Work Text:
Dean is already awake and putting on his boots by the time the alarm clock goes off and starts playing Asia. Not a bad choice, if he does say so himself. He bops his head along as he ties his shoes, expecting Sam to sit up rather quickly like he normally does when the alarm goes off. He doesn’t typically sleep past Dean to begin with, but if anyone deserves some extra shuteye, it’s Sam.
What he doesn’t expect is for Sam’s eyes to slowly open and his whole body to go tense.
“Dude, Asia!” Dean says gleefully. They’ve been woken up by far worse.
He definitely doesn’t expect Sam to roll over and smash his fist against the clock without the hurt even registering on his face. The clock lets out a metallic clang and the room goes silent. Dean’s fingers immediately stop their lace-tying. “Sam?” he asks tentatively.
Sam rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling and doesn’t offer Dean an answer. Dean doesn’t know what’s bothering him this early in the morning. A nightmare, maybe? The current state of their existence? All he knows is that he wants to wipe that blank look off Sam’s face and make him unclench his jaw.
It’s nothing some breakfast can’t fix. Hopefully.
As much as he wasn’t expecting everything that happened so far this morning, he certainly hadn’t expected Sam to tell him that he’s stuck in Groundhog Day.
“Guess it’s a good thing the radio wasn’t playing ‘The Time Warp’,” Dean says, half into his coffee. Dean looks up when he hears Sam huff a laugh and a smile just barely cracks across his lips.
The tension in Dean’s chest eases just a little. At least, even amidst all this unexpectedness, he can still make his brother smile.
He tries to keep it up the rest of the day, but his usual antics don’t quite seem to land. He distantly wonders how many times has Sam heard them by now.
It’s the last thought to cross his mind before he turns a corner and everything goes black.
Dean is already awake and putting on his boots by the time the alarm clock goes off and starts playing Asia. Not a bad choice, if he does say so himself.
Sam seems less enthused when he wakes up and more tired than normal. Nightmare, maybe. He needs all the rest and moments of peace he can get, so if something’s eating at him and preventing that from happening, Dean will gladly suffer through a chick-flick moment to get his brother back on an even keel. He’ll wheedle it out of Sam one way or another over breakfast.
They’re in the diner when Sam drops the bombshell about Groundhog Day. And one of the first things Dean can think is that sure, he likes Asia, but enough to listen to them on repeat every morning? No thank you. “Could be worse,” he says with a shrug. “It could be ‘The Time Warp’ waking you up every morning,” Dean finishes, hoping that it will break this spell that’s settled over Sam and get him to smile.
No dice.
Dean’s own smile fades in turn and the conversation grows serious. He can’t help but feel that if he can’t even make Sam smile with a simple joke, what good will he be in this situation if he’s the one that dies everyday and can’t remember it and can’t find a way to bring some lightness to Sam’s life in the meantime?
They leave the diner after both barely touching their breakfast. Dean’s mind is going a mile a minute trying to ask questions that may get Sam to think about things in a way he hasn’t before that could shed some answers on who or what could be behind this.
Somewhere along the way he feels the knot on his left boot slip loose but doesn’t pay it any attention as he tries to connect the dots in this horrifically weird scenario.
The next thing he knows, his shoelace is snagged and the sudden jerk throws him off balance. He seems to fall in slow motion, watching the pavement get closer and closer until it eventually comes up to meet him.
Dean is already awake and putting on his boots by the time the alarm clock goes off and starts playing Asia. Not a bad choice, if he does say so himself.
Sam rolls over and tells him to take his boots off. No preamble, no nothing.
“Who crapped in your Cheerios this morning?” Dean mutters but does as requested. He sits on the bed across from Sam, his socked feet feeling naked against the grimy motel floor.
A crinkle forms between Sam’s eyebrows that tells Dean he’s both really tired and really pissed off, and that’s something Dean needs to work to remedy really fast. “Sam?” he asks quietly as Sam rubs his hands over his face, turning his already sleep-mussed hair into more of a mess.
“There’s just no point in going anywhere, is all,” Sam says from behind his hands. When he finally drops them to his lap, he looks almost defeated, which is a seldom-seen expression on his face.
Dean leans forward a little. Dust floats by in the slats of sunlight that sneak in through the curtains. Gross. “Why’s that?”
Sam finally locks eyes with him. He takes a fortifying breath, tips his head back, and begins telling Dean about the time loop. At the end of it, Dean agrees to sit on his bed and hardly move while Sam calls Bobby and tries to work something out that maybe he had missed during the previous days—how many of which, Dean doesn’t know, because Sam won’t tell him.
He tries to avoid listening in on Sam’s hushed conversation, but it’s a small room, and finally Sam goes outside but leaves the door cracked open. A small gust of wind blows into the room and Dean watches the dust as it moves around. He takes a breath in and sighs it out as he wonders how they’re going to get Sam out of this mess if Dean can’t even move to help him.
When he goes to take another breath in, something dry catches in his throat, causing him to cough. He tries to keep it quiet, for Sam’s sake, but the next choked breath in yields the same response and all of a sudden his lungs seem to compress inside him. His coughing only gets worse, deep and guttural, as if it’s reaching past his lungs and into his stomach.
He can’t get a breath in. He can’t clear his throat. There’s too much weight on his chest and too much going out and not enough coming in and—
“Dean? Dean!” Sam’s panicked voice reaches his ears above the sound of his own rushing blood and horrendous coughing and fruitless gasping. Sam’s hands immediately go to his shoulders and help hold him up where he had begun collapsing onto the bed. “You need to calm down and breathe.”
Yeah, right, as if he isn’t trying, as if the whole problem isn’t that he freaking can’t. He’s dying again. He has to be. Asphyxiating on what? Dust? So freaking stupid. And Sam will just have to start tomorrow all over again and Dean will have no idea what even happened.
He tries to form an ‘I’m sorry’ through his coughing, but his throat isn’t good for vocalizing or breathing at the moment. Sam must see him trying to say something, because his hold tightens and he begins to shake his head back and forth. “You’re fine, you’re fine, you’re fine,” Sam repeats. A litany.
Dean’s head begins to grow fuzzy right about the time his vision starts to darken, not enough air coming in to keep him conscious. Sam’s hands are anchors on his shoulders as Dean’s apology dies on his lips.
Dean is already awake and putting on his boots by the time the alarm clock goes off and starts playing Asia. Not a bad choice, if he does say so himself. Before he can tell Sam to rise and shine, Sam is already sitting upright and staring at Dean.
“We need to go,” he says without preamble.
A myriad of questions work their way through Dean’s mind but none of them make it past his lips when he sees the deadly serious—and almost borderline pleading—look on Sam’s face.
Dean hits the radio to turn it off and nods. “Where to?”
It turns out that Sam doesn’t have a destination, which isn’t the strangest thing. Nor is it the fact that he utterly insisted on driving, which he hasn’t been doing lately. No, the strangest thing is definitely the fact that Sam has been living in a time loop where Dean dies at the end of every day and Sam has to relive it over and over and over again. It sounds absolutely crazy, but with the way Sam’s acting, Dean knows better than to doubt it.
“I just thought—I don’t know,” Sam lets out an exhausted sigh and clenches his hands around the steering wheel. Bright green shrubs and grasses cover the sides of the roads as they drive south towards Miami and out of Broward County. “Maybe if we get far enough away from the Mystery Spot, the effects will lessen?”
Dean watches him closely. It would be clear to anyone watching that Sam needs a break. To Dean, who knows Sam at times better than he knows himself, he can see that his brother is hanging by a thread. Sam needs this to be the key to the problem, and if not that, then at least a temporary reprieve.
He needs rest, real rest, and enough time to get his head on straight to figure this out. Sam seems rattled enough that this has to have happened at least a few times by now. The thought sits like lead in his stomach.
“How many days has it been?” Dean finally asks. Several snowy egrets stand out, bright white against their green surroundings as they drive by a pond. Dean lets a few seconds pass before he turns to Sam, who is staring straight out the windshield. His knuckles are white.
“Fifty-five.” Sam says in a small voice. It’s clear that he didn’t have to think about the number. He’s been keeping track.
The horror of it isn’t slow to wash over Dean, which is probably why Sam paused before telling him. After a moment, he can’t decide if Sam knowing the exact day is really a good or a bad thing. He tries to tell himself that it’s good because Sam hasn’t relived the day so many hundreds of times that he’s lost count. It’s unimaginably awful because it means that Sam has seen him die over fifty times and has never been able to stop it.
Dean won’t even survive losing Sam once in the long run if his deal does come due.
He wouldn’t survive fifty-five times, certainly not as intact as Sam appears to be.
Dean wishes he had something to say to that, some placation to make, some promise that it won’t happen again, but he doesn’t. The ride continues in near-silence as the air conditioner rattles.
They pull off for gas a few towns over once they’re out of Broward County. Sam still looks uneasy, but he lets Dean out of the car to use the restroom while he pumps gas. For a few minutes, Dean tentatively hopes that the loop has been broken and they can go from here.
That hope lasts until he exits the restroom, whereupon he is grabbed from behind and shoved up against the wall, chest-first. “What the—“ he starts and begins to throw his weight to turn around but promptly stops when he feels the cool, shaking edge of a blade against his neck.
“Wallet,” a man says in a voice that sounds serious but is betrayed by his shaking weapon.
Dean really doesn’t have time for this. Just as he’s about to try and talk the man down, the man is jostled and the knife skids along Dean’s shoulder instead. The wound begins stinging and bleeding immediately, but it’s far from the first thing on his mind. Sam has tackled the would-be mugger to the ground and is holding him there, eyes alight with fury.
“Sam!” Dean yells to get his attention. It doesn’t work. He uses his good arm to grab Sam’s shoulder. “Sam! He’s not worth it, come on.”
Sam is tense under his hand as he stares down the mugger, who looks wide-eyed back up at Sam. Sam rears back and lands one hit across the mugger’s jaw, knocking him out cold. When he stands, his attention immediately drifts to Dean’s wounded arm, and Dean watches his little brother begin to take over from the fury.
Realization dawns as he moves the frayed parts of Dean’s jacket to get a better look at the injury. Dean can feel his hand shaking as he does so. “Did he get you anywhere else, are you alright?”
Dean hisses as the fabric pulls on the gash but shakes his head. “No, no, I’m fine. Freaking amateur.” He’s more annoyed than anything.
“You’re fine,” Sam says. A prayer. A realization. “You’re fine.”
No, he’s been stabbed and almost mugged. But he’s alive. So yes, he’s fine.
They make it back to the car in record time and set about putting the gas station in the rearview mirror.
“I should’ve known that just up and leaving wouldn’t fix anything,” Sam says minutes later once they’re back on the highway and headed for the motel they left only an hour before.
Dean keeps a towel pressed against his shoulder and cranes his neck to look at Sam. “There’s no way you could’ve known, Sam. And hey, I’m still here, so maybe your plan worked. Whatever ends up happening, we’ll figure it out.”
Sam keeps his focus on the road. He doesn’t look like he’s at all convinced.
“Tis but a flesh wound,” Dean says with a smirk.
When Sam doesn’t respond in a similar manner, Dean knows that whatever’s going on in his brother’s head is serious.
Back at the motel, Sam insists on stitching up Dean’s shoulder, even though it really isn’t that bad. But he takes one look at Sam’s face, practically pleading for him to allow it, and he folds. He’d rather not bleed out from a stupid minor shoulder injury of all things—if that were even possible, which he highly doubts—if all of these groundhog days end with him dying.
There’s not really any point to stitching him up, anyways. Sam’s time would be much better spent taking a nap and getting some actual rest while Dean sits still and tries not to do anything in the meantime. As much as he hates to think it, the chances seem to be that he’ll wake up tomorrow none the wiser, shoulder back to normal, stitches or no stitches.
He doesn’t dare voice any of that to Sam.
He knows, if the situation were reversed, he’d be doing the exact same thing, trying to keep Sam with him and whole for as long as possible before the time loop snatched him away again.
Halfway through, Sam pauses, and Dean figures he’s thinking something along the same lines anyways. It kills Dean to not be able to do anything beyond spout a few jokes and words of encouragement. By and large, he’s a member of the audience here, reset every day, unaware the show’s already been going on for months now.
When Sam finishes smoothing a bandage over Dean’s shoulder and stands up to dispose of the packaging, Dean stops him in his tracks with a quiet, “Sam?”
He immediately stops and gives Dean his full attention.
Dean opens his mouth to reaffirm that Sam will figure this out and he’s strong enough to get through it, but the words get stuck in his throat. “Thanks,” is all he ends up saying. For trying, for everything.
He’s rewarded with a small, tired smile that ghosts across Sam’s features. “Don’t mention it,” he brushes off and moves into the bathroom.
As Dean listens to him pack up the med kit and wash his hands, an intensifying pain behind his right eye begins to make itself known. He keeps listening to the water running, much longer than it should be, and decides that this complaint can wait. Sam needs all the minutes of peace he can get, and Dean will do whatever he possibly can to get Sam as many of them as possible.