Title: Defying Gravity

Summary: Part of the Fusion 'verse. Sam has a bad night. Dean has a bad day. They both make it through anyway.

Characters: Sam, Dean, OFC

Rating: PG13

Wordcount: 4,176

Disclaimer: Alas, none of it is mine, though I really wish it were!

Warnings: Swearing, angst, allusions to torture.

Neurotic Author's Note #1: So this isn't the instalment of Fusion I had meant to write to begin with, but it is one that I've been toying with for a while, so here you go.

Neurotic Author's Note #2: Heh. I don't actually have anything to say anymore. I think this may well be a first. I blame Vancouver and elsewhere_kels for distracting me.

For a few minutes the sound of screaming doesn't even wake Dean up. Instead the landscape of his dream transforms, the water of the lake in which he's swimming turning first murky, then blood-red and warm before vanishing altogether and leaving him standing on the all-too-familiar platform, razor in hand. He's already as good as Alastair, he thinks with a swell of pride, and it won't be long before the student surpasses the master, as is the way of things. When that day comes, Alastair has promised him that he'll have whatever he wants, and Dean knows exactly what that is. He turns and bares his teeth in a terrible facsimile of a smile in the direction of the tattered soul in front of him, ignoring its terrified wail. Dean hasn't looked human in years and revels in the fear it inspires in the newly-arrived souls that twist and writhe under his ministrations. From somewhere far away the screaming starts up again, though, and something in the tone catches his attention. He cocks his head in the direction of the sound, because he knows that voice, would know it anywhere, and it's the one sound he knows doesn't belong down here, should never belong down here.

"Sammy?"

He comes to with a start, halfway tangled in his sheets, sweat pooling beneath his arms and at the base of his spine, the taste of blood still pungent and coppery on his tongue, the scent filling his nostrils. It's still pitch-black in his room, the only light the red glow from the digital alarm clock on his bedside table casting weird shadows on the wall. He blinks at it a few times before the time comes into focus, rubs a hand over his face, willing his heart to stop trying to rip its way out of his chest. It takes him another few seconds to realize that the screaming wasn't in his dreams at all.

He scrambles out of bed, nearly falls over trying to get himself upright and momentarily forgetting that his right leg doesn't work the way he remembers it should work. It's been months, and when he's awake it's never an issue, but there are still moments when he forgets, when it feels like he's seventeen again and his Dad is in the next room just waiting for him to come back so they can keep researching the next hunt while Sammy does his math homework. It's those moments which unbalance him, make his chest constrict until he can't breathe and his eyes sting, even now.

The screaming starts up again, and Dean shakes himself, gives himself a sharp mental order to snap out of it already, and limps as fast as he can past the bathroom to the smaller bedroom that Sam has claimed as his own. There's nothing in there except for a queen-sized bed and a night table, much the same as in Dean's room, except that here the street lamp outside is casting a soft glow through Sam's curtains, illuminating part of his face as he sleeps. Not that he's sleeping that well right now. It's a depressingly familiar sight, and Dean had optimistically hoped that they'd seen the last of the night terrors, that the nightmares had finally tapered off to the point of being manageable, but Sam is clearly trapped halfway between sleeping and waking, eyes open and arms thrown up over his head to ward off some unseen threat, though the screaming has died down again, replaced by a low keening that turns Dean's stomach. It's not hard to figure out the rest. Careful to avoid getting kicked or punched, he slides onto the bed, as close to Sam's head as he can get, grabs hold of Sam's hands to pull them away from his face.

"Sam, wake up!" he says sharply, mindful to keep his voice low. Yelling just makes it worse. "Sam! It's just a dream, Sammy, wake up!"

It takes a long time. Not that Dean is in the habit of timing these things, but it feels like hours pass while Sam fights him with everything he's got —which isn't much, given how feeble his struggles are, comparatively speaking. There's nowhere to go in the Cage, Dean knows. Lucifer takes up all the available room, crushes everything beneath his light, and it's all a tiny human soul can do just to keep itself going, to keep the spark of life lit. Sam spent a lot of time shielding Adam from Lucifer, Dean knows, and even now he marvels at the sheer strength it must have taken.

Gradually Sam stops making that horrific noise, quiets a little under Dean's hand. His eyes lose their faraway look, focus on Dean's face, and after a moment there's even a spark of recognition there. He shifts on the bed, heels scraping against the fitted sheet that he's half-pulled from its moorings as he tries to sit up.

"Dean?"

Dean lets out a breath he only half-realized he was holding in. "Yeah, Sammy, it's me."

"Are you—"

He shakes his head. He knows this line of questioning. "We're fine, Sammy. You and me, remember? Come on," he twists a little awkwardly to help pull Sam upright, hauls him into his arms and lets him cling the way he always does, still shaking. "We're fine. You're not there anymore, and neither am I. Tell me what's around us."

"Um," Sam's breath hitches, but his fingers find the fabric of Dean's t-shirt and hang on. "You. The sheet —I pulled it out. The bed. Pillows. Light —but from the street. Street light, so it's safe. Clock. I woke you up, didn't I? You're supposed to be sleeping, because it's a work night."

Dean smooths Sam's hair back from his face. "Hey, it's fine. You know that, right? It's always fine. Do you ever mind when you have to come wake me up when I have nightmares?"

"No, but—"

"But nothing. Same goes for me, you understand? You pull me up, I pull you up. That's how it works." It's their own little game of spitting in the eye of the laws of physics. Inasmuch as laws of physics have eyes, anyway.

Sam doesn't reply, but he relaxes a bit more in Dean's arms, tentatively moves one hand up to rub his thumb against Dean's bicep. It's yet another weird little quirk, but since it serves to make him feel better, Dean's pretty much inclined to let Sam pet him as much as he wants. Whatever works. He gives Sam's hair another gentle pat.

"You want to try the Klonopin? See if we can't get you to sleep some more tonight? Otherwise you're going to be a zombie tomorrow, and I don't really want to have to worry about you all day while I'm at work."

There's a fraction of a second during which he can feel Sam hesitate, but it doesn't last much longer than that. Sam nods, swipes at his nose with the back of his wrist and pulls away slowly so that Dean can get up again without hurting himself. Dean doesn't even bother switching on the light until he gets to the bathroom, and even then only long enough to make sure he's grabbed the right prescription out of the cabinet. His own pills —a couple of bottles of painkillers and anti-inflammatories, and one solitary bottle of a sleep aid he doesn't use much anymore— are tucked away on the top shelf, leaving the middle shelf for regular crap like cough syrup and Tylenol, and the bottom shelf reserved for Sam's ever-expanding collection of anxiolytics and antipsychotics. He half-fills a glass with water, brings it back without spilling any of it, and hands it to Sam along with the pills, watches as his brother swallows them both without complaint. For a moment Dean hovers uncertainly, until Sam clears his throat quietly.

"Um. Would you... would you stay? Just for a bit?"

He doesn't bother hiding the relief in his voice. "Sure, Sammy. Scoot over."

Sam does as he's told, then as soon as Dean is lying down he turns and wraps both arms around him, not so tightly as to confine him, but just enough to anchor him in place, and Dean feels something settle in his chest that up until now was fluttering, wild and out of control. It doesn't take long for the drugs to take effect —for all Sam is a huge guy now, he's strangely sensitive to medication— and soon the only sound in the room is the even in-and-out of every breath he takes. Dean wriggles a bit until he's more comfortably settled, matches his own breathing to Sam's, drifts back into a sleep that's mercifully free of dreams.

When the alarm clock goes off four hours later, Sam doesn't stir. Dean wasn't expecting anything less —the meds will keep him knocked out for at least another couple of hours, maybe more. He pulls out the rest of Sam's prescriptions from the medicine cabinet, brings them into the bedroom, shakes his brother until he rouses a little —just enough to swallow his meds and go back to sleep with a muted murmur of protest.

"Sleep well, Sammy," he says, aware that his brother probably can't hear him. "I'll leave a note for you in the kitchen for when you wake up properly, okay?"

Dean hates mornings without Sam, moreso now that they've become increasingly infrequent. Once he's showered and dressed —always a little harder without Sam to help him— he debates skipping breakfast altogether. The kitchen feels cold and empty without Sam's bottle of French Vanilla coffee creamer and his plastic container of meds, the quiet shuffle of stocking-clad feet against the tiled floor as Sam busies himself about making the coffee. Dean eats quickly, only imagining the bitch face that Sam would make if he knew he'd even thought about skipping breakfast, but makes up for it by smoking an extra cigarette, just out of spite. He grabs his bag lunch from the fridge, picks up his cane on the way out the door, and carefully locks it behind him.

Sophie is already opening up the shop when he gets there, and she gives him a critical once-over. "Rough night?"

He shrugs. "Had worse. Nightmares. He's sleeping now, though."

She nods. "That's good, then. You need someone to run you home on your lunch break to check on him?"

Dean grimaces. "I don't think so? I'll give him a call later, see where he's at. I might take you up on that, if it comes to it."

It turns out not to be necessary. Sam picks up the phone after less than two rings, and is perfectly calm and coherent when Dean asks him how he is. He's awake, a little groggy from the extra meds, and yes, Dean, he ate breakfast and yes, he is making a healthy lunch. Yes, he knows that there are leftovers in the fridge he can reheat if he's not up to cooking dinner, and yes, he will take a nap if he's still tired. In short, Sam is okay. 'Fine' might be putting too fine a point on it, but he's okay, he's coping, and he doesn't need Dean to stress himself out any more than he already is or take time out of his already-short lunch break to come check on him, or anything like that. Dean perches on the edge of a chair in the employee break room, cell phone to his ear, glad that Sam can't actually see him and start reading stupid shit into his body language. Instead he hangs up and digs into his tomato sandwich, suddenly starving.

It's only later in the day that things really go wrong. In retrospect, Dean tells himself he probably should have seen it coming. It was really only a matter of time, because since when have the Winchesters ever had a run of good luck that lasted for any real length of time? They've just been asking for Fate to piss on them, as far as he's concerned. In short, Dean let himself get cocky, and now he's paying for it, he thinks glumly from where he's lying at the bottom of the stairs leading to the small extra storage room in the basement of the bookshop. He's wedged uncomfortably between the bottom step and the wall, where the narrow wooden stairs make a sharp turn into the room, having obviously not been built with people with special needs in mind. Inconsiderate fuckers.

It all started out innocently enough. Since Sam was obviously okay, he agreed to close up the shop for Sophie, who had some sort of engagement. Closing up is easy enough, doesn't require any bending or kneeling or whatever. Except, of course, that there was that stupid box of books that had come in a few days before that Sophie kept meaning to take down to the basement and just kept not getting around to it. Dean was fed up of tripping over it or walking around it and constantly having to be aware of its presence, so it seemed like a no-brainer to simply take it downstairs. It wasn't a particularly big or heavy box, wasn't even hard to pick up, and it's not like Dean can't manage stairs. He can manage stairs just fine, so long as he takes them one step at a time. Of course, that's a normal flight of stairs, not these mutant, misshapen excuses for stairs that are all twisted and bendy and clearly possessed by some sort of demonic force. If he ever gets out of here again, he thinks, glowering at the portion of staircase visible from where he's lying, he's coming back armed with salt, holy water and a bunch of exorcisms, just to be on the safe side. Oh, and next time, he's definitely switching on the lights and not attempting the stairs in the semi-dark again. Not that that means there isn't something shifty and evil about the stairs, but better safe than sorry, right?

It could be worse. He could have seriously injured himself when he lost his footing, but apart from a really impressive crop of fresh bruises, he's really mostly fine. All the joints in his body that are still meant to bend do so without difficulty. There's no crippling pain anywhere, and he's about ninety-nine percent sure he didn't black out at all, so that's good. His left arm is kind of wedged uncomfortably behind him, but it's only got pins and needles in it now, and it never really hurt much to begin with. So, yeah, he's pretty sure he's not injured, just stuck. The books all spilled onto the floor when he fell, of course, and he's glad there's no problem with moisture down here, because it would suck if the books —and he— got all wet while they're lying down here with no one to come get them.

He snorts. "Help me, I've fallen and I can't get up!" he says in as squeaky a falsetto as he can manage. It would be funny if it wasn't true.

If he was smart, he'd call someone on his cell phone. The cell phone he conveniently left next to the cash register before picking up the box. He doesn't even know how long he's been here, because he wears his watch on his left wrist. It feels like it's been a fucking long time, though. His left arm is totally numb, as is his ass, and he's pretty sure he looks utterly ridiculous, lying halfway on the stairs and halfway against the wall and all twisted around. There's no way for anyone to know where he is, or even that he might be in trouble —Sophie's gone and won't be back until the morning, and none of the students who work here part-time were in today, which means there won't be anyone back until tomorrow morning at eight o'clock at the earliest. Great.

Of course, there's always the chance Sam will figure things out after a while, but there's no telling after a rough night like that. In fact, aside from the whole staircase fiasco, Dean is seriously starting to regret agreeing to close up rather than going straight home to check on him. Sure, Sam sounded okay over the phone, but that doesn't mean anything. He never does all that well when Dean's gone for too long, tends to either freak out or wander off or both, and now Dean is stuck at the bottom of a stupid staircase where no one knows where he is and that means there won't be anyone to look for Sam and bring him home if needs be. Sometimes someone will bump into Sam by accident, but it's not the same thing as Dean being out there and looking for him. The odds are against it, and anything could happen. It wouldn't take much for Sam to maybe step out into the street at the wrong moment, or maybe take a couple of left turns too many and walk himself clean out of the small town, at which point there are so many things that could go wrong that Dean doesn't even want to start listing them. It doesn't help that he hasn't had a cigarette in hours and right now he's almost willing to chew off a limb in order to get himself out and find the pack he left upstairs with his cell phone. Not that he'd be able to light a cigarette if he'd had the pack with him. Well, maybe. Necessity being the mother of invention and all.

Okay. Dean's a Winchester, he can totally handle this. It's ridiculous to be defeated by a pile of wood held together by nails, screws and a bit of wood glue. Screw the laws of physics. It's just a question of moving the right way, and he can wriggle his way out, no problem. Except, of course, that moving the right way would involve bending his right knee to give himself some room to manoeuvre, and it's not like that's going to happen in this liftetime. Shit. He can see exactly how he's trapped, and if his damned knee would just bend once, then it would be fine. Then again, it's not like willpower can overcome arthroplasty, and so he stays right where he is, and only succeeds in twisting his arm more so that his shoulder starts to ache dully. It's official, Sam is out there by himself and Dean is stuck here and can't go to him because he was a stupid, overambitious ass who really should have known better than to try to move boxes of books unsupervised, because apparently he can't do anything right, ever. He lets his head fall back with a dull thump, swallows the sudden lump in his throat, and stares resolutely at the dusty beams in the ceiling above him, because it would just be adding insult to injury to actually cry over something like this. Only girls cry out of frustration, it's a known fact, and Dean has had many years of happy intimacy with his own dick to know that he is not, in fact, a girl.

"Dean?"

"Sam!"

He does come perilously close to crying right then and there. He's not sure how he didn't hear his six-foot-five monster of a brother come in the shop, but it's probably some weird acoustic thing, and totally not because he was too wrapped up in his own thoughts to be listening for unaccustomed noises.

"Where are you?"

He lets out a laugh that's half a sob. "Down here! Man, I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I've been happier than this to hear your voice, dude. You okay?"

Sam's silhouette appears at the top of the stairs, and when he switches on the overhead light he is wearing the most expressive bitchface Dean has seen on him in quite a while. "You're lying at the bottom of a staircase and you're asking if I'm okay?" he says incredulously.

"Um. If it's any consolation, I'm fine. Just stuck. Little help, Sammy?"

Sam expels a noisy sigh through his nose, clumps slowly down the wooden steps, although Dean can feel the vibration of every step he takes through the wooden structure. He carefully steps over Dean's prone form, and it takes all of Dean's self-control not to flinch at the idea that Sam might actually step on him by accident. Nothing of the sort happens, of course, and a moment later his brother is kneeling next to him and patting him down, checking for injuries. Dean swats ineffectually at him.

"I told you I'm fine. I'm just bruised all to hell and my arm and my ass have gone numb from being like this. Just get me up already, please!"

Sam shrugs, conceding defeat, then gets to his feet, bends over and hauls him up easily by his armpits. Dean lets out an involuntary groan as the blood starts circulating in his limbs again, and reminding him forcibly why cutting off circulation is a bad idea to begin with. Sam keeps a firm hold on his arm, holding him up long after all the feeling is back in his arms and legs.

"You want to try the stairs now?" he asks quietly, and Dean nods.

"Fuck yeah. Let's blow this popsicle stand. Besides, my cigarettes are up there."

"Along with your cell phone," Sam adds disapprovingly.

Dean doesn't dignify that with a response, mostly because it takes all of his concentration as well as Sam's help to get back up the damned stairs. He stumbles once, only to feel one of Sam's hands, strong and sure, snake around to catch him by the waist as he curses under his breath.

"How did you get in here, anyway?" he asks, once they're at the top of the stairs and Sam has forcefully directed him to a chair. "I locked up before going downstairs."

Sam rolls his eyes. "I can still pick a lock, Dean. It was faster than calling Sophie and asking her to come open the store."

"How'd you know I was here?"

"I didn't. This was the first place I checked when you didn't come home and didn't answer your cell. I saw your stuff on the counter, figured you were probably still inside, and if you weren't then there'd be clues about where you went."

Dean grins. "Good old Sammy."

Sam's expression stays mild, but Dean can tell he's pleased at the compliment. "I have my moments. You want to call a cab to go home?"

He shakes his head. "No way. I definitely need to move after that. We'll just take it slow, okay?"

"Okay."

He pockets his cell phone, makes one last, careful sweep of the shop before they leave. The books will have to wait until tomorrow when he explains this whole humiliating episode to Sophie —maybe minus the part where Sam picked her lock. He'll just say he left the door unlocked, which will be easier to explain all around. He picks up his cane from its spot by the front door —he never uses it in the shop, only to get around when he's outside— but lets Sam keep a firm hold of him, bearing more of his weight than Dean will ever admit to to anyone other than them, then locks the door of the shop behind them. He's grateful, kind of pathetically so given just how shaky he still feels after all of that, like he could just up and float away. But Sam is bulky and solid and warm and safe next to him, matching his own stride to compensate for the uneven sailor's gait that's the best Dean can manage these days, and so he's grateful.

About halfway back to the house Dean clears his throat. "So I've been thinking Amanda might be right, after all."

"Amanda?"

"Yeah. You know, cute doctor chick? The one whose crossword puzzles you finish for her?"

"That was one time. And I know who you meant," Sam huffs, and Dean doesn't remember a time when he's been this grateful that his brother is such a pissy little bitch sometimes. He grins and shakes his head.

"I just think she might be right. You know, about the dog."

"The helper dog?"

Dean nods. "I mean, a dog could have, I dunno, gone for help. Or barked, or whatever."

Sam looks over at him, and Dean could swear there's a smile tugging at the corner of his lips. "For when Timmy falls down the well?"

Dean snorts and rolls his eyes. "Well, since you're the one who came and saved my ass, you realize that makes you Lassie."

This time Sam does smile. "You're welcome," he says softly, and leads them the rest of the way home.