-Summary: It's the end of the world and they've got one last card to play. Castiel sends Dean back: back before everything. Now he has time to stop what's coming, but no friggin' clue how to do it. Time travel should really come with a manual. TIMELINE AU

-Chapter Warnings: Time to catch back up on Sammy's progress the last two days! Uh, Actual Warnings: this chapter ain't pretty, folks. There be angst ahead. Heads up for trigger warnings; descriptions of withdrawal and fever dreams. Dark descriptions of blood drinking, death, and misery all wrapped up in a package of suicidal thoughts. It's not as bad as it sounds, Sam'll be fiiiiiine.

-Actual Actual Chapter Warnings: okay, but no, seriously, this chapter goes very dark places, so please proceed with caution.

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

The Road So Far (This Time Around)

Season 2: Chapter 6

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

Sam made it back to Souix Falls in a little under twelve hours. He'd hit some nasty traffic through Chicago, which canceled out all the backroad, side route knowledge that usually made hunters so much faster than the average map user. It had given him plenty of time to oscillate between anger and the far lesser form of annoyance his brother was currently incurring within him.

Dean had never been the sharing kind, particularly when he was grieving or guilt-laden, but Sam hadn't expected him to leave.

Like father like son.

He immediately winced at the thought and resolved not to think such a cruel thing again. Especially now. The reasonable part of his brain, the part untouched by overwhelming emotion, the part that would have made such a good lawyer, knew Dean was probably trying. Or at least, his version of trying. Granted he sucked at it and Sam was fast approaching his limit of how much he could take of his brother's overprotectiveness, emotional constipation, and trust issues. Even with the conciliatory agreement to finally, finally come completely clean, Sam was still angry and irritable and definitely getting the short end of the stick, hand over hand. There wasn't going to be much left of the damn thing when all was said and done, and Dean would be a lucky son of a bitch if Sam didn't beat him with it in the end.

But he'd almost died. Dean had almost died in that hospital. Every time Sam got too angry, too worked up, a little voice in his head reminded him that he'd almost lost him altogether. The last family he had in this world. Then his mind would revert back to being just annoyed, coupled with the grief of loss and fear of the future. At least until he inevitably talked himself back into a fury.

He put the truck into park along the salvage yard's drive, grabbing his gear from the otherwise empty passenger seat, and tried not to feel the newest whirlwind of emotions at the fact that his brother wasn't sitting next to him. Anger, hurt, annoyance, loss, sorrow, worry, dread, more anger, and over all of it a thick, heavy film of bone-deep exhaustion.

Bobby was waiting for him at the screen door, a raised brow at the lack of a second brother, to which Sam grumpily muttered something in return that at least put the old hunter off his questioning for now. The younger Winchester really didn't feel like talking about it anyhow. He trekked his way upstairs with his go-bag and his dad's too. He'd have to sort through it, keep any of the useful stuff and…. He didn't know what he'd do with the rest. A decision that should have been made together, if Dean hadn't gone off who-knows-where.

Selfish, self-centered, ignoramus, unthinking, martyring, asshole. That's what his brother was. And stubborn.

And also not dead.

Sam collapsed onto the bed after he'd dropped both duffels without much care. Without much anything, really. He was tired. Emotionally drained, tired of feeling so damn much all the time. Physically drained too. His bones felt heavy, his muscles ached, and his veins were hollow in a way that was fiercely uncomfortable, but he had no idea how to address.

No. That wasn't true.

Sam rolled onto his side, tucking a hand beneath his head as he stared at the second twin bed where Dean usually slept. He knew exactly what would make his body stop hurting. Knew what he could fill his veins with to make them sing instead of scream.

The hunter closed his eyes tightly against the gnawing hole in the pit of his stomach that had been growing since they'd left that cabin. When he'd first been cleared by the hospital staff, he wrote it off as hunger and ignored it in favor of finding his father and making sure his brother would make it through the night. When he'd finally sought out food, it had done nothing for that growing pit, and he'd decided it was because of Dean's condition.

It hadn't gone away once Dean woke up, perfectly fine.

He could say it was because of his father; he'd gotten his brother back only to lose his dad. But Sam knew that wasn't it. The other symptoms were too obvious to assign to his grief. The slight tremor in his hands. The insomnia and exhaustion that weighed him down with every step and every blink. The dry itchiness in his eyes and the tingle at the tips of every finger, the ends of every limb.

Withdrawal. He'd walked Brady through it enough times to recognize the signs. It also meant he knew exactly what stage he was at and the bad news was it was going to get much, much worse.

Sam rolled onto his back and opened his eyes to the ceiling above him. There was a water-stain just over his head. He and Dean had patched that for Bobby when they were teens, staying here on one of John's numerous hunts deemed too dangerous for them. There'd been a storm, and Sam woke up in the middle of the night to the drip drip drip of a quickly dampening bed.

Dean made at least three wet-the-bed jokes even as he scooted over on the small mattress and begrudgingly beckoned the even-then giant of a human into his bed. It hadn't been the comfiest of nights, but at least it was dry. Looking back on it, Sam wondered why one of them hadn't just taken the couch downstairs. Probably because they'd been sharing beds since they were toddlers and neither had grown up with a whole lot of personal space between them.

The next morning, seeing clear skies and a beautiful sunny day, they'd rummaged Bobby's library for a book on roof repair and got to work that afternoon. When they'd climbed down that evening, Bobby gifted them with beers and a solid waggle of his finger that he best not be hearing from John about it. Sam had tried a sip, gagged at the rough taste, and promptly given the can to Dean, enjoying a soda for the rest of the evening instead.

The young hunter turned away from that water stain and the happy childhood memory – one of the few he had. Dean wasn't here right now and he had bigger worries on the horizon than a night spent under a leaky roof.

-o-o-o-

He woke up shaking. It was the middle of the night, the room around him dark and empty. His muscles ached in a way they hadn't when he'd gone to sleep. Sam groaned, curling into a miserable ball beneath the blankets that weren't nearly enough warmth or weight.

Hours passed in shivering misery. Halfway through what was left of the early morning, Sam gave up fighting the cold that racked his body yet left him sweating, and stumbled from his bed long enough to grab the blankets from Dean's empty mattress. Muscles protested the sudden use, aching in such a way that suggested they were near cramping and his joints felt creaky and old beneath the weight of his large figure. He snagged the comforter with one hand and curled back up in a cocoon of fabric and wretchedness.

This was going far worse than he'd foolishly hoped.

-o-o-o-

Bobby came into the room in the early afternoon hours of the next day, probably to investigate why he hadn't come down for breakfast or lunch. The hunter didn't seem very surprised to find a sick Winchester curled in a mount of blankets, shaking and blinking at him from sunken eyes ringed by blue-black circles more befitting of a skull than a living thing. If the gruff old hunter thought it was a cold or something more (Sam was fairly certain Dean had told him about the demon blood), he was as unreadable as stone.

"You've both been going hard for weeks now," he reasoned as he dug another blanket – a thicker one, meant for the winter months. Karen had quilted shortly after their marriage, and Bobby hadn't touched it since her death, though the boys dug it out now and then through the years. She would have liked that, knowing he had kids who curled up beneath it during storms, spilled popcorn and soda on it through movie nights, and built forts and tents during long, hot days. "Not surprised your body finally called it."

He didn't need to mention that they'd also just lost their daddy. Falling victim to a cold was the least of the funny things grief could do to people.

Sam took the heavier blanket with greedy, shaking fingers and a weak thank you passed through chapped lips and a raspy throat. Bobby gave him a sympathetic look. Whatever this was had hit hard and fast. He left the kid to sleep it off as much as possible. An hour later he came back up with a cup of soup, a handful of crackers, and some juice he'd picked up on a run to the store.

When he came up the following morning with something equally light for breakfast, the food was untouched. The glass of cranberry juice, at least, was empty.

-o-o-o-

Sam desperately wished for his brother. He needed his brother.

There were only two times in his life he could remember being sick without Dean there to take care of him. To mother hen him way past the point of being ridiculous, actually. His older brother didn't do things in halves, that was for sure.

The first time was his freshman year at Stanford, barely a month into classes. He'd never spent so long on his own before. He was still finding his footing and hesitant to make friends, despite his eagerness too. Sam was good at making friends, but his unique childhood meant years of conditioning not to get close to people. He would always lose them to the next hunt, the next move. It was a lesson that had taken him far too long to learn, and one he'd made damn sure he wouldn't forget easily.

It meant that a month into college, he'd barely spoken to anyone for any meaningful amount of time. People there were great – amazing actually. For the first time in his life, Sam fit in somewhere. And not just because most everyone around was intelligent, eager, and striving for success in ways his family never would have defined the word. No, for the first time in his life, he was away from his family, away from the life and not going back. It was bittersweet, but it was the thing that made his new life feel so right.

Sam spent a week and a half curled in a ball in a shared dorm, miserable and weepy with fluids leaking from more places than he knew possible, wishing for his brother with everything that he was. He even thought how stupid he'd been to leave. To have gone out on his own, to face the world when he'd never managed it before and had almost no experience doing so. Eventually, his roommate – a fresh-faced, wide-eyed jackass with perfect teeth who had barely exchanged more than three full sentences with Sam – dragged him down to the parking lot, shoved him in his fancy car, and drove him to Urgent Care. Sam had managed to contract strep slapped atop a chest cold that was well on its way to bronchitis, all in his third week of school. The doctors pumped him full of drugs and tissues, handed him back to Brady, and the two had been best friends that day forward.

The second time had only been a couple of months before Dean came to fetch him in his search for Dad. That time Jess had been there to take care of him. Despite her choice of Halloween costume later that year, she actually had a terrible bedside manner. It had been a good running joke for those months after and, quite possibly, the motivation behind her sexy nurse outfit that October. Sure, she had taken care of him, but it had been so much more of a nurse Ratchet than a nurse Betty. Strong-arming him back to bed, telling him to stop being a baby and drink the damn soup, to get over it already, it was just pneumonia for Pete's sake.

She would have made a terrifying mother.

Will, Sam corrected. She will make a terrifying mother, one day.

Just not to his kids.

The young hunter shook his head, groaning at the splitting headache behind his eyes, threatening to burst through every orifice of his face with every movement. He pushed everything, including the pain, to the side, and forced himself to think happy thoughts.

Her bedside manner had actually reminded him of his brother, really. He'd never told Jess that – he didn't talk about his family before Dean tripped into their life in the middle of the night in the middle of their apartment – but he was fairly convinced it had actually helped get him better faster.

Nothing like a little Winchester tough love, after all.

All that had been missing was the hovering, over-protective, and more than slightly co-dependent helicopter parenting. Which was essentially what he spent weeks teasing her about afterward.

What Sam wouldn't give for a little of that here. It would suck to have Dean in this room with him, no doubt about it. The non-stop fussing and all the worry. The desperation and disappointment in his eyes. The pity as he looked on and watched Sam suffer a sickness of his own making. The slight anger just under the surface that he would refuse to address until it boiled over entirely and ended up with Mt. Vesuvius level fallout, usually losing the high ground and probably Sam's only saving grace.

He'd give anything in the world not to see Dean look at him like that, to see him like this. But he'd give more just to have him there.

-o-o-o-

Bobby knew it wasn't the damn flu.

He may not be some intellectual or academic, he may not have a degree or fancy letters after his name, but he knew those boys and he was no idiot. Dean hadn't warned him in so many words that this might happen, but he'd been worried enough about it that Bobby had picked up on the general concern.

But gee, it sure would be nice to have someone around right about now who knew about the fallout of blood addiction. Someone who was (and this was just spit-balling, here) conveniently from the future, perfectly suited to deal with withdrawal, knew the symptoms and risks, and also happened to be (oh, let's say…) related to the poor kid suffering alone upstairs.

Too bad Bobby didn't have anyone like that around to help.

Damn Dean Winchester for leaving when he was needed most. For being just like his daddy when the exact opposite of John Winchester was what they needed most now. What Sam needed most. Have no doubt, Bobby would be having words with his oldest kid just as soon as Dean showed back up from whatever fool errand had run him away from his family and his brother's bedside.

-o-o-o-

The fever got worse. It became hard to discern reality from the dark and terrifying thoughts his brain supplied on a never-ending loop in his unfocused, chaotic mind.

He should never have asked Dean to kill him. That's why his older brother had abandoned him, that's why he was alone to face this pain and hurt and misery. He'd pushed Dean away, asked him to do the one thing he could just never do. Sam wasn't an idiot. He remembered, vividly, every time John had taken Dean to the side to reprimand him. To remind him what his job – his only job – was. Sometimes he would scream it right to Dean's face, the youngest Winchester standing on the wayside, wide-eyed and scared and unable to look away.

Take care of Sammy.

That was always what John Winchester told his son. They were lectured on cleaning their guns, on running faster, on shooting straighter, on knowing more and acting quicker. They were grilled and berated and it had never stopped, even when their Dad was in a rare, good mood. But Dean only ever had one real job.

Take care of Sammy.

Sam could remember each time Dean had been yelled at, screamed at, reprimanded and brought down, all on his behalf. He knew how John had raised his older sibling. The disappointment in his eyes, and the anger and heartbreak in Dean's.

And now. Now, the last words Dad would ever say to him, the last thing Dean had heard, was an order to save or kill the one thing he'd formed his entire life around. The one thing John Winchester had raised him to never let happen. And Sam had looked him right in the eye and asked the same. He'd had no right to ask that. Less than no right, since he knew what it would do to his brother. He was worse than his dad, and he'd sworn to himself his entire life that he would not be John Winchester, even if it killed him.

In the morose and dark headspace, clouded with fever as withdrawal shook his frame and blood addiction screamed through his veins, Sam couldn't help but think this just might.

But Hell wouldn't let him go this way, would they? That was the whole point of asking Dean in the first place. The Colt was the only way either he or Dean would see an end to this. Even if he died here, they'd just bring him back.

Or Azazel would see to it that he got more blood in him first.

The sudden thought was so terrifying in its possibility that it damn near shocked him out of his fever-crazed, shivering state. The wards. He had to check the wards. The salt lines too. He had to make sure the demon could not get in this house. Could not bring more of that damn red hell with him.

God, he wanted it. He wanted it so badly.

He needed to warn Bobby. But he couldn't warn Bobby without admitting what was happening. And if he admitted what was happening, he was pretty sure the next thing out of his mouth would be to beg Bobby for what he so desperately needed. What his stomach was eating through itself for, what every bone in his body squeezed and ached for, what his muscles convulsed and clenched for until he was sure they would break his own bones with their force.

No, he couldn't tell Bobby. He couldn't own this, not now, when he knew he couldn't control what would come after.

So instead he sat, fevered and paranoid, watching the shadows and seeing yellow eyes in every corner, blood seeping from under the beds and down the windowsills until he had to shut his eyes, cover himself in blankets like a frightened child, and whisper over and over again that they couldn't get in.

-o-o-o-

Bobby kept bringing glasses of juice for the kid, though it seemed fairly random when he'd drink them or not. Soup and OJ went back downstairs, hours after going cold and warm respectively. The kid sometimes managed to keep down the cranberry juice, so Bobby eventually stopped with the soup and just delivered a glass every couple hours. He left the crackers, hoping when Sam came out on the other side of this, he'd be able to stomach the bland substance.

Over the passing day and a half, Bobby gathered damn near every blanket in his house and piled 'em on top of the kid. He knew next to nothing about taking care of a sick kid – outside of the handful of times one of the boys had fallen ill while staying with him. Even then, though, Dean or Sam usually took over for the other like a well-oiled machine. Those boys hardly ever needed him around.

Still, that was no reason not to be there for them all the same. That's what family did. So he piled blankets onto the miserable, shaking, beanstalk of a man who looked more pathetic than a drenched, homeless kitten caught in the rain. Bobby had learned the hard way he had claws like a damn cat too. The kid got a couple real good hits in the first time he'd gotten too close trying to wake him from a fever dream.

It sucked balls having to listen to the kid toss and turn and cry out in his fever-fueled mind, but trying to wake him had been arguably worse, leaving the kid awake but in fear-soaked delirium. So Bobby left him be as much as possible. He checked on him every couple of hours, cycled through glasses of water and juices, and spent his off-duty hours reading everything he could find about demon blood and other, mundane addictions.

-o-o-o-

Sam wanted to die. Anything to end the pain racking his body. It was everywhere and it was inescapable. No position eased the fierce aching of his bones, the tense spasms and twitches of overused, undernourished muscles, the burning in his eyes and just behind them as well. His head pounded away a constant headache, his fingers cramped and throbbed from fisting the sheets, now soiled with sweat and sick.

He hadn't wanted to die before, that much was very, very crystal clear to him now. He had never realized how very much he did not want to die, until he was lying there in Bobby's spare room and all but begging for it. He'd never been in so much pain in his life.

It was right around his first thoughts of death that the hallucinations started.

-o-o-o-

The unrelenting puddle of blood crawled across the cabin floor, seeking him out. He couldn't move away – couldn't leave Dean. His muscles didn't work anyway. He had no bones in his body. All he could do was slump over his brother's unbreathing body and watch the blood encircle him. Creeping, growing, climbing, until he was swimming in it. Drowning in it.

There was Dean, in his arms, eyes a foggy blue, unseeing as a halo of red spread from the back of his head. Sam wanted to pull away. Blood leaked from his brother's forehead, gurgling out of a bullet hole straight through his head, right between those unseeing eyes. A bullet Sam had put there himself, Colt still hot and smoking in his hand, covered in the blood. He barely registered what he'd done, though. Once he smelled it, once he saw the red, he couldn't see anything else. Sam wanted that blood. He licked it right off the weapon that had murdered his brother.

That was the first time he threw up. It was hardly the last.

Dean, Dad, Jess. He saw them all, dead in his arms, crimson spilling from their bodies, soaking him. He swam in their blood and all the while his throat seared with dryness and he begged for an end to the thirst. An end that was soaking through his clothes, coating his skin, choking his resolve with terror and need. All he had to do was drink it.

John Winchester stood over him, eyes so full of disappointment that Sam broke down and sobbed at his feet. Begged him to understand, that this wasn't his fault, that he didn't want any of it. But his dad had never been one to listen to him. Sam took to keeping his eyes squeezed shut whenever John showed up. That resulted in his father's deep voice filling Sam's head, relentless, never-ending, hounding. His voice was quiet. Calm. Even-tempered, as he rarely was, but so filled with disappointment that the boy cringed at every syllable. Each word condemned him for his father's death, hammered him into the floorboards for John's fate, for the pain he was suffering in Hell, surely, even now.

Sam sat, rocking against the wall that substituted a headboard, hands clamped over his ears and eyes shut against the ghost of his dead dad's accusations.

The torment was never-ending. He may as well have made the deal to save Dean himself, because this was a hell of his own making. Sam saw flashes and images too garbled together, too filled with panic and pain and fear, to tell apart. His mom, pinned to the ceiling, dreamily smiling down at him, so damn proud. Jess, suddenly beside her, the same grin stretched across her face even as blood dripped from her stomach. His brother, standing in front of him, terror in his eyes as Sam, wearing Lucifer like a sweet prom tux, held the Colt to his own head tauntingly. The sound of a gunshot, then he was falling. Falling, falling, falling, all the while wearing the devil, or was the devil wearing him? He hit rock bottom and arched his back away from the cold and the emptiness of the world. Azazel grinned down at him as he lay in the grave, stone walls stretching up, up, up. Too high to ever climb out of. He would never leave this place.

The demon extended his hand to fetch him, to bring him to his side, free him from the prison of his human body. His hand was coated red, dripping. The blood was hot and warm on Sam's face. Too close to his lips.

He screamed and screamed, fighting to get away, because even buried in Hell, in the cage, with no other way out, he refused to take that hand.

Through hours and hours of fevered hell, ever changing, ever terrible, Sam found himself in places he knew and others he didn't. Those he found comfort in were perverted by pain and fear. There was the panic room, the iron in the walls glowing red hot around him as he tossed in his sweat-soaked cocoon, trapped in the heat as he burned alive and boiled from the inside out. Dean and Bobby were trying to burn the demon out of him, but it wasn't going to work. He couldn't take it, couldn't survive it. They were killing him.

He was in Jenny's house – their house – lit aflame and he, with no way out, calling to no one who could hear – no one who would answer – as the water evaporated from the very air around him, his throat parched and burning. His body burning. There was an old tomb, dark and cavernous and empty and cold. He remembered the cold, because it was so jarring from the fire and flames that it possibly hurt more. He begged for the heat back, the warmth of the sun, the touch of his family. Of anyone at all. He had never felt so alone. Alone but for the eyes in the darkness, green and bitter and mad and staring straight through him.

It was Max's apartment, with the kid flat on the ground, neck twisted around, vertebrae jutting up against purpling skin at unnatural, broken angles. He stared accusingly at Sam with clouded blue eyes that followed him despite the fact they never moved. Couldn't move. Max was very much dead.

His shack, his castle in Flagstaff, all his and only his, for two glorious weeks. Only Bones, his dog, was nowhere to be found. He wasn't coming back. Azazel had snapped his neck and left his body, forever alone, in the woods. Or had it been John?

Then he was awake, and that was maybe worse.

Sam saw the demon everywhere. The foot of his bed, where he'd stand for hours, never moving, just staring. Sometimes he was right beside him, looming over the edge of the mattress, knowing Sam was too weak to even roll away. The corner of the room with the worst of shadows that had always sent him scurrying beneath his covers as a child. The closet he and Dean stored their guns and duffels in every time they stayed at Bobby's for any length of time. His favorite seemed to be spread out across Dean's bed as a taunting reminder of his brother's absence and abandonment. Always, he boasted a smile that split his face in two, blood dripping from his yellowing teeth as he held aloft an offering of glass and crimson that had Sam reaching for the demon as often as it had him screaming at him to leave him be.

He'd smashed the first jar clear across the room, but that had left a wall painted in blood, dripping, crawling, climbing, and the smell of iron and need filled the room until Sam was gagging from it. After that, he let Azazel taunt him all he wanted with that jar, just so long as the blood stayed inside those glass walls.

It was when the fever dreams and delusions finally ended and Sam sat, shivering and sweating, stomach cramping from a hunger he knew he couldn't feed, legs shaking from the aches and pains of joints and bones, mind foolishly wishing for death just to end the sheer misery leaching into every inch of him, that he knew he would never touch a drop of demon blood again. He couldn't. Wouldn't be able to, for the sheer terrifying knowledge of what came afterward.

If he had to go through this again, Sam wouldn't survive. He knew that, as sure as he knew his own name. He would give in, beg for blood, do horrible things to get it, of that he had no doubt. Now, more than ever, he believed the future his brother had told him about.

When the fever finally broke and the young hunter managed to keep down more than just a glass of juice that he was fairly certain he'd only drank because it was red, he came through the other side with a terrifying mix of trepidation and resolve. They'd never have to worry about him drinking demon blood again. Not in this timeline.

Unfortunately, something told him Hell wasn't going to accept his stance on the subject.

-o-o-o-

As the second day passed and the crippling symptoms began to lessen, Sam found a certain level of clarity about his current situation. The ability to think clearly for the first time in forty-eight hours also graced him with a calm he hadn't felt in weeks, or possibly months now. He owed his brother an apology, that much he knew. (Dean owed him one, too, but that was no revelation and certainly not something he'd hold his breath for.)

He also didn't want to die, something Dean deserved to know and which he needed to affirm aloud. His brother had asked him for faith, something that could not have been easy for his hardened sibling, and Sam wouldn't let him down. Dad's death hurt; his last words hurt even more. But Dean wasn't Dad, and Sam knew that. Loved that.

The problem with the blood was a far more serious one. Flirting with death had been, for all intents and purposes, a last resort. It was something he shouldn't have brought up at all, mostly fueled by grief and fear. The blood, however…

The blood terrified him. He'd take dying over being turned into whatever he had been for the last forty-eight hours. He knew, had Azazel somehow showed up in that room with a supply, Sam wouldn't be here now, back to rational thought and a growing determination to face this the right way. He'd have been at the beck and call of his mother's murderer, if only to stop the pain and feed his hollow veins. The thought was almost enough to empty his meager stomach contents all over again.

That was withdrawal after only a single dose, and he knew from guiding Brady through such withdrawals that this one had been thankfully short. His body's reliance on the drug had not been built up over time, and was more like an overdose than true withdrawal from a dependent substance. The troubling question he couldn't let go, though, was what would have happened to him if he had taken more.

Azazel had already gotten him to drink it once. He'd almost gotten him to do so again back in that cabin. Sam seriously doubted he'd be able to say no forever; the demon wasn't going to let him. Eventually, the yellow eyed bastard would find the right button to push, the right leverage that Sam wouldn't be able to fight.

But he could not allow himself to be turned into that craving, pathetic, bloodthirsty thing again. He wouldn't. And yet, it was very easy to see just how it was going to happen.

Either way, Dean had a point, and one Sam needed to get on board with. If he had the gall to tell Dean to hold on, by fingertips need be, then he could swallow his own words and do the same. He'd told Dean back in that cabin – compressing his chest every other second, blocking out the statics and facts condemning his brother to death in his head, desperately pleading to be wrong about each and every one so his brother would just breath – he'd told him that he couldn't do this alone. It was unfair to expect – to ask – Dean to do any different.

-o-o-o-

He made it downstairs towards the end of the second day. The sun was starting to sink in the sky, painting Bobby's den and kitchen with dusty, deep yellow light. There was something warming about it after spending forty-eight hours as a popsicle. Sam was still shaky and his joints felt creaky and fragile as he descended the stairs, but at least he was upright.

"Hell of a cold," Bobby commented with a lightness that immediately put Sam on edge as he settled into the kitchen chair across the table from the old hunter. "You feeling better?"

The young Winchester nodded wearily, head in his hand. He was feeling better, but that didn't mean he could still hold his head up on his own just yet.

"You want I should forget to mention that little bought of flu when your brother gets here, or you think he ought to know he might come down with it too?"

Sam grimaced at the dry words. They were caring, in the kind of reprimanding way only Bobby ever managed to pull off with sincerity, but they stung all the same. While the hunter hadn't said anything at all, he'd also said more than was needed to for the intelligent kid to read between his lines.

"Doesn't matter," he mumbled in reply, not quite making eye contact. Some of that newfound calm started to flag under the daunting task of admitting his sins aloud. "I don't think Dean has to worry about catching this."

Bobby nodded and the silence that filled the room wasn't nearly as uncomfortable as Sam had expected. After a moment, the gruff man scratched at his beard, fed a hand beneath his cap and repositioned it on his head, then cleared his throat. "You're a good kid, Sam."

Sam snorted, and Bobby gave him a look.

"Dean thinks so, too. Down to that boy's core." It was Bobby's turn to snort. "Might not say it in the best words, but it's there."

The young Winchester sat, staring at his hands on the worn surface of the kitchen table, and contemplated his friend and father-figure's words. He could still remember that itch under his skin, even without thinking about the need hours ago that had left him mindless and pathetic.

Quietly, he admitted, "I don't feel good, Bobby."

"Well you are," Bobby insisted firmly, a solemn nod adding to the weight of his declaration. "Don't you let anyone, not even yourself, tell you any different, boy."

The sound of a foreign car turning into the dirt drive halted the rest of the conversation, but Sam figured there probably hadn't been much left to say anyway.