LIKE A POPCORN

He was dreaming about microwave ovens, which, as far as dreams went, was pretty lame.

It wasn't a happy dream. It wasn't exactly a bad dream either. Just the bipping of the microwave oven, relentlessly warning him that his popcorns was done. The odd thing, however, was that he knew exactly how that bloated corn felt, heated up and swollen until it was unrecognizable as corn and had become something else. Odder still was the fact that the bipping went on and on, even after he opened the damn microwave door.

Dean came to with a jolt, still lost somewhere in the middle of willing the microwave oven to shut the hell up and feeling some strange kinship with popcorns. Despite realizing that it had all been a dream, the bipping and the bloated feeling remained. His mouth tasted like plastic and salt.

"Mr. Cooper? Mr. Cooper, sir? Are you awake?"

Dean ignored the female voice. He didn't recognize it and he sure didn't know who Mr. Cooper was, so he'd leave those two to deal with each other and focus on his problems instead.

He was in a hospital bed. It was impossible to mistake the feeling of a plastic covered mattress; even hidden as it was under the scratchy sheets he could feel under his fingers. The smell didn't fool anyone either.

"Mr. Cooper? Sir, could you open up your eyes for me?"

He curled his toes, happy to find out that everything seemed to be in working order, even if that slight movement did managed to wake up a battery of sore spots all the way up his body. Dean couldn't remember being in a fight, but he sure felt beat up.

Had they been hunting something and lost? Pool hustling, maybe? Why wasn't Sam—

"Sam!" Dean yelled in a whisper that barely managed to leak out, voice raspy and raw, like his whole throat had been scrubbed clean.

The lights above his head were too bright and made it terribly hard to focus on anything aside from the glowing halos and an unfocused nurse, standing beside him. Beyond her, nothing more than an open door and a busy hallway filled with more blurry people.

"Where's 'am?" Dean rasped out again.

Even though her face was nothing more than a blurry blob of soft brown, Dean could read her confusion. She had no idea of whom he was talking about.

And then he remembered. Cooper. She had been calling him Cooper, which meant that they were using fake ID's, which mean Sam was probably not Sam at all.

Dean accepted the straw that collided with his lips and pulled a gulp of cold water. He'd thought that it would feel good, that it would be just what his throat needed to get rid of that feeling of sandpaper all the way to his lungs.

It felt like razor blades going down.

"Easy, Mr. Cooper," the blurry nurse supplied, pulling the straw away, saving it from Dean's convulsing coughs. "You've got to give your throat some time to heal... it's only been a few hours."

Dean blinked, trying to coerce his eyes to see better. The nurse remained a blob.

"Was there," he tried again. Sam was around here, somewhere, and he needed to know if his brother was okay. The fact alone that Sam wasn't in the room with him, standing by his bedside... "Was there a guy with me? Mid-twenties... really tall?"

The nurse shook her head. "I'm sorry sir," she said, actually sounding sincere in her apologies. "I just came back from vacations today... I don't know who has been around to visit you."

Dean sunk back into the hard bed. The annoying bipping coming from above his head gave a chirping double pass and managed to sound terribly out of tune for a couple of seconds.

The nurse's face, focused on the monitor, didn't seem too happy with the new jingle. "I'll get your doctor," she said, propping a metallic file at the end of Dean's bad and moving to the door. "She'll want to know that you're awake."

"Wait," Dean called out before she left him alone with his questions and doubts. "What the hell happened to me?"

A flash of teeth, a gentle smile. "Severe allergic reaction," she provided. "You were very lucky, Mr. Cooper. From what I heard, if someone hadn't happened to have a Epi-Pen on them at the time it happened, you would've gone into anaphylactic shock before reaching the hospital... and we wouldn't be having this conversation."

Sam.

It had be Sam.

And since when had Sam started to carry Epi-Pens around?

Dean closed his eyes and tested his throat with a swallow. It felt like crap, but at least he could identify it now: the oh-so-sweet aftertaste of having a plastic tube shoved down his throat.

God... Sam had to be worrying sick about him...

He needed to get out of there and find his brother, but for the time being, maybe it was best to give his sore body a little more rest.

More footsteps, heels in tandem with sneakered feet. Dean opened his eyes with a gritty feeling that he hadn't noticed the first time. He had no idea of how much time had passed, not from the artificial lights from the still busy hall beyond his door, and certainly not from his windowless room. He just knew time had passed.

A dark haired woman had come in, with a teenager hanging from her hand.

The kid let go of the woman's hand and raced to Dean's bed, scrawny arms surrounding Dean's head and pillow in the same movement, teary face disappearing in Dean's shoulder before he could actually see the kid's features.

It didn't matter though. He knew without even looking. Ben was wearing the blue sweater that Dean had given him for his birthday.

"Careful, sweetie," Lisa warned, as she moved closer at a more curbed pace. There was a sad happiness in her voice as she moved her attention from her son to the man on the bed. "You scared the crap out of us."

Dean recovered enough to return Ben's hug with a one-armed hold of his own, while his other hand curled around Lisa's fingers.

Ben and Lisa.

Ben and Lisa, who were his family now.

"Why didn't you tell us about your pineapple allergy? Did you even know you had one? God, probably not... we never should've have gone to that stupid barbecue... I thought I'd lost you Dean," Lisa went on, carefully taking a seat on the bed, her body pressed against Dean's leg. "We thought we'd lost you."

He was living with Ben and Lisa now. He was Mr. Cooper now.

He'd stopped being Dean Winchester when the world almost ended.

When his world ended.

"I was so worried, Dean... we both were," Lisa said, her voice dropping to a heavy whisper. A whisper that told of watching him bloat up after taking a bite of the wrong fruit, of looking at Dean while he tried to take a breath and failed to push any air through a swollen throat. That told of hours pacing the ER's waiting room only to be told that, until the swelling went down, Dean had be put on a ventilator. "Promise me you'll never do that again."

Dean didn't answer. Couldn't answer, only glanced down at her hand clutched tightly in his, only giving it a tight squeeze.

He nodded instead, not actually promising, but needing to do something to erase the pain from Lisa's eyes, the tears from Ben's face. He couldn't bear to deal with their pain and his.

There was nothing to be done about his pain, about the hole in his chest.

Dean felt like crying himself.

There were no more Winchesters.

And there was no more Sam.

The end

AN: Big thank you to Jackfan2, for the beta-work. All remaining mistakes are mine.