*Set sometime during season 9, between "King of the Damned" and "Do You Believe in Miracles?". READ AND REVIEW.

3:47 AM

Dean was in a dazed kind of half sleep, cheek pressed against the toilet seat that had lost its coolness from his body heat. The rest of him was sprawled across the bathroom floor. He couldn't actually sleep, the mark wouldn't let him, but puking his guts out had at least tired him out enough so that he could lay here in this weak state of confusion.

He unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth and tasted the metallic taste of blood. His stomach tensed and he leaned over the toilet, hacking out what was now just dark strings of blood. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and slid to the tile.

He laid there on the floor, too weak to move, wishing to God someone was there to at least help this endless night go faster. Alone, time ticked by so slowly. Like Hell time. Each minute that ticked by felt like hours in between. And all of it spent alone because he was too stubborn to admit to Sam for the thousandth time this year, that he'd been wrong.

Wrong to take on the mark of Cain. Wrong for taking off to keep Sam from being tainted by Dean's toxic decisions. Wrong to let Crowley go free. Wrong to let an angel possess Sam to heal him. Doing more bad than good, but doing it all for family.

Which according to Sam, they weren't anymore.

The thought of it made the mark burn more tenderly against Dean's skin, and he realized in that moment, just how hot he was getting.

His fever was spiking hard. Way too hard. He could die here. And Sam would eventually come back to the bunker, and find Dean dead on the bathroom floor next to a toilet full of blood and vomit. Or maybe the fever wouldn't kill him. Maybe he'd be too weak to roll off his back when he had to throw up again and he'd full on Jimi Hendrix himself to death.

But either way, this fever needed to go down. If not to save him, then because he was tired of laying on the floor, drenched in sweat.

He managed to crawl to the shower, with biting voices in his head seeming to echo off the tile walls saying, "you're pathetic". He couldn't help but agree with them. He had to strain to even reach the water tap, turning on the freezing cold water.

It was terrible. He'd been trembling with chills of fever before, now he was shaking so hard his head kept bumping the shower wall.

All he wanted to do was kill but he had no way of hunting like this. He needed the blade. That at least eased his symptoms enough for him to go out and kill something. But it was tucked away in his dresser drawer, way at the end of the hall. He'd been holding back from touching the blade for the high, because he knew without being able to use it soon after, it would just make his symptoms worse.

But then, what didn't? The only real way to curb his symptoms completely was to kill on a strict and regular basis. And there weren't enough monsters in the world for that. Just plenty of humans.

He felt that spasm in his stomach again and he propped one hand against the wall, bending over the drain, dry heaving. He almost wanted to cry, he was so exhausted.

He glanced across the room at the full length mirror on the door and the tears just started to flow. He saw himself, in a soaking wet t-shirt and boxers, pale and shaking under the freezing shower, with blood stains around his mouth and fresh strands of blood hanging from his lips.

Once the tears started flowing, he couldn't stop. He felt pathetic, and sick, and alone, and terrified. Not because he was dying, but because of how shitty he'd be leaving things with Sam.

Not brothers. No trust.

"If the situation were reversed, and I was dying, you would've done the same thing."

"No, Dean. I wouldn't. Same circumstances, I wouldn't."

Tears mixed with blood and water, swirling around the drain like the bloody, flowered open flesh of a bullet wound.

"Sam?" He rasped.

His hand slid off the wall and his head smacked the floor. He blacked out for a few seconds and then came to, too weak to crawl out from under the icy spray, out of the blood stained shower, out of his sick, shaking skin.

"Sammy?" He called out desperately, thoughts weren't processing well enough for him to remember that Sam wouldn't be back until late morning and it was now only 4:06 AM.

He lifted his head, trembling violently, only for it to fall back against the tile with a dull thud.

"Sam?" He called out again, daze and confusion temporarily replacing craving and bloodlust.

The frustration stemming from the silence that answered was balling up into a weak scream, rising in his chest.

"SAMMY?!"

The knowledge that Sam was not there, and even if he had been, he probably wouldn't have gotten Dean the blade, was fading in and out of Dean's foggy mind. He finally crawled out of the shower, water still running, and began to drag himself across the floor. He was going for that fucking blade.

That thought alone, seemed to get him moving. He reached for the sink and levered himself off the ground. Leaning heavily against the wall, he made his way for the door. The fever was rocking and blurring his vision as he staggered down the hallway, and the whole thing was making him nauseous. He coughed back a gag, catching blood in his palm as he did so.

I'm gonna die here.

He palmed his way down the wall, consciousness beginning to deteriorate. He was repeatedly stopping, forgetting his objective, wanting to give in and just yak out all the blood he had left until the blackness that was limiting his vision to just a scrap of the center of the hallway took over for good. But he couldn't. Not until Metatron paid. Not until Sammy would be safe.

His bedroom door was still ajar from when he'd burst out of it to come expel all that black, red bile he continued to produce. He collapsed to his knees just before he got to the door. Crawling, he was about to drop off into oblivion when he reached his dresser. With all the energy he had left, he ripped open the top drawer, letting it dangle off it's tracks as he groped around inside for the canvas wrapped precious he so desperately needed.

Once his fingers touched the blade, an instantaneous feeling of relief swept through his body. Like a shot of adrenaline, all the fogginess cleared and he was wide awake. Aware. Wired. Ready. He held onto it for a long time. Letting the mark burn white hot as all the pain seeped away.

He sat there, back against his dresser, hand grasping the blade for several hours. He closed his eyes and leaned back, finding a kind of purpose and clarity in the images of blood and murder that flashed through his head. Some were murders he'd committed. Some were murders he knew he would. And then there was that one. The one he could never quite put his finger on. He was killing somebody, and they weren't begging for their life exactly... But they were sort of pleading that he stop to save his own. The voice was so familiar but so distant in this blade-induced high that he couldn't place it.

"Dean! Don't do this, you don't wanna be that thing, you're stronger than that!"

Bloody faced and broken, Dean couldn't make out the speaker. But something about that voice was just so-

He gasped, eyes snapping open, and released the blade.

11:26 AM

The door to the bunker creaked open and Dean barely looked up from his laptop. He downed some whiskey from his glass before refilling it as Sam's monstrous footfalls made themselves known down the stairs. He approached Dean at the table, and without looking up Dean said,

"How was Norfolk?"

"Uneventful," Sam said setting his bag down and getting a bowl out of the cabinet, "Turns out the weird dead plants and climate changes were actually just some new pesticide the town's been using. No necromancy involved."

Dean smirked, and nodded.

"What about you, how was your night?" Sam asked absently, rooting through the pantry for cereal.

Dean looked over at Sam who was now pouring some cornflakes, not looking overly expectant for Dean's answer. Dean sighed through his nose, turning back to his laptop, responding,

"Pretty much the same, uneventful. Just a Next Generation marathon and some Captain to pass the time."

"Nice, okay, I'm gonna go see if I can dig up a case." And he took his bowl and disappeared down the hallway.

Dean watched him leave, the mark starting to tingle on his arm as he snapped his laptop closed.