Author:Mirrordance

Title:Once More

Summary:Life's almost good now that Sam's back on the road with him, but then the tumors are back too, and Dean thinks he might be dying again. Sequel to "One Night," and set during the episodes "Scarecrow" and "Faith."

Note: Hi to all who bookmarked "One Night!" Below is a preview of the sequel, "Once More," which has just been posted at . I hope you look it up, and see if it's also something you might enjoy. Thanks for the alert and hope you like this one too!

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Once More

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PREVIEW

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It's not gonna kill me.

No, but it'll hurt like hell.

Flash of light, moment of mind-numbing brilliance, just before it was eaten by consuming black, and suddenly he was on the ground, and nothing of his body could move, nothing of his mind could make him want to--

Involuntary breath.

And damn but Sam was right, it hurt, it hurt like a sonofabitch--

Dean Winchester shot awake coughing, choking on the coughs, clutching his bruised chest, shaking with exertion. You know you've reached a new low when your nightmares equaled your memories, and he was just reflecting on that heretofore undiscovered, depressing fact, when he felt Sam's Sasquatch paws on his back, slapping, rubbing, telling him to breathe through it, asking him if he was okay.

"G' back t' sleep," he growl-gasped at his younger brother, pushing himself to his feet, and lumbering toward the bathroom. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he would not be followed; their time apart and how it came to be had conditioned the both of them toward giving each other wary spaces. But he knew Sam wouldn't be following his request to be left alone completely either, because their time together before Stanford had been deep and ingrained, like blood in their veins. That blood was running on thinners right now, sure, but it was still there and all damn over.

Dean snapped on the bathroom lights, kept his head lowered as he grabbed water from the tap, drank some of it. His mouth tasted funny. Very, very lightly coppery, like his teeth were bleeding. He rinsed off his mouth, fairly confident that if he was bleeding inside from that damned shot, he'd be having it much worse than this, wouldn't he?

Still, if there was something inside him that prayed, well... it prayed. He hoped it was nothing. He hoped he could just put this damned nightmare-memory behind him, put Sam's trigger-finger completely and absolutely in the past. Getting hurt worse would just fuck everything up all the more, and the both of them were just badly dented right now.

He leaned toward the cracked, smoky old mirror. He opted out of a shirt sometime after Sam had fallen sleep, in deference to the tender skin on his chest and to make sure that Sam would not see how gloriously the late Dr. Ellicott's handiwork blazed across Dean's skin. He spared the injury a thoughtful glance, before he grit his teeth and stared at the neat white rows, turned his head from side to side, then opened his mouth wide, searching for the source of the bleed from his teeth.

The coppery taste was gone, the search too much of a bother, so he rinsed off his face, shut the light, and went back out to the dingy motel room.

He realized with a grimace that this room, now soaked by the dim light of a dull morning, was one of their worst ones ever. Hard to notice these things after a sleepless night running around in a haunted asylum with your chest shot to hell, and you stop at the first place you find. But in situations like this, things always looked worse in the morning, and some motel rooms were just damned ugly, like waking up with a woman you'd never have taken to bed if you were a measure of sober the night before.

"You okay?" Sam asked, voice still deep from sleep, brown eyes discreetly drifting to the bruises he, under the influence of the dead, mad doctor of said asylum, had inflicted on his brother just hours before. He was seated on the corner of Dean's bed, anxious and uncertain.

"Just choked on my spit or something," Dean lied, absurdly vaguely, thinking it was ridiculous enough to be possibly true. Or maybe not thinking at all. Whatever.

"That's really gross, Dean," Sam said, looking mildly skeptical and heavily disgusted. Again, their time apart had taught them doubt, in this wacky dance. But, again, their time together before that had also taught them to tango too.

So Sam shifts tactics. He had, after all, always preferred actionable routes. "What can I do?"

Referring to the injury and not the spit, unfortunately, Dean realized. So much for the half-hearted lie.

"It's just a fugly bruise, Florence," Dean told him, slinking back beneath the covers of his bed. He tried not to think about where the hell these damn sheets have been and who may have laid there doing what before him, as he settled in for sleep.

"I've had plenty worse, you know that," he assured Sam, before realizing that was never really an assurance, and--

"That's not reassuring," Sam pointed out, making Dean think, Typical.

"Live with it," he growled, shifting and wincing, closing his eyes. He nudged Sam's hip with his foot, lightly kicking him off his bed, "Go to sleep, Sam."

"You mad at me?" Sam asked, after a long moment.

Am I? Dean wondered.

"Do we have to talk about this?" Sam pressed.

Do we? Dean asked himself, vaguely remembering he must have been asked this same question before.

"He latched onto you and amplified feelings of anger," Dean droned, like it was a mantra he'd been telling himself also, "It's not your fault."

"But are you mad at me?" Sam asked, because it didn't take a genius to know that these were two different things. It might not be Sam's fault factually, but what did Dean feel about all this?

"Are you mad at me?" Dean retorted, biting back the rest of it which was, 'Cos you're the one who shot-- he kept his face turned away and his eyes closed, thinking, I would really wanna fall asleep, like, right now.

"I told you, Ellicott--"

"Nevermind," Dean cut him off, irritably, because Sam was being an evasive, coy bitch and because it didn't take a genius to know that these were two different things too. Ellicott made Sam shoot his brother, fine, but that didn't mean he planted the resentful thoughts in Sam's mind. He had fed off of that, but they were already inarguably there.

"Nevermind," Dean said again, "I told you I'm not in the mood and I just wanna sleep."

In afterthought, he added, because he imagined Sam's lonely face in the dull light as if he could actually, actually see it, "It's not your fault, Sam."

Dean heard his brother take a calming breath, before the side of the bed where he was sitting rose with the loss of his warming weight, and the rustling of the sheets on the other bed indicated Sam was making an effort to head back to sleep too.

"I wonder," Sam murmured, "What he would have picked up from you if it was the other way around."

Dean's eyes opened at that.

He stared at the window in the room and the streaks of depressing, dull light going through the cheap, ages-old-and-thinned curtains, and wondered the same thing.

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It was the first time he woke up crying Jessica's name with no Dean there to lend grudging comfort. There was no firm hand on his chest, bracing him as he arched and vainly reached for the sight of her, long-gone. There were no big-brother hazel eyes darkened by the night and by worry. No tight mouth, jerking with quiet words that at first Sam doesn't hear above the echoes of his cries and the beating of his heart, until the smell of the smoke clears and his mind returns home, and he knows his brother is saying Sammy, or I gotcha, or It's just a dream, bro, or Come on back now.

He caught his breath and let the devastation devour him, wondered how deep and how long it would last, how much it would take from him, if he suffered through it alone.

Hurts like hell, he decided, imagining curly blond tendrils almost poetically catching fire at one end, then the flame winds and dances up, until the entire hair burns out. Every single strand of her hair burning out. Her eyes imploring him to save her, not understanding what was happening, expecting him to make things right. And her small mouth, moving, appropriately soundless, but he already knew that she too was crying for him.

He brushed angrily at tears that had welled over his eyes, and streaked down to his pillows. God, this room was ugly. The dull fucking light was depressing the hell out of him.

He rode the hurt, glancing his brother's deeply sleeping way.

Mad at me, he decided, miserably, just because the room was ugly, his dream was bad, and it was probably true. That was why Dean was ignoring him.

But he wouldn't, he thought, a breath before he accepted the idea with a deep knowledge. Dean was, for one reason or other, profoundly... forgiving. He was an open, unconventionally but remarkably naive, irrepressible soul. Simple, Sam allowed himself to think in weaker moments, because it felt condescending, except sometimes, there was just no two ways of looking at it. Simple did not equate to stupid, far from. It was just a question of, well, simple preference. Dean was theoretically easy to please: nice car, good food, good music, good company (which included family, women and kids, and occasionally dogs). He bore scars - who didn't?- but no grudges. Just... wishes. No grudges, just... wishes. For instance, it was never quite You-left-me-Sam much more than it was I-wish-you-were-here.

Which brought him back to the bare fact that his brother might be mad at him over that nasty asylum business, but ignoring him, especially in dreaming about Jessica, was downright impossible. The only other alternative was that he really was as busted-up tired as he had claimed.

Sam sighed, sat up, and still there was no movement from Dean. He leaned over and reached out, but his hand wavered, not quite knowing where to go. He settled for the turned shoulder.

"Dude."

Uncharacteristically light stirring.

"Dean--"

"Sleep," Dean groan-growled, irritably turning Sam's way, hazel eyes clouded and weary, half-open orbs settling on his younger brother's face and leveling out in realization and worry, "Sam...? You okay?" he asked a bit more lucidly, scrambling up to his elbows.

"No, no--" Sam's hands were waving around aimlessly again, and he felt embarrassed, "No, sleep. Sleep, please. I'm fine. I was just wondering if you were."

Dean rolled back his eyes and settled back down. He muttered something resignedly, something that sounded like 'Little brothers' in the same tone one would say 'Shit,' making Sam's mouth quirk.

"Good night, Dean."

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Dean woke up once more during that timeless, eternal morning/night.

Instinctively light feet must have taken him to the bathroom without further incident, or disrupting his finally-asleep, exhausted, nightmare-plagued kid-brother. That was the extent of what he knew about getting there, because he thought he was in bed until his eyes focused on a blood-spattered sink, his head lowered down to the spoiled, aged white of it, as he caught his breath.

This is a nightmare, he thought.

Or a memory, he corrected himself, because these two things have been shuffling back and forth tonight. Inanely, he thought he could be more diplomatic and just say it's a nightmare of a memory or a memory of a nightmare. Whatever. Point being, he'd been down this road once before, and that story ended years ago, when fear was coughing up blood in a dim bathroom in the middle of nowhere, thinking This is it, this is how I'm kicking it, and No one's ever gonna know. I'm just gonna be some dead guy with eight fake credit cards in a ratty motel.

Ended, because he was fine now. Fine. And he was no longer alone, and someone's gonna know if he wasn't, and someone's gonna care, and he found that was actually far more frightening than being all alone.

Is this real? he wondered, lifting up his head and looking at his face on the mirror. Years ago, he had looked up like this too, finding a face pale and hallowed on a scarred mirror, lightly blood-spattered, just like the corners of his mouth.

Is this now? he wondered, and let his eyes rake through his face, searching desperately for a difference between today and yesterday, because he wasn't feeling well and he was desperately confused.

His eyes settled on the bruise on his chest.

The bruise that hadn't been there until Sam shot him with a salt round, a few hours ago. This was now. This was fucking now.

The realization burned him, made him cough again. He slapped a hand over his mouth, smothering the cough, making it worse, smothering it more. Fucking cycle that apparently was going to end only after he dies...

You know you've reached a new low when your nightmares equaled your memories, he had thought earlier that night. Except now was an even lower low, what with both these things becoming the present all over again.

I'm dying again, he thought, experimentally, because there was a chance that the bloody coughing was just a result of his chest injury after all. But there was something gut-hitting to the idea, something that made him know beyond a shadow of a doubt that his body remembered exactly how that first time felt, and this was what was happening again. And worse, the fact that it was happening again indicated a tendency, possibly even a malignancy to the condition. The recent chest injury was likely just the aggravating factor that made the symptoms known, like before. But the disease must have been just inside him, waiting to take him.

I'm dying again, he thought again, opening the tap and letting the water wash the blood from his hands. He caught his breath as he worked, ridiculously thinking Out damned spot as he wiped at the mirror and the sink obsessively, once, then once more over, before scanning the sink hungrily, searching for any bloodstain he might have missed.

Clean, he decided with a measure of uncertainty and resignation.

He glanced at the bathroom door, suddenly dreading going out.

He sighed, coughed lightly and was relieved to find no more blood this time, before hesitantly stepping out.

He was relieved to find that Sam was still asleep. He picked up his cellphone from where it lay on the night table between him and Sam's bed. He glanced at his brother; Sam was really out like a light. He dialed his father's number, and stepped inside the bathroom just as the call kicked into voice mail.

"Dad," he said, voice low and hushed and just a bit huskier from his ravaged throat, "You have to let us find you."

I'm sick and Sam will need you.

"You have to let us find you," Dean said again, wished he could say more. He hung up, placed the phone back on the night table, and crawled back to bed.

To be continued...