Work Text:
Very natural, not quite super.
Sam works out. It's not a secret, it's pretty obvious by the way he looks, and it's... It's an outlet. It feels good, to pump his muscles, feel them burn and strain, because afterwards he feels light and happy. Like life is easy, and why was he so worried about that demon blood and hell and Purgatory and angel-shit, hm?
Also, it's pretty fucking important that he spends an hour here or there pounding the pavement, because sometimes... Sometimes they chase stuff, and if getting up early on a Sunday morning to go for a run will help him not be the runt of the litter, hanging back and surreptitiously leaning against random objects in his way, then he's all for it.
He's not made for running. Not really.
He tries to do that thing with his elbows that a teacher nagged him about in high school, but his legs still feel long and gangly and far too heavy to easily swing over a gravestone with birds on it and a little tree, what the ever-loving fuck?
The dog he's trying to follow disappears into the trees on the far end of the graveyard, and Sam knows without a moment's thought that there's no point in following it at this pace. That the woods are dark, wet and full of branches, bushes and undergrowth that'll help the dog disappear and leave him with scrapes and bruises that'll take a week to heal.
And also, he thinks while letting his legs slow to a walk, Dean is doubled over with his hands on his knees, panting and coughing and trying to gulp in air in big, heaving gasps, and that's way out of character for a guy who'd be trundling through the trees this very second if everything was all right, shouting and hollering for Sam to follow him and why are you such a girl, Samantha?
-
Dean, for all that he vibrates with a kind of serious intensity that reminds Sam so much of John that it's almost scary sometimes, can talk your fucking ear off. And he does that on a regular basis, going on about Metallica or a girl or a movie he hasn't watched but thinks should probably have a different ending. Long, falsely cheerful tirades on things Sam has already heard everything about before, somewhere between Washington and Wichita or halfway down the road from the latest motel still searching for a gas station because the Impala is one thirsty little bitch.
He talks and jokes and laughs, loud and brash in the way that matches the leather coat and sleazy grin Dean glued on over his actual personality sometime before his 16th birthday and never seemed to take off again, and Sam is used to it. His brother's voice rising and falling over the noise of the engine, the little high-pitched ringing noise the Impala makes and the knocking of an almost-dead demon/leviathan/witch/whatever in the trunk are familiar and appreciated, even if they're annoying as hell.
Sometimes he does it back. That thing with the intensity and the talking, but usually with less girls and more OCD-chatter about cases or how they're going to get where they're headed, the state of their economy (which means he's counted the number of fake credit cards they've got left, and decided they need more), and when he does he expects Dean to rise to the occasion and pelt him with bad puns and wily looks, topped off with loud demands for cheeseburgers and bacon, even if they both know they'll end up with a lunch made out of cereal bars and power drinks.
It takes him a while that first afternoon to notice that he's getting monosyllabic answers and grunts to his long, meaningful comments on the route they're taking home. Not in the surly, grumpy, "I'm a goddamned martyr, hear me roar"-way that Dean adopts when he's angry, though. For all that he's not talking he sounds friendly enough, his smiles reaching the corner of his eyes and his knuckles not turning even a little bit white on the steering wheel, but it's not the response he expected. It doesn't follow the rules of their little game at all, and that doesn't compute, because it's a fragile game at best, and it requires everything they've both got to keep it going.
He doesn't say anything then, because "Hey, you all right? You're all quiet." is girly, even for Sam.
-
It's a gradual descent into proper illness. Dean's nose blocks off the first night ("Knock id off, Sab!"), the cough sets in the following evening, and he even appears to be getting better on the fourth day before backsliding into a listlessness Sam hasn't seen in his brother since he was a teenager.
"I'b not hungover, Sab!" Dean claims, and Sam has to admit that as much as he'd prefer this to be a case of drunkalitis, the fever red cheeks and sweaty hair peeking out over the top of Dean's blanket, along with the wet, pained coughs punctuated by little pained pants don't fit the bill.
They hit the road again almost two weeks later, and if Dean is ten pounds lighter, four shades paler, and still coughing up a storm whenever Sam rolls down the window on the driver's side to let in some cooler air, neither of them mention it.
-
He drives Dean to a clinic on a Saturday morning, when his fever has been hovering around 103 for three days. He looks miserable, huddled against the window of the Impala, but Sam doesn't have enough sympathy to go around these days, not even when his brother is coughing up blood because the blood vessels in his throat have ruptured. Not even when getting into the car has Dean making pained little grunts in tune with the rapid little breaths he's making, trying not to set off the cough again. Really. No sympathy at all. Not even a little.
"Dean. We're here."
He expects to be punched or shoved or attacked in some way, because that's Dean, and that's what Purgatory does to a guy, but all Dean does is twitch and blink his eyes open in a bleary, slow kind of way that scares Sam even more.
"We're here. C'mon."
He watches his brother get out of the car with the grace of an 80 year old woman with bad hips, and crosses his fingers that tomorrow morning he'll wake up in a world where he's not driving his 30-something year old brother to a clinic where they'll register under a false name and pretend they're locals before they go back to their filthy motel room to watch daytime television and pretend that both of them want to be there.
-
"I found us a hunt."
Sam startles at the sound of Dean's voice, hoarse and squeaky after coughing and coughing and coughing, but Dean doesn't appear to notice. "A black dog. Look."
He turns the lid of the laptop around and, geeze, Sam thought he'd been looking up porn or busty asian-somethings, but all he sees is the garish front page of some local newspaper that've gone online and sent an employee off for a crash-course in web design. "Dog attacks!" a headline proudly announces in something Sam is certain is word art, and he shrugs.
"Yeah. It's a two day drive. You wanna take it?"
Dean's eyes bore into him at the slight hesitancy in Sam's voice, and Sam could punch himself in frustration, because seriously? He knows better.
"Can't stay here forever, Samantha."
"No, but.. It's a black dog, Dean. Let's just call Garth and leave it to some fresh-faced kid who needs the extra credit, huh?"
Dean's hand twitches towards his chest, where a black dog once tried to filet him.
"Let's not. A good, simple hunt, Sam. That's what we need."
Sam isn't sure that's a thing he's ever needed, but he shrugs it off. Next on their list is a black dog, apparently.
-
The only good thing about standing in a damp, wet, cold graveyard in the middle of the night when most people are in bed is that dawn isn't far off, and that he gets to kill the fucker so they can get back to their warm bunker sooner rather than later.
The other list is longer than a bad year, and it starts and ends with Dean, who's lagging twenty feet behind him as they make their way back to the Impala to gather the crap they need if they're going to hike through the woods in search of a big, bad fucker that wants to eat their.. Somethings. He's already elbow deep in the ancient army surplus backpack thrown haphazardly into a corner of the trunk, smelling musty and slightly marshy, trying to find their good compass when Dean catches up with him.
He's the colour of oatmeal, and Sam throws in a bottle of water and the little paper box with the blue inhaler the doctor prescribed, even if Dean hasn't opened it yet and it's been stuck in the backseat for a week and a half.
"We good to go?" Dean asks, rubbing one hand over his sternum as Sam shoulders the backpack. He looks pale even in the golden light of dawn, and Sam nods silently, taking off into the thick undergrowth and wet leaves.
-
The point is that Sam works out. He jogs, he does weights if he can find them, but this? This is probably good enough, he thinks, trudging through a damp forest at ass o'clock. He stretches to get over a tree that's fallen over, jumps easily to his feet on the other side, and readies himself to jump a stream. He can hear Dean lumbering along behind him, his normal grace left behind somewhere with his dignity and health.
Dean doesn't work out. He thinks jogging is ungodly (but hilarious to watch), that weights were made for strong men in a circus strictly for him to laugh at, and the scene in the Smokey and the Bandit sequel where Burt Mustacholds has to get back into shape normally has him chortling hard enough that whatever food he's eating ends up in his lap.
That doesn't mean, Sam thinks as he turns around to see where his brother-come-bulldozer is, that Dean normally lags behind. He's made of the same stuff as their father, who was just strong, even if he didn't ever work out or try to keep in shape. Sam might look like he's trying to become the next terminator, but Dean doesn't normally need to lean on trees to catch his breath at walking pace.
Normally.
"You want to head back?" He asks, even if he knows they're close now, because branches are broken and his spidey-sense tingles, and he knows they've backed the thing up in a corner. "We can come back tonight or tomorrow."
Dean is ten feet ahead of him before Sam can shoulder the backpack again.
-
The thing is, it's Sam's goddamned job to question what they're doing. Mainly because no one else will, and because it's healthy to question yourself when you're walking head first into danger, but as these things go it's become habit that he whines and complains, and while it sparks some annoyance in Dean, it doesn't seem to inspire any kind of deeper thought into what they're about to do.
He watches Dean lumber on through the dense undergrowth, stumbling and weaving stubbornly. His jeans are wet up past his knees now, and his shoulders are hiked up so high they're almost at his ears. He's breathing hard, too, and Sam winces in unexpected sympathy as Dean takes in a deeper breath than normal, trying to inflate his lungs completely, saturate them with air. He can hear the wheeze all the way back to where he's trying to keep a healthy distance between them.
Dean pushes on, and Sam can't help but think that this crawling pace is as fast as he can go right now, the slight uphill draining Dean of the little energy a week in a hard, starched motel bed has managed to feed into him.
-
The clock ticks nearer to 7AM when they slow down, and Sam can't help but wonder why the dog is so far out when they normally just hang around graveyards. It's out of character, highly unusual.
Dean's gait is uneven now, and when he coughs it's with the air of someone doing their best to hold back. He's not talking, either, or stopping for breath. Sam keeps his distance, even if they both know his brother is flagging. Hard. He remembers how it was as a kid, that first week after the flu, when you're still tired, still coughing, still stuck with the last little bits of the symptoms the illness brought with it, and he knows Dean is knee deep in that feeling right now. He grimaces, about to ask if they should stop and have some water when there's a growling ahead of them, and he stops dead.
His brother doesn't seem to have heard, however, and lurches on. Sam reaches for his gun, knife already in hand, but the dog is bounding out of the forest, right into Dean's chest before he can get a good shot, and Sam thinks the sound Dean makes will reverberate in his heart forever, because god.
The dog, at least 120 pounds of solid black steel, growls down at Dean's face, and Dean's hands are pushing at the thing's neck. It snaps wildly, drooling and growling, looking ferocious enough that Sam thinks he might have freaked out even if he doesn't have a thing with dogs, and then...
Then there are three bullets penetrating the dog's head, and it falls sideways to the ground. Quiet. Dead. Blood pours out, staining the leaves red.
It's anticlimactic to say the least. A big, mean, dead dog just doesn't justify a long hike through a wet forest, a two day drive and what promises to be an absolutely spectacular walk back with the way Dean is looking, and Sam keeps the gun pointed out of habit, waiting for the thing to get up and declare the end of the world any moment. In French. He supposes he just got too used to the insane twists and turns that make up their lives that he forgot what it was like to go hunt for something, and then finish. There's no harrowing intermittence at all, and maybe it's just been too long since their last "Oops, it wasn't supernatural after all"-hunt, but the dog..
Do black dogs normally have collars?
"'s a Rottweiler", Dean mumbles, and Sam startles out of his thoughts to look down at his brother. He's halfway up to a sitting position, his face sprayed with blood. "Just a mean fucker."
He sounds angry and butch and all kinds of manly, but Sam can see him trembling, even now, and he's not pulling to his feet.
"Good thing, too" He says finally, sitting down on a rock next to Dean, letting the backpack flop to the ground. "You doing all right? Is the fever back?"
Dean sighs, and Sam can hear the breath whistling out of his chest, ending in a set of deep coughs that look painful.
"Think I need a nap" he admits, and Sam laughs. "Yeah. I'm not carrying you out of this forest, sunshine, so you'll have to hang on until we can get back to the car."
Dean nods, but he looks miserable and cold, so Sam passes the water to him, and starts fiddling with the inhaler to get it out of the box so he can read the instructions.
"I don't..." Dean starts, but Sam throws him a look that says "Dude, you just got knocked down by a puppy," and Dean takes the thing, staring at it like it's trying to eat him.
"We're going to go home," Sam says, re-packing the backpack. "And we're not doing anything at all for another week. And then -", he says, getting to his feet just as Dean presses the button and inhales so hard his eyes nearly go crossed, and his chest heaves with repressed coughs, "-you're going to take up jogging. And wheatgrass smoothies or whatever. 'Kay?"
Dean looks confused for a moment, then lurches to his feet, looking wobbly and pale, his skin shining with sweat. Sam can hear his pulse from where he's standing, almost.
"Aw, Sam, you know I love it when you go all bossy."
"Yeah, well. Look at where we are. By the time we make it to the car, you're going to be on your knees thanking me for taking charge. A dog, Dean? Since when are we animal cops, huh?"
He keeps up the bitching all the way back to the car, three and a half straight hours of pure whining, but he keeps his pace slow and careful, doesn't let branches flop back into Dean's face, and they break often and long enough that Sam thinks a four year old could probably overtake them without much difficulty.
It takes them all morning to get back, but Sam doesn't particularly mind. He's got two weeks of whining to make up for, and all the time in the world.
-fin-