Tin Lung Echoes, for snickfic
Title: Tin Lung Echoes
Author: starlingnight
Recipient: snickfic
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: ~3000
Warnings: Language
Summary: Dean and soulless!Sam attempt to deal with each other. It’s hard. Sam’s missing something important, and Dean just misses Sam.
There was plastic lunch wrap stretched over the toilet bowl, a prank that Dean remembered first using on Sammy when the kid was eight years old. He rubbed a hand over his mouth and seriously considered tequila.
He cracked the bathroom door open and chanced a glance outside. Sam was sitting at the table, the faint glow of the computer screen shining on all the familiar angles and planes of his face. He didn’t look at all expectant or gleeful. He looked...intent on his research, without any trace of a smile, pretty much the same as before Dean had crashed last night. Awesome.
Dean looked back at the toilet, reached out an experimental hand and - yep, definitely saran wrap. He remembered this one being pretty entertaining, but they hadn’t really had time for prank wars since before the real ones started. Plus, their relationship had gotten a bit frayed during that time, and if they had to kill each other, out of personal preference Dean would rather that it not to be due to a fight over the ol’ itching powder in the underwear trick, or even a fatal slip on some piss on the bathroom floor.
That was a thought, actually. Maybe Sam had just decided on a really weird way to get rid of him. That’d be one for the tabloids.
Dean peeled the plastic film off the rim of the toilet, and shifted on his feet for a moment. Then he looked out into the room at Sam again, and gave him the silent dude, what?
Sam looked up at him.
“Dude,” Dean tried.
“Yeah?” Sam said.
“Uh,” Dean said, deciding to put off pissing ‘til later, “what?” He came out of the bathroom and held up the wrap. “What is this meant to be?”
“Oh,” Sam said. “That was meant to be a prank.”
“No shit!”
“So it didn’t work,” Sam said, drumming his fingers on the table. “Huh.” Dean could practically see the problem ticking over in his clockwork head.
“I taught you- Sam! That’s not the point!” Dean attempted to fling the plastic wrap to the ground, but it stuck obstinately to his fingers.
“But…it did work,” Sam said, brow furrowing. “You’re acting all pissed off. That’s what’s supposed to happen.”
Dean ripped the wrap off with his other hand, where it clung. “Yeah, I think you got cause and effect a little mixed up there, man. Sam, just, what the hell is this? What’s your angle, huh?”
Sam blinked at him. “Dean, I don’t have an… angle.”
“Yes you fucking do,” Dean growled. “You don’t do anything unless it seems logical to your freaky Schwarzenegger brain.”
“So the prank wasn’t kind of humiliating yet mutually amusing, leading to possible camaraderie?” Sam said, typing something. “No…? Okay.”
Camaraderie. Camaraderie. The son of a bitch wanted - okay, Dean needed a moment to process that and laugh except he might not stop laughing if he started, not until he choked on his own spit or some shit like that and then Sam would have a corpse on his hands, which maybe he could engineer some camaraderie with while he was digging a grave, and that would probably be easier than at the moment actually, Dean being such a damn crusty old bastard.
“Oh, what the fuck ever,” Dean said, and went to start moving their stuff to the car. “Dude, you wanna get off your ass and help?”
“No,” Sam said, typing something. He didn’t even sound bitchy or annoying about it. Just, ‘no’, as in, ‘nope’. Well, there had to be some upsides to this whole soulless-brother gig.
“Well, that’s just golden,” Dean said, packing ice into the cooler.
~
Dean took a couple of deep breaths and covered his eyes with one hand.
“Zip ties on the drive shaft,” he said. “You pulled - the zip ties on the drive shaft one. You.”
“I looked it up on the internet,” Sam said.
“Sam, I have no idea what the hell is up with this, this Prank Patrol bullcrap, but if you’re doing it to screw with me, so help me -“
“I’m not doing it to screw with you, Dean,” Sam said. Dean looked at him.
“No, you probably wouldn’t see the point,” he said.
Sam sighed. “Look…I just thought you might enjoy it.”
“Well, it’s not working!”
“Obviously,” Sam said, settling back in the seat like he always did. Dean had to look away as he started the car.
“Dude,” he said, “it’s just - you wouldn’t know camaraderie if it hit you over the head with a dictionary.”
“Probably not,” Sam allowed, with the hint of an empty smile, and Dean hated him and wanted his brother back. He thought about replying. But what would that do? Sam’s reply would just rattle out of his tinny lungs like silence, and the empty conversation would go round and round and back and forth like death echoes of tin men.
Sam’s shaggy brown head was leaning against the window, and his legs were kind of sandwiched under the glovebox and one of his elbows was leaning on the window too. He was looking out into the distance where the road kept going for a long time and the sky stretched out huge and blue overhead, eyes half-closed and vacant like they could be thinking about anything, and time was Dean would’ve been able to make a damn good guess, and he couldn’t keep on doing this.
~
Sam bought him pie at the diner they stopped at. Dean ate it, but it felt all heavy in him, and he was not really inspired to continue the conversation.
“Hey, I found us a hunt,” Sam said, pushing a newspaper across the table. “Looks like it might be a wendigo, if it’s our kind of thing.”
Sam going through the motions was kind of like watching a robot trying to carry on a conversation - it never quite worked, even though its rubber skin and plastic eyes and perfectly coiffed artificial hair were almost right. Dean had to tell himself that regularly, because it was getting hard to compare it with real Sam lately. He hadn’t seen his brother for a long, long time.
“Beautiful,” Dean said, slurping some coffee. “Take the Impala, call me when you’re done. I’m gonna sit this one out.”
“This is a two person job.”
“So call a Campbell, Samuel or Gwen or someone.”
“Sure,” Sam said, folding up the paper.
Dean grunted.
“…Any reason why?” Sam said.
“Any reason you care?”
“Interest.”
“Since when could you feel interest?”
“Okay then, brother maintenance.” Sam shrugged.
There was a moment of silence in which Dean attempted to sort through all the objections in his head enthusiastically presenting themselves.
“Okay,” Dean said, and set down his cup with a decisive thunk. “I cannot fucking stand you and I need a break from you. That’d be why.”
Sam blinked a couple of times, opened his mouth, and shut it again. He then frowned as if slightly confused. Dean’s arm gave an involuntary twitch, the beginnings of a reassuring pat on the back. Hey, uh, just kidding.
“And I’m sick of you using all the hot water before I get up. I want my own room,” he added, signalling for a waitress.
“But I,” Sam said, “but the pranks -”
“Gold star for trying.”
“What am I doing wrong?” Sam said. “I forgot something. What?” He leaned forward on his forearms.
“It’s all the little details,” Dean said.
~
Dean woke up the next morning to find a conspicuous lack of Sam and a note on the table.
‘Called Gwen, she’s nearby,’ it read. ‘Took car. Call you when I’m done.’
“Fuck you with a chainsaw,” Dean said loudly, and stomped outside, slamming the door behind him. The Impala was gone.
“Not - fucking - funny,” he said through his teeth, dialing Sam.
“Hey, Dean.”
“You took the fucking car!”
“Yeah.”
“What is this, another godawful prank?! Jesus Christ Sam!”
“I -“
“This is not a goddamn freakin’ joke, you son of a bitch! You can’t just -“
Dean tipped his head back for a moment and dragged a hand over his mouth. The air was chilly and the sky was like a crisp white blanket. He brought the phone back to his ear.
“You’re never happy,” Sam mused. “I thought I was being considerate, I mean, you wanted a break from me. Taking the car was the most efficient -”
“Dude, if I didn’t know better I’d say you were being passive aggressive,” Dean said, pacing.
“Good thing you do know better then. Hey, Gwen’s found something. See ya later.” Sam hung up.
Dean had a fleeting fantasy of just having a temper tantrum, throwing the phone to the ground and crushing it to powder on the tarmac under his boots, but he was way too old for that, and so goddamned tired. He slipped it back in his pocket and went back inside. Then he fished some quarters out of his pocket and lay on the bed, and he lay there and waited for Sam to come back and Jesus Christ, he was turning into an old woman.
Two rounds of Magic Fingers later, he was still waiting, and seriously considering tequila. There was a bar down the street, he could go there this evening. Interact with real live humans or something.
He kept lying on the bed.
A wendigo might take days to track down and kill. That was back in the day, though. This was, this was New Sam and New Sam got things done, he had it in his bones. Plus Gwen was probably a super awesome hunter and they were probably torching that wendigo like true badasses at this very moment. Dean was reminded at that moment, as he often was, of when Sam used to think he could stop things turning out this way.
“Cas?” he said aloud, on a whim. “Hey, Cas, you busy? ‘Cause I’m…not.”
He waited a moment, then sighed.
“’Course you’re busy. No big deal. Just, if you’ve got a free moment. Y’know.”
He got up and fetched a beer from the minibar and cracked it open. Taking a swig, he went to sit on Sam’s pristine bed and was surprised to find a perfectly placed whoopee cushion had been hidden there under the covers.
~
It was coming up to nine o’clock PM the next night, and Dean was just tugging on his boots, ready to trudge down to the bar, when there was a knock at the door.
“It’s Gwen,” he heard someone call from outside. “Dean, open up!”
Gwen. Sam -
Dean was on his feet and stumbling to the door in an instant. The door swung open and he strained to catch a glimpse of the Impala in the parking lot.
“He’s in the back seat,” Gwen said. Her eyebrows were singed, and the smell of burned hair hung around her. She was shaking and flushed with adrenaline.
Dean’s blood froze. Everything stopped.
“What -“
“Hey, hey, he’s fine!” Gwen said quickly. She stepped over the salt line and pushed past him to dump her duffel on the floor. “Well, not fine, but -”
Dean grabbed her arm. “Sam’s hurt? Talk to me!”
“Deep breaths, Dean,” Gwen said, shaking free of his grip. “You sound like you’re about to choke on your own spit. I’m okay, by the way, thanks for asking -“
“What happened to Sam?” Dean said. He had that sick feeling he’d never been able to shake whenever something like this happened and his hands were trembling.
“Dean,” said Gwen, “you need to calm down, he was just injured, okay? Not fatal, he can deal, he’s not gonna die - well, I think so anyway -”
The blood in Dean’s ears roared. “You think-?”
“Yeah, I think, and you’re just gonna have to go with my unscientific judgment unless you help me get him out of the car,” she said.
Okay. Okay. Dean took a breath and went to the car. Sam was indeed in the back seat.
“He was knocked out,” Gwen said, “and he got a little…mauled.”
I need this body safe, Dean thought, safe. Goddamn it.
He and Gwen dragged Sam inside. Dean dumped him on his bed with a grunt, which elicited a loud farting noise, and went to grab the first aid kid.
“…Was that a whoopee cushion?” Gwen said after a moment. “How old are you guys?”
“We try to keep a spirit of fun and camaraderie alive in our relationship,” Dean said, checking Gwen’s bandaging. “Hey, nice work here.”
He stood back and looked at Sam, and it was different like this, it was almost like normal, with his brother lying there with his eyes closed like that, kind of like he was sleeping, like he never did now. Dean felt as alone in that moment as he ever had.
“Thanks,” Gwen said, rummaging around for suture materials.
Not so goddamn invincible now, Dean thought as he took Sam’s temperature. You fucking bastard.
~
Gwen had been right - Sam wasn’t really at risk of death at the moment. He’d had worse, after all. They sat next to each other on Dean’s bed and watched Sam lie there.
“This is…really damn weird,” Dean said.
“Watching him sleep?” Gwen said, flopping backwards onto the bed. “You could say that’s a little weird, yeah.”
"Only ‘cause it’s usually the other way ‘round,” Dean said, rubbing his eyes.
“Wow, he is a bit of a freak, isn’t he?” Gwen said, fiddling with her phone. “Damn, I left my car in the next town -”
Dean got up reluctantly. “Don’t worry, you crash there,” he said. “I’ll take the floor.“
“Thanks, Dean,” Gwen said, yawning, “but no thanks. Think I’ll get another room.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s okay,” Dean said. “Peachy.”
He sat back down on the bed as she got her stuff together, took a sniff of her burnt hair and grimaced, and went to the door.
“Sure you don’t want some coffee or something first?” Dean said, feeling pathetic. “I just-“
“What?”
He shrugged. “Never mind. Thanks for your help, Gwen, I appreciate it. And babysitting Sam, you know. And the human contact and stuff.”
“No problem,” said Gwen, fiddling with the strap on her bag. “Speaking of babysitting though, wasn’t expecting to work on that case with him.”
“Yeah, and you guys got it done really quickly.”
“Yeah, well, you know Sam,” she said, looking at him lying on the bed.
“I guess I do,” Dean said. “Yeah. Well, he was getting a bit much to handle. Kind of booted him out for a day.”
There was some silence.
“I nearly died, you know,” Gwen said, suddenly. “He nearly got me killed. I was watching his back, all the way through, but he just - didn’t.”
“No, he…of course,” Dean said, mouth dry. “Gwen, I’m sorry.” He was such an asshole. He never said the right thing.
“I’ve been hunting with him before,” she said. “It never happened like this though.” She pointed at Sam. “You watch him, okay? He’s not a good guy.”
“Gwen, listen, he wasn’t always like this,” Dean said, a note of pleading creeping in, “he - he used to be good, he wasn’t really a freak-“
“I know he used to be different, but,” Gwen said. It looked like she was trying to finish the sentence, but she couldn’t think of anything to say, so she didn’t.
She went and hired another room and Dean sat there alone with Sam, and considered the tequila stashed in the minibar, but he was too tired to go and get it. So he didn’t.
~
“I take it I screwed something up with Gwen,” Sam said. Dean could feel his eyes on his back.
“Yep,” Dean said, popping the ‘p’. “You fucked that one up big time, man.”
“Did the whoopee cushion work, at least?”
Dean sighed, rummaging through the minibar.
“No, the whoopee cushion did not work,” he said. “Your great big prank master plan…thing just isn’t working. Move on, Sammy.”
“I’m doing it right, though,” Sam insisted. “I am.”
“Yeah, sure, Sam,” Dean said. “I just think you’re missing a key ingredient or two. Like, how prank wars even work. You can’t have one with just you! The point of a prank war is not to make me happy by vandalising my car. It’s to make you happy, and then I get my own back, and that makes me happy. That’s not hard to grasp, I mean it’s pretty much elementary school math.”
“That’s not how I remember it,” Sam said. “I remember it was better than that.”
“Well then,” Dean said, turning around triumphantly with a bottle in hand, “maybe I’ve just been jaded by your presence.”
“I remembered doing it to make you happy,” Sam said, shrugging. “So I just thought, why not try it. Then you got pissed.”
“That’s sweet,” Dean said, opening the bottle. “And why was it that you’d wanna make me happy, again?”
“I thought it would make you easier to deal with and we’d have less trouble hunting together?” Sam said after a moment of silence, like he thought he had the wrong answer but he wasn’t sure why or how.
“And there you go, folks,” Dean said, taking a drink. “Isn’t that just great.”
“You’re disappointed,” Sam said, watching him closely. “Huh.”
Dean took another drink and hated Sam and wanted his brother back, and wished he wasn’t enough of a fucking idiot to have hoped Sam meant it, and wished Sam hadn’t been right and that those stupid fucking pranks hadn’t given him that modicum of happiness somewhere in him that still hadn’t gotten the memo about his brother being dead and gone.
“How’s that feeling of camaraderie then, Sammy?” he said.
“That’s cute, Dean,” Sam said. “You tell me.”
“Oh, it’s just peachy,” said Dean, downing the rest of the bottle in one. “Really, really, really fucking awesome.”
He tried to remember what Sam would have said next but he couldn’t, he couldn’t be sure anymore, but that was okay, that was probably just the alcohol. He’d remember tomorrow.
Author: starlingnight
Recipient: snickfic
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: ~3000
Warnings: Language
Summary: Dean and soulless!Sam attempt to deal with each other. It’s hard. Sam’s missing something important, and Dean just misses Sam.
There was plastic lunch wrap stretched over the toilet bowl, a prank that Dean remembered first using on Sammy when the kid was eight years old. He rubbed a hand over his mouth and seriously considered tequila.
He cracked the bathroom door open and chanced a glance outside. Sam was sitting at the table, the faint glow of the computer screen shining on all the familiar angles and planes of his face. He didn’t look at all expectant or gleeful. He looked...intent on his research, without any trace of a smile, pretty much the same as before Dean had crashed last night. Awesome.
Dean looked back at the toilet, reached out an experimental hand and - yep, definitely saran wrap. He remembered this one being pretty entertaining, but they hadn’t really had time for prank wars since before the real ones started. Plus, their relationship had gotten a bit frayed during that time, and if they had to kill each other, out of personal preference Dean would rather that it not to be due to a fight over the ol’ itching powder in the underwear trick, or even a fatal slip on some piss on the bathroom floor.
That was a thought, actually. Maybe Sam had just decided on a really weird way to get rid of him. That’d be one for the tabloids.
Dean peeled the plastic film off the rim of the toilet, and shifted on his feet for a moment. Then he looked out into the room at Sam again, and gave him the silent dude, what?
Sam looked up at him.
“Dude,” Dean tried.
“Yeah?” Sam said.
“Uh,” Dean said, deciding to put off pissing ‘til later, “what?” He came out of the bathroom and held up the wrap. “What is this meant to be?”
“Oh,” Sam said. “That was meant to be a prank.”
“No shit!”
“So it didn’t work,” Sam said, drumming his fingers on the table. “Huh.” Dean could practically see the problem ticking over in his clockwork head.
“I taught you- Sam! That’s not the point!” Dean attempted to fling the plastic wrap to the ground, but it stuck obstinately to his fingers.
“But…it did work,” Sam said, brow furrowing. “You’re acting all pissed off. That’s what’s supposed to happen.”
Dean ripped the wrap off with his other hand, where it clung. “Yeah, I think you got cause and effect a little mixed up there, man. Sam, just, what the hell is this? What’s your angle, huh?”
Sam blinked at him. “Dean, I don’t have an… angle.”
“Yes you fucking do,” Dean growled. “You don’t do anything unless it seems logical to your freaky Schwarzenegger brain.”
“So the prank wasn’t kind of humiliating yet mutually amusing, leading to possible camaraderie?” Sam said, typing something. “No…? Okay.”
Camaraderie. Camaraderie. The son of a bitch wanted - okay, Dean needed a moment to process that and laugh except he might not stop laughing if he started, not until he choked on his own spit or some shit like that and then Sam would have a corpse on his hands, which maybe he could engineer some camaraderie with while he was digging a grave, and that would probably be easier than at the moment actually, Dean being such a damn crusty old bastard.
“Oh, what the fuck ever,” Dean said, and went to start moving their stuff to the car. “Dude, you wanna get off your ass and help?”
“No,” Sam said, typing something. He didn’t even sound bitchy or annoying about it. Just, ‘no’, as in, ‘nope’. Well, there had to be some upsides to this whole soulless-brother gig.
“Well, that’s just golden,” Dean said, packing ice into the cooler.
~
Dean took a couple of deep breaths and covered his eyes with one hand.
“Zip ties on the drive shaft,” he said. “You pulled - the zip ties on the drive shaft one. You.”
“I looked it up on the internet,” Sam said.
“Sam, I have no idea what the hell is up with this, this Prank Patrol bullcrap, but if you’re doing it to screw with me, so help me -“
“I’m not doing it to screw with you, Dean,” Sam said. Dean looked at him.
“No, you probably wouldn’t see the point,” he said.
Sam sighed. “Look…I just thought you might enjoy it.”
“Well, it’s not working!”
“Obviously,” Sam said, settling back in the seat like he always did. Dean had to look away as he started the car.
“Dude,” he said, “it’s just - you wouldn’t know camaraderie if it hit you over the head with a dictionary.”
“Probably not,” Sam allowed, with the hint of an empty smile, and Dean hated him and wanted his brother back. He thought about replying. But what would that do? Sam’s reply would just rattle out of his tinny lungs like silence, and the empty conversation would go round and round and back and forth like death echoes of tin men.
Sam’s shaggy brown head was leaning against the window, and his legs were kind of sandwiched under the glovebox and one of his elbows was leaning on the window too. He was looking out into the distance where the road kept going for a long time and the sky stretched out huge and blue overhead, eyes half-closed and vacant like they could be thinking about anything, and time was Dean would’ve been able to make a damn good guess, and he couldn’t keep on doing this.
~
Sam bought him pie at the diner they stopped at. Dean ate it, but it felt all heavy in him, and he was not really inspired to continue the conversation.
“Hey, I found us a hunt,” Sam said, pushing a newspaper across the table. “Looks like it might be a wendigo, if it’s our kind of thing.”
Sam going through the motions was kind of like watching a robot trying to carry on a conversation - it never quite worked, even though its rubber skin and plastic eyes and perfectly coiffed artificial hair were almost right. Dean had to tell himself that regularly, because it was getting hard to compare it with real Sam lately. He hadn’t seen his brother for a long, long time.
“Beautiful,” Dean said, slurping some coffee. “Take the Impala, call me when you’re done. I’m gonna sit this one out.”
“This is a two person job.”
“So call a Campbell, Samuel or Gwen or someone.”
“Sure,” Sam said, folding up the paper.
Dean grunted.
“…Any reason why?” Sam said.
“Any reason you care?”
“Interest.”
“Since when could you feel interest?”
“Okay then, brother maintenance.” Sam shrugged.
There was a moment of silence in which Dean attempted to sort through all the objections in his head enthusiastically presenting themselves.
“Okay,” Dean said, and set down his cup with a decisive thunk. “I cannot fucking stand you and I need a break from you. That’d be why.”
Sam blinked a couple of times, opened his mouth, and shut it again. He then frowned as if slightly confused. Dean’s arm gave an involuntary twitch, the beginnings of a reassuring pat on the back. Hey, uh, just kidding.
“And I’m sick of you using all the hot water before I get up. I want my own room,” he added, signalling for a waitress.
“But I,” Sam said, “but the pranks -”
“Gold star for trying.”
“What am I doing wrong?” Sam said. “I forgot something. What?” He leaned forward on his forearms.
“It’s all the little details,” Dean said.
~
Dean woke up the next morning to find a conspicuous lack of Sam and a note on the table.
‘Called Gwen, she’s nearby,’ it read. ‘Took car. Call you when I’m done.’
“Fuck you with a chainsaw,” Dean said loudly, and stomped outside, slamming the door behind him. The Impala was gone.
“Not - fucking - funny,” he said through his teeth, dialing Sam.
“Hey, Dean.”
“You took the fucking car!”
“Yeah.”
“What is this, another godawful prank?! Jesus Christ Sam!”
“I -“
“This is not a goddamn freakin’ joke, you son of a bitch! You can’t just -“
Dean tipped his head back for a moment and dragged a hand over his mouth. The air was chilly and the sky was like a crisp white blanket. He brought the phone back to his ear.
“You’re never happy,” Sam mused. “I thought I was being considerate, I mean, you wanted a break from me. Taking the car was the most efficient -”
“Dude, if I didn’t know better I’d say you were being passive aggressive,” Dean said, pacing.
“Good thing you do know better then. Hey, Gwen’s found something. See ya later.” Sam hung up.
Dean had a fleeting fantasy of just having a temper tantrum, throwing the phone to the ground and crushing it to powder on the tarmac under his boots, but he was way too old for that, and so goddamned tired. He slipped it back in his pocket and went back inside. Then he fished some quarters out of his pocket and lay on the bed, and he lay there and waited for Sam to come back and Jesus Christ, he was turning into an old woman.
Two rounds of Magic Fingers later, he was still waiting, and seriously considering tequila. There was a bar down the street, he could go there this evening. Interact with real live humans or something.
He kept lying on the bed.
A wendigo might take days to track down and kill. That was back in the day, though. This was, this was New Sam and New Sam got things done, he had it in his bones. Plus Gwen was probably a super awesome hunter and they were probably torching that wendigo like true badasses at this very moment. Dean was reminded at that moment, as he often was, of when Sam used to think he could stop things turning out this way.
“Cas?” he said aloud, on a whim. “Hey, Cas, you busy? ‘Cause I’m…not.”
He waited a moment, then sighed.
“’Course you’re busy. No big deal. Just, if you’ve got a free moment. Y’know.”
He got up and fetched a beer from the minibar and cracked it open. Taking a swig, he went to sit on Sam’s pristine bed and was surprised to find a perfectly placed whoopee cushion had been hidden there under the covers.
~
It was coming up to nine o’clock PM the next night, and Dean was just tugging on his boots, ready to trudge down to the bar, when there was a knock at the door.
“It’s Gwen,” he heard someone call from outside. “Dean, open up!”
Gwen. Sam -
Dean was on his feet and stumbling to the door in an instant. The door swung open and he strained to catch a glimpse of the Impala in the parking lot.
“He’s in the back seat,” Gwen said. Her eyebrows were singed, and the smell of burned hair hung around her. She was shaking and flushed with adrenaline.
Dean’s blood froze. Everything stopped.
“What -“
“Hey, hey, he’s fine!” Gwen said quickly. She stepped over the salt line and pushed past him to dump her duffel on the floor. “Well, not fine, but -”
Dean grabbed her arm. “Sam’s hurt? Talk to me!”
“Deep breaths, Dean,” Gwen said, shaking free of his grip. “You sound like you’re about to choke on your own spit. I’m okay, by the way, thanks for asking -“
“What happened to Sam?” Dean said. He had that sick feeling he’d never been able to shake whenever something like this happened and his hands were trembling.
“Dean,” said Gwen, “you need to calm down, he was just injured, okay? Not fatal, he can deal, he’s not gonna die - well, I think so anyway -”
The blood in Dean’s ears roared. “You think-?”
“Yeah, I think, and you’re just gonna have to go with my unscientific judgment unless you help me get him out of the car,” she said.
Okay. Okay. Dean took a breath and went to the car. Sam was indeed in the back seat.
“He was knocked out,” Gwen said, “and he got a little…mauled.”
I need this body safe, Dean thought, safe. Goddamn it.
He and Gwen dragged Sam inside. Dean dumped him on his bed with a grunt, which elicited a loud farting noise, and went to grab the first aid kid.
“…Was that a whoopee cushion?” Gwen said after a moment. “How old are you guys?”
“We try to keep a spirit of fun and camaraderie alive in our relationship,” Dean said, checking Gwen’s bandaging. “Hey, nice work here.”
He stood back and looked at Sam, and it was different like this, it was almost like normal, with his brother lying there with his eyes closed like that, kind of like he was sleeping, like he never did now. Dean felt as alone in that moment as he ever had.
“Thanks,” Gwen said, rummaging around for suture materials.
Not so goddamn invincible now, Dean thought as he took Sam’s temperature. You fucking bastard.
~
Gwen had been right - Sam wasn’t really at risk of death at the moment. He’d had worse, after all. They sat next to each other on Dean’s bed and watched Sam lie there.
“This is…really damn weird,” Dean said.
“Watching him sleep?” Gwen said, flopping backwards onto the bed. “You could say that’s a little weird, yeah.”
"Only ‘cause it’s usually the other way ‘round,” Dean said, rubbing his eyes.
“Wow, he is a bit of a freak, isn’t he?” Gwen said, fiddling with her phone. “Damn, I left my car in the next town -”
Dean got up reluctantly. “Don’t worry, you crash there,” he said. “I’ll take the floor.“
“Thanks, Dean,” Gwen said, yawning, “but no thanks. Think I’ll get another room.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s okay,” Dean said. “Peachy.”
He sat back down on the bed as she got her stuff together, took a sniff of her burnt hair and grimaced, and went to the door.
“Sure you don’t want some coffee or something first?” Dean said, feeling pathetic. “I just-“
“What?”
He shrugged. “Never mind. Thanks for your help, Gwen, I appreciate it. And babysitting Sam, you know. And the human contact and stuff.”
“No problem,” said Gwen, fiddling with the strap on her bag. “Speaking of babysitting though, wasn’t expecting to work on that case with him.”
“Yeah, and you guys got it done really quickly.”
“Yeah, well, you know Sam,” she said, looking at him lying on the bed.
“I guess I do,” Dean said. “Yeah. Well, he was getting a bit much to handle. Kind of booted him out for a day.”
There was some silence.
“I nearly died, you know,” Gwen said, suddenly. “He nearly got me killed. I was watching his back, all the way through, but he just - didn’t.”
“No, he…of course,” Dean said, mouth dry. “Gwen, I’m sorry.” He was such an asshole. He never said the right thing.
“I’ve been hunting with him before,” she said. “It never happened like this though.” She pointed at Sam. “You watch him, okay? He’s not a good guy.”
“Gwen, listen, he wasn’t always like this,” Dean said, a note of pleading creeping in, “he - he used to be good, he wasn’t really a freak-“
“I know he used to be different, but,” Gwen said. It looked like she was trying to finish the sentence, but she couldn’t think of anything to say, so she didn’t.
She went and hired another room and Dean sat there alone with Sam, and considered the tequila stashed in the minibar, but he was too tired to go and get it. So he didn’t.
~
“I take it I screwed something up with Gwen,” Sam said. Dean could feel his eyes on his back.
“Yep,” Dean said, popping the ‘p’. “You fucked that one up big time, man.”
“Did the whoopee cushion work, at least?”
Dean sighed, rummaging through the minibar.
“No, the whoopee cushion did not work,” he said. “Your great big prank master plan…thing just isn’t working. Move on, Sammy.”
“I’m doing it right, though,” Sam insisted. “I am.”
“Yeah, sure, Sam,” Dean said. “I just think you’re missing a key ingredient or two. Like, how prank wars even work. You can’t have one with just you! The point of a prank war is not to make me happy by vandalising my car. It’s to make you happy, and then I get my own back, and that makes me happy. That’s not hard to grasp, I mean it’s pretty much elementary school math.”
“That’s not how I remember it,” Sam said. “I remember it was better than that.”
“Well then,” Dean said, turning around triumphantly with a bottle in hand, “maybe I’ve just been jaded by your presence.”
“I remembered doing it to make you happy,” Sam said, shrugging. “So I just thought, why not try it. Then you got pissed.”
“That’s sweet,” Dean said, opening the bottle. “And why was it that you’d wanna make me happy, again?”
“I thought it would make you easier to deal with and we’d have less trouble hunting together?” Sam said after a moment of silence, like he thought he had the wrong answer but he wasn’t sure why or how.
“And there you go, folks,” Dean said, taking a drink. “Isn’t that just great.”
“You’re disappointed,” Sam said, watching him closely. “Huh.”
Dean took another drink and hated Sam and wanted his brother back, and wished he wasn’t enough of a fucking idiot to have hoped Sam meant it, and wished Sam hadn’t been right and that those stupid fucking pranks hadn’t given him that modicum of happiness somewhere in him that still hadn’t gotten the memo about his brother being dead and gone.
“How’s that feeling of camaraderie then, Sammy?” he said.
“That’s cute, Dean,” Sam said. “You tell me.”
“Oh, it’s just peachy,” said Dean, downing the rest of the bottle in one. “Really, really, really fucking awesome.”
He tried to remember what Sam would have said next but he couldn’t, he couldn’t be sure anymore, but that was okay, that was probably just the alcohol. He’d remember tomorrow.