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Sam wakes gasping, breath rancid, lips scaly and cracked. He hacks his way through his first breath, reaching and groping. Dean pulls the sipper top on the water bottle and held it to his lips. The first little bit just dribbles down sam’s face, like he doesn’t know what to with it. He turns away, moaning but his tongue flicks out, catching a stray droplet. His eyes widen. Suddenly he’s sitting up and clawing at Dean’s hands.
“Whoa, whoa! Steady on Sam!” Dean pulls back.
There is no comprehension in his brother’s face, just hunger. Hissing sibilant sounds escape his sibling, seemingly one word over and over
“Ischa”.
Dean has no idea what that means but slowly he hands Sam the bottle. He grabbed at it,throwing his head back and sucking the water down. He crushes the bottle and drops it, drops his body and drops his head back on the mattress. Dean is calm for a moment before the hissing starts again.
“Ischa, ischa, ischa”
“Sammy, shhh. It’s okay” Dean winces at the noises. He has no idea what Sam is saying. “Are you hungry?”
“Ischa, ischa, ischa”
“Right, yeah”
Dean doesn’t know why he keeps reaching out to Sam when he obviously can’t understand but he feels compelled to. It’s Sam, the boy he taught to read, to write, to speak. He should be able to understand, to make himself understood. But thanks to an archangel with a massive chip on his shoulder Sam couldn’t use his own first language.
He holds the spoon of soup out to Sam but he makes no move to open his mouth or sit up. Dean spills a little on Sam’s shirt before he gives up and goes to fetch the syringe from the first aid kit. But first of course he had to change his brother’s shirt. Sam could do nothing for himself, didn’t even know to try. He sits Sam up, wishing he knew the technical way to do this without having to haul him around like ragdoll. Undressing Sam is easy enough. He has done that many times before. He pulls the button up off Sam’s arms and lays him back down. He leaves the door open, mostly certain Sam will just lie in wait until he returns.
He is wrong. He returns momentarily with one of Sam’s t-shirts to find the room empty and elephantine banging coming from the kitchen. Then the sound of shattering glass.
“Shit! Sammy?!” Dean tosses the tee on to the bed and legs it to the kitchen.
He finds his brother, blood spreading around his feet from the broken glass he is unmindful in treading on. He is still hissing out that one word and rapidly emptying the cupboards, in search of God only knows. Dean goes to grab him by the hand but is shaken off. Sam’s hands close around a bottle of bleach, his fingers scrabbling uselessly around the child proof lock.
“Sammy no!” Dean screams, seizing his brother’s arm. The way Sam cries out and crumples is heart wrenching but at least he drops the bleach. Now he’s only got a bleeding, sobbing half naked brother, instead of a bleeding, half naked and poisoned brother. A trade he will take any day.
Sam starts to shriek when Dean picks him up, grunting under the weight of him. Even so, Dean wishes he was heavier. He lays him out on the bed, attempting a soothing hum as he picks glass from his feet and uses the t-shirt to stem the flow of blood. Its not best practice and he has better tools for the job but he daren’t leave Sam alone again. Not until he has child proofed the entire damn bunker.
Sam’s still pitiably moaning that same word over and over when he falls asleep. He kicks at the covers with bandaged feet and writhes. Dean cuffs him to the bed and distracts himself from that awful picture by calling Cas. He can’t pray to him lest the angel decide to turn up and wake Sam, who will sense his angelic grace and flip out. All the same he needs a translator. After he explains the situation he holds the phone close to Sam so Cas can listen.
“So, what does it mean? What does he keep saying?”
“It’s the enochian word for water. Your brother is crying out for water, likely because he is unused to the sensation of thirst and because it quells the feeling of eternal flame that was ever present in the cage.”
Well wasn’t that just a kick in the nards.
Dean thanks him and hangs up. He spends the rest of the night filling every available receptacle with water and surrounding Sam with them. If its water Sam needs its water he shall have.
Unbidden a verse from one of Pastor Jim’s sunday school lessons surfaces in his head.
But those who drink the water I give will never be thirsty again. It becomes a fresh, bubbling spring within them, giving them eternal life. John 4:14.
“Yeah. We could use a bit of that right about now” Dean doesn’t know who he’s talking to or what he hopes to achieve but he listens to compulsion and sits down with his bible and Sam’s old latin dictionary. Angels are impossibly old and speak in long dead tongues. This is the only dead tongue he knows. If there’s even a shred of a possibility Sam will understand it he will give it a go.
This is how Dean finds himself sitting at his brother’s bedside, surrounded by pots and pans of water, whispering sed aqua quam dabo ei fiet in eo fons aquae salientis in vitam aeternam until he too falls asleep.