FACING YOUR DEMONS
Chapter 8
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A two hundred mile drive was tiring enough, but a two hundred mile drive, firstly with a great unco-ordinated lump of a brother climbing over you inspecting your hair for butterflies, then with a great unconscious lump of a brother sprawled out asleep over you, tested Sam's driving skills to the extreme.
By the time the Impala pulled up outside the moonlit bunker, Sam was tired, aching, dishevelled and drool-stained.
He awkwardly shuffled out from under the 180 pounds of comatose Dean who had somehow, over the course of their journey, managed to worm his squid-like way almost entirely across the front bench seat to leave Sam driving the car from thirteen square inches of space squashed against the doorframe.
Walking round the gleaming black curves of the Impala's hood, Sam opened the passenger door and crouched down beside his brother's unconscious form.
"Hey dude, we're home," he murmured in an attempt to wake Dean gently.
The merest flicker of eyelids and a muffled snort was his only response.
He gently squeezed Dean's shoulder; "hey bro', you with me?"
"S'm-my," the incoherent murmur came from between Dean's slightly parted lips as his eyes flickered open, and squinted through the darkness at his brother's face.
"That's right dude, it's me," he grinned; "we're home, c'mon you gotta have your pills, then you can go see your bed; it's probably wondering where you are!"
Blinking rapidly, Dean groaned through a timid, one-sided yawn, and Sam couldn't help but notice how swollen and bruised his side of his face looked. He grimaced; he knew it had been for the best, but it was still painful to look at.
Shuffling inelegantly into something that might be described as a sitting position if one were feeling charitable, Dean slumped into the back of the seat, seemingly out of ideas as to what to do next.
Sam gave a wry smile; he knew what he had to do.
"Hey Dean," he coaxed; "let me help, huh? Just this once."
He took the lack of a meaningful response as tacit agreement as he ducked into the car, and rearranged Dean's pliant limbs into a suitable position for carrying.
Grunting with the effort as he lifted Dean's weight into his arms, he was relieved to hear that Dean was snoring peacefully into the crook of his neck and didn't seem to have any particular objection to being manhandled in this way.
"There's no-one to see this dude, and we can deny it ever happened," Sam reassured, even though he was pretty sure Dean couldn't hear him; "although I can't promise I won't use it against you as blackmail material some time," he added with a grin.
"B-bitsch," Dean grumbled blearily into his neck.
Okay, apparently Sam was wrong.
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As Sam decanted Dean on his beloved bed, it was hard to tell which of the Winchesters was more exhausted.
Floating between awareness and sleep, Dean was trying hard to co-operate as Sam worked him out of his outer layer of clothes and gently pushed two antibiotic capsules between his lips, coaxing him to drink, preferably without choking.
Somewhat relieved that the butterflies didn't seem to have followed them home, Sam lingered in Dean's room for a moment to reassure himself that Dean was finally settled. The elder brother lay burrowed down under his beige comforter, the soft, rhythmic rise and fall of his chest a fair indication of the deep and healing sleep that had overtaken him.
That was when Sam finally felt able to retire to his own room. He managed to tug off his boots and overshirt before slumping bonelessly onto the mattress. He was asleep before his head touched linen.
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"You're not obsessed, just concerned," Sam told himself as he looked in on Dean on his way to the bathroom for a pee around three a.m. He conveniently disregarded the fact that he then couldn't resist another quick peek as he was returning from the same comfort break less than a minute later.
He looked in once again when curiosity got the better of him about an hour after that, and succumbed to a further check on the way back to his room after he had taken that opportunity to divert to the kitchen for a glass of water.
But Sam definitely wasn't obsessed; he was just being sensibly cautious.
Each time, he had been relieved to see Dean sound asleep and seemingly not in any discomfort, and that was totally what he expected because, well, he wasn't obsessed.
The fifth and final time he had looked in on Dean was around five thirty a.m. after he had finally realised he wasn't going to get any more sleep, despite the fact that he wasn't obsessed, and so he made his way to the kitchen to brew a much-needed coffee.
He'd been sitting at the kitchen table for around two hours, trying and failing to read a book when he heard the sound he had been waiting the whole time to hear. (Okay, so maybe he was just a teeny little bit obsessed.)
Footsteps.
Or more appropriately, the sound of bare feet shuffling wearily along the linoleum flooring which lined the corridor linking all the Batcave's various rooms.
When he eventually entered the room, Dean's appearance was no more wholesome than the sound of his approach.
His haggard face was pallid to the point of greyness, except for the bulging swell of his inflamed cheek and jawline which was mottled with an impressively technicolor array of bruising. Sleep-glazed eyes blinked blearily from within charcoal-grey smudges as his face twisted into a grotesquely crooked yawn and he stretched, folding his arms behind his head a long, joint-cracking, muscle-popping stretch.
He eventually relaxed, coughed, and absently scratched at a sliver of belly exposed by his T-shirt riding north on his stretch. He stared in vacant silence at Sam.
"Dude, you look like crap!" Sam observed casually.
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tbc