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They drive down the deserted, lonely stretch of highway in silence. For once, Dean doesn’t change the cassette when it finishes, doesn’t allow it to flip back onto Side A, shutting off the music instead. For once, Dean doesn’t try to fill the void with noise. The light banter from the beginning of the trip has long since faded.
Sam shifts in the passenger seat as Dean reaches over and turns up the heat.
Despite Dean’s assurances, he can’t help but feel as though something’s altered between them. That Dean doesn’t quite trust him. Damn, he doesn’t even trust himself, how the hell is he supposed to expect his brother to still be able to trust him, especially after all he did while possessed?
“Dean?” Sam knocks tentatively on the bathroom door. He’s still not totally sure about what exactly went down after leaving Jo’s bar and Bobby’s because Dean won’t talk about the particulars, but he can’t shake the sick, apprehensive feeling that he’s the reason Dean’s been holed up in the bathroom for the past twenty minutes. Much too long for a piss, Sam thinks, realizing that he hadn’t heard the shower start. “You’ve been in there ages, man. Is everything okay?”
“Yeah.” Dean’s voice is shot to hell, a weak croak. “I’m fine. Jus’…” a long beat, something that sounds like a stifled groan, then stronger: “jus’ gimme a minute.”
Sam waits exactly thirty endless seconds, mentally counting off a half-minute worth of slow Mississippis, the way Dean’d taught him to count time when he was about four or five, before twisting the doorknob. He opens the door to find his brother stripped to the waist, his shredded t-shirt lying in strips around his feet. He’s hunched over the sink, chalk-white and sweating. Sam inwardly flinches. Oh, crap. Not good. Sam thinks, swallowing hard, knowing instantly that Dean’s either really sick or… No, please, God, no… he catches sight of the bloody towel Dean’s pressing against his left shoulder with his opposite hand… hurt bad.
Dean looks up, catches Sam’s face in the mirror. “It’s okay, Sammy,” he says roughly. “I’m fine. Jus’ a scratch.”
“Why didn’t you say anything at Bobby’s?” Sam fights to keep his voice even as his eyes travel to the small heap of dark-red, oversaturated gauze in the sink, clots of burgundy blood spattering the creamy porcelain. Shit.
There’s a hitch in Dean’s breath. A one-shouldered shrug. “We had to get out. Bobby did enough for us without having other hunters coming after his ass.” Sam sees him wavering on his feet, despite the death-grip he has on the sink.
“At least sit down before you fall over,” Sam says, already reaching out.
“Wait,” Dean lets go of the counter, wincing as the small movement pulls at his shoulder. He grabs the silver flask that’s sitting on the top of the toilet and wordlessly hands it to Sam.
Sam feels his stomach drop heavily as he takes the flask from Dean and unscrews it. Without taking his eyes off Dean’s, he takes a swig, swallowing holy water. It tastes warm, slightly greasy, stagnant. Nothing happens.
“I had to be sure,” Dean whispers, looking at the tiled floor, shoulders slumping in relief and shame. Pale, shaky, still pressing the bloody towel to his shoulder, he looks so small, much younger than his twenty-eight years.
“Hey.” Dean glances up and he looks like crap warmed-over. “It’s okay,” Sam reassures him. “It’s okay. I’d’ve done the same. Don’t worry about it. C’mon, you’ll be more comfortable lying down. Let me help you, okay?”
Dean nods, jerking back. Suddenly, before he’s barely taken a step towards the door, his legs buckle from beneath him.
“Whoa,” Sam catches him before he hits the floor. “Easy.” He cradles Dean’s elbow with his hand and presses Dean to his side. He swallows as he feels the heat radiating from his brother, even through all the layers he’s wearing. “Let’s take this slow, alright?”
Dean turns his face towards Sam, blinking unfocusedly, and leans into him, allowing his little brother to take most of his weight. And Sam knows right then, beyond all shadow of doubt, Dean trusts him, that they’re still good. Gently, Sam supports Dean out of the bathroom, careful not to push his brother faster than he can handle. Dean’s feet tangle and stumble over every other step as he tries to move under his own steam, impeding rather than assisting.
Sam eases Dean onto the bed closest to the door, knowing his big brother would never rest otherwise, his eyes never leaving the scarlet-stained white bathtowel. He has to know. “Dean,” Sam whispers. “Did… did I do that?”
Dean’s eyes are a brilliant green, glittering hard in the fluorescent yellow light with pain and, judging from his hot, dry skin, a low-grade fever. “No,” Dean rasps, grunting softly as he adjusts pressure on his wound.
Sam deliberately gives him the puppy-eyes, jacking up their effect, not allowing Dean to look away. He knows it’s an unfair maneuver, all too aware that his brother would never deny his little-brother-trump-card for anything, not even when in what must be excruciating pain. “Tell me the truth, please. I can take it.”
Dean swallows, clearly fighting with himself. “No,” he repeats finally. Clearing his throat, he pushes on before Sam can interrupt, “I mean, it was you… your body. But it wasn’t you. It was that buckets of crazy who was walking around with your face.”
Sam nods, accepting Dean’s answer, knowing it’s the most he’s likely to get out of his brother and it’s enough. Dean’s sudden groan catches Sam’s attention again just as his hand moves to readjust pressure against his wounded shoulder.
“Hurts?” The question slips out before he has a chance to think.
He’s rewarded with an incredulous Are-you-a-fucking-idiot? look. “What d’you think, College Boy?” Dean grits out. “I was shot,” his breath hitches and he lets out a hard pant. Exhaling, he continues slowly, as though speaking to someone especially dense, “as in a freakin’ bullet ripped through my shoulder. And you want to know if it hurts?”
“Okay, sorry. Stupid question,” Sam cedes, holding up his hands placatingly.
Sam depresses the syringe, a warm-water saline solution flushing out the wound. He dabs up the streaming, red-tinged fluids with a clean hand towel. “Huh. It’s not a through-and-through, but there’s no bullet...”
“Jo dug it out already.” Dean’s voice is weak, faint. Right hand fisting in the sheets, eyes fixed on some indeterminate point beyond Sam’s shoulder. “She’s a friggin’ butcher. Got the job done, though.” A controlled exhale. “There was no time to stitch it so she patched it the best she could.”
Sam clenches his jaw. She didn’t have time because you had to come after my ass, he thinks, repressing his shame. Not for the first time, he’s grateful for Dean’s steadfast, unwavering loyalty. “It’s all right. She did the worst of the job, then. We’ll just clean it out some more and I’ll stitch it up. It shouldn’t take too many and it doesn’t look infected yet.”
“Awesome.” A harsh pant escapes Dean’s gritted teeth. “Can’t wait. Just get on with it.”
“Dude, I’m not gonna stitch you up without some kind of painkiller in your system. You’re already in agony. I can see it.”
“Just do it, Sam. It was worse when Jo dug it out. Trust me. And all I had was whiskey.”
Sam gapes. “You...”
“Yeah. Didn’t want to be drugged to high heaven and back when I went after you. So, whiskey it was.” Dean’s control-breathing.
“Well, I’m not going to put you through that again...” Sam rifles through their massive First Aid kit. “We’re out of Vicodin,” Sam announces needlessly to Dean when he picks up the empty bottle. “But we’ve got one dose of Codeine. Well, technically it’s cough medicine with Codeine, but it might blunt some of the pain if you want it.”
Dean struggles to sit up.
“Whoa, whoa, easy.” He rushes to arrest his brother’s movement, palm against Dean’s chest. It’s frighteningly too easy to push Dean back down. “Lay still. Where d’you think you’re going?”
“My jacket. Jo gave me some good stuff before I left.”
“Stay. I’ll get it.” Sam immediately rises, crossing the tiny room to where Dean’s black nylon jacket hangs off the back of a chair. Rummaging through its oversized pockets, Sam comes up with a paperclip, a three-quarters-empty one-pound bag of peanut M&Ms, about ten crumpled gas station receipts from four different states, and a phone number scribbled on a bar napkin in mauve lipstick before finding the orange prescription bottle.
“Sadie?” Sam raises his eyebrow at Dean, sitting back down on the edge of the mattress and twisting open the pill bottle. “Who the hell is she?”
Dean shrugs one-shouldered the best he can from his supine position. “Some girl out by Timbuktu. She was a real classy chick. Awesome in bed. Dug Russian literature. And she was a vegetarian.” He scrunches up his nose, spitting out the last word, simultaneously horrified and disgusted at the prospect. “As in she was into tofu and soy shit.” His eyes widened slightly in disbelief anyone could refuse a greasy burger.
“So… that number...” Sam says slowly. “You got it for me?”
“Yeah. Figured you needed help in the ladies department...” Dean manages a lewd grin, which falls away a moment later. “Oh friggin’ shit...” His hand twists the sheets.
“Okay. Pill time,” Sam informs him as he slides an arm beneath his brother’s shoulders and helps Dean into a mostly-upright position.
Dean blanches another couple of shades at the change in altitude and his freckles are standing out across his nose and cheeks, as lurid as if they’ve been drawn with a marker.
“You okay, bro? Y’gonna pass out on me?” Sam doesn’t dare let go.
Dean swallows thickly, throat visibly convulsing, and he shakes his head, steadying. “N-no. I’m okay. Fork them over.” He flaps his hand at Sam.
Sam palms three white pills and watches as Dean snatches them up and chases them down with tepid water that probably tastes like ass from a filmy glass that probably never met a dishwasher or a sponge in its existence.
Easing Dean back onto the bed, Sam picks up the suture kit.
Fifteen minutes in, Dean’s shoulder is knitted together with catgut, fresh gauze taped over the mess, and he’s blissed out to the moon.
“Stuffzawdsome...” he slurs. “Wedgottasendjosacard...”
Sam grins and shakes his head. “Go to sleep.” He tucks the needles back in the piece of flannel.
“Jozawesome….”
“Yes she is,” Sam agrees magnanimously.
“Promizz’erIdcalls.”
“What?” Sam’s furrows his brow in confusion.
“Phone,” Dean demands. “Promizz’erIdcalls.”
“Dude, you’re not even on this planet. How about you wait until the morning?”
“Izmorning.” A despondent look. “Promizz’erIdcalls.”
“How about when you can enunciate separate words again, I’ll give you your phone. Promise.”
“Beds’oft...”
“Yeah it is… just go to sleep.”
“Promizzy’wontgo?” There’s a lost, terrified quality to Dean’s voice that makes Sam swallow hard.
“Not going anywhere, bro. You’re stuck with me.”
“Good.”
The sound of Dean coughing unproductively wakes Sam.
Suddenly the coughing shifts to gagging and Sam’s out of bed and hauling Dean upright in the space of a breath. He’s still got his hands hooked in his brother’s armpits when, “gonna...” Dean gasps out before twisting and heaving over the edge of the bed.
Vomit spatters the carpet, the dust-ruffle of the bed, Sam’s feet.
“Sorry...” Dean whispers, his voice wrecked, hand going to injured shoulder. He moans as he curls as much as he can around it. “Oh, fuck...”
“You okay?” Sam hazards, shifting around so his left forearm isn’t load-bearing beneath his brother’s weight. He can only imagine how much that lunge-and-puke thing had hurt.
Dean takes a shaky breath, leaning his sweating forehead against Sam’s abdomen, panting. He stays like that for a long moment, gathering himself, before pulling back. “Yeah. Thanks for not letting me Jimi Hendrix back there.”
“Anytime,” Sam tells him, still not letting go of his brother. “What d’you say we get you settled again?”
Dean straightens, wrinkling his nose as he looks down in disgust. There’s puke on the bed.
“Don’t worry about it. How about we get you in my bed and I call housekeeping?”
A sneeze explodes out of Dean, followed by a muffled curse. “Oh fucking hell, that hurt...” He pulls up a clean corner of the comforter and swipes it across the lower half of his face.
“Want some more good stuff? You’re due...”
Dean blinks up at him blearily. “Drugs’d be awesome.”
The next morning, Dean isn’t much better. If anything, he’s worse.
He’s huddled up in Sam’s bed, burrowed deep under the covers, shivering. All Sam can see is the top of his head and it vaguely resembles a furry creature had taken up residency there. And died.
Pulling back the corner of the blankets, Sam peers at Dean’s face. His brother’s curled on his right side, wounded shoulder bearing none of his weight, flushed and sweaty, his shirt clinging damply to his neck and shoulders.
“Fughoff,” Dean’s voice is thick, congested.
Sam reaches out to touch Dean’s forehead to confirm that his brother has a fever. Dean jerks away instinctively. The sharp movement elicits a moan from him as he curls forward, hand grappling for his shoulder. “Damn...”
Sam winces. “Sorry.”
“leavem’alone.” Dean fumbles one handedly and, catching hold of the bed covers, drags them up over his head again.
The cough starts in the early evening and goes on for minutes at a time. It’s a deep, raw hacking, each one ending on a high, hitching gasp that’s painful for Sam to hear, let alone to imagine how Dean must feel.
Dean’s sitting upright, not even attempting to cover his mouth anymore, bracing himself upright with his hand, cradling injured arm tightly against his chest. Sam sees there are tears streaming down his brother’s face and he suspects it’s not just from his inability to draw in a decent breath between barks. Finally, when the latest attack subsides, Dean lays back down, pale and weak, with a low moan.
“You alive?”
He’s rewarded with a one-finger salute. Then: “Oh, God...” he watches Dean drag himself painfully up to cough again.
This time, Sam goes to him and sits tentatively on the edge of the bed. He reaches out and places his hand on Dean’s back, feeling the battered muscles shudder with each inhalation, the ragged coughs that shake his frame. He begins rubbing slow circles on the damp, washed-too-many-times fabric and it seems to help. Or at least the attack doesn’t seem as long.
When it’s over, Dean sags into Sam, flushed and exhausted, wheezing.
“You good?”
Dean shakes his head and pushes weakly at Sam with his uninjured arm, before rising shakily to his feet. He staggers, catches himself, but Sam’s already at his side by the time he’s standing.
“Hey, easy, where d’you think you’re going?”
“Bathroom,” Dean grunts, his voice hoarse, shoving feebly as he blanches. “Now.”
Sam helps him into the tiny restroom, where Dean drops to his knees and begins retching, hawking up yellowish globs of phlegm. Sam cautiously places a hand on Dean’s shoulder and he can feel the heat beneath his palm. Fever. Awesome.
Five minutes later, Dean’s slumped over the porcelain rim, shivering. “Killmenow.”
“Sorry, no can do. C’mon let’s get you back in bed.”
While pretending to search for something on his laptop, Sam watches Dean draw the blankets up pitifully, trying to get warm while not jostling his sore shoulder too much, trying to sleep almost upright.
After fifteen minutes of waiting, watching, Sam throws in the towel.
“D’you want the sling now?” He asks. “It might help…”
Before he can launch into his pre-prepared argument, there’s a nod from Dean and his brother’s surprisingly pliable as Sam slips the arm through the blue nylon and tightens the gray-white straps.
“Better?”
There’s another barely-perceptible nod, a hesitation, and then: “Cold.”
Sam stares incomprehensibly at Dean. And then he gets it. “Oh.” Wordlessly, he opens his duffel and pulls out the gray-black hoodie that’s slightly too small for him and still somehow swallows his big brother up. He unzips the front and wraps it around Dean, helping him thread through the one mobile arm and zips it up again.
Sam’s just finished dosing Dean for the umpteenth time in just a little under thirty hours when Dean’s cell rings. Snatching it up, Sam answers it before Dean even raises his head from the pillow.
“Gimme,” Dean commands in a raspy, breathless whisper. His voice is all but gone and he’s a wreck, huddled up in the hoodie and shivering, despite the slick film of sweat on his face.
Sam shakes his head, makes shushing motion. “Hey, Bobby.” He tries to force cheer into his voice.
“Sam? Where’s Dean?”
“He’s here. He’s okay. Sick as a dog, though.”
“GIMME.” Dean might as well have been mouthing for all the strength behind his shout.
“How? It’s too early for infection. You did clean it properly, right?”
“If you mean the gunshot wound he tried to hide from me, then yes,” Sam glares over at the mound of fabric. “It’s clean and sutured. Checked it again a bit ago… bit inflamed but it’s not infected. At least not as far as I can tell. He won’t tell me anything about what went down, though.”
“Figures. Damn, he never does anything halfway, does he?” There’s an exhale. “I hate to break it to you, but you gotta get your asses outta Montana. Apparently some of Wandell’s buddies caught whiff of your scent.”
“Crap,” Sam breathes.
“You can’t come here… Wandell’s buddies already know about your roadhouse connections and about me. I already gave Ellen a heads-up. She’s got a cover story for you idjits and she’s sticking to it. Jo’s backing her up. Anyone who asks is being sent to South Texas.”
Sam lets out a wry chuckle. “Then we’ll steer clear of South Texas.” Sam glances up at a sharp hacking and sees Dean hunched over, coughing miserably and struggling to take a breath. “It’s bad, Bobby. Like I’m thinking maybe he’s coming down with pneumonia or bronch. Being on the road is the last thing he needs. Any other suggestions?”
There’s an exhale. “No. They’re on their way there now. Found a lead somewhere. Your best option is to go east… Minnesota. Indiana. Ohio. Farther east, the better. And keep a low profile. Wandell buddies are on a warpath but they like to stick close to home if y’know what I mean. Jus’ get the hell out of dodge, boy.”
“Thanks, Bobby…” Sam nibbles at his thumbnail. “And thank Ellen an’ Jo for us.”
He snaps the phone shut and sees Dean staring back at him through half-masted, fever-bright eyes, wheezing through parted lips.
“Road trip?” Dean rasps.
“No’gettinginth’back,” Dean slurs, swaying on shaky legs. Sam tightens his hold on his brother, ready to argue, when Dean presses on, “Can’breathe. Lyin’dawn.”
Sam nods and wordlessly folds his brother into the front passenger seat.
Three minutes later, they’re eating up pavement.