Some Changes Are Familiar, 2/2, for spn_summergen
Part 2:
---~---~---
Sam smiled to himself when the lock in the door clicked and he quickly extracted his tools. It’s been ages since he broke into a building, and he quickly opened the motel room to slip inside.
The hotel room was chaotic, with bulletin boards pinned with faces and papers with lines crossed out over faces and there were books strewn across the room and Sam could tell that they weren’t working on a werewolf case. For one, there were too many faces pinned to the board underneath the victim column.
And they were all children.
Sam took a deep breath and rubbed a hand over his face. He had seen the newspaper articles that Garth had sent over, the werewolf case didn’t have any child victims, didn’t have more than five in the past year, but the board had seven children’s faces pinned to it. They weren’t just any children though, each of these pictures were pictures of street kids on a slab in the morgue. Sam could tell they were street kids, because some of the bruising had been weeks old on some of the bodies, most were malnourished, and there weren’t any newspaper clippings pinned alongside. Classic signs on a murder board of the homeless.
Sam took a deep breath and forced it out of his mind to focus on checking the rest of the hotel room. Both beds were slept in, and when Sam lifted the edge of the bedspread closest to the door, Sam found Dean’s duffle underneath with some clothes and his weapons. In the bathroom, someone had left their hygiene kit by the sink, and Sam was almost sure that it was Williams. The shower was dry, and the towels had dried into piles on the floor.
Nothing in the closets, empty wrappers in the trash cans, and when Sam turned on the television, the channel that came up had been the History Channel. Sam checked the bathroom again, an
The room was lived in, but there was no sign of struggle, no sign that they had simply stepped out of the room, and they had been gone for a while.
This wasn’t good.
Sam took in a deep breath. Slowly letting it out.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone and redialed Garth’s number.
He picked up on the second ring.
“Dean and Williams have been gone for a while,” Sam blurted the moment Garth picked up. He quickly started looking around the room for a laptop, on the off chance they had information on it, “And they weren’t working on your werewolf case.”
“Really? What were they working on then?”
“Don’t know, something involving dead homeless kids,” Sam said as he flipped up bed covers to clear the beds and under them, “Didn’t Dean or Williams mention it to you?”
“When Dean checks in, it’s always just to tell me he’s alive, and in need of ammo, information or cash. He doesn’t exactly tell me his thoughts or plans,” Garth said and Sam moves onto the second bed when the first turned up empty.
“Well, can you look up information to see what’s been going on with children in Omaha? Something’s targeting homeless kids, but maybe some other pattern has turned up, or there’s something in the system about their deaths.”
“Yeah, gimme a few hours, I’ll try and look into it. Hey, Sam?”
“What?”
“Be careful, alright? I’m gonna see if I can track down Cas, too. I’ll send him your way, and hopefully you’ll get some back up.”
“Thanks, I’ll call Charlie next,” Sam responds as he moves on to pulling out all the draws in the nightstands and dresser, but he wasn’t finding a laptop. He hangs up on Garth quickly, and moves down his contacts list to find Charlie’s name.
“What up, princess?” Charlie’s cheerful voice comes up at the first ring and Sam was caught off guard by how quickly she picks up because he forgets every time.
“Has my brother called you about the case he’s working on?” Sam asks. He opens the fridge and all he finds is beer and cold chicken.
“Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuh…. He wanted me to look up how many homeless kids there are in Nebraska, Kansas, central US of A, and how many turn up dead in morgues.”
“To find out if seven showing up dead in one county is unusual?”
“In about half a year? It’s not necessarily unusual, but what was weird that there was only one dead each month that was mauled like they were. They were also on a roughly thirty day cycle, almost always lining up with the full moon. Hey, I thought you graduated out of hunting? What are you doing looking into a case?”
“I’m uh…” Sam starts turning over couch cushions and still no laptop. “I haven’t been well enough for hunting.”
“Aaaand now you’re into hunting? Doesn’t sound very sick.”
“Dean’s gone missing,” Sam can hear her gasp an ‘oh shit’ in the phone and he pushed the couch up to look underneath, “Garth sent me to his hotel room and I’m trying to figure out what happened. I can’t find any sign of the original werewolf case they came in for, or any laptops.”
“Oh shit oh shit this is exactly how Carver Edlund’s books started! Family goes missing, mysterious case in a hotel room-”
“Charlie! Focus. Tell me everything you know about the case.”
---~---~---
Charlie knew next to nothing about the werewolf case, but she did know that Omaha was experiencing an increased rate of the homeless turning up in the morgue, and that a lot of the bodies appeared to all be between eight and twelve. Sam had consulted the murder board that he assumed Williams had brought, and tried to piece together what they figured out.
Charlie had also looked into other dead homeless kids in nearby cities, and figured that whatever had killed the kids, had been moving from the east for the past five years. It might have been moving for longer, but Charlie couldn’t really pinpoint it; records drying up, too many possible towns, higher populations, limits in technology, etc etc.
Dean had also asked Charlie if she could gather all the police work for the kids. Dean and Williams had used a cover that wouldn’t get them back into the police station for a second case, and Charlie figured out where all the bodies had turned up and what little the police had found about each death. There really had been next to nothing. Only piece of interest was that the kids had all gone missing near parks, and hadn’t been dragged very far.
What was interesting was the reports from the coroner’s office.
Sam had found the reports pinned beneath the autopsy photos on the murder board, and each victim seemed to be picked almost to the bones, and there were signs of…
“Bear activity? In Nebraska?” There are bears sure, this rate of mauling in one city? That’s not a bear.
---~---~---
“Okay, Charlie, Garth,” Sam addresses his laptop from where he’s put it on a table and he leans forward on the couch, “Something is killing homeless kids, and Dean and Williams went missing looking for it.”
“Well,” Charlie started, “I’ve been looking into any deaths that fit the pattern in the surrounding states, and the only victims that fit the pattern of cause of death, location, time of month, yadda yadda yadda,” Charlie waves a hand off when Garth goes to say something on Skype, “And the only victims are kids under the age of thirteen, though there was one fifteen year old anomaly, but it left the town after that, so I think it just couldn’t get someone younger.”
“This went under the radar for years,” Sam continues, “It’s probably going after homeless kids for a reason. Neither of you have spotted this before-”
“Hey! We can’t check every autopsy that comes through!”
“They didn’t show up in the papers, It’s an unfortunate fact that supernatural cases involving the homeless are a lot harder to find, it’s no one’s fault,” Garth says, cutting Charlie off, “Dean must have seen this month’s body come in to the morgue when he went in for that werewolf case.”
“No chance that the werewolf was actually this guy?”
“None, none of the werewolf victims were younger than their mid-twenties, but they had an age range up to mid-sixties. They also weren’t mauled or eaten.”
“Ah, those poor kids…”
Sam runs a hand through his hair and glances over at the murder board, “The hearts aren’t consistently taken from the kids, so it’s purely the lives of children that the monster needs to kill. There’s scores of things that hunt children, and all of them are found in wooded or rural areas like where all the children were killed.”
“That probably means it’s some kind of boogeyman,” Garth drawls, and Sam can see him leafing through a book on the other side of the monitor, “Which doesn’t narrow it down much, there are countless versions of the boogeyman, and they’ve all had to adapt to the changing times, so the old method of narrowing it down by location doesn’t work in a city like this.”
“The fortunate thing is that I’ve got what kills them on me,” Sam says and hefts his handgun, “I brought a few different magazines with me, and iron was one of them.”
“Oh like the shtriga!”
“Exactly,” Sam says and Charlie looks pleased with herself, “Unfortunately, the vulnerability of the shtriga isn’t atypical of boogeymen. They’re hard to track, and when they target the homeless, it’s hard to find the case in the first place.”
“Okay, so how do you hunt things that kill homeless people? That hadn’t been explained in the books.”
“You uh… uh…” Garth tries to explain, but was scrambling.
“You have to do a patrol hunt,” Sam says, “Back before online media, Dad and Dean would pile in the Impala and drive through the streets looking for groups of the homeless or squatting grounds to try and convince them that we believe their story and just want to help. They tend to be the most helpful witnesses, ‘cause most now that there are things that go bump in the night, even if they don’t know the lore to get rid of them all the time.”
“So…. Dean went out driving with Williams?”
“Yeah, and it looks like they took their laptops with them,” Sam glanced around the room and turned back to the computer, “I haven’t talked to anyone yet, but it’s likely Williams and Dean disappeared together. Charlie,” the redhead perks up in her little skype screen, “have you gotten anywhere tracking Dean’s gps?”
“No, buuuuuuuut…” Charlie trails off while typing ferociously on her keyboard, focusing on something other than the camera, “I think I can get you William’s. Garth finally gave me his number to track him down.”
“Where is it then?”
Charlie rattles off a series of coordinates that leads to some abandon buildings that isn’t exactly outside of the area where the kids have turned up dead.
“Okay, I’m going to check it out. I could use some back up, so send anyone you know in the area, Garth,” Sam says and leans forward to shut his laptop. His head spins a little and Sam rubs a hand over his forehead to try and alleviate the pressure. He waves off Charlie’s questions and Garth’s concerns, and shuts the laptop. He sits there for a moment, head in his hand and Sam takes in a deep breath. He wasn’t sure if he could do this.
---~---~---
Sam drove down to the abandoned buildings that Charlie had pinpointed and tried not to let himself overthink anything. The creature only hunts once each month, only goes after kids, and the full moon was several days ago. Dean would be fine.
But…
Sam didn’t know what it was. It could be any of the flesh-eating boogeymen, but that still leaves dozens that could have migrated to the United State, because America wasn’t just a melting pot for civilians.
Sam spends half the trip coughing, and the other half worrying.
---~---~---
The building was creaking in all the wrong places, and Sam was worried it would come down on him if he accidentally hit a wall wrong. It hadn’t been touched in years, and the lack of care led to blackened walls with small beams of light lighting the grimy floor coming down from the decaying roof. Sam had his gun in hand ahead of him as he stepped quietly through the warehouse floor. He can see the upper floor falling apart, with a staircase in the back that he wouldn’t trust with his life.
Sam really wishes this wasn’t the building that the Impala was parked outside of, along with a truck that Sam has never seen before, but he assumes is Williams’ Toyota. It’s the second building within walking distance that Sam has gone through, the first being a similar warehouse that turned up empty and Sam has three more to go through if this one is a dead end.
There’s an eerie silence as Sam steps through: no pigeons, no rats, no squatters, no sign that anything has lived in this building. There had been no one in the last building, but Sam had heard the familiar squeak of rats, as the only sign of life.
Sam felt a tremble in his arms and he tried to ignore it. His gun felt heavy in his hands and every breath he gave felt like a bomb going off in his lungs. It has only been a few years since the trials, but his body felt frail on his skeleton, and it was just…
He had to focus.
Between blinks, Sam saw a shadow move in the corner of his eye. He didn’t hear a sound, but Sam had his gun aimed in that direction before he even registered that there might have been something there. There was nothing there.
Sam heard a growl in the rafters and he reacted, throwing his aim up in the rafters and firing a shot.
Recoil through Sam’s arms back and he stumbled back in surprise, but there’s a savage roar from above that shakes the rafters. He can hear something scrambling across the wood and then the shattering of glass as something scrambles out a window.
Sam shakes out his arm as he scrambles through debris toward a door in the side of the warehouse. Sam can see the shattered pieces of glass coming down outside of the open door, with the darkened figure dropping on all fours before racing between the buildings in the light of dusk.
Sam chases after it, and his lungs are burning already with ringing ears. He almost trips on a piece of fallen second story floor, but he clambers through the stumble and he’s out the door and staring after the thing running between the buildings.
“Shit!” Sam gasps as he turns a corner and the thing is running into another building. His sides are burning, but Sam keeps running after it, and when he turns into the building, he stumbles to a stop when he sees what appears to be a large section of the roof having collapsed into the center of the room, and something scrambling over top of it with barely a sound.
“Shit!” Sam shouts again, and he reaches into his pocket to pull out his cell phone. He feels dizzy and weak, and he stumbles back into a wall to hold his body up as he thumbs through his contacts.
“Did you find them?” Garth picks up during the second ring and doesn’t give Sam a chance to speak.
“No, I found it though. I shot it and I might have hit it, but it ran off and it’s either fast, or I’m worse off than I thought,” Sam replies and runs a hand over his forehead to run through his hair.
“Okay, describe it, let’s narrow it down.”
---~---~---
Dark and beast like, but fast and intelligent, smart enough to go somewhere that Sam couldn’t follow. With a taste for children, that cut the potential creature list down by three quarters. Only ones that have a strict diet? El Coco, Bugbear, H’awouahouha, talasam, Oude Rode Ogen and a few that don’t have names but John nicknamed “Iron-hearts” because a double tap to the heart with iron got the job done.
The ones native to the United States?
None.
Which is annoying, but the Apocalypse displaced a lot of supernatural creatures. That lamia that Sam and Dean took care of after the Apocalypse had no business where they found it. As well, boogiemen were some of the easiest creatures to be relocated, since they follow children and can hide easily in shadows in the presence of adults.
But killing each of them was unique, and Sam wasn’t sure if he could narrow it down further without seeing it closer and in better lighting.
But he knew where it was now. Knew that all the hairy, beast-like boogiemen didn’t try to save their meals. They were instinctive monsters that stuck to their pattern, even if that pattern was more erratic for a few species than others. So Dean and Williams could still be alive.
Or it killed them when it felt threatened.
---~---~---
Sam is clearing every room in every warehouse. He’s exhausted, and has to keep stopping to rest as he climbs over broken walls and rafters and debris. Has to stop even in buildings with clear floors. There’s just… so many buildings.
He is going through one, and while no building has smelt lovely and fresh, he steps into a smaller building behind a series of what looks like sewing warehouses Sam thinks was auto shop, and is overwhelmed by a terrible scent.
Sam hacks and coughs and takes a few stumbling steps back out of the building and covers his nose with his fist as he tries to cough up his lungs. He looks back in, even as he coughs into his closed fist.
The office area was just as broken and fallen apart as other buildings in the area, but he can hear the rats, see the flies and taste the decay on his tongue. Sam knows what he’s going to find as he steps into the room and stepping around the abandoned furniture. He can see something around the corner of the room, in the back room. A foot.
Sam has a hand firmly clamped over his nose and looks around the corner.
The body is in pieces, torn apart with the insides strewn across the room. There’s only chunks left of the liver and intestines, rats chewing on the left overs. The flesh of the body, what’s left of it, is discolored and developing fungi with insects crawling in the eye sockets and the mouth. The skin has slipped, revealing the fat and muscles where the clothes have been torn away.
Sam chokes, gagging as he looked at the corpse. He had to look. There was so much bloating and grime and disgust that Sam can’t tell who it had been.
He swallows the bile at the back of his throat and tried to take several shallow breathes. He’d rather take a long, steadying one, but the smell was so heavy in the air that Sam doesn’t want to have to get used to it to be able to endure it. He steps into the room, scaring several rats into crawling through openings in the walls to hide away.
Sam doesn’t recognize what little he could see of the clothes. The coat isn’t what Sam remembers Dean wearing recently, but Sam isn’t willing to make a final call on that. Not when he doesn’t know what all Dean owns anymore. Not just because things have been tense at the bunker, but because they don’t live out of each other’s pockets anymore.
Still… This is good.
Sam stares at the face and tries to pinch and hold his nose so that he can bend closer to try and tell if there are any distinguishing features, but all the flesh around the eyes, the cheeks, the nose has been eaten away. Or it has rotted away. Either way, Sam can’t tell based on the flesh left over. But…
Sam is pretty sure that this guy had a beard.
And not just Dean’s ‘I haven’t shaved in two weeks’ beard, but a full blown ‘groomed for ten years’ beard. It is patchy now, with all the skin slippage and the ripped away parts of the face, but Sam can still see the long, graying whiskers around the edges where all the skin had slipped down to lay along his jawline.
It isn’t Dean. Probably isn’t. Isn’t.
Sam turns around and goes out a side door to the back room, leading outside of the building and sees something reflect the light of his flashlight. Sam leans down and sees that it’s a broken cell phone. Dean’s cell phone. And his Colt 1911. A foot away, there is a reddish-brown stain.
It’s hard to see in the dark, but when Sam points the flashlight down, he can see the trail in how the debris, dust and gravel were pushed aside where someone had crawled away, leaving smears of blood in their wake. Sam grabbed what’s left of Dean’s gear, and follows the blood. The trail had turned sharply into another building, and Sam saw the bloody handprint of -Don’t say it, don’t jinx it-someone leaning heavily against a wall. Supporting themselves as they sought shelter.
Sam kept his gun level to the ground, flashlight trailing along the ground as he looked around desperately for a sign of someone moving or getting to safety. Someplace well defended.
Someplace… Sam put it out of his mind, and followed the trail of smeared, and fading, blood and what little remained of footprints. Sam moves down a street with cracked concrete with bloody hand prints and smears against a building, and it leads to a door. A door that Sam can’t open.
It’s jammed from the other side, and Sam is pretty sure that it’s intentional; the lock on the door isn’t engaged. The amount of rust on the handle makes Sam suspect that it’s because it doesn’t work. So… someone barricaded the door.
Sam circles the building, and finds two other doors locked in a similar manner, and one door that is wide open, with no blood stains. Sam glances in, his flashlight scanning the room, but there’s nothing in there that suggests to Sam that there’s anything wrong inside, though Sam can see that chairs and tables and the odd sofa had been shoved up against the doors. Only one table and chair had been spared, and if it hadn’t been used as a makeshift field hospital, it would have been because they were so flimsy there had been no point.
They hadn’t stuck around once they had gotten as treated as they could be. Sam wonders if they had brought the field kit with them because they had been hoping to save someone, or if they had found it when everything of value had been picked clean from this carcass of a district.
Sam turns around and looks for another sign of where someone had gone. They hadn’t gone back to the cars, so there had to have been a reason.
Sam stared down at the track marks and realized that these were the signs of someone running. Fast.
Sam glanced up with his flashlight and gun, and the light caught the reflection of something’s eyes on the roof of the next building over.
Sam fires a shot, and while the recoil still jerks surprisingly in his grasp, his aim has apparently not lost its potency because his second shot of the night seems to hit as well, though the thing only roars and screams on the roof while Sam runs for cover. He can see that in front of him there are several closed off buildings, all with high windows that this thing can jump to, but there’s one little one shoved in between some taller ones that only has one small window in the only door.
He’s running towards it when the door opens, just a crack, but enough for Sam to slide in, gasping for breath as his mysterious someone slams the door behind him in the creature’s face. He’s shoving himself at the door to keep it shut, and barely bites out a ‘Sammy!’ and Sam’s moving to shove the barricades back in front of the door.
Sam shoves the bookshelf against the door and holds it in place while a large tool crate gets shoved on its side up against it while Sam grabs the next heavy duty lock.
It’s only when the last object is thrown in front of the door that Sam looks over and smiles.
“Hey, Dean, you sure can’t seem to keep out of trouble can you?”
--~---~---
Dean had one arm in a sling and bandaged within an inch of its life, while the other had been minimal lacerations, along with his sides and pretty much every other inch of his body. He looked like he had tried to fight a small bear in a bar.
“Bugbear, right?” Sam had asked, quietly as he double checked Dean’s medical work and noted that Dean looked dehydrated.
Dean had snorted and asked Sam if he knew of any other creature that hunted children and happened to look like a mutated bear with opposable thumbs that could jump on rooftops. Sam had frowned and defended that at the time, he hadn’t known it could jump that high.
Dean had gone to reprimand Sam until Sam handed him his Colt. It wasn’t enough fire power however, killing bugbears required so much iron, that it was unrealistic to try with only two handguns. So, they put their heads together to try and figure out a plan. Because clearly their first few had not worked.
Just like old times.
---~---~---
Sam runs out of the shack full tilt, the dawn sky leaving soft shadows between the buildings, and he can’t stop running, even though his muscles are already burning and his chest feels like it’s going to collapse under his heavy breathing. He’s wondering if anything is following him, and he wants to doubt it, can’t hear a damn thing behind him or above him, but he couldn’t last night, and wouldn’t in the day either.
He doesn’t stop running though.
Sam’s not entirely sure where he is, he had gone into the area with barely any information, and had only a basic mental map in his head of the area, but Sam kept running. He runs through the building where William’s body is, and tries not to breathe when he goes through that building, though he’s starting to smell from outside the building, and there is seriously no one that checks out this tiny section of Omaha are there.
It’s when he goes through the building that he can hear the thing chasing him, when the rats scream and run and the flies try to leave the room, flying past Sam to the door. The bugbear also is in a more confined space, and has trouble turning as smoothly, and is hitting debris and glass as it chases Sam out of the offices of the auto shop, and Sam turns into the main bay rather than out into the street.
The main bay for the auto shop has a ceiling, and while it’s not as confining as the offices were, Sam can still dodge around work tables to try and leave the garage out a side door. The bugbear is still behind Sam, and he can hear it flinching as it grazes the iron and steel in the auto shop. It won’t kill it, but it’ll slow it down enough to give Sam a chance of making it into another building like this.
Sam doesn’t see another garage, but he does see what looks like a second wing to the sewing factory, and Sam runs straight at it. The door’s open after all.
The room’s not filled with much, just two very broken tables, but Sam still runs as fast as his aching body will let him. The bugbear is chasing after him, he had left the door open, but Sam manages to slam the door behind him when he runs out, and when it manages to tear open the door, Sam’s running into another building.
It keeps following him as Sam runs through cramped little building after cramped little building, even one small factory that worked with the local steel company, until it runs out of the building to see Dean and Charlie and Cas standing with Sam on the other side, and they all fire.
Charlie’s beretta -okay, Dean’s beretta, but Charlie needed something that Dean could trust for his fake-baby-sister-is the first to land a hit, followed closely by Sam and Dean to the chest, and Cas follows up with his shotgun. The bugbear is thrown back, screaming and spraying black tar from its mouth in a froth, with more of the black blood smearing as it tries to get to its feet.
Dean’s drops his gun, swearing himself blue in the face when he does -despite his blush--, and Sam stumbles back along with Charlie, but Cas just cocks the shotgun and shoots the bugbear again. He quickly loads his gun again while Charlie and Sam fire again, and Sam is gasping too hard to try and keep his arms up or his body, and lets Charlie and Cas shoot the boogieman to their heart’s content.
They don’t stop shooting until the bugbear begins to turn to ash around the edges, its blood staining the ground forever. Charlie’s got one left in her second clip, and Cas’s moved on to his hand gun.
They stand in silence for a second while Dean and Sam gasp for breath and Charlie and Cas try and see if it’s actually dead. It’s only when Cas nods that Charlie turns back to Sam and Dean and practically shouts over her gunshot deaf ears, “SAM, DEAN, ARE YOU ALRIGHT?!?!”
“I’m okay, just winded,” Sam gasps as he tries to get the words out though his body is trying to tell him that it does not want to do this anymore, “and tired, but… we really should… take Dean to the hospital.”
Cas leans over Dean to inspect his arms and tells Charlie, “Get the car, we should drive him in. I’ll clean up the scene, Take Sam with you.”
It’s telling to Dean’s condition that he only protests that someone had to get his baby home because he was not getting his blood all over her over something as stupid and shitty as a bugbear case.
Charlie is guiding Dean into her car when Sam turns to Cas, “Ralph Williams is over in the auto shop,” Sam says, somber and drooping with exhaustion, “He needs a hunter’s burial. Do you want us to…”
Cas shakes his head. “I can guide him to the afterlife, just…” He turns to glance at Dean, “I’ll come by the hospital when I’m finished disposing of the evidence of a firefight.”
Sam nods and pats Cas’s shoulder, “Thanks for coming.” Cas only smiles fondly and Sam stumbles over to Charlie’s yellow little beast to climb in. He falls asleep before Charlie even shifted gears.
---~---~---
Dean had been admitted to the hospital under the story of being attacked by a bear while camping, and Charlie and Sam had gone looking for him when he went missing. The hospital staff had barely asked question about where they had been camping in Omaha, Nebraska, because Dean’s adrenaline high had crashed in the car ride over and Sam wasn’t too much better.
Charlie had been booted until she had been able to prove with fancy papers that she was related to the ‘Campbell’s and Charlie Campbell’s new secret identity stuck around the brother’s hospital room during any sort of hours she could weasel her way in. Sam would often be awoken to Charlie reading The Hobbit aloud between Sam and Dean’s beds, and sometimes Sam could see Castiel in a seat watching them all from a corner of the room, but Sam would fall asleep too soon after.
Sam liked those moments, because on the drugs he was on, and how sometimes he would wake up from his own wheezing to hear Dean laughing at something one of their family had said and Sam would forget that he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. Didn’t know what he could do with it.
Despite Dean’s more terrible injuries and dehydration and stress, the hospital stay lasted as long as it did because of Sam’s respiratory complications. He had trouble maintaining any sort of steady breathing, often wheezing and gasping for ten minutes if he got started, and Sam was growing weary of the doctors poking and prodding when Sam knew they wouldn’t find anything. His body was just… too tired.
He’s just glad it hadn’t given up on him until he got to find Dean.
---~---~---
The last doctor left just a few minutes before Dean arrives, staring hard at Sam packing his bags from the outside of his hospital room’s window. He is glad he let Castiel talk Charlie and Dean into letting him discharge; Sam doesn’t like the way the doctors eyed him and Sam knows he will feel just as terrible at the bunker, but he’d at least be in a cage that he chose.
Dean just watches, with a heartbroken expression on his face at Sam’s heavy breathing. His breathing has gotten better to be honest, at least a little bit, with the new medication. Sam wonders if they have something for the dizzy spells or the muscle weakness. Dean eyes the medication that still sits on the bedside and Sam refrains from sighing out loud.
Sam lets him watch. It’s not like it’ll take too long, it’s just a few changes of clothes. He’s done in two minutes, and walks to the bathroom to pick up his hygiene kit. He hears Dean following him inside, and Sam does nothing to stop him.
Sam turns around as Dean shuts the door behind him, some shallow security blanket of security, but they were leaving now anyway, so who cares too much what anyone over hears. Sam’s not even sure what this conversation is going to be about until Sam opens his own mouth.
“Dean, why the hell didn’t you call for back up?”
“Sammy, you saw my phone-”
“I mean before you and Williams tried to take down a bugbear by yourself.”
Dean is silent then, and he gives a heavy sigh. It’s a tired one, one that Sam knows too well, from father figures, from brother figures and from himself. Dean rubs a hand over the back of his neck before saying, “We had thought about it. We talked about it. At the time, we hadn’t realized it was a bugbear. You said it yourself, there are a ton of different things that hunt kids that are boogiemen. But, I hadn’t wanted to drag any of you guys in. Garth’s Garth, Cas is… never fucking here, Charlie’s green, and you’re…”
Dean trails off and doesn’t try again.
Sam sighs, and coughs at the end of it. He waves off Dean’s concern and leans back against the sink, “I know that I’ve been… I’ve been kind of a shit about this.” Sam glares half-heartedly at Dean when he snorts, “But Cas started driving over the moment Garth called, and Charlie would do anything to help us. You still have family you can count on. And with me…” Sam trails off.
They stand their quietly in the bathroom, awkward in each other’s company, before Sam starts again.
“I mean, you’ve been scared-don’t give me that look, I know that’s the truth-and I’ve been… avoiding it rather than talking to you about it. Hell, isn’t that how we started the apocalypse? We didn’t talk to each other and we both… disengaged from one another?
“I can’t go hunting anymore. Hell, I had only been guessing before, and I guess I can finish a job, but it’s been almost two weeks in the hospital before I was well enough to leave under my own power. That’s not worth it. And… we both know that now.
“But, hunting isn’t the only thing that we’ve got between us… even though the last…. too long has sure felt like it is,” Sam rubs a hand over his face and scratches at his head, “But that doesn’t mean I’m leaving. I will always want to go running after you, but I just… I don’t want to be a burden.”
Dean laughs. “I think we both know that the only reason I’m here is because you’ve got my back, Sammy. You always have, I’ve never wanted to doubt that. And maybe…” Dean looks down at his arms, one still in a case, and one with all new kinds of weirdly shaped scares from field medic healing, “Maybe I’m too old for this shit.”
Sam laughs and punches Dean in his still good shoulder, “Don’t say that, you’ll get yourself killed.”
Dean grins, “Or I’ll just make half a dozen more movies to show how badass I am.”
Sam snorts, “Whatever you say, Damsel in Distress.”
“Oh, you take that back!”
“Never.”
---~---~---
The End.
---~---~---
Author’s Note: Thanks for reading! I had a lot of trouble writing this; I tackled more than I could chew with my last two quarters of university, and I hit a severe case of writer’s block that I tried to work through, and somehow this story doubled in size from what it was supposed to be. So this story isn’t perfect, I’m not even sure I like it, but it is a story, and it is complete. Just, maybe in the future I’ll rewrite it. A lot. But that is not this day! I hope my recipient at least kind of likes it~