A Winter's Tale (Destiel Fanfiction)

(3) A Winter's Tale

Cas's hand wouldn't warm up. This at last gave Dean something to think about— something other, that is, than the mental image of Cas sleeping alone outside in the September rain, shuddering with cold and wracked with hunger. And suffering through nightmares.

Nightmares about me, thought Dean.

Nightmares about me abandoning him.

After all he's been through, he was having friggin' nightmares about ME.

Focus, Dean chided himself. Cas's hand is cold. Do something about it.

Dean dragged himself out of the chair, and walked over to the nurses' station to ask about whether Cas was too cold. Two nurses came over right away. They were gratifyingly conscientious, checking Cas's temperature and vital signs carefully and adjusting all his blankets. They handed the notebook back to Dean (it had been sitting on Cas's legs) while they tucked the blanket edges around Cas's feet and covered up his shoulders a little more. Dean stood off to the side while they worked, clutching the notebook and feeling pretty useless.

The nurses then got into a complex discussion about whether they should still be trying to warm Cas up from his hypothermia or whether the major problem now was to make sure his pneumonia-related fever didn't take off. Apparently Cas actually was running a fever, at least in his "body core"; but somehow his "extremities" still hadn't fully warmed up from last night's hypothermia.

"So he needs more blankets AND he needs less blankets?" said Dean, half-heartedly quoting a line from one of his favorite comedies. Joking always made things more bearable, right?

Sam would've got the joke (it was from Walk Hard, a perennial favorite), but the nurses didn't. And Cas didn't, of course.

Cas would never get that joke anyway in a million years, thought Dean. Even if he were awake. Cas would've only frowned at Dean, probably with one of those confused-Castiel squints. And probably he'd have just added Dean's mystifying comment to his private mental list of the million or so confusing things he encountered every day -- all the other jokes Dean had never bothered to explain, and all the other details of twenty-first century life that Dean had never bothered to help him out with.

The joking impulse had died completely. Dean drifted over to the plastic chair in the corner and sat down there, watching the nurses as they fussed over Cas and got his hands and feet a little better bundled up. They then gave Dean a little pep talk; apparently Cas was "hanging in there" and "still fighting." Whatever that meant.

"Remember he's had a full day of antibiotics now," said one of the nurses. "We think he's got bacterial pneumonia, actually, not the viral kind, even though the flu started with a virus. That happens sometimes, you know — start with a flu, then get so weakened that the pneumonia bacteria somehow get in there and get a foothold. His immune system must have been pretty beaten down, though, for that to happen— was he under a lot of stress or something? Not getting a lot of sleep, maybe? Maybe he wasn't eating enough?"

Dean gave her a tiny nod, not trusting himself to speak, and the nurse said, "I suspected as much. You normally only see flu patients getting bacterial pneumonia like this if they're already immunocompromised or if they've been under a ton of stress. Anyway, the good news is, with the bacterial sort of pneumonia, sometimes you see improvement in just a day or two of the right antibiotic. What would be a really good sign is if he can start breathing on his own again, soon, today hopefully, because... well, it's not a good sign when... Well, anyway, don't give up hope."

The usual bullshit, thought Dean, but he nodded quietly. The other nurse gave him a little smile, tugged at Dean's hand to get him to stand up, steered him back over to the chair by Cas's side, plunked him down again, and finally they both left.