Chapter Text
Dean woke up panicked, as if from a nightmare. In reality, he hadn’t dreamt, and his nightmare was one that was in the waking world. Sam’s bed was empty, untouched, and horrible sounds of coughing and gagging came from the bathroom. He rolled out of his bed, tripping over sheets, to get to the bathroom. He flung open the door, finding his brother on the floor.
“Sammy!” Dean dropped to his knees, picking his brother up, feeling how terrifyingly light he was. “What the hell is going on?”
“I’m okay,” he pushed away, sitting back on the pink tile bathroom floor. “I’m just sick.”
Sam tried to push himself off the floor, but then fell and clutched the porcelain bowl. He leaned over to the toilet, heaving the contents of his stomach into the bowl. It wasn’t much at all.
Dean rubbed his back, feeling his spine sharply poking out.
He sat back up, flushed the toilet, wiped his mouth and mumbled, “I think it’s food poisoning.”
Dean kneeled on the cramped bathroom floor next to Sam, brushing his hair away from his eyes. He noticed the face like a skeleton dipped in wax, the dark circles under his eyes, and the hollow sadness behind them.
“Food poisoning?” He sighed softly. “From what food?”
Sam looked at his lap, suppressing another rumble of his stomach.
“I know you haven’t been eating.” Dean stood up, picking up a bath towel.
Sam stayed silent.
“You couldn’t have hid that forever.” He ran it under the hot water from the sink, which ended up cold anyways.
Sam still sat on the floor, slouching over, a sad sack of bones in a motel bathroom. Had his eyes not moved, Dean would’ve thought his brother was already dead. He felt the tight hand of worry find a grip around his heart.
“Are you gonna ignore me, or are you too nauseous to talk?” He crouched down, dripping washcloth in hand.
Still silent. And then, like an old door creaking open after years of being chained shut, he spoke.
“I didn’t make myself do it.” He mumbled.
Dean sat down, listening.
“I didn’t make myself puke,” He kept a hand firmly clutched to the toilet seat. “If you’re wondering.”
He fell silent again as Dean started wiping his brother’s face off with the towel. “Why aren’t you eating?”
Sam pushed the towel away. “Are you mad at me?”
He dropped it in the sink. “No, I’m not. I’m really upset that you wouldn’t talk to me, and I’m upset that you’re not eating.”
“That’s what being mad is.” He rolled his eyes.
“Not really.” Dean held up his brother’s fragile wrist as if he were made of glass. Sam flinched. “So are you going to tell me why you won’t eat?”
He shrugged. “It’s not like I’m not eating at all.”
“Still.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“When was the last time you ate?” Dean’s eyes were heavy with sadness when he looked at how frail his brother had gotten.
“I had coffee with milk today.” He offered.
“That’s not even food. You shouldn’t even drink coffee.”
“Alright. Food.” Sam mumbled to his lap. “The last time I ate was dinner.”
“Dinner on what day?” He knew Sam hadn’t eaten tonight.
“Tuesday.” He sighed.
Dean rubbed his palms in his eyes. “That was last week! A whole six days.”
“It’s not that bad!” Sam tucked his arms close to his ribcage. “I’ve gone longer, and I’ve been fine. After a while, you stop feeling hungry.”
“Longer? That’s not fine! You’re not fine!” Dean snapped, dropping his voice when he saw how Sam flinched. “You have an eating disorder, Sammy.”
He snorted. “Look, I’m not some- some- Dean, I’m not a girl. I don’t want to look like a model or whatever. You’re joking, right?”
“Guys can have eating disorders too,” He said softly, “That crap can happen to anybody. I just want to know why you do that to yourself.”
He sighed. “I don’t want to keep looking like some chubby nine-year-old. Dad won’t take me seriously, he won’t let me hunt, he treats me like a baby. He might take me seriously if I didn’t look like I was in third grade.”
“You don’t.”
“Well, obviously.” Sam pulled at the skin on his face. “Dad still doesn’t take me seriously, no matter how hard I work, no matter how skinny I was. I thought it just wasn’t enough, so I cut myself off again.”
Dean rubbed his face, with a shamed sigh. How had he let it get this bad?
“But I don’t get to choose where I live, when we move, what I do, the kind of life I want to live, anything. I don’t have the option to be normal, so at least I can look normal too, instead of looking like a baby. What I eat is the only thing in my life I can control.” Sam held his stomach, feeling another rumble of pain. “This ‘disorder’ is the part of myself I have power over.”
“Starving yourself ain’t normal.” Dean rubbed his back. “And I hate to break it to you, but the disorder controls you, not the other way around.”
“I’m the one who decides to stop eating, nobody else. I’m in control.” Sam pushed him away weakly.
“You don’t choose what you wear, what you eat, when you sleep, when you run, how you feel, what you watch on TV. You can’t even click through a cooking channel without looking like you're conflicted between puking or smashing the TV.” Dean pleaded, “Don’t you want control?”
“I do, but I can’t!” Sam hung his head, his whole body arching over into a defeated slump. “I don’t know how to stop. Every time I eat, I hate myself so much for it. I hate myself and I don’t want to be here! I’m miserable and I just want out! I don’t know if I want out of my- uh, my eating disorder or my life.”
Dean picked at the rug, lost for an answer while his eyes misted over.
“I don’t want to be like this.” Sam’s voice dripped with pain as he leaned his forehead on the toilet. “I just can’t see a way out.”
“Sammy, no.” Dean’s bottom lip twitched as he strangled a sob. “Offing yourself isn’t an easy way out.”
“I’m not gonna.” Sam shook his head, chewing his bottom lip. “But I might have. It’s easy enough for me.”
“Don’t say that.” He ran his hand over his face, rubbing his eyes. “It’s not fucking easy, Sam, it’s dying. It’s going and leaving us like Mom did, and it doesn’t solve anything.”
He let the weight of the conversation sink into the loaded silence.
“Sammy, you’ve got a life ahead of you. I’m failing high school, I’ll probably drop out, but you have time to change yourself. If you keep acting like you do now and you don’t change, then you’ll wind up like me, or worse, or even dead.” Dean chuckled weakly, still feeling tears slowly leaking from the corner of his eyes.
Sam wrapped his arms around his knees, resting his head on them. “I just wanna be okay, but every day I feel like dying.”
“Being dead would suck more than being alive, cause you’d be a ghost, and dad would have to burn your bones.” He wrapped his arm around his brother’s bony shoulders. “And I’d miss you.”
Sam let his head rest on Dean’s shoulder. “You would?”
“Of course I would, there’s no question about it. I’d never get over it.” Dean leaned against the sink. “Every day, I’d try and bring you back.”
“You can’t bring people back from the dead.” Sam yawned a little, slumping into Dean’s chest.
“I’d do it anyway. It’s my job to take care of you, even if you die.” He watched as his little brother’s breathing slowed, falling asleep on the bathroom floor.
Dean scooped him up, still shocked by the feathery lightness of his emaciated brother. He carried Sammy over to his bed and tucked him in. His brother looked peaceful, but in the hauntingly peaceful way of someone who died in their sleep. Dean rolled him over onto his side, because it was far too easy to picture Sam lying in a coffin when he laid like that. Sammy wouldn’t have a proper coffin, he’d be burned, but the image burned itself into Dean’s brain. He sat on his own bed, facing away from his brother as he thought.
“Sammy wanted to kill himself, I didn’t notice. Sammy didn’t eat all week, I didn’t notice. I’m supposed to look out for him, but I barely even looked at him. He’s all skin and bones. He’s dying.” Dean whispered to the window facing the highway. “How could I have been so stupid?”
Cars zipped past, their headlights roaming across the blank wall behind Sam. The darkness coiled it’s shadows over the furniture, up the bed, spreading from the corners of the room to swallow Dean whole. He gasped for breath each time the headlights shone over his face, only to be pushed back under to drown in the midnight shadow. Under the blankets, you could still see Sam’s skeletal frame.
“How could I have been so blind?” Dean gasped again, feeling the tears creep up to his eyes again.
He was plunged into darkness again, and his whole body shook with sobs. He wiped it away. He’d had enough of crying, but the tears didn’t seem to be finished with him. Dean relented, stifling the howls into whimpers, tears silently rolling down his face. They shimmered on his skin when they caught the gleam of a pair of headlights. After a few minutes, he took in a trembling breath, then let it out again. In and out, with the lights of the highway. He wiped his face, stood up and grabbed the duffel bag of his stuff. He picked up the sawed off shotgun of rock salt, and sat down on the end of Sam’s bed, facing the door. He looked at his baby brother, peacefully sleeping, for once. His face was sunken and sickly, his hair was thin and brittle like straw, his arms were thin and spindly like twigs, and he shivered under the pile of blankets. Dean pulled off his own sheets, pilling them over Sam. Starvation had left its mark on him, and Dean felt that same icy fear in his stomach, an aching for simpler times Sam couldn’t even remember.
He held up the shotgun and watched the cars roaring over the highway like thundering monsters.
“It’s my job to watch over you,” he said to Sam, guarding him from the unknown monsters outside, or maybe just to make himself feel safe. “I’m gonna take care of you, I’ve got you.”
“Dean still hardly talks. I try to make small talk, or ask him if he wants to throw the baseball around. Anything to make him feel like a normal kid again. He never budges from my side- or from his brother. Every morning when I wake up, Dean is inside the crib, arms wrapped around baby Sam. Like he’s trying to protect him from whatever is out there in the night.”
John Winchester’s journal, December 4th, 1983