the doctors when they say something stupid like “Get more blood work on Winchester in 319,” because he's not even on the third floor, fucking morons. They'll figure it out. Not his problem. He has morphine.
Then it's “Winchester's O2 is still low” and that's when he realizes they shouldn't even know his name is Winchester so why the fuck are they running around calling him that, plus his oxygen doesn't fucking feel low-but there has to be a logical explanation. It's the meds, gotta be, time to go back to sleep.
But then he's signing himself out at the front desk, his arm floppy in the sling and a little sore but he's not really feeling much besides static and bubbling and maybe he should call a cab, and one nurse asks another something about a Winchester and, okay, Dean's standing right in front of them, first of all, and he has this paperwork in his hand and his name is not Winchester, so time to get the fuck up to 319, he figures, and then he walks into the room and there's fucking Sam, who should be in his second week of his junior year right now, but he's fucking here, asleep in a bed in some hospital in fucking Montana, what the hell?
“Doctor Dean,” he mumbles to himself, and he unhooks the kid's chart from the bottom of the bed and takes a look. Took a fucking ambulance here a few hours ago, low blood pressure, hives all over, barely breathing, the whole she-bang. He was shit for an hour or two but now all the arrows are pointing in the right direction and he looks okay, still sweaty and pale and a little swollen, but he has an oxygen mask on, just a light one, the regular one, and he's breathing well.
So now that he knows the kid's not dying he can focus on the fact that this is ridiculous, because what the hell are the chances they both would be in Bozeman, Montana, and that they'd both end up in the same fucking hospital on the same fucking night and Jesus it's Sam, SamSamSamSam.
He probably needs to sleep. Fuck it. “Hey.” Dean shakes his foot. “Hey. Hey. Sammy.”
Sam stirs and blinks and drags an arm over his eyes. “...the fuck?”
“Hey, tiger.”
Sam sits up and grabs Dean's arm to pull him over, brings him into a rough hug. He's careful of the sling. “Jesus, did they call you? Fuck, hi.” He's hoarse.
“Hey.” He breaks out of the hug to push Sam's head back and feel around his throat, checking his glands and shit. Sam lifts his chin automatically, but he winces when Dean presses too hard.
“Sore?”
“A little. Fine. Dean. Hey. How'd they find you?”
Dean laughs. “Hey. They didn't, I was here anyway. Nurses won't stop talking about you, finally put the pieces together. How are you?”
“Fine.” He touches Dean's sling. “This is new? What happened?”
“Just dislocated, it's fine.”
Sam nods a little, touches Dean's shoulder. Feels around and makes sure they did it right. He or Dad could have popped it in easy, but Dean was alone and exhausted and an hour or two in the ER just seemed easier, and fuck if he isn't glad he came.
“What about you?” Dean says. “What'd you eat?”
“Gumbo. Apparently I'm allergic to shrimp now. Life is exciting. Does it hurt?”
“I got drugs. Did you pass out?”
“This is like Guess Who. Nah, I stayed awake. I didn't know where the hospital was so I called 911 like a bitch.”
“You're supposed to. Plus I came to the ER with a dislocated soldier, so I'm not exactly one to fucking judge.”
Sam licks his finger, draws a line in the air, gives himself a point.
“Fuck you. So what the hell are you doing here?”
“Oh, you know, sightseeing. Did you know Bozeman's motto is, the most liveable place? Seriously. Do you think there was a vote involved?”
“Sam.”
“Two world-class ski areas, too. They like to brag the fuck out of those. In September. To an asthmatic. I'm wheezing at the fucking motel desk, and they're like, want a brochure about skiing?”
“Where are you staying?” Dean says, and Sam smiles, the little shit, because he thinks he's gotten out of telling Dean why he's here, because he's a fucking idiot, apparently. (Seriously, you're allergic to fucking everything and you're like hey, let's try some shrimp while I'm alone! Fucking full ride to college, seriously.) He'll be answering, mind Dean's fucking words.
“Overpriced place two blocks over, but I can breathe there.”
“Mine's a shithole. Can't wait to get out of this fucking town. I want a hunt in Los fuck Angeles. Or around you's nice. Find a ghost at Stanford.”
“I'll keep my eyes open,” Sam says, which is funny because he's fucking falling asleep while he's talking. “What was the hunt? You're done?”
“Yeah. You want to sleep?”
“Tell me about the hunt.”
“Centaur. Creepy son of a bitch, running around kidnapping women. Just needed a silver arrow through the spine, I found out. Not until after he threw me, of fucking course.”
Sam rubs his eyes. “Don't they travel in pairs?”
“What? No.”
“Hmmm. Are you with Dad?”
“No, he's in Utah. Spirit at some state park has been pissing everyone off. Big bad one.”
“Oh.” Sam wheezes out a breath and scratches the insides of his arms. He's still kind of hivey.
Dean cups Sam's chin, looks at him like he's a fucking horse. “You really okay now? You look sick still.”
“Just tired. It's been a long week.” He rolls his eyes. “You're so goddamn transparent. I'll tell you all about it. Later. I'm beat.”
“Yeah.” He grabs Sam's chart again and looks through it. Sam lies down and watches him, plays with the strap of Dean's sling. It hurts a little, but Dean lets him.
“You were in bad shape, kid.”
Sam shrugs. “No worse than usual for a reaction.”
“Kinda sick going in?” Because this fucking is worse than usual for a reaction, Sam, because it shouldn't have taken fucking this much epinephrine for his lungs to give in, and, oh yeah, what the fuck is he doing in Montana so excuse Dean if he's looking for anything weird, okay? He's a fucking hunter and something's up with his kid.
“'That's part of the long story.” He's rubbing his eyes again, yawning. He has enough air for it. “I'll tell you all about it. Do you have to meet Dad?”
“Yeah.”
“You get a weekend off, though. Reward for finishing. Yeah?”
“Yeah.” The truth is, Dean was about to go back to the motel and pull out the map, see if he could make it to Palo Alto for a few hours before he had to head east. He hadn't seen Sam in months. “Don't know how the fuck to spend it. Strippers or just drink the whole thing away? Remember when you said life was exciting?”
“I was being sarcastic.”
“Hmm,” Dean says, just because Sam says it.
Sam yawns again and coughs a bit this time. “You should hang out here with me,” he says. “We can recover. After all, this is a liveable place.”
“Except I'm not really that hurt and you're not really that sick.”
Sam grins. “No one has to know that.”
“Does Jess even know where you are?”
“She thinks I'm spending the weekend with you.”
“Oh. Then...I mean, it's not good to lie to your girlfriend.”
“Exactly.”
“So...”
“So.” Sam nods. “So.”
He falls asleep with his face still in Dean's hand, and yeah, look, the boy's been sick. He needs a weekend to recover. And it's not like he can be left alone. That's not safe. That's just bad brothering. So.
So.
**
Sam's had a reaction or two at school but it's been a while since Dean was around for one, and he'd forgotten how much they just wipe the kid out. They're walking out of the hospital and Sam's a mess, walking in these uneven steps and rubbing his eyes with the bandage on his IV hand. He gives the roof of the Impala a sleepy pat as Dean unlocks her. “She looks good.”
Dean's smiling like a fucking idiot. “Thanks, Sam.”
Sam then loses all his points by making a face and turning down the music as soon as Dean starts the car.
Dean swings the car out of the parking space without fucking thinking and shit, shit, he's an idiot, fuck that hurts, and Sam says, “Whoa whoa whoa, shhhh,” and puts his hand, really fucking gently on Dean's fucked up shoulder. “Let's switch.”
“You're sick.”
“Just tired. It's fine. Out.” He starts to slide over, and if Dean doesn't get out the kid's going to be on his damn lap, so, fine. All right. He gets out and moves to the passenger seat, and, damn, it's been a while since he was here. Dad grabbed an old Jeep as soon as they started splitting up, so it's been a while since Dean's been in the passenger seat. It's been about since Sammy left.
Sam fools him into thinking he's any shape to drive Dean's baby by acting all capable for the first half of the trip and then sneezing like a bitch the whole second half. Dean digs around in the glove box for tissues but he doesn't always pack anymore, and he probably hasn't bought any since the last time he was with Sammy. He digs through his pockets. “I have a receipt,” he offers.
Sam sneezes into his elbow. “For what?”
“It matters?”
“Of course.”
“Uh, M&Ms and porn.”
“I'm good, thanks.”
“Yeah, fair.”
They stop at Dean's motel room so they can gather up his shit, and Dean is weirdly embarrassed of his unmade bed, his shit everywhere, the completely untouched other half of the room. Sam looks at the perfect bed. “They didn't have a king?”
Dean shrugs. “Habit.”
“Mine's a double, too.”
“Oh. Good.”
Sam ends up crashing on the bed (on Dean's bed) while Dean gets his shit together. Dean's all ready to wait around a little if Sam's sleeping, but he stays awake, just watching, asking all these fucking questions about the hunt. “Why do you care?” Dean says eventually, and he sounds like asshole which wasn't exactly the point but why the fuck not, right? Every single time he sees Sam he throws in some fucking comment about how glad he is to be out of the game so why's he asking more than he has to? It's not like Dean wants Sam's fucking class notes or some shit. They ask because they give a shit about each other, because they want to see the other one light up, and Dean's tired (Dean doesn't need to be lit up, everything is okay, Sam is resting).
Sam just shrugs.
“All right. Up. You can sleep at the clean motel.”
Sam laughs a little and coughs while he gets himself up. He stops Dean when he starts to sling his bag over his shoulder and says, “Hey. I've got it. Don't be an idiot.”
Dean growls and snatches the keys out of Sam's pocket and says, “I'm driving, Sneezy.” Sam bitches, but he's practically fucking asleep by the time they pull out of the parking lot, so yeah, he made the right call. He can do it one-armed.
“Hey,” Dean says as he parks. Sam mumbles and stirs a little, so he's the perfect level of awake for Dean to ask, all casually,“What the fuck are you doing here?”
Sam sighs (wheezes) and cuddles against the window. “Huntin'.”
“What?”
“They travel in pairs, moron.”
**
Dean was the one who told Sam, a few months before he left for Stanford, when Sam pulled him aside and told him what was going on, asked for his blessing (that night: fuck no, a month later: Sam fucking please I'm begging you, a month after that: just be safe, okay?) that “You're going to get back in. Nobody gets out of this for good.”
And now look at him. No one even had to drag him.
And he's telling Dean this big long story about how the first girl the centaurs captured was some distant step half second cousin of Jess's and Jess told him about it all upset and showed him the article and Sam's alarms went up.
Dean parks at the motel and says, “Then why didn't you call me about it?” because it wouldn't have been the first time Sam's rung Dean at weird fucking hours to babble about something he saw online that looks vaguely suspicious and Dean please go check it out and Dean pisses and moans and says that it probably isn't supernatural (it always fucking is) but that he'll go check it out, just for Sam (he always fucking does).
Sam shrugs. “'S for Jess.” He's still scrunched up with his head on the window and glaring at Dean every time he talks. Like he still thinks Dean's going to let him fall asleep before this conversation's over (not to mention while they're still in the fucking car when bed's right there.)
“You were bored,” Dean says.
“Nah.”
“You missed hunting.”
“Noooo.”
“You knew I would be here.”
“I totally didn't.”
“You thought Dad might be here.”
“No. But the thought crossed my mind and I didn't hate it.”
“Something bad happened at school.”
“No.”
“Something...”
“Something about me being sick. No.”
“Came to go skiing.”
Sam laughs.
“Come on, tell me. Why the fuck did you break your streak for this? You had a good thing going, there, Sammy. Two years, zero hunts, what the fuck gives?”
“Dunno.” He coughs into his fist. “Seriously. Was just doing some research, looking into it, kept doing more and more and then it was just all right in front of me and it already felt like my case so I figured, eh, what the hell, one weekend, there was nothing going on at school anyway and at least it'd be something to talk about with you once it was all over.”
“So...you missed me.”
“That's seriously what you heard?”
“Yeah, missed deep conversations with me about killing things and shit, that's what I heard.”
“All right, Dean, if you say so. I missed you.”
“If I say so is fucking right.” Dean gives him a rough clap on the shoulder. “Let's get you some sleep.”
**
The motel room is pretty damn nice. It has a kitchenette and a couch and shit. But Sam has a shitty bookstore job and is probably paying for this with real money. Kind of ridiculous.
Sam waves at the kitchen while he's changing from the hospital gown into some sweatpants. “Can you, uh...”
The gumbo's in a styrofoam container open on the counter because, what, was he supposed to do the fucking dishes while his throat was closing up or something?
“On it.” He throws the soup out and wipes down the counters, scrubs his hands. Sam sits on the foot of the bed and shoots him this sleepy smile. “God, don't get teary,” Dean says.
“You fucking glow when you take care of me, it's hilarious.”
“I'm cleaning a fucking kitchen, not exactly feeding you ice chips on your deathbed, Myrtle. Take your fucking meds.”
“Did already. When do you get yours?”
“Uh, two hours. Don't set a fucking alarm. Stop it. I can do it on my own.”
“Mmm. No.”
“Sam.”
Sam just smiles at him, and fuck, it's worse than those fucking puppy eyes, how is Dean not the fuck used to that smile.
“God, just...fuck you. Fine, Catherine, nurse me back to health. Are we going to paint our toenails, now? Play truth or dare?”
Sam pulls his pillow over his head. “Goodnight, Dean. I hate you. See you in two hours.”
**
It hurts it hurts why the fuck does it hurt so much what the fuck, Jesus, stop moving him--
“It's okay. It's okay. Fuck, you got yourself twisted all the hell around, didn't you? It's all right. Here we go.” Sam is so quiet and calm and his hands are really big and cool and fuckithurts
“S'mmy...”
“Shhh.” There's something cool and wet against his cheek. “There you go. Open your mouth.” Then the pill, then some water.
A minute later, the alarm goes off, and Sammy, why were you awake before the alarm? How'd you know?
Sam's hand on his forehead, wiping off the sweat, back to sleep.
**
Dean wakes up alone and pretty sure that Montana Sam was all a hallucination he created to get him through this epic suck of a dislocation. He pushes himself up, wincing, and looks around the room. The other bed is fucking made. But this is Sam's motel. So Sam must exist. Probably.
Then the door opens and there he is, all eight and a half feet of him, with two cups of coffee and a stupid ratty Stanford hoodie. “Rise and shine.” He hands Dean a coffee cup. “How you feelin'?”
“Jesus Christ, your voice,” Dean says, because he thought Sam sounded bad yesterday, but now he's talking like he was gargling gravel all night. He's an octave too low and croaking in and out between words.
“I know. It's just the reaction, fucked with my throat.”
“You sound like me.”
“Yeah? Uh...hunting evil. Banging bitches. Take your meds, Sammy. I'm hungry.”
“Yeah, you definitely sound like me.”
Sam grins and drinks. “It's going away. How are you?”
He takes off the sling, carefully stretches out his arm. “Sore. Fine.”
“Yeah. You had a rough night.”
“You?”
“No, I was fine. Slept hard. Didn't wake you up, did I?”
Dean shakes his head. “Would have slept through anything with those fucking pills you gave me.”
“Just codeine. It was my touching bedside manner, obviously. Speaking of-” He takes another pull from his coffee and sets the cup on Dean's nightstand. “Let me see that shoulder.”
“It's fine.”
“Yeah, but I'm getting rusty. Jess doesn't get thrown against shit much. So do me a favor.”
Dean mumbles and growls and fucking sounds like he's imitating Sam, here, with that croak in Sam's throat, and Sam moves behind him and crawls his fingers around Dean's shoulder.
He says, “You look okay, but it was really hurting you. Freaked me out.”
“Fucking humiliate the shit out of me, why don't you.”
Sam puts his hand on the back of of his head and scratches him a little like he's a fucking cat. Dean tries really hard not to loll his head back. Really fucking hard. Jesus, he's a fucking girl, he knows, but no one outside of a few fucking doctors last night has fucking touched him in God knows how long. Sam used to complain of the same thing when Dean came to visit him at Stanford, that he'd been fucking locked in the library for a week and a half and he missed goddamn human contact, but now he has Jess and it's just fucking Dean here alone staying a foot and a half way from John all the damn time, and the truth is one of the things he most misses about hunting with Sam was feeling someone else's shoulder bump his every once in a while or maybe a hand on his back now and then when John wasn't watching and now here's all six hundred pounds of mythical Sam-beast complete with his utter lack of understanding of personal space and Christ, it's just...it just is, that's kind of the point, it's just this constant is, this buzz in his head that he isn't fucking alone.
Sam gives Dean's healthy shoulder a squeeze and helps him back into the sling. “You want breakfast?”
“God, yeah.”
**
This coffee's not as good than the stuff Sam brought back, but after the past few days, Dean would fucking swim in it. He orders half the menu and idly pours in a few packets of sugar. Sam takes his black, like always (every time Dean sees someone drink black coffee, he wonders if they have asthma) and is quiet, stabbing his fork with his napkin and pulling his hands into his sleeves. He's been twitchy since they got here. Too much caffeine too early, probably.
“So you took out the other centaur all on your own, huh?” Dean says.
Sam rolls his eyes.
“Nah, don't, it's impressive. When'd you do it?”
“Like three hours before you did, sounds like.” He gives Dean one of those smirks that crinkles his eyes and fuck. This. Kid.
Dean clears his throat. “All right, but if you knew there were two, why not kill two? Why didn't you finish the job?”
Sam mumbles and drives his fork further into his napkin.
“You fucked up?” Dean says. “Got yourself hurt? You hurt?”
“Not hurt, didn't fuck up.” He wheezes and takes a pull from his coffee mug.
“Hey, you've never done a hunt on your own before. I hadn't when I was your age.”
“All those many years ago.”
“Yeah, bite me.”
“I didn't fuck up.”
“So what happened, then?”
Sam smiles at the waitress as she sets the plates down, then turns away and coughs into his elbow for a while. It's just normal coughing, but it sounds like shit on his sore throat. Dean offers his coffee cup, and Sam shakes his head, still coughing, and holds up his, half-full. The fit lasts longer than Dean expects and, by the look of Sammy, than he did too. He leans back in the booth to catch his breath.
“Fucking asthma. Wish it would leave me alone for just a minute,” he says.
“I know.”
“When things are really awesome otherwise, you know? I just wish it would fuck off.” He clears his throat a few times to get somewhat of a voice back. “The hunt. There were some complications. Let's just say-” his voice cracks-more like fucking crumbles-again and he coughs for a minute.
“Sam.”
“I know it sounds bad. It's just my throat.” He drinks some water. “Let's just say it's not the right hunt for me to do solo.”
“Just...”
“No. I didn't get hurt.”
“Okay.”
Dean attacks his pancakes and fuck, pancakes, he will never get over fucking pancakes, not for as long as he fucking lives, not if he had them for every meal, pancakes, and he's having a moment here, so it takes him a minute to realize that Sam's just pushing his food around. Not normal Sammy dawdling, what-the-fuck pushing his food around, but genuine not-one-bite-passes-those-lips pushing his food around, cutting his scrambled eggs into tiny bits and shredding his toast (shredding his toast with his sleeves pulled over his hands, getting all greasy), that kind of pushing around.
“Sam.”
Sam's head snaps up.
“What's up over there?”
“Nothing. Sorry.”
“Breathing that bad?”
He shakes his head. “No, just...”
Then Dean gets it, because Sam's eating has been his responsibility for a long fucking time; back when Sam was little and sick the asthma was John's (John kept a tight leash on that until Sam started fighting him tooth and nail and John gave up and sulked because John does not fucking get Sam, when you are fighting with Sam the last thing you want to do is act like Sam) but making sure Sammy ate, making sure what Sammy ate didn't make him sick, that was Dean's, and he's done a pretty good fucking job all in all because his kid's a hundred feet tall and not wasting away and generally not dying from food allergies and would still be eating playground dirt if not for Dean, so yeah, he knows what this is right here and knows it's not fucking fun.
Dean reaches his fork across the table and steals someone of Sam's eggs, then takes a bite of his toast. He chews, swallows, then drinks from his water glass, turns the glass around, hands it to Sam.
Sam takes it and drinks. He knows the drill. If there's something in his food that would kill him, drinking after Dean would definitely let them know, but just with tingling lips and a few hives (at least that's the fucking hope, but Dean's hand is on the EpiPen in his pocket anyway). This is what they do when Sam gets skittish. It's been a while. Who the fuck knows what he does at Stanford (doesn't fucking eat, probably).
Sam sits on his hands and waits to see if something happens, and Dean doesn't fucking hover. He eats, ten nice slow bites, before he glances up at Sam.
Sam gives him a small nod.
“Awesome. Eat.”
He pushes his food around, but in his normal weirdo way. He chews for a long time. “I can take down a centaur but not eat a plate of eggs.”
“Yeah you can, Sammy.”
“And I could barely take down the centaur. And left one behind. Jesus.”
Dean shoves his tongue into his cheek. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened, I just...I mean, surprise surprise, centaurs have fur. You saw me sneezing in your car just from what you tracked in. I was kind of a mess actually out there. And it was just wet and cold so I was wheezing. And I was okay, seriously, but I knew I couldn't finish the hunt. I'd pass out and get myself killed. So I bailed in the middle of a hunt so I'd have enough energy to get myself fed and to sleep and come finish it tomorrow. When hopefully another girl wouldn't have been killed off because of me, Jesus.”
Dean swallows. “And the feeding yourself didn't exactly work out how you planned.”
“Yeah. And fucking flying here with peanuts and shit on the plane. I've just been wheezing a lot for days. It's exhausting. This was a mistake.”
“Can we go back in time a few hours? I miss manic happy Sammy.”
Sam laughs a little. “Right? Ugh.”
“A fucking centaur by yourself, Sam. This was a rough one for me, and I've been hunting on my own for three years. And my lungs don't fucking suck.”
“Hey. Don't insult my lungs. They try their hardest. I just...”
“What?”
Sam shrugs. “It was nice security, telling myself that if I ever had to, I could handle a hunt.”
“Are you a fucking idiot, here, seriously. You did.”
“I didn't finish it.”
“So maybe you shouldn't be hunting on your own. Because frankly, Sam...I don't like it.”
“I'm not hunting.” He pauses. “Because of the asthma?”
“Because you're my kid brother” (he says brother) “and this shit's dangerous. You always had Dad and me watching your back. Fuck, I don't like hunting alone, y'know? You don't have to like it. You don't even fucking have to be able to do it.”
Sam takes another bite and wipes his mouth on his napkin. “It's not anything you have to worry about, because I'm not hunting. This was just...”
“Hunting.”
“Yes. Temporarily. Once.” He coughs.
“Sure.” Sam's back, Dean fucking knows he is. No one ever gets out of this, not really. Dean wonders what Sam's going to tell Jess. Maybe the fucking truth. It's about time.
Sam gives him that disapproving tight-lipped little asshole face Dean will sometimes try to do in the mirror when he's bored and never can, no, that shit is just Sam.
“Besides,” Sam says, quietly. “This is is just more proof that I'm not up to it. That...you know. It's a good thing I left.”
It's like everything goes quiet for Dean then. The waitress yelling to the bus boy, the girl at the next booth arguing with her boyfriend, the baby crying in the corner, the hiss of the espresso machine. It's just quiet.
“Sam,” Dean says. “Is that why you left?'
Sam shakes his head, but he doesn't look up. “It was a factor. I wanted to go to school and I fucking hated hunting, but...part of that was because it was getting too hard.”
“You should have told me.”
“Telling you now.” He rubs his cheek. He hasn't shaved. “I don't know. It's just...at Stanford, I'm in control. I'm...overwhelmed as hell, but...” he shakes his head. “But at least I know I'm not going to get trapped without meds for three days like that time with the Lady in White. And there's nowhere that I could potentiality get myself or Dad or you killed if I can't catch my breath in time.” He's rubbing his chest and he probably doesn't even fucking realize it. “I just...needed that control. Away from Dad fucking bossing me around. Away from monsters choking me against walls.”
“Away from the asthma.”
“Yeah.”
“And how's that one been working out for you?”
Sam pushes his thumb into the tines of his fork and looks away.
Dean finishes his pancakes, sets down his silverware. “We have this whole weekend together,” he says. “I want to do a hunt with you.”
“What?”
“I'll find us something easy. Caleb's been texting me fucking constantly, there's like a hundred fucking hunts on the table right now. We'll go check one out. Just you and me. You always used to talk about that, doing one just you and me.”
Sam chews on his lip and looks up at him.
Dean says, “See, yeah? You want to. And you'll see how fucking badass you are.”
“It doesn't mean I'm coming back, Dean.”
Yeah, sure, he'll fucking humor the kid. “Of course not. One hunt, and then you'll go back to Stanford with all your renewed confidence and channel it into your sociology classes.”
“English. English major.”
“Yeah, okay. So?”
“Just one. One, o-n-e-fucking-one, just you and me.”
Dean tries not to look totally fucking smug, but when is he ever wrong about Sam?
**
He wants an easy hunt, because the point is to build up Sam's confidence, so he's scanning through Cody's texts looking for some nearby wimpy vengeful spirit while Sam camps out with his nebulizer and his complete works of Shakespeare. It's kind of nice, honestly, lying here on the couch, glancing up every once in a while and just watching Sam and his pen and his textbook like he's some fucking normal kid. (He'll ignore the fucking machine his kid's sucking from for the time being, cool?)
His phone buzzes and he pulls it out of his pocket. “Hello?”
“Dean.”
John has that one voice (John has several fucking voices that will do it, really) that freezes every part of Dean. “Dad. What's wrong?”
Sam sits up straight, and Dean holds up a hand for him to wait.
John's breathing hard. “I need you here,” he says. “Something...it's gone wrong. I need backup.”
Dean hits the button for speakerphone and vaults his way to the table and places the phone between him and Sam. “What happened?”
“It's stronger than I thought. Threw me down in this ravine. I've broken something. Bad. How soon can you get here?”
Dean glances at Sam, who presses his finger over the speaker and whispers, “If you think you can do this better without me, go. I mean it. I'll get back to Stanford. Don't let me fuck this up.”
Dean licks his lips. He'll feel a million fucking times safer with Sam there, because Sam has his back and because Dean hasn't forgotten, even if Sam apparently has, that he's a fucking fantastic hunter, quick-witted and dextrous and fast, but this is asking a lot of Sam a day out of the fucking hospital and two years out of hunting, and when the kid's already doubting himself...
He swallows and moves Sam's hand off the phone.
“Dad, do we need backup on this one? I have Sam.”
Sam looks at him with big eyes.
John hesitates for all of two seconds. “Good. Bring him.”
“Yes sir,” Sam says. Old fucking habits.
**
Sam's fucking sneezing as soon as they're in the car, so they stop at the first gas station to blast the car clean with the air hose. The fur flying everywhere turns out to be a barrel of laughs for Sammy, so Dean finishes the job while Sam sits on the trunk and finishes mapping out the route.
“Looks like...350, 400 miles,” he says. “Maybe six hours.”
“We can do faster than that.”
“He's a demon on wheels...”
Dean laughs.
“Hey, Dean?”
“Hey, Sammy?”
“You think Dad's okay?'
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, he's fine.” He's not fine. Of course he's not fucking fine, but they both know that, and what Sam needs to hear is that Dad's going to be fucking alive when they get to him and Sam's out of practice, Sam needs some reassuring, it's fine (and Dad fucking better be alive when they get to him because Dean really doesn't like lying to Sam).
“Didn't...you know, break his back or anything, do you think?”
“No, no, just a leg, I bet. He'll be up in no time. He's going to make us cover a lot of hunts while he's recovering, though.”
Sam's quiet. “You, Dean.”
“What?”
“He's going to make you cover a lot of hunts. I'll be at school.”
“Right.”
Sam chews the inside of his cheek. “If he...you know. If he needs someone to take care of him. I can take time off for that, it's no problem.”
Dean snorts. “Yeah, I'm sure he'd go for that.”
“Yeah.”
“Come on, you. I've decontaminated the thing. Let's get going.”
“I choose music.”
“Mmmm no.”
Sam steals the air hose and blasts in the back of Dean's neck on his way to the passenger seat. As soon as he's climbed in, Dean shoves Sam hard against his door and Sam grins and knocks Dean's head to the side. John never let them fuck around like this. John gave them looks. John bit his tongue.
John isn't fucking here, so Dean elbows Sam in the side until he laughs and Sam grabs Dean's hand and twists it around until Dean yells uncle and Sam licks his finger and gives himself another point.
Yeah, Dean doesn't like hunting alone.
**
Dean takes his hand off the volume dial. “New rule.”
Sam looks up from the map. “Hmm?”
“If you're wheezing so hard I have to turn up the music, you're wheezing too damn hard. Do you want to stop?”
Sam looks at his inhaler in his hand like he didn't just fucking take it, like he hasn't been hitting it hard all day.
“Stopping won't help,” he says.
“We could find somewhere to set the nebulizer up, I don't know.”
He shakes his head. “I'm okay.”
“You need new meds, man.”
“I'll let you know when they invent something.” He pulls his feet up on the dashboard and messes with his shoelaces, then glances at Dean. “Aw, fuck, don't look at me like that.”
“I'm not looking at you like fucking anything.”
“It's that Tiny Tim look. I'm not dying.”
“I know that.”
“I'm not here to make you feel guilty.”
“I know that, too.”
“I'm happy the way I am.”
Okay, so now maybe Dean is looking at him like that, so what, because how the fuck can Sam be happy like this, is that something that's even possible? (Are people really happy the way the are?)
Sam watches him and laughs. “Yeah, it drives me fucking crazy sometimes. It hurts and it's scary. It makes you fucking freak out. But I didn't, like, turn into the sad little sick kid while I've been gone, okay? It's still fine and I'm still dealing. I'm the same happy little sick kid I always was.”
“Yeah, I don't know about little.”
Sam smiles at him and starts shaking the inhaler again.
**
They play the game where you look for all the letters of the alphabet. They switch off when Dean's shoulder starts to hurt. They switch back when Sam nearly sneezes them into a guardrail. Sam sleeps and Dean puts on Metallica's softer stuff for them, then Sam wakes up and teaches him the Stanford fight song. They take each other's meds by mistake and Sam doesn't go into anaphylactic shock, glory hallelujah, and Dean, much to both of their disappointments, doesn't develop any superhuman breathing skills (Dean: Are you sure these things work? Sam: BREATHE HARDER!) but he does enjoy Sam all fucking loopy on codeine (seriously, he's eleven feet tall and has the drug tolerance of a six-year-old) counting cows whenever they pass a farm and fucking asking Dean shit like “is that cow one cow or two cows?” and fucking leaning towards him with that enormous skull that somehow feels like the perfect size for Dean's hand.
John's in a fucking ravine on the other side so it all feels like blasphemy, but Dean has his fucking band back together, okay, and he still believes, he still fucking thinks, that Sammy's here to stay. And if he isn't? Well, they'll fucking deal. He can go back to school and get his fancy piece of paper and go off to fucking law school if he gets in (which he will because have you met Dean's kid?) and go wear suits and counsel people-family law, he wants to do fucking family law, and Dean has no idea what that is but shit, if you have to be a lawyer, right?--and he and John will fucking kidnap him on the weekends and make him kill shit and feel alive and Sam won't even have to do any fucking homework in the passenger seat then, so it'll work out. No matter what, it'll work out.
And maybe sometimes he'll visit Sam at his apartment or whatever, not for hunting, and they'll just fucking be, play goddamn fucking house for a few days, and Dean will get a good night's sleep and do his fucking laundry and make Sam cook. Maybe Sam will have a wife and some kids by then.
Sam's knee taps his.
Maybe not.
Doesn't matter. In the end it just doesn't fucking matter, because in the end it's always going to be him and Sam. They'll go down bloody together or they'll lie around Palm Beach when they're eighty and eighty-four and roll each other out to sit in the son. They'll get there. All roads lead to there.
Sam can choose whichever the fuck road he wants. The point is that Sam chooses.
**
“Remember how to shoot a gun?” Dean asks, once they're parked as close to the haunted state park as they can get and are grabbing their salt guns and shit from the back.
Sam gives him a look.
“Remember, you put even pressure on the trigger-”
“How about I shoot you for practice?”
**
It's a state park, so it's fucking full of ravines, and John isn't answering his cell phone or their shouts for him, and they're both getting nervous but Dean's trying to stay cool for Sam's sake. Sam's wheezing quietly but consistently and, well, he always fucking wheezes, but it's been a while since Dean always fucking heard it, so give him a break for worrying, y'know?
“You good?” he asks, softly.
Sam nods. “I'm going to check that way.”
“All right. I'll cover you.” He gets his gun on his shoulder and makes arc around Sam, because fuck if he's letting his kid get killed by some angry spirit on his first fucking hunt back, but then Sam yells, “Dean! I got him!” and starts running down this steep slope. Dean's after him in a fucking second.
Sam's kneeling in front of John, tapping his cheek. “Hey, hey, Dad. He's warm, Dean, don't worry.”
Dean wasn't fucking worrying, he was just breathing hard 'cause he's fucking tired, okay, or...just fuck off.
“Dad,” Sam says, and John sputters himself awake. He groans and puts his head back, then says, “Sam. God, Sammy, look at you,” and he's not saying look at you, wheezing, exhausted, still pale he's saying here, taller, saving my ass. “It's good to see you.”
“Y-you too. I'm going to look at that leg, okay?”
“Where's your brother?”
“Here, Dad, I'm right here,” Dean says while Sam grabs his hand and presses it into John's.
John breathes out and closes his eyes. “My boys.”
“Drug him up, Dean,” Sam says, making his way down to John's foot, and Dean his painkillers out of his pocket, and he sees John looking him over for the reason he's packing.
“Dislocated shoulder,” he says. “I'm fine.” He hands John two pills and the water bottle, because as long his Dad's fucking conscious no one's fucking feeding him, all right?
He takes them himself. “You got it fixed?”
“Yeah.”
Sam turns his head with a few sudden, stuttered coughs that he's trying to hold back, and John says, “You all right?”
Sam nods.
Dean says, “How's it looking down there, Sammy?”
“Looks like ankle and femur are broken. Other leg seems okay. You take the brunt of it on one side, Dad?”
John nods and grimaces. “We need to get out of here before the fucking spirit comes out again.”
Dean says, “On it” and slips his hands under his dad's arms, but Sam says, “Dean, don't be an idiot, let me splint this.”
“With what?”
Sam gives him a look and unloads his gun.
“Oh.”
It's kind of a shitty splint, just this gun attached to their dad's leg by Dean and Sam's jackets, but it'll do. Except now they're shivering and that's exactly what Sam and his asthma and Dean and his sore shoulder need, right?
“Let's move,” Dean says, and Sam nods. He gets under one John's left side so Dean can use his good shoulder on his other, and John grits his teeth when they pull him up but doesn't fucking pass out, so Dean's impressed. He and Sam have both caved for less.
They fucking drag him out of the ravine and it's brutal and John looks like he is dropping out now and Dean doesn't fucking blame him but he keeps his eyes half-open and says, “Dean, keep that rifle ready, the spirt's a nasty son of-” just as it appears out of fucking nowhere and slams Sam against the nearest boulder. John falls and takes Dean with him.
Dean scrambles to his feet. “Fuck. Sammy!”
Sam shakes his head fast. “Fine. Where the fuck'd he go?”
“I don't know. Dad. Hey. Dad. What needs burning?”
“It's...a hat. In the lodge.”
“Okay. I'm going. Sam! Get Dad's gun.”
Sam nods and runs over and starts going through John's jacket, looking for his gun, and shit, they're out of practice working with three people, why the fuck didn't Sam splint him up with John's fucking gun instead of his own?
Sam loads it and frowns. “It's jammed.”
“What?”
“He fucking fell on it, Dean.”
“Shit. Okay, switch the splint out-”
And then Sam gets thrown, a-fucking-gain, and shit, why is it always Sammy? Sam swings the butt of the jammed gun at the spirit and unloads the shells into his hand. “Dean, go, I've got this!” He runs back to John and stands guard over him, and Dean's ten feet away and can fucking hear him breathing.
So he hesitates.
“Dean, go!” Sam starts laying a salt ring, but he doesn't have time to get it even halfway finished before he's fucking thrown again. Dean gets his gun out in time to shoot the bastard this time, and he freezes and then starts towards Dean.
Dean runs up the hill to the lodge, turning every fifty yards to fire another shot at the asshole, but the last time he turns around it's gone, and there it is, back down the hill, charging towards John (who's on the ground fucking working on the salt circle, way to go, Dad) and Sam, who Dean can see up here has his making a fucking plan face on (and he's fucking wheezing like hell but Dean's not going to concentrate on that part right now, Sam's got this.)
He kicks down the door of the lodge and tears the main office and the break room until he finally finds a row of display cases in the president general director what the fuck do you call the head of a state fucking park's office. He smashes the case with the butt of his gun, grabs three hats in there, and sprints them out of the house so he can fucking see which will waste the spirit (see if Dad and Sammy are okay).
And there's fucking Sam, and it takes Dean a minute to figure out what he's doing, but he has the salt shells from his gun and he's fucking hurling them at the spirit, one after the fucking other, and the spirit's stuttering and falling back with each one and Sam just keeps going whipping them like he's in the fucking major leagues, and Dean salts and sets one hat on fire and nothing but the second one, the second one does it, and the spirit blazes up and disappears.
Dean runs down the hill and drags himself to a stop a few feet away from Sam. “You okay?”
Sam flicks his sweaty hair out of his eyes. He's breathing like shit, shoulders heaving.
He's smiling.
“Let's get Dad out of here,” he says.
**
Dean harasses the doctors and gives them the insurance information. Sam's doing all right. There are different doctors from the night before, so he doesn't get any shit about taking better care of himself or whatever the hell the doctors like to throw at him when he comes two nights in a row (and when Sam has to do the ER more than once a month, it's almost always two nights in a row because these things aren't fucking easy to shake) and they just set him up with a nebulizer in John's room and leave him the hell alone.
John doesn't need surgery because John's fucking invincible. They give him a fuckload of morphine and set him and give him a real splint, and they're making him lie here and wait for a few hours for someone to cast him. So now Dean comes back in from the hallway and John and Sam are just there, awkward again now that there's nothing to kill. Sam has a pulse ox on (his numbers are good, but that doesn't mean a whole lot; unless he's doing hideously, his numbers are good) and John's glancing at the reading every once in a while, and when Sam takes the mouthpiece out to cough, John puts his hand on his shoulder to help hold him still. Dean wants to smile at him, give John this nod to tell him he's doing it right, but he wouldn't like that (he's my son, of course I'm doing it right). And honestly, he's not doing it fucking right, he's not holding tight enough and his thumb is too close to Sam'd windpipe and Dean could do a better job, but...Dean and Sam don't make physical contact, not even those fucking shoulder nudges, not even fucking colliding with each other at the bottom of the hill after a hunt, when John's around, not if they can possibly help it.
And Dean can't even count how many times he's wanted to scream at John that John doesn't fucking get it, that he is completely fucking misunderstanding what's going on with Sam and the idea that Dean would fucking...with Sam completely misses the goddamn point which is that Sam is fucking precious and he would cut off his fucking hands before he'd do anything to screw him up and fuck you, John, fuck you, you raised them in fucking isolation from the rest of that world and you shoved Sam in Dean's fucking pocket and have you seen that kid's fucking smile and nineteen years just the two of them and Sam never fucking worrying about it and now he can't put his hand on his fucking kid's shoulder while he's wheezing and Jesus, he needs to calm down, that was a great hunt.
Sam finishes coughing and rubs his chest and John watches him and says, “So...how did this happen?”
“What?”
“How did you end up in Montana?”
Sam opens his mouth, looks at Dean, and Dean gets it, he sees it all over his face. Because if Sam tells the truth, John's going to pounce, John's going to try to drag him back, and this is going to end in screaming, and John's stoned and Sam can't breathe and Dean's getting a headache and everyone is in the same fucking room together and can they not tonight? Can they just not?
So he says, “I dragged him. Centaurs come in pairs and I wanted backup. Practically had to threaten him to get him out here.”
Sam watches him. He's expressionless and he's saying everything anyway.
“And he had a shitty allergic reaction and now this,” Dean says.
“Dean. I'm fine.”
Dean raises his eyebrows.
John says, “You all right now, Sam?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, we have some time to get you all the way up to snuff,” he says, with this smile that can always convince Dean to do fucking anything. “I think we all deserve a little time off after this one. But as soon as I'm up, Bobby has this lead-”
“Dad-” Dean says.
Sam holds up his hand. “Dad. I'm not staying.”
John looks at him and doesn't say anything and tries to look surprised.
“I have school, Dad. I have a girlfriend. I...have a paper due Monday. And I have a shitty lung disease that's not going to let me keep doing this forever.”
“No one's talking about forever.”
“I am. And I'm done with this. Forever.” He wheezes out a breath. “I'm glad I could help tonight. Really glad that you and Dean are okay. But I can't keep doing this. I don't want to keep doing this. I wish we could all just fucking stop doing this.”
There isn't any warmth in John anymore, not right now. “Sam, your mother-”
Sam puts up his hands. “I know. I know.”
He's getting upset which means he's breathing like shit. Dean picks the mouthpiece off the nightstand and holds it out to Sam. Sam shakes his head and says, “Let me finish this.”
John says, “We need you, Sam. We need you out there.”
“You don't need me, Dad, you need another fucking gun. That's not me. I never wanted this to be me.”
“Then why did you come?” John barks. “You think you can just keep coming back to us and leaving again? How many times do you think I can stand seeing you walk out that door, Sam? You think that doesn't rip me apart?”
Dean says, “Both of you. Stop. Please?”
Sam says, “I will die doing this, Dad. You know me. I'll get angry and obsessed and I won't know how to stop.”
Dean breathes. “Sam. Shut up.”
“Then go,” John says. “But don't expect us to just be around every time you need us. Don't demand that Dean come visit you every time you have an asthma attack. That's not how family works. We can't just be here when you need us. You're a part of this family, you have responsibilities. You've never understood that. Never.”
“I have to breathe, Dad! I have to do that before I can do anything!”
Dean says, “And right now you barely fucking are, so can we cool down for a minute?”
“You're breathing!” John says. “Look at you.”
Sam closes his eyes. “I can't get into that argument again, Dad, I can't. This isn't breathing, this is shit, and you couldn't handle this, okay? You fucking try this.”
Dean says, “Sam. Stop.”
“You fought it for nineteen years, Sam,” John says. “You can keep going.”
“This is going to fucking kill me. This isn't a joke. Do you get that I could have died on any single one of those hunts? I'm a fucking missed dose away from drowning in my own chest, how can you ask me to do this?”
Dean can't fucking help it, okay, he has his hands all over Sam's shoulders and he's saying “Sam, okay, come on. Breathe.”
John barks “Dean, stay out of this.”
Sam's on his feet. “Don't fucking talk to Dean like that!”
“It's fine, Sam.” Dean grits his teeth. “I'm not a part of this.”
Sam whirls on him. “You're not a part of this? I keep hunting, who the fuck's arms do you think I'm going to die in?”
Shut up Sam shut up Sam shut up Sam.
John yells Sam's name but he's looking at Dean and Sam yells, “When you fucking wise up and get the fuck out of this game, when you want a normal life, when you're both torn up and fucked over and missing your fucking limbs, I'm going to be there. You can come live in my fucking house with Jess and our three fucking kids. I'm going to be there for you, which means I need to stay fucking alive.”
His voice is still so fucking hoarse.
He still sounds like Dean.
He's still fucking barely breathing.
John says, “That's not how this is going to be, Sam. I'm done.”
Sam stands up and backs up a few feet, arms out. “Watch me leave,” he says.
Dean squeezes his eyes shut.
“Fucking watch me!” Sam yells, and then he backs up a few more steps and takes off. He's gone.
Dean and John stare at each other and fuck if he knows what to say, fuck if he has any clue, but he goes back to the motel a few hours later while John's asleep and there's Sam, Sam hunched over his LSAT study book, Sam and his coffee mug and that painful wheeze and his hand pushing into his forehead.
Dean puts his hand on Sam's back and Sam doesn't startle. He relaxes a little.
“Sammy,” Dean says. “You know you call the shots, right? You always call the fucking shots.”
He gives Dean this tired smile.
“I'm glad we did the hunt,” Sam says. “It was fun. And saving Dad was a bonus, I guess.”
“Ha. Yeah.”
“You get why I can't do this though, right?”
“We don't have to talk about this.”
“I'm just...I need to be in control.” He's staring down at his hands. “It's not just the asthma, you know? I get so fucking anxious and angry and I just...I have to just be where I can watch myself.”
“I know.” Dean pulls up a chair and sits down. “And that's what's going to happen because this...this isn't how it's going to work out, you know? This...thing. The you feeling trapped thing. That's not how I'm going to let this work out for you.”
“I'm not going to die in your arms.”
“See, then? We have a deal.”
Sam takes Dean's hand and twists it around some more, waits for Dean to yell.
He doesn't.
They look at each other for a minute, just fucking look at each other, and then Dean stands up says, “Let's get some rest, all right? I've got to check on Dad in the morning, then we have to get you back home. You're driving, okay?'
Sam's looking up at him
The thing about this fucking kid is that sometimes he doesn't have to fucking smile.
“Okay,” he says, and then he smiles anyway, Jesus. Jesus, Dean would give him anything.