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Dean’s been hooked on this band that Sam has really grown to hate, which is fine when you’re not bleeding out in the backseat and Sam is trying so hard to focus on literally anything else, which just happens to be bad music.
Your arm, wretched open and bloody, is stuck over the front seat. The dishtowel wrapping it up had to be lain over the Impala’s center console, but Sam’s starting to think the amount of blood you’re losing is going to stain the upholstery anyway.
This is why I don’t go into the field, Sam, you had said when he’d found you bound to a tree, arm draining. I have the demeanor of a blood sacrifice.
“Stop jostling it,” Sam chides when your arm rolls in on itself and you let out a sharp little hiss.
“’m not jostling anything, Sam. Dean’s just driving bad.” Your voice slurs a little, and Sam prays it’s because of the painkiller kicking in.
“There’s potholes!”
Sam doesn’t have anything to say to that, so Dean turns up the stereo. He’s not worried cause Sam’s got him covered on that front. You try to slink your arm off the console and Sam turns to pin you with a glare, not realizing you’ve stuck your face next to the headrest and are right there.
Sam ends up not scolding. You do a careful extraction of your arm and its bloody rag, and he doesn’t like it once you’re out of sight.
“Eugh,” you say, quietly enough that Sam wouldn’t have been able to hear it over the music if you weren’t so close to his ear. “That’s a lot of blood.”
“That’s why I had you stick it in the front. So you wouldn’t look at it.”
Dean yowls in tune to the tape, and your eyes flutter shut as you fall limp towards Sam’s seat.
“Shit. Dean,” Sam scrambles, a little blindly, grappling for the volume knob with one hand and the back of your head with the other. Somehow he’s able to wrangle you back into the seat with the seatbelt still cutting into his neck, and he’s seen too many dead bodies for anything other than panic panic panic to flood his nerves when he sees your head loll onto the car window and smear blood on the glass. Dean cuts the stereo.
“It’s alright, Sammy, she’s no good with blood.” Dean’s voice does that thing where he gets worried and tries to sound more like John. “She’ll be fine. We’re almost to the motel.”
Sam wonders why he didn’t grab your hand when you went to pull it away.
There’s two potholes between you strewn over the Impala’s backseat and the motel. Sam keeps his head uncomfortably craned, eyes on you, watching yours move beneath closed lids. You’re stirring when Dean whips through the left turn into the parking lot, and blinking when the engine cuts.
“Hey,” Sam says, trying to sound nonchalant, “How’re you feeling?”
“Fine,” you say, airy and distant, and look down at your arm, to where Sam’s covered the gore with the dishtowel. You groan, tip your head up against the back of the seat, and Sam worries you’re gone again until your good hand starts fumbling for the door handle.
He hits his head on the roof of the Impala trying to get out. You don’t successfully manage to open your door, thankfully, and are back to being limp but unconscious when Sam gets to you. His hand over your wrist is purposeful, to get a modicum of relief from your rabitting pulse, and only a halfhearted part of him is worried if anyone’s watching when he pulls you up off your seat with a careful hand on your rag.
You’re warm in Sam’s arms, leaning heavy on him. Dean’s got the motel door propped open as Sam takes you carefully through the parking lot, worried that if he says something his voice will shake.
“Sammy,” you say with that same light, worryingly calm voice as Sam takes you over the threshold, “can I have a nap?”
“No,” Sam says, a little too panicked, a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Not yet, we have to get you fixed up first. Then you can sleep as long as you want, okay?”
Sam thinks about the amount of people he’s seen close their eyes for the last time when you turn your gaze on him, with a heavy head and effort. Your eyes are glassy and incredibly beautiful. Internally, Sam kicks himself over and over.
Dean’s got the first aid kit splayed out over the bathroom sink. He asks Sam a silent question, Sam answers, and he helps Sam help you onto the toilet before leaving.
You rest your head and bad arm on the bathroom counter, blood already leaking onto the faux marble. Sam’s hands still when he sees the solution to your problem in front of him, and he’s back in every motel bathroom he’s ever been in stitching up Dean, picking out bullets, icing hits to the head. For his seventh birthday he got his first suture pad from John, and it wasn’t even a week later when he was closing up his dad’s back. Fixing your arm, soothing the pain, is easier than whatever he was doing in the car when you slumped over and for a second Sam lived in a world without you in it.
“Eyes open,” Sam tells you, and you blink blurry at him as he loads the needle.
“Told you, ‘m sleepy.”
All Dean’s been able to scrounge up is a bottle of whiskey. Sam frowns when he sees it.
“You have to stay awake for me, alright?” Sam rolls up a motel washcloth and holds it up to your mouth, relieved when it opens. Your teeth clamp down, albeit a little weakly, and Sam slides his hand into your good one. You’re too out of it for a fake out countdown to do anything, really, so Sam squeezes your hand and pours.
Your grip tightening on his is relieving. Your face contorting is not. The little sound that comes out of your throat is the worst of it—or, no, the worst of it is when your eyes open and they’re still bleary with pain but scrunched up small and helpless, looking right at Sam.
He squeezes your hand again, lets go. Grabs the needle.
It’s not the worst stitch job he’s had to do. Three big lacerations, running vertical up your arm. Perfectly missing everything that matters, just taking a hell of a lot of blood with them in the process. Sam works from the middle out until the flaps of flesh are three neat rows of stitches down your arm, and your eyes are closed again but your breathing’s too shallow for you to be asleep.
“You did it,” Sam says quietly when he cuts the last suture, “it’s over. Open your eyes, sweetheart.”
He doesn’t know where sweetheart comes from (he does—it’s living in the same place that keeps replaying the moment where you passed out in the Impala on loop, interspersed with your smile and fleeting memories of you happy, alive) but it must work enough to his benefit because your eyes crack open. Sam watches you process it all in real time as he wets the washcloth to clean up the stained blood, gentle by the stitches, until your arm looks like something close enough to normal.
You sigh when Sam pulls away, as he tosses the washcloth in the sink to watch the little pool of water turn pink. You start pulling at your sleeves, mostly successful, and Sam looks pointedly at the mirror.
“I’ll go get you some clothes, yeah?”
Your head is stuck inside your shirt, so all Sam gets is a thumbs up.
Dean’s sprawled over the bed closest to the window, chugging away at something on his phone. His eyes go straight to Sam’s at the sound of the bathroom door, and Sam knows his brother well enough to know that he’s worried.
“She okay?”
Sam nods, looks around the room without being entirely sure what he’s looking for.
“You okay?”
“Fine. Where’s my bag?”
“Still in the car. There’s clothes on the radiator.”
After knowing someone long enough, spending enough nights in a motel and on the road with them, it slowly starts to matter less and less about whose clothes are whose. Sam thinks the shirt is his, but you’ve probably worn it as a sleep shirt more times than him or Dean. The shorts are yours. Probably.
Back in the bathroom you’re almost naked on the toilet, looking quietly at your arm. There’s blood on the strap of your bra, stains of it on your skin, clothes in a heap in the bathtub. You look eager when you see the clean clothes in Sam’s hand, still warm, but the hand that reaches out buckles into the bathroom counter quickly.
“I feel dizzy.”
Sam holds out his arm, and you latch onto it. “Hey, it’s okay. Can I help?”
You nod, stick your arms forward and to him. Sam dresses you carefully, taking the shirt over your head and pulling out any hair stuck under the neck, helping you stand with hands on your shoulders as you pulled on the shorts. The part of Sam that’s been keeping people alive from a young age notes that your bad arm is a little more dextrous, movements a little more smooth. Even when you falter a little you grab Sam’s arm, steady yourself, look up at him with a wonderful smile.
“Thank you, Sam.”
Sam has enough wherewithal by then to help you walk. Your good hand rests in his as you stretch out your stitched up arm, looking over Sam’s handiwork.
“Do you think it’ll scar?”
“Probably not super bad. If anything, it would be this one,” Sam traces a finger above the cut in the middle, the longest and worst, “but that would look pretty badass.”
Your smile is incredible. It’s small but beams up at Sam until his eyes feel blurry, and then you’re tucking yourself into his side with a careful wobble.
“I’m gonna go to bed now.”
Sam’s careful with his arm around your middle, easing you out of the bathroom and stretching around you to flick off the bathroom light. The bathroom’s as cramped as the motel itself, and once you’ve crossed the door frame Dean sits up from his lounging.
“Hey, superstar. How’re you feeling?”
You don’t answer until Sam’s got you at the foot of the other bed, still all slow and careful.
“Good as new. Sam fixed me.”
Your voice is sticky with sleep, but Sam still feels a note of pride. You curl contentedly on top of the duvet, knees tucked towards the body of Sam’s shirt, and for a second he’s worried you’re already out.
“I don’t know how you guys do this every day,” you say, and your voice is half muffled into the pillows. “One scratch and I’m down for the count.”
Sam sits down at the foot of your bed. Dean snorts, responds, “Yeah, well, your job doesn’t involve tolerating blood loss, just incredibly boring research.”
“’S not boring,” you murmur half-heartedly, and Sam knows you’re going to be asleep soon. Dean knows too, apparently, because he starts into the all-too familiar bedtime routine that has to happen when you’ve tagged along. Usually it’s rock paper scissors, which is what Dean gets into position for at the edge of the bed, but your foot nudges Sam’s leg and you look up at him from your pile of pillows.
“Could you sleep with me this time, Sam?”
“Of course.”
Sam answers too quickly, is too flustered by the question, because when he looks over at Dean his hands are dramatically making out with each other. Sam retaliates by taking the bathroom first.
Dean’s got you set up with bottled water when Sam comes back with brushed teeth, and you’re absently focused on Jeopardy. Sam’s shared a bed with you plenty of times, but never before have you asked him so nicely to share, never have you nearly bled out in the backseat of the Impala and had to lean on him like a crutch.
Sam allows himself to revel in it. A little.
You settle into the covers when Sam slides in next to you, perched on his elbows as you nudge his legs with yours. The only light in the room is from the TV and the sliver peeking out from underneath the bathroom door, and it makes your face soft and blue.
“Thank you, Sam,” you say again, an echo from earlier in the bathroom. “Knew I would be okay, cause you were there.”
You could have been a nurse, Jess had said to him once when he’d patched up her knees, battered and bloody after an incredible fall on the one patch of ice California could muster. Thinking about her during a moment like this with you pangs, and for a moment all Sam wants to do is bolt—there were so many moments like this with her in their little campus apartment that was so fleeting, and now Sam’s probably shared a bed with you more than he has with her. You’re here, closer to the life than Jess ever was, and still better off. You’re hurt but here, in bed with Sam at the end of the day.
Alive—in part because of Sam. You’re everything in this dingy motel’s bed, laying on a stiff mattress. You’re safe, and that’s just about always been exactly what Sam has wanted.
Your fingers brush over Sam’s cheek. He wonders what you’re thinking.
“I can hear your brain,” you mumble, and your thumb brushes over the mole underneath his eye. “You saved the day, Sam, get some sleep.”
“I will,” Sam says, even if he knows he’s going to end up waiting for you to fall asleep first. You smile at him a little like you know it, and then your face is falling, shifting into something a little bit serious.
“Sam, I know it’s late but I’ve been meaning to tell you something, and I think—”
The bathroom door opens and you draw away, and whatever you were going to say fades and falls away. Sam’s skin burns where you were touching it, aches. He hopes it leaves a mark.
Dean fumbles in the dark with the TV before it shuts off and you’re obscured in the darkness. Sam hears you shift, trying to find somewhere comfortable for your arm, the creak of the mattress as Dean gets into bed, and then everything stills.
Sam doesn’t try to fall asleep until you’re breathing steadies, and even then he’s unsuccessful.
—
In the morning, Dean is already gone.
There’s a text on Sam’s phone, a buzz pressed into his forehead that’s guilty of waking him up—Getting bfast and cleaning out baby. 45 mins. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.
“Good morning, Sam.”
Sam startles, half awake with his phone in his hand, not realizing you were sat up and watching him. The motel room is lit up with the sun. You look better than you did yesterday.
“Did you sleep well?”
“Fine.” Sam adjusts, to being awake and the light and you in his shirt in bed, and two of the three are awful things. “How’s your arm?”
You hold it out in front of you like you’d forgotten. The stitches are still there in their neat rows, and there’s a shockingly small amount of blood that escaped the big one.
“It’s weird. I don’t remember much of what happened—I remember when they took me, and when you found me, and getting to the motel, but it’s all in these very little snapshots. It took me a second to remember that anything had even happened. When I saw the stitches I was a little freaked.”
Sam nods and scrubs a hand over his forehead, messy hair splaying out. “You were pretty out of it last night. Reasonably so.”
You wince, wipe at a chunk of sleep in the corner of your eye.
“Did I do anything weird?”
“No.” Sam knows as soon as he’s said it that he answered too quickly. Your eyes narrow.
“Liar. Do I need to ask Dean?”
Dean is the last person Sam wants in this conversation, in this bed, so when he scrambles it’s a reasonable kind of panic.
“Don’t ask Dean, it’s—ugh. It wasn’t anything. Just, um, as we were about to fall asleep, you said… something.”
You blink, cock your head a little bit. Sam sits up and ignores the pang in his back.
“What’d I say?”
“I don’t know. You didn’t actually say it.”
“Then how did you know it was going to be weird?”
“That’s not—” Sam feels like he is very slowly derailing, and you just look lost. “It’s not weird. You weren’t being weird, it was just. We were kind of, I don’t know, having a moment?”
You go very still, then, and Sam worries and worries.
“We didn’t do anything. If you were, um, wondering.”
“Oh, I know that, Sam. It’s just…” you trail off, look towards the window before your eyes return to Sam’s with a certain sort of determination. “You don’t deserve a semi-lucid love confession. You deserve a nice night and a nice restaurant and a park, or something, I don’t know.”
Sam knows he’s blushing, in the same way he knew you loved him and wouldn’t let himself believe it. Knows he’s about to kiss you before he actually does it, even if it’s only for a fleeting second, only the time it takes to move to stick one arm in front of you and put one hand on your cheek and draw you in, closer and closer and closer.
You sink into him wonderfully, every part of you fitting against every part of him with sort of precision that Sam’s never felt before. He wants to laugh a little at the absurdity of not having spent more of his life kissing you like this, but opts instead to keep at it until you’re ducking away, needing to breathe, looking pleasantly surprised.
“You’ve got too many talents, Sam Winchester,” you say, a little dreamy, and Sam laughs for the first time since the start of the hunt. You move closer to him and he revels in your warmth, still lingering from the sheets, before you’re laying back down on the bed with arms out. Sam takes a moment, a second to look at you, to replace his brain’s constant replay of you in the Impala with you in bed, soft and loved, safe.
He lays on top of you to make you laugh, pulls you into him when you shove him off. Your stitches lay over his chest, outof the way of any moving limbs, and Sam listens intently to whatever you’re mumbling about breakfast.
You’re asleep again by the time Dean gets back, head resting on Sam’s chest, and Sam does his best to fake it when he hears the shutter of Dean’s phone camera.