Nightmare (SPN, Dean and Sam)

[SexualOddity]

“HkkUSHH! HuhSHH! H’KSHH! ‘KSHH! HeHKkkusHHSHYEW!”

“Jeez, Dean. Bless you.”

Dean clears his throat and leans forward over the steering wheel, holding it still with his forearm while he rubs a hand against his forehead.

“Oh God. This isn’t good, Sammy.”

“What’s not?”

He coughs. “Pretty certain I’m getting sick.”

“Oh. “ Sam grimaces. “Shit.”

“Yep.”

“At least we’ve nothing on right now. We can find a motel room, hole up for a few days. Get you through it.” He reaches across to pat his brother on the leg. “You’ll be okay.”

But Dean’s expression darkens.

“It’s not me I’m worrying about.”

**

It’s been a part of their lives for a long time, really, when Sam thinks about it. It started out with recognising a different kind of growl in their Father’s voice and knowing that they were gonna wake up to shuffling in the night, trying to wrap their pillows around their heads before it got to the point of shouting and screaming.

And, Sam supposes, there was even a little of the same pattern in him back then, too. It’d be simple stuff: Dean hurt; Dad yelling; his mind going blank in the middle of a test at school, but it all felt a little more vivid when he was sick, as if the images were kind of lit up by his fever. He didn’t give it a whole lot of thought, though. Not until he started having real nightmares.

Dean would make fun of him, at first, when he started stocking up on alcohol gel and multi-vitamins, would wonder that Sam could bounce back from a compound fracture but would freak out at the thought of catching cold. Sam just let him laugh. He didn’t feel much like explaining it.

That continued right up until Sam caught some bug or other from Dean. Immediately, the nightmares returned and the mocking stopped. In fact, Dean started taking care of himself a little better after that. Sometimes, Sam even caught him dipping into his supplies during cold and flu season. It made him smile, although he never told Dean that he’d seen him. And, lo and behold: fewer illnesses, fewer nights waking up sweating and gagging on the smell of burning flesh. Yep. Sam could live with that.

Things took a turn again when Dean showed up on Sam’s doorstep, fresh from digging his way out of Hell. For the first month or so the nightmares were pretty much a constant. There wasn’t a whole lot that Sam could do besides sitting with his brother, getting him some water and a flannel when he woke up in a panic, watching his caffeine intake, looking out for signs of avoiding sleep. Later, when things had settled a lot and the nights were mostly quiet, Sam noticed Dean watching him, falling in step with all of his little routines. They never talked about it, but between them they built up something like a set of rules.

• Monitor your sleep, and if you’re short of six hours a night, divide up the driving time and make the best use of the passenger seat in the car.
  
• Alcohol gel lives in the glove compartment, that’s just a given. If it’s the worst of the winter, it probably makes its way into jean and jacket pockets as well.
  
• If you’re offered a face mask in a hospital or a morgue, you wear it, even if it makes you look like a douchebag.
  
• Better to spend twelve dollars on crazy-expensive preventative nose spray than twelve hundred dollars on therapy sessions.
  
• There is no shame in using an umbrella.
  
• Consume something that’s green on a daily basis (Dean likes to try to stretch this one with Mountain Dew and the pickle on his cheeseburger, but Sam lets it slide).
  
• And above all, keep maximum distance between self, and anyone you know to be ill.
  

But that doesn’t usually apply to one another.

**

Sam hovers in the door of the (single) motel room, take out bag in his hand. He’s got Dean a cheeseburger and a coke. After all, it looks like the healthy-eating ship has pretty much sailed. He figures Dean might as well have something he’s gonna enjoy.

“How you feeling?” he asks as he hands the packet over

“I’bm okay,” Dean tells him, even though his voice grates enough to make Sam wince, and he turns away, rubbing the bridge of his nose against his wrist as his eyes shut. “Ugh… do hafta sndeeze, though… UhhhHhh…” He grunts, unimpressed, and sniffs helplessly. “Ehhh…uh…HuHGHTDJCHew! Heh… EhHaHAHPTCHA! Goddambdit.”

“Sneezy cold.” Sam observes.

“Yeah, it is.” Dean answers, sniffling some more and pulling Kleenex from out of his box. “All the mbore reasond for you to keebp your distandce. Sniff! Thandks for the food. Yuhh… you should… huh… head to yours aa-gh…ahhAhTCHhh! HEH’AHTSH! Jesus.” He groans and kneads at the bridge of his nose while he sinks down onto the bed. “Head back to yours and eat. Get sombe rest.”

And Sam does. Because he remembers their argument from before. And because he sure as hell doesn’t know what he’s up against.

**

“What do I have to say to get this into your damn head?”

Sam grimaces, and trains his eyes on the road. He doesn’t like Dean raising his voice when it makes it sound as though it’s gonna crack.

“We have, fricking, balsa wood panelling between you and absolute chaos. You have the first idea what we all went through to get you back here? You really think I’m gonna throw all that away just so you can hold my hand through a couple nightmares? I think I’ll deal.”

Sam doesn’t make a comment on the morality of allowing his brother to go through Hell visions to protect himself from… oh, yep… Hell visions. In fact, he doesn’t say anything at all.

“Are you even listening to me?”

“What, you want me to pull over? I thought we were on a schedule, here. Another hundred miles before we’re likely to find a motel. Lot of germs you could breathe into the air in that time.” But, he pre-empts anyway and turns the wheel, sensing Dean at the point of pulling the damn thing out of his grasp.

“Do you know what Cas said about the chances for your soul if that wall comes down? What Death said? Pretty sure those are guys that know what they’re talking about.”

“You’ve told me,” Sam answers through gritted teeth.

“So wake up then Sam,” Dean spits right back at him, before his breath catches and his expression crumples. “Huh… Uhk..g’USH! AhhTht’Shh! HkkkK’isSHYUH!” The whole thing just sets him into a fit of coughing. “God! Sammy, just…” He gasps. “Just find us a place to stop, okay?”

**

Sam can hear his brother sneezing through the walls. They must be thin as paper because Dean is hardly loud to begin with. It’s a good thing, he decides, on balance. He’d rather hear what’s going on.

He picks at his salad and does very little else. Just like he’d promised.

**

It’s something about Dean’s tone of voice that makes Sam’s heart race. He’s bolt upright in his little single room before he’d even realised that he’d drifted off. He breathes deliberately, just to try to slow his body down so it’s quiet enough to listen.

Dean’s murmuring, that’s all. Not shouting, not crying.

It’s still making the hairs on Sam’s arm stand on end.

He listens harder, trying to figure out what’s bothering him. He must have woken up to Dean muttering or singing to himself about a million times. He even talks in his sleep, sometimes, if he’s got a lot on his mind. This is something different. The speed of it? The pitch? What?

It hits him with a catch in his breath and a chill-your-insides kind of a realisation. Dean just doesn’t sound like this. He’s about ninety eight percent swagger and concrete-thick composure. Even Sam has to work damn hard to weedle away into anything deeper than that, and by that point communication usually devolves into grunts and frowns and back slaps. He can’t even make out any words but still he knows this is Dean different than he’s ever heard him before. He sounds… well, scared, Sam supposes. But that’s quite a different thing without a quip, or a grin, or a wall of silence to cover it up.

Sam realises all of a sudden, that he’s probably never sat through this before. Generally, if either of the pair of them is lucid enough to realise what the other is going through, they would wake them up, to save them the length of the nightmare. More often than not though, both of them would be sick, and so caught up in their own fever visions that it gets tough to make head or tail of anything.

He wonders if it’s an opportunity, and immediately feels guilty at the idea. But Dean’s never been able to talk about Hell, and Sam doesn’t have the first idea what to ask. At least if it’s something they’ve both been through Sam can have a decent guess about what Dean needs. The whole thing with Hell is completely off the map. The sound of Dean weak, and pleading, and wavering, makes Sam’s gut twist. But at least he knows what’s going on with him. That’s about as much of a silver lining as he’s likely to get, so he leans back against the wall and lets the sounds wash over him.

**

At first, when Dean starts yelling, Sam is certain that someone’s gonna kick them out. He’s got mixed feelings about that. Dean will hate them being thrust back together again, and perhaps he’s not really up to heading back out onto the road again, but it’ll get him out of this nightmare, and it means that Sam will be able to check in on him, make sure that he’s looking after himself.

When nothing has happened after twenty minutes, Sam figures that nobody’s coming. Come to think of it, they hadn’t seen anyone since check in. He wonders whether the staff, seeing the occupancy so low, had left the place, and Sam and Dean with it, to fend for themselves. He lets himself relax a little, and rests his head against the wall, trying to pick out individual words from the stream of panic from the adjoining room.

“HEHhhHmmpah!”

The sneeze creeps up on him out of fucking nowhere, and by instinct, he squashes it awkwardly into the palm of his hand. As is fairly typical for him, stemming off the sneeze only makes the feeling burn in protest. He stumbles in the direction of the bathroom and tissue paper, but stills his hand this time as it rises to his face, realising that if no one has stirred at Dean’s screaming, then he can sneeze, for certain, without raising an alarm.

“EhhkSHshyew! HekkKSshyew! AhhHhhISHSshshYew! AhhhAHTCH’TCHYEW!

Sam leans against the bathroom wall, a bundle of toilet paper up against his nose, trying to catch his breath.

Unbelievably, it’s only then that the cogs began to turn.

Sure, generally a sneezing fit out of the blue wouldn’t give him much of a second thought. Travelling around as they do, there’s always a bunch of things that unexpectedly aggravate their allergies. For Sam, dust is pretty much the worst culprit. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d fallen foul of a badly kept motel room; it wouldn’t be the fiftieth, in fact. But it’s not as though they’ve just now stumbled back here to sleep. He’s been sitting around listening to Dean for hours without so much as an itchy nose.

It occurs to Sam that if he’s sick already then there’s nothing to stop him from going through to Dean’s room and seeing if he can’t settle him down a little. He doesn’t feel sick, true, but then, he still remembers Dean waking up that morning, sneezing his head off and wondering out loud, and with no small measure of indignation, what had set him off.

It’s strong enough reasoning, Sam decides, and he lets his motel room lock behind him before the mix of nausea and adrenaline in his chest can give rise to the start of any second thoughts.

**

“HahEHH! Huh…EHHH! Huh…EHTtT’CHUH!Ashch’CHEW!”

Sam’s caught by another run of sneezes as he heads into Dean’s room, so it’s only as he straightens, blinking and sniffling, that he gets a good look around the room. The lights are off, but Dean’s face is lit up by the moon. They don’t deal with curtains, or anything that’s gonna mess with their awareness of what’s around them. It’s not gonna help Dean though. He didn’t even stir when Sam came through the door. Just another reason why he shouldn’t have been left alone, Sam realises with shame.

Dean is crammed right up into the corner of his bed, face slick, either with fever sweats or tears, and scrunched up into a grimace. He’s chomping on his lip, and, looking at the darker patch on his chin, Sam wonders if he’s already made it bleed.

He does react when Sam comes to kneel beside him, jumps about fifty feet in the air with his hands at his face and this fricking emphysemic gasp.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Okay, it’s me, it’s me…” Sam garbles as Dean begins to yell something incoherent. He steadies him with a hand on his shoulder. Dean’s shirt is damp with sweat. Either his fever has hit him hard and fast, or he’s burnt himself out writhing and working up into a panic.

Sam rises, intending to find a flannel or a towel to wet and lay across his brother’s face to see if he will cool down a little, but as he does so Dean’s hand closes tight around his leg. He turns to see Dean still looking up at him, eyes half-lidded and glassy, but wild for all of that and darting the room.

“It’s okay… Dean, I’m just…”

“Ndo,” he hisses. “Ndo.”

Sam sniffs and rubs his nose against his arm, trying to bat back another tickle.

“Okay, okay, I gotcha.” He climbs into bed beside his brother, curling the blankets away from himself in an attempt to let out some of the heat. He lays a tentative hand on Dean’s arm as he shudders and begins to drift off again.

The talking starts pretty much immediately as Dean’s breathing settles into a stuffy rhythm and Sam can recognise maybe one word in three. He isn’t turning yet in his sleep, but his fists are clenched, every muscle hard beneath his skin. Fresh sweat begins to bead on his forehead. Sam squeezes his brother’s arm and wishes there was more that he could do.

**

“Stobp!”

Sam jerks awake and has to catch his breath and master the instinct to jump up and find a weapon. When he does, and he’s able to realise where he, is he takes in his brother, who has his fists mashed in against his pillow, tears streaming down his face.

“God! Stobp… please…”

Sam pushes him over onto his side, so he can see him properly and Dean’s eyes do widen momentarily before they dart around the room.

“It’s okay. It’s okay. You’re not… there. You’re not, okay?”

Dean just bursts into another flood of sobbing and crumples in against his brother’s chest. Sam can only lay what he hopes is a comforting hand on his back.

“What are you seeing Dean?” Sam murmurs, suddenly nervous. What are you seeing?”

**

“Sabm? God!”

Sam wakes to Dean coughing and wheezing and gasping out curses where he can find the breath for them.

“Whadt the hell? Ehhh… EHSHtUew! Huh… EH’HSHuh! Goddambndit! HEhAHhTch!”

Sam blinks, and breathes, with some resistance. He rubs his nose against the heel of his hand and tries to cough and clear his throat against some of the congestion.

For all his attempts at blustering, Dean looks fricking exhausted. He pinches the bridge of his nose and sinks down onto the edge of the bed that Sam is still sprawled upon. “Sam. I told you. Cough! I told you how serious this was.”

“I was sick.” He protests. “I was sick already.”

He knows it’s true now as well, because as much as his nose still itches like before, this morning it’s been joined by a sore throat, and the kind of heaviness in his head and his chest that he can only associate with illness. “Before I cambe ind here, I was sndeezindg already… I was gonnda get it.”

Dean just kind of sinks in his seat to hear it. The anger and the authority of just a moment ago almost vacuumed out of him. Not sure what to do, Sam just kind of lays a hand on his shoulder. It reminds him of the night before. Only Dean is at least akin-to-lucid this time, and party to a whole lot of knowledge… hell knowledge and all the warnings about what he’s up against, that Sam never really asked about.

Dean shudders, a sign that that fever is a long way from worked out, and sighs this utterly depleted sigh.

“I dond’t kndow how to gedt you oudt of this onde, brodther.”

Sam swallows, and only nudges at the three-inch lump that’s formed in his throat. He ruffles Dean’s hair.

“Good job I got it covered, thend. Okay?”

Dean only shudders and snuffles in response to what Sam hoped was encouragement.

“Yep. It’s okay, it's okay,” Sam answers on his behalf. “I got the whole thing covered.”

[SexualOddity]

Sorry! Forgot the prompt and I don't think I can edit.

So...

Supernatural, Gen or Slash

What the boys have gone through is enough to give anyone nightmares. But they're generally okay and can sleep through the night... unless they're sick. Cue the fever dreams of their memories of hell or purgatory or the cage. Suddenly, staying healthy goes hand in hand with staying sane and they both take some extra precautions (daily vitamins? getting more sleep? masks when visiting hospitals?). Despite this, one of them gets sick and the other's a little hesitant to get near him because he doesn't want to get sick too.

Massively intriguing and thought-provoking prompt inspired by tarotgal.

[Hibiscus]

Nice background story and very creative list idea! You wrote this prompt very well; thanks for sharing!

[Seniorstatus14]

This is amazing!! I love it

[SpookyScarySkeleton]

Amazing!!!!!

[Anilkex]

I cannot describe how I felt seeing that you wrote another story. The prompt is indeed massively intriguing and thought provoking, and I'm thrilled that you filled it. It's no secret that I love the intrigue and thought provokes more than the gratuity, and I can always count on you ro provide that balance that gets a reaction *right there* in my gut every time. Does it make the story more real? More honest? Not fabricated...even though these are fictional characters and we're warping them to our whim beyond their original intent? Absolutely. And for me, that makes it something instantly cherishable, beyond just enjoyable.

Deep words in a comment, but it's just been that kind of month, and I don't think you'll mind.

[Always-a-Ginger]

Very reflective. Definitively thought provoking and sad in its way. Well written. Love it.

[Slash2347]

cute

[Sawyer]

You filled this prompt SO SO SO well. It was really worth the wait. I love the contagion aspect, and the list (oh my god!), and the spelling of your buildups specifically... although the whole thing really was incredible. I'm so happy that you wrote this.