Disclaimer, Summary & Rating: Please see Chapter 1.

MILES TO GO BEFORE I SLEEP

Chapter 5

Either hell was like his hospital room, or Dean wasn't dead. After a moment, he plumped for Door No.2. Opening his eyes, Dean blinked a couple of times and noted that he had no blurry or foggy vision to contend with. Well, that was something. Other than that, he wasn't still warm and snugly, but he was still drifting in a cocoon of contented indifference that suggested they had only decreased the dosage of whatever slightly. Nevertheless, his body felt stiff in all the wrong places and he could feel a peripheral heaviness to his limbs that warned he should be very grateful he was highballed to the gills on painkillers. I wonder if I've still got all my limbs…

There was clear blue sky through the window and the room was light; in a chair in front of that window sat a large shape with floppy hair reading a newspaper…Sam. Dean moved his eyes around, but the hospital room was otherwise empty. Dean looked at his brother's bent head as Sam read the paper, considering what to do. If dad had been a drug-induced hallucination, mentioning it would only a) upset Sam and b) cause a reduction in his pain meds he wasn't quite ready for. If 'dad' had been a demon who was toying with Dean by letting him live so long for its own twisted reason, telling Sam would endanger his brother's safety…and if dad had been here and really been dad, 'fessing up to Sam would make him angry and he would take steps to stop Dad coming again. So keep your cakehole shut, Dean, he admonished himself.

Dean was content to just look at his brother and doze slightly until he began to itch slightly. He flexed muscles and tried to rub against the hospital sheets (hardly the softest thing he'd ever had against his skin) but no luck. He must have twitched again, noticeably.

"Dean?" Sam was standing beside the bed. "More ice chips?"

"Yeah…" Dean accepted the tiny slivers gratefully, sucking them to refresh his mouth and work on the lingering remains of the late Mr Skunk.

"You got an itch? I could scratch…" Sam saw him surreptitiously fidget.

"Not there you won't," Dean vetoed firmly.

Before Sam could respond, the door opened; a young and totally hot African-American nurse came in. She was Dean's every Halle Berry in a nurse's uniform wet dream come true.

She beamed at Dean as if he'd just discovered the cure for cancer. "You're awake, Mr Barnes, that's excellent."

Barnes… that had been what he'd needed to ask about the serendipity of them ending up in Winchester, New Hampshire – what alias were they using? He had a vague memory that the credit cards they'd been using this trip had been for Reece and Ryan Finchley, but he couldn't really remember, and those credit cards would only have paid for the ER treatment, not this hospital room…which was rather nice as well. Dean flicked a glance to Sam, but he looked blandly unconcerned, so Dean decided to worry about such things only if he had to.

"You can call me Dean," he dropped his voice half an octave and almost purred, ignoring the way Sam raised his eyes to the ceiling as if asking some higher being, Can you believe him? "and you are…?"

"You can call me 'Nurse'," she said firmly but with a twinkle in her delectable melted-chocolate eyes.

Sam gave a loud snort and glared at Dean with a clear 'behave' order in his eyes. "Can the doctor see Dean this morning?"

"He certainly will now you're awake and…reasonably…alert," she smiled at him, reducing Dean to a melted puddle of adoring goo, before giving Sam a significant glower as she added tartly, "but that won't be for a good hour, so plenty of time for you to take yourself off and at least get some food in your stomach."

Sam glared back at her, but Dean focussed on not just looking at his brother but actually seeing him…Yikes. Grey face, lank hair and red, dull eyes - with the entire Louis Vuitton luggage collection underneath them. "Take a break, Sammy."

"It's Sam," came the automatically reply, "and I'll be okay until the doctor's seen you."

"Sah-mee," Dean enunciated the word with as much pep as he could put into it. "Dude, you're not hearing the subtext."

"This from the guy whose eyeballs are pinwheeling in their sockets?"

Dean turned his head to the right, sniffing deeply and ostentatiously, "Bro', on my right, I have Coco Chanel, admittedly with unfortunate hints of carbolic…" turning his head to where Sam had stood up from his chair by the window, he sniffed again, "Over here I have the reek of old sweat and the pong of someone who's slept in the same pants for a week."

"Are you saying I smell?" Sam sputtered.

"I'm saying you're getting perilously close to stench. What nice Nurse 'Nurse' is too polite to say is that if you won't do us all a favour and go take a loooong shower, at least try and stick downwind."

"Really?" Sam looked at the nurse.

She gave him an apologetic smile, "Dr Field will be around in about an hour-and-a-half. That's more than enough time for you to get some breakfast and freshen up and be back. Don't worry, I'll make sure Dean is fine."

"Oh yeah…bye Sammy," Dean smirked at the nurse, who rolled her eyes.

"You offered," Sam also smirked at her before picking up his jacket and turning back to Dean. "I'll be back."

"Dude, where's your pride?"

Sam grinned, "Man, I've been waiting years to use that line."

Chapter 6

Sam's nose wrinkled as he slid into the driver's seat of the Impala. After he'd provided the hospital personnel with some startling excitement, he'd only left the hospital main building once since he'd burst into the ER half-carrying/half-supporting his precious burden. While Dean was in emergency surgery Sam had had to head off the sheriff, playing the preppy college boy for all he was worth; fortunately the man had bought it and Sam had chosen the 'Barnes' identities for this very reason, though eventually he would have to let Dean in on the story behind it. The background check the sheriff had undoubtedly done would corroborate his portrayal of Samuel Barnes and the Barnes' IDs were watertight – he had certainly paid enough for them to be so.

After dealing with the local law, Sam had washed himself up as best he could in a restroom and then moved the Impala to the darkest corner of the hospital's underground parking garage. He'd exchanged his bloodied T-shirt for one of Dean's, but the faint scent of his brother on the garment as he pulled it over his head had almost caused him to collapse in a blubbering heap of shock and fear for Dean's life. As he'd breathed in it had triggered a ghastly Technicolor replay of Dean grey and haggard in another hospital bed with some doctor telling him his twenty-six-year-old brother had had a massive heart-attack and was going to be dead inside six months…which had segued smoothly into another crystalline clear replay of his precognitive vision in Max Miller's closet…when Max had pulled the trigger and Dean's head had disappeared in a mess of blood and brains spattered on the bedroom wall...

So he'd left it at the T-shirt for his sanity's sake, just locking the car and returning the hospital. He'd eaten a couple of candy bars and caught a cat-nap in a side room but that was it. Considering the definite aroma permeating the Impala, Sam had to admit that Dean and Nurse…Castle, that was it…had probably had a point.

Driving away from the hospital, he pulled in at the first motel he reached. It was a level above the usual Winchester hotel accommodation, but you still had to pay extra for room cleaning, which Sam specifically didn't want, and they were still the sort of proprietors who preferred cash over cards and didn't bat an eyelid when everyone who signed the register seemed to be surnamed Smith. Sam paid for a ground-floor twin-bedded room in cash and stated that he wanted neither cleaning service nor disturbing for anything less than Armageddon itself.

Taking the Impala round the back of the motel, he parked it in the most sheltered corner of the parking lot, near his room. It was quick work to remove the false floor of the trunk and dump all his and Dean's 'tools of the trade' onto the currently unused bed; he had also removed their eclectic collection of IDs, Dean's Glock-17 and his own 9mm Beretta from the glove box back to the room. With the Impala restored to a superficially normal car once more, Sam locked his motel room and drove off again, finding what he was looking for in a local garage.

Though casually cordial, he saw the way their eyes gleamed at the sight of the 'classic' Impala, and Sam's sweet charm soon had them putty in his hands as he admitted to being one of the 'bear attack' brothers and regaled them with the terrifying tale. When he stated that the Impala had been a graduation present to Dean from 'our late mother,' they had been only too happy to help and he had used the Barnes' identity to pay up front. The garage assured him that they would give the Impala a complete overhaul and valet the inside to the point of sterilisation.

Grabbing a taxi back to the motel, Sam let himself into the room and locked it behind him, leaning wearily against it for a moment. There wasn't a millimetre of him that didn't hurt…a lot. Even his hair throbbed. He shrugged off his jacket, noting the faint dark spatters that the unobservant would take for coffee stains. The jacket was too expensive to discard, but there was a dry-cleaning service right next door to the hospital main entrance. As for his jeans, his original T-shirt and the one he was wearing of Dean's, they could all go in the trash, they were too ingrained with mud, forest grime…and his brother's blood.

Going into the bathroom, Sam found it a pleasant improvement on most for that price range. Apparently what the motel skimped in dusting the actual room they'd decided to lavish on providing a bathroom that wasn't a utopia for everything from Legionnaire's Disease through Ebola to the Black Death. The taps didn't exactly sparkle but all the fittings including the plugholes and the shower head were free from lime scale and there was no ubiquitous black mould in the tiling grout. Even better, instead of one of those skanky useless curtains that also safely harboured all known germs, the shower had actual frosted glass sides.

Looking at himself in the mirror, Sam admitted that he looked well…like how he usually felt – bone-weary. His hair was so greasy it shone as if someone had melted a tub of lard over his head. Sam lathered his hair vigorously twice and then allowed the hot spray to pound him back to wakefulness as he generously applied the cake of soap with equal enthusiasm. When he finally turned the shower off he felt exhausted but infinitely more human.

Drying himself off, he didn't get dressed straight away but treated himself to a wet shave instead of his usual rapid buzz with an electric razor. He didn't have the heavy whiskers of dad or Dean – note to self, don't let Dean look into a mirror without giving him a head's up – but he looked a lot less 'serial killer chic' once he'd shaved.

Grabbing Dean's holdall, he put in toiletries, clothing, plus shorts and a vest for Dean to sleep in, since keeping Dean Winchester willingly in that hospital gown was a non-starter. Checking their belongings were safely zipped up and showing nothing of interest just in case, he called another cab and went back to the hospital, alighting just outside the dry-cleaners, where Samuel Barnes paid for the jacket to be cleaned. Going into the hospital, Sam wasn't the slightest bit hungry but forced himself to eat a sandwich and drink a bottle of water from the café. Feeling infinitely more alert, he went back upstairs to where Dean and hopefully the doctor awaited.

Continued in Chapter 7…

© 2006, Catherine D Stewart