Chapter Text
They end up driving past this weird old bowling alley-slash-arcade about a million different times during the case and Dean keeps side-eying it like it’s going to turn him to stone if he looks it straight on (which...wouldn’t be the weirdest thing about this case, actually). And Sam, because he’s Sam, and unable to not notice Dean ever, thinks about the time the eighth graders were supposed to go to the bowling alley if they had good grades and Dean spent hours doing math and english homework, only for Dad to drive up to the crappy motel they were staying at and yell at them to pack their stuff the night before Dean would have gotten to go.
So, when the case is over, Edimmu at peace and Jack-in-Irons deader than most things, they pack up, and Sam makes notes in his journal, typing furiously so that he doesn’t forget anything before it hits the document. He’s pretty sure he’s read about another account of Jack-in-Irons in a Men of Letters journal somewhere, but he needs to look it up again once they’re back at the bunker. He makes a note—check leather journal on middle shelf. The author’s name escapes him, but that’s not too worrisome. All of those old Men-of-Letters journals have names like James Matthews III and Stanton Johnson Jr. attached to them, and they tend to blur together. Sam keeps them straight by remembering what’s inside.
He tries not to feel guilty for not caring who it was who wrote them.
He’s busy with the description of the Edimmu, and Jim Croce is playing because Dean’s been in a mood ever since the whole Edimmu-warning part of the hunt, and there’s the stupid bowling alley again. Dean shifts in his seat, faces more left than normal, and side-eyes it again. Sam slows his typing, and on impulse, slaps Dean’s shoulder.
“Slow down—turn in there,”
Dean looks at him with incredulity, even as he presses down on the brake, “Need the bathroom already? Man, you might want to have that checked.”
Sam finishes typing and folds the case back over the screen as Dean maneuvers into a parking spot far enough from the doors that it’s unlikely someone will dent the paint job.
“No, just thought we should stop by. We’ve driven by this place like...what? Seven, eight times?”
A police siren screams to life a few blocks away, and they both slide down their seats a bit in response.
“You-” Dean emphasizes, turning in his seat to stare Sam down, after a short silence as the police car blares past the bowling alley, “want to go bowling?”
Sam shrugs, “Why not?”
“Christo.”
“Funny. C’mon, bet I get more strikes than you,” Sam says, sliding out of the car.
“Oh, you’re on,” Dean says in reply, kicking his door open.
And they play four games because it’s bowl-for-two-hours Tuesday, and Dean complains about the price of bowling shoes the whole awful time, but gets into it when it’s his turn, and keeps making jokes about getting Sam the bumpers. Dean wins the first two games, and the last, and excuses his loss in the third game as ‘mid-season slumps’ and they get gross pepperoni pizza and better-but-still-not-good nachos from the snack bar, and when their time is up (both of them rushing their turns to see the outcome of the fourth game, which is the closest of all three), they return their shoes.
Dean glances at the arcade, then grins his stupid grin at Sam, who sighs. They get two cards for the arcade, and Dean complains the whole time that arcades are about quarters and watching the tickets scroll out of the dispenser, but plays skee ball five times in a row anyways as Sam tries his luck at the basketball hoops.
And the whole thing is kind of hilarious because other than them, there’s only a small family with a screaming toddler and two older children who fight the whole time, and this old couple that joins them for a round of team air-hockey and soundly trounce them.
When Sam runs out of credits, he tosses his card at Dean, who still has three more goes and tells him he’ll be in the car, because it was Sam who drew the short straw of needing to research through the night last night while Dean camped out on the targeted civilians’ couch and he’s tired.
He conks out for a little bit in the passenger seat, head against the window, and jolts awake when Dean opens the driver-side door and tosses something at his face.
Sam snatches it out of the air and blinks blearily at it. It’s a bright blue stuffed triceratops that has no place in the smelly-as-all-get-out Impala. He mentally puts air fresheners on their shopping list.
“What’s this?” He slurs, slipping back into rest mode, dropping the toy on the middle ground of seat between them.
“That is what your fake card tickets got you,” Dean says, trying and failing to smother his smile.
“What did you get?” Sam questions, raising an eyebrow at Dean and trying to adjust his jacket so that the zipper doesn’t dig into his jaw.
“Cleaned out their entire starburst stash,” Dean says, reaching into one pocket to draw out a handful, “and they’re all mine, so don’t ask for any.”
“Wasn’t going to,” Sam mumbles into his elbow as he adjusts his position again.
“Hey,” Dean says, in that not-really-a-statement-but-more-a-command way he got from dad, “you wanna sleep in back?” He shoves three unwrapped yellow starbursts into his mouth at once and talks around them, “I’m good to drive for a while.”
Sam hums, and thinks about moving, then thinks better, “This is fine.”
He can almost hear Dean’s eyes rolling, and it’s only his quick reflexes that save him from face planting when Dean leans over him and pulls the door handle.
“Dean!” Sam says, angrily, now wide awake.
“Sam!” Dean mimics, then, pointing a thumb behind him, “Backseat.”
Sam clenches his fist around the edge of the door and thinks about the fact that he’d been hovering between awake and asleep and that had been safe and now he had to wait for his heart to stop beating so fast again, and that would take forever and he—he stomps to open the other door.
Dean doesn’t say anything, just turns the key in the ignition and ignores Sam’s grumbles as he contorts himself into the backseat after closing the door. Jim Croce is still playing, but Dean’s got a hand under the seat as he pulls out of the parking lot, and it switches to Air Supply, and before he knows it, Sam’s getting pulled under, and when Dean tosses the stupid bright blue triceratops behind him so it lands on Sam’s stomach, he can’t bring himself to shove it off.
He blinks awake when Dean pulls in to get gas and sits up, dumping the triceratops on the floor and opening the door, needing to practically crawl out because his head keeps bumping the roof. Dean gives him a nod, and he heads to the bathrooms, and nearly has a heart attack when the door opens just as he’s heading in and he almost runs into an old guy that smells like cigarettes (it nauseates him).
He remembers when he wasn’t jumpy.
After finishing his business, he heads to the sink and tries to avoid looking in the mirror. He’s not that successful, and somehow manages to catch his own eye, and he’s glad smoker-guy is gone, because seeing someone jump at their own reflection would probably freak out anybody, and he really doesn’t want to deal with people right now.
(Even sharing a space with Dean has gotten more draining, and he can’t remember a time when he wasn’t tired, except that he can, and it was when he was on demon blood, and he never, ever wants to go through that again.)
Breathe. Relax. Stop gripping the sides of the sink.
He heads back to the Impala—back home, except it’s not familiar anymore—and it feels like his boots are weighing him down.
I’ve got heavy boots, he thinks, and then wonders where he’s heard that before and he’s back at the car, back at Dean, and he lets the thought go.
Because Dean’s Dean, Sam’s not surprised when he finds the triceratops in his bag, squished in between his glock and dirty laundry. He thinks about what to do with it—where to hide it to startle Dean, how to burn it—but his boots are still on, and he needs to find that journal with the Jack-in-Irons in it, so he leaves it in the bag and pulls out the dirty clothes, and then all the other clothes that were in the bag that are gross by their association with the dirty ones.
He dumps them all in the wash, puts in more detergent than the bottle says to, and clumps his way to the library, letting his boots scuff along the floor more than usual because it makes a weirdly gratifying noise and he feels like his brain’s about to fly out of his head.
Dean always says he spends too much time in his head. He doesn’t know the half of it.
Sometimes he’s not even there, not really.
In the war room, he picks up a sharpie and starts crossing off days on the calendar they keep on one of the tables. Almost eight months since the last demon signs popped up. The map (which had occasionally gone off for indeterminate reasons before) hasn’t so much as blipped since it sent the bunker into shut down.
He’s cold. He shouldn’t be.
The library—well, what he and Dean call the library and the Men of Letters called the Vault because they were pretentious like that—is the same as always, safe and solid. He likes it in here, because it feels real, and he’s able to read and study without the threat of a hunt hanging over their heads all the time. (But he misses what down-time used to mean—when he and Dean and the Impala would do things. Things that would get him out of his head.)
It’s just hard, sometimes. That’s all. That’s life.
Dean stops in, wearing the dead-guy-robe, tells Sam he switched the laundry to the dryer, and asks what he wants for dinner.
“Don’t care,” Sam says, easily.
“You never do,” Dean grumbles.
“Something healthy.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Then Dean wanders off, and the rehearsed nature of the conversation sets Sam’s teeth on edge, and the pit in his stomach rears its head, just as ugly as that drawing of The Little People of the Passamaquoddy Natives that decorates the inside cover of the book that Sam knows is on the third shelf of one of these bookcases.
He takes a breath, realizes it’s hard to take a deep breath, and almost panics, except he forces the panic out and draws air into his lungs, holds it, lets it go. Then he stands to thumb through the books on the middle shelf of the case with the wiggly shelf that Sam’s not sure isn’t caused by the Bunker itself trying to draw attention to the books there, and he can’t bring himself to look at those a third time, at least not today.
He knows there was a journal here, bound in real leather, that had an account of a Jack-in-Irons on a page toward the back, right next to an entry about some random ghost in the German countryside. But it’s not there. He swears it was there, can remember putting it on this exact shelf, except it's not there and he’s not sure about anything anymore.
The closest bathroom is too far away, so he leans over the trashcan to puke.
Dean comes running at the sound—because everything echoes in the bunker, rattling around the hallways with abandon—and then skids to a stop, nose wrinkling, and Sam knows (thinks) (hopes that it’s a fact)—that Dean hates dealing with bodily fluids and anything with germs, even if he can deal because he’s a Winchester, so he waves him back as his stomach muscles clench.
He heaves again, straining to keep his hair back with his left hand, even though the front wants to escape his hold. He pauses, breathing heavily, and spits, bringing his right hand up to his mouth to wipe it.
“You good?” Dean asks, still half-in, half-out of the room.
Sam closes his eyes, lets his hair fall in his face, “Think so. Told you those nachos were probably poisoned.”
Dean laughs, and it’s closer than before, and there’s a hand on his forehead, and he can’t help but lean into it because it’s warm and safe and Dean, and too soon it’s gone, but then back on his neck, making him scrunch his shoulders in discomfort.
“You’re all clammy,” Dean says, pressing his other hand to Sam’s cheeks, then his forehead again, “and shaky. Might be food poisoning. You notice anything else?”
Sam shakes his head, then regrets the movement because it makes his stomach roll again.
Dean sighs, “And I was making salad and everythin’.”
“Sorry,” Sam says, wishing Dean would leave his hand on his forehead because he’s freezing, but Dean is moving, sliding the trash can out of the way, “I’ll get that, sorry.”
“Not your fault Sammy,” Dean says, a tinge of humor in his voice, “C’mon, think you can walk to your room?”
“Yeah,” Sam says, blinking his eyes rapidly, “can you get me some water?” And he feels awful for asking Dean for anything, but his mouth feels even more awful and it reminds him of—of—
He’s shaking as he leans away from the wall that’s been supporting him, and realizes he’s been shaking for a while. He wonders how long it’s been since they got back, how long it's been since Dean asked what he wanted for dinner. His phone is on the charger halfway across the room though, so he can’t check, and he’s not even really sure if they got in at 6 AM or 6 PM, so it probably wouldn’t help any.
“Yeah, I’ll get you a couple bottles. Don’t die on your way down the hall, okay?” And Dean actually sounds worried, and that makes Sam feel even worse.
(He tries not to think about what lengths Dean’ll go to this time if he does.)
“Kay,” he says, trying to laugh, but just making his stomach do something entirely unwanted instead.
The problem, he thinks, is he’s probably been sick for a while—maybe for his whole life.
He manages to stumble his way to his room—door twenty-one, thirteen plus eight, a new level of sin—and digs his toothbrush and toothpaste out of the side pocket of his bag, and starts to scrubbing, even though the mint flavor threatens to set off his gag reflex.
“Here,” Dean says, as he walks in the room, stomping as loudly as ever, “two water bottles, and these meds that’ve been in the Impala for... Ever.”
He tosses all three things on the bed and drags Sam’s trash can over to the bed, even as Sam tries to stop him by mumbling “Wait,” around the toothbrush in his mouth.
“Sit down, idiot, you can spit just as well from the bed as you can over there.”
Sam sits, and immediately wants to lay down, because he’s realized his head hurts too, and he should have really seen this coming, but it seems like he has a headache half of the time anyway, even when he’s not sick and puking and uncomfortable because his armpits are sick-sore-itchy. He spits, then washes his mouth out with water, avoiding Dean’s gaze as he promptly spits the water back out and puts the bottle down.
He knows exactly what Dean’s going to say even before he opens his mouth.
“You need to get some fluids back in you,” Dean says, nodding with his eyebrows raised at the water bottle that’s now sitting uselessly on the floor.
“I’m just gonna throw it back up,” Sam argues, and then he finally starts the process of unlacing his boots, trying to ignore Dean, even though that is one of the few things he thinks is actually impossible.
Dean sighs, but doesn’t argue, and that’s not like Dean, and it’s not like Sam, and he wonders when they got so...different. Not from each other, but from the past.
Sam manages to kick his boots off, then pulls his belt out of the loops and chucks it on the desk before laying down.
“PJs?” Dean questions.
“Mmfff,” Sam replies, face down in his pillow. The box of pills is digging into his hip, but he just can’t be bothered, not with his stomach complaining like it is.
Dean mutters something uncomplimentary, and moves it and the other water bottle before tugging the covers out from under Sam, who doesn’t help, at all, even though he should, and it shouldn’t be Dean’s job to take care of him, even though that’s the way it’s been since the beginning and—
“Get some sleep,” Dean says, tugging the covers up to just under Sam’s shoulder blades.
Sam wakes up confused, but he doesn’t remember why he’s confused (except it was something burning inside him, a blue light, and oh, he knows what he was dreaming about, it’s all he’s been dreaming about these days), and he turns his head and Dean’s sitting at his desk, sipping some something that might be whiskey, but he’s not sure, because his head’s all foggy and clogged.
“Mornin,” Dean says, moving his gaze from his laptop to Sam.
“‘s it?” Sam mumbles, still trying to shake off the confusion that must have come from a dream.
Dean glances back to his computer, “It’s eleven. AM. Next day. You’ve been sleeping for about fourteen hours.”
Sam makes an incredulous noise, but just slumps back into the pillow.
“Hey, don’t do that. We gotta get you hydrated,” Dean puts a hand on his shoulder and shakes, more gentle than usual, but still enough to make Sam’s stomach send a very clear message on the queasy meter.
“Gonna throw it up,” Sam says, feeling bile rise at just the thought of it.
“You want the IV instead?” Dean questions, sounding a lot like Bobby.
“No.”
“That’s what I thought. C’mon, Sit up.”
And Sam does that, because Dean knows best, and he doesn’t want the IV, because then he’d have it sticking into him and—well—
He used to be okay with needles. It’s harder now.
Choking down the water is a struggle, and he’s entirely surprised when it doesn’t immediately come back up, but instead swirls sinisterly in his stomach.
“See?” Dean says, after a tense minute.
“Don’t jinx it,” Sam growls, curling with his arms around his middle.
Dean scoots the chair closer to the bed and drums his fingers on Sam’s head, “Told you reading too much wasn’t good for you.”
“Was probably the bowling alley nachos,” Sam retorts.
Dean ignores him, “There’s that quote. Bobby said it a lot.”
Sam heaves a sigh, knowing exactly what Dean’s talking about, much to his own misfortune, “‘From so little sleeping and so much reading’?”
“‘His brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind!’” Dean finishes with a snap of his fingers, “Sounds like you, alright.”
“Probably the nachos Dean,” Sam says, slumping even further into his slouch and trying to find the pattern of the song that his brother keeps drumming on his head.
“Or that pizza.”
“Yeah, that was gross too. Are you drumming Leroy Brown?” Sam questions, tilting his head a little.
Dean stops drumming, “No.”
A snort finds it way out of Sam’s nose, “Sure.”
“Shut up you...invalid.”
“Oh, the big words, what an accomplishment,” Sam says, finding himself slanting to the side and his eyes closing without any effort on his part.
Dean nudges the water bottle back into his hand, “If you’re makin’ fun of me, you’re well enough to drink some more.”
“Ugh,” Sam grunts, before taking another sip.
“You need a shower too. You were sweating like, the whole time.”
“Watching people while they sleep is creepy,” Sam says, feeling entitled to a little complaining after the day (night?) he’s had.
Dean fumbles his words for a minute, “You could’ve been dying.”
And he thinks about spitting up blood, about a church and a demon and the few memories he has from after—Dean with a handkerchief in hand, stumbling to the car, finally feeling that maybe, just maybe, he’d overcome the demon in him for the last time. (He hadn’t, he figured out later, but that was how his life went—even purification can’t fix that kind of evil.)
“Just food poisoning. Just ‘cause you never get sick from all that crappy fast food doesn’t mean I don’t,” he says, argumentatively, just because he can.
“I know,” Dean says, sounding offended, “I’ve been takin’ care of you bein’ sick since ever.”
Sam immediately feels awful again, his gut rolling, but this time with guilt and with shame, “Sorry. I know you have.”
Dean doesn’t reply, except to pat Sam’s shoulder, which in Dean talk means let’s not talk about it.
“I’ll go start the shower for you. Get up, okay?”
“Yeah, I’m getting.”
And Dean leaves, and Sam stares at the floor, and then stands up, turning to straighten out the covers, because that’s one thing dad taught him that he never really goes against and that stupid blue dinosaur is on the bed, and he stares at it for a minute, then sighs exasperatedly and picks it up to chuck onto the chair Dean vacated, only stumbling a little at the action.
The shower is nice, even if his legs wobble a bit and the smell of his shampoo makes him want to do a repeat of his show yesterday.
The problem comes about when he has to get out, and he knows it’s going to be freezing out there, and it’s not the same, it really isn’t, but he’s just never warm anymore, it feels like he can’t ever keep his heat in and—
He grabs a towel and steps out of the shower bank, spotting the pile of clothes and the extra towel he’d heard Dean drop off earlier.
It’s freezing.
He slides his boxers on, then the plaid pajama pants that were supposed to belong to Dean but went to Sam because Dean ‘accidentally’ got them too long in the leg, and then finally drops his towel from off his shoulders to tug on the t-shirt that was originally at the top of the pile.
The vents in the shower room blow cold air, and it’s a problem, because his hands are shaking from it, and from being sick, and stepping onto the cold floor has made his feet go numb.
He wraps the extra towel around his shoulders to catch the drips from his hair and plods his way back to his room. Dean’s already there, with a bowl of what looks like soup, and a sleeve of saltines that Sam knows is probably the last one because before they left for the last case, he decimated the second-to-last one. There are two more water bottles on the desk than there were previously.
“Princess Bride time Sammy, I tried to find a tray or somethin’ but all there was was that cookie sheet thing that weighs like twenty pounds, I swear.”
“Princess Bride?” Sam asks, raising his eyebrows.
Dean points a finger at him, “It’s a classic and you know it.”
“Inconceivable,” Sam says, with the little bit of a smile that crept onto his face when he walked into his room and found the heat on.
“You gotta say it with more umph,” Dean chides, “Inconceivable!”
Sam walks over to his drawers and pulls out a pair of socks that he knows were in that load of laundry he put in the wash because the one has had the bottom of it darned about seventeen times and it’s completely different colors from the rest of the sock.
“Thanks for getting my laundry,” He says, thinking about Dean doing exactly what dad said and never getting anything in return, hardly even a smile in his direction.
Dean hums a “mmhmm,” then tugs the towel off of Sam’s shoulders and replaces it with a blanket that was definitely an old Men of Letters relic because there’s no way either of them would have ever picked up a blanket with that garish of a pattern on it. Sam is bundled away to the bed, and he wants to complain or say that Dean doesn’t have to do this, but if Dean leaves he thinks he’ll—if Dean leaves, it might be to find another angel—he’s sick, he doesn’t want—
“Try to get some of that soup down, it’s alphabet.”
“Why?”
Dean shrugs, “I’m eatin’ it too, and it looked hilarious.”
Sam looks at Dean, and at how his shoulders are tensed, just a bit, and thinks about living off of spaghettios for a couple of months when he was thirteen or so, and how he’d complained every single meal and how he can’t even look at a can of them without getting nauseous, and says, “Remember when we’d get this and always try to find our names?”
Dean’s eyes crinkle as he situates himself next to Sam on the bed and grabs the bowls of soup, “Yeah, there were never any W’s, so we’d break the other letters up or use V’s for it.”
Sam laughs a bit, and realizes his nose isn’t protesting the smell of the soup, and his stomach is at least somewhat at rest, and Dean is like a block of warmth to his left, and he forgot Princess Bride started with the kid and the grandpa.
Dean nudges him awake for Inigo Montoya’s final fight with the six-fingered man and Sam wiggles under the covers and lets Dean pull the awful bird-patterned blanket on top of him too, and when Dean gets up to turn off the TV, he doesn’t even complain when the triceratops is chucked at his head again.
He does make a muffled noise of offense, but it’s ignored as Dean presses the back of his hand to Sam’s forehead, and it’s soft and warm and he’s halfway to sleep when Dean turns off the lamp and says a quiet, “Night Sammy.”
“Night,” He says back, mouth pressed into the blankets that surround him, even though he’s well aware that it’s nowhere near nighttime.
“Sheriff Mills called when you were sleeping,” Dean says as a welcome when Sam blearily wanders into the kitchen.
“Did you even sleep?” Sam asks, staring at Dean, still in that stupid robe.
“Yeah, couple hours,” he says, waving a hand, and that’s better than some days, “She needed some help with a case.”
Sam finishes waking up, just like that, “When are we heading out?”
“Relax,” Dean says, putting his feet up and sipping out of the mug that’s missing the handle because of the time Dean had dropped it violently in the sink while doing the dishes, “She just needed some research done, I got it. Wasn’t even her that needed it, really. You know she’s got a… hunter network or somethin’ now?”
Sam slumps, relieved, into a chair, heart rate slowing back to normal, “Sort of. She mentioned she’d met some other hunters last time I talked with her.” He reaches over and steals Dean’s mug, taking a sip, even though it’s too close to lukewarm for his taste.
“Hey! Get your own” Dean complains, grabbing his mug back, “Germs dude.”
“Same germs,” Sam says, gesturing between them, “how do you stand it room temperature anyway?”
Dean shakes his head at him, “How do you stand it burning your taste buds off?”
Sam shrugs, then stands back up to grab his own mug.
“You feelin’ all better?” Dean asks, scrolling through something on his phone.
“Think so,” Sam says, and it’s the truth. He feels...there, and awake, and thinking about food doesn’t make him want to chuck his cookies again (at least, not any more than normal).
“You know she was gonna study english in college before she went into law enforcement stuff?”
Sam takes a half a second to reconcile ‘she’ with their previous conversation about Sheriff Mills, then offers, “Huh.” Sam purses his lips and raises his eyebrows before bringing his newly filled mug to his mouth.
“We talked about—” Dean interrupts himself with a laugh, “- uh, The Outsiders, you know, that uh book-”
“Stay gold, Ponyboy?”
“Yeah, that one. Remember how, uh, I got assigned it for reading—”
“And you gave it to me and told me to tell you what it was about, but we moved before you even needed to write the report, and then you read it like a year later when we were stuck in uh-” Sam waves his hand absentmindedly.
“Georgia, with all those kids you played soccer with.”
“Yeah,” Sam nods, smiling.
“Didn’t we watch the movie sometime?” Dean asks, taking another sip from his mug, “With what’s-his-face in it?”
Sam squints, and vaguely remembers watching parts of it at Bobby’s sometime before dad had had his row with him, “Tom Cruise?”
“Yeah,” Dean says, then stands up to get more coffee, “So, Jody really likes that book, and this other one—I can’t remember what she called it,” he waves his hand absentmindedly, “but it was about this white kid who runs away from home with her black nanny.”
Sam sits up straighter, “I’ve read that one…It’s, uh, something with bees.” He can’t remember much about it, but Jess had—
He’d read a lot in college.
“Yeah, bees, I remember that part. Anyway, she said I should read it.”
“I’ll look it up, there’s probably an audiobook,” Sam says, thinking about how Dean likes to work with headphones in.
Dean lights up at that, “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool.”
They subside into silence as they sip their coffee, and Sam moves a bit so that he can sit on the counter instead of leaning against it. Something about this feels real, and here, and their type of safe. And there wasn’t a single charged part of the conversation that strayed too close to—
They’re okay.