My personal computer doesn't work, so I had write the first draft of this out longhand and transfer it to my work computer manually. Awesome. This chapter is another mega-multi-rewrite, but I think the final version (after like ten personal drafts and three separate beta-reviewed drafts) is pretty good. I hope you agree.

Thanks to all my reviewers; your encouragement and dedication is what's given me the will to see this through, despite all the changes (good changes, but still difficult ones) in my life.

Before any of you complain that this is the last chapter, there WILL be an epilogue; I didn't close everything up neatly like I prefer to in this chapter.

Thanks especially to K. Hanna Korossy. She now knows this chapter almost as well as I do, which is to say she could probably recite half of it by heart. I went through three separate draft-stages with her on this, and she was patient with me throughout. She is a great beta and a great writer.

Disclaim, disclaim disclaim.

With that, Chapter 15

Enjoy,

Kohadril

Chapter 15: Communication

Dean sat slumped in the off-blue upholstered chair by the foot of his brother's hospital bed. His head hanging, he stared vacantly at his knees.

He'd been sitting there for about thirty minutes. The last few days he'd spent most of his time there, but for three hours that morning he'd been out, taking care of some things.

Sam was asleep. With the quantity of drugs he was on, he slept a lot. It was better this way; Dean could pretend Sam was okay. Meaningless muttering, bouts of random terror, total lack of awareness of what was around him: that hurt like hell to see. Of course, the restraints on Sam's wrists and ankles kind of ruined the effect.

Dean looked up and watched Sam's chest rise and fall slowly a couple of times. Sam let out a moan and started to struggle against his restraints, but he didn't wake. Dean reached out and grabbed Sam's right foot, the nearest piece of his body not covered by the blanket, hoping the physical contact might calm him.

"You're okay," Dean whispered, gently rubbing the smooth skin of Sam's sole. Sam seemed to settle down. Dean wanted to believe it was a reaction to him, but at that moment, it wasn't enough. Even after Sam had quieted, Dean felt empty. He needed more than that from his brother, even if he had no reason to expect it. He needed recognition.

Dean ran his thumbnail underneath the ball of his brother's foot and watched Sam curl his toes. He knew it was a reflex, but it was also communication of a kind. That little flex was an acknowledgment, however unconscious and involuntary, that Dean existed.

Dean's heart ached. It was more than he ever got when Sam was awake.

He let his eyes lose focus, relaxing his grip without letting go completely. He wondered how long it had been since he'd really slept.

His mind wandered, taking him back a few hours to a scene he didn't want to revisit. He shuddered and shook his head, trying to pull himself out of his thoughts, if only for a few more minutes. But there it was, right in front of him, and he couldn't ignore it any longer. He barely kept the tears out of his eyes. Whether his brother could hear him or not, Dean needed to talk.

"Sam," Dean started quietly, in a rough, excruciated voice. "I think I just did something really bad."

Something was wrong. The young woman had been shrieking and glancing around the room in horror intermittently for over five minutes now. It wasn't uncommon for patients to get excited like this, but episodes didn't last this long.

Ben Matthews shook his head, trying to force his brain to function. He knew he should be doing something; he shouldn't just be sitting here by this woman's bed, watching her suffer. The truth was, the doctor was barely hanging on. It had been weeks since he'd slept well. He needed an answer to what was going on here, and he'd reached the limits of the available research. Now he spent his workdays observing patients, hoping something would come to him.

His mind slid back into gear. The room was still filled with terrified sounds, the woman shaking her bed as she battled her restraints. What to do? Medication, right. Matthews stood slowly, almost ignorant of the woman's struggles, and grabbed her chart from the wall. He blinked tiredly and perused the record.

It took a moment for him to see it, but then he did. This woman's resident, a Dr. Brandt, had messed up. He hadn't given her any antipsychotic medication in just under two days.

Matthews instantly snapped back to full awareness and looked directly into the face of the woman he'd been watching.

She was clearly insane. She was also clearly staring right back at him, incoherent but aware.

"Washington says he's sorry," Dean said evenly, trying, as though Sam could hear him, as though it would matter if he could, to keep the pain and uncertainty out of his voice. "He didn't want to, at first. I changed his mind." Dean stifled a shudder. "It took him a couple of tries to convince me he meant it."

Of course Sam didn't respond. He was asleep, and even were he awake, he wouldn't register any of this. But this was still a confession, and Dean was almost worried about what his brother might think.

"There's a good reason for you to get better," Dean observed with a cheerless smirk, his voice raw. "Without your bitch-boy morality lectures, I can get pretty dark."

Dean let go of Sam and looked down, putting his hands in his lap.

"I killed him, man. And it wasn't self-defense. It wasn't even about stopping him from trying another apocalypse," Dean continued. "I've got his journal. Found it under the floorboards of his compound after the cops swept the place. Turns out that trick he pulled won't work again for another two hundred years. And I didn't just find that out. I had the book before I found him—it's how I found him, actually."

Dean was having trouble controlling his demeanor.

"He deserved it," Dean defended, as though his brother were arguing with him. "What he did to all those people, what he did to you…I didn't make it easy on him, but he fucking deserved what he got and more, and I'm not sorry—"

Dean's voice gave out. He tried to swallow the lump growing in his throat.

"So why does it feel like this?" he managed, the guilt and shame flowing over into his voice. "And how do I make it stop?"

"Mrs. Desmond? It's Dr. Matthews from the hospital." Matthews braced for the yelling that almost immediately ensued. "No, ma'am, I'm not trying to convince you to bring your daughter in. I just want to know—ma'am?"

Matthews sighed deeply and waited for an opening. It took a little while.

"Ma'am, are you done?" Matthews asked, provoking another fifteen seconds of ranting. He decided to interrupt before the inevitable hang-up. "Mrs. Desmond, all I need to know is if there has been any change in your daughter's condition in the last three days."

The silence that followed was an excellent sign. Then the woman answered a breathless affirmative.

"Ma'am, I'm not going to ask you to bring her here, but would you mind if I came out to see her? You're still in town, aren't you?"

The expected questions came.

"We have another patient here who's had a change in condition, and I need to know why." The doctor smiled in relief as he got the answer he was looking for. "Thank you very much, Mrs. Desmond, I'll see you in about twenty minutes."

"I'm sorry. I didn't know how you felt," Dean said. The words were heavy, but being able to say them, here in Sam's presence, was liberating. "I mean, I knew you weren't okay, but if it weren't for…"

Dean took a shallow breath. "You're not worthless. You're not a wimp. You're not weak. I'd take back every time I ever beat you at anything, every time I ever made fun of you, if I could just convince you."

Dean could imagine Sam's denial. In fact, he could almost hear it.

"You think I'm some kind of hero, Sam, but you don't understand where it comes from." He couldn't believe he was saying this. He couldn't believe he never had before now.

"Before you, I was a normal kid. I wasn't strong. I cried a lot. Dad told me I was a whiny little bitch.

"But holding you that night, after the fire…I changed. Dad said he could count on one hand the number of times he saw me cry after that.

"When I was seven or eight, Dad started talking about how I had to take care of you, how it was my responsibility as much as his. He didn't have to say any of it, though. I got it. I had to be strong for my little brother. By then, I'd known it for years.

"It helped me when I was scared, knowing that you needed me to be brave. It helped me work hard, too—I don't have your nerdy discipline. I hated school and I can't sit still. But anything Dad could teach me, anything that could help me look out for you, I'd practice for hours without getting bored. And yeah, I've got good instincts. I'm a hell of a fighter, hell of a shooter. Some stuff just comes easy.

"But the point is, you're the secret, Sam. When you left, I spent three years just going through the motions. You can't ask him now, but if you'd asked Dad how I was then...

"I know it seems like nothing gets to me, but I'm only like that because you're here. Because somebody has to take care of you, and a scared, stupid, self-hating wreck isn't going to get the job done."

Dean looked up into his brother's face, noting once more how misleadingly normal he looked when he was asleep. Dean shook his head, blinking away the moisture blurring his vision.

"So if you're thinking about leaving me again, thinking maybe I'm tough enough to survive it, I'm not. You're what makes me strong. Girly as it sounds, I really do need you, bro."

The Desmond girl was much the same as the first woman. Four calls to the families of victims who had left the city yielded only one more patient who had been taken off the antipsychotics, but that one, a young boy, had also apparently changed considerably in the last three days. Of course, Matthews couldn't personally examine him, but this was a pattern that couldn't be denied.

How was he was going to get anyone to allow him to do a therapeutic trial? No one would want to take their loved ones off medication, particularly given how horrible the early stages of remission—if indeed that's what it was—appeared to be. Additionally, Matthews had no understanding of the causal mechanism between taking the patients off the drugs and the change in their condition. Without that, it would take far more evidence than he had to convince the hospital administration to let him do anything.

Then he remembered: he had at least one patient whose family was unlikely to be hung up on bureaucratic procedure or medical ethics.

"I never told you—I never tell you anything. I never fucking told you why I'm so sure you won't turn," Dean forced out, no longer able to maintain his composure and no longer caring.

"There's something inside you, Sammy—it's been there as long as I can remember. The things we see, the things we do, they still get to you, after all these years. Even after everything that's happened to our family, to you, you've still got some kind of faith that all the evil stuff out there is what's unnatural, and that things are supposed to be good."

"I know you won't turn because I haven't turned yet. You're a good man, bro. The best I know. And if I haven't gone dark, you sure as hell won't.

"I need that now," Dean continued quietly. "I need you to give me some hope, 'cause I'm fresh out of it here. I'm not ready to…do what you wanted me to, even if I know you're in pain. But if I get there sometime soon, the only way I can picture it happening involves two bullets: one for you, one for me. So we're clear, Sammy? If I outlive you, it won't be for very long."

With that, Dean felt he had said enough; however dark things still were, he had released enough to avoid being overwhelmed. Perhaps even enough to get a few hours of rest. He lay back in the chair and closed his eyes.

He was almost asleep when a knock at the door jostled him back to full alertness.

"Mr. Winchester?"

"Yeah," Dean growled, his voice rough from exhaustion. He ran a hand heavily through his hair, more to clear his head than anything else, and turned in his seat to face the voice.

"Do you mind if I come in?" Dr. Matthews continued, looking as spent as Dean felt.

"No. But if we're gonna talk, I'd rather do it in the hall. Don't want to wake him up," Dean said, thrusting a thumb at his brother.

The pair quietly retreated from the room, Dean pausing before he shut the door behind him. He gave his sleeping brother a final look, and couldn't help doubt that Sam would ever look like this—like the brother he knew—again when he was awake.

The hardest part was the waiting. The first twenty-four hours there was no change. Sam slept less, but he wasn't any more aware. It hurt to watch, but Dean couldn't turn away; he had nowhere else to be, and the doctor made sure they weren't bothered by nurses or other hospital staff.

It was almost like a fever that had to be allowed to build so it would eventually break. Sam's delusions and hallucinations became more and more powerful, more and more commanding, but also more and more immediate.

In the second twenty-four hours, things started to happen. Sam noticed his restraints first. Whereas before he had struggled against them absently, unaware of what was stopping him, now they became an obvious focus of his attentions. He pulled against them, fought them, ripped them off the bed. Stronger restraints were quickly required; Dean had to hold his brother down for them to be applied. No medications were administered, though, for fear of relapse.

Sam made eye contact, several times. He didn't seem to recognize Dean, but he appeared to know Dean was a person, an entity other than himself. That was a start. During that long second day, a horrible kind of progress was made. Every new milestone was reached after fresh hardships and painful glimpses for Dean into his brother's damaged psyche.

Yet for all its intensity, for all its difficulty, it was a thousand times better than watching nothing at all.

Not for the first time that week, Dean awoke from a brief nap to the sound of his brother stirring.

He was slow to react. He'd been down this road many times over the last few days. If Sam was going to go ape-shit, the restraints would hold him; the new ones were pretty unbreakable. Dean would do his best to calm his brother down, like he always did, and get maybe a few seconds of combative eye contact for his efforts.

No sounds came out of Sam, which made Dean finally look up. It was rare enough these days that Sam didn't freak out at least for a while after waking.

Sam was shaking. Shaking and looking right at him. There was fear and confusion in his eyes, but also a glimmer of real recognition.

Dean was speechless, overwhelmed. The chair was near the middle of the bed, so he grabbed his brother's hand—it was the only thing he could think to do.

"Sam? Sammy?"

The moment of silence couldn't have been more than a few seconds. It felt much longer. Sam looked like he was going to speak a few times before he actually did; there were tears in his eyes, and he jolted once as though in reaction to something Dean couldn't see or hear.

"Dean?" he eventually said, tentative and suspicious, like he expected something horrible to happen.

Dean practically choked on a laugh, a wave of euphoria going through him. He squeezed his brother's hand a little more tightly and looked him in the eye. "Yeah, it's me, bro," he replied with a hopeful smile.

"They've—they've got me tied down," Sam said questioningly, tugging on his restraints. "I don't know where—er—what...but they're…"

Sam looked at Dean with the kind of anguished frustration that could only build. He jerked on his restraints again, this time much harder, and when he still couldn't move, he started to freak out, eyes darting around the room fearfully as though he expected attack, terrified it would come while he was bound and helpless. He was hallucinating, even if it looked like he was beginning to be able to tell what was real and what wasn't, working himself into a tearful panic.

"Sam, stay with me," Dean pleaded. This was not the Dean who had battled for Sam's sanity the week before; this Dean was out of fuel, spent, hysterical as he felt his brother slipping away again, even if only for a time. With his free hand, he grabbed Sam's shoulder, as if to keep him from escaping.

Somehow the kid's thrashing slowed, his brow furrowed. Sam was fighting. Fighting like he hadn't been able to just moments before. With titanic effort, he brought his grey-green eyes back to Dean's and kept them there, every second a battle to maintain his focus.

One moment, Sam had been spiraling towards insanity. The next, he was battling it. Dean's need, not his strength, had made the difference.

All at once, Dean knew what had happened that day at the altar. Sam hadn't lost control. He hadn't crossed that line for himself, either, nor for strangers. He hadn't turned until the demon had started working on Dean. Sam had sacrificed his conscience, given up his identity, risked his soul, for his brother.

Sam loved him as much as he loved Sam. All those times he'd said he'd do anything, he'd meant it.

And if Sam loved him that much? That meant Dean was worth more than he gave himself credit for, more than just the measure of what he gave to others. It meant his own wellbeing mattered. Their father had died, and Dean had slipped into life as a nothing, a no one; it had been so much easier than living with himself. Maybe it had even helped, for a time. But right now, in this place, Dean resolved to remember who he was, for his own sake as well as his brother's.

Sam's concentration wavered, his eyes coming off Dean's for just a moment. His little brother was losing the battle with his broken mind, and would probably lose many more as he recovered. Dean couldn't imagine how hard that would be, but a kid—a man as strong as Sam would survive it; of that Dean had no doubt. And to the extent it was possible, Sam wouldn't be fighting alone.

Sam strained to reclaim his focus, but when he succeeded, his emotions started to get the better of him. It all began to unravel: Sam's strength deserted him, the terror he'd been holding at bay flooding in. His eyes conveyed aching weakness, shame, dread as he lost the will to stand on his own. He started to panic again, and he turned to his brother.

"I'm scared," the kid whispered tearfully, admitting defeat, begging for help. It was as honest a statement as either of them had ever made.

Dean leaned in. He found he knew what he needed to say. "Do you trust me?" he asked with a reassuring smile.

Sam didn't speak; his tears didn't stop. But when he nodded, he did so with certainty.

Dean squeezed Sam's hand and shoulder affectionately. "Then don't worry, man. I'm here. Nothing bad is going to happen to you."