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Dean’s days morph into a routine, a dragging process of keeping his baby brother alive against his will.
He no longer felt terrified by his brother’s screams piercing the dark of the early morning. He doesn’t notice the pain when Sam’s limbs jerk out at him, hard enough to bruise. He hums, whispers and coaxes his brother out of his hallucinations and nightmares. Sometimes it takes 5 minutes. That’s on a good day. Sometimes it will take half the day for Sam to look at Dean and actually see him. Dean hates those days.
The weight of him, slung over his shoulder and leant against his side is a familiar one as he half carries, half drags his brother to the kitchen. He knows Sam will sit dead eyed on the couch for a while before coming to and moving around the space, prowling like a caged animal. He knows that’s all the time he has to get any food in Sam for the day. This is the only time he is pliant enough to be fed, at least since Dean threw out the sedatives he’d lifted from an ambulance. It means he spends a frantic 15 minutes shovelling oatmeal and mashed banana down his brother’s throat but it also lowers the chance of addiction and the likelihood that Sam will just never wake up. He sees Sam’s eyes focus and hurriedly wipes his mouth, moving back to give his brother space.
Sam leaps up from the couch like he’s being burnt by it, and by the way his eyes keep shifting (the way Dean can tell he’s hallucinating) that might be exactly what he was experiencing.
Sam whines low in his throat, gaze wheeling around the room.
“Sam?” Dean keeps his voice low and gentle, forcing himself not to go to his brother’s side.
Sam doesn’t look at him. Dean waits a moment and tries again.
“Sam?”
“Aithnay” Sam hisses, still not looking at him.
Dean swallows. Fire. Alright okay, he can manage this. He grabs a bottle of water of the table (he keep them in every room now) He pulls out the towel he’s tucked into his pants and holding it under Sam’s hands, he pours water slowly, cautiously over them.
“Aithay ni. Ischa. Jarick na se dohom”
Not fire. Water. You are not burning.
This goes on for ten minutes, Sam crying fire and Dean softly repeating one of the phrases he’s since memorised from a list Cas had made. By the time Sam comes back to reality Dean has resorted to wringing the now sodden towel over his hands.
“Dean?”
“I’m here Sam. I’m right here.”
“Where am I? What happened?”
Dean pulls out another memorised phrase. “You’re in the bunker. You were out of it for a bit but you’re fine now. Everything’s fine”
Everything’s fine.
Dean says this about a hundred times a day. He tells Sam he’s fine as he takes the gun he’s cleaned for the third time out of his hands and locks it away again. He tells Sam he’s fine as he holds his hands under running water and vows to child lock the oven shut. He tells Sam he’s fine as he’s coming down from yet another episode brought on by standing too close to the fridge and feeling the cold air on his skin. He tells him he’s fine when he finally manages to coax him back inside, as he draping a blanket over him, as he rubs his hands and feet trying desperately to stave off hypothermia.
And it’s hard. Its fucking hard to keep someone alive who has no idea what that means. Its hard to look at this poor broken man and remember how he used to be, how his smile used to shine and light up a room. Its hard to hand feed a brother who used to be strong enough to pin him in combat.
But every time Sam finally comes to from a hallucination, or perks up enough to look him in the eyes, to speak his name, to reach out for him Dean knows he will do this as long as it needs to be done.