Chapter Text
24 hours later, Sam’s fever had gone down. A week later, the only sign that Sam had been sick was the occasional sniffle, or that was all he would admit to, but Dean could see that wasn’t all. Sam was jumpier: every time Dean rounded a corner he would leap like a scared cat, but he never pulled his gun, which Dean was grateful for, he didn’t want to be shot, but Dean was slightly concerned that Sam could be so scared of something and not pull a pistol on it. He knew Sam had his gun on him, despite it being a bit redundant in the highly-warded Bunker, but refusing to pull it made that choice all the more confusing.
After multiple days of this shit, Dean was at his wit’s end and decided to talk to Sam with all the tact of a bull in a china shop. “What’s going on up there?”
Sam had the audacity to physically lookup. “What do you mean, I don’t hear anything?”
Dean rolled his eyes. “I mean in there, your head, Sam.”
Sam stiffened. “Nothing, well, not nothing, but like nothing bad.”
“Bull.”
“It’s not!”
“Sam, you’re all but scared of your own shadow, what’s going on? Is it Lucifer? Is he still here?"
Sam shook his head.
“He’s not real, Sam, you know that right?”
“He’s not here.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s stupid.”
“But it’s something,” Dean said.
Sam sighed. “I can feel him. He’s not here. I can’t see him, but he’s there, around every corner, under the fucking table, in the next room, just out of sight.”
“Oh.” That explained a lot. “What can I—“
“Nothing, Dean. You can’t do anything.”
“But—”
“No, Dean. It’s not like I’m seeing him, or hearing him, I can just… sense him? But like what the hell are you going to do about that?”
“I don’t know… but there has to be something, Sam! We can’t just—”
“Yes, we can, Dean. You know what we did last time? Nothing. And it went away.”
“So that’s what you want me to do now? Just watch you suffer.”
Sam swallowed hard. “I’ll be fine, Dean. Out of all our problems, thinking Lucifer might be in the next room is not a big one.”
“Well, I think it is one!”
“Well, you don’t get a vote, Dean! Not in how I recover.”
“You’re the one who says that I need to share!”
“Well, you don’t! So just let me deal with this. I dealt with seeing him, I can deal with this. I don’t need to feel like more of a freak about this, okay?”
“I’m not trying to—”
“I know you’re not Dean, but that doesn’t change the fact that you are. This is something I can handle on my own, I promise.”
“The minute it’s not, you come to me, you hear?”
“Yeah, I hear you.”
It doesn’t stop Dean from humming whenever he goes down hallways, just so Sam can hear him before he turns.