REST AND RELAXATION

Dean's feeling a little bit too rested and relaxed; the brothers end up in a race against time to find and deal with the cause before Dean relaxes beyond the point of no return ...

My usual rules apply here; not in any way related to canon. Warnings for a few naughty words and mentions of the sex trade (well, come on, it is Dean, after all!).

Disclaimer: I don't own them, so I'm just going to pretend, okay?

Chapter 1

xxxxx

Sam couldn't understand it.

He sat at the dining table, quietly watching Dean, seated opposite him, attempting to eat the meatloaf he'd spent the afternoon baking, and seemingly struggling to stay awake long enough to avoid faceplanting into it.

If it wasn't so pitiful, it would have been comical. Fighting to keep his drooping, leaden eyelids open, Dean was nodding; one … two … jerking awake with an indignant snort each time on the third nod.

And it was barely six pm.

No, Sam really couldn't understand it.

It would have been nice to think that it was a simple case of Dean being his usual self-neglectful self and not getting enough rest, except for the fact that Dean seemed to be all but hibernating at the moment.

In the rare moments when he wasn't a horizontal, snoring lump, sprawled in unconscious oblivion across his bed, or the couch, or the floor, or – on one memorable occasion – Sam's lap;he might as well have been asleep. This lethargic figure shambling round the house in a listless hollow-eyed daze was certainly not awake in any meaningful sense of the word.

Sam sighed, trying not to notice as Dean apathetically shovelled another forkful of meatloaf into his mouth, narrowly avoiding poking it up his nose in his unco-ordinated fatigue.

Now that Sam thought about the whole situation, Dean had been like this for a good couple of weeks now, maybe more.

The decline had been quite gradual. Sam had remembered Dean retiring to bed earlier than usual on a couple of evenings, and it hadn't even registered as something to concern himself with; he'd just guessed that Dean wanted some private time to do whatever Dean was wont to do during his private time, and Sam wasn't about to start speculating on that. Ever.

Then there had been the sleeping in. Dean had never needed a huge amount of sleep; he'd always functioned quite adequately on the few hours' shut-eye that the brothers' unorthodox lifestyle afforded. He'd generally always been an early riser, if not necessarily a morning person. Come to think of it, he wasn't exactly an afternoon or evening person either, but what Sam did know was that Dean had never been an idler; never one for lazing in bed when he could have been up and about, working on the next hunt.

But as he looked at Dean's glazed eyes staring trance-like across the table at some distant spot in the distance behind Sam's left shoulder, he began to feel the first pangs of concern.

For the first time he noticed that Dean didn't even look well. There was a bloodless pallor to his wan complexion, charcoal-dark smudges surrounding his eyes, deepening the sockets to make Dean's shapely face look unhealthily gaunt. Sam's eyes busily scanned the defeated hunch in which his brother held himself as he yawned widely, displaying a wad of chewed meatloaf. Under Sam's watchful gaze, Dean knuckled his eye, groaning softly. He was all in.

Sam's mind raced. Was it the 'flu? A virus? A spell? Whatever this was, even the copious amounts of coffee that Dean was imbibing wasn't making a dent in it - and that could never be a good sign.

And when Dean pushed away his plate, half his delicious, lovingly-baked meatloaf untouched, Sam knew for sure that something was very badly wrong.

He sighed. And pushed away his own plate; his appetite had followed Dean's and vanished without trace.

xxxxx

Dean blinked blearily as he tried to focus his vision. He felt like crap; complete and utter, total crap.

He couldn't ever remember feeling like this; like he was running on empty, like his battery was flat. He was exhausted in both mind and body, and the worst thing was, there appeared to be no good reason for it.

He couldn't understand it; he just couldn't figure out how he could possibly be coming down with anything. He wasn't a sickly person and so far as he knew, he hadn't been in contact with anyone who seemed sick. He hadn't had any infected injuries or skanky bites on any recent hunts, and he certainly hadn't eaten anything questionable. Heck, he didn't need to now he and Sam had their awesome kitchen here in the bunker. That room was Dean's domain and no creepy germ with an atom of sense would dare to enter its gleaming, tiled space for fear of getting its creepy protoplasmic ass wiped out with enough bleach to turn Yellowstone into Whitestone.

Nope, he wasn't feverish or nauseous; he didn't have a sore throat or sore head or bad guts, he just felt, well, like crap.

It so wasn't fair; the brothers had settled into something of a routine since taking up residence in the bunker, or as much of a routine as their lives allowed. They ate good, nourishing food which Dean cooked, and they had their own beds; clean, comfortable beds that made going to sleep a pleasure, not a cringe-making game of 'dodge the bedbugs'. They had privacy, comfort and security.

Thanks to his newly-acquired love of cooking, Dean had developed a rather embarrassing fixation for grocery shopping which Sam was all-to-happy to enable. Better still, he'd even found, much to his delight, a nice little establishment a few miles away on the edge of town where he could go and find a little personal 'relaxation' now and again.

Right now, life was as close to perfect as it was ever likely to get for the Winchesters and, if anything, Dean should have been feeling like a million dollars. Except the only thing he had in common with a million dollars right now, he reflected, was that he felt spent, green and crumpled.

On the basis that if he wasn't moping around thinking about how tired and wrecked he felt, he'd feel better, he tried to keep himself busy; servicing Baby, indexing the vaults, baking goddamn meatloaf... Bang up job he'd done there. He'd worn himself out by trying not to feel worn out.

And the worst thing was that he could just feel Sam's eyes boring into him; worrying about him and dissecting him. He could hear the wheels in Sam's head turning, cranking their way towards a full-on mother-hen bitch fit which Dean had neither the energy or the inclination to deal with right now.

All in all, the whole situation sucked ass and Dean would be perfectly entitled to feel royally pissed about the injustice of it all.

And he would indeed - if only he could muster the energy.

xxxxx

tbc