ratherastory (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ratherastory) wrote2010-05-18 10:34 pm
ratherastory) wrote2010-05-18 10:34 pm
Entry tags:
Roses in December (4/14)
So here's the next chapter! It turned into a bit of a beast, and this one character just jumped out at me out of nowhere, and since I'm not 100% sure where this fic is going, I'm too chicken to just cut the character. We'll see, I guess.
Master Post
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
“I think we might have to move,” Jess says over breakfast one morning. Dean's head jerks up in obvious surprise.
“What?”
“It's a third-floor walk-up, and even if Sam's going to be a lot more mobile by the time he gets out of the hospital, I don't know if he'll be able to manage all those stairs. Not at first, anyway.”
Dean nods, more in acknowledgement of what she's said than because he agrees with her. He's busy carefully scraping butter onto his toast, a large cup of black coffee by his plate. Another small way in which he and Sam are so different: Sam made her laugh the first time she introduced him to the concept of vanilla lattes, eyes widening as though the idea of a coffee that was comprised mostly of foamy milk and sugar and artificial flavouring was completely alien to him. She laughed even harder at his expression when he first found out how much the cost, too. Dean treats coffee as though it's a tool, keeps it simple but well-made and effective. He brews a mean cup of coffee, she's discovered, and since most mornings he's awake, showered and dressed long before she is (although she's not exactly the type to sleep in), he's taken to preparing the coffee and the rudiments of breakfast with the casual disregard of someone who's accustomed to doing it but doesn't necessarily take much pleasure in the activity.
“Where were you thinking of going?”
“I'm not sure,” she admits. “Part of me is kind of resisting the idea, because, you know, what if coming back here triggers some memories for him? He's supposed to be surrounded by familiar things, but I don't think we'd be able to manage getting him to physiotherapy several days a week. Not with all those stairs.”
He nods again, admitting the practicality of what she's saying. “I guess we should start looking pretty soon, then,” he says, surprising her again.
He has a habit of doing that. She's not sure what she was expecting, but it wasn't for him to assume that she was including him in her plans for Sam, and now she's not entirely sure how she feels about that. She certainly isn't expecting the sudden surge of jealousy, like a burst of warmth under her breastbone. Sam is hers, dammit, and no stranger, no matter how charming and mysterious, no matter what blood tie he claims, is going to take him away from her. Dean looks up from where he's been staring into his coffee cup, and maybe he's more insightful than she gives him credit for, because he clears his throat mildly.
“That is, if you want me to help.”
She wants to refuse, to tell him to take his help and shove it, to go back where he came from and never come back. It's unfair of her, she knows, but she can't help but feel that, before Dean came into her life, things were good, and now Sam is lying in a hospital bed, broken beyond recognition, and maybe even beyond salvage. Even though she knows it's not true, it feels as though all of this should somehow be Dean's fault.
“Sure, okay,” she says. “We'll come up with a list of criteria, start looking around. The sooner we can move, the better. I don't want us to still be in boxes by the time Sam's out of the hospital.”
He glances around at the kitchen. “Yeah. You kind of have a lot of stuff. Moving must be a bitch.”
She's a bit nonplussed, since she's always prided herself on being something of a minimalist. Then again, Sam didn't have much by way of belongings when they first started dating, she recalls. When they moved in together, all his stuff had consisted of was a duffel bag full of clothes, a box of his school books, a sad-looking potted spider plant, and a single picture of his family, standing under the tree in front of his childhood home. He'd been living in a furnished dorm room, and didn't have so much as a poster on the walls. She'd wondered about it at the time, the anonymity of the room, as though he was afraid to leave even so much as a hint of personality behind. Now, watching his brother cart around his entire life in a duffel bag and his car's trunk, she's beginning to realize that what she took for individual idiosyncrasies are in fact habits ingrained from childhood.
“Good thing I have you to help me move the boxes,” she rejoins evenly, and he lets out a bark of laughter.
*
Recovering from a car accident is nothing like how they show it on television, Sam discovers quickly enough. He remembers television programs, remembers plotlines and characters, but can't remember where or when he watched them. He remembers that characters in comas wake up right away and are lucid, and then there's a cut, or the screen fades to black, and the show skips over the uncomfortable details. No one wants to see catheters and IV lines, or wants to experience the full extent of the humiliation of trying to use a bedpan for the first time without making a mess. He develops the beginnings of a pressure sore on one hip from lying too long in the same position, and that means more bandages and antibiotics and being manhandled by nurses.
He tries not to complain too much, remembers that stoicism is what's called for in this sort of situation. Except that he can't manage it a lot of the time. It's as though someone or something has access to a switch in his head, and the moment it's flipped he has the humiliating tendency to burst into tears. There's no controlling it, no gauging what might set him off. Some days he can try talking to Dean about their family without any trouble, and other days he can't even manage talking about the weather without tears. Some days it's all he can do to just keep his eyes open, and on those days he can't bring himself to talk at all.
“What about our mother?” he asks, on what he hopes will prove to be what they've all taken to calling a 'good day.' Dean has been there for about fifteen minutes, trying to coax him to eat some of the dubiously-coloured mush that the hospital has provided as a breakfast. He thinks it might be oatmeal. Dean's mouth thins to a line.
“She died when we were little. There was a fire.”
“Oh. How old were y— were we?”
It's only been a few days, but he's learning to read Dean. He's not sure if he's remembering on some unconscious level, or if Dean is just that open a book, but he can tell when he's hitting a nerve. Dean feels familiar in a way that Jess doesn't, but Sam isn't sure that he's not deluding himself somehow, trying to convince himself he can remember in order to make them all feel better. He doesn't say anything, watches as Dean wipes a hand over his mouth, averts his eyes.
“You were a baby. Six months old, to the day.”
“So what happened?”
Dean glances at him, so quickly Sam isn't sure he didn't imagine it, and the look on his face is so frightening for a moment that Sam wants to take the question back. Dean clears his throat, looks as though he wants to start pacing again —another nervous habit— except that even Sam noticed how badly he was limping when he came in today, so he stays put in his chair.
“Look, Sammy... shit with our family is complicated. It's not that I don't want to tell you, but it's a lot to take in. I want to make sure you're okay before I dump it all in your lap.”
“Must be pretty heavy stuff. Jess says I never told her any of it.”
Dean bites his lip. “Yeah. It's not exactly a family secret, but it comes close. We just... we don't talk about it much. Never have.”
“So what can you tell me?”
*
Sam's having a bad day. The first few days they weren't so apparent: he was drugged and out of it, and slept most of the time, anyway. Today, though, he's awake and staring at the window in his room. From that angle he can't see much except the sky and a tree branch, Dean knows, but he's staring as thought it's the most fascinating sight in the world. Jess is sitting by the bed, one leg tucked under her on her chair, clasping his fingers loosely, but she's run out of things to say, of ways to try to draw Sam out of wherever it is he goes when he's like this. He pulls up a second chair, parks himself in it, and puts a hand on Sam's arm.
“Hey Sammy. So I guess today isn't a talking day, huh?”
There's no response, and he sees Jess surreptitiously wipe at her eyes.
“That's okay,” he tries to sound encouraging. “We Winchesters have always been the strong, silent type. Well, you were a chatterbox when you were a kid, never shut up once you got going, but you kind of started taking more after Dad when you hit puberty. Except that Dad never mastered the art of making bitch faces the way you do.”
Sam just blinks, and he takes that as encouragement to keep going.
“So did Jess tell you that you guys are going to be moving house?” he looks over at her, and she shakes her head minutely. “No? Well, I gotta tell you, I've seen the new place, and it's pretty sweet. Got a little garden and everything. You play your cards right, and you can have yourselves some pretty awesome barbecues this summer. You're lucking out, too, because you don't have to move any of that heavy shit you and she accumulated over the last year. Seriously, man, I've never seen so much stuff in one place that didn't belong to some suburban family or other.”
Jess snorts. “Just because your family appears to have lived like monks...”
He stiffens a bit, shrugs, fakes a grin. “We're minimalists, sweetheart. Nothing but the bare necessities.”
“A duffel bag and a backpack?”
“Hey, there's more to it than that.”
Jess leans forward, squeezes Sam's hand. “He's trying to be all mysterious about it, and it's working. I didn't think I could be more curious about your family, but now that I've met your brother I think I know even less about you than I did before.”
“It's part of our charm,” Dean tells her seriously, and she scoffs, but Sam doesn't so much as twitch.
It's all normal, the doctors have told them. Or, well, as normal as you can get in this sort of situation. He's just overwhelmed, and the only way he can cope is to shut down, like a computer rebooting, or something. He's just not used to Sam not talking, and neither is Jess by the looks of it. Sam's tools and weapons of choice have always been words, and seeing him silent and elsewhere is creeping him the fuck out.
“It'll be nice for you to have a proper place to stay —not that your apartment wasn't great,” he adds hastily as Jess glares, “but this place is practically like your own house. We moved around so much when we were kids, we never really had that sort of thing. But I bet you could even, like, plant a garden the way you wanted to. Remember when... okay, poor choice of words. But when you were, like, five or six, Dad rented this place for about a month in the summer which had a tiny yard. It was really small, barely ten feet across, but you loved it. You wanted to plant flowers, but Dad was —busy. Besides, he and I never got off on that girly stuff. So one day I couldn't find you anywhere in the house, and you weren't at the park next door, and I was just starting to get worried when I found you coming back to the house with a bucketful of dandelions. You'd dug them up by the roots from some neighbour's yard —I think her name was Talbot, and man was that lady happy you weeded her garden, she even paid you a dollar.” He chuckles. “I don't think you knew they were weeds, or if you knew you didn't care. You thought they were pretty.”
Jess is smiling, eyes bright. “Well, that explains the dandelion bouquet he got me last summer.”
Dean's head jerks up. “Really?”
She shrugs ruefully. “He...” she corrects herself, forces herself to look at Sam. “You went out and picked a ton of dandelions and tied them up with a bow, and you told me they get a really bad rep for nothing. They really are pretty, when you take the time to look at them.”
Out of the corner of his eye Dean can see that tears are threatening to spill from Sam's eyes. He rubs Sam's arm. “It's okay, Sammy. But when you get better, just know that I'm going to tease you for being a gigantic girl for the rest of your life.”
For the first time Sam's eyes focus on him, his head turning fractionally to face him, but he still doesn't say anything, the silence thicker than a wall.
*
“You guys are lifesavers,” Jess tells Charlie-the-asshole and Brady as they wrestle a chest of drawers into the U-Haul truck she rented for the occasion.
Dean is surprised at how many people have showed up to help Jess move. Then again, almost everything about Jess is a surprise for him, and it makes him wonder just how far away from “normal” his life really is. He's always known that his family lived on the fringes, but having been immersed in what's as close to “normal” as he's ever going to get for the past six weeks, it's driving home just how alien this world really is. In the normal, civilian world, apparently it's normal for eight or ten friends to drop whatever they're doing over their weekend to come help someone move in exchange for beer and pizza at the end of the day. It's a social thing, too, he's realizing. They're laughing and joking as they do it, jostling each other and cat-calling and having fun, as though it's not an imposition on their time. Dean can't imagine having that many friends at all, let alone having any of them help him move furniture.
“Need a hand with that?” Charlie-the-asshole asks a minute later, gesturing to a bookcase, and Dean thinks that he may need to come up with a more charitable name for the guy, because it turns out he's not really an asshole, just a guy who's trying to be there for his friends.
“Sure, thanks.”
They're all treading carefully around him, because he's the stranger in their midst, but for the most part they're friendly enough. Charlie grabs one end of the bookcase, and together they negotiate it down the winding flight of stairs, until Dean fails to navigate one of the sharper corners, and pain flares from his ankle right up to his hip. He swears, stumbles, catches himself against the wall on one shoulder, trying to keep hold of the bookcase so that he doesn't send Charlie tumbling down the remaining stairs.
“Dean! You okay?”
“Fuck,” he tries to breathe through the pain, feeling sweat break out over his entire body. “Gimme a sec.”
Brady saves him, coming up the stairs from where he's just finished loading a box. He takes in the situation at a glance, runs up the remaining steps and grabs Dean's end of the bookcase. “I got it. You can let go.”
He's in too much pain to feel the full extent of his humiliation, sinks to a seated position against the wall, eyes closed, breathing hard. A couple of minutes later Brady comes back to find him.
“Come on, you can't stay here, someone'll step on you, or drop something heavy on your head, and one Winchester in the hospital is enough,” he grabs Dean's elbow and pulls him upright, helps him up the stairs without asking for permission, which is just fine by Dean. He parks him on one of the remaining chairs, raids Jess' freezer for ice, and wraps it in a ratty cloth. “Ankle?” he asks, and Dean nods.
“Fuck,” is all he can manage, gripping the edges of the chair so hard his knuckles have turned white. The pain has gone from white-hot heat to a steady throb, but it's still bad enough that he can feel every beat of his heart resonate in his leg.
“I'll bet,” Brady pulls off his shoe, wraps the cloth around his ankle with a skill that speaks to what the world might be missing out on now that he's dropped out of med school. “Bad break?”
He nods again, takes a breath to steady himself, swallows the handful of Advil Brady hands him dry. “Construction accident. Fucked up the ligaments, too. Bone fragment ripped 'em up pretty good inside the foot. They were talking surgery last time I went for a consult.”
“Did they try cortisone?”
“Yeah. They can't give me any more, not without fucking up my retinas or whatever else cortisone does to fuck you up.” He's not sure why it's suddenly easy to talk about this with Brady, even if it's not exactly the whole truth. Maybe it's because he's as close to a doctor as Dean is going to get.
“That sucks. Look, if you're anything like your brother, you're going to try to help here until it kills you, so will you do me a favour and stay put? We've got this covered, and we're almost done anyway. You've already qualified for the above and beyond the call of duty award today. You could have easily sat this out, and you've moved more heavy shit than is probably medically recommended anyway. I've seen sheets of paper with more colour than you.”
Normally he'd protest that he's just fine, thank you, but he's not sure he can stand up without passing out, so he acquiesces with a grimace. “Okay, fine.”
By the time they're done the pain is manageable again, but Brady insists on giving him an arm to lean on to go back down the stairs, and in the end Dean has to admit to himself that he probably wouldn't have made it on his own this time. For the most part he's able to function just fine, crap ankle or no, but he hasn't exactly been taking care of it the way he's supposed to ever since Sammy ended up in the hospital. That's going to have to change, he supposes, if he wants to be even remotely of help once Sam is discharged. If he can't walk, then the burden of making sure Sam is taken care of will fall to Jess, and that is just not on.
If nothing else, Winchesters take care of their own.
*
Brady hands him a beer at the new place, which is a jumble of boxes and half-assembled furniture. He insisted that Dean sit out the rest of the move, and strapped up his foot in a way that even Dean has to admit goes a long way to making the pain bearable. The whole group has sprawled out in the small garden, and no one seems particularly put out that he's stopped helping. To the contrary, a few of the girls are embarrassingly sympathetic, and they laugh when ducks his head, cheeks flaming, muttering that he's fine.
“Looks like blushing is a family trait,” one of them says, nudging his shoulder playfully. Her name is Lauren, he thinks, and she seems nice enough. She's got a sweet face with kind brown eyes, a sort of soft, round body with a little extra fat in places at which he probably shouldn't be staring too hard. She's studying sociology, about which Dean knows absolutely nothing, but that doesn't seem to phase her too much, and so far she's been happy to talk about music (she has shit taste, but apparently she thinks it's funny that he thinks so) and keep things on the light side. Until now, that is.
“Sam's adorable when he's flustered.” She winces a bit as she realizes what she's said, takes a pull from her beer bottle to cover up. Over in another corner of the garden, another couple of girls —Tricia and Sonya, if memory serves— are huddled up with Jess, along with Charlie-the-maybe-not-an-asshole. From the expressions on their faces, it's not hard to guess what they're talking about. Lauren seems like her mind's on the same track.
“So... how's he doing? I mean, we're all trying not to shove into you guys' space and all, but Sam's our friend too. I get that you guys are private. Sam... he never said anything about himself —hell, I didn't even know he had a brother, or didn't spring fully-formed from the ground when he was twenty-one or something,” she grins ruefully. “And I get that you're the same way. It's just... we care about him, and we want to help.”
He takes a drink of beer, twists the bottle around in his hands. It's going to take more than this to get him buzzed, and it's going to take more of a buzz for him to feel okay about discussing his brother's health with some girl he barely knows. Still, these kids have all come out and they're so damned earnest and eager to please —they remind him of Sam, he realizes with a jolt. All wide-eyed and innocent in spite of whatever darkness each of them knows. Even if they haven't seen what he has, Dean knows better than to think their lives are all sunshine and roses: no one's life is ever that good. So he shrugs, doesn't meet her eyes.
“Physically he's getting better. Another couple of weeks, and they're talking about letting him go outpatient, depending on test results and whatever.”
“Well, that's something. What about—?” she gestures with the hand holding her beer bottle, and it's not hard to guess what she's asking. He shrugs again.
“It's not —he doesn't... I don't know.”
“He still doesn't remember anything?”
He shakes his head. “No.”
“That sucks. I can't even imagine how hard it must be,” she says, and he blinks, because he's not entirely sure how her hand ended up on his thigh, and damn if it doesn't actually kind of feel nice, and he squirms a bit. She pulls her hand away, just a fraction. “Sorry.”
“No, it's okay,” he says hastily. “I'm, uh... it's a bit weird, you know? I mean, you're my little brother's friend, and I barely know you, and—” he's babbling, and that's usually more Sam's thing, and her hand is back on his thigh and damn.
“Sure, I'm Sam's friend, but I'm Jess' friend too, and I have lots of other friends. None of that means you can't be my friend too, right?”
His throat is dry, because his thoughts haven't exactly run to 'friend,' and what kind of sorry son of a bitch thinks about things like this when his little brother's in the hospital barely able to talk because he's too fucking traumatized. She seems to be able to read his mind, though, and smiles.
“It's not like we're instant friends or anything, but since I get the feeling you'll be sticking around for a while, I figure it might not be a bad idea to get to know each other better.”
Dean's brain thinks it's a terrible idea, but right now that's about the only part of him that does. Reason dictates that Lauren can't be a casual fuck, that even allowing himself to think that is borrowing trouble he doesn't need. He glances up to where Charlie-the-maybe-not-entirely-an-asshole has an arm around Jess' shoulders, letting her lean on him, then looks back at Lauren, who's got her bottom lip caught in her teeth, watching for his reaction. Brady is lounging a few feet away, very carefully not looking at either of them, contemplating his beer bottle as though it contains all the answers to the universe.
“Yeah, okay,” he breathes, and thinks he might just be making one of the worst mistakes of his life.
*
Chapter 5
Master Post
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
“I think we might have to move,” Jess says over breakfast one morning. Dean's head jerks up in obvious surprise.
“What?”
“It's a third-floor walk-up, and even if Sam's going to be a lot more mobile by the time he gets out of the hospital, I don't know if he'll be able to manage all those stairs. Not at first, anyway.”
Dean nods, more in acknowledgement of what she's said than because he agrees with her. He's busy carefully scraping butter onto his toast, a large cup of black coffee by his plate. Another small way in which he and Sam are so different: Sam made her laugh the first time she introduced him to the concept of vanilla lattes, eyes widening as though the idea of a coffee that was comprised mostly of foamy milk and sugar and artificial flavouring was completely alien to him. She laughed even harder at his expression when he first found out how much the cost, too. Dean treats coffee as though it's a tool, keeps it simple but well-made and effective. He brews a mean cup of coffee, she's discovered, and since most mornings he's awake, showered and dressed long before she is (although she's not exactly the type to sleep in), he's taken to preparing the coffee and the rudiments of breakfast with the casual disregard of someone who's accustomed to doing it but doesn't necessarily take much pleasure in the activity.
“Where were you thinking of going?”
“I'm not sure,” she admits. “Part of me is kind of resisting the idea, because, you know, what if coming back here triggers some memories for him? He's supposed to be surrounded by familiar things, but I don't think we'd be able to manage getting him to physiotherapy several days a week. Not with all those stairs.”
He nods again, admitting the practicality of what she's saying. “I guess we should start looking pretty soon, then,” he says, surprising her again.
He has a habit of doing that. She's not sure what she was expecting, but it wasn't for him to assume that she was including him in her plans for Sam, and now she's not entirely sure how she feels about that. She certainly isn't expecting the sudden surge of jealousy, like a burst of warmth under her breastbone. Sam is hers, dammit, and no stranger, no matter how charming and mysterious, no matter what blood tie he claims, is going to take him away from her. Dean looks up from where he's been staring into his coffee cup, and maybe he's more insightful than she gives him credit for, because he clears his throat mildly.
“That is, if you want me to help.”
She wants to refuse, to tell him to take his help and shove it, to go back where he came from and never come back. It's unfair of her, she knows, but she can't help but feel that, before Dean came into her life, things were good, and now Sam is lying in a hospital bed, broken beyond recognition, and maybe even beyond salvage. Even though she knows it's not true, it feels as though all of this should somehow be Dean's fault.
“Sure, okay,” she says. “We'll come up with a list of criteria, start looking around. The sooner we can move, the better. I don't want us to still be in boxes by the time Sam's out of the hospital.”
He glances around at the kitchen. “Yeah. You kind of have a lot of stuff. Moving must be a bitch.”
She's a bit nonplussed, since she's always prided herself on being something of a minimalist. Then again, Sam didn't have much by way of belongings when they first started dating, she recalls. When they moved in together, all his stuff had consisted of was a duffel bag full of clothes, a box of his school books, a sad-looking potted spider plant, and a single picture of his family, standing under the tree in front of his childhood home. He'd been living in a furnished dorm room, and didn't have so much as a poster on the walls. She'd wondered about it at the time, the anonymity of the room, as though he was afraid to leave even so much as a hint of personality behind. Now, watching his brother cart around his entire life in a duffel bag and his car's trunk, she's beginning to realize that what she took for individual idiosyncrasies are in fact habits ingrained from childhood.
“Good thing I have you to help me move the boxes,” she rejoins evenly, and he lets out a bark of laughter.
*
Recovering from a car accident is nothing like how they show it on television, Sam discovers quickly enough. He remembers television programs, remembers plotlines and characters, but can't remember where or when he watched them. He remembers that characters in comas wake up right away and are lucid, and then there's a cut, or the screen fades to black, and the show skips over the uncomfortable details. No one wants to see catheters and IV lines, or wants to experience the full extent of the humiliation of trying to use a bedpan for the first time without making a mess. He develops the beginnings of a pressure sore on one hip from lying too long in the same position, and that means more bandages and antibiotics and being manhandled by nurses.
He tries not to complain too much, remembers that stoicism is what's called for in this sort of situation. Except that he can't manage it a lot of the time. It's as though someone or something has access to a switch in his head, and the moment it's flipped he has the humiliating tendency to burst into tears. There's no controlling it, no gauging what might set him off. Some days he can try talking to Dean about their family without any trouble, and other days he can't even manage talking about the weather without tears. Some days it's all he can do to just keep his eyes open, and on those days he can't bring himself to talk at all.
“What about our mother?” he asks, on what he hopes will prove to be what they've all taken to calling a 'good day.' Dean has been there for about fifteen minutes, trying to coax him to eat some of the dubiously-coloured mush that the hospital has provided as a breakfast. He thinks it might be oatmeal. Dean's mouth thins to a line.
“She died when we were little. There was a fire.”
“Oh. How old were y— were we?”
It's only been a few days, but he's learning to read Dean. He's not sure if he's remembering on some unconscious level, or if Dean is just that open a book, but he can tell when he's hitting a nerve. Dean feels familiar in a way that Jess doesn't, but Sam isn't sure that he's not deluding himself somehow, trying to convince himself he can remember in order to make them all feel better. He doesn't say anything, watches as Dean wipes a hand over his mouth, averts his eyes.
“You were a baby. Six months old, to the day.”
“So what happened?”
Dean glances at him, so quickly Sam isn't sure he didn't imagine it, and the look on his face is so frightening for a moment that Sam wants to take the question back. Dean clears his throat, looks as though he wants to start pacing again —another nervous habit— except that even Sam noticed how badly he was limping when he came in today, so he stays put in his chair.
“Look, Sammy... shit with our family is complicated. It's not that I don't want to tell you, but it's a lot to take in. I want to make sure you're okay before I dump it all in your lap.”
“Must be pretty heavy stuff. Jess says I never told her any of it.”
Dean bites his lip. “Yeah. It's not exactly a family secret, but it comes close. We just... we don't talk about it much. Never have.”
“So what can you tell me?”
*
Sam's having a bad day. The first few days they weren't so apparent: he was drugged and out of it, and slept most of the time, anyway. Today, though, he's awake and staring at the window in his room. From that angle he can't see much except the sky and a tree branch, Dean knows, but he's staring as thought it's the most fascinating sight in the world. Jess is sitting by the bed, one leg tucked under her on her chair, clasping his fingers loosely, but she's run out of things to say, of ways to try to draw Sam out of wherever it is he goes when he's like this. He pulls up a second chair, parks himself in it, and puts a hand on Sam's arm.
“Hey Sammy. So I guess today isn't a talking day, huh?”
There's no response, and he sees Jess surreptitiously wipe at her eyes.
“That's okay,” he tries to sound encouraging. “We Winchesters have always been the strong, silent type. Well, you were a chatterbox when you were a kid, never shut up once you got going, but you kind of started taking more after Dad when you hit puberty. Except that Dad never mastered the art of making bitch faces the way you do.”
Sam just blinks, and he takes that as encouragement to keep going.
“So did Jess tell you that you guys are going to be moving house?” he looks over at her, and she shakes her head minutely. “No? Well, I gotta tell you, I've seen the new place, and it's pretty sweet. Got a little garden and everything. You play your cards right, and you can have yourselves some pretty awesome barbecues this summer. You're lucking out, too, because you don't have to move any of that heavy shit you and she accumulated over the last year. Seriously, man, I've never seen so much stuff in one place that didn't belong to some suburban family or other.”
Jess snorts. “Just because your family appears to have lived like monks...”
He stiffens a bit, shrugs, fakes a grin. “We're minimalists, sweetheart. Nothing but the bare necessities.”
“A duffel bag and a backpack?”
“Hey, there's more to it than that.”
Jess leans forward, squeezes Sam's hand. “He's trying to be all mysterious about it, and it's working. I didn't think I could be more curious about your family, but now that I've met your brother I think I know even less about you than I did before.”
“It's part of our charm,” Dean tells her seriously, and she scoffs, but Sam doesn't so much as twitch.
It's all normal, the doctors have told them. Or, well, as normal as you can get in this sort of situation. He's just overwhelmed, and the only way he can cope is to shut down, like a computer rebooting, or something. He's just not used to Sam not talking, and neither is Jess by the looks of it. Sam's tools and weapons of choice have always been words, and seeing him silent and elsewhere is creeping him the fuck out.
“It'll be nice for you to have a proper place to stay —not that your apartment wasn't great,” he adds hastily as Jess glares, “but this place is practically like your own house. We moved around so much when we were kids, we never really had that sort of thing. But I bet you could even, like, plant a garden the way you wanted to. Remember when... okay, poor choice of words. But when you were, like, five or six, Dad rented this place for about a month in the summer which had a tiny yard. It was really small, barely ten feet across, but you loved it. You wanted to plant flowers, but Dad was —busy. Besides, he and I never got off on that girly stuff. So one day I couldn't find you anywhere in the house, and you weren't at the park next door, and I was just starting to get worried when I found you coming back to the house with a bucketful of dandelions. You'd dug them up by the roots from some neighbour's yard —I think her name was Talbot, and man was that lady happy you weeded her garden, she even paid you a dollar.” He chuckles. “I don't think you knew they were weeds, or if you knew you didn't care. You thought they were pretty.”
Jess is smiling, eyes bright. “Well, that explains the dandelion bouquet he got me last summer.”
Dean's head jerks up. “Really?”
She shrugs ruefully. “He...” she corrects herself, forces herself to look at Sam. “You went out and picked a ton of dandelions and tied them up with a bow, and you told me they get a really bad rep for nothing. They really are pretty, when you take the time to look at them.”
Out of the corner of his eye Dean can see that tears are threatening to spill from Sam's eyes. He rubs Sam's arm. “It's okay, Sammy. But when you get better, just know that I'm going to tease you for being a gigantic girl for the rest of your life.”
For the first time Sam's eyes focus on him, his head turning fractionally to face him, but he still doesn't say anything, the silence thicker than a wall.
*
“You guys are lifesavers,” Jess tells Charlie-the-asshole and Brady as they wrestle a chest of drawers into the U-Haul truck she rented for the occasion.
Dean is surprised at how many people have showed up to help Jess move. Then again, almost everything about Jess is a surprise for him, and it makes him wonder just how far away from “normal” his life really is. He's always known that his family lived on the fringes, but having been immersed in what's as close to “normal” as he's ever going to get for the past six weeks, it's driving home just how alien this world really is. In the normal, civilian world, apparently it's normal for eight or ten friends to drop whatever they're doing over their weekend to come help someone move in exchange for beer and pizza at the end of the day. It's a social thing, too, he's realizing. They're laughing and joking as they do it, jostling each other and cat-calling and having fun, as though it's not an imposition on their time. Dean can't imagine having that many friends at all, let alone having any of them help him move furniture.
“Need a hand with that?” Charlie-the-asshole asks a minute later, gesturing to a bookcase, and Dean thinks that he may need to come up with a more charitable name for the guy, because it turns out he's not really an asshole, just a guy who's trying to be there for his friends.
“Sure, thanks.”
They're all treading carefully around him, because he's the stranger in their midst, but for the most part they're friendly enough. Charlie grabs one end of the bookcase, and together they negotiate it down the winding flight of stairs, until Dean fails to navigate one of the sharper corners, and pain flares from his ankle right up to his hip. He swears, stumbles, catches himself against the wall on one shoulder, trying to keep hold of the bookcase so that he doesn't send Charlie tumbling down the remaining stairs.
“Dean! You okay?”
“Fuck,” he tries to breathe through the pain, feeling sweat break out over his entire body. “Gimme a sec.”
Brady saves him, coming up the stairs from where he's just finished loading a box. He takes in the situation at a glance, runs up the remaining steps and grabs Dean's end of the bookcase. “I got it. You can let go.”
He's in too much pain to feel the full extent of his humiliation, sinks to a seated position against the wall, eyes closed, breathing hard. A couple of minutes later Brady comes back to find him.
“Come on, you can't stay here, someone'll step on you, or drop something heavy on your head, and one Winchester in the hospital is enough,” he grabs Dean's elbow and pulls him upright, helps him up the stairs without asking for permission, which is just fine by Dean. He parks him on one of the remaining chairs, raids Jess' freezer for ice, and wraps it in a ratty cloth. “Ankle?” he asks, and Dean nods.
“Fuck,” is all he can manage, gripping the edges of the chair so hard his knuckles have turned white. The pain has gone from white-hot heat to a steady throb, but it's still bad enough that he can feel every beat of his heart resonate in his leg.
“I'll bet,” Brady pulls off his shoe, wraps the cloth around his ankle with a skill that speaks to what the world might be missing out on now that he's dropped out of med school. “Bad break?”
He nods again, takes a breath to steady himself, swallows the handful of Advil Brady hands him dry. “Construction accident. Fucked up the ligaments, too. Bone fragment ripped 'em up pretty good inside the foot. They were talking surgery last time I went for a consult.”
“Did they try cortisone?”
“Yeah. They can't give me any more, not without fucking up my retinas or whatever else cortisone does to fuck you up.” He's not sure why it's suddenly easy to talk about this with Brady, even if it's not exactly the whole truth. Maybe it's because he's as close to a doctor as Dean is going to get.
“That sucks. Look, if you're anything like your brother, you're going to try to help here until it kills you, so will you do me a favour and stay put? We've got this covered, and we're almost done anyway. You've already qualified for the above and beyond the call of duty award today. You could have easily sat this out, and you've moved more heavy shit than is probably medically recommended anyway. I've seen sheets of paper with more colour than you.”
Normally he'd protest that he's just fine, thank you, but he's not sure he can stand up without passing out, so he acquiesces with a grimace. “Okay, fine.”
By the time they're done the pain is manageable again, but Brady insists on giving him an arm to lean on to go back down the stairs, and in the end Dean has to admit to himself that he probably wouldn't have made it on his own this time. For the most part he's able to function just fine, crap ankle or no, but he hasn't exactly been taking care of it the way he's supposed to ever since Sammy ended up in the hospital. That's going to have to change, he supposes, if he wants to be even remotely of help once Sam is discharged. If he can't walk, then the burden of making sure Sam is taken care of will fall to Jess, and that is just not on.
If nothing else, Winchesters take care of their own.
*
Brady hands him a beer at the new place, which is a jumble of boxes and half-assembled furniture. He insisted that Dean sit out the rest of the move, and strapped up his foot in a way that even Dean has to admit goes a long way to making the pain bearable. The whole group has sprawled out in the small garden, and no one seems particularly put out that he's stopped helping. To the contrary, a few of the girls are embarrassingly sympathetic, and they laugh when ducks his head, cheeks flaming, muttering that he's fine.
“Looks like blushing is a family trait,” one of them says, nudging his shoulder playfully. Her name is Lauren, he thinks, and she seems nice enough. She's got a sweet face with kind brown eyes, a sort of soft, round body with a little extra fat in places at which he probably shouldn't be staring too hard. She's studying sociology, about which Dean knows absolutely nothing, but that doesn't seem to phase her too much, and so far she's been happy to talk about music (she has shit taste, but apparently she thinks it's funny that he thinks so) and keep things on the light side. Until now, that is.
“Sam's adorable when he's flustered.” She winces a bit as she realizes what she's said, takes a pull from her beer bottle to cover up. Over in another corner of the garden, another couple of girls —Tricia and Sonya, if memory serves— are huddled up with Jess, along with Charlie-the-maybe-not-an-asshole. From the expressions on their faces, it's not hard to guess what they're talking about. Lauren seems like her mind's on the same track.
“So... how's he doing? I mean, we're all trying not to shove into you guys' space and all, but Sam's our friend too. I get that you guys are private. Sam... he never said anything about himself —hell, I didn't even know he had a brother, or didn't spring fully-formed from the ground when he was twenty-one or something,” she grins ruefully. “And I get that you're the same way. It's just... we care about him, and we want to help.”
He takes a drink of beer, twists the bottle around in his hands. It's going to take more than this to get him buzzed, and it's going to take more of a buzz for him to feel okay about discussing his brother's health with some girl he barely knows. Still, these kids have all come out and they're so damned earnest and eager to please —they remind him of Sam, he realizes with a jolt. All wide-eyed and innocent in spite of whatever darkness each of them knows. Even if they haven't seen what he has, Dean knows better than to think their lives are all sunshine and roses: no one's life is ever that good. So he shrugs, doesn't meet her eyes.
“Physically he's getting better. Another couple of weeks, and they're talking about letting him go outpatient, depending on test results and whatever.”
“Well, that's something. What about—?” she gestures with the hand holding her beer bottle, and it's not hard to guess what she's asking. He shrugs again.
“It's not —he doesn't... I don't know.”
“He still doesn't remember anything?”
He shakes his head. “No.”
“That sucks. I can't even imagine how hard it must be,” she says, and he blinks, because he's not entirely sure how her hand ended up on his thigh, and damn if it doesn't actually kind of feel nice, and he squirms a bit. She pulls her hand away, just a fraction. “Sorry.”
“No, it's okay,” he says hastily. “I'm, uh... it's a bit weird, you know? I mean, you're my little brother's friend, and I barely know you, and—” he's babbling, and that's usually more Sam's thing, and her hand is back on his thigh and damn.
“Sure, I'm Sam's friend, but I'm Jess' friend too, and I have lots of other friends. None of that means you can't be my friend too, right?”
His throat is dry, because his thoughts haven't exactly run to 'friend,' and what kind of sorry son of a bitch thinks about things like this when his little brother's in the hospital barely able to talk because he's too fucking traumatized. She seems to be able to read his mind, though, and smiles.
“It's not like we're instant friends or anything, but since I get the feeling you'll be sticking around for a while, I figure it might not be a bad idea to get to know each other better.”
Dean's brain thinks it's a terrible idea, but right now that's about the only part of him that does. Reason dictates that Lauren can't be a casual fuck, that even allowing himself to think that is borrowing trouble he doesn't need. He glances up to where Charlie-the-maybe-not-entirely-an-asshole has an arm around Jess' shoulders, letting her lean on him, then looks back at Lauren, who's got her bottom lip caught in her teeth, watching for his reaction. Brady is lounging a few feet away, very carefully not looking at either of them, contemplating his beer bottle as though it contains all the answers to the universe.
“Yeah, okay,” he breathes, and thinks he might just be making one of the worst mistakes of his life.
*
Chapter 5