This is a continuation to By Your Side and Forever and Always, aka the 'verse where Sam and Hallucifer are BFFs and things are Angsty and Awkward. I think this can stand alone, but it might be helpful to read the other stories first. They're fairly short.
Summary: The boys go on a hunt. Sam's sick. Dean's struggling. Lucifer's there.
Warnings: SPOILERS for s7 till 7.07: The Mentalists. Violence, blood, weirdness, metaphor-abuse, present-tense.
Disclaimer: I don't own Supernaturalor any of its characters.
Through Every Winter
"We've gotta finish this tonight," Dean says.
Sam shoves his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and shivers. "It's only been a couple of days since we found this hunt," he says, his voice scratching around painfully inside his throat. "We need to—know what we're up against."
Dean sighs, paws agitatedly through his duffel. "Supernatural creature killing people in the woods over the past two weeks, first poisoning them and tearing them to shreds. What more—"
Sam squeezes his eyes shut against a familiar throbbing in his head. "That's hardly—"
"We've worked with less before," Dean says with practiced flippancy, although his hands are shaking and he's thrown the duffel aside and resorted to pacing in a tight circle in front of the beds. "Besides, if I have to listen to one more 'bizarre witness account', I might just have to kill myself."
"Like you aren't doing a perfectly wonderful job of that already," Lucifer comments from where he's sitting on the other bed.
"Shut up," Sam mutters without thinking, and Dean stops pacing and stares at him, arms akimbo. "We've got to finish this tonight, Sam," he says again, and Sam can hear the hysteria lapping at the edges of his voice. I need a drink, Sam, is what he's really saying, because one of the few rules they have left is that they don't get drunk on the job—not when Sam is seeing things, not when neither of them can really trust the other's judgment.
"Okay," Sam says. "Okay, we'll go tonight."
Dean nods curtly, as if he'd known that he'd get Sam's approval all along, then starts packing weapons with the same frantic agitation. Sam lets out a breath, falls back on the bed, and closes his eyes. He coughs a bit, rubs his chest.
The sounds of Dean packing cease for a bit, and Dean asks, a little hesitantly, maybe even a little fearfully (or maybe Sam's just imagining it), "You okay, Sam?"
My chest hurts, Sam wants to say. I feel blocked up and shitty and cold and I think I'm running a fever.
He thinks of Dean's shaking hands and Lucifer whispering in his ear, every night, you will be okay, Sam. I'm here. I'm here.
"I'm fine," he says, and Lucifer snorts.
It comes out of the foliage dripping in the light drizzle, huge and sleek. Its body, at least four feet long, gleams in the moonlight, its tail curling high above, the sharp stinger poised to attack. A human face stares at them with piercing blue eyes, and when its lips draw back in a snarl, they can see three rows of very sharp teeth.
"Manticore," Sam breathes, not daring to move a muscle. Next to him, Dean tenses, hands tightening around his shotgun. "We are so fucking screwed."
Manticores can be killed by a bullet or knife to the heart, but they make for notoriously difficult prey—their stinger contains a potent poison, and can fling poisoned spikes across large distances with great precision. Even if you evade those, its claws and teeth can tear you apart before you get anywhere its heart.
This hunt was such a bad idea.
"I'm starting to think you jumped the gun on this one," Lucifer says, and Sam has to bite his tongue to keep from saying shut up, you're going to provoke it. The three (four) of them stay still for a few more nerve-wracking seconds, before Dean hefts his shotgun, and the manticore charges at them with a sharp sound that seems to pierce right through Sam's brain.
Both of them dive out of the way. Dean tries to get off a shot when the manticore lands, but it merely grazes the beast's flank and only succeeds in making it angrier. It swings its tail back and forth, flinging a shower of spikes their way. Sam ducks behind a tree, and hears the rapid thak-thak of the spikes hitting the wood.
"Gotta run," Dean says, his hand briefly on Sam's, then he's hurtling into the forest.
Sam can't quite seem to catch his breath, but there's the sharp, unearthly cry of the manticore again, and he's running even before he has time to think.
His breath burns in and out of his chest, and he wants so desperately to just stop for a few seconds and cough out all of the fluid that's barely allowing him to breathe. He's dizzy with it; the world becomes a blurring and shifting maze, dark and wet, and all he knows, all he's sure of, is that the beast is following him, claws deceptively quiet against the forest floor—
The sound of another gunshot rends the night, followed by the manticore's cry.
It yanks Sam out of his manic run, and he staggers, the world spinning nauseatingly around him. He's sweating despite the cold, and when he rubs the sweat and the rain out of his eyes and turns—
The hideous, not-human face is inches from his, lips pulled back in an awful facsimile of a leer. Sam stands frozen, utterly powerless, and feels what little breath he has catch in his chest. This is it, he thinks, this is when I die, and he wants to laugh and cry at the same time because we all know what 'death' means, don't we? It's just an excuse for all of it to start over again. And again, and again, and again...
"Sam! Down!"
A lifetime of instinct has him falling back to the ground at those words, the same time he feels the stinger, aiming for his abdomen, graze his thigh instead. There's the sound of another gunshot right above him, and he flinches as the beautiful cry of the manticore chokes off with a wet gurgle. Dean's got it in the heart this time; rich red blood pumps out of it as the beast gives one last agonised cry before swaying and toppling forward. Sam barely manages to roll himself out of the way before the manticore falls, shaking the earth and splattering mud everywhere.
"Sam!" Dean cries and rushes to his side. Sam stares up at him, breaths like knife-stabs through his chest, and says, "Dean, you—" before a terrible pain starts somewhere in his right leg, builds and builds and builds until he's on fire, for two hundred years he was on fire, never-ending and all-consuming, and he wants to scream, he's screaming, but his voice chokes off, turns into a bout of coughing so unmerciful he's praying for unconsciousness—
When the coughing stops, he finds himself against Dean's chest, cheek pressed against flannel. He wants to move—this isn't really helping him breathe—but he's limp, utterly drained, and Dean's shaking, clinging like Sam's all he's got left (Sam's all he's got left).
"Why didn't you tell me you were sick, you idiot," Dean says finally.
Sam can see Lucifer crouching, just behind Dean's shoulder. His leg hurts, his skin's on fire and he can barely breathe, but Lucifer smiles at him and Dean's there, and Sam buries his face further into his brother's chest and tries not to laugh.
Dean's got one of Sam's arms slung over his shoulders, and they're making the slow, painful journey back to the car. Sam can barely keep track of the sensations he's being bombarded with—the rain feels like ice-cold needles against his skin, but he's still burning, isn't he? He's burning from the inside, and there's no part of him that burns fiercer than where the manticore's stinger grazed his leg. He might not have gotten a full dose of the poison, but it still fucking hurts.
"I know, Sammy, just a little more and we're there," Dean murmurs, and Sam wonders idly if he's been talking aloud.
"Oh, you are," Lucifer says. He's walking on Sam's other side, straight-backed and cheerful, his hands shoved into his pockets. "The whole injured-sick-delirium thing. You're doing it rather well. Giving your brother an excuse to play nursemaid again? Because let me tell you: it makes him feel good."
"Of course it does," Sam says tiredly. Dean glances at him, but chooses not to comment.
"Which brings us to the question," Lucifer continues thoughtfully, "why don't you let him do it all the time? Seeing you two dance around each other's problems is only entertaining until a certain point, Sam. After that?" He gives a mock-shudder. "The angst is, frankly, suffocating."
"Screw you," Sam starts to say, but he's coughing again, and this time it feels as if his throat is tearing itself apart. Dean pauses, hitches Sam closer, rubs gentle circles on his back until the fit subsides. Sam lets his head fall and thinks why not, why not, why not.
Sam can barely keep his eyes open by the time they get back to the cabin. The constant pain's wearing him down, and he can't seem to draw enough breath to keep conscious. He finds himself surrendering to Dean's actions in a way he hasn't since—well, he can't remember, maybe when he was a goddamn toddler or something, because that's about how strong he feels right now.
"Aw, would you look at that," Lucifer says. "All that brotherly love—it's practically heart-warming."
Sam wants to tell him off, but Dean's removing his boots and stripping off his wet outer clothes and lowering him onto a delightfully warm bed and—Sam's forgotten what he wanted to say. Dean's rattling through their meagre collection of meds, talking about—something or the other, Sam can't tell, and he doesn't really care. He's missed this so much.
Then Dean turns, empty-handed, and says, "I'm sorry, Sam," and Sam wonders what he's missed.
"I'm sorry," Dean says, and his hands are shaking, the skin of his face stretched tight over his skull, and suddenly he's just as vulnerable as the rest of them, as Sam. "This—whole thing. It was my fault. If I hadn't insisted that we—point is, we went in blind, and you got hurt, and—I'm sorry."
Sam stares at him. "It's okay," he rasps.
"Right—right. Okay," Dean says and turns back, and Sam remembers Dean hasn't drunk anything for a while now. He almost wants to jump out of bed and push a bottle of beer at his brother, because this isn't how he wants Dean to realise how fucked-up he's getting. Not this way.
Lucifer settles next to Sam on the bed, rubs his shoulder with warm warm warm hands. "You were wondering why not earlier," he says. "I guess this is why."
Sam feels the last of his strength drain out of him, and he descends into a dreamless sleep.
He wakes up shivering a few hours later.
He shifts restlessly, feels the pain flare again, and opens his mouth to call for his brother, but only succeeds in provoking another coughing fit. Lucifer's there almost immediately, making quiet little soothing sounds, rubbing his chest until the coughing stops. Sam forces his eyes open to see Dean slumped in an awkward position on the other bed, snoring away, several empty bottles by his side.
"Hey," Lucifer says. "Hey, Sammy."
Sam grunts, and feels Lucifer climb into the bed. He lies snugly against Sam, loops one arm around his middle. It's warm, carries the comfort of over a century of protection and mending, and Sam can already feel the pain start to recede.
"Remember, Sam," Lucifer says in his ear, "I can be anybody you want me to be."
"Thank you," Sam says, and isn't surprised in the least to realise that he means it. "Thank you."
Finis